Grilling and lessons learned: Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs

A mix of Asian seasonings and indirect grilling combine to create flavorful, tender Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs. Recipe below.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last week I wrote my little anti-grilling manifesto, and here I am doing a grilling post this week. It’s not that I don’t like grilling or the wonderfully smokey taste of something done right on the grill—it’s that I don’t like not being in control, not feeling like I know what I’m doing. Continue reading “Grilling and lessons learned: Grilled Hoisin Chicken Thighs” →

Grill, schmill. Give me a good hot pan.

A good hot pan nicely chars bistro-style steaks and creates those delicious “browned bits” to be deglazed from the pan. Recipe below.

It’s summertime. That time when everyone cooks every possible meal on the grill. Well, almost everyone. Me, not so much. We have an old Weber kettle that sees action maybe three or four times a season [although so far this year, I’ve used it—oh, let me think now—zero times].

I could chalk up my lack of enthusiasm for grilling to the pain-in-the-ass factor: Starting the coals, cleaning the grill before and/or after, the fact that we live on the second floor and it lives down in the yard… but that would be less than honest. I readily do plenty of things that rank high in the pain-in-the-ass department.

For me, it’s more a control issue. Mainly my apparent lack thereof. Sometimes, food grills beautifully, and it is indeed sublime. Other times, it overcooks, undercooks or just plain underdelivers on wonderfulness. Admittedly, even then, the smoke does its magic flavorwise [and that’s why I stick with charcoal on the rare occasions when I do grill]. But the frustrating thing is that, while the results vary wildly, my cooking methods don’t, at least as far as I can tell.

So give me a good pan and a gas flame every time. I become one with pan and stove. Which brings me to the topic of cookware. As with most cooks, our collection of pots and pans has grown organically over the years. Among the cast of characters are always a couple of non-stick skillets which we tend to view as semi-disposable—however gently you handle them and whatever the warranty promises, sooner or later, they lose their non-stickiness. So we buy decent heavy ones, but don’t go overboard. And we don’t become too attached to them—when they stop working, we replace them.

At the other end of the spectrum are some very beautiful, very heavy French copper pots and pans that Marion heroically lugged back from Paris over a few visits—because of these, our total foodie friend Dan says we are the only people he knows whose cookware he covets. In between is a varied collection that includes everything from a copper pot Marion’s mother found at a yard sale for a quarter to a sturdy, utilitarian aluminum saucepan recently bought for cheap at a Chinese restaurant supply store and a gorgeous Staub La Cocotte roasting pan, also French, picked up at the National Restaurant Association’s trade show here in Chicago.

And then there is this pan. Is it possible to love a pan too much? I don’t think so, not if it’s a Calphalon One Infused Anodized Fry Pan. It sears meat beautifully and provides those delicious “browned bits” you’re supposed to scrape up when you deglaze the pan, much like the vaunted All-Clad stainless pans. It also releases food easily when it’s properly caramelized and, unlike what I’ve heard of the All-Clad, it cleans up easily, pretty much like non-stick pans do. And they don’t just let you use metal utensils with this baby—they recommend it. The better to scrape up those browned bits.

I had read about the wonders of these pans and was totally ready to try one, but the $135 price tag for the 12″ fry pan for something that might or might not be all it claimed seemed a bit steep. Well, sometimes he who hesitates is saved. I found it for 40 bucks at a Chef’s Outlet store in Michigan City, Indiana. Yes, it was a factory second, but all that had kept it from being a factory first at Bloomingdale’s Home Store was some minor scuffing along the pan’s rim. And if you’ve got food out where those little scuffs are, you’re not cooking—you’re spilling.

So I tried one, digging through the dozen or so in the store to find the factory second least deserving that label. Then I took it home and cooked with it. It. Was. Amazing. I think I cooked chicken breasts the first time. After they’d been in the hot pan for maybe four minutes, I started to slide the metal spatula under one of the breasts. Nothing doing. It was stuck. So I waited another minute, as the instructions said, and tried again. Bingo. One by one, the chicken breasts released effortlessly and, when I flipped them, revealed a beautifully caramelized browned side. I was in love. And when I achieved a perfect char on what I like to call my bistro steaks, I knew that love was here to stay. Continue reading “Grill, schmill. Give me a good hot pan.” →

Iberia meets Italia—for dinner

Pork Chops with Paprika and Fennel Seeds combine favorite flavors of Spain and Italy. Recipe below.

My friend Stan went to Spain last year. After he got back, the first thing I asked him about was the food, of course. He said that most restaurants offered pork, pork and more pork. Stan is Jewish, so he would notice this sort of thing.

To be fair, he did find other things to eat in Spain [and as he admitted to me later, did finally succumb to the delights of pig meat in his travels]. But Spanish cuisine does embrace meat in general and pork in particular, in all its forms, both fresh and cured. The small, dense Spanish chorizo sausages, a completely different, um, animal from the Mexican variety, are wonderfully intense. I know I’ll feature them in at least one upcoming post.

And to flavor all this meaty goodness? Paprika, of course. Paprika [or pimentón, as it’s known in Spain] is one of the essential ingredients of Spanish cuisine. It is made from ground aromatic sweet red peppers and ranges in flavor from mild to hot and in color from bright orange-red to blood red. Originally from the Americas, most commercial paprika now comes from Spain, South America, California and Hungary.

The Italians are no slouches in the consumption of pork either. And for them, one spice of choice for combining with it is fennel seeds. If you doubt this for a moment, just wait ’til the fennel seeds hit the hot skillet—you will smell the essence of Italian pork sausage. Fennel seeds have been compared to anise, but while they do have a big flavor, it’s not as pronounced in its licorice flavor as anise.

In this recipe, paprika and fennel come together to deliver a nice, subtle complexity in a quick, easy-to-make main course. Continue reading “Iberia meets Italia—for dinner” →

Black-eyed peas and big-flavored steaks

Black-eyed Pea Salsa with chili powder teams up beautifully with Curried Steaks. Recipe below.

A couple of quick notes. First, for those of you who don’t eat red meat, this black-eyed pea salsa also livens up grilled fish or chicken breasts. Also, I’m doing two posts today, so be sure to scroll down for the second one.

The other day I realized that, as much as I love red meat, you wouldn’t know it to look at this blog. In fact, in the seven months Blue Kitchen has been open, I’ve talked about it exactly once, unless you count the two chili recipes that use ground beef. That is just plain wrong.

Growing up, ground was about the only kind of beef I knew, aside from the occasional stringy pot roast—burgers, meatloaf, spaghetti sauce, more meatloaf… I wasn’t introduced to the wonders of steak until I was in college, and then it was at one of those cafeteria-style joints called BEST STEAK HOUSE [or something equally overpromising] where you watch hairy-armed men tossing steaks on permanently charred grills with flames shooting up all around as the fat sizzled off. A steak dinner with baked potato and iceberg lettuce salad set you back maybe four or five bucks, and it was love at first gristly bite.

I have since graduated to better cuts of meat—and from medium-well to medium to medium-rare to rare. But the pure primal satisfaction that is steak remains undeniable.

Although one of my favorite ways to prepare steak is what I call my French bistro steak, seared in butter and the pan deglazed with red wine, I’m starting with this recipe because when I came across it in my files recently, I immediately wanted the black-eyed pea salsa.

Black-eyed peas are another food item very popular in the south [like last week’s okra]. Even though this salsa is named for them, there are lots of flavors at play here. When you first start cooking the green pepper and chili powder, the aroma will be less than encouraging. Don’t worry, though—when the other ingredients are added, it all comes together fabulously. And when it gets together with the steaks with their peppery curry marinade, the results are amazing. Continue reading “Black-eyed peas and big-flavored steaks” →

“Hot soup, comin’ through!”

Easy-to-make Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo is flavorful, hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from hot pepper sauce. Recipe below.

The title to this post is a direct quote from my high school swim teacher and coach of the school’s swim team, Coach Otto. It was what passed for etiquette inside his grey crewcut-topped head. Constantly working in the damp, cold [even in warm weather] pool room, Coach Otto had hot soup every day in the cafeteria wihout fail. And every day, he cleared the path before him on his way to the faculty dining area, steaming soup in hand, with his own inimitable version of, “Excuse me, please”… “Hot soup, comin’ through!”

The weather’s been a real roller coaster ride this spring, especially temperaturewise. During one of those Six Flags Over Freezing My Butt Off spells recently, I started jonesing for some soup [for my non-U.S. readers, Six Flags is an amusement park chain—Six Flags Over Mid-America, Six Flags Over Texas, etcetera—that prides itself on having the scariest roller coasters around; they actually budget for a certain number of injury lawsuit settlements every year, rather than slow their coasters down]. But back to soup, I wanted something hearty and filling and warming. But it also had to be quick—it was a weekday, and I was at work.

That soup can even be quick was a revelation to me—and a recent one at that. I had totally bought into the notion that soup had to take hours to make. It was something you started in the morning and occasionally stirred, tended to, added to and fussed over throughout the day. And while there are plenty of soups that do indeed take this kind of time, there are also plenty that don’t. I was stunned and amazed the first time I saw a soup recipe whose total cooking time was in the neighborhood of 15 minutes or so.

In the interest of total honesty, many quick soups—this one included—depend on pre-made ingredients like miso paste or cans of broth, tomatoes or beans. Otherwise, they’d be slow soups.

But all’s fair in love, war and soup. So one recent cold afternoon, I went to Epicurious and searched for quick, hearty soups. I found Creole Chicken and Okra Gumbo. The name was promising, but when I looked at the recipe, I was less enthusiastic. Have you ever read recipes that sound too simple, too stripped down to possibly be good? That was this one in letters five miles high. Only a handful of ingredients and most of those either canned or frozen or somehow processed.

Still, it had okra in it, always a plus in my book. And I reminded myself that the lion’s share of really good New Orleans creole/cajun cuisine makes heavy use of processed foods and herbs and spices. Looking at cookbooks from the region, you’d be justified in suspecting that half the ships you see docked at the Port of New Orleans must be hauling in garlic powder or onion powder. I also reminded myself that I really, really wanted some soup, and I wanted it fast. This soup would be good enough.

Only it was better than “good enough”—really good, in fact. Maybe not omigod-company-dinner good, but flavorful and hearty and satisfying, with just the right amount of zing from the hot pepper sauce. And on an unseasonably cold spring night, it was exactly what we wanted. Continue reading ““Hot soup, comin’ through!”” →

Sunday dinners and simple pleasures: Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce

The Dill Dijon Sauce on this Seared Salmon Fillet tastes rich, calorific and sinful, but is in fact 100% fat free. Recipe below.

dill_salmon — Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce

SUSAN OVER AT FOOD BLOGGA RECENTLY WAXED ELOQUENT AND PASSIONATE about reviving the tradition of Sunday dinners. Of course, the Sunday dinners of her childhood memories took hours to prepare, with “every Italian-American woman with any pride starting the ‘gravy’ (East coast Italian-American for tomato sauce) at breakfast to be ready for 2:00 Sunday dinner.” Continue reading “Sunday dinners and simple pleasures: Seared Salmon Fillets with Dill Dijon Sauce” →

In a bind[er]: Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks

Sesame oil, soy sauce and sherry give a subtle Asian taste to Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks. Recipe below.

The vent above our stove in the new kitchen has us cooking more seafood these days. And that has me looking for more recipes and ideas. Last week, I saw beautiful tuna steaks at the store. So I nabbed a couple with no real game plan, knowing I’d figure out something to do with them once I got them home. We have tons of cookbooks—well, actually more like pounds, but anyway lots—but I turned first to the binders.

The binders started out as a binder, one of those blue cloth-covered ones with maybe one-inch rings. And for a long time, that was plenty. Occasionally, we would clip a recipe from the newspaper or photocopy something from a library cookbook, and into the binder it went.

Then came epicurious.com. Does everyone go as nuts as I did when first stumbling on this site? From my first visit, I was hooked. There were recipes, thousands of them. There was the advanced search feature that let you specify cuisine, course, key ingredients, cooking technique… There were even dictionaries—one for food and one for wine, for crying out loud.

I visited every day, sometimes several times a day, checking out the Recipe of the Day [an evil feature designed to keep you coming back for more] or just doing random searches based on any ingredient or food substance that popped into my fevered brain. And like crack or eBay or any other addiction, it interfered with my work. Well, maybe a little. Not that it mattered—my creative director at the time was a fellow foodie, so as long as I shared my findings with him, all was good.

Perhaps most telling, though, I printed out vast quantities of recipes. Scads of them. Reams of them. The single blue binder was replaced by two, these with three-inch rings and dividers with tabs. This seemed like an ambitious step at first, even foolish. But soon these were swollen and ready to call for reinforcements.

And then the obsession stopped, as quickly as it had begun. Oh, I still love epicurious.com—I have a permanent link to it in my blogroll. But now I use it responsibly. I log on, find the recipe [or more often, a basic technique based on a few recipes], then get out.

And the binders are still around. They continue to grow, but at a much slower pace now. So when I came home with the tuna steaks last week [remember how this rant started?], I flipped through the seafood section of one of them and adapted this recipe from one I found there. It originally appeared in Bon Appetit, sent into the Too Busy to Cook column, one of my favorite sections of the magazine. Because as much as we love to cook, we’re all often too busy, aren’t we? Continue reading “In a bind[er]: Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks” →

Small kitchens, big solutions

Chicken and Rice in a Pot, a quick one-pot dish adapted from the Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook. Recipe below.

Update: See Other Notes below for a timely food blog find.

In at least one previous post, I’ve mentioned New Yorkers’ collective penchant for ordering delivery instead of cooking, and my Brooklyn buddy Ronnie has backed me up on this. One huge reason is the tiny kitchens in most New York apartments. Real estate is expensive in New York. Really expensive. And usually, kitchen space is the first thing sacrificed on the altar of square footage.

For New Yorkers determined to cook at home—or for space-challenged cooks anywhere—there are solutions. Smaller sized appliances, for instance, that pack all the features of their bigger brethren, just in a smaller footprint. Forget hot plates and dorm fridges—these are high-end appliances made by the likes of Jenn-Air and Viking. It’s possible to drop a grand or two [or more] on an undercounter fridge, as an example. But for creative cooks, solutions to small kitchens come in all sizes, shapes and price ranges.

Which brings me to Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen’s Smallest Coolest Kitchen Contest. Last year, parent site Apartment Therapy held its first annual Smallest Coolest Apartment contest and showcased some wonderful apartments whose residents packed maximum living and versatility into minimal square footage. This year, they’ve rolled it out across all their sites: The Apartment, The Kitchen, Home Tech [home office or audio visual] and The Nursery. Site co-founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan and his wife Sara Kate live with their baby, born in November 2006, in a 265-square foot apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, so they know whereof they speak.

When you live in an apartment, smart use of space is an ongoing challenge, no matter how big or small your place is. So checking out last year’s entries and their solutions that ranged from brilliant to creative to sometimes a little bizarre became a daily obsession. Besides, let’s be honest—seeing other people’s apartments is just plain voyeuristic fun. Now that there’s a kitchen-focused category, I may need a 12-step program once it’s over.

There’s still time to enter, by the way. The deadline is April 16. So if you’ve got a small kitchen, apartment, nursery or home office you’d like to show off, go to the site for details.

If anyone is qualified to give advice on organizing and working in a small kitchen, it’s Justin Spring. For more than a dozen years now, he has cooked in a kitchen that is just 45 square feet. And he grew up cooking weekends, vacations and summers on the 36-foot family sailboat, where the kitchen consisted of a camp stove, ice chest and bucket. Spring has written an appropriately diminutive book on small kitchens with a ridiculously oversized title: The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook: Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up and Cooking in the Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen in the World—Your Own.

Unlike most kitchen books whose ideas are guaranteed to make your wallet bleed, Itty Bitty is refreshingly all about editing and purging, making pots and utensils do double duty and making space work efficiently. Besides lots of solid advice on equipping, organizing, cleaning, cooking in and entertaining from a small kitchen, you’ll find plenty of encouragement and inspiration, all in a friendly, fun, quick read.

You’ll also find recipes. A hundred of them, to be exact, all of which can be accomplished with no more than two burners and a toaster oven, if necessary. And while you won’t find haute cuisine, you’ll find some decent, doable eats. The recipes all feature what Spring calls “the combined imperatives of (1) being breathtakingly simple and (2) being interesting enough to merit the trouble of cooking.” The quick one-pot dish above is my adaptation of one from Spring’s teeny kitchen. The recipe follows. Continue reading “Small kitchens, big solutions” →

Spicy Salmon with Mango Salsa

Mango salsa with a touch of chili powder brings bold taste to salmon fillets with a hint of cayenne pepper. Recipe below.

The kitchen is open. Again. Sort of. Our new apartment is still filled with boxes and chaos, but we’re making headway. I was on the phone with a friend the other day and said, “It still looks like a bomb went off in here, but a much smaller bomb.” Marion added, “And a bomb that folded a little laundry.” I’ve decided that we either have to move more often, so we don’t acquire too much stuff, or else never move at all.

But I’ve actually managed to cook a few meals now. It feels good to be back in the kitchen—even a kitchen where I can’t find anything yet and the stove and fridge are in completely different places from where my brain says they should be. It’s almost like cooking in a parallel universe—pans and utensils seem reassuringly familiar, but everything is slightly out of whack, slightly off kilter. Cue ominous background music.

The good news is the new stove is vented, a first for me. I’ve been itching to try it out since the first time I saw it; I figured pan seared salmon would be the acid test. I had learned from Helen over at Beyond Salmon that one reason my Salmon Tarragon on a Bed of Vegetables didn’t stink up the place with my unvented stove was that I was using a cooking method involving liquid, steaming it. She also said that pan searing does cause the house to smell, particularly with fatty fish. Enter the salmon.

The mango salsa is a variation on one I’ve been making for a while. Fruit alone—the mango and strawberries, in this case—would be too sweet for the fish. The addition of green onion tops [you could also use chives] gives it a fresh wildness and just a bit of a bite, making it play nicely with something savory—the salmon, for instance, or grilled chops or chicken. You could also use minced shallot, but I think this would cause a definite onion taste to take over, rather than just the lively green flavor of green onions or chives.

Adding the chili powder gives the salsa just the tiniest bit of heat, but it really ramps up the taste. Similarly, the cayenne pepper only adds a hint of heat to the salmon; don’t expect a fiery Thai dish intensity with this meal. Continue reading “Spicy Salmon with Mango Salsa” →

A Tale of Two Chilis, Part 2

Marion’s robust chili uses red wine and soy sauce, along with more traditional ingredients, for a big, satisfying flavor. Recipe below.

I am nothing if not a procrastinator. Back in January, when I posted A Tale of Two Chilis, Part 1, I promised to follow up with Marion’s excellent chili recipe as Part 2. So here we are with spring right around the corner and I’m finally getting to it.

I also have a nice white bean chili dish made with chicken that I’d intended to get to as a hearty cold weather dish. But after two different chilis, my Tuscan beans from last week and Patricia’s delicious Brazilian rice and beans, I think I’ll take a little break from writing about beans.

That said, we don’t think of chili as a strictly cold weather meal at our house. Except for when the weather turns blazing hot—usually all of August here in Chicago—we’re happy to make it and eat it pretty much year ’round. Try Marion’s robust chili recipe below and I think you’ll be right there with us. I’ll turn the kitchen over to her now. Continue reading “A Tale of Two Chilis, Part 2” →