sigemuchi namul.

My picture doesn't do it justice, but basically following this recipe exactly resulted in a simply perfect room temperature Korean/Japanese side dish.

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sesame and garlic spinach.

1 big bag of spinach, washed
2 cloves of garlic, pressed
2 scallions, chopped fine
1 tbsp soy sauce, or more, to taste
2 tsp sesame oil, or more to taste
1 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted

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in the kitchn.

Above: Dad's blue suede badminton cake (think red velvet but you know, blue). Below: sweet potato puree, home-pickled jalapenos, Martha Stewart vs. Thug Kitchen's cranberry-orange relish.

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sweet potato, maple, ancho puree.

3 giant sweet potatoes
3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ancho chile powder
salt to taste

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collard greens.

1 bag collard greens
3 strips cooked bacon
1 onion
3 garlic cloves
1 tbsp cider vinegar
2 tbsp raw sugar
2 cups chicken broth
salt to taste

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cranberry-orange sauce.

juice of three oranges
zest from one orange
24 oz fresh cranberries
1 and 1/2 cups raw sugar
1/2 cup water
salt to taste

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here's looking at you.

This was designed to be a big healthy breakfast for a busy day of physical and mental activity, or at least what passes for those two things in my life, and it was so tasty and satisfying AND healthy-seeming that I would love to do it on a more frequent basis. Look at how excited I sound.

It does however have a couple semi-luxury items, smoked salmon (€2.99/100g) and watercress (€1.89/100g). Obviously those prices aren't breaking the bank, but breakfast-wise it's more of a budget hit than say an egg and toast. I should start looking into how much cheaper smoked salmon snippets are (these are the non-beautiful offcuts that are a by-product of slicing smoked salmon beautifully). Calorically speaking this was 410 calories as written below minus the shallot.

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soft-boiled eggs with smoked salmon and watercress. 

2 eggs

100g watercress, washed, spin-dried, and chopped rather fine so you don't have to discard the thickest stems. If you were serving this to someone you could separate the leaves from the stems and just finely chop the stems...I didn't care how it looked really, I was just trying to not waste any of my 100g of watercress.

1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp potent coarse-grain mustard
1 small shallot, minced, if you don't really have to worry about your breath

100g smoked salmon
2 tbsp chives, minced, if you don't really have to worry about your breath

no salt necessary
cracked pepper possibly, I didn't use any.

I've decided that I like my watercress slightly wilted, so I dressed my salad quite early in the process. Basically, put your eggs in a pot with cold water to cover and bring to a boil. While this is happening, make your dressing by combining the olive oil, vinegar, mustard, and shallot. Once the eggs are boiling, set a timer for 3 minutes and put a bowl of cold or icy water in the sink. Dress the watercress with the vinaigrette. When the timer goes off, gently remove the eggs from the pan and put them in the bowl of cold water. Plate the salmon on top of the dressed cress, then peel your eggs, add them to the bowl and do the green scatter on top with the chives.

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defroster.

Above: tonight's highly, highly successful Spinach Delivery Mechanism, which involved sauteeing bacon, sage, onions, and dried mulberries (expensively subbing for raisins) then slightly wilting the spinach in that melange. Throw some pecans in there and this would certainly work as a side for catfish at some point, hold on I'm having a brainstorm, catfish coated with the spices from Damon Lee Fowler's mama's sage and onion cornbread stuffing (cornmeal, black pepper, sage, lemon zest, nutmeg, celery salt).

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I kind of feel like I've come out of the defroster, if there is such a thing. I guess there is. It was a weird week, full of bubbling energy and no emotions, I felt more like myself but simultaneously like someone I've never felt like before. I think that by now, Day Six or something, things have settled...I'm going to give it a few days of non-alcohol-related free time to see how the nights are, and of course I'm sure I'll say something about the results of that experiment here.

So what else: Homesick Texan's carrot-habanero condiment was delicious and healthy so I'll post my adaptation of it below. It's nowhere as spicy as you'd think it would be given the ingredients, and even your first taste of it sets off a bit of a panic attack ("this is where it starts?"), but the usual slow fade-in of heat never arrives, it's just pleasantly piquant. No idea why, though I read somewhere that the smaller you cut your habanero, the less spicy it is.

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salsa carote. 

1 tbsp olive oil
2 large carrots, peeled and chopped
2 medium ripe tomatoes, cut into quarters
1/4 sweet onion
3 habanero peppers, cut in half with most seeds removed
3 cloves of garlic, cut in half
Juice of one lime
2 tbsp cider vinegar
Salt to taste

So, saute the carrots in the olive oil for 5 minutes, then add the tomatoes, garlic, onion, and habaneros and cook for 5-7 minutes more. The main thing is for the carrots to be just cooked enough and for your garlic to not be burned. Then puree everything to your desired consistency. 

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cherry bomb.

This Saveur article is what restarted my thinking about escabeches, well that and the temperature. It's finally hot here, so the idea of eating something vinegary out of the fridge sounds even better than usual. Maybe I'll eventually write down this turkey escabeche I made Friday night (oregano, habanero, cumin, cinnamon, allspice, vinegar, garlic, onion), but yes it may have to wait.

While I was poking about on the Saveur website I started looking at their picnic recipes, since etc what I said before about the temperature, and found this interesting-looking rice salad, also timely b/c Mara came into a bunch of cherries (that's what I said) and I've got kale and basil and spinach sitting around wilting and so I am making it right now. I'm unsure about the artichoke and cherry combo, that part sounds drug-induced, but will give it a try. Preliminary tasting results very positive (everything except cherries, almonds, and artichokes). Other items on the menu: Ottolenghi's smashed garlic cucumbers and that ol' beet carpaccio with feta. And maybe something with shrimp. We gwine be stinkee in our damn mouf.

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And later: cherries provided a beauteeful visual contrast but as suspected were unnecessary and/or distracting in terms of taste. They are now off macerating somewhere instead of participating in this recipe. Artichokes on the other hand were a great addition and almonds would probably also work nicely, but it was also great without them, this ended up being really one of my favorite things I've made recently.

kale and brown rice salad with basil and cherries.

1 cup loosely packed basil leaves
4 cloves garlic
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
1 and 1/2 tbsp raw/turbinado sugar

2 cups cooked brown rice
1 cup frozen chopped kale, drained
1 cup loosely packed fresh spinach leaves, chiffonaded or roughly chopped.
4 to 8 artichoke hearts, rinsed well, drained and quartered
1/2 cup toasted almonds, slivered or roughly crushed
1 cup or maybe even 2 cups cherries, pitted and halved, or quartered if you have time and patience

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pros, cons.

I've gotten to where I can squeeze a pretty darn satisfying fritatta out of 3 eggs, the idea being that it'll be healthier if I use fewer eggs, and if it came down to it I could make one in the morning and eat it all by myself throughout the day without having consumed 6 eggs before bedtime.

This morning's attempt, however, kind of negated itself in that department, it consists of: three eggs; a whole bag of kale (400g, good boy); last night's roasted parsnips, carrots, and onions (ok, use those leftovers); and yeah, the leftover bacon and reblochon from our tartiflette experiment last week (frown..yes those are leftovers, but...).

It's good enough to make again, I think I'd throw a clove of garlic in there next time, see what happens.

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sweet, greens, made of this, etc.

This totally looks like something boring you'd see on one of those "special diet" websites, but it's what I had for breakfast today and it's actually super tasty and I will be making it again very soon.

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sweet potato + greens.

4 big handfuls of fresh spinach, or possibly kale
1 clove garlic, minced, 2 cloves if you don't have social/romantic plans
1 tbsp EVOO

1 sweet potato, cubed small
1 red onion, chopped
1 pinch ground cumin
1 pinch garam masala
2 tbsp EVOO
salt and pepper to taste

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Do the spinach/kale and garlic as if you're sauteeing greens and garlic for a sandwich or something. Remove them and set aside. Saute the rest of the ingredients on medium-low heat until the sweet potato is done. Then add the spinach/garlic mixture back in and season to taste.

leafy green.

Tiny steps toward New Concepts in Dieting: kale and feta frittata with caramelized onions, smoked paprika and nutmeg. Based on this, pretty reliably great.

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terrific, pacific.

We need more vegetables. Back in our former lives, we vaguely remember making a couple of broccoli things that we used to eat all the time, but I can only seem to find this one, from an oft-used and now dilapidated and barely-usable pan-Asian cookbook called Terrific Pacific by Anya von Bremzen.

You can see that this was a well-loved cookbook, despite the mid-90s graphic design nightmare that is the cover. That is the whole book really. As a physical object, this thing is quaintly misguided, dated, and, um, shoddy (! damn, grrl, wtf? It uses Curlz MT, OK?).

But the content! I'd kind of forgotten about it until this week, but looking at it again, it's one of the most useful cookbooks we own, almost every sidebar is informative in one way or another, and the recipes are well-selected and authentic.

Since it's only $0.01 from Amazon I should buy another one, because as you can see, this one has fallen apart into 10 or 11 sections. Not so useful for actually finding anything, but kind of nice as a random-access nostalgia generator: for example, the "Cooking Squid" page sticking out of the top reminds me of one of my earliest bachelor gourmet cooking attempts, where I actually did that thing that cookbooks always fucking tell you to do. "Go see your local Asian fishmonger for the freshest (and cheapest!) fish around."

I went to Buford Highway to one of the "International Farmers Markets" (really just a big Asian grocery store), and as the only non-Asian person there, I must have provided a few minutes of good entertainment trying to pantomime "squid" and "dead, please" to the non-English-speaking guy with the dirty apron and the big knife.

But when I got it home, it was in fact squid and thankfully dead. And I did cook it the way Terrific Pacific told me to (3 minutes, garlic, ginger, fish sauce, basil, lime, sugar, cilantro, mint, basil). And while I was doing so, a repairman came to fix something, probably something one of our friends had pissed on or threw up on or otherwise destroyed, and he said: "Man, what the hell you cooking? You a chef or something? Smells like a damn restaurant in here...I got to get me some lunch after this".  

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broccoli with miso sauce.

2 tbsp shiro miso
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp cider vinegar
1 clove garlic, pressed
1 and 1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp raw sugar
2/3 cup chicken or vegetable broth
2 tsp sesame oil
salt and pepper to taste

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collard greens + brown butter.

After a gutbusting lunch, we tried to keep it light tonight: margaritas, a gifted honey baked ham for sandwiches and picking, and these greens. This was inspired by Saveur's recipe here.

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collard greens + brown butter + ham.

5 tbsp butter
2 bunches collard greens, washed, trimmed, cut into 2-inch squares
1 cup cooked ham, diced small
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 tbsp raw sugar
1 tsp crushed red pepper
salt to taste

Saute onion and ham in butter 3-5 minutes until butter begins to brown. Add collards, stir to coat with butter mixture, and turn off heat. Add sugar, salt, lemon juice, and red pepper. Let sit 5 minutes. Reheat 1-2 minutes, adjust seasoning, and serve. My collards were done at this point, but if yours aren't I could see how another five minutes of cooking at the end wouldn't hurt. Serves 4 as a side dish.

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