In which I show off my "good eater" stripes

Came across this on the Boston Globe today, entitled "The Omnivore's Hundred", a list of 100 things that every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life, according to this blog.

My list:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros (the best I've had is still the Harmony Special, offered at the Harmony Hotel in Costa Rica)
4. Steak tartare (best with a raw egg)
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush (really? not particularly exciting or exotic)
11. Calamari (Comment above)
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich (This list is bullshit)
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (OK, I had to look this up)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda (I had to look this up also, but it sounds like a garlicky and anchovy fondue, love it!)
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (The one at Punjabi Dhaba is excellent)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (NOT FOOD)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O (Also, NOT FOOD)
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal (on the list of things to try)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips (I only think of weird vegan baking, no thanks).
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears, or funnel cake
68. Haggis (but I think I'd like this a lot. <3>Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. (Dare to dream?)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse (sorry, Vives)
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

14 items that I haven't tried, and only one I wouldn't eat (or seek out) isn't bad I think. In my defense, I think this list is more heavily biased towards European foods, as it comes from a British blog. Other exotic things I'd throw on the list:

Jamón ibérico
Jellyfish
Chicken feet
Nagaimo, or Japanese mountain yam
Morels
Natto beans
Wild boar

Exercises in lamb

This blog was almost dead but was resuscitated by a rack of lamb sent up by my mother, and a vigilant photographer in the form of Jason.

I unfortunately haven't been cooking very much lately, because of the amount of hours I have been working - dinners have been consisting of food ordered and comped by the firm, or whatever frozen items I can find in my freezer. When I tell people about my job at a consulting firm, I think there are a lot of people who ask me about the perks, specifically about the free meals that I often get because I work late. The novelty of this wears off fast. I've burned through the selection of decent takeaway restaurants in the Back Bay area really quickly, and I felt like I could never enjoy the meal because I was too busy trying to finish some piece of analysis for an impending deadline. The constant late nights and ordering out have really made me appreciate my own home cooking, which I really hope I'll get to do more of than in the past month.

I became so fed up with working so much that I finally purchased a new knife, as a little reward for myself for working so much - a gorgeous 8 inch Wüsthof chef's knife. Kitchen Arts on Newbury sells refurbished knives, which is where I got my Wüsthof and it's a fantastic deal. The knives are in excellent conditions and it allows people like me who want to buy nicer knives but not spend $100 - $200 because of the wear and tear they'll put the knife through. Even though the knife wasn't as expensive as it could have been, I'm still not taking any chances with keeping it in our kitchen where everything seems to burn, break, or spontaneously combust. With good knives, you really should wash them as soon as you're done using them and dry them off as opposed to leaving them in the sink and since this would never happen in our kitchen, I'm actually currently hiding the knife in my underwear drawer and bringing it out only when in use. But so far, so good.

Back to the lamb.

The first thing I cooked wasn't done with the rack of lamb my mother sent up but rather inspired by this recipe by Mark Bittman. This was a perfect thing to cook on a rainy spring day, because it's a soup and it's warm and comforting but the acid you add at the end and the dill really brighten the dish up and it's much lighter and refreshing than you'd think a lamb stew is.

I was having a conversation with my friend Christine today about dill and we both agreed that dill really is one of those herbs that you can add to anything. I never used it much before it came in my Aerogarden because I never thought to buy it at the grocery store before. I could never figure out what I would do with the huge bunches that dill is sold in at supermarkets, but now that I can snip from the Aerogarden, dill makes a frequent appearance in everything that I cook.

Now onto the rack of lamb.

My mom came to visit Boston a few weeks ago, and like every Asian mother, she is always convinced that her daughter doesn't have enough to eat. She brought up among various breakfast items, homemade roasted red bell peppers, and shumai, a rack of lamb. I really wanted to do a full meal with it, with a really delicious starter to some kind of full, impressive and time consuming side. I remembered from Top Chef that Arianne did a cauliflower puree that sounded delicious so I knew I wanted to do that, like a more interesting variation of mashed potatoes. This was absolutely delicious - creamy and flavorful. I seasoned mine with thyme, nutmeg, salt and pepper and let the cauliflower just simmer in the cream on low heat for almost an hour, then removed the cauliflower and pureed it.

For the lamb, I made a rub with rosemary, salt and pepper, then broiled the rack in my new cast iron skillet. I also made a mint pesto to drizzle on top.

Finally, I made a side of roasted asparagus, just to have some green on the side.

I also had an unsuccessful attempt at making a gougère, made using the same choux pastry that I had made my cream puffs with. I made them with Gruyère, what gougères are traditionally made with, but I also included dill. Unfortunately, I think I used too much cheese in the gougères, so they didn't rise properly and were more like Gruyère and dill scones, instead of the light airy puffs that I was envisioning.

The end products:

Cooking days

Perhaps it's that spring is finally, finally descending upon Boston but I can't get enough vegetables. It helps that I've since discovered Russo's, which I first went to when I made this antipasti platter. In addition to having fantastic prepared foods and cured meats, their produce section is incredible, which was the inspiration for all the things that I was cooking in the past two weeks. These are a few of the highlights, mainly from Sundays, because those become my "cooking days" where I can devote 3 or 4 hours to just thinking up recipes and cooking.

I bought spring onions, which are just onions which are in between scallions and regular onions in terms of maturity. They are typically sweeter and milder than regular onions and are fresh and tender. The famed Vidalia spring onions hail from certain areas of Georgia and have the same sugar content as an apple. However, the ones I picked up were just spring onions. I really struggled with how best to showcase them and I could have just sliced them thin and put them in a salad but left them in the fridge for a little too long. Instead, I made a savory onion jam by first caramelizing them for about 30 minutes in butter, then adding brown sugar and letting the mixture furthur caramelize. I then added a splash of red wine vinegar and reduced for another 5 - 10 minutes. Finally, I added a sprig of rosemary from my new rosemary plant and simmered that for another 5 minutes. The result? This may be my new favorite thing to eat. The jam was sweet and savory, earthy from the rosemary and I have no fault to find with onions cooked in butter. I spread the jam on a dark Lithuanian rye (also from Russo's!) and shaved some extra sharp Cheddar on top.

Next up was zucchini-Parmesan latkes, which I had wanted to make for a long time but didn't get around to it until now. I used a mixture of potato, zucchini and yellow squash for the batter but would recommend only using zucchini and potato - the yellow squash is too soft, wet and full of seeds to be of any use in this recipe. Every variation of this recipe that I searced for online cautioned one thing: make sure to squeeze all the liquid out of the zucchini before frying, otherwise the batter doesn't crisp up. I found the best way to do this was to salt the zucchini, let it sit for 10 minutes then squeeze the liquid out of the shredded zucchini with a cheese cloth. I then added lemon zest, lemon juice, a healthy grating of Parmigiano Reggiano, salt and pepper and panko bread crumbs. Then, I (or Jason, because the oil started spattering and I screamed) just pan fried each latke in canola oil. I served these with a lemon dill sauce made with sour cream, dill (snipped from the Aerogarden!), and lemon zest. The result? Delicious, and way better than the Whole Food versions from my childhood. The frying makes the outsides crispy and burnt like real latkes, and I season with a much heavier hand. The next brunch where I have to impress someone, I'm making these.

Finally, this past Sunday I cooked a seafood risotto. I've been dying to make risotto for a long time, because I like savory carbs and the texture is similar to that of Chinese porridge which I also really like. Sunday was the day to finally do it because I had a Tupperware of fish stock with a limited shelf life in my refridgerator, made when we had leftover fish heads and bones from the fried tilapia adventure. At first, I wanted to make a cioppino but then I saw a bag of arborio rice in the cupboard so decided risotto was the way to go.

Let me just say this. Risotto is not the dish to make if you are a fretful cook. I stood over my pot ladling fish broth into my pot, trying not to have a panic attack. Too much? Not enough? When does this goddamn thing ever finish cooking? Is the bottom burning? When do I add the fish? It was a nail-biting thirty minutes. In the end, the risotto turned out beautifully, creamy with a bit of bite. I included some portabello mushrooms, whose inclusion also occured because of a limited shelf life, peas, tilapia, squid and shrimp. The most difficult part of this is really the constant stirring. I've read articles that say to the contrary, like this post on Bitten but I figured for my first try, I should follow the rules of risotto to a tee. But like Emily Weinstein, I had to reach across the kitchen to stir with one hand and wash mushrooms with the other (only possible when you operate in the world's smallest kitchen or when you have gorillas arms). Luckily, Jason is an excellent sous chef and handled most of the fish mongering.

Topped the risotto off with dill and chives from the Aerogarden. That thing is already starting to pay itself off!

Sibling Rivalry

Last Friday night, Jason and I went to Sibling Rivalry for Restaurant Week. It should be duly noted that usually, I hate Restaurant Week - it's an excuse for good restaurants to turn a quick buck and put things like chicken Caesar salad on the prix fixe menu. I also think you never get the full effect of what eating that restaurant usually is because there are mobs of people, service is sloppy, you don't get to taste the chef's trademark style, and I come out feeling cheated and unsettled. But I suppose, overall, it's a win-win situation for everyone - diners get the fancy dining experience at a fraction of the price and restaurants get inflated sales for a week. We went to Sibling Rivalry fully expecting to order off the regular menu and not the prix fixe, Restaurant Week being the push I needed to finally make a reservation. Imagine my delight when we opened the menu to realize that the entire Sibling Rivalry menu was fair game. That's $33.09 for any appetizer, entree and dessert from here.

The concept of Sibling Rivalry is that it has two executive chefs: two brothers David and Bob Kinkead. From the restaurant's website, "Chefs David and Bob Kinkead created a 'dueling' menu that showcases their talents with different interpretations of seasonal ingredients." We ordered mostly from Chef David's side of the menu, although when I read up on both chefs it seems like Chef Bob is the more critically acclaimed chef.

This was the first appetizer, a Morroccan lamb brik with cumin, curried lamb jus and a pickled cucumber and lamb salad. Also, on the plate, a bit random, was some orange sections. Brik is a North African type of fried or baked pastry around some type of filling, usually made with phyllo dough. The lamb filling in this was really, really delicious - savory and spicy, with some raisins thrown in for sweetness. I found the cucumber salad and the orange slices unnecessary garnishes, and would have been satisfied with the lamb brik alone. My only complaint was that dish came out not as hot as it should have been. This would have been delicious if it was piping and had come straight from the fryer.

Ancho Chili steak tartare, with tomatillo salsa, pickled cabbage, a cheese pupusa and avocado and cilantro. The tartare on its own was good but the whole thing really came together when you combined a bite of the cheese pupasa and the tomatillo salsa with the tartare. I liked the dish a lot because I thought putting a Mexican twist to steak tartare was very creative. The cheese pupusa was my favorite part of the whole thing; it's made with masa de maíz, the corn flour usually used to make tortillas and stuffed with cheese but I couldn't figure out what kind of cheese it was.

Seared duck breast, over celery root puree, roasted vegetables and brussel sprouts. The duck was slightly overdone, even after I had asked for it to "err on the side of medium rare" but what I liked the most about this was the celery root puree. This was actually the first time that I had celery root and I loved it! I like the very aromatic and distinct flavor of celery, and it seems intensified in celery root, but also there's a really comforting texture about celery root puree, like mashed potatoes.

Seared jumbo Cape scallops, with Anaheim chile relleno, tomatillo relish, and salsa fresca. This was perhaps an ordering mistake on our part but the flavors of this dish were remarkably similar to the steak tartare. What was weird was that these two dishes were offered by a different Kinkead. Still, despite the repeat in flavor, I really like the scallops, which were cooked to perfection and the chile relleno. They coated the Anaheim chile with panko crumbs which gave it a great texture.

Caramel chocolate mousse cake with caramel crème anglaise and white chocolate mousse. This was by far the worst thing we had all night, trite in concept and strange tasting. I think they put star anise in it, which gave it this really bad aftertaste.

Bread pudding with vanilla ice cream and some kind of berry reduction underneath. This was better than the chocolate mousse but same deal - a chef's dessert, an easy play. Ho-hum.

Overall, I think Sibling Rivalry was good but nothing remarkable compared to other New American restaurants in its price range. I think our experience was also downgraded by the fact that it was Restaurant Week: the whole place was so loud we could barely hear each other, it took a long time for our food to arrive and everyone seemed harried and rushed. I think (hope) that dishes would have come out hot instead of lukewarm had the place not been a madhouse. Service was friendly but also a little overeager - our waiter proclaimed himself a "total foodie" but a quick check on Wikipedia showed he was wrong on a few accounts. I didn't find this as much of an issue as the fact that at some point he propped down and sat next to me in the booth during dinner.

Forays into baking

The world is divided into cooks and bakers and the rare few who can do both. My friend Christine can but I fall primarily into the first category, with an irrational fear of the second. I think it first grew when I took Home Ec in eighth grade with Mrs. Petrowski, who always smelled like talc powder. The only things I remember from the cooking portion of that class is that she taught us to always soak our dishes in hot, soapy water ("it does the work for you!") and that we had to make blueberry muffins. I can't remember if the recipe was anything special, or if we used real blueberries or anything else specific but I do remember that we were put in groups, there was a boy named Anthony Romano in my group and we managed to turn out these god-awful muffins - soggy and uncooked, and somehow, green. Don't ask me how, but when Mrs. Petrowski saw these she threated to fail us for the day and since then, I've been afraid to bake. I'm not very comfortable with specific measurements and I hate cooking from recipes, and I find that baking, unless you do it frequently, requires both those things.

I'm trying to get better with baking, if anything because if I find myself on Top Chef one day, I want to be ready for the dessert challenge. I think part of baking is that it seems like an event, so doing it requires an attitude of "I will conquer this". On Thanksgiving, I made my first pie crust from scratch and felt pretty proud about that, even more so because of the lattice top.

Last week, I was feeling courageous so I decided to try something a little more complicated with greater room for failure - cream puffs with a chocolate sauce. I found the recipe in How To Cook Everything and was particularly intrigued by the dough. It requires making a pâte à choux, whose literal translation is "cabbage paste" for the way it should look. It is the dough used in making cream puffs, eclairs, profiteroles, beignets, and what I am most excited to make, gougères, or cheese puffs. The really cool thing about choux pastry is that when baked, it rises to about three times its original size because the air in the batter steams and expands the dough. As a result, you're left with a hole in the middle of your pastry that is perfect for filling.

I also made a vanilla custard to fill my pastries with and made a scrumptious chocolate sauce to drizzle on top by melting dark chocolate in heavy cream.

The results of the baking:
It turns out you can only eat so many of these before you feel like you might die, the chief ingredients being butter, heavy cream and sugar but I brought them into the office and they were a hit.

A trip to Russo's

I often complain about Boston not being a "food city" and nowhere is this more apparent than when I try to go grocery shopping. The supermarket landscape is dominated by three major players: the first is Trader Joe's, which I think is incredible for snacks and quick, gourmet frozen meals in a fix but the produce is never very good and I hate buying it in those weird plastic wrapped packages; the second is large, conventional supermarkets like Shaw's and Stop n' Shop (see syn. Safeway, Albertson's, Vons, etc.), and the third is Whole Foods, which I like but still not the kind of specialty grocery store like D'agostino's or Citarella that get me really excited. Checking listings for the two local farmers' markets yielded really disappointing results - The Copley Farmers' Market doesn't start until May 20 and the Coolidge Corner one doesn't start until July!

I went to Russo's yesterday, which describes itself as "the food lover's food store" and was blown away because this was exactly the type of grocery store that we are lacking in Boston. I think a lot of the food is seasonal and as locally grown as possible and there is also much more variety in their produce. We walked away with a lot of somewhat interesting vegetables and fruits like lemon plums, which I think is a type of plucot, and a red pomelo, with promises to live more dangerously next week.

What I especially couldn't resist is Russo's amazing prepared foods section, as well as their meats and charcuterie. When I saw the really fantastic looking prosciutto di parma, I knew that I had to do an antipasti platter.

Here are the fruits of our (not really) labor.

We got the prosciutto di parma that inspired it all, spicy soppressata, and dry Italian salami and grilled asparagus, eggplant, peppers, onions, and zucchini. Also, Tom Thumb tomatoes sprinkled with fleur de sel and cracked black pepper, some dried figs, mixed marinated olives and Sicilian green olives stuffed with bleu cheese, roasted tomatoes and the best Gouda I have ever had (it's a two year old Dutch Gouda).

I made a chickory and frisee salad with a lemon-shallot vinagrette and with shaved Parmigiano and a fried egg on top and had a bottle of Pinot Black, a 2007 pinot noir from Chile, my new favorite red wine.

Bring me back to the days of Taco Nazo

Before I went to college in California, I really didn't like Mexican food and mostly associated with the likes of Taco Bell and Jose Tejas, which I have eaten at only once. We passed by it every time we drove to my grandma's house near Princeton and there was a giant neon EAT sign hanging over it, that could be seen down the highway for a good five miles. One day, my mother's curiosity got the best of her and we pulled in for lunch. The meal consisted of standard East Coast Mexican food - subpar, and in large quantities. My most memorable moment from that meal is the waitress offering to bring my mother another 32oz. coke, even though she had barely finished her first and then we went running out, my mother shocked that people could consume that much cheese and sauce and crap in one sitting.

This all changed when I went to school in southern California, not so much the quantity of food but the quality of it. I was first introduced to it at Pomona's dining hall, where every Wednesday was Taco Day. I still maintain the best corn tortillas I've ever had, including those had in Mexico. It helped that a large majority of our dining hall staff was Mexican and were making the foodstuffs of their homeland, including those incredible corn tortillas which were handmade and grilled to perfection. This expanded to Mexican cuisine outside of our tiny Pomona bubble - we explored local Mexican joints, including a tiny taqueria called El Rey in Chino (fictional home of Ryan on the OC!) where I consumed tripe, carnitas, tortas, and tried eye-tearing after eye tearing salsas from the salsa bar, some so fiery red it almost hurt to look at.

The other great culinary discovery I made while I was at college was fish tacos, from Taco Nazo. Yes, they're a chain, but I had never been exposed to fish tacos before and the fast food in California (where everything is a drive through) is very good (see In n' Out). These fish tacos were incredible; flaky, white fish (What kind?Who knows? Probably tilapia) battered and fried so there was a crispy, hot shell on the outside, shredded cabbage, and a little tartar sauce probably thinned out with some yogurt or milk. I'd pile this with salsa and hot sauce and radishes and pickled onions from the salsa bar, squeeze a lime over my overfilled taco and eat to my heart's content. Especially on Wednesday nights when tacos went for a dollar. And this place had beer.

Needless to say, it's difficult to find this quality of Mexican food in Boston being as far from the border as we are. I've eaten at a few taco shops that people keep recommending and so far I haven't found anything that parallels the food I ate in California (but I'm still interested in more recommendations! I know that somewhere in Boston, there is a taco that rivals Pomona Taco Day tacos) so I've been doing my best to recreate what SoCal Mexican food at home.

Last night, Jason and I attempted fish tacos, so a lot of credit has to be given to him. He has a much better hand at getting Mexican flavors down than I do, the Mexican population being a little bit more prominent in Texas than New Jersey.

Below, the spread of goods:

Cornmeal battered tilapia, shredded red cabbage, tomato avocado salsa, Jason's sauce*, corn tortillas (but sadly, not handmade)

All this was was tilapia dredged in egg, then rolled in a mixture of salt, pepper, cornmeal and flour then deep fried in canola oil. Next time, I want to try this with my beer batter that I've made with my cheese stuffed zucchini blossoms.

Easy salsa with garlic, red onion, jalapeno, tomato, avocado, and cilantro all tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper, lime juice, and a dash of urfa pepper.

The finished product! Not quite as good as Taco Nazo but even cheaper than on Dollar Taco Wednesdays.