What's cooking? part 4

i think there will be plenty of grilled meats, so i was thinking a side dish or dessert item would be best. or, i can just grab a bottle of wine.

i'm making a japanese beef curry tonight. mmm i want it now.

me too! hah

oh and the salmon turned out really well. thanks jaq for the brown sugar idea. the glaze was perfect!

Yay for summer fish cooking! It was nice out today, overcast and cool, so we walked up to the market, had lunch and then made some groceries: milk, butter, and cream per usual, apples for Mr. Jaq's lunch, nectarines for me, an eggplant, rhubarb to make into a crisp w/the remaining strawberries from last week, 6 huge scallops and a 1.5" thick ahi steak. For dinner, I coated the ahi with olive oil, then pressed it in a mixture of white and black sesame seeds while the cast iron pan sat on a medium flame warming up (about 15 minutes, I wanted it good and hot). Seared for 5 minutes on each side (perfectly rare) and served with the kecap manis dipping sauce (3:1 w/ lime juice and sambal to taste). A simple salad of red leaf lettuce - made a nice light summer meal and didn't heat the place up too much.

oh my god i want scallops. probably my favorite fruit of the sea. today we made hamburgers and hot dogs on a little grill on ian's fire escape. well, ian did all of the grilling but i made margaritas at least.

i had scallops over the weekend, proper local ones. so good! some went into a bouillabaisse - pictures on ITP?.

lauren, that bouillabaisse looks incredibly good!

thanks! it was delicious. i'm very happy to be cooking with fresh seafood. clams in chili-coconut broth and tons of grilled squid next weekend, i think.

Are you cleaning the squid yourself? I keep looking at the whole ones in the asian market, but haven't tackled one yet.

oh wow that looks amazing!

i do clean it myself, yes. the market i like doesn't do it for you. it's actually not difficult. there are pretty clear directions available online and in seafood cookbooks. the four basic steps are remove head from body, remove beak/head from tentacles, remove cartiledge/guts from body, and remove skin (which comes off very easily). it's a little ooky, but no more so than dealing with any kind of flesh. i think it's much easier than carving a chicken, for instance.

Thanks lauren, that's encouraging.

link to the bouillabaisse pix?

http://isthatpie.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/seafood-lust/

Seared scallops tonight, after a quick marinade in olive oil, minced garlic, ginger, lime juice, thai chili pepper (birdseye?). Finished with chopped mint and cilantro. So so good.

yum! i need to buy some fresh seafood apparently!

i made salad with romaine, edamame, tomato, cucumber, orange sections, and a ginger dressing.

yeah those scallops sound great, will try it w/a milder chili for the timid palates in my household.

It was a good riff on your olive oil/lemon/garlic/parsley prep, m, which I've been using since you posted it.

I've got to make up that rhubarb/strawberry crisp today or the strawberries will be too far gone. But it's also warmed up again, so feels far too hot to cook. Dilemma. I am thinking this honey-flavored greek yoghurt will be excellent with it though.

so much rhubarb in the greenmarket this week. i'd like to try a crisp, but i'm very lazy when it comes to baking.

Jaq, does anyone in Seattle have air conditioning?

Crisps are the easiest baked fruit thing I know how to do. Chop fruit (or if berries, just pick over and rinse), layer in casserole, sprinkle with sugar (maybe some lemon juice if fruit is over-ripe), maybe dot with some butter (totally optional), make a streusel topping of some sort (1.5 cup of some mix of flours/semolina/rolled oats/other grains, 1 cup of white/brown sugar, 1-2 tsp of cinnamon/clove/allspice/nutmeg/other sweet spice, 1/2 tsp salt, all blended together; cut in 1-2 sticks of butter), sprinkle topping over the fruit layer, bake @ 350 F for 30-45 min. Eat hot, warm, or cold, plain or with cream/yoghurt/ice cream, for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

It's very rare here Rock. Our gym has it, thankfully. I've yet to live in an apartment or house here that has it though (out of 8 places we've lived around the city).

And to be fair, this is the first place we've lived where we really couldn't catch a breeze through the place. There have been few days when we felt desperate for cool in our other places.

thanks, jaq! btw, one of my best friends just moved back to portland after several years in austin, tx and is complaining of being cold!

Ha lauren, your friend's blood needs a week or so to thicken back up :) We're getting some thunderstorms this afternoon, so it cooled off some. I jumped at the chance to reduce a gallon of stock I'd had in the fridge (down to a nice solid cup) and make up the strawberry rhubarb crisp - 3 big stalks of rhubarb, about 2 cups of strawberries, made into 2 4-quart ramekins with streusel topping (rolled oats, white flour, whole wheat flour, white and brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, allspice, mace, 1.5 sticks of butter). Smells really delicious right now!

That crisp was deeelicious with a little scoop of rich greek yoghurt. Nice thick rolled oats (Snoqualmie brand, if you're in the PNW) gave a crunch and toasty nuttiness and the fruit turned a shocking pink color.

i think i'm going to make a rhubarb relish over the weekend. since i'm not much of a dessert person, trying a savory recipe seems like a better bet.

That could be fun - it can be so puckeringly sour! I remember eating stalks of it from the neighbor's patch with salt when I was a kid.

my gf last night made an open faced sandwich of sorts involving bread lightly brushed in garlic w/asparagus and an egg sunnyside up. i contributed arugula with a strawberry vinaigrette i made.

also made macadamia crusted mahi mahi w/a mango cream sauce.

Cold eggplant salad (a riff on Bittman's and another use for the ever-so-tasty kecap manis)

i did jaq's scallop variation w/sesame oil instead of olive, a big hit.

hoping this will be a gateway dish to more asian influences, get me out of the italian-american rut.

Stopped at the butcher's today for sausages, and they had fresh chicken livers for $1.99/pound. I made up a bourbon chicken liver pate, seasoned with garlic, thyme, and black pepper. It's cooling in the fridge under its coat of clarified butter now, but early tastes indicate success.

That turned out really well:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3264/2559224394_bbe8168b89.jpg

wau!

Pretty cheap too - $2 for livers, $2 for butter, maybe $2 for seasonings+bourbon?

i made some tilapia with lemon and an herbed crust the other night. served with green beans, onion, garlic, tomato, artichoke hearts, and olive sauteed with some olive oil, and a splash of lemon and white wine. it was very yummy. the leftover vegetable sautee was really great cold over lettuce for dinner last night.

my camera broke. phone pics suck :( but it was really pretty.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3122/2559362818_507ec03e2d.jpg

Man that sounds really good - I have got to start doing more with fish.

We are just now eating more of the pate, with a cold couple of pours of gewurtz (Bargetto 2005 I got from Wine Woot awhile ago). Hello Saturday afternoon!

I have been in some kind of cooking frenzy today - I made popovers for the first time:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3062/2559217323_bb63e14563_o.jpg

and also a batch of chicken stock. Popovers are just one more thing to add to the list of yummy stuff made with basically just eggs, milk, and flour (crepes, Yorkshire pudding, baked pancakes aka dutch babies, waffles - to name a few of the others).

whoa HUEG! Like, almost life-sized!

This has given me an idea for a really really long Is That...Pie? post.

Re; yr pate, jaq, I made opne recently with ox liver, beer and caramelised onion, the liver cost 50p!

God I love pate.

I am definitely making the next pate with dark rum - I think that will be awesome. I don't know I've ever seen ox anything over here, except oxtail but that is just from regular beef cattle. My butcher is from some Slavic country and was so pleased when I bought the chicken livers - I'm going to see if he carries tongue and some other exotica (for the US); it's difficult to get things like trotters and beef cheeks and skin-on pork belly most places.

i have decided i want to make cioppino. any tips? it seems daunting.

Mr. Jaq used to make it all the time! But we haven't had it for an age. It seemed pretty straightforward - I'll ask him when he gets back from the gym.

do you have a recipe?

if you're okay with bouillabaisse instead of cioppino, then i'd recommend mark bittman's recipe. it's a long list of ingredients, but it's actually very straightforward.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2DD163CF936A35751C1A9679C8B63

Alas, Mr. Jaq doesn't remember a) how to make it or b) where he found the recipe. No wonder we haven't had it since forever.

you can totally play with the amount and types of shellfish involved, btw. last time i made it, for example, i didn't include a flaky, white-fleshed fish - just the monkfish. also, i cut down the amount of shellfish and added a pound of squid. i like strong flavors, though, so i was pretty liberal with the seasoning measurements (including saffron, which i don't consider to be optional).

yeah, it seems like something you can play around with a lot and still have it turn out yum. i have just been browsing recipes... some of them call for making your own fish stock to use in it, and i don't know if i have that in me! (now all those years of being pissed that my dad's tupperware container's labled 'fish stock' were crowding up the freezer like giant chunks of wasted space are coming back to haunt me!)