Patty pan squash

Sometimes I impulsively buy food just because I think it’s pretty (irregardless of how it’s going to taste). It’s led me to some pretty crummy tasting, but gorgeous looking dishes at restaurants. I got this batch of patty pan squash from the local farmer’s market just because of its pretty speckled pattern. I was worried it’d lose its colors as it got roasted in the oven, but was surprised to find that it did not. I quartered the squash and drizzled it in olive oil with some salt and pepper. Combined with a roasted chicken from some hipster Brooklyn market, we’ve got dinner!

Eggs Benedict

It was a Sunday morning with nothing much planned. I love Sunday mornings like that. Since I had time on my hand, I decided to try a dish that I absolutely love at the restaurants, but have always been afraid to try at home: Eggs benedict. Both of the components in the dish were new and foreign to me: the Hollandaise sauce tempering over a double broiler contraption and the each poaching business. It could have all gone terribly wrong. But it didn’t turn out half bad.

I used the recipe over at the food network and although it got sorta crummy reviews on that site, I was proud of my rendition of it. I didn’t follow the recipe to a T. I used it as a basic skeleton and outline. I never exactly follow step by step with recipes, preferring to feel it out and adjust as I go along. Which works fine for cooking, but is another story in my baking. It leads me to my 50% success rate in baking while my cooking batting averages have generally been near 99%.

I didn’t take too many pics of the poaching and double broiling steps because I had my hands full, but I’m planning on making this again and with more detailed pictures.

The eggs: it’s best to get the freshest eggs you can find, but on a cozy Sunday morning, I wasn’t about to run out to the nearest farmer’s market, just for eggs. I used the wacky eggs in my fridge. The thing is, the refrigerator in the apartment has only two settings: half rotting food and half frozen food.  This is what happens to the eggs when they get too close to the frosty edge.

Throw some vinegar into simmering water on a skillet. It’s makes life that much easier if you use a skillet. 3 inches of water is enough. Don’t be like me and assume that more water = better. A stock pot is really a pain in the a** to fish around for poached eggs in. Crack the eggs and put them in small bowl. Very gently slide the eggs into the simmering water.

You might see some of the eggy edges billowing around. Resist your temptation to go cleaning it up: Don’t touch it. You’re just going to make more of a billow egg mess. I did it. I know. The first egg was nothing more than shredded whites and parboiled yolk. So don’t do it. Just let the egg sit there until the proteins of the white have congealed itself into a mass. Then I let it cook some more (2-3 mins) because I don’t like the yolks too runny. Just keep a close eye on that sucker because it’s better to be more runny and have to reboil it than to have to eat hard boiled eggs when you’re really craving poached eggs. Pick these guys up with a slotted spoon and shock them in some cold water to stop the cooking process.

 

The hollandaise sauce: I took a small saucepan with boiling water and slapped a glass bowl on it to create my double broiler. I put the butter in there to let it melt. Now the recipe on foodnetwork recommends that you heat the butter in another pan and separate out all the solids so that you’re using only clarified butter. That’s another pan and another dish. It also recommends you tempering the yolk first before adding the warm butter. I combined everything and let it all temper as a whole because it increases the volume of ingredients that won’t scramble (water and butter) and gives you more of a margin for error. If the only thing you’ve got in that glass bowl to temper is the small volume of egg yolk, the chances of you eating scrambled eggs goes up significantly. It’s also not going to affect the flavor hugely so screw that.

I put the butter directly in the glass bowl and let the butter melt while I separated the yolk from the whites. Save the whites to make macarons with later on. The ratio you want is about 2:1 on butter and yolk. How many ever yolks you plan on using, use about twice that amount of butter. Add a tablespoon of water for every yolk that you use. I put the uncooked yolk and the butter together in the glass bowl and whisk it all together. Now keep doing it. Fast, slow, whatever, just don’t stop whisking. It’s a good arm workout. Keep that mixture moving in there. Because the moment you stop is going to be the moment the sauce will congeal into a gelatinous mass. Not quite scrambled eggs, but still not something you want for breakfast. As you’re mixing, look for the sauce to go from runny and sloshing around, to just barely coating your whisk. The minute you see that sauce getting thicker, whisk it like mad and turn off the heat. Don’t wait to let it thicken some more because the residual heat from the bowl will continue cooking your precious Hollandaise sauce. Take that sauce that you’ve worked so hard on and put it in another bowl.

If the sauce is a bit thicker than you would like, it’s not the end of the world. Add the tablespoon of lemon juice now. If it’s still too thick, add in a tablespoon of water. Add salt to taste. Don’t add the cayenne pepper directly into the sauce or else it’ll look like mine: gritty. You’re supposed to dust it with cayenne pepper at the end. Not IN the sauce. Doesn’t affect the flavor, but sure looks ugly. Lesson learned.

Now toast some bread, heat up some ham, and start stacking yourself a delicious tower. Bread, meat, egg, HOLLANDAISE SAUCE.

After you drizzle the sauce on, dust it with some cayenne pepper and crushed peppers. Now dig in.

Grilled Mushroom Spinach Pasta

I had received some delicious looking spinach parpadelle as a gift and wanted to think of a good way to showcase it. Spinach usually plays nice with mushrooms and I had a pack of mushrooms in the fridge so I set about messing around with that. As for the sauce, I knew I wanted something rich, but not spoon coating creamy, so I fiddled around with making a lighter sort of alfredo with a cheese I’d been intrigued by.

It’s actually kinda funny because the cheese is not something unique or gourmet. I just had never really noticed it before. My apartment mate loves cheese to bits. This is a person who regularly buys warehouse party trays of cheeses and will go through the entire tray if given the opportunity. I’ve nibbled at a few here and there and there really isn’t anything special about them. They’re your generic soft American cheeses. In his recent shopping trip, he decided to get fancy and buy the gourmet selection of imported cheeses. In this tray of cheeses, the French Emmental was actually quite good and had a nice smoky flavor that I thought would go well with the pasta I had in mind. So I guess the alfredo sauce is kind of a French Emmental type of alfredo.

First to prep the mushrooms and the garlic.

Shrroms are scrubbed clean and patted dry. After I heat up the George Foreman and make sure that it’s sizzling, I leave the mushrooms in there for some char marks (about 5-7 minutes depending on how hot the griddle gets). During that 5-7 minutes, I prepare the garlic.

Garlic. Essential for all pastas. I hate touching garlic so I cut off the hard tip, smash them to loosen them from their papery husk, then throw them into a food processor to blitz. I wanna minimize the total amount of garlic touching time since garlic smelling hands are totally sexy.

By the time I finish getting prepping the garlic and have it mashed, the mushrooms should be done. I take them out and let them cool. The grilled mushrooms get cut into 1cm strips. Set them aside on a plate.

Next up: Pasta

Boiled al dente then shocked with cold water. This step is especially important if you’re a fan of al dente pasta. Don’t let the pasta sit there in the warm water while you’re doing other things. In that time, the al dente you’ve waited patiently for morphs into a soggy unpalatable mush. Don’t just drain the pasta and let it sit there either. Take the extra 30 seconds to give it that cold rinse. The warm pasta can actually continue cooking itself after draining if you don’t stop it. The cold water shock quickly halts the cooking process.

Now I get a pan on medium heat with olive oil. You’ll know that the oil has heated enough when you can get a good whiff of the olive-y smell coming from the oil. The olive aromatic molecules are getting volatilized by the heat. You can also tell that it’s hot enough when a drop of water on the pan cracks and sizzles instantly.Now add 3/4 of the minced garlic to the hot oil. Allow the hot oil to extract the aromatics from the garlic.

The remaining 1/4 minced garlic is set aside with the mushrooms to be added later (Put the garlic in the same plate/bowl/container as the mushroom. Go ahead and do it. They’re going to be mixed later anyway. That’s one less dish to wash).

Once the garlic starts to get browned at the edges, add about 1 cup of milk. This is the base for your sauce. If you’re using low fat milk (below 2%) you’ll want to add a pat of butter or a splash of cream to re-establish the richness in the sauce base. You need a good portion of fat in this step so that the fat can help incorporate the cheese into the sauce later. If you don’t add enough fat back, the sauce will not emulsify properly and the cheese will remain more chunky/gritty as opposed to a smooth sauce.

Once the milk/garlic/oil mixture starts simmering, turn the heat down to low and add about 4-5 pieces of the cheese of your liking. Allow the cheese to melt slowly, stirring frequently to incorporate itself into the alfredo.

Add the grilled mushroom and fresh garlic. Adjust salt to taste.

Turn off the heat and add pasta to sauce and mushroom combo. If you have thick pots, the retained heat will warm up the pasta that’s been shocked with cold water. If you have thin bottom pots, then you can do this step with the heat on low, but turn off heat as soon as possible after thoroughly combining everything. You just want to limit the time on the burner to prevent overcooking the pasta.

Note: You can see some grittiness to my sauce since I didn’t add much fat back to my milk, when I was making the base for sauce. Meh.

This last part is if you have some truffle oil available. It takes a decent pasta dish and throws it right out of the ball park. Take some of that liquid gold and drizzle it all over the pasta. Don’t do this step until after plating the pasta. Truffle oil doesn’t really behave well on high heat. Don’t use the truffle oil to cook. The flavors get so warped from the high heats during cooking that you might as well be wasting your money. The truffle oil aroma won’t come through if you’re cooking with it from the beginning. Truffle oil is a garnish, not a cooking staple. I learned that the hard way. Now you know and you won’t have to learn the hard way: don’t waste your truffle oil.

 

Remember to add a salad and make this a balanced meal. Dust with some freshly ground peppercorns. You’re all set.

Dish Rack: Because I’m OCD

NY apartments are tiny. Postage stamp tiny. Some don’t even come with real kitchens. At first, that concept seemed ludicrous to me. How could one live in a place without the means to prepare your own meals? Some didn’t even have full refrigerators. They have these tiny cube refrigerators that I used to used when I was living in the college dorms. Now that’s not a kitchen. It was absurd. It boggled my mind. It was understandable back when the dorm cafeteria was nearby and you’re a college freshman loaded up with meal points. Now I can only wish for those meal point days again. I’m much older and no longer waking up at 3pm and eating breakfast cup noodles for meals.

But then I moved into NYC. Then I understood. There are more restaurants per square mile in Manhattan than any other city in the world. It’s pricey, but not absurdly pricey. An individual can possibly get away with not having to cook a single day of the week. All of Manhattan is your cafeteria and your credit card your meal points. That explained the smidgen of a kitchen.

So right now I’m making do with the smidgen of a kitchen. Looks like I’m stuck with it until I can move back to California. I’ll be moving from place to place depending on the hospital I’m rotating through at any given time. Yes, moving kitchen stuff and pantry material from place to place will probably suck each and every time, but at least I’ll still be able to do something I enjoy at a time in my life where there is very little creativity left to me. I’m hoping I’ll have the time to update this frequently enough.

Moving onto the project: I had a pile of dishes sitting around and they’ve been bugging the crap out of me. It’s the OCD talking. Every time I want to get a big round dish, I have to move all the others out to get it. That requires two hands to get one dish out. When I’m scrambling around in the kitchen most days, I usually don’t have more than one hand available to grab the plate since the other one will be stirring something or the other.

Meet: Pile o’ Dishes

I finally decided to do something to organize these darned dishes. I looked around for some sort of cabinet organizer thing-a-mabob. Nothing available in stores would fit in this midget sized kitchen. I saw little ones at ikea, but they weren’t for sale. I thought about just bringing it up to the cashiers at ikea and telling them I’d pay whatever they wanted for it. I got talked out of that one. So I just decided to make it myself. I got all my supplies at the home depot. This project does not require any fancy hardware. I just used whatever was available at the home depot. There is no way the smidgen of space I have left for future clothes and shoes purchases was going to be used to store hardware and tools. Pfft.

Here’s the line up:

Sandpaper (Extra Fine)

Wood dowel cut to desired lengths (I did 2″ and 4″)

Flat piece of wood 12″ for the base and 2″ for the strut

Nails

I sanded down the sharp edges on the wooden dowels and the flat base pieces. I didn’t have a saw so the dowel pieces were cut using the handsaw at the lumbar station in home depot. I was a bit impatient so I just scored it and snapped it.

After all the sharp bits and pieces were sanded down, I hammered in some holes onto the dowel pieces. (I take back the whole not needing tools. I needed a hammer. I just happened to have one around. If not, any reliable heavy bludgeon like object will do.)

The base pieces were put together in an H sort of way. I didn’t have any idea how to keep them together so I just used some wood glue I had around. It worked for me. 

The only thing type of wood available for the base pieces was oak. Oak is a really annoyingly hard type of wood to be hammering through. I’m sure the neighbors didn’t appreciate the hammering at all. This project would have gone much faster if I had a drill. Per my earlier discussion on future shoes and purses vs hardware, a drill was not a possibility. Initially I thought I could hammer the pieces together. Would have been a good idea if the wood wasn’t so guddamn near impossible to hammer through. My neighbors would hate me for the entirety of my stay at this building if I did that the first Sunday after moving in. I grabbed a pair of foreceps leftover from playing around with sutures. I used that to heat up the nail on the stove and just burned a hole through that sucker.  After the hole was made and the nail came through on the other side, I just attached the dowels with the pre-made holes onto it.  

The fully assembled piece: A little on the wet side after washing off all the dust from the sandpaper. The contact point between the nailed in dowels was further filled in with some wood glue.

All the dishes nicely organized!

In retrospect, things would have been easier with a drill or a softer type of wood for the base, but since those weren’t available, I chose the alternative method. Now to start cookin!