And I aim to please. With gorgeous weather predicted for this Memorial Day weekend, I knew I’d have to break out the smoker, and what better way to kick off the summer than with a 7 1/2-pound pork butt?
Today’s post is brought to you by the letter P. You may recognize it from such words as Parsley, Pecorino, and my favorite word of late, Procrastination.
Last weekend’s kitchen adventures were spent in the service of Cinco de Mayo with a chicken and hominy soup and a recipe for beans that took the better part of a day to make, but were worth every last stinkin’ second.
But by the time the fifth rolled around, I just couldn’t bring myself to post anything about it.
What’s that word again? Oh yeah, Procrastination.
Which brings us to today.
The aforementioned soup.
Still under the weather, friends, but I did manage to cook one meal this week! Poor Gil, it’s been takeout (hot and sour soup, mostly) or indoor picnicking for the past couple of weeks and I’m sure he’s tired of it. But hey, we’re leaving for Milan in a few hours — I’m positive we’ll be able to scare up a few amazing meals while we’re away.
Growing up, I never developed much love for shrimp. We always had a ton of it in the freezer, so whenever Mom was feeling uninspired, a shrimp dish appeared on the table for dinner. Now that I’m older and live in an area where the little buggers are more precious, I feel more appreciative of them, but I think I inherited my mom’s predisposition — whenever I’m not feeling up to cooking, shrimp make an appearance.
This time I marinated the shrimp (split and cleaned, but still wearing their shells) in a wonderful Moroccan grilling paste from Williams-Sonoma which I can’t find on their website. Anyway, the ingredients are basically what I would’ve blended up myself, but were ready to go without any real work on my part — just the thing. We had the shrimp with a yogurt/fresh herbs/garlic dipping sauce I mixed up and it was very good.
But the real star of the show was the couscous:
I adapted a recipe from Epicurious, using regular couscous instead of Israeli, cooking it without the cinnamon stick, but adding plenty ground cinnamon at the end. As it turned out, the couscous was so surprisingly good, it was the main course, and the shrimp were the side.
And apart from a few busy days at work, that’s been my week. I hope to post something more exciting in the next few days.
Arrivederci!
to know his way around a shrimp recipe. If you haven’t yet clicked on the new Chadzilla cooking link at right, you’re in for a treat. I discovered his site a few weeks ago googling god-knows-what and stuck around for his love of scientific cooking and plain old enthusiasm for good food.
One of the techniques he trumpets is sous vide, but I’m too wary of trying it in my own kitchen, so the next best thing, I figure, is poaching. As it turns out, he wrote about poaching shrimp in olive oil with preserved lemons — it sounded like something I could probably attempt with some success, and I’m happy to say it was really delicious.
Poaching the shrimp gave them a very delicate, almost confit-like texture (as promised). After letting them soak in the poaching oil for about 8 hours, I wrapped them with prosciutto and grilled them lightly for about 30 seconds, just long enough to warm them through and crisp the meat on one side.
The shrimp promised to be very rich, so I thought I’d cut through some of that richness with a salsa verde from an old issue of Martha Stewart Living. I reduced the mint by about half because I’m not a huge fan of the stuff, so it had just enough presence to balance with the other ingredients and wasn’t overpowering at all.
If I’m ever down Miami-way, I’ll definitely stop in at Chadzilla’s restaurant. I’m sure it’d be one of the more memorable meals of my trip.
recipes after the jump
I’m always up for something new, especially when it comes to food — cooking or just eating it. So when Gil told me about a new gourmet food store that recently opened one town over, I could hardly contain my excitement and rushed there the very next day to see what it was about. Well! Zeytinia exceeded my expectations by a mile and we’ve already paid them three visits in one week. Their olive bar is a thing of beauty and sampling the varieties of honey could keep me busy for a year, easily. But where they really shine, IMHO, is in the produce section. The freshness of the fruits and vegetables alone would beat our local grocery, but they also have a variety I haven’t seen in this area.
As I was deciding between fava beans and cranberry beans (neither of which I’d cooked before), Gil made my decision for me: “Hey, those cranberry beans look like they were designed by Betsey Johnson!” (Reason 1, 375 why I adore this man so.) I only bought a small sampling just in case they turned out to be nothing special. I needn’t have worried, as it turned out. The test batch I made last night was so good, we found ourselves back at the store this morning for more, where I served as an ambassador for the beans, explaining how to cook them to a customer who stopped to ask. All I did was simmer the shelled beans in about 2 inches of water with a couple of whole garlic cloves, some peppercorns, and a few sage leaves. When they were soft but not mushy, I drained them, added salt and olive oil, and let them sit on the counter till they reached room temperature.
The beans had a very meaty, almost umami flavor and played well with a dandelion green salad and grilled skirt steak. I just used my regular old preparation of marinating the steak in oil (avocado, this time — another new purchase), garlic, and fresh herbs, then grilling over high heat.
The avocado oil had a beautiful green intensity you probably can’t see here, and a smoother flavor than the grassy olive oil I usually use. It was a good purchase, I’d say. It made a delicious dressing for the dandelion greens, as well, when mixed with sherry vinegar (to add sweetness to the bitter greens), roasted garlic, and a touch of Dijon mustard.
By the way, cranberry beans lose their beautiful pink swirly flair when cooked, but turn so delicious, the trade-off isn’t painful at all.
For once, bad weather in the area screwed up everyone else’s commute and didn’t affect mine at all. Hurrah! Between the uneventful trip and RESTORED AIR CONDITIONING at my office, I was feeling very fortunate, indeed. But it was still pretty darned hot out there and I didn’t want to heat up the kitchen when I got home, so the only thing I cooked indoors was a small pot of quinoa to use as the base of a Greek-inspired summer salad.
There’s no real recipe, as I just threw in handfuls of whatever we had in the fridge. That amounted to sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red peppers, baby spinach, green onions, kalamata olives, and copious amounts of oregano, thyme, and parsley. To complete the dish, I grilled asparagus and lemon-and-garlic marinated shrimp, then tossed the everything with a garlicky lemon vinaigrette.
It was very tasty and pretty easy to assemble, but I think my favorite part of the meal was the side — grilled feta. If you’re a cheese lover and haven’t tried this yet, you really should. Just cut a block of feta in half lengthwise, brush both sides with olive oil, and sprinkle with oregano, thyme, and black pepper (or the seasonings of your choice). Wrap the whole thing in foil and grill for a few minutes on each side, open the package (carefully!), spritz with lemon juice, and serve.
In summer, the song sings itself. — William Carlos Williams
Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability. — Sam Keen
With such gorgeous food so abundant this time of year, it seems unappreciative to go overboard with complicated recipes or convoluted preparations. I prefer to let the song sing itself (and to let my laziness shine).
To that end, a grass-fed porterhouse got a sprinkling of salt and 10 minutes on the grill before having a little bath of olive oil, garlic, salt & pepper mixed with fresh thyme and rosemary from the garden. Even traditional garlic bread was too complicated for me today, so I sliced roasted garlic bread and grilled it lightly with a spritz of olive oil. Broccoli rabe drizzled with lemon juice, olive oil, and pine nuts rounded out the meal and didn’t tax me overmuch.
And those pluots? Also grilled, and topped with balsamic vinegar, honey, and slivered basil.
When I was young, vegetables never were the focus of the meal. Always relegated to the side, they either were major cholesterol bombs — Cajun-style vegetables tend to be smothered with pork fat and onions, which is delicious, but not exactly heart healthy — or bland and uninspired. My mom never has been fond of spending time in the kitchen and still favors opening a can of petit pois or corn, dumping it into a serving bowl with a big pat of butter, and microwaving until it’s “done.” These dishes were really, truly, nothing more than a side or an afterthought.
But I’ve come a long way, baby — vegetables are more than meat’s wingman! (Look at me. I’m so enlightened!) Once I learned just how good fresh can be, and got a few good cookbooks to guide me, veggies started appearing on my plate in more than a side capacity. In fact, for the past year or so, I’ve been trying to eat vegequarian for most of my meals during the week (though obviously I still love the flesh) just to ensure I’m getting something other than meat and bread in my diet … and I don’t feel deprived at all! It’s hardly news to most of you out there, but it’s a whole new world to me.
With summer’s bounty on display at our farmers’ market this morning, it was nearly impossible to pass up anything at all. And so we came home with gorgeous red and golden beets, a dozen ears of corn, leeks, carrots, zucchini, garlic, onions, and tatsoi, along with a grass-fed porterhouse steak and mini apple pie. I hardly knew where to start for lunch!
We also had fresh vegetarian ravioli on hand from our latest Trader Joe’s run, so I decided to whip up a quick roasted veggie sauce to go with it. The smoky flavors of the roasted red pepper, onions, zucchini, and garlic were smoothed out with a little goat cheese and made for a tasty, light lunch.
Remind me to tell you about my fresh fruit discovery sometime. What a revelation to learn that fruit could be served without a ton of added sugar and in something other than fruit salad form.
As always, click on the pictures for a link to my flickr food photo set.
recipe after the jump
There are two ways to approach keeping cool (and keeping the electric bill down) while cooking in the summertime: Outdoor cooking and not “cooking” at all.
By far, my favorite of these two methods is taking it outdoors. We bought a Weber Q gas grill a couple of years ago and it’s served us very well. We don’t have the opportunity to do real barbecue on it, but for quick grilling, it can’t be beat. Over the weekend, I grilled our leftovers from the Ringwood Farmers’ Market a couple of weeks ago: Grass-fed bone-in ribeyes (or cowboy steaks, from Walnut Grove Farms) and garlic scapes. To keep things simple, I made a quick topping of rosemary, thyme, pepper, and olive oil for the steak. I didn’t have to stay outside for long and the flavors were fresh and delicious.
For a quick dessert, I stuffed a few fresh figs with blue cheese and wrapped them with prosciutto. A few minutes on the grill to melt the cheese and quick drizzle of balsamic vinegar turned them into one of my favorite desserts of all-time.
Not cooking at all is another option for really hot days. The weather’s been pretty agreeable here lately, but I was craving avocados and didn’t feel like making guacamole or using the avocado as anything other than the main ingredient. So I tried making my first avocado-cucumber soup. Despite the simple handful of ingredients, the flavor of the soup was very complex. This one is definitely going into my late-summer rotation.
recipe after the jump
For something I’d never even heard of before last weekend, I can’t imagine living without the garlic scape now. I picked up a huuuuuge bag of them at the farmers’ market yesterday, but after two days of cooking with them, I didn’t have enough left to pickle. Poor me. Maybe that’ll be a project for next weekend.
Ah, but this weekend … this weekend there was fresh garlic (below, left) and scapes (below, right),
not to mention lovely sugar snap peas
and radishes
and grass-fed beef!
Wow. Did we eat well. Gil was out on a hike yesterday and didn’t share in the stir-fried sugar snaps, scapes, and radishes with grilled shrimp,
but I didn’t hear any complaints when he had the grilled combo today — steak, corn, and scapes.
recipes after the jump
