Foodie Calls

Let's pretend it's summer...

2010-03-16T20:22:00.005-04:00

I think our recent meal at Border Cafe in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago (Cajun meets Tex-Mex) stuck with Melissa a little more than she knew. This evening she came home with some fresh catfish and produce for tomato and avocado salsa.

With a string of nice, sunny days coming up in exchange for the diluvian rains we endured last week and the switch back to daylight savings time, the approach of warmer weather in Boston is almost palpable. Mel made Cajun fried catfish with dirty rice and a lime, cilantro, onion, tomato and avocado salsa. The dish went well with a bottle of Picton Bay Marlborough (NZ) sauvignon blanc (a great value at $8, Trader Joe's).

We're still in the thick of Australian grant-writing season, so we'll hope to pick up the posting again next month...

Cheers!

New Year's Eve Feast

2010-01-03T16:38:00.016-05:00

So it's turned out to be a really eventful year for us. We made three trips to New Zealand and Australia in the last 12 months, and on the last trip we came back with new jobs! That's right, Foodie Calls is moving to Melbourne, Australia. Well, not for another year or so, but we are really excited about exploring what will be our new city.

The food scene in Melbourne is fantastic -- see our previous post for our report on a meal at one of the city's best restaurants. Our goal is to live within walking distance of Queen Victoria Market, where one can buy loads of fresh produce, meats, seafood, cheeses, etc. Such easy access to quality fresh food is truly a gastronome's dream. This is also only a short walk away from the medical institute where we will run our research lab.

To kick off what promises to be another momentous year as we prepare to move house to the other side of the Earth, we had a group of friends around for a seven-course meal. We started off tasting some of Etienne's latest homebrew while he busied himself preparing the first dish -- a beautiful salmon tartar.

With this dish we served up the bottle of aged semillon (Cassegrain Wineries, 2000) that we brought back from Australia last September. This dry, concentrated white was a perfect complement to the buttery, briny and herby flavors of fresh salmon, capers and dill. It was an unusual wine with its combination of bell pepper, citrus zest and honey flavors. We really enjoyed sharing it with friends that appreciated its uniqueness.

Melissa's salad course was a combination of recent favorites in our household -- oven-roasted beets and goat cheese on field greens with a simple balsamic vinaigrette. We had the tail end of that semillon and then opened up the chardonnay we planned to have with the next course.

Melissa made a beautiful chicken roulade stuffed with arugula, goat cheese, parmesan and polenta. The roulades were wrapped up in proscuitto and served with steamed arugula and the cooking juices from the chicken. For this course we pulled out the last bottle of "The Ascent" Reserve Chardonnay (Ascension Wine Estate, NZ, 2006) that we picked up in 2007 from the vineyard where we were married. A very nice wine with even better memories attached to it. A bottle of Bogle Vineyards 2008 chardonnay filled in the gaps while we awaited the meat course.

The peppered beef tenderloin roast was done perfectly, as you can see from the picture. The mushrooms were halved and set in the roasting pan next to the beef with a little salt and pepper, and the flavor was of intense, unadulterated mushroom. The starch was a rutabaga/swede puree (boiled rutabaga done with milk, butter, salt and pepper using a hand blender), and the steamed broccolini rabe provided a bitter counterpoint to the rest of the dish. We pulled out a big, lush cabernet for this course: Groth Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon (2006, Napa Valley). Got this bottle for a great price at $35 when we were out at a recent local tasting with Etienne and Angelique.

After a nice break to sip our wine and rest our bellies, we had the first of two dessert courses: brandy poached pears with gorgonzola ice cream. Pears and blue cheese are a classic combo, and this dessert never disappoints. Even people who say they don't like blue cheese tend to come around when you blend it into a rich, creamy vanilla ice cream. We had a bit of a surprise when the pyrex casserole dish the pears had been done in exploded on the stovetop. Fortunately we had already served up the goods, but we did lose a lot of the precious butter, brown sugar and brandy syrup that remained in the dish.

Bill made a welcome contribution to the evening with his ambrosia-inspired strawberry trifle. He made it with fresh whipped cream and an incredibly tasty homemade pound cake, which Mel and I finished off for breakfast the morning after -- could have been an inauspicious start to the year if we had made any silly diet-related resolutions...

With the dessert courses, the bubbles came out; it was nearing midnight and with all the culinary distractions we almost missed it! We had a good selection of standards to ring in the new decade, including Korbel, Barefoot and a nice crisp prosecco.

This brings us to the final course of the evening, compliments of Evan: black-eyed peas and collard greens. We southerners couldn't resist, and I hadn't partaken of this special dish in quite a while. Traditionally consumed on New Year's Day, the black-eyed peas are for good luck and prosperity, the collard greens for wealth and money. Melissa added some prosciutto and cornmeal for color, and voila!

We wish you all a fantastic new year!

Up Over...

2009-09-25T20:24:00.014-04:00

After a nice but too-short trip down under (a bit of a work/play holiday, really) we are back in Boston and mourning the loss of summer. As much as I like autumn in New England, it's hard to enjoy it for what it is knowing how quickly it will give way to winter...

We were in New Zealand and Australia just in time for the tail end of winter and the official start of spring. Already quite beautiful in Port MacQuarie (AUS), where Mel's brother was married -- congrats, Jamie and Melissa! And not too shabby in Auckland, either. I still enjoyed reading in the sun out on the terrace at Pam and Allen's place as I do in summertime, just with a long-sleeve shirt this time.

While in Australia we had some food and wine experiences worth noting. In Melbourne we had dinner at Markov Place (Drummond Street, Carlton) with our hosts from the biomedical research institute we were visiting. Great tasting menu with fresh oysters and paella, as well as a really nice Kiwi pinot gris. The coup de grace, though, was our dinner at Vue de Monde in Melbourne.

This is one of the top restaurants in a city where restaurants are very good. The experience was a first for us: a ten-course customized degustation menu with matched wines -- and over four and a half hours, no less. This is how to use your taste-buds to their full potential. Our personal culinary guide was a chef from Boston, so we got to discuss some of our favorites from our part of the world. Check out the sample menu below -- not exactly the same as what we had, but pretty similar.

Note the cheese course followed by a palate cleanser and two dessert courses. We all discovered some new delights -- the best truffle risotto ever, and some innovative ways to use the liver of a well-fed fowl. Thanks for your impeccable taste, Goffy -- we look forward to returning the favor.

We had the chance to visit just one winery while we were in Australia. Cassegrain wines, just outside Port MacQuarie, had some beautiful grounds and a great reserve semillon from 2000 that we brought back in my cunningly packed hardcase suitcase. This was different from anything we've ever tasted before: capsicum, citrus rind, floral and honey flavors with a deep straw-yellow color. We're looking forward to planning a meal for this one...

July 4th Holiday

2009-07-07T17:27:00.010-04:00

Given how busy we have both been at work lately, we weren't planning to hold our usual all-day grill-fest for this year's 4th of July. The weather was looking pretty sketchy as well -- we've had a record shitty June here in Boston with low temperatures and tons of rain -- but at the last minute we hatched a plan with our good friends Etienne and Angelique to have a small, relaxing cookout. To our great delight, the weather cooperated and it turned out to be a really nice day.

We started off with a large pitcher of mojitos. We have been enjoying this particular libation with increasing frequency as the need to control the mint in the garden becomes more and more pressing. A simple recipe -- fresh lime juice, a ton of crushed (muddled) mint leaves, Bacardi white rum, seltzer and simple syrup made from unrefined cane sugar (recipe below). Along with requisite fresh guacamole and salsa, it made a great start to the afternoon.

Etienne, Angelique, Amanda and I enjoy ourselves over mojitos in the lush summertime green of the courtyard and garden.

As usual, Lily joined in the fun...

Etienne did a bang-up job preparing the pork loin skewers for the grill. His own secret BBQ sauce recipe includes smoked chipotles and cayenne pepper -- how did he get inside my head? Melissa prepared an avocado, tomato and romaine salad with balsamic vinegar, some beautiful sweet corn and her signature grilled eggplant. As usual, we had more food than we needed, but better too much than not enough, no? The same goes for wine, so we had shiraz and merlot (both of the Yellowtail variety), a Chilean cab sauv (2008 Cono Sur), and some chardonnay (2006 Santa Barbara Landing, a TJ's special from CA) open for the main course -- a great lineup of inexpensive cookout wines.

Unbeknownst to me, Melissa had put together a nice selection of cheeses for dessert, and the cheese board was so beautiful that we all had to take a moment to admire it before we dove in. Montagnolo Blue from New Jersey, a nice French brie, grana padano and tallegio from Italy, fresh sliced peaches, fig jam and fresh-picked basil and thyme from the garden. In lieu of baking our own bread (seriously, who has the time for that?), we have been buying a lot of Take-and-Bake lately -- 10 to 15 minutes in the oven and you've got worm, fresh-tasting bread. The baguette is quite good.

Here's a shout out to our two newly minted citizens on their first Independence Day as official Kiwi-Americans. Congratulations Melissa and Amanda!

Recipe for Mojitos

60 gms of raw sugar
~1/4 cup of water
450 mls of freshly squeezed limes (~12 limes)
~1 cup of mint leaves

450 mls of white rum
450 mls of soda water
2 fresh sprigs of mint for the pitcher
2 or 3 fresh mint leaves for each of the glasses
Ice

In a small saucepan heat the sugar and water until all the sugar is melted and it has become the consistency of a thick syrup (aka simple syrup). Combine the lime juice and mint leaves and simple syrup in a suitable vessel. Crush/muddle the mint leaves to release minty taste. I did this in advance and let stand in refridgerator for an hour or two before guests arrived.

To serve

Strain the lime juice mix into the pitcher and discard muddled leaves and lime pulp. To the pitcher add cold rum, soda water and stir. Add fresh spigs of mint leaves to the pitcher for garnish. Add fresh lime leaves to the sides of the glasses and fill with ice. We decided against also filling the pitcher with ice so as not to dilute the mojitos before they were poured.

The guys added a little more rum to their glasses, but the overall mix for me was just right. The mint growing in our garden is not your usual spearmint, but instead what seems to be a hardy variety of variegated ginger mint. It's nice because it survives the New England winter, and also nice is the fact that we have to drink a lot of mojitos to keep it from taking over the garden ;-)

Grill Update

2009-06-01T21:07:00.007-04:00

Having skipped the entire month of May, I thought I'd give some highlights of our recent uptick in grilling activity with the warmer weather. We've had plenty of great food over the last month, but rather than attempt to catch up on all of those dishes, I'll show you what inspired me to get off my ass and put up a new post tonight.

We recently acquired a new ingredient to experiment with: a proper balsamic vinegar. This balsamic is made from Lambrusco, Trebbiano and Sangiovese grapes by Acetaia La Bonissima in Modena, Italy. It has been aged for a total of ten years in a long list of different woods. We had heard that a really good balsamic is something that you can enjoy sipping all by itself (vinegar? seriously?), but didn't really believe that until we tasted this. We were enjoying a beautiful Sunday out at the SoWa Open Market in the South End of Boston yesterday and happened upon a tent where a very passionate advocate of olive oils and balsamic vinegars was peddling his wares and offering well-narrated tastings. This stuff is ridiculous -- as fruity and rich as port wine, but with the sour bite of vinegar and a finish that stays with you for a few long, blissful minutes.

Used sparingly on grilled vegetables, fruit, fish and meats, it is a real treat. To inaugurate this new addition to our kitchen Melissa made a great meal tonight: grilled pork loin, romaine heart salad with mung bean sprouts, and a grilled peach half cradling a small pool of balsamic vinegar in its pit. The pairing of the pork, peaches and balsamic was so good that I forgot about the wine until the last few bites of my dinner -- which is a shame because the 2006 Tohu Pinot Noir we had (Marlborough, NZ) was a terrific match to the dish. Keep using that giant bottle of balsamic vinegar you bought at the grocery store for salad dressing, but get a bottle of really good balsamic and use it a few drops at a time on your special fruits, veggies and meats -- even ice cream or aged hard cheeses -- and you'll agree that it's worth every penny. I'm not optimistic about how long this rather expensive bottle will last in our house...

Two other recent dishes from the grill that were particularly noteworthy:

Another grilled pork dish, with sage and onion potatoes (the sage plant is already out of control and needed a serious pruning). The pork really needs nothing more that salt and pepper, and the trick is to get it off the heat before it gets tough and dry. Better to undercook than overcook -- it can always go back to the fire if you're squeamish about a little pink in the middle...

Last Saturday we were both thinking fish, so we picked up some nice looking rainbow trout and had it grilled with sliced yellow squash and Melissa's peach salsa (vine-ripened tomatoes, orange capsicum, peaches, lemon juice, chopped cilantro and sea salt). We enjoyed this meal out in the garden, and even Amanda ate the fish (we actually turned her ages ago).

Sorry for the long hiatus -- I'll try to post a bit more often...

Sunday Brunch and The Season's First Grill

2009-04-30T21:43:00.006-04:00

While Melissa thrills to the next-to-finale episode of Hell's Kitchen, I thought I'd catch up with a quick post to Foodie Calls. We had a spectacular weekend of warm, sunny weather (and absolutely minimal lab work), so we made the most of it. Saturday we took a nice long walk around the South End with Amanda to check out some galleries and studios, then enjoyed a late lunch and drinks at the Gaslight Brasserie. On the way home we mustered all our remaining energy to shop for the brunch we planned to host at our place on Sunday...

We got up early Sunday to start the preparations. Melissa prepped in the kitchen while I made the courtyard and gardens presentable. Then I ran to Whole Foods to get some last-minute items before the guests arrived -- avocados, blood oranges and the bouquet of spring daisies pictured above. On the menu for ten people were prosciutto-wrapped asparagus bunches, potatoes with red peppers, avocado and onions, and eggs Benedict. We had some variations on the standard Benny by offering a choice of salmon or prosciutto and conventional or orange-chipotle holladaise sauces. I believe the prosciutto/chipotle combination was the most popular by a fair margin, but all were fantastic.

In order to serve everyone at the same time and still have time to enjoy a glass of bubbly with our guests before the meal, Melissa made a few strategic preparations early that morning. The asparagus were blanched and wrapped, and since we planned to serve them cold they could sit to the side until needed. The potatoes took some time to cook but were left warming gently on the stove top while people arrived. Most importantly, Melissa half-poached a dozen eggs for the Benedicts way ahead of time and plunged them into ice-water to stop the cooking. This is a great trick, because a brief dip in boiling water from the kettle finished them off and allowed her to serve them hot at the last minute. She made one large batch of regular hollandaise sauce and added in the orange and chipotle peppers after assembling the dishes that required the conventional stuff. (I don't know how she thinks of all this when she has never served brunch for ten before.) A little help with assembly and delivery from Amanda and me made the perfect service. Our guests brought fresh fruit and wines, and we enjoyed some bubbly, some fresh summery whites, and a sparkling shiraz from Australia (made by Paranga) that was really stellar. That was a new one for us.

Tuesday night we decided to initiate the grill for the new season. We had actually used it already to blacken some bell peppers for use in the Sunday brunch potatoes, but that doesn't really count. We made a very simple favorite of ours: pork loin medallions marinated in equal parts Worcestershire sauce and smoked chipotle Tabasco sauce. Melissa whipped together a great salad of arugula, blood orange and avocado -- all left over from Sunday brunch. Spicy, smokey goodness in about half an hour.

Here's looking forward to a lot more outdoor dining now that the big thaw is complete!

Shrimp Alfredo; Beef Couscous Salad; Chicken Curry; Beef Stew with Lima Beans

2009-04-07T20:07:00.009-04:00

We're trying to settle into a rhythm of posting two to three times a month, and I'm even having trouble keeping up with that. Of course, Melissa is cooking as much as ever, but getting the photos and descriptions up is my responsibility...

Here are some recent highlights:

First up is a shrimp Alfredo pasta Melissa whipped together last week as a last-minute dinner decision (the way she usually cooks for just the two of us). This was a really nice meal, and the tomatoes lent a special richness to the dish because Melissa reduced them in the oven before adding them to the pasta. This concentrates the sweet and tart flavors, and it's a nice touch if you've got a little extra time and some olive oil handy. We already had the shrimp and peas in the freezer, so no extra trips to the store were required. A creamy Alfredo sauce was made with cream, egg, Parmesan cheese (a staple item we always have in the fridge) and plenty of garlic. With this dish, we finally opened a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse (white Burgundy) that Etienne and Angelique had given us some time ago, and it was perfect with the shrimp and pasta.

Melissa loves to make couscous salads with all manner of ingredients that need to be used up. This one was made with shredded beef, tomatoes, mushrooms, garlic and plenty of cilantro. The beef was cooked in a stew of canned tomatoes that Melissa often uses: she reduces a whole can of diced tomatoes in a large saucepan and lets them burn just a little to caramelize the sugars and bring out a smoky flavor for the sauce. Then she adds back the volume of water that was boiled off along with garlic, onions, salt and pepper, and stews the large chunks of beef (chuck or some other inexpensive cut) in this mixture. This time she threw in some smoked chipotle peppers in adobo sauce that we had in the freezer (originally from a can -- we didn't smoke them), then shredded the cooked beef before mixing it in with the couscous salad. This was fantastic. I may be biased since I love chipotle peppers -- Tabasco makes a thick, rich smoked chipotle sauce that we often use as a marinade for chicken and pork on the grill, which I'm sure will make an appearance soon now that the weather is beginning to warm up...

Melissa's curries are always a welcome treat, and this simple red curry uses the same tomato base described above. After reducing and caramelizing the canned tomatoes, she adds back the water, onions, a curry spice mix, and some whole peppercorns and coriander seeds. This is simmered down again while the chicken cooks through (in the same pan). Melissa served the curry with raita on a couple of homemade scallion pancakes from dough that she wisely froze down the last time she made some for a snack. She makes the raita from a plain yogurt base with a little cumin and lemon juice, some chopped cucumber, and finely chopped cilantro or mint, whatever is on hand. The curry is really quite easy, and Evan recently added this dish to his growing repertoire in his cooking lessons with Melissa. His curry was served on store-bought naans that are great when warmed in the oven and brushed with oil and garlic.

Finally, we have a simple beef stew with parmesan-tossed lima beans. The beef was stewed in a sauce of chardonnay, Dijon mustard, onions, sliced button mushrooms, salt and pepper. The lima beans were boiled and then tossed in grated parmesan cheese while still very hot. It was all topped with chopped cilantro, which we quite like, but it was really just for garnish and parsley would be great if cilantro is too strong a flavor for you.

There is material for another post that should go up as soon as we get our camera back from Amanda...

Eat well!

Five-Course Dinner Party for Six

2009-03-24T22:16:00.016-04:00

As you can see, I am playing a bit of catch-up this week on the food blog. I credit (among other things) the evils of television for my lackluster posting habits of late. Five reasons why TV is evil: (1) it's impossible to ignore when it's on, (2) it distracts me from the reading that I wish I were doing (3) it distracts me from posting to this blog, (4) it distracts me from all the other projects I wish I were working on, and (5) knowing all this, I watch TV anyway.

Well, one distraction that is much more powerful than television is eating and drinking with good friends. Last Saturday we hosted a dinner party with two other couples that have recently proven to be great new partners in the enjoyment of lovingly crafted foods and copious amounts of wine. For the occasion, Melissa planned an impressive five-course meal of dishes that (in Melissa's words) are all fairly easy to make. The night started with avocado and crab soup with creme fraiche and chopped scallions, an idea which Melissa borrowed from a dinner Ramon made for us on one of his visits here from The Netherlands. We had a chardonnay (Bogle Vineyards' current vintage, CA) and a kiwi sauvignon blanc (Matua Valley, 2008, Marlborough) open for this course.

For the second course Melissa pulled out that shrimp dish she put together for our anniversary dinner a couple of weeks ago. She sauteed some large peeled shrimp in garlic and butter (no wine this time) and served them up with tomato, red bell pepper, red onion, avocado, cilantro and lime salsa on small salad plates. If you look back at the previous post you'll notice that she changed the presentation a little to accommodate the smaller plates. Equally nice to look at. We were still working on those two white wines with this dish -- just getting warmed up, really.

Third course: prosciutto-wrapped asparagus with poached egg and Hollandaise sauce. Melissa dreamed this up as a brunch dish (previously using bacon), and couldn't resist bringing it out as part of a menu honouring the onset of spring (yes, it's still hovering around freezing in New England, but we know spring is out there somewhere...). Melissa wrapped up blanched asparagus bunches in prosciutto and then pan-seared them to create a great fried-ham aroma that had us all salivating, then topped them with egg and Hollandaise. This dish served as a perfect segue into the big beef dish...

We had a nice wine and cheese break during the preparation of the meat course: filet mignon with pan-roasted Brussels sprouts, reduced tomatoes and lima beans. David brought around a sample of his first stab at cheese-making. The gouda-style semi-soft cheese had a really great flavor and texture -- if this was David's maiden voyage in cheese-making I can't wait to see what he comes up with next... The Brussels sprouts were Melissa's inspiration for this dish, and her treatment made these tiny cabbages as beautiful to eat as they are to look at. They were halved and steamed before cooking them with butter and salt in a hot frying pan to brown the face. The sweet/tart reduced tomatoes and soft lima beans provided a nice variety of flavor and texture on the plate. And a good rare filet mignon never disappoints.

We had a couple of really nice reds with the meat dish that I want to mention. One of the wines brought by David and Kathy was a red blend from the Acorn Winery in Sonoma, California's Russian River Valley. Acorn's 2006 Medley is a blend of so many grapes it takes half the back label to list them: zinfandel, syrah, mourvedre, cinsaut, sangiovese, petite syrah, alicante bouschet and six different muscat varieties. Not kidding. The result is described in one review I found online as a "symphony of fruit." This is certainly accurate, but the fruit is also backed up by woody, peppery notes, and I would have guessed it was mostly zinfandel from my initial impression. This was a lively and thoroughly enjoyable red. The second bottle was a 2005 Miratus vin de pays d'oc from Domaine Phillippe Nusswitz between the Languedoc and the Rhône. We bought a couple of bottles of this wine after a recent tasting organized by a Quebecoise group some friends of ours belong to, and in the tasting we were struck by its unusually intense strawberry flavors. It's a really pleasant blend of syrah, grenache and mourvedre with plenty of fruit, a light to medium body and an eye-catching label. A great glass.

Finally we got to the dessert Melissa started making Friday night. She began with the idea of a trio of sorbets, then decided that cherries, strawberries and rhubarb had to be involved, and in the end decided that it needed a rich, creamy ice cream as well. The result was the beautiful trio pictured here. The one in back is a puree of Bing cherries (canned) frozen into a ball and then dipped into melted semi-sweet chocolate before re-freezing overnight. The concoction on the right is a strawberry and rhubarb puree that Melissa made on the spot with pre-frozen strawberries, fresh chopped rhubarb and a little sugar to sweeten. The tart berries and rich chocolate were balanced out by the scoop of butter pecan ice cream.

We brought out the second bottle of late-harvest gewurztraminer we brought back from New Zealand this year (2005 Judd Estate, Gisborne, by Matua Valley) to have with dessert, and when we finished that we opened the bottle of Weingut Johannishof German Riesling (2006) brought in by Beth and Per. I think we all suffered a bit of food and wine hangover on Sunday, but it was sooooo worth it.

Melissa pulled off another magnificent dinner without even breaking a sweat.

Our Wedding Anniversary

2009-03-24T20:52:00.007-04:00

Melissa and I recently had a small but decadent gourmet celebration in honor of our second wedding anniversary (March 9). We like to have a bottle of wine from the vineyard where we were married (Ascension Wine Estate, Matakana, New Zealand) in honor of the special day, and so we bring back a few every time we visit Melissa's family. Currently we have "The Ascent" Reserve Chardonnay (2006) on hand, so we put together a small starter dish and a (considerably larger) cheese plate designed to complement the wine.

To start, Melissa made a simple but elegant shrimp dish. For each plate, a half dozen large peeled shrimp were sauteed in a white wine, butter and garlic sauce and served with a fresh salsa of chopped red capsicum, avocado, red onion, tomato and cilantro with a dash of lime juice. As you can see, it made a visually stunning presentation, and the classic shrimp, garlic and salsa flavor combination pairs nicely with a dry, crisp and fruity wine like The Ascent Chardonnay.

We love a simple cheese plate with a nice wine. You can find an endless supply of advice on wine and cheese pairings in books and on the internet, but of course what it really comes down to is just what you think tastes good together. Cheese can generally mask both the bad and the good characteristics of wine, so this is a terrible way to judge the intrinsic qualities of a wine. But just like any wine and food pairing, when you hit upon a really good combination the synergy can be a fantastically rewarding experience. We went to the Whole Foods cheese counter and chose a few cheeses based on three criteria: what we know we like, what looks (and smells) interesting, and what we think might pair nicely with a wine we already know quite well. The result of this thoroughly subjective exercise was the following collection of cheeses (clockwise from the blue):

Fourme d'Ambert -- a semi-hard, mild French blue cheese made from raw cow's milk

Robiola due Latte -- a soft-ripened brie from northern Italy made from cow and sheep's milk

Taleggio -- a semi-soft and mild tasting (but strong smelling) Italian cow's milk cheese

Hirtenkase Reserve -- a hard cow's milk cheese from southern Germany that resembles aged gouda

I think for both of us the Taleggio proved to be a very pleasant new discovery. It's a rich, creamy feel with an earthy flavor and a surprisingly fruity edge to it. That said, the Hirtenkase was the star of the evening as far as wine and cheese pairings go. Apparently what starts as a semi-hard cheese, kind of like a reggiano or aged gouda, actually softens with age. We had a relatively young one at 5 months, and we both would have put money on it to be aged gouda tasting it blind. Can't quite put a finger on what made the pairing so spectacular, but Melissa and I both looked around almost in confusion at how much the wine and cheese flavors both developed for the better when experienced together. A spot of fig jam added even more nutty, fruity goodness to the mix.

Happy anniversary to us...

Three Great Salads

2009-03-03T19:37:00.006-05:00

In the couple of weeks after Valentine's Day, Melissa made good use of some leftover ingredients from our three-course love-day dinner by putting together some tasty salads. When we eat we are generally shooting for diversity, not low-fat or low-calorie per se, so you'll notice that these have some ingredients you wouldn't include in a typical starvation-diet salad. They tend to be much more enjoyable that way...

While I was away for a conference, Melissa made two salads for her own meals -- both with the aim of using up the iceberg lettuce she used in the shrimp cocktail. The first salad was stir-fried chicken thighs, sliced and marinated in a soy-sauce and sesame oil concoction with a drop of liquid smoke added for that wood-grilled flavor. Served up on a couple of handfuls of iceberg lettuce with cherry tomatoes and fresh green capsicum, salt and pepper and a dab of Kewpie Japanese mayonnaise for dressing. I wish I had been here to eat that.

A second salad saw a similar set of ingredients in a slightly different incarnation: an avocado half from that Valentine's Day shrimp cocktail replaced the capsicum, and a poached egg was added (because Melissa loves poached eggs). Again that Kewpie mayo makes the dish.

This last one I did get in on. Using the last of the great beef tenderloin in our freezer and the one remaining blood orange from the blood orange mimosas, Melissa made a salad that set my taste buds buzzing. On a bed of field greens she served up seared tenderloin slices (seasoned only with salt and pepper -- and very rare) with sections of orange. The dressing was balsamic vinegarette blended up with marinated green peppercorns and a few garlic cloves. The acids from the orange and balsamic complemented the seared beef beautifully.

All three salads would be good with a crisp, fruity sauv blanc (probably from New Zealand or Chile in our house) or a nice dry chenin blanc. I don't remember what we drank with the tenderloin salad, but it was probably one of those.

Salads make us long for summer weather -- only three months to go...

Valentine's Day Dinner

2009-02-22T17:49:00.007-05:00

I've been away for the last week for a conference in Santa Fe, NM, so I didn't get a chance to post our Valentine's Day Feast before leaving.

For Valentine's Day, I brought home a bouquet of mango calla lilies I had the flower shop around the corner order for me. We had these flowers in our wedding, so I thought they would conjure some great memories. I have nothing against roses, but I find a lot of other flowers more interesting...

We started with a prawn cocktail recipe Melissa found online -- it's one of Gordon Ramsay's and it was really tasty. That sauce is made up of Japanese (Kewpie) mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and cayenne pepper, among other things. Served with sliced avocado -- perfectly ripe since my allergy didn't pop up -- and shredded lettuce.

With that prawn cocktail starter we made some blood orange mimosas. We ran into this variation at an After Hours event at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here in Boston. These are great events where you get to wander around the incredible courtyard and gardens in this very unusual art museum with a glass of wine and listen to special short lectures on particular pieces. We have gone to quite a few of them, and it's right around the corner from Harvard Medical School, so it's a very convenient after-work destination.

The main course was a spectacular lamb shank dish with a spicy tomato sauce. As usual, Melissa cooked the shanks to perfection. They need to braise for a good 3-4 hours, but if you take the time to do it right, the meat just falls off the bone and melts in your mouth. The spicy sauce was a new experiment that came off really well. Mexican chili powder, ground cumin and smoked chipotle peppers gave the lamb a deep, smoky flavor and a nice kick. Melissa topped it with fresh chopped cilantro and served it with cilantro rice. We initially thought we would pair the lamb with a pinot noir, but with the extra spice in the dish we decided on a California Zinfandel for something a little heftier. This 2005 Oriel Hugo old-vine zinfandel (Russian River Valley, CA) fit the bill just perfectly. The deep, rich black cherry and spice with a slightly sweet finish made this one of the best zinfandels we've tried, and probably the best food pairing we've made in a long time. Price-wise, it was in the mid-range of the better zins at about $25.

Dessert was a strawberry souffle with strawberry-rhubarb compote and raspberry white chocolate truffle ice cream (Haagen-Dazs). Melissa got this recipe from Cuisine Magazine online, and although rhubarb was not particularly easy to find in the middle of winter, Whole Foods came through for me. Melissa served the dish with a brandy-rhubarb concoction on the side (shot glass). What a sweet finish.

Melissa's recipe for the braised lamb shank dish can be found at the end of the post.

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Lamb Shanks

3/4 green bell pepper

1/2 onion

(sautee until soft)

1 tbsp of peppercorns

1 tsp of coriander seeds

(grind and add to bell peppers and onion)

2 small lamb shanks

(toss in pan with onions etc and brown)

1 tsp of salt

1 tsp of mexican chilli powder

1 tbsp of ground cumin

1 Can of whole tomatoes

2 tbsp of canned chipotle pepper

1 cup of water

(puree and pour over onions and lamb shanks in cassarole dish - braise at300-350oF for 3 to 4 hours, turning shanks every hour and a half)

Chopped cilantro

Steam rice in salted water with 2 tbsp of chopped cilantro.To serve shanks remove from cassarole dish. Stir in fresh chopped cilantro andtop shanks with sauce. Serve with cilantro scented rice.

Four Great Chicken Dishes

2009-02-02T21:19:00.018-05:00

We have had a streak of successful chicken dishes recently, so I thought I'd put them together into a theme post.

First up, a colorful Asian-inspired grilled chicken salad. Here, Melissa has marinated skinned, boneless thighs in soy sauce with sesame oil and sambal oelek, then broiled them under the oven element. The salad is a bed of mixed greens with sliced red capsicum and enoki mushrooms. Melissa made a delicious dressing by mixing the chicken drippings with a small amount of balsamic vinegar. Great salad with a light Kiwi sauvignon blanc.

For a dish more suited to cold winter evenings, Melissa made roast chicken thighs with curry-spiced green peas and garbonzo beans (chick peas). For these types of dishes Melissa always uses bone-in chicken thighs -- it's a tiny bit more trouble and a little extra fat, but all that gets you an infinitely better flavor and texture in the cooked meat. She first pan-fried the the chicken thighs to get that nicely browned skin, then moved them into a covered sauce-pot with frozen green peas, canned chick peas, chopped onions and some curry spice mix. This was cooked on medium heat until the chicken was done, and served as shown. Simple, hot and satisfying.

Another great winter dish: chicken thighs with garlic and zucchini (courgette). Melissa first rubbed the skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs with chicken stock paste for extra-rich flavor. In a medium wok-style Calphalon pan, she browned the skin of the chicken in olive oil with chopped onions, then added a half-cup of chicken stock and sliced garlic cloves, and covered to cook the poultry through. Finally, she added large slices of zucchini and finished in the covered pan to soften them up and soak in the flavor from the broth. The chicken was plated on top of a smattering of zucchini and broth and served with a glass of 2006 Black Mountain Gravel Bar chardonnay (Napa, CA). Not a bad drink for a $6 chardonnay; nicely balanced oak and fruit.

The final entry in this series of chicken dishes is a stuffed, turkey-wrapped chicken thigh with green peas. We recently hosted a poker night at our place, for which we had bought deli meats and cheese for sandwiches -- after all, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich invented the food in the mid-18th century so he could eat with one hand while continuing to play cards without getting them all greasy, or so the story goes...

At any rate, Melissa made great use of the leftover deli fare for this dish. The chicken thighs were skinned, boned and beaten out flat, then rolled up with a stuffing made of fresh chopped tomato, onion, dried sage, chopped deli slices of smoked turkey and swiss cheese, bread crumbs, salt and pepper to season and a bit of water to bind. The rolled chicken was then wrapped up in a thin slice of said turkey and cooked in the oven in a deep casserole dish. When these were finished, they were set aside so the frozen peas could be cooked in the leftover juices and bits of stuffing that had escaped during the cooking process. The stuffed chicken was served with a scoop of peas on the side. The tomato from the stuffing makes a nice visual contrast with the peas.

We had a bottle of 2005 La Patache Medoc cabernet sauvignon with this dish, which was quite nice after decanting, but we certainly could have done well to leave it on the shelf another few years. Alas, we are not yet well practiced at leaving wines on the shelf -- they tend to meet their end in our glasses in relatively short order...

Beef with Bulgar Wheat, Asparagus and Enoki Mushrooms

2009-02-02T20:41:00.009-05:00

Well, we intended to get more than one post up in January, but such is life. Rest assured, the recent paucity of entries has less to do with lack of material than with the ass-dragging winter doldrums that make it difficult to get things done in this part of the country during the dark days of December and January. Seriously, while I thoroughly enjoyed the two weeks of New Zealand summer weather we got to experience over Christmas, the getaway may have made it that much harder to get through the rest of New England winter. Here in Boston, we're scheduled to warm up again sometime in June. I know there are plenty of places that have it worse, but that won't stop us from complaining...

On the upside, Melissa recently made a nice, hearty bulgar wheat dish that was unquestionably blogworthy: the grain was boiled to a perfect consistency and then drained and mixed with a little pepper jack cheese that we had in the freezer (a nice save from a holiday party at Harvard where the cheese buyers got a little carried away) to make a thick cheesy mix. She then combined the wheat base with sauteed slices of flank steak, red onions, garlic and asparagus, and topped it with a small bunch of enoki mushrooms and cracked pepper.

This dish went really well with a bottle of Kathy Lynskey Casto Reserve pinot noir (2004, Marlborough, NZ). Amanda's parents left us with a bottle of this beautiful boutique pinot when they visited for Christmas, and we recently bought another from Huntingon Wine and Spirits ($25, and worth every penny). This is a floral, earthy wine with deep fruit and woody notes -- it really picks up the mushroom and asparagus in the food. It's definitely worth a try if you come across it in your bottle store...

Getting Back To It: Pork Buns, Indian Dinner, Thai Ceviche, Pork Ball Soup

2009-01-12T22:18:00.032-05:00

Just back from a two-week holiday in New Zealand, Melissa and I are feeling fat and happy after all of the indulgences of the season. Both still recovering from the 36-hour trip back to Boston (free flights, terrible itinerary), but ready to get back into the kitchen...

There were a couple of dishes we didn't get posted before leaving on Christmas Eve. Melissa's best recent experiment was her pork buns. These were similar to the Chinese treat, but Melissa used a stuffing that was more Indian-inspired: curried pork mince with small cubed potatoes, canned corn, carrots and onions. She made a very moist yeast bread dough and raised it once before wrapping up the fully cooked filling (still warm) to form stuffed dough-balls. These were left to rise again in a springform pan, then put into the oven to bake.

The nicely browned surfaces were achieved by brushing with egg glaze halfway through baking. The result was hot, fragrant, moist buns with piping hot curried pork filling; something like a cross between samosas and Chinese pork buns. Melissa served two on a plate with a scoop of extra filling on the side.

One of the last meals we had before leaving our apartment and cat in the capable hands of Amanda's parents, Carol and Russel, who were visiting from New Zealand for the holidays, was saag paneer with chicken curry on warm naan (see Indian Feast from our gewurztraminer tasting last summer for some similar Indian ideas). This was my request, more or less, since I called from the grocery store to say I couldn't resist those tasty packages of naans so we should maybe have some Indian food. Alas, Shaw's had neither paneer nor Halloumi, so we made due with some locally made fresh mozzarella cheese. We can't really recommend this, since the texture is wrong and the cheese is a bit bland, but the spinach, chicken and curry seasoning were really nice on the oven-warmed Indian bread. We had a bottle of Cono Sur "Vision" gewurztraminer (2007, Casablanca Valley, Chile) with this meal -- a favorite of ours and a very popular entry at that gewurz tasting we held last year.

After a single day of recovery from our travels, we went to a fantastic all-day meal with some new friends in Cambridge. The hosts had put together plenty of wine, a starter of do-it-yourself Tunisian brik (look that up) and a great main course of New Zealand lamb shank with dried apricots and large pearl couscous. They had prepared gallons (not kidding) of homemade veal stock for the lamb dish and their own future use, and a few large containers of it were sent home with the rest of us as party favors. That veal stock came in handy the next day, when we had Amanda and her parents and Evan over for Sunday dinner.

First, we shared a special wine with our guests: a bottle of 2006 "The Ascent" Reserve Chardonnay that we bought from the Ascension Wine Estate in Matakana, New Zealand, when we were married there in March of 2007. We selected a number of wines on the occasion of our vineyard wedding, and the chardonnays are ready to drink, so we brought them back with us from this year's visit. It's a rich, creamy wine with peach, apple, toffee and vanilla flavors. The remaining bottles will be enjoyed on another occasion.

Melissa started the dinner off with a nice fresh Thai-style ceviche (recipe previously posted) while we enjoyed one of the many New Zealand sauvignon blancs with which Carol and Russel had graciously stocked our wine shelf at the end of their stay here (along with some nice NZ pinot noirs and a chardonnay I look forward to tasting) -- unnecessary since they were doing us a huge favor by looking after our beast of a cat, but much appreciated nonetheless.

The veal stock was used for the main course of pork-ball soup. Pork balls were formed using fine ground pork loin with garlic powder, Thai chili paste, sambal oelek, fish sauce, salt and pepper, and boiled in a veal stock base. These were set aside to cool while sliced shiitake mushrooms were boiled in the same stock pot for about ten minutes and then taken off heat until the ceviche course was finished. Just before serving, Melissa re-heated the stock to boil some vermicelli noodles for 5-6 minutes, then added back the pork balls along with some gai choy (Chinese mustard cabbage) for color and texture. Very tasty soup.

The dinner was topped off with a dessert of pineapple and mango crumble with toasted coconut topping (recipe and photo at the end of this post) along with a really nice late-harvest gewurztraminer we brought back from New Zealand (2005 Judd Estate, Gisborne, by Matua Valley). Not a bad start to the new year...

Catching Up...

2008-12-15T21:21:00.006-05:00

This is the time of year when holiday parties take over evenings and weekends, making the quiet night at home a rarity until next year sometime. When not out making merry, we have both been putting in the hours in the lab to bring things to a good stopping point before leaving for New Zealand for the holidays.

Nonetheless, there are a few dishes to catch up on. First there's the inevitable Thanksgiving leftovers: Melissa made a great turkey sandwich that we didn't get photographed, but it was on thin artisan bread, oiled and oven toasted to a hefty crisp with shredded turkey, avocado and saffron-butter gravy from the Big Day. The best use of leftover turkey, however, was in the turkey pie she made a couple of days later. A nice thin pie baked in a springform pan, Melissa filled it with a stew of turkey, peas, carrots, celery and caramelized onions and topped it with a thick layer of pastry dough. Served up with a spoonful of her cranberry sauce and a glass of chardonnay, it kept me going back so many times that we only left a sliver of it for another day...

A couple of weeks ago Melissa tried something she's never done before -- stuffed pork loin. A pork loin is not easy to stuff since the meat is rather dense, but she sliced into them like pita pockets and jammed in a mixture of avocado, salsa and crumbled peccorino cheese (it's what we had in the fridge). They were held closed with bamboo skewers and lightly coated with bread crumbs seasoned with salt and pepper. In order to maintain the shape and breading, Melissa cooked them suspended in the rack of a roasting pan. My food photographs are not as good as Melissa's (it's usually pretty obvious who took them), but the dish came out really well. The pork was tender and juicy, the cheese savory, and the salsa added a nice, clean bit of fresh spice. Served up with some extra sliced avo. Next time we'll add a nice garnish for better presentation.

To use up the extra angel food cake we had leftover from Thanksgiving Day dessert (mixed berry and Amontillado trifle), Melissa generously buttered some thick slices and pan fried them to a delicate crisp, then stuffed them with a simple mixture of sliced bananas and fresh whipped cream. Yes, it was every bit as good as it looks. The amount of butter and heavy cream in this dish might disturb the more health-conscious among our readers, but then that's why I tend to have coffee for breakfast and steamed broccoli or yogurt for lunch. My colleagues at work must think I'm on some silly diet, but those who have joined us for dinner at home understand that I'm just saving my caloric intake for Melissa's concoctions.

Finally, on a recent night last week Melissa asked me to pick up cat food and something green on the way home from work. I was pretty sure who the cat food was for, but I knew that what I chose from the produce aisle would play a large part in determining what we had for dinner. I decided to try something I had never seen before: Chinese long beans. Once they were chopped up in the beef stir fry Melissa made for four (Evan and Amanda came around for drinks, so Melissa fed us all), they looked fairly innocuous, but they resembled a squirming handful of huge, green night-crawlers when I removed them from the bag and brandished them for Melissa's inspection.

The garlic and curried beef stir fry was a huge hit, and the now-abbreviated long beans were a clean, herby complement with a denser consistency than regular green beans. Exotic produce is always great fun...

Notes on the Beef Curry:

This was a fairly simple recipe but came out wonderfully.

1/2 can of coconut cream
1 tbs of Red John West Thai Curry Paste
1 stalk of lemon grass
1 onion - chopped in half rings
olive oil
250gms of Eye Fillet (Beef Tenderloin) - Sirloin or Rump is also good, but boy is eye fillet tender
1/2 cup of almonds ground in blender to the consistency of bread crumbs
~300gms of Chinese Long Beans - chopped into 2 inch lengths
1 tsp of chicken stock paste

In a large pot fry the onion in olive oil until tender. Add lemon grass and continue to fry for a minute or so. Add the curry paste and thinly sliced beef and toss quickly until the beef is lightly browned. Add the coconut cream, almonds, chicken stock paste and Chinese long beans. Bring to the boil and put a tight fitting lid on the pot. After ~5 minutes the beans should be steamed and the dish ready to serve with rice.

Frozen green beans really can't compete with the Chinese long beans for consistency and flavour, but you could get away with fresh green beans if you can't find these beans at your local supermarket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yardlong_bean

Fifth Annual Blackwood Street Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T18:32:00.015-05:00

I've always had really good memories associated with Thanksgiving: long walks and bonfires in Tarpley, Texas (population: us), with my father's side of the family; formal dinner and frisbee marathons in Houston, Texas, with my mother's side of the family. Food galore and the comfort of friends and family -- nothing is better.

But now that we live so far away and it's not practical to travel for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, Melissa and I have developed our own tradition here in Boston. For the past five years, we have gathered together an evolving group of Americans who can't be with family, and non-Americans who may have never celebrated the holiday before, for a full day of food, wine and good company. It's an all-day extravaganza of eating and drinking that some of our dedicated guests look forward to each year almost as much as we do.

Like a kid on Christmas morning, Melissa woke up at 5:30 am and couldn't get back to sleep, because this is her favorite day of the year. I went to 7-11 to get some ice to chill the bubbly, then cleaned up the place while Melissa made the stuffing and prepped the turkey before any guests arrived. We always start with a champagne breakfast around 10 am, and some of our friends come by for the early meal before going to dinner with family.

This year we had 14 for breakfast, and Melissa's stuffed croissants were snapped up as soon as each batch came out of the kitchen. The filling of black forest ham, peccorino cheese, avocado, tomatoes and ground pepper was met with unanimous approval. The shortcut: croissants from a can. They smell absolutely heavenly in the oven, which is always a great way to greet early guests, and make for a quick and easy preparation at the beginning of a long day of cooking. The few who arrived after the croissants were all gone had to settle for the lemon crepes Melissa whipped up as a backup plan. We had orange juice and pomegranate to make mimosas with Lindauer Brut (non-vintage, New Zealand), a half-case of which was consumed well before dinner was served...

We were expecting a largely non-overlapping second wave of about ten guests for the big feast, and those who stayed through or arrived (as recommended) with plenty of time for relaxing and wine drinking before dinner were met with a reward of Wellfleet oysters I bought live the day before. The comfortable lull between breakfast and dinner was thus filled with oyster shucking and satisfied slurping -- all accompanied by New Zealand (Lindauer) and Italian (Prosecco) sparkling wines.

As soon as the breakfast preparations were finished, the turkey went into the oven. Melissa roasted the 13-pound organic turkey with a saffron-butter glaze and her pistachio and olive stuffing. After some experimentation in recent years, she has settled on this recipe, and the consensus is that it's a truly fantastic concoction. The saffron butter is the first aroma that makes it to the nose, well before the smell of roasting turkey wafts out of the kitchen, and the pistachios and green olives in the stuffing provide a great texture and flavor.

The trimmings for the turkey and stuffing included gravy that really held onto that saffron-butter flavor, a homemade cranberry sauce, blanched snap-peas and chipotle mashed sweet potatoes. The spicy potatoes are something we experienced a few years ago at East Coast Grill in Somerville, MA, and we thought it was such a great idea that we had to incorporate it into our Thanksgiving dinner as a variation on the traditional candied yams or sweet potatoes. Five large sweet potatoes were roasted whole in the oven until very soft, then peeled and mashed with one stick of butter, a splash of cream, a sprinkling of sea salt and three finely chopped smoked chipotle peppers, which come in a small can drowned in adobo sauce. The smokey flavor is divine, and there is just enough spice to sneak up on you after a few bites -- puts a nice kick into the plate.

We had a hodgepodge of wines open for the big feast: a couple of chardonnays, of which the Louis Latour 2006 Grand Ardeche was the star, a couple of pinot noirs, among which I really liked the Blason de Bourgogne 2007 Burgundy, and another bottle of the 2006 Paul Jaboulet Parallele 45 Cotes du Rhone we had with our midnight breakfast last Saturday. After that it was a free-for-all, and we had Aussie shiraz, Spanish tempranillo, German riesling and New Zealand sauvignon blanc, among others, as the night progressed.

For dessert Melissa made a trifle -- actually, twelve of them. The concoctions of mixed berries, angel food cake, dutch custard, whipped cream, Amontillado sherry and slivered almonds were assembled early that morning and placed in boxes outside in the cold to settle in and soak up the sherry. We know it's good when Amanda goes back for a second dessert...

When the feasting was all done (around 6 pm) it was already dark outside, but the night was young. With our bellies (and our glasses) full, we settled in for a rousing game of "Who Am I?" (See Etienne and Angelique trying to divine the names on their foreheads, below), followed by a few rounds of the more sinister game "Mafia". Turns out I'm not a very convincing Mafioso. Melissa, on the other hand...

Thanks to everyone who helped make the day a really great time, and we wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving.

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Recipes

Actually, for this post there are very few recipes for me to write. The "croissants" where Pilsbury cresent rolls, baked according to the instructions and filled with shaved cheese, ham, tomato and avocado when still piping hot.

The turkey was made from a recipe I saw in a cuisine magazine. It can be found here. The only alterations I'd make to the recipe is to continue topping up the liquid in the pan with water as the cooking proceeds and I preferred chicken broth here rather than wine. The liquids made a beautiful gravy at the end by just adding a tablespoon of cornstarch (corn flour) mixed in a little water and heating it through to thicken.

The cranberry sauce was simply 1 bag of fresh cranberries boiled with a small amount of water (just enough to cover the bottom of a pot) and 1/2 cup of sugar with a pinch of cloves and nutmeg. It takes about 5 minutes for the cranberries to pop and turn to mush.

For the trifle I simply layered the ingredients listed above in glasses. This is the first time I've made a trifle, but next time I think I'll cut the sherry with simple syrup, or maybe even melted peach jam to soak into the sponge (angelfood) cake and berries.

Midnight Breakfast; Roast Chicken Thigh with Roast Vegetable Gravy

2008-11-26T21:42:00.005-05:00

Actually it was more like 2 am: Last Saturday we went out with an eclectic group of friends for Evan's birthday. We started at the Top of the Hub, a bar and restaurant on the 52nd floor of the Prudential Tower, a mere three-minute walk from our apartment. On such a cold, crystal-clear night, the view of the city was awesome. After a bunch of drinks there, we froze our asses off scouting the area for another bar and ended up at Azure at the Lenox Hotel on Boylston Street. We then had a bunch of drinks there, and when the bar was ready to close we decided to bring handful of the more dedicated revelers back to our place for a late-night breakfast.

We stopped by our local 24-hour grocery store (I love the city) to pick up some eggs and bacon, and then we let out our secret for the world's most ridiculously fantastic eggs ever made. Melissa taught me this recipe, and it's usually pulled out late at night when scrambled eggs are the only thing we are competent to cook and eat safely. Beat eggs in a bowl wth a splash of milk or cream, a generous dose of grated Parmesan cheese, a few cranks from the pepper grinder, a small spoonful of chicken stock paste or powder, and a dash of Thai fish sauce. Yes, fish sauce. To be more exact, it's anchovy juice. You would never know it's there, it just adds a salty, savory flavor that your body craves after a big night out. Scramble in a skillet on medium heat and serve nice and slimy. We added bacon, baguette and a bottle of Paul Jaboulet Parallele 45 Cotes du Rhone (2006; grenache/syrah) to round out a great night out. Happy Birthday, Evan!

The following day, I whisked away Amanda (and her car) to go wine shopping at Trader Joe's. Gotta stock up for Thanksgiving and all the holiday parties coming up. After fighting the ridiculous pre-Thanksgiving Sunday evening crowds to buy a couple of cases of vino, we forced Amanda to join us for dinner and a True Blood catch-up session (our new favorite HBO series about vampires).

Melissa made oven-roasted chicken thighs with a roasted vegetable gravy that had us all chewing the bone and licking the bowls clean. She first seasoned the chicken thighs (bone-in, skin-on) with chicken stock powder and pan-seared them to cook out some of the fat. Then she roasted them in a large roasting pan (which is about to get a real workout on Thanksgiving) along with some chopped carrots, celery, onions and cubed potatoes. When the chicken was finished, she removed the meat and most of the vegetables, then made a pan-gravy by adding some chicken broth to deglaze the roasting pan, leaving in some of the roasted vegetables, and warming through on the stovetop. The final result was liquified with a hand blender to thicken and served under the chicken and vegetables in large soup bowls. Perfect for a cold night at home and some good TV.

We had both a Mondavi Private Selection 2007 chardonnay (Central Coast, CA) and a Matua Valley 2007 sauvignon blanc (Marlborough, New Zealand) open for this meal. The chardonnay was a much better match to the meal, but not everyone likes California chardonnay, and New Zealand sauvignon blanc is so good that we'll drink it with just about anything.

We're having a large Thanksgiving gathering tomorrow, so there'll be more to come very soon...

Chicken with Pomegranate Tartlets; Steam-baked Tilapia with Ribboned Zucchini

2008-11-18T20:38:00.004-05:00

As colder weather sets in there is less fresh, in-season produce to get excited about, but Melissa manages to find inspiration nonetheless. A recent dish inspired by a leftover fruit from the pomegranate martinis we made for my birthday cocktail party featured marscapone and pomegranate tartlets as accompaniment to chicken thighs with Lima beans and green peas. Grilled boneless chicken thighs were seasoned with simple chicken stock paste and ground pepper. Melissa sauteed some chopped onions with coarsely chopped bacon to add to the soaked, boiled Lima beans and briefly boiled green peas.

The tartlets were a real treat. Not being very experienced with eating pomegranate, I've only sort of chewed the flesh off and spit out the seed. In this dish the seeds and flesh were together in the tart on top of a generous cushion of marscapone cheese. The result was a light crunch from the filo shell, a rich creamy base from the marscapone, a jolt of tart from the pomegranate fruit, and a coarse crunch from the seeds. A panoply of textures and flavors. Melissa baked these for about 12 minutes at 400F in a mini-tart pan.

We had a Sbragia 2004 Home Ranch Merlot (Sonoma, CA) that we already had open with this meal. Someone brought this wine around on my birthday (who are you?), and it was fantastic. What a rich, fruit-driven, velvety-smooth wine. Backed up by vanilla and oak, it was really nice with the tart and savory mix in this dish.

On another recent evening we stopped by the store on the way home to forage for some dinner ideas. Before even reaching the store we discovered we were both thinking fish. And since we were also thinking inexpensive, we brought home some tilapia fillets and Melissa made an old stand-by of ours: tilapia fillets (it works equally well with whole cleaned trout) are seasoned with sea salt and ground pepper, then wrapped up in foil pouches with lemon, garlic and tomato slices and a generous pat of butter. We often cook these on the grill (which is how I learned it while trout fishing in the Rocky Mountains), but it also works in the oven. Melissa served the fish with ribboned zucchini (cooked covered in the microwave for three minutes and seasoned with a sprinkle of chicken stock powder), and some fresh sliced grape tomatoes, the last remnants from our garden this season.

We had a bottle of Guy Saget 2007 Vouvray (France) with the fish. We were hoping for a nice dry chenin blanc here, but this wine is off-dry to sweet. It's a little frustrating that the bottle doesn't give any indication that it's "demi-sec," but I still have good impressions of Vouvray whites from the handful that we've tried of late.

I recently read that Australia makes some fantastic ultra-dry semillon, so I think we will soon be on a mission to try those out...

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A quick note on another great budget red we found at Trader Joe's a couple of weeks ago: Epicuro Beneventano Aglianico (2006) from Italy. A deep ruby-red wine; the nose was deceptively similar to gamay (think Nouveau Beaujolais with its light, red Jello aromas), but the flavors in this wine were all rich blackberries and black cherries, with a decent backbone of tannin and bit of pepper and earth to back it up. This was surprisingly good for a $6 bottle. Seriously -- I think I'll buy a case of it soon. It would probably even improve a little by sitting on the shelf for a year or three; not that it'll last that long at our place...

Halloween Party

2008-11-09T17:28:00.004-05:00

The last three weeks have been a bit crazy, with two scientific meetings (and presentations to prepare for both), pretty heavy workloads in the lab, and a great costume/cocktail party for my birthday last weekend.

We had 22 people show up, mostly in costume, for a great party in our small apartment on Halloween. We had pomegranate martinis, strawberry daquiris, lots of wine and some great food. Melissa made her beef stew with polenta (previously posted), sausage rolls, homemade pate and bloody fingers (hot dogs with almond sliver fingernails).

Jawdat and Zee brought some great cupcakes which stood in as birthday cake, and a good time was had by all.

We were too busy playing hosts to take photos, so thanks to Jawdat, Zee and Uhn-Soo for keeping their cameras handy.

We'll soon get back to posting some new dishes now that things have settled down a bit for now...

Chicken Salad; Beef and Polenta Stew; Pork with Polenta and Pomegranate Reduction

2008-10-20T19:09:00.013-04:00

Since our last post we have hosted my parents for a week-long visit to enjoy the New England autumn colors, and both of us experienced a considerable up-tick in the work to be done in the lab. Fortunately the cause is positive -- Melissa just submitted her latest manuscript for review and I am diving headlong into data analysis from some very important experiments. However it does cut down on the time we have for serious eating...

These are some pics we took in Franconia Notch State Park in New Hampshire -- two from my dad (single leaves) and one of mine (canopy shot). Evan also got some really nice photos near Franconia Notch recently, as well as on a day trip he took with Melissa and me with my parents to Newburyport, MA.

We had a beautiful day for that trip, and our lunchtime picnic fare consisted of roast chicken, fresh ciabatta, cheeses and some local apples. These was all store-bought, but the next evening, Melissa made a light dinner of the leftover chicken and her own arugula and pecan pesto. She served the chicken salad on a bed of fresh arugula with rosemary au gratin potatoes and a bottle of 2008 Bogle Chardonnay (CA). Yum.

This past week Melissa has been experimenting some more with polenta. The first dish she made was a beef stew on soft polenta. The stew was made with browned chuck steak, potatoes, onions, fennel, garlic, whole black peppercorns and a red jalapeno from our garden, all in a chicken stock base. The soft polenta was a cornmeal base with Parmesan cheese and some New Zealand butter Melissa recently discovered at the grocery store. It was topped off with reduced grape tomatoes and a fennel-frond garnish. That polenta was amazing -- rich and creamy with plenty of flavors bleeding in from the stew. And the reduced tomatoes provided a sweet and tart counterpoint to the beef, garlic and onions. Between the whole peppercorns and the jalapeno pepper it packed a punch, but the heat wasn't overpowering and added a nice extra dimension to the dish. We had the stew with a 2006 Ku de Ta Malbec (Medoza Valley, Argentina), which was big enough to stand up to the dish, but was a little too young and tannic for us.

The second dish was pan-fried pork loin with a garlicky pomegranate reduction, fresh arugula, reduced grape tomatoes and a thicker polenta with lots of roasted garlic. The pomegranate reduction was the same one used for the lamb and eggplant dish Melissa served for a recent dinner party, and it's so good I think I would eat it on cardboard. Fortunately I don't have to, since Melissa is a real expert with pork loin. The line between cooked through and overdone is diminishingly thin with pork, but Melissa always gets it right on the nose.

Classic Spaghetti; Pork and Eggplant Stir-Fry; Hot Chicken Pockets

2008-10-06T19:16:00.008-04:00

After the great fun of hosting a large dinner party on Friday (Sept 26), we had a weekend of cleanup and recovery. Two broken wine glasses (one by me), a few Cabernet stains on the carpet (don't just clean it -- OXYCLEAN IT!), and one curtain rod torn from the wall kept me busy on Saturday. A couple of four-inch wood screws and a little drywall repair got the curtains back up well enough to last another year or two of rental, and the rest of the rainy weekend was spent resting up and doing a bit of routine cloning in the lab. Molecular biology can be surprisingly relaxing...

Monday night Melissa pulled out a classic spaghetti with tomato meat sauce. We had about four boxes of angel hair pasta left over from the dinner party (better too much than not enough), and it will all be put to good use eventually. In this dish Melissa used a base of canned diced tomatoes with garlic, onions and a whole lot of fresh basil from the garden. Chuck steak minced in the food processor added a fine meat base that melded into the sauce without being too omnipresent. A 2005 Villa Cerrina Montepulciano d'Abruzzo (Abruzzi, Italy) was really nice with this pasta dish. This wine is one of Trader Joe's best sellers when it's available -- a great budget Italian red at $5 for the bottle.

Tuesday we supped on Beth's famous buffalo chicken dip and warm chocolate chip cookies at our regular game night with some HMS graduate students. While Melissa and I kicked ass at Trivial Pursuit that night, I have to say it is generally surprising how bad a bunch of Harvard-trained scientists can be at this game.

Wednesday dinner was a great dish to use up the leftover eggplant from last Friday while also powering through the arugula and grape tomatoes that will otherwise soon rot in the garden as colder weather sets in. On a thick bed of said arugula, Melissa served up a pork loin stir fry seasoned with sea salt and liquid smoke and accompanied by a roasted garlic, eggplant and grape tomato puree. The smoky pork, sweet caramelized garlic and tart tomato flavors filled out the eggplant base and complemented the spicy arugula just perfectly. Melissa will attempt to reproduce this recipe upon request, but she says it's been too long since she made it to remember exactly what was done. Clearly a not-so-subtle suggestion that I get the blog posts up in a more timely fashion...

By far the most tastebud-jolting dish to come out of the kitchen last week was Melissa's spicy chicken pita pockets. Chicken thigh meat was marinated for a couple of hours with a Mexican chili powder mix, dried chili flakes, crushed garlic cloves and lemon juice, then pan fried and stuffed into halved pita bread with a fresh salsa made of tomatoes, basil and jalapeno peppers (all from our garden) with a bit of lemon juice and some tasty Australian olive oil. The jalapeno peppers we grew were hotter than we expected, and the whole thing snuck up on us like a mouthful of blowtorch. When the 2007 Villa Maria Riesling (Marlborough, NZ) we had with dinner failed to cool us down, we resorted to a glass of whole milk. The flavor was Texalicious and the pepper-storm was, well, cathartic.

When our tongues were sufficiently cooled and the last tears were wiped from our eyes, we went back for more...

Dinner for Sixteen

2008-09-28T20:40:00.007-04:00

Last Friday we held a going away dinner for a friend and colleague of ours who will soon take up a new post as assistant professor of biochemistry at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. On a rainy night starting at about 7 pm, we packed sixteen people into our 400 sq ft apartment for a three-course dinner and a copious outpouring of wine and good wishes. Five hours and sixteen bottles of wine later, the last guests left well-fed and in good cheer.

Of course Melissa's careful planning and brilliant execution made the night a great success, and our only misdeed may have been sending off the guest of honor a little later (and possibly a little rougher around the edges) than he meant to be leaving town on the following day...

Here is Melissa's account:

Always up for a challenge I agreed to Matt's idea of hosting a farewell dinner for one of our friends who moved to Atlanta this weekend. That challenge was that Matt was inviting the entire floor in the building where he works - and their partners. In the end we had a guest list of 14 plus ourselves but it could have ended up much bigger.

So how do you cook a three course dinner for 16 people out of a 400 square foot apartment while a storm rages outside, blocking access to the only dining table? It's all in the planning:

Menu

Nibbles on arrival

Pita chips with curried hummus and tabouleh
Olives, artichoke hearts and pickled onions

First Course: Eggplant stuffed with spiced lamb on roasted capsicum with pomegranate dressing

Second Course: Angel hair pasta with a chicken and mushroom cream sauce

Dessert: Mixed berry and apple crumble.

Recipes

Both the Hummus and Tabouleh recipes have already been posted on Foodie Calls.

I made the hummus the night before and refrigerated it in the ramekins I planned to serve it in. The bulgar wheat was also cooked the night before, but the rest of the tabouleh ingredients were assembled a couple of hours before everyone arrived.

Pita Chips

Buy whole pita breads and split in half by gently running a knife between the two layers. Brush rough side with olive oil and crushed garlic. Bake in a 420oF oven for ~5 to 10 minutes until lightly browned. Let cool a little and then cut into wedges. This needs to be started around 15 minutes before people are due to arrive so the chips are a little warm and there is a wonderful toasted garlic aroma in the air to tickle their tastebuds.

Eggplant and lamb

This is a recipe from Cuisine Magazine that I'd made before. I exchanged the chickpeas for minced/ground lamb and added a few fennel seeds. If you can't get pomegranate molasses for the dressing just buy pure pomegranate juice and simmer it in a pan to reduce it to a syrup. It retains all of its tart flavours. I made 2.5x the recipe.

I made the lamb filling, pomegranate dressing and roasted the bell pepper/capsicum the night before. The eggplant slices need to be cooked on the day, but as I needed 16 slices grilled on each side, and I could only fit around 6 in the oven at a time I started cooking them on one side a couple of hours before everyone arrived. I cooked the eggplant on sheets of aluminium foil and once a batch was done flipped the eggplant to the uncooked side and lifted the foil with the eggplant on it and stacked it right on top of the last lot. This held in a lot of the heat and continued cooking so that around 1/2 hour after everyone had arrived and was comfortable all I had to do was transfer each foil layer back to the grill for around 5 minutes to brown the other side of the eggplant.

The roasted peppers and filling I reheated by nuking in the microwave (covered to keep all the moisture in). It took around 5 minutes to assemble each plate with a roast pepper half on bottom, eggplant wrapped around filling on top, finished with a dollop of Greek yogurt and a drizzle of pomegranate reduction. Amanda did the honours of passing out the plates, and by the time she'd finished with the first six, another six were on their way.

Pasta

3 lbs Mixed mushrooms - I used baby bello, portobello and oyster mushrooms
1 lb Skinless and boneless chicken thigh
1/2 lb Butter
1 cup light cream
1 tbsp Chicken stock paste
1 tbsp Dried tarragon
3 tbsp Dijon mustard
2 Sliced red onions
1 lb Arugula/Rocket leaves
32 oz Angel hair pasta

2 tbsp Cornstarch/cornflour to thicken

The night before, I sliced the mushrooms and the red onions and defrosted the chicken so they were ready to go. To cook I first filled a stock pot with warm water and put on the heat to boil the water. This is by far the most time consuming part of the recipe, as it can take up to 30 minutes for a large pot of water to reach a rolling boil. Then I crammed as many mushrooms as I could into a covered pot with a couple of sticks of butter (200 g) roughly chopped, and cooked over a low to medium heat. Every 5 minutes I'd check the mushrooms and try to get the uncooked ones to the top, and vice versa.

The mushrooms release a lot of moisture, and after ~15 minutes of cooking I added 1 tbsp of chicken stock paste and the tarragon to the mushrooms. While the mushrooms were cooking, I sliced the chicken into small thin pieces and got the onions cooking. In a large pan I fried the onions in a little olive oil till they were translucent, and then removed them from the pan. Next I added the chicken a fried till it was cooked through, then added back the onions and added the Dijon mustard. At this point if I had a pot or pan big enough, I would have mixed everything together and added the cream. Instead, I transferred some of the mushrooms to the pan with the chicken and onions and added cream to both the mushrooms in the pot and chicken in the pan, and simmered for a couple of minutes.

With the sauce almost done it was time to cook the pasta. This pasta is so thin it takes around 3-4 minutes to cook al dente. In fact, I was more worried about overcooking it to mush than it not being ready in time, so I left it to the very last minute to cook. Back to the chicken and mushrooms, I thickened the sauce with a paste of cornflour and a little cream. Add a little at a time, since it takes around 30 seconds for the sauce to thicken after addition to a simmering sauce. Stop adding cornflour when you have the consistency you desire. I then combined both the pot of mushrooms and the pan of sauce which just fit in the pan. Drain the pasta as soon as its al dente.

To serve I placed a small handful of arugula at the bottom of each dish, topped with a tong full of pasta and spooned the mushroom, chicken mixture on top.

Berry, apple crumble

Fruit filling
8 granny smith apples
1 lb of frozen mixed berries
1/2 cup of sugar
1 tbsp of ground cinnamon
Topping
2 cups of rolled oats
1 cup of dark brown sugar
1/2 lb of butter
2 tbsp of ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp of ground allspice
1/2 tsp of ground nutmeg
To serve
Greek yogurt
Mint sprigs

The previous night I peeled and diced the apples into large chunks and placed in a ziplock bag with a little lemon juice to stop the pieces going brown. Before everyone arrived I scattered the mixed berries, apple, sugar and cinnamon into two casserole dishes with lids and set aside. I also put all the topping ingredients into the kitchen aid mixer so the butter could soften and it was ready to mix just before I needed it. Just before I started preparing the chicken, I put the covered dishes with fruit in the oven at 380oF to let the fruit stew in its own juices. Around 10 minutes before everyone was ready for dessert I started the mixer to combine the butter and oats etc and removed the fruit from the oven. I topped the stewed fruit with a layer of topping and put back in to the oven uncovered to get the topping nicely toasted (~10 minutes). To serve I topped each portion with a dollop of Greek yogurt and a small mint sprig.

A Pastry Experiment; Lamb Shank with Asparagus; Moussaka of Leftovers

2008-09-24T20:38:00.026-04:00

So last Friday Melissa's lab hosted the DFCI Dana 14 happy hour. Never one to pass up an opportunity to feed people, Melissa made homemade cheese puffs for the event. She has been wanting to try this for some time, and after a bit of research she set out to try the recipe she liked best...

They came out just beautifully, light and fluffy with the soft flavor of Gruyere cheese. Melissa stuffed the ones we had at home Thursday night with a salmon cream cheese sauce, chopped asparagus and fennel leaf. I see great things on the horizon with her pastry-type experiments. It took everything I had not to get up in the middle of the night and gorge on the cheese puffs meant for the happy hour.

Saturday was a big day out: food and wine shopping in the morning, a quick stop in the lab to tend to our cell cultures, then a light lunch at home. Some soba noodles with caramelized onions, bacon (mmmmmm... bacon...) and chopped asparagus.

We had little time to dawdle over lunch since we were due at Jillian's for bowling with about a dozen other people in celebration of a birthday. After a nice dinner at Eastern Standard in Kenmore Square we went down to the Roxy for what turned out to be a great night of music and open bar. My sister-in-law Casey's younger sister Kelly was in town with her company Rock Star Karaoke NYC (that's karaoke with a live band and backup singers) to play a private event at the club. This thing was enormous. A German biotech company rented out all three floors of the city's biggest dance club and threw open the bar(s) for what had to have been well over a thousand people. Although it was a private event, we got in as guests of the band and partied with them after the show. Sweet. See Evan's post from the day for some pics.

I ended up having quite a late day at the lab Sunday while Melissa recovered from Saturday's shenanigans in front of the television. Somewhere between movies inspiration struck, and by the time I got home she had made a roast lamb shank with red wine, tomato and onion sauce, blanched asparagus and lima beans.

The lamb was so tender it fell off the bone at the mere sight of a fork, and the meat just melted in your mouth. You have to cook it long and slow and turn it with love (see Melissa's recipes and notes below). We had a Trader Joe's La Boca cabernet with this dish (it was also in the lamb) that turned out to be really nice for $4 (seriously, $4). Not too shabby.

Finally, Monday's moussaka. We had been given some baby eggplants from a local farm recently, so Melissa made a nice moussaka using the eggplants, some pepper jack cheese we had in the freezer and the leftovers from the lamb shank dinner.

You can't go wrong with those ingredients, really. It was a rich and tasty dish with subtle reminders of the previous night's dinner lamb shank. Gotta love the continuity...

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Melissa's Recipes and Notes

Lamb Shanks

1 large or 2 small lamb shanks
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 head of garlic
1 tbsp of dijon mustard
1/2 cup of red wine
1 red onion
1 tsp of salt
1 tbsp of whole black peppercorns
1/2 cup of water
A couple of sprigs of rosemary
4 dried bayleaves

Place lambshanks into large casserole dish. Pulse tomatoes in a blender to chop tomatoes finely. Slice onion into half rings. Peel all the cloves in a head of garlic. Combine all ingredients and pour over lambshanks. Make sure the liquid is around half way up the side of the casserole dish. Bake covered at 380oF for 3 hours or more while turning shanks every hour or so. Around an hour before you intend to serve uncover the shanks to allow the liquid in the dish to evaporate to leave a thick sauce. Remove bayleaves before serving.

Lima beans - previously described

Asparagus

Break off stems that are woody at the bottom of the spears and place in a casserole dish. Blanch by pouring enough boiling water over the asparagus spears to fill the casserole dish. Cover and let sit for around 10 minutes. Drain and coat with parmesan cheese and freshly ground pepper.

Moussaka

There were quite a bit of leftovers from the lamb dish and I was secretly hoping Matt might have another late night in the lab and I could have a second meal out of them. What was left was really only enough for one, so when Matt came home at a normal hour I came up with a quick and easy moussaka-like recipe to finish them off. Howell and Melinda had given Matt some small eggplants and we had some pepperjack cheese left over from a Dana14 Happy Hour. Add in a few grape tomatoes, some basil leaves and a pepper from the plants outside and we had a meal on our hands.

3 baby eggplants
Salt
Olive oil
~1/2 to 3/4 cup of cooked lima beans
~10 large basil leaves
~6 asparagus spears - cooked
~6 grape tomatoes
1 small mild pepper
~1/2 cup of sauce and lamb pieces from lamb shanks
1/2 cup of pepperjack cheese cubes

Slice baby eggplants longways, salt and drizzle with olive oil. Grill/Broil in oven and flip when each side is golden brown. When eggplants are nicely brown and all the sponginess is gone they're ready. Make layers of ingredients in a small casserole dish. Here's the order I laid down the ingredients Cover the bottom of a small casserole dish with lima beans. Then add ~5 whole basil leaves. Make a layer of eggplant slices using half of the eggplant. Cover with sauce from lamb shanks. Chop asparagus spears and pepper together and sprinkle over sauce. Half grape tomatoes and put on top of asparagus. Cover with rest of basil leaves. Throw in cheese cubes and cover with the rest of the eggplant slices. Put lid on dish and microwave for 5 minutes. Remove cover and sprinkle with a little parmesan cheese and put in 400oF oven uncovered until parmesan cheese is melted and a little crispy (~5 minutes)

Cabbage Lovers Rejoice...

2008-09-18T19:27:00.019-04:00

... or: "Fun With Cabbage".

Two weeks since our last post... Rest assured we have been eating, but with a long weekend trip to Texas to see the Call family (enchiladas and margaritas galore) and lots of nights out here in Boston, we haven't had much to put up.

Speaking of family, check out these photos my folks snapped of us with the newest member of the Call family, Betsy Ruth Call (2 mo) with her older brother Beckett (3 yr) and the proud parents Brian and Casey Call.

Now to the food:

Three recent meals reflect Melissa's versatility with a simple and humble ingredient: cabbage. Now I was never a huge fan of cabbage, although I have consumed my fair share of coleslaw growing up in the south. And what the Germans do to cabbage borders on offensive. But since knowing Melissa I have met quite a few cabbage-based dishes that went down quite well -- cabbage stir fry, spicy Asian-inspired cabbage soup, it's even been used in omelets. These are not vegetarian dishes, but the methods for preparing the cabbage can easily be adapted to meatless ingredients. (By the way, all three dishes were made using just one head of cabbage.)

First, a great example of the Asian style cabbage dish: chopped cabbage and soba (Japanese buckwheat noodles) stir fried with pork tenderloin and sambal oelek chili paste. Not fancy, just really tasty and full of whole grain goodness; topped off with a smattering of uncooked cabbage for a bit of crunch. As usual, a gewurztraminer is our choice with spicy Asian-style foods. Cono Sur "Vision" gewurz (2007, Casablanca Valley, Chile) is our current favorite for under $20.

The second dish was an inspired combination that came out fantastically well: cabbage and lima beans with bacon, caramelized onions and red capsicum (bell pepper). Cabbage and lima beans are both ingredients that strike fear into the hearts many a finicky American child, but my biases were jettisoned a long time ago when it came to trusting Melissa's culinary judgement. The flavors in this dish were beautifully melded, largely because of the way Melissa cooked it all. The lima beans take around and hour or more to cook, so they were boiling away long before the rest of the dish was prepared. Around 30 minutes prior to the lima beans being finished the onions were caramelized in a slather of olive oil. The bacon went in next and slow cooked until done, and slices of capsicum were added just prior to serving. The cabbage was wilted by steaming over the lima beans just as they were finishing. Layer upon layer to serve and washed down with a Sam Adams Light. Yum.

As good as that dish was, the last one was really the coup de grace. A simple beef stir fry made with sambal oelek and red onions, with fresh arugula from the garden (it grew like mad while we were gone), accompanied Melissa's roasted cabbage. She sliced up the remaining cabbage in thick (about 1 inch) slices and roasted them in a roasting pan with olive oil and a bit of sea salt. The cabbage softened to a perfect consistency and the caramelized edges were smoky and just a little sweet. And it's visually stunning. Wow. Cabbage -- who knew? A 2007 Mondavi Private Selection chardonnay (CA) did the trick with this dish. Crisp and fruity with very subtle oak.

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A quick note on a nice wine we had while comfortably accommodated at Brian and Casey's beautiful new home in Fort Worth, Texas. I have met a number of inexpensive red blends from California that I have really enjoyed (think Red Truck). This Bordeaux-style blend from Napa Valley was really nice: Bangin' Red from Crescendo Hills Winery. Not sure what year it was, but I did read the label and I remember it had cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, malbec, zinfandel and probably some petit verdot. (Aside from not being made in Bordeaux, the inclusion of zinfandel grapes keeps it from being a true Bordeaux blend). Nice ripe berries, vanilla and spices on the nose and in the mouth; not particularly complex, but a great red for about $10.

Try it out if you spot it in your bottle store...

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Melissa's recipes

Stir fried noodles with pork and cabbage

250g Pork tenderloin
1/4 cup of soy sauce
1 tsp of sambal oelek (or other chilli paste)
1 tbsp of sesame seed oil
Soba noodles
1/4 large cabbage
1/4 cup of rice wine vinegar
1/4 cup of water

Slice pork into thin strips
Marinate in Soy Sauce, Sambal Oelek and sesame seed oil.
Boil Soba noodles together with cabbage in a pot of water
Stir fry Pork in hot pan with a little olive oil (saving the marinade juices for later)
Drain noodles and cabbage and add to frying pan
Add in marinade, rice wine vinegar and water to the hot fry pan so it coats the noodles, cabbage and soba. Let it boil off some steam for around a minute to reduce the liquid and make sure any pork juices are cooked.

Cabbage and lima beans with bacon

1 cup of lima beans
1/2 red onion
4 rashers of bacon
1/4 cabbage
1 red capsicum (bell pepper)

The lima beans take around and hour or more to cook unless you soak them overnight in cold water or soak them in hot water for an hour or two before cooking. I can never plan that far in advance so I boil them for around an hour at 20 minutes. While the lima beans are cooking, slice the onion into half rings and slow saute in olive oil until they're soft and add chopped bacon to the pan. Continue to cook on low to medium heat until the onions are fully caramelized and the bacon rendered and chewy. Add the sliced red capsicum to the frying pan a minute or two before serving and toss with the onions and bacon. Steam the cabbage over the lima beans in a bamboo steamer for 5 minutes. (alternatively boil in a little water for ~10 minutes). Serve the cabbage on the bottom, then lima beans, topped with the onion/bacon/capsicum mixture.

Sliced flank steak with roasted cabbage

500g of flank steak
1/4 cup of soy sauce
1 tsp of sambal oelek (or other chilli paste)
1 tsp of sesame seed oil
1/2 red onion
couple of handfuls of arugula (rocket)
1/2 a cabbage
Olive oil

Slice cabbage in 1 inch thick slices leaving stem intact. The stem keeps all the leave together so you can roast pieces of cabbage rather than "leaves" of cabbage. Brush with olive oil and season with salt. Roast in a 400oF oven for around an hour. Turn during cooking when each side is a nice dark brown. The dark brown parts are not bitter but instead become wonderfully sweet and chewy like roasted onions. Slice the flank steak thinly and marinate in the soy sauce, sambal oelek and sesame seed oil for ~20 minutes. In a hot/medium fry pan saute sliced onions until almost translucent. Turn up the heat and add sliced beef (draining off excess marinade before adding meat to pan). Quickly stir fry until meat is seared all over. Serve on a bed of arugula with roasted cabbage.

Filet Mignon with Broccolini; Crepes Flambe

2008-09-03T21:47:00.006-04:00

Despite the Monday holiday Melissa and I both worked a full day in the lab -- we both need to keep things moving ahead right now, and we were happy to do it. In the evening we settled in to a dinner of filet mignon with a medley of mushrooms in a white wine and dijon mustard sauce, and steamed broccolini (often sold as broccoli rabe). Melissa's filet mignon is always incredible. The beef tenderloin we get from BJs wholesale club is high quality, and we get a great price by buying a whole tenderloin and carving it up and freezing it at home. Just as important as the quality of the meat, though, is the way Melissa cooks it. After seasoning with sea salt and lots of coarse cracked peppercorns, she uses a very hot cast-iron griddle pan to sear the meat and seal in the juices, then serves it up very rare. And the mushrooms -- yumm... White wine and dijon mustard form the base of the sauce, with tarragon and a little chicken stock powder for seasoning. A 2006 Yellowtail Reserve Shiraz (AU) accompanied this dish.

Amanda showed up halfway through dinner to drop off some Gourmet magazines she thought we might want, and she got to share in the mushroom bounty. Even more exciting were the crepes Melissa decided to make for dessert. We had taken some great pics and videos of Melissa making these before, but somehow I managed to lose the files after deleting them from the camera disk. So I'm taking this opportunity to post some fresh photos. The basic crepe batter is one egg with 3/4 cup of flour and milk until the right consistency is reached. It should still be very liquid but viscous. She usually flavors the batter with a little sugar and vanilla. One ladle goes into this small non-stick pan on medium-high heat -- the flip requires a bit of finesse, but as long as the pan was well buttered it won't stick.

The really cool part is the flambe. We like a mixture of Apple Jack apple brandy with sugar that was pre-dissolved with a little water in the microwave. Abot 1/4 cup goes into the pan with a generous pat of butter, and light it up. It usually requires multiple lights to burn off most of the alcohol, but what is left behind is a syrupy, buttery, candied-brandy flavor that makes an awesome dessert.

Some marry into money, but I married into a much tastier kind of riches...

Pork and Papaya Stir Fry; Grilled Snapper; Shrimp Quesadilla

2008-09-03T20:30:00.007-04:00

As I wrote up the last post, Melissa was closing the deal on the mystery ingredients Evan brought the previous Saturday. She used the butternut squash that night, but the papayas weren't ripe yet. So last Wednesday she whipped together the most interesting stir fry she has made yet. Sliced pork tenderloin was seasoned with soy sauce, cracked pepper and a drop of liquid smoke, then pan fried and served with chopped papaya and arugula over rice. The fruit provided a great contrast to the savory pork, and the ground up papaya seeds were used as a garnish -- the slightly spicy flavor of the seeds nicely connected the fresh fruit with the pepper in the pork. It all went very well with a bottle of 2007 Ku De Ta Sauvignon Blanc (Casablanca Valley, Chile).

Thursday we went to an open house at the Sam Adams Brewery here in Boston. They brought out the Oktoberfest beers and served sausages and sauerkraut. It was a full-on Oktoberfest event -- Bavarian-looking oompa band and all -- and a very nice night.

Saturday we had a few people around for a nice summer dinner at our place, and Melissa combined some of her best recent ideas to make a fresh and delicious dish. Wild red snapper fillets were grilled with sea salt, pepper and butter, and served with peach salsa, grilled polenta and arugula. We had a 2006 Xplorador Chardonnay (Central Valley, Chile) and some fantastic weather with our dinner out on the patio.

I had picked up some huge shrimp when I bought the snapper for Saturday dinner, but the snapper fillets were so large that Melissa didn't use them that night. So they made their appearance for Sunday dinner -- pan fried with butter and garlic and served with cheese quesadillas. That salsa contains the first jalapeno peppers to come off our pepper plant in the garden; a little late in the summer, but very spicy nonetheless.

It was a tasty week...

Stuffed Butternut Squash; Steak Tips Curry

2008-08-27T20:00:00.015-04:00

Last Friday we had a spontaneous gathering of people we picked up at my department happy hour back to our place for wine and nibbles. Melissa and I have been discussing planning a dinner party soon (it's been a while since we did one that was really planned out with three or four courses and matched wines and all), but we just hadn't gotten ourselves together enough to get the ball rolling. So this temporarily satisfied the desire to gather our friends around us to eat and drink...

Melissa put together a nice plate of nibbles for the beautiful evening we spent mostly out on the patio. Double cream brie, drunken goat cheese (soaked in red wine), a little left over cambozola and a great emmenthaler; seasoned cherry tomatoes; smoked salmon with cracked pepper; arugula from the garden and fresh bread. Just the thing after some not-so-impressive bar snacks at happy hour.

Before hatching this plan for Friday evening, we had arranged to have Evan around on Saturday night for dinner and drinks. Melissa had issued him a challenge to bring a mystery ingredient upon which she would subsequently base the evening's dinner. Evan rose to the challenge and showed up with a large butternut squash and two green papayas. The papayas weren't really ready to eat (we all had to look up how to tell when they're ripe), but the squash was immediately put to use in a dish that seemed to take Melissa no time at all to formulate.

Mel has used butternut squash roasted and mashed in Thanksgiving dinners, pan roasted in large chunks as part of a roast vegetable medley, and in an excruciatingly fantastic butternut squash soup. This time she decided to roast and stuff it. First she halved, cleaned and roasted it flesh-side down in a roasting pan with some olive oil until it softened all the way through. In the meantime, she made a pork mince in the food processor with pork tenderloin, cumin, fennel seeds and half a tomato. A quarter onion was chopped and sauteed, then the pork mince and fresh chopped fennel (leaves and stem) were cooked together with the onions in the same pan. This mixture was spooned into the squash bowl and the whole thing was put back into the oven for about another half hour.

Melissa topped it off with crunchy croutons she made from some frozen bread pan-fried in butter, and a dollop of Fage Greek yogurt. I've mentioned this before, but this stuff is completely fat free and tastes wonderful -- look for it in your supermarket. Garnished with fennel frond and served up as open-face quarters. The squash was so well roasted you could almost eat the skin without even noticing, and the seasoned pork stuffing with Greek yogurt on top was rich with the aromatic fennel flavor. The croutons were a nice touch. We had a 2005 Jovly Vouvray Chenin Blanc with this dish, and the floral and honey notes of the off-dry wine worked out quite well with the aromatic and ever-so-slightly spicy character of the stuffed squash. After we finished this bottle, we went to a 2006 Monkey Bay Unoaked Chardonny (Marlborough, NZ) which, while it was entirely different from the chenin blanc (less floral and more fruity with peach and citrus notes), also worked quite well with the dish.

While divvying up the remains for second servings, Melissa decided on a better presentation for this dish:

Monday we had what I think was the best beef curry that has ever come out of our kitchen. Steak tips were chopped, coated in curry spice mix (see Melissa's approach to curry mix in a previous post) and seared to seal in the flavor, then stewed in a tomato base with garlic, fennel seeds and finely chopped almonds. Pretty simple (not that I could have come up with it), but the flavor was really special. Melissa says it was the way she made the tomato curry base: she cooked down a can of diced tomatoes (after she pureed them) in the pan she had used to sear the meat, with the slivered garlic and more curry spices, allowing the mixture to reduce dramatically and caramelize slightly on the bottom. Then the meat, some potatoes and extra water is added back and the entire stew was simmered until it became melt in the mouth tender. To this she added the almonds and a handful of fresh parsley just before plating it with some jasmine rice.

We always like to have a nice aromatic wine with Indian-inspired dishes, and this time it was a 2005 Sacred Hill Whitecliff Riesling from Marlborough, NZ. They do a lot of things right in Marlborough...

Steak Tips with Grilled Polenta; Tabouleh, Hummus and Callafels

2008-08-21T19:13:00.013-04:00

Monday night Melissa made judicious use of the leftover polenta from Sunday's dish to form the base of a steak tips and roasted veggies dish. The dry rub that seasoned the steak consisted of onion powder, cayenne pepper, sea salt and dried thyme. Mel put the nonstick roasting pan on the grill outside and cooked the meat right in the pan, along with cherry tomatoes, whole garlic heads and quatered yellow onions doused in olive oil. The tomatos reduced to tart, concentrated little jewels, and the garlic and onions caramelized to perfection. She served the steak and veg on a wedge of grilled polenta and a bed of spicy arugula fresh from our little urban patch of dirt outside -- we're eating those greens as much as we can now that their days are numbered as the weather cools down. This dish was great with a Smuttynose Summer Weizen (Portsmouth, NH).

Last night we had a bit of a delay before getting dinner started, since we came home to the smell of gas in the basement level of our building. While I went back and forth about who to call, Melissa dialed 911 like a rational human being. The fire department responded in great time and shut off the gas to the laundry room, where the leak was located. We had locked out the cat and left the building as soon as the call was made, but apparently nobody else in the building was aware of what was going on below...

When all was clear we settled back into our apartment and Melissa made tabouleh using the coarse bulgar wheat she had bought on the way home, along with a variation on falafel using lentils and spinach as a base instead of beans (we officially dubbed this "Callafel" last night). The hummus made the dish -- Melissa used a little bit of curry mix in the hummus, something I've never tasted before but it was really fantastic with the Middle Eastern flavors on the plate.

A bottle of Matariki "Aspire" Sauvignon Blanc (2006; Hawke's Bay, NZ) rounded out the dinner...

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Melissa's Recipes and Notes

Tabouleh

½ cup of bulgur wheat
1 cup of water
½ tsp of salt
½ tomato diced
1/3 onion diced
1 large handful of parsley - chopped
2 tbsp of lemon juice

In pot add bulgur wheat, water and salt and bring to a boil. Turn down heat to low and cover saucepan for 20 minutes in which time bulgur wheat will absorb water. Once cooked I found the bulgur wheat quite gluey so I placed it in a colander and gave it a quick rinse with cold water to lighten it up. Add rest of ingredients to cooled wheat to finish the dish.

"Callafels"

Falafels are typically made using either fava beans or chickpeas. I like to make mine with lentils and spinach, so technically they’re not falafels, but I think the general idea is the same. Matt suggested I call them Callafels and I think I might just do that from now on.

½ cup of lentils
Salted water to boil lentils
½ tsp of coriander seeds
1 tsp of peppercorns
1 tbsp of cumin
1 tsp of salt
¼ onion
1/3 lb of spinach
2 tbsp of breadcrumbs for the mixture
1 egg
~1/2 cup of breadcrumbs to coat the patties
Olive oil

Boil lentils in large volume of water until cooked (~20 minutes). In food processor grind coriander seeds and peppercorns to fine meal. Add ground cumin, salt, onion and uncooked spinach and puree. Add ¾ of cooked lentils to food processor and puree with spices and spinach. Remove ingredients from blender and mix in remaining ¼ of whole cooked lentils. The whole lentils give the patties texture. Add egg and 2 tbsp of breadcrumbs. Form the moist mixture into patties and coat in breadcrumbs before frying in a non-stick pan with a little olive oil.

Hummus

½ can of chickpeas
1 tsp of sesame seeds
1 small garlic clove
2 tbsp of olive oil
1 tsp of hot curry powder
1 tbsp of lemon juice

Hummus is usually made with Tahini which is a sesame seed paste. While in New Zealand I found I could only buy tahini in large 1 lb tubs which, while it kept for a long time, was far too much for me to use the odd time I decided to make hummus. So instead I just keep sesame seeds around (which can be used for other things) to add the sesame flavour and add a bit of olive oil to smooth the consistency of the hummus. If you like it chunky or low fat the olive oil can be omitted. The method is easy, put all the ingredients into a blender and puree to the desired consistency. If you’re a fan of the plethora of hummus flavours you can find at your local supermarket exchange the curry powder for things like sun dried tomatoes or oven roasted garlic to make a better fresher tasting version of what you buy at the supermarket and at a fraction of the cost.

Pepper Smoked Prawns and Oysters with Grilled Polenta and Peach Salsa

2008-08-17T20:21:00.005-04:00

This week we have failed to post because we really haven't had much to post. Late days in the lab for one or both of us have prevented us from having much in the way of proper dinners at home. We did have a couple of interesting bits to post (homemade pizza and crepes, on different nights) that I will not expound on further since I managed to lose the photos through some bone-headed techno-mistake that I still do not completely understand. Please accept our apologies for that tease, but rather than reconsruct the experiments without photo documentation, rest assured that we will repeat the dishes and post at a later date.

With that confession out of the way, I have to say that tonight's culinary marvel deserves a solo post anyway. We had the most spectacular weather in Boston today -- after weeks of intermittent clouds and thunderstorms, today was in the upper 70's and sunny; warm in the sun and delightful in the shade. We hit the gym at around 10 am (Sunday gymming is unusual for us), then enjoyed a relaxed coffee out on the patio before taking a nice walk through the Public Gardens. We ended up at a Charles Street photo gallery that we've been wanting to check out this week (the aerial landscapes from John Griebsch and the "drift" seascapes from David Burdeny are simply awesome).

On the way back home we parted company so I could put in a few unavoidable hours in the lab, and Melissa hit the supermarket with summer grilling on the brain. She had hatched a plan that involved a half-dozen live east coast oysters, a few giant prawns, a bag of cornmeal and a big handful of dried black peppercorns.

To back up a bit: after a show we saw on the Food Network a few years ago, we started using pepper-smoking as a way to add a little twist to our shellfish on the grill, and while our neighbors bristle at the teargas-like effect of the smoke that drifts in through their windows, we fell in love with the technique. Simply soak a large handful of black peppercorns in water for a few minutes, then drain and pack them into a foil pouch with some holes poked in it. Throw that directly onto the flame for the final few minutes of cooking prawns on the grill, and the flavor is divine. For the oysters, we shucked them fresh at home, then put the half-shells on the upper rack (or simply off-heat on the main rack) for just a minute or two to soak up the pepper smoke without actually cooking them. Here's a photo taken just after the heat was turned off (see polenta on the right and the peppercorn-pouch on the lower left):

Melissa served the shellfish on slices of grilled polenta with fresh arugula and a variation on the peach salsa that she debuted a little more than a month ago with grilled tilapia. The polenta was prepared with arugula and parmesan cheese, and would be a great vegetarian dish without the clam base she used when making up the cornmeal-based mixture (recipes coming soon).

The peach salsa is so fresh and clean-tasting -- it's quickly becoming a defining flavor of our summer grill. In this incarnation Melissa used fresh peach, yellow bell-pepper (capsicum), grape tomatoes, cilantro, basil, lemon juice and sea salt. The polenta mixture was poured into a spring-form pan and chilled for about an hour before being sliced into pie-shaped pieces and thrown onto the grill for some lines and a great pepper-smoked flavor.

We had a great wine with this dish. We don't often buy French wines for ourselves, since neither of us knows much about them and they are generally expensive enough that scattershot-purchases are dauntingly risky. Nevertheless, we occasionally receive a good bottle from a dinner-party guest, and this one came from our good friends Etienne and Angelique, who know a thing or two about French wines. The 2004 Coudoulet de Beaucastel Cote du Rhone Blanc paired beautifully with this dish. Melissa and I had each independently decided that we should have this bottle with tonight's dinner, although neither of us had read the notes on the label, stating that the "flowery, peachy nose and round, rich and full bodied structure"..."goes particularly well with fish dishes and other traditional provencal specialties." They were right about that.

We lingered long on the patio after out plates were clean, enjoying the wine and watching the sun go down on what at this time of year has to be considered one of the precious few perfect-weather days remaining in our New England summer season...

Spiced Pork Patty with Beets, Leeks and Eggplant; Olympic Chinese Food

2008-08-09T15:33:00.007-04:00

Last Thursday night Melissa really outdid herself with one of her most beautiful original dishes yet. She was headed to the grocery store on the way home from the lab, knowing that I would be an hour or two behind, when she noticed an outdoor farmers' market set in Brigham Circle. We hadn't been aware of this until very recently, but it's apparently out there every Thursday during the summer months. As she often does, Melissa just bought what looked good and then formulated a plan based on some or all of the new ingredients.

In this case what caught her eye were some really nice looking beets, leeks and eggplant. Inspired by the fresh produce, the dish she put together was spiced pork patties and eggplant on a bed of arugula, with a relish of sauteed leeks and beets. The relish absolutely made the dish, both in terms of presentation and flavor. The beets and leeks were finely chopped and sauteed together with garlic and olive oil, with a splash of balsamic vinegar added for a bit of a kick. I love beets when they are roasted or otherwise caramelized -- what a great mixture of sweet and savory. The rich green arugula and deep red beets made for a visually impressive contrast, and the yogurt and fennel garnish topped it off in style.

Friday we decided to hang out at home to watch the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics from Beijing. Evan, Amanda and Jason joined us and Melissa made some Chinese food for the occasion.

Who doesn't love scallion pancakes? Having never made them before, Melissa decided to give it a stab and they came out really well. She couldn't find any scallions at the supermarket, so she used leeks instead, and none of us even noticed the difference until she mentioned it. The tortilla-like flattened dough was pan-fried to a crispy, flaky golden brown with a little chewy bit left in the center: perfect with the ginger dipping sauce.

After that intro we had a super-tasty beef (tenderloin) stir fry with chinese broccoli. The meat was so good that all it needed was a little soy sauce and pepper and a quick splash around the fry-pan.

Dessert, as it so often is for us, was an afterthought. Nonetheless, Melissa pulled off a pineapple and mango crumble with toasted coconut and a yogurt topping. As long as we keep a bit of frozen fruit around, she can work wonders in very short order. Her recipes are found below...

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Recipes and Notes

Pork patties on eggplant with diced beets and leeks

5 beets
2 inches of leek
5 cloves of garlic
olive oil
1 tbsp of balsamic vinegar
salt

4 slices of eggplant (~1 cm thick)
salt
olive oil

1 pork tenderloin steak
3 cloves of garlic
½ tsp of coriander seeds
½ tsp of fennel seeds
¼ tsp of nutmeg
¼ tsp of celery seeds
½ tsp of salt
½ tsp of pepper corns
2 feathery fennel leaves
a few sprigs of parsley

Yogurt and fennel leaves for garnish

Dice beets into small pieces. Heat olive oil in a pan, and when hot toss diced beets to cook and brown. Quarter lengthwise and slice leeks crosswise. Finely dice garlic and add leeks and garlic to pan with beets. Cook together until around half of the leek slices and garlic have turned golden brown. Add a splash of balsamic vinegar and continue frying until most of the liquid has evapourated while constantly tossing ingredients.

Salt eggplant slices and coat with olive oil. Grill/broil in oven until each side is golden brown

Combine all herbs and spices small foodprocessor and grind. Cube pork steak and add to food processor to make ground meat/mince with spice/herb mix. Form pork into patties and steam for ~10 minutes in bamboo steamer. Alternatively pan fry in olive oil.

To serve, put 2 eggplant slices on a plate and top with a pork pattie. Top this with the diced beet and leek mixture. Follow with a dollop of plain unsweetened yogurt and garnish with a feathery fennel leaf.

Olympic Chinese Dinner

When I embarked off to the supermarket I had visions of dumplings, steamed pork buns, and other Chinese goodies on my mind. The best place to find these things is at Super88, but there isn’t one within walking distance and I didn’t have much time to prepare. Alas, while the Prudential Shaws is pretty well stocked supermarket they didn’t have any frozen dumplings ready to steam. In fact they didn’t really have any sort of dim sum type stuff which I found kind of surprising. Not a problem, I can make my own stuffing, just point me in the direction of dumpling wrappers…. Hmm no wrappers either. I’ve thought about making my own in the past, but from what I’ve read online they need a special flour and are fairly tricky to get right. So I was starting to think this whole Chinese thing might have to be dropped, when scallion pancakes came to mind. They’re not something I’d encountered in NZ, but here they’re pretty popular from Chinese Takeaways. They’re not like a flour, egg and milk type pancake though, more like a thin bread dough. A phone call to Matt for a general idea about how they’re made and I was set. Scallions are spring onions (or green onions) so off to the produce section to pick some up. Can you believe it, Shaws is out of them too! But all is not lost. Leeks are very similar in taste once cooked and I already had some of those from the Farmers Market. All I needed was some canola oil as I suspected olive oil might be a little overpowering in this dish.

The recipe I went by is at this URL

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ming-tsai/scallion-pancakes-with-ginger-dipping-sauce-recipe/index.html

However I made a couple of changes. Firstly the scallions obviously: The leeks were finely chopped and I fried them in a little oil first till they were a little browned to give them a head start in the cooking process.

Second, the recipe implies that you coat the pancake with ½ cup of oil. I tried slathering it on quite thickly but I still couldn’t get more than around ¼ cup onto the dough. And then when I rolled the dough and twisted it I got a goopy mess and couldn’t get the dough to stick together to make an intact pancake. I had to add more flour into it to rescue the dough. I think a light brushing of oil would be fine here, but the recipe could do with some clarification in this regard. I wouldn’t skip oiling the dough altogether though as the thin layers of oil are important to keep the pancake flaky. I suspect you’re meant to brush the oil on lightly and use the left over oil for the frying process. Nevertheless they turned out beautifully. The dipping sauce was also great. I replaced the scallions here with some chopped garlic chives from the garden and the vinegar I used was rice wine vinegar.

Beef Stir Fry

This was an extremely simple recipe. It went down well, but it was not really my skill in cooking it. It was more to do with the eye fillet/tenderloin beef I used in the dish. We buy a whole eye fillet each time we go to BJs (our local wholesale store) so I makes it much more cost effective that buying small amounts at the supermarket, ie ~$9 per pound rather than $30 per pound at the supermarket. So unless you too buy your meat in bulk I suggest using something like sirloin or rump for this dish.

1 lb of eye fillet beef
1 onion
400g of mushrooms
1 lb of Kai Lan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kai-lan)
¼ cup light soy sauce
1 tsp of sambal olek
1/8 cup of rice wine vinegar

1 cup of jasmine rice
1 ½ cups of water

Cook rice as per instructions on packet. Briefly simmer rice in water for 20 minutes and cover for ten minutes before serving.

In steamer cook kai lan (or other type of green vegetable such as bok choy, or any kind of cale). ~6 minutes until wilted

Slice beef thinly. In bowl marinate with soy sauce, sambal olek (or any other type of chilli paste) and vinegar for around 30 minutes. Slice onions into half rings and mushrooms. In hot pan with a little oil fry mushroom and onions until onions are a little browned. While pan is hot drain beef reserving marinade and add beef strips to pan to flash fry. The more tender the cut the more rare the meat can be cooked. For the eye fillet I flash fried it until there was no red on the surface of the meat. While the pan is still hot toss in the marinade so it steams up and starts bubbling (~30secs). Remove from heat and mix in steamed vegetables.

Serve meat and vegetable mix on rice.

Pineapple Mango Crumble

For the filling

3 cups of frozen cubed pineapple and mango
½ cup of coconut
½ bicardi rum
1cm of mined fresh ginger root
2 tbsp of sugar

For the topping,

50 g butter
100g of whole almonds
3 tbsp of sugar
2 tbsp of lemon juice
¼ cup of coconut
~1/4 cup of flour (just enough to make the topping crumbly)

In a casserole dish mix all filling ingredients and toss. There’s no need to defrost the pineapple or mango. In a food processor whir up butter, almonds, sugar and lemon juice to make a paste. Rub in coconut and flour to make a crumble to top the filling in the casserole dish. Cook in a 180oC oven for 30-45 minutes. To tell when its done I go by smell, the toasty almonds and pineapple aromas will intensify as the cooking process nears an end. The top will also go a nice golden colour. I served the crumble in bowls with a little dollop of FAGE 0% greek-style strained yogurt on top and a little sprig of mint or fennel. Matt can’t believe the yogurt doesn’t have fat in it. Actually neither can I, but that’s what it says on the label… I prefer it to cream because of the tang it has.

Corn Fritters, Beef Curry and Thai Risotto

2008-08-05T20:08:00.010-04:00

This last week has been a bit busy with long work hours and a great weekend trip for Melissa's Diplomacy tournament on Long Island. We've got three great dishes to report on, but first a bit about our weekend.

Friday afternoon we drove down to Bridgeport, Connecticut to catch the Bridgeport-Port Jefferson Ferry over to Long Island. The Woodring residence in beautiful Setauket, Long Island is the site of Husky-Con, an annual tournament of the war-strategy board game Diplomacy, of which Melissa is a world-renowned practitioner. And what an impressive venue. The Woodrings' three-story house sits on two acres of prime real estate with a beautiful view over Long Island Sound and a private dock at the intersection of Conscience Bay and Port Jefferson Harbor. While the diplomacy players diplomed late into the night, us non-gamers (collectively referred to as the "diplomacy wives" since most players are male) enjoyed the view, the wine and the inviting water. Don, Graham and Conrad are unbelievably gracious hosts, cooking for almost fifty people all weekend and providing sleeping space for every single one of them. Sitting out in a comfortable loveseat in their back garden on Friday evening, enjoying a glass of wine and watching the boats go by, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby, looking across the bay to the glitz and glamor of East Egg...

Check out the photos from the weekend at these two sites (flikr and picasa). Now to the food:

Last Thursday before we left for the weekend Melissa revisited a dish we have previously posted, and she made a few improvements. Her corn fritters were great the last time she made them, but this time she achieved a lighter, fluffier texture by whipping up the eggs and adding less flour -- see her notes below for the specifics. She also used some of her tomato, cucumber and cilantro salsa from last Monday's flank steak and mushroom dish (the salsa recipe is found in another post) to fill out the fritters. The tasty cakes were topped off with her home-made pesto aioli and ground black pepper. A great vegetarian dish.

We got back very late Sunday night from Long Island, and we were really feeling the weekend of wine drinking and constant grazing. But a good night's sleep cures a great many ills, and Monday night Melissa made a triumphant return to the kitchen with a steak-tips curry she put together using her own mix of curry spices (see below), served on a bed of arugula fresh from the garden with sliced tomatoes. Our arugula (a.k.a. rocket/roquet) is much spicier than what we buy in the supermarket, with pronounced flavours of black pepper and nuts. Who knows what makes the difference, but I'd rather not think about it given that the garden is often irrigated by the runoff from our apartment building... The beef was spicy and rich with intense flavours from the curry mix -- a perfect dish for Gewurztraminer. We had a 2006 bottle from Chateau Ste. Michelle (Columbia Valley, WA) that was still on our shelf from our recent Gewurz tasting.

Tonight we had a Thai-inspired risotto dish that has to be one of Melissa's best experiments in recent months. After pan-toasting the risotto rice, she simmered it in a mixture of chicken broth, coconut cream, lemongrass and green Thai chili paste for a nice kick. The consistency was perfect -- firm but not crunchy -- and the Thai flavors were evident from the aroma before even tasting the risotto. She served the risotto with wilted basil leaves mixed in, and topped it with diced tomatoes and stir-fried chicken she had marinated in fish sauce, curry paste and lemon juice. A garnish of feathery fennel leaves finished it off in style.

Wow, did I love this dish. Seriously, try it out...

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Melissa's Recipes and Notes

Corn fritters revisited

Last time I made corn fritters they looked fairly good, had good seasoning, but I thought they were a little rubbery. This time I attempted to fix this.

1 egg
1 can of whole corn kernels (don’t try sweet corn it’ll definitely be too stodgy)
½ cup of left over salsa (diced tomato, cucumber, mint, basil and lemon juice)
1 – 2 tbsp of flour
½ tsp of salt
1 tsp of fresh ground pepper
Olive oil

First up using an electric hand whisk I beat the egg until it was light and fluffy. I then folded in the corn, salsa, salt and pepper. Lastly I folded in the flour until I had a loosely bound mixture. In a non-stick pan I heated olive oil to a fairly hot temperature and then spooned in the corn mixture to make fritters. Once one side was nicely brown the fritters were flipped to cook the other. With the lower amount of flour, and the fluffy whisked egg these fritter were a lot lighter than last time.

Pesto Aoli

To top the fritters I decided to experiment with making fresh aoli. Aoli is basically mayonnaise without the lemon juice. I must admit I did add lemon juice so maybe mine would be better described as a pesto mayonnaise.

1 egg yolk
~1/4 cup of really good olive oil
1 small garlic clove
1 handful of basil leaves
salt and lemon juice to taste

Put the egg yolk in a tall narrow vessel. Whisk the egg yolk until light and fluffy with an electric whisk. Wide shallow bowls are not good at containing a single egg yolk for whisking, but may be used if the recipe is being bulked up. In a blender puree basil leaves, garlic clove and olive oil. Slowly add the oil/basil puree to the light fluffy egg while still whisking. Keep whisking egg and oil until stiff before adding more oil until all the oil is combined. Add salt and lemon juice to taste.

Serve spoonfuls of pesto aoli over the corn fritters to serve.

Beef with a curry rub over hummus and arugula salad

While the construction guys renovating the 4th floor of our building had done their best to kill my vegetable garden this year by draining all the rain from the roof directly into my patch of dirt, we got them to move their drainage pipe recently and finally got some arugula/rocket to grow. So while I hadn’t bought any fresh greens from the supermarket recently I managed to harvest enough arugula to make a little salad.

Instead of using potatoes, rice or pasta for starch in meals I’ve recently been experimenting with beans and lentils. I thought hummus might make a good substitute for mashed potatoes and thought to match I might make some steak sliced up and coated in a curry paste with a Middle Eastern inspiration.

~300g of sirloin steak tips – thinly sliced
little olive oil for frying

Curry rub

1 tbsp of curry powder
1 tbsp of cumin
1 tsp of coriander seeds
1 tsp of fennel seeds
1 tsp of whole black pepper corns
½ tsp of caraway seeds
½ tsp of celery seeds
5 garlic cloves
1 tsp of salt

Blend all ingredients in a grinder or with a mortar and pestle until a paste. Rub into thin slices of sirloin steak tips.

Hummus

½ can of chickpeas
1 tbsp of sesame seeds
2 garlic cloves
2 tbsp of lemon juice
Salt to taste

In same blender that curry rub was made (without rinsing) blend hummus ingredients until smooth. Add salt to taste.

After meat has marinated around ½ hour, flash fry in a hot pan coated with olive oil.

Salad

2 cups of fresh arugula/rocket leaves
1 tomato – sliced into thin wedges

Serve meat on bed of hummus surrounded by arugula leaves and a sliced tomato.

East meets West in an Italian-Thai fusion.

Coming home this evening I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I wanted to cook. Last night’s hummus flickered through my mind, maybe a little Turkish food with a yogurt dressing. While I was searching for the chickpeas that Matt froze last night my hand happened on the half tin of coconut cream frozen from last time I cooked a Thai Chicken curry. Last time I was at the supermarket I picked up some lemongrass (also frozen for future use) and then there’s always the John West Thai Curry Paste. Over to the pantry for the Jasmine rice only to be “Denied!” Alas, the Indian Feast used up all my Jasmine rice and there was only Risotto or Sushi rice left. Now that got me thinking, can you make a risotto using Thai Chicken Curry sauce instead of the standard chicken broth? And the answer is a resounding YES! Here’s the recipe.

Thai risotto

1-2 tbsp of olive oil
1 cup of Risotto Rice
1 cup of Chicken Broth
1 cup of Coconut Cream
1 tsp of John West Thai Curry Paste
~4cm of Lemon Grass

In a bowl mix chicken broth, coconut cream, and curry paste. Finely chop the lemon grass and reserve to add to the Risotto when the first ladles of broth are added. For the risotto find a big pot with a tight fitting lid. Heat the oil in the bottom of the pan and add the rice to stir fry it a little before adding any of the liquid. When the rice has been lightly toasted start adding the broth/coconut cream/curry paste mixture ladle by ladle while stirring constantly. Add lemon grass at this time. Wait for the rice to soak up all the liquid before adding the next ladle. Keep the rice on medium heat so the liquid can simmer, but not evapourate too quickly before it is absorbed by the rice. The rice will take around 20 minutes to cook. Keep tasting and look for the kernel to be firm without being crunchy. Matt was a little later coming home than I thought and so when the rice was almost ready I took it off the heat with a little extra liquid still to be absorbed and put a lid on it. While the rice is still hot it’ll continue to absorb moisture and cook that last little bit.

Chicken thigh stir-fried

1 tbsp of olive oil
~100g of thinly sliced chicken thigh
Couple of handfuls of whole basil leaves
1 tsp of John West Thai Curry Paste
1 tsp of fish sauce
1 tbsp of lemon juice
1 tomato diced and seasoned with salt and pepper
¼ cup of water

In a bowl combine chicken thigh slices, curry paste, fish sauce and lemon juice for a quick marinade. Heat olive oil in pan and stir fry chicken until cooked through. Add a little water and throw in basil leaves till wilted. With some water the basil leaves will wilt retaining their green colour. Without the water they will turn black because the heat is too high.

To serve place Risotto on plate and top with sliced chicken/basil mixture. Cover with diced tomato and garnish with a feathery fennel leaf.

Poached Eggs on Toast, Pork Tenderloin, Beef with Mushrooms and Chicken Coq-au-Vin (Sans Vin)

2008-07-29T19:59:00.006-04:00

Last Friday's Dana-Farber happy hour ended with the more (*ahem*) dedicated among us being invited up from the 14th floor to the 15th floor happy hour, which apparently was still rich in drinks and pizza and looking for takers. This one was sponsored by Invitrogen, whose sales rep has become a regular at some of our social gatherings, both in and out of the institute. The long and short of it is that we had plenty of food and drink and Melissa and I were sent home with two magnums (plural magna?) of wine that were leftover from the whole affair...

Saturday we got up quite early to get some home improvements taken care of (plumbing repairs that we no longer trust our property managers to do properly) before a quick wine shopping at Trader Joe's with Amanda and an afternoon of lab work for me.

The first food entry for this post is Melissa's Saturday afternoon lunch. When I went to work at the med school, she went to work on something to eat. She started with this heavy German bread she keeps in the freezer (her best approximation of Vogel's toast, something she really misses from home), and topped it with mushrooms pan-fried in butter, a perfectly poached egg and fresh pesto she made from the basil we're growing out in the garden. This was a really tasty treat, as I found out when she replicated it for me on Sunday morning when I was poking around for a bite to eat...

Saturday evening we had pan-fried pork tenderloin (seasoned with only soy sauce and cracked pepper) with mashed potatoes and asparagus. The potatoes were boiled in chicken stock before mashing to give them extra flavor, and then Melissa added in some finely chopped marinated green peppercorns. If you can find these in your local supermarket, buy them. They are great when used whole in stews (as are dried black peppercorns), and they give an unexpected kick to almost anything you dare to add them to. Not tongue-scorchingly spicy, just a concentrated hit of pepper. As is our habit, we had the asparagus simply blanched in boiling water then tossed in olive oil, sea salt and ground pepper. A 2007 Bogle chardonnay was just right for this meal.

Sunday we had a nice, leisurely morning together with some good coffee and an on-demand movie or two, then packed up in the early afternoon and caught the commuter rail with Amanda and Evan out to Framingham, MA, where our friend and used-to-be Dana 14 colleague Kim was having a BBQ at her pond-side home in the 'burbs. It's a nice area, and she has lots of space for grilling and volleyball, the latter of which occupied me for most of the day. We had ribs, chili, German sausages, eggplant, and beer galore to distract us from the really bad weather. After the thunderstorms passed, though, we got right back out in the yard with our volleyball and some water balloons. A great time was had by all, and when we returned to the city we were treated to a night of fantastic sleeping weather with temperatures in the low 60's and relatively low humidity after the all the rain -- open windows and a good fan were just perfect. It really is better then air-conditioning...

We started the work week off quite well with a Monday dinner of pan-fried flank steak (medium rare, as you can see) with roasted portobello mushrooms and Melissa's new favorite salsa (recipe in a previous post). With this meal we worked on the magnum of YellowTail cabernet sauvignon that was donated to our cause by Invitrogen last Friday, but ended up using a large portion of it to build traps for the surreal fruit-fly invasion to which we were subjected without warning last night. I don't know where the hell they came from, but they came in force. There was no rotting fruit in our kitchen, but they sure liked the wine...

Tonight's dinner was chicken coq au vin -- sans vin. Add in dijon mustard and tarragon with some potatoes, onions, peas, whole garlic cloves and black peppercorns in Melissa's own chicken stock, and we didn't miss the vin. Besides, a glass of chardonnay (another 2007 Bogle) on the side did much more for the dish than reduced wine would have.

We continue to fight the Drosophila invasion -- any advice out there?

Teryaki Chicken, Pork-Ball Soup, Fish Tacos, Couscous, Pork and Lentil Curry

2008-07-24T19:16:00.012-04:00

There's really no good reason for having waited so long between posts; there've been plenty of good culinary creations to report on. Honestly, it's mostly the online episodes of Lost that have kept me from the Blogger (we're now up to season 4)...

Last Thursday after leaving work early to attend a gallery opening on Newbury Street with wine and nibbles, Melissa and I made dinner of a chunk of brie and a loaf of bread.

Friday Happy Hour at the medical school ended early for us, since we got the call that the framer had finally finished with the painting we bought for our first wedding anniversary back in May. Evan went with us to pick it up, then Amanda joined us back at our place to help with the installation.

Melissa ended up whipping together a late dinner for four of grilled teryaki chicken, julienned telegraph cucumber and coleslaw (made with Kewpie Japanese mayo this time). You can see the new painting in the background of that food photo, but here's a better close-up:

It's an abstract in acrylics on handmade paper by an artist named Michael Kessler from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we bought it from Lanoue Fine Art on Newbury Street here in Boston. He does amazing things with layer after layer of thin-stretched acrylic paints on paper or wood panels, and the layers give the pieces a visual depth that sometimes approximates the interior light that you'd see if you were nose-to-nose with a perfectly finished slab of polished maple. We hope to visit his studio when in Santa Fe for a scientific meeting I plan to attend early next year.

I worked a half-day in the lab Saturday, and Melissa decided to make a variation on her much-loved pork-ball soup for dinner.

It was really spicy this time, with Thai green curry paste in the chicken-stock base and cilantro and garlic in the pork balls. Along with lima beans and sliced cabbage, it was a real treat, although the Thai curry began to sneak up on me -- not for the weak of tongue...

Monday we had a favorite meal of ours since I introduced the concept of fish tacos to Melissa a few years ago. Pan-fried tilapia fillets with a little sea salt and flour, sliced avocado (or guacamole if you're in the mood to make it), and Melissa's new favorite salsa (recipe given in our last posting) were wrapped up in a soft tortilla and seasoned with a little smoked chipotle Tabasco sauce. We can't get any decent store-bought flour tortillas here in New England -- they're all waxy and dry. So we use whole-grain tortillas with flaxseed oil; the oil keeps them moist and provides a good soucre of omega-3's to boot. They're not the best-tasting thing in the world all by themselves, but they do a perfectly good job of wrapping up all the goodies in a fish taco.

Tuesday dinner was a great quick-meal tip, the closest Melissa comes to "dinner from a packet." Store-bought parmesan couscous is really easy to make and tastes great. Melissa added in fresh tomatos, red onion, Italian cucumber and sliced avocado to make a fast and delicious vegetarian meal. I licked the pan. Cleaning up is my job, after all...

After our regular Wednesday night drinks and dinner at The Mission with Evan last night, tonight we had a pork and lentil curry. As I type up this post I am enjoying this rich dish with a glass of 2006 petite syrah from Bogle Vineyards (Sonoma, CA). Boiled lentils seasoned with curry powder and parsley from the garden with a little peanut butter for flavor and consistency. To the lentil stew Melissa added carrots, potatoes and cubed, pan-fried pork loin. Mmmmmm.

I'm going to go see if there's any left in the pot...

Recipes and notes coming soon

Saag Lentils, Flank Steak and Cabbage -- Oh, My!

2008-07-17T20:27:00.009-04:00

Wow, what a busy weekend. Melissa's lab hosted the Dana 14 happy hour at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the theme was summer cookout, so Melissa spent much of the day Friday grilling chicken thighs, sausages, mushrooms and eggplant on our grill at home. Great happy hour, by the way, and as usual we closed it out late in the evening. Saturday was full of preparations for and execution of our Gewurztraminer tasting dinner, and Sunday was another great barbecue at the home of Etienne and Angelique in the Allston-Brighton area (check out their Picasa album).

Starting at around 4 pm and going late into the evening, we were regaled with Etienne's always-impressive and increasingly sophisticated home-brews, Angelique's special hommous with its lemony, toasty, sesame-seed goodness, and some toothsome treats from the grill: pork tenderloin cooked to perfection with three different marinades, and Etienne's roast potatoes with caramelized onions done in foil pouches on the grill. A huge shout-out to Etienne on this one -- in the wrong hands, thick chunks of pork loin can come off the grill dry, chewy and flavorless. But Melissa and I agreed that his were some of the very best pieces of grilled pork we had ever tasted; juicy and tender with nicely browned edges and just the slightest suggestion of color inside. Perfect.

Melissa decided to put together a few of our weekday meals this week into this posting, because they have an interesting thread of ingredients running though them. She is in a very experimental mood in the kitchen these days, and that always means good things to eat...

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Monday: Saag lentils with radish-fennel cole slaw and cucumber-cilantro salsa

I had some cabbage. I meant to make coleslaw for a recent Happy Hour we had at work, but somewhere between marinating the chicken thighs, grilling the sweet Italian sausages and salting the eggplant I just forgot. I’m particularly partial to fried cabbage with things like bacon and chillis but I’ve never got into the whole coleslaw thing. This changed when I had a few radishes lying around and went to cuisine.co.nz and typed radish into their keyword search. A radish dill coleslaw came up and I thought what the heck…

I made my own mayonnaise (very messily I have to say) and replaced the dill with fennel fronds (which I have lots of in my garden) and replaced the cider vinegar with rice wine vinegar. Matt gave it the thumbs up and I thought it was a bit of alright, so here’s the recipe for the entire dinner. A bit of a hodge podge of everything, but somehow it ended up working together.

Coleslaw

1 egg yolk
½ cup of very good olive oil
½ tsp of salt
1 tbsp of lemon juice

¼ of a cabbage
~5 radishes
1 tbsp of chopped fennel “leaves”
2 tbsp of rice wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to season

I whisked the egg yolk in the tall narrow container that came with my hand blender (using whisk attachment) until it was light and fluffy. This step is very important. If you try to combine the egg yolk with the oil and whisk from there you won’t get an emulsion and everything will look like oil with globs of egg yolk in it. Once your egg yolk is nice and fluffy, drizzle oil with continued whisking to make a sauce that looks just like mayonnaise. Add salt and lemon juice to season. (alternatively adding roasted garlic instead of lemon juice will make garlic aioli).

Salsa

This is my new favourite salsa recipe…. Very simple

Chopped fresh tomatoes
Diced Cucumber
Coarsely chopped coriander leaves
A few good squirts of lime juice
~ ½ tsp of salt… (a little more than you think necessary will bring everything together)
Ground pepper to taste

Saag Lentils

Left over Spinach sauce from the Saag Paneer (last Saturday)
~1/2 cup of Lentils
Salted Water

Boil lentils in salted water for ~30 minutes, drain and combine with Saag sauce from Indian Feast.

Serve dinner with coleslaw, salsa and lentils…. Paired nicely with a Vouvray white wine Jason brought us on Saturday -- dry and crisp with plenty of fruit. Yum yum yum….

Tuesday: Flank steak with spicy cabbage and cucumber-cilatnro salsa

Spicy Cabbage

Still have cabbage… Just boiling it doesn’t bring out the flavours, but steaming it in a concentrated chicken broth with a good amount of cayenne pepper makes it interesting.

¼ cabbage – chopped
1/3 tbsp of chicken stock paste
¼ tsp of cayenne pepper – ground
Just enough water to cover the bottom of the pot.

Put water in bottom of pot ~1 cm deep, add chicken stock and cayenne pepper. Top with chopped cabbage and simmer on stove (covered) to steam cabbage and create sauce coating.

Flank Steak

This used to be a fairly cheap cut of meat but is gaining popularity which unfortunately has been pushing up the price. Provided you panfry this cut rare to medium rare, leave it to rest and cut it thinly with the grain it remains tender and is quite a tasty treat.

1lb Flank steak
¼ cup of soy sauce
1/8 cup of lime juice
Salt and Pepper to season

Combine above ingredients and marinate meat for >30 minutes. Pan fry for a few minutes of either side until the meat is medium rare.

(Try reading this for the rule of thumb for deciding when meat is cooked rare through well done.)

Serve sliced flank steak on top of a mound of cabbage. Top with same salsa as previous day. We had a Ken Forrester 2007 Petit Pinotage (South Africa) with this meal.

Wednesday: Omelettes

No cabbage today but left over salsa, red onion and a whole chopped tomato make an appearance.

3 eggs
3 egg white (from crème brulee left overs)
~1/4 cup of heavy cream
½ tsp of fish sauce
Salt and fresh ground pepper

Combine above recipes with a whisk

½ red onion (sautéed till lightly browned)
1 large tomato, chopped and fried
~1/2 cup of left over salsa
1 handful of coarsely chopped cilantro

Combine above ingredients ready to add to omelet.

~1/4 cup of parmesan cheese

In a small non-stick fry pan heat oil and pour enough egg mixture into pan to coat the pan. Cook on high heat until egg is almost cooked though. On one half of the egg mixture spoon some of the onion, salsa, cilantro mix and sprinkle parmesan cheese. Using spatula turn over omelet to encase filling and flip out onto plate to serve.

Repeat to make another 1 to 2 omelets.

Garnish with a little cilantro. Mmmmmm...

Gewurztraminer Tasting with Indian Feast

2008-07-13T09:35:00.014-04:00

Ahh, Sunday morning. I inexplicably popped out of bed at 7:30 this morning and went to work cleaning up after our wine tasting dinner last night. We had a really great evening with 10 of our friends, new and old, who all gathered at our place to taste Gewurztraminers from around the world out on the patio on a beautiful summer night. Yesterday was a busy day getting ready: Melissa spent the whole day preparing Indian dishes to complement the wines, while I scoured the bottle stores of Boston for a good selection of Gewurztraminers.

Gewurtz is not the most popular wine, so finding bottles from more than one or two regions at any given store wasn't easy. In the end, however, we got a great selection representing pretty much every part of the world that manages to do something respectable with this difficult grape. Alsacian winemakers certainly set the bar for Gewurz, but other areas with moderate growing conditions are also doing quite well with it: the northwest coast of the United States (OR, WA) and a few areas in California; South America (primarily Chile), South Africa, and New Zealand. We also had one from northern Italy, but that was way past its prime and a huge disappointment (see tasting notes below).

1. Cave de Turckheim, 2006, Alsace, France
2. Chateau Ste. Michelle, 2006, Columbia Valley, WA
3. Huia, 2004, Marlborough, New Zealand
4. Cono Sur, 2006, Casablanca Valley, Chile
5. Columbia Crest, 2006, Columbia Valley, WA
6. Fetzer, 2006, Mendocino County, CA
7. Paul Cluver, 2007, Elgin, South Africa
8. Kellerei Cantina "Lunare," 2000, Terlano, Italy

To our delight, many enthusiastic tasters had done some research and already had some idea what to expect of Gewurz from different areas, so we tasted everything blind (except the Alsacian wine) to avoid being influenced by our preconceptions about particular regions. After we had tasted all of the wines and made our notes, Melissa unveiled the Indian feast she had spent all day preparing: aloo gobi (cauliflower and potatoes), saag paneer (spinach and cheese curd curry), butter chicken and coconut-rolled bananas (possibly more Kiwi than Indian). Served up with hot naan (see recipes and notes below for our naan secret) and raita (cilantro and yogurt); we all but forgot about the wines as we dove into the food.

We were too busy in the course of the evening to get food photos last night, but here's a shot of the plate of leftovers we just finished for our early lunch today. Many tasters noted how much the wines changed when re-sampled with food. The strong, spicy dishes that would overpower most other wines really bring out the fruit in Gewurztraminers and Rieslings, and can suppress some of the less desirable characteristics in the tail end of these wines (see tasting notes below).

We knew we had to top off the dinner with Ramon's spicy creme brulee (habanero, serrano and red fresno chiles this time; the recipe was posted in May when we did it for Amanda's birthday dinner), and we really wanted a nice dessert wine made from Gewurztraminer to bring the evening full circle. Just when I was beginning to despair of finding one in time, I came across this late harvest Gewurz from Vista Verde Vineyard in San Benito County, CA. The wine manager at the store even reduced the price from $22 to $16 for me on the spot, so I bought two bottles and we were all set. It did pair beautifully with the spicy creme brulee and had deep, rich apricot and raisin flavors that lingered long on the tongue...

So here's the summary of our tasting. For those who were here and are looking back at this post to compare notes, the listing above is the order in which we tasted. The comments below are our best recollection of the consensus impressions of the wines, although they are largely reconstructed from the notes Melissa and I made.

1. Alsacian Gewurtz is a very distinctive wine: it's a dry style with a floral and perfumy nose and a minerally finish. The Turckheim hit the mark here. While it was not as spicy as some we've had, the pear and apple quickly gave way to pronounced mineral flavors and a strong hint of petrol that went on and on (and on) in the long finish. These attributes are normal (even prized) in Alsacian aromatics, but being true to form didn't necessarily earn this wine a spot in the top half of everyone's ranking.

2/5. We ended up with two wines from the pacific northwest by accident, but since we had them both, why not include them both? It turned out well that we did, because of the two wines the Chateau Ste. Michelle was better hands down. It came right after our Alsacian choice in the tasting order (not by design), and provided a good contrast. Much more fruit-driven than the Turckheim, it was also sweeter and retained little of that floral bouquet that Gewurz drinkers like. Tasters noted hints of lychee, key lime and orange rind in the mouth and a long-ish finish that featured citrus instead of petrol. The Columbia Crest, on the other hand, was sweeter and much less complex. Some stone fruits (apricot, peach) came through in the mouth but fell flat with the very low acidity of this wine. While it vanished from the palate with almost no finish at all, the lack of bitter aftertaste won them both a few points with some tasters...

3. The Huia from New Zealand was a paler color than most of the others, with a very nice floral and perfumy nose. Many tasters detected oak in this wine, which is certainly unusual for Gewurz. Grass and ripe pear were noted on the nose and in the mouth, and the low acidity and long mineral finish were reminiscent of the Alsacian style. While the oak didn't seem to do good things for this wine, it was relatively well balanced and ended up in the top half for many of us.

4. The Cono Sur was striking in how different it was from all of the other wines we tasted last night. Ramon brought us a bottle on one of his recent visits to Boston, and while Melissa and I have been enjoying this wine for some time now, neither of us picked it out in our blind tasting. It's dry and intensely fruity, with some perfume on the nose and refreshingly tart citrus and peach in the mouth. The finish was not as long as some, but featured citrus and grassy notes with a little undercurrent of mineral and no petrol to be found. I doubt that many of us would have picked this as a Gewurztraminer blind, but it was very popular among our crowd and one of the more enjoyable wines for sipping by itself.

6. The Fetzer from California was sweet, but more complex than the Columbia Crest we tasted right before it, and it probably benefited from this tasting order. It was one of the less floral selections, but had a nice crisp acidity with a bit of spritz, and a little toffee on the nose. Some felt that this was one of the better balanced wines of the night, but its middle-of-the-road qualities may have left it somewhat less memorable than the other wines in this tasting, for better or for worse...

7. The South African Gewurz was interesting. Lightly perfumy on the nose with floral notes that also came through in the mouth; spicy and fruity with relatively low acidity. Some tasters detected a pungent character in this wine that we had a hard time pinpointing: grapefruit peel was suggested, but there was also an earthy element. It came highly recommended from the wine guy at Marty's Liquors, which surprisingly had the best selection of Gewurz of all the stores we went to. It flew a little under the radar for me (perhaps coming seventh out of eight wines did not do it justice), but Melissa quite liked it and ranked it third under the Alsacian and Chilean wines.

8. As I stated above, the Italian Gewurz was a huge disappointment. I should have known better than to buy such an old bottle (Gewurz is not generally considered a robust wine for aging), but I wasn't looking at the vintage when the wine guy at Blanchard's was extolling its virtues and enthusiastically encouraging its inclusion in our tasting. Terlano is apparently very well known for its high-quality wines, and for the original price tag of about $45 on this bottle, it better have been good. I reiterate that the drastically slashed sale price along with the age really should have put me off buying this one regardless of what the wine manager said about it -- entirely my mistake. At any rate, it was golden brown and all vinegar. What a shame...

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Melissa's Recipes and Notes

Indian Feast

To accompany our Gewürztraminer wine tasting I kicked around a few spicy options. Should we try Thai… Vietnamese… TexMex… Indian… or a tasting platter of all? In the end I settled on Indian (despite the warm weather) because my three favourite dishes make a nice well rounded meal and I thought it would be relatively easy to keep it warm while we did the tasting. It’s also self service which makes it perfect to share among 12.
What I didn’t count on was how long it took to prepare. I’ll often whip up a curry in the evening, but this was the first time I’ve attempted 3 dishes at once. I started at around 12pm and was just finishing the last of the cooking at around 6:30pm. Admittedly there was a lot of marinating time and Matt swooped in a few times to “reset” the kitchen. I tend to cook like a tornado pulling things out here and there and never quite get round to putting anything back. Think Petroza on Hell’s Kitchen.

As I write these recipes the hardest thing to remember is going to be the spice combinations as I tended to taste and adjust the dish as I went along. I’ll try and remember what I put in each dish, but it might be better just to list the spices I had in the kitchen and encourage anyone attempting to cook one of the recipes below to experiment with combinations to their liking.

Cumin – I think of cumin as the curry tasting spice. It’s not hot, but forms the base for every Indian curry powder I’ve come across
Paprika – Just because it’s red
Turmeric – Just because it’s yellow – often described as poor man’s Saffron, it doesn’t have the taste of saffron, but it certain has the colour
Chilli Flakes and Cayenne Pepper – to make things spicy
Nutmeg – an aromatic spice that seems to cross over well between sweet and savoury dishes. Try it next time you make a beef stew, just a smidgen mind you, and you’ll be surprised at how it brings out the flavours
Fennel Seed and Caraway seeds– licorice/anise flavour. Crush/grind and add a little at a time as this can quickly over power a dish
Cloves – anyone that’s spiced mulled wine knows what this tastes like. Again a little goes a long way. Often cloves will be added whole early in the cooking process and removed before serving
Coriander seeds – has a flavour like the leaves but is somewhat nuttier. Mix freshly ground coriander with cumin to add body to the cumin’s “curry” flavour.
Generic Curry Powder – a mixuture of many of the above spices and some more besides. I use it as a back up when I’m too lazy to mix my own, or want a starting point to which I add a little of this and that to balance it up.

Butter Chicken

6 Chicken Thighs – skinned and deboned
2 tbsp of plain unsweetened yogurt (I used FAGE 0% - Greek strained yogurt)
Paprika
Turmeric Powder (~1tbsp)
Cumin Powder
Ginger Powder (or fresh paste if you have it)
Cloves (ground) (~1/4 tsp)
Chilli Flakes
2 tbsp of lime juice

Combine above ingredients to make a thick marinade for the chicken and leave to marinate overnight (or as long as possible). I left mine for 5 hours. Grill or roast chicken until cooked though. I recommend grilling it on the BBQ on a wire rack rather than in a roasting pan in the oven. The yogurt based marinade fares better in the BBQ.

Olive oil (ghee is more traditional)
2 Onions – diced
6 cloves Garlic – finely chopped
Coriander Seeds – crushed
Fennel Seeds – crushed (little)
Cumin Powder (lot)
Nutmeg (little)
Cloves (very little)
Carraway seeds (little)
½ tins of chopped tomatoes – blended to puree in food processor
500ml of cream
¼ cup of ground almonds
handful of chopped coriander leaves (cilantro)
Salt and cracked pepper to taste

Sauté onions in olive oil until soft, Add finely chopped garlic and continue to sauté until garlic is nicely caramelized. Add all spices and stir briefly until aroma is released being careful not to burn the spices. Add pureed tomatoes and reduce liquid by ~one ½ until tomatoes become a thick sauce. Add cream and ground almonds to finish the sauce. Chop grilled chicken into morsel size and add to the sauce and briefly heat. Add cilantro just before serving.

Aloo Gobi

1 onion – diced
2 cloves of garlic – finely chopped
1 tsp of fresh ginger paste
1 tsp coriander seeds – crushed
1 tbsp of Tumeric powder
1 tbsp of Cumin
½ tsp of cayenne pepper
1 tsp of salt
Water
2lbs Potatoes
1 head of cauliflower

The recipes I found online all cooked the Aloo Gobi in a pot on the stove, but in our small apartment we can’t afford to store lots of pots and pans, and the only appropriate sized pot I have for this dish was already being used for the Saag Paneer. I decided to cook the dish in a covered casserole dish in the oven instead which worked out just fine.
When cooking Indian food I always start by sautéing the onions, followed by adding the garlic until golden brown and then adding the spices to release the aromas, and the Aloo Gobi recipe is no different. I spooned the onion/spice mixture over peeled and quartered potatoes placed in the casserole dish and added a little water to cook the potatoes. In the covered dish the water should steam the potatoes rather than boil them, so don’t try and cover the potatoes with water or you’ll come out with a stew and dilute all the yummy spices. Place the dish in a 400oF oven and cook until the potatoes are just starting to soften (~20-30 mins). Remove from the oven and add the cauliflower cut into large florets. Spoon remaining liquid over cauliflower so they get covered and turn a nice golden colour from the tumeric and return to the oven for a further 20-30 minutes. The stalks of the cauliflower should lose their bright white colour and start to turn translucent when done. Don’t over cook, as the florets will start to disintegrate when served. Upon serving top with a sprinkle of roughly chopped cilantro to garnish.

Saag Paneer

Paneer is a type of cheese that you don’t see round much. I didn’t have much faith that our local Shaws or even Whole Foods would stock it so did a little research into making my own. Apparently how it’s done is to take a gallon of milk, bring almost to the boil and add lemon juice until all the milk proteins crash out of solution to form cheese curds, which you then remove from the whey and weigh down in cheese cloth to press out all the liquid. My first attempt was a failure. I think I didn’t add enough lemon juice to get all the protein to curdle, stirred it too much once the curds formed and also didn’t have enough of a plan to press the cheese. So instead of paneer I think I ended up with something more like ricotta. Not a bad ricotta, I have to say, but not a firm enough cheese to hold up to cooking in a frying pan. So while I’m sure I’ll perfect making paneer one day, I had no more time to experiment, so it was time for plan B…. Halloumi. Halloumi is a cheese used in Greek and middle Eastern cooking made from goat’s or sheep’s milk. It’s made essentially the same way as Paneer but is much saltier and stored in brine. Because it’s mostly protein (rather than fat as in most cheeses) you can fry it without it melting. In order to Paneer-ify it I cubed the cheese and soaked it in water for to try and extract some of the salt. This worked pretty well, and I was quite happy with the results. It’s also a lot easier to get halloumi because it keeps in the supermarket cheese chiller, whereas Paneer should be used within a few days of manufacture.

1 Onion
Few cloves of Garlic
Cumin
Coriander Seeds – freshly ground
Curry powder
Nutmeg
½ can of pureed tomatoes
1 lb of Spinach
¼ tsp of hickory smoke
¼ cup of cream
1 cube of butter
1 lb of halloumi – cubed and soaked in water for ~3 hrs

You guessed it, sauté the onions, add the garlic till golden, toast the spices and add the pureed tomatoes. Reduce the liquid by as much as possible till you get something resembling tomato paste. Add back water and spinach. Simmer for around 30 minutes to let the flavours combine. Add a little hickory smoke , cream and butter. Puree mixture using a hand blender or food processor. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Let Saag sauce stand until ready to serve. Just before serving, fry halloumi cubes until golden brown and add to Saag sauce. Briefly heat and serve with cilantro garnish.

Raita

½ cup of plain unsweetened yogurt
Cucumber (2 inch long slice)
Chopped cilantro
Curry Powder
Salt

Julienne the cucumber lengthwise to make thin long slices. Combine all ingredients together to form a yogurt sauce to serve as a side dish. Raita is an excellent cooling agent for guests who aren’t used to spicy food.

Another side dish I like to serve is banana slices coated in toasted unsweetened coconut. Not a traditional Indian dish, but I think it complements curry quite well. If like me you can’t figure out how to get unsweetened coconut in the USA, I soaked the sugar right out of it by putting it in a colander and letting it sit in a bowl of water. Keep changing the water until the sweetness has gone away.

All of the above was served with Jasmine rice (made according to the package instructions) and Naan breads bought from the supermarket and reheated on the BBQ to give them that straight out of the hot oven taste. The brand is “Fabulous Flats” and they’re the closest thing you’ll get to the real thing without a Tandoor oven.

Grilled Tilapia with Almond and Peach Salsa

2008-07-08T21:28:00.007-04:00

A hot, steamy day today turned into a nice evening for sparking up the grill. Tilapia is a staple fish at our place: we use it in fish tacos, ceviche and for poaching with tomatos and garlic, among other things. Tonight it was simply seasoned with salt, pepper and lemon juice and cooked quickly on the gas grill.

Melissa made up an inspired salsa for her perfectly grilled fish. To a base of diced fancy tomatoes she added slivered almonds and diced peach, radish and red onion with a little fresh basil from the garden. Salt and pepper to taste and a beautiful garnish made the dish.

A bottle of 2006 Monkey Bay Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough, NZ) complemented the meal nicely.

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Recipe and Notes

Talapia Fillets with peach and almond salsa

2 talapia fillets
Salt and freshly ground pepper to season
Juice of ½ lemon

200g of finely diced tomatoes
100g of finely diced peach
50 g of finely diced radish
50 g of finely diced red onion
1 heaped tbsp of finely minced basil leaves
Juice of ½ lemon
25g of finely diced almonds
Salt and Pepper to season

Combine all salsa ingredients and refrigerate until fish is ready to serve. Grill seasoned tilapia fillets on lightly oiled BBQ on medium heat. Tilapia is a moist flakey white fish from Mexico. It has a delicate flavour and provides an excellent blank slate for whatever is added to it. It could be replaced with any other white fish such as Snapper, Striped Sea Bass or even Swordfish in this dish. I wouldn’t try it with something like Mackerel though. Grilling fish on the BBQ is tricky because when you flip it you’re liable to have it all fall apart on you. The trick is to leave it long enough to get a nice golden crust fire side down without poking or prodding at it too much (~5mins depending on whether it’s straight out of the fridge or less if it sat at room temperature for a little while). When it’s ready it should come away from the grill easily when a fish slice/metal spatula is slid underneath it. If you cooked it with a cover to keep the heat in, the top-side should also have turned from translucent to opaque, which indicates the fish is almost cooked through. Flip the fish and cook for a further minute or two to get the golden colour on both sides of the fillet. Carefully transfer fish from grill to plate for serving without risking a second flip. Provided you don’t cook the fish too long it should remain tender and juicy. The aim is to catch it at the point when the last sliver of translucent flesh inside the fillet turns opaque. Not 30 seconds more, not 30 seconds less.

Once on the plate top the fish with some salsa and garnish with a whole basil leaf, 2 slices of peach and 2 slices of small tomatos. I bought a medley of tomatoes from Whole Foods and really liked the deep purple and green striped tomatoes the best. They were listed on the label as “exotics” – a chocolate fish for the first person to find out what they really are….

Beef Tenderloin on Potato and Celery Root Puree with Walnut-Arugula Pesto

2008-07-08T21:07:00.006-04:00

We had a fantastic four-day weekend in Montreal, Quebec last weekend. What a beautiful city -- we had some great food, great wine, and perfect hosts with Etienne and Angelique showing off their hometown. Add in the sidewalk art festival and the Montreal Jazz Festival in town, and we were kept busy the entire time. Watch Evan's blog for his synopsis and some gorgeous photos...

We got back into Boston Monday evening and after four days of eating out (or on the road), Melissa was itching to get back into the kitchen. She crafted a dish driven by a couple of unusual ingredients: a perfect cut of beef tenderloin was served rare with a potato and celery root puree and an unconventional pesto. We were fresh out of pine nuts, so Melissa substituted walnuts, and she also subbed about a third of the basil with arugula/rocket to bring in the nutty, peppery flavor. Simple salt and pepper and voila. It's nice to come home to a fabulous meal...

Recipe coming soon.

Hearty Beef Stew

2008-07-08T20:47:00.004-04:00

On Tuesday last week, Melissa decided to use that celery root she bought when recently foraging for ingredients she had never cooked with, and out came a savory beef stew. Lightly blanched green peas with just olive oil, salt and pepper made the perfect accompaniment.

Great use of the steak tips we have in the freezer from our last trip to BJ's wholesale club. The celery root was a little tough to chew but added wonderful flavor. Pay attention to Melissa's notes on preparation of the celery root and the stemmy bits can be avoided. This stew was great with a Sam Adams Light, my favorite light beer and the only one I know of that retains a rich, malty flavor despite being a "light" beer.

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Recipe and notes

Beef Stew

200g of sirloin steak tips
1 head of garlic
2 carrots
½ celery root
1 can of diced tomatoes
5 Bay leaves
1 tsp dried thyme
½ tsp dried Rosemary
1 tsp of whole pepper corns
½ can of small white beans
2 tbsp of grated parmesan cheese
olive oil
Water

Use a pot with tight fitting lid. Add drizzle of olive oil and bring up to temperature to sear beef. Add cubes of beef and pan fry until nice colour develops. Add whole peeled garlic cloves, diced carrots and sliced celery root.

To prepare celery root it is important to slice the skin off generously as there are some tough fibrous regions just below the knobby surface that don’t soften with cooking. Kind of the texture of apple core…. not pleasant. Also pan fry the garlic, carrots and celery root to give them a head start on the caramelization process. Then add in the tin of tomatoes. Keep pot on high heat and reduce as much liquid as possible from the tomatoes. The more moisture the tomatoes lose the deeper red they become and the more sugars they release. Keep evaporating liquid until the bottom of the pot sometimes sticks some tomato paste and turns it dark brown – (not black though ;-) ) Add enough water to cover the meat and add whole pepper corns, bay leaves, thyme and rosemary.

Simmer covered on low heat for around 1-2 hours topping up with water if the liquid gets too low. Once the meat is tender add the white beans and remove lid to reduce the liquid until a rich gravy is formed. Add some grated parmesan cheese for extra bite and creaminess before serving if desired. Serve with quickly blanched baby peas tossed in a little olive oil, salt and pepper.

Roast Chicken with Lima Beans and Dinosaur Kale

2008-07-01T20:14:00.009-04:00

Sunday turned into a really busy day -- lab work for most of the day, then a repair job on Amanda's kitchen cabinets, which were threatening to fall off the wall. Given that the property maintenance guys had done a pretty Mickey-Mouse job of installing them in the first place, we decided that we were better off doing the job to sure them up ourselves. One toggle bolt and a really big drill bit did the trick...

While I made a run to the hardware store in the rain for that drill bit, Melissa went back home to tend the boiling lima bans for her new dish. The chicken thighs, prosciutto and buttery lima beans paired beautifully with the chenin blanc Amanda brought over (Ken Forrester Petit Chenin Blanc, 2007; Stellenbosch, South Africa). Melissa describes the dish and the inspiration for it in detail below.

Dessert hadn't been planned, but with the bag of frozen mixed berries we try to keep on hand, Melissa can always whip something together in a flash. Strawberries, raspberries and blackberries were reduced in a sauce pan and topped with an almond-shortbread crumble (the same topping used in the apple-rhubarb cobbler last Wednesday) and nonfat Greek yogurt to make a super-tasty cobbler.

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**Encore**

Melissa put together a nice medley of leftover ingredients from last night's Sasso-inspired dish. Buttery lima beans and dinosaur kale with prosciutto, onions, garlic and mushrooms -- minus the chicken this time. We had a 2006 Bogle Chardonnay (CA) with this welcome encore.

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Melissa's Recipes and Notes

Roast Chicken Thigh with Lima Beans and Dinosaur Kale

Passing Sasso on Huntington Ave I thought I’d check out their menu for a little inspiration on the way to the supermarket. The Irish Sea trout, fava beans, pancetta and forest mushrooms, with a grapefruit vinaigrette caught my eye. I had left for the supermarket determined to buy some ingredients I hadn’t cooked with before, and I came up with lima beans, dinosaur kale, and celery root. Tonight’s dinner didn’t include the celery root, but I thought I’d include the dinosaur kale for its greenery in the dish inspired by Sasso.

The Sasso menu is simple in that it only lists ingredients, and not how things are cooked. Though inspired by the trout dish, mine was a departure for a number of reasons:

Organic Irish sea trout….. Interesting, I thought trout was a fresh water fish. In any case I had made the Sunday afternoon trek to the supermarket to pick up some veggies to complement the freezer stocked full of meat from our 3 monthly BJs wholesale foods run. I replaced this with roasted chicken thigh, bone and skin on.

Fava beans…. Upon arrival at the supermarket I couldn’t find fava beans anywhere. Of course I was looking through the canned and dried beans selections and thinking that maybe they had another name I just didn’t know I settled on dried lima beans because they looked like what I imagined fava beans to look like. Arriving home I checked the internet to see how close I was only to find fava beans seem to be bought fresh, and it was unlikely Shaw’s had them. Apparently you buy them in a waxy pod that you have to remove sometime during the cooking process, and inside they’re green. My lima beans were white (also known as butter beans) and from the description of the taste and texture I had no problem imagining them going well with the reworked dish I’d planned.

Pancetta…. I didn’t look hard for this, but decided to replace it with prosciutto. I love prosciutto and I thought if I bought ¼ of a pound I could have some for the dish and left overs for eating any which way I liked

Forest mushrooms… Shaw’s had shiitake mushrooms as their “exotic loose mushrooms” so they stood in as forest mushrooms.

Grapefruit vinaigrette…. I’m not a fan of grapefruit so I skipped this ingredient. If it were fish instead of chicken I might have considered it.

My lima beans were pasty white, chicken is white, and the mushrooms were pretty light too… Therefore I needed something green to finish the dish. I was looking through the leafy green section of the produce aisle when the dinosaur kale caught my eye. I’ve never cooked with kale, but I knew it has a substantial texture which I was sure would suit my dish well.

So here’s the recipe:

½ cup of lima beans
a little olive oil
1 onion
4 cloves of garlic
~100g of shiitake mushrooms
~5 strips of prosciutto
50g of butter
few drops of liquid hickory smoke
1 tbsp of chicken stock paste
½ lb of dinosaur kale
3 chicken thighs – bone and skin still attached

Soak ½ cup of lima beans in hot water for 1hr and then boil them for ~1hr in heavily salted water. Drain. Coat chicken thighs with ~3/4 tbsp of chicken stock paste. Roast in 425oF oven skin side down till chicken skin is browned. Flip thighs skin side up and roast another 30 minutes or till internal temperature is greater than 160oF. During roasting slice onions and garlic. Sautee in pan used to cook beans with a little olive oil. Add sliced mushrooms and 50g of butter. Cook until mushrooms are soft. Add prosciutto cut up into little pieces. Add ~1/2 cup of water, 1 tsp of chicken stock paste, hickory smoke and cooked lima beans back. On top of pot place bamboo steamer containing dinosaur kale with excess stalks removed. Boil for ~8-10 minutes to steam kale and reduce liquid in pot with onions, mushrooms and beans etc. When I had finished steaming the kale the liquid in the pot had all but disappeared, and the bottom had turned a golden brown. A few minutes longer and it would have burned, but the caramelization provided a wonderful flavour I’m not sure I could replicate by choice.

To serve place kale leaves on plate, followed by bean, onion, mushroom mixture, and topped with crispy roasted chicken thigh.

Walnut, Chilli and Anchovy Bruschetta

2008-07-01T19:11:00.011-04:00

After a bratwurst and a hefeweizen or two at my department happy hour at HMS last Friday, Melissa and I made our way home on the early side. Pending the weather (heavy rain had threatened almost every evening last week), we had arranged to cart a king-size foam mattress topper that we no longer required over to Amanda's place for her to try out. Melissa decided a snack was in order before manual labor ensued, so she whipped up a really original bruschetta...

She toasted some sliced sourdough bread we kept frozen for just such an occasion, then topped it with her walnut chilli salsa, chopped basil leaves and a single (large) anchovy fillet. These anchovies are pretty special (deboned by hand somewhere in Spain), and for someone who doesn't particularly like anchovies I have to say I really enjoyed them. Salty and intensely fishy, but when used in the right context with equally strong flavors that balance them out, really wonderful. The citrus, chilli and sun-dried tomato in the salsa did the trick.

After we ate we took our open magnum of 2006 Redcliffe Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough, NZ) along with the mattress topper and some power tools over to Amanda's to scope out a cabinet installation job she needed done. We didn't get the cabinet on the wall, but we did get to look through some fantastic photos Amanda had in her albums from New Zealand. She has a really great eye...

Grilled Salmon and Good Conversation

2008-06-26T07:55:00.012-04:00

Rather than go out last night like we usually do on Wednesdays, we decided to cook and eat on our patio to take advantage of the beautiful evening weather, so on the way home I picked up some fresh Atlantic salmon for the grill and invited Amanda and Evan for dinner. This dish is a rarity in that I both suggested it and I usually cook it, although I still need quite a lot of practice to get all the elements of a dish ready at the same time the way Melissa does. That is truly an under-appreciated talent...

The salmon fillets are briefly marinated in soy sauce and maple syrup, grilled to (hopefully) perfection, then topped with a spoonful of soy and maple reduction. The dish is great with grilled asparagus, but since I couldn't find any spears at the grocery store I used zucchini instead.

As the evening wore on into the night, we lit up the courtyard with string lights, candles and good conversation. We had a few of our standard wines open last night, including some Kiwi sauv blancs and a California chardonnay, but with dinner we served a 2007 Whitehaven Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough, NZ), which I picked up on sale for $15 (usually a $20 bottle, so we don't often buy it). This is a pretty special wine -- the quintessential New Zealand sauv blanc with strong notes of capsicum, fresh cut grass and herbs, with plenty of crisp acidity from the passionfruit flavors.

We were a little surprised when Amanda pulled out a shopping bag full of rhubarb. I wasn't sure where she was heading with this, but Melissa hatched a plan for dessert in record time. She had no milk, eggs or white sugar, but she did have some apples on the verge of being lost to over-ripeness, and she cobbled together a sort of shortbread crumble topping from flour, butter, brown sugar and baking soda. What came out was a superbly tasty apple and rhubarb cobbler. Tart from the rhubarb and not too sweet -- a toothsome treat, indeed.

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Recipes and Notes

Soy and Maple Salmon

Salmon fillet, 1/3 to 1/2 lb per person
Soy sauce
Maple syrup
Olive oil
Zucchini

Marinate salmon fillets for 10-20 minutes in a mixture of about 2/3 soy sauce and 1/3 maple syrup in a shallow dish. Place fish flesh-side down and try to avoid getting the marinade on the skin as this will cause it to stick to the grill. Make another mixture of about 1/2 soy and 1/2 maple syrup and reduce on medium heat in a sauce pan until thick and syrupy. Set this aside to glaze the cooked fish for the finished dish.

Salmon fillets should cook skin-side down on medium flame until skin is crispy -- this will also cook the flesh about 3/4 of the way to done. Carefully turn the fish -- it should come loose quite easily once the skin is a little charred but will stick fiercely if the skin side isn't yet done. Cook briefly on the flesh side to make some nice grill lines. Cut zucchini into strips about 1/4-inch thick and bruch with olive oil, then grill to soften and put lines on them. Serve the fish on the zucchini strips and drizzle with glaze.

Apple Rhubarb Cobbler

Makes 4

2 Apples, cored and sliced
5-6 sticks of rhubarb (no leaves)
½ cup of brown sugar
~½-1 cup of water

Put above ingredients into large pot or pan with fitting lid. Cover and simmer for around 30-45 minutes until everything is soft and the rhubarb has become mushy. Spoon mixture into ramekins.

Topping:

100g (1 stick) of butter
¼ cup of brown sugar
~1 cup of flour
¼ cup of almonds
½ tsp of baking soda

Preheat oven to 425oF. In food processor cream the butter and sugar and almonds. In large bowl mix flour and baking soda. Add butter mixture to flour and mix to a crumbly consistency. Adjust flour amount so large crumbs are formed. Too much flour and the crumbs are smaller, too little and the butter isn’t coated fully. Don’t over mix. Spoon crumbly mixture on top of rhubarb apple mix in ramekins but don’t press down. Bake in 425oF oven until topping is golden brown. Remove from oven and let cool a bit before serving. Garnish with a sprig of mint.

Beef Curry

2008-06-25T18:19:00.006-04:00

After a considerable hiatus of almost a week, we finally have a chance to post again. Last Thursday we went with Evan to an open house at the Sam Adams Boston Brewery. They were serving their Summer Ale and Pale Ale along with special ice cream concoctions that local company J.P. Licks came up with using Sam Adams beers as ingredients. The Summer Ale ice cream was pretty nice, but eating it while drinking actual beer was not a good combination. They had a grill going with a nice outdoor tented seating area, so the scene had great potential. However, the food coming off the grill was unimpressive to say the least -- the "pork sausage" was completely devoid of flavor and contained about 90% sawdust (or recycled cardboard) judging from the texture. We bailed and went to Acapulco's, a low-end Mexican restaurant in Jamaica Plain, for some cheap margaritas and enchiladas. The service was inexcusably slow considering that we were the only occupied table in the place, but we don't go there for the stellar wait staff...

Last weekend Melissa hosted her annual "Boston Massacre" Diplomacy tournament (see Evan's blog for a few photos and commentary), and since I was the designated go-fer, that kept us both busy from Friday morning to Sunday evening. We hosted a cookout for about a dozen participants on Friday night with Italian sausages, hot dogs, grilled vegetables and beer on the menu. Along with a long evening at work and a couple of convenience meals out, that didn't leave much room for cooking.

After a day home from work with a sore throat, last night Melissa made a spicy beef curry to chase away the germs. This dish paired beautifully with a 2004 Brancott Riesling (Marlborough, NZ). The Brancott label is actually Montana winery, but to market their wines in the US they wisely changed the name so that potential consumers wouldn't think the wine came from the state of Montana. See Melissa's recipe and notes below...

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Melissa's Recipe and Notes

Beef Curry

The day after the Diplomacy tournament my throat felt a little scratchy. As the day wore on it became obvious to me that this was not from overuse but a cold or an attack of tonsilitis brewing. That night I fell asleep only to wake up about 3am barely able to swallow. I managed to get back to sleep but decided to spend the next day in my 'jammies keeping warm, sleeping and reading Kai's grant. Food-wise, I ate lots of oranges (apparently Diplomacy players don't eat a lot of fruit) and tried to get as much garlic into me as possible. After two naps of more than 2 hours each and a head of roasted garlic with potatoes I was feeling quite a bit better, but decided to hit the last of it with a hearty curry for dinner. Halfway through the recipe I thought a couple of dollops of salty peanut butter would be nice addition, but as we didn't have any I threw in some ground almonds instead. There was something missing from the curry spices as well, so I threw in a little pre-made spice mix too. Cheating I know, but I was sick, and trekking out to the supermarket to pick up things like garam masala wasn't an option. I also had some plain yogurt in the fridge I was going to put with it, but alas it was off. Still, all and all it was a pretty tasty curry.

Olive oil
1 onion - sliced
5 garlic cloves
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp of black pepper seeds
1 tsp of dried chilli flakes
1 tbsp of ground cumin
1/2 tsp of ground cloves
1 tsp of ginger
1 tsp of curry spice mix
1 tsp of chicken stock paste
1/2 cup of ground almonds
400g of sirlion steak tips
A few small whole potatoes (optional)
Water to stew everything together
Salt to season
1 cup of rice

In a food processor, or with a mortar and pestle, grind coriander seeds, fennel seeds and pepper seeds into a fine mix. Find a medium to large pot with a good fitting lid. Drizzle some olive oil in it to coat the bottom and add onions to sautee on medium to high heat. Let them get a little golden colour. Add beef, garlic and all the spices and stir fry until meat has been sealed. Add water to cover and chicken stock paste and bring to a boil. Add ground almonds and simmer for about 1 hour to tenderize the meat, cook the potatoes and let the spices permeate the dish. Keep topping up water if it gets thick enough to start catching on the bottom of the pot. Serve on rice.

Wednesday Stir Fry

2008-06-19T21:20:00.009-04:00

Melissa was taking requests last night, so I asked for her special beef and onion stir fry over rice. She sent me to the grocery for an onion and something green, and I came home with broccoli rabe (a.k.a. raab, rapa, rapine, rappi, rappone, turnip broccoli, taitcat, Italian broccoli, and Chinese broccoli). It looks similar to broccoli but isn't actually a broccoli relative, and it works quite nicely as a steamed green in Asian dishes. The really special thing about Melissa's beef and onion stir fry is the wasabi mayonnaise she uses as a garnish.

She tends to hide a big, face-slapping whack of wasabi in the rice just to mess with me (actually it's because she has a passion for wasabi), but I love it despite the booby trap. I brought home a six-pack of Weyerbacher Merry Monks' Belgian Ale, which worked quite well with the sinus-clearing stir-fry, although the 9.3% alcohol content took us a bit by surprise...

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Melissa's Recipe and Notes

Beef and onion stir fry

Ingredients:

500 g beef eye fillet (tenderloin)
soy sauce
pepper
1 onion
olive oil
broccoli rabe
1/2 cup sushi rice
1 1/4 cup water
1 tbsp rice wine vinegar
Kewpie (Japanese) mayonnaise
wasabi paste

Thinly slice beef and drench in soy sauce with cracked pepper to marinate. Bring rice and water to simmer, then place bamboo steamer on top of the pot with broccoli rabe and leave to steam for approx 5 minutes. We're going to let the pot do double-duty by steaming the greens while the rice is cooking.

Remove the steamer after 5 mintues and replace with a lid, then turn heat to low for a further 15 min. Cover bottom of frying pan with olive oil and heat. To the hot pan add sliced onion (half rings) to soften, then add sliced and drained beef. Stir fry briefly to seal in the meat juices and then remove from heat. Remove onions and beef to a bowl and toss steamed broccoli in the pan juices. When rice is ready, drizzle with rice wine vinegar and serve in a bowl with 1/2 tsp wasabi paste.

Add in the steamed greens as shown in the finished dish photo, streak in Kewpie mayo and top with beef and onions. Mix wasabi paste and Kewpie mayo to taste and use it to top off the dish. Optional: Warn your diners about the wasabi booby trap...

Spicy Pork and Mushroom Spring Rolls

2008-06-17T21:02:00.015-04:00

We had to take advantage of the nice weather Tuesday evening to finish off Melissa's trophies for the diplomacy tournament she is hosting this weekend and get another layer of clear-coat on the more-or-less repaired patio table top.

This is the fourth year Melissa has had hand-made trophies for her tournament (dubbed Boston Massacre). Her design and her workmanship -- I just helped cut and sand the bases. Pretty nice, eh? They're better this year than ever before because we finally have a power saw to make clean, accurate cuts for those hardwood bases (a DEWALT DW713 heavy-duty 10-inch compound miter saw with a 15-amp, 5,000 rpm motor, to be exact). It sure beats hand-sawing through oak or poplar 2x4, as we've done before, and it should help me through a couple of other projects I have planned for this summer. I may not be into sports, but when it comes to power tools my stereotypical male inclinations shine bright and clear, much to our neighbors' chagrin...

So while I was browsing the hardware store for some new storage bins for the kitchen cabinets, Melissa was forming a cunning plan for a dinner that seemed to take just minutes to execute (about 20, actually). After I cleaned out and re-organized the kitchen cabinets Monday night, the spring roll wrappers that had rotated to the front of the shelf gave her an idea. Enter: spicy pork and mushroom spring rolls with leafy greens and Greek yogurt. Very fresh, very nice indeed. And that's the last of those cute little enoki mushrooms, for now. We had a bottle of 2006 Redcliffe Sauvignon Blanc (Marborough, NZ) that we were already drinking before we knew what dinner would be, and the dish was predictably too spicy for the wine. If we had actually planned this dinner we would have had a nice dry Riesling or an Alsacian Gewurztraminer. Here's to planning...

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Melissa's Recipes and Notes

Spicy Pork and Mushroom Spring Rolls

Here’s a shout out to my brother Cameron who’s managed to lose around 60 pounds this year. I asked him if he’d been reading my blog, but he replied, “too calorie rich, Mel, too calorie rich for me.” I did convince him that the grilled skinless chicken thighs and asparagus from June 2 would probably be fine for his diet, but I also thought this dish would probably fit too.

Ingredients:

4 large round spring roll wrappers. (These are translucent and made from rice starch)
Few crispy lettuce leaves
200gm of pork tenderloin (lean, fat trimmed)
4-6 cloves of garlic
1 tsp of John West Red Thai Chilli paste (Fairly mild compared to the green version)
½ tsp of Sambal Oelek Chilli Paste (hot)
Enoki Mushrooms
Crimini Mushrooms
Peas
2 tbsp of non-fat Greek yogurt
A little Kimchi (Korean fermented spiced cabbage) – optional

So from the above ingredients even the most naïve reader will be able to guess that these aren’t anywhere near traditional spring rolls. The crispy lettuce leaves I used were from a Boston lettuce, the chilli flavour came from a Thai sauce and an Indonesian sauce for that extra kick, the mushrooms are Japanese and Italian, the yogurt Greek, and if you add the Korean spiced cabbage you have a mélange of flavours from across the world…. What on earth was I thinking? In hindsight I should have probably made the Vietnamese dipping sauce of fish sauce, rice wine vinegar, sugar and chillis to top it off, but I’m not sure it needed it as the yogurt bound it together well. These rolls were pretty yummy despite my scattershot use of whatever ingredients I found in the fridge.

So here’s the method to my madness:

Cut the pork into cubes and peel garlic. Blend both in a food processor to make mince (ground meat in American). Add both the chilli pastes and cook well in a hot pan with a little olive oil (or just a non-stick pan if you want to skip the oil, Cameron). Once the meat is cooked, put it in a bowl and stick it in the freezer to hasten the cooling process. Flash cook the peas by dropping into boiling water and drain a minute or two latter. Rinse with some cold water to make them stop cooking and remain bright green. Fill a wide, shallow bowl with water from the tap (cold is OK). Take one spring roll wrapper and submerge it in water for about 60 seconds and then take it out. This should be enough to make it pliable. If you leave it in the water too long or try and do all four at once they’ll simply turn to glue, so just stick with one at a time and take them out as soon as you can bend them without snapping them. Towards one edge of the wrapper place some pork mince (2tsps), lettuce, two or three slices of crimini mushroom, a few Enoki mushrooms, some peas, a little Kimichi and a couple of small dollops of yogurt. See diagram below to judge how much filling you should have and how to roll your spring roll.

Repeat until you’ve made all the spring rolls. Arrange on plate and garnish with anything you like. I used a bit of the extra meat filling, Enoki mushrooms and a little yogurt.

Sunday Scallops Revisited

2008-06-17T08:24:00.005-04:00

Melissa is really good about using up the leftover ingredients from previous dinners, and this time around I made her job quite easy by buying way too many sea scallops when she sent me to the grocery store last Saturday. The seafood guy said I should have 1/2 pound per person, even though I told him there would be a risotto base for the dish. I talked him down to 2 pounds total, but it still felt like way too much food to me. Sure enough, Melissa only needed one pound for five of us. I am a terrible judge of these things.

Despite my aspirations with regard to lab work on Sunday afternoon, I got sucked into a marathon of LOST episodes (second season, available online) and spent a rare Sunday watching television with Melissa. For dinner, she pulled out the rest of the scallops she had frozen and served them on a salad of arugula, pear and walnuts topped with the remaining enoki mushrooms (aren't they cute?). This time she lightly coated the scallops with flour, salt and pepper before pan-frying them in olive oil to give them a nice crust. We had a bottle of Monkey Bay Sauvignon Blanc (2007, Marlborough, NZ) to pair with this dish as we pondered the significance of the numbers 4, 8 , 15, 16, 23, and 42 in the ongoing plot of LOST...

Mushroom Risotto and Sea Scallops

2008-06-16T19:58:00.019-04:00

Melissa and I got up early last Saturday morning and accomplished a lot before noon. We cut and sanded seven trophy bases for Melissa's upcoming Boston Massacre Diplomacy Tournament, and while she stained them I worked on some repairs to our outdoor dining table and a rickety old garden table. Then an early afternoon idea to try out a risotto dish turned into a great Saturday dinner with friends.

Amanda, Evan and Jason joined us for a dinner of mushroom and truffle risotto with pan-seared sea scallops. A combination of Shiitake, baby bello and small white mushrooms sauteed in butter and olive oil formed the base for the risotto, which was further flavored with a nice oaky chardonnay and truffle oil after cooking. The scallops were seared in a non-stick pan with sea salt, fresh ground pepper, butter and olive oil. Served on a bed of risotto and garnished with arugula leaves and enoki mushrooms, the little jewels were just begging to be eaten.

We were lucky to get Jason here on Saturday, since he was working feverishly on a talk for his upcoming interview for a faculty position at Rockefeller University in NYC. I figured he needed a break anyway, but a Saturday night dinner at our place can sometimes be bad news for someone trying to get back home at a certain hour (or stay sober)...

With dinner we had two California chardonnays: a bottle of 2006 Bogle, which was also in the risotto, and a bottle of 2006 Pietra Santa. Both were nice wines, but the Bogle was better hands down. There was a time not too long ago that I wouldn't have liked this wine, but it has everything good about California chardonnay without the things that turn many people off so easily. It's not light on the oak, but it comes across with great vanilla and toffee flavors and still leaves room for the fruit. The finish is long and creamy -- I really like this wine, and we usually get it for about $10. Other wines* we enjoyed as the night wore on were Avondale Pinotage (2006, South Africa), Stoneleigh Pinot Noir (2006, Marlborough, NZ), and Dona Paula Los Cardos Sauvignon Blanc (2007, Mendoza, Argentina). Well -- there were five of us...

For dessert we had a really special wine. When Ramon and Gijsje arrived in Auckland, New Zealand for our wedding back in March 2007, we took them directly to the Villa Maria Winery just a few minutes drive from the airport. We had a fantastic tasting out on their patio, and Ramon and Gijsje got to unwind in the best way possible after the long flight. They bought us a bottle of Villa Maria's 2004 Reserve Noble Riesling Botrytis Selection desert wine that we have been saving for a worthy meal. All I really need to say about this wine is that the winemaker's notes include the word "hedonistic." The raisin, apricot and nutty goodness in this wine perfectly complemented Melissa's selection of aged cheeses, ripe pear and candied walnuts (that was an afterthought that Melissa put together on the spot). The cheeses (all from Whole Foods) were Uniekaas Reserve Aged Gouda, Saint Agur French Blue, and cave aged Brillat Savarin, the latter of which we were introduced to last weekend at polo. That little red dollop at 5 o'clock on the cheese plate is a spoonful of fig jam, which really complements ripe cheeses beautifully.

What a rich finish...

*Disclaimers: (1) Wine list for the night not necessarily in chronological order. (2) Wine list not necessarily complete.

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Melissa's Recipes and Notes

I’ve been a fan of Mushroom/Truffle risotto since we were given a gift voucher to a North End restaurant (Marco’s) by Matt's brother Brian and his wife Casey for Christmas a few years back, where we had a delicious rendition of this dish. Since then I’ve recreated it from time to time. I think the most important part of risotto is the type of rice you buy and the method to cook it. The basic idea is to lightly toast the rice in a pan with oil, and then gradually add a broth till the rice becomes tender. If you get the right type of rice it releases starches to thicken the liquid and become quite creamy with continuous stirring, but retains its shape to provide a wonderful texture. Using this method the rice becomes a blank canvas to which one can add any manner of flavour. I had a hankering for mushroom risotto, but for a main course I felt like it needed something else… and it wasn’t an instant Kiwi ticket. (You might have needed to grow up in NZ to get that reference…*wink*). I did a Google search and found a few references adding scallops to mushroom risotto. A perfect pairing, both go so well with a buttery, oaky chardonnay, so surely they’d go well together!

I sent Matt on a mission to buy a selection of mushrooms and scallops from Wholefoods. Chantrelles are the quintessential mushroom for risotto (for me anyway), but I’ve yet to find them readily available fresh in my local supermarket, so it was no surprise when Matt came home with regular crimini (small white button) and baby portobello mushrooms along with two types of mushrooms that are typically used in Asian Cuisine. The Shiitake mushrooms hold their form well to cooking and the regular button and baby bella mushrooms soak up all the flavours they encounter, so nevertheless they’re well suited to the dish for which they were destined. He also had some beautiful juicy scallops sans yellow/orange roe -- for some reason they throw that part away in America, but the scallops are yummy nonetheless.

Mushroom and Truffle Risotto with Pan-fried Scallops

Ingredients:

Shiitake Mushrooms
Crimini Mushrooms
Baby Bello Mushrooms
Enoki Mushrooms
2 cups of Risotto Rice (Arborio)
Chicken Broth
Wine - Chardonnay
Butter
Parmesan Cheese
White truffle oil
Arugula

Slice up the Shiitake, Crimini and baby bello mushrooms and sautee them in butter. Remove the mushrooms from the pan and add olive oil and rice to lightly toast. Start adding a chicken broth/wine (50:50) mixture ladle by ladle to cook the rice. Add one ladle of liquid and wait till it is mostly absorbed before adding more. After around 20 minutes the rice should be cooked al dente – soft, but still separate with a little firmness in the center of each rice granule. Add back mushrooms and add parmesan cheese to taste, arugula and white truffle flavoured olive oil. I’ve had my truffle-flavoured olive oil for more than a year now, and quite frankly it’s too old. A lot of the flavour has been lost over time. I think a good rule of thumb would be to use the oil up within about 3 months if you’re a big fan of the pungent truffle flavour you can’t get anywhere else.

Once the risotto is made, simply cover and heat another pan with lavish amounts of olive oil until a fairly high temperature is reached (not yet smoking). Season scallops with salt and pepper and place into the pan. Cook for around 1-3 minutes on each side, depending on thickness. Scallops should go golden brown, but still remain squishy when you poke them and not shrink too much.

Spoon risotto on dish and arrange scallops with fresh arugula as garnish.

Candied Walnuts

Ingredients:

½ cup of white sugar
Walnuts
1 tsp salt

Heat oven up to 350oF. Put walnuts on a metal tray and lightly toast in oven for 6 minutes. In small sauce pan place sugar and salt on high heat. Watch carefully while tossing sugar till sugar evenly melts. Sugar should be golden brown rather than deep brown if you move the sugar round enough. Take toasted walnuts and toss into the melted sugar. Pour coated walnuts out on greased tray and separate with fork. The sugar should harden with a few minutes, and be cool enough to touch within around 15-20 minutes.

Got Poultry and Melon?

2008-06-12T22:11:00.010-04:00

Last night we had our regular Wednesday dinner and drinks at a local bar -- something we try to continue through the summer despite the suspension of the Wednesday Immunology Seminar Series at Harvard Medical School. We usually end up at The Mission, a place that is doing its part to revitalize the Brigham Circle area. The wait staff is friendly and attentive, the atmosphere is comfortable and sophisticated, and the veal osso bucco special last night was particularly good.

Speaking of wonderful food, Melissa was yet again inspired by things we needed to use or lose in our fridge, and with a little help from Google she put together an exciting dish that I hope to see again in one incarnation or another. Very nice with a Leffe Blonde Belgian Ale. Check it out...

Bloody Mary Chicken with Cantaloupe Salsa

Evan brought a wonderfully ripe cantaloupe to Polo last Saturday and in our over-stuffed state we weren’t even able to break into it. We ended up with it in our fridge after we got back, and I got to thinking -- I’m not much of a melon person. I don’t mind it when it’s wrapped in prosciutto, or the odd slice here and there, but I wasn’t quite sure what Matt and I would do with a whole one. So I got to thinking that maybe some sort of chicken dish with a melon-made-savory-salsa might be quite good. Google knows everything, so a search of Chicken and Cantaloupe (excluding salad) yielded this recipe:

Bloody Mary Chicken Breasts with Cantaloupe Salsa

Shauna Struessel, Security, CO

Ingredients:
4 Boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 15 oz. can tomato sauce
1 Tb. Celery salt
2 Limes
2 Tb. Freshly ground horseradish
1 Tb. Worcestershire sauce
1 Rocky Ford Cantaloupe
1 Jalapeno
1 Red Onion
¼ c. Cilantro
Salt and Pepper to taste

Instructions:
In glass bowl, combine; tomato sauce, celery salt, horseradish, Worcestershire sauce and the zest and juice of one lime and mix well. Marinate chicken breasts at least one hour, but up to 6. In small bowl, combine; 2 c. diced cleaned, and seeded cantaloupe (approximately 1 cantaloupe), 1 jalapeno diced finely with seeds and membranes removed, 1 c. red onion diced, ¼ c. cilantro chopped, juice of one lime and salt and pepper to taste. Let set covered in refrigerator at least two hours. Preheat grill to medium. Remove excess marinade from chicken and grill until done. Serve topped with fresh Cantaloupe Salsa. To complement this meal perfectly, serve with either Ptarmigan Vineyards 2004 Late Harvest Muscat OR Fat Tire Sunshine Wheat, both made proudly in Colorado.

I like bloody Marys, and while I didn’t have exactly all the ingredients I thought I could make do. Here’s my variation.

3 boneless skinless chicken thighs
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 lime
2 tbsp of horseradish paste
1 tbsp of Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp diced fennel stalk (to replace celery taste from celery salt)
1 tsp of chili flakes (I like my bloody mary’s spicy)

½ Cantaloupe
¼ cup of fresh tomato salsa (Trader Joes that we had left over in the fridge)
1 tbsp of cilantro sauce….. (unfortunately I broke the container pulling it out of the fridge, so then I really had to improvise)
1 Shallot (in place of the red onion)
½ tsp of chili flakes (no fresh jalapeno peppers in the house)
1 tbsp of chopped fresh basil leaves (to make up for the lost cilantro)
Salt and pepper to taste

First, blend the diced tomatoes to make “tomato juice.” When I read the recipe above I thought tomato sauce might be a ketchup-like product but the high vinegar content probably wouldn’t go so well so I replaced it with the can of diced tomatoes. After talking to Matt, though, I think the author of the original recipe probably meant something along the lines of a fairly plain tomato pasta sauce (no vinegar) rather than what Kiwis (like myself) would think of (Wattie's tomato sauce). So to the blended tomatoes, add the juice of one lime, horseradish, fennel, and chili. I might be tempted to throw in a shot or two of vodka here *wink*. I divided the bloody Mary mix at this point to marinate the chicken with one half and reserve the other half for garnish. From previous experience, I’ve found the horseradish loses its edge as soon as it hits the heat, so I wanted to preserve this in the finished dish.

While the chicken was marinating I diced the cantaloupe and mixed it with the remaining ingredients, then left it to steep in the juices to combine all the flavours.

The chicken was grilled on the BBQ after the requisite marinating time. To plate, I covered one half of the chicken with the cantaloupe salsa and spooned some remaining bloody Mary mix around the chicken (of course don’t use any bloody Mary mix that came in contact with raw chicken for this part), and then topped the dish with a single basil leaf.

Thoughts on next time….

I forgot that I had thought about putting peach in it before I did the Google search (Evan also left us with some peaches that were perfectly ripe). I got Matt to dice a little peach into the left over salsa, and it was really quite good and added an extra dimension to the flavour which could make it quite special.

As I was making the bloody Mary marinade, I was also reminded of a recipe for bloody Mary fish ceviche that I got from Cuisine Magazine (http://www.cuisine.co.nz/). I think that replacing the chicken with fresh snapper would make a delectable meal.

Tuesday Tasting

2008-06-11T07:45:00.012-04:00

Last night we went to a wine and food tasting at a new restaurant on Newbury Street called Cafeteria Boston. Cafeteria is an "upscale" establishment that purports to fill the massive void left in Newbury Street culture when Armani Cafe closed down last year (see this review by Boston.com).

Usually these events are designed to showcase the restaurant and build a customer base. Consequently, restaurants tend to lay out a generous spread and put their best culinary foot forward, often at cost or even at some expense to the restaurant in the interest of building business. While the restaurant interior was nicely cool and welcoming on such a hot day, the event was a massive disappointment for several reasons. First, our $19 pre-booked tickets (they were $29 at the door) bought us three tickets to taste wines. You may notice there are four wines on the tasting menu. Second, the guys pouring wine were unbelievably stingy with what we knew to be rather inexpensive wines. On offer were Nobilo Sauvgnon Blanc ($15 retail but we usually find it for $12), Hogue Pinot Grigio ($9 retail), Blackstone Pinot Noir ($18 retail) and Toasted Head Cabernet ($15 retail). They are all nice wines, although it was hard to tell with the whites since they weren't even properly chilled for the first hour or so.

Now to the food. There were some potentially interesting items on the menu: two types of gourmet pizzas, Kobe meatballs, stuffed mushrooms and beef carpaccio all came out hors d'oeuvres style. The stuffed mushrooms were quite good, but the pizzas and meatballs were mediocre and the carpaccio was shockingly bland. We were waiting with baited breath for the shrimp and crab cakes in what by now was a vibrant and crowded room, but only got more of the same. We pulled aside a waiter and jokingly remarked that the shrimp and crab cakes weren't actually going to be served, to which he responded that he had seen no evidence of such items in the kitchen. To be fair, we don't know whether they were ever brought out; since we had all exhausted our three "wine coupons" we left shortly thereafter to move to a place where we could get a full glass of wine and some really special food -- our favorite Spanish tapas joint, Tapeo, which is right across the street. They have fantastic sangria, and currently feature a menu of special dishes built entirely around asparagus.

This event was clearly designed to make a tidy profit rather than to showcase the quality of wine and food at the restaurant. It was part of the Tuesday Tasting Series hosted by BostonEventGuide.com, so we don't know how much of it's underwhelmingness can be blamed on the restaurant itself, but we are not rushing back to Cafeteria Boston anytime soon. Certainly they are responsible for the quality of the food, and their "showcase" hors d'oeuvres didn't do much to excite the palate. Besides, if $19 bought us a total of about $5 worth of wine and a finger-food tasting menu that was incomplete as advertised, what is to be expected for a full dinner? At least we didn't pay the $29 at the door like some poor bastards undoubtedly did.

My restraint is probably unduly generous -- check out Evan's account of the event...

Monday Evening Cooldown

2008-06-10T07:45:00.005-04:00

Monday was another scorcher with high humidity. The hazy day topped out at 95 degrees to make our Northeast heat wave official. However, by early evening a cooling sea breeze had broken the heat, and by the time we got home around 7:30 pm it was perfect weather for cooking and eating out on the patio.

We had grilled pork tenderloin with asparagus spears and a light, citrusy summer bruschetta. The pork was briefly marinated in soy sauce and coarse-ground pepper, and the asparagus were blanched and tossed in olive oil, salt and pepper before grilling. This is the way we always do asparagus spears -- it's quick and easy, and I have yet to encounter a better way to enjoy the vegetable. The bruschetta was made from grilled sourdough bread topped with olive oil, fresh tomato and onion salsa and Melissa's cilantro, lemon, olive oil and Greek yogurt sauce (also used in Sunday's grilled steak pitas). A glass of 2006 Monkey Bay Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough, NZ) for Melissa and a cold Smuttynose Summer Weizen Ale (Portsmouth, NH) for me topped off a relaxing dinner outside. I love summer.

Sunday Evening Pita Pockets

2008-06-09T20:34:00.011-04:00

After a day of lab work and shopping in the stifling heat on Sunday, Melissa put together a meal inspired by the pita bread we were left with from the polo picnic on Saturday.

First she grilled some zucchini and flank steak marinated in soy sauce, ground black pepper and the brine from a jar of marinated green peppercorns. Then she added fresh tomato and onion salsa and her walnut chili salsa (recipe to be listed in an upcoming antipasti post).

Sliced steak, zukes and salsa were stuffed into a pita pocket and garnished with a tastebud-jolting sauce of cilantro, lemon, olive oil and Greek yogurt. Wow. The walnut chili salsa is what made the dish. The combination of textures and flavors is amazing -- meaty, slightly crunchy, zesty and spicy. A glass of Nobilo 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough, NZ) rounded things out nicely.

A Saturday Well Spent

2008-06-08T20:23:00.020-04:00

We got up at around 7 am Saturday so Melissa could start prepping the food for our picnic and I could make a brief but necessary trip to the lab. We got out of town at about 12:30pm with Evan and our Canadian friends (Québécois, actually) Etienne and Angelique from the Dana-Farber.

Our first stop was Buzzard's Bay Brewery in Westport, MA, for a tasting and a tour. The brewery is owned by the same family as the Westport Rivers Winery, which we visited in a recent trip to the area. We fully intended to see the brewery that same day but time ran short, and we'd hate to rush such a thing. This time around we didn't need to be in a hurry, so we lingered with the tour guide to discuss the details of fermentation and filtration, and we all enjoyed the brews (the black lager was my favorite). We did stop by the winery to pick up a bottle of Imperial Sec and spread out on a picnic table for an early afternoon nibble. Angelique made a really nice hummus for the day -- we'll have to hit her up for that recipe.

The main event of the day was the first international match of the year at the Newport Polo Club in Portsmouth, RI. Evan and Philippa discovered this club a few years back, and it has since become a favorite summer excursion for us. Spread out on a blanket with a gourmet picnic and a cold glass of bubbly is pretty much the only way Melissa and I end up involved in any sporting event, so for now this is our only gig. The USA team was playing Canada, so Etienne and Angelique had to turn out the support. They (Canada) lost 11 to 9 in the highest scoring match we have seen since we started going a couple of years ago.

The picnic fare consisted of a roasted and stuffed chicken Melissa prepared Saturday morning, bread and cheese brought by Etienne and Angelique, and a mango mousse cake with fresh berries provided by Evan. Melissa's chicken is always wonderful, and this one did not disappoint. Her sage stuffing was a huge hit, and with Boston lettuce, ripe tomato, aged Gruyere cheese and a generous swipe of Japanese mayonnaise (a favorite of Evan's), I have never met a better roast chicken sandwich. We brought along a couple of bottles of Zardetto Prosecco Brut (Conegliano, Italy) and some Kiwi Sauvignon Blanc (Villa Maria and Nobilo), all of which make great summer picnic wines.

Etienne is a talented home-brewer, and he brought a litre bottle of his latest creation for us to taste. The brew got a great reception from our crowd, as evidenced by the smiling faces holding almost-empty tasting glasses -- it was a light ale with a heady aromatic nose and not too heavy on the bitter hops, something I have come to dislike in beer. A very well-balanced brew.

No picnic would be complete without the requisite insect life -- this little creature was taking a rest on my pant-leg in between chukkas (periods in a polo match).

Etienne and Angelique brought what way have been the most heavenly cheese I have ever tasted (we knew leaving them in charge of cheese would be a good idea). This is cave-aged Brillat-Savarin, a triple-creme brie-style cheese made from goat's milk. It was so magnificently melted in the near-stifling heat of the day that it resembled ice-cream left out of the freezer. The taste and texture were not far off that comparison, either. This is so rich and creamy that it's actually worth the $30/lb price tag -- and although you don't need much of it, it can be difficult to stop eating.

The half-time in a polo match is like recess in grade-school, but with drinks. Everyone floods out onto the field to play, socialize and stomp back in the divets made on the lawn by the horse's hooves during play. We may be milling around with champagne and martini glasses, but this is truly a family affair, and even the smallest fans get into the act while the players rest up and strategize for the second half.

We ended the meal with a mango mousse cake and fresh raspberries and strawberries, all compliments of Evan, which were so good that we almost finished it all despite our already quite full bellies. We did share the final serving of mousse cake with the couple seated next to us, much to their delight. What a great day-- even the terrible traffic on the way back to Boston couldn't taint it...

Thursday Night Stew

2008-06-05T20:47:00.006-04:00

A cool night and another wonderful dinner. Melissa's description of her creation speaks for itself...

Lentil, black bean and pork stew

Proper summer weather begins in June in Boston, but today it was decidedly chilly again - anything below 60oF/16oC may as well be the middle of winter to a kiwi like me. So after spending a day at the lab with the inside air conditioning being a little cooler than usual (they’ve turned the heat off now that it’s “summer”) and with the apartment also a little chilly (again no more heat) I had a hankering for something hot for dinner.

This dish has been influenced by a number of sources. First up was my attempt to make a vegetarian version of sausage rolls which involved a lentil/tofu/mushroom base. It’s pretty good but it’ll have to wait for another post. While making the base for the vegetarian sausage I decided I quite liked lentils. They have such a wonderful nutty flavour and unlike many other pulses do not require overnight soaking before cooking. But the real inspiration for this dish was Evan. We were getting a bit peckish one night when Evan was over but I was feeling a bit of a lack of inspiration in the cooking department. I asked Evan if he could have anything he liked for dinner what would it be? I think he had recently had a lentil and pork soup that he liked at a restaurant somewhere and it was the first thing that popped into his mind. It just so happened I had lentils left over from the vegetarian sausage rolls and frozen pork steak in the freezer so Evan’s obscure suggestion became reality in less than an hour.

Since then I’ve made a few variations, and here’s tonight’s effort.

½ cup of lentils
2 cups of water
1 tsp salt
Pork bone (optional)
few drops of liquid hickory smoke
½ can of black beans
1 tbsp of chopped fennel leaves
1 head of roasted garlic
1 pork loin steak (~300g) – cubed and soaked in brine
½ cup of peas

Cut pork into cubes and soak in brine while lentils etc are cooking. Boil lentils in salted water with pork bone for around 20 mins. Remove pork bone and add drops of liquid hickory smoke, black beans, fennel and garlic. Simmer together to combine flavours for ~10 minutes. Drain pork cubes and sear in a frying pan to seal. Add pork to lentil/beans and simmer till pork is cooked through. Add more water if stew becomes too thick or starts to "catch" on the bottom of the pot. A few minutes before serving add peas to pot and cook for a few minutes to soften peas. Serve in bowls and garnish with fennel sprigs.

Monday Chook on the Grill

2008-06-02T20:43:00.013-04:00

Another glorious weather day in Boston today. We've finally broken into warm weather here in New England. Spring blooms are nice but the rain and cold don't let up reliably until June -- so here we are...

We enjoyed a nice walk home from the medical center around 7 pm and I got out to join up another pair of poplar planks for our new patio table top. This project is coming along really slowly because I got all soft and caved in to a neighbor's complaints about my using power tools on weekends and evenings. I'm going to have to take a couple of half-days off work to make some cuts with my circular saw and power miter saw while no one else is home, not to mention the hours of power sanding I'll need to do when the table top is fully joined up and cut to size...

While I wrestled with the wood glue and bar clamps Melissa was preparing a grilled dinner in honor of the good weather. Grilled chicken thighs marinated in lemon-lime, cilantro and red onion with a bit of Thai fish sauce for flavor. Grilled asparagus is always a favorite -- blanched and tossed in olive oil, sea salt and ground black pepper before finishing on the gas grill.

We had a bottle of 2006 Cono Sur Gewurztraminer (Casablanca Valley, Chile) with dinner. We discovered this winery through their reasonably priced Cabernet Sauvignon (a steal at $7.50), which we bought by the case for some time. The moderating effects of the coastal breezes and the Chilean Andes provide good growing conditions for a wide range of grapes, and it turns out they make a nice pinot noir and, a surprise for us, a Gewurz that is both crisp and flowery with strong citrus and perfumy aromatics in good balance. We got this bottle a few times for $7 at our local Shaw's supermarket, which turned out to be a pricing mistake on their part, but it's still worth the corrected price of $14. It paired beautifully with the citrus and cilantro in the chicken, although I thought it didn't work so well with the smoky, creamy flavor of the grilled asparagus. Live and learn...

Sunday Evening Experiment

2008-06-02T19:45:00.010-04:00

I didn't intend to spend the whole day in the lab on such a beautiful Sunday, but time has a way of getting away from me when I get my head into my NMR data. I am relatively new to structural biology, but I'm told that this is how it always works -- people lose entire days, miss meals, and time accelerates when you're in that dark room full of computers...

We picked up some flank steak at the grocery store looking for a relatively thin cut that's good for marinating quickly and pan frying. Melissa made up a fresh, zesty marinade of lemon and lime juice with salt and pepper, then seared the steak in a ridged, cast iron griddle pan. Leeks and baby portobello mushrooms were sliced and sauteed in olive oil before she added the last of the chive butter she had made up a while back to have with hot sourdough rolls. Steak and vegetables were served on a base of white bean puree. Melissa uses canned small white beans pureed with roasted garlic and a bit of lemon juice to make this flavorful base with a thick, mouth-filling texture.

The 2006 Sebastiani Chardonnay (yes, we buy quite a bit of it) picked up both the crisp acidity from the citrus marinade and the buttery, earthy tones of the leek and mushroom accompaniments. The wine actually brought the dish together a bit since the disparate flavor palates in the lemon-lime marinade and the buttery vegetables had some clash potential. Melissa says next time she would probably leave out the citrus and sear the steak with just salt and pepper.

The lemon-lime marinade made us think of good steak fajitas, though, and we finished the last scraps of steak in resepctable Tex-Mex style with fresh guacamole and tortilla chips. Lucky we had those avocados...

When the Soup Becomes the Sauce...

2008-05-30T20:13:00.016-04:00

Melissa and I took a break from the lab today from 5-6 pm for the BCMP happy hour (that's the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, where I work). We both had another hour or so of work to do afterward (always a delicate operation returning to the lab after happy hour), but when we got home Melissa had a flash of inspiration...

Looking in the refrigerator she found a number of things that had to be used or lost, so she put together a dish that illustrates particularly well her mastery over the use of leftovers.

The dish was pan-fried pork tenderloin with portobello mushroom, beets, fennel bulbs and butternut squash puree. It was beautifully presented with a careful arrangement and a garnish of feathery fennel leaves fresh from the garden. Note that the pork tenderloin is the only ingredient that is new tonight: the beets and fennel were leftover from last night's roasted veggie salad, the butternut squash puree was actually last Saturday's squash and goat cheese soup, and the portobello was the lone morsel that didn't make it onto the grill last Sunday. The smaller plate in front is mine -- I came home feeling not-so-hungry due to my consumption of Bertucci's pizza for lunch and Domino's pizza at happy hour. Why do I eat such things despite my knowledge of what culinary jewels await when Melissa takes the helm in our kitchen? I guess I still have a graduate student's inability to pass up free food at work. Such is life...

Melissa did something really smart that added a nice dimension to the flavor of the pork. Knowing that meat fresh off the heat should rest for a few minutes before it is cut so that the flavorful juices re-absorb into the meat rather than dribbling out all over the cutting board, she topped it with the juicy mushrooms she had pan-fried together with the pork while it waited to be sectioned and presented. We buy whole pork and beef tenderloins from the wholesale club and butcher and freeze them at home, which results in a much better quality-to-price ratio than we find in the local grocery stores -- plus we control the portion size.

We had a nice dry Gancia Prosecco (Veneto region, Italy) with the meal. We love bubbly, and Prosecco is always a crisp, fresh drink, especially with warmer weather foods. Pear, melon and apples abound in most of these wines, and many good labels go for $10-$20 ($11 in this case, although it was probably overpriced since it was from our local small bottle store).

I'll wrap this up so I can get back to the 2008 Scripps National Spelling Bee, which Melissa is watching live right now. She actually changed it to the HD channel because the definition was insufficient. So far the best bit was when one contestant (and the entire viewing audience) mistook the Hindi word "numnah," referring to the pad or cushion placed under a horse's saddle, for the similar "numbnut," which could be used any number of ways. Much to his relief and ours, the misunderstanding was sorted out before he began to spell...

Roast Veggie Salad

2008-05-30T19:21:00.011-04:00

It's been a busy week -- either long days in the lab, or eating out as we usually do on Wednesday evenings after the Harvard Immunology Seminar Series lectures (followed by wine and cheese reception at the medical school). Either way it means our own kitchen doesn't see much action...

After a long day in the lab on Thursday, we sat down around 9 pm to a dinner of roasted vegetable salad. Melissa has done this a few times before, and our favorite combination is roasted beets and fennel bulbs, although she has previously included carrots and potatoes among other things that looked good at the grocery store or happened to be growing in our little urban garden. For anyone who has yet to associate beets with good food experiences, the roasted root is a much different beast from the boiled and pickled one. When roasted long and slow, the sugars caramelize beautifully and make a tasty crust at the edges of the peeled root (see above).

Melissa roasts the peeled and rough-cut veggies for about an hour arranged in a nonstick roasting pan with just cooking spray and balsamic vinegar, then serves them on a field green salad with fresh tomatoes and some good olive oil, sea salt and fresh ground pepper. She enjoyed the salad with a glass of 2006 Redcliffe sauvignon blanc (Marlborough, NZ). I washed it down with a Long Trail Ale (it may have been two; Vermont, USA) from the six-pack that Taylor brought by around 9:45 pm on his way back into town from his volunteer teaching gig at Norfolk Medium Security Prison (you'll have to ask him about that...).

Not a bad night, all in all.

Sunday Afternoon Grilling

2008-05-26T11:29:00.033-04:00

Yesterday was a truly gorgeous day in Boston, and today we are getting more of the same (I can tell by looking out the small window next to my lab bench -- sigh). Sunny, clear, mid 70's and breezy. These are the kind of days we need to fully recover from the long New England winter...

In honor of the glorious day we decided to have a small cookout with a few close friends. After a brief run to the lab to tend my cultures, I cleaned up in the apartment and courtyard (a slow and unnecessarily meticulous process) while Melissa prepped food in the kitchen (she is quick and efficient). It must drive her nuts to watch me clean -- but she enjoys the results too much to complain about my methodology.

While the grill was warming up we relaxed with Evan in the small window of direct sun we get in our courtyard. This time of year a few square meters of sun move across the outer edge of the patio table for about one hour early in the afternoon -- our golden hour. We soaked in the sun while nibbling at a cheese board with a glass of 2006 Sebastiani chardonnay (Sonoma, CA).

Beautiful and delicious things always come off the grill when Melissa tends it. The main course was a whole roast chicken. She roasts chickens like this standing up on a soda can full of a seasoning mix that percolates up through the meat while it cooks off the flame. This is often referred to as beer can chicken, and it results in a tender and well-seasoned bird. Accompanied by grilled eggplant, zucchini and portobello mushrooms, it made a formidable feast. Melissa also makes a mean grilled tempeh for the vegetarians -- even we carnivores couldn't pass it up.

The most impressive dish of the day was probably dessert. Melissa comes up with some pretty inventive ways to make grilled desserts, and this was a stunning example. She chopped a pineapple lengthwise into fillets (not rings) and coated them liberally with brown sugar. These were grilled over direct flame until the sugars caramelized on the outside of the fruit and made nice, dark grill marks. This was served hot off the grill on a pool of stiff oatmeal cookie batter and topped with vanilla ice cream and mint garnish. Beautiful to look at, even better to eat -- we almost didn't get a photo of this one...

The Sangria

We made the first sangria of the season to accompany today's cornucopia of deliciousness. Sangria is a base of red wine that is fortified with extra spirits (rum, brandy, vodka, etc.) and sweetened with sugar and fruit juices. Served with copious amounts of chopped fruit and ice, it makes a wonderful summer drink. Always a favorite, our sangria recipe was carefully crafted through scientific process a few years back. After enjoying some excellent sangria and a fine dinner at Tapeo on Newbury Street, Ramon, Gijsje, Melissa and I decided we had to replicate this at home. Being a group of four Harvard-trained scientists (three immunologists and a physicist went into a bar...), we of course went about it with great discipline and careful methodology. We assembled a group of ingredients suggested in various recipes we collected during the "literature search" phase of the project and set up our workspace in a controlled, well-lit environment (Ramon and Gijsje's Cambridge apartment).

The experiment: we did not vary the wine base; one should always use an inexpensive Spanish red. Using expensive, high-quality wine is a complete waste -- these should be enjoyed unadulterated by ice, fruit juice and the various other things we are about to add to the concoction. We always use a tempranillo or tempranillo-garnacha mix typical of Spain's Rioja wine region (usually Abrazo del Toro Tinto -- $5 at Trader Joes). We tried various ratios and combinations of fortifying spirits and fruit juice, then sweetened each batch to taste and made our notes. In the end we came to this simple recipe: 4 parts wine, 1 part spirits, 1 part orange juice. The choice of spirits is key and we found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that fruit brandy works best. Apple or peach brandy is what Melissa and I use, and the peach especially gives a nice twist to the usual apple and citrus flavors you find in a good sangria. We have also used regular brandy with triple-sec or Cointreau to good effect. Apples and oranges (about 1 or 2 fruits per bottle of wine) should be chopped and marinated in the brandy overnight in the refrigerator; the wine and other ingredients should be chilled until needed. When ready to serve, add the fruit and brandy to the chilled wine in a large pitcher or punch bowl and stir in the orange juice. Orange juice turns out to be the most important ingredient as far as I'm concerned: it takes the sharp tanniny edge off the wine and softens the whole concoction so that it doesn't just taste like cheap red wine made stronger with cheap brandy. Sweeten it to taste with simple syrup and serve on ice in tumblers or wine glasses.

This recipe is delicious, but also pretty strong -- and it tends to sneak up on you -- so I sometimes dilute it a bit with soda water to make it go a little further and avoid knocking too many of our guests on their asses. Please let us know if you try it out and if you discover any improvements -- a good experiment needs to be replicated as many times as possible.

At the end of the day, Poppy was exhausted. Entertaining is hard work...
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Melissa's Recipes

Roasted Chicken on the Grill

This is my version of “Beer Can Chicken”. I have always been particularly fond of stuffing, so it was difficult for me to forego cramming sage and onion stuffing inside the bird before I cooked it. However, I was once at a friend's house in NZ and had the most wonderfully tender roast chicken. I found out the tenderness was due to the whole lemon stuffed inside the chicken during roasting. All of the oils from the rind and acid from the juice scent and tenderize the chicken as it cooks. So in the summertime I like to make roast chicken that combines the sage from the stuffing, the lemon for tenderness and the BBQ/Grill.

1 whole chicken
2 tsp of chicken stock paste
1 head of garlic cloves
1 lemon
A few sprigs of sage leaves (mine are from the garden. Sage is one of the few herbs that survives the New England winter)
1 empty can

~2 hours before roasting chicken mix chicken stock paste, ~4 cloves of garlic finely chopped, and the zest of one lemon into a paste. Carefully with your fingers separate skin of the chicken from the meat without tearing the skin. I leave the connection between the skin and the ridge between the two breasts intact to form pockets under the skin in which I can smear the garlic/stock/zest paste. Then carefully insert ~ 6-8 whole sage leaves under the skin. Try and lay them flat as when the chicken cooks the skin will become translucent and they will show through. Hand crush the lemon the allow some of the juices to escape and put in the cavity with the rest of the sage leaves. Allow everything to soak in before preparing the chicken for roasting around 2hrs later.

To get the chicken ready for the BBQ remove the lemon and sage from the cavity and cut the lemon in half and collect remaining juice. Cut the lemon and remaining garlic into small enough chunks to fit into the empty can. Add the lemon juice to the empty can also. Place the chicken over top of the upright can so the can fills its cavity and the chicken is vertical. Keep the chicken upright so the contents of the can don’t spill. With toothpicks truss the open neck cavity skin together. As the chicken roasts on the BBQ the can will heat up and all the aromas from the lemon, garlic and sage will be released. Sealing the neck will keep all the aromatics from escaping before they have a chance to permeate the meat.

To cook the chicken on the BBQ you need cook it covered using indirect heat. Our BBQ has 3 burners and a lid (I haven’t tried tenting it in foil if you don’t have a covered BBQ but this might work). I place the chicken over one burner that I leave off. I leave the other two burners on such that it heats the BBQ up to an oven temperature of ~200oC. If you don’t have a good feel for this I’d start on medium and keep peeking. If after ~30 minutes the skin hasn’t started browning you should probably turn it up a bit. If it starts getting brown much earlier than this I’d turn it down a bit. How long it takes to cook the chicken can vary widely. I first use the skin colour to judge, then poke it at the bone joint next to the breast to see if the juice runs clear. The meat should also be firm when prodded and not squishy. Or alternatively you could use a meat thermometer to make sure the internal temperature is ~165-175oF. I like to stay on the lower side to maintain the juiciness of the meat, (but if it’s pink and translucent inside it’s gotta go back on).

I carve the chicken Chinese style by first removing the limbs at the joints and then removing each breast whole and cutting slices against the grain. That way everyone gets some yummy skin with their slice of breast.

A Nice Saturday Soup

2008-05-24T22:16:00.013-04:00

Melissa and I got up early this morning (about 7 AM) and had coffee in the courtyard while we pruned some plants in the garden. The renovation project that has put a lid on our patio (with plenty of construction debris to spare) for almost a year is winding up and now we have some cleanup to do.

After getting the painting we recently bought for our first wedding anniversary to the framers and making brief appearances in the lab, we had a relaxing afternoon of naps and reading. Then Melissa sent me to the store for "some goat cheese and a pumpkin." I knew she meant a squash, probably acorn or butternut, but not the big orange Halloween beast we usually refer to as a pumpkin in this country...

Melissa had a roasted vegetable salad in mind, but I suggested butternut squash soup and she ran with it. Thick and creamy, but not overly heavy, it was blended from butternut squash that had first been roasted in the oven. Cream, chicken stock, nutmeg, fresh thyme, salt and pepper, and topped with a generous slug of really nice goat cheese. Mmmmmm... Goat cheese... Served with hot, crusty sourdough rolls and a 2006 Sebastiani Chardonnay (Sonoma, CA). Sebastiani is a recent favorite of ours since our grocery store has it for $10 or $11 -- crisp and fruity with all of the cream and toffee flavors that come from a well-oaked California chardonnay. Good pairing.

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Melissa's Recipe

Butternut Squash Soup

1 butternut squash/pumpkin
Olive oil for roasting
~1 cup of chicken or vegetable broth
100ml of light cream
100g of soft goat cheese
1 tsp of fresh thyme leaves - chopped
1/8 tsp nutmeg
salt and pepper to season

Peel and cut squash into chunks and oven roast with salt and olive oil until tender and turning brown at tips. Remove from oven and place in large pot. Add broth, cream, ~1/2 of goat cheese and nutmeg to pot. Puree with a hand blender to get smooth, or simply mash as the pumpkin/squash will fall apart easily. Adjust broth amount to get desired thickness of soup. Heat to serving temperature. Season with salt and pepper. Spoon into serving bowl and float a round disc of goat cheese. Add a sprig of fresh thyme to garnish.

Friday Evening Nibbles

2008-05-24T09:32:00.008-04:00

After attending Friday afternoon Happy Hours at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, we came home with bellies full of beer and nibbles, so we didn't really need to have dinner. We settled in with a bottle of 2006 Redcliffe sauvignon blanc (Marlborough, NZ) -- a pretty decent wine and a good value since our local bottle store sells it at $20 for a magnum (no, we did not finish the whole bottle last night).

As usual, however, Melissa simply couldn't stay out of the kitchen. Upon discovering we had no bread or crackers with which to polish off the last of Melissa's homemade pâté, most normal people would just whip down to the store (there are three within a couple of blocks of us) and get some, but Melissa decided to make her own. She whipped up a pizza-dough kind of concoction studded with fresh chives cut from the garden and baked it to a beautiful golden brown.

It came out more or less like a flatbread you might use to make panini, and it tasted wonderful. Melissa often plans to freeze a portion or two when she makes breads, but I can't stay away from fresh, moist bread still warm from the oven, so that never happens.

Cut up into square pieces and drizzled with some good olive oil, it made the perfect vehicle for pâté, which we subsequently devoured. We then devoured most of the boule loaf Melissa made from the same dough. With a glass of wine an altogether respectable late-night snack...

Thursday (Vegetarian) Dinner

2008-05-22T20:46:00.013-04:00

A shout out to our vegetarian readers: tonight Melissa made a great dinner of corn fritters with fresh salsa and field green salad. She might have cheated a bit by adding some chicken stock (after all, we are not vegetarians), but it can just as well be done without that one ingredient.

The salsa topping the fritters was light, clean and refreshing with red onion, tomato, red bell pepper/capsicum, cucumber, lemon juice, cilantro, sea salt and a bit of habanero, serrano and jalapeno peppers left over from last Saturday's spicy creme brulee. The field green salad was seasoned with just olive oil and sea salt, so no heavy dressing detracted from the light flavors in the rest of the dish.

The key here is to use a flavorful olive oil. After experiencing the amazing quality of boutique olive oils in New Zealand and the US, we have sought out reasonably priced oils that retain some of the fruit and spice that come through in really high quality oils. So far the winner has to be the Red Island oils from Australia. At about $10 for a half-litre bottle and a whole lot of flavor, the price is right. Has anyone else had any good olive oils recently?

We are never disappointed with a good New Zealand sauvignon blanc, and the 2007 Oyster Bay nicely highlighted the fresh citrus and pepper in the salsa.

We watched a great documentary on E.O. Wilson's life-long study on ant social behavior while we ate. I guess we're just scientists to the core...

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Melissa's Recipes

Corn Fritters

I didn’t initially publish this recipe because I think it still needs a bit of work -- but given the demand for the recipe, I’ll record it now and welcome suggestions.

~1/4 of a large red onion diced
2 eggs
1 can of corn whole kernels (creamed sweet corn won’t work!)
1-2 tsp of cilantro pesto (yes it did go a fair way but that was the last of it)
~1/4 cup of flour
liberal amounts of ground pepper
½ tsp of chicken stock paste (vegetable substitute or simple salt would do here)
dash of dried garlic powder
Cooking spray

Mix everything in large mixing bowl and then cook in fry pan like pancakes.

All in all the taste of the fritters was excellent; however the texture needed a little work…

So the obvious improvements to the fritters would be to use corn sliced fresh off the cob and pan fry a little crushed garlic to add to the fritter batter – fresh is always best, though with quick after-work food I think we can accept a few shortcuts. I think to get a lighter batter, next time I’d also only use one egg and reduce the flour to ~2tbsps. Thirdly while cooking spray makes the fritters very low in fat, I think the outside crust looses a little crispness, so using liberal amounts sizzling hot olive oil would also improve this.

Monday Night Dinner

2008-05-19T20:24:00.004-04:00

After fighting our way home from the lab in 35 mph gusting winds today, we dove into Melissa's quick Monday night dinner. Beef eye fillet/tenderloin seared in a ridged griddle pan and served very rare on a bed of field greens with tomato, cilantro and avocado salsa. Topped with the remaining lime, cilantro and greek yogurt sauce from Saturday night's lamb dish and plated with garlic and olive oil naan (store-bought bread but very nice warmed up in the oven with fresh seasoning).

Good start to the week...

Amanda's Birthday Dinner

2008-05-18T14:57:00.026-04:00

I just finished cleaning up the kitchen from last night's festivities -- what a beautiful dinner. In honor of Amanda's birthday (Monday), we hosted a small evening of friends and food. Melissa put together some of Amanda's favorites and the birthday girl served up a round of Mojitos to start the night.

Melissa got things going with a platter of creamy brie, aged gouda and her homemade pâté, accompanied by tomato, arugula and some perfectly ripe avocado (I know because it didn't set off my unfortunate allergy to under-ripe avo). Great with fresh baguette....

We toasted the guest of honor with a bottle of 2001 Imperial Sec from Westport Rivers winery (MA). This is a really fresh, fruity bubbly made from 88% riesling with 12% Rkatsiteli (A Russian varietal that makes an interestingly perfumy, citrus-laden wine all by itself). The folks at Westport Rivers really know what they're doing with bubbly, and also give a very informative tour and tasting at the winery (see Evan's blog posting on our recent trip there). Highly recommended day trip from Boston.

Melissa kept things fresh and light with prosciutto-wrapped melon followed by a Thai ceviche made with tilapia, bell peppers and coconut milk -- one of Amanda's favorites at our place and a nice pairing with a Cuban mojito in one hand and a fork in the other.

The main event was a braised lamb shank served on couscous salad with a zesty sauce of cilantro, lime and Greek yogurt. When done right, lamb shank falls right off the bone and melts in your mouth, and this one hit the mark dead center. Seasoned with coriander and fennel seeds, garlic and cumin (among other things -- see recipe below), it was a panoply of flavors that held together beautifully.

We topped off the night with what has become a favorite, and somewhat legendary, dessert in our house. Ramon debuted his habanero, serrano and jalapeno creme brulee at a Blackwood Street Thanksgiving a few years ago. It met with some suspicious looks (before tasting), quickly followed by rave reviews once the crusts were cracked. Melissa got the proportions just right: the clean, fresh flavor of the peppers came through with just enough spice to leave a tickle in your throat, deftly sidestepping the high potential for disaster with this dish. Ramon would be proud. Self-service with the torch was optional, and guests met with mixed levels of success making a nice sugar crust -- a fun activity as long as alcohol consumption has been sufficiently moderate to warrant brandishing a lit propane torch in a tiny apartment full of people.

Libations for the night were somewhat haphazard: mojitos to start, followed by bubbly (both the Imperial Sec and a nice Prosecco Evan brought), and a 2007 Arona Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough, NZ). As the night wore on the gin bottle was cracked and the final drops of a bottle of Glenlivet 12 yr Scotch were consumed. All in all a great Saturday night...

Happy Birthday, Amanda!

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Melissa's Recipes (serves 6; cited amounts are estimates):

Pate

500g/1lb Chicken Livers
1 Portobello Mushroom
2 Shallots
200ml/3/4 cup Cream
50g/1/2 stick Butter
50g/1/2 ounce unsalted Pork fat
2 tbsp Breadcrumbs
1 tbsp Black Peppercorns
1tsp Salt (leave out if salted pork fat is used)

Coarsely chop shallots and mushroom and pan fry in butter until soft. Add cooked mixture to raw livers, cream, raw pork fat, breadcrumbs, peppercorns and salt. Using a hand blender or food processor puree all ingredients together until there are no lumps. Mixture will be fairly runny. Pour into ~4 greased ramekins. Place ramekins in a large high sided pan in the oven. Fill pan with boiling water from a kettle so that the pates cook in ramekins surrounded by hot water (bain marie). It is safer to fill the pan while it is in the oven than move it to the oven after it is filled with hot water. The pates should be cooked ~1hr at 180C/350F or until internal temperature is ~76C/170F. Cool before serving.

Ceviche

3 Tilapia Filets (snapper or flounder is also suitable - cod doesn't work so well)
4-6 Lemons
1sp John West Thai Green Curry Paste
1-2tsp of fish sauce
1/4 red onion (Finely sliced 1/2 rings)
1/2 can lite coconut cream
11tbsp of chopped coriander leaves/cilantro
Mixed salad greens or rocket/arugula
1/2 red capsicum/bell pepper (julienned)

Dice fish into cubes and slice onions. Place in bowl and add lemon juice until it almost covers fish (how much lemon juice depends on type of bowl). Add green curry paste and fish sauce and mix. Cover with Gladwrap/Cling film. Push plastic down so it contacts fish and removes air pockets. Let sit in fridge for at least 2 hours, or preferably overnight. For shorter times or 2 hours cut fish into smaller pieces. Over time the lemon juice will "cook" the fish so it goes from translucent to opaque and the texture stiffens. Just prior to serving add coconut cream and coriander leaves/cilantro and mix. In a bowl make a base of salad greens. Spoon fish mixture on top. Add capsicum/bell pepper as a garnish and serve.

Lamb shanks with cous cous salad

Lamb

1-2 lamb shanks (mine was large, so might have been a sheep shank)
1 tbsp whole coriander seeds
1 tbsp cumin
1 tsp of fennel seeds
6 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tbsp salt
Beef broth (enough to 1/2 fill casserole dish after lamb is placed in it)

Grind coriander garlic and fennel seeds in mini food processor or with mortar and pestle. Add cumin, olive oil, salt and lemon juice and mix to loose paste. Put lamb shanks in smallest casserole dish that lid still fits on. Pour over spice paste and rub into meat. Fill casserole dish 1/2 full with beef broth (or any other type of broth or red wine), cover and place in 180C/350F oven for 3+ hours. In the middle of cooking time turn shanks so both sides cook in liquid. During cooking lamb will contract to expose bone and when ready lamb will slide easily from bone and the meat can be pulled apart by hand. Do not allow liquid from casserole dish to evaporate completely as the meat will become dry. ~15 minutes before taking out of the oven I spooned over juices containing garlic bits and cooked uncovered to allow the spice slurry to dry on the meat for extra flavour. Remove from oven and let cool to room temperature to serve with cous cous.

Cous cous salad

1 cup cous cous (fast cooking)
1 1/4 cup chicken broth
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tomato (diced)
1/2 avocado (diced)
hand full of coriander leaves/cilantro (finely chopped)

Place cous cous into dish, add boiling chicken broth and olive oil and cover. Allow to sit until cooled to room temperature. Cous cous will be cooked after ~5 minutes and cooled after ~20 minutes. Check that cous cous is cooked after 5 minutes. If chicken broth was not hot enough, microwaving for 2-3 minutes will soften cous cous before cooling. Prior to serving add tomato, avocado and coriander leaves/cilantro and mix.

Cilantro Pesto

1 cup of coriander leaves/cilantro
1 tbsp lime juice
2 tbsp oil
1 tbsp unsweetened plain yogurt
1 tsp salt

Add all ingredients to blender and puree till runny and smooth.

To serve lamb with cous cous, spoon cous cous salad onto plate and place chunks of lamb on top. Drizzle Cilantro pesto over lamb and serve.

Creme Brulee

500ml of cream (I used 1/2 heavy, 1/2 light cream)
6 egg yolks
100g/3.5oz of sugar
1 tsp of ground ginger
1/6 habanero pepper
1/3 jalapeno pepper
1/3 serrano pepper
sugar for crust

In mixer whisk egg yolks and sugar until light and fluffy. Bring cream and ginger to boil on stove. Add hot cream to egg mixture and whisk. In blender finely chop peppers (with seeds removed) and add to cream and eggs mixture. At this stage mixture should be like very runny custard. Mine was still a little too thin so I boiled a pot of water and placed the mixing bowl over the pot to heat and thicken the contents a little more. Pour into 6-8 ramekins and cook at 150C/300F in a bain marie (see pate recipe for instructions on bain marie). Cooking time should be ~40-50 minutes. When done creme brulees should "wobble" when ramekin is tapped rather than remain runny. Remove from oven and cool to room temperature.

Just prior to serving sugar crust should be made. If you try to do this in advance it will get soft and redissolve into the brulee, so it must be done just prior to serving. Coat brulees with liberal coating of sugar. Any kind is ok but raw sugar is pretty good. With propane torch melt sugar until golden brown and runny. When heat is removed this will form a hard crust. From my limited experience here are a few tips that I think are useful. Remember the hottest part of the flame is at the tip so hold the torch back a generous distance from the creme brulees. Keep the torch moving so as not to burn regions of the topping. While the sugar will melt and slowly turn golden, any exposed creme brulee base will quickly turn black and bitter so more sugar rather than less makes it easier to get that golden brown crust. Good luck!

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P.S. Salad of leftovers...

Yum, Yum, Pig's Bum (well, not exactly)...

2008-05-11T22:06:00.010-04:00

After a day of woodworking (Evan and I were prepping and joining some poplar planks to make a new top for the patio dining table), Melissa put together a Sunday dinner worthy of the occasion. Grilled pork rib roast seasoned with mustard and coriander seed, whole peppercorns, garlic and sea salt -- she cunningly tucked the mixture under the fat layer to better flavor the meat. The roast was accompanied by Melissa's much-loved grilled asparagus spears and eggplant (we think these might have turned Casey into a Texas vegetarian), and paired with a Mirassou 2006 Pinot Noir (CA) -- nice match for the seasoned pork roast.

Notes: Pork roast was cooked on the gas grill -- mostly on indirect heat -- for about an hour. Eggplant medallions were salted (to season and sweat out moisture) and oiled before grilling. Asparagus spears were blanched and tossed in salt, pepper and olive oil and grilled.

Thanks to Evan for our inaugural food-blog photos.