The new issue of Gourmet had lots of excellent recipes for produce that was already burning a hole in my pocket, so I went on a cooking bender today. (Gourmet's A-Z concept issue, btw, is all the things that the Saveur 100 used to be, or at least close enough. Sigh.)
Anyway, for future reference:
- grated zucchini salted, drained, squoze, then sauteed in butter and garlic and topped with bread crumbs fried in butter with lemon rind and thyme
- green / yellow beans cooked then rewarmed in olive oil and garlic, salt and pepper, and then tossed with lemon rind and shredded basil
- a wine and lemon verbena gelee with summer berries
All came from Gourmet and were clever little things I hadn't thought of on my own. I used lemon balm instead of verbena, and like a dumbass only had half the gelatin needed, so it may turn out runny, but it seemed like a tasty idea with blueberries and blackberries, and a nice way to use up marginal berries without really cooking them. I always like a new idea for beans, and this one is a very nice flavor, but the beans were old ones and they're a little tough for this preparation. The zucchini came out awesome, and I may grate all my zucchini for cooking henceforward.
I also grilled up a bunch of yellow crookneck and red onion with my steak tips tonight, just to have them around. I also roasted one of the anaheim chilies from the parental plants. Earlier today I made a gazpacho with tomato juice, cubanelle and cucumber, and I may have to do that one again. Ditto the new corn salad I made up -- with edamame and vinegared cucumber and chives and lemon thyme. Yums.
That wee fucker has been eating the fruits in our backyard. We thought it was the squirrels that had methodically plucked and eaten EVERY SINGLE PEAR on the tree. But tonight I was on the back deck in the dark, shucking corn (long story), and I kept hearing the grapevine rustle. I thought I was knocking it somehow with the corn husks, but then I looked up and saw the ratty gray tail on the gray beast standing in the grapevines. At first I thought it was a giant rat, but then I realized rats don't have that much fur on their tails. This little bastard had no fear at all. Tallasiandude came out and did a goddamn photo shoot, complete with flash, and he just stayed put. Even when tallasiandude got a broom and WHACKED the little fucker, he hung on that vine, chowing down. We had to whack him a bunch of times and then chase him out of the garden.
Wee fruit-stealing sumbitch. Harrumph.
This year the blackberries at the parental homestead have been going apeshit. I've never seen such fat sweet blackberries -- the really ripe ones don't need even a grain of sugar.
I stuffed most of those straight down the pie hole either whilst picking or during a blackberry-appreciation moment with B to whom I was giving a bunch of the loot.
As for the rest of them, the lovely but not quite as oozingly sweet ones, they were absolutely gorgeous with vanilla ice cream. Normally I dislike dairy and berries, finding that the creaminess mutes the berry flavors, but this particular combo rocks the house, bringing out the best qualities of both.
Littlelee brought back a few bags of Old Dutch chips from Montreal and we tried them this past weekend. Ketchup, NOM. Bacon, unexpectedly meh. And All Dressed. WTF All Dressed? I still don't know, after eating them and after googling them, but sweet holy heaven they taste GREAT!
Apparently it's a common Canadian chip flavor. A little sweet, a little tangy, quite savory. They're utterly yum, and everything I could want in a chip, including a nice light thin crisp texture. Definitely in the Top Ten Chips Ever list. If you head north, see if you can score some... and bring some back for me.
I love my husband for many reasons, but one of the most recent is that he bought me this for my birthday. If you are in any way nerdy about either comics or Japanese food, you need to check out this manga series. Awesome!
I made a blueberry sorbet this week, with the 800 shitloads of blueberries from the parental homestead, and I thought that it might be nice to use a red wine for the alcohol -- something about those flavors seemed like it might be complementary.
This simple recipe seemed pretty good, but I followed this recipe with the following exceptions:
- no egg white
- used red wine + a splash of water in place of the water
- i screwed up and used 2x the water called for, ie nearly 1 cup of wine + the splash of water
And astonishingly, it came out tasting great. I gave some to my parents without telling them anything about the recipe, and they said it had intense blueberry flavor. Yay!
(it was a sonoma cabernet sauvignon for whatever that is worth, and i cooked the wine and sugar for a little while, to reduce volume and deepen the flavor a little)
We stayed in the new Ace Hotel on 29th and Broadway for the second half of our NYC trip so as not to outlast our welcome with friends who kindly let us stay in their apartment for a few days. It's a rock-and-roll sort of place, but friendly, luxurious, and conveniently located.
Especially if you want Korean food. The K-town strip of 32nd St between 5th & 6th is stumbling distance away, and frankly it's about the only good food in the area. Since we were having lunch, and I needed to get back to work fairly promptly, we didn't go for the full-on charcoal bbq experience. I dug up this article, and when we saw jambong praised to the heavens, we were sold.
And Shanghai Mong delivers. There's a long menu of normal-sounding Chinese dishes, but I recommend you do as we did and most of the other diners were doing: get noodles.
The jambong is excellent, a rich buttery broth with lots of squid and miscellaneous sea creatures amid a tangle of onions and carrots, a handful of mixed mushrooms, and lots of good noodles. (Not quite up to the heavenly standards of Garden House, according to tallasiandude, but nom nevertheless.)
The jja jang myun was new to me, though I'd seen it in many restaurants and coveted it. The same noodles, but in a rich thick black bean sauce with chunks of potato and braised meat. Comfort food at its finest, and not spicy at all, for those of you who fear the monstrous redness of Korean dishes.
I got a split dish, with one side full of jambong and the other full of jja jang myun. Tallasiandude went with full-on jambong. The panchan are limited to just yellow daikon, some salty preserved radish, and an excellent, tangy kimchi that I suspect is either homemade or obtained from some badass maker in the city. We were in and out of there in an hour, stuffed to the eyeballs and happy as can be.