Sweet Talking

When Giz and Psychgrad chose us for the Arte y Pico award earlier this month, we newbie bloggers were so touched that the ensuing post was halfway between endearing and saccharine. Krysta, one of our awardees, has since then politely informed us that she "doesn't take compliments well"... by which she means "Puh-lease. Can we save the valley girl 'Your my BFF For-4eva!' emoticon language and pretend for one minute that we're actually adults who simply enjoy one another's company?" So I'll pretend to be veteran blogger and contain my enthusiasm for the people below.


While checking up on Melissa a few days ago over at Alosha's Kitchen, I skimmed her 'More Awards' post, to see if it was anyone I knew. Bing! Melissa, apparently, appreciates our zany food choices and the back and forth banter of a two voice blog. She appears to also be hinting that the purpose of our blog is to evangelize for male home cooking. Melissa, honey, I hate to break it to you, but that struggle took place a year ago and would have required blogging with more profanity than our current public would appreciate ("Dear. Can't you even make dinner once???? I slave away every night, etc."). All glib remarks aside, Melissa's enthusiasm for cooking and expanding her culinary horizons is absolutely laudable: she approaches the foodie blog world as a resource and it's exciting to watch her cooking style evolve over time. It also helps that she's one of the most unabashedly friendly folks out there. The sincere affability that I was talking about at the beginning? Yeah, that's Melissa.

There are three folks to whom we would like to pass this award:

-- Cathy over at The Noble Pig. Cathy is my most recent addition to my mental short list of blogs I check every day. She blogs about wine!! Do you have any idea how rare that is on the foodie blogosphere? And she does it really well: she knows a ton, but she's able to communicate to your average Joe. I guess it helps that she's working to set up a vineyard in Willamette Valley (how freakin' cool is that?? Best Pinot Noir in the country is produced there!). And I love her for calling her husband "the Wild Boar." She's fantastic, go check her out.

-- Ruth over at Ruth's Kitchen Experiments. Ruth works for the Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland, which is wickedly awesome to begin with. Some of my best friends from high school were American Protestant outreach workers posted in Geneva, so knowing Ruth feels like I've come full circle. Ruth is also recently married (with a super cute post about her one-year anniversary shebang). But the real reason that I'm giving this award to Ruth is that she's created a Food Event that I'm convinced is going to become The Next Big Thing: Bookmarked Recipes. The gist of it is that you submit a dish that came from a recipe clipping, an earmarked cookbook, or a bookmarked blog post, and Ruth posts the compilation every Monday. Now, which one us doesn't have a massive, overwhelming collection of magazine clippings, cookbooks, and blog bookmarks?? Just like everyone makes pasta for Pasta Presto Night, everyone has recipes bookmarked for Ruth's event.

-- And finally, a new friend: Molly over at A Year in the Kitchen. Molly, out of all of us, truly deserves this award because her blog has an actual purpose. She created her food blog "as an exercise in discipline" and vowed to write every day. What makes her even more unique is that she successfully blogs without photos, an accomplishment that my prose, at least, would not allow me to aspire to. Molly's a great writer. Check out her hysterical posts on Rachel Ray if you need to be convinced.

All right ladies and gents, go frolic and be merry. We have one of our best friends from college coming out to visit us this weekend, so we may be sporadic over the next few days. I hope not, but you never know. In the mean time, I'm off to clean the scum out of the bathroom and stash the dirty clothes under the bed. I refuse to believe that we're the only ones out here that have an immaculate kitchen but a disastrous every-other-room.

Red Snapper Delight

There is something I have to admit. It's about my past. A sordid detail - yes, thats right, I grew up in the Midwest. Don't get me wrong, I love Chicago and Naperville, where I grew up, is a really nice suburb. But, fish was just not readily available to the home cook. My father grew up out on the Chesapeake, so he would bring home a nice piece of fish every time he could find one - but, it's the Midwest, that isn't so often. The problem is not that no fish is sold in the markets, it's that the fish has, for the most part, been frozen and tends to be fairly low quality - even if you make the run over to Whole Foods. The classic fish dishes I grew up on are fried Catfish and seared Salmon. My father has certainly prepared other fish as well, but those two are the ones that would happen regularly.

Now, however, I leave on the East coast - soon (so very, very soon), I will be living on the West coast. It is really high time I got to know my Snapper from my Striped Bass - and learned to cook them too. Neen and I have done a few seafood dishes since we have gotten out to D.C., but mostly they have revolved around either clams or mussels. So this weekend I decided to give cooking fish a try. Lucky for me, I just happened to have a recipe from last month's Food and Wine magazine for "6 quick fixes for fish fillets." The decision on which to make was easy enough: their picture of the Sea Bass Fillets with Parsley looked divine. Now, being F&W, when they say "quick fix" they mean that it takes only 4 prep-bowls, 3-4 trips through a blender (for various pieces of the sauce), and approximately 1 hour of hand time. This is not exactly what I would call a "quick fix," but the chef is well repaid for the work when the dish is served.

The original recipe called for using Sea Bass, but I have always been addicted to Red Snapper for my light, flaky fish cravings - this started when I was young and we would go to Thai restaurants and they would have a fried Red Snapper glazed with "Thai sauce." Here, the preparation of the fish itself is a little complicated, but the basic idea is to bread the fish with a mixture of bread crumbs, parsley, salt, and pepper. It is worth noting that the method they use for breading is one of the most successful that I have worked with. First they coat the fish in flour, and then they coat that in egg, before dredging in the bread crumbs. I have never tried breading in that order before, but it worked very well.

Once breaded, the fish is cooked in oil and butter and then topped with a lemon-parsley cream sauce. The flavors work together perfectly. The Red Snapper comes out light and flaky, covered with a crispy shell of bread crumbs. The sauce on top carries enough of the lemon flavor to excite the palate if the fish is very fresh, or mask some of the fish-y flavor if the fish is slightly old. You might wonder how I know that ... well, because we actually made this dish twice. Once just after purchasing the fish then again a couple days later to use up what was left. I thought about cooking a different recipe, but I couldn't find one that I had most of the ingredients for and looked as delicious as this recipe is.

All this to say, if you can get really fresh red snapper, it is an amazing dish. And the breading technique is well worth remembering.


"Red Snapper" Fillets with Parsley Sauce
Cook Time: 40 min (or so F&W claims)

1.75 cups fresh bread crumb
1 cup finely chopped parsley
salt and ground black pepper
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 shallot minced
1.5 cups chicken broth (low sodium is best)
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
3 tablespoons creme fresh
.25 cup extra virgin olive-oil
all purpose flour
2 large egss, beaten
4x6-oz Red Snapper Fillets

Preparation for Sauce:
1. In a small saucepan, melt 2 tablespoons butter. Add the shallot and cook over medium heat until translucent (~1 min). Add chicken stock and lemon juice then boil over high heat until reduced to 1 cup (~15 min).
2. Whisk in the creme fresh with 1/2 cup parsley and 1/4 cup bread crumb. Scrape sauce into blender and puree. Strain sauce back into saucepan and warm gently.

Preparation for Fish:
1. In a large bowl mis 1.5 cups of bread crumb with .5 cup of parsley. Add 1.5 teaspoons of salt and 0.5 teaspoons of pepper.
2. If you haven't already, remove skin from fillet. Put flour and beaten eggs into two shallow bowls.
4. Season the fillets with salt and peppers, then dredge them in flour, dip in the beaten egg, and coat with the bread crumb mixture.

Cooking the Fish:
1. melt 2 tablespoons of butter in the oil over moderate heat.
2. When the butter starts to brown slightly, add the fillets to the skillet until browned on the bottom (~3 minutes). Flip the fillets and cooking until just white throughout (~2-3 minutes).
3. Transfer to plates, spoon sauce alongside, and serve.

Mint 2.0: Rice Paper Rolls

Yesterday was Memorial Day. Do and I fully intended to go to Arlington National Cemetery, both to pay our respects and to appreciate the full magnitude of both the day and the place. It's apparently the thing to do on Memorial Day in this town. A freakin' convention of Motorbikers pour into town to be there, the President shows his face, etc. The cemetery even holds a special 3x year ceremony in the heat of the sun for mad dogs and English tourists who have a taste for pomp and circumstance.

We never made it. It was too damn hot and sunny. And Do refused to wear sunblock or to strip down to cooler clothing. We're talking Memorial Day at Arlington Cemetery, he didn't want to show up in a t-shirt. So we missed it. We spent the day on computers in a coffeeshop and then cleaning the house. It was okay. A little bittersweet, but okay.

2 weeks until Do leaves for California, 3.5 until me and my Dad start our grand coast-to-coast roadtrip.

The big overachieving success of the weekend were these Vietnamese rolls. I'd clipped the recipe from Bon Appetit magazine, pretending that I'd be cool enough to follow-through but speculating that, really, the recipe would be another long term resident in my clippings folder. Along with the recipes that call for unfindable ingredients or 2-days worth of prep work.

Well, the recipe does involve a lot of prep work. Some less onerous than I'd feared: we picked up a package of grated coconut (so much for the 'fresh' part. You pick your battles), all the greens and peppers can be finely diced in the food processor, and the rice paper was surprisingly easy to find (Whole Foods) and to use (dunk each piece in warm water for 3 seconds before using). However, the recipe cavalierly calls for peeled, cooked shrimp... and Do finds pre-frozen seafood not worth eating. So I got my first experience peeling, deveining, and sautéing shrimp. The deveining part was particularly...exotic.

The end product was surprisingly refreshing and light, even though we probably wolfed down two servings each. There was that sea-taste, and the green crunch, and the delicate rice paper-fresh mint combination. We ended up adding whole mint leaves to the outside of each roll, to maximize that refreshing, summery flavor. It was lovely, really. Perfect for a weekend summer lunch. There was much self-satisfied 'I actually made that!' head-swelling going on. Mission accomplished; recipe conquered.

The catch, as we discovered 24 hours later, is that leftover rolls lose a lot of their fresh flavor. The zesty dipping sauce helps cover that somewhat, but they're still better the first time around. Since the technique itself (minus the shrimp) isn't particularly hard or time-consuming, it'll be interesting to experiment with different innards. The possibilities of stuffed rice paper rolls now appear endless...

Given that this was a victory over an intimidating clipped recipe, I'm sending this over to Ruth's Kitchen Experiment's Bookmarked Recipes, a (somewhat)new weekly event that could sure help us get through our giant file folder of magazine clippings!


Shrimp and Coconut Rolls (Bon Appetit)
Makes about 15 rolls, serves 3-4 as a meal

• 10 oz peeled cooked shrimp, cut into 1/4- to 1/3-inch pieces
• 2 1/2 cups thinly sliced iceberg lettuce (about 1/4 large head)
• 1 1/4 cups finely grated peeled fresh coconut
• 1/2 unpeeled English hothouse cucumber, seeded, cut into 1/4-inch cubes (1 cup)
• 1 tablespoon plus 1/2 cup fresh lime juice
• 6 teaspoons fish sauce (such as nam pla or nuoc nam), divided
• 4 1/2 teaspoons sugar, divided
• 3 teaspoons minced seeded red or green serrano chiles, divided
• 2 tablespoons finely chopped green onion
• 2 teaspoons chopped fresh mint leaves (N: try whole leaves, and more of them)
• 15 8- to 9-inch-diameter rice paper rounds (spring roll wrappers)

  

Preparation

• Combine shrimp, lettuce, coconut, cucumber, 1 tablespoon lime juice, 4 teaspoons fish sauce, 1/2 teaspoon sugar, 2 teaspoons chiles, green onion, and mint in large bowl.
• Moisten kitchen towel. Squeeze out excess moisture and lay towel flat on work surface. Fill large bowl with warm water. Following the directions on the package, submerge 1 wrapper in water until beginning to soften, about 20 seconds (mine took 3 seconds). Place on damp towel. Place 1/4 cup shrimp mixture in 3-inch long strip down center of wrapper. Fold in sides of wrapper over filling, then roll up tightly, enclosing filling. Repeat with remaining wrappers and filling. [DO AHEAD Can be made 8 hours ahead. Place on baking sheet lined with parchment paper, cover with damp paper towels, and refrigerate. Let rolls stand at room temperature 10 to 15 minutes before serving.]
• Mix 1/2 cup lime juice, 2 teaspoons fish sauce, 4 teaspoons sugar, and 1 teaspoon chiles in small bowl. Serve rolls with dipping sauce.

Emergency Gourmet: Mint Pea Soup & Tip for Over-Spiced food

My life is honestly less interesting when we don't post. I mean, first of all, I become less interested in food and ingredients and presentation in general. Dinners degenerated to leftovers, canned/defrosted goods, and even (gasp!) ramen. I come home and find myself lackadaisical and apathetic and bored. And boring.

But just as bad, when I don't blog, I feel too guilty to go visit my bloggie-friends. And we really do have the best bloggie friends ever. You guys keep visiting and posting even when I (metaphorically) refuse to get out of bed and actually communicate. Thank you for not giving up on us. I especially want to give a shout-out to Krysta, who went out of her way to find some key ingredients at her local African-Caribbean grocery store to support my Chiebu Djen odyssey. I am completely floored and energized by her thoughtfulness. Apparently that Chiebu Djen struck a cord: my Dad also bought and mailed some dried fish for version 2.0. So expect some heavy duty Chiebu Djen to surface within the next few weeks!

*****

Earlier this week, Do and I had a couple of his graduate student pals over to dinner. Let me rephrase that: Do remembered 24 hours ahead of time that he had invited them over a month ago. We had just gotten back from Chicago, there was dirty laundry and half-unpacked luggage all over the place (and in an apartment as small as ours, even one suitcase can feel like an invasion), and the fridge was empty. Deer in Headlights moment. Oh and did I mention that one friend is vegetarian (there goes the quick roasted chicken idea) and the other turns out to be lactose-intolerant (ack!). To top it off, it was a Tuesday night. So we had to leave work, shop for ingredients, prepare food, host a dinner, and have them out the door by a reasonable hour.

Oh God.

It was this blog, of all things, that saved us from my rapidly approaching panic-attack. Do faced this minor calamity by very simply going to our blog and skimming through our 'All Time Favorites' posts. About 40 minutes before our guests arrived, he propped up his laptop on the kitchen counter and threw together his Pasta Arrabiata, which took about 15 minutes and next to no ingredients. Brilliant.

Do talks over Neen for a moment, before remembering to grab the talky stick: Well, as we all know I like spice. Something that I have always been curious about is how to tone down a spicy dish once the damage is done, so to speak. I have noticed before, that dishes that involve tomatoes tend to require more hot sauce to get the same amount of kick. So, floating in the back of my mind has been this idea that, if I just add more tomato sauce, the heat of a dish should decrease. Well, after adding 4 Serrano peppers, red pepper flakes, and cayenne pepper to my Pasta Arrabiata - I got a chance to test that hypothesis.

It worked like a charm. Before adding the additional tomato sauce, Neen was crying after taking one bite of the sauce. I added in two tablespoons of tomato sauce and all of a sudden Neen found the sauce pleasant, even slightly mild. Mild! From crying to mild in 10 seconds or less. I love it.

I have been trying to figure out why, but the internet has been no help. Capsaicin, shown to the right (image stolen from Wikipedia), is the molecule that binds to receptors on the tongue, giving the sensation of spice or heat. It is a pretty standard looking hydrocarbon. Since I don't know exactly how Capsaicin binds, it is hard to be sure why tomato is affecting it, but it may be a weak acid-base reaction. The back tail group (the part from the HO to the NH-C=O), which is conserved across a family of molecules with similar effects, has a couple possible acidic or basic components. It may be that the tomato sauce, being slightly acidic, is reacting with the molecule. Of course, that would suggest that lemon juice or any other acidic addition should have the same effect. And that is easy enough to test (oh yes, that is an experiment coming soon to a kitchen near me)! If it's not an acid-base reaction, then it may be a more complicated interaction between the Capsaicin molecule and something more specific that is found in tomatoes. Possibly an interaction resembling the Capsaicin-Dairy Fat interaction. Dairy fat dissolves Capsaicin, so that when you eat a spicy, dairy food, the Capsaicin can't bind to the receptors on your tongue because it is all tied up with the dairy fat. Which is why cream-based food doesn't tend to taste as spicy.

Neen grabs the talky stick away before Do scares all the readers away with too much science talk.

In the meantime (ahem), I forged ahead with the absolute best emergency recipe in my arsenal. This is my bang-for-your-buck, gourmet-in-30-seconds Ace. Giz and Psychgrad, if you host another Tried and True event, I'll be sending this recipe over. Mint pea soup. Ridiculously refreshing and light, perfect for a summer meal or an appetizer.

This soup is a godsend. It required no cooking, no prep, no exotic ingredients. In fact, chances are you may have all the necessaries in your pantry right now. Literally, you throw all the ingredients in a blender and have at it (or, if you have an immersion blender, throw the ingredients straight into the serving bowl). Serving it in wine glasses makes it fancy-shmancy; ah, the deceptions of presentation! For our dinner on Tuesday, I even had enough time left over to make homemade garlic croutons.

Someday, when I'm a harried mom or a broke, harried graduate student, this soup will be my saving grace. The original recipe is from "Real Simple: Meals Made Easy," the cookbook that introduced us to our first kitchen. The book has a whole section of No-cook meals, as well as no-shop meals, 30-minute meals, etc. When we sooner or later lose the luxuries of time and disposable income, and have to set aside overachieving cookbooks like Silver Palate or Madhur Jaffrey, Real Simple will be there for us. We will still eat well. Thank God. Because I'm so freakin' tired of apathetic dinners.

We're sending this Mint Pea soup recipe over to Joelen, who is compiling Blender recipes for her monthly Tasty Tool event. We can't think of a single better use for your blender!

Mint Pea Soup. Serves 4

2 10oz packages (4 cups) frozen peas, thawed slightly
3/4 cup fresh mint (or more!)
4 scallions, roughly chopped (1/4 onion works too)
3 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp sugar
Optional garnish: torn mint leaves, plain yogurt/creme fraiche, or croutons.

Place all the ingredients in a blender. Puree until smooth, at least one minute. Pour in individual bowls. Garnish with mint leaves, a dollop of creme fraiche or plain yogurt, or garlic croûtons.

The. Move.

Mega, mega writer's block on the food front. Apologies. We're moving to California next month, and I think that the 'cleaning out the pantry' mentality is having devastating effects on the quality of our dinners. It's hard to work up enthusiasm for cooking or eating when the mentality revolves around cans, leftovers, minimum purchases, and just making do.

It's going to be epic, the move I mean. We both start graduate school in Berkeley in August, but what happens between now and then is less regimented. Do, as our resident scientist, is to report for duty at a Berkeley lab as soon as humanly possible. My program has no such expectations and I absolutely refuse to lift a pinkie finger this summer: it'll be my first summer without a job or internship or scholastic requirement since pre-high school. So we've cut a deal: Do moves out in early June and gets to find us a place to live, my family and I pack up all our stuff and load it in a pod, and then my Dad and I drive the car across the country. Don't even talk to me about gas prices.

The father-daughter cross-country drive is going to be a ball. My Dad, characteristically, has gone a head and planned out every day, every stop, every motel. Phase 1 will snake us through the South-East, visiting much of my paternal side of the family (free bed!), a civil war battlefield, a renowned Bar-B-Q joint, and an ice cream factory, before landing us in Austin for a week plus. [My folks have retired to Austin, and I haven't gotten a chance to spend more than a long weekend there]. Then phase 2 will be new territory to me: El Paso, Tucson, Pasadena, Fresno, and finally, the Bay Area. We should roll in to Berkeley in mid-July.

Needless to say, suggestions about places to hit up on the way, food-related or otherwise, are more than welcome!

We haven't yet figured out how/how often we'll be able to stay in touch with you all. We don't even know if you'd be interested in my adventures from the road (mmm, truck stop food. Again.), or in Do's photoless cooking attempts while he crashes in Oakland with a bachelor buddy from college.

I'll definitely at least try to do something. Even this mini-break from blogging has left me really missing you guys.

Finally, tonight, we have a free evening and several dishes on the backburner. Expect some real, food blogging very soon!

Dinner alone

Leftovers.

Dear Do (because I know you're reading this),

Right now, you're in the air somewhere between here and Chicago. Which is a shame, because cooking dinner isn't nearly as fun without you. I mean, I was almost too lazy to assemble my fajita/burrito, even though you'd prepared and carefully packaged all the components last night. As for utensils, a plate, a place mat? Forget it. I ate dinner while standing in the kitchen. Why bother taking the extra time? Which is kind of funny, given that I'm the fastidious one who insists on napkins and place mats.

I'm bemused at how little I want to cook, with no one to cook for. Is it because there's no one to share the resulting creation with, no one to appreciate the intimate moment known as dinner time? I feel completely lethargic and culinarily apathetic. I really enjoy cooking with you, for you. I find it really fun to participate in your culinary adventures, offering unwanted tips while washing your prep bowls, sampling your creations and trying to argue you out of adding wine and/or hot sauce. I love how you always find something worth complimenting when I set dinner on the table, and how any less-than-optimal parts of the dish are always the recipe's fault, never mine. The two of us huddling over cookbooks on Saturday mornings, over tea, passing recipe clippings back and forth, is disgustingly endearing. I love how much you, and we, have gotten into cooking. It really makes my day, every day.

You should have landed two minutes ago. I'll see you in 39 hours.

Oh, and Do? I just accidentally bit into one of the many jalapeños that you added to the fajita chicken. It nearly seared my taste buds off; what on earth were you thinking??

Potluck contributions from the road

Okay. As I write this, we are in Charlottesville, VA, on a romantic get-away weekend full of wine tasting and gourmet food. It's a for real vacation: I've even taken Monday off.

However! It's also Krysta's very first potluck. Think of it as a blogosphere House-warming. Blog-warming? There's no way that we were going to miss this. Romantic vacation or no romantic vacation, we will be in Krysta's backyard in California this afternoon, sipping mojitos and shooting the shit. Because that's what friends are for.

So we've stopped the car in Charlottesville and found a coffeeshop. Not that this is any great sacrifice: we just came from a wine tasting in Barboursville (one of Virginia's most renowned vineyards) and are heading towards a gourmet dinner and bed at our favorite Joshua Wilton House in Harrisonburg. We figure that Krysta's in California and they're three hours behind, so we shouldn't be the last ones to show at her party.

And, much to my delight, we've stumbled across Charlottesville's Mudhouse Coffeeshop. I feel like I'm on a pilgrimage: one of my more thought-provoking non-food authors, Lauren Winner, waxes poetical about this coffeeshop and even titled her second book Mudhouse Sabbath, after this establishment. I won't go into how interesting her ideas and perspectives are, because it's not good manners to talk religion at a party. Suffice it to say, this is super exciting. I feel like I should be asking for an autograph from the barista. ;)

Anyways, our contributions to Krysta's party are a strawberry spinach salad and the services my favorite grill-meister. We're assuming that Krysta has a backyard grill (it's California, right? Who doesn't have a backyard? And if you have a backyard, why wouldn't you have a grill? We certainly would.), and you always need someone to flip the burgers, so Do is volunteering. He figures he'll be less of a hazard in your backyard than he would in our kitchen!

Do actually really enjoys making burgers; it's a great lazy meal for us. After reading a Minimalist column about the Perfect Burger, he's gone absolutely wild. Burgers stuffed with blue cheese or cheddar, burgers stuffed with pesto, burger made out of ground lamb, burgers glazed with bar-b-q sauce while cooking, burgers topped with paté... As you can see to the left, his most recent permutation was a cheddar cheeseburger topped with an egg over easy. It was messy as hell to eat, but delicious and really entertaining. He would tell you about it himself, but he's busy taking advantage of the free wifi to submit computer jobs to his lab computers. In a perfect state (i.e., distracted) to be volunteered for grill meister duties! :)

As for the salad, it's really no big deal. Strawberries are on sale here these days, super juicy ones, and strawberry-spinach salad can tempt even the carnivores to eat their greens! This salad is nothing more than strawberries, spinach, thyme, mint, and a dressing made out of oil, sugar, and lemon juice. The dressing isn't phenomenal, so I'm not going to give you a recipe for it, but the idea of including fresh mint and thyme was a good one. If anyone has any tips for what dressing to serve with a strawberry-spinach salad, I'm all ears!

A toast to the hostess!

And now, back to our romantic vacation...