Today, I cooked up some curry for my buddies. I used a yellow curry paste, vegetables, chicken and eggplant. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking along with two versions of the recipe: the full version I made tonight and the shortcut version I make for myself when I want a quick meal. The beauty of this recipe is that once you learn the basics, there’s a lot of leeway to customize this to your personal tastes: choose different vegetables, choose a different meat, adjust the quantity of the curry paste or even use a different curry paste altogether (I normally use a red curry paste, actually, which is much spicier).
Yellow Thai Curry with Eggplant
Full Version
Ingredients: 1 boneless chicken breast, sliced thin 1 head of broccoli, cut into florets 2 medium carrots, sliced 1 Chinese eggplant (a regular one works fine, but may be a little thick), sliced about 1/2 inch thick 1 can of bamboo shoot strips 1 can of coconut milk Salt Pepper Flour or Cornstarch (I used coconut flour, because I prefer to minimize grain intake, but it can be tricky to find) Yellow curry paste (or the curry paste of your choice!)
First, toss the sliced eggplant with salt and leave in a colander to drain (put a plate below it) for 45 min - 1 hour. This takes out a lot of the harsh flavors of the eggplant (you should do this whenever you cook with eggplant).
Now prep the rest of the of the ingredients. Put the sliced chicken in an airtight container (I use a Ziplock bag) and toss it with salt, pepper and the flour/cornstarch/coconut flour.
Heat light olive oil (don’t use virgin–virgin olive oil is not made for high heat) in a wok over high heat. Toss in the chicken and stir fry. Depending on the size of your wok or pan, you may need to cook the chicken in multiple batches. You want to stir fry them quickly and not steam them. Once the chicken is cooked, put it aside in a separate container.
Add more oil to the wok if necessary and toss in the broccoli and carrots. Stir fry them for a minute or two, then add the eggplant. Cook for another minute or two, then add the bamboo shoot strips. Add a tablespoon or two of the curry paste to taste and return the chicken to the wok. Pour in the coconut milk, mix all the ingredients together so the curry paste dissolves into the coconut milk and lower the heat to low. Let simmer for 10-15 minutes and serve over rice (or by itself).
Quick Version
The key to the quick version is to buy a lot of the ingredients pre-prepared. You’ll also skip starching the meat and leave out the eggplant. Purchase pre-cut broccoli and carrots. Try and find chicken already prepared for stir fry at your supermarket.
When you cook the chicken, add salt and pepper as you stir fry it. Skip the eggplant steps, since the eggplant takes at least 45 minutes to prepare. Otherwise, follow the directions above. The actual cooking time should be no more than 20-30 minutes.
Occasionally, Blizzard does some cool stuff…
When I mentioned to one of my high school friends that I was throwing a dinner party for friends here in Seattle, he expressed interest in having me throw one in New York. So during my recent trip home, I spent an evening preparing a meal for some of my high school buddies. I regret that I didn’t spend enough time to prepare an interesting menu, so I just fell back on some basics, but I did experiment with a dessert I had been thinking about trying for a while.
Appetizer: Goat cheese and grape tomatoes on cucumbers I had literally just learned this recipe the weekend before while touring Napa valley. Robert Mondavi Winery served this to us with their sauvignon blanc. The original recipe called for a lot of preparation just to spice up the goat cheese and add some garnish. I skipped this in favor of plain goat cheese. Certainly, the spices added a nice complexity to the dish, but I don’t see the need for additional preparation time–soft goat cheese with herbs an spices is usually not to rare at the super market.
Ingredients: Miniature or persian cucumbers Goat cheese (herbed or flavored, if you prefer) Grape tomatoes
The actual dish is really simple to prepare. Take a mini-cucumber and slice it into quarter inch thick slices. Cut up the grape tomato into small pieces as well (quarters would work well). Put a nice blob of goat cheese on each cucumber slice (maybe a teaspoon or two) and then top with a piece of grape tomato.
Main Course: Eggplant Parmigiana One of my high school friends is vegetarian (despite my efforts to convince him of the deliciousness of meat), and sadly, my repertoire of vegetarian entrees is rather lacking. I usually end up falling back on this old favorite that I read in an Italian cookbook, and adapted to my own methods.
Ingredients: 2 eggplants Fresh mozarella Tomato sauce (or make your own) Fresh basil Parmigiano-reggiano cheese, grated or shredded
Preheat oven to 350.
Cut off the stem of the eggplant and then slice it lengthwise. Lightly salt each side and arrange the eggplant vertically in a colander over a plate or in the sink to ’sweat’ the eggplant for 30 minutes. This will remove a lot of the bitter flavor from the eggplant (which will drip out below, so make sure you don’t leave the colander out on the counter).
Once the eggplant is done sweating, heat up some oil in a pan or skillet over medium-high heat (I used olive oil, since I figured that would complement the Italian flavor). Lightly pan fry each slice of eggplant on both sides. You may need to replenish the oil between batches.
Now get an oven pan or pans about 2 inches deep (I think I used an 11″x17″, but at home I often use two 8″x8″ pans). Layer the bottom with eggplant slices, then cover with mozarella, tomato sauce, parmigiano-reggiano cheese and fresh basil. Repeat this step and create more layers until you run out of ingredients (or pan space, in which case get another pan).
Bake in the oven for 30 minutes. Optionally after about 15 minutes, take it out and drain the grease from the pan. This is a pain in the butt, so I skip it.
Dessert: Creamy Lemon Tart Filling Super easy and delicious. It tastes like a smooth pudding or custard. It’s technically for filling tarts (and you can certainly do that), but I’m avoiding grains, so I just served it in little pudding bowls and garnished it with fresh strawberries and blackberries. I originally learned this during a cooking demonstration at the Pike Place Cheese Festival here in Seattle, but I changed the recipe to use ricotta cheese instead of goat cheese. I think the goat cheese came out a little smoother, but ricotta cheese is more readily available.
Ingredients: Lemon Curd Ricotta Cheese (or Goat Cheese)
Mix the lemon curd and cheese together in a bowl at a 1:1 ratio. Stir vigorously until smooth.
Spoon into small bowls or into tart crusts. Top with fresh fruit of your choice.
Yes, it’s really that simple.
And that covers the cooking part of the meal. My mom helped out by cooking up some sausage (for the meat eaters) and helping to prep the salad (nothing fancy, just some greens and veggies with dressings on the side). She also prepped some pesto flat bread pizza from Trader Joe’s that everyone said was fantastic–of course, I passed on the grains.
P.S. Sorry, no pictures. I’ll try to remember to use my camera at my next dinner party.
I just got back from ten days visiting friends and family in the Bay Area and New York City area. Since I’ve already been to SF a few times and I grew up near NYC, the tourist-y activities didn’t really interest me (although I did some). Instead, I thought I’d talk about some of the fantastic restaurants I enjoyed great food and even better company at.
A Tale of Three Izakayas Japanese Izakaya-style restaurants seem to be getting popular these days. I haven’t really been to this style of restaurant until recently, but the combination of tapas-sized plates and the sorts of delicious Japanese dishes you don’t find in your corner teriyaki restaurant are quickly making them some of my favorite restaurants.
At Gochi in Cupertino, CA, the food was more of a fusion style. Highlights included some fantastic risotto-mushroom croquettes, which might challenge Brouwer’s kaas croquettes for unquestioned dominion over all croquettes, and the beef and kimchi rice bowl, which had a delicious korean flavor to it. I also enjoyed a crab omelette and a variety of delicious small bites. Unfortunately, the kabocha (pumpkin) cheese mochi didn’t work so well–mochi and cheese just shouldn’t be mixed. For dessert, I ordered an amazing black sesame mousse. I really think we need to import black sesame into the standard western dessert flavor collection. It’s like a sweeter, yet more delicate version of peanut.
A week later, I found myself in Yokocho in New York City’s East Village neighborhood near St. Marks Street. The food here was decidedly more traditional Japanese and the decor gave the impression that you were sitting at a streetside restaurant in a traditional Japanese town. The highlight of the meal was definitely the yakitori, especially the bacon-wrapped scallops. We also enjoyed an order of takoyaki–a Japanese snack featuring little tidbits of octopus and vegetables fried in a soft batter and topped with bonito flakes, okonomi sauce and mayonaisse. The atmosphere and the breadth of options available on the menu make me want to return next time I’m in New York, despite the thirty minute wait for a table.
I thought I’d also compare these two Izakayas with the more local Maekawa Room here in the International District of Seattle. Compared with the previous two restaurants, Maekawa Room lacks a lot of the atmosphere and presentation of the previous two, but it makes up for that by being less than half the price and conveniently about two blocks from where I work. I’ve been there a few times, and my favorite dishes so far are the pork kakuni, a nice fatty chunk of pork stewed with a hard-boiled egg, a dish made of boiled spinach ‘cubes’ with a sesame sauce (tastes a little like peanuts) and the fish roe omelette. The yaki nasu (grilled eggplant), however, is somewhat bland.
Seafood by the Bay I managed to have dinner at two fantastic restaurants during my stay in San Francisco (aside from Gochi above). At both restaurants, I ended up ordering a dish in a spicy coconut milk broth, and I think I’m starting to develop a taste for coconut milk. I’ll be experimenting with adding it to some of my own cooking soon.
First up, is Fresca, a Peruvian restaurant located in the West Portal district of San Francisco (among several other locations) where, against their protestations, I treated my gracious hosts to dinner (my mom would be proud). I ordered their sudado, a dish featuring mahi mahi, yucca (a starchy root vegetable) and various shellfish in a tamarind-coconut broth (I’m going by the menu a bit here). The broth, really more like a creamy curry sauce, was the highlight of this dish, and really served to impart a fantastic spicy-sweet flavor to the various seafood and vegetables in the dish. On the side, I ordered a dish of fried plaintains for the table to share. The plaintains were fantastic on their own, as fried plaintains tend to be, but were even better when paired with the sour cream, which contrasted with the plaintains sweetness to provide a more balanced flavor.
A couple of days later, on our way back from sampling the fruits of the beautiful Napa Valley, we stopped by Bar Crudo in San Francisco. This seafood restaurant featured a menu with an interesting progression from raw dishes to cold dishes and finally to hot dishes. We started off with a sampler of their raw dishes, which I recall being somewhat hit or miss and, like sashimi, not particularly filling. Luckily, my next dish, a lobster heirloom tomato salad, was fantastic. I don’t normally like raw tomatoes very much, but these various heirloom tomatoes were more flavorful and less watery than the typical grocery store tomato. I might need to start paying more attention to heirloom vegetables. Rounding out the meal was my next seafood and coconut milk dish; seared scallops in a coconut curry. Once again spicy coconut milk and scallops produce some good eats (and this time together).
New York Italian Food It wouldn’t be a trip back to New York without enjoying some delicious Italian food (it’s just so hard to find good Italian food on the west coast). Besides dining at local family favorites Marinara and Mezzanote, we also went out to a slightly fancier Italian restaurant, Giardinetto in Inwood.
Although Giarinetto’s decor and atmosphere seemed like it would be a great date restaurant, the clientele on Saturday night seemed to be mostly families and groups of middle aged couples, but I suppose that has more to do with who lives in the area and can afford it, since I would suppose most young professionals live in Manhattan and not the suburbs. I ordered a crab salad (no, the irony of me ordering a crab salad on the east coast and a lobster salad on the west coast is not lost on me), which was small, but delicious. They shaped it like a crab cake, and it sort of tasted like a raw version of one–which isn’t a bad thing at all. The real highlight of this meal was my main course, the veal chop valdotana, a sizable veal chop stuffed with prosciutto, eggplant and fontina cheese and sauteed with wild mushrooms and a cognac reduction. Conceptually, it reminds me of the turducken: awesome stuffed with awesome and covered with more awesome, except not quite as ridiculously extravagant and probably quite a bit tastier. Sadly, at $34, it was a little pricy, but if you can sacrifice the veal for some good old fashioned chicken, they offer a chicken version at almost half the price.
This month I’ve been participating in the Primal Challenge over at Mark’s Daily Apple. Part of my personal goals for this month are to cut out grains and eat more vegetables. Last night, I tried this recipe for Cauliflower Crust Pizza. The premise was simple: a crust made out of cauliflower, eggs and mozarella–not a single grain of… grain. The results were tasty, but the crust did not have the crispness that I was hoping for based on the pictures. Also, it was difficult to remove it from the parchment paper. I think I will try it again sometime and see if I can improve it. I topped it with tomato sauce, mozarella, onions, red bell peppers, sausage and mushrooms.
Saw this today and had to take a picture. Someone at the Uwajimaya near where I work turned this display of boxed curry into a depiction of a Japanese garden. I especially like the bridge, which is held up without any support, turning this into a fantastic display of culture, engineering and groceries.
Dogfishhead Red and White. A mix of a red ale brewed with Pinot noir grapes and a Belgian white. The red part gave it a delicious fruity note.
Welcome to the home in the blogosphere of Andrew Gould, a software engineer originally from Long Island, New York and now living in Seattle. Hopefully my musings here will be interesting or valuable to someone. Maybe you’ll find a useful recipe in an account of my experiments as an amateur cook. Or perhaps you’ll want to swap strategies after reading a story about my efforts to build muscle, drop the fat and develop a killer beach body. Then again, maybe I’ll just randomly entertain you with some thoughts about Seattle, New York, style or something else. If you’ve been reading between the lines at this point, you’ve probably figured out what I’m really trying to say: I don’t quite have a vision or focus for this blog yet beyond adding my own voice to the cacophony of information that is the internet. Enjoy!
