Weeknight Roast Chicken

Posted on 24 September 2010 by christao408

By Wednesday night, the leftovers were finished. The black bean chili was gone. The braised pork in star anise and ginger was gone. The refrigerator was looking bare and it was time to cook again. Wanting the warmth of a homemade meal without too much hassle, I opted for weeknight roast chicken.

What makes it perfect for the weeknight? For starters, it doesn’t use a whole chicken but instead uses pieces. This cuts down on a whole lot of roasting time. Additionally, I can make a double batch just about as easily as I make a single batch, so I can get plenty of leftovers – leftovers that can be repurposed into other dishes!

The first step when you walk into the door is to get your chicken ready. There are a variety of ways you can do this depending upon how much effort you want to put into it. My favorite way is to take a couple of cups of buttermilk, a tablespoon of salt, and a couple of hearty dashes of cayenne pepper and mix them together in a plastic zipper bag. Dump in the chicken, shake it up so the chicken is completely coated, and then set it aside to marinate. If the buttermilk brine is too much work, just sprinkle both sides of the chicken pieces generously with salt and set in a bowl to give the salt a chance to work its magic.

Turn the oven on to about 350 F / 180 C. While it is heating, prepare some root veggies. I had some potatoes, carrots, and Japanese pumpkin on hand. Other tubers or root veggies would be fine, too. No need to peel potatoes and carrots if you don’t want to – a good scrub of the exterior is fine. Now, when it comes roast chicken with root veggies, the veggies are the things that can take some time. A shortcut, if you want to take it, is to boil a pan of water with some salt in it and parboil (pre-cook by boiling) the veggies. The softer things (pumpkin) only need a few minutes then pull them out. Potatoes need more time and carrots could use eight minutes or so.

Put the parboiled veggies in a bowl or save yourself the washing and put them directly into a baking dish. This is a good time to throw in some sliced onions and/or some whole cloves of garlic, if you would like. Add a generous pour of extra virgin olive oil, another sprinkling of salt, several turns of the pepper mill, and then you can add some herbs, too. Rosemary makes the kitchen smell marvelous and some thyme (I happened to have fresh on hand) is really nice, too. Stir the veggies a few times so they are coated with the oil, salt, etc.

If you haven’t parboiled the veggies, you should go ahead and put the dish into the oven and give them about fifteen minutes head start on the chicken, covered with aluminum foil.

If you marinated the chicken, take it out of the buttermilk, rinse the pieces off, and pat dry with paper towels. If you didn’t use the buttermilk, you can just pat dry with the towels. Add some fresh ground pepper and a drizzle of the olive oil, and then place on top of the veggies with the skin side of the chicken facing up, and bake, covered with foil, for about twenty minutes. After twenty minutes, remove the foil and continue cooking until the chicken is nicely browned, about another twenty to twenty-five minutes.

Check the veggies with a knife – they should be cooked to the tenderness you like. I like mine to still have a little firmness to them but not too much. Check the chicken with a thermometer – you’re looking for an internal temperature of 165 F. Pull the dish out and let it rest for about five minutes before serving. There you have it – a healthy and easy weeknight dinner.

Braised Pork with Star Anise and Ginger

Posted on 21 September 2010 by christao408

There’s a new restaurant in the neighborhood, one about which I’m excited to write just as soon as I can get some pictures of their food. Eating there, I enjoyed a Burmese style stewed pork dish that was resplendent with ginger and it got me thinking about stewed pork. Since we were in the midst of some drizzly weather that seemed stew appropriate, I sought out some recipes and settled on one for braised pork with star anise and ginger.

Star anise is one of my favorite spices, its evocative aroma reminding me of a big bowl of Vietnamese phở even if the actual dish in which I’m smelling it is unrelated, like this stew.

I took chunks of boneless pork butt (which is actually the shoulder – go figure) and after browning them, simmered them for a few hours in a mixture of ginger, garlic, soy sauce, stock, a little bit of vermouth, and honey with a few star anise and a cinnamon stick thrown in. Once the pork was so tender it fell apart with a nudge, I added some bok choy and let that cook for about five minutes before serving it with a nice scoop of organic jasmine rice. What a delicious meal. For those of you who don’t like pork, this recipe would go wonderfully with beef, lamb, or even chicken.

Mexican Black Bean Chili with Red Cabbage and Apple Slaw

Posted on 20 September 2010 by christao408

Last week our weather was a little cool. Well, relatively speaking. Several days were overcast and drizzly all day long, more Seattle-looking than our usually rainy season weather which owes more to Midwestern summer thunderstorms than anything else. It seemed an appropriate time to cook some warm, hearty comfort food, so I dug up a recipe for Mexican Black Bean Chili and made it in a Monday night meal along with some buttermilk cornbread muffins and a tasty red cabbage and apple slaw.

Beans are super-healthy, incredibly inexpensive, and easy to use. Make a large batch and freeze up the extras so you can thaw them out and make a fast and easy weeknight dinner like this one. This chili uses chopped onions and peppers (I added some carrots, too, as I had some on hand), and plenty of cumin, lime juice, chopped cilantro, and dried chipotle pepper to add a nice kick. One thing I add that isn’t in the recipe is a few tablespoons of cornmeal. I add then to the aromatics as they are sauteeing in a little bit of oil. This creates a roux that thickens the chili and adds a nice flavor, too.

To garnish, I used a little leftover homemade salsa and avocado cilantro lime cream sauce from fish tacos a few nights earlier.

The slaw is a nice alternative to the usual green cabbage slaw. Not only does this offer more vitamins, it also has more flavor. The recipe is based loosely on the one from Blue Smoke BBQ but I play around with it. For starters, I leave the peel on the apples (more fiber and flavor) and slice them thin instead of chunks, which adds more visual interest to the dish. Additionally, I play around with their dressing recipe, reducing the mayonnaise, using apple cider vinegar for their white balsamic, leaving out the chilies, and adding some nigella seed. Sitting alongside a cornbread muffin, I think it is quite pretty.

The combination makes for a very tasty and very healthful meal. To top it off, chili is one of those dishes that benefits from a night or two in the refrigerator, so it made even nicer leftovers later in the week!

Lavender Lemon Buttermilk Scones

Posted on 17 September 2010 by christao408

This is turning into some sort of an Iron Chef thing where I get inspired by a certain ingredient or combination of ingredients and return to them day after day. In this case, I had pulled the lavender from the back of the cupboard and resolved that I had better start using it before it went bad, combined with a good price on lemons at the Gourmet Market at Emporium. Continuing on the theme, I decided to try a recipe for Lavender and Lemon Buttermilk Scones.

Now, buttermilk biscuits are one of my specialties, one of the few recipes that I can make (and actually follow the recipe!) from memory and that I can turn out consistently, time and time again. Scones and biscuits are relatives and the biscuits I make reminded a former British roommate of mine of scones, so I figure I can move from one to the other pretty easily.

The recipe I used was from the EatLocal blog on WordPress, but like many similar versions of the recipe I found online, this one was credited as being adapted from Leslie Mackie’s “completely fabulous” Macrina Bakery Cookbook, so that’s maybe where credit is really due.

Lemon Lavender Scones

2 cups flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tbsp grated lemon zest
2 tsp dried lavender, divided use
4 tbsp chilled butter
½ cup nonfat yogurt
½ cup buttermilk
½ cup powdered sugar
1 tbsp fresh squeezed lemon juice

Heat oven to 400°F. In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda, lemon zest, and 1½ tsp of lavender.

Cut butter into pieces and cut into dry ingredients with a pastry cutter, or crumble in with your fingers. Separately, whisk together yogurt and buttermilk. Combine wet and dry ingredients to form a dough that will be wet and sticky.

Turn dough out onto a floured surface and knead a few times, then shape into a square about 1′ thick. Using a kitchen knife, cut the dough into eight triangles. (As you can see, I used a biscuit cutter for a round shape.)

Transfer to an oiled baking sheet (I just used parchment paper instead of oiling and brushed the tops of the scones with cream) and bake 20 minutes, or until scones are golden brown.

Remove from oven and cool on baking sheet. Meanwhile, dissolve powdered sugar in lemon juice and mix in ½ tsp lavender, then drizzle over scones.

I wasn’t terribly patient – we were hungry and had a condominium juristic meeting to attend – so I put the sugar-lemon glaze on while the scones were warm, so instead of glazing it just absorbed. Still, they tasted really good. The tops also cracked, which leads me to believe I should have turned the oven down a little. My oven is a convection and I think you’re generally supposed to cook at a slightly lower temperature but I don’t always heed this advice.

Anyhow, hope you enjoy these scones as you begin your weekend!

Lavender Lemon Panna Cotta

Posted on 16 September 2010 by christao408

Nearly two weeks ago I made a greek yogurt panna cotta for a brunch dessert. Since then, I have done some cooking with lavender and lemons. Looking in my refrigerator, I saw that there was some yogurt left as well as some more lemons on the counter and plenty of lavender, so I decided to revisit the panna cotta but this time with lavender and lemon as the flavoring.

I added lavender to the cream and sugar mixture, brought it to a near-boil, and then let the lavender steep for two hours off the heat. Afterwards, I strained the flowers and reheated the cream. Taking it off the heat again, I dissolved some hydrated gelatine into it, then whisked the yogurt in.

For fun, in addition to putting it in ramekins that could be unmolded onto a plate, I poured some of the mixture into shot glasses. These were put in the refrigerator overnight to set.

The next day, I made another mixture with lemon juice, sugar, and gelatine. This was poured on top of the panna cotta and allowed to set for a few hours. Upon eating it, you had a sweet-tart lemony jelly on top of the lavender panna cotta. Quite nice and it makes for interesting presentation. A garnish of mint would have been nice, too, but I didn’t have any.

Preserved Lemons

Posted on 14 September 2010 by christao408

Limes are a popular fruit in Thai cooking, are plentiful, and are generally inexpensive. Lemons, on the other hand, are none of these. In fact, there is no word in Thai for “lemon” – they just use the same word as lime and, when necessary, say “yellow lime” to distinguish. That’s one reason you are likely to order an iced lemon tea only to remark at how much it tastes like lime. But I recently found a reasonably good price on lemons, about half their regular cost, so bought a dozen in order to try preserving lemons.

Preserved lemons are a staple of Moroccan and other Middle Eastern cuisines and provide a certain unique flavor that fresh lemons cannot provide. One food writer said that if you couldn’t find preserved lemons, it was better to substitute capers rather than fresh lemons, so different are the tastes. Curious, I decided to try preserving my own lemons, something that several recipes promised is easy to do.

The ingredient are simple: lemons, salt (I used sea salt from Samut Songkhram province), and spices – coriander seed, cloves, bay leaf, pepper corns, and cinnamon were recommended and I decided to add some cardamom pods, too.

After purchasing a Fido pickling jar at Muji and washing and sterilizing it, I cut about 1/4 inch off from each end of the lemon, making them flat. Then I cut them into quarters, slicing down almost the entire way but leaving the quarters connected at the bottom. I then liberally salted the insides of the slices.

After lining the bottom of the jar with a few tablespoons of salt, I mushed lemons in, alternating each layer of lemons with a generous sprinkling of salt and spices. I kept layering until the jar was tightly packed and then added the juice of two additional lemons to fill up the remaining space. Close the lid, shake a few times to help the salt dissolve, and that’s it.

Now all I have to do is wait. I’m supposed to leave the jar on the counter at room temperature for a week or so, and then can transfer the jar to the refrigerator for at least another three weeks before using. I’ll keep an eye on these and once they are complete, will write a follow-up entry.

After finishing this process, Tawn told me that we can buy Chinese preserved lemons (used in some Cambodian dishes among other things, I understand) at local markets here. But where would be the fun in just buying them?

Making Xiao Long Bao with No Roadmap

Posted on 12 September 2010 by christao408

One of the training classes around career development I’ve written for my company lays out the premise that you can’t get to where you want to go if you don’t know where you are going and how you will get there. Having a clear destination and taking the time to plan your route are important of course, not just in career development but in cooking, too. So it was all but certain that my desire to make Xiao Long Bao (Shanghainese soup dumplings, hereafter abbreviated as XLB) was bound to fail as I had no clear road map for getting there.

I definitely had my destination in mind! XLB are my favorite Chinese dumpling and my favorite place to have them is at Din Tai Fung, a chain originating in Taipei. In fact, here’s a little video about Din Tai Fung’s XLB from my November trip to Taipei with Tawn to visit Andy and Sugi.

The destination was clear, but as I started reading the recipes and learning about the technique, I realized that this was going to be a lot more effort than I was ready to expend for some weeknight dumplings. Surely, I thought, I could just find my way through the wilderness without a map. Couldn’t I just, you know, feel my way to the XLB?

(Yeah, you know where this story is going, don’t you?)

I started with what I did know about XLB: the filling was a mixture of minced pork, ginger, garlic, green onions, soy sauce, rice wine, and white pepper. Easy enough. I gathered those together.

The “secret ingredient” of these soup dumplings is that you gelatinize broth and mix the cubes of the gelatine into the filling so that the broth melts as the dumplings steam, leaving a nice pool of juicy goodness to slurp up as you eat the XLB. So I used some broth and some gelatine and made broth jell-o. Easy enough.

When I mixed the cubes of broth into the pork mixture, though, the kitchen was too warm and they started melting. Before you knew it, I had no more cubes but instead had a watery filling mixture. Oh, no!

The next step was to fill the dumpling wrappers with that perfect twisted pleat, shown above in the handiwork of the Din Tai Fung cooks. I was using gyoza (potsticker) wrappers purchased premade at the store. Even before I started filling them, I had a suspicion that my lack of a road map was going to lead me down a dead-end street. Sure enough, I couldn’t get the gyoza wrappers to hold that pleated shape.

Getting hungry, I just went with a simple half-moon fold, trying to satisfy myself with being able to keep the runny filling (thanks to the no longer gelatinous broth) from leaking out.

The end result wasn’t pretty but actually tasted just fine. Nobody in their right mind would confuse this mess of a dumpling with XLB, but for a weeknight it was good enough. Sometimes, driving without a road map takes you somewhere other than you intended, but a place that is perfectly suitable nonetheless.

Sunday Date Brunch

Posted on 5 September 2010 by christao408

This is going to be the final word on dates for the time being. I invited two couples, Doug and Bee and Ken and Chai, over for Sunday brunch. Since I had been on such a roll this week with date-themed recipes, it became something like an Iron Chef challenge. This meal’s challenge ingredient: dates. In all humility, it turned out pretty darn good. Let me share the menu with you.

An amuse bouche of sedai dates stuffed with a little French chèvre (soft goat cheese) and a sliver of almond. What a tasty combination! The orange rind, which I should have salted, was more for presentation than flavor. Had it been salted, I think it would have been a nice contrast and would have really stimulated the appetite.

Two of our four guests – Doug and Bee. Doug is a fellow American who lives in our neighborhood. Credit goes to Tawn for the elegantly understated table setting.

Two types of flatbreads. Both were brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with coarse sea salt. The one of the left has freshly chopped rosemary. The one of the right has za’atar, a Middle Easter spice mixture that contains oregano, thyme, basil, savory, and sesame seeds.

Greek style salad with fresh romaine lettuce, cherry tomatoes, roasted red peppers, olives and Feta cheese. Served with a homemade lemon vinaigrette dressing. (The dressing recipe is here)

The main course was the Moroccan style braised chicken. This picture doesn’t quite flatter the dish, which I thought was the standout of the meal. Wednesday’s Moroccan Pork Chop dinner (my blog entry about it and the original recipe I followed) was the starting point. Based on what I learned from that recipe, I repurposed it for chicken. Zakiah suggested a recipe for tamarind-date sauce (thank you – what a great idea!) and I extrapolated from that and braised the chicken instead of just pan frying it.

The chicken was brined for four hours in a mixture of buttermilk, salt, and cayenne pepper. While it was brining, I created a tamarind-date sauce. This was a learning experience as I haven’t worked with tamarind paste before.

Tamarind paste comes from the flesh of the ripe fruit of the tropical Tamarind tree. The flesh is very sour with just a hint of sweetness. Mashing the paste in a little warm water, you can extract a thick liquid with which you cook. A little goes a long way! To make the sauce, I sauteed an onion with the same spices I used for the chicken. Once the onion was soft I blended it with chopped dates and the tamarind water. Then I thinned this mixture with broth and cooked it down for a few minutes.

While the sauce reduced, I rinsed, patted dry, and dredged the chicken pieces with a spice mixture, then pan fried them a few pieces at a time. Once all the pieces had formed a nice crust, I returned them to the pot and added the tamarind-date sauce, covered the pot and cooked for an hour at low heat until the chicken was tender and cooked through. The nice thing about this recipe was that it could be prepared the day before then reheated. Tender, flavorful, and convenient.

To accompany the chicken, I made another batch of the Moroccan style rice. (Recipe I started with but I modified it a lot as I don’t cook with a microwave.) I was out of apricots so used dates, raisins, and dried mango to accompany the rice. Interestingly, this batch turned out much softer and mushier than the one I made Wednesday. I used the same type of rice and proportion of rice to liquid as before, but the rice was from a new bag. All I can figure is that this bag of rice was younger and didn’t need as much liquid. Still, plenty tasty!

For dessert, we has two items. The first was a date nute bread (recipe) from Ina Garten of the Barefoot Contessa series of cookbooks. This is a quick bread similar to banana bread or zucchini bread. I think I overcooked it a little as it was dry. Tawn, however, likes his food drier than I do, so he thought it was perfect! Toasted, I think it would make no difference. On the side is a tub of butter whipped with a little honey and orange zest.

The final dish was a Greek Yoghurt Panna Cotta with dried apricots reconstituted in a white wine and honey sauce. (Recipe) This turned out very nice as the panna cotta is not overly sweet and has a nice tanginess from the yoghurt. Of course, by this point we were stuffed, and smaller servings would have been fine!

All in all, the brunch was a success. Pleasant company and conversation, most importantly, and the food turned out nicely, too!

Cooking with Dates – Moroccan Rice and Pork Chops

Posted on 1 September 2010 by christao408

Now that we had a nice box of dates as a gift from Tawn’s boss, the only question was, what to do with them? Okay, the premise is a bit misleading. I always have some dates on hand and add them to my oatmeal every morning. And I’m certainly not going to use the expensive, plump fresh dates for cooking – they’re perfect for snacking or stuffing with candied almonds or goat cheese. But the receipt of the dates did get me thinking about ways to incorporate dates into my cooking beyond the oatmeal, so I was inspired to try some Moroccan-themed recipes.

Before anyone accuses me of not being authentic, or of using pork in a recipe ostensibly from a Muslim country, let me acknowledge the disconnects. These recipes were more “loosely inspired by the cuisine of Morocco” than anything else.

I didn’t strictly follow a recipe – no surprise there – but used one as a guide. I prepared jasmine rice, since it was handy, in a rice cooker with a mixture of half water and half chicken broth, adding a cinnamon stick, some cardamom pods, and some cloves.

While it was cooking, I fried a small onion, finely diced, with cumin, tumeric, ground cinnamon, paprika, and chili powder until fragrant, then added chopped pine nuts, slivered almonds, chopped dried apricots, chopped dates (you were wondering when I’d get to that, weren’t you?) and the zest of half a lemon.

After the rice was finished, I pulled out the cardamom and cloves, then stirred in the onion, spice, and fruit mixture. I added a little salt and pepper to taste and garnished with some green onions. If I had had some coriander (cilantro) I would have added that, too.

The pork chops (you could use chicken, too) were marinated in a brine of 2 cups buttermilk, 1 tbsp of salt, and a generous dash of cayenne pepper. After two hours, I rinsed the buttermilk off, patted the meat dry with towels, and then coated it with a mixture of flour, brown sugar, ground coriander seed, cumin, paprika, cinnamon, garlic powder, salt, and pepper.

Fried the chops for a few minutes to get a crust, and then moved the pan to the oven until the internal temperature reached 160 F. While the pork chops rested on a plate, tented loosely with foil, I made a sauce from the drippings, using chicken stock, raisins, green onions, and a little corn starch as a thickener.

This was a tremendously tasty meal and I’ll have to experiment with it further and see what other things I can do with the basic idea. Chicken is next on my list, maybe for a brunch this Sunday.

Miso Glazed Fish Fillet and Apple Cobbler

Posted on 22 August 2010 by christao408

When trying to think of what to make for a meal, I often turn to cookbooks. Not so much for the recipes themselves – I have a habit of not following those very closely – but for an idea, an inspiration of something that sounds good and fits the constraints of time, money, and interest. So it was that Thursday afternoon I was flipping through Martha Stewart’s Dinner at Home which Tawn had left out.

“Menu 8: Tofu and Scallions in Mushroom Broth; Miso-Glazed Fish Fillets; Seasame Brown Rice and Cabbage; and Caramelized Persimmons.”

Two words from that over-ambitious menu leapt off the page: Miso-Glazed.

The concept was simple enough: prepare a glaze made of just four ingredients: mirin (Japanese sweet rice cooking wine) or, not having that, sake; rice wine vinegar; miso paste; and sugar. I keep miso paste in the fridge because it lasts pretty much forever and is a handy flavor enhancer. Sake and rice wine vinegar are nice items to keep in the cupboard. And instead of sugar, some maple syrup would add a nice touch.

Salmon would have been a fantastic choice of fish, too, but Martha suggested black cod. I went with her suggestion, taking a single good sized fillet, placing it on a baking sheet. To make clean-up easy, I lined the baking sheet with some parchment paper and lightly oiled it so the fish wouldn’t stick. Brush a generous coating of miso glaze on the fish and then put it under the broiler for about 6-8 minute, or until the top is nicely browned and the fish is opaque throughout.

I served the fish on top of some mashed potatoes with a chopped salad on the side. I make my mashed potatoes with butter, an ingredient that some people like to demonize but I think a little butter will go a long way to making your potatoes nice. I also added some leftover sour cream and some chopped fresh rosemary to give it a tang and a nice piney aroma.

For dessert, an apple cobbler. I used pink lady apples, chopped small with the skin still on. Cooked them in a saucepan for a few minutes with a little bit of sugar, a little bit of water, a little bit of corn starch, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Cook until starting to soften and add a little more water if necessary in order to get a bit of a not-too-thick sauce with the apples.

Put the apples into an over-proof dish. I topped it with a homemade sweet biscuit dough, similar to what I use for shortcake. Flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and a little sugar. Cut in some vegetable shortning (Crisco) to the size of peas, and then add either buttermilk (or, if you don’t have that, milk) and stir just until combined. Put the dough on the top of the fruit leaving a few openings for steam to escape. I put a few slices of butter on top of that and sprinkled on some raw sugar for a nice visual. Bake in a 350 F oven for about 25 minutes or until the juices are bubbling and the crust is golden. Serve once cooled to room temperature with ice cream, whipped cream, or just a little pour of fresh cream. Key word here: cream.

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

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