Market Tomato Sauce from Scratch--Vegetarian Even

I went to one of the local markets and found a seller selling bags of super ripe tomatoes for a buck; five for a buck.

I picked one up, also got an onion and some garlic, and some thyme and basil, and still spent barely under five bucks.

To start this kind of pomodoro sauce, you first need to get the skins off the tomatoes before you'll be able to make a nice sauce. Blanching them is the fastest way to do that, and besides, you'll want to stew the tomatoes a little.

To blanch them, core the tops:

And score the bottoms, slice an "X" in them. This will make it quick peeling business once you drop them in ice water from the boiling water.

Here's a picture of the "before" prep work. For this sauce I went old school-industrious style, and used a box grater for the onion and a hard-cheese grater for the garlic:

Here's the "after", the onion and garlic grated and retaining their spilled juices:

Here're the tomatoes in the boiling water. The skins will start to slough off, and that's when you drop them into ice water, and then moments later peel off the skins. From there I'd drop them back into the boiling water, to stew them a little more, but not for too much time, maybe two minutes or less.

Once stewed, I used a potato masher to mash the tomatoes. They don't need to be fully cooked through, since you'll be getting to them later

Starting with olive oil, add the onions.

Once nice and soft, add the garlic, red pepper flakes, and thyme. Work it until it blooms, and your kitchen fills with the nice aroma:

Then add your wine. I only had red wine, so it comes out an odd purple. Reduce it by half.

Next add water or stock, bring to boil, and add the tomato. I used stock, and I didn't use enough to be able to break down the tomatoes for long enough to meld the flavors completely. Be sure to have been adding salt and pepper, and add a tablespoon of sugar with the tomato to counteract the acidity. It won't make anything sweet.

Balsamic vinegar is another thing that can be added, even though acidity can be an issue. It brightens the flavor and brings out the savory with its own sweetness. It's hard to explain.

Right near the end add a healthy amount of fresh chopped basil. You'll be able to tell it's almost done when the tomato will be mostly broken down, but still partly chunky.

This is also vegan, but not because I wanted it that way; it just worked out like that. If you want, mounting it with butter is a good way to alter the mouth-feel, but isn't necessary. (To mount it, put a little butter in and mix it vigorously off the heat.)

It gets better by the day, also. I used it with angel hair pasta and sliced sausage.

Small Post: Sweet and Spicy Grilled Corn

This is the Halloween post for grub, and since candy corn isn't something you can make easily enough (maybe it is, I don't know) I thought I'd talk a little about regular corn.

Grilled corn, anyway.

So it starts with corn on the cob, and once you peel back the stocks, you give yourself a nice handle (the stalk). I have some Mai Ploy chili paste, which is a red paste made from all sorts of great aromatics. I use it in Thai soups, curries, and even for grilling occasionally.

Like here for corn. I mixed about a tea spoon of the paste with a table spoon of brown sugar and then mixed  that into a half cup of coconut milk. I blended it well, and used it as a baste for the corn.

The cobs will develop a nice glaze, and when you go to eat them, you'll be surprised at how they look shiny and wet, but are actually quite dry to eat, but not in a bad way. Depending on how much chili paste you use will determine how spicy the corn will end up.

It's an exotic and easy recipe. Good stuff.

Jujubees

This blog is originally a home-cooking site, but I was introduced to what's sometimes called a Chinese Apple at a farmers market, and I felt compelled to share.

There is an (awful) hard-jelly candy called a jujubee. I don't know where that name came from, but this is the real thing.

The fruit, jujubee, comes from a tree, and doesn't look appetizing necessarily: a rusty-brown color and a dull, thuddy sound it gives when you tap it:

It looks like a date, almost. It definitely, though, doesn't feel like a date. It feels hollow almost, light, unsubstantial:

But when you bite into it, oh man! The flavor is hard to describe. The consistency is like an apple, but much drier. Much drier, and maybe a little spongier, but in the apple ballpark. The pit or seed is large and mostly almond shaped. It doesn't drip, like a juicy apple would:

It tastes creamy. Not tart, or sour, or even all that sweet; creamy. It's so weird, and yet, so damned good you'll find yourself drawn back to their bag, again and again. Words fail to explain this strange quality of the jujubee. Everything about them is a little, eh, different.

Chicken Thigh Tutorial

I tried to do a photo shoot of the boning process for the thigh and drumstick conflagration, but I was by myself and my hands got too greasy with raw chicken too fast to get too many good pictures. I'll learn from that at least.

But the first cuts you'll need to make run along the bones themselves. Then take your knife and slice around a point above bottom of the drumstick. Check below on the left. The idea is to sever all the anchoring sinew from the former heel of the chicken.

Then it's just a number's game. Numbers and patience. Slice gently and close to the bone, going slowly.

You'll be able remove one part, then work the longer drumstick, then you'll find it's the knuckle is the last part still attached. It's easy to cut the final part, but only if you know what you're doing. Go ahead and cut it off, and pick any hard cartilage or tiny bone remnants out with care and the tip of your knife.

This blog isn't really a butcher forum, and my pictures are woefully insufficient, but the essence is here for those who have the patience and the courage. The cut, once finished, can be pan fried into one of the best tasting chicken dinners anywhere.

Hope the pics aren't too gruesome.

Roasted Mushrooms

My favorite mushrooms are hard to find out here on the west coast, whereas they grow wild  in huge colonies in the northeast. They're an amateur forager's dream, in that they're excellent tasting, grow to be huge, and the best part, there aren't any poisonous lookalikes.

Those mushrooms are mostly known by their Japanese name, maitaki. They're also known as hen-of-the-woods back east sometimes, because they look like the back of a hen. A delicious and unique 'shroom for everyone's enjoyment.

One of my favorite ways of cooking the maitaki I'll be discussing here, with a few more notes for a meal. But I'll be using oyster mushrooms, which are pretty good as well.

You want to first crank up your oven to 500, and make sure it's pretty hot once you start. Cut off any knobby or tough parts of the stem on your mushrooms.

What follows will be fine for any kind of mushroom.

Start with some vegetable oil in your pan, and crank the heat up to high on that as well. Wait for the wisps of smoke to appear, the oil shimmering, and drop in your mushrooms, but only enough so they're not crowded. Once in, season with salt and pepper:

Let them go for maybe five to ten seconds, and then place inside the hot hot oven.

It'll take only two minutes in the oven, give or take ten to twenty seconds:

See how they're golden? Now comes the awesome, yummy finishing part: the buster basting. Drop a pat of butter, between a half tablespoon to a whole, along with a healthy amount of fresh thyme sprigs. See below:

The thyme leaves pop and fill the air with such an aroma that you'll be transported to the late eighteenth century. Using a hand-towel or oven mitt, shake the pan vigorously to foam the butter and get all the thyme popped:

Now remove the mushrooms and thyme sprigs and set them on a plate to lose some of the butter grease, maybe even using a slotted spoon to remove the 'shrooms. This pretty much a done topper now, to be placed artistically as garnish on steak or chicken dishes, or to be used in pastas, which is what I was making on this day: a pasta dish.

To do that, start with a clove of garlic, smash it, and put in in the pan with some wine for deglazing. I only had red wine at the time, but white wine is usually used.

There won't be too much to deglaze, but it'll be tasty. As the wine reduces and your kitchen now smells like a French restaurant, add some chicken stock (water will do as well, but won't taste as good), and using a spoon, break up the garlic:

Now, like any good French pan sauce, add butter, and turn off the heat:

Mix in the butter with the heat off and the sauce gets a nice coating ability, and then add your already cooked pasta. I had shells left over that I'd stored separate from the tomato based sauce from the previous evening.

That sauce coats and covers the pasta with flavor and sexy goodness, and return the mushrooms to the pan, toss everything once or twice, just to coat the mushrooms (if you want to do that, it's not necessary), and then plate it:

Awesome.

Not that anyone cares, but I scrubbed the stove top later that day...it was damn filthy and embarrassing me a bit.

Gonzo De-Boned Rolled Quarters

Trying to get a little funky, I decided to pull out an old trick. The missus and I had gone to the big Sunday farmers market in our neck of the woods and picked up some nice goat cheese, and in order to make sure it doesn't go bad, I've been finding things for it.

One was the rolled thigh. This dish can be done with any kind of stuffing, or no stuffing at all. It doesn't even need to be rolled, really. It's the carving that's the star here.

The cut is a chicken leg quarter. And the carve is to remove the thigh bone and drumstick, leaving the thigh meat and leg meat intact on a sheet of skin. Maybe I should have a tutorial demonstration, but until then, see the picture:

You don't need to be a butcher to get this. All you need is patience and a sharp knife. Go slowly. Really that's it. It just takes time and sharp knife.

This next picture has the string with which I'll be tying the quarters, and the goat cheese getting ready to be lined:

Here are the rolled and tied quarters:

The starch from this meal was also purchased at the market: fingerling potatoes. I was going to roast them old school, like back at Inside Park, a restaurant I worked at in Manhattan. I started with minced garlic (fresh from the market) and some chopped rosemary from out on our balcony.

Then I added salt and pepper and olive oil, and then the potatoes, halved and rinsed and then dried off. In New York I would've added chopped thyme as well, but I don't have any here.

Then onto a sheet tray, and into the oven. My oven was off a little, so I didn't get the color I was looking for on them, but they tasted very good.

Besides showing off how filthy my oven is, you can see the potatoes and the chicken working together. The chicken was done in a half sexy, half stewing way. First, you need your pan to be able to go into the oven. Then you get a little screaming hot, shimmering and beginning to smoke. Put the chicken down skin side down.

For these rolled quarters, it's three quarters skin, so you need to roll it around like you would for stewing meat, and get some color on all sides. Then leave them cut side up, and wait for them to finish. That could take anywhere from 15 to nearly 30 minutes, depending on your oven and what else might be inside.

But in the end, you get something like this:

And here's the final meal. Gonzo Rolled Quarters, Manhattan Fingerlings, and farm delivered butter lettuce salad.

We like our meals balanced.

Gonzo Fried Rice

What a mess. These pictures show off how bad our kitchen looked a few days prior to a nice deep clean.

It makes me cringe.

In any case, it's hard to see. And on this day I was making fried rice.

Fried rice is easy and something that can absorb lots of different leftovers, especially rice. This is one of the extender-of-meager-provisions dishes.

Rice for the fried rice is usually left over, and a little dried out, even in restaurants. We eat plenty of rice, so the occasional fried rice can be done with just a few extra vegetables.

I started with an onion, sauteing it in oil, then added garlic and red chilis, and in a second pan fried up two eggs. By the time I got the eggs started, I'd added carrots and broccoli.

Here's the stuff that goes in later. Once the broccoli and carrots are soft, but not fully cooked, put the rice in. Toss the rice until it's evenly mixed. Once it gets hot and popping, start the flavoring. Notice I hadn't added any soy sauce or anything such liquid. That goes in after the rice.

Soy sauce, nam plaa (Thai fish sauce), and sesame oil are the usual suspects. This is done to taste. While the rice is still hot and flavored well, turn off the heat and add sliced scallions and finely chopped Napa cabbage, but here all I had was Savoy cabbage.


If you need to make rice for the dish (as I did since I didn't have quite enough rice), cool it on a sheet tray in the fridge once it's done. It may not be as dry as you may like, but it'll still work.

The idea is to wilt the scallions and cabbage in the still hot rice. Fold in the eggs here as well. Sprouts are also traditionally used at this moment.

Here's the final mass:

It's tasty and plentiful.

Stretching Vegetables

Between our farm delivery and some purchases from the store, and after some meals, I realized that we didn't have enough corn for one meal, nor enough green beans for one meal, nor enough lettuce for one meal. But, we did have, between the three, enough for two dinners, if properly mixed. We also had tomato and garlic. 

On the first night I grilled the corn over my burners on the stove. It popped and smoked and smelled pretty good. I cut the kernels off and into that mixing bowl. I then cut up some tomato and garlic, and then trimmed the green beans down to about a half-inch pieces, visible here:

I heated up some oil in a pan and started sauteing the green beans, since they'd take the longest. I tossed in the garlic and let it bloom, and then added the tomato, since it adds acid and juice. Quickly I added corn, and about a half cup of water, and turned the heat down.

It simmered and was good enough for dinner and the missus' meal the next day at the office.

The next night I cut the remaining green beans in the same way, then blanched them. I diced the last of the tomato and finely sliced the remaining lettuce. I added them to the green beans, and then added some feta, olive oil, and salted sherry vinegar.

Two nights in a  row, stretching the vegetables.

From the Missus: Sweet Potato Salad

From our farm delivery we were inundated for a two weeks with sweet potatoes.

On one day I made a side dish that was between a pan-fried biscuit and a sweet potato pancake. They were pretty freaking tasty, and with the spicy Italian sausage sauteed with peppers and onions over top, the combo was nice in the flavor department and consistency department, if the look was a little lacking.

The next day the missus put together a potato salad using boiled sweet potatoes (a little too far), but without mayonnaise. Here's a look:

It had thinly sliced baby beets and flash sauteed garlic and beet greens. Topping off the flavors, she'd taken some of our freshly grown dill seeds to the mortar and pestle and then added them to about a quarter-cup of sherry vinegar. Maybe it was less than a quarter-cup, but it was damn good. It was creative and used up plenty of our farm delivery material.

Sometimes that just works out like that.

Starting Early, and Working in Batches

The heatwave that passed through the Southland has mostly broken, but I've been keen to find ways to do nice cooking without using the oven. This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but one our main methods of roasting meat and vegetables is by starting them in hot oil over the range-top and then sliding them into a super hot oven. That's how you get sexy grub.

But recently this has been hard, so I started early, and resigned us to eat some of the food chilled.

I started some beats in the oven, roasting them for later use (like the next day). That took nearly an hour in the oven. I used my four quart sauce-pan, put he trimmed beats inside, tossed them with olive oil, salted and peppered them, and put a half-inch of water in the bottom. I put the whole thing, covered, into the oven, and checked it later. You can smell when they're mostly done. I took them out, set them on the counter to cool, and put a that night's starch into the exact same sauce-pan, added some salt and pepper, and returned it to the oven.

They were cute little sweet potatoes. Both the sweet potatoes and beets, and the following zucchini and carrot are all from our organic CSA, so we knew we were getting good, healthy food.

Once the beets were cool enough to handle (see: still pretty hot) I peeled them with a towel, as is the best way dealing with beets. They're beautiful beets: a pink one, a pink and white one, and a large white one.

Once the sweet potatoes finished, I did the same thing: setting them to cool, now I turned off the oven, waiting a few minutes, then peeling them. Starch was done. I put them into the fridge to chill.

Next I worked on the vegetables. I waited until I knew the missus was heading home, then got a frying pan nice and hot with some olive oil. In a mixing bowl I had my zucchini and carrot and some roughly chopped garlic. I tossed this to evenly mix the vegetables. Once the oil was very hot, I put in the first batch of vegetables. What you're looking for is for the vegetables to be in a a single layer, and not too crowded.

Why? If it's too crowded or densely loaded, you'll end up steaming the vegetables instead of getting some nice color and flavor on them. You're trying to keep the mush-level as low as possible.

With the burner on high, the first batch will will get color before they're done. That's what you want. They should still be kinda hard. Remove them and put them on a plate to rest. They'll continue cooking for a time as you do the next batch. Just add a touch more oil and some more vegetables. Keep this up until you have no vegetables left.

On the last batch, as it's getting color, return the rest of the resting vegetables and toss the set vigorously. After a minute or two, return them to the resting plate, and reserve to serve. They're done and not mushy.

Here's a picture of the batching. Notice the vegetable resting on the counter in the background.

For the protein, I had, after buying whole chickens and carving them appropriately, a bunch of chicken wings left over. I had them marinating overnight, and then roasted them in the oven, the second time I had it turned on during the day, but since they were so far apart, it didn't turn the apartment into a sauna.

Here's a picture of the plate, with the vegetables, the wings, and the coolly smashed and seasoned sweet potatoes:

Breakfast of Champions

I don't mean a shot of whiskey, a cup of coffee, and a cigarette, I stopped those breakfasts some years ago.

Since I've been laid up with the broken leg, the missus and I go back and forth making breakfasts. Actually, she makes it most of the time, and we're talking about the weekends only. It's always something fresh and quick and easy. Take a look:

So good, so quick. Set the water on the stove in a small pot with about a quarter cup vinegar to keep the white attached. That's how long this breakfast to take to prepare: time it takes to bring water to a simmer + two-and-a-half minutes.

Our nonstick pan died some time ago, and busting out the wok every time you want to fry and egg is a pain in the ass, so we just started poaching the eggs. You can keep the yolks nice and runny while the white stays solid and isn't snotty, and eliminate the grease from the dish.

After you put on the water, slice and dress some lettuce, add cherry tomatoes if you have them---these are our organic babies from our CS--- and one half of the plate is ready for the egg. On the other side add some fresh fruit; here we had strawberries and blueberries. And the water wasn't even boiling yet.

Once the egg goes in, you want to make sure the water isn't a rolling boil, and check it often using your finger. When you decide it's at an acceptable level of soft-/hard-ness for you, take it out, set it on the lettuce bed, and season.

When poaching an egg, a few notes will help out: unlike blanching water, do not salt the poaching water. This is mostly for eggs, and not for fish or chicken. The salt will pock the eggs and take their smooth edge away. You want to put salt and pepper on them after they come out. Also, you'll want to put some vinegar into the water. I've tried all kinds, and regular distilled white vinegar seems to work best. This will keep the white intact, for the most part.

Also: strawberries and blueberries as a combo is awesome.

Cooking on Crutches

I couldn't stay away from the kitchen. Missus Chef Gonzo has been doing an awesome job with the cooking since I've been jacked up, but lately I've been wanting, nay, needing, to get back in there and do something. I've been cooking little things, here and there, but the other night I made something a little bit more involved, and even had the camera with me.

I'd have to say that dishes are probably my least favorite thing to do while on one leg. Prep work keeps me focused, as does the actual cooking part, but dishes are just a sweaty, purple-footed shenanigan.

So...I used our spiffy La Creuset pot and made some of the dish I called Bronx Sofrito. The first time I made it I used our oval La Creuset baking dish, but that dish, as nice as it is, can't be put on the heat. The new round one we have can, as it's one of the cast-iron covered in porcelain editions.

I also had very limited supplies, and had to forego the olives and tomatoes that give it the Spanish-feeling.

This first picture is the first half of my work station. The bowl in the back has the diced onions and carrots (my mirepoix), the cutting board has finely diced garlic and some butter (the butter will be tossed in to add flavor to the rice when it's browning), and the plate where I seasoned the chicken thighs. Also, the ever present salt and pepper.

Here's the rice, a mixture of wild long grain and regular white, the oil and behind the towel, the hard to see chicken stock. I eventually filled that stock container up with water just to have enough liquid for the rice.

Here are the thighs working. You have to brown them so when they cook for the time in the oven they'll retain the flavor. Also, as they brown they shrink, and here you can see that in action. I started with two thighs, t5hen they shrank enough for me to add the third, and eventually I added that fourth. Always start skin-side down.

After you remove the chicken, you add the mirepoix and let it go for a minute or two. Then add the garlic and red chili flakes, and let it get aromatic. Then add the rice. As this toasts, add the butter, and smell the goodness. Here's the rice toasting with the butter, oil, and rendered chicken fat 9it may sound like a lot of grease, but surprisingly is not):

After about thirty to forty minutes in your oven, this is what it will look like:

The chicken falls off the bone, and the rice is rich and delicious. Even without the tomatoes and olives, this meal turned out great, and it was truly Gonzo.

It felt good to be doing something productive again.