Grilled Chicken, Sausage & Vegetable Skewers

When I planned out the week's worth of dinners I had ambitiously planned 2-3 dinners on the grill. Evening commitments in general may keep me away from the kitchen and it looks as though weather will keep me away from the grill as it did last night. Grilled Chicken, Sausage & Vegetable Skewers (found on this site in a watered-down format, I used boneless chicken thighs, turkey sausage, and zucchini and stuffed fresh rosemary sprigs here and there as per the cookbook) from Mark Bittman's Quick and Easy Recipes from the New York Times, is meant to be done on the grill and it would have been an easy way to get back into the swing of things out there after a bit of time off. Alas, rain and cold kept me inside and the oven sufficed.

Not being 100% confident in "grilling" under a broiler (and not wanting to sit there and make sure they don't burn) I put the skewers in the oven on 350 for 20 minutes and then under the broiler for 4 minutes a side and they came out great. Bittman suggests that you squeeze the roasted lemon over the meat and vegetables and he is right on the money. The salt, pepper and lemon give it a light, summery taste.

I have two cookbooks by Mark Bittman and I turn to them both again and again.

Braised Red Snapper

Over the weekend I borrowed Tom Colicchio's Think Like a Chef from my local library. The premise is pretty straight forward; know a few essential cooking techniques (roasting, braising, blanching, stock-making, sauce-making) and a few classic food pairings and trios, and create your dishes. While he presents it in a pretty straightforward way, that kind of cooking represents the "Mt. Everest" of cooking to me. I'm going to hang on to the book for a bit, though, and see if I can take away a thing or two.

I am a fan of braising and jumped at the chance to try a recipe for Braised Red Snapper. About a pound of Red Snapper fillets (two long ones that I cut in half) browned in oil on the skin side for about 3 minutes, removed from the pan. Added a rosemary vinaigrette, strips of roasted red pepper, and lemon sections to the pan, nestled the fish among it and brought it up to a simmer until the fish was done. Served over rice it was a nice dinner.

Spiced Chicken Thighs

I had the house to myself last night and had the fixings for Spiced Chicken Thighs so I gave it a whirl. There was a little bit of a challenge with this recipe, which is not usually the case when cooking from Myrecipes.com, and that came in the form of garam masala. I expected to be able to buy this spice blend in a supermarket; not so. I began then to scout around the internet for a recipe and came across many. The one I chose was from the Food Network:

Garam Masala

2 Tbsp cumin seed

2 Tbsp coriander seed

2 Tsp cardamon seed (I shelled these first)

1 3-inch stick cinnamon (broken up)

3/4 Tsp cloves

1.5 Tbsp black peppercorns

2 bay leaves (broken up)

Put all spices in a heavy skillet and roast on low medium heat until it becomes darkened and aromatic, about 4-5 minutes. Remove from the heat and let it cool and then grind fine, I did this with a mortar and pestle although a clean coffee grinder would be quicker.

What a treat! The house smelled great and I knew that the spiced chicken was going to be pretty special. The garam masala is mixed with a little curry and rubbed on the skinless chicken thighs then browned in a hot skillet. Red wine, chicken stock and sauteed onions are added and it's all braised for about 15 minutes. I served it over jasmine rice and it was amazing.

Crisp Parmigiano Fish With Spinach and Onions

Another site I like for its easy meals is No Take Out. They have good ideas, especially for "weeknight" meals, read fast and easy. The site, however, is designed for the absolute beginner cook so when you print the recipe it includes all sorts of extra stuff like, "get out tools," or "set the table." And there is lots of this stuff so that a simple recipe can only print on one page with a small font. So I copy and paste to a word document and chop it down. This is a pain in the neck if you are trying to get out of your office in a hurry. Because of all of this I only turn to this site once in a while, like last night for Crisp Parmigiano Fish with Spinach and Onions, and the results were quite good.

A hot oven with sizzling oil produced a crispy piece of fish and the combination of spinach fish and onion really popped.

Where I Find Good Recipes Online

By and large, I am a cookbook chef. However, the internet has some good places to find recipes or to have recipes find you. I am a big Mark Bittman fan (food writer and cookbook author) and followed his food blog from its solo version to its recent move to the Diner's Journal. This is a great source of recipes, some of which you'll find in Wednesday's NYT's Dining In/Out section, others you may not. Last week I prepared Carrot and Tahini Soup from the NYT and it was phenomenal.

The next site I recommend is MyRecipes.com which is the online entity of whatever company publishes Cooking Light magazine and about 10 others that I don't know much about. For daily cooking this is a great resource for tasty, easy, fresh, nutrition conscious recipes. There's lots of things to stumble upon if you browse but what I like to do is either use their great Enhanced Recipe Search or access recipes through their daily Dinner Tonight pages either as an RSS feed or sent to my email address.

I've got a few others for a later post.

Lasagna Tonight

My lasagna is nothing special but it is a utilitarian lasagna and I can get it into the oven with minimal fuss, and, my kids will eat it. So, company coming with kids tonight, no idea what their eating habits are, so lasagna.

Usually I use the Ronzoni oven ready noodles and I make the recipe on the back (or find it here) but I prepare it in a 9x9 glass pan so that it is a taller lasagna. When company comes I double the filling, buy extra noodles, and just keep staking the layers in a 9x13 pan until I run out of filling. Now that's a nice thick lasagna.

I don't make my own sauce, I use bottled and if I have some open cans of whole tomatoes in the fridge or some open diced, I add it. It's not like my mother's lasagna; bechemel, a lite homemade sauce, that's Milanese fine dining.

Tagine it was

Tagine it was for dinner last night. Chicken with hard boiled eggs and almonds. It took a while and the saffron gave me sticker shock ($18.00) but what a result. Instead of a cut up chicken I used 1.5 lb breasts and 1.5 lb thighs. I dropped the hard boiled eggs into the tagine liquid to give them a bit of color. Blanched the olives for one minute in boiling water... struck me as too long.

I had also purchased the fixings for Braised fennel and olives from All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking by Molly Stevens, so had at that while the tagine was cooking. Had an easy time with that, loved the spice mixture (fennel seed and coriander seed toasted and ground) got hung up on the olives though. My local supermarkets are olive impaired, yes they have the olive bar but it all tastes the same so if you are looking for a kalamata or gaeta, or something stuffed with an almond, or even gorgonzola, no problem. Something else, you're in trouble. I used kalamata in the braise and the end result was too salty. I guess that a Morrocan olive is something like this product. So I'll try to find sun cured black olives next time.

Dinner Tonight

So tonight I'm going to cook Tagine T'Faia from Claudia Roden's "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food" which I'm thinking of purchasing but just found in its entirety (is that true?) on http://books.google.com/

A tagine with hard-boiled eggs and almonds, sounds good to me. I'm intrigued by Tagine pots such as this one. Wouldn't you love to cook in that, but what a price! I use a dutch oven instead.

Maybe a pic tomorrow... stranger things have happened.

The Kitchen Sync

No Julia & Julia here. Do love to cook though and find myself thinking about it and related things often... hence the blog.

I cook from cookbooks. No natural talent to throw together ingredients from my fridge but resourceful enough to say, "hey, this is what I have on hand, let me look for a recipe." So dependent am I on recipes that even when I cook an old stand-by dish, I pull out the recipe and follow it closely. Is there a name for people like me?

Received the "Gourmet" cookbook for Christmas and cooked like a fiend from it in January to March. Probably four dishes a week. Took a breather from Ruth Reichl and picked up Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" and Claudia Roden's "The Food of Italy." From moderately maximalist to Italian minimalism. What a change. The most fun part of the transition have been a few forays into whole fish, more on that later.

I'll get some photos up, give some recipes, and generally talk cooking and food. Let's see where this leads.