Classic Brunch

Today we took a shot at that fantastic Manhattan tradition, brunch.  Last night we made a pesto and cooked a couple of chicken breasts in a broth of garlic, onions, and lemon juice based on the chicken marinade of the same ingredients.  This morning I bias-sliced them and drowned them in the pesto for an hour or two.  In the meantime we made a Hollandaise sauce and poached a few eggs.  When those were done we set them aside while we sliced some cantaloupe and made sandwiches using the pesto chicken, sliced tomatoes, and arugula on foccaccia.  The selection was rounded out by platter of lox, tomatoes, avocados and scallions.  Add a couple of mimosas and we were on our way.

Cashews are the new Mushroom

Last night I had a somewhat random assortment of ingredients available: a couple of chicken breasts, a couple of peppers, couple of carrots, some celery, onions, and garlic.  I asked Nina if she felt like stir fry (we eat a lot of stir fries).  Nope.  How about pasta?  (We'd already had past this week.)  No thanks.  So I mused for a bit and while I was musing happened to find a bag with about a cup of cashews in it in the freezer.  That's when the recipe below hit me, and it turned out so well I will definitely make it again.

1 cup cashews
1 clove garlic, minced
2 large onions, cut in ribbons
2 stalks celery, chopped
2 chicken breasts
1/2 cup white cooking wine
1/2 cup vegetable stock
2 bay leaves
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/8 - 1/4 cup flour

Heat the butter and oil over medium heat and sauté the cashews until they start to brown.  Add the garlic, onions and celery and continue to sauté until the celery is bright green and the onions are becoming translucent.  Add the cooking wine and then the stock.  Reduce heat to low and then place the chicken breasts in the middle of the pan.  There should be enough liquid in the pan to mostly--but not quite--cover the chicken breasts.  Cover an simmer until the chicken is done.  Remove the chicken and reduce the sauce by 1/3 to 1/2, adding salt and pepper to taste in the process.  Add flour and stir until the sauce just starts to thicken.  Serve the sauce over the chicken breasts accompanied by a favorite starch and/or vegetable.  The result is a rich, slightly sweet flavor that is somewhere between French onion soup and a mushroom sauce, but with the nutty deliciousness of the cashews.

Pork & Bok Choy Stir Fry

Here's something I put together that came out surprisingly well for a first go.  I bought a couple of pork loin chops, sliced them into strips, and marinated them for about four hours in a mixture of about a quarter cup of rice vinegar, a few tablespoons of toasted sesame oil, a few tablespoons of soy sauce, and a tablespoon each of brown sugar and roasted red Thai chili paste.  Then I took a couple of stalks of celery and a large onion and chopped them.  Next I cut two heads of bok choy into small pieces.  I got a tablespoon or two of toasted sesame oil hot in the wok and slightly browned the pork, then set it aside.  I added the onions and celery and sauteed them for a minute or two.  Next I added the bok choy and continued sauteing until it shrunk down.  Then I added the marinade plus a sauce made of about a half-cup of vegetable stock, a little fish sauce, and another tablespoon of the chili paste.  I then brought the sauce to a boil  (this is important since the marinade had the raw pork in it), then lowered the heat to a simmer, stirring occasionally in order to ensure even cooking.  After a few minutes I returned the pork to the wok and continued cooking until the bok choy was tender.

Carrots & Fennel

Here's a dish that I came up with recently that has three of my favorite attributes: is easy, healthy, and delicious.  The bitter earthiness of the celery is the perfect antidote to the aromatic sweetness of the fennel, while the carrots and onions round out the flavor.

Cube 2 - 3 large carrots and one large fennel root.  Dice half of a large onion and chop one or two celery stalks.  Heat about a tablespoon of oil or butter and sauté them over medium heat until the celery starts to get a bit brighter green.  Salt with a couple of pinches of kosher salt (I'm sure regular salt works too, just not sure how much to use) and continue sautéing until some of the liquid starts to come out of the vegetables.  Add about a quarter of a cup of white cooking wine.  Turn down to low and cover, simmering until the carrots are just soft to a prick with a fork.  Remove from heat and serve.

Potatoes: What are they good for?

Of course they're great for a lot of things, like providing the prime example of a Giffen good in Hal Varian's microeconomics text.  But this being the Hop and Hearth, after all, I'm going to talk about eating them.  The reason that I even ask the question is that Nina and I don't eat very many potatoes.  We tend to favor quinoa, or rice, or quinoa pasta for our dinner carbs.  Anyway, I bought a bag of mixed potatoes yesterday because Nina recently got into breakfast (I'm talking full-on American breakfast).  Yesterday I shredded a handful of potatoes and blanched them.  Then this morning I sauteed some onions in oil and added the shredded blanched potatoes (and a decent amount of salt).  I cooked them on pretty low heat in the pan--mixing them up occasionally--until they were pretty well browned all over.  Not too bad.

Come dinner time I still had a bunch of 'taters.  I decided to make an American potato salad (as opposed to German or Serbian potato salad).  I boiled the potatoes in salty water until they were just soft enough to get a fork into.  (I have learned that the #1 potato salad FAIL is to overcook the potatoes.)  I immediately removed them from the heat, drained them, ran cold water over them, and refrigerated them.  In the meantime I chopped some onions and celery and sauteed them in oil, salting them once they just started to get translucent.  I was careful not to over-do it, and soon removed them from the heat and refrigerated them as well.  I also hard-boiled two eggs and refrigerated them when they were done.  Shortly before serving time I took all out and mixed in a bowl with a healthy dollop of mayonnaise along with salt and pepper to taste.

It was one of the best potato salads I've made, and I think the reasons were:

• Plenty of salt in the water when I boiled the potatoes
• Didn't overcook the potatoes (as I said, this is critical)
• Use a lot of celery and onions: by volume there was almost as much of them as potatoes

Overall I was very pleased with the results, and definitely would make this again.

French Twist

We've been working on a good steak condiment for a while, and I think that last night we nailed it.

Three medium onions
1/3 cup Marsala cooking wine
2/3 cup chicken stock
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt

Slice the onions into thin ribbons and sauté them in the oil. As they start to become translucent add the salt and stir. Continue to sauté the until they are thoroughly carmelized. Grab a spoonful of onions and throw them into a reducing pan. When the pan gets hot add the wine and stock and reduce completely. Stir the reduction into the onions and keep the mixture warm to serve over the steak when done.

Roasted Garlic Potatoes and Rosemary Green Beans
To round out our steak dinner we chose two classically French sides for steak, but gave them a bit of a twist. First we minced garlic and rosemary and separately warmed them in olive oil to infuse it with their respective flavors. We cut the potatoes into small pieces and tossed them in the oil, added salt and then roasted them in the oven at 400 degrees for about forty minutes. The green beans we kept whole and steamed until tender, then tossed them in the oil and added salt to taste.

Yum!

Onion as Vegetable and a Tasty Vegetable Medley (with Onions)

I can't remember where I had it first or what it's called, but I'm under the impression that there are some Indian dishes where onions are one of the main ingredients. I used this as the inspiration for what I'll call "Curried Fish."

Curried Fish
1/2 - 3/4 lb. tilapia filets
3 yellow onions
1/2 cup chicken stock
3 Tbsp olive oil
3 Tbsp Morton & Bassett curry powder
1 tsp salt

Slice the onions into thin ribbons and cut the tilapia into cubes about a 1/2 inch on each side. Saute the onions in the oil until they begin to turn translucent. Salt them to draw the water out and saute a minute or two more. Add the curry powder and continue to saute until most of the onions are thoroughly translucent. Add the chicken stock and fish. Simmer the mixture, stirring occasionally until the fish just begins to break apart. Serve over rice or quinoa.

Vegetable Medley

In the past couple of months Nina and I have tried simmering every imaginable vegetable in cooking wine and stock (depending on how much water the vegetables themselves contain). We've created some seriously delicious combinations this way and I'm only blogging about this one because I made it with the fish and wanted to blog about that. That said, one of the really great features of this method is that the flavor of the veg itself really gets to shine, and this particular mix of veg goes great together.

2 medium zucchinis
2 yellow or orange bell peppers
1 yellow onion
6 - 8 button mushrooms
4 cloves garlic
1 Tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup chicken stock
1/8 cup white cooking wine
Salt to taste

Cut the veggies into pieces of approximately the same size (I used 1/4 inch slices of the zucchini as a guide). Mince the garlic and saute it in the oil until it starts to mellow. Before the garlic starts to brown, add all the veg except the mushrooms. Continue to saute until the onions start to turn translucent. Add the mushrooms and shortly thereafter the wine and then the chicken stock. Cover and simmer until zucchini starts to get soft (but be sure not to let it get mushy). Add salt to taste while it is simmering.

Voila!