Tri-Tip in Black Pepper Sauce

I marinated a tri-tip beef roast from TJ’s in an Asian black pepper sauce and slow cooked it in the oven, much like the Easter brisket, in stages, with onions and garlic, and then used the drippings from the marinade to further make a sauce. It was quite richly-flavored, with a sneaky pepper afterbite.

I also made brown jasmine rice (I thought I had grabbed the white basmati, but oh well) to go with, and a garden salad (baby greens, cucumber, arugula, cherry tomatoes, and green onions, as well as some left over hard-boiled egg and the remainder of the red pepper (see below)) with vinaigrette.

G&T came to dinner (it’s Friday again, yay!) and brought the fixings for stuffed red peppers (stuffed with ground beef, rice, onions and green peppers, as well as mozzarella and Parmesan cheese, sage and thyme and other yummy stuff) and T assembled and cooked and baked them here. Even better, they brought a chocolate cake (mmm…..) and red wine (a Gundlach Bundschu ’05 Pinot Noir, one of our favorites! And, as if the evening wasn’t festive enough already, L joined us, too, and we played a lot of Rayving Rabbids 2, while listening to some well-needed rain falling outside.

Porky Roast with Scalloped Potatoes

Tonight, a pork roast, cooked in a dish with olive oil, garlic and onions, in the oven with scalloped potatoes from a box (sale on Betty Crocker’s at Lucky this week (4 for $2!)) at 325°F for about an hour, accompanied by garlic steamed fresh green beans / haricôts verts, and grilled portabella mushrooms (marinated first with olive oil, salt and black pepper).

Guest Post: Chris’ Stir Fry Recipe

Tonight I made one of the few recipes in my extremely limited repertoire that involves more than dumping some cans into a pot and letting them simmer for half an hour. (Though chili made in that fashion is mighty tasty.) The recipe is my modification of the Thai Chicken Curry recipe found on the page of the Dinner Co-op of Carnegie Mellon’s CS department. I’ve scaled up the recipe to match the packs of three chicken breasts that sell at the local Price Chopper, and added some small things along the way. The dish is odd in that it’s both creamy and spicy, but I like it a lot. The peanuts add a crunch, sort of like a poor man’s water chestnuts.

Ingredients:

• For white sauce:
  • 3 Tbsp butter
  • 3 Tbsp all-purpose flour
  • Dash salt
  • Dash pepper
  • 1½ c milk
• For stir fry:
  • 2 c broccoli florets
  • 1.5 lb boneless skinless chicken breasts, sliced into ¼-inch pieces
  • 1 medium-size red bell pepper, sliced long-ways into ¼-inch strips and then in half
  • 3 Tbsp sugar
  • 3 Tbsp soy sauce
  • 4 or 5 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 tsp ginger powder (use some fresh ginger if it’s handy)
  • 1 heaping Tbsp red chili paste (Priya brand is great if you can find it) or curry paste
  • 3 Tbsp cooking oil (I used canola)
  • ¼ c roasted peanuts

Directions:

1. Blanch the broccoli. Boil some water in a saucepan. Add the florets to the boiling water and let boil for one minute. Drain the water and set the broccoli aside.
2. Make the white sauce. Melt the butter in a saucepan on low heat. Once it’s melted, add the flour and whisk it all together before the flour has a chance to cook. Add salt and pepper. Add milk and whisk it together. Raise the heat to medium and cook, stirring every minute or so, until thick enough for the sauce to drip onto the surface and leave bumps. Turn off the heat and set aside.
3. Stir fry, woo! Heat the oil in a large skillet or wok over medium heat. Add the chili/curry paste, break it apart in the oil with your spatula, and let it cook for one minute, stirring constantly. Add the sugar, soy sauce, garlic, and ginger (I always combine these four beforehand). Add the chicken and stir-fry for about thirty seconds. Add the red bell pepper and stir everything together. Stir-fry for six minutes, or until the chicken looks done. Add the white sauce, broccoli, and peanuts; mix the whole lot together and heat through.

Serve with jasmine rice. Serves four or five.

Guest author Chris Willmore’s other pursuits may be found online at www.treedub.org

Chicken and Yellow Rice

J’s been a fan of Cuban food since childhood, and has been jonesing for some since a new, but uninviting, Cuban restaurant opened near us, and took it on to prepare some properly at home tonight. We’ve been using saffron regularly since we bought some a couple of years ago to try and make yellow rice ourselves, but only recently did we figure out that the secret ingredient we were lacking was turmeric (yes, that r is supposed to be there, look it up). So J ground up both with some salt and black pepper in the mortar and pestle to create a base for both the chicken and the rice and then simmered the chicken with some onion, garlic, olive oil, Sriracha chili sauce and tomato sauce, and then combined them into one dish and baked for a while in the oven. Very nice, very soothing, and not entirely unlike Miss Neddy’s Congee!

I made some green and yellow split peas with some garlic in them to go with, which are always hearty and filling, as well as a light salad of tomatoes with green onions and fresh oregano from the garden, with a really simple vinaigrette dressing of just olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, and black pepper.

Guest Post: Congee

Guest Author: Miss Neddy , Singaporean Tea Blogger Extraordinaire

I love a good congee, and usually a minced pork and century congee is my favourite. But being short of both pork and century eggs, I settled for making chicken congee instead. Congee is more commonly known as jok or chok, and is of Cantonese origin. Depending on how much time you have, you can spend a few hours making it, or just half an hour. It’s more common for breakfast, but given the amount of time I needed to make this, I’d have to have started last night. It is very much like chicken soup, very warming and easy to eat and digest. Make it thinner for when your tummy isn’t feeling too well, or thicker if you’re hungry. If you like umami, congee is chock full of meaty goodness, even if you use water instead of stock. Just remember not to skimp on the chicken slivers.

I used chicken bones, about 2 tablespoons of soya sauce, 2 small red onions and half a clove of garlic to make the stock. I would love to use some dried scallop as well, but ran out today, so to get the sweetness for the stock, I substituted with a roughly chopped carrot. If you like sweet potatoes, you can use them too, but take them out when they’re cooked and use them later to mix in with the congee. I did that with some chicken breast meat here; once I took the cooked meat out, I let them cool before tearing them into slivers. A slightly better way of doing this is to get the ribcage of a chicken, with the breast meat still attached; once the breast meat is cooked, take the chicken out, tear off the meat and chuck the bones back into the pot. This will give you lovely long strands of chicken, instead of the short chunky ones I had to settle for.

I cooked the stock for around 3 hours on medium heat, and soaked the rice in water for around 2 hours. Just as the ligaments of the chicken begin to soften, causing the bones to fall apart from one another, I took out all the solids from the stock and poured in the rice, turning the heat down to medium-low. This step doesn’t take long, but there’s quite a lot of intermittent stirring involved to stop the rice from burning at the bottom. After around 10 minutes, the rice will break down and the congee is formed. Time to stir in the chicken slivers. Wait another 10 minutes or so, and the congee is ready to eat. I cracked a fresh egg into a bowl and spooned the congee over it, and stirred slowly to mix the egg into the congee. One problem with using stock rather than water for making congee is that the congee has a slightly unappetizing yellow colour, instead of a glossy rice-white colour.

Congee thickens more as time passes, so I put aside 2 bowls of stock to water it down for later meals. Hot water is fine too. Just use a low heat to warm the congee back up and stir in the stock or water.

Steak Burgers with Mushroom Gravy

A collaboration tonight: I made a garden salad with my vinaigrette, mixed lettuce greens, heirloom cherry tomatoes (all different colors and shapes), cucumber, green onions, and, because they are in season and totally buttery, delicious and CHEAP, a whole avocado for each of us!

By J’s request, I also made the oven crisped potatoes with rosemary, garlic, black pepper, salt and olive oil, I made last week, and reheated the butternut squash from last night. J sautéed mushrooms, onions and garlic in olive oil, fried up the steak burgers in the skillet, then made a gravy in which to further sauté the burgers and then serve over the top of them.

For dessert, another in-season treat: a fruit salad of just perfect fresh pineapple, slightly disappointing strawberries and a delectable little honey tangerine.

Easter Sunday Brisket + Butternut Squash Tutorial

My father and my step-mother visited recently, and while she was here, I was able to wrangle her mother’s brisket recipe out of her, much to my great pleasure, having enjoyed when she made it on several occasions. So, since J considers Easter a valid reason to make a nice big dinner, I thought it would be a good excuse to try the recipe. G&T joined us as well and so did L. For appetizer/nibbly bits, G&T brought cantaloupe wrapped with prosciutto and blue corn tortilla chips and hummus, as well as some red wine and dessert.

The recipe calls for 4 lbs of beef brisket, sliced onions, black pepper, Heinz chili sauce and bay leaves, and it takes over 4 hours to cook altogether, so I started it early in the afternoon. It takes lots of steps, but it’s worth the effort- it practically melts in your mouth! As well, I made a big tossed garden salad (G helped!), with tomatoes, cucumbers, green onions and mixed baby greens, with my homemade vinaigrette dressing, and some brown jasmine rice, cooked in mushroom stock and then tossed with the mushrooms that made the stock, after they were sautéed in olive oil with some garlic and fresh thyme from the garden.

At the same time that I started the brisket, I also baked a butternut squash, which lately has become one of my favorite squashes, much less foods, to my great surprise. Of course, the way I make it, it’s pretty much irresistible:

Mini tutorial: Butternut Squash

1. Peel and de-seed it and cut it up into small pieces
2. Layer it in a Pyrex dish with a bunch of sliced pats of butter (almost a stick) and cover liberally with five-spice powder, salt and black pepper.
3. Bake covered at 350°F for 45 mins or until it falls apart when poked with a fork
   
4. Let it cool some, and blend it in a Cuisinart / food processor with a little milk or butter until it reaches the desired consistency
5. Keep warm for an hour or two before serving… the longer you can let it stand before serving, the more the flavor develops. Reheat before serving if you can’t keep it warm the whole time.

YUM! For dessert, a big creamy peach Boston cream pie/cake concoction. Not the traditional Easter Ham by any means, but who’s complaining? Not like there were any leftovers!