What's Cooking (Take Three!)

[Jenise]

Not much of one. But man, we got a lot of batteries!

Last night we had ahi. Not sure where I was going with it, I started goofing around in the kitchen and came across a forgotten package of enoki mushrooms. That started the ball rolling: they got marinated with some strips of rehydrated shitakes in a vinaigrette with a heavy chile oil heat. Separately, I mixed glass noodles with a lot of sesame oil, green onion and fried shallots out of a jar (a Taiwanese ingredient). With those two salads, it made sense to go kind of poke salad with the ahi too, so I cut the fish and tossed it with thinly sliced Walla Walla onions, sesame oil and soy sauce. Pretty divine.

[Jenise]

Jenise that is so funny! But the shock must have been a sight to behold, have you recovered yet.

I'm not sure! I honestly had every intention of going back to bed but after seeing that, NO WAY.

I had a pound of flank steak left over from the Sichuan dry-fried beef so last night I made Cantonese stir-fried beef with bell peppers. Simple to make, and simply wonderful. IMO flank steak is the best cut for this dish. It's very easy to cut across the grain into thin slices, and it has more flavor than the tenderer cuts. And it used to be dirt cheap. Alas, the big fajita fad changed that. -Paul W.

Likewise with flank steak. I now buy skirt steak or sometimes sirloin for fajitas. Another once-cheap cut was flat-iron steak. And the price rise on chicken wings is unbelievable. I remember when they were free or 19 cents/lb or some denomination of el cheapo. Now they're priced like ribeye steaks.

[Jenise]

Yup to all that. Throw lamb shanks on that list, too.

The Spanish word 'fajita' originally meant the cut of beef known as 'skirt steak' in English. This is the animal's diaphragm muscle. It became so universally used in Tex-Mex carne asado (grilled beef) that 'fajitas' became synonymous with marinated skirt steak, grilled whole, sliced, and served as a taco with sauteed vegetables and flour tortillas. That dish really took off in the 1990s and variants using other types of meat cropped up. Fajitas came to refer to the cooking technique rather than the cut of meat. Skirt steak and flank steak used to be dirt cheap because, although highly flavorful, the meat is tough. But the demand for both to make fajitas caused the price to soar.

Chicken wings have a similar history. When the poultry industry started selling the different cuts of chicken packaged separately (a pack of chicken breasts vs. a cut-up whole chicken), there was a problem of what to do with all those chicken wings. The ratio of skin and bone to meat is much higher for the wings than for any other part of the chicken's anatomy. Packs of chicken wings were almost given away. Then along came Buffalo Chicken Wings and suddenly the wings became the most popular part of the bird. And are priced that way, too.

-Paul W.

Today my major kitchen task was baking 12 dozen of ANZAC biscuits to be served with tea and coffee after our ANZAC day service tomorrow.

I love ANZAC biscuits. They, and Kirks Lemon Squash, are two foods I look forward to enjoying whenever I visit Australia.

-Paul W.

Tonight I am making Pollo al Ajillo (Garlic Chicken) a second time. I'm using skinless chicken breast strips instead of the chicken thighs of the original recipe. It has few other ingredients just: garlic, oloroso sherry and sherry vinegar.

I'm obviously going to have a Spanish wine with it, I haven't decided which but am thinking of an unusual Rioja made exclusively of Mazuelo. Label says that only 3% of Rioja is planted with Mazuelo which is one of the varieties permitted and which usually goes into Rioja blends. Mazuelo is known in France as Carignan and I'm really appreciating Carignan now, so yes, I think I'll go for it.

First time I made Pollo al Ajillo was for my 'travel the world in lockdown' series,- see it here

[Jenise]

Last week I combined two pounds of lamb with one pound of ground pork (for better texture, the lamb had almost no fat) to make Armenian-flavored meatballs--lots of mint and allspice. A lot of meat but it was deliberate--I wanted the leftovers. So that night I served those dry to guests who prefer dry food, and combined the rest with lots of onions, chopped tomatoes, broth, cumin seed and berbere, braised them for an hour then set them aside in the fridge. Last night I added more broth to the mixture and half a bag of short rigatoni noodles to cook in the broth. And that was dinner--divine! Italy by way of Ethiopia, or something like that. And there's enough left over for another complete meal.

Today we're going vegetarian and I'm planning a ma po tofu type dish.

A friend requested a Turkish birthday dinner. From the Samarkand cookbook she chose the cinnamon, clove lamb kabob and hot hummus. Kabobs were great. Hot hummus was an epiphany. Said to often be served hot in Turkey it was almost like a souffle but the recipe, also with cinnamon didn't work for me. I would definitely not use cinnamon in the hot hummus again. Perhaps roasted cumin. I filled out the menu with home made pita, dill, garlic suzma and a large platter of roasted vegetables- eggplant, onion, pepper, asparagus, zucchini dressed with a tiny bit of thinned ramp green olive tapenade and dotted with a variety of olives and pickled garlic.. The local Med Market is now heavily stocked for Ramadan and dessert was a variety of pistachio-nougat sweets and filo- pistachio sweets from Chicago and Michigan vendors. Turkish coffee after the meal was welcome.
I have spoken of this market before. Only three short aisles but packed with such interesting ingredients it has really directed my cooking the last 6 weeks since I've been back in town.

Apart from simple heating there is only one thing that I can cook well: omelettes. My wife and I love them and she says mine are better than hers. The credit is not due to me but to a very simple short recipe in a little book called "Simple French Cooking". My wife likes her omelettes rather more baveuse than I do. Sometimes I put several things in the omelettes , but personally am quite happy with a simple parsley omelette on occasion. Richard L

[Jenise]

I wish I were one of those people easily satisfied by eggs, but I'm not. I rarely eat them. Omelettes? Only with black truffles and a good old burgundy.

I made up a batch of Chris Schlesinger's Jamaican jerk marinade last night in preparation for tonight's jerk chicken thighs.

-Paul W.

To Jenise: My wife and I love eggs, but you are a gourmet chef. Fortunately we can get very good meals delivered from our club . Richard L

I like omelettes, and souffle, and most other egg dishes. I'll eat breakfast for lunch some days. I even order the 'breakfast pizza' at my local coal-oven joint: personal size crust, spattered with ricotta and mozzerella, then add several strips of guanciale and finally two eggs. The sunnyside up eggs sometimes break but mostly they end up medium (so oozy rather than runny).

Ice cream is an egg food, too, if you do it right.

Eggs are frequently mentioned as nature's most perfect food. That's because they lack only Vit C, which chickens can manufacture themselves. Only humans and another species or two can't and we can wind up with scurvy. Another good reason to eat chiles.

[Jenise]

After reading the last few posts, I think I've decided to make blue cheese souffles for dinner which I'll serve with an old Beaujolais! I recently acquired some ramekins that will be perfect single-serving main course sized and have been dying to use them.

Sounds good. It's been a while since I've made a souffle. And the blue cheese sounds great.

[Jenise]

Larry, it was a blue cheese (specifically roquefort in that case) souffle that made me rethink my sketchy relationship with eggs. SO good. Parm is great as well.

This time I'll use Cambezola since I received a gift of it recently at Costco. "Gift" because someone else mistakenly put a lump of it in my cart, which I realized at the checkout line. Not wanting to buy it, I put it on my purse (inside but on top) to keep it off the conveyor belt and hand over to the cashier at payment--but Bob pulled out his credit card so I didn't have to, and we didn't realize the inadvertent theft until I remembered it on the way home.

This time I'll use Cambezola since I received a gift of it recently at Costco. "Gift" because someone else mistakenly put a lump of it in my cart, which I realized at the checkout line. Not wanting to buy it, I put it on my purse (inside but on top) to keep it off the conveyor belt and hand over to the cashier at payment--but Bob pulled out his credit card so I didn't have to, and we didn't realize the inadvertent theft until I remembered it on the way home.

Probably tasted better. BTW, I may have seen your photo on the post office bulletin board.

I recently acquired some ramekins that will be perfect single-serving main course sized and have been dyeing to use them.

FIFY. A little late for Easter, Jenise, but let me know how the blue, purple, and orange souffles work out.

[Jenise]

Green and pink, Jeff, green and pink.

I lost track of time working in the garden on the first hot, sunny day of late spring. Garlic chives have invaded every cranny of the yard so I harvested about a half pound and will make fly's head pork with fermented black beans. A very quick dish to use up some of those chives.

I'm making goulash

Its to go with a Hungarian wine - Egri Bikaver - for the latest in our Lockdown World Tour

I searched the web for recipes; there are a great deal and none of them agree. Only certainty seems to be meat and paprika, the meat is usually beef but there's pork or sausage versions. Paprika can be hot, mild, smoked ........

Red wine, white wine or no wine, caraway seeds, caraway powder or no caraway.....

So after reading several recipes, I'm steering my own course

[Jenise]

Hungarian paprika is never smoked (Spanish usually is), so there's one thing you can rule out. They do liberally use 'sweet' and 'hot', though. My Hungarian stepmother would insist that goulash be made with ground pork, which is what she learned from her mother who came here as a young bride but never even learned to speak English. She was old world all the way.

But of course you're right, there are as many ways to go about it as there are Spaghetti Bolognese. One thing would hold true thought make your own spaetzle. It will be the star of your dish. Good luck!

Oh, you can amuse your wife by calling the wine Eager Beaver, my husband's nickname for it. We long ago bought quite a bit when an especially good batch came through Trader Joe's.