Tag: red pepper flakes

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The Book Vegetables

187. Roasted Spiced Sweet Potatoes p.584

The recipe

I served these sweet potatoes along with Lillie’s North Carolina Chopped Barbecue , and they were a lovely accompaniment. I should have though about the colour palate of our dinner before pairing sweet potatoes and barbecue, the plate was a little orange. You may eat with your eyes first, but the important bit is what happens when you put it in your mouth. On that score these potatoes did very well.

The Good: These sweet potatoes are delicious, simple, and in most other contexts very good looking. A child could make them, you just cut sweet potatoes into wedges, toss with ground coriander, fennel, oregano, red pepper flakes, kosher salt, and oil, and roast for 40ish minutes. It’s an unusual combination of spices, but they worked unexpectedly well together.

The Bad: Wedges are a popular food shape because they’re easy to cut, but they cook very unevenly. The thin edges of the sweet potatoes started to dry out before the interiors fully cooked. This was less of a problem with smaller sweet potatoes, but with any bigger onces I’d try a more uniform shape. I’d consider using a baking sheet you don’t like much for this dish because there was a lot of burned on spices and oil that were difficult to get off.

The Verdict: This recipe was a winner, it was simple, delicious, and took less than ten minutes of my time. Roasted sweet potatoes are always a treat, I love how the exterior puffs up and blisters while the interior melts into a decadent mash. The spice mixture was very present, but didn’t overwhelm the natural goodness of the sweet potatoes. These would be good any time of the year, but I think they’d be exceptional as part of a not-so-traditional Thanksgiving. My Dad loves to scandalize the family by messing with classic Thanksgiving dishes, and this recipe would really fit the bill.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

156. Dry-Cooked String Beans p.523


I couldn’t find a recipe for this one online.

I was in a frying mood the night I made these beans and the onion rings. The combination of a fried appetizer, and a fried main course was just a little too much. This stir fry was more than greasy enough all by itself.

In this dish trimmed green beans are deep fried in a wok for 30 seconds, then drained. You then drain off most of the oil, and build a stir fry starting with garlic, red pepper flakes, and ginger, then add ground pork. Once the pork is browned the beans go back in to reheat. A mixture of sugar, salt, soy sauce, sake, and sesame oil is then poured over top along with a handful of scallion greens and stirred to coat. Put this on a bed of sticky rice and you’ve got dinner.

The stir fry itself was totally delicious, it was an excellent balance of ingredients, just spicy enough, and wonderfully complex and arromatic. However, the stir fried beans were a bit weird and greasy. I trimmed the ends of the beans, so there was an open tube down the middle of them. Some of those tubes filled with oil during frying, and made the dish much greasier than I would have liked. It’s possible that my oil temperature dropped too far, and the pressure of escaping steam wasn’t enough to keep the oil out. If so, more oil, or smaller batches of beans would have taken care of the problem. The recipe says that the point of the deep frying is to lock in the coulour of the beans, but blanching, and shocking them would have done the same thing. The exterior of the beans took on a funny wrinkled texture, but they remained firm and crisp, and nicely green.

I’d happily make an adapted version of this recipe, but I think the deep fried green beans are better left behind. There are lots of recipes for dry-cooked beans out there, so I’ll presume it’s a well respected technique, and suggesting that they kind of suck is probably insulting someone’s Grandmother’s cooking, but they just weren’t my bag. The rest of the dish was excellent, and simply replacing the frying for a blanching would probably solve my only criticism of the recipe. If it had been less oily, it would have earned 4.5 mushrooms, but as it is, I can’t give it more than three.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

138. Macaroni and Cheese p.223


The recipe

I haven’t eaten all that much macaroni and cheese since I graduated to shoes with laces, but most of the kids I knew, and the stoners they grew up to be, loved the stuff from the box. As a child, macaroni and cheese was just the brand neutral way of saying your mom was making Kraft Dinner. I decided that KD was not for me around age 5, and looked for creative ways to avoid it, or mask its flavour. For reference, cut up hot dogs made it better, ketchup made it worse. Unfortunately kids in Montreal ate a lot of KD in the ’80s. My mom accepted my quirks and stopped serving it to me, but I still ate a lot of it at friends houses.

I was well pleased to leave mac and cheese behind me by the time I reached high school, and it stayed that way ’till a a nice Southern girl introduced me to the home made version in my early 20’s. Her macaroni and cheese was an entirely different animal, using real cheese, building flavour and texture with a roux, adding a touch of heat, and baking the whole thing with some extra cheese on top. I came around, and macaroni and cheese became something worth looking forward to.

I started experimenting with my own versions of mac and cheese, without much success. The problem I was trying to solve was that M&C is inherently rich, bland, and straightforward. Some people interpret that as a food surrogate for mother’s love, but I find it a bit dull. I tried adding herbs to the M&C, which fubared it, adding more chili flakes didn’t help either. One version with chipotles was actually pretty good, and worth revisiting sometime. Drawing on my childhood hot dog experience, I tried adding some slices of merguez, which worked quite well. These experiments brought me closer to what I was looking for, but they were still lacking. I was happy to discover that Gourmet has hit upon secret elixir that cuts the richness, and ties everything together, Dijon mustard. The Book’s version isn’t perfect, but I’m immensely grateful to it for bringing me closer to the ultimate macaroni and cheese recipe.

In this version, you make a three minute roux with butter, flour, and red pepper flakes, then whisk in milk and bring the sauce to a boil. After letting it boil for a few minutes, cream, extra-sharp Cheddar, and Dijon are added. The sauce is then added to cooked macaroni, and some of the water from the pot in a baking dish, then topped with mixture of butter, panko bread crumbs, and more cheese. The casserole goes into the oven for around half an hour, and then served.

The mustard and red pepper flakes make all the difference, and prevent this from being just too rich to be enjoyable. Getting the cheese right is important too. The recipe calls for extra-sharp Cheddar, which seems simple, but even an average grocery store will have about ten different versions, ranging from the plastic packaged stuff sold along with the milk, to fancy-pants imported stuff at the cheese counter. You can spend a fortune on truly wonderful Cheddar, but it’s probably a waste of money to go melting that into mac and cheese. The low end rubbery stuff will be OK, but not as good as it could be. The cheese really carries this dish so spending a bit more on a nice piece of aged local Cheddar is a worthwhile investment.

The recipe calls for panko, or other dried bread crumbs. I couldn’t get my hands on any panko, so I went with bread crumbs from the bakery down the street. Panko are known for their lightness and texture, while my bread crumbs were quite finely ground and dense. The 2 cups of panko the recipe called for might have been a nice topping, but 2 cups of my bread crumbs probably weighed twice as much as panko did. The macaroni was just too heavy on the topping, and the very dry bread crumbs sucked up a huge amount of moisture, so that within about 20 minutes of taking the dish out of the oven, the macaroni had set up, and lost the saucy-runny aspect you’re looking for in macaroni and cheese. You can see from the photo that it was next to impossible to find any of the macaroni under all the topping.

I think this recipe did a very nice job with the macaroni and sauce aspects, but fell short with the topping. I can’t comment on how it would have been with panko, but while they gave regular bread crumbs as an acceptable alternative, it obviously wasn’t. Beyond the topping, it was probably the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had. I’m sure that just a little tweaking could result in a truly great macaroni and cheese dinner, for the adults as well as the kids.

Categories
Poultry The Book

114. Foolproof Grilled Chicken p.363


The recipe

The blurb before the recipe says that the secret to perfect grilled chicken is to brine it then toss it in a vinaigrette once it’s done. I’ve never really had a problem with my non-brined, non-dressed grilled chicken, but this version does have its charms. Brining makes things taste good by saturating them with salt, sugar, and extra liquid. They remain moist and get the flavour enhancing goodness of salt all the way through the meat. Unfortunately that means brined dishes are really salty. If it’s done right it doesn’t taste all that salty at the time, but I inevitably wake up parched in the night after a dish like this.

We made this dish for some friends we were visiting. They live near San Francisco, which means I got to have my first Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s experiences. Other than amazingly priced wine I didn’t really get what the big deal about TJs was, Whole Foods really was worth they hype though. On the one hand it’s just like every other megalomart, only expensive. On the other good quality organic stuff was everywhere. We just don’t have an equivalent in Montreal, and one opening here would be a big deal for me. We’re taking a mini-break and visiting different friends in Brooklyn this weekend, I’m anxious to get back to a Whole Foods and do a little exploring. Incidentally that means I’ll be away tomorrow through Sunday, so no updates ’till Monday.

I picked up the chicken and herbs for this dish at Whole Foods, and most of the rest of the ingredients for dinner from a cute farmer’s market in Palo Alto. I brined the chicken for three hours instead of the recommended six. I also misread the recipe and added a bunch of lime juice to the brining liquid, it didn’t seem to affect anything, so no harm done. I then made a Thai style vinaigrette of lime juice, garlic, cilantro, mint, red pepper flakes, salt, and oil. I left out the two tablespoons of fish sauce, which the recipe promises won’t make the dish taste in the least fishy. My dining companion’s superpower is detecting fermented fish at even the lowest concentrations, so I decided not to include it.

The Book offers extravagantly detailed instructions on how to grill the chicken. It comes down to searing it for a few minutes, then moving it to indirect heat and letting it cook slowly until it’s done. The breasts will take longer than the leg pieces. Once the chicken is done you remove it and toss it in the vinaigrette. You then put halved limes cut side down over the hottest part of the grill for a few minutes to develop some grill lines. I’m not sure that the grilling of the limes served any purpose, but they did look cool. You can imagine that heating them makes them easier to juice, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a gimmick.

This method did produce a very fine grilled chicken, I’m not sure it was worth the extra effort though. The vinaigrette worked wonderfully, and I’d be happy to try it again as well as the alternate Mediterranean vinaigrette it gives as an option. The brining enhanced the flavour of the chicken, but it really was quite salty. I have a hard time deciding how much the brine actually improved the chicken, because I rarely buy organic, which is naturally more flavourful. I was a very poor scientist to vary both my ingredients and methods at the same time, I’ll need to do some control experiments to figure this out.

I’ve never found grilling chicken to be all that error prone or difficult, so I think I’ll skip the brining step in future. The vinaigrette added nice acidity, and aromatics to the chicken. It was simple to prepare and fragrant, a definite keeper. I liked serving grilled limes with the chicken, they were fun, looked cool, and I liked being given the option of adding as much or as little acidity as I’d like. This was a fairly good grilled chicken recipe, but I don’t think I’ll give up my home-brewed technique.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

39. Penne with Broccoli Rabe p.206

I can’t find an Epicurious recipe for this one. If I had this might have been a 4.5 mushroom dish, but I can’t bear not to share this simple flavourful Tuesday night supper with the world. Here it is.

2 pounds broccoli rabe
1 pound penne
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 garlic cloves, sliced
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or to taste
Salt

Accompaniment: finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Trim and discard any yellow or coarse leaves and tough stem ends from broccoli rabe. Cut off florets and reserve. Cut stems and leaves crosswise into 1-inch-wide pieces. Wash stems, leaves, and florets and drain in a colander. Cook Broccoli rabe in a 6-quart pot of boiling salted water (1 tablespoon salt per every 4 quarts water) until stems are tender, about 5 minutes; drain.

Cook pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until al dente.

Meanwhile, heat oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderately low heat. Add garlic and red pepper flakes and cook, stirring until garlic is golden, about 1 minute. Add broccoli rabe and salt to taste, increase heat to moderately high, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 3 to 5 minutes.

Drain pasta and toss with broccoli rabe until well combined. Transfer to a bowl and serve with cheese.

Broccoli rabe is usually sold as rapini here. I don’t think I’d ever tried it before I met my dining companion. She adores all bitter greens, but rapini is her special favourite. It looks quite a bit like leafy broccoli, and has a similar taste, but with a serious bite. Apparently it’s a member of the turnip family, and some of that sharp flavour comes through. Rapini was definitely the vegetable find of 2006 for me. We eat it quite regularly, and I hope that I’m getting the touch. It’s a bit tricky because it has tough fibrous stalks, and relatively more delicate leaves. The idea is to get the stalks tender, without overdoing the leaves. More than once I’ve stopped early (inedible stalks), or gone too far (nasty yellowish leaves, and a bit of a sulfurous funk). I think I’ve got the hang of it now, and the 5 minute mark set in this recipe is right on the money. The photo is proof that it came out a vibrant green, and I assure you that it was toothsome and not a bit mushy.

For a recipe I’m giving a 5 mushroom rating to, it’s horribly written. It wasn’t at all clear to me what I was supposed to do with the florrets that I’d reserved. Were they meant to go in to boil with the stalks? possibly. Perhaps then they are the broccoli rabe that goes into the pan with the garlic and oil? Would have been nice to specify it. Does that mean that the boiled stalks go into the pan as well as florets? Perhaps reserve the florets, meant reserve for another purpose. Who knows. Anyway, I boiled the stalks, cooked the garlic and red pepper flakes, then added the stalks to the garlic, cooked for a bit and tossed with the pasta. I forgot my little bowl of florets on the counter and they never made it into the dish at all.

I guess the recipe is pretty tolerant, and it is delicious. Do what you will with the florets, but do make this dish.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

13. Toasted Walnut, Roasted Red Pepper, and Cumin Spread p.12

the recipe

This was an absolute winner. Easy, cheap, packed with flavour, unusual, brightly coloured, exploding with garlic, what’s not to love? I’ve made this twice and I’m sure a third time is not too far away. There are flavours pulling in all sorts of directions here, sweet roasted red peppers and molasses, earthy cumin and walnuts, sharp garlic and red pepper flakes, an acidic bite of lemon juice, but everything plays very well together. It also changes a bit as you eat it. At first the sweet and spicy flavours are prominent, but after a few bites the nuts start to take centre stage.

I was complaining that the lamb tagine’s flavours were too scattered and working against each other. The flavours here are similar in some ways, but they’re pulling in concert. The result is my new favourite spread. The book suggests adding this sauce to meat, and while I haven’t tried it on a roast, I did put it on a turkey sandwich. I thoroughly enjoyed my lunch.

The only downside here is that I think I might be slightly allergic to walnuts. It’s nothing much, just a slight numbing of my mouth and lips and a tickle at the back of my throat; particularly if they’re raw. I’d probably do well to limit my exposure to avoid kindling or sensitization though. Too bad.