Crummy Cook

My Herb Garden

2013-05-15T04:42:00.001-07:00

As I thought about throwing away an old gas grill, I thought again, and repurposed it as an herb garden. Original plan was to put the soil right in the firebox, but it was too rusted away on the bottom.

Mara took this picture

Breakfast for Dinner Last Night

2013-04-15T03:42:00.001-07:00

Scrambled eggs with chives and cheese, and bacon. Hardly noteworthy except for two ingredients:

Zingerman’s Jowl Bacon, made from the pork cheek rather than the belly. I know people are all over re-discovering bacon, but this was unusual and pretty damn good.
First chives of the season from my re-purposed gas grill herb garden (I had hoped to include a picture, but can’t find it in my labyrinthine picture archive

My Tuna Noodle “Casserole”

2013-04-13T09:07:00.001-07:00

I was home alone last night. Debbie was in California. Everyone else – of course – over the hill and far away.

I got it in my head to make a tuna noodle casserole.

Here’s how it was. I bought a boatload of canned tuna some weeks ago as part of a low-carb diet notion, and have to keep reminding myself of ways to use them up. So tuna. Then I saw some yogurt in the fridge, so I looked up “canned tuna and yogurt” in Epicurious and a couple of other online sources. Got not so much. But relaxing the criteria to a mere “canned tuna” surfaced, as you might imagine, a number of cuts at tuna noodle casserole.

I noticed at this point that there was maybe a cup of leftover pasta from Debbie’s and my last meal together, so things were beginning to look good. And I even found a can of Campbells Cream of Celery soup in the basement. The fundamentals were in place.

Ultimately, I just improvised. I put together canned tuna, used pasta, cream of celery soup, grated cheddar cheese (had that too), canned sliced olives, frozen peas, and, as a Crummy flourish, a couple of tablespoons of harissa.

Here’s how it looked coming out of the oven (not the best picture, sorry).

Actually pretty tasty.

Adobo-Rubbed Pork Tenderloin with Black Bean Pico de Gallo/Mushroom Soup

2013-02-03T06:59:00.001-08:00

Debbie was back from the Left Coast last night, so we cooked together (a first!). She can be a bit bossy in the kitchen, but this worked out very well. Either she’s changed or I have, or both.

I made the pork tenderloin from Epicurious. I picked this one mainly because it didn’t have any fruit or fruity sauce in it (still carb-sparing old Crumster here). We’ll try a fruity one at some point soon.

As it turned out, making an adobo rub was interesting (although it almost depleted our paprika), and it was great on the pork. The combo of searing the pork and then finishing in the oven made it not dry out too much.

Here’s the adobo rub.

Here’s the finished product, pork underneath the black bean pico de gallo.

Debbie made a mushroom soup sans dairy, so no cream or even milk. Just stock, mushrooms, onions, and a bit of sherry.

Here’s the finished product. It was terrific.

Catfish with Green Olives

2013-02-02T09:53:00.001-08:00

On a whim I bought catfish at Whole Foods yesterday evening.

Well, not exactly a whim. I’d had catfish for the first time in my life last year, and, to my surprise, it tasted pretty much like any other kind of smaller white fish. A tastier kind of tilapia, so to speak.

So I wasn’t afraid to buy it anymore.

But when I got home, the bulk of the recipes in Epicurious involved breading it and frying it.

I like frying as much as the next person, but breading in tabu on my current diet, something between a low-carb and a slow-carb diet, somewhere to the left of South Beach. So breading was out.

I found this recipe, however, and it spoke to me. I like olives. I had parsley (and like it well enough). and I’m always intrigued to use new kitchen junk, so the idea of putting a circle of parchment paper on top of the cooking fish-and-olives tickled me.

(Debbie’s away until tonight, so I had only myself to please here.)

There’s how the picture in Epicurious looks. I didn’t get my own home photos because the phone was upstairs and I was downstairs (I know, it’s a First World problem, but then I’m a First World guy).

Really tasty. I had it with a big old salad and was quite pleased with myself.

South Beach Mock Satay

2013-01-17T18:08:00.001-08:00

Debbie and I are doing something very much like the South Beach diet lately, and I actually went and bought one of the South Beach cookbooks (in Kindle format).

Tonight we had a pork tenderloin, and it seemed close enough to the South Beach recipe below that we made the sauce, the marinade, etc. and just applied it to the tenderloin.

Screen clipping taken: 1/17/2013 1:56 PM

The cashew sauce was actually pretty good, kind of a mock satay.

Or maybe it was just the fruits of diet-induced deprivation.

Broiled Fish Redux (but with a picture)

2012-07-15T14:37:00.001-07:00

Same drill this week as last: stop off at Black Salt Fish Market on the way home, pick up whatever looks most glistening, and prepare it simply as part of the Great Circle of Life.

This week the fish that called to me was barramundi, and I got a beautiful sweet-smelling fillet for Debbie and me. And I accompanied it with Israeli couscous and a salad (not shown).

Broiled Cod, Corn on the Cob, Tossed Green Salad

2012-07-07T09:57:00.001-07:00

It’s too soon to call this a CrummyCook pivot, but last night’s meal was a departure from the “look it up in Epicurious/use signature ingredients” style that marked the CrummyCook’s Early Period.

There was a cod dish in Epicurious that involved a few unusual ingredients, and involved poaching the cod in parchment paper. Well, baking the cod en papillote. I had printed out the shopping list and was preparing to go out into the 105 degree heat when I said, “what the heck am I jumping through hoops here, the point is not to take on the bizarre but to serve good-tasting food and spell Debbie as household cook.”

With these bracing words, I got out Mark Bittman and made cod marinated in the vinaigrette from the previous night’s salad, corn on the cob, and a tossed green salad with (thankfully) a different dressing.

The only novelty was broiling the fish a la Bittman in a cast-iron skillet that had been heated up to the CrummyCook’s usual “smelting steel” temperature and then drizzled with olive oil.

All in all, pretty good. Debbie liked it, and maybe it is the start of something new.

Salmon Burgers

2012-01-02T03:55:00.001-08:00

An anonymous guest chef (AGC) asked the Crummy Cook to help him make salmon burgers over the New Years weekend, and they were terrific.

The recipe came from the Frugal Foodie Cookbook whose authors, as it happens, are college friends of Mara’s. AGC had been given their cookbook by Mara and liked this recipe.

Here is how the patties looked before heat transformed them. It was not quite grilling weather, so we baked them in a 400 degree oven and put them on buns with guacamole (store-bought, I’m sorry to say). Results are here:

AGC was right. They are great, and reasonably healthy too. Thank you, AGC, for your inspiration and a kick in the butt to get back in the kitchen.

Salt Cod Fish Cakes

2011-10-29T09:48:00.001-07:00

Ever since I made salt cod this past September I’ve been meaning to make something with it.

The problem has been that you have to soak the salt cod in fresh water for 24 hours (or even more!!) before using it, so you have to be together enough to plan 24+ hours in advance and then deliver on the other end.

This week the perfect storm. Debbie is out of town, so when I got home Thursday night from NYC I had no distractions and was able to see clearly forward to the Friday night as an oppty. I jumped on it.

Salt Cod Fish Cakes, from Gourmet, via Epicurious, are what you might call, if you were Jewish, latkes with scales and fins. Basically a potato pancake (with an inexplicable bit of parsnip thrown in) with salt cod as about half the throw weight.

Here’s the finished fish cakes. I thought they were great, but I love salt (I thought the unwashed bacalao was pretty tasty, before the 24 hours fresh water treatment).

Anyhow, as Marshall would say, good chomp.

One Hit, One Miss

2011-10-02T13:25:00.001-07:00

Made two dishes last night: "New Coq au Vin" and "Crispy Cauliflower with Olives, Capers, and Parsley". One hit, one miss.

The hit was the cauliflower. The long cooking with oil in the pot – maybe you’d call it “non-stir-frying” or “pas de saute”-ing – made the cauliflower tender and crispy. And the dressing was peppy enough to please Debbie and me. Doesn’t look fantastic in this picture, but it was pleasant enough to the eye and tasty.

The dud was the chicken. I don’t know – I’ve got a thing about braised chicken, and I had an unstoppable yen to do some kind of chicken braised in wine.

The recipe looked bland, but I kept hoping that the infallible Epicurious would prove itself again. Guess what, it didn’t. Maybe I’m getting better at translating in my mind from the (web) page to the table. In any case, it was not obviously flawed in any way, but didn’t taste very… pronounced.

Seared Scallops with “Bok Choy” and Miso

2011-09-23T03:00:00.001-07:00

A classic CrummyOuting. I searched Epicurious for rice and miso, and found this recipe.

Unfortunately, I bought my supplies at the suburban Giant on my way home from work. It’s a huge space but contains almost nothing out of the ordinary, just more varieties of the ordinary.

In particular, the recipe called for baby bok choy. They had adult bok choy, but no babies (maybe worried about cruelty?). I dithered around in Produce for maybe 10 minutes, hoping for inspiration, and finally setttled on small endives. Approximately the same shape as the baby bok choy, not far off in flavor, and arguably in the same phylogenetic order as bok choy, (worst case, in the same phylum).

I didn’t get the value of serving the dish with the huge quartered veggie pieces; I would just as soon have cut them up when finished stir-frying them. But we quibble. It was basically quick and tasty, and used up rice and miso.

Sorry no picture. I thought I took a picture of it, but none was to be found in my phone in the morning.

Salt Cod

2011-09-18T17:47:00.001-07:00

Well, Deborah (my friend Deborah, not my wife Debbie) shamed me into resuming the blog. It’s not that I haven’t been cooking some (although less than weekly); it’s not that I’ve been blogging less (more on tech topics, another interest of mine (I don’t use the word “passion” where “interest” is the right word; let’s save passion for love). It’s just that… well, she was right. I’ve got to get back on the horse.

Two weeks ago I bought some cod impulsively for a dinner for Debbie, and realized belatedly that we were probably going to do something else that evening. I looked up ways to cook cod, just to do something with it, and most of the recipes were for salt cod.

How hard can it be to salt cod, I said to myself. And found the recipe here: basically salt, cod, and time.

Here’s how it looked after a week of salting. Firm, dried out, definitely bacalla-like. Next job is to try it in something… Stay tuned.

Galletto alla Diavola

2011-06-21T08:02:00.001-07:00

I had a yen this weekend to cook a spatch (or spatchcock) chicken on the grill.

I’ve already blogged about cutting up a whole chicken, and spatching is similar: you cut out the backbone, pry out the front “keelbone” cartilage. Then you whack the whole thing flat(ter) with a mallet.

Harry sent me a recipe for a Roman spatched chicken dish which looked really good. Marinate the chicken in olive oil, lemon, garlic, rosemary, and hot pepper flakes. Spatch it, clamp it into a hot-dog griller, and grill for 30-35 minutes.

As it happened, Debbie was coming back from a business trip just in time to join me in eating it.

Really good.

Buffalo, Wholesome Rice Pilaf

2011-06-11T07:44:00.001-07:00

I bought a buffalo steak (boneless sirloin, if you care) a few weeks ago, and haven’t done anything with it since Debbie declared that it made her “squeamish”.

Everyone’s squeamish about something, so I don’t begrudge her that, but buffalo seems just like lean beef to me, I don’t see it’s worth putting it in the squeamish-generating class. But that’s me.

Since she found it squeam-o-genic I didn’t do anything about it until Thursday night, when she said, “Why doesn’t the Crummy Cook make something tomorrow night?”

As you can see from the lack of postings, I’ve been pretty idle lately, a consequence of too much travel and nights out with friends or restaurants.

So I said, “what’ve we got in the freezer?” Debbie rattled off a list of things including the buffalo, and I said, “I’ll make the buffalo, but I’ll also make something else substantial in case you don’t want any of it.”

OK. I found a Brown- and Wild-Rice Pilaf With Porcini and Parsley recipe in Epicurious that looked pretty tasty (amazingly, there are a bunch of brown- and wild-rice pilaf dishes; lot of people trying to make brown rice interesting). I thought that would be pretty substantial.

And, just for kicks, I searched for buffalo recipes, and found Buffalo Steak and Onion Confit on Garlic Toasts, which I thought might overwhelm Debbie’s squeamishness.

It all went well (although, inexplicably, the onion confit calls for large pieces of onion, even chunks, which seems a little weird in a confit, but what do I know?). Debbie and I both loved the pilaf, and the buffalo was pretty good too. It didn’t quite overcome Debbie’s hesitation, but she finished it and declared she would eat it another time.

Chard Cakes with Sorrel Sauce

2011-04-30T05:06:00.001-07:00

Debbie saw this recipe in the New York Times and talked the Crummy One into making it last night. I have to admit the title of the food wasn’t very appealing.

It doesn’t look too bad in their picture. But things were more challenged chez moi.

The core problem was structural integrity. You’re supposed to make the chard, pine nuts, cheese, bread crumbs, and egg into patties, but mine wouldn’t hold together; they didn’t even pretend to hold together. I put in an extra egg. I put in more panko (we were using panko instead of dry white bread crumbs, which possibly caused the problem…). All to no avail.

I ended up frying heaps of chard cake batter in the pan.

Tasted pretty good, as it happened. The sorrel sauce, as promised, was something you might want to put on a bunch of things. Debbie approved.

We’ll try again some time with new approaches to the binding.

Slow-cooked lamb stew

2011-04-17T15:08:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I expected Debbie home about 8 pm (it turned out to be more like 10, thanks to those lovely weather systems we’re getting more and more of nowadays).

Plus I had the yen to slow cook something. We have a crockpot from the dawn of time (I think we got it as a wedding present in 1982), and the idea that I’m a crock-pot cook or a slow cook or whatever is deeply appealing to me.

In any case, I had seen a recipe in a magazine I picked up in Whole Foods for slow-cooked lamb shanks, but you had to cook them three different ways in the recipe (brown them, then bake them, then broil them) with various manipulations in between.

The heck with that. But it fixated me on lamb. I started looking around in our cookbooks for slow-cooked lamb recipes, and came up with a relatively simple “Neapolitan Lamb Stew” in a book on slow cooking from Ten Speed Press.

Harry, my guest blogger, business partner, and friend, tells me that “Neapolitan” is a code word for “tomato sauce”, and, indeed, this recipe had 2 lbs of tomatoes in there. But also red wine, rosemary, and boatloads of lamb stew meat.

Recipe ordinaire, I was fretting, but 8 hours of slow cooking in the crockpot turned it into what Joy of Cooking or somebody called a “Heavenly slumgullion” after a while. It was really good. All the gnarly bits were rendered out of the lamb chunks, the sauce came together, and it was A-1.

Soft-shelled Crabs

2011-04-17T08:43:00.001-07:00

On Friday night I did soft-shelled crabs, which I love. Once Black Salt Fish Market cleaned the crabs (which, the guy told me, was “easy” if you had a scissors) they were pretty easy to prep. I dipped them in milk, dredged them in panko, and fried them in a mix of butter and oil. One of the two came out just about perfect, the other was not well-done enough: it would have squeamed out Debbbie but I was able to eat it fine, it wasn’t like raw or anything.

Sorry, no pix.

Miso Stew

2011-04-17T08:40:00.001-07:00

I was alone most of this week (Debbie in CA again, business and family), so cooking away.

On Wednesday night I was inspired by a couple of huge cans of miso we have in the fridge. What can we make?

From Epicurious comes the Miso Stew recipe. It’s essentially a very hearty miso soup with oodles of “sea vegetables” (aka seaweed), tofu, and, surprise of surprises, quinoa (I’m sure that’s not too authentic).

Here’s their version of it.

And here’s mine:

Aside from irrational exuberance with the asune flakes, it doesn’t look too shabby.

Tasted good, but not remarkable. I guess there isn’t a remarkable miso soup unless you count “perfection of small things”.

Guest Blog: Harry on Zeppole

2011-04-07T04:49:00.001-07:00

March 19 is the feast day of St. Joseph, celebrated as a holiday in Italy, and in fact Italian Father’s Day. Italians enjoy the day with an abundance of Italian breads and cookies. In some households a “table” laden with these treats is dedicated to the Saint. Sometimes an open house is held and friends and family are invited to partake of the offering. The most famous of the foods served on that day is zeppole (Zeppole di San Giuseppe). The zeppole is a cream puff-like shell usually filled with one of two types of cream, pastry and cannoli, and topped with a bit of sour cherry preserves.

We were recently invited to a belated Saint Patrick’s Day dinner, and decided to expand the ethnic fare with a plate of homemade Zeppole, pictured below.

Zeppole di San Giuseppe were invented in 1840 by Don Pasquale Pintauro. His pasticceria (pastry shop) still stands on Via Toledo in Naples. My wife and I visited the shop on a trip to Naples last fall. It was October, so they were of course not serving zeppole. We were able to enjoy the shop’s delicious Sfogliatelle. But I guess that is a topic for another entry on the Crummy Cook.

Quinoa Wars, Part 2 (The Revenge of the Inca)

2011-04-02T06:28:00.001-07:00

I’ve become determined to make quinoa tasty, or at least find one or two palatable uses for it.

My inspiration this week was Chinese fried rice, where you take leftover rice and stir fry it with vegetables, etc. Why couldn’t you do the same thing with leftover quinoa (which I had from The Qunioa Wars Part 1)?

Well, one of the few forms of cooking I knew something about pre-CrummyCook was stir frying. I read a paperback back in the ‘70’s with a “theory” or stir frying: a generalized approach to the cooking method that helped you improvise.

So you cut up everything your going to cook into bite-size (and cooking-size) bits. You heat up some oil in a wok (which is better than a frying pan because you can push food out from the center and let it rest (relatively) while other stuff cooks) and cook the things in a sequence determined by their cooking time and their contribution to the taste. So: garlic and onion and ginger first, then meat, then vegetables in order of longer cooking time, then tofu or whatever. Then you put a sauce in (1 part soy sauce to 1 part sherry or mirin to 2 parts chicken stock + minced ginger and other tastes) and cover the wok so everything steams in the sauce for a while, then you open up and finish (cornstarch, garnish, whatever).

OK. So I did onions, cauliflower sliced thin, and then the quinoa. When I put in the sauce it formed, to my astonishment and dismay, a kind of slurry. Either I had erred on the side on too much sauce or somehow the quinoa was forming a new form of matter with the liquid.

It didn’t taste too bad (i.e., the quinoa was subdued) but if I try this approach again I’ll put some stronger vegetable tastes in there (and probably some meat too) and try even harder to throttle back the --- well, soap – taste in the mix.

Whole-Wheat Breadcrumb-Crusted Shad Roe (on a Bed of Quinoa)

2011-03-27T16:40:00.001-07:00

Well, I sort of backed into this one.

Josh H. urged me to make shad roe. It’s seasonal, he said. It’s delicate. You cook it, he said, basically like Wiener Schnitzel (a great love of mine in childhood).

So, with Debbie out of town and no one to fold their arms and glower at the Crummy Cook, I bought two “sets” of shad roe (two sides of the egg case, I guess) and “set” to work on it.

Josh H. told me to coat the egg cases with beaten egg and then with panko, but I had some fresh whole-grain breadcrumbs (from some failing whole-grain loaves) which had been on my mind, so I used them instead.

And the whole buttery Wiener Schnitzel world seemed to call out for a bed of something. I wanted, again, whole grains, so for some reason I decided to go with quinoa.

Quinoa is the reason, I’m convinced, that 300 Spaniards under Pizarro were able to conquer the vast Inca nation. The vast Inca nation smelled the frying garlic from the Spanish camp at night, realized they didn’t have to eat something that tasted like soap every single night, and surrendered.

So why did I use it tonight? I succumbed to quinoa propaganda: they call the flavor “nutty” instead of “soapy”.

Anyhow, I did it. It wasn’t terrible, but I wish I’d used the panko and skipped the quinoa.

Next time.

Beet and Cabbage Soup (not Borscht)

2011-03-27T13:45:00.001-07:00

We have some beets (the not-very-red kind; maybe they’re even “yellow”) that have been in the fridge for a while, and almost a whole big head of purple cabbage.

I beetled off to Epicurious, who seemed to have nothing but recipes for Borscht.

Nothing against Borscht; Debbie makes it from time to time, and it’s tasty and hearty. But I wanted something different.

Enter "Beet and Cabbage Soup", a Mexican recipe (of all things) featuring jalapeno, lime juice, and tortilla chips at the end.

Here’s the mess o’ vegetables saute-ing at the beginning (the beets are the golden colored chunks).

And here’s the soup at the end, with tortilla chips and a dollop of (low fat) sour cream.

Tasty, but, you know what? It kinda tasted like Borscht with lime juice and tortilla chips and a hint of jalapeno. And the mauve color didn’t help bring it to life for me.

Braised Chicken Legs from Fine Cooking’s “101 Tips”

2011-03-27T08:19:00.001-07:00

I’m on something of a braising roll lately. And since I’m not that keen on eating the things you really should braise – tough fatty cuts of beef, lamb, or pork – I end up wanting to braise chicken.

(Which Josh H. tells me is really stupid to do, since chicken is a tender meat and doesn’t need much braising unless you’re cooking a 40-year-old rooster or some such. He’s right of course, but the urge to braise goes on.)

A few years ago I got a picture book called “The Best of ‘Fine Cooking’ 101 Tips”. Debbie wanted to throw it out when we purged books this winter. She sneered at it: “Most of those things I already know.” But the point was that I didn’t know them, I love tips, guidelines, and, most generally, advice, so I rescued the book from the purge box, put it in the bathroom, and have been leafing over it for some months with pleasure and instruction.

Well, it has a recipe for “Braised Chicken Legs with White Wine, Bacon, Cipolline Onions, and Mushrooms” (shown below, from their website), and I resolved to make it this weekend while Debbie was away wrapping up family affairs in California.

Some minor-league problems. No cipolline onions (which I looked up on the web, e.g. here), although the main thing about them seemed to be “flat and sweet”. I got some white “boiling onions” instead, because the supermarket I hit on the way home didn’t even have sweet onions.

I was worried there wouldn’t be any cremini mushrooms either, but those they had.

Other than that, it went really smoothly and tasted pretty good.

Chicken and Vegetables Braised in Peanut Sauce

2011-03-06T09:51:00.001-08:00

The origins of this project? I’ve had a yen for a while to “braise” something. There’s of course a bunch of foodie propaganda in the magazines and online about braising in the winter, and the dishes look really good. So I’ve been getting more or more exciting about braising.

(On, one more thing: the foods you normally braise – tough fatty red meat – kind of grosses me out, even if braised. I was mildly disposed to avoid those kinds of braises, although Debbie has done a pretty good job time and again with braised boneless short ribs.)

So, the usual drill: epicurious with search terms taken from my fridge, so “braising” and “root vegetables”. What turned up was Chicken and Vegetables Braised in Peanut Sauce, with the additional lure (for me) that it’s an African dish or a dish of African origins, so reminds me of Mara.

Here’s how it looks in the Gourmet magazine presentation.

Well, I’ve also had a yen – also generated by foodie reading – to learn how to cut up a whole chicken, so, rather than getting 5 lbs of chicken parts I got a 5-lb chicken and started to cut it up.

Not as easy as I thought: a raw chicken is slippery and floppy. It’s hard to find the joints. I did get it, though. Four breast pieces (two breast halves cut in two), two thighs, two drumsticks. I neglected to cut off the wings, which turned out to be a big mistake since they interfered with browning, cooking, and eating. Ah well: next time I’ll know better.

Here’s my version (I used brown rice (not shown) instead of white). Not too shabby-looking compared to the prototype, although my chicken is not as well browned (due to size of pieces and presence of wings).

Not all that tasty, though. It basically tastes like a very mild peanut-butter sauce, which is kind of eh.

I’ll try it another time, I think. I’ll also try other braises. Onward and upward.