recipes

About a month ago, I decided to make a nice special meal for my wife for mothers' day. I asked her what she wanted, and she said duck. This made me happy, since I consider duck to be one of the most wonderful foods in the entire universe. I decided that instead of making one of my regular duck dishes, I'd try something new. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do: I just went to the store, and looked around to find something that appealed to me. I ended up creating a dish that's a real winner: duck breast in a port wine and mushroom sauce. Ingredients 2 large duck breasts 4…
I do all of the cooking in my house; my wife amazing at baking, but she's just totally lost when it comes to cooking. But given my commute, it's hard to start making a nice dinner when I get home, and have it done in time to be able to eat, and have some time with my kids before they go to bed. So I like to make large dishes on the weekend, so that we've got a couple of days during the week when we just need to heat something up. So casseroles are a great thing. Unfortunately, I don't know a lot of casseroles. So a few weekends ago, I tried something new: pasticcio. Pasticcio is sort of…
It's been a while since I posted a recipe, and last week, I came up with a real winner, so I thought I'd share it. I absolutely love beef short ribs. They're one of the nicest cuts of beef - they've got lots of meat, but they're well marbled with fat, and they're up against the bone, which gives them extra flavor. When cooked well, they've got an amazing flavor and a wonderful texture. This recipe produces the best short ribs I've ever had. It's based, loosely, on a chinese recipe, but it's cooked more in a western style. There's one unusual ingredient, which is a chinese sauce that I've…
This one's for Wilkins; it's a Pi Day / St. Patrick's Day twofer. Ingredients 1 lb. stew lamb 1 onion A few tbsp diced tomatoes (whatever was left in the can you used for pasta the other night) 1 clove garlic 6-8 ice cubes of broth - I make broth from whatever bones and scraps I have left over after other cooking, and freeze it in ice cube trays for easy use later. Fortuitously, my most recent batch was mostly lamb ribs and onion butts. ~1/2 pint Guinness Salt, pepper, and MSG to taste 1 cup white flour 1/2 cup whole wheat flour 8 tbps (1 stick) butter 2 1/2 tbsp vegetable shortening, and…
The mojito is quite possibly a perfect cocktail. Fussing with it never seems to generate significant improvements, but driven by the need to seem unique and creative, bars keep offering variations with pomegranate, green tea, lychee, or whatever else the flavor of the month happens to be. After impulse-purchasing some kiwis and throwing them into a mojito pie for the ScienceBlogs Pi Day contest, I can't say I'm any better than a bartender shilling $12 cocktails to jaded foodies. But the kiwi and lime blend seamlessly together in a refreshingly tart custard, and hey, they were on sale. You'll…
(Note: I've changed the transliteration of the name of the dish since the original version of the post. I think it's now the correct pinyin transliteration. Please correct me in the comments if you know, and it's still wrong.) Today you get the recipe for one of my very favorite dishes. Since I married a Chinese woman 14 years ago, I've learned a lot of chinese cooking, and of all of the things I've learned to make, this is probably my favorite. It's called Shanghai Xu Chao Mien. It's a variant of what's called Lo Mein in the US, except that it's actually authentic. And as is typical of…
This is a recipe I created just a couple of weeks ago. I saw a beautiful Angus beef flank steak on sale, and wanted to find something to do with it. I came up with this idea of stuffing it. Amusingly, the day after it, a recipe appeared in the New York Times food section for a stuffed flank steak. But there's really nothing common between the two except the name. The basic idea behind this is that flank steak has a terrific flavor, but it can be a bit tough. So I wanted to do something to it that would make it tender, while taking advantage of that terrific flavor. The idea I came up with…
It might be Labor Day, but summer isn't really over until the blackberries are gone. Since it's harvest season and I'm still on leave from the workforce, I've been spending my time figuring out clever things to do with the bountiful produce of my neighborhood's back alleys. (Tonight: lemon verbena drops and blackberry meringue pie.) Hoping to bring a little more order to the proceedings after a failed blackberry fish sauce, I cracked open Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking, written by one of the gurus of high tech haute cuisine, Hervé This. This explains with charming prose…
This is an interesting recipe, in a very unusual vein for me. Homemade tonic water. I hate tonic water. I really despise the stuff. But like a lot of people, I have some strange twitchy muscle ticks, in my legs and my eyelids. A few years ago, I was talking to my opthamologist about the eyelid twitch thing, and he said that while there was a prescription drug that he could give me for it, he'd found that most people got more relief from just drinking tonic water. The quinine that gives it its distinctive bitter taste works better than the prescription. So I gave it a try. It didn't actually…
This is a complicated recipe. It takes a couple of days to do properly, and works best done with a slow-cooker. But it's worth it. It's a Taiwanese dish - a spicy beef noodle soup. It's pretty much the national dish of Taiwan - Taiwanese love this dish. There are annual competitions in Taipei for who can make the best Niu Rou Mien. I learned about it from my wife, who grew up in Taiwan. I've made this a few times, and this is the recipe the way I've worked it out. Ingredients 3 lbs beef soup bones 3 lbs short ribs with bones. 3 star anise. 12 crushed cloves of garlic. 3 crushed slices of…
This recipe is based on a recipe for Moroccan spiced duck breasts, fromThe Soul of a New Cuisine, Marcus Samuelsson's new African cookbook. Chef Samuelsson is the guy who's responsible for getting me to eat beef after not touching the stuff for nearly two years. He's a very interesting guy - born in Ethiopia, but adopted as a baby and raised in Sweden. He's famous in NYC for being the chef at a Swedish restaurant, called Aquavit, where he was the youngest chef ever to get 3 stars in a New York Times restaurant review. A few years ago, he became interested in African cuisine, and spent a lot…
One of the staples of chinese cooking is fried rice. Unfortunately, what we get in American restaurants when we order fried rice is dreadful stuff. The real thing is absolutely wonderful - and very different from the American version. The trick to getting the texture of the dish right is to use leftover rice. Freshly cooked rice won't work; you need it to dry out bit. So cook some other chinese dish one night, make an extra 2 cups of rice, and then leave it in the fridge overnight. If you can, take it out of the fridge a couple of hours before you're going to cook, to get it to room…
I'm a big fish eater. In general, given a choice about what to eat, I'm usually happiest when I get to eat a nice fish. Even now that I've started eating beef again, most of the time, I'd rather eat a nice piece of wild salmon than pretty much anything made of beef. When it comes to cooking fish, I think that there's no cuisine that does a better job with fish than Chinese. The chinese style of cooking fish is, in my opinion, perfect. It relies on getting really good quality, fresh fish - and then doing as little to it as you reasonably can, so that the wonderful flavor of a really fresh…
I recently started eating beef again, after 18 years of abstaining. Last weekend, I made a big batch of Chili using beef, and it was fantastic. So I thought that was a good excuse to give you my chili recipe. This is real chili. Up here in NY, usually when you see chili, it's ghastly stuff. Usually made from ground meat, insane amounts of cumin, and tomatoes, and very, very little actual chili pepper at all. In this recipe, the chili pepper is the main flavor: the entire recipe is based on my favorite chili pepper, the ancho chili. Anchos aren't particularly spicy as chilis go; they're…
Because of the holiday, I'm posting my recipe early this week. It's actually too late, but I don't let little things like reality worry me. This is my thanksgiving turkey stuffing. The origins of this stuffing date back to my discovery of the "black turkey" recipe. I tried it one year, and the stuffing was really good, but the whole thing was just insanely overdone - everything about it was overcomplicated, and there were so many spices muddled up in the stuffing that I just didn't believe that there was any way that you could taste all of them. So over the next few years, I experimented,…
This is a very simple, authentic chinese dish. It's a great example of what real chinese food is like - it's a lot lighter and more delicate than what's typically passed off as Chinese food in the US. You should really go to a chinese grocery store for the bean sprouts: you'll get them fresher, and a hell of a lot cheaper. (My local chinese grocery sells bean sprouts for under $1/lb; at the local grocery store, I can buy one-half a pound of sprouts for $4.) Like most real chinese food, a this isn't a full meal by itself - a real chinese meal has several contrasting dishes served together.…
One of my favorite comfort foods is a mac&cheese tuna casserole. That's real mac&cheese, not any of that glow in the dark orange garbage. It amazes me just how many people have never actually had a proper, home-made macaroni and cheese! It's really good eating (unlike the glow in the dark stuff). The most important thing for this is to use good cheddar cheese. The pre-shredded stuff is tasteless - you need a good brick of some kind of high quality, aged cheddar cheese. Of the widely available stuff, my favorite is Cabot extra-sharp. Ingredients 1 pound of macaroni, cooked according…
Lo Mein is one of the staples of Chinese restaurants in the US. In general, it's not bad, but it's a bit greasy, and a bit bland. This version of it is closer to authentic, and has a really nice kick. The heat comes from a sauce called Sambal. Sambal is the vietnamese name, but Chinese make it too, and call it chili-vinegar sauce. It's basically a ton of fresh chilis - the variety that we call Thai bird chilis - pounded in a mortar and pestle until it forms a loose sauce, roughly the consistency of a thin ketchup. You really need to go to a Chinese grocery for the noodles. The chinese egg…
The year before our first kid was born, my wife and I went on vacation in Budapest. It was a beautiful city, and the food was wonderful - I particularly loved the chicken paprikash that they seemed to server everywhere. When I got home, I started looking for recipes to reproduce it. This is the closest I've been able to come. The most important thing for this recipe is the paprika. Get good hungarian paprika. American paprika is pretty much just powdered red food coloring. Hungarian paprika is a richly flavorful spice which is the heart of this dish. Ingredients 3 tablespoons Sweet…
Since the friday pathological programming died out, I've been looking for something else to do for special friday posts. A while back, I posted a bunch of recipes for a mutant meme, and it seemed a lot of people really liked it. So I've decided to do an off-topic friday thing: friday random recipes. For today, a special chinese dish: braised salmon in meat sauce. This dish would traditionally be done using pork for the meat in the sauce, but since I don't eat pork, I use ground chicken thighs. Whatever meet you use, you need to make sure it's not too lean - the sauce does need a bit of fat…