combustication

Last night’s dinner was a quick Asian-inspired stir fry (purple kale and mushrooms with black bean sauce) with soba noodles, but I wanted a little extra something with some protein, so I whipped up an edamame, radish and ginger salad. Couldn’t have been simpler and it was really good. The pickled ginger added a little wallop to the sesame oil and soy sauce dressing and also made the flavor of the (frozen) edamame pop. This is going to be part of my summer salad repetoire, as I think it will be even better after sitting in the fridge overnight.

Edamame, Radish & Ginger Salad
Ingredients
1 cup frozen shelled edamame
3 radishes, washed and sliced thinly
2 tsps. soy sauce
1 tsp. sesame oil
sea salt to taste
1 ½ tablespoons (or more to your liking) minced ginger

To Do
Cook the edamame in boiling water for about 5 minutes, drain and rinse under cold water. Add the radishes and the rest of the ingredients. Let sit for about 10 minutes before eating. It would probably be even better after a night’s rest in the fridge, but it’s still delicious! Serves about 2 as a side dish.

Last night I had the best meal and restaurant experience in recent memory. Phil took me to Chestnut for my birthday and before I go blabbering on about the food, I suggest you make a reservation ASAP. The number is 718-243-0049 and they’re participating in Brooklyn’s Restaurant Week with everything on the menu pretty much covered (some fish and meat dishes have a $5 surcharge)…GO NOW!

Sorry, I got a little crazed. Chestnut is located on Smith Street, the oversaturated restaurant row of Carrol Gardens, but don’t let that deter you! Once you get into the small restaurant, you almost forget the craziness of the street outside. I stress that this is a tiny place. I could have taken a table count, but was a little concerned that the hostess lost our reservation (which she didn’t) and was enchanted by the simple and warm decor of the place and the food smells coming out of the kitchen.

Once seated, next to the swinging door of the kitchen, we opened our menus only to have our very friendly waitress tell us about how the menu worked with restaurant week (see 1st paragraph) and then picked out our appetizers and entrees. Wait, the pickles. The most amazing pickles in the world, yes the world darnnit, were served to us with bread and a fruity olive oil. These pickles were crisp, tart and sweet and tasted like no other pickle I’ve had before. I asked the waitress if the chef used anything different in his pickling spice and she went to check. Nope, nothing different, he just makes his with “corazón.”

Appetizers:
Phil had the baby beet salad with marcona almonds & mizuna and I had the grilled calamari with quinoa, romesco & musk melon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a prettier presentation of squid. If the restaurant wasn’t so dimly lit, I would have taken some photos, but I wasn’t about to use a flash camera in the peaceful atmosphere. The calamari rested on a bed of greens and stuffed with the quinoa. The squid was cut on an angle and then fanned out so you could see the quinoa inside. It was delicious. I would never imagine to pair squid with quinoa and the combination was intriguing. Not having a typical fried-to-the-death calamari was also a treat. Phil’s salad was also amazing with the marcona almonds taking a normal beet salad to a new level. Yum.

Entrées:
I had the celeriac ribbons, puy lentils, mache & chestnut
and Phil had the chickpea‑black sesame ravioli, braised greens & ricotta salata. I really thought Phil won with his choice, but he really liked mine as well. The presentation of the black sesame ravioli was gorgeous - they raviolis were shaped like little boats and each one was nestled on seperate beds of braised greens. The sesame also really made the chickpea flavoring stand out. I have no clue how they managed to create those celeriac ribbons (think very wide egg noodles), but they were complimented by the chestnut sauce. The presentation wasn’t so great on this dish.

Dessert:
Phil had theAssorted cookie plate Vin Santo pairing and I had homemade ice cream (oatmeal cookie, vanilla and pineapple peach) & shortbread cookies paired with a Muscat. What can I say? Desserts are all delicious. Always. My icecream came with a little candle on top. After dinner I spoke with the owner as we were leaving and he told me they run a prix fixe with this menu every Tuesday and Wednesday for $25. Unbelievable! Get thee to Chestnut!!

I hope to be eating many more of these today.

Open Source Food is a neat website that is pretty much gorgeous food photos and the people who took them all the time. I particularly like how one of the co-founders compared his hotel to Fawlty Towers – brilliant. I’m up there and already got a few comments. If you like to cook/bake and take photos, sign up!

In other news, tomorrow is my birthday. I would love some recipes from readers in the comment section. Steph…bagels? Please?

Phil has some amusing photos of my pre-birthday debauchery for those interested.

Try saying that three times fast.

I was talking to my incredibly talented little sister via gchat the other day and told her that I was starting to post again on the site. She got excited over the pic of the butterscotch chocolate cookies and I told her we could make whatever cookie she wanted when I went back home last week. A transcript:

me: well what kind of cookies do you want to make?
Amanda: uummm i have no idea.
something that has to do with chocolate
me: okay
well
a chocolate chip
oatmeal chocolate chip?
Amanda: chocolate rasberry and whitechocolate chips
me: chocolate chocolate chip?
okay
Amanda: mwahahaha

She’s a little crazy, but the recipe I found to base the cookie on and the resulting product was really good and complex. The raspberry was there, but it wasn’t overwhelmed by the chocolate and the macademia nuts added a rich crunch the cookie.

Amanda’s Macademia White Chocolate Chocolate Raspberry Cookies

Ingredients
1/3 cup butter (at room temp)
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup sugar-free raspberry jam
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp. baking soda
8 oz. white chocolate chips
1 cup crushed macademia nuts

To Do
Preheat oven to 350F.

Cream butter and sugars in an electric mixer. When light and fluffy add the egg and beat until incorporated and then add vanilla and raspberry jam.

Mix together the flour, cocoa powder and baking soda in a seperate bowl. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in batches and scoop the sides of the mixer to get all the flour mixture in. Pour in the nuts and white chocolate chips and stir by hand.

Plop your desired cookie size (about a tablespoon makes for a nice-sized cookie, but do what you want) onto greased cookie sheets about 2″ apart or more if they’re bigger. Bake for about 8-10 minutes. DO NOT OVERBAKE!! I baked them for just a little over 8 minutes and had them cool on the rack. Munch.

There is a fantastic article from Epicurious that is all about food and traveling through the different regions of Portugal, my family’s homeland. My mom is from a little town called “Chipar de Cima” and my dad is from Lisbon. We have family all over the place in the country. When I was little, we used to go to Portugal every summer. School would let out and we would get on a plane and spend three months with my mother’s parents and other family members. Portugal is where I milked cows, witnessed chickens getting their necks wrung in the yard and pigs being caught in the driveway and slaughtered, picked strawberries and vegetables for dessert and dinner and learned the wonders of Parmalait. It was a pretty great way to spend a childhood summer - we would go to the beach every day, I learned to ride a motorcycle, read books voraciously and actually knew how to speak Portuguese for a while (very rusty now).

The Epicurious article is spot-on about a lot of what is fantastic about Portuguese food - fresh, no-nonsense and simple food. The focus at my grandmother’s was always fresh ingredients, good olive oil and kitchen knowledge that was not based on any cooking book. I recently got my mother this Portuguese cookbook, which she loves because it has many of the recipes of her childhood written down with exact measurements. My grandma uses her senses in order to tell her when the dough is ready for breadbaking or a cake batter is set enough to go in the oven. My mom jokes that I’m just like her in that explaining how I made some Portuguese sweetbread last year, I would say “just throw a handful of flour in the batter until it looks right.” That’s fine by me.

Anyways, Portuguese food is pretty awesome. If you live in NYC, a great restuarant to try is Alfama.

Since I’ve been getting a lot of hits on it lately, a link to my Portuguese Custard Cups recipe.

We didn’t make it out to the swamp. Phil has created a more detailed description of our trip, but here’s the quick version.

In four days Phil and I managed to read on the beach with swimsuits on in 80-something degree weather, have a bite in a Christian-themed cafe, camp in a rain-soaked state park outside of Raleigh’s national airport for an evening, hike the lovely Cox Trail at Eno River State Park, get some confused directions another state park (almost causing brain seizures on our end), set up tent in front of a prime piece of lake real estate, hit up 2 wineries and a B&B and ate dinner atop a mountain blanketed with iced covered trees and snow. Lots of extremes.

A little crazy, a lot of adventuring and map trickery and quite a bit of fun in retrospect.

During Hurrican Fran, the river rose over this footbridge!

The mighty neptune holding a pissed off tortoise.

Phil and I are leaving the city just as it warms up and heading to even hotter climes. Virginia Beach and South Carolina for some resting and fun times. One look at my nice kitchen nook of cabinets and shelves before I head to the wilds of Congaree Swamp National Park and some campfire cooking.

Sometimes I get a bit obsessed with a vegetable. For a while, it was okra sauteed over high heat with a liberal dousing of crushed red pepper flakes. Then I got into a brussel sprouts phase. Brussel sprouts any way are fine in my book. In the middle, there was a cauliflower period. Roasted cauliflower and cauliflower steamed with some carrot ginger dressing are delicious, but one of my favorite ways to eat cauliflower is by making mashed “potatoes.” It couldn’t be simpler and is delicious. I suspect if you add a ton of butter and cream they would beat out even the best mashed taters, but I like a lighter version. We had some last night with another favorite - asparagus flashed in a pan with some garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. This was the first time I used chives with the cauliflower and they lent the mash a minty glow. You could always make it for St. Patrick’s day, but it’s a quick side for any day of the week.

Chive & Garlic Mashed “Potatoes”

Ingredients
1 head of cauliflower, washed
2 cloves garlic
handful of chives
2 tablespoons light sour cream
salt and pepper to taste

To Do
Boil a half pot of salted water or get a steamer ready (I like using a steamer, but used the boiling method last night). While the water is boiling, remove the heart and roughly chop the cauliflower. If you don’t have a food processor or stick blender, chop the cauliflower finely - it will be easier to mash by hand.

Boil or steam the cauliflower until tender. You’ll have to keep an eye on this depending on how finely you chopped the cauliflower. When a fork can easily pierce the cauliflower, it’s done.

Drain and then place into a food processor with a chopping blade. Pulse and add the garlic, chives and sour cream. Keep pulsing until a creamy mixture forms. If you need to add more sour cream or a bit of milk to get a creamier consistency, go for it. Add salt and pepper to taste. Now, if you don’t have a food processor, you can put everything in a bowl and mash it up with a stick blender or just use a traditional potato masher and whisk. Get some elbow grease in there! When its mashed to your your hearts content, reheat for a bit on a pot over the stove. If the puree seems a bit watery, reduce it a bit by heating it up without a lid on the stove while stirring. Serves about 4.

This post is not about basketball. More like how crazy March is and I’m only in the second week. This weekend MiG had a show on Friday (thanks Jenny!) and then a house party in D.C. which didn’t end until the wee hours of the morning. The morning in which time “sprung” forward. I am exhausted. Thanks a lot to Matt for hosting the party and letting us crash on his floor and Berg for putting it together. Both shows were a lot of fun, but house parties are my favorite places to play. People lose their inhibitions a bit more (could be the free-flowing booze) and are just friendlier before, during and after a set. Nothing great to report on the food front. I was going to take pictures and describe things I ate while on the road for a short while, but it wasn’t worth it. A real tour will warrant some interesting food tidbits, but this jaunt was too short.

Got home and wanted something sweet so I whipped up some chocolate and butterscotch cookies with applesauce subbing in for butter. They came out great. Not too chocolately or heavy, just enough to satisfy a sweet craving. No recipe because I have no idea what the measurements were. I eyeballed the whole thing. There was some wheat pastry flour, regular AP flour, applesauce, a capful of oil, a handful of butterscotch chips, oh and oatmeal, cocoa powder, a bit of brown and white sugar and baking soda. Baking is a science that I sometimes don’t have patience with.