28 posts tagged “dinner”
Story time! So I'm feeling under the weather this weekend. I thought I was getting another wave of allergies, but then my throat started to feel sore, and pretty soon I was feeling weak and mildly feverish. I realized that I must have a cold of some sort. Since I had slept my way through most of Friday night, I woke up at around midnight thinking about what I could make for a late late dinner / snack that wouldn't drain me of all my energy.
The fridge is mostly empty since I haven't gone grocery shopping in a while. But in my cupboard I had an unopened bag of fine ground corn meal that I bought back when I was getting my wisdom tooth out and thinking of making grits. Well I never did get around to using it, and now grits sounded pretty good to me. Looking online for some good recipes, I noticed that most of them were savory grits, with cheese, gravy, sausage, etc. Unfortunately for me, my fridge was so empty that I didn't even have the usual milk that goes into grits. I did, however, have a single slice of American cheese and a little bit of spam. I discussed the prospect of making spam grits with my boyfriend, who thought it sounded gross and could not find a single recipe for it online. I personally thought I could invent a really cool spam grits dish, but alas, when I went to prepare it, I noticed that my spam was spoiled. Great.
So by this point I was starving to death and really annoyed that I had water boiling for my grits, but nothing to put in it. Finally, I decided that I would make a light grits with garlic and that one slice of cheese, and eat it topped with canned chili, which would provide most of the flavor. I guess in that sense it sort of takes on the role of polenta haha. So let me tell you, this was an exercise in persistence. When my water was at a full boil, I poured in all the corn meal I was going to use, at once, before reaching for tongs to stir with. Bad idea. That corn meal puffed up in a matter of seconds, absorbing all the water and forming these giant clumps with dry corn meal still in the middle. No matter how hard I stirred it and added water to thin it out, the messy clump in the pot was just not edible. So down the garbage disposal it went...
The second time I got smarter and turned down the heat before slowly adding the corn meal while stirring, and everything came out just fine - it was nice and smooth, with no clumps. Plus, my favorite part is that using finely ground corn meal shortened the cooking time dramatically. I was done in just 10 minutes! Now that's a good fast meal I could handle any day :) It's also relatively healthy too, since I don't use any milk or cream for the grits, and the chili is quite good for you with all its beans. I used canned chili here for convenience, but I'm sure it would be even better with home-made chili, if you have the patience that is!
Chili-topped Garlic Cheese Grits (serves 2)
Ingredients:
1/2 cup finely ground corn meal (it's like a powder rather than little gritty pieces)
2 cups water
1 slice American cheese
1 pat salted butter
onion powder, garlic powder, and salt to taste
canned chili
chopped raw onion for garnish
Directions:
1. Bring 2 cups water to boil in a small pot. Reduce heat to low.
2. Slowly add the corn meal to the water, while stirring constantly with a whisk to avoid lumps.
3. Cook on low for about 7-10 minutes, stirring often, and adding water as necessary to thin out the grits to your desired consistency (I prefer mine to be on the creamy, lightly viscous side). They absorb a lot of water so I think I added maybe an extra cup's worth of water before I reached a nice consistency. Season with onion powder, garlic powder, and salt to taste.
4. When grits is finished cooking, stir in a pat of butter and the slice of cheese, torn to pieces, stirring until melted and incorporated. Serve immediately, topped with warm canned chili and garnished with freshly chopped onions if desired.
On a night when I was particularly busy trying to meet a submission deadline by midnight, I asked my boyfriend to make dinner for us (which I planned to shovel into my mouth at light speed before returning to work). He wanted to do something simple that could incorporate a bunch of ingredients and be a one-pot kind of dinner. Fried rice seemed to fit the bill! Neither of us particularly enjoys eating the soy sauce doused stuff that people pass for fried rice at greasy Chinese takeout spots. Instead we prefer Yang Chow style fried rice, which if you aren't familiar with, is a lighter and more savory fried rice that isn't flavored with dark soy sauce so the color is usually lighter, and contains certain usual ingredients including roast pork pieces, egg, shrimp, and scallions. Many times when I order Yang Chow fried rice in restaurants, they come looking pristine and white, which leads me to believe that they must be flavored with no soy sauce at all, though I'm not quite sure how to achieve that aside from using salt or fish sauce. In any case, my boyfriend decided to wing it based on skimming Wandering Chopstick's recipe (whose Asian blog I love), and thus was born his improvised version of Yang Chow fried rice:
He substituted Chinese sausage for the traditional roast pork, because it's what we have on hand and its sweet flavor is a very appropriate substitute for the roast bbq flavor of the pork. Shrimp and eggs were added, as well as diced carrots and onions for more body and flavor. For the greenery, he generously added chopped scallions and cilantro at the end of the stir frying, to keep them crisp and green. From what he tells me, he mainly flavored the rice with fish sauce and a little bit of soy sauce, as well as garlic and onion powders, salt, and sugar. He did manage to keep the rice relatively light colored though :)
I loved the cilantro here - it was so refreshingly good and crisp. To be honest, I used to hate cilantro when I was younger. In fact, I hated it up until maybe a year or two ago. But then one day something happened and I started to realize how much flavor it lent to certain dishes like Vietnamese summer rolls and Banh mi. And then it was just a matter of time before I started forcing myself to eat the cilantro that came with dishes, instead of picking them out like I normally would have. Just like that, I built up my tolerance and now I love cilantro in the right places. It perks this fried rice right up!
There are days when I just can't bear the thought of firing up a skillet and hovering over a stove for an hour just to make dinner. For those times, I like to rely on my trusty drumsticks and a coating of Shake 'n Bake to take over. But as the price of food as increased dramatically, I recently invested in a large (read: cheap) container of parmesan seasoned bread crumbs, and thought that maybe I could use it to make a substitute for Shake n' Bake (which runs for a couple of dollars for 8 servings or so). It was easy enough, since the bread crumbs were already seasoned, I just had to give my thawed drumsticks a toss in a ziplock of crumbs and it was ready for some oven action (375 degrees F for about 40 minutes or until juices run clear when poked).
The best part is that I can do the vegetables at the same time, by roasting a sweet potato in the oven simultaneously. Ah, how I love the sweet potato (I just can't stop calling it a yam, because I grew up thinking they were the same thing). Anyway, I like to cut the sweet potato in half lengthwise, leaving the skin on. Then I wrap up each half with foil, and lay them flat side up on a baking sheet for the same amount of time as the drumsticks (these things don't overbake anyway). They're ready when they are soft and start to leak caramelized liquid. You can stir up the flesh of the sweet potatoes with a little salted butter, brown sugar, and lots of cinnamon. Soooo delicious! And when you're all done, the only cleanup necessary is to ball up the foil and throw it away :)
Yesterday (which was just an hour ago) was my 23rd birthday - the beginning of the age when we are expected to suddenly go from college students to being grownups. How intimidating! Things have been going quite smoothly in my work life, and in the next few weeks I will make my final decision about which medical school I will be going to this fall. Maybe the continued schooling will give me an excuse to be a "student" for another few years :)
I had a chance to celebrate my birthday early with my family this week. We had a cake freshly decorated for us from the only Chinatown bakery that was still open at 8pm on a Sunday night, so I'm quite grateful that I got a cake at all haha. The decorator made me a bull out of whipped cream on top of the cake, since I was born in the year of the Ox. It was done quite well if I do say so myself - I really liked the cute chocolate accents :) I was originally tempted to make my own cake, but you never make your own birthday cake heh. The cake had a mixed fruit filling, and the sponge cake layers were soft. I wasn't terribly fond of the whipped topping, as it was more fluffy and marshmallow-y than I would have liked, but the flavors came together pretty well. My family and I enjoyed the cake with some freshly brewed aromatic white tea that my dad brought back from China this past week, mmm.
That said, the meal I had tonight was still as amazing as Shino's has always been. I didn't really notice the flavor of the brown rice. It might have been slightly more chewy, but it definitely was a subtle difference (grr, not one I'd want to pay for), which is good because I was so worried that brown rice would ruin the sushi experience. I had a regular salmon roll, a crispy eel roll (eel, avocado, cucumbers, flying fish roe, and topped with mayo and crispy tempura bits drizzled in unagi bbq sauce), and one of their specials, the Boston lobster roll (avocado cucumber roll topped with warm baked lobster mixed with chopped raw red onions in a wasabi butter sauce). The rolls were all amazing, with fresh and fatty fish that melted in my mouth. The lobster roll is one of my favorites because it has such a unique flavor - the wasabi butter sauce really brings together everything in that roll, and it really is a monster to behold with all that lobster! My boyfriend also got a shrimp tempura roll which he said was really good too. Mmm I really wish I could go back to the days when Shino's was cheaper...
After dinner we went to Cheesecake Factory for some dessert - the Godiva chocolate brownie sundae :) Deliciously rich and a perfect end to a wonderful birthday dinner. I never knew this, but apparently Edy's makes a special vanilla ice cream specifically for Cheesecake Factory to use in their desserts. I wonder what exactly is different about it...
Thanks for a nice birthday dinner Greg! Gosh, I still can't believe I'm 23 already... time just passes so fast. There are so many things I'm looking forward to this year, and I'm also sad to be leaving Boston in just a few months. It really is a wonderful city filled with an endless array of amazing places for every taste. I am certain that the years I have spent here will be fond memories I carry with me forever.
I know, I know... nobody uses silken tofu to make pan fried tofu chunks because it falls apart too easily. But I had a dinner to whip up and what I had at hand was silken tofu. My boyfriend told me that his family sometimes makes a dish where they pan-sear slices of tofu and then top it with beef in a brown sauce. That sounded really good to me, but I was a bit skeptical about getting the silken tofu to sear without breaking it up into tiny chunks. I went ahead and tried it anyway though! I used pork instead of beef, and added a bunch of onions to the brown sauce. It was amazing! Seared silken tofu has this delightfully crunchy skin and a warm soft tofu center that just melts in your mouth... and topped with the pork and onion gravy, the flavor is just right! I had to experiment with a few pieces of tofu before I got going with the easiest searing method - but that means you won't have to! :) It takes a little bit of care to make sure you're not tearing the tofu up to shreds, but the result is so worth it.
Pan-seared Silken Tofu with Pork and Onion Gravy (serves 3-4)
Ingredients:
3 blocks of fresh silken tofu (3 inch cubes)
1/2 lb. pork tenderloin
1 1/2 medium onion, cut into thin strips
handful of cilantro, chopped up
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp rice wine
1 tsp sugar
dashes of garlic powder, onion powder, and white pepper powder
2 tsp cornstarch for the meat, plus more for the sauce as needed
1 1/2 tbsp teriyaki sauce (I used roasted garlic flavored)
3 tbsp oyster sauce
vegetable oil for searing
Directions:
1. Wash tofu blocks and cut into slices that are 1/2 x 1 x 2 inches in dimensions (about the length and thickness of your index finger), cutting it so that the "skin" side of the blocks are always along the thin edges of the slice - this helps hold the tofu together. To make this easy to figure out, just always place the skin side of the tofu down on the cutting board, and proceed to cut 1/2 inch slices from the top down.
2. Cut pork into thin strips, and marinate in the soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, cornstarch, garlic powder, onion powder, and white pepper powder for 10 minutes.
3. In a hot nonstick skillet, sautee the onions until starting to turn translucent. Remove from pan and set aside. Sear pork slices until mostly cooked through on both sides, and add back onions. Pour in about 3 cups of water (adjust as desired to get amount of sauce).
4. To make the sauce, stir in teriyaki and oyster sauces to achieve desired saltiness. It should be a rounded flavor with some sweetness. Stir in a slurry of 2 tbsp cornstarch in 1/4 cup of cold water, and allow the sauce to come to a boil to thicken. Add more cornstarch slurry if needed - you want to get a sauce consistency that is somewhat thickened, so that it will sit nicely on top of the tofu later.
5. In a clean non-stick skillet coated with vegetable oil, heat to medium/medium-high (about 6 on a dial from 1-9). Carefully lay down 8 to 10 pieces of your tofu with the flat side down. Don't let the tofu touch each other or else they'll stick later. Close the lid of the pan, and allow to sear approx 5 minutes, removing lid occasionally to release steam and remove water collecting on the top of the lid (you don't want too much of that to drip back into your pan).
6. Using 2 spoons, carefully flip each piece of tofu onto its back. The seared side should be golden. Continue to sear the backsides of the tofu pieces for another 4-5 minutes before removing from heat. Repeat with remaining tofu slices, and clean the pan in-between each batch if there are lots of little bits in the pan (don't want them to burn).
7. To plate: lay tofu slices out flat and spoon pork and onion gravy on top (I had more than enough pork gravy for the tofu I used - I had about 1 piece of pork for each piece of tofu). Garnish with fresh cilantro and serve immediately. Enjoy!
I think dry fried beef chow fun is one of those Chinese restaurant dishes that you either try and love or you get unlucky with a badly done dish and hate it. For the most part, I think it's hard to mess up - the usual culprit in a bad beef chow fun dish would be hard noodles. Normally, there are soft sheets of noodles that have soaked up the flavors from the oyster-based sauce, slippery with the vegetable oil that helps prevent the noodles from sticking and intermingled with flavorful pieces of beef and onions... it's always so satisfying, even though you know it's pretty greasy.
After seeing my mom buy the premade steamed rice noodle sheets from the Asian market recently, I discovered that you could also use the same noodles to make dry fried beef chow fun! (Just get the plain noodles without dried shrimp and scallions). So when I got back to school, I bought a bag of refrigerated freshly made rice noodle sheets from Super88 in Boston - they come in bags of 1-2 lbs of noodles, all folded into neat squares or rectangles and bagged in clear plastic baggies with vegetable oil to prevent sticking (cost me about $2.75 or so for a 2 lb. bag). I found an easy recipe from About.com, and with a few improvised ingredients, everything came together pretty easily. Dry frying is really just a term for stir frying something without the use of a liquid sauce or oil to fry in. You use dry frying to get things cooked without making it soggy and saucy, or crunchy, and with a hot enough wok, you can make your foods with a nice and smoky flavor this way too. And since I was cooking the chow fun myself, I could add veggies and use a lot less oil to get a healthier version of the same dish, double yum!
Dry Fried Beef Chow Fun (serves 4-6) original recipe at About.com
Ingredients:
2 lbs. folded steamed rice noodle sheets
1 lb. beef flank steak
2 medium onions, sliced
1 bag of washed fresh spinach
2 stalks of scallions
3 cloves garlic, minced
5 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp rice wine
1/2 tsp sugar
few drops of sesame oil
1 tsp cornstarch
2-4 tbsp oyster sauce (use as needed)
vegetable oil as needed for stir frying
Directions:
1. Cut flank steak into thin strips about 1/4 inch in
thickness. Marinate with soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, sesame oil, and
cornstarch for 15 minutes at room temperature.
2. Rinse refrigerated rice noodles under warm water to loosen sheets, applying mild pressure to loosen the folds. Cut noodle blocks into 1 inch strips and peel apart the sheets. Set aside.
3. Heat a skillet with vegetable oil on medium high. Sear beef by laying each piece flat against the skillet, and flipping after a minute. Cook another minute on other side. Remove from pan and clean the pan.
4. Cook the onions until they are starting to turn translucent. In another pan, heat some vegetable oil and gently cook the spinach just until wilted. Drain and set aside.
5. Add some vegetable oil to the onion pan, and add in the rice noodles, stirring vigorously to prevent burning and sticking. Try to coat all the noodles with oil to prevent them from sticking (some will probably occur, that's okay). Mix in minced garlic, cooked spinach, and cooked beef.
6. Add oyster sauce to the noodles, and mix to allow the noodles to soak up the sauce (they will turn a light brown color). The noodles should soften as they are warmed up. When they are soft and they taste flavorful enough (add more oyster sauce if needed), stir in scallions briefly, then remove from heat and serve.
Beef chow fun is best eaten fresh - if you have leftovers, sprinkle some water on top before microwaving. Rice noodles are hardened when they are cold, so make sure you microwave long enough to get them nice and hot. I really enjoyed this dish, even though I had some difficultly stirring the noodles around in the pan without too many casualties flinging outside the skillet (a big wok would have solved my problems). My boyfriend liked eating it with a bit of Sriracha sauce squirted on top, but I thought the flavor was great just the way it was. Best of all, it didn't taste or feel greasy, and the noodles didn't stick, so it was really nice. I would add some bean sprouts next time too, but the onions and scallions gave a nice crunch to contrast the soft chewy noodles also. Hah, not so tough after all!
I'm home for spring break right now. Every time I come home during breaks or long weekends, my family likes to celebrate by having something special for dinner. The thing is, we always celebrate by having the same thing - fresh crab or seafood hotpot. Chinese folks tend to see seafood as the ultimate celebration food, so it's always a special treat for when I come home. In fact, every time I go home, my boyfriend can predict that I'll be eating crab or hotpot at some point during my stay haha, and he's always right!
In my hometown, there aren't any large Asian markets like there are in Boston, but there are lots of small Vietnamese grocery stores. My parents happen to know one of these stores gets new seafood stock every Thursday, so this Thursday we dropped by and had our pickings of the best and freshest blue crab in the store. They were live and kickin, always a good sign of freshness. Blue crab is probably my favorite crab variety, as they have the tenderest and finest meat of any crab I have ever eaten. While the crab itself is usually quite small (about the size of my hand) and does not have a lot of meat, the meat it does have is sweet and silky. In comparison, other larger crabs like the dungeoness, rock crab, and Alaskan king crab all have very thick fibrous meat, where the fibers are large and sometimes quite chewy. For the most delicate of crab meats, I always go to blue crab. They're nasty little suckers to try and dig into, but you are well-rewarded for your hard work! Right now also happens to be the breeding season for blue crab, as all the crab we bought this week were filled with bright orange crab roe (eggs) that are considered a delicacy.
My family prepares these crab by first giving them an hour or two to soak in a sink filled with tap water. This soaking allows the crab to sort of "wash" their gills with clean water, which helps get rid of any sand or grit that are in their gills. Blue crab are usually not farm raised, so when they are caught they tend to have sandy gills depending on where they were living. Then you simply place the crab in a pot to steam on top of some boiling water, until their shells turn a bright orange (about 15-25 minutes). We also prepare a soy and vinegar-based sauce to dip the crab meat in when we eat it. Delicious! We usually eat about two to three crab per person, and it can get messy just like eating lobster, but it's so much fun :)
We also usually prepare a starch on the side to eat, as the crab alone may not fill you up, or leave you hungry later in the evening. Dumplings are a popular choice, or something like a stir fried noodle dish. This time, my mom had picked up a few packages of freshly steamed flat rice noodle sheets rolled up with dried shrimp and scallions from the Vietnamese market. After just a nuke in the microwave, they were ready to be served with a dallop of hoisin sauce. These rice noodle sheets are delicious and soft, and are used to make the popular chow foon dishes (also called he fun in Mandarin).
Finally, my mom prepared a tasty soup of spinach, mushrooms, snow peas, and pork blood. That's right, I did say pork blood. Now don't freak out on me... pork blood isn't actually liquid blood. It's blood that's been solidified (by congealing I think) into a block whose texture resembles tofu. It's a pretty popular ingredient in Asia. You buy it in rectangular blocks, and then you dice it or cube it into small chunks to be cooked in soups or dishes. Pork blood has a very distinctive texture - something of a mix between firm tofu and liver. The flavor itself is pretty mild, I would say it's similar to a very mild liver. It sure makes for an interesting form of protein in soup. In China, one of the most popular variations is to use chicken or duck blood in soups. For some reason, chicken/duck blood has a very soft and delicate texture, very similar to silken tofu, and is therefore preferred by most people over pig's blood. I know this is probably grossing you out, but it tastes pretty good. Just don't think about liquid blood and you'll be okay... it's sorta like a pate!
Anyway, that was my dinner this Thursday, and it was a mighty delicious way to be welcomed home :)
One of my favorite meals while I was growing up was savory Chinese pancake wraps (面饼) that my dad would make for us for dinner. It was one of the few things my dad liked to cook, and I remember him showing me how to make the batter and cook the pancakes on multiple occasions. An interesting tidbit about my dad: he never cooks except on rare occasions, but it was he that taught my mom how to cook after they got married! So everything my mom makes is really from my dad's expertise, yet he never cooks around the house anymore. How oddball haha.
Anyway, Chinese pancakes are somewhat similar to crepes, except they are a bit thicker. The batter is very simple, made with just flour and water, along with some salt and sugar for a little bit of flavor. But for the most part, the flavor comes from the filling that you wrap into the pancakes - savory sauces and meats and crunchy vegetables. It's a lot like eating Peking duck rolls, except the wrap isn't dry like a tortilla. In my family, we make these pancake wraps for an easy dinner, and serve them with hot congee (rice porridge) on the side. We usually spread hoisin sauce on the pancakes, and then wrap in whatever meat that we feel like that day (often times we use pork sung, but also sometimes turkey ham or bologna... it really doesn't matter). For the pancakes I made last night, I seared up some Chinese sausage for the meat filling, and cut up fresh cucumbers and onions for the vegetable. I really liked the refreshing crunch from the veggies and the Chinese sausage is so delicious and savory it rounds out the whole wrap.
Savory Chinese Pancake Wraps (makes approximately 6 pancakes - serves 2)
Ingredients:
For the batter:
2 cups all-purpose flour
8-10 oz. water
generous pinch of salt and sugar
For the fillings:
1-2 Chinese sausages
1 cucumber
1/2 small onion
Hoisin sauce
Directions:
1. Place flour in a bowl, and make a small well in the middle. Pour in water all at once and stir quickly to dissolve flour. The batter should be liquid but slightly thick, like a cold heavy cream. Add water as necessary to get the right consistency. Try to minimize the number of lumps by crushing them to release the flour inside. Stir in salt and sugar.
2. Heat a skillet to medium high. Add a little bit of vegetable oil to prevent sticking. Lift pan away from heating element and ladle about 1/2 cup of batter into the pan, tilting pan to rotate batter into a round shape (this takes practice, but it doesn't matter if it's misshapen, I promise :)
3. Cook pancake until the topside has lost most of its raw white color, and bottom is starting to just get a little bit golden in a few spots. Flip pancake and cook for a minute more - the bottom should have a bunch of round spots browning (see picture below for what the spots look like on the pancake). Flip again and cook the first side for another minute. Repeat with rest of the batter.
4. Slice up the Chinese sausage into short strips, and toss around in a clean skillet for a few minutes on medium heat until they start to release their oils and darken slightly in color. Slice the cucumber and onions into small strips as well, and place all the filling ingredients in separate plates for serving.
To serve: Take one pancake at a time, spread a teaspoon or two of hoisin sauce down the middle of the pancake in a long strip. Then lay a few strips of sausage, cucumbers, and onions down the pancake on the hoisin sauce. Roll up and eat :)
When I was at Trader Joe's last week, I picked up a bottle of balsamic vinegar (my first!) to try cooking with. Of course, in the moment of choosing, I made the mistake of being cheap (I'm a student after all...), and ended up with a 16 oz. bottle of balsamic vinegar for $1.99. It certainly looked better to my wallet than the half as big bottle that cost 3 times as much. When I got home of course, I did a little research and realized that the longer balsamic vinegar is aged, the better it is, and the more expensive it is. The one I bought was aged about just 1 year or so, and was very thin, just like regular vinegar. But I think on the bright side, cooking with a less quality balsamic vinegar means that I can be more careless with it, experimenting and learning without worrying about my money going down the drain. One of these days, when I become a better cook, I promise I will invest in a higher quality bottle of aged balsamic vinegar :)
Tonight's dinner was up in the air when I remembered I had a couple of frozen vacuum-sealed salmon fillets in the freezer that I had been meaning to make. I usually go with a trusty teriyaki salmon, but today was the day to take my balsamic for a test drive! I saw a recipe on Allrecipes.com that looked great and that I had most of the ingredients for. I made a few substitutions and additions, and it came out great! I overcooked my salmon a little bit, but that's my fault. The glaze for the fish was tart with a hint of sweetness (very different from teriyaki), and very healthy too - no fat and almost no salt! I served my salmon with white rice topped with Japanese rice seasoning (as you can probably tell, I don't go very far from my rice haha).
Balsamic Glazed Salmon Fillets (for 1 fillet) adapted from Allrecipes.com
Ingredients:
1 salmon fillet, thawed (5 oz.)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp rice wine
1 tsp honey
1.5 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp mustard (yellow or Dijon)
onion powder
garlic powder
salt & pepper to taste
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line a small pan with foil. Place salmon fillet in center of pan.
2. Stir together ingredients above, adding in a few generous dashes of onion and garlic powder, and just a little bit of salt and pepper. Spoon over salmon fillet.
3. Bake for 10-15 minutes, until just starting to flake when forked. The sauce will have bubbled and reduced to a thicker glaze.
4. Remove salmon to serving plate, and spoon remaining glaze from the pan onto the salmon.
I love being able to have dinner ready without any hassle and without having to dirty up dishes and pans for the prep and cooking. I think this salmon would be a great with a refreshing salad (the balsamic glaze makes for a great salad dressing flavor!). Enjoy!
I mentioned that the seafood risotto I had at McCormick and Schmick's was my first taste of risotto. Well it was on the salty side, but I thought the texture was quite nice and I loved the creaminess. So I looked up how to make risotto, because I was always under the impression that it was hard to make, but it's actually not bad at all - it just requires a bit of your full attention for half an hour or so. That's encouraging! So tonight when I came home from work and needed a good idea for dinner, I decided it was finally time to pull up my sleeves and give risotto my best shot. I had those crab cakes in the freezer from my Christmas present food basket, so that seemed to be the perfect pairing with a nice risotto.
There are so many possibilities with risotto, but I actually didn't have any ingredients for making it exotic or even for making one of the more popular risottos involving mushrooms or lemon. Well, like any good student, I accepted the fact that my empty kitchen cupboards were a sign that I should probably start from the most basic risotto recipe and work my way up. For your most basic risotto, all you need is rice (Arborio is the preferred rice, but any short grained rice will also do), onions, broth, and optionally a bit of cheese and butter. Luckily I had gotten some chicken broth from Trader Joe's last week (they have these really cool condensed chicken broth packets that you can dilute in water to achieve regular chicken broth - 12 cups worth of chicken broth takes up about the size of a salt shaker in my cupboard!). Perfect timing! I'll try and describe the cooking process in the recipe
Basic Risotto (serves 2-3)
Ingredients:
1 cup short grain white rice, raw
2 cups chicken broth, plus water as needed
1 medium onion
garlic powder
olive oil
optional:
powdered Romano cheese
salted butter
Directions:
Okay, so I did quite a bit of improvising making this risotto, because I didn't copy down a recipe (I just read the page I linked to above). So I'll just walk you through what I did and you can feel free to adjust as necessary.
I first brought a few cups of water to a simmer on the stove (my condensed chicken broth paste requires hot water to dissolve - if you are using canned or homemade broth, just heat it up to almost boiling and keep it hot).
Next I diced up half of my onion and threw it into a skillet with olive oil on medium-high. I sauteed the onions until they turned soft and brown... I actually thought I had burned them! I decided to set the browned onions aside and start over. I diced the second half of the onion, into finer pieces this time, and cooked them again on medium high except I took them out of the pan when they were still yellow and beginning to turn translucent but were not browned at all.
Once the onions were out of the pan, I added about 2 tbsp of olive oil to the pan, heated it up on medium-high, and then put in my cup of raw rice. I stirred it so that all the kernels were covered with oil. All the recipes I've seen tell you cook the rice in the oil until the kernels turn translucent, but I noticed that mine were translucent right after I coated them in oil (probably due to using regular short grain rice). So I pushed the kernels around until some of them started to turn an opaque white color, which I assume is the point where the rice is starting to toast.
Now, it was time to add the chicken broth. I ended up diluting 2 cup's equivalent of condensed chicken broth into 4 cups of water. I added 1/4 cup of broth to the rice in the pan, and stirred it in as it sizzled and sputtered. The rice absorbed the water very quickly, so I added another 1/4 cup of broth and stirred it some more. You simply repeat this step, each time stirring the rice until the broth has been mostly absorbed but not completely dried, before you add more broth. After 10 minutes, I added the cooked onions back into the rice, sprinkled on some salt and garlic powder to my discretion, and continued to cook it with broth, tasting a few kernels as I went along to check for doneness. You can make the risotto as soft or as chewy or crunchy as you'd like, but I prefer mine to be al-dente, soft on the outside with a bit of chew on the inside. When you've just about reached this stage (it took me about 20 minutes), stir in a final little bit of broth, then add your grated cheese and a pat of butter, stirring it all together so the cheese and butter melt. Let the broth cook down until the risotto is nice and creamy but not watery or dry, and serve immediately.
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After plating my risotto with my baked crab cake and some Shanghai bok choy (I needed some greens and it was all I had in the fridge - sorry it doesn't match the dish well), I tasted some of my browned/burnt onion bits from earlier and discovered that it was actually like caramelized onions, with a nice bit of sweet smokiness to it. So I sprinkled those onion bits on top of the risotto for a garnish, and my boyfriend actually thought it was really really good that way.
So how did it turn out? Well, having not had other risottos to really compare to, I thought this simple and basic risotto tasted wonderful! It was creamy and soft with a bit of chew, and the chicken flavor really came through. I'm glad I used Trader Joe's broth, it's a good quality chicken broth with a lot of flavor minus the sodium. I also liked the creaminess that the Romano cheese and a little bit of butter provided, and the second batch of onions that I put into the rice came out nice and soft, melting into the risotto. Honestly, I was very very pleased with how it turned out, and I just couldn't get enough of it! (Don't save any for leftovers - it just dries up) I'm excited to try it again in the near future with other fun ingredients too. Risotto is really jazzed up rice, and I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with just plain rice ever again haha. The risotto went really well with the crab cakes too, which were very savory and a bit on the salty side, thus complementing the mild nature of the risotto. Yum, as I'm typing this I'm craving more!
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