Joe said we should meet for dinner at Thai Aree. You may all remember Joe for his helpful advice on J. P. Graziano's, but I still wasn't sure whether I trusted him completely. l rattled off a few alternatives, slyly attempting to change his mind, but he insisted. "The food is wonderful and the prices are great too." Fine, whatever. I didn't really have the courage to admit that I didn't really much care for Thai food.
Thai food...
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
Slow Cooked Salmon with Ginger and Scallion
This simple salmon dish is cooked in a low oven so the flesh stays moist and succulent.
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Even though it's been around for a few years now, I am still incredibly excited to have joined a CSA this year. A few years ago, "CSA" was the big new food acronym, standing for Community Supported Agriculture, the rather wonderful setup where cooks and eaters pay in advance for the season and in return get a box delivered to their neighborhood every week or two, effectively a farmer's market haul. The farmer gets all the money up front, which helps defray costs, and the CSA member gets the freshest, most local, most in-season produce possible. Every week is a surprise.
Elin and I decided to sign up for a CSA this year from Angelic Organics, outside Chicago. The first box came today: broccoli, bok choy, herbs, chard, garlic scapes...
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
Hong Kong Style Pan-Fried Noodles
There's no need to boil: just toss in a skillet for crispy noodles with meaty mushrooms and bok choy. A little chili sesame oil helps wake everything up.
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Had you put a gun to my head a few years ago and asked me what my least favorite kind of food was, I'd have A) asked you why wanted to shoot me, and then B) probably said Chinese. Bad broccoli and beef, greasy fried rice, those strange orange packets of sauce--these were my impressions of the entirety of Chinese cuisine and what a billion people ate for dinner. Though I probably knew better, I couldn't block the mental image of those bad Chinese buffets that litter Midwest strip malls.
So imagine what happened when I first tried Mapo Doufu from the Sichuan region of China. It's a mixture of tofu, ground meat, and chile bean paste suspended in a bright red and dangerously spicy sauce. The first bite knocks you over with heat, and then this strange numbing sensation takes over your...
In practice, significantly more flavor is extracted from the meat. [...] When combined with good ingredients, these factors produce remarkable stocks in significantly less time.
-Heston Blumenthal, The Fat Duck Cookbook
I started making stock when I realized that you could stash the carcasses from roast chickens in the freezer and save them up for an empty Sunday and a few hours of simmering. That certainly got me past the cost barrier that I think...
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
Shaved Asparagus, Pea, and Prosciutto Salad
Blake takes advantage of asparagus season by shaving the spring vegetable thinly and tossing it in a salad.
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Eggs in a basket was the first meal I ever cooked. I was in 5th grade, and it was a Sunday morning at my best friend's house after a sleepover. We woke up hungry, and for some reason his parents weren't home. This confused me--my parents would never do that--but more important than confusion was the fact that I was terribly hungry, and I didn't see how that problem was going to be solved, since his house never had any cereal in it.
"We'll make eggs in a basket," my friend said, pulling out a loaf of bread, a jug of oil, and a carton of eggs. You mean, we'll be cooking? I wondered. This was a novel idea. I would later find out that he'd only watched the process before, never having actually...
You can shave truffles over a dish and call it special, but it's not; it's just expensive.
- Rick Bayless
I've been a fan of Rick Bayless since this blog started over four years ago, but it wasn't until he blurted out the above statement during the Top Chef Masters finale last year that I really figured out why. I already knew that I loved so many Mexican dishes because they balanced fat with acid, and layered spices, vegetables, and chiles in a really dynamic way. But I never connected the dots that all the meals I made used some seriously cheap and humble ingredients. It's true from the tamales to ...
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
Grilled Asparagus Panzanella
Panzanella is usually based on stale bread and great summer tomatoes, but here grilled asparagus is the backbone, to delicious results.
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I heard a lot of complaining this month about Chicago weather, mostly about how cold and rainy it was, and I added my fair share to the chorus. "It's May, already, where's the warm weather?" was a common conversation starter, as weather always is. Apparently, somebody upstairs was listening. This week we have been thrust into what feels like the height of summer: it has climbed repeatedly above 90 degrees, and Chicago has been humid and sticky. The hum of window air conditioners fills the air. Just thinking about cooking makes me sweat.
Nick got your back earlier in the week with a cocktail to cool your nerves, the Silver Fizz, but you have to eat, too, right?
Usually the heat of...
I'm not sure if the Silver Fizz was developed in Chicago, or if it was just popular for a time around 1883. But I have to believe that there is a correlation between cocktails and the cities that embrace them. Wine has a tie to the land, and cuisines are based around what's local and fresh. So it's my humble opinion that the Silver Fizz was built to cool the heads and stomachs of men without air conditioning, and I imagine there were a few hundred thousand people in the summer of 1883 in Chicago who would have fit that bill.
See, it's hot in Chicago right now. Even though it is only May, it's abysmally, horribly hot in a way like asphalt is hot in the middle of August. What I need is a drink to cool me down, to right these weather wrongs...
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
Spicy Italian Sausage with Peppers Sandwich
An Italian sausage and pepper sandwich is usually tired and boring, but this one adds some much needed acid to the party.
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I've long been drawn to the idea of urban farming. When I lived in Brooklyn, I had two plots in two community gardens, in addition to three massive tomato plants on the back deck. Planting seeds and growing vegetables was an unlikely pleasure. For me it was connected to good eating: I loved to cook and eat the freshest vegetables I could find. Getting to the source is something we often explore on The Paupered Chef--from seeking out how to make a dish from scratch, to visiting wholesale fish markets in the Bronx. Growing vegetables is no different.
The clash of growing food within the concrete...
I know that biscuits and gravy together don't make sense. It's meat, thickened with flour and milk, ladled atop a starchy biscuit. There is no balance, no acid, and no spice. Compared to the dynamic Szechuan food I've been making lately, it can seem safe and boring. But that's not how I think of it. Perhaps it's something that needs to be injected to your blood as a child, because I have a fondness for this dish that nearly eclipses all other breakfast foods. Pancakes, waffles, eggs benedict, bagels, croissants--I'd trade them all for a overflowing plate of biscuits and gravy.
I know that Blake never had that childhood sausage infusion, and he questions me regularly how a dish so heavy and gray could possibly be good (he's even...
Our weekly roundup of what the two of us have written over on Serious Eats.
Monte Cristo
Essentially it's a ham sandwich that's been cooked like French toast. A mishmash of dinner, breakfast, and chaos, all on the same plate. Oh, and it's delicious.
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Last night I made the best batch of biscuits and gravy ever. That's not something I ever thought I'd say out loud, but I cannot tell a lie. I started with some homemade breakfast sausage, which formed the base of a sensational gravy. The buttermilk biscuits were baked from scratch. It was nearly perfect.
The problem? The biscuits didn't rise, or at least not enough. I followed a fairly well respected cookbook author, but my biscuits turned out thin and flat. The flavor was there--they had a real tart buttermilk tang to them. But they never fluffed up. Also, I didn't see those incredible layers that I usually associate with a perfect biscuit.
The method I used mixed cold butter with the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. I rubbed it together with my...
I recently stumbled on an essay called The Power of the Hot Vinaigrette in Michael Symon's new cookbook. "Cold vinaigrettes are excellent," he writes, "but add one to the hot pan you've sauteed some shrimp in, and the blended acid and oil will pick up all the flavor of the bits of protein and sugars that have stuck to the pan." He advocates for pan sauces to be vinaigrette-based, rather than stock-based. "I don't tend to make a lot of stock at home. When saucing food, I almost always turn to vinaigrette."
First of all...
Do you remember your first Martini? Mine came while I was still working as a waiter. After a long, hard shift, all of us would sit around a table and get one free drink before heading home. Usually I went for the coldest beer I could fine, but that day I held my head high and ordered a Martini. It felt good to say it out loud, and it arrived all handsome and clean with a single olive in it. It was beautiful, which didn't initially mean that I liked it a whole lot. Though I ordered it with absolute confidence, I drank it with trepidation. No drink was drunk slower. Why? Well, it's stone dry and aggressive. Though I've fallen for the drink over the years, I can see why it wasn't love at first sight.
Perhaps I should have started with a Turf Club. It's an...
You may remember awhile back my lamenting post about a favorite ingredient I couldn't find in Chicago. The ingredient that Claudia at Cook Eat Fret christened "the bacon of fish." Something relatively undiscovered and very difficult to find in the U.S. A secret ingredient, you might say. Well, I'm done lamenting. Because I have found bottarga, the cured roe sack that's pressed and dried to become the density of hard cheese.
Now. Doesn't that sound delicious? It has been found, thank heavens, at a little place called J.P. Graziano's which...
