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Tuna Tartare Bite
We seldom eat in the sort of restaurant that serves an amuse bouche. The amuse bouche, a tiny bite before you get the menu, is generally found in fancy restaurants. It’s a sign of graciousness and a signal that you’re about to embark on a luxurious culinary journey. It’s also a sure sign that the bill will be grossly enlarged, a tab that sure ain’t paying for the amuse bouche or the guy who assembled it.
The brilliance of the thing, you see, has nothing to do with its substance, and everything to do with the bottom line. A shot glass of creamy potato-leek soup? A pastry cup filled with mushrooms? A cherry tomato carved in the shape of a football and injected with cactus syrup? Free stuff? They’ve got you hook line and sinker.
The best way to enjoy an amuse bouche is at home, as part of whatever you’re eating that night. If you have split pea soup lying around (as we did last week), and someone visits for dinner, add a little cream, pour a little into a shot glass and serve. It’s kind of a nice gesture. Even better, if you’re having fresh fish, lop off a tiny segment, chop it up into a tartare and serve over ice.
If you’re having a sub from White House Subs in Atlantic City, just eat the thing. Hard to deconstruct a sub into an amuse bouche. It seems tartare might be expensive, but at, say, $15 a pound for good tuna, 4 oz sets you back 4 or 5 bucks. So if you’re feeling fancy, go ahead, it’s a nice bite of fish. Make sure it’s plenty cold.
Tuna Tartare w/ Crème Fraiche (Amuse Bouche)
Serves 4
4 oz fresh tuna, chopped finely
2 tablespoons crème fraiche or sour cream
1 teaspoon finely diced tomato, no seeds
1 teaspoon minced shallot
1 teaspoon minced capers
salt
- Fold the shallot, tomato, and capers into the crème fraiche. Season with salt. If you have a 1-inch ring mold: spoon some tuna into the mold, press lightly, and remove. Repeat with the remaining tuna and refrigerate until cold. If you don’t have a mold, serve in a teeny tiny mound.
- Place a dab of the sauce on top and serve. (the tip of a paring knife works well.)
Polenta Fries with Capers and Creme Fraiche
I’ll never understand some of the stuff people make at home. Crackers, for instance. Or bagels. Or potato chips. Crackers aren’t so great anyway, so what’s the point? And homemade bagels deserve a “nice try” but not much else. Potato chips is possibly the worst idea. After all, you may not live near a great bagel place, but you can get chips anywhere.
I’m not proud to say that once I attempted to create homemade chips. Like most makers of store-intended items, I began with the arrogant notion that mine would surpass the bagged junk consumed throughout the nation. That illusion was shattered the moment I spooned out my first batch of soggy discs. Ratcheting up the flame didn’t help much either; soon my tray was piled high with charred ex-potato shards.
Optimism became disappointment and disappointment became grief. Unfortunately, the more I stared at the oil splatter and ruined chips, the more my grief switched to anger. Were this a movie I would have, whirled about the apartment in a rage, sweeping books off the shelves and throwing plates. But when you’ve become blindingly mad possess a pot of hot oil, the only thing to do is toss the oil out the window, which I did. Luckily, it was late and I lived on a quiet street, but it’s not something I’m proud of.
Years later, I’ve learned my lesson. Making chips and French fries is a waste, but not so making polenta fries. Polenta fries taste extra crispy and, naturally, corny. They’re also pretty simple: they don’t require the two-step French fry process, and all you have to do is chill the polenta, slice and fry. Ketchup with these sounds pretty gross, but whipped crème fraiche or sour cream does the trick.
The moral of the story is to leave crackers and chips to the giant conglomerates. If you have a yen for cooking tasty, fried, crispy snacks, polenta chips is a good option. Incidentally, the morning after my medieval oil dump, I slipped on the stuff, a great moment in culinary history.
(NOTE: these things are pretty delicate, i.e. they break, so when you’re ready to serve, don’t launch them into the bowl, just slide them in.)
Polenta Fries w/ Crème Fraiche
Makes about 3 dozen fries
½ cup instant polenta flour
2 ½ cups water
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cups flour
salt and pepper
1 cup crème fraiche or sour cream
2 tablespoons capers, drained
zest 1 lemon
oil for frying
- Coat the bottom and sides of a standard loaf pan with the olive oil. Bring the water to a simmer in a small pot. Add the polenta in a thin stream, whisking vigorously. It’s done when it thickens and starts releasing from the sides of the pot but is still pourable, 10-15 minutes. Pour into the loaf pan making sure it’s even, let cool and refrigerate until chilled and firm.
- Heat 3-4 inches of oil in a large pot to 325. Meanwhile, invert the chilled polenta and slice into even fries, about 4 inches by ½ inch. Add the flour to a large bowl. Line a tray with paper towels.
- When the oil is hot, dredge polenta in the flour, shaking off excess flour, and add to the oil. Do this in batches and don’t melt your fingers. Use a slotted spoon to swirl them around so they don’t stick and remove to the tray when golden and crispy, 3-4 minutes. Sprinkle with salt. Add the capers and fry quickly until crispy.
- In a small bowl, whisk the crème fraiche or sour cream to stiff peaks and season with salt and pepper. Put the fries in a bowl, sprinkle with the capers and serve.
Scallion Pancakes (and cooking school)
Cooking school is generally a waste of time and money. Articles have been written to this effect (at least the money part), so this isn’t some kind of bitter screed. Grads are stuck with thousands in debt, a situation not uncommon to alumni of all sorts of schools. However, restaurant jobs aren’t exactly the most lucrative gigs. For a starting line cook subway fare is an indulgence.
On the bright side, it does provide you with some funny moments. Such as sausage day, otherwise known as “day of attrition”, as described by our instructor, a bald and voluble chef. Actually, he had it right: my partner and I, half-listening to his instructions, barely trimmed the sinew from the lamb, resulting in a hopelessly jammed grinder. Naturally I backed away and let the teacher deal with it, watching as he tore away at the tangled, shredded tendons, cursing the whole time.
Cake day was another funny one, as a student, told to ice his cake, upturned it into a vat of ice. One time, a student went after his classmate with a pair of tongs, which ended up flying through the air. All eyes followed the soaring tongs, which landed in the giant whirring Hobart mixer, bringing the paddle attachment to a violent halt in a manner similar to that of the tangled sausage grinder.
Less funny was Chinese food day. For debt-laden cooking school grads, memories of Chinese day is enough to prompt thoughts of revenge and instruments of torture. There’s nothing better than being taught how to make Chinese food in a few hours by a guy who knows nothing about Chinese food.
The only thing I recall with any fondness is making scallion pancakes. It’s kind of a simple and cool procedure. Simple because the dough is more or less mix and cook; cool because to the eater, it seems like it must have been a pain to embed all those scallions. Not so. Rolling, cutting, and forming is a snap, and as long as you know how to slice scallions you can make this stuff.
I haven’t made scallion pancakes since cooking school, i.e. in ten years, but, flipping through Corinne Trang’s Essentials of Chinese Cuisine, I passed right by a recipe for today’s post. I’m not sure whether nostalgia or a craving for a simple fried snack made me go and buy a bunch of scallions, but I’m glad I did. Within an hour I was gorging myself on scallion pancakes dipped in soy sauce.
For those of you thinking about cooking school, I just saved you the pain of Chinese day. For you cooking school graduates, I may have churned up some bad memories. Sorry. Soothe your pain with a tray of these things.
Scallion Pancakes (adapted from Essentials of Chinese Cuisine, by Corinne Trang)
Makes 12 pancakes
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons lard, chilled
1/4 cup sesame oil plus another ¼ cup for frying
2 tablespoons kosher salt
8 scallions, roots trimmed, light and light green parts sliced thinly
soy sauce
- Sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl. With your fingers work in the lard quickly until incorporated. Make a well, pour in 1 cup water and stir until the mixture becomes a dough. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead for 5 -7 minutes until smooth. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit half hour.
- Roll the dough into a 12-inch long cylinder and cut off 1-inch long pieces.
- Using a rolling pin, roll a piece into a rectangle about 2 inches wide and 6-inches long, about 1/8 inch thick. Brush with some sesame oil, sprinkle with salt, sprinkle with a tablespoon of scallions.
- To form: roll up the dough lengthwise into a cigar, pinching the seam and ends to enclose the scallions. Then roll into a spiral, press flat and roll into a circular pancake, about ¼ inch thick. Repeat.
- To cook, heat some of the remaining oil in a medium pan over medium-high heat. Fry the pancakes in batches, until golden, about 2 minutes on each side. Serve with soy sauce.
Belly, Belly, and Cheeks (w/ a Thai Salad)
The Brits have fantastic food tv shows. To be sure, they’re full of corny music, camera tricks, and cooked up (no pun intended) suspense. And the formats are often laughably contrived and convoluted. Great British Menu is a Top Chef sort of show: young, skilled chefs compete for a prize. But as with Marco Pierre White’s Great British Feast (no relation)it took me a few shows to grasp the convoluted, windy path to success. Still, they never deviate from the reason for being-the food-which is refreshing for the viewer and often inspiring for the cook.
Chefs over there-and by extension I suppose, the citizens-use a lot of meat off-cuts, a practice which, over here, has only recently gained traction. Watching these shows you realize just how much meat is consumed over there. But they don’t just throw burgers in a pan (though I’m sure that’s popular as well). They seem to embrace the whole animal; there it is, walking around, let’s kill it and eat the whole damn thing. Which is how I decided on lamb belly.
I cook pork belly sometimes; if eating a giant square of bacon weren’t somewhat unhealthy I’d do it more often. Braised pork belly is actually superior to bacon: tender meat, melting fat, and a sheet of crunchy crackling. So when I saw some guy on Great British Menu grill a slab of lamb belly I was compelled to give it a shot. Belly means fat; fat means good. So I headed over to Pino’s.
Naturally he had it lying in the walk-in. A lamb being, well, not a pig, possesses a leaner belly, which-as he smacked it down on the block-looks exactly like wimpy spare ribs. Glancing down to the case to check out the other flesh for sale, I saw a little metal tray of pork cheeks. Another new one for me. (Actually, we did serve veal cheeks once, and I was underwhelmed.) So I left Pino’s and walked home with my bag of cheeks and bellies.
Cuts like cheeks and bellies usually need a little work, in other words a long braise. So I threw them in the pot and braised them together until they became super tender. They were then chilled and sautéed. The result was a spectacular platter of meat. The pork belly and cheeks were excellent, as was the lamb belly, which was in fact a sort of skinny but succulent sparerib tasting of lamb.
To offset the richness of the meat I chose a light Thai salad seasoned simply with lime juice and fish sauce, which is where I departed from the Brits, who apparently like their belly with heavy sauces and gravies. At times so do I, but I had a feeling that my belly full of bellies would need a little relief.
(NOTE: usually you would serve this with the reduced braising liquid. You could glaze the meat with a few tablespoons of the sauce in the frying pan, but we serve simply with a salad. Refrigerate the sauce, skim off the fat the next day and pour it over chicken or whatever. It lasts 3 or 4 days.)
Pork Belly, Lamb Belly, Pork Cheeks w/ Thai Salad
Serves 6-8
3 pounds pork belly, skin on
2 pounds lamb belly bone-in
2 pounds pork cheeks
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
kosher salt
fresh ground pepper
¼ cup canola oil plus more for sautéing later
2 medium carrots, chopped
1 onion, peeled, chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
few sprigs rosemary
chicken stock, at least 6 cups
2 bottles beer, (we used Guinness)
2 medium cucumbers, peeled, seeded, julienned thinly
small handful of fresh mint, chopped
2 small Thai chilies, thinly sliced
3 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
1 tablespoon mirin
1 tablespoon ginger, minced
1 tablespoon shallot, minced
juice 2 limes
1 tablespoon sugar
- Rub the meat all over with the cinnamon. Season well with salt and pepper and let cure for a few hours or even overnight.
- Preheat oven to 300.
- Heat oil in a large pot over medium high until nearly smoking. Add the meat in batches, searing all over until browned, remove to a large bowl. Add the veggies and sauté, stirring, until browned. This whole process will take about 20 minutes.
- Pour in the beer, reduce by 2/3. Return the meat to the pan, making sure that the pork belly is skin-up. Throw in the rosemary and add the chicken stock. It should cover the meat but leave about ½ inch of the pork belly uncovered. Bring to a boil, cover tightly, place in oven and braise until very tender, about 3 hours.
- Remove, let cool in liquid. When completely cool, remove meat gently to a platter. You may want to remove the lamb belly bones, or they may already have fallen out during cooking. Refrigerate until firm. Hey, stuff happens. Strain sauce through a fine mesh strainer into a container and refrigerate (see note) for later use.
- In a small bowl, whisk the fish sauce, mirin, vinegar, lime juice, and sugar until sugar dissolves, stir in the ginger and shallot. In another bowl add the cuke, chilies, and mint. Refrigerate both.
- To serve, cook the meat: slice the belly into portions, about 1 inch thick. If sautéing, heat about ¼ cup canola oil in a large pan over medium heat, add the meat in batches if necessary and cook on both sides until crisp. If broiling, lay on a rack over a sheet pan and cook on both sides until crisp.
- Serve the bellies and cheeks on a platter or individual plates with the salad.
Leftover Steak and Eggs
I ate my first plate of steak and eggs in college at daybreak after a night of drinking. It was at a Boston IHOP and I remember it was very delicious. It is possible, however, that my standards were slightly compromised, no offense to the IHOP chefs. Tastiness aside, I do recall the extreme thinness of the steak; a chewy, overdone affair, a poorly cooked minute steak. But such a cut is precisely what’s called for: it’s breakfast, not a steak dinner; it would be a waste to use a fancy cut like strip or ribeye.
Perhaps because it’s tattooed on my brain as hangover fare, I haven’t eaten steak and eggs since that morning. But as a family man, I find myself living in a universe of leftovers. Last week I ate split pea soup three times; so far this week it’s been slices of Monday’s roast from my man Pino the Butcher.
Pino, actually, suggested steak and eggs as a good leftover option. A sensible and original notion, I gave it a shot. The problem is that I wasn’t sure how to proceed. My recollection from IHOP was that the dish is hot, and I wasn’t about to reheat my perfectly pink steak. Leftover or not, I don’t like grey steak.
And so I hit on cold steak and hot eggs. Hot and cold on the same plate is done all the time. And, more to the point, the only leftover steak is cold steak. It was very good; better than some half-assed, fried piece of gristle. Some cold slices of a good roast, hot scrambled eggs. Steak and eggs for the mature guy.
Leftover Steak and Eggs
For 1, up to 3 days post roasting
3 pound rib roast, with about a ¼ inch layer of fat
3 eggs
touch of milk
coffee
toasted English muffin
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 425. Season heavily all over with salt and pepper. You want a nice crust. Roast on a rack for ½ hour until browned and sizzling then reduce heat to 350 and roast to an internal temp of 130 (for medium rare). This may take another 40 minutes, but check after half hour. Remove and let rest about 15 minutes before carving.
- Over the next 2 or 3 days make sandwiches, eat plain with salt, or make steak and eggs. Scramble the eggs with a touch of milk. Season with salt and pepper. Serve piping hot with slices of steak and buttered muffin and a cup of coffee.
Coffee Granita w/ Whipped Cream
Unpasteurized cheese and creamy scrambled eggs: stuff we don’t eat on this side of the pond but probably should. To this add our current item, coffee granita with whipped cream. If we weren’t so uptight we’d have all of the above and more on the menu. At least with the coffee drink, the issue isn’t health but rather lifestyle: it’s not a Starbucks venti iced latte; you need to sit and chill in a café watch the passersby and eat this sucker with a long spoon and maybe a cookie or a good roll. Let me know if you see this happening anywhere in our fair country.
Basically, this is an adult milkshake: crystal-crunchy, icy coffee lightly sweetened and layered with unsweetened whipped cream. Unfortunately, given the scarcity of streetside cafes and gitanes, that leaves us with two options: AM or PM. AM is no good; granite and whipped cream seems a little much; PM would be okay, except it’s more of an after-dinner, later in the evening drink, which means a 10 PM shot of caffeine, not something I prefer.
But it’s very refreshing and slightly rich, and therefore deserves some respect, so when to eat (drink). I recommend a weekend afternoon. Sunday, preferably, if only because that’s when the newspaper is fattest. Kick up your heels with a glass and a spoon, read about Linsanity and enjoy.
(NOTE: The recipe makes a ton of granite, which lasts about 3 days; scrape now and then. You could easily make half the recipe, but it’s only coffee and water so you’re not being too wasteful. We tried these out in super-small cups, almost shot glasses. For 4 servings in normal-sized glasses, you could add another cup of cream. If you have some left over, whipped cream stays in the fridge for a day.)
Coffee Granita w/ Whipped Cream
Serves 2
¾ cup sugar
2 ¼ cups water
1 ½ cups coffee
1 cup cream
dash of ground cinnamon
- Boil the water and sugar in a pot to make a syrup. When the sugar is dissolved, add coffee. Pour into a container and freeze for several hours, occasionally.
2. Whip the cream to stiff peaks. To serve, alternate spoonfuls of granita and cream in a tall glass. Top with cinnamon and serve.
Apple Cake w/ Gingered Berries
I took our 4-year-old to a playground on Houston and Sixth for a skateboarding lesson. To anyone unfamiliar with New York City playgrounds, I suggest rewatching Sesame Street where the biggest peril I’ve seen is a tiny thwarted fire in Mr. Hooper’s store. With all that jumping and dancing, how falling and bruising isn’t more of an issue I’ll never understand.
As I’ve been learning, the Sharks and the Jets are chumps. The true playground nightmare is its unforgiving floor. It’s cringe-inducing to watch a little kid wobble on a skateboard knowing that he’ll inevitable take a pounding from the cement below his short legs. And sure enough that’s what happened when our kid tumbled off the board onto his soft hands and, tears flowing, bolted my way for comfort.
If urban cement is a kid’s worst enemy, his best friend is a cup of hot chocolate. And so we wandered down Houston to Payard’s place for their excellent version, essentially super high quality chocolate melted, presumably with cream, and poured into a cup.
As he sipped I flipped through one of Payard’s books, Simply Sensational Desserts, a welcome throwback cookbook. The dishes are all classic French items you’d expect to see in the case at, well, Payard’s: Lemon Pound Cake, Dark Chocolate Mousse Cake, Pain d’Epices, Financiers, and so on. There are even dessert soups, which I gather used to be a big deal before they dropped out of fashion.
I appreciate the honesty of these desserts. They taste as advertised: dry and wet folded together along with some sort of zest and baked. And I like that in place of pie and cupcakes, there’s a cluster of loaf cake recipes. Thus, no apple pie but apple cake. Loaf cakes have a bit of sophistication about them. You can’t order a slice of cherry loaf cake at Bubby’s: pie is a rush of sugar and fruit, often warm and served with a scoop of more sugar in the form of ice cream.
Payard’s apple cake is an adult dessert or midday/midnight snack. Not too sweet, studded with a few sturdy bites of apple and raisins and glazed with apricot jam, it’s a subtle slice washed down with a cup of coffee. While dessert soups don’t appeal, the gingered berries he uses to garnish a mango soup, are quite delicious. Lightly soaking the apple cake with the berries and their syrup elevates the dish.
Hot chocolate soothes a 4-year-old who has just been crunched by the cement of a New York City playground. A slice of Payard’s apple cake soothes the soul of an adult who has just soothed said 4-year-old.
(NOTE: the cake is actually better cold the next day.)
Apple Cake w/ Gingered Berries (adapted from Simply Sensational Desserts, by Francois Payard)
Makes 1 loaf (10 servings, depending)
1/3 cup raisins
3 tablespoons dark rum (optional)
1 cup flour
¾ teaspoon baking powder
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 cup confectioner’s sugar
3 eggs
2 apples, peeled and cored
Apricot Glaze
Gingered Berries
- Preheat oven to 325. Butter the sides and bottom of an 8 ½ * 4 ½ * 2 ½ loaf pan. Dust with flour and tap our excess.
- Bring a small pan of water to the boil. Add the raisins, turn off heat and let soften for 10 minutes. Drain, mix with rum and reserve.
- Sift together flour and baking powder
- In bowl of electric mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream together sugar and butter on medium speed until light. Add eggs one at a time until incorporated. You’ll need to stop the mixer and scrape the butter from the bottom occasionally. Mix in raisins and rum. Add dry ingredients on low speed to mix. Spoon half of batter into the prepared pan and smooth out.
- Cut one apple into 12 wedges and arrange in the batter in a line, domed sides up. Spoon the remaining batter over and level off. Cut the other apple into 8 wedges, then half those wedges horizontally and scatter over the batter, pushing in lightly so that just the tops stick out.
- Bake cake 60-65 minutes until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool cake on a wire for 15 minutes. Unmold and brush generously with the glaze. Cool completely before slicing (see note). Serve with the berries in their syrup.
Apricot Glaze
½ cup apricot preserves
½ cup water
- Bring preserves and water to a simmer in a pan, stir till smooth and turn off heat.
Gingered Berries
1 cup sugar
1 piece ginger, about 1-inch long, sliced thinly (1/8 inch), unpeeled
1 pint berries (mixed raspberries and blackberries if desired)
1. Simmer the ingredients in a saucepan, stir to dissolve sugar, turn off heat and cool to room temperature.
Catfish Sandwich w/ Snow Pea Slaw
Consider the fish sandwich. Typically, fish for sandwiches is fried (oyster po’ boys), mixed into a salad (tuna on rye), or compressed into squares prior to being fried (filet-o-fish). While we eat too much meat and fried stuff, seafood does, in fact, present a textural challenge when it comes to the sandwich.
Think of a sandwich as a battlefield in which all the elements fight for distinction. The sandwich maker’s role is peace broker; to harmonize the parties so that each balances the other. Bread, spread, veg, central ingredient: they all have to mesh, or the dish fails.
Fish is tough, as it’s usually soft and flaky and thereby no match for bread or anything else. Hence the proliferation of crunchy fried fish sandwiches. But then the sandwich becomes all about the fried fish; you may as well subtract the bread and eat a bowl of crunchy crispy seafood.
However, what happens if you reverse the crisping process: pan-fry (rather than deep-fry) the fish, and lightly toast the bread? Both are equally crunchy though still soft, making for a nice, harmonious bite. Allowing us to move on to the other stuff between the bread, which is what caught my eye about the Momofuku recipe in the latest Art Culinaire.
I read the recipe for the snow pea slaw and knew it would be good. It’s a simple alternative to cole slaw, and also (obviously) green, which brightens the dish, a very important factor when building a fish sandwich. The slaw is crunchy and, as opposed to, say, a Romaine leaf, actually tastes like something. Top it all off with melted butter and you’ve got a pretty good fish sandwich.
We used catfish because it’s firm and easy to pan-fry. That’s right, pan-fry with a little olive oil, not deep-fry. Other white fish, like cod, hake, mackerel, trout, or bass, would be great. It’s hard to resist eating that catfish, smoking hot and crisp in the pan, but keep your eye on the ball, we’re on a larger mission: to bring back the fish sandwich.
Catfish Sandwich w/ Snow Pea Slaw (adapted from Momofuku via Art Culinaire)
Serves 4
1 pound snow peas, julienned
¼ cup sour cream or crème fraiche
1 tablespoon mustard
juice of ½ a lemon
2 catfish fillets, about 10 oz each
2 sprigs rosemary
1 cup olive oil
8 slices country bread, sliced ½ inch thick brushed with melted butter
salt and pepper
- In a bowl whisk the sour cream, mustard, and lemon juice. Toss in the snow peas, season with salt and pepper and refrigerate.
- Heat the oil in a large sauté pan over medium high. Season the fillets on both sides with salt and pepper. When the oil is nearly smoking hot, slip in the fish gently. Cook without moving until crisp and golden, a few minutes. Flip, toss in the rosemary and repeat. Remove to a tray or cutting board.
- Toast the bread until lightly colored.
- To assemble the sandwich: top bread with about ½ a fillet each then a mound of sprouts, close, and eat.
Salmon Roe Tea Sandwiches
Because we use salmon roe, this qualifies as a seafood recipe. You’ll notice the #INTHESHELL tab. Seafood is, we think, underused and underrated, especially with the current craze over BBQ and pork belly. To encourage fish cookery, we invite bloggers to submit guest seafood posts. Think about it. Now on to today’s item.
Before you start thinking we’re all fancy and have a fridge full of fancy stuff, I should say that we catered a party Sat., which explains the presence of a four-ounce jar of salmon roe in the fridge. As it happens, we did something different with the roe, but should you find yourself with a jar of the stuff, you could do worse than make a little tea sandwich.
Salmon roe is nature’s gift to the hors d’oeuvre world (see previous post on salmon roe sushi): a bouncy, bright burst of brininess the color of a Wyoming sunset. (We were just in Jackson Hole.) We use it almost as often as we do cucumbers, another bedrock of the hors d’oeuvre universe. Mild, crisp, pretty, likeable, easy to slice and dice, cucumbers are made for little bites. Conveniently, roe and sushi marry well, an arrangement beneficial to both caterer and grazer.
And who doesn’t like a good tea sandwich, particularly of the cucumber variety? It doesn’t get simpler: a round of cucumber, a piece of brown bread, and some cream cheese. But it works. If you have it around, a little salmon roe on top is quite delicious. Just spoon it over, you don’t have to get elaborate.
But we happen to have a drawerful of ring molds and tiny spoons, so why not get fancy?
(NOTE: Most stores sell cocktail bread (I think). If not, just use regular-sized. Cream cheese also works, but it should be softened so that it spreads. If you buy the cocktail loaf, you’ll have about 30 slices remaining. Make more cucumber tea sandwiches minus the roe.)
Salmon Roe and Cucumber Tea Sandwiches
Makes 8
½ medium cuke, peeled, sliced thinly, about ¼ inch
8 slices pumpernickel, rye, white cocktail bread (see NOTE)
½ cup sour cream (see NOTE) mixed with 1 tablespoon horseradish
2 tablespoons oil of any kind
4 oz salmon roe
few sprigs dill for garnish
- Grab a 1 ½ inch ring mold and brush inside with a little oil. Lay a slice of the bread on a cutting board and top with 1 teaspoon of the sour cream. Top with a cucumber right in the center and press lightly.
- Place the mold on top and push down, cutting through. Leaving it in place, use a little spoon to add 2 teaspoons of roe onto the cuke and spread gently into a single layer.
- For the tricky part, remove the ring: run a paring knife around the bread to loosen and remove the ring without disturbing roe. Garnish center with a sprig of dill. Repeat. Refrigerate until cold and serve.
Lychee Shots w/ Szechuan Pepper
There’s little I pretend to know less about than cocktails. I think I’d have a better chance of fixing a busted radio. Then again, maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Just standing behind a counter within arms reach of hundreds of backlit bottles containing liquors of all shades doesn’t make you a mystic. Anyhow, most bartenders either flip open beers or pour wine.
And then you encounter those drinks which reveal your ignorance. A Sidecar at the Carlyle, “Tajmopolitan” at Surya, Lemongrass Iced Tea at Lani Kai, or “Bonded with Spice” at the Crosby Hotel. We discovered the Tajmopolitan on a snowy night six years ago. We were in the West Village and ducked into Surya to escape the cold. A handful of Tajmopolitans later, we were best friends with the bartender and decided to make it our signature wedding drink.
Cranberry juice, lime juice, Chambord, vodka, served in a martini glass and dusted with ground cinnamon. That’s the Tajmopolitan. Like a marshmallow floating atop the cocoa, the cinnamon makes the drink. As does the lemongrass in the Lani Kai iced tea, or the blast of cayenne in the Crosby’s apple drink (apple brandy/honey syrup/allspice/lime juice/hot sauce/cayenne/Granny Smith garnish).
Cocktails are tricky because everything’s mixed up in a glass. You can’t use a fork to fish out stuff you don’t like. And then there’s the alcohol factor: unlike real food, you have to work around a mandatory constant, the booze. With this one, I decided to stay in the comfort zone and take an hors d’oeuvre approach. As with any dish, I balanced the sweet and savory, treating the booze as a savory ingredient, countering the sweet with a blast of vodka. Or, in this case, vodka made spicy from Szechuan peppercorns.
The final touch, a few spoonfuls of red food coloring, is for visual effect. If you can’t mix drinks, you may as well fake it. We happen to have a jar of dark crimson food coloring in the spice drawer. It’s for tandoori chicken, with which I’m quite comfortable.
NOTE: Lychees aren’t in season (who knew?). Use canned. Chinese spoons look nice, but shot glasses would also be great. If you have neither, soak the lychees in vodka for a while, drain and serve inverted sprinkled with a bit of crushed pepper works well. Because Chinese spoons tend to fall over unless counterbalanced, lay down the lychee before the vodka.
Lychee Vodka Shot with Szechuan Pepper
Makes about 8 shots
½ cup chilled vodka
1 tablespoon crushed Szechuan peppercorns
2 tablespoons red food coloring (we used tandoori coloring)
8 peeled lychees
Lime zest garnish
1. Whisk the coloring and vodka in a measuring cup or small bowl. Place a lychee on each spoon and pour a tablespoon of vodka in each. Sprinkle with peppercorns and garnish with lime zest.
