A Tuscan Shrimp & White Bean Stew

This one was amazingly easy and came out great. I’d already bought shrimp for dinner. I hemmed and hawed between making a simple scampi and doing a dry-cooked szechuan shrimp, and then I played the episode of America’s Test Kitchen my DVR recorded today where they did this recipe (mostly), and cooked this one up immediately after watching it.

First, I peeled the shrimp (3/4 pound) and then brined ’em in a bowl of water with a tablespoon each of salt & sugar, for about 15 minutes.

I took the shells and sauteed ’em in some olive oil until they turned pink & fragrant, then added 1/2 cup of water to make a little fresh shrimp broth. I let it simmer maybe 5 minutes, then removed the shells and set aside for later.

Into the main saute pan: half an onion, chopped – three garlic cloves, sliced (not minced – overwhelming garlic flavor that way), a few pinches of red pepper flakes,  maybe 1/4 tsp of ground black pepper, and a few pinches of kosher salt – all cooked in some olive oil for a few minutes until golden and soft.

Added a 1/4 tsp of fish sauce (they used actual anchovies on TV), then added 1/2 can of chopped tomato, and 1/2 can of cannelini beans with their liquid, along with the shrimp broth. Brought it up to near boil, then simmered it, covered, for 15 minutes.

Added the drained/patted dry shrimp, mixed in, recovered & let simmer for 7-10 minutes.

At the end, hit it with some lemon juice & basil (on TV they also added lemon zest).

It looked thicker on TV than what I finished with, but this was easily taken care of by removing shrimp/beans/tomato/whatever with a slotted spoon & then cooking down the remainder for only a few minutes.

Good stuff – a wonderful mix of shrimp flavor with hits of the pepper, and then followed by the lemon and basil combo, all mellowed by the creaminess of the beans. HELL YEAH!

I had it with some ciabatta bread (any good crunchy bread’ll do), side salad and a pinot grigio.

Then I watched the rest of the America’s Test Kitchen episode, and their top rated manual pasta making machine turned out to be the most expensive $75 retail Atlas 150, the one I FOUND AT A THRIFT STORE, USED ONLY ONCE MAYBE, STILL IN ITS BOX, FOR ONLY FIFTEEN BUCKS!!!!

I RULE!!!

A Sunday Cooking Post, March 11, 2018

I’ve been thinking of getting myself yet another kitchen gadget, this time one of those Instant Pots, that combine a pressure cooker, slow cooker & sauteé-r into one countertop electronic thigamajig that’ll make my cooking of stews, chilis and the like much easier….

… and then I came across this guy’s version of a pressure cooker mac and cheese that intrigues me greatly.

Check it out:

Tonight, however, it’ll be a simple chicken dish, since I just restocked on boneless breasts & thighs. I’m thinking I’ll cut the breast into cutlets, pound ’em flat, dredge in some seasoned flour, brown in olive oil on both sides, remove from the pan, throw in some minced garlic, chopped tomato and white wine, return the chicken to the pan and let simmer in the sauce for 20 minutes or so before adding a little basil & pepper and serving.

Get all that?

Told you it was easy.

I’ll probably grab the 3 qt version of the Instapot and cut the portions of the mac & cheese recipe down from the family-size serving in the vid to the I’ll just sit here alone in the dark with my meager dinner before I end it all proportions. I’d hate for the cops busting down my door in the hazmat suits to take my rotting corpse away think that I wasted food.

Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Wine

Whenever I cook up a batch of my pasta sauce, I prefer to use a sweet wine. I like the ways in which it enhances & brings out the flavor of the tomatoes, giving them a mysterious sweet quality that makes the sauce taste a lot riper, despite being made from canned.

For a while, I’d been using Casa Rossa, a nice Brachetto wine they used to sell at Trader Joes. AND THEN THOSE BASTARDS DISCONTINUED IT. And from what I can tell, they sell no other sparkling sweet Brachetto varieties.

So I found some alternates that have worked pretty well. Moscatos and Lambruscos are pretty close to Brachettos in flavor. One fizzy Moscato from the Puglia region, Sara Bee, has worked about as well as the Casa Rossa. I’ve also gotten good results from a California variety of Moscato from Blue Fin.

The sweet Dornfelder German grape is the source of the Joseph Hagler Sweet Red sold at Trader Joe’s, and while not quite as sweet as the Moscato, it worked very well in the sauce recipe.  They sell a few Lambrusco varieties as well…. I’ll have to add those to the sauce experimentation at some point.

I loaded up on some of those sweet wines today, along with the usual assortment of Sangiovese, Pinot Grigio, Chianti and Montepulcianos that I like.

L’chaim!

Steamed Fish In A Spicy Garlic Sauce, Cheating Version

I’m calling it “cheating” since I’m <GASP!> using the microwave and not a traditional bamboo steamer. If you want to use the steamer, feel free, just set the ingredients on a plate inside the steamer and let it rip for a good 15-20 minutes.

But since I’m using fish I thawed myself after buying frozen on the cheap, it makes no difference in the end, flavor or texture wise. The microwave works by heating water molocules anyway, so microwaving fish is practically the same as steaming it anyway.

This is an easy meal to prepare and have on hand, which is why I do it.

I’ll get frozen cod or tilapia or orange roughy from Trader Joe’s or wherever – so long as it’s the frozen in vacuum sealed bag variety. This’ll keep in the freezer as long as anything else in my freezer. As much as I buy fresh fish to cook that very day, this turned out to be an easy way to work it into the dinner rotation without having to shop for it the same day.

Remove from the bag & thaw overnight in a covered dish in the ‘fridge.

Then:

1. Rinse the fillets and pat dry.

2. I put the fillets into a microwave-safe dish, in a single layer, spaced a bit – a nice 9×12 glass pyrex job works well.

3. I mix the following and spoon over each piece – I’ll put a ratio for a single piece of fish here, maybe 1/2 pound size: 1 tsp soy, 1 tsp chili garlic paste, 1 tsp hoison sauce, 1 tsp rice vinegar, 1/2 tsp honey. Feel free to add freshly minced ginger, garlic or szechuan peppercorn to taste.

4. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and into the microwave. Now, my microwave has an automatic setting for fish, where a moisture sensor cooks it, tells me to rearrange it (I don’t) and then finishes. I let it sit for 5 minutes covered, then serve. If you microwaved a pound of fillets done this way on high for 5 minutes and then let sit, covered for 5 minutes, it’ll do. If you know your microwave and its behavior well enough, you could figure the right time out, although I’m assuming most of the newer models have these wonderful built-in sensors.

5. That’s really it. You can do the same thing with different sauces – I’ve done a chopped tomato/lemon/basil/salt & pepper arrangement, a butter/lemon one, and variations on the Chinese ingredients. They all work out fine. Tilapia, pollock or cod work very well, just a good white fish, not overly thick, that’ll cook up evenly in time.

I’ll serve the fish with rice or noodles, usually, or a nice crusty bread. It’s sorta the freezer to microwave version of a dinner thrown together from pantry items alone, and it’s pretty good.

Some Boneless Short Ribs In The Slow Cooker

Every now and then when I’m on a Costco run, I’ll splurge on a big pack of their giant boneless short ribs. They must get ’em from steers on the Barry Bonds diet since I never see ones at the regular supermarket as big.

Whatever. I cut ’em in half so that they fit my pot. And they cook up no differently than brisket or a chuck roast.

And a slow cooker is a wonderfully lazy way to cook on a Sunday, especially when my solar panels are powering it all. I LOVE BEING CHEAP!

I slightly modified an Italian pot roast recipe for this one, and it came out pretty good.

1. Salt/pepper/garlic powdered the ribs & rubbed it all in, good
2. Browned the ribs all over in a big ol’ pot in some olive oil
3. Removed the ribs and put them in the slow cooker
4. Threw a coarsely chopped onion, 3 chopped garlic cloves, some chunked up carrot and some rosemary into the olive oil, sauteed for a few minutes to soften the onion a little and get the garlic fragrant. Then that all went into the slow cooker.
5. Added one 15 ounce can of chopped tomato & a cup of Nero (any good red wine will do) to the slow cooker.
6. Cooked on high for 5 hours.
7. Removed the meat to rest & put it in a covered dish.
8. Transferred the gravy to the same big pot I used earlier, cooked it down by maybe 1/3, then stirred in 1 tsp cornstarch/1 tsp water to thicken, adjusted the seasoning by taste, and then put the meat back in.
9. Let sit on low 5-10 mins, and then served myself a portion while freezing the other. It went well with the same Nero wine.

And that frozen leftover, once thawed and reheated, will somehow be even better. I once read up on the chemistry of that particular phenom and I still don’t understand it, but I will continue to enjoy it.

Had it with a big salad & a couple of pieces of a nice Ciabatta.

And now I look like this. Yay!

How Many French Coffee Presses Can I Break?

Just broke the fourth one I’ve owned. Knocked it over while reaching for an item behind it, and it fell hard onto the counter and shattered.

I use them for loose leaf tea, which they are perfect for brewing. But unlike nearly every other damn breakable thing in my kitchen, they are the ONLY item I manage to regularly drop and break while washing, knock over (like just now), knock on the floor, etc.

But I PREDICT my spazness! I always have a backup on hand, which means I’ll need to buy a new backup. Whenever I spot one during any thrift store excursion, I usually pick it up for five bucks or whatever since they go for way more new.

I’m still pissed, tho. I liked this last one, it had a nice filter up top for pouring. Bah.

Quick And Easy Chinese Spicy Shrimp

The Martin Yan cookbook I snagged a month or so back at a rummage sale for a buck continues to pay dividends.

Tonight I concocted a slight variation on one of his shrimp recipes, and came up with the following:

1. Peeled/deveined about 3/4 pound of large-ish shrimp (16-20s)
2. Tossed ’em with a pinch or two of kosher salt, one minced garlic clove, and a couple of pinches of red pepper flakes
3. The shrimp and seasonings would then get stirfried until practically done in a wok, maybe 4-5 minutes.
4. Added the premixed sauce: 2 1/2 tsp soy sauce, 2 tsp ketchup, 1 tsp hot chili paste, 2 tsp honey.
5. Thickened it a tad with maybe 1/2 tsp of cornstarch in 1 tsp water.

AND THAT WAS IT.

This was amazingly easy to throw together, and tasted just great. Hints of sweetness with the honey, followed up with a sneaky increase of heat and then a finish of the garlic.

Yan’s version leaves the shells on the shrimp and dusts ’em with cornstarch before wokking ’em with dry red chilis and garlic. But the sauce is the same. The texture on his version would be different, but I’ve never been crazy about leaving the shells on shrimps. If you fry ’em enough and they crispy, fine, but I didn’t trust myself. And I still got what I wanted – shrimp in a thick, clingy spicy sauce.

A recurring motif in this Yan book is also the use of balsamic vinegar and hoisin sauce to create sweet/sour effects underneath chili heat. The Kung Pao recipe uses this, as well as some others, and I discovered it worked rather well. Despite large amounts of chili paste with red pepper flakes on top of it, the dishes do not come out overly hot, but well balanced.

AND my copy is an autographed first edition! Not too bad for a buck.

A Quick Post For A Quick Recipe

The On Top Of Spaghetti cookbook from Providence’s Al Forno begins to pay off.  I started with a slight variation on their simple “mother” sauce recipe, and it came out great.

So here’s what I did:

1. Minced up 3 big garlic cloves, for about a tablespoon’s worth, and sauteéd it in a little more than 1/4 cup of olive oil until it began to turn golden, maybe two minutes over medium-low heat.
2. Carefully (to avoid splashing) added 2/3 cup of chicken broth & 2/3 cup of red wine
3. Brought it to a boil, then reduced to a simmer and let half the liquid boil off.
4. Added 1 28 ounce can of crushed plum tomatoes
5. Brought it back up to a  boil, then let simmer for about five minues
6. Salted to taste (about a half a teaspoon), added a tablespoon of dried basil

… and that’s it! The sauce finished in those five minutes, and then I added it to some seasoned ground turkey I browned up before finishing some penne with it. The rest of the basic sauce went into refrigerator & freezer portions. This makes about 5 servings, and took a total of maybe 10-15 minutes.

DON’T EVER HAVE SAUCE FROM A SUPERMARKET JAR AGAIN!

Just What I Needed! Another Italian Cookbook!

Why only have 27 when you can have 28? (Yes, I counted them when I got home.)

How many more recipes could I have on hand? How many could I actually eat before my inevitable death due to pasta-induced obesity?

Check the current over/under in Vegas & put me down for ten bucks on “over.” Too much is NEVER enough.

So finding On Top Of Spaghetti… by Johanne Killeen and George Germon while rooting around a Burbank thrift store I took as a SIGN FROM THE ALMIGHTY.  Killeen & Germon are the owners of Al Forno in my special-origins-issue of Providence, Rhode Island. Al Forno is probably the most famous of what I’d term the fancy/schmantzy upscale Italian that began appearing in the 1980s, existing alongside the old school red sauce places ubiquitous throughout the state. (If there’s a cookbook out there somewhere for Mike’s Kitchen, located inside a Cranston VFW post and my pick for best Italian in the state, I’d certainly love to hear about it. This is probably as close as I’ll get. One night long ago when I went to dinner there, we saw Germon eating there and chatting with Mike.  In Germon’s earlier book, they published Mike’s polenta recipe, which is a good’n. Mike is 85, and he’s had his perch at that VFW since my college days. May he live forever!)

Anyway, I’ll glance at all sorts of cookbooks at thrift stores, yardsales, library sales, you name it… my usual rule is that if I can’t find more than one recipe I’d want to cook while browsing through the book, I put it back for the next glutton to come along. Suffice to say that a book of original pasta recipes would be enough to pique my interest. And whenever I come across one that has a Rhode Island connection, I figure it’s a cosmic message.  It happened many years ago at a yardsale, when I came across a copy of We Called It Macaroni by Nancy Verde Barr. Barr grew up on Federal Hill and offers up a nice mix of family recipes and the cultural background of that old Italian neighborhood.

Authentic Rhode Island! THAT’S what I want on my dinner table! All that’s missing is Jimmy Two-Times to go get the papers get the papers.

The other books? I’d rather save focusing on them for different blog posts in the future. I’ll try to check back in with different ones after I cook some amazin’ recipe from them.  I have several focusing on different regions of Italian cookery from north to south, some from eminently trustworthy Italian chefs like Lidia Bastianich or Marcella Hazan, some from other great Italian restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and other cities…..

Yeah, I make Italian food a lot.

Which is why I agree with the title of this article, and ignore its final paragraphs.

It WAS The Best Bean & Cheese Burrito I’ve Ever Had

I had a day to ride the rails for free, thanks to a Metrolink promotion, so I organized some errands for downtown Los Angeles (most notably a visit to The Last Bookstore) and took note of whatever other stuff was worth visiting that laid close to train stations.

While temped to ride the spiffy new line to Santa Monica pier, I put that safari off for another day and decided instead to think about lunch.  Something new. That meant passing on the best pastrami in the world at Langer‘s (right near a Red line train stop) and instead venturing to sample Al & Bea’s Mexican Food, within a a couple of blocks of a Gold line stop.

This place has been there for literally fifty years, serving up old school Mexican, specializing in burritos. Supposedly it has the best bean & cheese burrito in Los Angeles.  My pick for best LA-area foodie Jonathan Gold certainly thinks so. Twenty first century Criswell-wannabe stat cruncher Nate Silver came to the same conclusion.

And so did LA Weekly.

I’ve been trying to remember an episode of St. Elsewhere, when Howie Mandel & Stephen Furst go out to Los Angeles, and ex-pat Angeleno Dr. Ehrilch (Ed Begly Jr) begs them to bring him back a burrito from some specific place…. I keep wondering if it was Al & Bea’s. I only remember the shot of Begley unwrapping the burrito outside the hospital on a cold Boston winter night, and smelling it in heavenly bliss.

So I hiked from Mariachi Station in Boyle Heights, admiring the wonderful hilltop view of the downtown LA skyline in back of me, and ordered the bean & cheese with red sauce the other day.

The first bite. Just ONE bite and my reaction was an immediate “Lives up to the hype!”

And then I basically inhaled the thing.

I tried to peg down the secret. The beans had a definite home made vibe to them. Looser and goopier than the pasty-style refried beans you get in some burritos or other dishes. Made the thing a sloppy mess to eat, but I wasn’t exactly in tie & tails. Not a lot of cheese in the thing, which kept the cheese flavor and melty texture from overwhelming the thing. And the red sauce? My guess it that the red sauce was practically pure hot pepper mash, but – and here was the MAGIC – while the hotness pervaded each bite, it did not overwhelm. The main flavor consisted of the mild flavor of the refried pintos, with the cheese and hot pepper moving in and out of. And let’s not forget the tortilla – slightly thinner than other flour tortilla burtitos I’ve had, but with enough of a chewy al dente type bite – not too gummy, not too chewy, but with enough substance to be a dry framework for the thing without being too dry or going soggy. An impressive piece of culinary engineering, to be sure.

I love the old school stuff at Henry’s in North Hollywood, and any time I have to schlep to the stupid airport, I try to make a stop at Tito’s. But I gotta give this one the top rating.

Oh, and if I keep eating this stuff, by all means buy stock in Glaxo/Smith-Kline, makers of Gas-X.