Happy Year of the Ox!

Happy Year of the Ox everybody!!

Very few holidays -- Chanukah, Christmas, National Pancake Day -- go uncelebrated in our home. So of course we celebrated Chinese New Year.

Night one was dumplings. We didn't get pictures of them. Sorry guys.

But night two is when the fun starts. I've been wanting to make Hainanese Chicken for a while now. It's not too involved and it's got all sorts of great flavors. And I was curious - I mean, take a chicken, put it in water to cover, bring it all to a boil along with some ginger and garlic, simmer it for 10 minutes, and then turn off the heat and let it sit for an hour. That's it?


More or less, yeah. Then use the stock, from simmering the chicken, to make some rice, and make some dipping sauce, and eat it all with cucumbers, tomatoes, scallions, cilantro. Enjoy.


And trust me here: although it looks a little bland, with lots of pale white stuff, the chicken has some great ginger flavor, the rice is nice, and when it all comes together, the flavors really fuse - it's tender, and savory, and refreshing even.


And then night three: pizza night, because it's almost been a week. That BBQ sauce of the month club has us flush in BBQ sauce, so I doctored some up with ginger, sriracha, five spice powder, and a bit of soy sauce, and made an Asian BBQ Chicken Pizza. (If you're a pizza purist, obviously, that sounds awful to you.) So toss on leftover chicken, fresh mozzarella, fontina, and scallions and cilantro, and enjoy.

Angry Trout Salad

With all the less than healthy food that we post on this site, I figured that it would be good to post one of our favorite salads to prove that we do sometimes just crave a really good, healthy salad to bring balance to our diet. We decided to make this salad after a weekend spent with two very close friends of ours who are moving to San Francisco soon. Among their other wonderful qualities, they are very good eating companions and we said our goodbyes to their New York years (part 1?) by eating at our favorite brunch spot - Clinton Street Bakery. I don't know what goes into the pancakes there, but they induce plate clearing every time I order them. The egg sandwich with homemade sausage, cheese and tomatillo sauce served open faced on a big, warm, buttery biscuit kept me full for the rest of the day. Salad would be the menu for Sunday night.

The inspiration for this salad comes from the Angry Trout in Grand Marais, MN. I grew up going to this restaurant each summer while on vacation on the north shore of Lake Superior. When we went here for our honeymoon this past August, I was so happy to be able to introduce my better half to this great place. The Angry Trout was the first restaurant that I was aware of that served locally grown, seasonal food, long before it was a trend for restaurants. Their location right next to a fish and smoke house on Lake Superior certainly makes it easy for them to serve fresh and smoked fish, and they also do a great job serving locally grown fruits and vegetables. I could go on and on about this place but I will leave it at this: If you ever find yourself in Minnesota, driving on Highway 61 on the north shore of Lake Superior, stop at this restaurant (and get a donut at the World's Best Donuts afterward).

So for our salad, we used the Angry Trout's smoked trout salad and tomato basil dressing. The focal point of the salad is the smoked trout, but there is a lot of room for improvisation for the rest of the ingredients. When walking through the fruit and veggie aisle we focused on getting ingredients with different textures and colors. This time around we picked sugar snap peas, carrots, raspberries and pear. We had some left over proscuitto and cheese from pizza night that we also included.The dressing consists of chopped tomato, olive oil, red wine vinegar, fresh basil and a pinch of salt.


The salad was so refreshing and with so many elements in the salad, each bite was a little different. Even the color of the salad brightened my mood in the middle of this cold, grey winter.

Someday Soon, We Hope

Many thanks to all of you who have e-mailed us about the bacon explosion. I'm not entirely sure what it means that so many of you have sent it to us. Well, I suppose it means you all think we're bacon loving gluttonous slobs with no regard for cardiovascular health. You might be onto something.

Anyways, perhaps soon. (We're happy to do the work if someone has a good reason for us to make it. If we weren't already bringing chili to the super bowl on Sunday, we'd be all about it.)

Pizza Night with Lewis

Meet Lewis. He's a CPA, loves watching Jeopardy!, mixing plaids and coming home after a long day's work to a bud light and some chex mix. He has been living with us for the past week and was a little anxious to have his picture up on the blog until we told him it might help him find a special lady friend.



Lewis experienced his first pizza night this week. We had two pies, one trying to copy the ham and cheese pizza at Co., Jim Lahey's new pizza place on 24th and 9th Ave. His inspiration for the pizza comes from a ham and cheese sandwich on rye. The dough is brushed with olive oil, sprinkled with caraway seeds and topped with fontina, guyere, fresh mozzarella and pecorino romano cheeses.

Once the pie was out of the oven, we topped it with thin slices of prosciutto, which melts and wilts from the heat of the pizza. The pie is salty and delicious. The caraway seeds add nice flavor contrast to the pie and an interesting texture as well. One of my favorite parts about pizza night is the excuse it gives me to stop off at Murray's Cheese and Murray's Real Salami at the Grand Central Terminal Market. I cannot say enough good things about both places. The staff is always friendly, helpful and very generous with the samples. Not to mention the wonderful selection of product at both places. I would love to spend 6 months working at both Murray's Cheese and Murray's Salami broadening my knowledge about cured meats and the world of cheese.

The second pie of the night was a mushroom pie. We made some red sauce and sauteed some hen of the woods and shiitake mushrooms and topped the pie off with fresh mozzarella, fontina and a dusting of parmiggiano cheese.


All and all I think Lewis's first pizza night was a success. He enjoyed watching us toss the pizza dough into the air and learning about the pizza upskirt. Lewis said the only thing that would make pizza night better was if he could bring a date next time.

The finished mushroom pizza.

Recent Meals We Have Made and Enjoyed (But Not Written About)

We'd have trouble if we posted about everything we made and ate and enjoyed. And you'd get bored. I mean, how self-indulgent are these people? Who cares what they eat for dinner each night? I make dinner too and nobody gives me a medal or anything, right? I agree. So feel free to skip this post (although, if you're here already, it's probably because you're looking for a good time-waster, and don't let me dissuade you). But, for those of you with a morbid curiosity about it, here are some meals that didn't make the blog, in no particular order.

Bacon, egg and cheddar on a Portuguese roll, with Cajun-spiced home fries:


Spicy creole peel-and-eat shrimp:

Spaghetti and meatballs:

Chili, latkes and eggs:

Hawaiian pizza: leftover xmas ham, pineapple, smoked mozzarella:

Sausage, ricotta, and broccoli rabe (pre- and post-autopsy shots):

Shopsin's Senegalese chicken soup:

Curried lobster and eggplant soup:

Cornmeal pancakes and bacon:

Burgers and Onions and Cheese, Oh My

We love these onion cheeseburgers. They're easy, quick, tasty, and the right amount of messy. So here's a step-by-step guide. Note: you can follow the same technique to make sliders, just use appropriately sized buns (we prefer Martin's potato rolls, hamburger-sized for the big burgers, dinner roll-sized for the sliders).

Here we go: (1) slice up about 2 onions, really thin. A mandoline, or a good sharp knife, or a cheapo v-slicer, is helpful.

(2) Put a few pretty much unshaped hunks of meat (no bigger than 4 oz or so) in a very hot pan, with a little bit of oil in it.

(3) Top with more onions than seems reasonable. Add some salt and pepper.

(4) Smash down on the patties, so the onions get smashed into the beef, and it sizzles, and things really start cookin'. Cook for a couple minutes, until the bottoms get nice and brown and crusty.

(5) Flip the burgers over. The onions, on the bottom now, cook in the rendered beef fat and get crispy and tender at the same time. Cook for a couple minutes more, til the burgers are just about your desired level of doneness.

(6) Put cheese on top of the patties. Look, I think processed American cheese is absolutely awful most of the time. But it's the only cheese to use here. I promise.

(7) Put the top bun on top of the cheese, and the bottom bun on top of the top bun.

(8) Add in a bit of liquid - water is fine, beef or chicken stock can work too. Then toss a lid on, so the whole thing (thanks to the liquid) steams - the cheese gets nice and gooey, the bun gets soft, the onions get even awesomer.

(9) Take the bottom buns, and put the burger/onion/cheese/top bun on top of it. Add whatever you like - ketchup, pickles, etc. If you feel like you owe your body something healthy once in a while, pile a salad next to the burgers.

(10) Dig in!