Tag: scallions

Categories
The Book Vegetables

193. Beets with Lime Butter p.523


The recipe

This was a very simple, and highly effective preparation for beets. My dining companion is mildly obsessed with beets, and we certainly eat more of them than the average couple. We tend to stick to Ukrainian, or Eastern European preparations, or pair them with goat cheese in salads. This week a friend brought an Egyptian preparation of beets in Mediterranean yogurt to a pot luck which was just delicious. We’d never considered trying this recipe’s method before, but I think we will again. The beets are shredded, simply sautéed in butter with lime zest, then tossed with a little more butter, lime juice, salt, and pepper, and served with chopped scallions.

The Good: This was remarkably simple, and unexpected. Beets don’t make me think of limes. Beets and some type of acid makes perfect sense, but limes have got such a particular tropical floral scent that I’d just never considered them working with beets. In the end the sweetness of the limes and of the beets played very well off each other. There was just enough butter to make this dish cravable, but it remained quite light, and although my picture doesn’t really do it justice it was a very striking dish. I was very pleased that this took all of fifteen minutes to make.

The Bad: I have nothing bad to say about the final dish. It was simple, satisfying, and very tasty. The only downside to the preparation is that grated beets tend to stain. Beet juice comes off counter and floors nicely, but clothes can be a bit of a problem. I would also recommend using a plastic cutting board. It’s actually a good check to see if your cutting board is getting too old and scarred, the beet juice will rinse right off the surface, but any deep groves will be stained purple.

The Verdict: We’re fond of beets and serve them to all comers at our house. We’ve had several guests who were kind of tentative about beet eating when they arrived, but most of them have become converts. If beets aren’t one of your pantry staples this is a nice introduction. I thought it was a bright, fresh, and wholesome, take on one of our favourite vegetables.

Categories
Poultry The Book

191. Spice-Rubbed Quail p.402


The recipe

I like to think of quail and lobster as perverse challenges on a Japanese game show. They’re complicated and messy to eat, but you’re challenged to do it in your finery with your peers looking on. I can imagine the quiet golf claps from the spectators as you deftly separate the leg joint, and the derision of the judges and jeers from the peanut gallery as you forget your manners and start gnawing on the wings. There are loads of public forums for messy lobster eating, where plastic bibs rule and squirting lobster juice into your dining companions’ hair is considered to be all part of the fun, but very few community organizations seem to throw an annual quail bash, so I prefer to keep small fowl eating confined to my home.

These quail are supposed to be semiboneless, where your butcher has removed all but the wing bones, and the drumstick. I’m sure that would make the eating a lot neater, but it probably costs an arm and a leg, so we ripped our meat off the bone with our teeth thank-you-very-much. The boned out quail are cut in half, rubbed with salt, pepper, cayenne, and allspice, then chilled for a hour, and cooked under the broiler. The quail are served with a gastrique made with chicken stock, lime juice, molasses, scallions, and butter.

The Good: These quail were just delicious. The spice rub did very nice things for them, quail are fairly flavourful birds, so they were able to stand up to the allspice and cayenne. The quick broiling they received was a really nice way to cook them. Unlike chicken you’ve got to cook them as quickly as possible to get the outside nicely crisped before the meat gets overdone, intense direct heat from the broiler seems to be the ideal solution. They’d probably work well quickly grilled over an intense flame.

The Bad: While there was nothing wrong with the gastrique, I thought it was more or less unnecessary. The quail were a complete package on their own, they weren’t begging for an acidic caramel sauce. I tried some of the gastrique with the quail, and it just covered up some of the bird’s deliciousness. Sometimes I think people make gastriques more because they look nice drizzled decoratively on the plate, or painted on with bold brush strokes than any underlying culinary theory. In this case they didn’t do much for the quail, so I’d skip it. However it might depend on what you’re serving it with, a sweet and acidic sauce like this can go a long way towards tying a meal together.

The Verdict: Make the birds, skip the sauce, eat with close friends and loved ones, don’t worry about making a mess.

Categories
Breads and Crackers The Book

168. Cheddar Scallion Drop Biscuits p.597

The recipe

The Boys were over for breakfast, and I decided to make them biscuits. One of them has been living down in the Carolinas for the last few years, and has become something of a biscuit connoisseur, so I didn’t dare try a traditional buttermilk biscuit. These are far simpler, and less error prone. It’s a basic biscuit dough (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, butter, buttermilk) with a bit of sugar, cheddar cheese and scallions mixed in. These aren’t kneaded or shaped which when done wrong can toughen the biscuits, they’re not cut out so there’s no risk of collapsing the flaky layers, and there aren’t twenty generations of ancestors looking over your shoulder to make sure you do it exactly right. You just blend butter into the dry ingredients, stir in the cheese and scallions, and barely mix in the buttermilk (gluten is still your enemy). The biscuits get unceremoniously dropped onto a baking sheet, and stuck in the oven.

As Epicurious posters have noted, the cooking time is off, at 450 these will be burned after the recommended 18-20 minutes, I started smelling a hint of char from the bottoms after 14-15 mintues. so don’t get too far from the oven, and use your nose.

They tasted a lot like the biscuits at Red Lobster. I don’t think I’ve been to a Red Lobster since 1998, but the taste of their biscuits is stuck in my food memory. They’re less over the top greasy (which unfortunately means not quite as good), in fact they’re a little dry. A bunch of the Epicurious posters recommended adding more buttermilk, and I think I’d go with that suggestion next time. The cheese flavour is prominent in these biscuits, I used some middle of the road aged cheddar, but I’d definitely choose the oldest sharpest stuff I could get my hands on next time, the cheese is the make or break ingredient, so choose it wisely. I really liked the addition of scallions, the onion flavour wasn’t overwhelming, or un-breakfasty, just delicious. The exteriors of these biscuits were glossy and crispy, and while the insides were a bit dry once they’d cooled, they were lovely and tender when warm. The solution is obviously never to let these cool down.

These biscuits were a success, they’re fairly idiot proof, so I can handle making them before the espresso machine has heated up. The ingredients are mostly things you’ll have on hand (or maybe normal people don’t absolutely always have scallions in the fridge, but that’s just semantics), they taste good, and look pretty. While the recipe has a few problems, with a couple modification I think they could be a breakfast standby.

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

149. Chicken Long Rice p.247


The recipe

The Book is at it again. I’m beginning to understand that when the blurb before the recipe mentions comfort food, I’m in for a boring dinner. This time it’s comfort food, Hawaiian style.

I’ve just started to get to know Hawaiian food through a few of the recipes in The Book. I don’t have a good sense of it, I’m not clear on what they’re going for, or trying to be. They’re all a little bit odd, using unexpected ingredients, in initially strange combinations. I get the sense that there’s an underlying culinary theory that just hasn’t been explained to me, and if I could tune into it, all these dishes would just come together. I visited my aunt in Hawaii several years ago, but we mostly ate Korean barbecue, and Japanese soups. I missed out on the luau experience, without even trying the cheesy pupu platters and grass skirts kind. I’d dearly love to be invited to someone’s back yard for the real deal. Maybe thinking of this luau classic as fortification for a night of hard partying gets me a bit closer to groking it.

The recipe is really straightforward. You start by simmering chicken thighs with ginger and salt, then let it cool. You then remove the skin and bones, and shred the meat. The broth gets strained, and brought to a boil with water, bouillon cubes (not stock), onion, and dried shiitakes. You then add bean thread noodles, cook for a few minutes, then allow the dish to sit for half an hour while the noodles absorb the broth. You then add the chicken, reheat the soup, and stir in scallions just before serving.

The preparation went easily, except for cutting up the bean thread noodles into 3 inch lengths. Those things are incredibly tough. I’ve never used them before, and I was expecting that they’d break apart like rice noodles, but I practically had to get the power tools out to get the job done. Kitchen scissors were an abject failure, my chef’s knife just turned on the noodles and tried to cut me, and hitting them with a cast iron frying pan made me feel better, but inflicted very little damage. In the end my bread knife did the job, but sent little bits of adamantium noodle all over the kitchen. Next time I think I’ll get out the pruning sheers.

After all that noodle cutting effort, I was hoping for a tasty dish, unfortunately this was as bland as it gets. You’d think that ginger and mushrooms would bolster the chicken and make a satisfying soup, but all that flavour just disappeared. It tasted like a weak broth, with a hint of ginger, and some washed out watery chicken chunks. I liked the noodles quite a bit, they had a fun texture, and they seemed to concentrate what little flavour there was in this dish. This recipe makes a whole lot of very bland soup, so I had to get creative with the leftovers. Stirring in some sriracha chile sauce, and swirling in a beaten egg improved things considerably.

Another lesson I’m learning about Hawaiian food is that the name of a dish is a pretty poor clue as to what you’ll be served. Chicken long rice is indeed made with chicken, but the rest of the name is a mystery. Maybe I’m just missing the point of this dish, but as it stands the only way I’d make it again is if I was serving someone on their deathbed and even the slightest titillation or elevation of their heart rate could push them into the great beyond. Those of us with many good years ahead can spend our dinners more wisely.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

142. Oysters Rockefeller p.52


This recipe from Epicurious is similar to The Book’s version, but the linked recipe has slightly different proportions, and makes twice as much topping. I didn’t read the recipe very thoroughly, and used little Malpeque oysters for the recipe, instead of the “large” oysters the recipe called for, so I had more than enough topping.

We used to get Oysters Rockefeller about once a year as children. My parents would pick up a case of Oysters for themselves, or get a few cases and invite friends over for an oyster party. Us kids were totally grossed out by raw oysters, and dared one another to try slurping them. Inevitably one of us would take the bet, and then gag on the slippery salty oyster, and spit it into the sink. My parents quickly realized this game was a waste of precious oysters, and started making Oysters Rockefeller for us, which we devoured. As I grew up I came around on the raw oyster, and ended up preferring them raw with just a little squeeze of lemon juice, or a dash of hot sauce.

During my late teens and early twenties I was a volunteer firefighter, and our department had an oyster and beer bash every fall. Mostly people came to the party to shuck and slurp raw oysters at long tables all night long, but we prepared oyster soup and oysters Rockefeller too. I would spend the afternoon shucking oysters and saving the prettiest shells. I never got the department’s recipe, but they did an especially fine version of the oyster Rockefeller. Even though I prefer my oysters without adulterations, I certainly wouldn’t say no to one.

Unfortunately this recipe doesn’t live up to either my Mother’s or the department’s version. Using the wrong oysters threw the whole recipe out of whack, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. You start by making a mixture of chopped Boston lettuce, baby spinach, scallions, parsley, celery, garlic, and bread crumbs. You then wilt this mixture in a skillet with butter, and add Pernod, anchovy paste, cayenne, salt, and pepper. The mixture is allowed to cool, while you crisp and crumble some bacon. You then add an oyster and some of it’s liquor to a cleaned oyster shell, top with some of the vegetable mixture, bacon, and more bread crumbs. The oysters then get stabilized on a bed of salt crystals, and go into a 450 oven for 16 – 18 minutes.

My main criticism of the recipe is that there were way too many bread crumbs. The crumbs soaked up all of the oyster liquor, and overwhelmed the oysters with their sandy texture. Even if I’d used gigantic Pacific oysters that would have been a problem. Using the smaller oysters also meant that they were overcooked and dry by the time the the tops were browned. Unfortunately my little oysters got completely lost under a mountain of spinach and bread crumbs. I could almost detect a hint of the sea in this dish, and I thought I found the oyster in a couple of them, but it could have been a clump of bread crumbs. Given the excess of topping, I was surprised at the lack of bacon, you could easily have doubled it without going overboard.

Done right, oysters Rockefeller have a just barely set oyster, with a good deal of liquor left at the bottom, and a flavourful crunchy topping. They can compliment and accentuate the oyster, leaving it as the star of the show. My oysters were, dry, didn’t taste like oysters, and didn’t even try to compensate with bacon. It’s hard to give the recipe a fair rating, because I messed things up. I’m sure that the topping had too little bacon, and too many bread crumbs, I would have liked the anise flavour of the Pernod to come through a little more clearly as well. My final product didn’t taste too bad, but I would have saved an hour, and enjoyed myself more if I’d just slurped the oysters raw.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

122. Smoked Salmon Mousse with Salmon Roe and Crudités p.19


The recipe

I was really looking forward to this recipe, but I didn’t expect to like it at all. I’ve never had a salmon mousse before, and it has a certain reputation. Pop culture uses it to indicate that a character is out of touch, horribly backwards, or disturbingly gross. I suspect many people can’t think of THE SALMON MOUSSE without imagining the grim reaper from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. It turns out that salmon mousse became popular enough to earn this iconic status because it’s delicious. Maybe its reputation got dragged down along with the casserole-generation’s jellied hot dog and marshmallow salads.

The mousse is made by folding whipped cream into a purée of smoked and canned salmon, sour cream, and tabasco, with scallions and bloomed gelatin stirred in. The mixture is poured into an oiled mold, whose bottom has been lined with cilantro leaves. The mousse is refrigerated, unmolded, and the base is surrounded with salmon roe.

I was surprised at how much I liked this spread over a cracker. The airy mousse had a great consistency. I was worried it would end up gummy and jellied, but the gelatin just barely set it, leaving it soft and smooth. The smoked salmon was the backbone of flavour in this dish, The canned salmon kind of disappeared. The salmons flavour was intense enough that it could stand being diluted in the whipped cream. In a happy accident I quadrupled the tabasco (1 tsp instead of 1/4 tsp), which added some needed punch, and helped to counter the richness. The cilantro leaves were pretty, but I didn’t really think they added anything. If you’re going to top the mousse with cilantro, then it should have some cilantro flavour. Next time I’d chop some up and stir it in. The salmon roe had mixed reactions from the crowd I served this to. It was incredibly intense, and added a burst of salmon essence to the mousse, but some people felt it was a bit much. I enjoyed the roe, and would use it again.

This kind of dish has been out of fashion for a long time, but it’s definitely ready for a comeback. The molecular gastronomy (or whatever you want to call it) set are making savoury gels of everything they can get their hands on, and the food fashion conscious are eating it up. Maybe you can reintroduce the salmon mousse by claiming that your salmon are organic, and telling people you set it with agar agar. Sure it’s whipped fish Jello, but it tastes great, and it’s weirdly elegant. I love that this dish could fit in at a regency banquet, at an “I Like Ike” booster, or as an experiment in geometry from the people behind Ideas in Food.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

96. Salmon Burgers with Spinach and Ginger p.291


The recipe

I rarely make recipes from The Book for lunch, but this was an exception. I happened to be home, and to have a salmon fillet lingering in my fridge, so I decided to go for it. It wasn’t the greatest thing I’d ever tasted, but it certainly wasn’t bad. It’s a simple burger made of diced salmon, spinach, scallions, ginger, salt, and pepper. It’s held together with an egg white, and a dash of soy, then shaped into patties, fried crisp, and topped with pickled ginger. As you can see I happened to have some neon pink pickled ginger in the fridge, and I used it. It didn’t look great, and it wasn’t the best pickled ginger I’ve ever had, but this was lunch and I was alone, so who would ever know? I still had a bunch of the dill and crème fraîche mixture I used in the Rye Crispbread Crackers with Pepper-Dill Crème Fraîche and Smoked Salmon, so I added that and the burger to a slice of Russian bread and called it a meal.

The burger cooked up nicely, and developed a crispy crust. I often worry about fish burgers falling apart in the pan, but that was not an issue. The flavours were a bit aggressive. Salmon can stand up to intense sauces, but this was pretty much a ginger burger with salmon and spinach. It tasted quite nice, but not much like salmon. Unfortunately my kitchen still smelled like pan fried fish. I’ve also got to deduct points for the boring “let’s make it Japanesque” flavours they’ve gone with. Ginger and soy are a great combination, but leaving that as the only flavouring in an Asianoid dish smacks of foreign food of the ’50’s. And not in that quaint kitschy way I love.

Overall the burgers were fine. Not particularly inspired, but totally edible and even enjoyable. I definitely don’t think this should be the definitive salmon burger, or the only fish burger in The Book, but it’s not bad at all. The nice thing about lunch is that it’s held to a lower standard. This burger might have been a disappointment at supper time, but having a burger for lunch is a treat no matter how it tastes.

Categories
Sandwiches & Pizzas The Book

74. Lemon Coleslaw p.193

The recipe

This coleslaw is meant to be served as part of Shredded Pork and Lemon Coelsaw Sandwiches (p.192). I made the slaw on it’s own though. This dish is found in the Sandwiches and Pizzas section of The Book, and this is the first recipe I’ve done from that section. So, let’s open Sandwiches and Pizzas with a coleslaw.

It was a very light, cooling, and fresh slaw. It wasn’t weighed down by a gallon of dressing, and the lemon flavours made the whole dish taste bright and clear. On the other hand, the cabbage retained all of it’s crispness. I like crunchy cabbage in a slaw, but this was going a little too far. My jaw hurt from the effort.

The dish is as simple as you could ask for. Whisk together a bit of sour cream, mayo, lemon zest and juice, water, sugar, salt, and pepper. Stir in sliced cabbage, grated carrots, scallions, and parsley. Let the whole thing sit in the fridge for an hour and serve. The hour in the fridge is supposed to give the sugar and salt in the dressing time to draw moisture out of the veg and wilt them a bit. But, after an hour the cabbage was just a tough as ever.

I sliced my cabbage as thinly as I could with a chef’s knife, and ended up with good looking pieces of cabbage. Maybe I sliced it too thickly for the one hour to be sufficient. If I’d used a mandolin to get narrower slices things might have worked out better. Alternately more time would have done the trick. I had some leftovers the next day for lunch and the texture was much better. Some of the freshness of the lemon had faded, but the whole salad had mellowed, and the cabbage still had a crisp bite without causing jaw cramps.

There were a lot of things to like about this slaw, but it needs some refinements. If I were to make it again I’d toss the dressing on to the sliced cabbage the night before, then add the carrots, scallions, parsley and a little refreshing squeeze of lemon an hour before I wanted to serve it. The flavours are really clean, but a bit unidimensional. If I were to make it again I’d add some sliced fennel into the mix. I really appreciated that the recipe allowed the cabbage to be front and centre. So many slaws are downed with goopy dressings in an attempt to hide the fact that you might be eating cabbage, so this was a refreshing change.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

70. Chow Fun with Chinese Barbecued Pork and Snow Peas p.249


The recipe.

This is the stir fry I mentioned a while back. It called for leftover Char Siu as an ingredient. The stir fry alone is competent, but not exceptional. The char siu is what makes the dish. The stir fry is very restrained in it’s selection of vegetables, just snow peats, scallions, and bean sprouts. This is cooked up with rice noodles, and the char siu. The flavourings are a fairly standard combination of chicken stock, oyster sauce, soy, sake, sugar, garlic, ginger, and sesame oil. All good stuff, nothing hard to find, and quite well balanced. This stir fry is the closest to Chinese take-out I’ve ever made at home. I’ve made stir fries I’ve liked better, but this was the most authentic if you’ll permit me to stretch that word to it’s breaking point.

The cooking directions seem a bit backwards to me. The recipe fries the noodles in the wok first, then adds the vegetables and aromatics and sauces. One of my favourite things about stir fry is the way the vegetables get seared on the outside, but remain crisp inside. In this method the noodles prevent the veg from ever really making contact with the bottom of the wok, so they end up steamed. That’s not so bad, but I missed the caramelization.

Once the frying is done the stock, oyster sauce, soy, sake, sugar mixture is added, boiled and thickened with corn starch. This did a great job of producing that take-out style slick glossy texture, and made them more fun to eat.

I was a bit surprised to see that the recipe called for a wok. Home wokery seems to have fallen out of favour in the last decade or so (Cook’s illustrated would have us throw them out). The objection is that wok cooking is an extremely high heat cooking method, and that our ranges (even top of the line gas burners) can’t pump out the BTUs necessary to do the technique justice. I’ve seen Alton Brown get around this by setting a round bottomed wok on the industrial sized burner of a turkey deep-fryer, or over a charcoal chimney starter. I have a large round-bottomed stain-prone steel wok that I enjoy cooking with on my electric burner, even if it doesn’t have the benediction of Chris Kimball. I like the size and shape more than its heat distribution properties. I enjoy having room to move the food around without slopping things over the sides. I’m a fan of my wok, but I’ve felt like it was my dirty little secret. It’s nice to see The Book validate my cooking lifestyle choice.

If you have Char Siu in the freezer this recipe takes 20 minutes, and tastes great. I’d like to have a control condition stir fry though. I feel like the Char Siu recipe was so good it could make any stir fry delicious. However, if you’re feeling like DIY take-out food this dish is the way to go.