To me croutons are, more than anything else, a way of preventing food waste. Take old, stale bread (not molding, just stale) and cut it up into small pieces to remake it into something that you would want to eat. Throwing away bread is such a shame.
The other thing that’s nice about croutons is that, since they are fully dried, they have a long shelf-life if you store them in an airtight container. The other route you could go with stale bread is to make breadcrumbs, but I’ll cover that some other time. Basically you just throw it in a blender. Like I said though, I'll cover it later.
You can flavor these any way you want, and it’s a great opportunity to use up some of those dry herbs you’ve had lying around since you got them in that gift set five years ago. The method I show here is the baking method, but actually you can successfully make croutons in a frying pan if you don’t have the time to bake them off. If you’re storing them for a long time, however, I prefer baking them because it more evenly dries out all of the moisture from inside.
Like I said in the video, croutons are great with soups and salads, but that’s news to exactly zero people out there. Here’re some other ideas that you may not have considered – toppings for chicken bakes, gratins, and casseroles. Bread puddings. Pie toppings (replace the herbs and spices with sugar!). Snacks for dip. The list goes on, and I’m sure you can come up with many more. I’d love to here about your creative ideas for croutons, too, so give this one a try!
Sautéing or braising chicken breasts in a fry pan has got to be the easiest and quickest way of preparing a meat-based meal, but I’m surprised to find how many people still have trouble with this. I’ve prepared a few pointers to make the process a bit more clear and get you on your way to happier, healthier breast-feeding.
These chicken breasts were reserved for cooking from a previous post on chicken stock. Check that out if you want to learn more about stock creation.
The two biggest concerns around the breast appear to be knowing when it is properly cooked through, and what to do about seasonings and flavors. The second concern starts first. Think of flavors in advance and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble – better than the scenario where the thing’s already in the pan and you realize too late that you didn't plan the next step.
This goes back to the idea of mise en place, the French way of saying don’t have the things you want to use in an inaccessible pantry back cupboard. Keep things you use frequently handy, and get the things you want to cook with out and ready before cooking. It’s a simple idea but it makes things go much more smoothly.
This time around we’re keeping our recipe very simple, but you can work in all kinds of things after getting this down. Of course the vegetables here can be switched out with others of your choice. The lovely thing about what we're doing here with salting the vegetables a bit while cooking is that this will end up making its own sauce, by drawing the vegetable juices out. That just sounds delicious already right? Say it with me now - vegetable juices.
The Procedure:
In the video, I previously had poached these breasts in water to help create a chicken stock base. You can poach in boiling water for about 1 minute if you like, but if you have the time, you might as well turn that water into a chicken stock since you're already off to a good start.
Salt and pepper your breasts – both sides – and rub in bit of oil with maybe an herb. That's plenty right there, but I put it on a plate of sliced onions for some more flavor, since I wanted to cook onions anyway.
Get your frying pan hot on high heat, and then lower to medium heat.
over a bed of onion slices for a nice addition
Add your oil, wait a moment for it to get hot as well.
Place in your ingredients starting with the hardest ones, like carrots. You don't have to cook these for so very long, just a minute or two is fine.
Make some room in the middle, and place your chicken in the pan skin-side down – away from yourself in case of oil splashes – and listen for a sizzle (and make sure it’s there). I reiterate - if there is no sizzle, the pan has gotten too cold. If you just leave it on medium the whole time this shouldn't be a problem.
Keep on medium and don't walk away from the frying pan too much, chicken doesn't take that long. This is key - do not move the chicken around. One flip is what we want, so leave it and only check to see if there's that golden color on the skin.
When the skin has gotten nice and golden, turn it over. It should only take 2-3 minutes per side, but chicken breasts vary in thickness so that's only a rule of thumb. When the chicken is done, take it out of the pan (or it’ll keep cooking) and put it on a plate to rest. One note, if you cover the pan with a lid like I do towards the end of the video here, the steam will cook the chicken from all around, so it'll stay juicy.
There are two methods for confirming that the chicken is cooked through. One is to use a meat thermometer – internal temp should be 74 degrees C or 165 degrees F. The other is to cut open the thickest part and confirm that there’s no pink meat. Once you cook a lot of these, a third option opens up and that’s to check by feel, the spring-back of the chicken when you poke it. By the way, I've noticed the look-and-see method only works for chicken breasts, for other meats it’s better to have a thermometer around.
And oh yeah, this is a chicken breast, don’t throw the skin away. That’s the best part! If you’re that worried about the extra calories, well, just don’t be worried. You’ve already gone lean by going chicken, right? Who would want to get rid of that crispy golden deliciousness?
Ingredients from the video
two chicken breasts SKIN ON
1 onion sliced
1 stock broccoli
1 carrot
2 big tomatoes diced
white wine or flavorful liquid (stock etc.)
herbs (thyme and sage here in the vid - you could also use dried if that's all you have, you poor thing)
If chicken soup is for the soul, then a good chicken stock is the basis of that spiritual healing. Another on the list of things that are a million times better fresh but that most of us rarely find time to make, this is one that is just integral to so many ways of cooking, and it’s great to have on hand. If you want to know where that rich, full flavor that you just can’t quite place is coming from in that expensive restaurant dinner, it’s the stock.
I follow the freezer-pack method, in which you freeze all of your stock in ice cube trays and then store the cubes in freezer bags for later use. I like this because you can use the stock cubes as measurements, and you can throw them right into a hot pan for instant satisfaction. Whatever you do – and you are bound to have heard this by now – don’t buy those bouillon cubes. That’s fools’ gold, a cubed kitchen trap hemorrhaging salt that’s sure to make your lovely dish unpleasant. In fact, when making stock let’s just leave salt out of the equation entirely.
Remember, we’re not making broth, it’s stock. It’s an ingredient, like salt is an ingredient. Since you don’t salt things for taste until the end of the cooking process, you want to avoid upping the salinity of your ingredients, which will only cook down and become more concentrated – hopefully not concentrated-ly salty.
In the video, I use a couple chicken breasts to flavor the stock, but reserve them for another recipe. You can see that recipe here.
There’s an unavoidable part at the end of making a stock when every home chef (professional chefs having long lost their empathy for ingredients) feels bad about throwing out the used up vegetables. As hard as it is to come to terms with, those onions and carrots simply don’t have anything left to give.
If you’re really thrifty, you could use them in compost, but otherwise bite the what-a-waste bullet and toss them. It may seem like a pity, but the soul of that celery has been transferred to that liquid heaven in your pot.
believe it or not, there is cod in there under the foam sauce
White, firm, and clean tasting, cod has remained one of my very favorite fish. I do have a bias however - it seems that I have a Newfoundland cod fishing heritage on my mother’s side. Donning oil slicks and bundling over stormy waves in the foggy waters of the Grand Banks, some distant relative fought and struggled with these fish in what I imagine was an epic battle that would have put The Perfect Storm to shame.
Meanwhile I get mine down at the fishmongers. Unfortunately the cod I have to work with in Japan is Pacific cod - what they used to fish off the Banks was Atlantic cod. You can’t taste the cold water of the Labrador Current in the Japanese varieties, but it is - for the purposes of cooking - the same fish.
We are making a point of creating two different but balanced flavors. The cucumber is vinegared to give it a refreshing sour tang, and the fish with its foam sauce is an herbaceous and rich companion to it. We want it so that by eating the cucumber it makes you want to eat the fish, and vice-versa. The rice vinegar could be replaced with apple or wine vinegar, but I recommend against balsamic for this recipe because there's too much flavor going on there. Additionally, while the extra step takes some more of your time, soaking the cucumber slices overnight can make a really nice pickle for the wrap.
First off, get some rice going. White is fine but I prefer to throw in some herbs while it's going to flavor it up. The fish: salt – both sides! – of your square-cut fillet and set it aside while you peel your cucumber. Take your peeler and take as thick a slice off the side of the cucumber as you can. Make four of these slices per fillet, and chop up the rest of your cuke in as haphazard a way as you choose.
George Clooney in The Perfect Storm
Throw these guys into some salted water and add to it about 2 shot glasses (50ml) of vinegar. Let them soak while you make the fish.
Back to our fish. Drain off any juices from the fish that may have collected from your salting. Pat dry. In a fry pan over low heat, add a small amount of not-olive oil (something less flavorful, like grapeseed oil) and add the fish. As it begins to whiten you’ll see a line coming up the side of the fillet. When it gets around halfway, turn the fillets over and add the remaining chopped cucumber.
Just before you feel that it's done, take it off the heat. Don't overcook this one! If you have nice fresh fish, please consider leaving the center soft like you would with a steak. You'll thank yourself that you did. Just after taking it off the heat, evenly sprinkle a small amount of vinegar – I like rice vinegar here as well – to calm the flavors. The heat remaining in the pan will warm the vinegar and brighten its flavors.
You'll also probably want to make a foam sauce - it goes frighteningly well here. I'll talk more about foam sauces in another post. If you don't want to take the time, don't worry - it'll still be excellent without.
Pat dry your cucumber slices. I use a form to shape the rice, but you could use an old soup can or an upside-down cup. Make it into a cylinder and wrap the cucumber slices around it. Put the fish fillet up on top there and drizzle your foam sauce over if you're using it. Or as an option to that you could sprinkle an additional small amount – the goal is not a puckered face, so be sparing – of your vinegar after plating if you like. Simple and elegant.
Honey mustard is an underused sauce. I almost want to say honey mustard is an underused concept. Think about it, it's too often the sauce relegated to McD's and KFC. Fast-food fare. Pushed to the side next to the McNuggets. That's not the image I have of it. This is a sauce that can be elegant, versatile (again my two favorite words), and amazingly poignant. Ham, chicken, salads dressings - there's lots of uses for this basic recipe mixing a spicy tangy seed (mustard) with a sweet natural sugar (honey).
Honey mustard sauce
Pommery, a serious mustard for serious mustard gourmets
●Whole-grain mustard (Pommery, I love you)
●Yellow mustard (or Dijon, which tastes better but is surely less American)
●Soy sauce (just a drop)
●Coarse ground black pepper (accept no pre-ground!)
●Honey (microwaved until thin)
●Something spicy (I like sambala)
●Sea salt (salt is really too obvious to include as an ingredient but hey)
●Ginger powder
Just combine everything in a bowl. Nothing raw here so you can use it immediately if you like as a dip, spread or topping. Super easy and super quick, and of course you can modify the recipe with your own additions.
A note about Moutarde de Meaux Pommery. This is a French mustard that's been a Pommery family secret since the 1700s. It's a whole-grain mustard, and I'm confident that it's incomparable to any other whole-grain mustard out there. It has the spicy bite of whole mustard seeds, but simultaneously the soft mellowness of Dijon mustard. The recipe is still guarded closely but the ingredients are all natural products from the Meaux region. Even now it comes in an earthenware jar and the wax seal with a distinctly old-world presence to it. By the way, if you're in America and don't recall having seen this one in the store, that's because it's not distributed in America anymore. Import tariffs to America became too high for the small-batch numbers that Pommery produces. More luck for those living in Canada, where it's still available, or if you're like me, in Japan.
Another thing you can do is use it as a marinade for chicken or meat. I also find it to be a nice salad dressing if you emulsify it with oil. If you want to do that, slowly drizzle oil while beating the mixture with a fork or whisk.
You could also pour it into a frying pan and cook it down into a thick drizzle sauce, which will give it rich flavors from the mustard seed. Brilliant.
Many people might agree with me about this already, which makes bringing it up controversially as if I were arguing for its cause sort of a feint, but steaks are best rare to medium rare. This has been a recent realization for a lot of people though, with overblown fears of raw meat poisoning and poor understanding about cook temperatures in general driving people to scorch their steaks. But in a meat where succulence is everything I don’t at all understand why you would want to fry through the core to make a burnt-out chunk of what could have been magical.
I remember as a young kid going to this supposedly fancy steakhouse called The Hindquarter, which my parents had somehow procured a gift certificate for. When I was young the family wasn’t invested heavily into red meat, and honestly speaking steak was a virtual mystery to me, something that I only saw on Swanson Hungry-Man and Applebees commercials.
This steak, which based on my childhood memory - mixed with my current knowledge - I am convinced must have been rump roast, was so blackened and cooked to death that my young pre-teen teeth never were able to bite through it. I remember being profoundly disappointed, since the waiter had gone out of his way to recommend it to me. Steaks were supposed to be expensive because they were incomparably delicious.
It wasn’t until a barbecue at a family friend’s house - Leonard's house - some years later that my image of them was revived. Leonard’s steaks were juicy and medium-rare. He hadn’t used rump either (who tricks a kid into thinking that’s a nice cut?), but skirt steak. He wasn’t so afraid of a lawsuit that he wouldn't dare to leave the center soft and pink. His confident steaks were appalling, revitalizing, and eye-opening for me at the time. That juicy, rich color matched the richness of Swanson's commercials perfectly.
By the way getting that perfect pink is all about temperature control. That and a grill pan. You can do it on a flat pan, but get the grill pan - it’s just more awesome!
First of all, credit where credit is due. The original Bacon Explosion recipe comes from two barbecue geniuses: Jason Day and Aaron Chronister, writers of BBQ MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER - the title is literally in all-caps even on the book - and creators of the site BBQ Addicts. Apparently, you can even order ready-to-eat versions of the Bacon Explosion at their site now. The only problem I have is that the recipe is massive, about the size of a football, and I wanted to come up with an individual portion scale-down. Thus the birth of the mini coupe version. The ingredients, as well as the process, are largely the same as in the official version.
thick-cut slices of bacon (short, you can cut normal slices in half)
sausage meat (preferably Italian)
bbq sauce bbq rub*
*If you are making a rub, there’s lots of ways but basically these ingredients:
5 paprika
4 brown sugar
3 sea salt
2 black pepper
1 cayenne pepper
1/2 dry mustard
The numbers indicate ratios that I recommend, but everyone’s tastes are different. I like this one because it’s sort of a descending scale – if using teaspoons, use 5 teaspoons of paprika and so on; if using tablespoons, likewise.
1. Reserve a couple slices of bacon, and weave the rest into a square lattice (think apple pie). So you need equal amounts of bacon for the X and Y axis of the lattice. If you don't have at least 4x4 it's a no go.
2. Preheat oven to 225 degrees. Fry the bacon you saved in a frying pan and cook until crisp. Sprinkle latticed bacon with bbq rub. Remove sausage meat from its casings (if you couldn’t buy it as just meat). Evenly spread the sausage meat on top of the bacon lattice. You want enough to cover to the outer edges.
3. Crumble fried bacon into pieces and sprinkle on top of the sausage meat. Drizzle some bbq sauce on that and sprinkle with some more bbq rub.
4. Separate the front edge of the sausage layer from the bacon weave and roll the sausage away from you. The bacon weave should stay where it is. Press sausage roll to remove any air pockets and pinch together.
5. Roll toward you, this time with the bacon as well, until it is completely wrapped. Turn it so that the seam faces down. Sprinkle with a bit more bbq rub.
6. Place the roll on a baking sheet into the oven. Cook until internal temperature reaches 165 degrees F, about 1 hour for each inch of thickness. When done, glaze the roll with more sauce. Like the original recipe, I recommend serving in slices.
This is a taste-splosion of flavor, so keep your dose low. I did notice, however, that it's much lighter feeling in this mini version, probably because the juices don't have all the time and space to move around in the center of the roll.
Sweet strawberry spinach salad yin-yang-ed with balsamic vinaigrette chicken scaloppini
The yin-yang effect - the sweetness and color of the red strawberries will contrast delightfully with the tangy, deep-maroon colored balsamic.
Let’s marinate our chicken, and then make the salad. To rightfully give it the scaloppini tag, we’ll need to flatten the breasts out a bit. Sandwich the breasts between sheets of wax paper or plastic wrap and lightly pound them down with a mallet, the goal being to get an equal thickness throughout. Once that’s done, season your scaloppini with salt and pepper and set in a tray or bowl. Pour enough balsamic vinegar to nicely cover (3-4 tablespoons should do it). Add a drizzle of olive oil. If you have it, sprinkle some fresh tarragon or sage leaves on top. I didn't at the time so there's none here in mine. Mix lightly and put away in the fridge.
Get some nice ripe strawberries (often smaller ones are sweeter, don’t be fooled) and slice them up finely. Sprinkle a bit of salt on them, and put aside in a small bowl. Wash your spinach thoroughly, and either use whole leaves (my preference, if the leaves are small) or cut them into large pieces. Back to the bowl and add in either a bit of white wine or (if you’re avoiding alcohol) some white wine vinegar. Just a small bit, and then stir together gently. Now, drizzle some olive oil on your spinach leaves and toss. A pinch of sea salt adds a great crunch and taste. Add half of your strawberry mix and toss again gently. I recommend waiting until serving to put the other half of your strawberry mixture up on top to give the salad its beautiful color.
They've been marinating for long enough by now, so whip out your breasts like it's half-time at the Superbowl. Get a frying pan hot but don’t put in any oil – there’s enough of that already in the marinade. Shake off excess juices before putting it in the pan. There should be a sizzle! At this point, turn the heat down to medium / medium-low so that our thinned chicken doesn’t dry out. The key here is to not overcook the chicken. The cooking time is very short because of the thinness. When color comes half-way up the side of the chicken, turn them over. A good thing to keep in mind is that the chicken will continue cooking in its own heat even after you take it off the pan, so it’ll be done before you know it.
When plating, I tried to showcase the different dishes as individuals rather than combining them. Simple, light, and totally delicious - try this one out!
Believe me I have my share of off days. Shrimp, bacon, mushrooms with kale and a glass of grape juice might not look pretty, but leftovers and exhaustion can force you to be creative. At least that's the idea. Sometimes even when you love cooking you just don’t feel like doing it. Long day at work, the whole story - you’ve heard it, you know it. But you can’t give in to the Big Macs of the world. Cooking isn’t just good for your body, it’s important to make your own things - to have control over what you’re eating and not to give in to fast food alternatives. It’s satisfying to not be reliant on some teenager sitting over an at-best-weekly-oil-changed fryer. Even if the stuff that you make does come out a little…unorthodox, sometimes.
We all need a few ideas for super-quick things to make when we've waiting too long and we're already hungry. I'll continue to post my impressions on quick and dirty meals here on the blog; for now take a look at rmcrayne's great article on HubPages, containing ideas for super fast and super simple meals.
It’s easytobuy pasta. So many varieties, rather inexpensive, and it keeps near indefinitely. Making pasta by hand is not something that crosses everyones’ mind when planning dinner. Even so it’s a basic kitchen skill, only needs dos ingredients, and is satisfying to make from scratch. So let’s get to it!
The general idea seems to be about 100 grams of flour to 1 egg, which makes just about a 1 person serving. So if you have 3 people, 300 grams of flour and 3 eggs is easy as math!
Sift the flour into a bowl (or pour it into a bowl and cheat-sift after with a whisk). Make a well in the middle of your flour and crack your egg(s) in there. Using either a fork or a whisk, mix the egg up and slowly start pulling the flour together from the sides. There are a lot of people that do this right on their work surface with the flour well, but it can turn into a mess real quick if the wall of flour surrounding the egg gets messed up, so hey I dig the bowl approach.
When you get all the flour mixed in into a ball, you’ll notice it doesn’t come together very nicely. It’s flaky and hard. So to make nice, smooth pasta, the idea is to fold the dough on itself and flatten it down a number of times. There’s a couple of ways of doing this. If you are into pasta all the time, a pasta machine of some kind might work for you. But if you only want to do this occasionally, just use a rolling pin. Roll it out as best you can (as thin as you can) then fold it in half, half again, and repeat. Do that 5 or 7 times until it’s very smooth, the last time, to get it very thin, follow this trick:
Roll the ball out roughly into a circle, then roll the dough around your rolling pin. With the dough rolled around the pin, rock it back and forth while pulling the dough out from the center towards the outsides of the rolling pin. You can get it really thin this way. Lastly, you have to cut the dough. Nothing fancy required since you can just use a knife. Take a look:
The yin-yang is already a symbol derived from life – following the yearly patterns of the sun and moon – and has an obvious balance to it. When we design things, we want to find a kind of balance to the design as well. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to talk to you about the yin-yang as the Chinese representation of the celestial universe. I needed an easily recognizable symbol that we can talk about, and we’ll be talking about it from a food design perspective.
sweet strawberry salad with balsamic scaloppini
When I start talking about food, there are two distinctions here: balance in appearance, and balance in flavor. Flavor has all the nuances of a painter’s palette; it’s just that we see all the colors and tones with our tongue rather than our eyes. The methods of design are also similar: choosing colors that harmonize as well as colors that contrast is what will intrigue us and keep us interested.
It’s also a simple way of working with meals – choosing dishes in pairs - with each complementing or contrasting the other. Keeping them separate also takes away the worry of trying to blend complicated flavors. Choosing something with color-contrast as well as flavor-contrast will be sure to get all of your senses going. That’s it for the theory, let’s take a look at some ideas:
Sweet strawberry spinach salad yin-yang-ed with balsamic vinaigrette chicken scaloppini
Salt pork cutlet yin-yang-ed with avocado bean sprout purée and Chinese cabbage
Cucumber cod fillet yin-yang-ed with spicy-hot red bell pepper soup
salty pork with avocado bean sprout purée
Basically, you just want to let yourself be creative; thinking about groups of flavors and colors instead of constraining yourself to the names of vegetables. You might be concerned about melon with lamb, but if you thought about caramelized brown with a deep rich green? You might be afraid to put grapefruit with honeyed chicken, but would it bother you to put sweet with sour? Free your artistic palette as well as your sensory palate. Oh yeah, recipes for the dishes pictured here soon!
Most salad dressings are, essentially, acid and oil. I’m only saying ‘most’ to guard myself from the inevitable “don’t you mean vinaigrettes”-s and “my favorite dressing is mayonnaise”-s. Anyway since there are many of both acids and oils, endless arrays of combinations can be made to spice up any old leaf into something unique - without the nasty preservatives and unnecessaries store-bought varieties contain. Consider the following list:
AcidsOils
Lemon juice olive oil
Apple vinegar grape seed oil
Red wine vinegar flax oil
Balsamic vinegar sesame oil
Rice vinegar chili oil
Grapefruit juice avocado oil
This is by no means exhaustive since there are an amazing amount of oils, vinegars, and other acids (think citrus fruit) available these days. Just mix and match - even doing it at random is bound to give you something more interesting than a bottle would. It’s like those old toys where you could rotate the alligator head onto the dog body.
give him the alligator head!
For the ratio, I seem to recall reading a Jamie Oliver book that mentioned 3 to 1 oil to acid, but basically you just want more oil than acid. There’s 2 ways to mix these guys together, since the oil will separate if you just pour them together.
Method 1 – broken vinaigrette style
Pour your acid first into a jar (one that has a lid), then pour in your oil. If you use a clear jar it’s easy to measure the ratio. All you have to do then is shake it like a paint can (or a James Bond-style cocktail?) until it comes together. Use it immediately after shaking and you’re solid. Wait and it’ll separate again.
Method 2 – emulsified stylin’
Again pour in your acid first. This time, slowly, as slowly as you can, pour a constant thin stream of oil in with one hand while whisking with the other hand. This might take a bit of practice but the result is beautiful – emulsification means the dressing becomes one inseparable liquid. Good cheat is to do this in a blender, then it’s hands-free.
The last thing here, of course, is seasoning. You’ll want some salt: I really recommend sea salt or mineral salt – not baking salt – something tasty. For fancy flavors feel free to chop up herbs (anything – basil, dill, cilantro, fennel, even dried stuff will work), finely mince up vegetables (onions, shallots, bell peppers), or get creative (chervil + sherry wine vinegar + strawberry jam = kitchen magic).
After this, you won’t need to eat the same salad twice. Get creative!
I wouldn’t usually talk about baking. Not that I don’t bake. Baking just seems to be more common knowledge to a lot of people, and there is lots of good information on cakes, cookies, pies and the like already - it makes me feel that adding my two cents won’t amount to much (although I guess it’s been a while since two cents amounted to much). Still, the mood strikes me every once and a while. Muffins!
Muffins are like sandwiches, or cookies, or bread itself – there are so many styles and types that it’s more of a category than it is a specific thing. What I want to share here is a simple – but effective – recipe that I’ve been using for a while as a base for other recipes. It’s crumby, soft, and buttery - somewhere in between a muffin, a cupcake, and a pound cake:
so crumbly
250g flour
150g sugar
1 egg
110g butter (melted)
lemon zest
200ml milk
1 tsp vanilla
Bakes 15 to 20 minutes at 190 C. Get a good bit of lemon zest. That really gives a fresh, delicious punch to the finished product. Also, consider other citrus for unique flavors: orange, grapefruit, lime.
It’s fairly simple to leave it at that, but it’s the upgrade from a simple morning muffin into something approaching a dessert that will make this feel decadent – and we are going for decadence here. I mean come on, it’s a dessert. There’s no diet dessert in my book - the very fact that you’re eating dessert should jump you past worrying about calories (yeah, diet soda, I’m talking to you too).
If we slathered icing on top it would feel like a cupcake. We don’t want that: the post title clearly says “muffins”. Let’s attack it from the inside. Making some kind of pastry cream filling is not too difficult a task. Whipped cream is another easy substitute. This time though, we’ll do a mascarpone blueberry jam filling - because on top of managing to sound inspiringly fancy, it’s a breeze to make. If you don’t have a pastry bag, you can always use the old cutting-a-corner-off-a-Ziploc-bag approach:
2 parts mascarpone cheese (you could use cream cheese)
1 part jam (went with blueberry this time)
Combine in a bowl until it's one cohesive color. Couldn’t be simpler. You could bulk it out with whipped cream if you need more (and don’t want to pay for the mascarpone). Pipe that in either through the top or bottom of the muffin, and enjoy!
Quality scallops are one of my very favorite treasures of the sea – I definitely prefer them over hijiki, by contrast – and can be eaten raw. Note what word I chose to begin that sentence with. Don’t settle for second-rate seafood. Look at it, smell it, don’t buy discounted old stuff - all the common-sense rules apply. With seafood, freshness is everything. That, and maybe avoiding mercury contamination. The key here though: don’t fear the natural product. When searing scallops you’re not trying to cook these things through, far from it. All you are aiming to do is caramelize the outside. The whole process should take around a minute, maybe less.
a little fancied up
Remove (if it hasn’t been done already) the tough muscle shaped like a little foot on the side of the scallop. If you are using frozen scallops, which by the way are quite good these days, bring them to room-temperature-ish before searing. You can eat the foot by the way; it just doesn’t have a nice texture. Get a fry pan going on high heat until it’s very hot. Put some high-temp cook oil in there (like grape seed oil or canola oil), maybe a couple of tablespoons, and when the oil is also hot place your scallops in there. Make sure you hear that sizzle! It’s the sure sign that the oil is hot enough to give you a good sear. Stay on high heat and check your scallops after about 20 seconds. If it’s golden and browned, turn. 20 seconds the other side. Cut the heat and take those guys out of there, they are finished. If you want to sear a flavor in, try a dry-rub beforehand instead of a marinade. You don’t want them wet before searing. Wet things don't sear. Me? I like them with a little salt, and maybe some turmeric or Cajun seasoning. Or sometimes a bit fancier.
Amberjack is a trout-sized fish that's common in Japan, but it could be replaced with cod or another firm white fish fillet. I should also say that prosciutto is simply the word for ham in Italian, and what is meant here is dry-cured ham, which is what us Americans tend to mean when we say prosciutto. You will want:
Fillets of white fish (de-boned and de-skinned)
Enough prosciutto (you’ll see)
Sea salt
For the salad:
Avocado
Fresh basil leaves
Lettuce (of choice, something crisp)
Something crunchy (I use celery)
Simple dressing
Wrap the prosciutto around the fillets, covering them entirely as best you can. Season with sea salt – both sides, always both sides – and set aside. Preheat your oven to 210 C.
Break up the lettuce coarsely with your hands. Wash and throw in the salad spinner (an absolute essential kitchen device) along with a couple handfuls of fresh basil leaves. Also cut up a celery stock or two and toss those in as well.
To make a simple dressing, shake lemon juice with olive oil and some salt together in a mason jar. This isn’t emulsified but it works fine. Dress your salad and toss. The wrapped fillets go into a hot frying pan with a glug of olive oil. There should definitely be a big sizzle when they touch the pan, and we’re going to keep high heat the whole time. By the way, a glug is a unit of measure based on sound – it’s more than a splash but less than 2 tablespoons, according to me (who you gonna trust?).
Now, since we’re going to pop this into the oven after pan-frying, the goal here is not to cook the fish but rather to crisp up the ham with a nice sear. Golden brown with maybe just a touch of black char will tell you that it’s done. Do both sides. The searing will only take a minute or so, so watch the fish and adjust heat down a bit if needed. Take the fishy bundles of joy out of the frying pan and put them in an un-greased baking pan in the oven for 10 or 11 minutes.
While that’s baking, get the avocado out of its shell with a spoon and slice it up thinly. Arrange that on your salad, lumping it up in the middle a bit. Take out the fish, let it rest for just a bit, and then place it atop the avocado. This will warm the avocado without much wilting the leaves. One spoonful of pan jus - the juices left over in the pan after cooking - over the finished fish gives it that sexy sheen (and I don’t mean Charlie!).
This works really well as a light luncheon or entrée for a romantic dinner. I would say lager beer with the luncheon and chardonnay with the romantic dinner. The juices from the prosciutto seep into the fish, giving it a meaty, fishy, chicken-y, my-taste-buds-don't-quite-know-how-to-respond-but-it's-wonderful-y feel. Brilliant.
