Category Archives: Food - Page 12

Rack of Lamb

Posted by on May 1, 2011 11 comments

We made rack of lamb for Easter dinner.

We made two flavors of crust. Both were excellent.

Ingredients

The first crust flavor had macadamia nuts, parsley, regular mustard, and parmesan cheese:

The second crust flavor used macadamia nuts, pistachio nuts, butter, and Dijon mustard:

In addition to the ingredients shown, you’ll need a bit of olive oil.

Preparation

First, coat the lamb in salt and pepper and then pan-sear it in a little olive oil at high heat:

This takes less than 2 minutes per side; the goal is not to cook the lamb, which will be done in the oven, but to seal the surface to retain internal moisture during cooking and to prepare the surface for the crust.

With the back of a spoon, spread the mustard over the seared lamb:

Meanwhile, in a food processor combine the other crust ingredients with a bit of butter or olive oil for better cohesion. For the parsley crust, we ground the nuts first and added the parsley last with a bit of oil:

Spread the rest of the crust ingredients over the mustard-covered lamb:

Preheat the oven to 400ºF, and place the lamb on a foil-covered baking sheet:

Cook for 20-25 minutes. They’ll come out looking like this:

Slice between each rib and serve:

Some of the crust detaches, but it still goes great with the lamb. (Conventional recipes use bread crumbs, which we eschew.)

Conclusion

This is an easy entrée to prepare and it tastes fantastic! With a little wine, it’s excellent for your HDL.

Seafood Paella

Posted by on April 17, 2011 19 comments

Paella is the classic rice dish of Valencia on Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

It’s a great food for a dinner party: the ingredients take some time to gather, but paella can be made in bulk and provides a complete meal in one bowl. It also uses some wine, so you can drink while you cook and get in the party spirit before the guests arrive!

Ingredients

You’ll need a collection of meats, and seafoods are the usual choice. We chose shrimp, calamari, mussels, salmon, and spicy Italian sausage:

White wine and bone broth provide the necessary liquids. Our ox feet bone broth has plenty of collagen and fats as you can see:

Other ingredients we used are saffron (the threads are soaked in water overnight), red pepper, onion, uncooked white rice, a lemon, garlic, paprika, and parsley:

We also used olive oil and coconut oil (not shown).

Cooking

You can start by stir-frying the onion and garlic in olive oil for two minutes, then adding red pepper for a minute, then the saffron and paprika:

Immediately after the saffron and paprika, add the rice (this was 2/3 cup uncooked), stir to coat it in oil and spices, add the wine and broth, and cover:

Cover the pot and simmer the rice in the broth about 15 minutes at low heat. As it cooks it absorbs liquid; if the broth runs low, add more bone broth. After 15 minutes looks like this:

At this point add the meat, and cover again to steam-cook the meat:

When we made paella a second time, we cooked the shrimp in coconut oil separately and added it to the paella only after the other meats were cooked. This enhanced the flavor of the shrimp:

Once the meat is cooked, add the parsley, juice of a full lemon, salt, pepper, and any other spices. The first time we made it looked like this:

But it’s really better when it has more parsley. When we made the paella the second time, this was how much parsley we used:

You can see that the second time we used more broth. This is the proper amount of liquid to have; our first version was too dry.

Here was the finished product the first time:

Here it was the second time:

Conclusion

If you’re tired of Cambridge Fried Rice, this is a good alternative: it has similar macronutrient proportions but a totally different taste!

For a bonus, we asked Gordon Ramsay to do a paella video:

Pacific Sweet and Sour Salmon

Posted by on April 10, 2011 30 comments

You’ve just come home from work, you’re tired and hungry, and would like to eat in 20 minutes. How do you make a meal that’s easy and quick, but new and different?

The solution is to fry a meat and boil a starch, but use a tasty sauce to give variety to this most easily-cooked meal. One of our favorite sauces is something we call Pacific Sweet&Sour Sauce.

The Sauce

The essential ingredients are rice syrup for sweetness, lemon juice or rice vinegar for sourness, tarragon, rosemary, and garlic. An optional ingredient is any kind of chili powder for spiciness; we used the Vietnamese spicy sauce at top – this one happens to be Huy Fong Chili-Garlic Sauce and is made from chili, salt, garlic, and distilled vinegar.

Of course you can substitute: basil works well as a herb, and coconut milk is an excellent addition to the sauce. Fish sauce gives it a more Vietnamese flavor.

Dice the herbs and set them aside; mince the garlic and mix with the sweet, sour, and spicy ingredients:

The sauce is ready. We used about 1 tbsp rice syrup and juice of a full lemon.

Pacific Sweet&Sour Salmon

Removing the central bone from the salmon steaks speeds up cooking significantly, and finishes the meat when the skin is cooked to just the right crispiness. Here we’ve filleted, and put salt and pepper on, two salmon steaks:

We put a bit of coconut oil in the pan and cooked at medium-high heat.

When the color has changed about 2/3 of the way up the sides of the steaks, which may take 3-4 minutes, they’re ready to flip. After flipping cook another 2 minutes and add the sauce:

With the sauce in cook another 1 minute on one side, and flip again to finish for another minute. Add the herbs in this final minute:

Be sure to keep all the sauce when you transfer to a serving plate:

Pacific Sweet&Sour Pork Bellies

We like pork belly a lot: it is a tasty, fatty cut of pork, and we like the natural flavor better than processed bacon.

If you’re nervous about timing, you don’t have to cook everything together: you can pre-cook the meat, then add it back to the sauce.

Here’s an example. After cooking pork belly slices, remove the meat and add the Pacific Sweet&Sour sauce to the pan oil:

After a minute of heating and stirring, add the herbs:

Return the meat to the pan, mix, and serve:

Pacific Sweet&Sour Beef Liver

We find this sauce works very well with beef liver too:

Shou-Ching, who doesn’t like the taste of beef liver, is happy to eat this.

If you really dislike the taste of liver, you can further remove the liver taste by boiling the beef liver slices briefly before putting them in the pan.

Conclusion

This sort of meal is easily cooked in 20 minutes or so. Alongside the meat, we prepare a starch – usually rice cooked in our rice cooker or warmed in the microwave (one batch lasts us 2-3 days), or potatoes or taro boiled or re-heated in the microwave (again, we prepare enough for 2-3 days) – and serve assorted vegetables – for us, usually various flavors of kimchi and seasoned seaweed. Kimchi and seaweed require no cooking.

We’re having Pacific Sweet&Sour Mussels tonight, with coconut milk in the sauce. Create your own variations! They’ll all taste great.

Creamy Steamed Egg Soup

Posted by on April 3, 2011 9 comments

This is a sort of hybrid of an omelette, the steamed egg custards which are popular in Asia, and a soup.

It is a good for busy families because:

(a)    it is quick and easy to make;

(b)   it can be eaten at any meal – breakfast, lunch, or dinner; and

(c)    it can satisfy a diversity of tastes, since each family member can choose a personal set of ingredients and cook the meal in his own bowl.

Ingredients

Here’s a sample set of ingredients:  eggs, cream, and bone broth (for a great broth, get bones with as much fat and collagen attached as you can!); scallions, tomatoes, and shrimp.

The volume of the cream and broth should be equal to the volume of the eggs. Water or milk can be substituted for broth if it is unavailable. Other ingredients we frequently use are shiitake mushrooms, onions, smoked gouda or pecorino romano cheese, bell peppers, bacon, meats, and fish. Not shown are herbs and spices to taste.

Start by mixing the eggs, cream, and bone broth:

Pour these into a bowl through a strainer. This breaks the egg white up into tiny pieces, mixing it into the fat and broth and preventing chunks of uncooked protein from appearing in the soup.

Then, mix in the other ingredients and spices to taste:

While you’re doing that, start a little water boiling in a wok:

You’ll need a steaming tray to put in the wok; this elevates the bowls above the boiling water.

If you have a large pot with a steaming basket, that will work equally well. We used the wok because it has a glass cover and we can take pictures as it cooks.

It comes out looking like this:

And here it is served:

You want to cook just long enough – 5 to 10 minutes depending on the size of the bowl – so that protein is cooked.

We’ve tried cooking this in the microwave, but it doesn’t taste as good: the egg comes out tougher.

Buffet-style family dinners

If not everyone has the same taste in food, set out ingredients buffet-style and let them build their own meal. Here are a few alternative ingredients:

Our wok fits three soup bowls:

This is what the finished product looks like:

Individual bowls take about 5 minutes to cook, one large bowl about 10 minutes.

Accompaniments

For complete macronutrients in one meal, potatoes or sweet potatoes with butter or sour cream, or rice with seasoned seaweed, and vegetables such as kimchi can be served alongside. We buy kimchi at an Asian supermarket on weekends and it relieves us from having to make vegetables during the week.

Conclusion

Steamed egg custards are very popular in China, Japan, and Korea, but they are generally made without cream or broth – just eggs, water, and salt. This particular version is our own invention, and we think the bone broth, the cream, and the delicate texture of the steamed egg make a delightful combination.