March 15, 2012 in cooking,
So I usually think of myself as a good cook, but — I think I might’ve mentioned — I’m slow. Glacial. Weeknight meal? Sure, I’ll have that up for you in four hours, straight away.
Yeah, doesn’t work. So, I think I mentioned in my New Year’s Resolutions that I was going to take a cooking class. After a bunch of research I decided on a local school’s intro to cooking class.
Right. Intro. Time to suck up my pride. I learned back in tae kwon do that you only get to be fast by being perfect to start, so I figured, hey, let’s make unfounded generalizations. So far it’s been fun. I’ve been playing the role of super-nerd, asking every possible question (yes, it’s a role! don’t look at me like that!) and getting tons of perspective. And tons of chances to cut things up. And, best of all, tons of chances for the instructors to tell me what to do or not.
The first class was on salads. We paired up and my team ended up with the caesar salad. It was a little easier than I’d hoped but, hey, we took some care and it ended up real nice.
Today was harder: we made a red snapper green curry.
I was really excited for this week, because, despite all my foodie pretensions, I’m as scared of cooking fish as the next guy. I always choose slow, moist fish-cooking techniques that leave me with no risk of burning or sticking; but here I had to cook the snapper fast, over very high heat, to get nice browning. And, as the instructor said, “expect it to stick.”
Well, we got compliments on the doneness and texture of the fish. I have to say, it turned out everything I could hope. And everyone else deserved compliments too, with dishes like these:
And, best of all, my team finished quickly enough that we had time to practice various techniques and to just jaw a bunch. A little speed? Yes please!
February 26, 2012 in cooking,
We have this lemon tree in the backyard. Every year, it gave a bounty of lemons; we hardly had to buy a one at the market. Except for last year; last year, somehow it didn’t give us but one or two. It’s an old, dry tree, and we wondered if it was just getting ready to pass on. Well, it answered us this year: this year, it produced all last year’s lemons, all at once.
Confronted with all of these lemons, we’ve been cooking delicious marinated meats and lemony dressings, but it’s about to get out of hand. So I decided to go old school on it: I bought a bunch of canning jars and went to pickling.
First I harvested a big batch of orange-sized lemons. I cut off the stem end, cut them in quarters almost all the way through, and packed them with salt on the inside, in the Moroccan fashion.
Then I planned to stuff them in the jars; except these jars were sized for a lemon-sized lemon, not something that dwarfed our measuring spoons. So I quartered the lemons all the way through, packed in more salt, and added coriander seeds, cinnamon, and chills — all from Zanzibar!
Now it’s a few weeks before we know how things turn out, but I’m excited. Updates as acid- and salt-related cellular changes follow.
August 15, 2010 in cooking,
When it’s summer around here, the grill and the wok both come out. They’re two incredible tools to cook light food with flavors that cut through the heat — and without making Courtney or I boil in the kitchen, either. On a lark, we saw these beautiful-looking, and cheap-as-anything squid at the local Japanese Marketplace. Now, neither of us knew the first thing about preparing squid, but it’s the kind of food that seems like either it takes 5 minutes or 5 hours to prepare, but nothing in the middle. So we picked it up and took it home.
So, squid takes about 5 minutes to prepare. Maybe a little longer if you’re cooking up a lot of little ones, like we did, but really not long at all. The first step is to clean the squid. I learned how from the Internet, so I’ve memorialized my process here too.
Step 1: Get yourself a little something to help with all the cooking ahead. My favorite helper is a dirty martini.
Step 2: Remove the head. To do this, grasp the head in one hand and the body in the other. I found it easier to hold the body from inside than from the tail; holding it that way made me feel like I was going to tear the body.
Step 3: Cut the tentacles off. They’re edible; save them. Throw away the head. A blog I found good directions on this at suggested that your dog would find the head delicious. Yours might; mine spit it on the floor, much to my wife’s consternation.
Note here that a number of sources on squid disassembly suggested that I squeeze the ink out from sacs in the head and reserve it at this stage. None of the squids I got had any particular amount of ink in them — except for one. That one, I cut into it and a gigantic arc of ink shot across the kitchen. Again much to my wife’s consternation. Again, the dog didn’t care.
Step 4: Squeeze out the guts. There’s just no nice way to say this step. There’s some sort of organs that look like scallops, as well as, well, let’s call it slime, inside the squid. Get it out by running the flat side of a knife down the squid from tail to the open end. I put my cutting board at the edge of the sink and basically just squeezed the junk into the sink.
Step 5: Remove the skin. This part is easier than it sounds. The skin is paper-thin, and, as you scrape your knife against the squid in step 4, you’ll tear it. Slide a finger inside this tear and delicately separate the skin from the body. About half the time the whole skin came off like a glove, the other half I had to scrape the remainders off with the knife.
Step 6: Remove the quill. The quill is a piece of cartilage that runs the length of the squid. I used one hand to separate the cartilage back inside the body, near the tail, and the other hand to pull at the tip. Almost every time it came out in one piece.
Step 7: Rinse under water. To make the slime go away.
Step 8: Chop as you please. I chopped it into rings, but strips are pretty typical for stir-fries, and you can also cut the body into two nice steaks.
Step 9: Heat the aromatics. Chop up a couple of inches of fresh ginger and 4 garlic cloves, heat them in some oil with chile flakes until very fragrant. The chiles don’t really make the dish spicy, but they brighten the flavor, just as they do in, say, a nice marinara.
Step 10: Add in some fresh vegetables. To highlight the fresh flavor of the squid, I didn’t load the dish up with a lot of vegetables. The Japanese market had delicious-looking oyster mushrooms and bok choy.
Step 11: Stir-fry and add sauce. Stir-fry and soften up the vegetables a bit, adding sauce and then stir-frying more. What sauce? Well, I used a pretty typical Thai sauce that I learned in a cooking class I took in Chiang Mai. It’s 1 part fish sauce, 1 part soy sauce, 1 part sugar, and 2 parts oyster sauce — although I replaced the 1 part sugar with 1/2 part agave.
After stir-frying the vegetables until slightly soft, add about a quarter cup of broth — I used dashi. This stretches out the sauce and keeps it from being too strong-flavored. Then throw in the squid and cook briefly — no more than 20 or 40 seconds. It’ll turn white almost immediately.
Step 12: Serve it forth! Probably the martini’s not the best accompaniment here.
March 1, 2010 in cooking,
Christmas brought a lot of things, not least of which was Rachael Ray’s Big Orange Book Cookbook.
Now, I’m admittedly a big Rachael Ray fan, not so much for her cooking or her show as for her looks. But this was the first time I actually cooked anything from her. With no puns in mind, I picked a delicious-looking meatball recipe.
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February 8, 2010 in cooking,
This winter has been full of cold, wet weather. This kind of environment is unfamiliar in LA, a land of single-pane windows, minimal insulation, and even less drainage. Given my druthers, I’d solve all problems with either technology or cooking. While technology may soon enough solve cold and wet through global warming, in the short term the best solution is a cooking one: a hot bowl of soup. So this winter has been full of soups.
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