One day last weekend, I was looking for an excuse to not leave the house so I decided to braise something. I feel like although I’ve been doing a lot of braising this winter (thanks to Julie and Julia, which has us all craving Boeuf Bourgignon in August!!), I hardly ever use my oven. I obviously use it when I bake, but it’s so rare that I do something like roast a chicken and the oven just never gets used for cooking. I takes so long! You have to wait for it to preheat, then it takes forever to actually cook your food…. so it’s the stovetop for me the majority of the time. Every once in a while if I’m snowed in (or want to pretend I’m snowed in!) I take advantage of the time at home to make a delicious braised dish. Like these short ribs, which simmer away all afternoon until the meat falls right off the bone and is tender as can be.
Instead of doing a traditional Italian braise, I decided to put a southwestern twist on my ribs, using beer and tequila as my liquids and adding a jalapeno and some chili powder to the pot. The flavor turned out great – it wasn’t spicy or beer-y at all, but it had a nice little southwestern kick. In order to develop the recipe I used the “Create your own” feature on the Fine Cooking web site. The feature walks you through the recipe and lets you drag different combinations of ingredients into the “pot” – then at the end it gives you a recipe that you can follow to recreate the dish n a real kitchen. I always play around with the feature, but I had never actually cooked one of the recipes before. I was impressed! Although you ned to pay attention to what flavors will go well together and make sure you have a good balance of richness and acidity, it’s a great way to put a fun, personal twist on a recipe that you aren’t that familiar with.
For any of you that have never had short ribs before, it’s similar to pot roast with a slightly firmer texture – fork-tender and succulent meat, with vegetables that cook down into a nice sauce. I served these with mashed potatoes (with sour cream instead of milk) to serve with my ribs. They were a great way to soak up the extra sauce! [....]
These udon noodles with ponzu and brown butter sauce are one of my favorite recent creations. It’s amazingly simple and takes almost no effort to throw together. There are certain words that I really don’t like to use to describe food; they’re overused and cliche. But sometimes, there’s just no other appropriate way to describe something. So I’m going to break one of my own unwritten rules and come out and say it – unctuous. That’s the only way that I can describe these fat, slippery noodles that are lightly coated in a buttery, citrusy sauce. The ponzu and brown butter sauce is incredibly rich and fills your mouth with a rounded flavor. Red peppers and green onions add color to the dish as well as pierce through the richness of the sauce to make the dish seem light on the palate. The noodles themselves are so rich that you don’t need much steak in this dish, but it does deserve a special mention. A quick marinade of sesame oil, ponzu, and ginger imparts tons of flavor. A quick kiss by a hot pan will cook the steak perfectly, making it so tender that you barely need to chew it. [....]
January is National Soup Month. January 24th is about the time when most people start losing focus on their New Year’s resolutions to eat better. I love soups and find that they provide a tasty and nutritious meal without a lot of work. So when Foodbuzz sent out a call for proposals for the January 24, 24, 24 event, I knew exactly what I wanted to do – a world tour of soups. (A soup Olympics, if you’re eagerly anticipating the games next month.)
That’s right: I’m presenting you with six soups, one representing each (populated) continent. Each soup is hearty enough to be a meal and can be made quickly and easily as long as you have stock on hand. And to keep everyone happy, two of them are vegan. They also all freeze well, which is good considering I now have enough soup to feed a small country.
(Six recipes with photos makes the just about the longest blog post ever, so I’m cutting it off here. Please click through to read more!)
Shepherd’s Pie. Soup, Lasagna, Soup, Stew, Soup, Soup, Soup. That’s been what dinner here has looked like the past few weeks. The colder weather just has me craving comfort foods, most of which are pretty boring and not worth posting about. But this pot pie is another story. For some reason puff pastry comes in packages of two so I had some left after making that baked brie. I’m not normally a pot pie fan, but I remembered seeing a recipe for beef and guinness baked under puff pastry when I was looking at Jamie Oliver’s web site not to long ago, and I liked the general idea. I’m sure his recipe is good, but it looked kind of boring to me so I took mine up a few notches by playing around with the cooking technique and adding lots of vegetables and more seasonings. The result is a stew of tender beef and potatoes swimming in a rich and flavorful broth that has just the slightest bit of bitterness (in a good way!) from the beer, all tucked nicely beneath a buttery crust. It was warm and comforting – exactly what I was looking for on a cold winter day. [....]
After a long day raking leaves and a late lunch that left me not really wanting dinner, finding the motivation to get up from my nap on the couch wasn’t really there. Until I remembered my plan to make these Brussels Sprouts in Ponzu or dinner! Then I was off the couch and in the kitchen in about 5 minutes!
At the FoodBuzz Festival, one of the major hits with everyone at dinner was Namu Chef Dennis Lee’s Brussels Sprouts. They were incredible, and no one could stop talking about them. In fact, we all kept talking about them so much that he finally relented and gave out the recipe. Score!! I’m not likely to get tired of Brussels sprouts when there are recipes like this out there. They’re browned in butter, and then simmered in a citrusy ponzu sauce until they’re very tender. Oh… and there’s bacon, too! [....]
