I've had a great life...its been a roller coaster ride....but backwards...super exhilarating on the uphills and terrifying on the downhills ...this is the tale of that experience on planet earth
I have had this urge to make a rye loaf. Having never made one before, I was a little surprised at how different the dough is. The dough is pretty wet and sticky compared to regular sourdough, so, it was a little unsettling to work with it blind to what to expect. My experience with sourdough had me proof it for a very long time which seemed to have been the correct decision given how it turned out. Update: It is absolutely perfection! Next on the menu, corned beef on rye and hot pastrami sandwiches!
Japanese comfort food is amazingly moreish. Soboro Donburi, Gingery Ground Beef with Peas over Rice, is not just delicious, it’s super easy and quick. You just have to have the ingredients. Sake and Dashi are the two main things you need to find along with soy, sugar and pickled ginger. You also need fresh ginger and I like to add garlic and even a shallot to make it a rounded dish. You start by getting the aromatics fragrant, (I like to add a good bit of red pepper flakes here too,) then brown the beef. You add the sauce and let it braise in the sauce for about 10 minutes. Before the sauce is all evaporated, add the thawed peas and take it off the heat. The residual heat will warm the peas. Serve over jasmine rice and top with a tablespoon of pickled ginger. It’s one of those dishes that is on our regular rotation for a very good reason. It’s delicious and moreish!
We were feeling like a pastry meal…so Heather requested a Steak and Mushroom pie. I found a great recipe calling for the beef to be braised in Stout. I also made the choice to make the rough puff pastry from scratch. That was perhaps not a great choice, but it still tasted great. The pie itself was put together after the beef and carrots and mushrooms along with celery, thyme, and chicken stock and a bottle of Guiness braised in a simmer for about 4 hours. To enhance the flavor, I had added Marmite, fish sauce, malt vinegar, worcester sauce and soy sauce. It smelled wonderful and before I put it in the pie plate I adjusted the salt and pepper levels for flavor. I used frozen butter for the crust and with a few 2 hour rests in the fridge, it came together nicely. In the end, I allowed the crust to cook in a 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes till broiling it for a minute to get the golden brown I was looking for. WE both enjoyed it accompanied by an ice cold Guinness Stout and a small green salad. (If you look carefully, in the middle, to the left, you can see the Pi symbol we tried to create and there are also 3 mushrooms at the top right that are well disguised!)
Normally, I find French cooking a little intimidating. Maybe that is because I don’t do too much of it. On the other hand, this dish is one of my very favorite dishes. It’s also super easy and has therefore become a standard in our house. It’s basically a few ingredients that you can put together in a few minutes and 30 minutes later be licking your plate. You core and slice tomatoes, I use 4 or 5. We love garlic, so I use a whole head. Separate the cloves, but leave the skin on. chop a cup or so of flat leaf parsley, and clarify a3 tablespoons of unsalted butter. Liberally salt and pepper your chicken (we use thighs), then begin to brown the chicken in the butter on a medium hot stove once the butter stops sizzling. Add all the garlic, Brown on both sides, then add the tomatoes and the parsley, and a quarter cup of rice wine vinegar.. Cover and let it simmer for about 15 minutes. Then remove the chicken and keep them warm in a 200 degree oven while you finish the sauce. To finish the sauce, remove the garlic from their peels and mash them with a fork before putting them back in the pan. Add 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter and get the sauce nice and creamy. Pour it over the chicken and enjoy! You will quickly add this dish to your regular rotation.
If anyone asks, my favorite food memory from South Africa is Prawns Peri Peri. I remember as a kid, sitting under the big blue and white tent on the beach in Lorenzo Marques (now Maputo) in Mozambique, eating piles of red hot Tiger Prawns till the tears ran down my face. My mom used to say about me that I only ate 3 things as a kid, Lamb chops, Chinese food, and prawns peri peri.
I had to figure out how to make them as an adult, and luckily was able to find Peri Peri powder from an online South African Store (https://www.africanhut.com/) which has been a great resource for me for a few items. In any event, my recipe is to marinade the cleaned prawns in a marinade of lemon juice, olive oil, loads of finely chopped garlic and a pile of chopped parsley, along with a good amount of peri peri powder (your mileage may vary. Peri Peri is equivalent to the Birds Eye pepper on the Scoville scale. It’s hotter than cayenne, similar to or slightly hotter than Thai birdās eye chili, and usually not quite as hot as a habanero.)
Then to make it, I always make jasmine rice.
To cook it, ideally, I prefer to cook it over an open flame on the BBQ, but we do not have access to one at our apartment, so I cook them on the stovetop. I use a good size brasier and melt some butter, with olive oil, fresh peri peri powder, and some fresh garlic. When the garlic is softened, I add the prawns, I keep the temperature high and make sure to turn each one over so that they get cooked through, I add any marinade that is left, add a couple hits of angasturabitters, and squeeze a lemon over them to finish. Dish them up over the rice, pour the sauce over the shrimp and go to town. Have ice cold beer available.
These prawns were pretty small, but they were still very tasty!
This was another instance of “Lets use up the ingredients we have in the fridge” pizza. I honestly did not know what this pizza was going to be till I went into the cheese drawer and pulled out all the leftovers. There was some fontina, Feta and also a little fresh motz. On the protein side, there was a half pack of spicy Korean sausages and about a third of a pack of pepperoni. Heather suggested that we use picked jalapeno and red onion as well. So that is how this came together. I chopped pepperoni, the Korean sausage, and the pickled jalapeno. I shredded the cheese (other than the fresh Motz, and sliced the onion. Stretched the dough out, spread the tomato sauce, layered the cheese, and covered it with the chopped jalapeno. I added the pepperoni and the sausage and finally, spread the sliced red onion. 11 minutes later this delicious tasty beauty emerged.The rough edges are the cheese that bled over the edge.
When we executed our World Tour of Chicken a few years ago, we found one or two surprises. I would say that this dish is the most surprising of them all. Mussakhan is a classic Palestinian dish traditionally laid out on a giant piece of bread, where the flavorful roasting juices laced with allspice, sumac, and cumin can be poured over the top. It is meant to be placed on the table so that everyone can pull off sections of bread and chicken, but we serve it on individual plates. It’s basically 2 ingredients. Chicken and red onions, but when you add sumak, lemon juice, cumin and allspice, garlic, pine nuts, parsley and naan, you have the most amazing set of flavors. After making several times, I have found that the secret is to marinate the chicken and onions overnight for the best flavors to emerge, and this time, I also made the naan from scratch.
To make the naan, naturally, I used our sourdough starter. Surprisingly the bread includes both milk and yogurt in the recipe. It’s also cooked on the stove top. Like the chicken, the dough needed to be rested overnight in the fridge. Once the naan is made, you save it for serving. To make the chicken, you roast it in the oven with the onions, the present it on top of the naan with oil fried pine nuts, chopped parsley and olive oil. You serve it with a little more sumac, and a squeeze of lemon juice with more garlic naan on the side.
When you have ridiculously delicious leftover mango sauce, and wonderful Toum in the fridge, you naturally make coconut rice and mango chicken. Fusion of African, Lebanese and Thai flavors on a plate. Flavor bomb! I seasoned the chicken, salt, pepper and peri peri, then seared it before finishing it in the oven under the grill. Served with mango sauce and toum on a bed of coconut rice!
Our world tour of soup took us to Vietnam this week, and there is only one soup that can be considered the national dish in Vietnam, that, absolutely, is pho. We live in an area of the world where there are multiple pho restaurants around, which makes it hard to consider making something that is time consuming and labor intensive when for about $20 you can have a perfect soup in about 10 minutes. Something else about pho for me, is that being that I am not from Vietnam, I have no real sense of their ingredients or the way they build flavors beyond eating Vietnamese foods. So, I did what I always do, which is to surf recipies till I find one that is pretty good, well laid out and easily duplicatable. Then it’s down to getting the ingredients. Building pho is a process of layering in flavor. You start with marrow bones and meaty bones (I substituted Ox tail for that part since there were none available.) First you boil the bones for about 5 minutes with the brisket, then you wash them all off and start again. As you are bringing a pot of water to the boil, you scale a couple of onions and gingers, and you roast the spices, including star anise, cardamom, coriander and cinnamon. Then, when the pot comes to the boil, everything goes in, the bones, the meat, the onions and garlic and the spices. That simmers for 3 hours before you pull and save the brisket, and strain the broth into another pot. (I saved the marrow bones because I love marrow on bread!) The broth is flavored with fish sauce, salt, and sugar till its just right.
To serve you have to get the rice sticks (noodles) softened and ready, which we just about got right, and you prepare the sides. In this case, bean sprouts, cilantro, korean peppers, and the thinly sliced meats (including some of the brisket). Then, of course, you need hoisin sauce, siracha and garlic chili to make the dish sing. It’s a truly great soup.
The second day of the meal, which we had a couple days later, was even better. This time, I got the rice sticks )noodles) right. My god, what a delicious dish.
My Life: A Memoir 