Hot Stove, Iron Glove

White bean dip with cilantro and jalepeno

2012-01-27T17:15:00.000-08:00

It's pretty much what it sounds like!

About a week ago when it was really snowing here, Tom and I went to a friend's house down the street for dinner, to try and escape the cabin fever that snow in this city causes. Before dinner, my friend Monica pulled out a store-bought white bean dip that was amazing, and looked simple enough to make, so I tried it today with excellent results.

You'll need a food processor, two cans of canellini beans, a bunch of cilantro, and a jalepeno. Open and drain the beans, and rinse them. Your mileage may vary, but I am not a fan of the nasty water-and-preservative mix inside most canned beans, so I rinse mine until they don't foam anymore. Put the beans into the food processor, and slice the jalepeno into chunks - nothing fancy, I just cut mine into about four pieces across the pepper - and toss that in as well. I used half of a large bunch of cilantro, rinsed well to get the dirt out, and tore that up into the mix, then added enough olive oil through the top of the Cuisinart to help the blade emulsify everything.

Add spice to taste; cumin, chili powder or cayenne pepper, salt and black pepper should do it. I also tossed in a few shakes of a product called Pico Limon, which is a Mexican spice mixture with some dried citrus added. You'll wind up with something that looks vaguely like pesto:

It took me about 10 or so minutes to make, and is a pretty close substitute for the store bought stuff. In the future if I have more time to make it, I might cut up and sautee' another jalepeno or even a serrano and put the chunks into the mixture, then let it sit overnight for a little extra texture and flavor. Or maybe even a few scallions or half a yellow or red onion diced up raw might be nice. Enjoy!

Green papaya salad

2011-04-18T15:55:00.000-07:00

I went to Uwajimaya yesterday after a dinner downtown, and picked up two green papayas. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that Asian food is my favorite - all kinds. I have often gotten cravings for green papaya salad, but there are not that many places around Settle that serve it, and the crab and dried shrimp that usually accompanies the dish is not on my list of favorites. So I set out to find a recipe that I could piecemeal for work lunches this week, and I managed a bit of success. It will need refining as I continue to improve on it, but for a first try, I'm quite pleased with myself.

Keep in mind, this is a lot of salad, meant to last a single person a few days, so if you use the 3lbs of green papaya that I did, you'll wind up with a lot of salad. Pare down the recipe to your tastes or needs, as usual.

So first, I peeled both papayas with a regular veggie peeler, and cut them both into quarters, and grated them up:

I've had regular papaya before, and the seeds are black. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the seeds also mature with the fruit. Green papaya seeds are white, and sort of look like tiny diamonds (you can't totally see the detail, but they're very pretty):

They also feel and behave like styrofoam pebbles, it's very bizarre.

Next up, the other ingredients:

That's a bunch of cilantro and a bunch of scallions. Chop them both up as finely as possible. I didn't julienne the scallions because I'm awful at it and I wasn't trying to impress anyone - as long as they made it into the salad, I would be fine with it. Here's the part where I tell you that if I had to do this again, I would consider adding one red bell pepper, for color. I debated pea pods as well, but that goes into territory of another Thai slaw-style salad with cabbage that I make, and I think the two salads should definitely be a little different. So red pepper for color and a little flavor would be fine, if you want.

Then the dressing ingredients:

Ignore the tea in the background, it's not involved.

I mixed about equal parts of salad oil and lime juice, then a generous squeeze of the ginger (I would usually prefer fresh ginger, but I was being lazy today). The little packet there contains four cloves of garlic. Dice them all and toss them in with the oil and lime juice. Add a few shakes of fish sauce to your taste, and do the same with the sesame oil, but go REALLY light on it. I almost put too much in, and while it doesn't hurt the flavor of my salad, it would have been really easy to go overboard. The recipe I found for reference also says to add brown sugar, and I might eventually, but this time it wasn't needed. A bit of sambal makes it. Sambal is not in the original recipe for green papaya salad, but I adore it, and it adds a bit of a kick, so I figured why not.

Toss the dressing into the salad, mix everything well, and serve with red pepper flake garnish!

No, it's not traditional, and I'm guessing a lot of proper chefs would laugh at me - but it's good, it takes care of my craving for the dish, and I can always work with it to make it better. You could also add diced salted peanuts on top as well, but I ate all of ours yesterday, so no dice.

Quick Cincinnati chili from a can

2011-01-01T15:46:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, it doesn't sound great, but bear with me.

Normally, cooking to me means exactly that - breaking down foods with a knife and actually cooking them. Cooking should not really be defined by warming something up in the microwave that came out of a can or was initially frozen. While I've done it many times before, I try and reserve my warming of processed food for more dire occasions. Today was just such an occasion. After two weeks worth of holidays, we have just about run out of food. The day after New Year's Eve and some now-rare-for-me drinking, I was in search of something tomato-based; spaghetti usually does the trick, but we didn't have that.

What we did have, however, was wheat pasta, a can of Stagg Country Chili, and cinnamon - you can probably see where I'm going with this...

I boiled about a quarter-sized grouping of pasta (hand-measured), in a small saucepan, and after that, tossed in the whole can of chili, and about a half to 3/4 teaspoon of cinnamon. Stir everything together so that the cinnamon gets mixed in everywhere, and top with cheese - we got a 3lb block of Cabot Vermont cheddar for Christmas, which is just too good not to use. This "recipe" gives you enough for one extremely hungry person or two not-that-hungry people. I feel bad calling it a recipe, but it was actually a decent trial for winging it (I normally prefer to make my own chili with far less beans), and now I'm full, so mission accomplished.

Chorizo and cornbread stuffing on the fly

2010-12-16T18:31:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season for lots of cooking. I found out a few weeks ago that I would be hosting Christmas, and decided that since we already had possession of some frozen turkeys from the local QFC's post-Thanksgiving sale, I would take care of the cooking of Christmas dinner.

Tom and I went to my brother's house in Portland for Thanksgiving, and his girlfriend cooked a very traditional Christmas dinner - turkey, gravy, mashed potato, green bean casserole, rolls - you really don't need much more than that, and it's easier than trying to go nuts and make a ton of appetizers and sweet potato-something and cranberry-whatever. Simple and to the point, right? Yes. But here, I can't do simple and to the point. I'm a multi-ingredient, multi-spice, personal recipe kind of gal. So we are doing a traditional Christmas dinner (which is, really, pretty much a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, if you're not into goose or ham) with a bit of a twist - Mexican flavors!

In order to pull this off, however, I had to find recipes online that would be simple and still good, spicy yet still a little mild, because my parents are older and don't handle spice so well - I have to set aside some 'normal' mashed potatoes, rather than the poblano recipe I'm planning on making for everyone else because peppers wreak havoc on my mother. I also have been doing test runs on these, to make sure that I don't find out Christmas Day that my lack of truly following recipes and cooking for others collides in a bad way. We've done the poblano mash already, but today was the stuffing. Tom bought a turkey breast so we could kind of get a feel for how they'd go together, and I set off on my errand.

So you need some ground chorizo, not the link kind. If you're in the Seattle area, QFC carries it for around $5 for about 3/4lb or so on those nice styrofoam plates. You'll also need a yellow onion, some carrots, celery, a can of water chestnuts, a little chicken broth, and some dried oregano and basil. You can choose to make your own cornbread, but I did not. We have Jones Barbecue right down the street, and they are in the partial business of cornbread. Their cornbread is also not too sweet, and is a little dry, so it's perfect for stuffing. We got 4 pieces.

First, PAM-up a glass baking dish. Ours is like 11x17-ish. Crumble up the cornbread into the baking dish. Then, brown the chorizo in a large frying pan - I used one of our woks. Add two cloves of diced garlic, and about a half a large yellow onion, also diced. Add the carrot next (one big one seemed to work alright), and stir well so the carrot softens up a bit. Dice your water chestnuts and about 3 small sticks of celery or 1-2 large ones, and toss those in with the meat. Sprinkle the whole mess somewhat liberally with dried basil and oregano, and stir to keep cooking.

This is kind of the tough part - the chicken broth. Obviously, you don't want the stuffing to be ridiculously wet or dry, and if you're anything like me and make this up as you go, things like this present a problem. What I did this evening was add about 1/8 cup of chicken broth, then pour the contents of the wok over the cornbread, fold all together, and bake at 350 for about 15-20 minutes. It turned out well, but still needed a bit more moisture if it was going to be perfect - next time, I'm actually going to add the cornbread to the wok, and fold everything (don't stir, you'll break up your cornbread too much) together, and gauge my chicken broth from there. Either way, the taste is excellent, and you don't need to add any salt or pepper, because the chorizo adds all the flavor to everything. I have also found that QFC's ground chorizo is pretty lean, so there's no worrying about fat to render - if you do have to render the fat, I would suggest leaving about a tablespoon or so in there for flavor and to help bind the bread.

This was the end result. If you're not feeling brave enough to follow my instructions, you can follow the recipe that inspired me here. Happy holidays!

Simple fried rice

2010-12-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

Holy cats did I fail at keeping up over the summer. No matter, I will still keep this up and kicking as I can.

I have been up to a lot of cooking, but not a lot of picture-taking, so I figured that I'd share a simple off-the-cuff recipe that I made yesterday that is easy to do, and turned out quite well. It involves turning a grocery store-made seasoned pork loin and leftover Chinese take-out into delicious fried rice.

Before he left for a gig trip to Texas and Mexico last week, Tom made us a pork loin with roasted brussels sprouts. I would say there was about 8-10 ounces of it leftover after we ate dinner. The night before he left for Mexico, he ordered us some Chinese take-out because he didn't feel like cooking. So, faced with most of a large take-out bucket of several-days-old white rice and some pre-cooked pork, I needed to use it up.

I drizzled some olive oil and sesame oil to my taste in a non-stick Calphalon pan (I love ours, it was a gift). With the burner on almost-high, wait for the oil to get hot, then dump the rice in and break it up. I'm thinking that if it was just day-old rice you wouldn't have to spend as much time breaking up lumps, so lesson learned there. I cut the pork into bite-sized pieces, and while continuing to break up the rice, put in probably about a cup or so of frozen peas. I added a few sprinkles of Thai spice we happened to have from Penszey's Seasonings (totally optional, of course),and some soy sauce to taste and color the rice. Then I tossed in the pork in, and diced about a quarter of a large red onion. The onion got thrown in (keep stirring so that it doesn't burn, or turn the heat down a bit while chopping, keep in mind I was making this on the fly), and to brighten things up, I sprinkled some rice vinegar into the pan.

Stir and cook until the rice shows signs of browning and everything is nice and warmed through. Take it off the burner and stir for a bit to keep the rice from burning (this may just be my pan or preference), and voila, you've just made some awesome, simple fried rice!

This could probably also be done with freshly-steamed white rice, but from what I understand, day-old rice will turn out far better. Tom has tried fried rice with fresh rice, and it comes out a bit more moist than it probably should (but still good, of course).

We are planning a Mexican-inspired Christmas dinner, and I'd like to get that up here, too, so stay tuned!

Recent developments

2010-04-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry to anyone who might have stumbled over here the past month, I have not been very active. Tom has been gone on tour for pretty much the past 3-ish months, and things have been a bit of a mess - cooking for one turns into eating out of cans and warming stuff up in the microwave, sadly. Also, apparently I didn't have anything set up so that I could actually receive comments, so apologies to anyone who may have commented here, I only just today saw them. That should be remedied from here on out, along with a little word-recognition thing to cut down on spam. Not that I've had any so far, but cutting down on spam is always a good idea. Unless you're cooking Hawaiian food.

So I will try in the upcoming months to update more frequently. With a Seattle summer coming up that is projected to be warmer than normal, I'm sure that there will be more barbecues and the like, so there should be more posted up here. In the meantime, hold tight, I'll be back soon.

From somewhere in Germany...

2010-03-04T07:34:00.000-08:00

As many of you might know, Tom recently came back from a trip to Europe with his band. Dietarily, this trip was a bit of an exception to the otherwise hard-and-fast rule of eating coldcuts, warm mayonaise, and salad without dressing, plus whatever local faire the various promoters make available backstage (usually supported by the aforementioned sandwich disaster). Their tour manager made sure to take them to plenty of good local places with various ethnic foods which were sometimes good and sometimes just a little off (hint; Chinese food in Germany does not taste like it does here, nor does either Euro or US Chinese food likely taste like it does in China), but one place that got at thumbs up was a chain restaurant called Nando's (only one US location, in Washington DC).

I don't know much about Nando's but I guess chicken is their specialty, and they originate in South Africa. Tom had a peri peri chicken dish there that he attempted to copy here the first night he was back (one thing he misses most when on tour is cooking), and while we managed to find most of the ingredients for the marinade, peri peri sauce is not an easy find in Seattle. Peri peri can be used as a marinade, but Tom says that the sauce is thicker, so we tried to hunt it down. We looked at both QFC and Metropolitain Market (where we found some tamarind for another recipe a few weeks back), but no dice. The MM cheese counter woman even looked at us like we were crazy when we asked her if she had any Robichon, but maybe that's because Tom and I look like the last people who would know what that even was.

So rather than peri peri, we settled on hot sauce. Brother Bru-Bru's hot sauce, to be specific, and called it a day. Turns out our good friend Bru-Bru makes a hell of a hot sauce, and Tom was happy with the taste similarity.

Last night, we had some friends come over for dinner, so he decided to make it again, and this time he kept track of the ingredients he used. These photos were taken on an iPhone, as I was napping at the time. The marinade in our food processor:

That's a ton of paprika all over the top there. Next, he put it on the chicken and let that sit for a good half hour or so:

The first time we made this, we tried to grill it right away - but the basting marinade he was using had butter in it, and we had a lot of grill flare-ups, and the skin got charred pretty quickly, but the meat wasn't actually done. So this time, Tom put it in the oven for a while before going on the grill, to make sure it was cooked through:

And then on to the grill! Not a great photo, but there was fire, cooking meat, all the rest of it:

Unfortunately, the final product photo did not come out well, so I'm using a picture from the first time we ate it. This was my plate:

Not a great photo, either, but at least the idea is there. The chicken is merely served with wild rice prepared with a little citrus (lemon specifically, but any aside from maybe grapefruit would do), and sprinkled with cilantro or flat-leaf parsley and served. That's a bit of hot sauce on the side there - Brother Bru-Bru is not to be trifled with!

1 15oz bottle of lemon juice
8 cloves garlic
1/2 large onion
6 serrano peppers
handful of italian flat leaf parsley
2 tablespoons paprika

2 whole chickens, quartered and rubbed with salt and pepper.
2-3 tablespoons butter

Combine ingredients in a food processor and pulse until you have a liquid with small chunks of the solid ingredients. Set aside 1/4 of the marinade to put on the chicken when it's done. Set aside another 1/4 of the marinade to be combined with the butter for basting during cooking. Take the remaining half and pour it over the cut up chicken (which you should salt and pepper beforehand) and let it marinate for 30-60 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 350 and let chicken cook for about 20 minutes. The marinade and the chicken skin are prone to flare ups on the grill, so pre-cooking it a bit assures the insides will be cooked fully without the skin being burnt to a crisp. Fire up the grill and grill chicken an additional 20 minutes or until done, flipping and re-basting with the marinade/melted butter mixture each time.

Serve over wild rice (add a few tablespoons of the marinade to the water you cook the rice with for a nice, subtle hint of lemon), spoon some of the reserved marinade over the chicken and sprinkle liberally with the hot sauce of your choice...

Adventures in chicken cacciatore

2010-03-02T15:24:00.000-08:00

Last week, we went to a friend's house for Friday night dinner. We watched the last bits of the Olympic games, drank scotch, petted cats, and most important of all, cooked a fantastic dinner for about 10. My friend Gray was responsible for the bulk of the cooking, and I managed to get a recipe from him that I'll post here with photos. He doubled the recipe because of the amount of people there, but it looks like like this would feed 4-6 really hungry people. The recipe is an altered version of a Cooks Illustrated recipe, a magazine that Tom and I get regularly, and quite a few of my friends are very fond of. The "assorted olives" were from an olive bar at a local grocery, so the tangy flavor of their oils and marinades added quite a bit of flavor to the original recipe. I'd imagine you could use regular black olives if you don't have an antipasto bar at your local grocery store, but maybe toss some green ones (de-pimento'd, if possible) into the mix as well, as a substitute.

8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
Oil
Flour
1 large can diced tomatos [1]
1 pint assorted olives
about 10 oz. portabello mushrooms, diced into 1" cubes, about 2 large caps
about 10 oz. crimini mushrooms, whole if small, halved if bigger
1 medium yellow onion, diced in 1/2" chunks
1 Tbsp minced garlic
1 & 1/2 cups dry red wine [2]
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 Tbsp thyme (fresh is best, I used dried)
1 Tbsp minced fresh sage

Optional: Brine thighs for 1-4 hours before preparing; dissolve 1/3
cup Kosher salt in cool water. Submerge thighs in brine, and sit in
fridge for 1-4 hours. Drain, rinse chicken.

Preheat oven to 325. [3]

Season thighs with salt and pepper.
Heat about 1/4" of oil in skillet over medium-high, until shimmering.
Place 4 thighs, skin side down in hot oil. Cook, without moving, for
about 5 minutes, until skin is nicely browned and crispy. Flip chicken
and brown other side for about 5 minutes. Set aside. Repeat with
remaining thighs. Remove skin from all thighs, and place thighs in an
oven-proof Dutch oven or roasting pan,

Pour off excess oil, leaving only about 2 Tbls in pan. Add diced
onions and mushrooms. Cook, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms
start to cook down, and the water release is cooked off. Add 1 Tbl
minced garlic, and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds.

Sprinkle about 1/3 cup flour over veggies. Stir to incorporate. Let
flour mixture cook, stirring contantly, for about 3 minutes (the raw
flour taste should be cooked out). Slowly add wine, stirring
constanly, flour should thicken the mixture.

Add broth, tomatos, olives, thyme, stir.

Pour over chicken thighs, being sure to cover them. You can add a bit
more wine/stock at this point to make it enough to cover the thighs.
The liquid should be fairly thick, like the consistency of
half-and-half. Add a bit more flour, or cornstarch, if it needs
thickening up (it will thicken while cooking as well).

Put dish in oven, and cook 1 to 1.5 hours, until chicken is tender,
and sauce has thickened. Stirring once or twice. When stirring check
for salt/pepper need, and adjust as needed.

Stir in fresh sage just before serving.

Serve with egg noodles, pasta, polenta, etc.

[1] I really like the San Marzano ones. If you don't use these, you
might need 2 cans, as the other brands are a little smaller.
[2] I use Cotes du Rhone, any bottle around $10
[3] Original recipe calls for 300, I used 350. A slowwer braise at
lower temp would likely make the chicken come out even more tender.

Hopefully I'll get the photo function here figured out soon, these are obviously not in order, but hey, it's my first post.
We also had some single-malt scotch that was made in Oregon. It was not the best thing I've ever had, but everyone else seemed to agree with it. For me, scotch has to be a nice, dark, sugary brown with a bit of 'oomph!' to the body, which this did not have. But it looked nice when I poured it:

Happy Tuesday, everyone! Cheers!

Welcome!

2010-02-26T16:01:00.001-08:00

I have started this up as a way to not only keep up on my writing, but also to focus on another part of my life (other than baseball) that I hold dear; the joyride - and car crash - that is cooking. I am accustomed to WordPress's layout, and in fact my blog about the Seattle Mariners, Section331, can be found there. This blog will chronicle my adventures - and misadventures - in cooking. Recipes - such as they are - will be posted, as will pictures and general description. I hope that it will prove useful and amusing for all who happen to stumble upon it.