Cook Daily

What Went Undocumented

In my last post I mentioned a culinary theme for the week. Then posted nothing for days. NOTHING:  that should have been my culinary theme for the week. Or rather: The Things I Won't Take Pictures Of. Because I did make a thing or two since that Quinoa salad, I just didn't photograph them. I'm not always good about that. Especially when we have people over--guests, cooking and picture taking is sometimes too much for a girl to take care of. Then when I don't have a picture I tend to forget about it. Until I look at my forlorn, abandoned cooking blog and start to remember. So to make sure these things get their rightful mention, I'm going to recap some of them now.

There was this zucchini gratin that I found over here that was jaw-droppingly good. As is Ina's way, there was a lot of "How bad can that be?" butter, but it was the perfect accompaniment to some grilled filet mignon and some risotto (I know, not exactly a light dinner). This is a contender for Thanksgiving dinner, if we host it this year, and even if we don't.

There was also a salad from this book. A book with a great name and concept that called to me from the library shelf (yes, I borrow a LOT of cookbooks from the library), and then when I took it home and perused it more closely, none of the recipes really called to me at all. But to give it a fair shot, I made the orzo salad with a roasted garlic and pesto dressing. It wasn't inedible, just not great; I wouldn't make it again, or suggest you make it even once, which is why I'm not posting the recipe.

For some Trader Joe's Tilapia, I turned to an old Cooking Light recipe that I've made many times before, just not since starting this blog. It's sort of like Chicken Piccata, only with fish, and peppercorns instead of capers. Here's that one:

Sautéed Tilapia with Lemon-Peppercorn Pan Sauce

 3/4 cup fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 teaspoons drained brine-packed green peppercorns, lightly crushed
1 teaspoon butter
1 teaspoon vegetable oil
2 (6-ounce) tilapia or sole fillets
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons butter
Lemon wedges (optional)

1. Combine first 3 ingredients.

2. Melt 1 teaspoon of butter with oil in a large nonstick skillet over low heat.

3. While butter melts, sprinkle fish fillets with salt and black pepper. Place the flour in a shallow dish. Dredge fillets in flour; shake off excess flour.

4. Increase heat to medium-high; heat 2 minutes or until butter turns golden brown. Add fillets to pan; sauté 3 minutes on each side or until fish flakes easily when tested with a fork. Remove fillets from pan. Add broth mixture to pan, scraping to loosen browned bits. Bring to a boil; cook until reduced to 1/2 cup (about 3 minutes). Remove from heat. Stir in two teaspoons of butter with a whisk. Serve sauce over fillets. Garnish with lemon wedges, if desired.

And now it's time to get ready for my late birthday dinner at a place that is a surprise, but I have my suspicions, (having dropped enough hints), and I am very excited.

Scallops, Spinach and Mashed Potatoes

Most of the time I plan meals and go to the store specifically for the ingredients I need to make them. Sometimes I fly more by the seat of my pants, or by the seat of a car, as having access to one to get home from work in can make impromptu stops at Whole Foods much more frequent. A few days ago, I found myself pulling into their parking lot without much of a clue about what I was going to make. Mostly I knew I wanted to use up the giant bag of spinach occupying way too much space in the veggie drawer. I was considering a "green" risotto (courtesy of the one everyone loves to hate) with some sort of seafood. But did I want to tend to a pot of rice that night? Not so much. Then I saw the scallops and had a vision of them sitting atop a bed of spinach and mashed potatoes. Done.

I didn't use recipes for any of it, which is most unlike me. After considering marinating the scallops in some limes that we had sitting around, as well as some other ingredients, (along the lines of a recipe in the Whole Foods cookbook) I decided I didn't want to bother. So here's what I did:

Potatoes: Peeled and quartered about 3 russets and cooked them in a pot of boiling salted water for about 25 minutes. Then drained them, and mashed them in the pot with some salt, about 2 tablespoons of butter and about 1/2 cup of milk. I didn't really measure the milk, and just eyeballed it. These weren't the richest, creamiest mashed potatoes I've made, but they were simple, and good.

Spinach: Sauteed some minced garlic and a bit of leftover shallot in a glug of olive oil for a few seconds, added the spinach leaves and tossed them around in the garlic oil until they were wilted. Then seasoned with salt and pepper.

Scallops: Heated some olive oil and a pat of butter in a heavy-bottomed skillet, seasoned the scallops (very lightly) and cooked them over medium-high heat until they had a golden crust on each side.  Some of the scallops were bigger than others, but on average they took about 4 minutes per side--bigger ones a bit longer.  I just watched them carefully and turned them when they looked like they were ready to be released from the bottom of the pan.

Pan-Roasted Halibut with Roasted Butternut Squash and Cherry Tomatoes

Just as I was getting ready to rename this blog, "500 Ways with Chicken", I made fish. At last. This is another recipe from my new favorite Sara Foster cookbook: Fresh Every Day. You can't go wrong with halibut, no matter what you do with it. This is definitely a recipe that will be revisited.

1 small butternut squash, halved lengthwise and seeds removed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes, or other small heirloom variety, washed and stems removed
1/4 cup sherry vinegar
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
4 halibut fillets, cut 1-inch thick, skin on
2 tablespoons fresh marjoram leaves
Juice of 1 lemon
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup chicken broth

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Place squash, cut side down on a baking sheet with sides. Pour 1 cup of water and 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in the pan around the squash and roast for 40-45 minutes, until the squash is tender when pierced with a knife. Check on the squash while it's cooking and add more water if the baking sheet is dry. Remove from oven and let cool.

3. While squash roasts. place tomatoes in a small baking dish and drizzle with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil and 2 tablespoons of the vinegar. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss to coat. Roast the tomatoes alongside the squash for about 20 minutes, until they are slightly brown and wrinkled. Remove from oven.

4. Reduce oven temp. to 300

5. Meanwhile, rub halibut with t tablespoon of the olive oil and season with 1 tablespoon of the marjoram and some salt and pepper. Heat the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a non-stick skillet over medium high heat, until just before the smoking point. Place the fish, skin side down, in the skillet. Reduce heat to medium and cook the fish without moving it until it is opaque halfway up the side, about 4 minutes. Carefully turn fish over and squeeze the lemon juice over it. Cook 2-3 minutes longer until it is tender and flaky when pierced with the tip of a sharp knife. Transfer to a platter covered loosely with foil and place in the oven to keep warm while you prepare the sauce.

6. Pour wine, broth, and remaining 2 tablespoons vinegar into the pan you cooked the fish in, increase the heat to high and bring to a boil. Boil for 2 minutes, until the sauce is bubbly and thickens slightly.

7. Remove the skin from the squash and cut into bite-size chunks. Add squash, tomatoes and remaining marjoram to the pan with the sauce, and simmer, stirring gently, to warm. Season with salt and pepper, spoon the squash and tomatoes over and around the fish and serve immediately.

Cooks Notes

1. I cheated and used pre-cut squash. I questioned whether I still needed to roast with the liquids, but did anyway. Everything got absorbed and the squash was perfect.

2. I shelled out the $5 for a bottle of sherry vinegar. It doesn't smell that much different from balsamic vinegar, maybe a little milder. If you don't have sherry vinegar, I'm pretty sure you could substitute balsamic.

3. 300 seemed high for a "keep warm" oven, especially my psycho oven, and I was worried it would dry the halibut out.  I reduced to 250.

4. I used just two pieces of fish, kept the other quantities the same, but used slightly less olive oil and marjoram to rub the fish.

5. I served this with leftover mashed potatoes from the night before.

Hong Kong Crab Cakes and Baby Bok Choy

Just a day or so before making this, I had lamented how expensive crab was at Gelsons ($23 a pound), and wished Trader Joes carried crab, since I had a hankering to make some crab cakes. Turns out they do. For just $9 a pound. It's canned, and not as good quality as the canned crab they sell at Costco, but it's ok.  Normally I make the crab cakes from America's Test Kitchen's The Best Recipe, but since I had bought some bok choy at the farmer's market, I wanted to go a little more Asian with my crab cakes. Tyler Florence, and this book, had what I was looking for:

 

Crab Cakes

• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
• peanut oil
• 1 pound lump crabmeat, preferably Dungeness
  
• 1 cup fresh bread crumbs
• 1 green onion, finely chopped, white and green parts
• 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 1 1/2 teaspoons red chili paste, such as sambal
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 egg white
• sea salt and ground white pepper

Bok Choy

• Peanut oil
• 2-inch piece fresh ginger
• 2 heads baby bok choy, halved lengthwise
• 1/4 cup low sodium soy sauce
• 1/4 cup oyster sauce
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• Toasted sesame seeds and sliced green onion for garnish

1. Saute the garlic and ginger in a tablespoon of peanut oil for a few minutes. Remove from heat.
In a mixing bowl, combine crabmeat, bread crumbs, green onion, mayonnaise, chili paste, lemon juice and egg white. Scrape the garlic-ginger mixture into the bowl; season with salt and pepper. Fold the ingredients together gently, but thoroughly, taking care not to mash the crabmeat.

2. Using your hands, form the mixture into 4 crab cakes; they should be moist and just hold together. Put crab cakes on a plate, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate while preparing the bok choy.

3. Cover the bottom of a skillet with a 2-count drizzle of peanut oil and heat until almost smoking. Split the piece of ginger open with a knife, then whack it with the flat side of the knife to release the flavor. Lay ginger pieces in oil, cut side down, to let them start to perfume.

4. Pan fry the bok choy, cut side down, for a couple of minutes to give it some color. Add soy sauce, oyster sauce, lemon juice and brown sugar. Thin out sauce with 1/4 cup of water. Cook for 5 minutes, or until the sauce has a syrupy consistency.

5. While that's happening, coat another skillet with a 4-count of peanut oil and bring it to a slight smoke over medium heat. Fry crab cakes until brown, about 5 minutes on each side, turning carefully with a spatula. Serve with the bok choy and garnish with toasted sesame seeds, cilantro and green onion.

Some cook's notes:

1. This mixture made more than 4 crab cakes for me. I didn't want them to be too huge, so I ended up with 6. Tyler says this serves 2. I think it would serve 4 (but the bok choy quantity would need to be doubled).

2. The crab cakes didn't hold together that well. It took alot of care to get them to stay intact, which sort of irritated me, because I hate persnickety cooking. I am too impatient.

3. I left out the cilantro and extra green onion as garnish, and served with regular long grain rice, but Tyler suggests Jasmine.

4. While these were good, I think I prefer the America's Test Kitchen crab cake recipe...

5. I would reduce the oyster sauce in the bok choy. While I am a salty salt lover, the bok choy was a tad salty even for me.

Seafood Linguine

I'm very much a grocery shopper that figures out what I'm going to make that week, goes to the store and gets exactly what is on that list. But every once in a while, I buy things that I have no idea what I'm going to do with. Most people have these flashes of inspiration when eyeing the beautiful fresh produce at the farmer's market. My last flash of inspiration happened over frozen shellfish from Trader Joes. When I saw the bag sitting there in the freezer section with a perfect mix of calamari, scallops and shrimp, I suddenly thought that a seafood pasta dish sounded like something I might want to make. And I love the no-pressure aspect of frozen things. No throwing away once perfectly good, now ominously stinky seafood that I was too lazy to cook after a long day.

I perused my recipe books and my favorite cooking web sites and finally settled on a recipe I found on Epicurious, that I then adapted completely. Here's what I ended up making:

Seafood Linguine

• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 medium zucchini, diced
• 1 bell pepper, diced
• 1 tablespoon all purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• 1/2 cup  chicken broth
• 1/4 cup whipping cream
• 16 oz bag of mixed seafood from Trader Joes (you could use fresh, of course. It would probably be better...)
• 1lb linguine, freshly cooked
• Fresh parsley for garnish (chopped)

1) Heat olive oil in heavy, large skillet over medium high heat. Add onion and saute until golden (about 5 minutes)
2) Add garlic, zucchini, bell pepper and saute for about 3-4 minutes
3) Stir in flour and coriander and cook 1 minute
4) Add wine, chicken broth and cream and bring to boil, stirring constantly.
5) Add seafood and simmer, until cooked through, about 5 minutes
6) Toss cooked linguine into pot, and coat with sauce
7) Shower with parsley

The orginal recipe didn't have the other vegetables, didn't call for chicken stock, used less wine and 1 whole cup of whipping cream. I wanted the vegetables for some added color and texture, and because they were headed for the trash if I didn't do something with them. 1 cup of cream was just too much ass-widening dairy for my taste, and if cutting back on cream means adding more wine, well then I'm all for it.

Again, my apologies for the blurry picture. How do all those talented food bloggers do it? Half the time I'm so ravenous and anxious to sit down and enjoy a hot dinner that the picture taking tends to be a very scattered, and not even remotely styled afterthought.

Baked Orzo wth Shrimp, Tomato Sauce and Feta

Every once in a while I will surprise myself and make dinner on a night that i hadn't planned to. This is particularly unusual for a Saturday night which is often an eat out night or a pizza night. But tonight I just felt like something homemade. Perhaps it was the gigantic bean, rice and cheese log I lumbered down for lunch at the Beverly Center. Or that even though we had been invited to a party, we just didn't feel like dealing with Hollywood traffic the night before the Academy Awards. And besides, the party going on at the new club on Melrose Place at the end of our block was so loud that we felt as if we were there.

So. At the last minute I decided to make an old staple that I got from Epicurious.com a few years ago and have made pretty regularly ever since. With the exception of the shrimp, it calls for things that you probably have in your pantry, and is quite delicious. There is actually a slightly different version of this, also on Epicurious, that I like too, and would have made last night since the quantities are smaller, but I kind of forgot about it until I was mid-cook and remembered that I had really intended to make the other one. These things happen. But no matter, because either one is good, and unlike the fateful curry noodle balls, these leftovers will be eaten, and possibly even more delicious the next day, which is today, for lunch.

A link to the recipe I made is here. The other one is here. As you can see, I served this with a very simple mixed green salad, and a hunk of delicious baguette. Seriously, I've had many a baguette in my day (it was those and nutella that turned me into a beached whale after a year in Paris), and this one from a humble (okay maybe not so humble) grocery store just up the street is one of my favorites.

P.S. This could be made without the shrimp for a vegetarian version (that's specially for you, Heidi)
P.P.S I am working on those photography skills.