Accidental Genius (or Momofuko you)

Last Christmas I got the Momofuku Cookbook from the Mrs.  The book was beautiful and fascinating, but honestly I hadn't really had much time to make the food in it.  Part of the problem, of course, is that I've been meaning to eat at one of the Momofukus for almost two years now, but haven't gotten around to it.  Sometimes it's hard to be motivated to make something that you've never eaten before.  For me at least.

Anyway, so this weekend, I found some time to try out David Chang's rice cake recipe, complete with something he refers to as  Red Dragon sauce.  The rice cakes were edible.  It's basically rice shaped into a log and fried in a pan with oil.  I also slow roasted a chicken and adapted his ramen recipe to suit my own ingredients.


Both courses were well and good, but the moment of genius occurred when I took the leftover chicken and slathered the sauce over it and give it a quick re-fry.  Out of this momofukoing world!

Snow Day!

After two predicted snow storms that never materialized, we finally got hit with some snow. School is canceled and I have all day to cook whatever I can think up. I really hit all of the bases since I have an extra day now that I wasn't expecting.

First, I mixed some bread dough and am letting it rise. I've been tricked before with dough that is slow to rise, so I'm planning on letting this one go crazy until Friday when I'll bake it during the day and enjoy it shortly thereafter. It should be light and fluffy, not dark and dense like the last time.



Next, I started up a new batch of beer. I used a few different kinds of malts from the ones that I used the first time. I used some "Munich" style malt from an Oktober Fest kit that I had, and I used an entire English Brown Ale kit worth of Amber malt extracts, spray malt, and chocolate crushed malt. There are a lot of sugars in this batch, but not as much of the weird stuff. My last batch had a lot of molasses, brown sugar, and maple syrup. I added the brown sugar, but I didn't have any molasses. I might add the maple syrup at a later point in the fermenting process, but honestly I haven't decided yet. The maple syrup really raises the cost of the brew. As it is I'm putting about $50 worth of materials into 5 gallons of beer. That's almost $1 per bottle of beer. Not cheap considering its homemade. Then again, the sort of beer that costs you a dollar is not the sort of beer that you're likely get from a home-brewer. My stuff is of much higher quality than your average Coors Light.

My batch should be ready to go for St. Patrick's Day. It's a good thing too, because we just might end up going through 5 gallons of beer on that day. I made a gallon of Mead as well. This is my first attempt at Mead making but it seems pretty straight forward. I added a giant bottle of honey to about a gallon of water, added a splash of orange juice and a few sticks of cinnamon. The yeast I used for the Mead was a little on the old side, but I proofed it in some sugar water and lo and beyond it foamed right up. Before putting the Mead wort into my 1 gallon mini-keg and sealing it up (with an airlock on top), I checked the gravity of the wort. It is pretty high gravity and should end up at about 10% alcohol. It is fermenting very slowly though. I figure it'll also be done right in time for St. Paddy's. It doesn't have to be bottled and carbonated, so that buys me some time, but since its fermenting so slowly, it might be a while in that little mini-keg.



For my next trick, I made some chopped salted chilies. This is a staple in Hunanese cooking, and is really easy to make. You basically chop up some fresh chili peppers, mix them with a few tablespoons of Kosher salt, put 'em in a jar, and then cover the chilies completely with salt. You seal up the jar and wait a few weeks. What comes out of that jar is, if you like things that are spicy and salty, absolutely amazing. Sure, you can use them just for making Chinese food, but there is a lot more available to you than that. My favorite: Throw a few in your salad. While fresh chilies are really really hot, once they've been cured by the salt for a few weeks, they are significantly less hot. And they get a really great crunch to them that makes them fantastic for salad, or eggs, or pizza, or really anything that you would put hot sauce on. If they are too salty for your taste (and if you are like me and want to just eat them straight, they might be), you can always rinse them off with water before serving. Plus, they are just pretty to have a jar of the stuff sitting in your kitchen. You're supposed to refrigerate it once you've opened the jar, but I just keep it on a shelf over my sink and it is as much decoration as it is condiment.



So now my beer is brewing, my bread is rising, my chilies are salting. What's left? Oh yeah, what are we going to eat for dinner? Chicken and Pasta Rags. I saw a recipe for something similar to this on the Essence of Emeril show a few months ago. The "Pasta Rags" concept sounded really great and right up my alley. Of course, I made the pasta from scratch and got another chance to break in my pasta maker. Tasty Trix had a post recently where she made homemade fettuccine, and that was a pretty good guide for where to start with the pasta making. I think I still need a bit of practice. My "rags" looked pretty ragged.

Before I made the pasta dough, I put a chicken confit in the oven. Now, I know in some circles I'm supposed to cook the thing for 10 hours. I didn't have 10 hours. I had about 2. So the thing cooked for 2 hours. It was still great. I put some garlic cloves in there too late in the game with the hopes that the oil would absorb some of the flavor and also that my garlic would be pretty mellow when I put it in the pasta dish. The whole process is fairing straight forward. I took some chicken, I added some salt, pepper, and fresh thyme and then put the chicken (I had chicken thighs, but you could use any cut) in a saute pan and covered the chicken with fat or oil. I used mostly bacon fat, but I had to also use some chicken fat that I scraped off of my frozen broth and a little bit of olive oil in order to fully cover the chicken. Then cook on low heat until you can't stand it anymore. I used some of the oil/fat as the oil in the pasta, adding scallions (for crunch), crushed red pepper (for color), and Parmesan cheese (for obvious reasons). Magnifique!

All The Great Things

I've been feeling guilty. This might just be a general condition of my Catholic upbringing, but I prefer to think it is because of some actual transgression on my part. In November, I wrote 16 blog posts, more than every other day. Since baby arrived though, it's been tough. Not only because it is hard to find time to write, but because it even harder to find time to cook something that is worth writing about. I've been dying to try my hand at bread again, there is a can of malt extract that is calling for me to brew more beer, I've got three new cookbooks that are worth my attention and all around me the foodie universe continues to go on without me.

And, as I mentioned recently, there have been plenty of culinary failures in my house. No sense giving you a recipe to something that tasted like crap so there are a few blog posts that could have been but weren't due to performance errors on my part.

That said, there is lots of cool stuff going on in the world, and even a couple of success stories in my own kitchen. For instance, my cyber-buddy Chuck sent me a kick-ass wing recipe. It seems as though everyone and their cousin are discovering Sriracha for the first time, which only confirms my belief that the obscure things that I embrace fully will all sooner or later become super popular (note also that I brought back the high-five, brought back beards, brought back saying "rad", popularized premium tequila around 2002, and made it O.K. to prefer small batch Bourbon over Single Malt Scotch, which, at least in the North-East, was a pretty big deal). Sriracha is just latest example. We used to only find it in Asian specialty stores and the occasional enlightened Whole Foods, now it's on sale at nearly every neighborhood supermarket. Sriracha has now reached the pinnacle of popularity since being featured in the January 2010 issue of Bon Appetit. Since then, Sriracha recipes are everywhere. It's nearly impossible to watch the Food Network for 15 minutes without hearing a mention of Sriracha. So, I decided to give these wings a try, resolved to share my own wing recipe at the next convenient time. In the meantime I'll give you a recipe for crab cakes that, yes, calls for a dollop of Sriracha, but more importantly, will introduce you to Sriracha's more rustic cousin, Chili-Garlic Sauce.



The wings came out great. I ended up using lime juice instead of lime zest, which I think ended up amping up the lime flavor a bit, and not in a bad way. The wings were more or less perfect, any gripe with them would be merely stylistic. Of course, Chuck promised that they wouldn't be very spicy and I do disagree on that count. I loved 'em, but they weren't really for people who don't like spicy food. Just a warning. Then again, almost nothing that I cook is for people who don't like spicy food. Those people should go to Mickey D's for dinner.

Beyond my kitchen, I wanted to alert you to someone who successfully made french bread at home, rather than, like yours truly, merely attempting the endeavor twice and failing both times. OK, perhaps I am being hard on myself. My bread was totally better than store bought. But it didn't look like this! That is what I believe in the journalism business is called being "scooped". Looks delicious though and I think we all have something to learn from Kissmyspatula (not the least of which is that if I ever go to Paris, I should rent an apartment, rather than stay in a hotel).

Last but not least before we get to the crab cakes: These people make sausage! I love them. The world is better place when more people make sausage. And people who cure sausage, there is a special place in heaven for you!

Ok. Crab Cakes. Now, I make traditional crab cakes with the Worcestershire sauce and a bit of mustard served with tartar sauce. And it's great. But I wanted to do something different here. I did a few experiments and I ended up a spicy but slightly sweet teriyaki crab cake. They are necessarily smaller than regular crab cakes, mostly because I crisped the outside by frying them in oil. Normal crab cakes are also fried, but not as hot and not in deep oil. Mine were done in a pan of hot peanut oil. I wanted to crispness to lighten it up bit, which I think it did, although they are only as light as crispy fried food can be. I also tried just broiling the cakes and that worked as well. I served them with a dollop of sour cream and a dot of Sriracha on each cake. The sour cream was a superior choice to mayonnaise since my aim was to make the cakes seem less dense and heavy, which is my usual complaint about good crab cakes. (My complaints about good crab cakes are, obviously, different.) Upon completion, they were fantastic, lighter than normal crab cakes, and had a really unique and interesting flavor. Definitely worth trying if you are tired to the same old usual mid-Atlantic take on crab.

There are a couple of pointers about crab cakes in general that are worth considering. The first is that you get what you pay for with crab (I find this to be true of most food, except at the farmer's market). Want crappy crab cakes? Buy crappy crab meat. Want excellent crab cakes? Buy excellent crab meat. End of story. Second, use too much bread and your cakes can be dry, but use too little and they are hard to cook and don't stay together. If the pan is consistently spitting hot oil towards your eye (yeah, that really hurt) then your cakes are too wet, add more crumbs. Third, here is a great opportunity to use day or two old french bread for breadcrumbs. You can sub with a canister of 7 month old breadcrumbs, but it's better with better ingredients.



Terriaki-Chili Crab Cakes

Ingredients
16 oz. Premium Crab Meat
2 Eggs
1 1/2 cups packed French Bread Crumbs
1/4 cup Chili-garlic Sauce
1/4 cup Teriyaki Sauce
1 Tbsp Fish Sauce
1/2 cup Mayonnaise
2-4 Shallots, minced
2-4 cloves of Garlic, minced

For frying, 2 cups of peanut oil

In a large bowl, combine crab meat, eggs, chili-garlic sauce, teriyaki sauce, fish sauce, shallots, garlic, and mayonnaise. Mix well with a large fork or spoon. Next, mix in bread crumbs with your hands. Be sure all the ingredients are evenly distributed throughout the mixture, especially the bread crumbs and egg.

In a medium-sized cast iron skillet or another pan with high side walls, heat peanut oil to about 300 degrees. Pack the crab mixture into little egg shaped cakes. The cakes should also be approximately the size of an egg. Gently place each crab cake into the hot oil and cook for about 1 minute on each side. Cook the cakes in small batches so as not to cool down the oil too much.

When each cake is crisp from frying in oil, remove the crab cakes and place them on a foil covered baking sheet. Bake the cakes at 275 degrees for about 20 minutes if there is any concern that your crab cake is raw on the inside. This is generally only an issue if you oil is very hot but your crab cake is too large. The outside will be cooked but the inside will be raw.

Serve with sour cream and Sriracha. Alternatively, serve with sliced avocados and whole basil leaves. These make a great appetizer, or will serve 4 as a main course.



P.S. - I finally a logo for the site, I know its not perfect but it's a good start. Hopefully I'll get a chance to clean it up at some point in the future.

Mushroom Espagnole Sauce

I could have named this post "What Anthony Bourdain taught me about cooking." Not that Anthony Bourdain knows me, or that he would tolerate my amateur skills. But still, it would be true.

I've been reading his book, Kitchen Confidential, at nearly every moment that I can spare. Which, as a law student, is not many moments. But still, I've stolen enough time to be two-thirds of the way through it.

It's not a cookbook. It's more of a memoir about the ups and downs of his career as a chef, full of heavy drug use, hirings, firings, and punk rocker attitude. It's pretty spectacular if you like that sort of thing. And I might.

Anyway, aside from being thoroughly entertaining, the book has a lot to teach an amateur chef about cooking. For instance, this is probably pretty basic information to a trained professional, but did you know that French cooking divides sauces into five "mother sauces" out of which most other sauces are made? The basic mother sauces are made out either a white roux or a brown roux and mixed with light broth or milk or a darker broth. There is also the tomato based mother sauce, which is a more recent addition to the mother sauces.

I'm probably not the best source for this, but it's worth reading up on. I didn't even know that anything like that exists. Here is a link explaining what the mother sauces are, how they are made, and what sauces are derived from them.

It's been a fairly important concept for me to understand since it has the potential to formalize my approach to cooking sauces. Usually I just mix and match the flavors in my head. But by actually learning what a million people before me have already figured out, I should be able to mix and match a little more easily. Anyway, I never claimed to be the best cook. I'm just the cook whose blog you are reading right now.

Tonight I made what I would call an Espagnole Sauce, although truth be told I used chicken broth instead of beef or veal. I've give you the recipe for the sauce, and you worry about how you want to cook the meat. I just baked some chicken breast, but since this sauce could go with almost anything, I don't see the point in telling you how to bake a chicken breast.



Mushroom Espagnole Sauce

Ingredients
2 tsbp of unsalted butter
2 tsbp of flour
1 quart of broth
1/4 cup of white wine
2 cups or so of baby bella mushrooms
1 tsp thyme
2 bay leaves

Pour broth into a small pot and bring to a simmer uncovered. Add bay leaves and thyme. Let simmer while making the roux and sauteing the mushrooms (see below).

In a small saute pan, melt butter on medium heat. Add flour. Using a spoon or spatula, mix flour with the butter to create a paste. Crush lumps while stirring almost continuously. Cook until the paste starts to thicken and brown. Do not burn. Remove from heat.

In a separate and larger pan, saute the mushrooms in olive oil or butter. Stir mushrooms about 10 minutes on medium-high heat until water is released and mostly cooked off.

Add broth to mushrooms through a strainer to remove bay leaves and thyme. Add wine to the mixture. Bring to a simmer. Using a whisk, stir the roux into the sauce. Stir vigorously until the roux is fully dissolved. Let simmer briefly and remove from heat. Pour the sauce on chicken, beef, veal, tofu, toast, or just about anything that needs sauce. Salt and pepper to taste.

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More and Better Pictures Please

Look at Orangette. Now look at Big Man with an Apron. Besides the fact that she actually writes recipes in a clear and concise manner, the biggest difference between her posts and mine are that she's got fantastic pictures (people also read her posts, although I guess if you're reading this, then I have readers. Wow!). So, I'm trying to remedy that (the part about the pictures, not about the readers, cause I already know now that you are reading).



Bam! There's a picture! See how easy that was?




There's another one! Same dish, of course, but you get the idea. That was a fun night, by the way, making Chinese food for family in Texas. Don't worry, we got some BBQ the next day.




Tricked you that time! That's my dog. She sits in the kitchen while I cook because she thinks that I will drop some food on the floor. She is usually right.



This was one of my most favorite lunches ever. It was at the Franciscan in San Francisco during my honeymoon.

Hopefully I'll do a better job of adding more pictures and getting better at taking them. This will be practice for parenting anyway, since apparently I'm supposed to take pictures of everything that the baby ever does.

My Chicken is Better than your Chicken. Here's Why.

Most of us who are grown-ups have made chicken before. We are familiar with the basic concept of putting raw meat on a hot object (or in a hot object) for a certain amount of time and then eating it. But, of course, there is way more to it than that. Making dinner isn't just about making raw meat safe to eat, although we all know a few people who seem to swear by this mantra. It's about making your food safe to eat AND undeniably delicious.

Here is one suggestion for a chicken dinner that is easy to make, doesn't take too much time, and pays dividends in the taste department, far above and beyond your usual dried chicken meat disaster that you call dinner on Wednesday.

Here it is:

You will need:

Rice
Chicken Thighs
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil
2 Tbsp Butter
1/2 cup white wine
2-6 cloves of fresh chopped garlic
Optional Spices (oregano, basil, tarragon, chinese five spice, nutmeg, cinnamon, corriander, curry, etc.)

Step 1 is to make some rice. If I have to tell you how to make rice, this recipe is already too complicated for you and you should just order a pizza.

Next, heat a pan on a medium-hot stove (I prefer an iron skillet and will explain why some other day). DO NOT PUT ANYTHING IN OR ON THE PAN UNTIL IT IS HOT!!!! Give it about 2 minutes before you even add oil. This is important and is the difference between chicken thighs perfectly browned and chicken thighs perfectly glued to your pan.

Add some olive oil. The idea is that you want enough oil to coat the entire pan, but not enough to deep-fry the chicken. Use your judgment.

Give it 30 seconds to get hot.

Take some bone-in chicken thighs. (I won't tell you how many because I don't know how hungry you are, but bear in mind that you probably won't need more than 4 thighs for 2 people. The rice is pretty filling.)

Before putting your thighs in your hot skillet, pat them dry with a dry paper towel. Sprinkle salt, pepper, and whatever else you feel like adding. You could try tarragon, oregano, basil, or get buck-wild and throw on some cinnamon, nutmet, allspice, chinese five-spice, whatever. Let's just say now is the time to season your thighs.

Put the thighs in the skillet, skin down. Let simmer for a bit. It's important when you first put the chicken down in the pan not to mess with it. It sticks to the pan at first, but will let go when its ready. So, don't move it quite yet! You should be listening to the sounds of the pan and looking to see if the pan seems like it might be too hot. You can only really figure this out with experience, but my point is that if you use this time to check your fantasy football scores, you might just end up realizing that your pan was too hot, or not hot enough. Pay attention to your thighs!

When the skins on the thighs have released from the pan, flip 'em and cook the other side. While the other side is cooking, chop up some garlic, really fine. Or use one of those garlic presses. I love those.

Throw in the garlic while its still just oil and chicken in there, but after the other side of the chicken has had some time to cook and spew some juices. Seeing some chicken juices drop out of the meat is always a good sign to check out whether you're cooking it sufficiently.

Now, by this time your chicken should be looking good, and your garlic should be sauteing but not getting too crispy or too brown. Now add about 1/2 cup of white wine. I keep crappy white wine in the fridge at all times for just such an occasion as this. I used to use "cooking wine" from the supermarket, but if you ever read the ingredients in that, you quickly realize that you shouldn't eat things that you would be disgusted to drink. Instead of spending $3-4 on "cooking wine" in a little bottle. I spend $5-7 on real wine, in a 750ml bottle. It's way better, trust me.

You've added your wine, now add about 2tbsps of butter and turn down the heat on your skillet. You're no longer browning the chicken, you are now braising it. Congrats.

Now, depending on how saucy you want your chicken and rice, you could add any of these things: water, more wine (but don't overdo it, especially if its "cooking wine"), more butter, more oil, broth, etc. You could probably add light beer, but since you've already committed to wine, I wouldn't mix the two. They compete too much for flavor when you're cooking with them. I would recommend broth above all others, but you can get away with just about anything you have. If you weigh 84lbs, you might as well just use butter. I'm hoping to give you a recipe for something that is less than 10,000 calories though.

Once your sauce is starting to bubble and boil a bit, make sure you want watching your heat. If it looks like it is really vigorously boiling, turn it down! You just want a gentle simmer. Now is a good time to think about seasoning the sauce. I love salt and pepper and you can usually get away with just that. If you like heat (which I do), now is a good time to add some cayenne pepper or crushed red pepper. If you have a fresh hot pepper, you could put it through a cheese grater and that will make a nice addition to the sauce. Anyway, do as you see fit on that front. Just remember that the more you cook something spicy, the less spicy it tends to get. If you're using fresh hot pepper, add them earlier. If you are using lame frank's red hot, just add it at the end.

Once you're done fiddling with all of this, cover your chicken in its sauce and tend to your rice. Get a nice big plate, and lay out the rice in a volcano shape, as if it were mashed potatoes and you were 10 years old. When the chicken thighs are done, you are going to put 1 or 2 of them in the volcano part of the rice mountain. This makes it look more appealing than just slapping the chicken onto a paper plate and diving in with a plastic fork.

Give it 20 minutes or so, covered and simmered, and check on your thighs. Cut one open and make sure that it is cooked 100 % through. I usually give myself the one that I cut in half, so everyone has the benefit of a nice presentation. Some people like it cut in half for them, though, so whatever you think is best probably is.

Don't forget to eat some vegetables too!