16 posts tagged “food and cooking”
Last night, I started thinking about how little time there was in the day, and I started doing the math and trying to break up my day to more effectively fit everything in. It was a little discouraging, especially since I feel so often that I do so little and everyone else seems to do so much, and it turned into a little brain teaser to play with all day. Anyway, this is a roundabout way of describing how I started thinking about quick and simple dishes for dinner and reminded me that I should jot down this recipe for spicy shrimp.
- 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
- 3T sunflower oil or EVOO
- 1t paprika
- 3/4t cumin
- 1/4t ground ginger
- pinch of cayenne or ground chili pepper
- 1/2 pound large frozen or fresh shrimp, peeled
- salt
- 2-3T cilantro or parsley, chopped
- Saute 2 cloves of minced or crushed garlic in oil
- Stir in spices
- Add shrimp
- Season with salt to taste and add herbs.
- Fry about 5 minutes or until shrimp is a nice healthy pink.
M has been nagging me about the holiday baking because although chocolate gingerbread cake, chocolate Guiness cake, chocolate chip cookies, ginger spice cookies, and oatmeal cookies are all well and good, these are not the best items to eat nutritiously and light. I have dutifully hunted for healthy recipes and last night made a pretty tasty curried lentil soup, which was healthy and filling without being heavy and had a nice spicy kick to it (I will experiment with the spices more though).
I have laid off the baking.
And then, this afternoon, I received a belated Christmas gift from my college friend Jo.
I am so glad that work has a gym.
Fisher writes about different moments in her life as they relate to food, from when she was a little girl in 1912, helping her grandmother with the canning, to living in France and Switzerland during the 1930s and ending with her trip to Mexico in 1941 as a widow. Her writing voice is reminiscent of the same time as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she writes about Europe before the war. Fisher is perceptive and reads people well, and she reveals them in her writing without being sentimental. There are a few stories where I learned rather more intimate details than I expected of the people around her, and one very funny story where a little yet indomitable waitress almost kills Fisher - partly against Fisher's will - with a surfeit of exquisitely prepared dishes. One passage that I particularly liked was about how she learned how to eat alone in public, which most people would shy away from, but which Fisher starts doing while traveling alone on a sea voyage. She eats simply and well and voluptuously and gains extreme pleasure and confidence from the act. It backfires on her on a couple of occasions, but I liked the independence and of her ability to give herself over to the moment and to know exactly what she wants. I suppose what I liked most was that although she had difficult times, she had a great deal of self-awareness and at least in the moments she discloses in the book, she lived her life well.
This one is rather big so I tore it in half and half was enough for breakfast. Later, I will make sandwiches.
My attempt at food photography. These are chives with the flower buds. I stir-fried these with a bit of shrimp and a little pork and young ginger. You don't want them to be over-cooked but just lightly stir-fry them so they have a little crispness to them. They have a nice garlicky bite.
My parents are visiting this week and certain childhood memories started bubbling up to the surface. A lot of the memories are food memories. I've been taking my parents around town to sample the local restaurants, mostly Asian cuisine which is what they are interested in, but once they discovered the Chinese grocery just around the corner from our house, my dad has been cooking every day. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because I'm getting to eat Filipino food again - I do cook Filipino food on my own but there are a few dishes which M just doesn't have the palate for so I don't make - and bad because I almost instantly started gaining weight once they arrived.
So far, my dad has cooked chicken and beef asado, chicken and pork adobo, a dish of sauteed Chinese sausage and onions, garlic fried rice, tomato and onion salad with a little radish as garnish to go with the adobo, and right now, my mom is marinating her infamous BBQ pork (although we did have to visit 4 stores to find the country style pork ribs she wanted). I'm enjoying it both because it's good food and also because there are a lot of steps, which would never be included in a cookbook that he's passing on to me, lessons he learned from his grandfather. They're little steps I would never think of and don't quite understand but apparently they do make the difference, such as when you pour the vinegar and soy sauce in the pot you shouldn't stir it until it starts to boil or the asado will be too sour. It's good to learn these things and my house smells like vinegar and garlic.
As you can see, my dad sure likes his meat. And here's the memory that came to mind: my dad at the grill. After my dad was finished with being on first call at the hospital all night, he would stop at Kroger's - the local grocery chain - on the way home and pick up a few steaks. He'd drive home and before coming inside the house, fire up the grill outside, come inside to season the steaks, and head back out. He would do that all year whenever he finished a particularly long or hard shift at the hospital.
M was listening to us talk about it and said, we grill all year, too.
But you see, I grew up in Ohio and my dad still grilled all year long - even in the heart of winter. Before entering the house from the garage, he'd switch from his leather boots to his winter boots, change the nice coat he wore to work to the huge parka with faux fur-lined hood pulled up and tied tight so he'd look like an eskimo, and then he'd grab his plate of steaks and the tongs and trod out into the foot-high snow and bitter cold. As little kids, we'd set the table and see him re-enter the house with the steaks, snow flurries chasing him inside and chilling the room, and then we'd sit down and have a nice hot dinner.
I've been a bit stressed and overrun at work so I haven't been cooking lately and have reverted to going out. I'm going to try to avoid dining out so much this week, but I've had some very good food - nothing fancy - but good.
At Cupertino Square, we discovered HC Dumpling. It's one of the smaller restaurants in Cupertino Square. It's fronted by large glass windows and the room is crammed with tables and chairs draped in table linens and seat covers although the place is slightly dingy. The clientèle is mostly Chinese and the servers kept addressing me in Mandarin, furrowing their brows when I didn't respond in the same language. Luckily, D was there to order. Aside from the dumplings, the restaurant has a fairly wide selection of Chinese dishes such as beef shank, seafood, and veggie dishes such as eggplant with Chinese basil or lotus root. We will go back. We've only gone for dinner so far but I will try their lunch menu some weekend. The lunch menu seems like a good deal and includes dumplings, an appetizer, an entrée and a side dish or two.
The best thing about HC Dumpling is that they serve soup dumplings or xiao long bao. They're little steamed pork dumplings with a bit of soup inside. I believe that the dumplings are prepared with a bit of pork and the soup in gel form, so that when the dumpling is cooked, the gel melts and turns into hot steaming soup inside the dumpling. The soup can be a bit treacherous for the unwary because if one simply bites into the dumpling, the soup will spurt out and possibly hit one's face or stain a shirt. The trick is to place the dumpling on the spoon, take a small bite, and slurp up the soup. The first time I was introduced to soup dumplings was in a Chinese restaurant in Japan, so the dumplings bring back good memories.
In addition to dumplings, I learned how to eat raw oysters. AY had his 50th birthday party and had a raw oyster bar as the culinary spotlight. I'm not sure which had the greater part in my conversion: my taste buds changing or if I finally had good fresh raw oysters. The first time I had oysters was when I was six. My dad told me to just let it slide down my throat. I remember the oyster as being huge and it jiggled in my mouth as if it was protesting and trying to escape and I wasn't quite sure at six years of age whether the oyster was really a creature because it didn't look like any animal I had ever seen, so I gagged. I may have even cried. I had not touched raw oysters since that first experience although I have had cooked oysters such as Oysters Rockefeller - and in Oysters Rockefeller you can't really taste the oyster so much. For some reason, this time, the oysters were just delicious. They served Miyake oysters, which apparently hold up well against sauce but the oysters don't really need anything except for maybe a little squirt of lemon. They taste like little bits of the sea. Yum. It will be hard to eat cooked oysters again.
I asked the oysterman - who used to raise oysters himself but who is in semi-retirement now - where I could get good oysters in my area. He suggested The Fish Market, of which I haven't been a big fan possibly because I haven't ordered the right dishes there although I've always felt the place was a bit overpriced even if they do supply crayons, but he said that the chain actually raises the majority of their own oysters and that the new shipment always comes in on Wednesday, so go on Thursday night.
And finally, we went out for Thai food. We used to eat Thai food quite a bit at Brown and during the first few years we moved to California. When we moved to PA, we stopped eating Thai food because there aren't really any good Thai restaurants up there, but there is quite a wide selection where we live now. This time we tried Krung Thai by Valley Fair. We had chicken satay, deep fried rolls, shrimp toasts, very spicy drunken noodles, and "jungle" curry with beef. I also had Thai iced coffee which I always love although I thought their iced coffee was on the milky side. The curry was okay but everything else was good. On the down side, although the servers were very polite, they were understaffed so a bit slow. Also, the acoustics in the restaurant are terrible, making for a noisy environment, so it's not the best place to have dinner and expect to have a conversation. We'll have fun exploring other Thai restaurants near us though.
We hosted our first seder Monday night and I am still exhausted. We pulled it together a few days before because M hadn't decided to host one until just then. He said that now that we have a home, we should have a seder. I couldn't really argue, so I searched for recipes recommended for Passover.
It was a little nerve-wracking but Epicurious is my friend.
I've never cooked for a dinner party before, particularly Passover dinner which has certain dietary restrictions, for several people, but this was the final menu:
Appetizer:
Entree:
Side Dishes:
- Apple and Walnut Charoset
- Tsimmes with sweet potato, carrot, and dried prunes
- Rebecca's Apricot Kugel and Spinach Kugel
- Dima's chocolate chip and raisin cookies
- Dark Chocolate Torte with Spiked Blackberry Coulis
Anyway, I stuffed them! My parents and aunties would nod with approval. I'm also armed with a little experience for next year.
Leading the seder was also a little daunting but luckily that was M's province (as the Jew) and not mine (as the non-Jew) so I could just relax and enjoy. My job was done once I fed people. He was nervous beforehand because he said a seder is something that grandparents host, at least in his family, but the Jews at the table knew it was the first time we had ever had one and were understanding and seemed to have a good time. He said we will use a different Haggadah for next year though.
Friday night, M and I went to San Francisco for a vodka tasting. Now, M has a weakness for vodka, and I, cruel wife that I am, designated him as driver for the night even though I am not a big vodka drinker.
I didn't feel too bad about it though. I drank many martinis. I even learned how to make a martini.
At the party, the hostess presented us with 10 vodkas in unlabeled bottles. She provided a little card in which we could record whether we liked the vodka on a scale from 1 to 10 and another blank in which we could try to guess which vodka it was - Grey Goose, Chopin, Absolut, a local Russian vodka, etc. I tried tasting one vodka, sniffed another that smelled musty (must have been the Popov), decided that I had had enough of that, and headed for the infused vodka which the hostess had prepared herself.
She made the following vodka infusions: lemon, lime, dirty olive, blood orange, berry, coconut, green habanero, and cinnamon. She had also tried to do pear and apple but those hadn't worked out although she said that they had been excellent on the trial run but somehow the measurements had been off for the later batch. By far, the most interesting was the habanero - the spiciness spread through my tongue and I could feel it minutes afterward - although my favorite one was the berry. I made a chocolate berry martini although I also had a nice blend of pomegranate juice and cinnamon vodka, the end result being a sort of spiced pomegranate vodka drink a little like mulled wine.
Other people in the party continued with the blind vodka tasting. It was amusing to watch people pick a bottle, pour the vodka into their shot glass, put the bottle back in the ice tub, pick up their pen to make a note, and then realize that they had forgotten which bottle they had tasted. Also, although everyone sampled the vodka randomly (the bottles were labeled A-J) the score for each vodka tasted progressively got better.... In the end, there was no consensus on what vodka tasted best and no one was able to guess which vodka belonged to what since the highest score anyone got was 2 matches.
Finally, we all decided that the martini glass, although pretty, is an excellent little test of one's balance and hand eye coordination.
Today was a good day for the CSA. While I was organizing my fridge, I came across the radishes from the first week. They were still good, small and firm and bright violet like broken off tootsie pop heads. I love the color. I scrubbed a few clean, sliced them very thinly, and ate them sprinkled with a little fleur de sel and toward the end, just a little bit of butter. It was the perfect after work snack. Light and crispy and peppery and sharp and good. mmmm. I never thought I would actually like radishes, but these are good.
In this week's box, we received baby turnips, yellow carrots, chard, leeks (yay!), lettuce, cilantro, dandelion greens, and oranges. The entire lot looks very fresh and green, so it was fun dividing it up. Dandelion greens are the mystery food this week since I haven't a clue what I'll do with them. The farm newsletter recommends throwing them in a salad to add a bit of sharpness to the salad if one likes dandelion greens or if you don't like dandelion greens, aside from throwing them in soup like split pea, smothering them in a rich, creamy buttery sauce or making a wilted salad with bacon. (I don't know if I like dandelion greens, but knowing me, I will probably go the bacon route.) The carrots are a little unusual because of their color. Rather than the usual orange, they're a pale yellow, near white. I think I'll flash fry them in rice wine with soy sauce along with a few regular orange carrots to contrast the colors.
I already ate the baby turnips, which were small and white and cute. I boiled and then glazed the baby turnips and cooked the turnip greens with chard in olive oil with a bit of green garlic, chickpeas, onion, and lemon juice. The greens were a little more fun to cook than eat as a main dish, so I'll look for something good to pair them for lunch tomorrow, maybe a hunk of bread toasted with a little bit of olive oil. At the very least, my lunch tomorrow will be better than what the cafeteria serves up. M really liked the glazed turnips and says that he's been pleasantly surprised by the CSA: a lot of new vegetables but we're finding good new food to eat and recipes to add to our repertoire.
