Getting Creative with Leftovers

Fried Rice, made with yesterday's peppers and onions

So today is a short post, for a small dinner. As I opened my fridge tonight and brought out the bowls of leftover grilled peppers and onions and plain white/brown rice, I was less than enthused at the prospect of a bland, microwaved supper. So, I put two and two together (literally! aha!) and made a stir-fry. Into the pan went the rice and vegetables, along with some soy sauce and sesame oil. Several minutes later, voila! I had a delicious, hot dinner. I ate my fried rice happily.

Mixed Grill Monday

Ribs, slow cooked on the grill until they were falling off the bone.

Peppers and Onions, salted an peppered.

After the sudden appearance of a grill behind the apartment, I made plans to put it to use. And to the farmer's market I went, picking up a nice quarter rack of ribs. After some dry-rubbing with barbecue seasoning, I stuck them in the fridge to season overnight.

And then I got home from work tonight, and fired up the grill. I wrapped the ribs up in foil and slow cooked them on the grill, along with peppers and onions in another foil. The veggies were stewing in a concoction of olive oil, salt, and pepper. I found a folding chair in the basement and relaxed outside with some brews, gouda, and a good book.

Tonight's dinner was quite easy. Reflecting back, I'd suggest adding more sauce to the ribs, and poking holes in the veggie foil to let the water out. Also, the huge amount of ribs really cooked down more than I expected (there was originally meat/fat all the way to the tips of those bones). Overall, a good night, and a nice meal.

Steak.

Medium Rare. 16 Ounces Prime Aged Wagyu Sirloin.

Mashed Potatoes with Roasted Garlic, Scallions, Butter, Milk, Pepper.

The full steak after juices redistributed, and one of my homebrewed beers.

Go big or go home, right? This was steak taken to the next level. And I may be new at cooking dinners, but I'm not afraid to boast about my steak-making skills. I went all out on this one. 16 ounces of Aged Prime Wagyu Sirloin, marbled perfectly and cooked exquisitely to medium rare. Yeah, it's making me hungry too just looking at those pictures. Don't worry though, I'll teach you how to make this beauty. Paired with the steak was a nice bowl of delicious mashed potatoes, spiced slightly and made fluffy. I had been dreaming about this meal for weeks (actually), and it was just as perfect as I had imagined. Along with my sous chef and dining friend for the night, I made a steak meal that cannot be topped.

As you might have figured out, I'm crazy about eating. However, I'm serious about my meats. For this meal I took a trip to a local butcher to get the best cut he had. Ever heard of Kobe beef? Well, this steak was from that same Wagyu cow. The cut was a 16 ounce, 1.5 inch thick sirloin, that had been thoroughly aged. Sirloin is one of the juciest, tastiest cuts of a cow. So- how did I make it? Here we go:

I started by rubbing the steak with pepper, and then coating it with very flavorful olive oil (yes, there are significant flavor differences in olive oils). I let the steak warm up for a few minutes while I worked on my mashed potatoes. Once this starts cooking, it will demand 100% of your attention. Don't salt the steak until right before you throw it in the pan, else the salt will suck the moisture out of the meat. Heat a cast iron skillet up to the maximum temperature you can, and preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Throw the steak in the pan and don't touch it. After exactly two minutes, flip it. This is searing the outside, offering a crispy shell and locking in all the juices. After exactly two more minutes, place a pad of butter on top of the steak, and move the pan into the 500 degree oven. Cook for around 2 minutes, but just until the internal temperature reaches a few degrees below the doneness you want (130 degrees for medium-rare). Yes, it's worth investing in a digital thermometer. Seriously. This steak is worth it. After the steak is done, pull it out and plate it, pouring all that good juice back on top. Finally, WAIT! Wait 5 minutes for the juices to settle and redistribute across the meat. This step is crucial, and is completely worth it. You can cover the plate with foil as the steak finishes the last stage of cooking. After, your steak is ready. It is hot, it is awesome, and it should be enjoyed immediately.  Here are a few bonus pictures of my insane steak making:

Salting the steak, just as it was put on.

Time's up! Rushing to place it in the oven.

You should have seen the smile on my face. I was so excited to eat

In the end, it made the list of my top two steaks ever eaten. For the mashed potatoes, I made them with milk, baked garlic (soft and flavorful), scallions, plenty of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. I paired the meal with one of my homebrewed Blackberry Ales, and ate my way to nirvana.

Temperatures Rise Over 100, I Make a Curry

Red Peanut Curry with Chicken

It is unbelievably hot today. Like over 100 degrees, and I never realized I'd miss air conditioning so much. But that wasn't going to stop me from eating well- no! I had cracked open a coconut the other day, and had the time of my life laboriously peeling bark off every stupid chunk. Coconuts are delicious, but they're a lot of work. Anyway, after I finished prepping a whole coconut I realized that I only needed a small bit to go with my frozen yogurt. That left me with a full two cups of shaved coconut and a cup of coconut milk (not coconut water). So, at the kind suggestion of my awesome chef cousin, I made a curry!

It may have been extremely hot in my apartment, but spicy curry and a glass of icy fruit juice really cooled me down. This curry was pretty easy to make. It started with scallions, ginger, and garlic fried in some vegetable oil. Following them came red curry paste, then a generous serving of peanut butter, a little sugar, soy sauce, pepper, chili oil and lime juice. To make it into more of a sauce, my freshly made coconut milk was added, along with around 3/4 cup of chicken stock. Finally, as the sauce/curry was reducing at a simmer, I added the chicken, which had been cut up in small pieces.

Funny story about the chicken, actually. In my exhausted, I-just-commuted-home-in-100-degree-heat-in-my-shitty-car-without-air-conditioning state, I picked up the wrong package of chicken off the supermarket shelf. As I sweated in the kitchen hoping to make a semi-quick dinner, I soon realized that I actually bought drumsticks. So, I took a serrated knife and cut them up. Turns out, drumsticks have a lot of connective tissue, and are really slippery and hard to cut up. However, they are dark meat, and thus have more flavor. It was pretty worth it in the end. Each chicken piece had its own flavor in addition to the amazing curry. Yum!

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Red-Curry-Peanut-Sauce-359773

Regarding Reduction

Ragu alla Bolognese, slowly cooked and reduced, with fresh egg fettuccine pasta

The whole meal

Creamed Corn on the side, made with heavy cream, butter, salt, and pepper

So I did that thing, where you get halfway through the recipe and then you hit the unexpected "cook for 1.5 hours, then add milk and simmer for 45 minutes". SHIT- that totally wasn't in there when I first read the recipe! Either way, this turned into a two-day ordeal with lots of simmering, slow-cooking, and reducing.

Keeping with my theme of the most delicious meals possible, I attempted to make the famous Ragu alla Bolognese. Additionally, I had a cob of corn lying around from an impulse buy the weekend before. Naturally, I did my thing and turned that corn into the most delicious side dish possible. The recipe that I used for my creamed corn involved heavy cream, butter, water, salt, and pepper, all simmered together. Unfortunately, a recipe for 15 cobs doesn't divide down well for 1 cob. So, I was left with a soup of butter and heavy cream, with some corn on the bottom. Instead of taking the corn out and eating it, no, I had to make it more delicious than that. "Reduce!" I said aloud and then I watched a tv show or two while my creamed corn came down to a thick, creamy, buttery, delicious side. It was unbelievably good. It turned out to be perfectly salty with a nice peppery flavor overridden by extreme buttery goodness.

Onto the entree. I made this one by the books, following the recipe exactly. I won't go into the gory details of this one (you can read the recipe in the link at the bottom if you'd like), because it was just a slow-cooked sauce with things added at different times. But here are all the delicious ingredients: 1/2 pound veal, 1/2 pound ground beef, not very lean, two vidalia onions, pancetta, some carrots, some celery, chicken stock, red wine, milk and a touch of tomato paste.

Now, onto some notes on reducing. Reducing is a drag, but it shouldn't be rushed. Seriously- make something else to eat tonight, and know that the meal will be so much better the next night as you let it simmer for extremely long amounts of time. The next thing I learned was an important one - if you need to reduce, reduce as much as possible before adding milk or dairy. Once I added the milk to my sauce and attempted to reduce it more, it started to burn. Luckily I caught it in time, but I was left with a little "smoky" flavor in my sauce. However, with my slightly smoky bolognese sauce, I dined well! I got some freshly made egg fettuccine pasta and cooked it to that perfect al dente point of chewiness. I grated some parmigiano reggiano on top, and it was just as I wanted. Combined, the meal was extremely savory.

After hours and hours of reducing, I was left in a rich delight.



http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Classic-Ragu-Bolognese-365181

An Asian Supper

Scallion Pancakes, fried fluffy and served with a sauce of Ginger, Scallions, Tamari Sauce, Sugar, and Rice Vinegar

After Sunday's impulse buy of scallions (green onions) to serve and garnish my burgers with, I found myself with a double bunch of scallions. With this key ingredient, I felt like an Iron Chef Contestant. I imagined the big unveil of the night's secret ingredient, as some Japanese guy holds up scallions into the air, while yelling something in Japanese into the microphone as the crowd goes "oooh" and "aaah". Well, my Iron Chef fantasy aside, I came up with the ingenious idea (if I do say so myself) of making scallion pancakes out of them.

This savory treat is a classic Asian dish. Although I grew up in a half-Chinese household, I rarely got to eat them, and mostly have memories of eating scallion pancakes in Asian restaurants. Also, no, I was never passed on the secrets of Chinese cooking. If I haven't said so before - I'm pretty new at cooking.

This dish was made by first making dough using flour and boiling water, which supposedly changes the protein structure of the bread so it's flakier, not airy. After letting it sit for a half hour, I rolled four balls of dough into flat circles. After brushing on sesame oil and rolling up & flattening into circles again, I applied another coat of sesame oil and sprinkled a LOT of scallions on top. After this was rolled into a ball (first like a carpet, then the carpet roll is coiled like a cinnamon bun), it was rolled out into the final pancake form. In a pan generously oiled with sesame oil, the frying began. Amidst a ton of smoke and oil spatter, the scallion-bulging pancakes were fried to perfection.

The last, and best part of the dish was the sauce, a combination of 2Tbsp Tamari Sauce (soy sauce), 2Tbsp Rice Vinegar, 1.5tsp sugar, and then chopped up scallions and ginger. You can also add chili oil if you like it spicy (I do).

They came out great - fluffy but dense, with a crispy outside and an almost chewy inside. They were also surprisingly filling, so they'll yield some leftovers! Although a lot of oil and dough is used, I'd recommend this to anyone who's up for a savory meal.

A Man's Best Friend (A Burger)

A Delicious Burger: Beef, bacon, shallots, mushrooms, french blue cheese, aged cheddar, jalapeños, lettuce, scallions, on a garlic aioli-smeared grilled bun

An up-close view of this delicious thing

Forget dogs - burgers are a man's best friend. And with love, I made my burger tonight. Inspired by the summertime and one website's challenge to create the most delicious burger possible, I embarked on a long journey to the Sunday market ravenous. It was a very dangerous thing for me to be in a new food market while hungry, surrounded by fresh food after looking at hamburger pictures all morning. In my salivating state, I compiled a shopping cart full of the most delicious ingredients I could think of. This burger was going to be a medium-rare monstrosity, so packed with flavor that no condiments were necessary.

   After prepping the necessary ingredients (I'm learning! Less frantic mid-cook chopping this time) I fired up two skillets and the fun began. I sizzled three thickly cut maple-smoked bacon strips until they were almost cooked. In the other pan, I began to caramelize my shallots in butter, adding the cremini mushrooms to saute at the appropriate time. Once the bacon strips were out of the first pan, in went the burger patties, two perfect circles of thinly formed 73% lean beef. I had about .4lb of beef cooking. Oh yeah - after over a year's experience of making burgers at Five Guys, I know a thing or two about ground beef. These patties would never get close to well done on my watch!

   Once the meat was almost perfect, it came out of the pan. I toasted two buns in the meat pan, smeared with garlic aioli for extra flavor. In went the bacon around the bread, to heat and finish cooking (bacon cools too fast for my liking).  The shallots and mushrooms came out and into a bowl, and I pressed sliced jalepeño peppers into the vegetable pan, grilling them and blackening the edges.

   After the buns were properly toasted, I assembled the burger in two halves and face-up put them in the meat pan, with some nice French blue cheese on one side and 1-year aged Vermont cheddar on the other. After a quick broil to melt the cheese, I compiled the amazing burger with crisp red lettuce and scallions on the side. At last, my creation was ready. Feeling like Dr. Frankenstein, I wiped the sweat off my forehead and looked at the monster on my plate. It had been a furiously busy 10 minutes, but that golden moment had arrived- the first bite.

All I can say is, "oh my god." It was that good. 

Bruschetta and Stir-Fry

Appetizer, Bruschetta: Olive oil coated bread, toasted with tomato, basil, and garlic

Stir-Fry: A conglomerate of vegetables and sirloin mixed with Asian sauces, served over rice

Woah, time to take a deep breath- it has been a long night of cooking. I'll miss some sleep due to this meal but no worries, this is all in the name of nutrition! Just kidding. It's just me looking to stuff my face with more delicious food.

Tonight started out well, with delicious Bruschetta to get me going as I chopped away at the millions of vegetables going into my stir-fry. Using the french bread left over from the french onion soup last time, I coated it with olive oil and baked it with garlic, basil and tomato. Delicious!

Dancing and singing around my small kitchen, I had a lot of fun making the stir-fry. This time I remembered to prep over half the vegetables before applying any heat to the pan. That, combined with the bruschetta and white wine saved me a ton of stress. And into the frying pan went everything!

I got a little creative here, and combined a few recipes. It didn't turn out as I expected, but hey -  I'm learning here. I put in: sirloin tips, an orange and its peel, a bell pepper, snow peas, some white mushrooms, broccoli, julienned hot peppers, bok choy, half a tomato (left over from bruschetta), ginger, and garlic. For sauces, I mixed sesame oil, tamari sauce, hoisin sauce, and some white wine.

It smelled delicious, but eventually needed to be boiled down a bit. All the vegetables released a large amount of water, and I didn't add enough sauce for the enormous 2-skillets worth of food I was making. I enjoyed the result, but I'll do some tinkering with the leftovers. Notes for next time: be cognizant of the flavor of the vegetables I add. Peppers and tomatoes will add sourness to the sauce. Combined with wine and orange juice, this may be too much. If I'm going for a citrus sauce, I'll have to go all-out and reduce fruit juice until it is rich with flavor, and then sweeten or salt it to taste. If I'm going for a savory sauce, skip the flesh of the orange, and keep the peel in. I learned some valuable lessons on water, and flavors today. We live and we learn, but most importantly, I have a full belly. :-)

A Flash of Inspiration, and a Headache

French Onion Soup, complete with extra melty gruyere

As I don't like wasting ingredients, it bothered me that half a box of beef stock was in my fridge, leftover from the beef stroganoff. In a flash of inspiration (partially assisted by the discovery of french onion soup bowls in the apartment cabinets), I decided to make one of my favorite soups of all time. It was, as the French say, Soupe a l'Oignon au Fromage.

I got this recipe from epicurious, an amazing site my aunt recommended. Also, who knew it was so easy to make this soup?

After a long day at work, I got a spontaneous headache during that final half hour before 5:00. This is an odd occurrence for me, but it hit me hard. So hard that I wore sunglasses during my commute - on a dark, cloudy, rainy day. I winced my way through the grocery store this afternoon, walking around like a zombie with a pained expression on his face. I was not sure I could bring myself to make dinner, let alone wake up from a short nap. But I did.

Something about the smell of onions sweetly caramelizing in butter brought my mood up. Chewing on french bread dipped with olive oil and salt was a nice distraction. Ultimately, as I pulled the bowl out of the oven, dripping with gruyere, the headache abated. This scrumptious meal was just what I needed.

A Joy to be Cooking

Beef Stroganoff, before the egg noodles were added

I was itching to use the birthday present I got two months ago: a copy of Joy of Cooking. Furthermore, after a year of cafeteria food at a school that is (very) vegetarian friendly, I was ready for some meat. Some good meat. Flipping through my new huge cookbook, I was enticed by the word "Beef", wasn't sure what a "Stroganoff" was, and then the ingredient of 2 lbs of sirloin tips sealed the deal.

So, I'll admit, I had no idea what Beef Stroganoff was supposed to look like, or taste like. But it ended up tasting really good. Notice the italicized letters- that means I'm putting emphasis on those words. Imaging me squinting my eyes, nodding slowly, and drawing out those two words. Anyway, I enjoyed it.

Besides the sirloin tips, I also gathered a full pound of mushrooms. Being an ambitious young adult, I took it upon myself to go as wild as possible with the mushrooms, amassing a collection of around 5 of the most obscure types of mushroom I could find. 

Cooking it was a blast. In olive oil, I seared the steak briefly in small thin strips, browning the outside and leaving the inside raw. It was at this point that I realized how stressful cooking can be. It was a bad idea to assume that I could "easily cut up some vegetables" while the meat was cooking. Yeah right. When the meat is ready to turn and I'm halfway through chopping an onion, and my eyes are tearing from the onion mist, and a bead of sweat is itching my forehead because there is no air conditioning in this apartment - only then do I realize that I should have done some cutting prep work beforehand.

Well, this is dragging on longer than I intended, so I'll have to summarize everything else. The mushrooms and onion simmered in a lot of butter, and smelled great. When I simmered them with beef broth, the sirloin, the juices from the sirloin, and a cup of sour cream, everything turned out oh-so-savory. Add some chopped dill, serve over perfectly cooked egg-noodles, and you have yourself a happy guy.

A Sweet Treat

Fresh strawberries from a farm stand, and rich Belgian chocolate milk

Normally, I'm not much of a desert guy, but this combination had me smiling. Coming home from a relaxing weekend in the Catskills, I grabbed some freshly picked strawberries from a farm stand off route 28. These strawberries were delicious, that perfect mouth-watering ratio of sweet and tart. I paired them with a tall glass of Belgian Chocolate Milk that I found at the supermarket. That was some of the best chocolate milk I've ever had. It was extremely thick, very rich chocolate. These two foods together made my night.

Wow, what a treat!

A Beginning

"This isn't a scientific paper, this isn't a scientific paper"...

I'm not going to open this up with an abstract or a statement of purpose. Frankly, I'm not sure what this food blog is going to turn into- so I'm not going to constrain myself with limits and expectations. I had an urge one day to document my food so I'll remember it. But here's a little intro:

I'm up near Boston this summer, a student intern living in a small apartment. I have lots of passions and interests, but I really love eating. Cooking is my way of eating the most delicious food possible. Between work, sleep, and physical exercise, I have around 2 hours at home each night. I'm coming home hungry and creative, ready to make the most tantalizing meals I can imagine. My tongue is in the lead, so get ready for a wild ride.