yassa.

Above: De Ceuvel. Below: America, O'Neill's basement last night.

The recipe: good the first night, wayyyy better the second day, this would fit right in with any kind of Caribbean menu. Super good if one is a fan of the habanero and the mustard being together what language is this.

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yassa (senegalese chicken in lemon, mustard, and scotch bonnet). 

marinade
3 boneless chicken breasts, cut lengthwise into strips
2 red scotch bonnet peppers, seeded and veined
juice of a lemon
8 cloves garlic, peeled
1 tsp smoked salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper or black peppercorns
2 tbsp olive oil

sauce
1 large or 2 small onions, finely chopped (about 2 cups)
1 cup coarse-grained mustard
1/4 olive oil
juice of a lemon
3 bay leaves
1/2 tsp ground turmeric
salt and pepper to taste
handful of cilantro, chopped

notational.

The recipe worked perfectly, apparently even defying the laws of physics and biology to allow me to cook 8 pounds of pork butt in 4 hours. And, for posterity, a 4kg shoulder yielded 1 liter of pulled pork, do NOT ask me how that metric shit works, I just look at the packaging and what my containers say they hold; science and math do/does the rest.

Our full contribution to the ghost-pepper-centric menu tomorrow is as follows, because I'm a senile old man and keep losing the scraps of paper where I keep writing it down:

Georgia-style BBQ pulled pork with raw sweet onion on squishy little white buns
red cabbage chipotle-buttermilk slaw
a nicely mustardy potato salad
bread and butter peach-cucumber pickle

chicken wings two ways:
1) brined for slightly too long (4 hours was just on the verge of too salty, I'd do two next time) and tossed in Momofuku's octo vinaigrette (soy, garlic, ginger, rice vinegar, sesame oil, scallions)
2) spice-rubbed and tossed in a lemon ghost brown butter (unsalted butter, whole dried ghost pepper, lemon zest, lemon juice, miniscule amounts of Frank's and Old Bay.

maybe a smoked ghost jerk tenderloin if i feel uppity

probably not:
ghost pepper oil (details undetermined)
ghost pepper-pickled mustard seeds (if I can make it work)

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jamaican curried chicken.

Above: homemade bread and small-batch hot sauces from Alexander Krone at Butcher's Tears.

Not much to say at the moment other than that the below curry is sounding better than anything else right now. Stolen from Saveur, adaptation forthcoming.



















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jamaican chicken coconut curry. 

1 kg chicken of some sort
1/4 cup fresh lime juice
2 tbsp good fresh curry powder
1/4 cup coconut oil
salt and pepper

1 tsp ground allspice
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
3 scallions, finely chopped
3 sprigs thyme
2 carrots, thinly sliced
1 sweet potato, coarsely diced
1 2-inch piece ginger, minced
1 cup coconut milk
1 Scotch bonnet or habanero chile, slit in half lengthwise

2 tbsp soy sauce
1 or 2 tbsp creme fraiche

Combine chicken, lime juice, and 1 tbsp curry powder in a large bowl, and toss to combine; refrigerate for at least 4 hours or up to overnight.

Melt oil or butter in a good stew pot or wok. Add remaining curry powder, the allspice, garlic, scallions, thyme, carrots, sweet potato, and ginger, and cook, stirring occasionally, until lightly caramelized, about 6 minutes. Add chicken and any remaining marinade to pot along with coconut milk and chile, and stir to combine. Cook, stirring occasionally, until chicken is cooked through and sauce is thickened, about 40 minutes; add soy sauce and creme fraiche to taste. Serve over rice.

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mr. saturday night special.

Saturday? Mole rojo from my oldest cookbook, Coyote Cafe, just now finally starting to fall apart. Somehow the only ingredients we're lacking are chicken and celery.

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mole rojo.

caldo de pollo (makes about 4x as much as you need, but then you've got leftover chicken broth)
1 chicken

2 celery ribs

2 carrots

1 onion

1 head garlic

1 clove

1/2 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp thyme

couple grinds black pepper

mole
18-24 dried chiles, comprised of
mild new mexican chiles

ancho chiles

pasilla chiles

mulato chiles

I used 18 mild new mexicans, 3 pasilla, and 3 mulato b/c that's what I had

5 tomatoes, charred under the broiler for 5 minutes

1/3 cup sesame seeds, toasted carefully

1 cup toasted almonds

1/2 cup currants, soaked in boiling water for 30 minutes, water discarded

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/4 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp cinnamon

3 tbsp butter
20g barely sweetened chocolate
20g slightly sweeter chocolate

pinch of ghost pepper salt if anyone complains about the "lack of heat"

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orange you glad i didn't say asian again.

Turmeric Quest 2013 still in progress, but even I as a true lovvver of most things Asian am needing the occasional break from the normal Indonesian-Thai-Vietnamese-Japanese-Burmese-Cambodian-Sri Lankan-etc stuff we cook over here.

And yet. Trying to eat orange stuff like turmeric but also squash and sweet potatoes, I'm sure you know why. And kale, you know why, everybody does. And prunes, you probably think you know why, but it's just because I've had this bag of them sitting around forever and it's time to start fresh and begin ignoring a brand-new bag of prunes.  

Thus, if not Asian, toward what cuisine do we steer our mighty kitchen spatula. Have you noticed I'm not using question marks anymore. It's more blasé that way, like I don't even care if "you" answer. More rhetorical. I've also put sarcastic exclamation marks "on pause". Quotation marks, unfortunately not (yet), and parentheses are still going pretty strong. And I'm still really likely to use more than one colon in a sentence, probably all of them incorrectly. Progress (implied question mark). 

The answer to my extremely rhetorical and questionably punctuated moronic question turned out to be: Moroccan, ish. In the end though, by the time I got around to turning on the stove I just really didn't have it in me anymore so I just scorched/steamed a chicken breast, threw some cilantro at it and dipped it in harissa, almost the same thing. The squash is still roasting, it's 9:45pm. A recipe for tomorrow's usage of tonight's detritus will eventually emerge from the shambles below. 

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calico tagine. 

100-200g leftover chicken
1 or 2 fried or hard-boiled egg(s)

2 or 3 cups kale, chopped pretty fine
1 or 2 cups butternut squash, roasted with smoked salt, cinnamon, and cumin seed

7 or 14 prunes, soaked, keep the water

handful almonds, toasted, chopped

pinch powdered ginger or ras el hanout

teaspoon cumin seed

a good bit of cinnamon

an assload of harissa, ok i used 2 tbsp 

extra-virgin olive oil if there's not already some from the squash or chicken
salt or feta if you're eating dairy
freshly cracked pepper to taste
a sprinkle of smoked paprika if you're in the mood
toasted sesame seeds

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chickie.

So yes, a regular reader pointed out that it's been quiet here. Nothing to worry about, I just have a few more "Draft" posts hanging around than usual. And I spent a few days being pleasantly distracted by the new hire at Megasubtiel.

I've made a couple of things worth talking about lately...one was a butternut squash, spinach, almond and smoked cheese gratin I made today, will post the recipe in a bit. The below happened a couple of days ago, based on the thing from Je Mange La Ville that Mara makes. I served it with potato mash and roasted runner beans, super nice.

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kind of southwestern beer-braised chicken with sage and bacon.

2 tbsp olive oil, more as needed
1 kg chicken legs or 4 kippenbouten
salt and pepper

2 medium onions, cut in half, then in very thin crosswise slices
2 cups dark beer
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 tsp powdered bay leaves
1 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp dried sage
pinch smoked paprika
a healthy pinch pul biber
i would like to try a pinch of cumin seed in here next time

1 tbsp unsalted butter
a bunch of fresh mushrooms
125g lean bacon
2 green Holland chiles, or more, fire-roasted

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¿qué pasa?

Que?! What's happening? I can't even remember what I was just typing into the Google Search bar, but the autocomplete for it was "crab scotch egg". Has Google just gotten a whole bunch better? I'm Googling for wonderful things I didn't even know existed (for those of you who may not understand the phrase "crab Scotch egg", it's this).

Actually I do remember what I was Googling, crab and scotch bonnets, because I have some of the latter sitting around waiting to burn the shit out of me.

Above: the chicken phố I made while Mara painted the "living room", not my best effort, but in this kitchen bad phố is pretty much like bad pizza: not really all that bad at all.

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tandewri.

Defrosted some jalfrezi sauce tonight and blasted this quick and convenient marinade onto some chicken for 4 hours or so, it wuz real nice and would probably work equally well on anything else. Quite obviously you will not be able to make this exact marinade unless you use our butcher.

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tandoorish marinade.

2 or 3 tbsp bright red tandoori spice mix from the butcher, whatever looks like the right amount for the amount of protein you have

2 balls preserved ginger, smashed or pressed through a garlic press

4 cloves garlic, crushed or pressed

juice of a lemon

1/2 cup yogurt

salt

500g of some protein

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son of jerk.

I mentioned ze Barbecue Bible the other day, and yesterday I remembered the other reason I bought it: finally a reliable, refindable set of jerk recipes.

I've only made jerk a few times since living in Holland and frankly it's never really worked out, I guess b/c in America we used to tweak Penzey's jerk blend, which was easy and perfect, and dus I never had to develop my own recipe.

So I think the below recipe solves the problem. Last night I made some jerk chicken plus a pineapple-papaya salsa (pineapple, papaya, red onion, salt, lime, cilantro), something called "shogun slaw" with shredded carrots and ginger, and some sweet potatoes, oh yeah and some basic black beans. All good, and good together. Then we tried to watch Four Lions but failed b/c it wasn't what we were expecting or in the mood for, not to say it wasn't interesting.

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jerk marinade (in progress)

2 scotch bonnet chiles, deveined and deseeded
4 scallions, green and white
1 red onion
2 shallots
3 cloves garlic
1 tbsp grated ginger
2 tsp allspice
1 tsp dried thyme
2 tbsp brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
5 tbsp lime juice
3 tbsp soy sauce
1 cup water
3 tbsp neutral oil

Process all this shit. If you're marinating fish or shrimp, an hour or two is good. Chicken or pork more like 6. This is enough marinade for a kilo of something, including enough volume for you to boil the marinade and use as a sauce afterwards.

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chicken, or steak?

Hey there everbody, what's up. You will be noticing that not much blogging is happening here and when it is happening it is completely just going through the motions.

Case in point: so I went to roast a chicken tonight, and once again spent some time futilely looking for my perfect roast chicken recipe on this here site. As always, I couldn't find it, because as always, I've never actually posted it here.

So, here it basically is. I vary the herbs and spices, but the cooking process is essentially the same, except sometimes I only do the first two flips. Thus, at 450F: 20 minutes breast side up, 15 minutes breast side down. Then down to 375F and two more 15 minute flips.

Also: the Maroc suddenly has blood oranges, which taste more like Italy than just about anything else we can get our hands on.

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good evening.

Mara just reminded me that one time in high school she threw up on a cop at a U2 concert. Jägermeister.

Above: Westerpark this morning at 9am. Tonight's dinner: beet carpaccio. Moroccan chicken wings. Some kind of salad with a faux-bacon dressing or if that fails then maybe this tahini dressing that we haven't made in a while.

The fennel seed in these wings makes for nice little surprising bursts of flavor.

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moroccan chicken wings.

3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp paprika
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp cayenne
Juice of one lemon
an extra sprinkling of salt

Oven at 200C. Place chicken in a single layer on a roasting pan. Cook for 30 minutes until chicken is tender, then increase heat to 250 and cook for an additional 5 to 10 minutes, until chicken is crispy and caramelized.

soto ayam.

Tried to take a picture but no camera would cooperate, and plus it's just a bright yellow chicken soup, you can imagine that just fine I think. It's really good, a totally soothing yet spicy and exotic chicken soup.

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soto ayam (indonesian/surinamese chicken soup with turmeric).

4 chicken legs (not drumsticks, the whole leg) or 1.2 to 1.5kg equivalent whole chicken with bones.
400gr carrots, cut for soup
1 onion, in large dice
2 liters water
8 kaffir lime leaves
one 2-inch-long piece of fresh turmeric, peeled
1 tsp coarse salt, less if it's not coarse
1 habanero, Scotch Bonnet, or Madame Jeanette pepper, whole
12 allspice/pimiento berries, whole

1 tsp black peppercorns
1 tbsp coriander seeds
2 tsp cumin seeds

the turmeric from earlier, plus more if you like
4 cloves garlic
one 2-inch-long section of ginger, peeled
one 2-inch-long section of galangal, peeled
5 candlenuts
one or two tbsp water to make processing possible

1 to 2 tbsp coconut oil for frying spice paste

for serving:
fresh coriander leaves
cut limes
hard-boiled eggs if you want

Basically, combine the first group of ingredients and cook for 45 minutes. Remove the chicken, let it cool, and then get the meat off those dang legs and shred it. Also get that chile pepper out of the soup and discard.

While they're cooling, take the pepper, coriander, and cumin, and grind them to a fine powder in a food processor. Add the next set of ingredients plus the turmeric from the first step and process to a paste, adding water if necessary. Fry the paste over LOW heat for 10 minutes, it should bubble but not burn or get crispy .

Add the spice paste and the chicken back to the broth and cook for 10-15 minutes. It should be done now, but mine didn't taste awesome until the next day, when you should really skim the fat off, reheat and serve with garnishes. You could remove the allspice berries and kaffir lime leaves if you wanted. Also, soto ayam traditionally has noodles, you could do cellophane noodles if you wanted, I just didn't want.

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day eleven.

I mean yes, I do like both of those things.

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Progress report: DJ gig successful; tofu pancakes way better than I imagined; everything else still proving a bit problematic.

Tonight: some kind of kimchi chicken thing, haven't worked out the details. Though I don't imagine there are too many details to work out: kimchi, chicken, sesame oil, scallions, maybe an extra blast of ginger, my head is congested all of the sudden.

UPDATE: In reality, this chicken ended up being pretty dynamite b/c I found this last bit of red dragon sauce, so imagine: all of the above ingredients, plus cilantro, plus this red dragon sauce. Goooooood. 

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chkn.

Above: oliebollen and Crash, a possible first in the history of humanity.

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Well, 100M has fallen prey to yet another 2011 head cold, so we are trading out one comfort food plan (duck confit, sauerkraut, and that horseradish/butter/parsnip mash thing) for another: phở.

Bought some chicken to go into this thing, and with some of the non-necessary bits I'm doing two things: wings; and some kind of lettuce-wraps.

But I'm wondering, why did I not document the cooking process for the superamazing wings I made for Mara's birthday last year? I also don't think I documented the cooking process for this amazing phở I made this summer that involved toasted ginger. Why??? WHAT'S WRONG WITH MEEEEEEEEE??????

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UPDATE: Everything worked out fine. Turns out that you just cook the wings for like 20 minutes at 350, 20 minutes at 400, and then blast them at 450 til they're the right color. Or slower if you have time. For wings that you're coating in sauce, you can't really dry them out.

For the rest, below: chicken phở with all accompaniments; red dragon chicken/lettuce wraps, kind of a Momofuku thing, not bad; wings.

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caesar salad deviled eggs.

Above: Swami Peter at the Wildeman. +++

Tomorrow it cleans the house and rewards itselves with these.

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Wednesday the Mara heads off to the Scotland for a few days and that evening I think I'm cooking Japanese for the Swede. I mean, I'm definitely cooking dinner, I think it will be Japanese. I'm kind of ohhhh "in the zone" with it, and since my rehearsal for tomorrow is canceled, I have a little "extra time" to do geeky prep things like make my own okonomiyaki sauce. For my own reference here are things I'm thinking about doing:

Mini okonomiyaki (okonomiyakini?) or nasu dengaku.
Sake-rubbed roasted chicken (something I made up) with ginger-scallion, octo vinaigrette, and red dragon sauces (all Momofuku).
Quick salt pickles (Momofuku).
Furikake rice (something else that I made up but probably already exists).

Ehhhhhhh....dessert? Maybe green tea ice cream?

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you. keep. on. eatin' cars.

Ja. Still not blogging, this isn't blogging, this is just pre-coffee typing to document a couple of facts.

1) I have taken something out of the freezer that no one can identify, and I am thinking about eating it. It has many of the characteristics of pumpkin soup, and yet it smells strongly of fish and smoke. No one remembers making this, but it must have been made since December when we cleaned out the freezer. I know I made a smoked pumpkin soup in November, but this can't be that. I mention all of this in case I die from eating this. UPDATE: it seems to be a smoked mackerel and pumpkin soup. I remember talking about trying this, but I remember nothing about making it. It's pretty good, if it doesn't kill me.

2) In the past couple of weeks I've twice made a very good Mexican roasted chicken recipe from Zarela Martinez: basically rub the chicken with a mixture of black pepper, cumin, cloves, oregano, and thyme; stick a couple of cloves of sliced garlic under the skin in strategic places; give the whole thing a splash of apple cider vinegar and and salt liberally. Marinate for more than 1 and less than 6 hours. Roast as you would a regular old chicken. I served with basic black beans and a quick chile sauce from Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz's Book of Latin American Cooking, called salsa de chile ancho y almendra. Really good.

3) Yesterday, Korean food. Every single time we make Korean food I say something like "why don't we make this more often": it's fast, easy, healthy, and great. Last night was "salmon bulgogi" (based on a Rozanne Gold recipe) with a side of kim chi, perfectly good.

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salmon bulgogi.

2 garlic cloves, crushed
1/3 cup scallions, chopped
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 tbsp Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
one 3/4-inch cube peeled fresh ginger
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp sesame oil
3/4 tsp dochujang

four 125 gr salmon fillets

Process first eight ingredients in a food processor til smooth, pour over salmon (possibly reserving a little marinade to drizzle over at the end if you don't mind raw garlic), marinate for an hour. Bake salmon in the oven for 15 minutes at 200C. Serve with kim chi on the side maybe, or some kind of other milder pickle.

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what?

My worldview was irreversibly shifted this morning, by this.

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Lots of hilarious laughing today. Having dinner with Andy, Terrie, Valentina, etc. This is Coq à la Bière.

Which turned out pretty great. Gave Andy his birthday present 6 months late, Momofuku cookbook, hopefully this means we get to eat some Andy Momofuku food soon. Dessert also wonderful: oranges macerated in Grand Marnier and cardamom (a la KK), plus madeleines, and a side of sugarless chocolate mousse from Valentina.

Then we went downstairs for even more hilarity, culminating in an opera whose primary performers included a man eating bag after bag of McDonalds with contact microphones taped to his cheeks; a Prince-like figure wrapping his plugged-in guitar in cellophane and then rhythmically humping it for 10 minutes or so; and a finale which involved lighting three seven-foot-tall hash bongs, filling the room with smoke and thoroughly destroying everyone present.

Everybody was seriously fucked, simultaneously. Which was great fun. And then for some reason people started buying everyone drinks and things fell apart completely. Jasper ran into the wall on his way out of the building. Good times!!!

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big chicken.

This is based on this, and though we found it lacking just the tiniest bit of someting, we all ate the heck out of it, the sauce was pretty perfect and in general it gave us a warm and homey Cantonese feeling. Seems like a good template for braised chicken legs in general.

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beer-braised chicken legs with sriracha.

16 drumsticks
2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 bottle dark beer
1 cup chicken stock
1/4 cup sherry
1/2 tbsp hoisin sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt

1 large onion, chopped
2 cups cremini mushrooms, sliced
2 to 3 tsp sriracha
1 clove garlic, pressed
4 scallions, chopped

Brown chicken in oil. Mix beer through salt together and pour over chicken, braise covered for 30 minutes on stove or in oven. Remove chicken, add onions, mushrooms, and garlic, plus sriracha to taste. This is your sauce, cook it down for 10 minutes or so. Put chicken back in skillet, place under hot broiler to crisp up skin, flip chicken, do other side, serve over rice or noodles, scatter with plenty of scallions. Serves 4.

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as big as my arm.

This looks pretty unassuming. But it's something I'm going to keep making until I get tired of it or I can't find daikon anymore. This sounds familiar, I know.

I guess you'd call it chicken and daikon soup/stew. Basically chicken soup with carrot and daikon as the featured vegetables. But you dress it like pho, so: scallions, cilantro, mint, and a squeeze of lime if you want, followed by the appropriate amount of sriracha. You almost don't miss pho anymore.

Now we're making Elana's pumpkin bars. Nice to be cooking with the squawker again.

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UPDATE: By popular demand, more deets on the soup. I didn't include a recipe b/c this was basically an inefficient kind of improv thing.

What I did: I made a neutral but delicious chicken soup, with 4 liters of water, a whole chicken, onions, celery, and carrots, seasoned only with salt and black pepper. Maybe there was a clove of garlic. Oh and there were definitely 4 or 5 uncut chiles in there, the ones I think of as "Szechuan chiles", about the size of your pinky, dark red, not scarily hot. When the soup was done, I took the chicken out, ate half of it, shredded the rest and put it back in the soup.

That was Day 1. Day 2, I ate it as regular chicken soup.

Day 3, I had this big fucking daikon that needed using, so I cut half of it into cubes (I pickled the rest via Momofuku's recipe), probably 3 cups' worth, and added a little water to the leftover soup and simmered this new version of the soup for about 45 minutes, until the daikon was totally soft. Oh yeah, I added four more little carrots as well.

To bring this new version up to taste I used soy sauce instead of salt, maybe 2 tbsp, you could probably use fish sauce as another interesting variation. At this point, it's ready to go, served with plenty of chopped scallions, mint, and coriander. And the sriracha bottle.

Next time I try it I'll probably add some whole aromatics to the initial broth and remove them afterwards, I'm thinking lemongrass, ginger, turmeric, or galangal would all be welcome additions.

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firestarter.

It's pretty cool having someone "handy" around the house. Sometimes all you have to do is say, "I'm thinking about buying a charcoal chimney", and the handy person says, "No need!", and then you go buy a gargantuan can of olives at a very nice Middle Eastern grocery called Interfood (Groen van Prinstererstraat 88), take the ends off, drill some holes, attach some thick wire to serve as a grate between the charcoal and the newspaper, pour a Pimm's Cup, head up to the roof, and light that bitch (the, eh, chimney).

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As for the food: this was a test run, and the results were something we'll call "mixed". We ended up with some nearly perfect BBQ drumsticks; some initially disturbing but fixable asparagus; and borderline disastrous salmon that seriously tested the cook's patience and good humor. Two alterations would have made the whole endeavor markedly more successful from a cooking perspective: properly cleaning the grill BEFORE putting food on it; and starting with enough charcoal to to make a seriously hot fire.

But that's what test runs are for. The home-made chimney worked flawlessly (at a cost savings of more than 20 euro), so let's extend a big VDuck thank you to DIY Girl ("Thanks, DIY Girl!").

Oh yeh: anyone got any idea what to do with 400 green olives (besides tapenade)?