Zucchini Challenge: Disastrous Plating Failure

While drunk in a Manhattan bar after a trip to the Guggenheim, Erin and I were discussing the challenge. Here's what we came up with. Tuna tartare with chopped vinegar soaked zucchini topped with a poached (because I wasn't sure about raw) quail egg. The plate is rimmed with tonkatsu sauce and dollops of spicy kewpie mayonnaise and garnished with zuchinni peel (as per Kyle's bitching). I have never been able to plate dishes for my life so trust that it tasted better than it looked. Erin agreed.I started with fresh sushi grade tuna I had gotten at the asian market on rt 18. I badgered the hell out of the guy because neither of us could find a common language but eventually we agreed it was in fact fresh sushi grade tuna and that we are both fans of giving thumbs up. I guess we all speak the international language of The Fonz.Here is the chopped zucchini sitting in vinegar. I did that just for some extra taste. We then rinsed the zucchini and incorporated it with the tuna.I couldn't get the water spinning fast enough so the eggs poached a little wispy but they were still good. Not quite as good as a raw egg yolk sitting on your tartare but I wasn't 100% sure about these quail eggs so I didn't want to chance it.Erin spent most of the time snacking on these spicy wasabi crackers and cherry tomatoes I picked up at the asian grocery while getting the tuna. I eventually convinced her to chop up some zucchini and tomatos together for a cracker topping. Here's her rebuttal to my dish. She incorporated leftover tuna. It was miles better than what I made.She also topped these suckers off with some spicy kewpie mayonnaise leftover from my dish. These little bastards were increadible. Perfect spice to match the coolness of the zucchini and the tuna. I think she beat me. Not afraid to admit it.

Workshopping a Heinous Study Sandwich: A Sibling Approach

Me: the sandwich is toast, parmesan cheese, and anchovies
Ben: whoa

sounds like that bad boy could use some lettuce to settle things down
Sent at 11:19 PM on Wednesday
Me: this sandwich rules

i added lettuce and non marinated artichoke hearts
Ben: word

whats the sauce or is there none
Me: none b/c the artichoke hearts were in brine

semi-brine anyway

The "Sushi Taco"

My recent breakfast that Meredith has affectionately dubbed the sushi taco. The inspiration for this was the CwD episode on onigiri. I've been wanting to make those for a while but I'm too impatient to let the rice cool so I just dump the pot of rice on the nori. I had at one point not even cut the nori and just folded it over. The result was just tacoish enough to earn an alias.

I drop a piece of nori across the plate and start up the rice. Sushi rice. As it begins to boil down i throw in some chopped onions and dried wakame. The wakame expands in the remaining water. Once its just about ready I crack an egg over the top of the rice and cover the lid. It steam cooks the egg just over the rice. Perfection. Last night I covered the nori with a layer of rice (which in all fairness could have been cooked just a bit longer), then a layer of tunamayo, then rice topping with bonito sesame and more nori, then more sushi rice and finally the steamed egg. I then cover it in tonkatsu sauce. I love tonkatsu sauce. It gives a fruity kick to whatever I'm eating. For a while I was on oyster sauce but this is my new current fave.

Being that I cooked this at 3am lat night there wasn't enough light so the picture isnt great. Here's one with a flash. EDIT: PICTURE COLOR CORRECTED BY SISTER.
I doubled the recipe and made one for Blake too. We chowed down while watching Starship Troopers. Excellent movie. Excellent breakfast/dinner.

This is a picture of the other one. I wasn't sure which one looked better. You be the judge. EDIT: THIS PICTURE ALSO COLOR CORRECTED BY SISTER.

Guest Post: Sean's Shepherd's Pie

So I decided that because my damn schedule is as busy as my girlfriends, it would be a nice idea to try to spend some time with each other to find a nice recipe and make dinner together. Being relatively inexperienced in the kitchen, I turned to Ben for some advice. I found a recipe for Shepherds Pie …

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 large onion, peeled and chopped
• 1 large carrot, peeled and chopped
• 1 pound ground lamb (or substitute half with another ground meat)
• 1 cup beef or chicken broth
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 teaspoon chopped fresh or dry rosemary
• 1 tablespoon chopped Italian parsley
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup milk (any fat content)
• Kosher salt to taste

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.

2. In a large sauté pan over medium-high heat, heat the oil, then add the onion, carrot, and meat. Cook until browned, 8 to 10 minutes.

3. Drain the fat and add the broth, tomato paste, and herbs. Simmer until the juices thicken, about 10 minutes, then add the peas.

4. Pour the mixture into a 1 1/2-quart baking dish; set aside.

5. Meanwhile, bring the potatoes to a boil in salted water. Cook until tender, about 20 minutes; drain.

6. Mash the potatoes with the butter, milk, and salt.

7. Spread them over the meat mixture, then crosshatch the top with a fork.

8. Bake until golden, 30 to 35 minutes.

I basically followed it all to a T except I added a good bit of Worcestershire Sauce while browning the meat, and I topped the mashed potatoes with shredded cheddar cheese. The only hangup we had was that my girl decided to add milk to the mashed potatoes after I had mashed them with heavy cream – she didn’t like all the cream…so we had some liquidy mashed potatoes on top but it basically baked itself into place in the oven.

I was very nervous about cooking something that I felt was going to be complicated – worried that it wasn’t going to turn out well and worried that I would scare myself away from cooking more often. It came out fantastic and I was thrilled with it…we both enjoyed it a lot. I’m really glad that it worked out well, because it proved to me that you don’t need to be an expert to successfully prepare a great meal. I’ll absolutely be trying to find some more things that we can do together. We’re going to try to come up with at least one night per week that we can make dinner with each other. It was a perfect way to spend a great night together…

BENTO BOXES

Meredith and I have been obessed with bento boxes for quite some time now. Whenever we go out for Japanese, Meredith orders the bento and we are constantly talking about buying our own boxes to bring to work or school or pretty much anywhere. Today we had decided to bring them to the movies. The original plan was to put together some bento boxes based on whatever movie we were gonna go see and sit in the theater with them. We had spent maybe half an hour sending eachother pictures of different crazy bento boxes on the internet. Unfortunately I over slept and we ended up not going to the movie. We spent way too long wandering the aisles of the RT 18 Asian Market to get all our ingredients including two packs of sashimi from the restaurant we love out in front of the market. Then we went home and got to work. The picture above is the ingredients we were going to use. Once we got the rice going we started opening up the canned fish and making the "tuna mayo" (CwD).

This picture is Meredith packing one of her rice balls. I think this one is "tuna mayo" wrapped with a strip of nori and covered in rice topping. We kept forgetting to cut the nori first and it turned into a mad scramble with our hands covered in sticky rice.

This is one of the bentos filled with rice balls (boxes courtesy of our mom). They were all sooooo gooooood. Luckily Meredith didn't eat all of hers and I had leftovers that I'm eating while I'm typing this.

This is my finished bento. I wish I had a picture of Meredith's. It was much more elegant. I kinda just shoved stuff in there. Below my initials and the sashimi is a bed of sticky rice. Above it is cucumber strips, broiled eel and mackerel covered with avacado and eel sauce, oysters, fake crab meat, and an anchovy.
This is a picture of Meredith eating a rice ball and getting pissed at me for taking pictures of her eating. She hates when I do that. Anyway the bentos and rice balls were delicious. We ended up sitting around eating them and watching Metalocalypse. A truly blogworthy night.

THE SOUP

Anyone who knows Meredith and me know our obsession with THE SOUP. The story goes back years. Ever since we both started coming to Rutgers, we've always had dinners together to celebrate stuff. Anything we can find we celebrate. The first was the fact that we were both there. We chose to go to Noodle Gourmet. Excellent place. I think most of my greatest college take-out memories are tied to Noodle Gourmet. Eat there. The first time we went I got a giant noodle soup. I'm not sure if any of you have ever had their noodle soup but that fucker is cheap and giant.

After that we spent a few years with Edo as our hangout before we eventually started celebrating at Saporo. That was a big leap for us and also the first encounter with THE SOUP. I can't remember what we were celebrating but we were there and decided to get the Nabeyaki Udon and some rolls. We could absolutely not finish that soup. Its not quite as big as the Noodle Gourmet soup and nowhere near as cheap, but the taste is infinitely better. Its like comparing a Kia and a Porshe. We've been hooked ever since. Any time we can we go sit and wait for that glorious pot to get set down between us where we delicately divy up the treasures burried within and setting atop those wonderful noodles and that flavorful broth.

Years later when I finally balled up the plate, this was the goal. Ever since we've been attempting to find others like it through our own cooking and through little eateries in the area. It's been a staple of my dutch oven cooking and my almost daily breakfast/dinner. Something about soup with an egg cracked into it is just the perfect breakfast/dinner combo I need to complete my day with the sunrise. Meredith has been getting on me forever to finally post one so last night with my extra time off work i finally decided to do so.

This was a quick one. I used a granulated bonito for the dashi with a little extra soy sauce and sesame oil. Once that was going I threw in two frozen dumplings and the miso. From there I added udon, seaweed, chicken, and dumped in a raw egg to poach in the soup. Thats always been my favorite part. Just before it was ready i threw in some kimchi. I've had it sitting around and I don't have many ideas so it went in. Just enough to sweat some of the flavor into the broth. I gotta tell you, its wonderful.

This kimchi will haunt me till the day I die. Or that day I move out and decide to not take it with me.

Family Dinner

When you can't eat steak, tofu steak. Yup, that's right. Tofu steak. I was shitting around with John and told him that I would take care of the sides and he could make the steak. Being that we're communally vegetarian in this house, tofu steak. He let the tofu marinate in steak sauce and then coated them in flower and seasonings and fried them up with onions and mushrooms. At the end I pulled them out and threw some wine in with the veggies and reduced for a sauce. I also made some mashed potatoes with cheddar cheese and garlic. While the potatoes were boiling I threw my new bamboo steamer on the top as a lid and put broccoli in the bottom and spinach in the top. Just a little al dente for those real veggie lovers.

Here's everything all ready to go. We called Kyler in and sat down for a home cooked family dinner. It was excellent. Here's a picture of the boys sitting down to chow.

The pictures were all rushed because I totally forgot to charge my camera! Anyway it was an excellent departure from the foreign one panners that we all usually try to throw together. And there were leftovers!

Some stuff from my fridge that I threw together

Basically, this has been a big trying-to-use-things-up week for me. My main motivation was a long-stem artichoke turning in the fridge. The good thing about the long-stemmers is that the stem is delicious and a lot of non-main-artichoke related possibilities open up. I was really interested in getting some carbs into this dish, so after peeling the tough outer layer of the stem and slicing it into half-coins, I made some pasta dough and cut that down into linguine-width strands using the I-tossed-out-my-pasta-machine-because-I-didn't-think-I'd-ever-use-it method.

I sauteed the half-coins in a little olive oil and then put some liquid in the pan to soften them up while the pasta water got to boiling. When the stem pieces were a little softer but still al dente, I threw in some crimini mushrooms that needed to get used. Just before the mushrooms started to sweat, I poured in some red wine and let the sauce reduce. In the meantime, the pasta was ready to get cooked, which happens almost instantaneously with fresh pasta.

The sauce finished up and at the last minute I stirred in some of the pesto I made earlier in the week. Not something I would usually do to a wine sauce, but it was worth it! I lowered the heat and added the noodles to the sauce. This saucing step is essential. When you are working with a noodle dish, the noodles should remain a bit undercooked and added to the sauce at the last step so that they can cook the rest of the way in the sauce and everything gets nice and incorporated.

KETTLE CORN

This one goes out to Matt Keys! The genius cook! The master of the corn!

because he did what i'm not sure i could have done. he kettle-cooked some corn! mmm so good. some of the kernels were cooked a bit too much for me (see the golden brown corns above) but he preferred those, so it worked out quite nicely.

2 parts kettle corn
1 part white sugar
1 part oil (corn, preferably... though matt used olive oil and it seemed to work)
salt

(he cooked this with 1/2 cup corn)

take the oil and put it in a kettle, or for those of us in urban america, a thick-bottomed pot. put the oil on the stove on HIGH. put three kernals in the oil, and when the pop, take them out and stir the sugar in until it dissolves. i assume this was pretty quickly. then throw the rest of the corn in, and shake the pot until all the corn is popped! be careful not to burn the corn, which WILL happen if you dont keep shaking the pot. better to have unpopped kernals then a whole bunch of black and gross ones.

salt to taste. then strip down to movie-watching clothes (underwear, preferably), sit back, and pop in The Matrix and eat that kettle corn. oh yeah. best summer night ever.