malvasia bianca

The third recipe in my “curry paste” series, and the second recipe in my “chicken curry by country” series. I’m a bit dubious about this recipe’s authenticity, even before my alterations. But it’s yummy, which is what counts. Though admittedly not as stunning as the first installment in the latter; I can’t think of the another week where I’ve enjoyed leftovers so much.

vegetable oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 inch cube ginger, minced
1 onion, chopped
1/2 tsp turmeric
2 Tbsp mild curry paste
1 1/2 lb chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces
5 dried red chiles
14 oz can diced tomatoes, mostly drained
2 Tbsp peanut butter
4 Tbsp dried shredded coconut
1 Tbsp soy sauce
2 Tbsp lemon juice
salt to taste

Heat oil in a skillet; fry garlic, ginger, onion, and turmeric for 5 minutes. Add curry paste, fry for 3 minutes more. Add chicken, and cook for a few minutes until cooked on all sides. Add remaining ingredients, and cook for another 10-20 minutes.

Tonight’s dinner. It takes a bit too long to make on a weekday: it’s not as complicated as the list of ingredients might make you think, but it does take a little while and requires you to juggle a few skillets. Nice if you’re looking for something a bit special to cook during the weekend; also, it is a rare guest in my experience who won’t be pleased by being served this.

It’s from The Elephant Walk Cookbook; I trust the restaurants continue to serve the populace of the Boston area well. I’ve modified the recipe lightly to reflect the way we actually cook it; the most significant difference is that the original recipe calls for a couple of pounds of whole chicken pieces. (I’m just not into large pieces of meat.) I did, however, leave all of the esoteric ingredients intact, despite the fact that we rarely or never use several of them; please don’t let their absence from your local supermarket dissuade you from cooking this recipe. We did use star anise once when cooking this, but I didn’t notice a difference; we’ve never used shrimp paste whith it, and while I imagine I probably would notice a difference there, our kitchen isn’t well enough ventilated to want to play around with the stuff. (Rotting fish; yum!)

Paste:
1/4 cup vegetable oil
4 stalks lemongrass, trimmed and sliced
3 dried New Mexico (or Anaheim) chiles, soaked, seeded, and deveined
5 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
1 large shallot, coarsely chopped
1/2 inch piece of ginger (or galangal, if you can find it)
1 1/2 cinnamon sticks, cracked
4 whole star anise
9 cardamom seeds
1 small Asian nutmeg
16 peppercorns
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds

1 cup water
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh cilantro stems
1/4 tsp turmeric
2 1/2 tsp shrimp paste
1/2 cup plus 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 can unsweetened coconut milk
1 - 1 1/2 lb chicken breast
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
2 Tbsp fish sauce
4 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 - 1 1/2 lb potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/4 inch thick slices

First, make the paste: heat oil in skillet, and add the rest of the paste ingredients. Fry for about 5 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to move it to a blender, and combine with water, cilantro, turmeric, and shrimp paste; blend until smooth.

In a large, heavy pot, heat 1 Tbsp oil, add half the coconut milk, and cook for 2-3 minutes. And curry paste and cook for another 2 minutes. Add the chicken, onion, fish sauce, sugar, and salt, and cook for 5 minutes. Add rest of coconut milk, and continue to cook.

Meanwhile, heat 1/2 cup oil in a large skillet; fry potatoes until golden brown. Add them to the main pot when done; cook for a few more minutes to let the sauce pervade the potatoes.

If I’m going to post random recipes here (not entirely random - they’re all good!), I suppose I might as well try out other recipes in blogs I read. The kung pao chicken recipe from this blog entry is pretty good, it turns out.

Another very easy Indian recipe, basically a vegetable curry on a bun. Some of the quantities may be a bit off: this recipe I’ve modified (much) more than most.

(I like eating ethnic food on buns. Go tortas!)

1 onion, chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
vegetable oil
1 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 Tbsp mild curry paste
14oz can mixed vegetables
14oz can corn
8 oz tomato sauce
2 tsp garam masala
salt to taste
6-8 buns

Heat oil in skillet; fry onion and garlic until soft. Add curry paste and spices, and cook for another thirty seconds. Drain vegetables and corn; add them and the tomato sauce to the skillet. Cook for a few more minutes, to reduce the liquid a bit. Add garam masala and salt; serve on toasted buns.

We did indeed make a new batch of curry paste last weekend; joy joy joy. Here’s a recipe you can use it in; extremely easy, though it wants to marinade from one hour to one day. So it’s not a bad strategy to take 5 minutes to prepare the marinade after dinner some evening, for use the next day.

1 1/2 lb boneless skinless chicken breast
1 tsp turmeric
1 Tbsp mild curry paste
1/2 cup water
1 tsp salt
2 oz salted butter
2 Tbsp cumin seeds

Cut the chicken breasts into bite-size chunks. Mix turmeric, curry paste, water, and salt; marinade the chicken in this mixture for 1-24 hours.

Melt butter in skillet, add half the cumin seeds and the chicken (with its marinade). Stir-fry until cooked; towards the end of the cooking time, toast the remaining cumin seeds in another skillet, and add them to the chicken when done.

I’m starting to really miss good food. I’m not up for going out to eat right now, I’m not up for grocery shopping, I’m not up for cooking, and my body is only just now up for eating. But I was watching Iron Chef last night, and my taste buds let me know that they were feeling underused, and that in particular the chef’s choice chirashi sushi from Sushi Tomi would be just fine right now, thank you very much. And today I’ve been feeling like Indian food.

There is a problem with the latter, though, totally aside from my condition: the Indian food that I feel like is from the Curry Club cookbook, and it depends on their excellent mild curry paste. Which we are currenty out of. I think that I’ll be up for spice shopping and paste making by the end of this week, though, at which point some Redang Degang, Pao Bhaji, and Jeera Chicken will be in order.

Here’s the spice paste; recipes for dishes to follow.

60g coriander seeds
30g cumin seeds
20g fenugreek seeds
25g gram flour (a.k.a. besan)
20g garlic powder
20g turmeric
20g garam masala
5g dried curry leaves
5g asafetida
5g ginger powder
5g cayenne pepper
5g mustard powder
5g black pepper
175-250ml vinegar
175-250ml vegetable oil

Roast and grind the coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fenugreek seeds, and curry leaves. Mix together with the rest of the spices as well as the vinegar, adding water if necessary to make a creamy paste. Heat oil in a skillet; add paste, stir-fry until water is cooked out. Store in fridge and use as necessary.

One of our thanksgiving desserts was the “Marquise au Chocolat Taillevent”, from Patricia Wells’ The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris. A book that has served us well, though I hope she comes out with another edition before the next time we go to Paris, if only to find restaurants there that serve a decent raclette. The recipe is quite good, quite easy; use good chocolate, of course.

The cookbook pairs it with a pistachio sauce; we’ve never tried that, because it seems like rather more work. Though probably we can get shelled pistachios at the Milk Pail, which would help somewhat.

9 oz. (280 g) bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces
3/4 cup (100 g) confectioners’ sugar
3/4 cup (185 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
5 eggs, separated
pinch of salt

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Add 1/2 c (70 g) sugar, the butter, and the egg yolks, in that order, stirring to mix after each.

In a small mixing bowl, beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff. Add the remaining sugar; beat another 20 seconds, until glossy.

Remove the chocolate from the heat. Fold in a third of the egg white mixture, then the rest of it.

Rinse an 8 1/2 inch (22 cm) springform pan with water. Leave it wet, and fill it with the mixture. Refrigerate for 24 hours.

Remove from refrigerator about 30 minutes before serving.

Thanksgiving dinner was quite pleasant, and surprisingly painless, given the amount of food. There were eight people eating dinner at our house; the food included a dish that could be labeled as a main dish if you wish, four side dishes, and two desserts. Which sounds like a lot of work, especially if you’re only just toying with the idea that you might be healthy, and especially if you’re a little tired mentally from having steam-cleaned carpets two of the three previous weekends (different carpets on different weekends, they don’t get dirty quite that fast, and our grime tolerance is really very high) and have to pick up a guest from the airport on Thanksgiving day, but it really wasn’t bad at all.

One thing that helped was that guests brought two of the side dishes. Another thing that helped was that we did some of the cooking on previous days. Which is a double-edged sword: we’re not exactly perky and bustling with energy evenings after work, so it’s not always a good idea to offload work to weekdays. In this case, though, it was the right move: on Tuesday, Liesl made cranberry-orange relish, which basically means dumping cranberries, an orange, and sugar in a food processor. And on Wednesday, Liesl made the dough for the pie crust (I didn’t realize how easy that is), and I made the marquise au chocolat (I should post the recipe for that some time; like many good chocolate desserts, it’s a simple preparation of high-quality ingredients), neither of which took as much as half an hour.

So on Thanksgiving all we had to do was finish the pie (pecan pie, so basically dump a bunch of things together, mix them, and put them in the pie crust), make the other side dish (a spinach dish that was made much much easier by our buying pre-cleaned baby spinach. We should get into the habit of making fresh spinach dishes much more often, given the availability of that stuff), and make a double recipe of the following:

2 pounds skirt steak, about 1/2 inch thick, cut into twelve 4-inch-long pieces
12 slices prosciutto
12 fresh sage leaves
1 pound pancetta, cut into 1-inch cubes
olive oil, salt, pepper
skewers

Put a piece of prosciutto and a sage leaf onto each slice of steak. Roll them up, and put them on the skewers, alternating with the pancetta cubes. Brush with olive oil; season with salt and pepper. Grill or broil, turning once, until the beef is medium-rare, about 3 minutes per side.

And even a doubled recipe of that is really easy, especially since I wasn’t, say, sweating about the fact that my pieces of beef were all different sizes. Really good, too, in ways that I’m not used to. For one thing, it’s the first time I’ve cooked with thick slices of pancetta. We had to go to a butcher to get it (we got the steak there, too); first time I’d been there, but I’ll be happy to do so again in the future. Thick pancetta turns out to be a quite different beast from the thin slices I’m used to: much more of an aroma, and you just can’t ignore the fact that, at times, you’re biting into a big chunk of fat. Which, normally, is a huge downer for me, but it wasn’t in this dish. Probably because of the broiling, which is something that we almost never do; the skirt steak was also much fattier than I’m used to cooking with, but I didn’t notice its fat at all while eating.

We had the meat too close to the broiler’s heating element, so it smoked up the place; fortunately, our smoke alarm is not hyper-sensitive. (No way to turn it off, and it’s wired to the townhouse complex, so if it goes off you will at a minimum annoy your neighbors and at a maximum, if you don’t get on the phone soon enough, have fire engines at your doorstep.) Because of this, the beef ended up being a lot more rare than medium on the inside (though the outside looked lovely); it tasted delicious nonetheless. We really should use the broiler more.

So: easy food, which I think was more than good enough to stand up to almost any Thanksgiving I’ve had. And quite nice company. Followed by three more days of weekend. (Not that I don’t enjoy work, but the occasional break has its benefits.) And no gifts. What more could one want from a holiday?

I was kind of bummed when Erubiel Durazo got hurt, and Scott Hatteberg’s performance has certainly been nothing to write home about this season. (I still have no idea why he’s gotten the contracts he has from Billy Beane.) But Dan Johnson’s performance has been a pleasant surprise: I’d literally never heard of him, but after 174 plate appearances he’s slugging .500. Who knows how long he’ll keep that up, but I guess he isn’t a complete flash in the pan: looking at his entry in the 2005 Baseball Prospectus, I see “Johnson is ready to step in and take Hatteberg’s job”, and they certainly got that right.

We’re watching the shanghai crab episode of Iron Chef right now. I’m used to seeing live seafood there (driving nails through the heads of pike eels thrashing around on the cutting board), though seeing the poor crabs put live into a hot wok was a bit much. A first for me, though, was a crab with its shell off, in the process of being disemboweled, and you could still see its heart beating…

Bonny Doon is the best.

A couple of trips to Paris ago, Liesl and I discovered the joys of raclette. We had it at a restaurant (attached to a cheese shop) called the Ferme Saint-Hubert; they gave us this huge chunk of cheese, stuck it on a rack with a heating element, gave us some meats and potatoes, and told us to scrape the cheese onto the meats and potatoes as it melted. Which we did; it tasted great, and was quite the sybaritic experience.

So we went back there again on our last trip to Paris; we also tried raclette at another restaurant, but that melted it themselves in the kitchen, so it wasn’t as much fun. We’ve since bought a tabletop grill that can be used as a raclette maker: not the same experience, since you slice the cheese up in advance instead of putting a heating element next to a half-wheel of cheese, but it tastes just as good, and is probably our favorite thing to serve when we have guests over. (Easy and impressive.) We buy the cheese at the excellent milk pail market (honestly, that store is one of the main reasons why we wanted to stay in Mountain View); for what it’s worth, I have a slight preference for French raclette over Swiss raclette, but you can get them both there.

So, of course, we wanted to go back to the Ferme Saint-Hubert again on this trip. But, alas, it had closed: a restaurant specializing in truffles had replaced it. Unfortunate, but it actually led to our most pleasant food discovery of the trip: down the street was a bistro called the Ferme des Mathurins, with very friendly staff, stunning mozzarella, and a quite interesting 1998 white wine (whose name I’ve forgotten) that tasted rather sherry-like and was the yellowest wine I’ve ever seen.

All was not lost, however: our trusty copy of The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris listed several other places where we could get raclette. (It’s about 10 years old, not even the most recent edition of the book, so not too surprising that one restaurant listed in it was closed.) So a couple of nights later, we tried another cheese restaurant. But it had closed, too! Fortunately, another candidate was within (lengthy) walking distance of that one, so we walked there: closed as well. Sigh; we gave up, and had a decent meal at a brasserie nearby.

So we tried another one a day or too later, and our luck continued: four cheese shops out of business. The one thing we most wanted to eat in Paris, and we couldn’t get it. Actually, that’s not quite true: in the den of cheap restaurants near the boulevards St. Michel and St. Germain, there were four restaurants serving raclette; after the aforementioned failures, we tried one of them, and while they did have a tabletop grill, I wouldn’t have guessed that the cheese was raclette if you hadn’t told me.

Oh well; we did have quite a bit of good food on the trip.

Incidentally, we did go out for Japanese food a couple of times, at Miranda’s request. One restaurant was quite good: lovely decor (including some of the serving dishes), some very interesting dishes, and stunning toro. In general, though, the sushi there seems worse than what we can get around here: in particular, the salmon just wasn’t as good as the stuff we get around here, and neither restaurant had flying fish eggs (Miranda’s favorite sushi). At least one of the restaurants (we didn’t check the other), didn’t have any edamame, either, which surprised me.

Museum restaurant guide: the Picasso museum has surprisingly good food, and the restaurant on the top floor of the Pompidou center is quite nice.

Last night I was planning to go to a talk, but I decided at the last minute to stay at home instead. Which meant that we didn’t have any dinner planned, and neither Liesl or I was up for anything elaborate anyways.

The solution was the excellent Pasta Rouille avec Thon. It has the virtues that:

• It’s quite yummy.
• It’s quite easy: the sauce doesn’t require any cooking, and there’s next to no chopping.
• All of the ingredients are non-perishable (except for garlic, but who doesn’t have garlic lying around?), so you can pull them out of the pantry whenever the urge strikes.

I got the recipe from Jordan (who will be happy to extol its virtues as well), who clipped it from the Washington Post; I don’t know what the original source was. Here it is, for the sake of harried cooks everywhere.

Pasta Rouille avec Thon

7 oz. roasted peppers
2 flat anchovies
2 large cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
2 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup olive oil
7 oz can tuna, drained and flaked
1 Tbsp drained capers
red pepper flakes, to taste
1 lb short pasta

In blender, blend peppers, anchovies, garlic, oregano, salt, pepper, sugar until smooth. Add olive oil, blend some more. Put in bowl, mix with tuna, capers, red pepper flakes. Cook pasta, drain, toss with sauce.

Miranda’s cooking skills are continuing to advance: she’s working on presentation now. Last night’s dessert started with a meringue cookie, surrounded by 5 gummi bears (in a regular pentagon around it, one gummi bear of each color that we have). This represented a flower; on top of the flower, she put marshmallows, which she said was snow covering the flower. And then she put sprinkles on the marshmallows, which represented sunshine glittering on the snow.

She is fabulous.

For the last month or so, Miranda’s been really into helping out with cooking dinner. I’m not quite sure what triggered it; part of it, I suspect, is that with her current bed time, she doesn’t get to spend much time with us in the evenings, and the best way to maximize that time is for her to help us with dinner, since we certainly can’t play with her while cooking! Also, the week before she started helping so much, the cooking segment at school involved her using sharp knives; this may have given her more of a sense of power and accomplishment. (We don’t let her use sharp knives at home, for what that’s worth.) (Once of the many nice things about PACT is that kids get to do stuff like cooking - basically, whatever parents are interested in teaching, kids get to do!)

Actually, though, she’s been cooking for a while, and doing it much more creatively than Liesl and I ever do. She designs her own desserts, and they can be quite distinctive. The basic model is ice cream, chocolate sauce, marshmallows, and a couple of colors of sprinkles, but she quite frequently substitutes in other ingredients (chocolate bars, cookies, fruit, whatever else she thinks of). Not always the most coherent of dishes, but they’re fun to eat (and fun to help her with), and I’m really impressed with her desire to design them.

A new cookbook we got had a recipe for gorgonzola and walnut “ice cream” that we tried last weekend. It looked a little strange: cream together 4 ounces of dolce latte gorgonzola, 8 ounces of mascarpone, add a half-cup of chopped walnuts, whip and fold in a half-cup of cream, and freeze. But all the ingredients are things that I like, the other recipe I’ve tried from the cookbook (meringue chocolate chunk cookies) worked well, and she’s one of the authors of one of my favorite cookbooks.

Sad to say, it was awful. Miranda had several bites of it. Liesl’s mom thought that it might be okay at the start of a meal. Frankly, though, I thought that the combination of whipped cream and gorgonzola was almost nauseating. Admittedly, the gorgonzola we used, while good, wasn’t labeled as “dolce latte”; if I ever run into the stuff, I’ll give it a try and see if I think it would work well enough in this recipe to be worth trying again. But I’m not optimistic…

Have I extolled the virtues of Bittersweet, by Alice Medrich, here yet? I guess not. It’s a wonderful chocolate cookbook that I’ve been working through off and on; very good recipes, and many of them aren’t very difficult. Today, for example, I decided to make her “Truffles Au Cocolat” again, for the third time; since I’ve gotten recipe requests for it before, I figured I might as well put it in the blog. So here it is!

1 lb. bittersweet or semisweet chocolate (50-62 percent), coarsely chopped
10 Tbsp (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
2 large egg yolks, at room temperature
1/2 cup boiling water or freshly brewed espresso
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Line the bottom and sides of an 8-inch square pan with tinfoil.

Melt the chocolate and butter together. Combine the egg yolks and water/espresso; mix with a spatula, scraping the bowl to prevent the eggs from scrambling. Then mix that into the chocolate, stirring gently until completely blended and smooth. Pour the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer into the pan, and spread evenly. Cover and refrigerate until firm (at least 2 hours).

Remove pan from fridge; use liner to transfer the sheet of chocolate to a cutting board. Allow it to soften until you can cut it without cracking, about 30 minutes if it is very hard. Invert the sheet and peel off the liner. Put the cocoa powder in a bowl. Cut the chocolate sheet into 1-inch or smaller squares; toss them in the cocoal powder.

Store tightly covered in fridge (up to 2 weeks; up to 3 months in freezer). Let warm up for about 20 minutes before serving.

I’ve simplified the recipe a bit; in particular, she wants you to heat the egg mixture in a double-boiler (she actually recommends an improvised double-boiler, but never mind that) until they reach 160 degrees on an instant-read thermometer. (This is presumably to kill bacteria.) The thing is, just adding the boiling water already brings the mixture up to that temperature, so that step seems not very useful to me. Also, she tells you how to modify the recipe if you’re using higher-percentage chocolate (she tells you how to do that for all the recipes in the book - it’s one of the things I like about it, since it gives the recipes a more experimental feel). When you press the mixture through the strainer, make sure you scrape off the bottom of the strainer. (It’s not clear to me whether the strainer has any role other than to strain out scrambled eggs, for what that’s worth.)

If you’re looking for good chocolate, by the way, Scharffen Berger does a good job. I recommend their factory tour the next time you’re in Berkeley, too.

Imagine: last Friday, I thought the playoffs were getting boring. 2-0 leads in both series, no reason to think that either underdog had much of a chance. When driving to the restaurant on Saturday, the Red Sox had taken a lead, so I was starting to perk up, but by the time the meal was over, they’d given up 13 runs, with more to come. (The dinner was at the excellent Shiki Sushi, which we went to for the first time. I’m not sure the sushi is quite as good as that at Sushitomi, but that’s a very high standard, and the non-sushi parts of the menu are much more varied. With monthly specials that, this month, included three matsutake mushroom specials and a monkfish liver special. Very friendly staff, nice ambience. It won’t replace Sushitomi as our Japanese restaurant of choice, but if they were both equally far away from our house, we’d probably go to both equally often.)

And then Sunday looked like more of the same - the Red Sox took a lead, the Yankees took the lead back, and that was that. Except it wasn’t that - the Red Sox tied it against Rivera in the ninth, and won in the twelfth. But I still wasn’t convinced; at work on Monday, I saw (well, “saw” - I just was watching icons on a Java applet) the Red Sox take the lead, I saw the Red Sox lose the lead, I thought it was probably over. But then, just as I was leaving work, the Red Sox tied it up; by this time, I was starting to learn my lesson, and was looking forward to listening to them win on my ride home.

The game did not, however, finish on my ride home, or even two hours after my ride home. I won’t go through the blow-by-blow, except to say that Tim Wakefield is one of my favorite Red Sox. The thing is, though, that apparently wasn’t even the best game played yesterday - by all accounts, the Astros / Cardinals game, which basically started and finished while the Red Sox and Yankees were in extra innings, was an absolute classic. Great pitching, of course, great defense (I had no idea Carlos Beltran was such a good fielder), and as dramatic a finish as one could hope for.

And, as I type this, the Red Sox just forced game 7. I never ever expected Curt Shilling to appear again in the postseason; and what an appearance! Nice to see the umps get calls right, too - I actually kind of expected them to get the home run call right, but I’m really impressed that they got the other play right, where Alex Rodriguez knocked the ball out of Arroyo’s hand. I can’t wait until tomorrow…

Side note: I’m really glad baseball switched to an unbalanced schedule last year. The AL West ended in as exciting a manner as possible, with Texas, Anaheim, and Oakland slugging it out (though I would have preferred a different outcome, of course), and, as I learned on the radio today, the Red Sox and Yankees’ game today was their 51st meeting in the last two years. (Splitting the previous fifty meetings equally.) That’s the way it should be.