Asian Lettuce Wraps

This dish - whatever recipe you use - is too satisfying and too easy to not be in your repertoire.

I used an online adaption of PF Chang's formula. It was very good, but I'll probably try a different recipe next time. Ketchup in the sauce, really?

This is great for summer, and you certainly don't need the wok.

Angel Food Cake

Ah, this most finicky of cakes. My first attempt tasted fine but was, texture-wise, a disaster. So I grabbed a friend, who had made them before with her mother, and we tried again.

Success! Not 100%, but pretty close. My big mistakes the first time around were in not understanding how delicately the batter must be handled.

1) I hadn't whipped the egg whites long enough. Alton's recipe says "medium peaks" - what you really want are stiff peaks. AKA as much air as you can get in the egg whites without breaking them.

2) The flour MUST be sifted first, and the additions of the flour mixture to the whipped egg whites must also be sifted in. Old 50s cookbooks talked about sifting all the time - a step that is largely absent from modern baking instructions. You can't skip it here, though. [Full disclosure: I don't have a sifter, so I used a tea ball. I bet a fine-mesh strainer would also work.]

3) When sifting the flour mixture into the egg white mixture, don't add too much at a time, and fold it in *gently*.

4) Bake the cake until the top is REALLY golden brown. On attempt #2, we took it out just a little too soon, and lost about an inch of volume due to some collapsing. Another 5 minutes in the oven halted any further collapse, but we did lose some fluffiness with that mistake. Be careful checking doneness with a wooden skewer, as apparently even this step can lead to losing volume.

5) Cool the cake - for an hour minimum - upside-down. The first time around, I just flipped the cake pan upside down on a cooking rack - that only worked because the cake had about half the desired volume. The second time, we balanced the cake upside down with the central piece on a can, although apparently you can also put the upside down cake on a full wine bottle to hold it while it cools.

So, after driving yourself nuts with the paranoia - you are done! Enjoy with fresh fruit! I think the next attempt will be even better, as I have a much better idea now of what to do.

Chairman Mao's Red-Braised Pork

This recipe was the favorite dish of Mao Zedong - a fact which will no doubt prompt everyone who reads this to run out and buy pork belly immediately. Fuchsia Dunlop, while in Hunan province to research her cookbook on the region's cuisine, was told frequently of the dish's benefits:

"In keeping with traditional Chinese gastronomy, which seeks to make a medical virtue out of every dietary predilection, the people in Mao's home village, Shaoshan, recommend red-braised pork as a health food: 'Men eat it to build their brains,' Chairman Mao's nephew Mao Anping assured me when I met him there a few years ago, 'and ladies to make themselves more beautiful.' His friend and neighbor, the Shaoshan communist party secretary, told me he ate two bowlfuls a day to keep his intellect in shape."

[Excerpt from Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook - Recipes from Hunan Province]

I can't speak to the brain building or beautification properties, but this is a very tasty dish requiring relatively few ingredients.

Your first task is to track down pork belly. A surprisingly difficult thing to do in most standard grocery stores. The local Giant, for example, was quite obviously a no-go. The guy behind the meat counter at Harris Teeter didn't even know what pork belly was (it's the cut from which bacon is usually made, before the curing and slicing) and had to get the butcher - who then told me they didn't stock it. The local international market, though? Score! They had packages and packages of the stuff.


After pork belly, you need a some wonderfully aromatic spices: cinnamon stick and star anise, along with sliced ginger and a few dried red chilis. The bottle with the red label is Shaoxing wine - a standard pantry item if you're doing Chinese cooking, and carried by every Asian market.





First, the pork belly is plunged into boiling water for a few minutes until partially cooked. It looks SO appetizing afterwards. Not.






Out comes the wok. Some sugar and oil go in for a few minutes, until the sugar has melted and caramelized, then all the other ingredients are added - the pork belly, the wine and the aromatics. The whole thing is barely covered with water and the heat is turned down. Set your timer and walk away for 45-50 minutes. Except you can't, because this smells AMAZING. Reminiscent of pho broth, which has pork bones and broth in it, and I suspect some similar spices.



Towards the end of the cooking, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce. The sauce does not get very thick, even after reducing.

I think I reduced the sauce a little too far, just because there wasn't enough of it. The flavor of this dish is wonderful, with the spices and chilis (there is some slight heat), but as most of the flavor is in the sauce and not in the meat itself, you are constantly dunking the pork into the sauce. This is quite fine, we just didn't have enough to dunk in. Next time I think I won't reduce quite as long.

Plain rice is the preferred accompaniment. Fried rice wouldn't really work, I think. Especially since I usually tank up on garlic when I make fried rice, and there is no garlic in this dish. It wouldn't fit the flavor profile, which has a somewhat delicate quality with the star anise and cinnamon.

The pieces of cooked pork belly are delicious - some of the fat you want to eat, and other parts you pick around.

I would definitely make this again.

Emeril's Cajun Jambalaya

I've used Zatarain's mixes in the past to make jambalaya - I'm not usually a boxed dinner person they're great to put tasty food on the table really fast. When I wanted to try to make jambalaya from scratch for the first time, where else to look but Emeril?

I used all three proteins as his recipe requires - shrimp, chicken and andouille. I haven't cooked with shrimp hardly at all at home - this might have been my first time, now that I think about it - and I accidentally purchased shell-on shrimp that also needed de-veining. Not a huge deal, but a smelly job and one I'll probably side-step next time by buying shrimp with these things already done.

The single biggest problem I had with the recipe was the amount of time it said it would take for 3/4 cup of rice to absorb 3 cups of chicken stock. The recipe says this step will take 15 minutes. Anyone who has ever made risotto knows how unrealistic this is. It took closer to 45 minutes. Not a huge deal, but we were really hungry after waiting the extra half hour.

The recipe has a good back heat that you notice on the first bite but which builds up in your mouth after several bites. We love spicy food, so this wasn't a problem for us, but it might be for the spicy-sensitive. I might add a little more of the Creole seasoning next time, but otherwise there was a good depth of flavor from all the different seasoning ingredients.

The star, perhaps not surprisingly, was the andouille. We were all picking the sausage slices out of our bowls. Overall a very good recipe, that might approach "wow" status with a little more tinkering.

Herbal Marinade for Steak

This marinade came from Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc at Home and is very different from the marinades I usually break out for beef. There's no acid - no citrus, no vinegar.

It's a great change-it-up treatment for steaks. The marinade smells amazing when you prepare it, with all the garlic and fresh herbs, and the meat takes on a wonderfully herby flavor.

I'm thinking this might be good on chicken as well, although I haven't tried it.

Bacon-Stuffed Waffles

This is a fun variation on basic waffles if you like the combination of sweet and salty/savory, and it works particularly well with my favorite waffle recipe - one from the New Basics cookbook that includes some whole wheat flour and cinnamon.

Pour about half of the amount of batter you usually use on the heated grates, and lay a couple strips of already cooked bacon across them. (Don't use raw bacon, as the waffles won't be in the iron long enough to thoroughly cook it.) I need to cut my bacon slices in half so they fit.







Then pour more batter on top of the bacon, before closing the iron and waiting a few minutes for the waffles to cook.








The waffle batter cooks up and around the bacon, so it's only visible from the ends.

Good maple syrup is a must!

Thai Chicken Tacos

I've come out of my cooking dormancy in a big way. I'll have made more than four new things this week alone! However, of all of them, this recipe clearly took first prize. It came from Better Home and Garden, June 2011.

The recipe said to marinate the chicken for only an hour, but as anybody who knows anything about marinating knows, that is not long enough. I put it in the marinade for about six hours.

For the slaw, I managed to get to Publix just as they were clearing out the wilted produce, so I went with a pre-chopped slaw mix for the lettuce and carrots and then picked up the green onions, cilantro and radishes separately. I left out the peanuts.

This dish was incredible! Richard says it is his new favorite. The flavor of the chicken completely awed me. I have never done any cooking with sriracha or fish sauce before now, but they definitely won a spot on the staple list. The slaw played very nicely with the chicken. The one minor thing I might consider changing is the tortilla. The corn flavor was almost too much. I might like to see how flour tortillas work.

My biggest dilemma was what to serve on the side. I don't know how one would classify this dish...Thai-Mex? Cali-Thai? Not sure. I ended up breading and frying some zucchini-very tasty.

Butternut Squash Gnocchi

I've been making ricotta gnocchi for several months now with great success, but I had not been brave enough to try my hand at potato gnocchi since Em's and my utter failure at it circa June 2009.

However, a friend had given me a butternut squash and although I love my curried butternut squash soup, I wanted to try something new with this delicious gourd. Enter butternut squash gnocchi.

To begin with I did not want to buy a ricer for the potatoes and presuming that people made potato gnocchi before Williams Sonoma existed, I decided to try it with my 100-year-old, French rotary grater. The results were great! As you can tell, I was very proud of this.

The squash roasted in well under an hour, after which it was pureed and reduced. I then gently mixed, kneaded, rolled and cut the squash-potato dough.

I refrigerated it for a couple hours and then made my big mistake. :( I usually read recipe reviews religiously, but for some reason skipped them for this one. The recipe said to cook the gnocchi for 15-17 minutes, which I thought seemed excessive. It was excessive. They came out well over-done. The sage and brown butter sauce might have been good if the canvass had been better. I served it with sauteed baby eggplant.

This was, however, not a total failure. I learned a lot. First of all, in my ricing reading, I noticed many people recommend ricing potatoes for mashed potatoes. After seeing the light and fluffy results of ricing, I definitely will try this next time I make mashed potatoes. Secondly, I reinforced my emphasis on reading reviews. All the reviews said 15 minutes was too long. Lastly, I could see myself trying potato gnocchi again but probably not this variety. I couldn't really taste the squash at all

Fruit Leather

Matt is a huge fan of fruit leather, so I was pretty excited when I found a recipe for making it at home. This is a great use for fruit you can get in bulk - I used apples here. Spending money on berries, kiwi, etc. so that you can intentionally dry out all that great juice doesn't seem cost effective.





The formula is very easy. Peel/core/chop your fruit of choice, and add it to a large pan with half a cup of water for every 4 cups of fruit.





Simmer the fruit and water, covered, for about 15 minutes, or until it's cooked and softened. Mash the fruit up a bit, and taste it. I added just a little bit of sugar (the apples were pretty sweet on their own), a couple shakes of good cinnamon and little bit of lemon juice to make the flavors pop. I did another 15 minutes of cooking as well, just because I'd chopped the fruit unevenly and wanted to make sure it was cooked through.





When you're happy with the seasoning, toss the mush in the blender. Or the food processor. Or a food mill. You basically want to puree the heck out of it, until it's very, very smooth.








Spread some microwave-safe plastic wrap (the more sturdy variety) on a baking sheet, and spread the fruit puree over it evenly.







The directions say 140 degrees for 8-12 hours. The lowest my oven would go is 170, so we set the timer for 9 hours and went to bed.









This is what we found in the morning. The puree had shrunk a little with the drying, and was smooth on top.










After just a couple minutes of cooling, it peeled easily from the plastic wrap.









Matt's first comment was "Did you try this? This is awesome!"

I don't get the whole fruit leather thing, but I don't need to. :)

Chicken Pot Pie

Despite Florida's reputation for heat, our winters here in North Florida fluctuate wildly, and we have some genuinely cold days. Pot pie is perfect for those days, but I've out-grown frozen pot pies. Em recommended this recipe, and since she generally has good taste, I tried it out.

I used a rotisserie chicken to save myself some trouble, and I also used the crust recipe that the blog link has listed. I did boil the carrots and potatoes in the same pot. Other than that I followed the recipe.

To me, the most important thing about a pot pie is the crust. No argument. This crust was fabulous and I loved that I got to use my food processor for it.

Em had told me how much she enjoyed the bechamel, although it took more time to make. I cannot claim to be such a big fan of this bechamel. I found it too thick and I didn't feel that the extra time added anything to the flavor. It also seemed to be too little quantity for the pie, and most of it absorbed during baking. Next time I plan to use my stand-by bechamel recipe instead.

The one thing that I really didn't like in this recipe was the potatoes. When reading the recipe, I realized I'd never had a pot pie with potatoes in it. There's a first time for everything, but I will not use them next time. I think they may have been the bechamel-absorbing culprits.

As far as first pot pies go, this was a good start.