ginger « Justin Dunham - 's journal about making things

Pâté with balsamic onions, olive oil ice cream and polenta cake, carrot ginger soup with spheres, trout meuniere

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: anchovies, apple cider, arugula, balsamic vinegar, calcium chloride, capers, carrots, chicken, cream, ginger, marsala, mustard, olive oil, onions, parsley, pâté, pears, polenta, salt, sodium alginate, spheres, tomatoes, trout, white wine — Justin Dunham on April 16, 2011

Sauteeing some chicken livers with capers, anchovies and oil

Toast components: pâté, pâté with parsley salad, pâté with salad and balsamic onions. Yum!

Trout meuniere and salad with roasted tomatoes.

Polenta cake, olive oil ice cream, and some pears poached in marsala

Had some friends over for dinner last weekend. This meal was my return to serious cooking (I took a break for most of January and February), so I wanted to make it interesting. Also, my fiancée was back in Philadelphia for the weekend, and she loves pâté, so I thought that would be a nice surprise. Accordingly, I made the following:

Chicken liver pate with balsamic onions, with a parsley salad
Carrot-ginger soup with apple cider “caviar”
Trout meuniere and a simple salad with roasted tomatoes
Polenta cake, olive oil ice cream, and some pears poached in marsala

This was a fun meal to make. Pâté is surprisingly easy, and this one just consisted of chicken livers, capers, anchovies, white wine, and a couple of other things, pureed. That’s it.

Another advantage (besides impressing your significant other) is that if you were to buy a pound of chicken liver pate at the store, it would cost you, what, $10 or $20? A pound of chicken livers costs about $3, and then you add maybe $1 or $2 in additional ingredients to make it yourself. And you know exactly what’s in it.

One other thing, too. By making pate yourself, you might learn to like it if you didn’t already. My original experience with pate, as it was with mayonnaise, is that I found it rather… unpleasant to contemplate. But when I saw what actually goes into it – basically just a few incredibly strong and delicious flavors – and how it’s made, I lost my dislike of it. Pate will probably never be my favorite food, but I definitely have more of an appreciation for it now. The combination of the pate, parsley salad and onions sauteed in balsamic vinegar was also… pretty awesome.

As for the carrot-ginger soup, I’ve made it before. But this time, I added an experimental ingredient. If you add some sodium alginate to a relatively neutral liquid (such as carrot juice, apple cider, or certain other things), and then put drops of the resulting combination into a bath of water and calcium chloride, the liquid immediately becomes solid spheres that burst in your mouth when you bite them. This is exactly the same experience as eating caviar. I will write a separate entry about this later, but I (actually we – I invited everyone to help) performed this procedure with some apple cider, resulting in little spheres of cider that burst in your mouth when you bite them. We then put these spheres in our soup… and also tried putting them in our water as well, which was actually sort of interesting.

I’ve written about trout meuniere before, so I won’t say too much more about that here. I served it along with a simple salad of arugula and some tomatoes that were roasted for an hour or so in oil, garlic and onions. Delicious.

Finally, there’s the dessert. I’ve been waiting to make polenta cake again for quite a while, but I didn’t know what to serve it with; the grapefruit mousse I made last time was not repeatable and not amazing. Recently, I came upon a recipe for olive oil ice cream, which seemed like the perfect complement

Let me tell you, this stuff is weird. First of all, the recipe uses raw egg yolks – no cooking as with normal ice cream. Secondly, it is made out of freaking olive oil. But man, it is really delicious. The first time you take a bite, it tastes a little unexpected. But then you want another bite… and another. I served this whole thing with some pears poached in marsala, which were a good accompaniment but which I’m not sure I’ll make again.

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White Russian ice cream and blueberry coffee cake, trout meuniere, carrot-ginger/potato-leek harlequin soup, and other things

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: bacon, blueberries, broccoli, carrot, cauliflower, cheese, coffee cake, collard greens, cream, feta, flour, ginger, ice cream, kahlua, kale, leek, mustard, onions, potato, sole meuniere, thyme, tomatoes, trout — Justin Dunham on April 1, 2011

Harlequin soup - right is carrot ginger, left is potato leek.

Collard green salad.

Trout meuniere with a mustard cream sauce, broccoli, and cauliflower gratin.

Blueberry coffee cake and White Russian ice cream.

A while ago, I made a four-course dinner with the following courses: a kale salad with bacon, a harlequin soup (half carrot-ginger and half potato-leek), trout meuniere with cauliflower gratin and broccoli, and finally blueberry coffee cake with White Russian ice cream. Whew!

The harlequin soup came out well as usual – the flavors of the carrot-ginger soup and potato-leek soup actually went together pretty well. The salad was interesting – I was supposed to use kale, and only had access to collard greens. Raw collard greens, that’s right. I would probably reconsider making this salad, although one of the things you do to make the greens softer is pour very hot bacon grease over them. It actually went together pretty well, and the bacon is sort of a “reward” for getting through the greens.

The trout and sauce were simple to make and delicious, as was the cauliflower gratin (probably incredibly unhealthy but great). The trout is basically breaded sole meunière (with trout instead of sole), so named because the fish is coated in flour before it is cooked – the meunière is the miller’s wife.

Finally, the White Russian ice cream. I don’t usually use recipes from Rachael Ray, but I was thinking of doing something along these lines and wanted to use something that would definitely work. The White Russian flavor is extremely apparent and delicious, and it goes particularly well in an ice cream format because of the cream that normally goes into a White Russian. It can – and should – be used anywhere vanilla ice cream is!

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Dinner for seven

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: beets, carrots, celery, corn, ginger, onions, risotto, scallions, short ribs, tomatoes, vegetable stock — Justin Dunham on September 18, 2010

Roasted tomatoes stuffed with scallions and corn.

Risotto on the simmer.

In late August I had the wonderful opportunity to make dinner for seven! I invited several of my classmates over so we could all get to know each other and finish up a class project.

I made things I’ve made before: carrot soup, stuffed tomatoes, braised celery, braised short ribs and beet risotto. Old favorites, you might even call them. I picked these because they’re relatively easy to make – and because I’ve made them so many times before I’d be unlikely to screw them up!

Culinarily, one thing that was interesting is that we had a vegetarian joining us. Cooking for vegetarians is a brand-new experience for me. To make it work, I substituted vegetable stock for the chicken stock I usually use in making risotto, and for the beef stock I usually use when braising celery.

Vegetable stock definitely does not work quite as well for risotto. You lose a certain savoriness. I may try mushroom stock next time, or half mushroom, half vegetable, to get that back. Vegetable stock also attenuates the color a bit – the risotto at the bottom of the pan started to turn orange!

However, I would argue that braised celery tastes even better with vegetable stock. If you ignore the directions to cover the pan (which I did), the stock boils off a bit, leaving you with a nice, syrupy, vaguely-tomato sauce.

Logistically, this was the only the second time I’ve cooked for more than 3 people, and I also had barely any time on the day of to completely the dishes. To resolve this, I tried to pick stuff that is either very quick to make (braised celery and to a certain extent beet risotto) or that can be made overnight (short ribs and carrot soup). Braised dishes actually tend to taste better the day after they are cooked, which was the case this time also. Something about the dispersion of the various sapid molecules, maybe?

I would guess that I spent an entire workday or so actually making the dishes, which is fairly typical when I make a complex dish – the additional servings add more time, but not twice as much to make twice as many servings, for example. Eventually, I will need to learn to reduce cooking times. I wonder how many times I have to make a dish before this happens?

Finally, I also struggled with how many servings to make. I didn’t want anyone to go hungry. On the other hand, we have been sort of overwhelmed by the amount of leftovers we’ve had lately, and I wanted to avoid that too. I actually ended up simply doubling what I normally make for me and my fiancee (which usually results in several days of leftovers). This seemed to work pretty well.

One final note: To make risotto, you essentially just spoon hot broth into hot risotto rice, wait until the broth is absorbed, and repeat. I have been skipping heating the broth before pouring it in, because it saves a little time and you end up with one fewer pot to clean. But I think this may be a big mistake. The risotto took almost an hour to make (instead of 30 minutes), and I am guessing this may be because the cool broth “shocks” the hot rice, leading to a protracted period of re-warming before anything else can be absorbed.

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Avocado soup, lamb and figs, and a rice fiasco

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: avocadoes, beans, broccoli, chicken stock, figs, ginger, lamb, lime, pepper, rice, thyme — Justin Dunham on August 23, 2010

Avocado soup and a delicious cocktail...

Lamb; you can see the roasted figs distributed on top. Rice and beans. Broccoli.

Now that I actually have a schedule during the day (and a busy one at that), I try to do 2 cooks during the week. A “big cook” on the weekend where I do 3 courses, and a “small cook” during the week where I just make a main dish.

For big cook this week, I put together this avocado soup, and this roasted lamb and fig recipe, together with some roasted broccoli and rice and beans.

Soup is an interesting thing to make. The balance of flavors keeps changing, and so the soup must be tasted constantly as it cooks to make sure everything is in balance. With this soup, I tried to maintain the proportion of its main flavors (chicken broth, avocado, lime and pepper) so that nothing would overwhelm anything else. In general, when I am making soup, I don’t pay close attention to the recipe; I’m not sure that’s even possible.

I will note that ginger is also supposed to be a part of soup, but ginger doesn’t survive much cooking, and so I let it burn off rather than trying to keep adding more. I will probably fix this the next time around. Also, though the soup seemed quite smooth after I pureed it, I took Thomas Keller’s advice – “when in doubt, strain”. This was a smart move, since a fair amount of fibrous matter stayed in the strainer; straining may qualify as one of my kitchen secrets. Finally, as the soup aged in the fridge the lime component actually got stronger; this was an interesting side-effect.

The main was fairly straightforward – roasted filets of lamb. I bought some strange hunk of lamb from Trader Joe’s (I can’t remember what it was now) that was trussed up like a chicken. It was really cheap, and yielded seven filets! However, it took me about a half hour to get it broken down. Also, the recipe calls for a rack of lamb. Since meat with a bone in it apparently cooks much more slowly than boneless meat, I ended up overdoing the lamb fairly significantly. Still good, but seeing all the finished lamb sitting in pools of juicy goodness – which should have remained in the meat – broke my heart.

For dessert, I attempted to make this rice pudding. It was a complete and total disaster, approaching the tarte tatin incident of 2009, about which more later. I’m not sure why, but the rice simply would not absorb any liquid. I tried letting it go for a fairly long time (about 45 minutes), by which time it actually burned, forming a thick layer of charred rice along the bottom of the pan I was using. Hm.

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Tuna, beans and rice, and cilantro salad

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: avocado, beans, cilantro, ginger, rice, soy sauce, tuna, vegetable stock — Justin Dunham on August 20, 2010

The completed dish.

This seared tuna and cilantro salad recipe is delicious and not too difficult to make.

Not that I had ever heard of a cilantro salad before. It is what it sounds like, which I suppose would be difficult for those for whom cilantro tastes like soap. I served the tuna and salad with with some rice and beans cooked in vegetable stock and a little onion and garlic, and an avocado. The flavors – lime, ginger, soy sauce, cilantro, tuna, avocado, rice, beans – mix really well together.

The recipe calls for sushi-grade tuna, which I’m not sure is strictly necessary. Yes, the inside of properly-seared tuna is essentially raw. But I’m not sure that should be a problem for most people. Plus, and I know this from personal experience, sushi-grade tuna is extremely expensive and can be difficult to get in filet form.

I learned a couple other things that I’ll note here. You can’t sear with olive oil (I think I may have mentioned this before). Its smoke point is too low, so it smokes pretty much as soon as you get to searing temperature. I also forgot to season the tuna with salt and pepper before searing, which was a shame; it’s important to have that seasoning for flavor as well as texture.

Still came out great, though.

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