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Cereal-Milk Panna Cotta a la Momofuku

I’ll finally get off my lazy butt and resume blogging about my kitchen adventures (and misadventures) this weekend.  To kickoff my comeback to bloggerdom, I wanted to give my personal recommendation for Christine Tosi’s (of Momofuku fame) Cereal Milk Panna Cotta with Caramelized Corn Flake Crunch recipe that appeared in the NY Times last week.  No pictures, but I can say it was was a very nice combination of salty and sweet.  Best of all, it was a cinch to prepare.  And better yet, leftover corn flake crunch makes for a great ice cream topping.

Garam Masala Scallops with Acorn Squash

For no other reason but sheer love for Indian flavors, I have been on a curry fix of late.  I found this recipe from Epicurious for scallops in a curry sauce over acorn squash.  I would not have thought that scallops, acorn squash, and curry would work together, but this recipe turned out very nicely.  Not only did it look nice on the plate, but the slightly spicy and creamy curry sauce played an excellent complement to the sweet scallops and squash.

As with most recipes, good-quality ingredients are important to this dish.  I used jumbo U-10 dry scallops, which are meaty and rich enough to not be overpowered by the curry sauce.  A purist would have made curry powder and garam masala from scratch but I had Penzeys excellent representations of each already on hand, which made for an easy and delicious dinner.

Bastardized Lemongrass Chicken

Still trying to use up the rest of the Southeast Asian produce I bought at Whole Foods last week, I came across this simplified recipe for Lemongrass Chicken from Food and Wine.  Although I prefer to cook authentic, unabridged meals when I choose ethnic recipes, after work, I do not have the time nor the physical and mental energy to cook anything more intricate than chopping some veggies and meat and throwing everything into a pan for a few minutes.

This recipe was slightly more difficult than my usual weekday dinners as I had to marinade the chicken (albeit for only 5 minutes) and make a caramel sauce before I was able to throw all the ingredients into a pan.  In the end, it was a well-flavored dish, but the result was chicken thighs in a curry sauce, not lemongrass chicken.  The curry powder in the sauce obscured the lemongrass and the caramel sauce, making even this simplified recipe seem unnecessarily complicated.  By simply throwing garlic, shallots, oil, curry powder, water and chicken into a pan, I could have made an equally delicious dinner.

Salmon Braised in Pinot Noir with Mushrooms

In my last post, I noted the challenges of keeping a well-stocked pantry and how it is always a triumph when I am able to prepare a gourmet meal with ingredients I have on hand.  In this regard, last night’s dinner was a triumph.

As four o’clock came around yesterday at work, my mind began to wander from spreadsheets to what I would cook for dinner.  With cold weather rolling in, my fridge is  always stocked with a supply of fall vegetables that go so well in braised dishes: carrots, leeks, and celery.  I also had a pack of cremini mushrooms on hand that I had picked up on a whim at the grocery store last weekend.  I searched for a way to use at least some of the ingredients I had on hand, and I came across this recipe from for salmon braised in Pinot Noir.  The ingredients:

• Salmon: would have to buy on my way home from work
• Salt and pepper: on hand (duh)
• Butter: in the fridge
• Celery: in the fridge
• Carrots: in the fridge
• Leek: in the fridge
• Tomato paste: in the fridge
• Pinot Noir: on hand (surprisingly)
• Bay leaf: in my pantry
• Thyme: in the fridge (random Greenmarket purchase)
• Chicken broth: in the freezer
• Heavy cream: in the fridge

Could it be?  A moderately complex meal that would only require an easy trip to the seafood market to pick up a couple of fillets of salmon?  A triumph!

Unfortunately, I found the sauce slightly bland, so the meal was not a triumph on all levels.  However, my girlfriend loved it, so I still put it in triumph territory.  Perhaps this was the first step to keeping a well-stocked pantry…

A Well-Stocked Pantry

One of my greatest cooking challenges is keeping a well-stocked pantry.  Rarely am I able to cook a meal that does not require a trip to the market to pick up at least one ingredient, and usually I have to get a basket worth’s (and a wallet worth’s) of ingredients.  The biggest source of this problem is that I do a poor job of planning menus for the week; all too often, I plan meals on the train ride home from work, stopping at the grocery store before I get home to pick up ingredients, some of which I am bound to already have on hand.  Menu planning is a skill that I am trying to improve on. My other problem is that I enjoy cooking somewhat complex meals that do not always contain the “standard” ingredients.  Lastly, I normally cook for one; unless I cook the same thing every night of the week, perishable foods that I keep on hand are bound to spoil before I have a chance to use them up.  Whenever I am able to cook a somewhat complex meal without having to pick up more than a couple items at the market, it is a triumph.  I just wish that would happen more often.  Surely other amateur cooks have been able to get around these challenges and maintain a well-stocked pantry.  What are your strategies?

Spice Braised Nyonya Pork

Towards the end of my trip to the Greenmarket this past Saturday, a rainstorm forced me to seek shelter in Whole Foods.  Soaking wet with a backpack and totebag full of local goodies, a very non-local vegetable caught my eyes: fresh galangal from Hawaii.  Fresh galangal?  At Whole Foods?  I thought that was something that was only found in Chinatown, and usually frozen at that.  I knew that it was an omen, so I picked up a four inch piece of galangal along with a handful of fresh thai peppers (another “At Whole Foods?” moment for me).

When I returned home, I immediately pulled out the cookbook that I had in mind when I spotted the galangal: James Oseland’s Cradle of Flavor.  The book is full of delicious recipes from the Spice Islands, but I do not get to cook from it very often since nearly every recipe requires a trip to Chinatown to pick out ingredients such as fresh turmeric, kaffir lime leaves, and, yes, galangal.  This time, I at least had one ingredient on hand without having to treck down to Mott St.

The recipe I picked out was Spice Braised Nyonya Pork.  Pork butt sauteed with galangal and a paste of shallots, then braised with water, sugar, double black soy sauce, rice vinegar, cinnamon, cloves, and star anise.  All of this is reduced until the sauce just barely coats the meat.  It ain’t local, but it sure was delicious!

Molly Stevens’ Sausages and Plums Braised in Red Wine

To celebrate my girlfriend’s long-awaited move to New York, I cooked a dish from one of my favorite cookbooks, Molly Stevens’ All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking.  I braised sausages and plums in red wine, and like every other recipe I have tried from the cookbook, it did not let me down.  It was a very simple braise that filled my apartment with aromas of sweet italian sausage, sage, and red wine.  The recipe can be found here.

Pork Tonkatsu

I’m still alive!  After spending last week on vacation in Florida, I have been busy catching up on work and my workouts, and have had little time to cook or post.  My cupboard and refrigerator are pretty empty, so I have been living mostly off of leftovers this week.  I did, however, find some Berkshire pork cutlets in my freezer, so I prepared pork tonkatsu, a simple japanese dish of panko-breaded pork with a sweet and sour sauce.

I prepared the pork using the tonkatsu recipe from Mark Bittman’s The Best Recipes in the World.  It’s very easy: season the pork, dredge in flour, dip it in beaten eggs, and coat it with panko.  Shallow fry for 3 minutes per side.  Serve with a sauce consisting of equal parts dijon mustard, mirin, and soy sauce, and slightly less rice vinegar.  I served the pork with roasted potatoes and stir fried kale.  Sorry, no picture due to poor lighting.

Now that this hectic week is almost over, I’ll I can make my return to the kitchen (and the blog).

New Amsterdam Market and Marcella Hazan’s Roast Chicken

Last Sunday, I schlepped over to the New Amsterdam Market at New York’s South Street Seaport.  This is the third installation of the market, which runs a few days a year and and features some of the region’s top proponents of local and sustainable food.  The goal is for the market to become a permanent fixture of the South Street Seaport, but for now, we Manhattan foodlovers must settle for having some of the region’s top purveyors and producers of fruits, vegetables, meats, cheese,  bread, and more in the same place only a few times a year.  It’s like a Greenmarket on steroids.

After stuffing my face with bread and cheese samples; an excellent ham, pickle, and butter sandwich from Marlowe and Sons; and a slice of delicious caramelized leak and ricotta tart from a baker I don’t remember, I began to think about dinner.  I did not have much cash on me, so I passed by two of my favorite Greenmarket meat producers, 3 Corner FIeld Farm and Flying Pigs Farm, and set my sight on the $5 chickens at Bo Bo Chicken.  I was unfamiliar with Bo Bo chicken, but the friendly lady at the stall informed me that they sell super fresh (i.e. less than a day from the slaughterhouse) poultry.  She told me they sell mostly to Asian markets, but also deliver fresh poultry to some of New York’s finest restaurants.  I bought a medium-sized chicken for $5 dollars, and they also gave me a free tote bag with an ice pack so I could safely get the chicken home to the Upper East Side in this 90 degree weather.  A great deal for a what sounded like a great chicken.  Here’s what it looked like when I put it on my cutting board to prepare dinner:

This chicken was so fresh that it had seen little in the way of a butcher’s table.  I had only dealt with headless and feetless chicken before, but I was able to quickly get the chicken into it’s more familiar form with a few chops of my knife.  I threw the head and feet into the freezer for a stock I will be making later down the road.

To prepare the chicken, I used a recipe for roasted chicken with lemon’s from Marcella Hazan’s The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  Roasting a chicken does not get much easier than this.  Just take two lemons, roll them and squish them, poke a bunch of holes into each, and stuff them into the cavity of the chicken.  Season the chicken with salt and pepper, truss it, and into the oven it goes.  Here’s what it all looked like after cooking at 350 degrees for an hour, then 20 minutes at 400 degrees:

Unfortunately, I failed to dry the chicken well enough after I washed it, so the skin did not get as brown or as crispy as I would have liked.  Thankfully, the meat was deliciously moist and flavorful with the lemon juice that it absorbed while in the oven.  Marcella even convinced me to retract my statement that the best roast chickens are cooked with generous amounts of butter.  This chicken had no butter, and was as delicious as any roast chicken I have made.  It did, however, have a good amount of salt, so I stand by my belief that salt is a roast chicken’s best friend.