Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Clam Chowder Black Cod and Rice with Mushrooms




We had left over Black Cod with Miso Sauce. Normally I don't like left over fish but the Black Cod makes great leftovers. We let it warm to room temperature and served the fish with Rice. On our last trip to Japan we had brought home several boxes of Rice Flavorings that are added to the rice. This one happened to be Chicken and Mushroom.  If you have a rice cooker it is a no-brainer. Simply measure the rice and add the appropriate amount of water, then stir in the contents of the box. Any Asian market will have a variety of flavors and if you can't read Japanese, just look at the picture on the cover. We started with Clam chowder that we had purchased at Cape Seafood.

Monday, March 28, 2016

Black Cod with Miso Sauce

Hot off the Griddle

We wanted to check out the new fish market Cape Seafood. It was just opened by Michael Cimarusti the owner of Providence Restaurant and Connie and Ted's. We bought some beautiful Black Cod with the intention of making Black Cod with Miso Sauce one of our favorite fish presentations. We first had it of course at Matsuhisa Restaurant. You can get the recipe from our blog of: May 12, 2009. Click the date to get the recipe. It is wonderful.


We started with an Asparagus Salad. Boil the Asparagus for 3 minutes. Top with brown Butter that we sautéed breadcrumbs in. Sieve a hardboiled egg over the top or combine with the breadcrumbs finally sprinkle with salt and pepper. Perfection!

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Sausage with Pot Roast Sauce and Polenta


We finished the Pot Roast leftovers. We just loved the sauce. Rather than throw it out, I decided to keep the sauce and add Sausages to it. We served it over Polenta. The idea was a good one but it didn't work. The Pot Roast Sauce and the Sausage did not make for a good paring. It might have been a factor of the flavor of the Sausage we chose. Oh well, we tried.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Swordfish


We purchased beautiful Swordfish Steaks at McCall’s Meat andFish. We had read an article in The New York Times about cooking fish. We wanted to try their recipe. It is worth reading the article. The recipe is buried within it.

We served the Swordfish and Butter Sauce over our very favorite and rich mashed potato recipe. We used the recipe for Garlic Mashed Potato recipe in TheBalthazar Cookbook by McNally, Nasr, Hanson. This is a fantastic recipe - it is super-rich! You can find the recipe on our blog of: November 12, 2012. Click the date to get the recipe.

With the Swordfish Cathy sautéed fresh Snap Peas. It was a delicious dinner.

Read the article and recipe below about cooking fish.

Conquering the Fear of Cooking Fish
The New York Times

Fear of fish can afflict even the most confident cook.
Fewer and fewer fish have crossed my stove in recent years. This is partly out of guilt, because wild species are so often out of season or endangered, and farmed fish are so often unappealing. It is partly because in my apartment, to cook fish for dinner is to live with its smell for a day and a half. And it is partly because I ate so much fancy fish in restaurants to make up for my failings as a home cook that I had forgotten how delicious a simple buttery pan-fried fillet can be.
The modern fashion in restaurants is to serve fillets swimming in a broth, juice or nage (as if returning to water is somehow natural for cooked fish). Other chefs like oil-poaching, which involves a slow simmer in gallons of top-quality oil; expensive and impractical for Tuesday-night dinner at home.
And others recommend that home cooks start with en papillote: folding up individual fillets in parchment paper with butter and herbs, which steams the fish and produces a kind of thin broth. This is not a thrilling outcome.
For weeknight home cooking, I wanted a way to cook a fish fillet the way I cook all my favorite proteins (steaks, shrimp, lamb chops): quickly, simply and over high-enough heat to bring on the browning that makes food crisp, appetizing and fragrant. (Food science nerds call them Maillard reactions.) But a simple sear in oil isn’t the answer for fish: overcooked and flavorless fillets are the result.
I brought the quandary to Mark Usewicz, a former chef and current co-owner of Mermaid’s Garden in Brooklyn, where he teaches classes for home cooks, like “How to Cook Fish in a New York City Apartment.”

His solution (of course) involved butter.
The best way to cook a fish fillet, he said, is on top of the stove in a heavy skillet, with constant attention — not a tall order, as the whole process takes less than five minutes from start to finish. The short cooking time seriously reduces the chance of lingering smells.
The initial sear should be in oil that will not burn over high heat: grapeseed, canola or even extra-virgin olive oil. (Although experts advise us not to waste extra-virgin oil on sautéing, using a few teaspoons here and there is well worth it for convenience and taste.)
Continue reading the main story
To finish the cooking, add a nut of butter to the pan, flip the fillet and baste furiously. The melting butter will keep the flesh tender, help form a tasty crust and finally brown lightly to become a sauce for the finished dish. A few fresh herb sprigs tossed in at the same time perfume the whole thing nicely.
“It’s a variation on the most basic restaurant recipe, the first one you learn at the fish station,” he said. In most restaurant kitchens, the cooking starts on top of the stove but is finished in a hot oven, to make room for the next table’s order. For home cooks, heating the oven to 400 degrees for five minutes of cooking time is an unnecessary step.
Renee Erickson, a Seattle chef who specializes in seafood at her restaurants, the Whale Wins, the Walrus and the Carpenter, Boat Street Café and Barnacle, also relies on butter-basting as the best basic way to cook fillets, from fatty salmon to slender flounder. “There are more delicate ways to cook fish, I suppose,” she said, but not tastier ones.
“If you order a pan-fried fillet from one of our kitchens, it comes out seriously browned,” she said. If the pan and contents get too hot during the cooking and threaten to scorch, she advised, add a bit more cold butter or squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.

Melina Hammer for The New York Times
The method works for small whole fish, too, she said, as well as skinless and skin-on fillets. You can score the skin with the tip of a sharp knife to prevent the fillet from curling as it cooks or (even easier) just press down on it lightly for the first minute or so of cooking.
What kind of fish to buy for this dish? Assuming your fish is in good shape, and the right thickness — not less than a half-inch thick or more than an inch — almost any fillet can be cooked this way, from brook trout to Arctic char. Black cod, rockfish and halibut are excellent choices from the Pacific; from the Atlantic, sea bass, grouper and snappers; red drum from the Gulf of Mexico.
Mr. Usewicz said that selecting the right fish for a particular recipe is prominent among the anxieties people bring into his shop.
“It is amazing how afraid people are of fish,” he said. “Afraid of cooking it, afraid of buying it, afraid of keeping it.” Most of his customers, for example, firmly believe that fish can’t even be kept overnight in the refrigerator without spoiling. “Fish is like any other kind of protein,” he said. “It’s perishable.” But that doesn’t mean it’s on the verge of spoilage.
Continue reading the main story
“A really nice piece of fish lasts a few days in the fridge, and it doesn’t smell up your house any more than steak does,” he said, as long as it’s been treated properly from the moment of catch. That usually means eviscerated on deck, frozen or flown to market within hours and kept cold at all points on the way to the case.
“People get all caught up in choosing exactly the right kind of fish,” he said. “But really, the most important thing that will affect your dish is how it’s handled before you ever see it.”


Okonomyaki


Okonomyaki Recipe on the Squeeze Bottle 


Batter on the griddle




On our most recent trip to Japan I had Okonomiyaki. I have had this dish many times in Los Angeles and love it. What I had in Hiroshima was unbelievably good. I never suspected that I could actually make it at home. I decided to Google and YouTube it and I was surprised to see all kinds of recipes and people making it. What most surprised me was the secret sauce that was the key is not made by the chef but is bought at an Japanese Market. It comes in a squeeze bottle and is cleverly named: Okonomiyaki Sauce. In all of the times I have been to Japanese Markets I had never spotted it! In addition, the recipe is written on the squeeze bottle and it is in English!

You can read about my encounter with Okinomiyaki on our travel blog of: Japan 2015. Click here to read the blog entry. You can also compare what my Okinomiyaki looks like compared to the original. The one in Miyojima had the fresh oysters from the Hiroshima Bay. Hiroshima is famous for this dish. I used Shrimp from Gelson’s. Not quite the same. But it tasted and looked like the real thing! I did it!


Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Asparagus Pasta





Nothing says spring like fresh Asparagus. It is just coming into the market. The best from our point of view is not from Mexico but from the Delta. Especially Zuckerman Farms. We found the asparagus at Cookbook, a favorite neighborhood small grocery with excellent produce. We used a new for us pasta: Casareccia. It has a slit on the side of the tubular pasta and absorbs lots of sauce.
We highly recommend this pasta. You can find the recipe for Asparagus Pasta on our blog of: April 17, 2007. Click the date to get the recipe.

We started with a Salad made with Dates and Parmesan Cheese.

Great dinner.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Pot Roast Leftover




Tom and Scott joined us for leftovers. We had so much Pot Roast. We started with Asparagus, Burrata and Hazelnut salad. Yummy leftovers!

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Pot Roast





We saw a recipe for Pot Roast in The New York Times. The recipe calls for a cut of meat called: Paleron. We had never heard of it. We contacted Nate at McCall’s Meat and Fish and he said although he doesn’t carry it, he can replicate it buy tying 2 flat iron steaks together. In fact, he said, it would be better because it would not be connected by gristle. The process is to cook the meat in the liquid then slice down and return to the liquid and vegetables so that the meat can absorb the flavors. We returned the meat to the broth and vegetables after slicing and stored in the refrigerator for 2 days. We reheated it and served over Noodles. It was delicious and made for great leftovers. We will definitely make it again. This is a keeper.


Pot Roast
New York Times

At Spoon and Stable, his Minneapolis restaurant, Gavin Kaysen cooks a version of his grandmother Dorothy’s pot roast using paleron (or flat iron roast), the shoulder cut of beef commonly used in pot au feu, as well as housemade sugo finto, a vegetarian version of meat sauce made with puréed tomatoes and minced carrot, celery, onions and herbs. This recipe uses a chuck roast and tomato paste, both easier to find and still delicious.

INGREDIENTS
3       pound boneless beef chuck roast
Kosher salt and ground black pepper
3       tablespoons canola oil
4       tablespoons butter
2       medium red onions, cut into quarters
4       arrots, peeled and cut into 2-inch pieces
3       stalks celery, cut into 2-inch pieces
1       rutabaga, peeled and cut into 12 to 16 pieces, about a pound
8       cremini mushrooms, halved
2       parsnips, peeled and cut into 2-inch pieces
1       head garlic, top cut off to expose cloves
¾      cup tomato paste
2       bay leaves
3       sprigs rosemary
1-½  cups red wine, preferably cabernet
4       cups beef broth

PREPARATION

1.  Heat oven to 340 degrees. Season meat generously with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a large Dutch oven, or other heavy roasting pan with a lid, over medium-high heat. Sear the meat until a dark crust forms, 3 to 4 minutes per side. Remove meat to a plate.
2.  Reduce heat to medium and add butter to the pan. Melt the butter and add the vegetables, stirring frequently and scraping the bottom of the pot, until the vegetables start to color, 8 to 10 minutes.
3.  Add tomato paste and cook, stirring frequently, until it darkens slightly, about 5 minutes.
4.  Add bay leaves, rosemary and wine and cook, stirring occasionally, until liquid is reduced to a thick gravy consistency, 5 to 7 minutes. 
5.  Return meat to the pot. Add broth, then cover the pot and transfer to the oven. Cook for 2 hours 20 minutes.

6.   Let roast sit at room temperature for at least 10 minutes. Remove meat to a cutting board to slice. Discard bay leaves and rosemary stems. Squeeze any garlic cloves remaining in their skins into the stew and discard the skins. Serve slices of meat in shallow bowls along with the vegetables and a generous amount of cooking liquid ladled over top.