The Road to Becoming a Yankee Chef?

At work I came across two cookbooks I felt I needed to get. The first is Favorite New England Recipes, compiled by Yankee Magazine's "Lady Editors" and it's original publication date was 1972, though the version I got was from 1990. (Still..can you believe that was 21 years ago?) I thought to myself that it was perfect for me and for this blog! The recipes seem to be characterized by simplicity, with very few ingredients. Often quite contrary to any deeply flavored Southern dish.

There is quite a variety of recipes from "Jellied Chicken Pate" (You can bet I will NOT be making this) to "Yankee Chicken Hash" and "Fried Cucumbers" (hmm...) to "Yankee Christmas Pudding" and a LOT more. This cookbook is PACKED with interesting recipes. Many of them are fish-centric and use mostly ingredients able to be grown in the north (Excluding spices). I think this is great.

When I first moved to New England I had never had, or had an interest in tasting New England Clam Chowder. When I went to a dinner at Silo's Steak House (RIP) in Merrimack, NH and was served Clam Chowder as an appetizer (Set menu..I didn't choose it) ... Well, I was blown away. It was amazing. Creamy and flavorful, with perfectly cooked clams (which I am starting to appreciate...at least when they are in other things or deep fried). Since then I've been a connoisseur of New England Clam Chowder and have tried it at many restaurants. There are two types of NECC, one of which I like and the other I find gross. There is the thick NECC... that's the worst. It's the kind you get at chain restaurants and out of a can. It's not fresh. It's full of potato chunks and overcooked clam. The kind I do love is thin, creamy and all of the ingredients are fresh and the clams are perfectly cooked. No one element is predominant the flavors are a perfect harmony. This is the kind of NECC I am dying to learn to make. To be honest, I haven't even attempted to make NECC...because I am afraid of what I will do to it. I want a tried and true and perfect recipe. I have a feeling I will have to experiment in the end, though.

The other cookbook I got was The Williams-Sonoma Cookbook. The thing I like most about this one is that every single recipe has a picture. A lot of times I'm flipping through cookbooks and I see a recipe and think "That COULD be good...I wonder what it looks like." Most of the time I'm about 75% more willing to try a recipe at random (meaning I'm not looking for a recipe for that particular dish) if it has a picture.

I've already seen some dishes in this book that I really want to make. I have read a few reviews that the recipes can be bland, though. Luckily I've got a pantry of Penzeys Spices to supplement if needed. For anyone who is not familiar with their spices I highly recommend them. Their best are their "blends" that can bump a dish to the next notch with almost no effort. I'd strongly recommend the Bicentennial Rub for rotisserie chicken, and Pork Chop Seasoning for delicious pork chops with no effort. And of course they have GREAT flake sea salt for cheap.

I've been pretty busy at work and without a lot of time to cook. Earlier in the week I made some portabella mushroom and guacamole sandwiches that turned out well, and a couple of meals we make when we don't have the energy to cook, such as angel hair and spaghetti with turkey kielbasa, or shake and bake chicken wings. Hopefully soon I'll have time to do some exploratory cooking.

Food of Japan

I know that when I left for Japan I promised you all I'd post photos of what we ate when I came home...and I know that I didn't do it. Honestly I always INTENDED to...it's just...time is short and all that. Well - here I am - ready to show you all the splendors of Japanese foods. These are going to be things you're surprised even exist. Oh yeah - you thought you knew ALL about Japanese food... Well, ya don't. Here's just a little snippet for you - because most of the time we got 3/4ths of the way through our meals before we realized we hadn't taken a photo.



This is Kitsune Udon. There was this udon restaurant around the corner from the first hotel that we stayed at and every time we walked by it smelled SO good. So we decided to go in. It was the best udon i had the whole trip. The place was ALWAYS open --- they seemed to stay open all night because we saw them open at 11...and 8 am! What??? Who knows? In Japanese "Kitsune" means Fox. I am not sure why it is called Fox udon, but the broth is mildly sweet and doesn't taste like any particular kind of meat. There were greens in the bowl (that I ate before I took the photo) and the part that makes it particularly Kitsune udon is the square of sweetened fried tofu. Udon itself is a thicker noodle made to be slurped up. The bowl was bigger than my face.

This is called Kushi Katsu and it essentially means (and is) "Fried things on a stick" This is one of my favorite Japanese bar foods. Fried ANYTHING... We had mushroom stuffed crab, onion, pumpkin, shrimp, chicken, pork, quail egg, sweet potato...Almost anything you can imagine on a stick, deep fried with sauce. The Japanese do it right.


While this probably LOOKS disgusting, it's actually AMAZINGLY DELICIOUS. This is called "Omraisu" (Omelet Rice). Mine was the top and it was cheese and eggplant. Aj's was chicken katsu (Fried chicken cutlet). This is essentially buttered rice, wrapped in an omelet, with a topping and then covered in Japanese curry sauce. I don't know how to explain that this is in fact delicious unless you try it. Aj and I are HUGE fans of Japanese curry. We tried a ridiculous number of things deep fried and drenched in curry sauce while we were there. It was a great fallback food. We knew we loved it, and it ALWAYS hit the spot. And it's abundant. It's sweet, mildly spicy, and alarmingly flavorful. If any of you ever gets the chance to try Japanese curry, I'd highly recommend it. It's very different from any Indian curries.

This is Japanese somen. I had never had Somen before and especially not prepared like this, but this was one of the most memorable and delicious foods I had while I was there. The broth was rich and sweet and chicken-y. There is something resembling general tso's chicken in there, a soft-boiled duck egg, and some greens. And then of course Somen noodles which are thin and made of wheat flour. They're delicious and I've decided to try to recreate something like this in the near future. I think the greens were Mizuna, "Japanese Mustard" - it's a tasty green we don't have readily available here in America. But delicious.

The last photo I have for you is of all of the delicious FOOD we brought back from Japan. We took 2 suitcases, one packed inside the other. The small one held our clothes and some souvenirs, and the big one held just souvenirs and food. Yum. We've eaten a lot of this stuff already but we do have plenty left. The Japanese kitkats were something we searched EVERYWHERE for to get the most flavors. We could only find five flavors ...they are seasonal and February is not a popular season for unique flavors. That's OK though...we got plenty else!

We also ate a lot more food than this, but forgot to take photos. We had sushi, tempura, okonomiyaki, and lots of other traditional Japanese foods. We did not once eat an American restaurant or fast food place (Though I was tempted to have Aj try to Tamago Big Mac from McDonalds)... We really went for Japanese comfort foods and day to day things with some traditional foods thrown in. We had real green tea and Japanese sweets. We had more bread and pastry items than you could ever imagine (Oh the Japanese are HUGE on pastry and take a lot from France. Their pastry and breads are amazing). Overall, we had a huge variety of delicious foods and to top it off, we probably spent over $100 on tiny cups of coffee, vending machine drinks, and a couple of beers. (Japanese vending machines do hot AND cold) --- perfect!

For those of you more interested in the Japanese sites, we did take tons of photos. You can check a selection of them out in this album.

The Easiest Bread You Ever Made

I have recently been pursuing making homemade bread. So far it's going OK. It takes years to perfect a good loaf and so far I've just been following recipes and learning the right places in my house to rise bread.

The other day I was doing laundry in the basement and saw my bread machine. It was all dusty with that sketchy kinda dust that comes from basements...but I hauled it up the stairs (this is an exaggeration...it weighs less than my dog)...and cleaned it up. Then I looked up a recipe for a really simple bread.

I was looking for something that used the bread maker start to finish, but ended up picking one that mixed the dough and did the first rise, and then you transfered to a pan for the second rise and bake. In the end, I think the results were good...and I learned that a bread machine can really cut down on the time you need to make bread! I had forgotten this.

The recipe I used was some random recipe from a website called "Soft As Wonder White" - I wouldn't really call this bread anything like wonder bread...but it was definitely a white bread, and it was soft, and good.

In order to use this recipe you probably need a bread maker. I suppose you don't have to have one...but the point of this post is how EASY it was with a bread maker. You get to stick all the ingredients in the bread maker and come back almost 2 hours later for a nice dough that's already had its first rise! Awesome.

The Easiest White Bread Ever

• 1 C. Water
• 1 Tsp. Salt
• 3 Tbsp. Margarine or butter
• 1 Tbsp. Honey
• 3 C. All-Purpose Flour
• 1/4 C. Powdered Milk** (See notes below)
• 2 Tsp. Sugar
• 1 1/2 Tsp. Bread Machine/Rapid Rise/Instant yeast (all essentially the same)

1. Add the ingredients into the bread machine in the order listed.
2. Set to the dough cycle. This will mix the dough and then rise the bread, and should take about 1 hour 40 minutes.
3. When the timer on the bread machine reads 1 hour, turn the oven onto 400 for about 3 minutes, and then turn it off.
4. When the timer goes off on the bread machine, turn the dough out gently onto a floured surface. Mold it into a loaf as gently as possible. Try not to work the dough much.
5. Put the loaf in a loaf pan and cover it with a towel. Place this in your oven which should now be luke warm. Make sure the towel won't inhibit the rising of the bread by being caught under the pan.
6. Rise 40 mins or until doubled in size. (When it looks like a loaf of bread...that's when it's ready to bake)
7. Bake at 350° for 25 to 30 minutes.
   
8. Take out of pan and cool.

NOTE: If you're using a very dark bread pan, knock the heat down to 325.

**Powdered milk can be purchased at the grocery store but usually does NOT come in any kind of reasonable size. In fact, I had to buy a box that would make like 50 gallons of nasty watery skim milk. HOWEVER....this is a VERY COMMON ingredient in bread recipes and it essentially can't easily be substituted with regular milk. So just suck it up and buy it if you're going to be baking bread regularly.

Who's Bringing the Shrimp?

Have you ever thought about shrimp...I mean REALLY thought about shrimp. Where they're from and what they eat and do? It's kinda gross, really. They crawl around all day eating fish poop. I'll tell you what though...they are DELICIOUS. Just goes to show that the phrase "you are what you eat" is a load of crap (haha..pun intended!).

I asked Aj to cook me a nice dinner this week. He agreed and kept it a surprise until I got home. When I got home he was hard at work cooking up a storm ...and it sure looked good! He kept being self depreciating and telling me he wasn't sure it would be good, etc...etc. He was making shrimp skewers with sauteed asparagus and mashed potatoes. The mashed potatoes came from a box...(We're huge fans of Yukon Gold which we think taste like KFC mashed potatoes...but they discontinued them and that was our last box.) The asparagus and the shrimp were freshly seasoned and cooked, though. When we finally sat down to eat and I tasted my first bite of asparagus....MAN! It was gooooooood!

Aj was excited that it tasted so yummy and mentioned something about cooking more (Can I get that in writing, please?). He even said that he looked up a shrimp marinade and made some changes to it to make it his own...Very impressive! It was quite possibly some of the best shrimp I've ever had. So I've decided to do another guest recipe so you can all taste the deliciousness of this shrimp!

If you're wondering how we grilled these in the middle of winter...we have a Japanese little stovetop grill and a single-eye gas range that we use for table-top cooking. Whatever method you come up with for grilling these...I'm sure it will taste yummy.

The Best Shrimp Marinade Ever

• 2 Lbs. raw peeled, de-veined shrimp
• 1 Large clove of garlic, finely minced
• 1 Tbsp. coarse salt
• Pinch of cayenne
• 1 Tsp. paprika
• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 Tsp. lemon juice
  

Mix everything but the shrimp together in a bowl. Skewer the shrimp 5 to a stick. Evenly and liberally coat the shrimp. Grill 2-3 minutes on each side or until the shrimp are opaque.

Enjoy!