Experiments in Asian Cuisine: Singapore Noodles with Shrimp

Both Marshall and I adore Asian cuisine.  We have become lovers of Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai food; always looking for that amazing hole-in-the-wall local place where the food is delicious and authentic.  I know I'm always on the look-out for amazing ramen (if you've got suggestions, let me know!).  The problem is, while I can easily cool in the Western-European style, I am a complete klutz when it comes to Asian-style cooking.  I honestly would LOVE to find an Asian cooking class and take it at some point in my life.  I know that a white girl like me could never really master the true art of Asian-style cooking, but I would really like to get close.  There's a philosophy and a method to Asian cooking that I just can't seem to grasp.  I loved having an Italian grandma, but if only I could've had a Chinese grandma, too!  There's this balance of fast cooking and big flavors (without being TOO big) which I fumble all the time.  Hell, I can barely steam rice!  One of our wedding registry gifts was a wok.  My sister gave it to me for my birthday before the wedding and, while I was looking forward to receiving this gift like nobody's business, I was also highly intimidated.  My sister also got me this beautiful Asian cookbook from William and Sonoma with amazing recipes from all over the Asian continent and sub-continent.  So far, Marshall and I have experimented with the noodle recipes, which have so far yielded acceptable-to-good results.  This particular recipe, though, came from the all-wonderful-and-amazing America's Test Kitchen: Cooking for Two 2010 from last year.

I know Marshall is always up for cooking Asian-style foods, even if he isn't always up for going out for Asian-style food (still haven't figure out how that works...), so I decided to give this recipe for Singapore Noodles with Shrimp a shot.  Since we live in such a culturally diverse area, we have access to many Asian markets and we can usually find the new or sometimes "odd" ingredients listed in some recipes.  Luckily, all the ingredients listed for this recipe can easily be found at your local Safeway in the "Asian aisle".  You could also find them at other more special stores like Whole Foods.  All in all, this turned out to be a successful dish and I didn't fumble it too much while cooking.  Since stir-frying is a very fast-paced method of cooking, it's is invaluable to have all your ingredients prepped (chopped, sliced, measured, etc.) before heating up the wok or pan.  This prep stage can be time-consuming, but it is definitely worth it.  This is one of the many reasons why I absolutely love my set of mise en place bowls from William and Sonoma.  They are a godsend when it comes to cooking this way!

No grill? No worry!: Steak Tacos with Sweet and Spicy Pickled Onions

A good portion of our last summer was spent discovering and perfecting the Mexican street taco.  We made batch after batch of carnitas and carne asada with various toppings, kept simple to be authentic, and hit our stride after a while.  Marshall's birthday last year even had a taco theme.  We had a huge BBQ at my parent's house and backyard with close to 30 people and Marshall and I cooked up chicken, carnitas, carne asada, and marinated portobello mushrooms.  I threw together homemade guacamole, pico de gallo, and salsa verde, as well as the below-mentioned pickled onions.  Lime wedges and warm Trader Joe's homemade corn tortillas were provided and we flew through all our food.  Everyone enjoyed our tacos and Marshall was delightfully pleased with his grilling and cooking skills.  Since I'm usually the one to cook for our parties, it was great to hand over the responsibilities to Marshall for his birthday. 

After my previous post (in addition to the above paragraph) talking about how great it is to grill, it seems rather scandalous that I would follow up with a recipe for steak tacos without using a grill.  But I am.  The thing is, these steak tacos are awesome.  They're not carne asada (only modeled after), but they do taste authentic and entirely delicious.  They're also very easy to make AND, like I said earlier, they don't need a grill.  You actually don't miss the lovely grill flavor, since the steak is so incredibly tasty and succulent.  This was also a wonderful way to make really great steak tacos when it's too cold to grill or when you don't have a grill at all.  You don't need an indoor grill (like a George Foreman), either, which is great.  These are perfect apartment tacos-you can ferret away for an evening to the dusty streets of Mexico City and sink your teeth into these incredibly tender and tasty tacos!

Oh, and did I mention the recipe is built for 2 people?  That's right.  I found this awesome recipe in America's Test Kitchen's Cooking for Two 2010 collection.  You can, of course, increase this recipe as needed, but it's great for being on your own or sharing with the one you love, like, or just live with.  :)

Best Salad Ever: Bacon, Lettuce, and Cherry Tomato Salad with Aioli Dressing

Everyone knows that bacon makes everything better; I think it's common knowledge by now.  What I think is the epitome of food perfection is making a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich at the height of tomato season.  Soft sourdough surrounding crisp clean leaves of lettuce, sweet juice tomato, with crunchy and salty bits of bacon, all blanketed with creaming mayonnaise.  I don't know what else is better than that.  Oh wait, I do - this salad I found in last July's Bon Appetit!

You can almost forgive the absence of sourdough bread in this salad, although you can do what we did and toast some yummy ciabatta bread brushed with olive oil and scraped with garlic.  This salad is light and refreshing.  The presence of the crispy bacon standing out prominently from the crisp Romaine lettuce and sweet, juicy cherry tomatoes.  What is great is that the aioli dressing on this salad is not over-powering and it doesn't drench the salad at all.  There is just enough dressing to add enough flavor and creaminess to make you reminisce about the equally delicious sandwich variation. 

While you can certainly make this salad all-year-round, you'll miss out on how sweet and tangy cherry tomatoes can be in their height of their respective season.  Living in California, though, we are spoiled and can find rather tasty cherry tomatoes (and other small tomato varieties) even in the dead of winter.

This is a hefty enough salad to stand as a main dish, although can easily  be a side dish.  However, I wouldn't want this as a side dish as I would find myself eating more of this salad than anything else on my plate!

Running out of Gas: Latin-Spiced Flank Steak and Fresh Corn Salad

When Marshall and I moved in together almost 5 years ago, one of the appliances we knew we had to buy was a grill.  Unfortunately, due to city ordinances and apartment leasing policy, we reluctantly had to go with a propane grill.  We found a really nice Weber Q and have been grilling on a regular basis throughout each summer ever since.  I've even gotten the hang of grilling and I love being able to make an entire meal on the grill (stay tuned for my all-grill-meal fajitas, coming soon!).  Unfortunately, there are some draw-backs to using a propane grill.  I do not relate to my good friend, Hank Hill - I happen to like the charcoal flavor left on burgers, steak and chicken.  I can certainly still taste the meat, but the charcoal adds this extra boost of flavor.  Yes, with propane grills you do indeed taste the meat and not the heat; I definitely can't argue with that.  One night, though, we ran into the other problem with propane grills:  running out of gas.  With charcoal, you can run to the nearest 7-11 and get a small bag of briquettes, but with propane?  If it's after 6pm, you're totally out of luck.  Marshall and I found ourselves in that same situation the night we were making Latin-Spiced Flank Steak.

We didn't want to completely give up on having flank steak for dinner.  So, we turned to other cooking methods.  While it might not be a direct substitute, we pulled out our George Foreman and fired up the lean, mean, fat-burning, grilling machine.  The George Foreman definitely has its strengths.  It's convenient and fast, but it works best when cooking evenly-sized portions of food.  A flank steak is never completely even and that unfortunately led to some uneven cooking of our deliciously-seasoned steak.  Also, after not having used our Foreman Grill in ages, we completely blanked on the cooking time and over cooked our steak.  The end product wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't what we both hoped it would've been.  I'm definitely looking forward to when we start firing up the grill again and trying this recipe.  I know it will be delicious!

Not all was lost that night, though.  The suggested side dish for the flank steak was a Fresh Corn Salad with Black Beans and Tomatoes.  I love a good black bean and corn salsa and this sounded delicious and a perfect accompaniment to our steak.  It did not let us down and it was very good.  We had fresh sweet corn, tender beans and summer-fresh tomatoes and it all led to a wonderful salad.  I think the part I liked best about this salad was its dressing.  I would put this salad dressing (and I did end up putting this dressing) on everything.  It's got a nice acidity and just enough spice to liven up your everyday green salad.

Monochromatic Deliciousness: Orecchiette with Cauliflower, Anchovies, and Fried Croutons

I was never a big fan of cauliflower.  It was always displayed sadly next to the rest of the cut-up vegetables with ranch dressing at potlucks.  No one ever touched it either, which didn't endear me to the little white florets.  Plus, when I did try it, it had no flavor whatsoever.  I stayed far away from cauliflower until a few years ago.  My mom and I decided to share a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) box one summer.  I enjoyed the fresh vegetables and fruits, but was at a loss when I kept getting head after head of cauliflower.  I would stare at them wondering just what to do.  Luckily, this particular CSA group (Two Small Farms) included a weekly newsletter with their boxes, including a musing on the vegetables and fruit in season and recipes using that week's veggies.  Luckily for me, one week found a recipe for cauliflower.  It was very simple:  oven-roasted cauliflower florets and garlic, sprinkled with fresh lemon juice.  I made it with a slight hint of apprehension, but was greeted with the best tasting vegetable I had ever had.  The florets were browned slightly and had a very slight sweetness.  It was so good that I changed my mind about cauliflower from then on.  I was happy to use it in soups and stews and roasted sides.  However, I still will not tough the stale little white florets on store-bought veggie trays.

This brings me to a great recipe I found in Bon Appetit early last year which coupled my new favorite, cauliflower, and a very old favorite, pasta and croutons.  Originally, I was apprehensive, only because of the lack of color.  White on white on white?  It seemed rather monochromatic and I really like to vary the color of food on my plate.  But this was pasta with roasted cauliflower and zucchini:  how bad could it be?  Well, it turned out to be as far from bad as possible.  Marshall and I were surprised at how the cauliflower and zucchini mingled with the salty anchovy and tender pasta.  Plus, every so often, the texture is broken up by the crunchy friend croutons.  It's a very comforting dish; it warms the soul.  In fact, if I might be honest, I made this dish again tonight.  I will definitely keep making this dish whenever I want a thoroughly tasty pasta dish!

A Meat-and-Potatoes Kind of Night: Chicken Vesuvio

Another intriguing recipe I found in Cooks' Illustrated "Cooking for Two" collection from 2010 was a dish called "Chicken Vesuvio".  The picture, on which I sometimes rely heavily, showed what looked like seared chicken breasts, peas and roasted potatoes.  Now, you may look at some of the other recipes I have written about and think "why would she pick this one?"  I think it boiled down to simple curiosity.  I've never been much of a "meat and potatoes" kind of person.  While I do love roasted chicken and potatoes, I certainly do not turn it to it often.  I do find that kind of meal composition to be really heavy and sometimes too much for when Marshall and I usually sit down to dinner:  around 7:30 or 8pm, sometimes even close to 9.  I cannot imagine eating a large helping of chicken and potatoes with a mere 2 hours before going to bed.  Anyway, I was curious about this dish, especially since it had an Italian-sounding name.  Turns out this dish originated in Chicago and was simply bone-in chicken with roasted potatoes, covered in a garlicky sauce with peas.  It sounds more English than Italian, if you ask me.

While it might sound like I'm completely bashing this meal, I really was surprised at how it tasted in the end.  Yes, this was a very hearty meal and something I would only think to cook on weekends or in the dead of winter.  You're left feeling very full afterward.  However, the meal itself was very tasty.  I ended up not really pairing this with anything, since I thought the peas in the dish were enough to cover the "vegetable" portion of our dinner.  I really enjoyed the thick gravy on the chicken and potatoes.  The peas did not lend much of their flavor to the dish; I'm thinking that originally it was just to keep the dish from looking too bland.  The flavor, though, wasn't bland at all.  This dish definitely reminded me of meals I had while visiting the mid-west, which definitely brings light to where it originated.  I can easily see this dish being plated up at family dinners in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.  Marshall and I both enjoyed this dish, but agreed it was very filling and something that would be revisited sparingly in the future.

Mixing the New with the Familiar: Steak Pizzaiola and "Dirty" Broccoli

In the late Summer, I picked up a copy of America Test Kitchen and Cooks' Illustrated's "Cooking for Two" anthology for 2010.  Marshall and I get by with following recipes originally written for larger servings and deal with leftovers.  Unfortunately, most of the pasta recipes say they serve 4, when they actually could easily serve 8, and we're left with overflow amounts of leftovers, more than what our nightly dinners or daily lunches could tackle.  This collection of recipes seemed right up our alley.  I already loved working with Cooks' Illustrated's recipes and having them already scaled down for us is great.  All of the recipes looked like they could easily be used for us, even with enough leftovers to cover an extra night.  There were also many recipes that we walked away with and that I will write about in this blog.

The first is a dish I had never heard of:  Steak Pizzaiola.  This rather comfort-like dish, according to the article, evolved from a throw-together dish created by Italian pizza-makers to make their lunch:  taking a cheap piece of steak and simmering it in leftover pizza sauce.  Customers took notice and wanted to eat it, as well, so cooks upgraded the cut of steak and used marinara sauce with roasted peppers and mushrooms.  What the editors and cooks at Cooks' Illustrated set out to do was to create a sauce with the impression that it had been simmered for a day, but could be prepared after a long day at work.  I managed to easily make this after coming home from dinner and both Marshall and I were surprised at how tasty this dish was.  The steak was cooked perfectly and the sauce on top was delicious.  It reminded me a little of my mom's pasta sauce, which is almost like a chunky stew rather than a thin sauce.  The entire meal was warming and perfect for a cool summer evening.  I would imagine this would be even better for a winter meal with the thick sauce and the seared steak.  It can also be easily "jazzed" up for having company over!

Sometimes I have a problem coming up with side dishes.  I have an even harder time coming up with side dishes which aren't starches.  With steak, I automatically think potatoes, but with both Marshall and I keeping our starches to a minimum, both of us are sometimes at a loss for a satisfying vegetable side.  Salads are good, but sometimes a main dish calls for a warm or cooked vegetable side, with which I really don't have much familiarity.  Last year, I picked up a special edition of Fine Cooking called "Eat Smart with Ellie Krieger".  Marshall and I were introduced to Ellie Krieger on Food Network and we both really enjoyed her show which focused on healthy and balanced eating.  Her recipes were approachable, easy and really healthy, but were actually delicious.  She also recognizes that certain ingredients cannot be substituted, like cheese, but teaches how best to use them in moderation while keeping the essential flavor.

One dish that has become a household favorite is "Dirty" Broccoli.  I have said before that I absolutely love broccoli.  I can easily eat broccoli all day every day, but Marshall, which he enjoys broccoli, simply cannot hang with that.  This dish, though, is fantastic.  Long spears of broccoli, quickly steamed in the microwave (which I've learned recently actually helps retain the most nutrients compared to other cooking methods) and sprinkled with homemade seasoned breadcrumbs.  The breadcrumbs are so tasty, we could easily eat just that and be completely satisfied!  With the broccoli, there is just enough flavor to enhance the broccoli without completely drowning out the flavor.  This was a fantastic side dish to the Steak Pizzaiola!

Comfort Meal "Cole-Style": Pesto with Green Beans and Grilled Lamb Chops

Growing up, my mom had a lot of "go to" comfort meals:  Chicken with Mushrooms and Olives, Veal or Chicken Picatta, Chicken Cacciatore with "mushy" Polenta, Spaghetti and Meatballs and Italian Sausage, Tuna Noodle Casserole...  I could go on.  I loved them all and when I make them at home with Marshall, I'm transported to my mom's kitchen, sitting at the heavy kitchen table feeling warm and happy.  One of my absolute favorites was homemade Pesto with Pasta and Grilled or Broiled Lamb Chops.  This was a popular dish during the spring, when lamb is freshest, using pesto my mom made and froze the previous fall.  While we didn't eat this all the time (lamb can be expensive), it was wholeheartedly welcomed.  When I got older, my mom started adding green beans to the pesto.  This is something my mom's grandma used to do when preparing pesto for the family.  The sweet crisp green beans, boiled for just a couple of minutes with the pasta, blends beautifully with the garlicky pesto and the creamy Romano cheese.  Of course, during the summer, when the pesto is made from freshly picked basil this is a fantastic meal to eat outside.  When I think of summer, I get aromas of the charcoal BBQ, lamb and basil.  

When I moved into my first apartment my sophomore year of college, I inherited my grandmother's electric skillet.  It's this huge round fry pan that plugs into the wall.  The reservoir just under the cook surface is filled with something and an electric coil.  The great thing about this electric skillet is that the heat is always constant and even.  My grandma used this for making Chicken with Mushrooms and Olives, and...pan-fried lamb chops.  Whenever I would visit my mom during breaks or weekends, I sometimes would be sent back to school with frozen plastic containers of homemade pesto.  I remember specifically one night feeling extravagant and bought myself a few lamb chops from the Italian market in downtown and cooked myself pesto with pan-fried lamb chops.  I sat in front of the TV and devoured everything I made, sucking loudly on the lamb chop bones, which thoroughly bothered my vegetarian roommate, and slurping up my pasta.  I was at home again.

My sister even used to make this same dish when she and her, then, boyfriend (now husbands) were living together in college.

Luckily, I introduced lamb early to Marshall and he loved it.  I can always make lamb without much issue in our house and pairing with pesto has become a favorite in our home, too.  I took advantage of some pesto I had whipped up with some extra basil I had from another meal.  I bought green beans and lamb chops.   The green beans get trimmed and thrown in the pasta pot when there are only a few minutes left cooking time.  The lamb chops are prepared just as simply; seasoned with just some salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil and thrown on a hot grill, cooked medium-rare.  This is a meal known for not having any leftovers.  The pesto is devoured and the lamb chops are stripped clean to the bone.

This is true comfort food.  This is a meal which reminds me who I am and where I come from; it's family.

Bubba Blue Be Proud: Southern Shrimp Burgers

I'm not sure if I said it any time before this, but I'll say it again and again and again:  I love shrimp.  I will eat it cooked in any fashion, too:  boiled, broiled, grilled, sautéed, baked, stuffed - as long as it's is cooked, I'll eat it (not sure if raw shrimp, even for sushi, is OK).  One of  my favorite cooking magazines, Cooks Illustrated, came out with a Summer Grilling issue last year and I've found more than a handful of successful and delicious recipes in it, some of which made it onto my blog already.  One of those recipes was for Southern Shrimp Burgers.  Funny enough, I had never eaten a shrimp burger.  I've had tuna burgers, salmon burgers and crab cakes (which are kind of like burgers, right?), but never a burger made of shrimp.  The headline in the magazine stated "In most versions of this coastal classic, the shrimp flavor is all but buried beneath excessive amounts of binding and spices.  We wanted shrimp burgers that tasted like shrimp."  They certainly succeeded.

Making the shrimp burgers was similar to making any other kind of burger, although there is a little bit of binding, since shrimp tends to be wetter than most other proteins.  What's great is that the only binding is a slice of sandwich bread (I think we used sourdough, since that's what our home considers "sandwich bread").  The rest of the mixture includes fresh herbs, mild spices, mayo and shrimp:  the perfect combination of flavors to enhance and showcase the sweetness of the shrimp meat.  They held surprisingly well on the grill, which is where we cooked them.  You can easily cook these in a pan on the stove, if you're interested in having a summery light meal in the dead of winter.  The burgers were tender and juicy, sweet and delicious.  I would definitely make these again.

I served the shrimp burgers without buns.  I would think buns, or any kind of bread-like product, would totally ruin the freshness of the burger and weight the meal down.  They were perfect fork-and-knife burgers, although you didn't need a knife at all to cut through the burger.  I made a home-made tartar sauce for dipping.  A simple mixture of mayo, capers, and fresh chopped dill.  You can certainly buy tartar sauce from the store, but when it's this easy to make, why would you?  The picture in the magazine showed the burger alongside some fresh greens.  I remember making a Tuna Steak au Poivre a long time ago that had a bitter greens salad on the side, which was great.  I figured that kind of super light salad would be perfect and it was.

I hope you give these burgers a shot.  I highly recommend using fresh, unfrozen, shrimp if at all possible.  They really aren't expensive, comparatively speaking, and you get a MUCH better flavor.  Also, again if possible, buy as local as possible.  Unfortunately, for Californians, local shrimp comes from the Gulf of Mexico, which is definitely more local than Thailand or Vietnam.  Like with all fish, wild-caught is infinitely better, both in taste and nutritional value, than farmed (shrimp aren't supposed to eat corn).  I know that when I first started preparing raw fresh shrimp myself, the deveining was the most worrisome.  It is so easy, I can't even tell you:  take scissors (kitchen shears and desk scissors work equally well) and snip the shell along the back of the shrimp (not the side with the legs) stopping right before the tail (if you want a handle) or all the way through the tail (if you just want the meat).  The snipping allows you to peel the shell easily from the shrimp meat and will cut just enough of the flesh to expose the vein.  Under running cold water, clean out the groove you made with the scissors and you're done!  Your shrimp are now ready to cook and enjoy!

Just Warming Up: Cuban Black Bean Soup

And...I'm back, readers!  I'm hoping to do better by you and stick with my cooking blog writing.  It's been quite a while since I've last provided you all with a cooking experience and a recipe, but believe me - I've got plenty coming.  I've got a stack of papers and magazines sitting on the floor next to my desk, just waiting to be introduced!  But back to the topic of this evening...

Winter calls for soup.  A coworker commented on my leftover lentil soup in the kitchen today about how it's all we seem to eat in the winter is soup.  It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone to learn that our bodies crave warm carbs during the winter months.  With the lack of sunlight giving us the endorphins and Vitamin D we need to keep our spirits up and our bodies warm, we turn to food to fill the void.  Potatoes, pasta, beans, creamy dishes which we would never touch when it's hot outside call us forth to their steaming bowls.  We go to bed at night with a comforting feeling in our warm-soup-bellies. 

To be fair, I made this Cuban Black Bean Soup when it was closing on Fall, but it would definitely feel right at home in the months between December and March.  The first time I made this soup was actually a few years ago.  I have made other black bean soups after that, but there's something about this particular recipe which is just terrific.  I think it's the simplicity of the soup itself.  All the fixings you add to it, are added on top of a bowl of stewed black beans - there's nothing else.  For recipes like this one, you'll definitely need the day.  It's perfect for a weekend evening, particularly Sunday, when you can drag out the copious leftovers.  I think Marshall and I even used the soup base leftovers for an attempt at enfrijoladas (tortillas smothered in a pureé of black or pinto beans) one morning a while back and it worked perfectly.  The various toppings make this a great dish when serving kids.  They can have fun plopping chunks of ham, shreds of cheese, and dollops of sour cream into their bowls to make their soup their own.


This soup warms the soul with a little kick of spice.  It also has an underlying sweetness which keeps you coming back for more.  I know that when I make this soup, I cannot have just one bowl - I must have seconds!