15 posts from May 2009

Homemade smoked salmon from my buddy's father, homemade pizza bread, mozz, green and purple onions, and a little parm on top. Very tasty. I do so like making my own pizza dough. Or any bread dough, that is.

This was seriously good... I made a blueberry galette a couple of years ago, and I have no idea why it took me so long to try this again — other than the fact that I rarely make dessert. But the pear and blue cheese part of it comes from a pizza that this very excellent grandmother of a friend of mine ordered from California Pizza Kitchen — caramelized pear and blue cheese. I think it's fantastic that someone of that age would be so open minded about unusual food combinations. I tried some of the cold, leftover pizza, and it was simply spectacular. I'm not sure how it'd taste hot, but cold, it was an eye opener.

Well, I took that combination and used it for my galette, and it was a winner. It looks a right mess, but oh well, you can't have everything.

Obviously, it wouldn't go down with people who don't like blue cheese, but I'd never allow those sort of people at my dinner table. Denying evolution, the moon landing or the Holocaust is one thing, but blue cheese?! What kind of depraved bastard would do such a thing? Get thee to McDonalds, you degenerate.

In the wok, purple onions and garlic, green onions, and finally asparagus, stir-fried. Meanwhile, the tofu was sautéed in a non-stick pan with toasted sesame seed oil. A sauce of low-sodium soy sauce, rice wine vinegar (that's the sour part), water and corn starch, along with lots of red pepper flakes and Schezuan peppers. The tofu was dumped in, and served, garnished with shredded basil.

It was quite good, but the tofu didn't take on much of the toasted sesame seed oil, though.

I didn't intend to use asparagus, but we had some left over, along with the red bell pepper I had intended to use (would have given it a nicer color combination, I thought). And red bell peppers last a lot longer than asparagus. So asparagus it was.

Given that this was a completely improvised thing, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm getting better at improvising, and coming up with my own stuff, these days. Hurray for confidence.

Normally — no, not normally. Always. I always take multiple pictures, because my camera has a bit of a focusing issue. And it seems to me, that very often, it's the first picture that's the best one. This, of course, is wrong. It's a great example of how imperfect human memory is; how fuzzy and prejudiced and preferential your recollections are. It's like how people who gamble will not recall the ten times their "hunches" or "gut feelings" went wrong and lost them money — but that one time when it worked, hey that episode is etched into memory in perfect detail.

Like superstitious people who claim to have experienced some amazing premonition because they got a phone call from a friend or relative, just when they were thinking about that person — not realizing that thinking about people is a rather common occurrence, and that they thought about that person ten other times that day, without the phone ringing...

So I said screw it, I'm just taking one shot here. And this unfocused crap is what I ended up with.

The fish was okay, but just barely. I had an idea, that I still think is a good one, but it didn't quite work out this time. I decided to stuff the trouts with lemon slices and basil, and then grill them. The flavors didn't penetrate very well though. Next time, I think I'll leave the flavoring component in the fish for a few hours, before grilling them. (And yeah, them fishies have been trussed, so that's kitchen string (or whatever it's called).)

This is just a crying shame, how bad these ribs look. 'Cause they were amazing.

People talk about how really tender ribs come off the bone... It does not impress me that you can pull a bone out, and leave all the meat behind. I literally want the meat to fall off of the bone. I want the rack to fall apart like a big salmon fillet — unless you handle it with sweet, tender care. These are my kind of ribs. Pig pickin' ribs. Yehaaw.

Spinach and potatoes, with curried bread sticks. Spinach is called saag in some cases, but with this dish, it's called palak. Sag can refer to other greens than spinach, while palak tends to mean spinach specifically. Also, I believe palak is a Punjabi word, while saag is something else, like Hindi or Urdu. I'm starting to suspect that some of these languages are almost as closely releated as Scandinavian languages.

This was really very good, but the recipe I used was a little too quick. Next time, I'll add about half an hour of simmering to make the flavors blend a little better. The potatoes were boiled, peeled, cut into large chunks, pan fried until browned, and finally mixed into the spinach — although I reserved one piece for presentation.

The breadsticks were made from some dough that I made a few days ago, for a naan. I mixed in a curry powder mix I made a while ago, and the result was excellent. Next time I may naan, I think I'll use this curry powder, but with some garlic and ginger mixed in, as a paste when I make the dough.

Have been trying to create my own curry powder recently. This was my second attempt, and I'm pretty happy with the result. I added garlic, ginger, kaffir lime leaves and fish sauce to the shrimp, which marinated for several hours, and took on a really nice yellow color, along with the typical pink hue that shrimp get when cooked. They were cooked over extremely hot coals (with the coals about 1/4" away from the cooking griddle). I also did asparagus, and naan.

This is the first time I've tried to make naan on the grill. I've tried both pizza and a saumon en croûte, with poor results, but this time, I used the raised grid method that produces some exceptionally high cooking heat, and that took care of the sticky-ness, as well as the problem with all that dough cooling the grid down. But you've gotta watch it like a hawk. I didn't, and burned a couple of naans really badly.

Celebrating the Norwegian national day: "Syttende mai" — which incidentally happens to be very close, phonetically speaking, to "Shit in my eye," which in turn is the only appropriate manner to pronounce the event, for any self-respecting Norwegian-American. Mashy garlic taters, sauerkraut, carrots and peas. I screwed the sauce up completely; it actually broke. That's just sad. And I used the last bit of lingonberry jam — and I didn't even manage to get a shot of it. Man, that's just sad.

Worst bit about this meal is, the thermometer broke 100°F with vengenance this weekend, so this type of food is just completely inappropriate. I forsee a lot of grilling...

There were four popular kebabs at Abdul's: Seekh, Chicken Tikka, Shish and Donner. Seekh (my favorite — spicy hot, minced lamb) and chicken tikka, I've already done, and donner I can't, and won't do, even if I got my hands on a vertical grill with a rotating skewer, and an enormous glob of mystery meat. So that just leaves shish kebab.

If I thought seekh and chicken tikka were a bit hard to nail down, as far as spices and flavorings, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Shish kebab is a severely generic term. It just means skewered grilling meat. So, chicken tikka is, technically speaking, a chicken shish kebab. At Abdul's, seekh was ground lamb; chicken tikka diced chicken, and shish diced lamb. Diced lamb is a tad tricky to get yer hands on in California, and I'm trying to avoid red meat, so I went pork tenderloin.

Problem is, shish kebab is eaten not just in India and Pakistan; it's done all over the Mediterranean area. And so, the preparation methods vary wildly. I ended up combining this cooking experience with my attempts at creating a good Indian curry spice mixture — I also added minced onion, garlic and ginger to the marinade. Mediterranean shish kebabs tends to use herbs like rosemary and thyme, which is probably a really good idea, although I decided against it on this occasion. If I can figure out how to make a really great curry spice, I'll incorporate it in the marinade for shish kebab, though.

Very nice naans, grilled onions, and decent little green salad, too.