Dinner! 2012

[Zeemanb]

looks delicious. I bet that apricot addition made a very big difference. I plan to 'borrow' your idea.

Ditto, and with the mild winter this is the first year I've had my sage come back on its own in the garden...already flowering so I've got a ton to put to good use. Great idea, I do love lots of sage in a dish....

[Kim Shook]

Bruce – thanks so much. The pork is marinating right now. I’ll be grilling it tonight!

robirdstx – your tortillas are great! Maybe another retirement project for me? I really need to get started on those . My first is going to be bagels – PC sent me wonderful precise directions for them.

Jerry – oh, that CHEESE !!! I saw parts of that episode and really wanted that cheese. Not to mention the pate. My mom’s BD is Sunday and she’s requested an antipasto platter. I just went and added pate to my shopping list. I don’t know if it is ‘kosher’ with antipasto, but I pictured spreading it on a piece of crusty bread. Now, if I could just find some cheese like that. Cool platter – is it supposed to look like graph paper?

For dinner night before last, I was trying to make good use of our CSA delivery, so I made mustard greens and cream of sorrel soup. The soup:

Mr. Kim really liked it a lot. I thought it was just ok – but I’m not much of a vegetable person. I could happily live on meat, fish, starches and gravy.

Mr. Kim was lo-carbing, so I did an omelet for him:

Ham, Jarlsberg and spring onion.

I had a kinda-sorta croque madame:

No béchamel, really just a ham and cheese croissant – grilled with a fried egg on top. I was trying to emulate Xilimmns’ gorgeous dish from the breakfast thread, but failed miserably. It tasted great, but sadly, my egg looks nothing like Xilimmns’. Those little drips in front are not my attempt at plate painting, just drippy egg yolk that I was too dispirited to bother wiping off for the picture! Seriously, though, you should go look at that egg – it is amazing. Xilimmns even explained how it was done, but I still didn’t have any success. The beautiful high sitting yolk, bright yellow. Sigh.

We had a very simple dinner last night – salad, hot dogs and sauerkraut:

Mr. Kim’s dogs w/ mustard and sriracha:

[Zeemanb]

Jerry – oh, that CHEESE !!! I saw parts of that episode and really wanted that cheese. Not to mention the pate. My mom’s BD is Sunday and she’s requested an antipasto platter. I just went and added pate to my shopping list. I don’t know if it is ‘kosher’ with antipasto, but I pictured spreading it on a piece of crusty bread. Now, if I could just find some cheese like that. Cool platter – is it supposed to look like graph paper?

Pate is kosher with ANYTHING! Our new local "old world" butcher isn't doing me any favors...outrageous stuff. Green Dirt Farms is awesome...the people, the cheese, the location. I'll pretend to be too cool for Bourdain, but seeing your good friends cooking for him and having dinner is pretty neat. When Green Dirt Facebooked that they had bossa that was "about as ripe as what we served Tony", I made the drive across town to hit that market Saturday. Our CSA starts in another week, but we're already in creativity mode....

You will find this hilarious....the platter is from your favorite place, Fishs Eddy's, which I didn't know anything about until YOU told me about them when we had dinner at your house!

[patrickamory]

The homemade cavatelli look delicious.

Pasta e fagioli:

Lovely, though it's making me mildly homesick. What recipe did you end up going with, in the end?

Thanks. It was a combination of the New York Times and Dean & Deluca recipes I mentioned in the Pasta e Fagioli thread. It's pretty much the NYT ingredient list, except that I added the rind of reggiano you recommended, as well as fresh thyme, and fresh sage. I sautéd the onion, celery and garlic in olive oil rather than cooking them with the beans, then added the soaked beans, herbs, tomatoes, cheese rind, and water. The rest of the technique was pretty much the NYT version - parcooking the pasta, adding that to the beans, and garnishing with more parsey, olive oil and pepper. Oh, and I had good grana padano so I passed that for grating as well.

I was happy with it, though I felt the thyme was a bit overwhelming - I might have added too much. Normally I can't have enough thyme. (It might also have just been crappy supermarket thyme.)

[kayb]

SUCH marvelous meals -- too many to call any of them out, but if I could eat dinner with each one of you, I'd be thrilled.

Still not cooking a lot....the move, and hair-on-fire busy at work. But I did manage a sous-vide pork loin, 24 hours at 155C, then glazed with barbecue sauce and seared in a hot-hot-hot oven. With baked potato gratin and baked beans. Not half bad.

Particularly when accompanied by a caprese with good, fresh tomatos and buffalo mozzarella.

[C. sapidus]

EnriqueB – Thanks! Anyone who combines fish sauce, lemon rind, and parmesan is my kind of cook! That duck rice looks good, too.

Franci – Thank you, I hope you and your family like the asparagus.

Chicken stir-fried with lemongrass and chile – with cabbage, shallot, curry powder, fish sauce, sugar, and coconut milk. Served with jasmine rice and our usually unpictured salad, pictured.

[Hassouni]

It's warm weather, finally, so that means it's kabab time. Here's Iraqi style, sort of:

Chicken breast marinated with yogurt, onion, garlic, za'tar, coriander, saffron, lime juice, and olive oil, impaled along with some peppers and tomatoes:

Plated on top of toasted Barbari bread:

Technically, this is "tikkat dijaaj," not "kabaab" in the Iraqi dialect, but this is all Kabab in the Iranian/Western sense, so there you have it.

Served with a vaguely Iraqi salad (lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, beets, olives, with pomegranate dressing):

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/522543_774079067551_37003198_35955150_2081596892_n.jpg

Not pictured: sliced onion, sumac and parsley salad/garnish, and grilled pineapple sprinkled with maple syrup (nothing Iraqi about that, but damn delicious!)

Edited May 2, 2012 by Hassouni (log)

[Kim Shook]

Jerry – too funny! Yes, Fishs Eddy was very sorry to hear of my retirement !

Kay – great looking meal. Your ‘too busy to cook’ meals look much different from mine. I do not think that that means what you think that that means .

Hassouni – Mr. Kim would have certainly approved of the addition of peppers to our ‘kebabs’ tonight. Those are some lovely looking swords that you have your dinner impaled upon! Much more impressive than my puny little coat hanger-ish rods!

Dinner tonight was Bruce’s Chaing Mai BBQ Pork:

Thank you so much for giving all of the particulars, Bruce! It was really delicious – Mr. Kim and I both loved it.

Served with stir fried noodles, mustard greens and grilled pineapple:

Tonight I just brushed the pineapple with a little soy sauce – MUCH better than that icky teriyaki glaze!

[David Ross]

Here are a few recent dishes I did as part of our Cook-Off discussion about Curing, Brining, Smoking and Salting Fish.

This is a Smoked Halibut Cheek served with a Spring Pea Risotto with Bacon and Morels-

And this is a Smoked Sea Scallop dish with Toasted Almonds, Olives, Lime, Micro-Greens and Fried Red Onion Chips-

The Cook-Off discussion is incredibly interesting and a wonderful learning experience. Check it out here.

[FrogPrincesse]

Beautiful polenta with calamari, SobaAddict! I really like polenta but mine never comes out quite right. What kind of polenta do you use?

For the polenta. Why you don't like how your polenta turns out?

Everywhere you go they have a different preference for polenta and they like a different variety.

Hi Franci,

Good to see you on the Dinner thread.

The polenta I've been experimenting with is Moretti white polenta. I made a gratin with it and was supposed to cook it "until it is no longer grainy" which never happened, even after an hour on the stove.

[Hassouni]

Jerry – too funny! Yes, Fishs Eddy was very sorry to hear of my retirement !

Kay – great looking meal. Your ‘too busy to cook’ meals look much different from mine. I do not think that that means what you think that that means .

Hassouni – Mr. Kim would have certainly approved of the addition of peppers to our ‘kebabs’ tonight. Those are some lovely looking swords that you have your dinner impaled upon! Much more impressive than my puny little coat hanger-ish rods!

Dinner tonight was Bruce’s Chaing Mai BBQ Pork:

Thank you so much for giving all of the particulars, Bruce! It was really delicious – Mr. Kim and I both loved it.

Served with stir fried noodles, mustard greens and grilled pineapple:

Tonight I just brushed the pineapple with a little soy sauce – MUCH better than that icky teriyaki glaze!

Hey, that pineapple looks not dissimilar to what I made tonight!

As for the swords - hehehe yea, that's the classic Iraqi-Iranian (and elsewhere in the region) set up - those fairly narrow ones for chunks, and 1" wide ones for ground meat. I can't say I never fenced with them in college with friends....

[Kouign Aman]

Kouign Aman – I admire your great repurposed customized frittatas. Fine looking jiaozi. What’s in the filling?

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Nothing fancy, plain chicken dishes.

dcarch

Stir fried chicken with black garlic

The jiaozi were basic pork and cabbage, seasoned with garlic mostly.

Aside from the sheer taste appeal of your food, these slices of radishes are so intensely attractive and creative for a background. Did they taste well with the chicken?

[harrysnapperorgans]

My sister brought her new boyfriend around and I made roast beef with roast potatoes, roast kumara (New Zealand sweet potato) steamed brocolli, yorkshire puddings and a red wine jus with the beef juices.

I haven't had roast beef in a long time so it was very very welcome. :-)

[Ashen]

David Ross.. That Halibut Cheek dish looks killer.. I love halibut cheek; combined with morels and pea risotto , I will be dreaming about that dish I am sure.

[C. sapidus]

Kim – I am so glad (and a little relieved ) that you liked the pork.

Grilled chicken – marinated with lime juice, fish sauce, garlic, black pepper, sugar, and oil before grilling over charcoal. Sweet chile sauce added post-picture.

Cabbage and egg stir-fry – with garlic, fish sauce, black pepper, and soft-cooked egg. Jasmine rice to go with.

[mm84321]

Morels stuffed with morels

[FrogPrincesse]

Linguini with shrimp scampi

[Norm Matthews]

I have been packing, moving and unpacking for a couple of months. Even though the new kitchen space is bigger, counter space and storage is smaller. The strip steak was done indoors on a cast iron griddle, corn and potato in the oven. Halfway through the spinach I realized I didn't have any vinegar so used sone Italian dressing. Salad was tomatoes, onion, celery, radish, and carrot. I used Plugra butter on the breadstick, potato and corn. Drink was Squirt.

Edited May 3, 2012 by Norm Matthews (log)

[avaserfi]

Tried doing a porchetta 'tartare' with roast pig skin. It was delicious, but next time I plan on curing the pork first to give it a pink hue, furthering the tartare feel of the dish.

[ScottyBoy]

Original and I'd love to taste, nice!

[menuinprogress]

Beet, avocado and orange salad:

[SobaAddict70]

Leftover spaghetti with green garlic pesto (no pic), but there was also this:

Asparagus with coconut, black mustard seeds and cardamom

Asparagus, mesclun, polenta cake, wild turkey egg

[Kim Shook]

Bruce – I was so drooly over your pork, that I somehow missed the second picture with the ground pork and bean sprouts. Bean sprouts are one of my favorite vegetables in the world – especially with pork, so I printed out the ingredients and will be making that soon!

Stash – that polenta cake couldn’t be more perfect! Did you like your polenta experiment?

For dinner tonight, we finished up Bruce’s pork. We got shitake mushrooms and bok choy in our CSA delivery today, so I did a little stir fry for Mr. Kim:

Mushrooms, bok choy, soy sauce, spring onions, elephant garlic, ginger, galangal and curry powder. He and Jessica, who stopped by, both loved it.

[FrogPrincesse]

Kim - your stir fry looks wonderful.

I went with something very simple tonight: grilled fish Romagna style (recipe from Marcella Hazan), green asparagus.

The fish (I used a large snook fillet) was seasoned and marinated for a while in olive oil and thinly sliced fresh rosemary, and coated with breadcrumbs (I used panko). Then I cooked it on the grill, adding a few bay leaves to the charcoal for the aroma, which was subtle but noticeable.

I served the fish with green asparagus seasoned with olive oil, balsamic, and fleur de sel.

Edited May 4, 2012 by FrogPrincesse (log)

[ddelima]

Kim Shook: your croque madame looks great, how was it taste wise? Pork and pineapple go so well together!

menuinprogress: beautiful salad, what dressing did you use?

mm84321 & David Ross: I'm starving for some morel because of you ;-)