Thursday, January 29, 2009

Thai soup for your short attention span

Contains MSG: so you know it's legit!

Ok. So we here at Feast are not all about pre-made junk, processed foods, and particularly monosodium glutimate. But what the hell.

I eat all the time. Every day. Like at least seven times a day. So sometimes I eat kind of dubious stuff. Cheap, delicious, healthy. Choose two.

So at my aformentioned favorite Thai market, the Bangluck Market on the south side of Hollywood Blvd just west of Normandy, I found a jar of Tom Ka Kai soup paste. Thai food is really hard for me. I am always missing something, so doing it from scratch is just too much work 90% of the time. This stuff has MSG in it. But I thought about it and I'm thinkin- so does all that delicious Thai food I pay folding money for at Sanamalang.

So here's the bachellorette magic! In a small pot, cook up 6 Trader Joe's (I swear they aren't paying me) chicken postsickers in a puddle of water with a splash of black seseme oil. While they cook, rip up some spinach into a small soup bowl. This is a great time to use your beastly large spinach leaves. Chop green onion chives, cilantro, and aneheim peppers. When the dumplings are done, add extra water - like 1.5 cups. Stir in a spoon of soup paste. Toss in the veggies, except the spinach. Give it a minute, then pour the soup and potstickers into your bowl over the spinach. Eat with chopsticks or whatever.

It's magic.

The soup makes even formidable spinach plyable, and the intense flavors are well-balanced by the bland potstickers and bitter greens.

It's not the same as a delicious bowl of leftover Tom Ka Kai soup, and it's got enough salt that you don't want to do this more than three times a week (trust me!). But it's totally meal-shaped and will fill you with exotic-ish goodness on a tiny budget and a short attention span.

The breakdown:

TJ's potstickers
soup paste
green onion chives
cilantro
anehiem peppers
spinach (tough OK!)

Matches well with Kirin Ichiban, which Micron Liquor sells for 8.99/ 12 pack.

Bachelorette Pizza

Disclaimer: Not a particularly sexy pizza. Just a good pizza idea for the single lady. Or bro.

Trader Joe's makes these medium Margarita Pizzas. They're from Italy (!) and cost like $4. I keep a stack in my freezer for emergencies.

About the same price as a pizza crust, they have very little on them; a tiny splash of sauce and some cheese slices. That's ideal for creating your own low-maintenance meal quickly.

Chop or rip:
sweet basil
spicy basil
past-its-prime spinach
anaheim peppers
cherry tomatoes
red bell pepper

Put those on the frozen pizza and cook that sucker for 7 minutes, right on the rack. I wanted to put cheese on it but my cheese went bad, and I found out it's actually great just like this.

The awesomeness comes from Thai Town. Next to Sanamalang, our favorite cash-only Thai place (on Hollywood just west of Normandy), I often stop into the Bangluck Market to get cash. Last time I bought a bag each of fresh "sweet basil" and "spicy basil", about $1 each. Sadly I don't know anything about these plants or where else to find them, so if anyone does, please advise.

So yeah. Keep some frozen pizzas around, and you can toss any veggies you have lying around on it. It's especially good for veggies that are a little gamey so you don't want them fresh.

Good for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Extremely Random Salmon Success!

I'm tired. Like, obscenely tired. Like, slept from 6-7 pm before deciding that I should get out of bed and return at, say, 9:00.

After a few minutes of Marquito listing the things I might call for delivery - cuban, pizza, chinese, thai, each causing us more nausea than the last - and the places I might drive if I had ANY will to leave the house, I asserted that seductive third option: I can cook. Requiring movement from the sofa, this prospect Marco finds particularly nauseating.

At last I stalked with a surly glare into the kitchen. The refrigerator prognosis was bad. I've eaten a lot of augmented frozen pizzas lately. All out. No lettuce or crispy spinach. No broccoli. No beans, fresh meat, serviceable cheese. No leftovers. In the freezer, nothing meal-shaped. After days of oatmeal, ramen, and coffee, my body was begging for protein. I resolved to woman up and cook a salmon.

Trader Joes sells silverbrite salmon fillets frozen in pairs for cheap. Wild caught Alaskan.

I'm tired because I taught some general education university geology labs today - beginning at 8am. And last night, well, I should have stopped at that first draft Spaten Optimator. Hindsight.

So I was in a weird mood, ok? Just keep that in mind. Here's what I combined in one pot, heat off:

1.5 cup cooked spirally pasta
1 tsp olive oil
1/2 lemon juice
1 chopped fugi apple
1 fork drizzle of blackberry honey

And in a frying pan:

salmon fillet
1/3 red bell pepper, chopped to 2 cm chunks
2 green onion chives, chopped fine-ish
1.5 minced green aneheim (I think) peppers
1/2 lemon juice
1.5 fork drizzle blackberry honey
2 diced tamatillos

Plating: shallow bowl, with ladle of pasta salad next to about half the salmon entree, with six plump cherry tomatoes on the side of the pasta.

Appetizer: a half can of ripe green/black olives to savor.

Beverage: slightly warm can of Kirin Ichiban

Dessert: same olives, chilled.

Diagnosis: Totally delicious.

No photo will accompany this post, on-account-a there's too much sand in my camera.

It's a very proud success for me. I had a completely absurd assortment of ingredients. By no means do I support anyone going out and shopping to create this kind of meal. The lesson for me is that if I follow my pallet, in my indefatigable, Remy the Rat - esque confidence, I can make a delicious, healthy meal out of just about anything.

The big lesson here is what's NOT in the meal. Garlic. Crushed red pepper. Salt. Pepper.

In fact, I didn't use any seasonings at all. I'm pretty predictable. So when I'm hungover, surly, and don't want to cook, I think it's a response to what I image I'm going to make. Boredom.

Sometimes ya gotta surprise yourself.

So here are some details for order of operations:
Pull everything veggie-related from the fridge.
Leave the tomatoes on the counter to warm up. (Ideally they shouldn't be in the fridge to begin with, but hey. We're city people. Gotta protect that tomato investment.)
Set water boiling in a pot.
Thaw the salmon in the microwave.
Chop the veggies.
Cook the pasta without salt or oil.
Simmer the salmon in the frying pan. Low heat.
Open a can of olives, and eat some.
Drain the pasta and toss it right back in the pot with some oil.
Toss the veggies into the salmon.
Add lemon juice to both pots.
Dice the apple and toss into pasta.
Drizzle honey on both pots.
Dice the tomatillos and add to the salmon.

Somehow the olives really tied the meal together. I made enough for two but I would NEVER prepare this kind of meal with a guest. Not yet. It would have to be someone who's extrememly loving and forgiving, because it's quite likely it'll taste like crap. It's like ingredient rulette. Each time you add something, it could be just the additional flavor the meal needs, or it could be the staw that breaks the flavor's back. This time, I got lucky.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Coming Soon: duck how-to


My mom and I made these two ducks for Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the most important holiday in the universe and one I heartily believe we should celebrate all the damn time. That's what this blog is about really. Every day you deserve to make the most of what you eat.

I've got to compare notes with mi madre because it wouldn't be fair to post the how-to on these ducks without cooking times and temps and all that.

I'm not really a recipe person. I hate cookbooks. They always call for things I don't have. My kitchen mo is really to combine things that are lying around and let my experience inform what I buy next time. All that said, when it comes to making birds, you really need a damn recipe to tell you about, like, ovens.

Bad Company

Delicious food served with delicious food is delicious, right?

I share with you now a terrible misadventure, because I care about you, and don't want to watch you make the same mistakes I did. It's a coming of age story, really.

Now, here are three totally delicious things to eat:

1) Huevos Pobres

Fry up some spicy sausage, and add fresh veggies.
cherry tomatoes
bell pepper
sweet onion
chives
mushrooms
aneheim peppers
crushed red thai peppers
minced fresh garlic
Add eggs to that and cook it till awesome.

2) Restauranty Salad

Slice cold polenta and fry it in pork fat until its crisp.
Serve this on a bed of romaine, add cherry tomatoes and queso fresca.

3) Candy-dream-universe Salad

Pile broken queso fresca with fresh pithed strawberries.


Now, do NOT combine these three dishes! It's horrible! Sweet merciful crap!

The eggs were savory and cooked to perfection. The polenta crunched superbly alongside the yielding queso. The cheese and strawberries blended serenely. But combined into a meal, I could not enjoy these sensations.

These foods cannot share a plate together. It's like inviting your ex and all the people you're dating, and kind of dating, and have a crush on, to the same barbecue. Each as an individual is so enjoyable, so full of complexity, inviting slow savory appreciation. Combined, the personality of each dish clashes with the tone of the next. The greasy sausage and the blithe strawberries represent two different parts of your palate, two equally important desires that cannot be satisfied at the same time. Not, at least, as they are each achieved in these dishes. They're mutually exclusive.

Even worse was the pairing with delicious Newcastle Brown Ale. Even the glass of water felt awkward, and asked to leave.

Leftover Chronicles: Marco comes home

Marco came home after a few months in Miami. I used to cook often alongside the three guys I live with, and Marco's return sparked a little of that down-home goodness. This is a meal for budget-stretching, and an ode to the well-stocked veggie drawer.

Serendipitous Entree: Pork. I brought home leftover pork from a paleontology dinner at La Barca on Vermont in K-Town. So we stewed that up with some broth.

Side: Cuban black beans. Stew these things together for as long as you can:

canned plain black beans
fresh minced garlic
red onion
bell pepper
pasilla pepper
lime juice

Side: Rice and broccoli

I think I threw the broccoli into the pork for a while to soften up. I put frozen corn into a pan with some water. As it starts to thaw, I added the broccoli and some butter. Then, garlic. I prefer this with TONS of sauteed hot pepper, but the guys are not so into spicy.

Also Vic has that pitiable genetic condition (Pauline told me so and she knows stuff) that makes cilantro taste like hot ass, so when he joins us I forgo cilantro.

Plating: I LOVE these shallow bowls I got at the Goodwill when I moved in. Spoon the pork onto ripped romaine, and slap some sides next to it. Garnish with fresh mandarin slices.

If you've got some tortillas this mean is cutlery free. That was sort of my theme for November.

Out of Season

At the risk of alienating my non-existent readership with untenable recommendations, I am posting a backlog of favorite meals. This little gem of the lean season (fiscally and caloricly) was inspired by field food.

Lydia is a genius and co-conspirator. We went to Nevada for a two-day, eight hundred mile camping blitz of field work. We invented this perfect field sandwich.

One half a sourdough english muffin, warm
one wedge of laughing cow soft cheese
one package of marmalade

I know this involves processed things instead of whole foods. That's kind of the beauty of field food though. Steal a packet of marmalade from one of those little jam caddies at a diner. The cheese wedge is sealed in foil. The english muffins are a dollar a pack at Vons. At home I use mom's homemade marmalade. I should get her to publish that recipe.

The whole meal includes farmer's market strait-ups:
spinach
queso fresca
strawberries
cherry tomatoes
boiled egg

This is a good meal for breakfast, but if it's evening (or if you're a drunkard) pair with Newcastle Brown Ale.

Lounging Around


They were still selling strawberries at the farmer's market on Sunset this morning, so I guess it's not too late to publish this gem from many weeks back.

This became my favorite snack for about two weeks strait.

spinach
queso fresca
strawberries
cherry tomatoes

Pair with Flight of the Concords.

Desert field work: food gets serious


I spent last week trekking across the deserts of Nevada and Utah, on a paleontology field trip. I concocted the most astonishingly terrible gorp recipe which I must share with you! Combine these things in a bag:
Trader Joe's Tamari Roasted Almonds
TJ's Wasabi Peas
Craisins

Totally delicious in a sinister way. Induces AWFUL breath. Lots of protein.

The other amazing wonder food from heaven is something I found in Little Tokyo in Downtown Los Angeles. If you are headed to the field, I highly recommend this. Bring chop sticks and a bag for the tin when you're done. (For a detailed review, see my Nov 2008 post, "Indulgence in a shitty economy")

Duck Season


This is another epic salad. This is also a cool no-effort clean-up meal if you follow the order of operations.

As soon as you get in the door, set down your bag, let the dog out, and walk into the kitchen. Cut a sweet potato in half and put one half inside your toaster over. Set the timer for a half hour. Go about your buisness.

When you come back to the kitchen, slice some duck and put it on foil next to the potato in the toaster oven. Put these things in a bowl:
One or two handfuls of spinach.
Queso Fresco (stab at the round with a fork to break off some chunks).
Sliced strawberries.
Mandarin wedges.

When the duck is warm all the way through and the potato is stabable with a fork, you're ready to eat. Put the duck on the salad. I recommend a Kings Hawaiian Sweet Bread roll if you aren't raging against the processed food machine.

Pair with a rad beer of your choosing. Or, if you're not drinking tonight, enjoy Trader Joe's pomegranate juice watered down with some bubbly water.

Woodland genius



This is really just a plating recommendation for duck.

Slice some leftover duck and put it on foil in your toaster oven (it you don't have one go buy one now because they are AWESOME). Also put some leftover wild rice mix in there. Bake that for long enough for it to warm up. Serve it with a few big unaltered branches of broccoli and a green onion. Totally awesome.

Here are beer pairings, sorted by emotional context:
Convincing yourself that eating alone is the hallmark of independence and being single is your CHOICE, after all? Newcastle.
Worried about the recession? Trader Joe's Octoberfest.
Excited about an upcoming date? You could push it and go with a Red Trolley.
Want to reward yourself for a hard week of work, and prevent any work happening after dinner? Spaten Optimator.

Leftover Chronicles: epic salads



Yo. In desperation to procrastinate grant-writing, I bring you special reports from my backlog of recipes for holiday leftovers. Too late for your Festivus ham? Well it's in time for Easter.

Pictured here is one of the raddest salads. First, let's talk about salad. Salad is a medium. Like it's brethren the Sandwich, or the Pizza, the Salad is a format for food. Too many people limit their salads to veggies, and douse the veggies in unhappy glue-soup dressings. Here at Feast we're as enthusiastic about minimalism as we are devoted to deliciousness.

Here's how to make the above salad.
Put a handful of spinach into a dish. Now you are officially making a salad, so anything goes. Spoon some cold home-made cranberry sauce onto the margin.
On the counter, assemble: some pecans, a fuji apple, plantains, ham. From the fridge, get your masson jar of Duck Fat (we haven't covered how to get make this but I'll post it soon).

Put about a teaspoon of duck fat into a frying pan and kick the burner to medium. While the grease melts and spreads (mmmmmm), chop the fuji apple into cubes a bit bigger than dice. Once the grease is liquid-y and clear, turn the heat down to low. Toss all the apple cubes in the pan and shimmy the handle so that all the pieces get coated in a layer of duck grease. Now let them cook a little bit in the pan, flipping them around. It should take about a minute or two. The idea is to let the sugary outer margin mix with the grease and caramelize a little bit. You don't want to cook the apples all the way through. When they're done, put them in a little dish like the people on tv do.

Now the plantains. Slice them pretty thin and fry those puppies up (add oil - canola or something, it needed). While the plantains fry, slice your ham into medium pieces. Slap the ham into the pan when there is only a little tiny bit of duck grease left. You don't want to add grease to your ham but it will keep the ham from drying out as it warms up.

Now put all these things onto your salad at once.

The flavors of the duck, fuji, ham, and plantain are so rad together. But it's really important to have a hefty bed of spinach underneath. It's a great way to eat a bowl of greens with iron and all that. Most importantly, the crisp, mellow bitterness of the spinach balances out the decadent insane flavores dancing around it.

Notice we didn't do anything to the nuts. Candy would be overkill here. And the ham is plain also; no coatings or nonsense.

I made this with my mom, at my parent's place, with ham leftover from a class party (Graduate Sedimentology Seminar: Carbonate Depositional Environments). We also made basic cuban black beans. My mom, in an adorable effort to welcome my independent heathen spirit to her home, bought BEER (gasp) for me. She chose Corona (probably from seeing comercials for it, bless her heart), and with a crisp lime it went well with the beans. But if I planned this meal for guests (and it would be perfect as a romantic dinner for two), I would pair it with something richer and not too sweet. Negro Modelo maybe.

Other pairing options for this salad, matched to goals:
Stay in and play ping pong? Black Toad.
Party? Red Stripe
Decadent romance? Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar
Old friends, maybe some Scrabble? Firestone Double Barrel

Incidentally this is a coffee table that my dad carved for my mom when they were dating.