It’d be selling them short to claim eggs as my favorite breakfast food, as that leaves out all of the other meals where eggs win my heart. Sure, I can appreciate a fluffy waffle or sugar-dusted french toast. But if eggs are one of the options, all other sweet delights are off the table. It’s eggs for me 100%.
Though I’ve yet to meet an egg that I didn’t like, there is something about perfectly scrambled eggs in sandwich form that makes me grin bigger than Christmas morning. This sandwich gilds the proverbial lily by adding tender steak to the party, and ups the egg quotient with a piquant topping of jalapeno hollandaise (made in the blender for quick and easy eating). Yes, darlings, this one is trouble. And the best kind of trouble you can get in to, no less. Comfort-food noshing, hangover staving off, one-on-one private time with you and your breakfast a la Hall & Oates kind of trouble. You know exactly what I’m talking about, so don’t even pretend. Continue reading Steak and Egg Sandwich with Jalapeno Hollandaise→
Recipe for The Daring Kitchen
Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.
From the fragrant sauce of orange peel, ginger and cinnamon sticks, this beef stew screams holiday delight like no other. Typically, when I’m prepping for a Daring Kitchen Challenge where I don’t get to choose the exact recipe that I follow for the challenge, I have a bit of a notion as to how it’ll turn out. From all the time spent in the kitchen, I can usually gauge how well or poorly I’ll be able to execute the dish, and what the resulting taste profile will be like. Let me tell you – this stew knocked my friggin’ socks off. I went into it thinking, “Beef stew with sweet potatoes…this’ll be warm and comforting and simply homey.” Boy, was I wrong – in addition to all of those things, this stew was heady with spices and full of complex flavors. Almost floral at times. And the rooibos tea forms a stock that is spicy and rich and glorious. I immediately made a mental note to save this recipe for friends and loved ones, because it embodied all I love about my favorite dishes. It personified the melding of seemingly ordinary ingredients into something novel and special – a dish worth savoring for just a little bit longer. Continue reading Rooibos Beef Stew with Sweet Potatoes→
Recipe for The Daring Kitchen
Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique! We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.
Cooking with tea? Who woulda thunk it? When I found out that this month’s Daring Kitchen Challenge was to cook a savory dish using tea, the only reason that I wasn’t surprised was because I’d done it before. A long while back, in a moment of sheer MacGuyverism, I decided that since I couldn’t tea-smoke chicken in my NYC apartment without bringing in the fire department, I’d try to make a marinade for it using black tea. The resulting mixture, which I coined “hell broth” for it’s spicy, fragrant scent, was a great success. The chicken was diced and tucked into crisp leaves of bibb lettuce and dunked into a zippy hoisin sauce. Tea was apparently meant for so much more than just sipping. Continue reading Black Tea Chicken Lettuce Wraps→
The October Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Shelley of C Mom Cook and her sister Ruth of The Crafts of Mommyhood. They challenged us to bring a taste of the East into our home kitchens by making our own Moo Shu, including thin pancakes, stir fry and sauce.
I’m totally mad for moo shu and I think that what does it is the inclusion of the awful sounding (but awfully addictively good) tree fungus. Tender pork, spicy ginger and matchsticks of bamboo shoots all solidify the greatness, but it’s the ebony slivers of the tree fungus that make me crazy with delight over this one. I’m known to pitch an actual fit over my chinese takeout if the moo shu order comes with white button mushrooms as a substitute. Blech. Not cool. Continue reading Moo Shu Pork with Homemade Pancakes→
Recipe for The Daring Kitchen
Mary, who writes the delicious blog, Mary Mary Culinary was our August Daring Cooks’ host. Mary chose to show us how delicious South Indian cuisine is! She challenged us to make Appam and another South Indian/Sri Lankan dish to go with the warm flat bread.
When tasked with creating a curry from Southern India or Sri Lanka, I decided to take cues from our host, Mary Mary Culinary, and do a little research to put a happy spin on my recipe for The Daring Kitchen. Her Sri Lankan coconut curry was divine – a blend of chilies, tamarind, fresh curry leaves and coconut milk simmered with cubes of tender lamb. I found that because of the Dutch settlers in Sri Lanka, there were several dishes that formed from the hybrid of cultures. One was the use of meatballs in various curries and baked dishes. Given that I am a lover of the meatball in all forms and ethnic spins, I decided to take Mary’s curry and marry (ha!) it with a meatball. Continue reading Meatballs with Coconut Curry→
Recipe for The Daring Kitchen
Mary, who writes the delicious blog, Mary Mary Culinary was our August Daring Cooks’ host. Mary chose to show us how delicious South Indian cuisine is! She challenged us to make Appam and another South Indian/Sri Lankan dish to go with the warm flat bread.
In the midst of planning a well-rounded menu for my second Daring Kitchen Feast, I had a formidable opponent in finding a party-pleasing veggie. My husband, though an adventurous eater, seems to have an outstanding war with turmeric. It just turns his stomach, negating all the loving care placed in perfecting the taste of the dish. I’d been reading through Amanda Hesser’s massive New York Times Essential Cookbook and was on the beans and legumes when I came across a recipe for Chickpeas with Ginger. The sauce had notes of Indian spices that rang true with the other offerings for the Daring Kitchen, and no troublesome turmeric. Continue reading Curried Potatoes and Chickpeas→
Tortilla soup has become a standard of tex-mex menus here in the states, becoming another pillar of the glorious international chicken soup pantheon. While its origin is shrouded in mystery, food historians can pinpoint its arrival to America somewhere around the 1890s. The combination of slow simmered chicken, tomatoes, and fried tortillas is a simple blend of flavors that seem as if they were always meant to be together. Crazily, the myriad chicken tortilla soup fails come in the way of people bastardizing this formula, inundating the soup with unnecessary toppings (or worse, using cheese to cover up a watery broth or lack of chicken and vegetables). Continue reading Mexican Chicken Vegetable Soup (Caldo Tlalpeño)→
My husband likes most all that I cook for him – in fact, the only thing that got a resounding thumbs down were my Cold Peanut Noodles – I still say it’s not the noodles so much as his distaste for cold pasta, but that’s another story for another day. But because of his regular approval, I live for those dishes that mean adoration spelled across his face in a smile – the ones that get a “This is REALLY good, baby!” instead of a mere “It’s good.” The bites that make him look up immediately, eyes creased with a smile, the satisfaction emanating in a grin and nod. They don’t tell you when you get married that you become hypersensitive to context clues, but alas, here I am, reading facial expressions like ancient runes, sussing out the inside scoop. Continue reading Littleneck Clams with Chorizo and Garlic→
This one is hardly a recipe in that ginger scallion sauce does all the heavy lifting. As much as I feel that recipes within recipes can be daunting (I’m talking to you, Thomas Keller), the actual ginger scallion sauce is so simple that you’ll barely feel like you are tacking on extra steps.
My first dance with the glory of ginger scallion chicken was at my favorite haunt for Chinese food in the DC Metro area, XO Taste. Prepared the traditional way with a whole poached chicken accompanied by small dishes of the spicy, complex ginger sauce, I was in love. Not with the chicken so much as the sauce, which I wanted to drink by the canteen full if possible. When I set out to make this recipe for myself, I tried to amp up the chicken a bit to include all of my favorite elements. Rather than poach and serve with loose, rubbery skin, I decided to sear the skin on bone-in chicken breasts and then finish them off in the oven. The result is crisp, crackly skin protecting moist, white meat chicken, all of which is adorned with ginger scallion saucy glory. Victory is mine, and can be yours as well with a few easy steps. Continue reading Ginger Scallion Chicken→
Today’s guest post is coming at you straight from NYC courtesy of my good friend Arber. We met under non-culinary circumstances during my time as the master of web goodness at The City College of New York. I had the dubious honor of serving as the advisor for his student organization, a cluster of entrepreneurs, programmers and designers who created the brilliant website, In Your Class.com. Funnily, in order to get their student organization up and running as quickly as possible, they found it easier to take over an already established group rather that go through the appeals process to create a new one. Thus, although I am out and out Brazilian/Italian/African-American, I soon discovered that I was the newest advisor to the Albanian Students Organization. The founders (Arber included) were all Albanian, so to prove my mettle, I showed them all I learned from Wikipedia about Albania and had them fill me in on the rest of the important details. I adored the multiculturalism mixed with the laughs, and was totally honored that they asked me to be their advisor in the first place. Continue reading Classic Mussels with White Wine and Herbs→
