Archive for April, 2010
The Season Is Here: Soft Shell Crab with Sweet Corn Salad and Chipotle Aioli
Despite the recent “chill” in the air, today I stumbled across a sure sign of spring: the first batch of fresh, live, soft shell crabs at Citarella. Nothing makes me happier than a nice fried soft shell crab, and now I’ve got three months of crab season to look forward to. The fact that it coincides with my favorite season of the year has a *little* to do with it, but either way, I’m psyched:
Food52: Chef’s Spotlight
Well, looks like Amanda and Merrill over at Food52 decided to give me the Chef’s Spotlight treatment this week! Check it out on the link below. Thanks guys! Cheers!
Blackfish about to be dinner, Summer 2009
Orecchiette with Snap Peas, Prosciutto, Cream and Mint
The second Food52 contest this week was for spring peas. I decided to put together a little spring pasta with a cream sauce, just because that’s my favorite way to eat pasta. Peas always go well in cream sauces (I have made one with smoked salmon and peas before that is great) and diced prosciutto is another favorite. Put all this together, and you get this:
Sambuca Seared Scallops with Shiitake Truffle Creme
This week’s Food52 theme was scallops. I decided to go for the appetizer-portion seared scallop, and added a bit of licorice flavoring with the Sambuca crust to compliment the truffle. These are rich and satisfying, and if you serve them at a dinner party you will pretty much rock (if I do say so myself). They take about 10 minutes of cooking time, and 5 minutes of prep time.
Here’s my writeup for Food52:
“This recipe doesn’t have an origin in anything other than coming up with an elegant starter course featuring diver scallops. I knew that I wanted to sear them, and I knew that there would be a truffle cream sauce to finish. Working out the details was a matter of tasting and testing. Adding Sambuca for a bit of sweetness and the anise flavor came to me in the shower, as do a lot of my ideas for these contests: hungry, starting the day, with quiet time to come up with crazy ideas. I think it wound up working out nicely, and it does come through in the crust, and pairs nicely with the truffle. It’s a little French, a little Italian, and a tiny little bit Asian.”
Man, I hate writing those things. They always sound pretentious. Anyway…here’s the dish:
Mark Bittman’s Expedited Tagine
Mark Bittman’s Minimalist Column in the New York Times is frequent stop on my internet food travels, but I have to give Kate credit for pointing this recipe out to me yesterday. It seems that anything he makes with chickpeas is worth our time, so I decided to give this recipe a try. I don’t own a tagine, as most people don’t, but a dutch oven worked just fine. You can’t serve it at the table like they do with a real tagine, but we obviously weren’t going for authenticity here. The beauty of a true one-pot meal is often overlooked (and in my case, rarely achieved…usually I wind up using every pot I own in the course of making a meal). This dish is a winner for its simplicity and the use of a flavor profile that most of us don’t experience every day.
An Easy Recipe for Naan
To go along with the tagine I served last night, I dug out an old recipe for naan that I made during a cooking class at the ICE (Institute for Culinary Education) several years ago called “Indian Feast”. Traditionally naan is baked by slapping the dough on the inside of a giant clay oven (the tandoor) but this recipe can be made easily at home with just a skillet and an oven.
Chilean Sea Bass with Cous Cous and Wild Mushrooms
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a recipe, as many of you have pointed out. I apologize for the lapse, but I have been traveling, eating out, and generally not cooking anything very LeChef-worthy, so I have refrained from posting until I did something worth sharing. Today’s meal is a classic “walk into the grocery store, see what looks good, and go from there” dish.
First stop was the fish counter, where I found some great-looking Chilean sea bass. Incidentally, Chilean sea bass is not sea bass at all. It’s not even closely related to sea bass. It is actually the Patagonian Toothfish, a rather fearsome looking fish native to the southern oceans. In a spectacular branding coup, enterprising fishmongers dubbed it the Chilean Sea Bass and brought it to the world markets in the late 1970s. What used to be a trash fish, a by-catch of more desirable species, made its way into the finest restaurants. I guess “seared Patagonian toothfish” just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?
In any case, the beginnings of a seared toothfish dinner was in the makings. I decided to pair it with some wild beech mushrooms in a simple butter sauce with parsley. A cous-cous with fresh green almonds, cranberries, and shallots would be the starch.
