Lunch
Sauteed Squid w/ Chili Oil and Fried Garlic
So I discovered the world’s greatest condiment. It comes in a little jar and it’s called “chili oil with crunchy garlic”, which you have to admit sounds pretty awesome. Like many of the best condiments, this one is Asian (Japanese to be precise): I found it on a shelf at Pearl River. In a store otherwise full of schlock I plucked out the sole worthwhile item.
The label is entirely accurate, a virtue not to be taken lightly. Slipping in my spoon was like dipping a toe through a wave receding back into the ocean: halfway through the liquid, you’re met by a crunchy wall. My new little bottle was packed-packed!-half-full of, as advertised, crisp little bits of fried garlic. So I started doing something uncharacteristic: eating oil. On closer examination, the bits were a lovely mixture of fried garlic and a few other things equally delicious, the identity of which was frustratingly mysterious. I thought I sensed some dried fish in there, but the label said chilies and, oddly, almonds.
A proper condiment is like popcorn in a movie theater: without it, the main event is palatable but bland. For a condiment to attain pantheon status, its absence must render the central item irrelevant and pointless. A plate of fries with no ketchup, for instance. Munching fried garlic, chilies, and almonds; I couldn’t imagine a life without my new friend-in-a-little-bottle.
This stuff can be drizzled on noodles, meats, fish, chicken, added to stews, stir-fries, over toasted bread for a sandwich or a dipping sauce, etc. A bowl of noodles coated with the oil sounded particularly delicious, but too easy. I came up with squid, sliced thinly and tossed with the oil, scallions, black sesame seeds, and salt.
Ketchup is powerful; just ask the fry. But this stuff has a far wider range. In a forthcoming post I’ll attempt to recreate it in the kitchen, but for now I’m happy to enjoy my discovery and spread the word.
Oh yeah, it’s called Taberu Rayu.
(NOTE: Unless your squid/pan size ration is precise, you’ll probably end up with some excess squid liquid, in which case just drain it off in a colander. In general you shouldn’t crowd pans, but I don’t like a lot of extra dirty dishes. Also, to serve as an hors d’oeuvre we plated the squid in Chinese spoons. I’m not sure of any other practical way to do it. Maybe a little glass and a tiny fork or something. On a plate in lettuce cups would work. Finally, like steak tartare this is a season to taste kind of recipe. Just don’t add too much stuff; you’ll overwhelm the squid.)
Sauteed Squid in Chile Oil with Fried Garlic
Serves 2 as an appetizer, 4 as an hors d’oeuvre
2 tablespoons oil
1/2 pound squid sliced very thinly, including tentacles
¼ cup Taberu Rayu (chili oil w/ fried garlic)
2 tablespoons black sesame seeds or roasted sesame seeds
4 tablespoons thinly sliced scallions, whites only
salt
- Heat the oil to smoking over high heat in a large pan. Add the squid and sauté for 45 seconds. Remove to a colander (SEE NOTE) to drain excess liquid.
- Add squid to a bowl and toss with remaining ingredients. Season with the salt and serve either on separate plates as an appetizer or small spoons as an hors d’oeuvre. You could simply set the bowl in the middle of the table with chopsticks.
Spring Salads: Fiddleheads and Favas
Myth: a salad doesn’t have to be seasonal to be great. It just has to be well-made and well-designed. Like a Caesar of whole leaves dressed lightly with a fresh light dressing of crushed anchovies, garlic, olive oil, and maybe an egg. Or a beet salad with a dollop of yogurt or crème fraiche, and dill. I’d happily eat those year round.
Still, perfect, seasonal ingredients guarantee a great dish, regardless of its crafter’s skill. Finally, it’s springtime, which means a lot of weird-looking sprouts, shoots, edible flowers, and so on. Fiddleheads, with their tightly coiled stalk reminiscent of a bike wheel, may be the oddest. Like a crummy musical, the taste is far less interesting than the appearance, but springtime salads are about subtle flavors, light dressings, and an almost food-styled beauty.
We used fava beans which, like fiddleheads, are subtle in flavor, which is why a few cloves of garlic confit and a light grain mustard vinaigrette boosts the whole dish and makes it a perfect spring salad. Frisee, tasteless, but beautiful, adds a nice touch, but feel free to wander the yard and pull up weird (hopefully safe) shoots. All in the name of a spring salad.
Fiddlehead and Fava Spring Salad
Serves 2
1 cup fiddleheads
1 cup fava beans, shelled
1 bulb garlic, peeled into individual cloves
2 tablespoons grain mustard
medium handful frisee, trimmed of green
olive oil
salt and pepper
- Bring a pot of salted water to boil and blanch the fiddleheads and favas, about 2 minutes. Refresh in cold water, peel the skins from the fava beans, and reserve both.
- Add the garlic cloves to a small pot and cover with olive oil by about an inch. Place over very low heat and cook for about 1/ 2 hour. The garlic should be meltingly soft and lightly colored but not brown. If it’s bubbling too much, lower the heat. Remove from heat and let cool then Strain the oil and reserve for another use. It’s very handy.
- For the broken mustard dressing, whisk the mustard with 1/3 cup olive oil in a small bowl and season with salt and pepper. It won’t be fully emulsified.
- Finish the salad by tossing the vegetables with the vinaigrette very gently. Divide among plates and arrange three cloves of garlic confit inside each portion as well as a light drizzle of the dressing.
Corned Beef Sandwich the Right Way
There are several hurdles for the novice dry sausage maker: preservatives, patience, and precision. Fermented, dry sausages (salamis, sopppressata, etc.) take a long time, and, more to the point, must be hung in enclosed areas varying in temperature and humidity. It’s like trying to perfect a golf swing inside a tiny room. And so we made corned beef.
Homemade corned beef is simple and satisfying in the manner of any successful project: brine and simmer a brisket. The sole sticking point being the use of aforementioned preservatives, which are optional anyway, since grey corned beef is as tasty as pink corned beef. But a few tablespoons of pink salt profoundly boost one’s pride.
Any respectable corned beef lover knows that it belongs in one place: between two slices of good rye bread. To fry it up in a pan as hash or serve hot in a stew is a betrayal of all that’s pure and right in the world. Back to the sandwich, for once I have no opinion, as both are great: 1.) mustard (cole slaw optional) 2.) as a Reuben-warm, under a blanket of melted Swiss, sauerkraut and a smear of Russian dressing.
I tend to order (in this case, serve at home) corned beef with mustard because it’s about ten times lighter. Also, a good Reuben is tough to find. Often it’s transformed into an open sandwich slop of corned beef obscured under a pile of cheese. Katz’s, where you’d expect to find the genuine article, delivers a phone book thick stack of meat between bread soggy from an equally heavy hand with the Russian dressing. It’s a clumsy, careless product.
Which is why it makes sense to corn your own beef (if that’s a verb). You can craft your sandwich according to personal taste. You don’t need an exclusive cut of brisket, but because it’s critical to have good rye, I’d recommend sourcing that first. Or baking, if you know about that stuff. Then you’ve got a truly homemade sandwich.
(NOTE: they use ground ginger, which I loathe.)
Corned Beef Sandwich w/ Mustard (from Ruhlman and Polcyn’s Charcuterie)
Makes a lot of sandwiches
1 gallon water
2 cups salt
½ cup sugar
5 teaspoons pink salt
3 garlic cloves, minced or crushed
4 tablespoons Pickling Spice (see below) (halved-otherwise you’re stuck with a
dusty can of excess pickling spice)
One 5-pound brisket
Deli or Dijon mustard
Good, seeded Rye
1. Combine everything except the brisket and 2 tablespoons of the pickling spice (not the bread or mustard if I really need to say that) in a pot, bring to a simmer, stir to dissolve, cool to room temperature and refrigerate until cold.
2. Place brisket in brine (we used a giant ziplock-two actually) for 4 or 5 days. Remove, rinse under cold water, add to a big pot, cover with a lot of water and the remaining 2 tablespoons of pickling spice. Simmer 3 hours. Remove from heat, let cool in liquid. Lift out and refrigerate. Slice and make a sandwich.
Pickling Spice
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 tablespoon red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon allspice berries
1 tablespoon ground mace
1 cinnamon stick
5 bay leaves
1 tablespoon cloves
1. Mix in a bowl. How’s that?
Baked Eggs w/ Shrimp and Capers
The French may be annoyingly provincial (to be polite) about food, but I must say, they’re damn good with eggs. Short of personally laying one, French folks can do virtually everything with an egg: hollandaise, béarnaise, béchamel, omelets, soufflés, crepes, custards, crème anglaise, and so on.
Given that eggs are extremely difficult to get right, it’s an impressive legacy, much of which gets lost over here, where generally we throw them into a hot pan or a pot of boiling water. If you’re looking to expand your repertoire, Michel Roux’s book Eggs is useful to have around; each chapter begins with a master recipe for that section (pasta/soufflés/etc.), followed by several simple yet pleasing dishes.
We chose eggs en cocotte because of our love for a runny egg, and if you don’t overcook it, a baked egg is the best of all runny egg preparations: unctuous and slightly runny, heightened with a little cream and an assortment of flavorings. The white, usually an unfortunate, tough flap, virtually dissolves in this rich bath.
We tweaked the recipe a bit, chopping up a few medium shrimp instead of using the 48 tiny sweet shrimp called for. I’m grateful for French egg cookery, but making me bust my butt looking for teeny tiny shrimp? That’s cocky.
Baked Eggs w/ Shrimp and Capers (adapted from Eggs, by Michel Roux)
Serves 4
8 medium shrimp, chopped in ¼ inch pieces, tail blanched and reserved
2 tablespoons butter
4 eggs
4 tablespoons heavy cream
24 capers
salt and pepper
- Preheat oven to 325
- Brush 4 ramekins (about 3 inches high and 1 inch deep) with butter on bottoms and sides. Season with salt and pepper. Carefully tip an egg into each mold, drizzle cream over the egg whites, then scatter the shrimp and capers over the yolks. Bake about 10 minutes and serve garnished with a tail.
The Best Sandwich Ever
This one is along the lines of meals I’ll never forget. And not because it was the day our son was born or A.J. Duhe intercepted Kenny O’Brien and wrecked the Jets’ season. Or an elaborate concoction of items assembled in a pan, reduced and strained to sauce consistency. This one was just plain awesome.
It was on our trip to Lugano, Switzerland at a table outside a small but bustling panini joint. They had about 20 panini, all simple, based on prosciutto, turkey, mortadella, and salami. Rather than the standard deli slicer we all know and love (except the guy I worked with who cut off a finger), they use a Berkel hand-cranked slicer, which permits one essentially to shave slices of meat thinner than paper-thin, if that’s possible. Let’s call it tissue-thin.
My sandwich arrived, full of that great prosciutto (did I mention Lugano is in the center of meat-eating country, and the cured stuff is excellent), a few slices of brie, baby arugula, and touch of mustard. Good bread is the key to any sandwich, in this case a fantastic, crusty, black bread with sesames. Each bite was as succulent as the next.
I won’t include a recipe; for this one, you need the right ingredients, and if you happen to have the right ingredients, you don’t need me to tell you what to do with them.
Vietnamese Peanut Sauce
Fish sauce is one of my great culinary discoveries. Not cooking with it, mind you, but the only way truly to appreciate fish sauce: spilled on the floor. You see, don’t cry over spilt milk is nice and all, but you probably should cry over spilt fish sauce.
I was in cooking school and a tray containing several half-closed bottles tipped out of its slot in the cart and crashed to the ground, splattering the stuff all over the white tiled floor. It was like when the chem. teacher magically altered the color of flame: an instant reek arose from that shiny floor like a fishy nuclear cloud.
In fact, fish sauce, like wine, is chemistry in a bottle: a product of fermentation, in this case fish rather than grapes. But the idea is the same: take a natural product and let it rot until it’s really tasty. Of course, spoiled grape juice sounds better than spoiled fish, but without fish sauce there’d be no Vietnamese food, and I’d rather live in a world without wine than a world without Vietnamese fare.
Yet fish sauce, by itself in, say, a cup, is pretty gross. You need to mix it with other stuff, which is how we come to the other wonder of this cuisine: the marriage of these seemingly yucky products. It can act like salt, seasoning rice and other items, but it’s magical when whisked with lime juice, a little sugar, shallots, and herbs; squirted in to finish a curry; or sizzled at the end of a simple stir fry.
In this dish, it’s stir fried with ground pork and two other items which aren’t great on their own: tamarind water and fermented soy bean paste. Add a little water and you have a slightly chunky sauce to be used as a dip for vegetables, noodles, salads, etc. On paper it reads like the recipe for a nasty fraternity drink: scoop a bunch of stuff into a cup and drink. But this funky marriage works beautifully. Just don’t spill it on the floor.
(NOTE: tamarind water is essentially the strained liquid from tamarind pulp mixed with water. For the offbeat ingredients, go online. Our Thai market is Bangkok Center Grocery-they have a website. The sauce goes well served as a dipping sauce for vegetables. You can pour it hot over a salad of cilantro, scallions, and lettuce with or without beef or chicken.)
Vietnamese Peanut Sauce (from Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet)
¼ cup roasted peanuts
2 teaspoons peanut oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons ground pork
3 tablespoons fermented soybean paste (dao jiao in Thai) (NOTE)
2 tablespoons tamarind water (see NOTE)
1 cup water
1 ½ teaspoons sugar
1 or two bird chiles, minced
squeeze lime juice
- Grind peanuts to a coarse powder and reserve.
- Heat a wok or skillet with the oil over high heat. Add garlic, cook 15 seconds till lightly colored then add pork. Break it up, and when changed color, add tamarind water and soybean paste, stir.
- Add ½ cup water, most of the peanuts, sugar and chilies, and stir. Add up to ½ cup or more of the water. It shouldn’t be a thick liquid, not watery.
- Use as a dipping sauce for vegetables, to pour over salads or stir fries.
Chicken Livers w/ Bacon and Honey
Like a plate of risotto or a new pair of shoes, chicken livers have to be just right or they’re no good at all. Cooking chicken livers is a perilous but very brief journey. To stick with metaphors (not the same one as above), it’s like skydiving: there’s always that chance everything could go to hell, and very quickly.
Even the pickiest eater will be happy with a medium steak versus the medium rare one he desired. No one, however (with half a palate), likes an overdone chicken liver. And by overdone, I mean sitting in the pan a few seconds too long. Overdone, a chicken liver becomes dry, grey, and unpleasantly gamy.
Enough with the apocalyptic warnings. Cooked well, and a chicken liver is extremely delicious: creamy and only very slightly gamy, crusty from the hot oil, and ready for instant munching. You can drop them on pasta, poke in a few toothpicks for an hors d’oeuvre, or toss in a warm salad.
Oddly, the other ways to enjoy a chicken liver involve less attention to the aforementioned precision timing. In other words, chopped liver, pate, or mousse. These are the ultimate life-saving, compensation recipes. They involve the injection of plenty of fat-cream, chicken fat, butter-which transforms the slightly overdone liver into something creamy and delicious.
Not surprisingly, bacon fat is a natural aid to the chicken liver cooker. It bastes the livers as they cook, resulting in a crispy, bacony, livery delicious little bite, which would fit perfectly on any tapas plate. A healthy drizzle of honey lifts the dish.
Chicken Livers Wrapped in Bacon
Makes 4 or 5 tapa
¼ pound large chicken livers, trimmed
2-3 strips bacon
2 tablespoons olive oil
honey
pistachios
- If the livers are large, cut to about 1 to 1 ½ inch pieces. Otherwise leave whole. Halve the bacon widthwise and wrap each liver. You should need only 2 slices.
- Heat the oil over high heat in a small pan until nearly smoking. Lay in the livers seam down. Cook until golden and nearly crisp, about 1 ½ minutes. Flip, cook another minute and then roll to cook on all sides. They will take about 4 minutes. If necessary, reduce heat.
- Serve immediately on a plate drizzled with honey and pistachios.
Broiled Sardines w/ Dill and Blood Orange
Some foods are better in theory than on the plate. Homemade tongue, for instance. I like a good tongue sandwich once in a while, but I’ve made it at home, and each time, as if struck by amnesia, I forget my previous efforts and the accompanying mild revulsion. It’s one thing to sit at Barney Greengrass making your way through excessive pickle piles, and be handed a delicious tongue sandwich with mustard on rye. It’s quite another to simmer the thing at home, chill it, and stare at it in the fridge, testing your nerves, daring you even to touch it.
I’ve often found sardines to be a better concept than actual food. They convey images of Mediterranean beach grills, smoldering embers, and olives. But they’re often extremely fishy. This past summer, blinded by a Mediterranean haze, I bought a handful and threw them on the grill, only to be disappointed by their intense flavor.
That oiliness, however, is also the upside to a sardine. The fat and oil allow the fish to char, creating a beautiful, smoky, crust to offset the fishiness. Get a little acid and herb into the flesh and they’re even milder. They’re also great in a sandwich. So is tongue, by the way, as long as someone else makes it.
Broiled Sardines w/ Dill and Blood Orange
Serves 2 as an appetizer
1 blood orange, sliced paper thin, each slice halved to fit inside the fish
1 small handful dill, coarsely chopped
zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon Szechuan peppercorns, ground finely
8 sardines, cleaned
¼ cup olive oil
salt
- In a small bowl mix the dill and lemon zest. Stuff the sardines with the mixture and blood orange slices. Lay on a baking sheet, season with salt and the Szechuan peppercorns. Drizzle all over with the oil and shake the tray to gently roll in the oil.
- Broil about 2 minutes per side, or until nicely colored. Eat immediately.
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.
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.
