It is late and I haven’t the energy to go into a lot of detail. Suffice it to say that this afternoon and evening with Zakiah and Mohammed was fantastic and I ate… very… well…
There are lots of pictures, many things to share and lots of video. Yes, if ever you wanted Dr. Zakiah to star in her own cooking show, you will have your wish fulfilled, with all of the wit and charm you’ve come to expect from her!
I return to Kansas City Friday morning.
Sometimes you read a blog entry and you think, “Yes, this person hit the nail on the head!” (If you are Matt, you might think, “Drat, I was going to write that and they beat me too it.” But that’s another story.) This morning, a friend of the younger sister of a high school friend whose food blog I read posted a link to another food blog by Not Quite Nigella in which she lists 10 things you should know about food bloggers.
Here’s a sample:
#1 – Be prepared to eat early. Like a reverse Vampire, we love the light as more light means better photos. Eating dinner at 4pm? Sure, no problem, the light will be good then. Similarly, you’ll also find us seated near the window more often than not as the light is better there and we only use flash in extreme circumstances or in closed blogger-friendly company.
For the rest of the list, her entry is here. After reading this, you’ll either understand my dining behavior better or… just maybe… you’ll recognize some signs of your own inner food blogger. Enjoy!
For a long time after moving here to Krungthep, I continued to subscribe to Sunset Magazine, the “magazine of Western living.” Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, its articles and recipes reminded me to a lifestyle that is in my roots. Eventually, the subscription expired, renewal notices didn’t make it to me, and I decided it was time to let go. But the past week, I dug up a recipe from my Sunset files for a “never fall” polenta soufflé and salad.
Attributed to Victor Scargle, then chef at San Francisco’s Grand Café, these soufflés are moist and light, more like a spoon bread than a classic soufflé. With a salad and mushroom dressing, they make a simple but handsome supper.
You start off with a mixture of polenta, milk, salt and butter. Allow to cook over medium-high heat until the mixture boils, then reduce to medium heat and stir regularly.
Meanwhile, separate four eggs. Ultimately, I think I could have done with one fewer yolks, but maybe these eggs are “eggier” than normal. Beat the whites until they form distinct, moist peaks.
The polenta is done when it is thick enough to hold a clean path for a few seconds when drawing a spatula across the bottom of the pan.
Remove it from the heat and add baking powder and egg yolks, mixing well.
Fold in the egg whites, one third at a time, and gently mix. Spoon the mixture into ramekins that have been buttered and lined with grated parmesan cheese.
Bake in a 375 F (180 C) oven for about 30-40 minutes or until well-browned.
Meanwhile, make a mushroom sauce by browning chopped mushrooms and onions.
Deglaze with a little vinegar and beef stock (or substitute chicken stock, if you prefer.)
Reduce until mushrooms are soft and the liquid has formed a glaze.
Serve soufflés alongside a mixed green salad, spooning the mushroom sauce over the salad.
Alternatives: Since I had a few soufflés left over, I reheated them, combining the left over mushroom mixture with some bell peppers, onions and sausage fried in anatto oil. Spooning this new mixture on top of the soufflé was a wonderful addition.
It has been a while since I’ve done a food entry (yeah, maybe a whole week!) and there’s plenty that’s been cooking. In fact, I’ve been preparing food at home more often lately, on account of a couple of factors.
First, Tawn has been getting home from work late, so it feels too late to go out for food. Second, I’ve been working more in the evenings recently because of a couple of big projects, so I don’t want to take so much time away from the office. Finally, I prefer to cook our food, that way I have so much more control over what goes into it.
So, what’s been cooking? Here’s a selection of recent items.
Grilled pork chops with a cumin-paprika-chili powder rub. Side of mashed potatoes, homemade applesauce, and stir-fried asparagus with garlic.
Cook’s Illustrated had this recipe for “easy” chicken tikka masala. The tomato and cilantro sauce was nice. The chicken could have marinated a bit longer in the yogurt mixture. Served with mixed rice and a spinach and ricotta cheese bake.
A recent loaf of bread came out kind of funny. I think it looks like an alien!
Pizza pie is always a quick and easy meal. There are usually a few servings of pizza dough wrapped and stored in my freezer. This one had salami, roasted red bell peppers (easy when you use the broiler as the oven is pre-heating for the pizza), mushrooms and fresh basil.
A fun dessert: free-form apple tart using store-bought puff pastry dough and two types of apples. Toss them in a little maple syrup and cinnamon, add some cornstarch, and then sprinkle some ground walnuts on top.
Finally, after the latest Martha Stewart Living had some pictures of various hamburger recipes, Tawn asked for some. So I made a pork-chicken burger with Italian spices, with avocado and tomato. Quite… er, vertical.
Last month Sheldon broke in his new kitchen with a batch of almond tuiles, a crisp, wafer-like cookie made with almond flour. They looked beautiful and since I had some extra almond flour left over from the macarons, this seemed like a good opportunity to use it.
The tuiles (pronounced “tweel” – I had to double-check this as my French has all but been replaced by Thai) are basically a mixture of almond flour, all-purpose flour, sugar and salt, moistened with egg whites and melted butter. They are spread very thin on parchment paper and then baked.
The name “tuiles” comes from the French word for “tile”, so these cookies are means to be shaped similarly to the terra cotta tiles you might find on the roof of a home in the French countryside.
To do this, you have to slide them off the baking sheet while piping hot and, working quickly, drape them over a curved object like a rolling pin. Even with only six on a tray, by the time you are pulling the third one off it is already beginning to cool and stiffen.
Frankly, I’m inclined to follow Sheldon’s lead and not curl them as they taste just as lovely flat and they store better.
One challenge I encountered with the recipe was that it calls for 1/2 cup of almonds, ground. This is not, I imagine, the same as 1/2 cup of ground almonds. Since my almond flour is already ground, measuring 1/2 cup of it may have been too much. But I didn’t want to tamper with the recipe until I had tried it once.
The cookies turned out a little chewier and “cakier” than I think they are supposed to be, which leads me to suspect that “1/2 cup of almonds, ground” must measure out to less than 1/2 cup of ground almonds.
I still have plenty of almond flour, though, and these were pretty easy to make. I do need to get a metal spatula, though, as the plastic one seems to be an attractive surface for macarons and tuiles to stick to as I try to remove them from the tray.
Continuing (and concluding) with my theme vegetable, the beet root, I made a recipe suggested in my comments by Zakiah. Kheema Shulgum, or Ground Meat and Beet Root, has definite Indian flavors, is really easy to make, and is healthy to boot.
I’m going to share the recipe here as I suspect that Zakiah wouldn’t have written it in the comments section if she wanted to keep it secret. I cut back on the oil and butter as our lamb here has a pretty good fat content.
1 Tsp each oil and butter
1/2 cup sliced onions (I used a whole medium sized onion)
1 Tbsp paste of ginger and garlic
1 Lb ground beef or lamb (I used lamb)
1 Tsp chili powder
1 Tsp turmeric
3/4 Tsp salt
1 cup beet root, cut into matchstick-sized pieces (I added about 2 cups)
1 Tbsp shredded coconut
1 Tbsp sour cream
Start by heating the oil and butter, sauteing the onion till golden brown. Add the ginger/garlic paste and fry till fragrant.
Add the meat and brown well. There will be some liquid from the meat, so try and dry that a little. I unded up having to spoon out some of the liquid.
Add the chili powder, turmeric and the salt and continue to cook for about five minutes or until the spices’ aroma has blossomed.
Add the sliced beetroot pieces and cover the dish with a tight-fitting lid for five minutes, stirrring every so often. I improvised and added three small roma tomatos, seeded and diced.
Cook until the beet root is fork-tender but not mushy, then add the coconut and the sour cream. The sour cream I added was mixed with some shredded Granny Smith apple, left over from the borscht recipe.
Serve warm, garnished with mint and cilantro, neither of which I had handy.
It turned out very nicely, a squeeze of lime substituted for the missing herbs. I also added a sprinkle of some more coconut just for visual appeal.
To accompany this meal I baked pita bread, some of which actually puffed up this time. Last time, you might recall, they turned out mighty flat. Letting the dough rest for a few days definitely improved it.
Thanks again to Zakiah for that wonderful recipe. Reading the entry, I realize it just has my improvisational marks all over it. Can’t just follow the recipe the way it is written, can I?
As for the beets, I think I’m ready to move on to another vegetable!
My life isn’t an episode of Iron Chef by any stretch of the imagination, but lately there has definitely been a featured “challenge ingredient”: beet root. Thanks to some buy-one-pack-get-one-free specials on locally-grown organic beets, I’ve been stocking up and trying different beet root recipes.
First it was beet pizza. Then a beet and goat cheese salad. Now comes borscht, the classic Russian peasant soup that is served either hot or cold and is garnished with sour cream.
I don’t recall ever having had borscht. My friend Ken, whose parents are from Russia, hates it, but maybe if he tried this recipe he might change his mind.
I started out by sauteeing some aromatics – carrots and onions in this case, although a bit of celery would have been nice, too – with some thyme. I had already roasted the beets with just a little olive oil and a splash of orange juice until tender and let them cool.
Once softened and slightly caramelized, I pureed the beets and aromatics in a blender with some chicken stock. Stock, while relatively simple to make, is time consuming. I just buy my stock from the khao man gai (chicken over rice) vendor up on Sukhumvit Road. He probably loads it up with MSG so I dilute it in a 1:1 ratio with water. Even if it doesn’t have MSG in it, it is pretty richly flavored and I don’t want my borscht’s beet base overwhelmed.
After blending, which results in a beautiful color, I return the mixture to the pot, adjust with more stock and water to get the right consistency. Best to aim for just a little watery as it will thicken on the stove. A touch of honey and a bit of red wine vinegar adds a nice sweet and tangy flavor, which keeps the borscht from tasting heavy.
The garnish was interesting: in addition to the normal sour cream dollop, the recipe suggested grated Granny Smith apple. So I mixed the two. This was really nice as the apple adds a bit of texture to the soup.
We also enjoyed a nice pork loin and cheese panini on homemade bread, which is becoming a regular midweek dinner feature. This was a really satisfying dinner, easy to make and healthy, too.
Stay tuned for another beet recipe tomorrow!
I try my darndest to support local and sustainable farming practices. This is something of a new industry here in Thailand, although I guess you could say it is really an old industry coming back around, since until a few decades ago all farming here was both local and sustainable. The seed and fertilizer companies gained significant influence, like they have elsewhere, creating a dependence on the part of farmers that is just now starting to be broken.
When I’m at my local market, I make it a point to look for specials and seasonal items. We don’t really have as distinct growing seasons here as you do in more temperate climes, though. This week, though, there was a special on beet roots. Buy one pack, get one free. Local, organic, free! What more do I need to be told?
I walked home with six packages of beets (yeah, all pre-wrapped in plastic trays and plastic wrap… what can you do?) – about fifteen beets, each about the size of a small orange.
Not knowing what to do with the beets, I decided a good first step would be to roast them. This took a bit more than an hour but afterwards, I was rewarded with some beautiful and tasty roots.
Looking at some recipes online, I decided I would make a beet root pizza for dinner last night and then use the rest of the beets for a borscht (beet root soup) later in the week. The pizza was more of an idea rather than a specific recipe, a little bit of a walk on the culinary tightrope.
First step – some pizza dough (always have some homemade half-whole wheat dough in the freezer) covered with homemade hummus (I keep portions of cooked chickpeas in the freezer, too) as a base. In retrospect, the hummus, while tasty, wasn’t the right choice. Something acidic was needed to brighten the flavors and a tomato sauce or a tangy squash sauce would have been a better fit.
Some onions, which I had baked at the same time as the beets with a little bit of balsamic vinegar. These would have been more lovely had I spent a few hours making truly caramelized onions.
Sliced beets on top. I also boiled some eggs and was going to add these, but then forgot to take the container out of the refrigerator so they are still sitting in there this morning!
A little bit of chèvre – goat cheese – sliced on top. One recipe I read also used a little bit of mozzarella cheese, which would have been nice. This pizza was a tad… fat-less. Does that make sense? Sometimes you need a little fat to make the flavors rounder and fuller.
Just out of the oven – it looks quite nice but it isn’t a balanced meal yet.
Topped with some organic, locally-grown rocket (arugula) – now it is finished. You can tell it is organic because of all the little bug bites on the leaves. At least they left some for me.
At the same time, I’m playing around with a new master bread recipe, an olive oil dough that has about 1/3 whole wheat flour.
As you can see, it rises nice and with a dusting of flour and a truly sharp knife, it looks pretty. (I just realized, as I searched for an entry about going to a local market to get my knives sharpened, that I haven’t written that entry yet!)
Even more so once it comes out of the oven. This was tasty bread, but it is a quicker dough than the “no knead” recipes I’ve been using, and as such the interior has a very uniform crumb, almost like sandwich bread. I kind of prefer to have some larger bubbles and spongier texture.
It was a small brunch on Sunday, just five people. It seems that when we get more than six or seven, the table’s capacity is exceeded and the dynamic just isn’t as intimate. Also, eating while sitting around the sofa just isn’t as comfortable.
Left to right: Suchai, Ken, Tawn and Doug.
The menu was a fairly simple, mostly vegetarian and vaguely Mediterranean one.
To begin with (after appetizers of celery sticks with white bean hummus), I pulled together an interesting salad based on a suggestion from Tawn. A Hawaiian papaya half filled with a shrimp, mango and cucumber salad. Flavored with nigella and cumin, it was really wonderful.
The main meal included scrambled eggs; oven-roasted asparagus; a quinoa salad with feta, corn and cherry tomatoes; and a roasted red pepper fougasse.
The fougasse, a stuffed flatbread from Southern France, came from a website I was recently recommended: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. It is really easy to make. After roasting some red bell peppers under the broiler and skinning them, I rolled out a basic olive oil yeast dough.
I cut a few slits on one side and spread the peppers on the right. Next time I’ll roll the dough a little thinner and add more peppers. I then sprinkled coarse sea salt and thyme on the peppers.
Then, I folded the dough over, sealing the edges firmly. A brush of olive oil (I would use an egg white wash next time) and another sprinkle of thyme and it went into the oven on a pre-heated bread stone.
After about 20 minutes at 450 F / 230 C I pulled it out and let it cool a bit before cutting and serving. Easy!
In the afternoon, after everyone headed home and Tawn went to his parents’ house, I tackled a long standing project: finish scanning various recipes from old Cooks Illustrated magazines and sorting and shredding old bills and receipts. What an exciting Sunday, I know!
A week ago Sunday, Tawn’s friend Pat came over to teach us how to make French macarons. The results were tasty but technically flawed, thanks to my inexperience. Wanting to master the secrets of this elusive, meringue-based confection, I did a week’s worth of research and then set out again this past Sunday for another attempt.
The first attempt had resulted in macaroons (right) that were too puffy and lacked both a smooth, even surface and a “foot” – the slightly cracked edge around the bottom.
They also suffered from problems with hollow interiors, caused when some of the insides would remain stuck to the parchment paper after baking, pulling away from the outside of the cookie.
My goal this week was to improve my technique and get to something that looked a lot closer to this ideal:
As promised in the last entry about macarons, I’ll provide you with more detail about the process, which isn’t exactly difficult but does require attention to detail. If you want to skip the whole “reading” thing, there’s a nifty video that I edited, recounting my adventures in macaron baking.
Macarons basically involve three steps: the first is to make a relatively dry dough combining almond flour, powdered sugar and egg whites (below, left). The second is to make a meringue: egg whites, caster sugar and water (below, right). Then you fold the two together to form the batter.
All the ingredients including the egg whites are measured by weight, in order to keep the chemistry of the recipe correct. This is my challenge with baking: I have to closely follow instructions.
The almond flour and powdered sugar have to be sifted. Because almond flour tends to clump, I sifted it first by itself and then again with the sugar, resulting in a fine powder.
Two egg whites are then added to the flour/sugar combination, then the mixture is stirred until no dry pockets remain. Since I was making orange-flavored macarons, I added some fresh orange zest.
The next step was to make the meringue. Most macaron recipes I found just make a traditional meringue: beaten egg whites with powdered sugar added. The recipe Pat gave me (as well as one or two other recipes I found online) use an Italian meringue.
Italian meringue is made by pouring a steady stream of boiling sugar syrup (soft ball stage – 116 C / 240 F) into partially-whipped egg whites, then continuing to whip them to the desired stiffness. Italian meringue is a bit more complicated than the traditional soft meringue, but it is also much more stable – a huge benefit when you don’t want your batter to deflate.
I learned a few things from the experience of making Italian meringue that will come in handy next time:
First, get the egg whites to soft peaks before you incorporate the sugar syrup. Second, when you pour the syrup into the mixing bowl, keep it away from the whisk itself. I ended up with little “sugar icicles” that stuck to the bottom of the whisk and were a pain to clean up afterwards.
The meringue is then folded into the almond flour mixture, a little bit at a time. It has to be incorporated fully but not overworked. This is a careful balancing act and I think I overworked it a bit as my macarons ended up just a little flatter than I would have hoped.
The next step is to fill a pastry bag with a number 10 tip and pipe the macaron batter onto parchment paper. Pastry bags and piping aren’t my forte so I used a nifty little technique: trace circles onto the back side of the paper so you have something to fill in.
Two lessons I learned here: keep plenty of room between the circles because they spread, and don’t overwork the batter next time, so the macarons don’t spread so much!
After piping (notice a few misshapen and inconsistent circles!), the macarons have to air dry until they form a skin and are no longer sticky to the touch. With the air conditioner on high (on a drizzly afternoon) it took the better part of two hours. This is a crucial step, though. The first time I made these we didn’t wait until we had a full skin on them, and the tops cracked and were not smooth.
I also tried baking them one sheet at a time instead of two, as I did the previous weekend. While I have a convection oven, so theoretically the heat is even throughout because of the fan, I have observed that there are some significant hotspots, so cooking one pan at a time will give me more control over even cooking.
One challenge I still encountered was the problem of the meringues sticking to the parchment. The ones in the upper-right of the picture were ultimately not usable because there wasn’t enough substance left. The recipe calls for 130 C oven and about 12-13 minutes of baking. That wasn’t enough.
While I risked overcooking, it seems like I got better results at 150 C for about 16-17 minutes per tray, turned once in baking. Various helpful techniques I read online, such as spraying some water under the parchment paper after taking them out of the oven, didn’t seem to help. Also, letting them cool on the pan versus moving the paper to a rack didn’t seem to make a difference.
If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions of how to tackle this problem, please let me know!
As the macarons were cooking, I cooked up an orange curd: eggs and egg yolks combined with sugar, thickened over a bain marie – a pot of boiling water – and then some orange juice is incorporated. This didn’t get quite as thick as I’d like; I need to experiment more to get the best texture, but it worked well enough.
The end results turned out much better than before: my macarons have “feet” and puffed up nicely – although a little less overworking would have made them even puffier. They have a nice smooth surface, although they don’t have the glossy sheen that some patisseries are able to achieve. I wonder if they brush the surface with egg whites before baking?
Of the eight dozen individual macarons, about two dozen were not usable because of the sticking problem. This resulted in about three dozen gerets – the macaron sandwiches.
I also learned that they store in the freezer (in an airtight container) for several days very nicely. Good to know.
So, I think I can call this weekend’s second attempt a success. I’ve created a macaron that is substantially similar to what I can buy in the hotel pastry shops. They aren’t nearly as good as the ones in Paris, but were pretty decent. Given that the entire process took the better part of five hours of my Sunday, I’m not sure they’re worth the effort, though!
But, still, a fun and tasty adventure.
christao408 