Binge Blog Post #2

Kali and I grabbed some chili half-smokes and chili cheese fries from Ben's Chili Bowl when she visited me in D.C. Being from Maryland, Ben's has been a lunch staple for me whenever I go downtown. Nostalgia mixed with the distinct aroma of Ben's smoky chili is a great thing. This place is a landmark in D.C., boasting regulars like Bill Cosby and Duke Ellington (while he was alive). Obama just went there a few weeks ago. I thought this pic deserved a place in my blog as its the perfect description of honest food that hits the spot every time. Sometimes I dream about Ben's. One of my favorite restaurants period.

Now on to food that I've made recently:

A simple dinner of mapo tofu, Sichuan-style potato, and chilled tofu. The potato was coursely julienned and then stir-fried with minced garlic, ginger, green chili, soy sauce, tomato paste, salt & pepper, and red wine vinegar. Red chili is more traditionally used, as well as Sichuan peppercorns. I don't really know what's used for the element of sourness, but red-wine vinegar worked pretty well here. Tasted pretty close to one of my favorite dishes at Lao Hangzhou Fengwei - a great place on Gaoyin St. in Hangzhou, China.

Fajitas are one of my favorite quick dinners. Here I used chicken breast, red yellow and orange bell peppers, and yellow onion. This preparation tastes even better if you add green bell peppers and poblano peppers. Poblanos are key in my opinion for fajitas. I always switch up marinades because I don't like cooking the same thing twice, but an easy mix that tastes deceivingly complex is just olive oil, cumin, turmeric, chili powder, coriander, garlic, onion powder, sugar salt and pepper. This works for both the meat (dark thigh meat is a more tender option) and veggies. I like to add a ton of lime juice and cilantro to my meat marinade though. And obviously whip up some pico de gallo and guac and keep them in the fridge until before you serve to get that temperature contrast.

Pasta bolognese. Here I used ground pork, ground beef, deli ham, and bacon for the meat sauce - but I'm sure it tastes better with the traditional ground veal and pancetta. The heaviness of the sauce (which is based in white wine and heavy cream) is a bit much for me - so I added a gremolatta (chopped parsley, garlic, and lemon rind) to cut a bit thru the atherosclerosis-inducing sauce. Gremolatta is only usually used on top of ossobuco but I think it played a nice role in this dish too.

Orange roughy was on sale at Dominick's! I was craving northern Indian flavors that night, so I seasoned both sides with s&p, chili powder, cumin, and coriander and pan-fried the fish. The brocoli and cauliflower were cooked similarly. The sauce was a "curry" of tomato, red bell pepper, onion, and bacon cooked with tomato paste, red wine, garam masala, and chili powder. The best thing I've cooked this past month. Orange roughy is a great fish that's fatty and hard to overcook but delicate in flavor.

Tilapia baked with chili-infused olive oil. Served with roasted red potatoes and a red bell pepper yogurt sauce. Obviously I didn't overthink presentation on this one.

New York strip steak served with oven-baked potato crisps, a bed of sauteed arugula and red onion, and two sauces: a traditional Argentine chimichurri, and an arugula pesto infused with orange juice. I love Peruvian steak and chimichurri, so I tried to do a bit of South American fusion here. Second best thing I've made recently, cause I oversalted the steak. This was the first time I've made steak indoors. There seems to be a mysticism about how to cook steak, and being a novice cook I was intimidated at first. However, given that you have a stove-top grill - I actually think this is quite easy. Just get as good a quality steak as you can afford (the more well marbled the better), season generously with salt and pepper rub, and remember to let the steak rest for 10 minutes after cooking. With a quarter to full-inch steak like the one I used, I found that five minutes on each side gave me a great medium sear. Resist the urge to touch the steak at all while it's cooking! Just one touch to flip it...that's all it takes. By the way, arugula and red onion sauteed together with s&p and olive oil goes a long way. What a money salad.

White chicken chili with navy, kidney, black beans, and jalapenos. I added the kidney and black beans to make the dish a bit healthier, and ended up liking this combination even better than the traditional practice of just using white bean. A good rous is key to this dish, and chilled guac on top contrasts well with the spicy richness of the chili.

Garlic and thyme butter salmon, with potato crisps served over creamed spinach and leek. After making the garlic and thyme butter roasted chicken you'll see below, I thought the flavors would work well with salmon too. They did, although since salmon bakes for a much shorter time than chicken I would recommend sauteeing the garlic first as it came out of the over a bit raw. The garlic thyme butter is courtesy of a recipe in Food & Wine by Grant Achatz. I haven't been to Alinea, but if this butter is any indication of Achatz's culinary genius I'm sold.

Pasta a la caprese. Kind of like a caprese salad (tomato, basil, mozarella, and olive oil) - a classically delicious flavor combo. Next time when they're cheaper I'm going to make cherry tomato confit and use that in here. Tomato confit is another great Achatz recipe you can find on Food & Wine.

The aforementioned garlic and thyme butter chicken. I made this for my parents as Christmas dinner - best roasted chicken I've ever eaten.

I'm sure you can tell by now I'm a bit obsessed with avocado. Here I was going to eat a pre-made samosa but was feeling playful, so I put it on top of some avocado mashed with onion and lemon juice (no seasoning), and plain yogurt seasoned with a bit of sugar. I keep reiterating this, but cold avocado with spicy food is to-die-for. If you consider this Latin-Indian fusion, maybe Vermillion could adopt this easy recipe?

That's it for now. I promise to stop binge blogging as soon as my computer stops making me reformat and losing all my pics.

Back from the Dead

I feel guilty about not updating in so long, so here are some pictures from the past couple of months. There are still a lot of pics sitting in my camera, and I owe a bunch of people dinner so look forward to more frequent updates.

Panna cotta ~ blackberry balsamic reduction

corn soup ~ tilapia, shrimp, sesame oil, spring onions

salmon baked soy-honey marinade

yakitori chicken ~ grapefruit-teriyaki marinade, "bamboo" (asparagus) skewer

Pork Chops

Checking out restaurant menus online is a recently developed hobby of mine. One site which I like a lot is www.tkrg.com. It's the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, which includes a place called The French Laundry in Napa Valley. This guy is a culinary god according to chefs on Food Network and Wikipedia - and hopefully one day I'll have a chance to try out his $200 tasting menu which changes each day at the French Laundry.

Now on to my own cooking. After realizing that the cheese I like so much in the Pasta Bowl's spinach chicken salad is goat cheese - I decided to buy some at Costco, along with some pork loin chops. Here's what I did with it:


The pork loin chops I marinated for a couple hours in balsamic vinegar, olive oil, honey, and Coca Cola. I've read that aside from its sweetness, Coke works well in certain marinades because the carbamic acid in it tenderizes meat. The pork chops were cooked in a pan over the stove top four minutes on each side to brown and caramelize, and then the marinade was added and the chops simmered for 20 minutes until the marinade reduced by about half.

The salad is a mix of asparagus, cherry tomatoes, red onion, and apples tossed in olive oil, sea salt, black pepper, and garlic that was sauteed briefly.

The goat cheese I piled on top of a thick slice of apple, and baked in the oven at 350 for 15 minutes until it browned and was warmed all the way through. I also added honey, paprika, black pepper, and lemon zest to the cheese before baking.

This dish was probably the best one I've blogged about so far. Balsamic vinegar and honey work together beautifully, and the goat cheese on top of the apple was awesome. There was actually a very fluid progression of flavors when you had a piece of pork with some veggies and goat cheese. Every element in the dish worked together. I do wish though that the marinade had reduced in further to create a glaze, and that I hadn't cooked the apples for the same amount of time as the asparagus and tomatoes. I'm not sure the Coke added much to the tenderness of the meat, and its flavor was very subtle - taking a backseat to the sweet tartness of the vinegar and the richness of the honey.

The picture above isn't the greatest, but I love the color of cherry tomatoes. Kind of like I love the color of bright red hot chili peppers. I also love the color of yellow bell peppers. Hmm...

Glorified Sushi

Sorry guys for the hiatus. I haven't been able to find the USB cord that allows me to upload my camera pics. A couple of things to note:

1. Ghareeb Nawaz on Devon St. was amazing. Between us, Sean, Kali, and I shared some delicious chicken biryani, a lamb curry I forget the name of, chana masala with chicken, gyro parantha, and some authentic chai tea. I have to say this is easily some of the best Indian food I've had in Chicago. All the meat we ordered was cooked tender, and heavily spiced (my kind of approach to cooking). I have to say I never want to go back to a simple gyro in pita bread when I could have a spiced up version of it in parantha bread. It actually only took us a half-hour to get there (20 min on intercampus and five on the 155 west.) If you're in the Streeterville area this is an obligatory visit for anyone who loves spicy, authentic Indian food.

2. I recently made a "La Jiao Shiao Tsao" (Hot Pepper Stir Fry?) that turned out well. My mom cooks this for me when I go back home - and I thought it was about time to try cooking it for myself. The main ingredient is leeks and hot peppers (jalepenos work fine) - the combination is a fragrant, spicy flavor that I find irresistable. Pork strips and dried tofu strips are included in the stir fry. You can get this stuff plated in less than 20 minutes if you cut and wash quickly. I cut pork into little strips (a staple in Chinese stir-fry) and marinated it in white pepper, soy sauce, a bit of rice wine, and corn starch for a couple of hours. The corn starch keeps the meat tender during cooking. To cook, cut up one leek (you have to wash these well), three mild jalapenos (if you like milder spice remove all the seeds), and three cloves of garlic. Stir-fry these in a wok with a bit of vegetable oil for two minutes, then add the pork, dried tofu strips, a couple tablespoons of water, one tablespoon soy sauce, and white pepper to taste and cook for another three minutes. Keep the heat on high the entire time, and serve immediately with white rice. Tsingtao beer actually works amazingly with this dish - so if you've got it break out a couple of bottles. If you've got garlic chives and shrimp, these add even more complexity and flavor to the dish. Just clean the shrimp - cooking time shouldn't vary much.

Ok now here's what I wanted to show you guys:



This crazy idea started with the need to use up some avocados. I also wanted to do something artsy - which I kind of failed at...but anyways you could call the above dish chicken on a raft, floating down a river dwarfed by mountain. I know, its crazy but I was listening to Incubus - Aqueous Transmission and so I had to make a river.

The raft is made out of some asparagus cooked with a bit of garlic and sea salt. The chicken was marinated and baked in teriyaki sauce (equal parts of soy sauce, mirin, and sake) and a bit of sriracha for spice. The river was made of avocadoes pureed with some sea salt, milk, olive oil, and wasabi (basically I was trying to make avocado wasabi mayo without using raw egg).

The mountain is white rice topped with honeyed walnuts and goji berries (my healthier take on a Chinese desert called eight-treasure sticky rice). The walnuts I toasted for a bit to bring out the natural oils, coated with honey diluted with a bit of water and lemon juice, and baked. I put these walnuts on top of the chicken as well.

Everything was put on top of two sheets of salted sea weed - so the remaining bits could be wrapped up and eaten...kind of a glorified sushi.

All in all, I would judge the dish as a bit chaotic - the "mountain" tasted very good, but didn't really have any relation to the other components of the dish in terms of flavor - though wasabi-tinged avocado with the teriyaki chicken worked very well in my opinion. I also think I succeeded in preserving the natural flavors of my ingredients (ie I didn't add too many spices) which I appreciate about Japanese food. I have to try to keep my flavors a bit more focused. I had a lot of fun making this though.

Battle Fennel

One of the things I love about Tuesdays is the Farmer's Market, in front of the MCA. Today I picked up fennel - which I've never cooked with before or eaten. It's basically the baby of leek and aniseed (in my tastebud's opinion). Here's what I ended up making with it.

The chicken was seasoned with sea salt, black pepper, rosemary, garlic, and chopped up fennel stalk - and saute-ed for just a couple minutes on each side to brown the outside. I then stuck it in the oven to bake with some bigger pieces of saute-ed fennel, yellow onion, and garlic. Everything was covered with a light coat of olive oil while baking.

The hummus that the chicken and fennel were plated over was made by blending chickpeas, a very little bit of lemon juice, olive oil, and sea salt at first. After this, I added some concentrated tea (South African rooibos), a drop of vanilla extract, honey, and cinnamon. The rooibos tea has a very subtle sweet, aromatic flavor.

The couscous was infused with the rooibos tea, and also mixed with some toasted pistachios and dried cranberries and a bit of butter.

Basically, I wanted to complement the liqourice flavor of the fennel with the aromatic sweetness of the rooibos. Overall, I was pretty satisfied with the way the flavors worked together - especially when the chicken was dipped in hummus and eaten with a small piece of fennel and a spoonful of couscous. I was also happy with the way the natural oils of the pistachio complemented the flavor of the tea.

However, I need to figure out how to make couscous fluffy - I'm still not a big fan of it. After a grueling exam though, it was nice to sit down to a nice meal with a couple of my favorite people =)

Here's to great eating

I have to credit my trip to China a couple summers ago for both reinforcing and expanding my appreciation for food.

Chinese people approach eating seriously. When you eat a real meal, you commit time to it - sometimes a few hours. You sit down with your family or friends or both, and share each dish at the center of the table. You encourage each other to eat some more, and to have another drink. Most Westerners get the feeling after the fifth 'gan bei' or their third bowl of rice that they're part of an intimate celebration.

For those who love cooking, the passion, creativity, and respect for the history and natural character of an ingredient is easily apparent in Chinese food - but this also goes hand in hand with the daring to totally manipulate ingredients and make them taste like something that could never be found in nature. Artwork is created atop every plate served - from the simplest long-life noodles to very intricate phoenix nests.

I've created this blog for a few reasons. One is to make sure that when I eat out - the experience stays with me for longer than however long it takes to digest. I'm doing this for the sake of culinary inspiration, and for the sake of forcing myself to use my digital camera. I also want to share my food and ideas with others, and most importantly - bring my friends and whoever else wanders upon this blog to my proverbial table...in a celebration of food!