One of the reasons I started this blog was to keep notes on my various culinary efforts. Despite the recent hiatus in posting here, I haven't stopped cooking, but I've also grown to realize that I miss being able to refer to those notes. So here I am again.
Another thing that's been going on lately is more non-Asian cooking. For example, a few nights ago, I wanted something quick and easy, but something more than a packaged meal. It finally dawned on me that I could toss together some "Pasta Alla Gricia" from Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. Just brown some chopped bacon in olive oil (I didn't have pancetta on hand), reserve the bacon and its juices, cook your pasta (again, capellini was what I had on hand, so that's what got used). When the pasta's done, add the bacon and juices plus grated Pecorino Romano cheese. The result is fast, tasty and gives the pleasure of cooking your own food without a lot of work.
Not that I've turned my back on cooking Asian food, by any means. I've been enjoying reading and cooking from Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. That last dish I tried was from Land of Plenty, namely "Chicken with Chiles." I made a few changes in the recipe, most notably skipping the initial velveting step and treating it as a straight stir-fry.
Aromatics are important in this dish; it calls for dried red chiles, garlic, ginger, Sichuan pepper and scallions. Of course, I only have ground Sichuan pepper, so that burned when it hit the hot oil (whole peppercorns are preferred). None of these seasonings are meant to be eaten; they're there to flavor the oil. Again, I kept the pan too hot, so there was little oil to be had by the end of the proceedings. I had a cup of chicken broth on hand, though the recipe doesn't call for it, so to keep the pan from drying out, I made sort of a pan sauce from the chicken marinade (dark and light soy sauce, Shao Xing rice wine and salt) and the broth. In the end, the chicken meat had complicated spicy flavors, very intense but still a light meal. Serving this over a lot of white rice would be a good idea.
Showing posts with label italy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label italy. Show all posts
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Packing an Italian lunch
Sometimes (especially when I feel particularly cheap), I like to make my own lunch to bring along on birding trips. The best method of doing this is to cook dinner the night before and make sure plenty of leftovers are available. Not only does this mean there's one less thing to deal with in the morning when I'm trying to get myself on the road, it also means that if dinner disagrees with my stomach, I can put together Plan B for the trip. Intestinal issues are bad enough when you're at home; when you're on a birding trip and may be miles away from a pit stop, they can be catastrophic.
My birding pal The Lurker, like many, just packs a sandwich or two when he feels the need to brown-bag it. You might ask why I don't bring a sandwich. For some reason, I just don't make them for myself any more. I used to pack them frequently when I worked in New York City. Of course, these were the most boring sandwiches you could imagine: two slices of generic bread and some lunch meat completed the picture. Sandwiches just don't excite me, I guess. Besides, something like Thai fried rice seems to do a better job of keeping me going during the day.
Yesterday we went off to Delaware in search of shorebirds at Bombay Hook and the avian celebrity of the moment, a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. I knew I wanted to pack a lunch, so I picked out a simple pasta recipe from Anne Casale's Italian Family Cooking, "Linguine with Shrimp." However, I didn't get to cook it until yesterday morning.
I didn't follow her ingredient proportions exactly because I was just cooking lunch and not wanting leftovers for a change. I sauteed three sliced scallions in a blend of a quarter-cup each of olive oil and butter for two minutes, then did the same with some garlic for a minute and a half. Then, in went the peeled shrimp, which I cooked over high heat until they turned pink. Then I turned the heat to low and added a few spritzes of lemon juice and a teaspoon of torn basil leaves; once this was heated through, I added half a teaspoon each of white pepper and salt, stirred a few times, then poured it over spinach fettuccini. By the end, the scallion bits were fairly brown and the sauce was rather oily, so I minimized the proportions of those ingredients when I dished it into my lunch container. I did add more sauce than I would normally, just to keep the pasta moist while it traveled around in the morning. The kitchen smelled wonderful, but it was time to run out the door.
Lunch found us at a Wendy's in Smyrna (along with everyone else in the county, it seemed). While my accomplices in crime waited on line to get their fast food, I started sampling my lunch. It was quite good; one unexpected thing I enjoyed was that the shrimp had cooked long enough to get a few little crispy brown bits on their edges. That made them extra tasty. When Perfect Tommy finally arrived at the table, carrying his Wendy's salad, he was able to guess the ingredients in short order. Later on, he suggested adding grated parmesan to top the dish, which sounds like a nice addition in the future. By the time The Lurker got to the table, my lunch was all gone, which meant that I wasn't the last one finishing my meal for a change.
My birding pal The Lurker, like many, just packs a sandwich or two when he feels the need to brown-bag it. You might ask why I don't bring a sandwich. For some reason, I just don't make them for myself any more. I used to pack them frequently when I worked in New York City. Of course, these were the most boring sandwiches you could imagine: two slices of generic bread and some lunch meat completed the picture. Sandwiches just don't excite me, I guess. Besides, something like Thai fried rice seems to do a better job of keeping me going during the day.
Yesterday we went off to Delaware in search of shorebirds at Bombay Hook and the avian celebrity of the moment, a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. I knew I wanted to pack a lunch, so I picked out a simple pasta recipe from Anne Casale's Italian Family Cooking, "Linguine with Shrimp." However, I didn't get to cook it until yesterday morning.
I didn't follow her ingredient proportions exactly because I was just cooking lunch and not wanting leftovers for a change. I sauteed three sliced scallions in a blend of a quarter-cup each of olive oil and butter for two minutes, then did the same with some garlic for a minute and a half. Then, in went the peeled shrimp, which I cooked over high heat until they turned pink. Then I turned the heat to low and added a few spritzes of lemon juice and a teaspoon of torn basil leaves; once this was heated through, I added half a teaspoon each of white pepper and salt, stirred a few times, then poured it over spinach fettuccini. By the end, the scallion bits were fairly brown and the sauce was rather oily, so I minimized the proportions of those ingredients when I dished it into my lunch container. I did add more sauce than I would normally, just to keep the pasta moist while it traveled around in the morning. The kitchen smelled wonderful, but it was time to run out the door.
Lunch found us at a Wendy's in Smyrna (along with everyone else in the county, it seemed). While my accomplices in crime waited on line to get their fast food, I started sampling my lunch. It was quite good; one unexpected thing I enjoyed was that the shrimp had cooked long enough to get a few little crispy brown bits on their edges. That made them extra tasty. When Perfect Tommy finally arrived at the table, carrying his Wendy's salad, he was able to guess the ingredients in short order. Later on, he suggested adding grated parmesan to top the dish, which sounds like a nice addition in the future. By the time The Lurker got to the table, my lunch was all gone, which meant that I wasn't the last one finishing my meal for a change.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Going Italian
Ah, Italian food. Whenever I get a little tired of fish sauce or soy sauce, I can just readjust my attention to tomatoes, basil and garlic. Rather than noodles, I can have pasta. Olive oil goes into the pan, not peanut oil, and one sautes rather than stir-frying. Well, ok, maybe the differences between some of these things are judgement calls, but Italian food is a good way of satisfying myself when I want "normal" food.
The first recipe I cooked from Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner was fettuccini carbonara. I thought it worked out well, but there were a couple of things I wanted to tweak. I got my chance to do that recently when I used Bittman's recipe for "Pasta alla Gricia," which is the base recipe from which the carbonara recipe "deviates." The interesting thing was that my tweaking didn't make any difference. I substituted regular olive oil for extra virgin olive oil because I thought the extra virgin olive burned and gave the carbonara a bitter undertone. Apparently the oil was not the culprit, because the pasta alla gricia had the same taste. Perhaps I cooked the pancetta too hard and too long? Pasta alla gricia is a simple dish (which is what attracted me to it on the night in question); cook the pancetta and pasta, combine them, then serve after stirring in some Pecorino Romano cheese. This was the first time I'd cooked with Pecorino Romano cheese and that, too, seemed somewhat bitter to me (though I'm the first to admit I'm not the world's biggest cheese fan).
The other night, I was looking for another simple pasta recipe. This time I used Anne Casale's Italian Family Cooking. I settled upon "Bucatini with Plain Tomato Sauce," although I used spinach fettuccini for it as well (it was the pasta I had in the house). For the sauce, one slowly sautes half a cup of chopped onion in a blend of two tablespoons each of olive oil and butter until soft but not brown. Add two large garlic cloves, halved, and again saute until soft but not brown. Add a 28 ounce can of crushed concentrated tomatoes, one and a half tablespoons of minced fresh basil, half a teaspoon of sugar and one teaspoon each of salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then turn heat down to low and let simmer, partially covered, for about 25 minutes. Casale recommends lots of stirring during these stages of sauce creation, but I stirred only occasionally and it didn't seem to hurt the end result. After the 25 minutes are up, let the sauce rest for an hour before cooking the pasta. I just cooked the pasta and dumped the sauce on top of it, although Casale gives slightly more involved directions for how to combine pasta and sauce.
This was very tasty. The sauce was mild and tomatoey (just what you want this time of year) and was very easy to make. The onions give it a bit more depth, but still make it sweet rather than spicy. This would be easy to tweak in various directions, as well. There was plenty for leftovers the next day. With results like this, I'm definitely emboldened to try Italian cooking on a more consistent basis in the future.
The first recipe I cooked from Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner was fettuccini carbonara. I thought it worked out well, but there were a couple of things I wanted to tweak. I got my chance to do that recently when I used Bittman's recipe for "Pasta alla Gricia," which is the base recipe from which the carbonara recipe "deviates." The interesting thing was that my tweaking didn't make any difference. I substituted regular olive oil for extra virgin olive oil because I thought the extra virgin olive burned and gave the carbonara a bitter undertone. Apparently the oil was not the culprit, because the pasta alla gricia had the same taste. Perhaps I cooked the pancetta too hard and too long? Pasta alla gricia is a simple dish (which is what attracted me to it on the night in question); cook the pancetta and pasta, combine them, then serve after stirring in some Pecorino Romano cheese. This was the first time I'd cooked with Pecorino Romano cheese and that, too, seemed somewhat bitter to me (though I'm the first to admit I'm not the world's biggest cheese fan).
The other night, I was looking for another simple pasta recipe. This time I used Anne Casale's Italian Family Cooking. I settled upon "Bucatini with Plain Tomato Sauce," although I used spinach fettuccini for it as well (it was the pasta I had in the house). For the sauce, one slowly sautes half a cup of chopped onion in a blend of two tablespoons each of olive oil and butter until soft but not brown. Add two large garlic cloves, halved, and again saute until soft but not brown. Add a 28 ounce can of crushed concentrated tomatoes, one and a half tablespoons of minced fresh basil, half a teaspoon of sugar and one teaspoon each of salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then turn heat down to low and let simmer, partially covered, for about 25 minutes. Casale recommends lots of stirring during these stages of sauce creation, but I stirred only occasionally and it didn't seem to hurt the end result. After the 25 minutes are up, let the sauce rest for an hour before cooking the pasta. I just cooked the pasta and dumped the sauce on top of it, although Casale gives slightly more involved directions for how to combine pasta and sauce.
This was very tasty. The sauce was mild and tomatoey (just what you want this time of year) and was very easy to make. The onions give it a bit more depth, but still make it sweet rather than spicy. This would be easy to tweak in various directions, as well. There was plenty for leftovers the next day. With results like this, I'm definitely emboldened to try Italian cooking on a more consistent basis in the future.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Shrimp and mint
I've accumulated some shrimp recipes that I want to work through, and this week I decided to try Mark Bittman's "Shrimp, Roman Style" from The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. I used the variant of shrimp over pasta. Bittman says this recipe is normally used for tripe, which takes a long time to cook, but using shrimp requires much less time.
Season some olive oil by browning a tablespoon of chopped garlic over medium heat. Bittman adds 6 dried red chiles to this step as well, but I used some Korean red pepper powder and added it later, while the tomatoes were cooking. After browning the garlic, turn off the heat for a minute, then add chopped tomatoes to the pan. I used some plum tomatoes, less than the four cups Bittman calls for. They were also less juicy than regular tomatoes, of course, which affected the sauce's consistency. In any case, bring the sauce to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer. Stir occasionally and season with salt and pepper if desired. By the time I was ready to add the shrimp, the tomatoes were starting to soften.
Cook the shrimp for about about five to ten minutes, until they're pink. Adjust the sauce seasonings if necessary, then stir in a cup of chopped fresh mint leaves. Dump over pasta and serve.
Bittman says the sauce should have the consistency of "a moist, almost soupy stew," but because my tomatoes weren't that juicy, I wound up with chunks of tomato instead, sort of a sauce in parts. I can't say it mattered to me, however, because it tasted just fine. The mint gave an almost electric zing to what would otherwise have been an ordinary Italian-style tomato sauce. It was a good change on Italian food as usual, as well as another dish whose taste outstrips the effort involved in puttting it together.
Season some olive oil by browning a tablespoon of chopped garlic over medium heat. Bittman adds 6 dried red chiles to this step as well, but I used some Korean red pepper powder and added it later, while the tomatoes were cooking. After browning the garlic, turn off the heat for a minute, then add chopped tomatoes to the pan. I used some plum tomatoes, less than the four cups Bittman calls for. They were also less juicy than regular tomatoes, of course, which affected the sauce's consistency. In any case, bring the sauce to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer. Stir occasionally and season with salt and pepper if desired. By the time I was ready to add the shrimp, the tomatoes were starting to soften.
Cook the shrimp for about about five to ten minutes, until they're pink. Adjust the sauce seasonings if necessary, then stir in a cup of chopped fresh mint leaves. Dump over pasta and serve.
Bittman says the sauce should have the consistency of "a moist, almost soupy stew," but because my tomatoes weren't that juicy, I wound up with chunks of tomato instead, sort of a sauce in parts. I can't say it mattered to me, however, because it tasted just fine. The mint gave an almost electric zing to what would otherwise have been an ordinary Italian-style tomato sauce. It was a good change on Italian food as usual, as well as another dish whose taste outstrips the effort involved in puttting it together.
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Fettucini carbonara
The first recipe from a new cookbook is always a rite of passage. No collection can be judged by a single recipe, of course, but a good result gets everything off on the right foot. A disappointing result, on the other hand, brings doubt about one’s cooking abilities, book selection skills, or both.
A couple of weeks ago, I picked up Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. I’ve been catching Bittman’s PBS show How to Cook Everything on an irregular basis on NJN tv. I like some episodes better than others, but some of the recipes look pretty good. In any case, when I flipped through the book, it looked like a good no-frills guide to cooking. Most dishes are western ones, but there are some Asian and Asian-inspired dishes as well. I also like the tips and variations for each recipe.
Yesterday, I decided to try Bittman’s version of pasta carbonara, which he lists as a variation of the “Pasta alla Gricia” recipe. Carbonara has historically been one of the things I buy as a frozen dinner, so the idea of making it for myself is attractive. I previously tried a Frugal Gourmet version of carbonara, but due to my use of 1% milk rather than whole milk, the results left something to be desired.
To start things off, I sautéed some pancetta in a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil until it was browned and crispy. Then I removed the pancetta from the heat and started to cook the spinach fettucini I was using for this dish (rather than the more typical spaghetti). While the pasta was cooking, I mixed three beaten eggs, a half cup of grated parmesan cheese and the pancetta and its juice in a warm pot. When everything was done, more or less at the same time (the egg was even starting to set in the bottom of the pot), I mixed it all up and garnished it with some more grated parmesan and pepper.
It turned out to be a rich pasta dish, quite filling and almost decadent (thanks to the eggs, no doubt). There was nothing remotely thin about this sauce. I probably used more pancetta than necessary; a little less would’ve balanced the ingredient proportions better. At times, I tasted a somewhat bitter undertone; I suspect that this was due to the fact that I used relatively cheap olive oil, or perhaps to overheating it. I had thought that cooking with extra virgin olive oil was a no-no (because of its delicacy), but Bittman cooks with it regularly in this book.
So, based on yesterday’s lunch, this cookbook looks like a worthy addition to my library.
A couple of weeks ago, I picked up Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. I’ve been catching Bittman’s PBS show How to Cook Everything on an irregular basis on NJN tv. I like some episodes better than others, but some of the recipes look pretty good. In any case, when I flipped through the book, it looked like a good no-frills guide to cooking. Most dishes are western ones, but there are some Asian and Asian-inspired dishes as well. I also like the tips and variations for each recipe.
Yesterday, I decided to try Bittman’s version of pasta carbonara, which he lists as a variation of the “Pasta alla Gricia” recipe. Carbonara has historically been one of the things I buy as a frozen dinner, so the idea of making it for myself is attractive. I previously tried a Frugal Gourmet version of carbonara, but due to my use of 1% milk rather than whole milk, the results left something to be desired.
To start things off, I sautéed some pancetta in a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil until it was browned and crispy. Then I removed the pancetta from the heat and started to cook the spinach fettucini I was using for this dish (rather than the more typical spaghetti). While the pasta was cooking, I mixed three beaten eggs, a half cup of grated parmesan cheese and the pancetta and its juice in a warm pot. When everything was done, more or less at the same time (the egg was even starting to set in the bottom of the pot), I mixed it all up and garnished it with some more grated parmesan and pepper.
It turned out to be a rich pasta dish, quite filling and almost decadent (thanks to the eggs, no doubt). There was nothing remotely thin about this sauce. I probably used more pancetta than necessary; a little less would’ve balanced the ingredient proportions better. At times, I tasted a somewhat bitter undertone; I suspect that this was due to the fact that I used relatively cheap olive oil, or perhaps to overheating it. I had thought that cooking with extra virgin olive oil was a no-no (because of its delicacy), but Bittman cooks with it regularly in this book.
So, based on yesterday’s lunch, this cookbook looks like a worthy addition to my library.
Monday, November 22, 2004
Carbonara
Frozen dinners. They are a bad habit dating back to my early days of being on my own. Stouffer's makes it so easy for you that there are dishes I've only eaten as frozen tv dinners. It's long past the time I should cook them for myself. Chicken Carbonara is one of those dishes.
Last night I cooked "Pasta Carbonara, Roman Style" from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines. It was a learning experience. The 1% milk I prefer made the sauce not smooth and creamy, as the recipe suggested, but a bunch of cheese particles suspended in butter solution. Not very appealing, visually, but I was impressed at how the taste matched the Chicken Carbonara I'm familiar with. I guess that's the important thing, but as I am usually cooking for one, presentation is one of those things that gets tossed out the window first. I want food to taste good. If it looks pretty, that's just gravy. So to speak.
Last night I cooked "Pasta Carbonara, Roman Style" from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines. It was a learning experience. The 1% milk I prefer made the sauce not smooth and creamy, as the recipe suggested, but a bunch of cheese particles suspended in butter solution. Not very appealing, visually, but I was impressed at how the taste matched the Chicken Carbonara I'm familiar with. I guess that's the important thing, but as I am usually cooking for one, presentation is one of those things that gets tossed out the window first. I want food to taste good. If it looks pretty, that's just gravy. So to speak.
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