A Month of Food Blogging (6 of 28) : Caramelized cauliflower

This one is a perennial favorite around our house. The baby adores cauliflower, and even my initially dubious husband thinks this is pretty darned delicious. The caramelization gives it a nice toasty flavor, and destroys that pesky sulfurous smell that brassica is prone to. And the browned butter with curry makes your entire kitchen smell great. (Although if you don't have curry on hand, this is pretty tasty even without.)

Microwaving it bootstraps the cooking process, making this a great last-minute dish. (And by last minute, I mean "oh shoot, the pasta is already done, and I forgot to make a vegetable.")

Caramelized cauliflower

Servings: 2 (4 if you're less greedy about your cauliflower.)
Time: 7 minutes
Planning Ahead: None
The Funny Stuff: Curry powder, garam masala
Virtues: Cauliflower! Vitamin C, potassium, B6, all that jazz.
Downsides: Butter.
Calories: 120

Ingredients
1 small head of cauliflower
olive oil or cooking spray
1 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp mild curry powder
1/2 tsp garam masala
salt

Directions
Chop cauliflower into medium chunks. Try to make sure most chunks have at least one flat surface to caramelize. Pop it in a microwave safe bowl, loosely covered, and microwave it for 4 minutes.


Preheat and oil a skillet on medium-high. When the cauliflower is done microwaving it, toss it in the skillet, and sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Cook until one side is golden brown, and stir.


Remove the cauliflower from the pan, and set aside. Melt the butter in the skillet until it starts to brown very slightly.


Toss in the curry and garam masala, and let them get nice and fragrant.


Drizzle the browned butter over the cauliflower.


We had this with fish and a mediterranean pasta toss: lemon juice, olive oil, feta, sun-dried tomatoes, etc.


And baby had the same, and loved it. (Minus the feta.)



Photo credits to Aaron Wood and Aleatha Parker-Wood.

A Month of Food Blogging (5 of 28) : Ramen with Chashu (Lazy food)

One of the ongoing themes of this blog is to choose your battles, both culinarily and otherwise. Not every meal at our house is scratch cooked gourmet food. However, I try to have things on hand that make it easy to eat well, even if I'm just opening a package. A little bit of stockpiled food goes a long way, and adding a little meat and a few veggies can take something from a health hazard to a well-rounded meal.

This dish falls somewhere in the middle between real ramen, and that nasty stuff you used to eat in college. Real ramen is a glorious brothy wonder that takes hours to make. Pork bones are slowly simmered, broth created, noodles made fresh on the spot. I eat mounds of it every winter, but I've never made it, it's too much work. I have a couple ramen-ya in the area that I rotate through, each with their own specialty. Packet ramen, on the other hand, is a tragic pile of sodium and fat, with not a vitamin in sight to redeem it. The high end ramen you can get in Asian markets is closer to the former than the latter. It takes about as long as packet ramen, but has less fat, surprisingly good noodles, and comes with real pork goodness. It requires you to have high quality pre-made ramen on hand, but it's almost as good as going out for ramen, is actually faster than getting takeout, and doesn't require you to bundle up children into the car, or leave work before 10 PM when the ramen shops are open. It's also a great dish to blog about when you've had a long day, and minimal time to cook and shoot.

Ramen with Chashu

Servings: 2
Time: 10 minutes
Planning Ahead: Needs chashu
The Funny Stuff: Real ramen, nori
Virtues: 10 minutes of effort, lots of vitamins from the nori
Downsides: Requires real ramen, reminds you of being a starving student.
Calories: 547

Ingredients
4 oz of chashu, which you have already made
1 2 serving packet of high quality tonkotsu ramen
1 sheet nori
1 green onion, sliced

Directions
Compare your tonkotsu ramen to Maruchan. Notice how it is not insanely fatty, and has a realistic serving size. (2 servings per noodle block? Please.)


Chop some squash and put it in a bowl, so you can tell your mom you ate your vegetables. Pop it in the microwave, loosely covered, for 7 minutes.


Follow directions on ramen packet. Boil, mix broth, put noodles in broth, etc. Slice some chashu and green onions. Place chashu, green onions, and a half sheet of nori on each bowl.


Chop some squash and chashu for baby.


Eat dinner and go to bed.

Photo credits to Aaron Wood and Aleatha Parker-Wood.

A Month of Food Blogging (4 of 28) : Chashu (Japanese stewed pork)

Most of my recipes are an amalgamation. I borrow a bit from here, a bit from there, throw my own twist on it... Not this one. This one is straight from the holy lips of the pork queen: Chashu Rice Bowl. It is perfect as it is.

Chashu is a stewed pork recipe. It's most traditionally served thinly sliced over ramen, but it's delicious in a lot of other dishes as well. It's not a 30 minute dish. To get the consistency right, it needs to simmer for one and a half to two hours. So why am I mentioning it? It's really easy to make, about 5 minutes worth of effort on a weekend, and then you can ignore it for two hours. It freezes really well, and it remixes endlessly for dishes that are less than 30 minutes. I'll give two recipes this month, one over ramen, and one as an Asian-inflected pulled pork sandwich, but you can have it as a stand-alone meat, as part of a rice bowl, in pot-stickers, as the base for a hearty and fast pork soup... Make sure to save the braising liquid as well, it makes a great BBQ sauce for the pulled pork sandwich.

Chashu

Servings: 8
Time: 1 1/2 hours
Planning Ahead: None
The Funny Stuff: Fresh ginger, mirin, miso paste
Virtues: 5 minutes of effort
Downsides: Pork shoulder is a fatty cut, so trim it and use sparingly
Calories: 297

Ingredients
1 1/2 lbs pork shoulder
2 cups water
1/4 cup soy sauce
2″ piece fresh ginger, sliced thinly
1 green onion
3/8 cup mirin
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp miso paste
3 garlic cloves
About 20 peppercorns

Directions
Smash the garlic cloves with the flat of your knife to partially crush them, then peel the skins off.


Put the pork shoulder and the dry ingredients in a pan.


Add the wet ingredients.


You want the liquid to almost cover the pork, but you don't want to dilute it, so cut the pork down into chunks until it's mostly underwater.


Cover it, put it over medium-low heat, and ignore the heck out of it for the next hour and a half to two hours. Go watch YouTube videos, or play with your kids, or do homework or something. If you're strangely anal, like me, you might want to flip it halfway through, so that the braising liquid colors both sides evenly.



Return to the scene of the crime. Should look something like this. It won't be pretty, but it should smell like a riot in a potsticker factory.


And it'll be crazy tender.


You now have chashu. Toss it in the fridge or freezer. Don't forget to save the braising liquid! Don't worry about straining out the ginger and peppercorns, they'll continue to slowly add more flavor.

Photo credits to Aaron Wood and Aleatha Parker-Wood.

A Month of Food Blogging (3 of 28) : Fish Picatta

Picatta is one of my new favorite dishes. It's fast, and it's delicious. It sounds like you slaved away over a hot stove for hours, whipping up Nonna's secret recipe, but it's actually stupidly easy to make. It goes over just about anything, from chicken to fish and seafood. Here I'm serving it with asparagus, along with some baguette to mop up any sauce that might remain. I should note that I made a terrible error when reading my fish package, and thawed an entire pound of instead of the half I've called for in the recipe. There's normally rather more sauce left over than you see in the photos.

Fish Picatta

Servings: 2
Time: 25 minutes to table if the fish is thawed, otherwise 35.
Planning Ahead: None, unless you thaw the fish in advance.
The Funny Stuff: Capers
Virtues: Low in refined starches, high in vitamin C and a number of B vitamins
Downsides: Totally addictive, uses butter
Calories: 301 or so, depending on your choice of fish.

Ingredients
4 oz mild white fish (I'm using Striped Pangasius from Trader Joes) sliced into thin fillets
2 tbsp flour
2 tbsp cornmeal
salt and cracked pepper to taste
1/2 tbsp olive oil
3/4 cup white wine
3 tbsp lemon juice
1/4 cup capers
1 tbsp butter

Directions
If you're thawing the fish, throw it in a sink of warm water. It should be hot, but not unbearably so. At about the same temperature that your skin starts to protest, the fish will start to cook, and we don't want that. This, of course, violates the directions on the package, and everything you have ever learned about food safety in school. However, it's only going to be in the sink for 8-10 minutes, which isn't long enough for even the most ambitious bacteria to make in-roads on your food. If you thaw it in a cold water bath, you'll be there all night.

While the fish is thawing, we're going to make a dredge for it. This step is somewhat optional, and if you're living gluten-free, like some of my friends, by all means skip it. I like the taste that the browned flour adds to the sauce, especially for fish, which doesn't add as meaty a flavor as chicken. Add flour, cornmeal, and some salt and pepper, and mix it together.


At this point, since I was waiting for the fish, I also pre-heated the oven for warming the baguette, threw the asparagus in a microwave safe bowl, and microwaved it for 3 minutes, loosely covered with a lid.


Heat your skillet to medium-high, and drizzle a little olive oil in it, then spread it to coat.


Dredge the fish in the flour, and add it to the pan.


When the fish starts to turn solid white around the edges, and is golden brown underneath, flip it.


Once the fish is golden on both sides, and cooked through, remove it from the pan, and set it on plates. Deglaze the pan with the white wine. Be sure to scrape all those tasty brown bits into the sauce!


Once you've finished deglazing, add the lemon juice...


And capers.


Reduce the sauce by about half, and then stir the butter. Remove it from the heat once the butter is incorporated.


Drizzle it over the fish.


In the dirty pan that I just poured the sauce out of, I drizzled a little more olive oil, and about 1/3 Tbsp butter...


And did a quick saute of the asparagus, picking up all that tasty lemon flavor.


Et voila, dinner.


The baby loves fish, so we checked it over carefully for bones, and diced a well-cooked asparagus tip for her.


Photo credits to Aaron Wood and Aleatha Parker-Wood.

A Month of Food Blogging (2 of 28) : Buta Kimchi (Pork belly with kimchi)

As soon as I launched into the first recipe post in this project, I realized that doing it directly in Google+ wasn't going to work. For starters, I couldn't put photos inline, just attach an album. So I'll be cross-posting from Blogger to Google+. It's OK, I'm still working the kinks out.

(If you have arrived through my blog, and are wondering what the heck is going on, look here for some context, and here for some pantry tips to get you started.)

For today's dish, I made buta kimchi. This is a staple Japanese tapas dish, traditionally made with pork belly. Since I rather spontaneously decided to start food blogging last night, I didn't have anything planned for today, but I did have some pork belly I picked up on Thursday as a treat for this weekend. Obviously this is not the healthiest dish when made with pork belly (although it's delicious), but you can just as easily make it with a much leaner cut, you'll just have to oil the pan first. I've made it here with white rice, at my husband's request, but brown rice would also improve its health value. The downside to brown rice is that it takes about 10 minutes longer to cook, which runs over our allotted 30 minutes. There are a couple of ways around this. 1) Soak your brown rice starting in the morning. Just throw it in a Ziploc in the fridge with some water. 2) Use precooked brown rice. (I often make a big batch and freeze it in half cup increments for lunches.)

Buta Kimchi

Servings: 2
Time: 30 minutes to table
Planning Ahead: None required
The Funny Stuff: Pork belly, kimchi, gochujang¹ (optional).
Virtues: Lots of vegetables, high in fiber
Downsides: High in sodium, high in saturated fat as shown
Calories: 599 as shown here, not including the rice and salad. 344 if you use pork loin instead of belly.

Ingredients
8 oz. pork belly
8 oz. kimchi
1/2 medium onion
1 Tbsp. gochujang
1 tsp. soy sauce
1/2 tsp. sesame oil
2/3 c. rice (white or brown)
1 1/3 c. water

Directions
First, start the rice. This will take the full 30 minutes to cook, so get it going promptly. Put the water and rice in a pan, crank it all the way up to high until it starts to boil, then turn it back down to medium-low, or whatever a gentle simmer is for your stove.

Next, admire your pork belly.


Don't admire it for more than five minutes, however. We are on a timeline here. Next, take your pork belly and slice it thinly, like so.


Admire it again. It's so darned pretty!


Moving on. Take your half onion, and slice it into strips, pole to pole, and then cut it in half along the equator. (I find this goes easier if you leave the roots on until the last cut, they'll hold everything together.)


Coarsely chop the kimchi.


Heat a skillet to medium high. If you have a heavy skillet, as I do, you might want to get it warming before you chop the onions. Add the pork, and lightly brown it on both sides. If you're using pork belly, you won't need to oil the pan, but if you're using a leaner cut, add some cooking spray beforehand.


Remove the pork from the pan, and set it aside. If you used pork belly, you now have a bunch of fat. Wipe almost all of it out with a paper towel. Then add the onions to the pan.


Stirfry the onions in the remaining fat until they are slightly translucent, like so.


Add the kimchi back in, and stir for a minute or so. Then add the pork back in, and a splash of kimchi juice, and stir.


Turn the heat down to medium low, add the soy sauce and gochujang, and stir everything together.


Put a lid on it, and let it simmer while the rice is finishing. (It should have about ten minutes left at this point.)


You now have ten minutes to make a salad to round out the meal. If I were a restaurant, or throwing a dinner party, I'd make an elegant Asian coleslaw with miso-sesame dressing, or some such a thing, but we are trying to get dinner on the table here, and we've had a long day, and we're tired. Chop some lettuce and put it on a plate, along with whatever veggies you have on hand. Here's the final product, plated over rice.


Since we are not only feeding two adults but a baby, it's worth mentioning the baby's meal as well. She likes spicy food, but kimchi is a little too hot, and it makes a mess, so she gets finely minced pork, some rice, and a bit of cauliflower, for sort of a deconstructed rice bowl. (Not shown, the leftover spanokopita that rounded out her veggies.)


(1)
Gochujang is a sweet and spicy Korean pepper paste. However, if you don't have any around, don't despair. A fair substitute is equal parts miso paste and sriracha, with a pinch of sugar. If you also don't have sriracha, use miso, sugar, and ground ancho peppers.