Chipotle Salsa (And a Breakfast Tostada to Boot)

It's tomato season! While my poor little tomato plants have been cruelly neglected, leading them to provide me with a total of 10 puny little grape tomatoes, thankfully my CSA farm employs much better tomato nurturers.

Besides putting tomatoes on all my salads and sandwiches, I've made a couple delicious homemade salsas this week. The first is a roasted poblano salsa (poblanos also from the CSA!) and the second is a fresh tomato chipotle number featured in this post. It's crazy easy and results in a spicy smoky salsa perfect for all your chip-eating needs. I made it in a food processor since I'm a big fan of the restaurant-style pureed salsa, but you could also hand-chop all the ingredients and mix for a chunkier version. Bonus: it went great on a breakfast tostada we made to kick off a gorgeous Saturday in Maryland.

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Chicken Tikka Masala Pizza

Such a good idea, right? I couldn't resist when I came across this recipe on Rasa Malaysia (a great website in general). I love cooking with Indian spices, and I love pizza. Done and done.

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Thanksgiving Part IV: Pumpkin Spice Cake with Chocolate-Pecan Filling

Oh my God, you guys, this cake is ridiculously good. I made it as a dessert for Thanksgiving to combine and put a twist on the traditional pumpkin and pecan pies. The result is something straight out of a fall dessert dream. I realize it's no longer fall, but I don't recall there being any rules on when pumpkin could be consumed. This will be the last but certainly not least installment of Thanksgiving recipes from 2012.

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Seared Scallops and Foie Gras

This year's contribution to our annual Valentine's Day meal is by far the fanciest, most decadent, and most gorgeous addition to the recipe family. Previous years brought us the good ol' surf n turf and the unique duck pizza. This year I copied a recipe from Top Chef, pretty much the only reality show I can stomach. For those of you who have not tried foie gras, it is fatty duck liver that melts in your mouth in buttery savory sweet amazingness. It's so decadent that you can't eat very much at once, which is good because it's freakin expensive. $28 at Wegman's for ~5 oz.

There are several components to this dish: a french toast-like bread called pain perdu, apple preserves, spiced pecans, maple foam, and of course the scallops and foie gras. You can make the preserves and pecans ahead of time, but the rest needs to come together simultaneously so unless you are a Top Chef it would be good to have a sous chef slash willing husband available.
I don't have any fancy equipment to make the maple foam, so I used my immersion blender and scooped the foam off the top, immediately before serving so it would hold. It's not as thick as a foam you'd see in a Colicchio restaurant, but it tastes the same.
We meant to have this as an appetizer (2 each), with a seared duck breast salad as an entree, but we were too full to make the duck. Full disclosure: we also had a pre-appetizer of cheese.
I halved the recipe for the apple preserves (already halved below), but you could probably also 1/2 the pecan and foam recipes as well. We have leftover pecans which is actually not a bad thing, but did throw out a lot of foam.

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Thanksgiving Part III: Harvest Focaccia

This focaccia is a bit more time consuming than other focaccia recipes I've made but oh lordy is it worth it!! The grapes and turbinado sugar ("sugar in the raw" as you may know it) sweeten the salty bread just enough but not too much as to make it a dessert bread. I intended to serve it alongside the meal but we ended up eating a bunch as soon as it came out of the oven; it smelled too good!

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Thanksgiving Part II: Wild Mushroom Bacon Stuffing

This was my favorite dish of Thanksgiving, and I don't usually even like stuffing! We didn't stuff the turkey at all, just made a separate dish since most of us prefer a crispy-topped stuffing. This was the first leftover to be devoured (cold, with spoons, directly out of the baking dish) the next day. That's how good it is.

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Thanksgiving Part I: Citrus-Herb Roasted Turkey

Well this is embarrassing... all my previous lapses in posting are nothing compared to this one! So let's catch up. My summer was great. The Mediterranean cruise was unbelievable (picture from Cannes to the right) and our new house is all we ever wanted. We attended five beautiful weddings this year, ending the wedding season at the beginning of November with one of my best friend from college's rustic carriage house wedding. Oh, I also turned 30, but we can gloss right over that one.

This fall my parents visited from Connecticut for Thanksgiving, which was held at my house with my sister and brother-in-law also in attendance. It was my first Thanksgiving! (If you don't count the time in college my family visited me and cooked a meal in my dingy college apartment while I was at work) The meal turned out so well that it inspired me to pick up the keyboard and type up a few blog posts about it. My mom and sister helped tremendously and we all had a great time cooking together while the boys built a bonfire out back.

First, let's focus on the main event: the turkey! I picked up a fresh 16 lb hen from Maple Lawn farms, which happens to be just a few miles from my house.

Because of its freshness I decided against brining, but I definitely would have brined if I had gotten a store-bought turkey. The recipe is Giada's, but the real expertise came from my mom who has years of turkey-perfecting practice.

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Grilled Scallops with Mango Salsa

Spring has definitely sprung, and with that comes my love for all things grilled, including scallops on skewers. This time, I rubbed them with a homemade spice mix and served with fresh mango salsa. The most time-consuming part was the salsa and even that was simple: just chop up a few fresh veggies/fruits and mix together. Add some red rice, and you've got a perfect weeknight meal!

Just realized that this totally looks like a bikini bottom. You can't unsee it.

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MaPo Tofu

Howdy, strangers. I'm alive!! I really don't have a good excuse for not blogging in over 2 months, but I'll offer up some mediocre ones. First, my camera broke a few months ago. I've been taking pictures with my phone and as you may have noticed, they suck. A phone camera, even one with 8 mp, doesn't compare to a real one. I'm still using a point-and-shoot, mind you, but it's still better than the phone. We finally got a new camera a few weeks ago. Second, work has been really busy. Third, we're moving! We fell in love with a house in Howard County in February, and have been working with the seller (sans agents) since to finalize everything. In the meantime, we're also trying to find renters for our current house. We close in a few weeks, and move in June! So excited. Oh yeah, and we're also going on a cruise in the Mediterranean for 2 weeks at the end of May (!!!). Between packing the house, getting ready for the cruise, and showing the house, it's been crazy around these parts.

Anyway, my inaugural spring post is my favorite Szechuan dish: MaPo Tofu. We have a great Szechuan restaurant near my work and I order it every time. Szechuan peppercorns are essential in this style of cooking; they are spicy but in a totally unique, mouth-numbing way that you can only understand by trying them. Most Americanized Chinese restaurants with "Szechuan" dishes aren't using Szechuan peppercorns, so you need to go to a more authentic place to get the real deal. Don't make this dish without 'em. Some of the ingredients must be bought at an Asian market, but once you have them, this dish comes together in a jiffy.

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Valentine's Day: Hoisin Duck Pizza

Happy belated Valentine's Day to all! As I mentioned last year, we usually try to plan a getaway around Valentine's Day but it never works out. Without plans or reservations, we end up making a fancy meal at home which is always better and more relaxing than we could have wanted. This year, we had the best of both worlds! We actually managed to plan a last minute weekend getaway to the Bahamas, but were home in time to cook an elaborate Asian-themed meal for Valentine's Day. On the menu was tuna tartare, wild mushroom salad, and duck pizza.

The tuna tartare was everything I dreamed taste-wise, but it looked like a pile of soy vomit, for lack of better words. Without thinking of presentation, I marinated it in dark soy sauce which completely ruined the beautiful pink hue of the raw tuna. The tuna was mixed with avocado and should have created a gorgeous pink and green tower, but alas. I learned my lesson! Tartare requires clear marinades! I'll make it again in the future and post the recipe, but this one is going into the vault.

The mushroom salad was a simple mix of shiitake and oyster mushrooms served over greens with an Asian-inspired vinaigrette. Pictured below, but no recipe is really needed.

The hoisin duck pizza was the star of our evening. I will spare you the "before" pictures, but let's just say that I didn't realize when I bought a frozen unrecognizable ball of duck from the Asian market that, when thawed, it would be Mr. Quackers in full; duck bill, webbed feet, and all. Thankfully it was at least gutted for me. I had to learn my way around a meat cleaver right quick! Since I only needed the breast for the recipe, I saved the legs for another day. The carcass (neck and all) made duck stock which is sitting in my freezer. Not sure how good it will be but I'll let you know!

Anyway, to the pizza...

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Chickpea and Chorizo Soup

I made this soup last winter, took pictures of it because it was so delicious, then never got around to writing about it before the weather got warm! At that point, a hearty sausage-y soup lost out over more summery grill and salad recipes. But fear not; I made the soup again the other night and remembered how awesome it was, and how easy to throw together with ingredients that you probably already have. I usually keep a variety of meats and sausages in the freezer, and chickpeas always live in my cupboard. Feel free to use turkey sausage if you want to reduce the fat a little, but I'll keep the yummy spicy chorizo thank-you-very-much. The original recipe has you adding extra olive oil but I omitted that and instead used some of the rendered sausage fat to cook the onions. I didn't miss the oil one bit.

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Awesome Peanut Sauce for Satay

I found this recipe for chicken satays with peanut dipping sauce a while ago and haven't looked back since. Once you make this, you'll never make another peanut sauce again! With a food processor and a reasonably short shopping list, this sauce is a cinch to make and lasts a while in the fridge. Serve with grilled chicken (or any other meat, or tofu - can you grill tofu??) skewers or veggies. When I use chicken, I marinate it first in a simple Asian marinade (either a homemade mix or Makoto Ginger Dressing).

One ingredient this calls for is a shallot, which I use all the time as a more mild onion. Shallots are great for dressings, marinades, and sauces and don't need to be cooked to have a great, mild flavor. Today's shallot is brought to you by Frieda's - it came along with the Meyer lemons and red pearl onions.

this is a shallot, my friends

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Spinach and Goat Cheese Ravioli

Armed with my new pasta maker attachment for the KitchenAid (again, thanks Mom and Dad!!), we set out on a Sunday ravioli-making experience. Making homemade ravioli is very time-consuming, but you get to choose exactly what goes inside and bonus: no preservatives or extra crap you see in store-bought ravioli ingredients! I'm always amazed by the paragraph of unrecognizable ingredients in a lot of store-bought food, so I try to make things at home as much as possible. Of course, it's not always feasible, but I think that every little bit counts. Who knows what all that stuff is doing to us?? A couple easy things to make at home where store-bought is usually filled with high fructose corn syrup or other unappetizing ingredients are dressings and marinades. There are gazillions of awesome and easy dressing and marinade recipes out there. But, I digress... to the ravioli!

We ate the ravioli with brown butter sauce which is delicious, but I probably won't make it again. The ravioli would be just as good in a lighter tomato or olive oil-based sauce without all the extra saturated fat. For a splurge, though, it's great!

You don't need a pasta maker attachment to make ravioli, but it does make it easier.

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Baked Chicken with Preserved Lemons and Artichokes

Now that we have all these preserved lemons, what to do?? How about an awesome Moroccan-themed oven-roasted chicken, served over couscous? Sounds yummy to me. I cooked mine in my new Le Creuset Dutch Oven (thanks Mom and Dad!!), but any ol' baking dish will do!

Once you have the preserved lemons, the rest of the recipe is incredibly simple. Essentially just toss everything together in a baking dish and throw in the oven.

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How to Preserve Lemons

I'm not at all experienced with Meyer lemons, but what I have heard/read about them is that they are perfect for preserving, which is another first for me! I went to the Container Store and bought a singular canning jar (since I don't have plans to make this a habit...yet) that seals via boiling. The actual preserving process was stupidly easy, and I now know that the results are kinda awesome, so if I do come across Meyer lemons again I know what I'm gonna do.

If you have seen these lemons at the store, I recommend trying your hand at canning to preserve them! As mentioned previously, Meyer lemons are slightly sweeter and less tart than regular lemons; preserving them only enhances these attributes. The actual preserving is no more than adding a buttload of salt and sealing them in a jar with their juices. Then waiting, for at least 3 weeks. Read on for the steps!

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Spanakopita (Greek Spinach Pie)

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had as great a holiday as I did. I know I promised my next post would be on preserving lemons, but you'll have to be patient. They are still sitting in the fridge a'preservin' and I didn't feel like taking them out for photos just yet. So instead I'm posting a recipe for an amazing appetizer I used to buy frozen all the time (...and eat the entire tray myself, but who's counting). I decided a while back that I wanted to try my hand at making spanakopita myself. This particular recipe has three different kinds of onions, but don't fear because the end product is definitely not overwhelming in the onion department. However, the flavors meld deliciously with the spinach and feta cheese. Serve that up in a flaky, crusty phyllo dough and your guests are sure to swoon! I won't lie, working with phyllo dough is time-consuming and can be frustrating at times when the dough breaks apart, but it's totally worth it for special occasions.

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Meyer Lemon Mojitos

I recently received some goodies to try out from Frieda's, a specialty produce company based in California. Frieda's products can be found at Giant Eagle stores which are all over Pittsburgh, but there is also one located in Frederick, MD, for my more local readers. In the package were shallots, red pearl onions, and Meyer lemons. I decided to experiment first with the Meyer lemons, since I've never used them before. Meyer lemons are smaller and a little sweeter than regular lemons, making them a perfect option for preserving (next post!) and using in drinks. When coming up with ideas, I remembered that ancient saying: "When life hands you lemons, make lemon mojitos!" Yup, that was it.

The Meyer lemon is on the left!

I have to admit, I've had trouble making a great mojito at home, but this recipe, even though a slight twist on the regular lime mojito, really hit the mark!

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Farro with Apples, Almonds, and Smoked Mozz

So, I had 80% of this post written the other day and I accidentally hit my browser's back button a bunch of times, losing the entire thing. I thought there would at least be some of it saved, but no! None! So I threw in the towel. But I'm back and ready to post again, no longer angry at the computer. For the time being, at least. Anyway, to the foods.

Farro is another one of those ancient grains that is just now becoming popular in the U.S. It reminds me a bit of barley, but with more of a bite to it. It's hearty and healthy and a perfect alternative to pasta or rice in soups, bakes, or on its own as a salad. This recipe does just that - farro served with a delicious combo of apples, toasty almonds, dried cranberries, and smoked mozzarella. It would have been great as-is, but we were in a non-vegetarian mood so I baked some breaded chicken cutlets and served those on top. Delicioso! FYI the breaded chicken recipe is awesome in general for all your breaded chicken needs (chicken parm sandwich, salad, etc.).

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Oma's Gulyasleves (Goulash Soup)

Goulash is a staple in the Hungarian diet, and our family was no exception. Oma (my grandmother) always had a piping hot bowl of goulash ready for us, served with a heap of nokedli (like spaetzle noodles). She always knew to make extra nokedli when I was coming over, since I tended to have a bowl of nokedli with a dash of goulash on top. I've gotten a little better about that now, but still, goulash without nokedli is like summer without sand, or Ben without Jerry.

This soup is easy to make and has few ingredients, but packs a lot of flavor. Note that Hungarians eat their goulash as a soup, while Czech's tend to have it as a stew. We do it the Magyar way. This is the second recipe from Oma that I've posted. They are all near and dear to my heart!

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Seared Scallops over Celeriac and Rutabaga Puree

I've never cooked with celeriac (aka celery root) nor rutabagas, so this post can easily qualify as a "branching out" recipe. I haven't done one of those in a long time! I had a Groupon for Whole Foods, so decided to use it on fresh sea scallops, a treat in our house. Um, and $100 worth of produce and other goodies... but let's not split hairs. That's how they get ya!

Celeriac is an ugly, bulbous-looking root of a kind of celery plant. The greens that grow off it may look like celery, but they do not taste as good. I saved mine for chicken stock. Rutabaga is in the turnip family and also not very attractive, but fear not! Both are unoffensive yet have distinct flavors that are perfect for wintery soups, vegetable roasts, and purees. For an easy yet ridiculously fancy-shmance-sounding dinner to impress the in-laws, give this a whirl!

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