Fried Things

Whenever I get the urge to deep fry something, I usually go on a streak of deep frying things over the next couple days before getting rid of the oil...it'd be a waste not to right?
First was the fried chicken sandwich from Bakesale Betty's, but instead of buttermilk breading which takes time, I just panko crusted it. This was mainly an excuse to make the slaw that they put on the sandwich. It's almost as good when you make it at home. I used cilantro instead of parsley.


After a partial oil refresh and filtering, I decided to try out munchkin-like doughnut holes from a Korean mix.


They were so chewy that I decided to cover them in chocolate in order to hide the fact that they didn't work.


Finally, with all that leftover slaw that I had, I decided that I needed something fried to eat along with it, so I made wings. They were lightly dusted with potato starch before being blanched, dried, then fried again. The sauce was butter, soy, ginger, sriracha and chili-garlic sauce with a splash of balsamic vinegar.


That'll be it for home-fried foods for a long time. Once I get it out of my system and my apartment smells like deep-friedness I won't fry anything for a while. Especially with our cardio module coming up, although you think I would've learned after our Nutrition module. Then again, those two weeks were complete bullshit.

These same people must google "I'm an Idiot"

The stat tracking service built into my blog tells me that people in the US, Canada, UK, and the Netherlands have all landed on my page via the google search "Foods I Don't Like," and this term accounts for about 70% of keyword activity. In fact, I'm pretty sure if you google "Foods I Don't Like," my blog is the number one site! Whooo!!! We did it!

So first off...WELCOME PICKY EATERS! YOU HAVE A TERRIBLE PERSONALITY FLAW! SACK UP AND JUST EAT WITHOUT COMPLAINING! UNLESS IT CAUSES YOUR THROAT TO SWELL UP AND COMPROMISE YOUR AIRWAY, CHOMP IT DOWN AND SHUT YOUR YAPPER!

Second...why did you have to perform a google search for foods that you don't like? Isn't that really one of those things that you should know better than google?

Failures...Tasty Failures

In an issue of Men's Health awhile back, Eric Ripert talked about Egg and Soldiers being a pretty healthy late-night post-drinking food. That's where you soft boil eggs then dunk sticks of toast into them. But what if you don't want your late night drunk food to be healthy? What if, like me, your after-party routine is usually Steak n' Shake? I remember my sister telling me about a cleverly named "Fried Egg" at SPQR. It was a soft boiled egg that was then breaded and deep fried. I tried to replicate it.

First I boil-simmered eggs (four minutes) and then dunked them in ice water. Peeled, floured, dipped in egg (eggs dipped in egg...that one was new), and panko breaded, followed by a quick fry. They ended up looking nice enough:



I then cut them open to find out if it worked and...fail!



They ended up being medium-boiled eggs. I doubt if the super-quick fry was enough to harden the yolk that much (especially since I had cooled them down), so they must've become medium-boiled in the actual boiling phase. The whites were plenty firm to peel without any trouble, so next time it'll be all about getting the perfect soft-boiled time right. Still, I put them on toast and topped with another failure:



I tried to replicate Papalote's delicious salsa, but it really needs to be made with a powerful blender (I wonder if a stick blender would work?), because my food processor left sand-sized flecks of pepitas. I knew I should've gotten that 1000-watt blender on woot when I had the chance.

A few Atlanta eats

So I've moved to Atlanta for medical school. Just like I had a "First Post From New Apartment" when I moved into my Amherst place, I figured I should post something or other from my new residence. I am excited that I now have a gas stove to play around with, and have ordered a round-bottom wok/ring off of amazon. There's also a Whole Foods right next to my complex that I can walk to. Unfortunately, it isn't that large so it's missing things like bulk spices, has a limited selection of bulk grains and staples, and doesn't even have puffed kamut cereal, which means it's difficult to make the granola on my sister's blog. They were running a special on bone-in pork chops however, so I made this:


Brined pork chops with mushroom risotto and grilled zucchini. I installed some ceiling light fixtures from IKEA that can accommodate compact fluorescent bulbs, but food looks disgusting under them. Oh well.
Atlanta is home of The Varsity, which has curbside service.


It doesn't feel that cool in a Honda Civic coupe...the car just feels kinda cramped and it gets really hot, but if I had my dad's old Chevy Nova I'm sure it'd be super badass. They're famous for chili dogs (apparently they serve over two miles of hot dogs each day) and the chili slaw dog was freaking delicious.


Onion rings are good, but fries are so-so. As great as it is that places like In-N-Out and The Varsity freshly cut their potatoes...this usually means that they aren't fried twice and end up being a bit soggy.
On the drive down here, somewhere at a gas station in South Carolina, I had a fried chicken biscuit, which was the most delicious food item I've ever gotten from a gas station.


I'm sure there'll be more stuff to write about...either that or med school will occupy my entire existence and I'll never post on this thing again.

America in Crisis

Hungry FDA Official Orders Massive Pot Pie Recall

What is one to do in these trying times when no store-bought pot pie is safe?

Make your own chicken pot pie. This pot pie is completely safe...with a puff-pastry crispy flaky golden brown crust for added protection. I didn't get a good picture of the filling, but I used whole wheat flour for the roux and a minimal amount of heavy cream (because I had to save it to make Joe-Joe custard ice cream...as a reward for making such a relatively healthy pot pie).

The Real Iron Chef is Finally Here Again

Thank you Fine Living Network for bringing back the original Iron Chef (even if it is dubbed), but shame on you for replacing the Backdraft theme with some crappy .midi that seems like it was hastily cobbled together by a four year old with GarageBand.

Mushroom Risotto Among Other Things

It's been awhile since I've posted anything and the 3 people who read this blog have been wondering what's been going on. I suppose that the novelty of having my own kitchen has somewhat worn off and now that I'm cooking all the time it's just kinda like...meh. I keep thinking when I cook something new that I should take a picture of it and put it on my blog, but inevitably I just end up eating it and forgetting about the picture. That is why you will not see pictures of prosciutto and ricotta stuffed cappellaci with truffle cream sauce, chipotle hush puppies, or Mexican style "lasagna" made with chicken in a roasted tomatillo and cilantro puree layered with black beans and queso blanco. I do have a smattering of random pictures I remembered to take which are presented now:

Kimbap - It took me freaking hours to make this stuff. I never realized how much work it involved. Pretty though right?


Gyoza - Made these with Toki. She's responsible for them looking neatly crimped.




Recently I made something that demanded I take a picture of it, because I can safely say that it was the best dish I have ever made, and I'll probably never make anything as delicious ever again. When I go home over the holidays to Lafayette and I see the popular high school kids at the Round-Up (local dive bar) because they never left town I always used to enjoy how hilariously depressing their lives were. Now I understand what it's like...I've peaked and from here on out it's all downhill. Ah well...here are the steps to making porcini mushroom risotto.

Night before: Open porcini mushrooms brought back from Florence that were GhettoVac Packed (TM). This involves sucking the air out of a ziploc bag containing dried porcinis until the air and porcini dust are solidly in your own lungs, no longer in the bag. Soak.


Heat liquid and chicken stock in pot. Briefly toast arborio rice in olive oil. Open bottle of white truffle infused olive oil snuck through customs in shoe and curse euro-dollar conversion rate, then add a few drops to pan shortly before addition of dry white wine. Slowly incorporate stock/soaking liquid mixture into pan.


When rice is nearly finished absorbing liquid, lightly chop and add porcinis to pan. Add pat of butter, then open jar of white truffle butter which cost too much (optional: curse euro exchange rate again) but take comfort in the fact that you bought the good stuff and didn't end up with the monosodio glutamato-laden mystery paste your sister bought. Hahahahahahahaha sucker. Add small spoonful of MSG-free white truffle butter to pan.



Grate parmigiano reggiano into pan. Stir. Plate. Eat.



Recommended Garnishes:
Grated parmigiano
Black pepper
Fresh thyme
2-inch thick dry-aged porterhouse steak - Rare

London

I went to visit my girlfriend who's studying abroad in London. We went into Borough Market on her birthday. This place is incredible, and I can't wait to go back.
We started at Neal's Yard Dairy where we bought some Irish Cooleeney. It's a soft cheese made from unpasteurised cow's milk (delicious unpasteurised cow's milk).


It's pretty much a cheese paradise.

Right next door is Monmouth Coffee.


In the greenmarket area is the famous Raclette guy. Cheese bubbles under a heating element and is scraped off onto potatoes and gherkins. It's delicious and greasy.




The toasted cheese sandwich is also available here. It's the grilled cheese sandwich that every other grilled cheese sandwich wants to be.


We also ate a venison sausage sandwich with grilled onions and lettuce (we chose the cranberry and bitter orange sauces...with a bit of tabasco for good measure).

Since everything costs double in the pound-dollar conversion, I did some cooking to save some money. This dish was inspired by something I ate in Bordeaux. It was a shrimp salad in an avocado half over salad. I used chicken instead, and mixed mayonnaise, ketchup, fresh chilis, garlic, and lemon juice and stuffed an avocado. This was put over an arugula salad drizzled with olive oil, lemon juice, and balsamic vinegar.

Whew...I underestimated how spicy the chilis would be. Who knew British people can handle spicy peppers?

The next day (after a visit to Waitrose), I made a spinach and smoked English cheddar omelette with jalapeno home fries.

Nougatine

In New York I had a prix fixe lunch at Nougatine (the casual dining room adjacent to Jean Georges in the Trump Tower). At only 24 bucks, it's a steal.


First course was carrot and citrus soup with cumin crisp. Segments of orange and grapefruit accompanied the creamy carrot soup with that delicious cumin cracker thing. There were also bits of candied ginger and that um...green stuff.



Next I had the pineapple glazed short ribs with ginger and mushroom ravioli and mint. Outstanding.


For dessert, chocolate cake with cocoa nib ice cream. It's much more complex than it sounds, but it's hard to describe.

First meal in New York

So I'm here in New York staying at the Westin Times Square for the Chamber Music America conference. Though Times Square itself is a wasteland in terms of food (unless you count the fanciest McDonald's on the planet as noteworthy), I popped up to Columbus Circle to check out the Time Warner center. I popped up to the fourth floor to marvel at the Per Se menu and to stare at the doorway to Masa. To console myself for not having the $300+ necessary to eat at either of these places, I went downstairs to Bakery Bouchon. Though pricey, the food is good (not to mention my department is picking up the tab).

I had a roast beef sandwich, and although the beef itself was not the best I've had, the palladin bread it came on was pretty damn tasty, as were the garlic aioli and carmelized onions. It also had fontina cheese, and arugula, and came with two cornichons.

Then there was the macaron.
There was a trio of special winter macarons, and I had a hard time deciding between blood orange and chestnut. I ended up choosing blood orange. Good lord it was fantastic. Crisp outside, chewy, dense, almondy on the inside, with a delicious blood orange jelly/marmalade in between the cookies.

The latte was nothing spectacular.

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.