Unfinished Projects

I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately cooking wise. The cooking still happens, but I feel like I’m always rehashing the same regular things and there is no innovation going on. The one exception is a recipe that I came up with on the walk home from work about a month ago. I’ve tried it twice now and it’s quite good, but there are still some kinks to work out.

Zucchini Quesadillas with Balsamic Reduction

• one medium zucchini
• queso chihuahua (maybe 1/2 pound?)
• 6 small corn tortillas
• 3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1.5 teaspoons brown sugar
• olive oil
• salt and pepper

To make the balsamic reduction, bring the vinegar to a boil in a small saucepan. Reduce heat and simmer until it is reduced by about half. Add the brown sugar and continue to simmer. Keep the balsamic reduction warm while cooking the quesadillas.

Coarsely grate the zucchini. Press the zucchini between paper towels to remove some of the excess moisture. Add salt and pepper to the grated zucchini. Shred the cheese and assemble the quesadillas by added roughly equal amounts of cheese and zucchini to one half of each tortilla.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan. Fry the quesadillas in batches, depending on the size of the pan. Start with the tortillas open. After the cheese begins to melt, spoon a couple of teaspoons of the balsamic reduction over them, fold the tortilla over, and fry on both sides.

Serve with salsa fresca.

Ok, so that’s the recipe. Now the problem that I’ve been having both times I cooked it is this. My desire is to have crispy fried corn tortilla on the outside, with a mixture of savory cheese, sweet balsamic vinegar, and zucchini inside. The flavors are great, but I just can’t get the crispy fried outside.

My first suspicion was that the zucchini had too much water in it and was preventing the frying from happening. That’s why I patted down the grated zucchini and also added some salt (I salted the zucchini at least 20 minutes before I started cooking with it). This didn’t really help, so I’m starting to thing that I just don’t really know how to fry a corn tortilla. On top of this, once I add the balsamic reduction, some amount of it is bound to leak out of the tortilla and onto the frying pan. Once that happens, it instantly starts burning, smoking up the kitchen and staining every quesadilla that I cook on top of it. Maybe I should open up the quesadillas after they are cooked and just spoon a little vinegar inside?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Yesterday I tried poaching eggs for the first time. I don’t think that I’m doing it quite right yet, but my third egg was much better than my first. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any Radio Zero to listen to (“music you can poach an egg to”), but I think that their web presence has faded since J. stopped doing the show.

The poached egg is served on a toasted Med bagel, with shaved parmesan and pistou. Evidently, pistou is French for pesto. It also seems a little bit different, with more olive oil, less garlic, and no parmesan. I got the recipe out of Bon Appétit.

So I went to Washington D.C. last weekend. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Supposedly that city contains numerous cultural landmarks, museums, and monuments, not to mention the governmental apparatus of the United States. I wouldn’t know about any of those things, however, since I spent the entire weekend eating food and drinking (ok, I did spend a little time in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, but that was pretty much by accident). My wonderful hosts for the weekend were Amy and Jeff. Keep in mind that, if you ever go and visit them, you should wear pants with an elastic waistband.

Ok, so of course I’m going to run down every meal I had there. It definitely counts as gloating.

Friday night I arrived and Amy and I immediately headed out for some pre-party food. That was at a new restaurant in Adams Morgan called M’Dawg. Yeah, it’s a hot dog, excuse me, haute-dog restaurant. Also, it was kind of disappointing. Maybe that’s because I got the veggie dog and then put vegetarian chile on it. From there we walked to this dude Eric’s place. He is more than a little bit interested in home brewing. To be more exact, he is three-taps-in-a-refridgerator interested in home brewing. Tap number 1 yielded an imperial stout that weighs in at 10%. Tap number 2 involved smoked hops that he found somewhere in Delaware, I think (or maybe Virginia). That beer was fantastic and tasted a little like bacon. Tap number 3 had something delicious but more forgettable. Amy and I hung out at the beer party for a while (ok, for a long time) and I managed to try a few bottle beers as well. Lest you think I spent the entire time with my face in a beer mug, I also met a guy named Jack who is from Maine and has a totally sweet ‘stache. Later in the night, Jeff finished work and showed up. We left the party and decided to pick up some snacks on the way home. That involved a trip back to M’Dawg and then stopping by Julia’s Empanadas.

We slept in pretty late Saturday, which was pretty much the only thing to do with that kind of hangover. After some coffee, we headed to Georgetown. See on Saturday, all of the EU embassies were having open houses and the Swedish embassy is new and really snazzy. Of course, the first necessary thing was to get food (while I was notably full for most of the weekend, that morning I was close to starvation). That food was provided impecably by Pizza Paradiso. I had a grilled tuna sandwich and it was awesome. The Swedish embassy was cool (the picture above is just the emergency exit sign, more pictures here and here) and it didn’t have as much Ikea furniture as our dumb jokes might have led people to believe.

Saturday night we went out for some french food (oh yeah). First thing though, we stopped by the restaurant Central Michel Richard for a tasty beverage. And I totally won the tasty beverage competition. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was a celery concoction, featuring Hendrick’s gin (the best gin ever), Pimm’s No 1, lime juice, and Dr. Brown’s celery soda. The french food came from Café du Parc. I had pork sous-vide, which means that the pork belly was vacuum sealed and slowly cooked for 24 hours. Actually, it was almost too fattily delicious. We finished up the night at a Cleveland Park bar called Aroma. The highlight of that one was that the bouncer grew up in Hyde Park, so we chatted about that for a bit.

Sunday was Mother’s Day, so we had to plan ahead a bit for our brunch reservations. Amy was totally on top of it and we got a spot at Belga Café, which serves up the Belgian food (and beer). I got a lovely toad-in-a-hole. Two of them, actually. It was so good that I’m going to put a photo here. (Ok, some web searching has informed me that the name for this dish is ‘egg in a basket’ and that ‘toad in a hole’ involves sausages. But I like my version better.)

After brunch, we went to Murky Coffee for their classic capuccino. That item is one where you are not allowed to make any substitutions (’cause then it wouldn’t be classic) and it involves whole milk. That place was right near Eastern Market (which recently burned down) and a flea market. Then I flew back to Chicago and had some pretty lousy airport food.

Well, it has come to my attention that this is getting to be my longest entry ever by a large margin, so I’m going to just cut it off here. Go to D.C. and eat lots of food. It is extremely worth it.

I’ve been meaning to post this recipe for a while because it was really good. The dish is (as the post title suggests) a spicy peanut stew and you eat it over rice. I got the recipe out of the usually un-reliable Vegetarian Times (I don’t know why this magazine gets delivered to my apartment, but it does). It makes a ton of food, but that’s ok because the leftovers are even better than the first time around. And I don’t have any photos of the meal. Maybe because it sort of looks like vomit.

Heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a big pot (I used a stock pot). Add a diced onion and a couple of chopped celery stalks. Cook until the onion is getting translucent, then at 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger and like 4 or so chopped cloves of garlic. Keep cooking for another 5 minutes. Next, add 1 medium sweet potato, which has been peeled and chopped into 1 inch cubes, and a can of diced tomatoes with chiles (Jenn was surprised to discover that you can buy canned tomatoes with fire-roasted green chiles already in there). Let this cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes to thicken it up. Then add 2 cups of water, and salt and pepper to taste. Bring it to a simmer and leave it there for 10 minutes. After it has done all that simmering, add 1 pound of butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1 inch cubes, and 1/2 pound of cauliflower florets. Cook this for 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are all tender.

The last thing to do before taking it off the heat is to mix in 1/4 cup of creamy peanut butter. It might be necessary to cook it a bit longer after adding the peanut butter to get everything mixed nicely and at the proper consistency. Serve it over rice with a garnish of watercress (except I used cilantro because the coop didn’t have watercress).

That recipe was accompanied in the magazine by a recipe for a ‘cool cucumber sauce’ to be added on top of the stew and rice. I forgot to get the ingredients for that, but I did mix up the few ingredients which were on hand. Those were 1/2 cucumber, chopped fairly fine, 1 jalapeno, seeded and chopped, 1/4 cup chopped cilantro, and a bit of salt.

Give it a try and leave a comment if you like it! (That’s basically just a desperate plea for comments.)

I may not be ready to take pictures at concerts, but I can show off my food photography skills. Here is my delicious dinner from Monday night. The recipe came out of my favorite part of Bon Appétit magazine, the RSVP column. That column takes letters from readers that describe their favorite meals out at particular restaurants and then the magazine gets the recipe straight from the chef. So this recipe is from bills in Sydney and it can be found online here.

Jenn‘s birthday was over the weekend and she got a neat vegetable cookbook from Dan. Those Cook’s Illustrated people do extensive experimenting in order to get all of their recipes right, so it got me inspired to take their instructions for various roasted vegetables and go from there (plus there was some inherent uncertainty because I almost never use my oven). Into my Pyrex dish went diced potatoes, chopped carrots, a quartered onion, and a quartered green bell pepper. I drizzeled on some olive oil and also tossed in some minced garlic (3 cloves, I think), salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme. Then, because I was curious and it looked pretty, I put some of the carrot greens on top (spoiler alert: those didn’t roast so well).

The cookbook had different temperatures and durations listed for all the different vegetables, so I split the difference and went with 425°F for 20 minutes with foil over the pan and then 20 more minutes uncovered. It smelled fantastic and tasted pretty damn good as well. However, since we’re going for more quantative analysis here, I’ll break it down a bit. The bell pepper was pretty much perfect, but it was an amazingly good bell pepper to start with. The onions maybe could have been cooked a little more, but they were very close. The potatoes were cooked about the right amount, but I should have tossed them around at the halfway point because their bottom sides were baked onto the dish. Finally, the carrots were undercooked, but Jenn humored me and said that she likes them crispy. Oh yeah, the carrot greens were blackened and wilted, so don’t try that one.

Now my original conception of this dish full of vegetables included a bit slab of pork cooking on top, so that the juices from the roast would drip down and mix with the aromatics. But we’re going vegetarian here, so I just baked some tofu in a separate tray, covered with foil, for the last ∼15 minutes of the vegetable’s cook time. The tofu was pretty tasty, but I owe that exclusively to some delicious barbeque sauce that I picked up and used as a marinade.

I meant to take some pictures, but that didn’t happen. Maybe some other time…

I cooked up some seafood soup yesterday and, after some worries early on, it ended up tasting great. I owe some credit to the excellent shrimp and scallops that I picked up at Fox and Obel. The recipe came from Bon Appétit, but I’m including it down below.

Sauté a yellow onion in olive oil until it becomes translucent. Then add four cloves chopped garlic and sauté for another minute or so. Add 3 cups clam juice, 1 15-oz can white hominy (drained), 1 cup salsa verde, 2 tablespoons finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes (in oil), and 1 tablespoon grated lime peel.

Bring this broth to a simmer and keep it there for 5 minutes or more. When I first mixed up everything, it tasted kind of funky (leading to the worries that I mentioned above). But after simmering for a while, the flavors really combined and it started tasting awesome. After sufficient simmering, add in 3 tablespoons chopped cilantro, 1 pound jumbo shrimp (the recipe said uncooked shrimp, but I used already cooked shrimp), and 1 pound sea scallops, halved horizontally. Keep the soup simmering until the scallops are cooked, which is only a few minutes. Then serve it up, with a bit more chopped cilantro across the top for a garnish, and a slice of crusty bread. Hot damn!