So it’s been another long time between posts, but for this one I pulled out all the stops.  I’m entered in the fifth battle this year on Foodie Fights – Battle Burger, so I tried to come up with something not only delicious, but also different from anything out there.  I love Mark Bittman’s column, The Minimalist, and when the battle was announced to be burgers, on the same day he posted a couple of burger recipes that push the envelope beyond just straight up ground beef.  Not wanting to crib from such a widely read column in a competition, I didn’t do any of those, but used it as a jumping-off point to create what I am dubbing Rudebwoy Surf and Turf Burgers.  Surf and Turf because the meat is a mixture of  beef and shrimp that I ground in a food processor (a recent acquisition after my grandmother got a new one for Mothers’ Day) and rdebwoy because they are seasoned with Jamaican-inspired jerk spices and dressed with banana mayonnaise.  I served them up to a bunch of my friends at a cookout and they were a huge hit.  I’m usually something of a purist as far as burgers go; this was my first time making them with any kind of seasonings in the meat mixture, and definitely the first time serving them without ketchup and mustard, but they were phenomenal.  Even though a real rasta wouldn’t touch these due to the shrimp, these burgers had a great spicy Caribbean flavor complemented perfectly with the creamy and slightly sweet banana mayonnaise.  Beef and shrimp may be a bit of a non-sequitur, but if you won’t take my word for how great they were, you can check out the reaction shots!

I started by making a batch of Mark Bittman’s Light Brioche Buns from the New York Times last year.  I never made hamburger buns before, but they came out really well even though I substituted in a cup of whole wheat flour and used yogurt instead of milk.  Then I made a quick spice blend to season the burgers with.

Jerk Spice Blend

Ingredients

1 T. allspice berries

1 T. dried thyme

1/2 t. ground cinnamon

1/2 t. ground coriander

1 t. ground habanero pepper

Directions

Grind up the allspice berries with a pestle and mortar and mix in the rest of the spices.  That’s it really.  If you’re using whole coriander or cinnamon, grind those up with the pestle and mortar too.  I just had the ground stuff on hand for those so that’s what I used here.  Nutmeg and clove would be good in here too if you have it, in a lesser proportion than the allspice and thyme – those are the two flavors that really make jerk seasoning.  The habanero too.  If you don’t have the ground stuff – and I’m guessing that will be the case for the vast majority, we just happened to have some that we barely use because it is freakishly, just really painfully hot, one or two fresh ones all minced up in the meat would do the trick.

Surf & Turf Burgers

Ingredients

1 1/3 lbs. chuck beef

2/3 lb. uncooked shrimp

2 cloves garlic

1 T. fish sauce

1 scallion chopped

1 T. minced ginger

1 T. jerk seasoning

salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Pulse the shrimp and garlic in food processor until just chopped and remove to large bowl.

Pulse the beef in food processor until coarsely ground (be sure not to over-process it) and put it in the bowl bowl with the shrimp.

Add fish sauce, scallions, ginger, and spices.  A lot of jerk sauces use soy sauce as their base, but I thought fish sauce would be really good with the shrimp in this to help the seafood flavor stand out more.  The ginger and scallions give it some freshness and almost bring an Asian flavor to the burgers.

Mix, handling the meat as little as possible.  Shape into patties.  I didn’t really have anything to put the patties on and I didn’t think about it until I started making them so I but them on some cut up paper plates until I cooked them the next day.  It’s good to give the burgers a little time in the refrigerator to set up and cling to each other better.  It also lets the flavor of the seasonings sit in and permeate the meat.  I wrapped them in plastic wrap and let them go overnight.  This makes eight quarter pound burgers, but you can make them bigger or smaller to your taste.

This is when I made the banana mayonnaise and pretended like it was the weekend.  I didn’t take any pics of that process because the whole thing was pretty frenetic, I just had the most basic idea of what I was doing and ended up making like 10 cups of the stuff.  No one told me that two eggs worth of mayo was so much!

Banana Mayonnaise

Ingredients

2 eggs

2 bananas

juice of 1 lime

2 cups neutral oil

Directions

Blend the eggs, bananas, and juice in a blender, then slowly drizzle in the oil.  I used regular old canola oil.  Keep it going until you have a nice thick emulsion.  You definitely may want to halve this recipe, because it will leave with with more banana mayonnaise than I use regular mayo in a year.  No joke, this makes a buttload of mayonnaise.

When you’re ready for it to be grill time, invite some of your friends over (the keg is optional).

Get some coals going on the grill, so one side is nice and hot and t’row dem tings on!

My friend pointed out that the shrimp meat in there makes the burgers look not so great in the picture, but trust me, they were out of this world.  They only need to cook about 4 minutes on each side, so don’t stray when they’re on there.

Lightly toast your buns, just for about fifteen seconds over the hot part of the grill, then slather on some banana mayonnaise and drop a burger on there.  We were really wishing we had some shredded cabbage or something to top it with, but these were so delicious it barely mattered.

Let your friends put them to the test!

We had other friends that were vegetarian or else didn’t eat red meat, so these two and I and one of our other guests got to take down the whole batch.  We also had a smoked pork butt and smoked and grilled sardines that day as well as a keg of beer that took the party on a turn for the debauched by the end of the night.  All in all, the barbeque was an unqualified success, though! The burgers were crispy and beefy and shrimpy, all in a good way with a cool and fruity banana mayo that took them over the edge.  It is a little more work to grind all the meat, but this departure from regular burgers is well worth the work.  Be sure to vote for me at: Foodie Fights!

Music Selection

I am particularly proud of my BBQ playlist.  It’s got a mix of rock and roll music, old R&B, reggae, and some summer rap anthems, and that was going on all day long.  Since this is a contest, though, the song I’m choosing from that list is DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” with T-Pain, Ludacris, Rick Ross, and Snoop.  It’s such a banger,  a great summer jam, and I’m hoping it will bring me luck in the competition.

Beer Selection

Well we ate these along with kegged Yuengling beer and it was delicious, but I think a great accompaniment would be a Belgian White, like Great Lake’s Holy Moses or if you want something with a little more kick than either a Saison or something funky and sour like a Biere de Mars or even lambic.  Not a fruit one though, but a pure lambic or gueuze would be great I think.

Indian food is one of my absolute favorites, and while it’s basically easy to just make up an approximation of a curry by stirfrying some vegetables with curry powder and coconut milk, I feel like every time I try to make Indian food for myself and my friends that it always has this kind of amateur-ish, illegit quality to it, analogous to that fruity yeast-y taste that homebrewed beer can have.  This, on the other hand, is nothing of the sort.

My friend Scott (the one whose birthday cake and toy dinosaur were pictured in the recipe-less post I made a couple weeks ago) has a great book of Indian recipes that his dad and colleagues compiled.  His dad worked with some Indians and traveled there on more than a few occasions, and it was Scott that really turned me on to Indian spices and stuff when we lived together during our undergrad years.

When I was at his apartment in Rochester a couple weekends ago we made a red lentil soup from this cookbook that was absolutely out of this world (look for that in a post in the future), and while we were making that, Scott and I shared the leftovers from a huge batch of chickpeas in tomato yogurt that he had made earlier that week, and it blew my freaking mind.  This is the closest to restaurant Indian food I have ever tasted from a white home cook.  Thankfully, Scott let me copy the recipe down, and only a couple days after I got home I made this for myself to eat during the week.  There are few things more satisfying to me than drawing dirty looks from undergrad engineering majors that are taking up the computers and generally just getting in the way with my tupperware dish full of spicy, smelly Indian food.

I’m not normally one to cook strictly from recipes, but I’m honestly not sure what it is about this dish that makes it taste (to me anyways) so authentic.  One of the things that really set this dish apart is the whole cumin seeds.  Every once in a while you will bite down on one and just get a mouthful of wonderful cumin flavor.  When I did this, I made my own garam masala, but you could easily substitute the pre-mixed stuff.  Don’t cheat yourself by not getting whole cumin seeds though.  I will definitely say that my confidence in my ability to make great Indian food at home is restored now.  I can’t wait to start experimenting.

Chickpeas in Tomato Yogurt

Ingredients

1 1/2 T vegetable oil or ghee

2 medium onions, sliced

5 cloves garlic

6 green chillis

2 t coriander

2 t cumin seeds

1 t turmeric

1 T garam masala

14 oz. crushed tomatoes (1/2 a can)

1 c stock or water

1 can or 3 cups cooked chickpeas, drained

1/2 c half and half

1/2 c plain yogurt

Directions

If you’re making your own garam masala, you want to do that first.  There are a hundred thousand recipes for this spice mix online, so I’m not going to go too in depth with it (Here is a nicely photographed one from a site I love).  Get as many of the whole spices as you can and toast them up in a dry pan before grinding them up.  You can use them in any proportion you want; play around and see what you like.  Below is a picture of the spices that I used in this recipe for my masala.  As a side note, there is some cardamom in there two from probably 4 green pods that I smashed like garlic cloves and emptied the contents into the pan.  Also, I used powdered coriander and cinnamon, as I had those on hand and it didn’t make sense to get more of the whole stuff.

Once you’ve got your garam masala all made up, get all your aromatics chopped; this is a really quick recipe if you want it to be.  I like to halve the onions and then cut them into slices like you see below for this recipe but, as always, it’s up to you what you really want to do.

Heat up the oil or ghee in the pan over medium heat and just add all the veggies in.  Hit them with a little bit of salt and sweat them until they start to get soft.

Once the onions start to soften up and you can smell the chillies, add in all the spices.  If you count the garam masala, coriander and cumin are listed twice in this recipe.  Using my inductive logic skills, I would say that that’s because this recipe wants you to go a little heavy on the coriander and wants you to have whole cumin seeds.  If you made your masala with a lot of coriander in the first place, you can probably skip the second addition.  DON’T SKIP THE CUMIN SEEDS THOUGH.  I’M TELLING YOU.  IT’S AWESOME.

After a couple minutes, add your tomatoes and stock or water.  In this particular iteration I used turkey stock, but that’s just what I had on hand.  Obviously you can use whatever you want, and you can easily make a vegetarian version of this dish by using vegetable stock.

Reduce this mixture just a little bit, until it starts to thicken up nicely and has a little less gravy than you’d want the final version to, then take it off the heat and slowly stir in your half and half and yogurt.  That’s it!

Obviously, this is great served over jasmine or basmati rice.  You can use more or less chillies if you want to.  I like things face-meltingly spicy, so I used all six that I called for here (the original recipe called for two) and then stirred in a bunch of Sriracha before I ate it.  As good as it is hot, this tastes even better the next day.  I’ve had leftovers reheated and cold and they’re both just great.

Beer recommendation: Although I’m sure that I come off as a beer snob in most posts, the best way to enjoy this is a refrigerator-cold Genesee…from a can.  You can pour it into a glass, that’ll do nicely.  Actually, if you can get Koch’s Golden Anniversary, I love that even better.  It’s brewed by the same people nowadays. Also, I’m sure any IPA would stand up to the heat and complement this dish well.

Music recommendation: “In Time” by Sly & the Family Stone.  You need something funky to get your head bopping and butt twitching while you make and eat this dish.  This is the opener from their 1973 album, Fresh, and you would be well served just to put the record on and let it play all the way through.  The opening drums and keyboards on this song are just irresistible and I can’t think of better kitchen music for sipping a chilly beer and toasting up some hot spices in preparation for a funky spicy dinner (read: I am a tool).

I love soup.  In the winter months there are few eating experiences that are as pleasant as a piping hot bowl of soup with a chunk of homemade bread.  Fortunately for all, there are few eating experiences as easy to achieve.  You can put almost anything into a soup and be sure that it will come out wonderfully.  Vegetables, pulses, meats, and cheeses are all delicious simmered up in a broth and can be made as hearty or rich or brothy as you want by pureeing or adding cream or roux or chopping your ingredients large or small.  In the soup world you are limited only by your imagination.  Unfortunately though, it seems like when it comes to broccoli and cauliflower soups, people always stick to the old chestnut creamy, cheesy soup.  Not that there’s anything wrong with it; that has been one of my favorite soups for as long as I’ve been alive.  I just wanted to make a soup showcasing cauliflower without resorting to the standby.  This spicy roasted cauliflower soup with French lentils is a perfect winter warmer.

I came up with this recipe on my own (no big feat, as you’ll see it is extremely simple) through the help of an amazing book that I got for Christmas: The Flavor Bible.  Going out on a limb here, I’ll say that you’ve probably heard of this one before, and as if it needed repeating, I’ll say that it lives up to its sub-title of the Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity.  There’s no recipes in here, just a cross-referenced list of ingredients that complement each other.  Say you decide you want to make something with cauliflower and lentils (see where I’m going with this??), you can look up both of those things and see what the numerous chefs interviewed by the authors think go well together.  There are also a lot of sidebars where chefs will talk about specific ingredients and a really great introduction.  Together with Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, I’d say this is the best reference book for home cooks.

Both these, and the Daily Soup Cookbook that I mentioned in my post about chowder, will tell you that the way you start a soup is with mirepoix.

Roasted Cauliflower and Lentil Soup

Ingredients

1 medium to large or 2 small onions, roughly chopped

2 carrots, roughly chopped

2 stalks of celery, roughly chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/3 head of cauliflower (about 4-5 cups) chopped

10 cups stock or water

1 cup French lentils

2 T. garam masala (I strongly encourage making your own with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, bay leaves, cumin, and coriander)

red pepper flakes

salt and pepper

olive oil

Directions

Pre-heat your oven to 425.

Get out your cauliflower and chop it into bite-sized florets.  Don’t throw away the stump!  Chop that into bite-size pieces too, and while you’re at it, chop up the stuff for your mirepoix to whatever size will give you a soup with the chunkiness you prefer.  Named after a town and its dukes in France, mirepoix is the combination of carrots, celery, and onions sauteed in fat to form the base of a sauce, soup, or stew.

Toss the cauliflower with some oil and and salt and pepper and then lay it out in one layer on a baking sheet.  Throw the cauliflower into the oven and start roasting it.  This part takes a little while, so this might be a good time to clean up a bit, or have a beer or something as this soup really doesn’t make much of a mess.

After your cauliflower has been roasting for twenty-five minutes or so and you can see that it is starting to brown up, you can get some oil going in a stockpot over medium heat and start sweating the aromatic vegetables with some salt and pepper.  Smell your kitchen almost immediately fill with a wonderful soupy aroma.  Add your garlic, garam masala, and crushed red pepper after five or so minutes and then add your stock and lentils once that starts to smell really good, maybe around two minutes.  Bring the soup up to a boil and then reduce the heat until it is just simmering.  Cover it up and let it simmer until the lentils are tender, probably 40 to 45 minutes.

When your cauliflower looks like this, turn off the oven and add it into the soup.  At this point, check the seasonings and see if there is anything you want to add.  I think I may have put in some oregano at this point or even some tomato paste.  I’m not sure I remember.  Continue to let this simmer until the lentils are done and then serve it up.  I made some croutons out of some old bread we had and put some parmesean cheese on top because I love it like that.  Also, there is something so cozy about eating soup out of an oversize mug, so if you’re so inclined and have the means, I recommend that sometime.

Makes probably 12 cups or so of soup, a whole bunch really, and it’s even better the next day.

Beer recommendation: I would like to have this with an Extra Special Bitter most likely, or even a malty bock if it’s getting toward springtime.  If you’re ready to settle in for a long winter’s nap, a Russian Imperial Stout, like Brooklyn’s Black Chocolate Stout or Old Rasputin would go nicely.

Music recommendation: I’m going to double up on this one and recommend both “Tried & True” by Wilco, which is a demo from the Summerteeth sessions that became the song Summer Teeth on that album, though I like this version better; and “World Sick” the brand new song by Broken Social Scene that was just released today.  This kind of sprawling mostly instrumental song is right in the vein with most of BSS’s stuff, and I simply cannot wait for their new album, Forgiveness Rock Record, on May 4th.

This is our shelf where we keep our teas and vitamin supplements and usually bananas.  The shelf is above our sink and is usually nicely lit.  You can see that mortal and pestle in the recipe for sweet potato chowder.  Featured prominently in this photo are some jalepeno peppers that we grew in the garden behind our house.  This picture is from late October to early November times, the peppers were the last thing left and they sat up on this shelf for a while before I ended up roasting them and making enchiladas.

These are the aforementioned enchiladas plated and surrounded by law school texts.  I took photos of the entire enchilada process, but as you can see, the results weren’t very photogenic and I forgot what I put in there anyways to be honest.  The recipe was basically like the veggie burritos I made last spring.  I really like the set of plates that includes this one here.  They’re from Williams-Sonoma I think and they have these botanical drawings on them.  I like old-timey stuff like that, Audobon books and science drawings and stuff.

Another shot from the enchilada series, this is the tortilla press that I bought at a yard sale during the Lilac Festival in Rochester.  I think the original bolt was a little bigger, because this thing doesn’t get the tortillas as nice and thin as they should be, but they still come out just great.  They’re so tasty and simple to make and I’m thinking of doing a Cook’s Illustrated-type experimentation to perfect my recipe.  Right now I just use masa harina and water,  but I’m itching to do it with lard.  Anyways, this press is heavy and metal and, as you can see, is named Vanessa.  Nessie for short.

I have a bunch of fish ornaments that we always put on the tree at my mom’s house.  She buys me a new one almost every year.  I don’t know what it is about them, but I really like them.  Especially the ones that are made out of the really thin glass with glitter like this one.  I have four or five of these.

My roommate came home one time with a head of elephant garlic and this is a clove from that.  You can’t really tell how big this garlic is from the photo, but trust me, it was mammoth.  Probably the same volume as 4 or 5 regular cloves.  We’re all big garlic eaters in this house, so it was really no big deal when this entire thing went into one batch of soup.  In the background you can see our jars of beans and oatmeal.

Today is my friend Scott’s birthday, and this weekend I went to his house to hang out and celebrate and watch the beginning of the Olympics.  I got there early and made a cake with his girlfriend Sara.  I’ve said a thousand times that I’m no good at baking, but Sara and I baked the HELL out of this cake.  I am inclined to share the recipe anyways because it was so good, so maybe I’ll just make this cake again so I can.  The recipe is from a CIA cookbook that my roommate (who is an AMAZING baker) got for Christmas, but Sara and I added unsweetened coconut to the batter and frosting and swapped the vanilla extract for almond extract.

I just looked up the Wikipedia article about birthday cake in order to put in a little tidbit for this photo of the cake with candles ablaze, but it’s just a mess.  I feel like you don’t see those horrendous articles as often as you used to.  Anyway.  The pertinent part of the article tells me that the tradition of putting candles in a birthday cake dates back to 18th century Germany from birthday celebrations called kinderfest (kinderfesten?).  You put candles on the cake for every year and some to represent years to come.  It seems that here we did not put all 25 candles on.

I got this soda from the Indian grocery store.  It’s another good example of the old-timey type aesthetic that really catches my eye.  Here you see it on an end table in my friends’ apartment with a toy brachiosaurus.  The lighting is just so warm and nice in their apartment.  I took about a thousand photos of different arrangements of stuff on this table.

I hope you have enjoyed this assortment of photos and captions.

Music Selection:

“Rosy and Grey” by The Lowest of the Low

These guys are relatively unknown outside of Buffalo and Southern Ontario I think, but their album “Shakespeare My Butt” is one of my favorite early 90’s alternative records.  This song is just an awesome, good-time, sing-along, buddy track.

Here’s another one from the vault.  I made these back in October again, for a bake sale for my school’s chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get to man the table at the bake sale; I had just gotten back from the NLG conference in Seattle and, like every time that I fly, I managed to come down with a killer sinus infection.  Still, sniffling back nuclear neon green boogers, I made these scones to for the Guild to sell and raise some money to put on some events.

The recipe is from crispy waffle, and the one scone that I snagged from the batch when they were hot out of the oven was really good with a hot mug of tea, though it did have a little bit of a baking powder-y taste.  Still, they came out looking beautiful, especially when the glaze hardened, and I do believe that they sold out – I didn’t get any back anyways.

When it comes to chemically leavened stuff, I’m really in over my head.  I don’t make them a lot, and they never come out exactly as I planned.  That’s why you haven’t and you’ll never see a lot of cookies and cakes on here.  This was my first crack at scones and I was pleasantly surprised.  I really like scones in general, and these ones have oats and maple syrup – favorites of mine both together and when they’re on their own.  I would definitely make these again.

Maple Oatmeal Scones

(adapted from crispy waffle)

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups regular oatmeal

1 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup brown sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 cup butter, cold, cut into small squares

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 large egg

Glaze

1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar

1/2 cup maple syrup

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 and toast the oats for about 8 minutes.  Pull them out and let them cool to room temperature while you raise the heat in the oven to 450.  Whisk together the cream and egg in a measuring cup and combine the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a big bowl.  Reserve some of the cream and egg mixture to brush on the scones before you bake

Scatter the cold butter over the dry ingredients and cut it together with a pastry cutter (or two knives if you’re me) until it looks like coarse cornmeal.  This is where I think I may have messed this one up, because I did not have a pastry cutter nor did I know exactly what to look for in my mixture.

Stir in the oats and then the cream and egg mixture and fold it all together with a spatula until it clumps to itself.  Spread the dough out in a roughly 8″x10″ rectangle and then cut it in half lengthwise and cut each half into 5 or 6 scones.  I also kind of messed up here I think because I did not know how to get all evenly-area-ed triangles out of the rectangles, but I did my best.  Brush the reserved liquid onto the scones and then bake them for about 12 minutes.

When the scones are golden brown and done, pull them out and cool them on a rack.  When they’re all cooled down to room temperature, combine the sugar and syrup to make the glaze and drizzle it over the tops.  If you do it when they’re hot, it’ll all melt like it did on my scones.

Let the glaze harden into a nice maple-y color and enjoy!

Should yield 10 or 12 scones.

Music recommendation: “Hallelujah, I Love Her So” by Ray Charles

Wine recommendation: None, coffee or tea

Beer recommendation:  Same, but maybe a porter or stout if that’s really what you want to do.

Well it’s been another long time in between posts, but I now have an entire semester of law school under my belt and can maybe start posting again with a little more regularity.  This is a soup I made back in the beginning of October, but didn’t get to write up until now.  My awesome sister gave me a cookbook for my birthday with a bunch of different soups in it, and this is kind of an amalgam of a bunch of different recipes from that, plus a little of my own imagination.  It was really good this fall; the batch I made was enough to eat for dinner one night and then to bring to school for lunch for the rest of the week, and I think it would be equally delicious in these frigid winter months.

The soup is spicy and filling, with protein from black beans and a smooth base of pureed sweet potatoes and chunks of white ones.  Using root vegetables and beans that can be dried and stored makes this a great seasonal dish.  I don’t really remember exactly how I made this, so the following recipe is going to be more of a recreation based on the pictures I took and what I can remember of the process.  Also, I don’t really remember the quantities of the ingredients, so as always, you can and should tweak them to whatever makes the most sense to you.

This brings me to a sort of tangent in the form of a conversation Christmas Eve dinner that my mom and I had with my grandparents about cooking.  My grandpa was reading a recipe that my mom had printed off from the internet (I think it was a Rachel Ray one) and was commenting on the units of measure she used (all palm-fulls and good drizzles) and was asking how you could cook with such subjective and inconsistent measures.  The point we made was that you just use your common sense.  A good drizzle of olive oil is however much you need in a pan to saute some enough onions and garlic for what you’re making or whatever.  A palm-full is a medium grab of something.  If you have huge hands, then go a little easy with it.  If you have tiny ones, go a little over.  The thing for all of these though, and what I didn’t realize when I thought the questions were so silly is that you need to have some kind of baseline to base your common sense on.  If you don’t know roughly what you’re looking for, then it’s hard to use those kind of rough measures.  My mom relayed an anecdote about a friend who decided to make a batch of “camp chocolate chip cookies,” and didn’t realize until she had just an enormous amount of batter that two pounds of butter was way more than a regular recipe.  Turns out, the recipe was for enough cookies for a camp.

I just thought it was interesting, because it is easy for people who cook a lot to scoff at those that print out every recipe and measure out every cup of oats and half teaspoon of salt, but everyone has to start somewhere.  Okay, end tangent, on to the chowder.  It’s a spicy, spiced soup that can be kind of labor intensive if you don’t have an immersion blender, but in general it’s really good and easy, and spicy and hearty enough to warm you whether it’s in the brisk Buffalo autumns or cold, windy winters.

Sweet Potato, Chipotle & Black Bean Chowder

Ingredients

3 or 4 sweet potatoes, chopped

2 chipotle peppers in adobo, chopped

1 large onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

8 cups or so broth or stock or water

2 or 3 white potatoes chopped

1 can black beans rinsed or 2 cups rehydrated and cooked dried black beans

olive oil

maple syrup

salt

pepper

spices (cumin, fenugreek, mustard seeds, bay leaves) (this is sort of like a curry powder sans turmeric, you could substitute curry powder here and it would be delicious or chili powder if you wanted a more southwestern-y tasting soup – it’s really up to your personal tastes, but those four are what I used)

Directions

First you probably want to toast up all your spices and grind them either with a spice grinder or with a mortar and pestle.  Put a little more than a teaspoon of each of those four into a dry pan and toast them over medium heat for a minute or so, just until you start to smell them and maybe the mustard seeds start to jump around and pop.  Dump them into the mortar and grind them up with the pestle until it’s a powder, or else use your dedicated spice grinder or your coffee grinder to do this really quickly.  By hand it will probably take a while and maybe tire your wrist out, but you should end up with a tablespoon and a half or so of spice mixture.

While you’re doing this, you can also get some oil (a good drizzle of it) going in a heavy-bottomed stock pot over medium-high heat, then throw in your onions.  When they’re starting to go transparent, stir in your garlic, the chipotles, and the spices.  Add a good pinch of salt and let these go a couple minutes until maybe you’re sneezing and the kitchen is starting to smell all oniony and garlicky and spicy.  Then add the sweet potatoes and saute those for a couple minutes and pour in your broth.

Get the whole thing up to a boil, and then turn the heat down until the soup is just simmering.  Simmer this (keep an eye on it!) until the potato chunks are fork-tender (they slide off when you pierce them).  Now either break out your immersion blender and puree the whole thing or blend it in batches in a regular blender like I had to.  At this point you may have to thin it out with some more stock or water.  Again use your common sense to achieve the consistency that you would like in a soup.

Now, put this all back into the stock pot over medium heat and add the regular white potatoes, the black beans, and the maple syrup.  Don’t go nuts with the syrup, just put in some to give the soup a hint of sweetness and cut the spice from the chipotles.  Keep tasting all throughout and adjusting the salt and spices.  This is really important, and is something that the cookbook that Devon gave me emphasizes.  With soup or really any dish, you have to keep tasting it as you cook to get it just right.  It’s also a great way to develop the intuition in a kitchen to tell you exactly how big a palm-full or how good a drizzle you need.

Anyways, simmer this whole thing now for maybe 20 minutes or so, just until the potatoes are tender enough to eat, then serve it up in bowls with a crusty wheat or sourdough bread on the side to dip and mop up the traces with.

This will make about ten or so cups of soup, depending on how thick it is and if you cool and re-heat it, it may need thinning with some more stock or water.

Music recommendation: “Radio Cure” by Wilco

Wine recommendation: I really don’t know, I’m admittedly horrible with wines.  Maybe something sort of dry and red?  A zinfandel?  Maybe someone that reads this (ha!) can help me out with something that may pair well.

Beer recommendation: Either a pilsener or a pale ale, nothing too too bitter, but nothing too sweet or malty either.   Southern Tier makes on in their “Pack of Pales,” it’s just a pale ale, not as hoppy as their IPA, that would be perfect I think.  Though a crispy Stella would be just great as well.

I’m back again!  I know that in the movie, it’s probably the Rosato brothers, but whenever I watch Frankie Pentangeli gripe to Michael, I always imagine him just having a real big problem with some guys who just make risotto all the time because of how trendy and popular it is.  Or was I guess, it’s not 2006 any more.  Or 2004.  I guess I was thinking something along the lines of the “risotto wars” between Onstad and Téodor chronicled beginning here in his blog.  Judging from the food trends these days (and by food trends I mean what they make on Top Chef always), maybe it would be the Ceviche brothers.  What am I talking about?  Anyways, tonight I made a risotto with some acorn squash.

Feel free to “ooh” and “ahh” at the kitchen counter and dining room table photos from my new apartment.  These pictures, and this blog’s continuance, have been made possible by my mom’s and her brother’s (my uncle’s) generous gift of a digital camera of my very own for my birthday three weeks ago.  Thanks!  Anyways, to summarize what has gone down since my last post on June 18th, the new Raekwon album did come out (albeit in September), and it was better than the Blueprint 3, I still live in my amazing apartment in North Buffalo with 3 of my best friends in the entire world, we smoked a bunch of pork, it became autumn at some point, we had cable for a month, and law school is a ton of work.  The past few weeks, I’ve been on a total squash and sweet potato kick, celebrating the new season and all (I am a Libra you know), so what could be more apropos than a squash risotto for my first post back?  (I know there’s a fucking ton of these, but I made a pumpkin risotto two years ago that people loved and I am just dying for positive reinforcement so I decided to make something similar again).

Acorn Squash Risotto

Ingredients

1 acorn squash

4 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

2 small onions, diced

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 1/2 cups arborio rice

1/2 cup dry white wine

3 1/2 cups chicken broth

3 tablespoons parmesan cheese

crushed red pepper

sage

salt and pepper

Directions

While probably a little more complicated than the foods I normally make, risotto is totally easy; it just requires some attention and constant stirring.  You want to start by somehow peeling your squash and chopping it into 1″ chunks.  I don’t have a ton of experience here, but what I did this time was to cut the squash in half like in the photo above, then halving each half and cutting that into semicircular rings and those rings into chunks.  I wish I had a paring knife, but since I didn’t I just used the sharpest part of my big chefs knife to cut the skin off.  It took forever, but luckily I had some good tunes and a big cup of wine to pass the time.  Start preheating your oven to somewhere near 400 F here too.

Toss the squash chunks with some olive oil (about a tablespoon(?)), salt, pepper, and some of the sage, chiffonaded like I did there, and then throw them in the oven.  If you’re going to roast the seeds, then do them now too.  Make sure you keep an eye on them though or some of them will burn like mine.

After the seeds are done and the squash has been roasting for a good 20 – 25 minutes or so, start heating up your chicken broth (you want to it to be at a hot simmer when you start adding it to the risotto) and warm up the rest of the olive oil in a big pan with the butter too.  Add the onions and sauté until they’re translucent, then throw in your garlic and the rice.  Toss this all together so the rice is coated in the fat and you can start to smell the garlic cooking and the rice starting to get a little nutty (I lack the words to better describe this, just try it and you’ll know the smell I mean).

Get ready, because you’re not going to stop stirring until the food is done.  Also because the food is going to start smelling better and better until you will hardly be able to stand it.  Add the white wine and stir until it’s absorbed by the rice.  Then, start adding the chicken broth about 3/4 cup at a time and stir constantly until it’s absorbed.  Now is probably a good time to check on the squash and pull it out if it’s done cooking (soft, but still with some structural integrity).  Throw in some more sage at some point and keep adding broth as it becomes absorbed.  After about a cup and a half, add half of the squash, and then keep going.

When you’ve hit about three cups of broth start tasting it pretty frequently because it will be done really soon.  Stir in the cheese and the crushed red pepper, and when it tastes done to you (creamy with still a bit of bite, I mean I imagine anyone reading this will know what risotto is supposed to be), stir in the rest of the squash.

What I chose to do (because I really wanted to show off… to myself… I drank the rest of the wine that I didn’t put in the risotto) was to garnish the whole finished deal with some fried sage leaves and the roasted squash seeds.  I know.  I never did fry up sage leaves before though and I thought it would be nice to eat some pretty Italian rice and squash food and drink cheap Chardonnay tonight and I am not ashamed.  Here is a picture of this dish in front of a large pumpkin:

The recipe makes enough to probably feed two people if that’s all they eat or four or more as accompaniment to other dishes.

NEW SECTION THAT WILL BE INCLUDED IN ALL POSTS TO COME:

Music recommendation: La Quintette du Hot Club de France (Gypsy jazz by Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grapelli)

Wine recommendation: A dry white, the same one that you cooked with

Beer recommendation: I don’t think you could go wrong with either a farmhouse saison or an Oktoberfest / Märzen.  Don’t go for any “extreme” variation on either style though; you want this to speak for itself, err on the side of understatement (I sound like a tool).

Courtesy of Google Maps, here is the primary reason that I haven’t updated this since April.  A few weeks ago, I moved out of my mom’s house and into this beautiful upper in North Buffalo with two of my best friends.  It goes without saying that a move, even only 20 some miles away, is time- and brain power-consuming and so this blog thing has really been at the back of my mind.  An added snafu with this whole move is that I no longer have access to my mom’s digital camera to take pictures of the delights my new roomies and I have been cooking up (and we have been cooking up some delightful delights).  Maybe someday soon this summer I’ll be able to throw up some pictures and recipes for noodly salad dishes, whole wheat breads, day-long smoked pork shoulders, and crispy pizzas.  But for now, in order to satisfy my loyal readers (hah!), I’m just going to throw up some links to stuff that has interested me lately.  A lot of it is jacked from other blogs, so if you go down that list on the right here, you’re bound to see some repeats.  Sorry.

Bike Messenger – Here’s a book review David Byrne (yes, the one you’re thinking of) wrote a while back for Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities, a book that’s real close to my current sensibilities.  I just love David Byrne and bicycling and the idea of developing policy to make cities more friendly to bicyclists.  Triple whammy!

Sesame Noodles with Red Cabbage – I really like Macheesmo, and this cold noodle dish is basically exactly what I concocted myself when I wanted something similar the other day.  I made mine with cucumbers, green cabbage, yellow peppers, and bean sprouts.

Raekwon – “New Wu” – Only Bulit 4 Cuban Linx 2 has been “coming soon” since right after the first one dropped it seems, but my hopes are high that it will actually come out this august when they’re saying it will, with this new banger as evidence.

Rust Belt Renaissance – This August I am going to be starting my 1L year at the University at Buffalo Law School, and as of late, my area of interest has been ways to shape policy in the Buffalo-Niagara region to revitalize the area (see the interest in Pedaling Revolution).  This is an article about a conference starting today here that was written by a good friend of my ex’s that appeared in last week’s ArtVoice.  I wish I had a spare $25 to check this thing out.

Broken Social Scene – “New Country” – Too bad I’m not allowed into Canada. One of my all-time favorite bands since I caught them as a last-minute act at Thursday at the Square six years ago, Broken Social Scene, played a surprise show in Toronto as part of their label’s NXNE showcase. Not only that, but Leslie Feist played with them for what must have been the first time in almost the same amount of time that I’ve known the band (You may know her from the iPod commercial or her appearance on Sesame Street). Anyways, here’s a video of them playing a song together.

Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun – Finally, a story from yesterday’s New York Times about Urban Farming.  This also fits into my interest in revitalizing Buffalo and the surrounding area.  There are a lot of grassroots organizations and projects going on right now to localize food-production and decrease sprawl by using land more efficiently.  This is especially relevant to Buffalo where we have hundreds of acres of land that’s not being used right now with abandonded and derelict houses on it (Here’s a bonus link from Bruce Fisher: The Green Zone.  Also, check out his blog: The Fisher Variations).  Now thankfully we have things like Urban Roots and the Wilson Street farm springing up to encourage community and urban agriculture.  In other cities, you have people creating green roofs and restaurants using their space to produce their own produce.  It’s exciting!

Post number 2 for today is a soup that I knew I had to make as soon as I saw the recipe in the Artvoice that came out last Thursday.  There’s a local chef named Joe George that writes for that paper a lot, as well as the magazine Edible Buffalo, and for his own awesome blog, Urban Simplicity where he talks about cooking, bicycling, and all kinds of things of interest to Buffalonians or anyone else.  His Food for Thought column in Artvoice is something that I always look forward to, and this one about honey provided three great looking simple recipes, including this absolutely delicious curried carrot soup.

I adapted a little bit from the recipe Mr. George provided in order to make things simpler and just because of my own misinterpretation.  He originally called for 1 1/2 lbs. of carrots and I had 2 lbs. so I decided to increase everything else by just a little bit.  I also used vegetable stock instead of chicken, just to keep things vegetarian.  One of the things that I increased was the ginger, which I read as 2 tablespoons in the original recipe and increased to probably 3, when it turns out he wanted 2 teaspoons.  So my recipe is significantly more gingery (gingerier?), but I love ginger so I’m not really complaining.  If I had some galangal, I would have liked to use that in its stead, but alack and alas, I do not.  Maybe when I move into the city… All said, though, this soup came out great and was delicious, as Joe George said, both hot and chilled.  It came out sweet and spicy, and when it was cooking it gave off this delicious nostalgic aroma not unlike that of a head shop actually.  Go figure.

Curried Carrot Soup with Honey and Yogurt

Adapted from Joe George’s recipe in Artvoice volume 8, number 17

Ingredients

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 large onion, diced

3 tablespoons minced ginger

4 cloves of garlic, minced

3 tablespoons curry powder

5 tablespoons of honey

2 pounds carrots, peeled and diced

4 cups vegetable stock

1/2 cup + a couple tablespoons plain yogurt

salt and pepper

Directions

This soup is really easy to make, but kind of prep intensive.  Before you start anything, get all of the ingredients peeled and chopped and minced and diced up.  I made the mistake of only peeling the carrots before I started the oil with all the other stuff and ended up frantically dicing them and was only about half done by the time it came to add them.  So peel your ginger and carrots and mince and dice them all up according to the ingredients list first.  Don’t leave the carrots like they are in this picture – dice them fools!

Looking at that, it’s kind of funny to me now how pretty much everything in this soup, all the produce anyways, is some kind of a root or rhizome or something.  It’s like underground soup.  But yeah, once everything is prepped, get the oil going in a big soup pot and once it’s hot add the onions, garlic, and ginger and season them with salt and pepper.

Once the onions start to brown a little bit and go soft, add the curry powder and the honey and saute that for a couple more minutes until it gets good and gooey and the curry powder fries a bit, then add in the carrots and broth.

I had to use store-bought vegetable stock because I don’t have quite enough scraps yet to make as big a batch as I would want, but if you have homemade broth or stock, by all means use that instead!  Bring this whole deal to a boil, then reduce it to a simmer and cook for about 45 minutes until the carrot bits are good and soft.  Then pull it off of the flame and stir in the yogurt.

Now if you have an immersion blender (I do now, but won’t for very much longer…ahh it’s nice to have access to mom’s gadgets), just put that in here and blend the whole thing until it’s good and smooth and bisque-y.  If not, you can transfer it in batches to your regular blender and just puree the hell out of it.

Now either serve it up or chill it first if you’re so inclined.  Kind of looks like butternut squash, doesn’t it?  I elected to garnish it with a dollop of yogurt and some chives from the garden, but some shredded carrots might have looked nice as well.  This stuff really is equally good hot or cold, and you could substitute sour cream in as a garnish if you like as kind of a borscht-thing.

The recipe makes a little more than 2 quarts.

Well it looks like today is going to be another double post day, because I’ve been meaning to throw this one up since I made it the day before yesterday and I wanted to post it before I wrote about the soup I made this morning.  This one is another super-trendy entry, by my estimation at least, judging from all the stuff I’ve seen on Taste Spotting and Foodgawker with ramps in it, but oh well.

After reading one particular blog post at night, I went Frisbee golfing the next day with a bunch of friends (I’m not ashamed – it’s fun!) and after a really wretched throw I had to fetch my Frisbeedisc brand “S-Driver” from the bottom of a hill.  You see, we were on the fifth or sixth hole and so pretty far into the woods and my driver S’ed the wrong way.  About halfway down the hill, I spotted those tell-tale pale green tufts of broad leaves (I must have “had my eyes on” as Michael Pollan would put it, because they stood out to me for some reason like a flashing neon sign, I wasn’t even looking for them).  Easily distractable as I am, I started pulling up fistfuls of the guys.  I got pretty far behind the rest of the people I was frolfing with, but eventually tracked down my disc and caught up with a green tongue, AWFUL breath, and a handful of ramps.

Ever since then, I’ve kind of been ramp crazy.  I just can’t help but notice them and cry out to anyone who will hear: “Ramps!”  This past weekend at Zoar valley I found some more and chewed them until my spit turned green, and then Monday when I was walking my dog, I spotted some in a little stand of trees on Knox Farm in East Aurora.  Being close to home, I decided to harvest some and cook with them.  What I came up with was a deliciously flavored and colored pasta primavera with a ramp and pepita pesto (I told you it was trendy). In addition to being the Italian word for spring, primavera literally translates as “first green,” and you can’t get much greener than this dish here.  Look at how lovely my little wild springtime leeks are in the afternoon sun:

Farfalle Primavera with Ramp Pesto

Ingredients:

2 cups fresh ramps, packed

1/2 cup olive oil

1/3 cup Parmesan cheese

1/3 cup pepitas (shelled pumpkin seeds)

salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper to taste

3 cups mixed vegetables (I had broccoli and zucchini so I used that)

2 servings farfalle (I don’t really know how much it is measured out, use your head)

Directions

Toast the pepitas in a dry pan over medium heat until they just start to change color, maybe 2 minutes, 2 and a half max.

Blend the pepitas with the ramps, the olive oil, the cheese, and seasonings until you get a thick paste.  I had kind of a hard time with this one, it would probably be easier with an immersion blender or a food processor or something than with your standard smoothie blender.  Also, you might want to roughly chop up the ramps before blending to make them more manageably-sized.  I didn’t do this and it took a lot of blending and shaking to finally get it to the consistency I wanted.

While all that’s going on, boil and salt some water for your pasta, then throw it in.  To save on dishes, I just put my steamer insert right over the top of the boiling pasta water and steamed all the vegetables right there.  You could even just throw them in the water when there’s only a couple minutes left.  Both ways give the pasta water a nice light green cast that will be good for when you mix it with the thick pesto to make your sauce.

When it’s all done, drain your pasta, reserving some of the water, then mix a little of the water in with your ramp pesto to make a more liquid-y sauce.  It comes out so wonderfully green!

Toss some of the sauce with your pasta and vegetables and top with more cheese if you want (you obviously do), and whatever else to make it pretty.  We had some chives coming up in the herb garden so I put some of those on too.  More pepitas would also be nice, and I also put a lot more crushed red pepper on mine.  A word to the wise, though, a little of this sauce goes a LOOOONNNNNG onion-y way, so be sparing at first and taste it before you put more on there.  I made the mistake of putting a shit ton on at first and my mouth tasted like ramps until 3 in the morning.

This recipe makes 2-3 servings with some pesto left over.