Food Porn

Managed to steal Jason's computer to use his iPhoto so enjoy these pictures of past meals.

This was the chicken salad sandwich I had made with yogurt-mayo sauce, celery, radishes, raisins and the root vegetable mash on the other piece of the French bread. I'm not that happy with the photo, but the lighting in our kitchen is nonexistent.

I was really excited when going through all the pictures I had on my camera because I also stumbled upon pictures of a really delicious roast chicken dinner I had made a few weeks ago:

Roast chicken is now one of my favorite things to cook because first, it is one of the most economical and tasty things you can cook. Most people buy chicken breasts packaged, which first of all I don't understand, because it is almost impossible to keep moist but additionally, you pay more for four chicken breasts than you do for an entire chicken. Also,I love roast chicken because it feels really comforting and wonderful when you smell it and it's something I associate with coming home to a warm and bustling house after a cold winter day (even though I know that my mother, in her entire life, has never roasted a kitchen. Blame the oversaturation of American television I was exposed to as a child). The way I am cooking roast chicken is incredibly easy - all I do is rub it down with olive oil, salt, and pepper and throw it in the oven at about 450 degrees over some vegetables. One of my favorite vegetables to use when doing this is parsnips, which caramelize really well and take on this incredible sweet flavor that goes with the savoriness of the juices from the chicken. Sometimes, as I did in the picture above, is just roast the legs, thighs and wings and I save the breasts for poaching, which is the only technique that keeps breasts really moist and tender. Finally, I throw the carcass in a pot with a mirepoix (traditionally carrots, onion, and celery but I like to also include garlic and sometimes leeks or parsnips) and make a tasty stock for soup or just to freeze to have stock on hand later.

The side dish is just roasted asparagus, tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper and with a little lemon juice squeezed over it at the end. Simple but delicious.

Finally, these are from a meal I made when my mother sent me up to Boston with an entire pork tenderloin. Pork is a meat that I am only recently learning to appreciate because it's supposed I usually associate with the ground bits that are often throw into a lot of bad Chinese dishes but I've had better variations of it and I have really come to appreciate it, especially when it is cooked so it's slightly pink in the middle. I know some people are deathly afraid of uncooked meat but I don't think there's a worse travesty than overcooking a piece of meat. I say, the bloodier, the better and if I could, I'd eat the cow still moving.

I was a little intimidated by the giant slab of pork tenderloin so I consulted Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything where I found a great recipe for roasted pork loin with a garlic rosemary rub. I just tweaked his recipe slightly, using the herbs and spices I had on hand: garlic minced into a paste, rosemary finely chopped, some cumin, salt, pepper and I included some great chili powders that I got for Christmas (courtesy of Jason, who also bought me some other really great kitchen supplies, but that's for another post). I threw the whole thing in the oven for about 2 hours and the result was a fantastic, succulent piece of meat. I was thrilled with the texture but I found it was a little oversalted on the outside, which reminded me why I struggle so much with rubs. How do you use a rub and flavor the inside of a piece of meat without making the outside too intense?

The Brussels sprouts are classic, with bacon. I just crisped up some bacon (is there anything in the world that doesn't taste better with bacon?) and used the fat to sautéed the Brussels sprouts. I'd like to get a little more creative with them and will be trying a recipe that called for using lemon zest soon.

Eggs

At the fear of being repetitive, check out my Tumblr on why I struggle so much with cooking eggs over easy. Help is greatly appreciated.

Food art

I had a friend,an amateur photographer, once say that he thinks that close up shots of food are ALWAYS artsy, and therefore a cop out. That might be true, but I love gorgeous shots of food - even more so since I've recently took the plunge, bought myself a digital SLR and took a photography class. I want to start putting pictures of the food I eat and make, and I promise these will make their way onto the blog soon. Unfortunately, my Mac Powerbook (the really old school 13 inch edition) is finally on its last legs, and refuses to import pictures, rendering my "artfully" composed shots completely unviewable on this blog.

For now, I indulge my food photo fantasies on this super great website Tastespotting, where every morning, I get to work, turn on my computer, and spend a good 30 minutes perusing recipes and pictures before I attempt to get anything done.

These zucchini-parmesean cakes, which I know better as zucchini-parmesean latkes, I first saw on Tastespotting and will be attempting some time this week. I used to get them from Whole Foods when I was younger and they were my favorite thing to eat. I found them again at the River St. Whole Foods in Cambridge, but like most things from childhood, are never as good in the present. I think the problem with the Whole Foods ones I had is that first, I had purchased them before embarking on a 3 hour car ride to Maine and heated them in a gas station microwave reserved for Hot Pockets, and second, they were mushy to start out with. Whole Foods in an attempt to make them healthier, choose not to use a lot of oil where these are crying out to be fried up as proper latkes should be.

In line with my 45 year old ways...

I want this Aerogarden so that I can grow my own herbs even in the dead of Boston winter.

Food diary

In an attempt to eat more interesting things, I'm following in the footsteps of the food blogging greats, Grub Street and Mark Bittman (who wrote maybe my favorite Minimalist article in awhile) and keep a food diary for at least a few days.

Dinner last night: Jason and I rummaged through the fridge and found: some chicken thighs and drumsticks that he had roasted two nights ago on top of root vegetables, parsnips, carrots, butternut squash, celery, onions and some leftover French bread in the pantry so the only thing we could really think of was making a chicken salad sandwich deal for dinner.

We shredded the chicken and he made this sauce that he first had at this fish taco place in Texas: it's just mayo, yogurt, garlic, something acidic to cut through the richness (he used lime juice) and chili peppers, that we tossed the chicken in. I threw in some radishes and celery for crunch and some golden raisins and craisins for sweetness. Pretty standard but that sauce is SO good.

We still had those root vegetables, and I had remembered seeing something in Food and Wine last month about a root vegetable mash so I just boiled up two potatoes, then threw all the leftover root vegetables in the pot and mashed the whole thing up with milk, butter, a little salt and pepper, and yogurt. Usually, I like to add a tiny bit of sour cream into whatever mash I'm making, it makes the texture a lot better but we were out and yogurt was a fine substitute. It needed a little something extra to pick up on the sweetness of the root vegetables, so I threw in a little cinnamon and it was great.

Finally, I just sauteed some spinach with garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper (why are people constantly not seasoning their food?! I put S&P in EVERYTHING), and a splash of rice wine vinegar.

Voila! Dinner (I realize no one wants to read this much text, so pictures will be posted soon).

Breakfast: Roasted pork buns from Boston's Chinatown which don't hold a candle to roasted pork buns that you can get in the NYC Chinatown. This is pretty true for anything epicurean between the two cities. An orange (my life is a constant battle to eat more fruit) and coffee.

Lunch: One of the perks of my job is a million opportunities for expensed meals out; today's was a mentor-mentee lunch where I am supposed to ask my mentor the pressing questions I have about working. Mostly, we just complain about the hours and catch up on bad reality shows. Unfortunately, this being Back Bay Boston, our allocated budget puts us in the category of restaurants of what I like to call "mediocre fine dining". Things that fall under this category include but are not limited to, Joe's American Grill, Legal Seafoods, and today's offense, the Cheesecake Factory, where things taste fine enough, by virture of if you deep fry something and cover it in cheese, it tastes fine enough.

I ordered the Pasta Da Vinci, which is just penne with chicken, mushrooms, and onions cooked in a madeira wine sauce. I'm not sure how restaurants have this freakish ability to put copious amounts of salt into their food without having it taste oversalted but now I'm sitting at my desk feeling dehydrated and like I'm about to burst at the seams.

I hate mediocre restaurant experiences.

Dinner: Leftovers again but I am a firm believer that they can and should taste better - this NYTimes article interviews Eli Zabar who thinks it's not enough to just use leftovers, they should be better than the original (his ability to do this allows him to charge 24.99 for 8 oz. of his Parmesan toast which he makes from stale Foccacia that he couldn't sell in his stores). In this tradition, we cooked dinner tonight.

First up a roasted potato soup, which we made a few days ago but it seems like I can't make soup except in bucketfuls. It was too rich and too thick, almost custardy so we thinned it out with some water, cut the richness with some red wine vinegar and wilted some spinach in it as it was reheating and chopped some green onions and threw that on top. The result was incredible, like liquid salt and vinegar chips, only with spinach thrown in so I could pretend to be healthy. We had the soup with some French bread we had thrown in the oven and the crunch reminded me even more of potato chips.

Some Trader Joe's mini pitas, celery and lemon hummus (I used to be skeptical as well but I think it has a really refreshing flavor and a complexity that you don't really get from hummus which I mostly find to be bland) rounded out the pre-dinner snacking.