I started with just over a half pound of flank and sliced it thinly across the grain – perhaps somewhere between 1/8 and 1/16 of an inch. I wanted it thin, but not so thin that the meat would fall apart when tossed in the wok. I marinated the sliced pieces in a mixture of hoisin sauce, soy sauce, chili sauce, Chinese cooking wine, five spice, and a little bit of cornstarch as a thickener. This is where it’s up to you to find the best combination. I’ve tried this a few times, all with different proportions and even a few different ingredients (e.g. oyster sauce instead of hoisin); I can’t seem to screw it up, but each batch has had a different flavor. The meat should marinate for a half hour or more.

After the marinating was complete, I blanched a handful of cut broccoli in boiling water for about 10 seconds and removed it to a strainer to drain. I then fired up the wok, got it up to temperature with a tablespoon of sunflower oil, and dumped in the entire meat and marinade mixture. (By this time, the meat had absorbed most of the marinade and there wasn’t much left to splatter as it hit the oil.) Just as the meat was losing the last of its pinkness, I added the broccoli and a handful of raw sprouts, continuing to toss for another minute.

As the meat continues to cook, it starts to release some of the marinade that it has absorbed. What initially may seem a fairly dry dish while it’s in the wok actually ends up having a bit of flavorful sauce that blends nicely with a side of rice. The meat/broccoli proportions gave me enough for one complete dinner plus a lunch, and the meat releases even more of the marinade in the microwave the next day. All in all, this is a pretty basic dish that’s very forgiving in its ingredients.

This dish is extraordinarily easy to make. (Recipe here.) If you can chop something, boil it, and make sure it doesn’t boil over, that’s about 90% of the work necessary. Typically, Thai curry with chicken is just chicken and potatoes; however, the flexibility of Thai food makes it quite easy to add other things. Take pad thai, for example. Use chicken? Use shrimp? Use both! No peanuts? Use cashews. You can get away with substitutions or adding a lot of things not in the formal recipe.

The same flexibility holds true for this recipe. I had a handful of Brussels sprouts left, so I decided to boil them separately and add them at the end of cooking. It added some color to a tasty, but typically bland-looking meal, and gave me an easy serving of vegetables without having to make a side salad. The sprouts also didn’t muck with the taste of the curry.

Accompanied with jasmine rice, this is a very filling meal. Just a note on the rice maker: these things are essential for pretty much any kitchen. They making cooking rice quick and easy, and there’s no danger of burning or having pots boil over. Of course, if you’re trying to make flavored rice or Persian tadig, you can’t do it with a rice cooker like this since additives can quickly gum up the inside. The rice cooker does pretty much one thing, and does it well.

Sorry I didn’t get more pictures. Frying the steak can get pretty messy even with a mesh guard, and I was just trying to manage the oil flying around the kitchen. But here’s how I made both parts, which turned out quite well.

The fries

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Slice one russet potato into 10-15 pieces; don’t peel it. Soak the slices in cold water for about 10 minutes and dry thoroughly. Put the slices into a Ziploc bag with about a tablespoon of sunflower oil, seal, and shake until all pieces are coated.

Now, here’s the fun part. The depth of the flavor using only sunflower oil is pretty shallow, so dice a slice of raw bacon, add it to the bag, and shake some more. Dump it all out onto a foil-lined baking sheet, bacon pieces and all, and bake for about 35 minutes. I added salt and pepper about 10 minutes before the potatoes were done.

The steak

With about 15 minutes left on the potatoes, heat a frying pan on high. Meanwhile, take a nice thick rib eye, dry it with paper towel, and rub in salt, pepper, and real maple syrup. You can also use sugar, but maple syrup adds a little bit more flavor.

Once the pan is hot, add sunflower oil and a piece of butter to the pan in roughly equal amounts. Judge the amount so that the pan bottom is just covered. When the oil/butter mix is hot, gently add the rib eye. Depending on thickness and desired doneness, cook the rib eye 3-4 minutes on each side. I go for 3 minutes a side, which puts a thick rib eye at medium-rare and is short enough that the oil won’t start to smoke.

The finish

By now, you should have a cooked steak on a plate and potatoes nearly finished, but still sizzling in the oven. Take the steak pan, pour off most of the oil, and put the pan back on the burner. At this point, you’ve got a lot of options on how to do the reduction. I added about an ounce of white wine, sliced portabella mushrooms, and a tablespoon of sour cream. Stir and scrape until you’ve got a nice sauce, and pour over the steak as desired. Pull the potatoes out of the oven, and you’re done!

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Pad thai was not one of those dishes I expected to turn out well. It’s a mess of different ingredients, different cooking times, and ingredients that behave differently than one might suspect. The rice noodles, for example, are never really boiled – they’re softened in cold water and then fried, during which they have a fantastic ability to stick to the bottom of the wok.

Add in the fact that the prep time for the multitude of ingredients was typically far more than I normally tolerate, and the odds of success really were not good. But now I’m hooked. I’ve made this dish twice, and will probably make it a third time soon. Why? It works. It adds diversity to my diet. It tastes good. Plus, it makes two dinners and a lunch.

It’s not all that bad for you either. Probably the worst ingredient is the amount of sugar; the sauce recipe calls for 1/4 cup, but only half of the sauce recipe goes into one wok’s worth of pad thai. I also use sunflower oil for frying, since it’s healthy and doesn’t impart any flavor as olive oil might.

The real pain of making this dish is shopping for and prepping everything that you need to make it. That’s something that I think I can handle. The recipe’s linked here if you want to give it a shot.

So, to make a mai tai, you will need the following:

• 2 oz. of rum (see above for two potential brands)
• 1/2 oz. of Curaçao (triple sec, Cointreau, Citronge, etc.)
• 1/2 oz. of orgeat (almond) syrup
• the juice of one whole lime

Pour everything into a shaker with crushed ice, shake, and serve. Garnish with a wedge of lime.

The color is right on this one, but I didn’t get around to crushing the ice which would normally fill the drink from top to near-bottom. Also, the more appropriate glass is a double rocks glass. But the taste is right. Some recipes suggest a little bit of simple syrup as well – if the drink is not sweet enough for you, 1/4 oz. of syrup will do the trick. I think these are plenty sweet enough already.

Always on the lookout for nice kitchen appliances, I bought a Breville sandwich press about a year ago at Tuesday Morning. The model was being discontinued ostensibly because it had flat griddles as opposed to the increasingly popular griddles with grooves. But I actually prefer the flat pans, since the cooking is more even, and if I want to fry a sandwich in butter I don’t need to come up with creative ways to keep the butter in contact with the bread. Also, for a sandwich like a reuben, I prefer the consistent toasting to “panini stripes.”

Having finished the toasting, I put the reuben on a plate with some pretzels and homemade applesauce. I’ve really been trying to get through as much of the applesauce as possible, since I’ll be moving in a couple of months and whatever is in the fridge is not coming with me.  I’m down to one jar in the freezer from an original supply of six. (Cornell Orchards had 10 lb. bags of apples 2-for-1 at the end of the season in 2007, and all 20 lbs. ended up as sauce.)

Since I still have pastrami left, this will probably be lunch tomorrow as well.

]]> http://www.moschella.net/blog/2009/03/pastrami-reuben.html/feed 0 http://www.moschella.net/blog/2009/03/sangria.html http://www.moschella.net/blog/2009/03/sangria.html#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:23:32 +0000 Joe http://www.moschella.net/blog/?p=126 I like my sangria a little on the tart side, and this version is pretty much as basic as it gets. No peaches, pineapple, or melon. Just wine, brandy, citrus fruit, juice, and sugar. Peaches are okay*, but once you get beyond that, it really starts to take on the character of punch [...]]]> I like my sangria a little on the tart side, and this version is pretty much as basic as it gets. No peaches, pineapple, or melon. Just wine, brandy, citrus fruit, juice, and sugar. Peaches are okay*, but once you get beyond that, it really starts to take on the character of punch that you once made in a bucket at a house party. Not that that’s a bad thing, but why make life more complicated?

To start, you need a bottle of dry red wine. The bottle above is a rich Portuguese and it’s almost not dry enough, but I have a whole bunch of this stuff and it was easier to use this than go out and buy something else. Note to Ithacans: Northside Wine & Spirits has a Portuguese section that they import directly for their store. I’ve tried quite a few, they’re all really good, and not available elsewhere in the US.

Here is everything measured out.  The recipe (below) calls for 1/2 cup of sugar, which I would probably use if the wine were a truly solid dry. However, I only used about 1/4 cup since some of the fruit in this wine will help pick up the slack. Use your judgment based on the wine; maybe start with 1/4 cup and go from there. You can always add more later. It’s a bit more difficult to take the sugar out once it’s already in.

The end result is eminently drinkable, with the caveat that a couple of glasses of this stuff will make for a very unproductive evening.

• 1 lemon, 1 lime, 1 orange
• 1 1/2 cups of brandy
• 1/4 – 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cup of fresh orange juice
• 1 bottle of dry red wine

Slice the fruit, place in your pitcher with 1/4 cup of sugar, and mash it up a little bit to release some juices.  Add the brandy and mix well. Let it sit for a few hours in the fridge. Then add the red wine and OJ, return to the fridge overnight, stir, and taste. Add more sugar if necessary.

* Just my opinion, but if you want peaches in wine, you’re getting closer to a dessert than a drink. Try the Italian pesche al vino instead, which is basically just ripe, peeled peaches marinated in red wine with a little bit of sugar.

This recipe is made with a standard vanilla frozen custard recipe, to which prunes soaked in Armagnac (plus some of the syrup) have been added. It’s a darker color than the Sud Ouest version, as well as a bit more mellow. Wolfert’s recipe is a custard-based vanilla ice cream – my guess is that the Sud Ouest version is just milk and cream with no egg. Also, the mellowness of Wolfert’s recipe likely comes from the prune and Armagnac syrup, as opposed to just adding straight Armagnac, which I’m guessing is what Sud Ouest does. The aftertastes are equally unique, with Wolfert’s recipe having better combined the two flavors, while the Sud Ouest preparation gives you a refreshing cold blast of Armagnac across the palate.

This recipe is very easy to make, because it requires no more than giving the prunes two soakings (once overnight in chamomile tea to rehydrate, two weeks or more in Armagnac), and then combining with the custard base in the ice cream maker. The alcohol keeps the final product nice and soft even after several weeks in the freezer, so not only is it easy to make, but easy to keep a supply. Thankfully, the tasty pruneau d’agen, the French prune that goes into this recipe, just happens to be the same strain that Americans know as the California prune, so the featured ingredient is easy to come by. (Sunsweet Gold Label worked very well for me.)

Added bonus: if you use the Wolfert recipe for soaking the prunes, you have enough for two batches of ice cream, plus a small container of Armagnac prunes left for snacking.

* Since this ice cream is first cooked with egg yolks, it’s technically a frozen custard and not an ice cream.

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I bought a new flat-bottomed wok after coming back from China, and it works well with my flat-burnered stove. One of the first things that I made was a favorite Chinese dish of mine – twice cooked pork. For my first time making the dish, it was a pretty successful experiment. I used a combination of a bunch of recipes, and am still working on the best mix of ingredients (which will be posted and linked in the future.)

The final product turned out a little more dry than I would have liked, so I’ll probably double the sauce mixture and add more as necessary while I cook. Another reason for the dryness could have been due to the type of pork used; all of the recipes from my Chinese cookbooks call for pork belly, rather than the much leaner pork loin that I used.

One thing that I have quickly learned from wok cooking is that your mise is extremely important. I knew this already from being a Bourdain fan, but it’s so important with the wok. One of the hallmarks of wok cooking is extremely high heat, so timing is essential. By the time things start going into a hot wok, it must be tended religiously; you can’t go and chop some more green onions. So, two conclusions: do your mise, and use more fat.

It’s a convenient tool if you always have some kind of dessert after a meal, since the contents of the Dessert Whip sit patiently in your refrigerator until you’re ready for a shot of sugar. Plus, it’s a great way to make use of excess cream. I usually have at least a pint in the fridge for various recipes that need a few tablespoons, but I never get through the entire carton before it starts to go bad. If you dump the remaining cream into the charger – particularly with a shot of brandy or cognac – you get another 10+ days of use out of it.

My final picture of the mousse is not the best since the flash really brings out the air pockets – it looks and tastes much smoother than shown here. The best description of the texture is like a very, very light buttercream frosting with a bitter edge. This is what goes into the Dessert Whip to make chocolate mousse:

• 14 oz. chilled heavy whipping cream
• 2 tsp. instant espresso
• 4 Tbsp. sugar
• 4 Tbsp. cocoa powder
• 2 Tbsp. cognac or brandy

As a tip, when you make the chocolate mousse, it is important to whisk out as many lumps as possible before pouring into the canister, as it is possible to clog the nozzle. Also, you do need to shake the canister after charging it, but don’t shake too much, or it will solidify the mixture inside the canister making it very hard to dispense. You still want to be able to hear a thickened “slosh” when you shake it.