Dinner! 2010

[percyn]

Prawn, gorgeous meal as always. Now I feel like running to the store to get some ingredients to make that Rogan Josh (Gohst).

...

I was a little disappointed in the skin. I thought it would be crisper. The meat was completely done, but the skin was a little pallid in most places.

Kim, I keep a butane torch handy just for these occasions when things need some help in color and flavor in certain spots.

[Kim Shook]

Prawn, gorgeous meal as always. Now I feel like running to the store to get some ingredients to make that Rogan Josh (Gohst).

...

I was a little disappointed in the skin. I thought it would be crisper. The meat was completely done, but the skin was a little pallid in most places.

Kim, I keep a butane torch handy just for these occasions when things need some help in color and flavor in certain spots.

Good idea, percyn! I have a tiny little culinary one, but I've been eyeing the larger one at Lowe's for performing all kinds of kitchen mayhem!

[deensiebat]

Lousy picture, but lovely dinner: asparagus pizza

[djyee100]

Wonderful meals, everyone. Deensiebat, I love asparagus pizza, & I try to make it at least once a year as a rite of spring. I haven't gotten to it yet this year, though.

Tonight's dinner, Fried Spatchcocked Chicken, from Paula Wolfert's Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking, aka Chicken Cooked Under A Brick. The chicken is marinated with olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, fresh rosemary, and crushed red pepper, then grilled under a clay weight. The marinade makes for a delicious chicken. I deboned my chicken for more even cooking and easier eating.

The recipe is available on Googlebooks, page 86:

http://books.google.com/books?id=DwtbDDGaQcIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=mediterranean+clay+pot+cooking&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Served with roasted potatoes and sauteed sugar snap peas. I received the sugar snap peas from my CSA, and flipped through Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Vegetables to figure out what to do with them. A simple recipe, but really, one of the best ways I've found to cook sugar snap peas. They tasted sublime. This is my adaptation of the recipe.

Sauteed Sugar Snap Peas: Trim the sugar snap peas, and slice into 1/2-inch pieces. Put them into a skillet so that they form a shallow layer, and add 1/4-inch water, a pat of butter, and a dash of salt. Bring to a boil and cook over medium-high heat for about 3 mins until the liquid evaporates and the snap peas are tender crisp. Taste for seasoning, and serve.

BTW, the recipe for Roasted Chicken with Moroccan Flavors, also from Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking, is now available on Googlebooks at page 85. I don't think it was before, when I cooked the recipe upthread. Googlebooks seems to be rotating the recipes it shows from this book. The Moroccan-style roast chicken was fantastic, so if you want the recipe, find a pen and paper and take some notes while the recipe is still on view.

[nickrey]

Sous vide cooked steak dredged in Teriyaki sauce before searing sliced on top of stir fried bok choy, ginger, garlic and chili in oyster sauce. Topped with home made cucumber and daikon pickles courtesy of the Momofuku pickling recipe.

[Kim Shook]

Dinner a couple of nights ago was comfort food:

Cheese and yellow pepper omelets and roasted asparagus. I had some toasted leftover Yorkshire puds with mine.

I was making sausage rolls for Mother’s Day brunch and had some leftover puff pastry. I stuffed a couple of sheets with my pear preserves and made some nice little pastries:

[Kim Shook]

Dinner last night was another simple, comforting meal:

Tunafish salad sandwiches w/ alphabet soup. Can you tell that my life is a little stressful lately ?

[Kim Shook]

Tonight was leftovers, but pretty dern good ones:

Some of Mr. Kim’s smoked pulled pork from the freezer w/ slaw and my baked beans from last weekend. Great combination.

[menuinprogress]

Some of Mr. Kim’s smoked pulled pork from the freezer w/ slaw and my baked beans from last weekend. Great combination.

Yum! I love having leftover pulled pork in the freezer - such great flavor.

[C. sapidus]

Can’t go wrong with pulled pork.

Home-style chicken and potato curry (murgir jhol) and ghee rice (ghee bhaat), courtesy of Vivek Singh in Curry Cuisine. Mrs. C dry-fried delicious, meaty mushrooms, flavored with soy sauce and (I think) balsamic vinegar.

For the chicken we fried bay leaves, cardamom pods, and black peppercorns; brown-fried onions; added potatoes and chicken thighs (skinned and chopped in half); seasoned with ginger and garlic paste, coriander, cumin, cayenne, and turmeric; cooked everything down with chopped tomatoes; simmered until done with chicken stock; and finished the dish with chopped cilantro and roasted / ground cinnamon and cardamom.

We soaked basmati rice, boiled the rice with excess water (like pasta), drained when done, and then mixed the rice with ghee and sea salt.

[Darienne]

Not exciting but it's what we often eat...compilations of this and that, lessmeatarian (Mark Bittenism), mostly what we have. Seldom is a meal built around meat. And the big meal is at noon, with supper time alternating mostly between huge salad (every second night) and such delights as soup, grilled cheese sandwiches and popcorn and orange juleps.

This starts with a spiced Chickpea and tofu casserole with multiple additions of spinach, chorizo and mushrooms, etc, then three kinds of cheese with an Impossible Pie topping of 3 egg/ 1 1/2 cup milk/1 cup flour kind of biscuit. No name. One meal from just cooked and the rest divided and frozen for later times.

Next, though, I would like to cook pulled pork. Recipe anyone please?

[emmalish]

Tonight I made Moosewood's Mole de Olla, a spicy tomato-based stew with potatoes, green beans, zucchini & corn. It starts with onion, chilis, garlic, cinnamon & cloves and smells amAZing. Served with some grated cheese (of course )

[Prawncrackers]

Two very different dishes that called for caramel. Yesterday was Vietnamese Ca Kho or Catfish in caramel fish sauce. Tonight was spiced pear tart tatin, served with a big dollop of vanilla ice cream. It would have made for an interesting meal together. Can't think of many other savoury dishes with caramel though, is it only in Vietnamese cuisine that it occurs?

[Kim Shook]

Bruce – your meals always make me feel hungry, envious and ignorant in equal parts! I know that we have some really good Indian restaurants in Richmond and Mr. Kim and Jessica love it – I haven’t ANY exposure to Indian food and need to correct that.

Darienne – I really like your way of doing the big meal at lunchtime. If we were home during the day, that is EXACTLY how we’d eat. As for pulled pork recipes, I have two. I don’t know how you are set up for outdoor cooking, so I’ll give you both. One is an easy oven cooked recipe click.. If you are set up for smoking, here is Mr. Kim’s rub recipe click and for his sauce click.

Prawn – that catfish sounds amazing. I can’t think of another cuisine that would use caramel on anything but sweet dishes. I know (because I ‘wiki-ed’ it ) that catfish are found all over the world, but it still seems funny to think of English folks eating them. My English dad would die before eating catfish (but he thinks eel is lovely – eel just looks like a stretched out catfish to me!). And that tart is gorgeous!

The night before Mother’s Day Jessica made dinner to free me up for all the prep for the next day:

Butter beans, her fantastic corn casserole and very much kicked up Sloppy Joes. It was delicious and much better than my thrown together meal would have been!

My Mother’s Day celebration was a brunch, not a dinner, but we ate it all day, so this seems the best place to post it!

Pre-brunch nibbles:

Crackers and celery with Rachel’s ‘paminna cheese’:

and her ‘Redneck Gazpacho’:

A weird and wonderful mixture of fresh tomatoes, mayo, bacon and Saltines! It tastes like BLT in a bowl. Not everyone will remember Rachel since it’s been awhile since she’s participated here. If you don’t, you should search out her old posts (she posted as racheld). What richness of beautiful writing we have here at eGullet – Rachel is one of the best.

Brunch also included:

Quiche Lorraine:

Made with this decidedly oddly shaped Neuske’s bacon:

It’s no Blessed Virgin in a potato chip, but it enlivened our morning .

I also did a spinach and tomato quiche with Monterey Jack and goat cheeses:

Sausage rolls:

My stepmom’s chicken casserole:

Salad w/ creamy chive dressing:

Fruit salad:

Dessert was a Key Lime Poppy Seed Cake:

It was a white poppy seed cake filled with lime curd and frosted with a key lime extract flavored 7 minute frosting. Very, very good! I forgot to get a picture of a slice, but it was beautiful inside and the leftovers got scarfed up really fast at work.

Since my co-hostess turned up sick and I didn’t have any of her food, I had to make a last minute second dessert and I just made one of those frosting cakes since they come together so easily:

German chocolate cake with pecan, coconut and caramel frosting drizzled with chocolate and caramel.

I also made a pitcher of White Sangria that I forgot to take a picture of. On a trip to visit friends in Florida, we fell in love with Columbia restaurant’s White Sangria and our host, Gary came up with a wonderful version. It was delicious and POTENT!

[twoshoes]

okay ms shook, I'll take two sloppy joes and two sausage rolls.

that quiche looks like pizza - yummy!

[emmalish]

Kim, I know it's not yours, but I'm intrigued by that corn casserole. And twoshoes is right, that quiche does look like pizza! Delicious delicious quiche-y pizza!

[Rico]

Okay, I'm still slightly embarrassed to take pictures of food I make in front of my girlfriend, so I certainly couldn't muster up the courage to take them at the Lonesome Dove for the gf's birthday last night, but I can at least say what I had:

They do a sampler deal with their appetizer course, and we had:

Elk sausage and foie gras sliders

Boar ribs with barbecue sauce

Seared scallops

Ostrich nachos

Rattlesnake and rabbit sausage

The salads were salads.

I had the roasted garlic stuffed beef tenderloin, and the gf had the New Zealand red deer tenderloin. Sides were asparagus (good) and white truffled mac and cheese (so freaking good I almost cried).

My review is that it was frickin' unbelievable. All of it. But I probably appreciated the main course slightly less because I was already so full from the appetizers and such. But I'd go back. In a heartbeat.

[Prawncrackers]

Prawn – that catfish sounds amazing. I can’t think of another cuisine that would use caramel on anything but sweet dishes. I know (because I ‘wiki-ed’ it ) that catfish are found all over the world, but it still seems funny to think of English folks eating them. My English dad would die before eating catfish (but he thinks eel is lovely – eel just looks like a stretched out catfish to me!).

Thanks Kim but you forget I'm English of Cantonese descent; so catfish, dogfish, redfish, bluefish, anyfish is good for me!

[robirdstx]

We had Red Snapper Fish Tacos for dinner last night but I forgot to take a photo, even though the camera was sitting right there on the counter. Today, while making lunch with the leftovers, I remembered to grab my camera before eating.

[Darienne]

Darienne – I really like your way of doing the big meal at lunchtime. If we were home during the day, that is EXACTLY how we’d eat. As for pulled pork recipes, I have two. I don’t know how you are set up for outdoor cooking, so I’ll give you both. One is an easy oven cooked recipe click.. If you are set up for smoking, here is Mr. Kim’s rub recipe click and for his sauce click.

Gosh, Kim, just found the reference to my pulled pork event on your post now, about half an hour after finally making up my mind to do the butt in a slow cooker for 18 hours with a eGullet sauce from Mark "South Caroline Mustard Barbecue Sauce". Next time...your recipe. Thanks.

[djyee100]

Can't think of many other savoury dishes with caramel though, is it only in Vietnamese cuisine that it occurs?

Questions like this are insidious. Late in the afternoon, they are so much more interesting to think about and research than the other work I'm supposed to be doing on my computer...

There's a popular Chinese restaurant dish of deep-fried shrimp with caramelized walnuts. But except for that, no other savory caramel dish comes to my mind, outside Vietnamese cuisine.

While checking out a couple of Andrea Nguyen's caramel recipes, which I remember from her cookbook Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, I came across this interview with her on a blog. She explains the origin of caramel sauce in Vietnamese (and she says all Asian) cooking.

Towards the bottom of the page, caramel sauce:

http://www.spicelines.com/2008/05/andrea_nguyen_talks_vietnamese.htm

A couple caramel-y recipes I've tried from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, and liked.

- Chicken and Ginger Simmered in Caramel Sauce. For awhile, this was my go-to dish for weekday nights. It's delicious, and very quick and easy to cook--as long as you make the caramel sauce ahead of time. I kept a jar of caramel sauce handy in the cupboard.

Recipe on this blog (same ingredients, different instructions). I suggest you skip Step 1 here and make the sauce as described on Andrea's website.

http://www.seasonednoob.com/vietnamese-ginger-pork-with-caramel-sauce/

- Caramelized Minced Pork, which tastes like candied pork, if you can imagine such a thing. Available on this blog (a doubled recipe of the same ingredients, different instructions):

http://www.braisd.com/whats-for-dinner-vietnamese-caramelized-pork

Andrea's recipe for caramel sauce is on her website. It really is a burnt caramel sauce, dark as coffee or molasses with a reddish cast to the color, and quite bitter with a sweet taste underneath.

http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2007/10/caramel-sauce.html

Kim, perhaps your father would be more willing to try a Vietnamese caramel dish with chicken or pork.

[Kim Shook]

Mysstwalker & judiu – glad you found the recipe! It really is good and unusual!

emmalish – I’ve asked Jess for the recipe and will post it as soon as she sends it to me.

robirdstx – those fish tacos look wonderful!

[deensiebat]

Thinning the garden led to my favorite greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts spring dish: shrimp with green garlic:

Just green garlic, fish sauce, curry powder and shrimp, but it tastes like much more.

[robirdstx]

robirdstx – those fish tacos look wonderful!

Thanks Kim, they were very tasty.

Dinner tonight was Tortilla Soup with shredded chicken, yellow corn, black beans, avocado salsa and queso fresca.

[kayb]

Been on the road. First night to cook once I got home was the first homemade pizza I've made in probably 25 years (not a big pizza fan). Pepperoni, baby portobello mushrooms on half (some non-mushroom eaters in the house), tomato sauce, fresh basil, grated mozzarella and grated pecorino romano. I thought between the pecorino and the pepperoni, it was overly salty, but not bad for the first time in a quarter-century.