Month 5 day 13: Souffles

Today I made:
Spinach Arugula and Parmesan Souffles, Cooking Light June 2011

Experiments weren't working as planned this morning so I decided to come home and make souffles for lunch. I only had 2 eggs and I'm leaving soon for a conference and don't need leftovers anyway, so I halved the recipe and made two personal-sized souffles. It's kind of a lot of pans for two servings, but oh well. I had a bunch of arugula left over from the salsa for the fish, so I used that in place of spinach.

This recipe is weirdly ordered. For example, step 2 is to cover the ramekins with breadcrumbs. They will then be set aside for about half an hour, and there will be a lot of waiting time when this could be done at a later point. Step 3 is to cook spinach. Again, this will be set aside and not used until later. Step 5 is the step that should come first, which is to mix egg whites with cream of tartar and let sit for 15 minutes at room temperature. And that's basically the last step... so if you were following along with the recipe as written, you now just watch an episode of Arrested Development while you wait for things to sit. Really this should all be in reverse order-- let the egg whites and cream of tartar sit, meanwhile make the white sauce, which needs to cool for 10 minutes. While that's cooling, you can easily do the spinach part, and then everything is ready to come together at the same time. BAM!

Anyway, I love when I get a chance to use my Le Creuset ramekins. I only have two, (another reason why it was good to half the recipe) but they are so cute!

The souffle didn't really rise or anything, but it is still light and airy just because the egg whites have been whipped. I got hungry soon after, but I guess that is to be expected since really this was just one egg with some things mixed in it.

For dinner I fried up a sausage (left over from the polenta dish) with some bell peppers and had it with pasta. I grated some robusto cheese on top. It was surprisingly good for having so few ingredients. Just trying to clean out the fridge before the trip!

So I think this is it for Month 5! It was a short month, and while many of the later recipes tasted good, I am sick of them after eating them for several days in a row :-P

June's best recipes:
I think we would both have to go with the Mexican dinner! G might put in a plug for the next day's frozen hot chocolate too. Why not make it with Abuelita and serve the two together?

Month 5 day 12: Monkfish with peach salsa

Today I made:
Grilled Halibut Monkfish with Peach and Pepper Salsa, Cooking Light June 2010
with white corn cheesy grits

This was a nice recipe. Shaw's miraculously had ripe peaches-- this never happens. They've been making my room smell amazing and I've been enjoying eating them, so I was almost hesitant to use the rest of them up on this, especially since it uses a habanero pepper and I thought there was a chance I might not be able to eat it :-P A good number of the reviews say that it was way too spicy, although I didn't taste much spice at all. It makes me a little paranoid that all the pepper was at the bottom of the bowl and I will get it tomorrow, but hopefully it will be ok. It's very fresh and delicious.

I walked to Whole Foods for the fish since I was getting a late start and the Shaw's fishmonger closes early. This recipe calls for halibut, but WF didn't have any. They had monkfish and I was curious. The fishmonger said that it tastes like lobster. I'm not a huge lobster fan, but I decided to just try it for fun. The taste isn't really similar at all, but the texture is. It was a very mild flavor-- I think people who don't normally like fish would be fine with monkfish.

The bad thing about monkfish is that raw monkfish looks just awful:

Like some harvested organ or something. Luckily it is more appetizing once cooked through.

I wanted to eat this with cous cous, but we were out, so I went with grits instead. I picked up some robusto cheese at WF so I put some of that in at the last moment to melt.

Month 5 day 11: Sausage+polenta and muffins

Today I made:
Parmesan Polenta and Spicy Sausage Sauce, Cooking Light May 2011
Tuscan Lemon Muffins, Cooking Light May 2011

I planned to make a different recipe today, either one for Asiany tuna or one for halibut with peach salsa, depending on the availability of ripe peaches. But by the time I got to the grocery store the fishmonger was closed up for the evening so that didn't work out. I remembered that there was some polenta tomatoey recipe with sausage, and figured I probably had most of the necessary ingredients at home as long as I picked up some tomatoes and sausage. I thought I remembered the word "spicy" in the title so I bought spicy sausage, although when I got home I realized the spice is from red pepper, and it was supposed to be sun-dried tomato chicken sausage. I cut up a few sun-dried tomatoes to put in the sauce and didn't put the full amount of pepper to make up for it. I didn't have fresh basil or oregano, so I used dried. This was a good recipe, and I think G would like it too, so I will save it. We enjoy polenta! But I didn't think that the Parmigiano-Reggiano flavor made it through, so next time I would either add more or just use normal (cheaper) parmesan cheese. The sausage was good!

After dinner I made lemon muffins. They're made with ricotta cheese and olive oil! It's a bit unusual, but they are very soft and moist. The lemon flavor is actually pretty subtle, even though it has a full lemon's worth of zest and juice. It could use more though.

I meant to eat salad too, but ended up eating muffins instead :-P Does it count as a vegetable if it is in a flower cup?

Month 5 day 10: Japanesey tofu two ways

Today I made:
Udon Noodle Salad with Broccolini and Spicy Tofu, Cooking Light May 2011
Mashed Tofu Salad (白和え), Food Network Magazine June 2010

 I wasn't super enthusiastic about tonight's dinner; Japanese recipes in these American magazines usually aren't as good as you expect/hope. I'm not entirely sure if that's just the recipes themselves or the ingredients. The udon, for example, just didn't taste very good. Tofu in America is usually pretty bad too. I got this tofu at the Korean store a few blocks away. It was some Korean brand because the Japanese brand whose name I recognized (House Foods) had an ad for "The Croods" on it, which took away from its Japan cred. The tofu was fine, but nothing special. I miss my Obaachan in Kusanagi! She ran a store that sold only tofu and tofu-related things (including shira-ae like this, but with more ingredients and much better, which she would sometimes throw in my bag as a bonus) and used an abacus to calculate the total price. The tofu there was great.
The sauce was good, a little spicy though. I didn't have the patience to drain the tofu as long as I should have, and so it seemed a little wet when it came out of the oven. I couldn't find broccolini at the store, so just used normal broccoli. I used sesame oil instead of peanut oil, because sesame is the best. I also subbed pumpkin seeds for cashews, which I don't particularly like. I think this salad would be ok with a different brand of udon (don't get Kame), but I won't save it. The shira-ae was fine, but not that exciting... it seems a little lacking to just have spinach. If I were making an -ae of some sort, it would be goma-ae with sesame paste.

Month 5 day 9: White bean burgers

Today I made:
White Bean and Sage Pita Burgers, Cooking Light June 2011

This was pretty easy for a veggie burger. The onions and garlic are sautéed a bit first, but otherwise everything just gets dumped in a food processor/blender and pulsed, so it's very quick. The recipe made a big deal about how sticky and hard to scoop it would be, but I just used my hand and guessed at the amount instead of using a measuring cup, so it was fine. Another change I made was to use walnuts instead of almonds because I couldn't find any... although I usually have a bag in the freezer at all times. This really does need to be cooked on medium, and with enough oil to coat the pan. The first batch I made got burnt, but the next batch I made was fine. I bought these orange and yellow tomatoes thinking they would be more interesting, but they're not that flavorful actually. I thought this sandwich tasted good, but I don't think that G would have cared much for it. I would recommend it for people trying to be gluten-free (without the pita) or vegetarian.

Month 5 day 8: Salmon with potatoes and Kale Slaw

Today I made:
Grilled Salmon with Chorizo and Fingerlings, Cooking Light June 2010
Green Cabbage Coleslaw: Kale and Parmesan variation, Every Day with Rachael Ray June 2012

This was a ton of food! I was so full, in a good way.

The June 2010 issue of Cooking Light is obsessed with Spanish chorizo. It's been in two of the recipes I've made from it so far, and I think it was in a few others in the issue as well. Anyway, that's kind of nice because it comes in a big package, so I just finished it off with this dinner. The chorizo, onion and garlic, and baby potatoes get braised in broth until soft, so this is a pretty hands-off dinner. I used that time to make the kale slaw.
It's a favorite thing for these magazines to have one recipe followed by several variations on it. In this case, there was the green cabbage cole slaw followed by ten variations. But it's hard to know how to adjust the original recipe. The kale variant, for example, said to make the green cabbage slaw but with kale instead of cabbage, an apple, parmesan cheese, and subbing EVOO for mayo and lemon for vinegar. But then, do you still put caraway seeds? Not that I was going to anyway, but it seems like you might, and that would not mix well. Or carrots? I left them out because the picture didn't show any, but technically if you followed the recipe it should have been kept in. And, I didn't end up doing the first step of the original slaw recipe, which was to soak the cabbage in ice cold salt water for an hour. Not sure if that was really intended for all variants, but I wasn't going to wait that long. This ended up tasting really good, but I think that's just because Parmigiano-Reggiano is the best ever. It reminded me of a Caesar salad, maybe again because of the cheese. G doesn't like mayo so he normally doesn't like any slaw. I am also not a big mayo fan, and I historically have not liked cole slaws, but there have been so many in the magazines this year that I feel like I have made several by now. I think he would like this one though, because it's more just like a salad, and he loves kale (but maybe not raw?). I wonder what it would taste like to sauté this just a bit. The apples might become soft and sweet? There is plenty left over, so I might give it a try.
Anyway, as soon as the potatoes are softened, it's just grilling the salmon (on a grill pan, for me) for a few minutes and then it's all ready.
When I bought the salmon, I noticed it was not boneless, so I asked if there were going to be a lot of little tiny bones. The woman felt around on the fillets for a little bit quietly (that should've been a tip off) before saying that she didn't think it would be a problem as long as you took out the piece of the backbone. Well, that doesn't come out that well, and yes, there were a ton of little bones to take out :-P It's so hard to cut raw fish though, and once it's cut it just flakes apart on its own... so maybe I should've just grilled it bones and all and worried about them later.

Yakitori Zai

Today was our day at Yakitori Zai. They have been open about a year I think, and they used to do cultural classes where they taught things like how to wear a kimono or how to make yakitori. They got too busy though and have put these classes on hiatus. What they have started doing are lunches-- ramen lunches. Yum! So today the New England JET Alumni went to Yakitori Zai for a special class. We got free ramen (I had the tonkotsu tsukemen-- chilled noodles, pork, and soft-boiled egg served with a warm pork-bone-based broth), and then we made several skewers of thigh yakitori. This was all free to us. I still don't know why this happened, but I'll accept it. Given their (fairly high) prices, this was probably about $40 of food for each of us :)

Tonkotsu tsukemen

After we ate our ramen, the head chef demonstrated how to cut up a chicken, taking apart and saving all the pieces. At this restaurant, they serve skewers of tail, for example. Now, I've certainly cut up whole chickens before, but somehow the way he deconstructed it there were all sorts of muscles that I have never noticed before. After watching him we had our turn with a second chicken. Everyone was shy, so I went first to take off the tail and pop off the legs. It was difficult, especially if you're trying not to fling chicken juices on everyone. I certainly don't remember all of the different steps and parts, even having seen it all twice through.

After we finished that, it was time to grill up some yakitori. This was a little bit like a cooking show in that the chickens that we just cut up were whisked away and some pre-made skewers were brought out instead. The chickens we had cut were for broth-- they are old chickens, so their meat is too tough for making yakitori, at least here, where they are very particular. They try to get as much organic and cruelty-free ingredients as possible, and the grills run on imported white charcoal.
The skewers are brushed with sake on both sides before going over the charcoal. After they are completely cooked through, they are dunked into sauce (tare) or sprinkled with salt and pepper (shio) and put back on the grill. The shio ones are done soon after, but the tare ones are dunked one more time into the tare before being ready.

Yum! Ready to eat!

 These plates and the vase-type cups that collect the used skewers were apparently made by autistic students at a local school that has ceramics facilities. So just all-in-all this place is trying to source everything in the best way it can.

Thanks to NEJETAA for the event and the pictures I stole :)