Monkfish tagine with couscous

"Tagine" refers both to a Moroccan cooking vessel and to stews traditionally made in that vesel.  I cooked the fish dish in a nice tagine I bought online.

The stew is very complex.  It has a base of sauteed onions, carrots, and celery; a braising liquid of fish stock, wine, preserved lemons, and tomatoes; and a "chermoula" marinade for the fish consisting of lemon juice, olive oil, cilantro, garlic, red chiles, saffron, cumin, and sea salt.  Shredded mint leaves and freshly ground black pepper add to the complexity.

I made my own preserved lemons two months ago using this method.

Currant scones

Five-spice chicken and mustard greens

Gambas al ajillo

Corn cherry scones

Berkeley is my favorite city in the U.S.  My favorite thing about Berkeley is the Cheese Board Collective.  They put out a terrific book called The Cheese Board Collective Works with most of their recipes and much of their wisdom.

I used to eat these corn cherry scones once a week or so.  My home version was pretty darn close to the original, especially considering that I have little baking experience.  I'd rank these the second best scones I've eaten in LA, with Gjelina Take Away being tops.

Hunan food

This is an unusual dish, which follows a recipe in Fuchsia Dunlop's book on Hunan cuisine "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook."  Ms. Dunlop says that the dish was a favorite of Chairman Mao.  The recipe calls for stir-frying pieces of smoked trout, seasoning them with fermented black beans and chili oil, and then steaming them until tender.

This is sauteed snow pea leaves with garlic

This is a humble bowl of jasmine rice.

Vietnamese rice noodle salad with shrimp and fish balls

Sichuan dan dan noodles with tofu

Trenne with cauliflower-anchovy sauce

Indian food

Poached orange roughy in cilantro cream sauce with mint and nut pilaf

Braised okra

Risotto with wild mushrooms and gorgonzola

Spaghettini with tomatoes and bacalao

I had some incredibly tasty heirloom tomatoes that were getting old and a pot of soaking bacalao (salt cod) that I didn't know what to do with, so I made this.  Really good.  Just pasta, tomatoes, olive oil and salt is enough to make a winning meal if the quality of the ingredients is good.

Pasta in sage cream sauce with sauteed morels

Heirloom tomatoes with marinated buffalo mozzarella

Chicken, peas, and mashed potatoes

Mom is great.  She sent me some fresh shelled conch peas, my favorite kind of peas.  So far as I know, they're only found in Florida.  I cooked them in duck fat and some turkey ham from Whole Foods.  Delicious, but not as good as back home.

 












I had this with some Argentian white wine from a varietal called torrontes.  I've been blown away by my last two bottles of torrontes.  This bottle was Camino del Inca 2010.

Sichuan food

I made this a while ago.

Mung beans in coconut curry

Greek braised octopus and eggplant

with roasted cashew pilaf

Lotus root in roasted-cumin yogurt sauce

The diversity of Raghavan Iyer's cookbook 660 Curries is extraordinary.  The book has no fewer than three recipes for lotus root--a vegetable I have not encountered at any Indian restaurant.  This excellent recipe calls for simmering chopped lotus root on a base of sauteed garlic, ginger, and green Thai chilis and then bathing it in a sauce of yogurt, heavy cream, ground roasted cumin, and chopped cilantro.

Noodles with shredded chicken in sichuan sesame sauce

Ling cod in Vietnamese lemongrass sauce

with ong choy

Malaysian chicken and potatoes

with coconut samba rice

Chinese noodles with tofu and miso-ginger sauce

I'd like to get more variety in my diet by cooking more Asian noodles and less Italian pasta dishes.  This is a quick and easy recipe in Helen Chen's book Easy Asian Noodles.

Moth bean curry

This dal recipe in Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries is made from moth beans along with sauteed onions, chilis, herbs, spices, and lime.

Chicken with roasted poblanos in pepper-cream sauce with smoked cheddar

(pollo con rajas y crema)

I loosely followed recipes in Diana Kennedy's The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.  Kennedy's recipe for plain white rice (arroz blanco) is revelatory to me.  It calls for stir-frying the rice for several minutes until it changes color, and then steaming it slowly in twice as much liquid as I'd use in an Asian rice recipe, with a towel under the lid to absorb the steam.  The result is fluffy and delicious.

The chicken is excellent too.  This is the second time I've made it.  Some tips: Bake uncovered to allow the cream to reduce.  Cook only until the center of the chicken reaches 160 F.  Puree hotter chilis along with the rajas into the cream to add a little kick  (one Thai bird chili per 2 cups of cream is plenty). Young smoked cheddar worked very well and much better than sharp aged cheddar.  But the cheese isn't necessary; the dish is delicious without it.

I also made a Yucatecan jicama-orange salad in a bitter orange sauce, following a recipe in Kennedy's book.

Greek dips

These were nice with bread and ouzo.  For each dip I followed a recipe in Vefa's Kitchen--a massive tome on Greek cooking.  All the dips were very easy to make.

Tzatziki (yogurt and cucumber dip)

Taramosalata (carp roe dip)

Roasted eggplant and pine nut dip

This is nearly the same as baba ghanoush, but with pine nut paste instead of tahini.  One tip to making any eggplant dip: you have to broil/roast the eggplant until it is very soft inside--so soft that you can spoon it out.  Otherwise, the dip will be stringy and raw tasting.

Walnut dip

(my favorite of the four.  good mixed into rice.)

Trenne with citrus-dill cream sauce and smoked salmon

Trenne is just triangular penne, but what a difference a shape makes.  For reasons a mechanical engineer could more adeptly explain, trenne is springier, more resilient, and altogether more substantial than penne.  I prefer it for these reasons.

















+ braised leeks with shaved parmesan

Potato, paneer, and fenugreek curry with Indian dirty rice

These are recipes in Raghavan Iyer's 660 Curries.  Potatoes and fenugreek (aloo methi) is one of my favorite combinations in Indian cuisine.  The addition of paneer turns it into a light main dish.

Indian dirty rice is one of many excellent rice recipes in 660 Curries.  The rice is cooked on a base of caramelized onions and hand-ground spices.  Rather than grinding the cinnamon in a mortar, as Iyer instructs, I suggest using a spice grinder--at least until you arrive at a coarse grind.  It's very hard to grind cinnamon in a mortar, and if you don't get it fine enough the final dish will be unpleasantly gritty.  The other spices are easy to grind in a mortar to the desired dirty (but not powdery) texture.

Chicken pelau

Pelau is one of the essential dishes of Trinidad.  Other than that, I don't know anything about it.  I made this dish rather blindly following a recipe in Norman van Aken's New World Kitchen.  It came out well, but I felt it was missing some oomph.  Next time I'd try mixing in some soy sauce for more umami taste, vinegar for bite, and more butter.  Also, while chicken breasts make for a nice contemporary presentation, I'm sure this dish is superior when made with bone-in dark meat.

Black seafood paella

I've had success with most of Anya von Bremzen's recipes in The New Spanish Table.  I made this great dish following her recipe for arroz negra.

Hunan homestyle tofu

Spaghettini with petrale sole

Thai coconut soup with tofu and oyster mushrooms

This soup (tom kha) is most traditionally made with chicken (tom kha gai), but variants are not uncommon.  Wikipedia has an interesting entry saying that the Lao version uses dill in place of cilantro--something I'll have to try.  

Anglo-Indian chicken curry

This was really tasty.  I used this wok, which I bought a couple of weeks ago and love.  It's become my vessel of choice for sauteeing chopped ingredients.  Its holds heat well and sits nicely on an electric burner due to its flat bottom surface (the internal surface is rounded like a normal wok).

Sichuan dan dan noodles

I roughly followed a recipe in Land of Plenty, Fuchsia Dunlop's excellent book on Sichuan cooking.  Instead of ground pork, I used diced chicken breast, which worked great.  In an earlier version, I used ground defrosted frozen tofu, which worked poorly because it was too absorptive.  (Not shown is the pool of red oily sauce at the bottom.  I've seen several versions of this dish in which the sauce comes halfway up the bowl.  The sauce is not meant to be eaten directly--it is meant to flavor the noodles as they are pulled from it--but tofu will soak it all up.)

This is a very easy dish with a high reward.

Hunan cucumber

Cooked cucumber is, in my experience, a rarity in all cuisines.  I can only think of two dishes with cooked cucumber.  The first is a Goan cucumber curry that my landlady in Berkeley cooked for me.  The second is this Hunan dish, which I first had at a Hunan restaurant in Beijing.  The English menu said that it was seasoned with an herb called perilla, which I'd never heard of.  Later, I learned that in Japan this herb is called shiso--quite familiar to sushi enthusiasts.  Given the uniqueness of the dish, I was excited when I found a recipe for it in Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.

Greek mezze

Horiatiki

Hummus with paprika oil

Fried halloumi