Carbonara-esque Fried Rice in 10 minutes or less

bMarch is my least favorite month in Yankee Land.  A few warm (50+) days melted the remainder of our 7 feet of snow and made everyone think spring was imminent... but today it never got above 39 and snow flurried all afternoon. [Actually, I appreciated the snow. If it's gonna stay cold, it may as well snow.] I mean, I love my jaunty red thrift-store puffy coat, but I'm getting tired of wearing it, know what I'm saying? 

These plants are all supposed to come back to life "in the spring"

My real problem is that it's so gray without the white snow or green trees. The trees will start budding in a few weeks and blooming in another month, but I'm not supposed to replant my fire escape until after the last freeze in May. [I think greens like arooogula can start sooner, since back in Texas they're a winter crop.] My poor kitchen herbs are all leggy and dying to get away from the grow light and back in some real sun [and I brought half of them from Texas with me, so they know what they're missing.] Sigh.

Anyway, my winter malaise doesn't inspire creative or complicated cooking.  To wit:  Carbonara-esque Fried Rice 

I think I've mentioned leftovers fried rice is a staple at my house, but this time I didn't have anything but the [brown] rice left over.  I did, however, have some prosciutto that was a little on the dry side, so I diced a few slices and pan fried them in a teaspoon of olive oil 'til crispy while I nuked some frozen peas for  a minute to warm them up*, then stirred still-cold rice in with the meat and let it sit for ~ 1 minute, untouched, to let a crust to form, stirred it, let it sit again, stirred in the peas and let it sit long enough for me to beat a couple eggs in a bowl and pour it over the top.** 

Stir until the egg is no longer runny [but not dry] dump in a serving bowl and top with some cracked black pepper and maybe some hot sauce.

Note: A real carbonara would have some kind of hard cheese like pecorino or parm grated into it, and the eggs would be added off heat to make sure it stayed creamy... and there's nothing wrong with either of those things as far as I'm concerned. 

You could add frozen peas with the cold rice, but the peas can get a little starchy where they touch the pan directly too long, and I'm just not a fan of starchy green peas unless I'm turning them into soup.

** That may be an excessively long sentence, but that's how the recipe works: once you start you just keep going 'til it's done.

Toasted Mushroom-Avocado Sandwich aka "The Gandalf"

So there's this place in Houston called The Hobbit Cafe.  [It was The Hobbit Hole when it was located in an appropriately hobbit-like old house, but it moved well before my time.]

It's quaint. There are Lord of the Rings drawings and posters and figurines, most of which are at least 40-years old, and the food is great and mostly healthy-ish... and named after LOTR characters.  Back when JG and I lived in Houston, we'd go there fairly often and split a "Gandalf"... a toasted sandwich of sliced avocado, mushrooms, and swiss cheese on whole-grain bread, served with a side of shredded carrots [though this was before I was particularly interested in healthy eating and we usually subbed potato chips for the carrots.]

There was a certain magical flavor in the sandwich not attributable to any of the stated components which elevated the whole thing to the sublime, and one day JG asked what it was.  The server went back to the kitchen and reemerged with a spice bottle labeled "Spike."  We'd never seen it before but promptly went to the grocery store and found it with the rest of the spice blends.  [It turns out it's like the MSG of hippie food, created by a natural foods advocate circa 1925 named Gayelord Hauser, whose dislike of white bread might have been greater than mine.]  It was indeed the key ingredient to recreating the perfect Gandalf at home.

JG and I had kind of forgotten about that lovely sandwich [It's getting close to 10 years since we lived in H-Town] but we made blue cheese turkey burgers with avocado -- on homemade buns -- the other day, and as the slices popped out the sides it brought back memories... so I picked up another avocado on my way home from work yesterday [there's one grocery store on the way that always has acceptable if not great avocados] and we made paninis for dinner on leftover buns.  In tribute to the Hobbit Cafe, I also made my spicy carrot slaw to go on the side [it's so easy and surprisingly good]... and it really was a much better meal than with chips.

It was a slightly odd dinner for a 30-degree evening, but it felt like spring in the kitchen.

Recipe: Mushroom-Avocado Sandwich: The Gandalf

Lamb Stew

Here's a perfect example of why I love leftovers.  It was a blustery New England day and JG and I both got home chilled and hungry.  We had a leftover shank. We made soup. It tasted like something we'd labored over for hours, when all the work had been done by a slow cooker a couple days ago.

No recipe here... We sauteed another onion, threw in a couple bunches of coarsely chopped kale and let it wilt [kale is a superior soup green because it won't turn to mush], then threw in a can of garbanzo beans [including canning liquid], the leftover meat juices [the sauce had congealed from the gelatin in the bones], 4 cups of water, and a Parmesan cheese rind [I save these in the freezer for just such a purpose]. Once it came to the boil, we threw in some of the leftover risotto in the soup, checked the salt [it had plenty from the lamb], threw some bread in the toaster, ladled out the soup, pulled the toast, and dinner was ready.

Slow-Cooked Lamb Shanks

The leaves are starting to change here in Yankee Land, and that makes me want to break out the slow-cooker.  To whit, I present an epic-looking dish which is actually an easy midweek dinner that's just about ready whenever you walk in the door.

 

[Mark Bittman totally stole my thunder on this one.  The good news is, I was going to tell you that preserved lemons take time to make but are easy to buy, but Bittman just posted a recipe that only needs a few hours... so there you go. His uses sugar as well as salt (many do) so it won't taste exactly the same as mine, but I'm sure it'd be great.]

The wet rub for these shanks was actually JG's creation from about a month ago... I think because the weird jar of salt-packed lemons had been taking up pantry space and we weren't using them very fast, so he created a marinade with them and a few other powerful ingredients that was fantastic smeared on lamb steaks...  but I also thought it could be great for slow-cooked hunk o'lamb with just a little modification [reducing the oil and adding a bit of salt].

In the end, the texture of the meat [fall off the bone tender] and flavors were great and the onions were pure caramel-y goodness.  The sauce was a little on the salty side, so recipe below reflects my "notes for next time" adjustment.  People tend to call anything with preserved lemons "Moroccan-style." I think these flavors -- particularly with the rosemary-- are more eastern Mediterranean, but I don't really know.  I do know that they taste great together, and that's all that really matters to me.

Recipe: Slow-Cooked Lamb Shanks with Rosemary and Preserved Lemons

Superfast Elote Asado... with a Caveat

The polenta was almost finished when I remembered I had a couple ears of corn languishing in the fridge. It's not like me to neglect sweet corn, but we went out of town for a wedding and sometimes these things happen.  I thought a little roasted corn flavor might be nice in that polenta, but there just wasn't enough time to make elote asado before everything else was ready for dinner, so I gave it the chile pepper treatment and held with tongs over the open flame of my stove burner.  The kernels spit as they charred, making these wacky little bursts of sparks [It's not as scary as that may sound.]  As soon and they were spotty all over,  I transferred them to a cutting board, gave them a minute to cool while I checked the polenta, then cut the kernels from cob and stirred everything together.  The texture of the kernels was a little chewier -- it's definitely not a replacement for stand-alone elote asado* -- but it had the desired flavor and made the polenta dish taste like super gooey, whole-kernel cornbread.  It was good.

 

I topped it with fried eggs and scattered raw yellow tomatoes and roasted wax beans around the plate. It was supposed to be a textural and tonal dish, harkening back to the early days with JG when I'd regularly make an all-yellow meal of blue box macaroni and cheese, fish sticks, and canned corn [I've come a long way, baby]. Aesthetically it wasn't much prettier than that meal from the old days... I could have scattered some bright green cilantro over the whole thing and it would have been lovely, but I didn't garnish back them and I was overly committed to the theme.  At any rate, it tasted great with a few splashes of [tonally acceptable] Cholula hot sauce and was a _bit_ healthier than my yellow dinner of yore... and at ~15 minutes of total cooking time, the new, whole grain/fresh produce version might have even been faster.

*that's the caveat

Simple Polenta [Grits]

Polenta has a bad reputation as a very fussy starch, but it may help your confidence to think of it as "corn grits" -- a simple, salt-of-the-earth sort of dish.  The name polenta is derived from pulmentum, the Latin word for "porridge."  In practice, the big difference between "polenta" and "grits" is that the former is traditionally adulterated with cheese and butter [and sometimes milk] while the latter makes use of bacon fat [and cheese on occasion, but those are usually called "cheese grits"].  Despite these conventions, a plain mixture of cornmeal, water, and salt can rightfully go by either name.

Polenta making is often seen as hot and tedious, requiring a long simmer with constant stirring to prevent the dreaded clumps... but this, my friends, is completely unnecessary.   Clump-free polenta can be made in your microwave in 10 minutes or less with a minimum of stirring!
[I sound like an infomercial, but wait! There's more!]

Actually, there's not.  You can certainly get fancy with your polenta, but its glory lies in its simplicity -- you don't have to do much at all.... and that makes it a regular guest at my weeknight dinner table.

Recipe: Microwave Polenta [Grits]

Bulgur Salad Lettuce Wraps [aka Mediterranean Tacos]

I needed to cut back all of my herbs and lettuce before depositing my garden in the bathtub and skipping town, so I made this pretty little no-heat salad for dinner.  

 

I salted the remaining tomatoes and left them to drain over a measuring cup, then combined that with the juice from my 2 remaining lemons, stirred in 1/3 cup of fine bulgur (parboiled cracked wheat) and let it sit until the grains absorbed the liquid ~ 15 minutes.  

Then I tossed it with my herbs (mostly the cilantro and burnet, which were bolting), diced my remaining queso seco as a feta cheese stand-in, threw in a few pinches of salt and pepper,  drizzled it with olive oil, and served it with lettuce leaves, taco-style.

I was pleased with the result.  It was a nice dinner for two, but I imagine it'd make a nice side dish with shish-kebabs.  A diced cucumber and chopped kalmata olives would have added some nice texture, but I didn't have the first and I didn't think of the second until later.

Saba Hoedeopbap, Mackerel Fried Rice

I'm still thinking about that place, so I'm sharing one more recipe before I move on to more July 4th-ish things.  This meal's got a little more... fusion.  It's based on my love of Japanese saba rice (stir-fried rice with cured mackerel) and a Korean bipbimbop or hoedeopbap where cooked rice and raw fish and veggies gets thrown in a super hot bowl and topped with an egg yolk before you add sauce and stir it around as so it cooks through.

I was going to do a bipbimbop with a firm-fleshed fish, but they didn't have quite what I wanted at the counter and the Spanish mackerel looked shiny and fresh and I suddenly remembered how much I loved oily-fish fried rice -- it's like the seafood version of chorizo fried rice, and it's some very yummy, stick to your ribs, belly-filling goodness.  I figured combining with greens and a rich sauce bipbimbop-style wasn't going to hurt it any and extra crunchy rice bits could only make it better. [I was right!]

[Speaking of the sauce, I was going to use fish sauce as a component until I noticed the expiration date on mine (ew) but it turns out the primary ingredient is anchovy puree and I keep a tube of anchovy paste in my fridge to punch up pasta sauces... unless my little brother is watching.]

As for the cooking method, it was too hot in my tiny place to use my broiler to get the pot as hot as a real bipbimbop and I wanted to make sure my mackerel was fully cooked, so this variation uses two pans (plus whatever you use to cook the rice ahead of time).


Recipe: Spanish Mackerel Fried Rice

Simple Temaki [a.k.a. Japanese Tacos]

I've had some amazing Japanese food in my day.  I discovered sushi late in college and was fortunate to get an expense-paid visit to Tokyo when JG was working over there for a bit... though I think I was still too new to the cuisine at the time to make the most of my trip.  After moving to Austin, I fell in love with a modern Japanese place and even developed an unfortunate habit of of putting any raw thing in my mouth based on the things they [carefully and safely] served.  It was exquisite.

I learned the importance of toasting nori at this lovely place -- and that's the key to a tasty handroll.   The greatest thing about a hand roll is that it doesn't require skill as there is no rice shaping involved.  I also learned that the hand roll [temaki] is the Japanese equivalent of a sandwich with a similar origin story: a noble -- too obsessed with the gaming table to come away for a meal -- ordered his servant make him something he could eat with one hand.  It seems a little too close to the Earl of Sandwich story, but maybe it's a case of culinary convergence.

Temaki is the only sushi I'll make at home because doesn't require skill.  I don't want to spend the money for sashimi-grade fish for a weeknight meal, but there are times when I want that refreshing satisfaction of a sushi meal mid-week, and the hand roll hits that spot... plus they're fun to make:  All it takes are toasted seaweed sheets [nori], a bowl of vinegar rice and an array of sliced veggies, sauteed mushrooms for a meaty texture, and occasionally kani [fake crab sticks make from pollock that I find disturbingly delicious in a distinctly non-crab way].  You fill one corner, roll it up into a cone, and eat it quick before the nori goes soft. It's a casual week-night food at its best.

It takes a lot of practice to make true sushi rice look and taste right and involves lots of fanning and folding.  I've seen it done many times and I'm not even close to mastering it... but with a little tweaking I've created a brown rice version with the right flavor and a close enough texture for the at-home hand roll.


Recipe: Simple Temaki, Japanese Tacos

Microwave Pasta!

It's been kinda hot here in Yankee Land.  Mock me if you must, but here's the thing:  Where I come from all houses are climate-controlled, and my attic here offers no respite.  In Texas, I didn't mind exercising in 100F+ weather*, but I kept the AC in my house at a comfortable 76F from late-April through early October.  Now when it's 85F outside, it's over 90F in my afternoon sun-drenched kitchen.  This can make cooking anything unpleasant when even my little toaster oven puts out an unbearable amount of heat.

Salads and hummus plates are my friends, but I like the act of cooking enough that I also see the heat as a challenge, which lead me to an amazing discovery:  You can cook pasta in the microwave! A pound of pasta cooks in 13 minutes, which isn't really faster than cooking it on your stove [~5 minutes for your water to boil+ 7-10 minutes cooking time] but it doesn't add any heat to the kitchen, and this I will take as an unqualified victory.

After it's cooked, I dumped it on top of some homemade frozen pesto cubes and sliced cherry tomatoes, let it sit until the heat from the pasta thawed the sauce, tossed in some fresh basil from the garden, and topped it with cracked black pepper and an extra drizzle of good olive oil. It's easy and it can be served at any temperature.

Recipe: Microwave Pasta
  

*No, not "dry heat."  Austin's relative humidity is usually between 70-90 percent, and the "heat index" is often 10-15 degrees hotter than the actual temp.  [Where I grew up further west, it was a dry heat, but the true temp was also 10-20 degrees hotter than Austin on any given summer day.] Boston's prevailing weather goes out to sea instead of drawing it in, and the humidity is less than 50 percent most of the time.  I still don't understand why people who find out where I'm from want me to agree that New England August is more oppressive.  I used to live in Houston** with window units, which in August is kind of like living inside someone's mouth... there's simply no contest. Just stick to your winters, people, you win every time.

**Houston is a great city with an amazing art scene and worldclass research institutes. Anyone who thinks it's a hole probably never got past the vast suburbs... but it was built on a swamp and I don't miss those summers.

Scallop Tacos, Two Ways

 Local scallops were on sale here in Yankee Land, so I picked up more than I needed for dinner [but not nearly as many as I wanted].  The first night I made a ceviche with lime/serrano/shallot and garnished with fresh corn and cilantro from my herb garden.  The next night I seared the scallops [one side only] and served them with sliced avocado, toasted pepitas, and roasted corn on the side.

The ceviche was so deliciously delicate in flavor that it might've been better if I'd used some of my lettuce as a wrapper instead of the hearty, store-bought tortillas... the seared scallops held their own and were phenomenal.

Recipe: Scallops for Tacos

Fragrant Mussels with Coconut Flakes

A friend saw my request for Indian recipes and directed me to the BBC's Indian Food Made Easy.  I had more coconut to use and mussels were on sale, so mussels with dry coconut was a no-brainer.

It was easy, as promised.  I made a half recipe, used quartered grape tomatoes, and didn't cook the mussels separately. Instead, I added 1 1/2 cups of water to the onion/spice/tomato mixture and threw in the mussels after it cooked down.

The recipe makes use of garam masala, an Indian spice blend generally containing ginger/cardamom/coriander/cumin/pepper/nutmeg/cinnamon that has quite a few recipe variations [like curry powder] and is usually added at the end of cooking because it's considered less robust than using the whole and/or freshly ground spices typical of the cuisine -- it's like using a shaker of "Italian seasoning," theoretically, Italian dishes should have varying amounts of basil/oregano/garlic/onion/lemon depending on the dish, but that shaker makes everything taste vaguely Italian in universal way. Garam masala varies widely depending on the producer and those made commercially tend to use more of the cheaper spices, but it's still a potent blend for my American palate and the resulting dish was delicious in a vaguely Western Indian (coconut/tomato/seafood/rice) sort of way.

We ate all the mussles and had a little brothy goodness left over.  I stirred in some leftover rice to soak it all up, and tonight we will have leftovers-fried-rice with Indian spices and mussel broth. I'm excited.

Oops!... plus Chorizo and Egg Tacos

If any of you stopped by the end of last week/ beginning of this week, I was playing around with moving the site to its own domain and inadvertently lost it for a little while... Let's just pretend I handled it really well and didn't freak out at all, okay?
[I know almost nothing about web design but I feel like I should be able to figure out the basics... which hasn't worked so far.]

Let's focus on the positive.  Here's a little demo of the chorizo cubes in action:

The frozen [raw] cube in the pan over low heat

Break it apart as it cooks

Increase the heat to medium-high and pour in the egg

Swirl it around a bit

Dump it in a bowl

Serve on warm tortillas with optional garnishes

[I leave 'em plain for breakfast and jazz 'em up with avocado and pickled jalapeños for dinner.]

Lean Mexican-Style Chorizo

The first time I cooked Mexican chorizo at home, I was horrified. I opened up the casing, the contents glugged into the hot pan and started bubbling away, and I thought -- since it was sausage and sausage is generally a fattier food -- that it was at least 30% oil or some weird fat that rendered instantaneously. All of the chorizo and egg tacos I'd consumed in my past suddenly seemed... unseemly.

I now know that Mexican chorizo has a substantial amount of vinegar in it, which both flavors it and acts as a bacteria-killing preservative. Unlike Spanish chorizo, which is smoke-cured and sold at room temperature for slicing and serving as-is; Mexican chorizo is sold uncooked, refrigerated, and must be pan-fried into little crumbles before joining a given dish. Any place you might add bacon, you can add chorizo -- eggs, cooked greens, soups, salads, beans, etc. -- and because it's so heavily seasoned with garlic and onion and chiles and vinegar, you can even substitute a lean meat combination without diminishing its fantastic flavor.

Here JG pan-fried it with left-over rice and stirred in an egg at the end for chorizo-fried rice. It was tasty.

Recipe: Lean Mexican-Style Chorizo

Red Lentils & Yogurt

I'm trying to make more Indian/South Asian food because up here in Yankee Land it's a lot easier to find the ingredients cheaply than it is for my Mexican staples. There are three Indian and Pakistani grocery stores within a three-block radius of mi casa and I've found them to be the best-priced purveyors of bulk spices around town, so I decided that this week I was switching from beans and rice to their South-Asian split-lentil counterpart: dals.

[Side note: I've heard that people in the food scene here don't consider Mexican cuisine to be a viable food trend, which hurt my heart a little... and gave me a serious jonesing for some homemade corn tortillas... and made me think they need to visit Berlin for a little enlightenment.]

On this particular night worknight, I wasn't up for any real effort [like blooming whole spices in oil], so I decided to try a super simple [Americanized?] version of a red lentil recipe I'd printed from the New York Times. I didn't have any sweet potatoes, so I just skipped them and added a whole 15oz can of diced tomatoes (with juice) instead. The ginger in my vegetable bin was, ahem, fuzzy so I doubled the dried ginger. I didn't have a Thai chili so I used a serrano, half-seeded. I actually had a fresh coconut, but didn't feel like splitting it and I also had a jar of dried, unsweetened coconut chips in the pantry [gotta love a well-stocked pantry], and I'd somehow used all my fresh cilantro, so I put a big dollop of unsweetened, fat-free yogurt on top.

Verdict? Tasty, perfectly acceptable alternative to beans, and clearly adaptable to my whims. I served it over brown rice for dinner and ate it swirled with yogurt [2:1] for lunch the next day.*

I do have one Indian cookbook, and though it is the source of my favorite recipe for mattar paneer [spicy peas w/ fresh cheese], I don't really love it for some reason and rarely reference it. If you've got recommendation for a book or blog on the subject, let me know in the comments.

*... actually it was breakfast, but it was great, and it would have been great for lunch, too.