Tempura Soba

"So what do you want me to cook for you?" I asked my Japanese friend.
"Asian."
"Asian?"
"Asian."

So I decided on tempura soba. A Korean guy cooking Japanese food for a Japanese person? That's right baby...balls of steel.

I started by making dashi.

Konbu


Katsuoboshi


This is mixed with a bit of salt, soy sauce, and mirin to make the broth. The same dashi is mixed with soy sauce, mirin, and sugar to make the tempura dipping sauce.

Here's what I fried up:

Zucchini, shrimp (wild caught 16-20 size), green beans, and fennel.

The finished product:

Leftovers

I'm heading home for a long weekend, where I'm sure to fatten up by a good 5 pounds or so. But to get rid of some stuff I had lying around in the apartment I made this:



Leftover couscous, raw almonds toasted in butter and spices, and shrimp sauteed with curry powder and cayenne pepper. Mostly I'm just excited about how the picture turned out.

Chicken Cacciatore

I threw together this chicken cacciatore with polenta. It had a bunch of stuff in it..capers, canned plum tomatoes, mashed anchovies, basil, garlic, roasted red pepper, and a few other things I threw in there that I can't really remember at this point. The secret seasoning? My own blood. Indeed...no longer just an expression about putting hard work into something...I actually cut my index finger while slicing the garlic and I'm pretty sure the knife didn't stop until it hit bone. Salty!

Pyromaniacal tendencies

Despite never being in the Boy Scouts, I do enjoy fire, which is why I pulled out the old torch. My friend Narae has returned for the year and we went to Costco, where she got some strawberries. I had some left in my fridge, and since these were kind of the sour ones, so I had an idea. First I set up a little suspended cooling rack contraption to hold strawberries with toothpicks stuck in them. I rolled the strawberries in sugar then torched 'em. Then I added a second coat of sugar and torched them again. This results in a little shell of just about the best tasting strawberry hard candy you'll ever taste.


I then decided to use some of the leftover chocolate from the 1 pound bar I used for the cookies. I melted this up with a bit of balsamic vinegar, ginger juice, and a bit of oil (so that it would actually melt) to dip the strawberries.

Cookie Monster

I made a batch of some dark chocolate chunk cookies. Only slightly sweet, buttery and a tiny bit salty on the crispy edge, soft in the middle. After baking two batches of 6, I had more batter than two cookies, but not enough for three. The solution? One gigantic cookie as an affront to God.

I've included a quarter for scale comparison...

I can't even palm it.

Ahh the sweet smell of deep fried (sort of) success

Mmm...cast iron skillet fried chicken. So it's not technically deep fried, but it certainly was mostly submerged in...wait for it...shortening. That's right...shortening...the abomination against nature of the frying fats. But damn it makes for some delicious fried chicken.

Hmm...

So, do you think I can turn this thing into fried chicken tomorrow? We'll see.

Butchering a chicken is really pretty tough...especially if your knife is duller than you thought it'd be. Also it doesn't help to have warm hands. Is there any part of cooking that doesn't punish you for having good circulation?

Stuff

So I took the plunge and bought a chimney starter for my meager little grill, and I tested it out by grilling up some pork loin, which i basically threw a bunch of stuff in my pantry on and grilled up. It was pretty good, especially with rosemary roasted potatoes and avocado butter (ah Good Eats, permanent resident of my DVR).


With that cast iron pan I got, I made some cornbread, with bacon, chives, and chipotle peper. The bottom is fried in rendered bacon fat! The first batch I made was horribly dry (very unfortunate since it was for guests). But I fixed that problem by adding half a stick of melted butter. Melted butter pretty much fixes everything that duct tape can't.


And yes...here it is...the legendary Global fluted Santoku knife. I never thought I'd hold this box in my hands, but here it is. Actually I'm selling it to my sister, for the price of 1 penny. Korean superstition forbids giving knives or blades of any kind as gifts, because it means your cutting off all ties/relations with that person so I have to sell it to her.

The benefits of living alone

Rice krispies treats anytime.
The fluffernutter sandwich seems to be the official food of Massachusetts, so marshmallow creme is available everywhere. So why not have rice krispies treats all the time?
Other things in my fridge/pantry that wouldn't normally be at home:
Ice cream
Oreos
Carbs...delicious carbs

I also got some new kitchen toys including a microplane, a mini food processor, a probe thermometer, a propane torch (on sale at ACE hardware), and a 12" cast iron pan, which I'm not sure why we don't have at home, because it was only 15 bucks on Amazon.com

Snacks

There's nothing like watching Fresh Prince and Saved by the Bell reruns on the DVR with a snack.


Grilled chicken, bacon, aioli, arugula, grilled scallion, grilled jalapeno, sourdough toasted with roasted garlic paste and gorgonzola.


Mmm...ramen. This is only marginally harder to make than instant ramen, and a billion times better.

Fourth o' July

You're supposed to eat ridiculously too much...because overconsumption is what America is all about (did you see the nathan's hot dog contest?). Anywho, I made gorgonzola, roasted garlic, and bacon stuffed burgers. The meat itself was seasoned with some green onions sauteed in the bacon drippings, ketchup, worcestershire, granulated garlic, and paprika. Here's what the inside looks like:

A few friends came over and brought corn on the cob and Long Trail Blackbeary Wheat beer.

For dessert, they brought some strawberries and blueberries. I used 'em to whip up a compote with orange juice, lime juice, a jalapeno pepper, and some balsamic vinegar (though after I sent them out for sugar...seeing as I had absolutely none in the apartment). I topped an ice cream sandwich with the compote, then put a toasted marshmallow on top. Look how it ended up being patriotic!

Aioli

To use up some of that garlic I roasted yesterday, and to go on tomorrow's burgers, I made some Aioli (from the Provencal verb "aioler" meaning "to charge Americans more for mayonnaise"). I made it with egg yolks, sea salt, pepper, paprika, mustard powder, lemon juice, roasted garlic, a bit of olive oil and a crapload of canola oil. Here's the result:

After furious hand whisking for a while, the aioli started to get thick and I switched over to an electric beater...this also illustrates my desperate need for an apron or something...as demonstrated by my shirt:

First Post From the new Apartment

So I'm settling in to my new apartment, and my fridge/pantry finally have some stuff inside. For the fourth, I'm gonna make some gorgonzola, bacon, roasted garlic stuffed burgers. I roasted up a bunch of garlic today, and I thought "Man I shouldn't waste the olive oil that ran out into the roasting pan." So I sliced up some tomatoes, brushed them with the oil, and broiled them and topped 'em with some cheese and an anchovy fillet. I took the same roasting pan and then added some white wine and roasted garlic. I tossed some fettucine in there and then plated it with the tomatoes on top. Here's how it looked:

More blogginess!

Watch this space...New posts about food are coming. It's been quite a while since I've written anything. I've been terribly busy with my mustache competition, thesis, graduating, etc. But the good news is I've been officially offered a job by the college as the concert manager. I'll be in an apartment and cooking for myself, which means I'll be eating instant Ramen 6 nights out of 7...but on that 7th night, i'll hopefully have some blog-worthy material. I just have to get through finals, graduation, job training, etc. before I can get back to the things that REALLY matter...food, and making fun of waste-of-planet-space idiots.

Super Bowl Party

I've always thrown a Super Bowl party for the people I live with/around. This year, I made:

Guacamole with plenty of cilantro, garlic, habanero and jalapeno peppers.


Tuscan white bean dip with roasted garlic and rosemary olive oil. I roasted garlic in a toaster oven with some rosemary and thyme, then blended it up with cannelini beans and the rosemary infused olive oil. Served it up with some bruschetta (which is pronounced BrusKEtta...none of that "shh" shit). Also, bruschetta can simply be toast rubbed with garlic...it doesn't have to have a bunch of stuff piled on it. It's a subset of a larger category of crostini. Right then...

I also made a cream cheese and chili dip and spinach and mushroom quesadillas.

Christmas Rib Roast

Yeah I know...Christmas was a really freaking long time ago, but I've been too busy with my new mustache growing contest to put up any pictures.

My sister and I made a rib roast, which basically involves sticking meat into an oven.

Here are pictures.

Bûche de noël

This thing took all day, would've taken two if it weren't for our kitchenaid stand mixer. The cake was an orange-almond spongecake. The frosting was made with whipped cream, italian merengue, chocolate, and coffee. The mushrooms were piped Italian merengue dried on a silpat for a couple hours. The cake ended up being ridiculously sweet. Oh well, at least it looked nice.