PSA: Wear gloves when chopping or deseeding jalapenos!

We broiled the chicken in the oven for about 18 minutes (far longer than the recipe specified), then simmered it in the sauce for a few minutes and served. The result was the spiciest tikka masala we’d ever tried — it had vindaloo levels of heat and the jalapeno flavor overpowered the milder ingredients. The pepper, which I associate with Mexican cuisine, just tasted out of place amid all the Indian spices. But below the peppery heat lurked one delicious dish: a smooth, creamy sauce enlivened with sweet and savory notes of cinnamon, cardamom, and cumin. I’ll try this again without the Mexican interloper, and I think it will be incredible.

The naan was surprisingly easy to make. It consisted of just four ingredients: flour, plain yogurt, salt, and baking powder. I let the dough rise and then separated it into ten balls. As John and I had commandeered the kitchen’s rolling pin for our pottery projects, I had to flatten the balls by hand, so the dough-pancakes didn’t come out quite as thin as they should have. We then fried the “naancakes” in skillets until they began to brown on the bottom, then broiled them in the oven until they swelled up into that characteristic bubbly naan-texture and browned on the surface. And that was it–no tandoor necessary! The naan were a little on the thick and undercooked side, but their flavor was excellent: like Lebanese bread with a slight sourness from the yogurt. As always, the blackened crispy parts were the best. We finished the naan before the chicken and couldn’t stop munching it — we had to cut ourselves off so we’d have some left to dip in the tikka masala sauce.

John cooked basmati rice to round off the meal. He cooked it in the rice cooker the same way we do regular old jasmine rice, and it came out just fine. Another mystery of Indian cooking debunked!

I had always thought of Indian cuisine as esoteric and difficult to make, and assumed I couldn’t approach the wonderful flavors a place like the Sitar Palace pulls off in my own kitchen. Well, I still can’t and probably won’t ever reach Indian-restaurant heights, but I can come pretty close (and, if you’re a halfway decent cook, so can you). Now I’m excited to try vindaloo, korma, saag, daal, rice pudding, and all our other favorites.

John and I picked up twice the amount of tomatoes we used last time at the farmers’ market — 8 lbs. in all. John cut x-shapes in the bottoms of each one and I blanched them in boiling water for a full 20 seconds, which made the skins slide right off. We also skipped squeezing the tomatoes this time around in hopes of getting a wetter sauce.

This time the tomatoes did boil down to something resembling a sauce, rather than the tomato sludge I wound up with last time. The problem was that there was a bit too much liquid in the sauce, even after I let it reduce for 40 minutes, with the result being that the basil-and-garlic flavors of the infused olive oil were a lot more muted than they were last time. The dominant note of the sauce was of ripe, bright, fresh tomatoes, with the garlic and basil playing in a more minor key in the background. I would have liked those flavors to have been more pronounced, but the sauce was still very tasty. You can’t go too far wrong with ripe, NC-grown tomatoes!

This batch made more than enough for the 9 oz. of pasta we cooked (a good amount for the two of us), and it looks like we can get 4-6 more servings out of it! Maybe the key is to only squeeze half the tomatoes, or to squeeze them all and add water back in as needed. The squeezing step definitely makes a huge difference.

I could pretty much live on carbs and tomatoes, but John needs his protein, so he made another favorite of ours, Mussels Italiano, to accompany the pasta. I usually use crushed tomatoes instead of the diced ones the recipe recommends because otherwise not enough tomatoes get into the mussel shells for my taste. (Also, that way there’s more delicious sauce left over to mop up with some crusty bread.) I’m wondering if the mussels would also work cooked in the No Rez sauce–might be worth a shot, if I can get those proportions right.

Tonight I made one of my favorite dishes, Spanish Chicken with Saffron Rice. I use a simplified version of this recipe from Epicurious.com that I got at A Southern Season. They were selling saffron that day, and this recipe is as good a reason as any to splurge on some.

The changes my recipe made to the Epicurious verson were: using 3 lbs. of chicken breast instead of a whole chicken and omitting the peppers and peas. My version also didn’t specify that you were to cook the rice in the sauce, so I’ve been “mistakenly” adding already-cooked rice to the sauce. (This is how you can tell I’ve been married to an Asian guy for almost two years — I see the word ‘rice’ in a recipe and automatically throw a couple of handfuls in the rice cooker!) Looking at the picture on Epicurious, I realize the dish is supposed to consist of large chicken pieces atop dry, seasoned rice with a lot of vegetables in it.

But, you know, I like saucy, stewlike foods (yes, I’m a big fan of Indian cuisine, and I won’t say no to a risotto), so I’m going to stick with my version. I even swapped out diced for crushed tomatoes tonight to amp up the stewiness factor. And it was good.

Though in the pictures the dish looks like some kind of Indian curry, the aroma and taste are very different. The bitterness of the saffron, the tang of the tomatoes, and the salty-savoriness of the olives combine in a piquant way that gives the sauce a lot of character — there are multiple, harmonious flavors going on in every bite.

Next time I make this, though, I’m going to cut the chicken up into bite-size pieces or maybe shred it. Even with lots of salt and pepper and being browned in olive oil, those chicken breasts were bland. They need burying in that aromatic sauce to be palatable.

Posted via web from Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah

This is part of a new series on cooking and cuisine my husband John and I are doing. If you prefer your food blogging straight up with no Star Trek chaser, check out our Posterous blog, Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah.

I try to cook like this dude. Toolishness ensues.

On the heels of our very successful attempt at making the French fries Anthony Bourdain featured on the “Techniques” episode of No Reservations, John and I decided to try the pasta with red sauce Scott Conant made on that same episode. The results were mixed: The sauce we made was extremely tasty, but the recipe didn’t make nearly enough to coat the amount of pasta it called for. I’m guessing that Conant cooks the way my father-in-law does a lot of the time—without using a recipe or measuring, as he’s so familiar with what goes in each dish he can do it by memory alone. That’s a great trait for a chef, but it doesn’t always translate well when scaling down a recipe for a home kitchen. Sometimes Conant seemed to be describing the way he’d make the dish for restaurant use, making figuring out the proportions a little tricky.

One problem we had, for instance, was that Conant didn’t specify the amount of tomatoes needed during the TV segment, so we turned to the similar-but-not-identical recipe posted on the Travel Channel website, and used the 20 plum tomatoes and 1 pound of pasta that recipe called for.

The technique of blanching the tomatoes and then plunging them in ice water worked well, though I think the tomatoes could have stayed in the boiling water a little longer than the 15 seconds the recipe recommended.

Once in the saucepan, that big pile of tomatoes reduced waaaaay down to about three-quarters of an inch of funky-looking, delicious-smelling tomato sludge that in no way resembled the thick, rich, deep red saucy sauce Conant had going at this point in the recipe. I’m guessing he used a lot more tomatoes than I did. His also looked to have more fluid in them, even though he squeezed them beforehand. Next time we try this, I’d probably double the amount of tomatoes and just take the seeds out without squeezing out the juice to try and get a more fluid consistency.

40 minutes also seems like too long to cook the tomatoes—mine were as soft and pulpy as they were going to get about 20 minutes in (which is what the online recipe recommended anyway).

I infused 2 cups of olive oil with the basil, garlic, and crushed red pepper as shown on the episode. From the TV segment, it was hard to tell how much of that oil Conant put in the tomatoes. It looked like all of it, but that seems like a ton of olive oil unless you’re making a mecha chef-size potful. The online recipe called for 1/3 cup of oil, which sounded a lot more reasonable . (Plus, if I added 2 cups of oil to my tomato sludge, I’d wind up with oil with some tomato bits floating in it.)

My oily tomato sludge

Here I missed an essential step. I combined the tomatoes and the infused olive oil in a sauté pan instead of in the saucepan, and then tried to put as much of the pasta as I could into the saucepan to finish cooking. Only about 2/3 of a pound of pasta would fit in my pan that way, and it was impossible to flip. And, despite the fact that the sauce looked awfully oily, pasta still managed to stick to the bottom of the pan. After rewatching the segment, I found that Conant was finishing the pasta in individual portions, adding only 4 oz. of pasta and 6 oz. of sauce to the sauté pan at a time. D’oh!

The result came out tasting less like ‘pasta with red sauce’ than ‘pasta with an insufficient quantity of deliciously seasoned tomatoes.’ The bulk of the pasta tasted like olive oil with a little hint of flavor, though every so often I’d get an especially tomatoey bite. But those few tomatoey bites were delectable: bright and fresh-tasting, redolent of garlic, basil, and olives, like a burst of Italian sunshine. (And this with anemic April tomatoes, too!) They were enough to convince me that I need to try this recipe again—and get it right this time.

The finished product.

Posted via email from Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah

The MRE, unwrapped.

MREs, for my less martial-minded readers, are the meals-in-a-bag soldiers in the field subsist upon. The acronym MRE stands for Meals Ready to Eat, and, often enough, the moniker is a contradiction on all three terms. MREs are like airline meals on steroids: rather cunning meal kits consisting of a entrée in a pouch (think Starkist Tuna Creations); a water-activated flameless heater to warm said entrée; a side dish like rice or fruit, also in a pouch; a dessert in a pouch (toaster pastry, pound cake, or the like); a snack in a pouch; crackers and jam; a wee bottle of Tabasco sauce; a plastic spoon; and an accessory kit containing napkins, toilet paper, salt, sugar, drink mixes, and the like.

My experience with MREs is limited to the one military science course I took in college out of curiosity, when I did a day of training with the real hardcore ROTC kids and got to munch on my very own MRE. I received the dreaded tuna noodle entrée – which, I am gratified to learn, was discontinued in favor of more appetizing fare in 1998. It looked, and I imagine, tasted, much like cat food. But the rest of the meal was surprisingly palatable, especially the pound cake. And opening all the packets and pouches was, for this civilian, fun, though I’m sure it loses its novelty value pretty quickly.

MRE heater instructions. I love how you're directed to prop the heater up against a "rock or something."

If nothing else, browsing through MREInfo will give you a new appreciation for the troops who have to live on the stuff in the little brown bags. For devotes of weird food, though, it’s a goldmine: it contains “menus” for all MREs from 1981 through 2009, pictures of the contents, reviews of some of the entrees, and much more. Scanning the menus and seeing what items get dropped and added over time is like a crash course in military foodways. Out go the Leave It To Beaver standards like escalloped potatoes and chicken a la king; in come vaguely ethnic dishes such as chicken fajitas, beef enchiladas, pasta primavera, chow mein, and something known as “oriental” chicken.

Here’s a sampling of some of the other cool stuff to be found on the site:

Animal abuse? Reviewer feeds his cat an MRE entree.

Civilian MREs. Yes, that’s right, you don’t have to enlist in order to enjoy such delicacies as Brisket Entrée, Beef Patty, or Chili and Macaroni! You can order your own MREs through such companies as Ameriqual or MRE Star, or, for the ultimate in authenticity, you can purchase Menu Cs, made by the same supplier that provides MREs to the Armed Forces. Stock up now and you won’t be caught helpless once the bird flu pandemic hits or the zombies rampage your city! (Actually, they’re probably bought by the kinds of folks who hike the entire Appalachian Trail. I can see them being good for camping or hiking, and nerds like me kids would enjoy the novelty of using the heaters and unwrapping all the little packets.)

Gitmo MREs. Otherwise known as MARCs (Meal, Alternative Regionally Customized), these MREs were designed for the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The entrees are all vegetarian, Indian meals like Channa dal Masala and Saag Chole. According to the reviewer, they’re not that bad-tasting.

HDR packaging

Humanitarian Daily Rations. These are the MRE-type meals in bright packages you see being airlifted to refugees. The meals are vegetarian and the entrees sound like that joke on The Simpsons about Indian food: all beans, rice, and lentils. Interestingly, the bags contain the message: “Food Gift from the People of the United States of America.”

The story of the omelet-with-ham fiasco. At one point during the war, Iraqi allies were given MREs to eat – including ones containing the omelet-with-ham entrée, which of course they couldn’t have, being Muslim. So some generous soldiers picked out all the chicken and beef entrees and gave them to Iraqis, and were then faced with a diet containing a high percentage of omelets with ham. (I hope somebody sent those guys some good coffee.)

Brave reviewers eating MREs from the Reagan Administration. Yes, one guy was crazy enough to sample a still-intact MRE from 1986. He didn’t die from the “Army Alpo,” but neither did he enjoy the experience. No wonder, when the “Ground Beef with Spiced Sauce” entrée looked like this:

And for dessert, reconstituted fruit! Yum:

He also tried my old nemesis. Oh, memories:

And look what a pitiful excuse for coffee they give those poor grunts:

MRE "accessory kit"

Taster’s Choice? Nobody can fight on Taster’s Choice!

International MREs. Some Italian rations kits come with nip bottles – 3 oz. bottles of “cordiale.” Specifications state that this brandy-like liqueur must be 70 proof, pale amber in color, and “of a pleasing smell and taste.”

But you know who’s really got it made? The French. French RCIRs offer such choices as lamb navarin, paella, sautéed rabbit, and white bean, sausage, and duck casserole (!). Soldiers on duty with French troops have been known to trade 5 MREs for 1 RCIR, and in Somalia, reportedly, you could trade a case of RCIRs for a U.S. field cot.

Contents of a French RCIR.

If some company decided to combine the French entrees with the Italian cordiale they might have a hit on their hands: GMREs, or Gourmet Meals-Ready-To-Eat, perfect for the upscale hiker, batty rich survivalist, or starving grad student!

One of the Nantucket Grill's mile-high cakes. Replace the strawberries with frosting, and you've got a pretty good idea of the Unbirthday.

The latest trend among chichi cupcake bakeries is frosting shots: miniature cups filled with frosting that buttercream addicts like myself can order, sans cupcake, whenever they want a quick sugar rush. Don’t live in L.A. or Manhattan? You’re out of luck, unless you want to make your own shooters at home . . . or unless you live within driving distance of the Nantucket Grill in Durham, N.C. That restaurant, already known for being the only place below the Mason-Dixon line that offers whole-belly fried clams, has created a frosting lover’s dream come true: a 10-layer-high ode to diabetes known as the Unbirthday Cake.

One of the restaurant’s signature “mile-high” cakes, the Unbirthday consists of five layers of vanilla cake interspersed with five layers of rainbow-colored, sugary, delectable buttercream frosting. And the whole thing is frosted with, well, even more frosting. That’s a frosting-to-cake ratio I can really get behind. While my pancreas threatens to revolt if I ever have another slice, my taste buds are telling me I need to get back to Nantucket for another oversized slab of nirvana.

10. The Hangover Cure

Normally, Starfleet’s greatest lush orders his coffee Irish. But, after a wild night with some Klingons in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Dr. McCoy requested it Janeway-style: “I’m gonna need a pot of black coffee,” he mumbled when he had to go on duty the next morning. Jadzia Dax also required the black stuff after her fateful “bachelorette party” – especially after Worf found out about the, um, unpleasantness with her future mother-in-law.

9. Coolest Travel Mugs Ever

The Defiant was one sweet ship: fast, sleek, heavily-armed, and outfitted with some really great travel mugs. I want a travel mug with U.S.S. Defiant on it so badly, I can’t even tell you.

8. Where No Bean Has Gone Before

Captain Archer has a lot to answer for, but one thing he did right was to introduce Earth’s favorite caffeinated beverage to parts of the universe that did not yet know about its miraculous properties. In “Oasis,” he serves some to alien trader D’Marr, who likes it so much he accepts ten pounds of beans in exchange for information about the whereabouts of a downed ship. I like to imagine D’Marr took the beans back home with him, where his people learned to synthesize them and became a planet of java junkies.

7.  Of Course It Sucks – It’s Decaffeinated!

When Kira is carrying the O’Briens’ baby, Miles worries his little one will be born a raktajino addict, so he has Quark create a decaf brew for Kira to drink. She takes one sip of the foul-tasting “Quark-tajino” and that plan gets tossed out the airlock. (And, in a deleted scene, Quark gets tossed out the airlock too for daring to serve Kira decaf, the p’tahk!)

6. The Beans That Beat The Borg

In “Hunters,” Janeway delivers one of the greatest paeans to the brew in television history: “Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It’s got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it.” Take that, Earl Grey.

5. The Way To A Bajoran’s Heart

In his morning security briefings with Major Kira, Odo always makes sure he has a hot raktajino ready and waiting for her – because he’s in love with her, but also because he knows that, without her coffee, Kira’s even more likely than usual to go on a bloody, Cardie-killing rampage.

4. One With The Java

And so, when Odo develops his shape-shifting abilities to the point where he can appear to eat and drink, what beverage does he choose to emulate? Not Diet Coke, that’s for sure. (Actually, Odo doesn’t seem to have thought that one through that carefully. Given the number of coffee fiends on DS9, there’s a distinct possibility he might get swallowed.)

3. Need A Warm-Up, Captain Kirk?

Phasers. Great for killing your enemies, stunning people who get in your way, blasting down doors, and . . . keeping your coffee toasty. In “The Corbomite Maneuver,” Kirk is surprised when Yeoman Rand serves him a piping-hot cup of java. “I thought the galley wasn’t open,” he remarks. “I pulled out my hand phaser and zap! – hot coffee,” Rand replies. Ah, to live in the days when firing your phaser on board wouldn’t bring security down on your head.

2. Give Those Beans A Medal

What to do when the effects of a black hole have knocked out everyone on your ship (except you, as you have Vulcan!Super!Powers!) and you need to wake your captain up to help you fly the thing? Give him a cup of high-test. That’s how T’Pol, using a little ingenuity and a lot of good strong brew, saved the Enterprise in “Singularity.”

1. “There’s Coffee In That Nebula!”

In the most coffee-centric episode of Trek, the most coffee-centric of captains risks flying her crew into a nebula because she can’t go another day without her beloved brew. Oh, Janeway might say she needed the energy from the nebula to run the warp core or something, but we know what her real motivation was.

Bonus: Janeway’s Java Jive

Check out this fun YouTube tribute to Janeway’s mad love for the bean:

(Thanks to TrekCore, Memory Alpha, and dreamsavvy.)

– Nietzsche

Last night, my in-laws introduced me to two varieties of Chinese fondue – a mild Cantonese version and the infamous Sichuan hot pot. I had been curious about hot pot ever since I saw Anthony Bourdain try it on No Reservations: I love spicy food, and figured anything that could reduce a tough guy like Bourdain to flop sweat and tears of pain had to be really, really intense. So I was psyched when I heard I’d get to try it.

Basically, hot pot is a combination of water, oil, and fiery hot peppers into which you dip bits of meat, vegetables, and tofu, fondue-style. The meat’s sliced very thin so it cooks up in a flash. My father-in-law chose ten types of protein-laden goodies ranging from the pedestrian (chicken, pork, lamb) to the somewhat bizarre (at least by wimpy American eating standards): pig livers, duck tongues, and tripe.

A typical hot pot spread.

But everything tastes good when you cook it in searing-hot pepper broth and finish it with a little sesame oil and soy sauce. My apologies to Guangzhou: after one bite of meat cooked in the hot stuff, I never went back to the Cantonese version. The hot pot was simply too addictive. It made my nose run and my eyes water and all but had me breathing fire, my tongue periodically numbed by the natural Novocaine that is the Sichuan peppercorn, and I could not stop eating. Each bite brought a delicate balance between pleasure and pain—deliciously peppery flavor, bought at the price of having your mouth feel like you’d swallowed fire. But the pain was a good pain, somehow. It forced you to slow down and experience each bite, and that’s a rare experience these days. No one mindlessly gobbles Sichuan hot pot, simply because it’s physically impossible to do so without powerful anesthetic.

Tripe.

As for the “weird” bits, by and large, I liked them. I had had tripe before, at the Grand Asia Buffet in Cary, but of course I preferred the hot version. Tripe has almost no flavor of its own, so it pairs well with sauces or fondue-type deals. It’s basically a conveyance for the flavor of whatever you cook it in. Its texture is somewhere between that of al dente fettuccine and calamari – a bit chewy, with a distinctive “squeakiness” beneath your teeth. Fairly innocuous, really, once you get past the idea of eating cow’s stomach. I’m not ready to chow down on a big bowl of tripe just yet, but the stuff’s certainly growing on me.

Duck tongues.

Duck tongues were the surprise of the night. In both taste and texture, they resembled the bits of fat and skin and chewy stuff around the joints of a chicken wing. Each contained a long, flat bone that you had to eat around, and, after a few tries, I got the trick to it down pat. Duck tongues, again, don’t have that much flavor of their own, but they’re a good vehicle for sauce – and I bet they’d be tasty fried.

I wasn’t so crazy about the pig livers, which had a strong, metallic taste and a rich, intense texture, but I’d try them again if I got the chance.

We finished off the meal with noodles cooked in the hot pot, which had boiled down to a vivid, thick redness disturbingly reminiscent of magma. The noodles emerged from this primordial ooze redolent of oil, peppers, and the meaty flavor of everything that had gone in the pot before them. They were socko.

Post-hot pot, I felt pleased and a bit giddy to have braved the cauldron of fire—it had been a small adventure to start off the week, the culinary equivalent of the Path to Kal’haya.