liamsaunt

My niece came home from college for the weekend to have some home-cooked food and watch a couple of the Oscar-nominated movies that are available for streaming, so we are doing some of her favorites. Last night: miso salmon udon soup with spinach, pea shoots, and shiitake mushrooms (no dreaded mushrooms in hers) Movie: Belfast. The dinner and the movie got a thumbs up from all of us.

Chicken tinga tacos with pineapple-avocado salsa. The cheese sauce on the bottom is from a large batch in my freezer that I have been trying to use up (and am finally almost done with). It has roasted poblanos, sharp (orange) cheddar, garlic, and cumin, plus some American for the meltability factor. I cannot even remember what I originally made it for at this point, but will be glad to have the freezer space back.

Spinach malfatti with tomato sauce

Crab cakes with a lemon dill aioli, cabbage, apple and carrot slaw, and oven fries

Stir fried cod with black pearl oyster mushrooms and broccoli.

I was born in Philly and my parents grew up there. I got my Dad those cheesesteaks from Goldbelly for Christmas and he loved them. He got me some Philly pretzels from Goldbelly as a thank you, so I guess that means they were pretty good. I think my favorite commercial was the one for Rocket Mortgage with the Barbie dream house and Anna Kendrick.

I normally do not have access to grouper. This was flown in from Florida and was being unpacked at Eataly while I was there. Unlike the rotten cockles they sold me, this was impeccably fresh. I am still mad at them about the cockles though 🙃 Two flatbread pizzas last night. Margharita Black pearl mushrooms, pea shoots and taleggio

I only host when our team makes it, and even if they had, covid would have prevented having a party (again) this year anyway. I'm just planning on making a couple of pizzas and maybe a salad. The game will be on in the house somewhere, but I have a date with my book 😀

Lightly blackened grouper tacos with avocado crema and pickled watermelon radishes and onions.

Last night was a bit of a dinner disaster. My husband had a procedure at a hospital in the city yesterday, so while I was waiting for him I stopped by Eataly to get some fish for dinner. I used to stop in once a week for fish when I still worked in Boston, but had not been back there since Covid started. I chose some cockles for linguini with cockles. The fishmonger just scooped them out of the ice they were buried in and dumped them in a bag without sorting through them first. I thought about asking him to pick through them, but let it go because I figured he was having a grumpy day and after all, it was Eataly, so what could go wrong? Well, it turned out that a bunch of them were dead, and the smell had invaded all of the other cockles, so I ended up having to dump the entire lot in the compost. ARGH. A nice dinner of clams turned into a thrown together plate of spaghetti with tons of garlic, a few overripe grape tomatoes, lots of parmesan and the last of a bunch of basil. Whatever. It was one meal and we were hungry. That said, once I am back to full time food shopping in person, I won't be rushing back to Eataly for fish.

I like to keep my crab cakes really simple. Instead of using a shrimp mousse as a binder, I make the cakes in the morning and then leave them in the fridge all day to firm up. They are still quite delicate when I cook them, but they do stay together. I use as little binder as possible, and barely dust the cakes with flour before pan frying them. I also use a 50-50 mix of canola oil and butter to cook them. Here is a simple recipe from Jasper White's Summer Shack Cookbook that is one of my go to recipes when I want a traditional style crab cake. (I hope it is OK to post these images here, but please delete if not). I usually make a lemon-dill aioli to serve with them, but the English mustard sauce Jasper suggests here is also good.

I got the idea from the Red Boat Fish Sauce cookbook. Their recipe has you simmer equal amounts of fish sauce, minced onions and palm sugar in water for about 20 minutes before cooling the mixture and adding soft boiled eggs to steep for at least four hours, and the longer the better. We had eggs again last night, this time broiled eggs with herbs and cream, with a salad and some toasted bread. I started out using the eggs from our farm stand (the bright orange ones in front) but switched over to Organic Valley brand from Whole Foods (the yellow one in the back). The farm ones are hard to separate cleanly, and I like to add the yolks towards the end after giving the whites a head start so they stay nice and runny. What a difference in yolk color!

There is not enough bone scrap to make it worth saving for broth. Right now, there are only three of us in the house, so we get one pound of fish to split. I would have to save the bones for a long time to get enough for broth. And, this is the only kind of fish we get that is so bony, and we do not get it very often. I do try to be mindful about making broth from leftovers when I can (like roast chicken), but it's not practical to save the redfish bones. Last night we had ramen bowls with purple daikon radish, shiitake mushrooms, pea shoots, napa cabbage, and fish sauce marinated eggs. This one was my husband's bowl, and he also got the leftover chicken from a chicken I roasted this past weekend (my sister and I did not want any chicken)

There is one section of the filet that is very, very bony, and that part I just cut out and throw into the compost. The smaller bones in the rest of the filet get ground up in the food processor. Between that and cooking the fish cakes, you do not notice them. That's another reason I dislike this fish: there is more waste than with other kinds we get. Last night, rigatoni with swordfish and puttanesca sauce

My fish share gave me the worst kind of fish (in my opinion) that they have yesterday, Acadian redfish. I hate it because it is filled with tiny little bones that are impossible to get out. So, I ground it up, mixed it with Thai red curry paste, cilantro and fish sauce, and made fish cakes that we ate in lettuce wraps with sweet chili sauce, some rice and a cucumber salad. It was acceptable but I hope we get something different next week.

Baked ziti (well, radiatori, because I had some) and salad.

At the food truck (and then later at their mostly takeaway restaurant a few blocks away) the eggs were soft poached and then deep fried to make the edges all lacy and the outside crispy while the yolk stayed runny. The unfortunate side effect of this technique was that sometimes the whites remained a little underdone but I would just scrape away those parts and eat the rest. Eating one of those sandwiches for lunch guaranteed a sleepy and decidedly unproductive afternoon at the office 🤣

Shiitake mushrooms with larb flavors. Rice and salad with nuoc cham dressing

Chicken shawarma

Before they opened their restaurant Mei Mei, the sisters who wrote that cookbook had a food truck that used to come and park outside the building I worked in. I would get the Double Awesome sandwich for lunch sometimes. I am pretty sure the recipe is in that cookbook. It would make a terrific breakfast. You should try it if you have not already. It really is delicious, but fair warning it is dangerous calorie wise. There is a reason that I have lost 30 pounds since I stopped working! 🤣

Seared scallops on a potato, celery root, and leek puree, with broccoli.

My fish share gave us pollock this week, so I made coconut curry with it. If we have to have pollock, this is our favorite way to eat it.

Pasta ala norma

I used cinnamon, fenugreek leaves, a little bit of cloves, spicy Indian chile powder. I found a link to the recipe I like: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/mar/29/20-best-cheese-recipes-meera-sodha-paneer-butter-masala That looks really delicious! Can you share a recipe? Last night we went with the old standard miso salmon udon noodle bowls. It also had spiralized carrots (I got an attachment for my kitchenaid stand mixer that spiralizes hard vegetables with ease, unlike my old plastic one), bok choy, a ton of fava shoots from my CSA box, plus some black king oyster mushrooms from our mushroom share. It was very nice on a cold, windy and snowy night.

Indian food last night. We could not decide which paneer dish we wanted so I made two: saag paneer and mutter paneer. With basmati rice and naan.