Bacalao & Shrimp Potpies

Recipe: "Bacalao & Shrimp Potpies" from "Homemade Summer" by Yvette Van Boven
Rating: Good.  Very filling.  Make small pies.
Status: Made once

Bacalao, which is also known as salt cod, is a dried salted fish which is eaten in Europe and the Caribbean.  I first had salt cod in the Caribbean last summer; a few restaurants had a version of salt cod and potato brandade or fritters.

Salt cod needs to be soaked in room temperature or cold water for one to three days (it is okay to soak it at room temperature); the water should be changed 3 to 4 times a day.  Drained it and cook it at a bare simmer; rapidly boiling water will make it dry and stringy and overcooking it can also make it lose its tenderness.  See this nytimes.com article for more information about cooking salt cod.

I choose this recipe because it isn't the standard chicken potpie, and it was fun to use salt cod since it is a new ingredient to me.  This recipe mixes salt cod with shrimp in a cream sauce and tops it with puff pastry.  The cream sauce is made with heavy cream, cream fraiche, and fish stock.  One thing that's nice about this recipe is it uses up exactly 1/2 pint whipping cream an 8 oz of cream fraiche (a tub).  I also substituted absinthe for the Pernod.

For the fish stock, made shrimp stock from the heads and shells after cleaning a previous batch of shrimp.  The stock should be made immediately after you clean the shrimp, so that the shells are fresh.  To make stock, simply cover the shells and heads with cold water (you can also add aromatics if you like), bring to a simmer, and simmer for 20 minutes to 1 hour.  Strain through a fine meshed strainer and discard the solids.  Let the strained stock sit on the counter top for at least 10 minutes so that any remaining particles settle on the bottom.  Pour off the clear part of the stock and discard the cloudy portion on the bottom containing particles.  The shrimp stock can be frozen until you want to use it.

Since there is so much cream in this, it is very filling.  The recipe makes 4 to 6 small pot pies (I made 5, but I think I'll try to make 6 next time).  Even though they look small, we were very full after eating just 1 pie each and nothing else.  So I suggest using small ramekins to serve this (bowls would be too large for a single serving).  I would also consider leaving out the butter next time--I don't think the dish needs it and it is heavy enough already, though a reason to keep the butter is that it does make the sauce especially luxurious.

One modification I made was to "freshen the shrimp" (Kasma Loha-unchit's term for this in "Dancing Shrimp") by soaking them in salted water.  This will given them a slight bouncy resistance when you bite into them.  To do this, mix 1/2 cup of water and 1 tsp salt for each pound of shrimp.  Let the shrimp soak in the salted water for 5 to 10 minutes.  The water will turn grey and murky.  Rinse thoroughly in cold water.  Drain well.  If you are pan-frying or stir-frying them, pat them dry to make sure they are not wet when you cook them.

Ingredient Sourcing: Salt Cod can sometimes be found at Italian, Spanish/Portuguese, or European markets; in San Francisco, Lucca Ravioli Company has salt cod.  See Sources for Bay Area Ingredients for more information.  If you don't want to make your own, frozen housemade puff pastry can be found at Bi-Rite; after defrosting in the refrigerator overnight, you can gently roll the puff pastry out a little bit if you need it to be slightly larger in order to cover the pot pies.

Banh Mi

We went for a Sunday afternoon walk at the San Francisco Botanical Garden.  Lots of wild flowers are in bloom!  We had Banh Mi for dinner afterwards; it was quick to put together since we had made nearly everything beforehand.

Recipe: Used several sources as inspiration: "Saigon Subs (banh mi - Vietnam)" from "Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia" by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, "Bánh-mì" from "Tartine Bread" by Chad Robertson, and "Bánh mì" from "Vietnamese Home Cooking" by Charles Pan
Rating: Good.
Status: Made once.

We decided to make this meal because we had some leftover chicken liver pate, frozen meatballs, and every weekend William makes a new loaf of bread.  The bread is a bit crustier than banh mi should be and isn't shaped as a french roll because we used William's bread which he baked this morning and he only knows how to make a country style loaf using the Tartine method.  So I made mine as an open faced sandwich and ate it with a fork and steak knife (William ate his as a sandwich).

I made the Vietnamese carrot and daikon pickled salad in the morning, and set out the meatballs to defrost (6 meatballs for the two of us).  We set out the following ingredients and assembled our own sandwiches at the table.  Since we had made everything beforehand, dinner was very quick to assemble.

• Slices of William's bread
• Chicken liver pate
• Meatballs (defrosted and then warmed in a skillet)
• Sliced black forest ham
• The porchetta was all gone, but we could have used this in our sandwiches if we still had some.
• Vietnamese carrot and daikon pickled salad
• Sliced cucumber batons
• Cilantro
• Thinly sliced jalapeño
• Lime slices (for squeezing lime juice on top)
• Fish sauce
• Golden Mountain sauce.  Maggi sauce is an alternative but I don't have it.  We ended up preferring our sandwiches without Golden Mountain sauce.
• Mayonaise

I liked mine as an open faced sandwich topped in the following order: pate, mayonaise, cilantro, cucumber, jalapeño, halved meatballs, carrot and daikon, with some lime squeezed on top and a little bit of fish sauce.

Pressed Tofu and Peanuts in a Spicy Bean Sauce

Recipe: "Pressed Tofu and Peanuts in a Spicy Bean Sauce (Hua Ren Dou Fu Gan)" from "Asian Tofu" by Andrea Nguyen
Rating: Great.  Quick and easy.
Status: Made once

Additional Notes:

• I replaced the peanut oil with chili oil, instead of mixing in chili oil at the end as suggested.
• After a few hours the peanuts lose their crispiness and become chewy, so if you want to enjoy this dish for multiple days, I would keep the roasted peanuts separate and add them in as you are eating.
• I made 1/2 the quantity specified in the recipe.

Spicy Yuba Ribbons

Recipe: "Spicy Yuba Ribbons" from "Asian Tofu" by Andrea Nguyen
Rating: Great! I love Asian tofu
Status: Made once.

This is noodles cut from sheets of fresh tofu skin which have been quickly stir fried in a light soy sauce mixture.  Yuba is the Japanese word for tofu skin; in Chinese cuisine this is usually translated into English as tofu skin, since it is made from the film that forms on top of liquid soy milk when it is boiled.

Additional Notes:
Even though the recipe was for 8 oz, I used 5 oz of yuba noodles with the exact same quantity of sauce and everything else listed in the recipe (because I didn't notice that I had bought a smaller amount than specified).  I'm happy with the results, although next time I'd like to try the suggested proportions because I'd like the soy sauce to be a touch more subtle.

Chicken Liver Pate

Recipe: It is called "Baker's Foie" in "Tartine Bread" by Chad Robertson but it is actually a quick chicken liver pâté. 
Rating: Good.
Status: William made once.

I served this with some sliced radishes on the side and their plain green tops underneath.  The radishes are best if you place a pinch of salt next to them for people to dip the slices in just before eating.  Don't sprinkle salt directly on the radish slices if you are serving them like this because it will tend to make them to weep, become moist and damp, and the salt will get diluted.  You want the radishes to remain crisp, refreshing, and hydrated.

Radish leaves are edible, but this particular radish has some stiff hairs on it which are a little bit unpleasant, so these ones are for ascetics only.  However, if your radish leaves are fresh, vibrant and the leaves are smooth, then you should eat them or use them in a salad since they have a nice peppery bite. They can also be cooked.

Porchetta

Recipe: "Porchetta" from "Tartine Bread" by Chad Robertson
Rating: Loved it!
Status: William made once.

Since the pork is slow cooked for 8 to 10 hours, this recipe is nice because you can put the dressed pork shoulder in the oven before you go to bed, and remove it and place it in the fridge when you wake up the next morning. The following night, you can slice off a few pieces and pan fry them until they are hot and the edges are crispy.

William actually dressed the pork and tied it up on Sunday, and then we stored it in the fridge until we cooked it on Monday night.  Since it is generally tasty to allow salted meats time to marinate, its possible that this helped to make ours even better.  When I woke up after this had cooked all night, the kitchen smelled amazingly savory and comforting.  William choose this recipe because it is a great do-ahead project, and it makes enough for many meals--he prefers to get all his cooking done on weekends rather than on weekdays.

My contribution to this meal is that I made some roasted cauliflower with tahini sauce so that we would have some vegetables to go with it the first two nights.  Then we had Winter Salad with Fennel, Radicchio, Walnuts and Manchego or Parmesan the next with the porchetta.  The porchetta uses fennel fronds, but not the fennel bulb, so I choose this salad in order to use the bulb.  I think the porchetta tastes best when there are some vegetables on the side to lighten it; both dishes went well with it.

My own little modification of this recipe is that I use some of the rendered pork fat to fry up the slices of porchetta, and I fry them until the edges get very crispy, browned, and caramelized.  These are some of the porchetta ends which were fried up for tonight's dinner.   They were some of the best parts because they have lots of textures--crispy on the outside or on the thinner pieces, or falling off-the-bone soft in the bigger pieces.  It is nice to cut some pieces a bit thicker (1 inch or so) and some pieces very thin, so that pan frying the interior slices until they get really browned crispy edges in the pork fat has a similar multi-textured effect.

Makes 8 servings.

Weighing Salt

Different salts are different--but the most important difference for cooking isn't taste, where it is from, or if it is fleur du sel.  It is its saltiness by volume.  Since salts can be fine-grained, corse-grained, or flaky, salts are equivalent in saltiness by weight but not by volume, so using weight is a more reliable measurement than volume for salt.

Whenever you are using more than a tablespoon or two of salt, such as when brining or measuring large quantities of salt (or baking bread), you should measure by weight so that the saltiness is the same no matter what type of salt you use.  However, it is also important to develop a feel for how to season foods by taste.  Since your fingers measure by volume and small quantities are specified by volume in many recipes, you will need to develop some sense of how salty your salt is.  So using volume for small amounts of salt is fine as long as you salt to taste, start with less and add more as needed, or conservatively use the conversion formula below.  This is easiest if you buy the same brand, since as Michael Ruhlman explains in "Twenty", "it's important to use the same brand of salt; otherwise you won't be able to teach yourself how to season consistently".

Sea salt, flaky sea salt, fleur du sel are all finishing salts which are meant to be used to sprinkle on top of finishes dishes for their texture or taste.  Kosher salt should be used for cooking, dissolving in liquids, and you can even finish dishes with it if you aren't looking for a specialized texture.  Somewhere around a year ago, I started using kosher salt in most of my cooking.  Michael Ruhlman's explanation in "Twenty" that you should use a fistful of salt to season water for pasta and blanching vegetables convinced me to buy some and then I found I liked it quite a lot.  If you are properly salting your blanching liquids (it should be a 5% salt solution) and pasta water (it should be a 1% salt solution), so you want to use salt that isn't expensive.  A 3 lbs box of kosher salt should be $4 or less.

I like Diamond Crystal because it has no anti-caking agents like Morton's does; Diamond Crystal is 100% salt.  I like it because the grains disappear into dishes, even when you sprinkle it on top so it becomes a background flavor which highlights the dish, rather than being at the forefront like larger sea salt crystals are.  The flaky sea salt / fleur de sel trend seems to have passed and nowadays it seems to be common for recipes to be written for kosher salt.  Even though I used to like grey sea salt and flakey sea salt, I find that if I now switch back to larger grained sea salt, I find it too aggressively salty and distracting (except in some applications where the salt should be noticeable, such as salty caramel).  In addition, an advantage for me is that Diamond Crystal sea salt is local, since it is from the San Francisco Bay (TheKitchn.com).

In order to be precise, recipes should specify the type of salt that they are using.  This allows you to make an approximate conversion from the amount of salt specified in the recipe to the type of salt that you use.  For the last year, I have been using Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt, so all of my recipes that specify quantities of salt are for this type, unless otherwise specified.  In the future, I will try to be more precise and specify the type of salt when the measurement is given by volume, so that you can convert my volumetic measurements to your type of salt (it isn't actually necessary to buy the same brand of kosher salt as me if you prefer a different kind of salt and make the conversions).

For example, various sources (e.g. source 1, source 2, source 3) have measured the volume of the same weight of various salts and determined some conversions.  Depending on which source you use:

1 Tbsp of fine sea salt = 1 Tbsp table salt = 1 3/4 Tbsp to 2 1/4 Tbsp of Diamond Crystal brand kosher salt = 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 Tbsp Morton's kosher salt

Thus, there is about 1.5 Diamond Crystal to 1 part Mortons by volume or you can even nearly double the quantity of Morton's kosher salt listed in a recipe when you replace it with Diamond Crystal.  As Michael Ruhlman explains in "Twenty", "Diamond Crystal is flakier than Morton's.  Morton's is denser, so that the same volume is saltier than Diamond Crystal; a tablespoon of Morton's weighs more.  If you're used to seasoning with Diamond Crystal and you start using Morton's, you may well oversalt your food."  Thus, an additional advantage of using Diamond Crystal is that it is harder to oversalt your food--if you use a recipe that was developed using Morton's, than their amounts will be a touch too small, and it is also harder to accidentally oversalt your food when salting to taste because it takes a larger amount of Diamond Crystal salt to make food salty, so salting isn't extremely sensitive to small additions.

Brine Solutions: Cooking Pasta, Blanching Vegetables, and Brining Meat

If you want your pasta or blanched vegetables to be seasoned, then the brine that they are cooked in must be seasoned properly.  The correct amount of salt for blanching vegetables was way more than I used to think was necessary before I read some of Michael Ruhlman's writings--for a normal amount of water to cook pasta, it is a fistful or more.  I recommend kosher salt for salty solutions like this, since it is cost effective and it isn't necessary to use fancy textured salt (such as fleur du sel) since it will be dissolved.

Michael Ruhlman recommends (in "Twenty" and "Ratio"):

• 1% solution for cooking Italian pasta *:
• By weight use a ratio: 1 part salt to 10 parts water by weight = 10 g salt per 1000 g water (1 litre) = 1 oz salt per 100 oz water (about 12.5 cups)
• Since the saltiness of different types of salt (even different brands of kosher salt) differ by volume, large amounts of salt should be measured by weight (see here).  In order to help you envision how much salt this is, the conversions for volume are approximately: 1/4 cup (4 Tbsp) of Morton's kosher salt for every 8 quarts of water (2 gallon) = 3/8 cup (6 Tbsp) of Diamond Crystal kosher salt for every 8 quarts of water  (2 gallon).
• 5% solution for for blanching vegetables or brining meats:
• By weight use a ratio: 1 part salt to 20 parts water by weight = 50 g salt per 1000 g water (1 liter) = 5 oz salt per 100 oz water (about 12.5 cups)
• Since the saltiness of different types of salt (even different brands of kosher salt) differ by volume, large amounts of salt should be measured by weight (see here).  In order to help you envision how much salt this is, the conversions for volume are approximately: 1 cup of Morton's kosher salt per 4 quarts of water (1 gallon) = 1.5 cups of Diamond Crystal kosher salt per 4 quarts of water  (1 gallon)

If you are brining meats, you should weight your ingredients to make sure that your solution has the correct percentage of saltiness.  If you are making pasta or blanching vegetables, you have a bit more leeway so it isn't always necessary to measure exact amounts once you know about how salty the water should be.  If you don't want to measure, then Michael Ruhlman suggests checking by tasting the salted water.  A common saying for pasta water is that it should taste like the sea.  For brines he says it should taste saltier than a soup, but not so salty that it feels acrid on your tongue.

* Note that some Japanese noodles suggest cooking them in unsalted water, since the noodles are salted when they are made.

Kumquat Marmalade

Recipe: Modified from "Kumquat Ricotta Tartine" from EatingFromTheGroundUp.com
Rating: Quick and easy.
Status: Made once.

I was served some kumquat marmalade along with a some sort of pastry such as a muffin or scone at brunch restaurant.  I loved how the sour citrus contrasted with the sweet baked good, and how refreshing the sourness was.  Ever since then, I've been interesting in making or owning some kumquat jam.  This recipe makes a full flavored fairly sour marmalade; its perfect contrasted against something sweet, or something mild such as quark, or even as a refreshment to nibble in between bites of a strongly flavored cheese plate (e.g. stilton cheese).  A small spoonful of this is also nice on top of an open faced jambon-brie sandwich (ham and brie, preferably black forest on top of a slice of bread which has been pan fried in butter).

This recipe only makes 1 jam jar of marmalade.  You don't need to sterilize the jam jars if you plan on eating in just a few days.  If you want to store the jam for longer, then you should follow canning directions to sterilize your jar.  I didn't think of it this time, but next time I make this it would be nice to include a tiny pinch of salt (just enough to bring out the flavors but not make it salty).

You don't have to buy exactly 22 kumquats.  Just buy a few handfuls, and then adjust the quantities in the recipe below to proportionally how many kumquats you have.

Ingredients:
22 or so Kumquats
3 Tbsp honey
3 Tbsp water

Specialized equipment:
a crab pick tool, toothpick, chopstick, or some other small pointy tool is helpful for removing seeds

Wash and dry the kumquats.  Remove the stems.  Thinly slice all of the kumquats (leave the skin on, it is edible and a large part of the taste of kumquats is the skin), removing the seeds as you find them.  Discard seeds.

Place kumquat slices and the juices from the cutting board (if there are some--I didn't have any) into a small heavy non-reactive pan.  Add honey and water.  Bring to a simmer.  Simmer constantly stirring for 10 minutes, or until the mixture thickens.  Place in a clean heatproof jar with a tight fitting lid.  Let cool a bit before eating.  Store in the refrigerator.

Thai Nam Prik Pao Fried Rice

Recipe: Modified from TheSpicedLife.com's recipe for nam prik pao fried rice
Rating: Great. Quick. Easy. Flavorful.
Status: Made once.

Making Thai nam prik pao fried rice is easy, fast, and you can adjust the quantities to what you have around.  I had just a tiny amount (1 serving) of leftover rice (it was made from Tamaki Gold brand sushi rice), so I made this single serving sized portion.

Ingredients:
minced shallots
left over cooked rice
nam prik pao
fish sauce
oil
(optional) fried shallots

To make it, heat a pan and then add some oil.  Saute some minced shallots; when they have wilted and are starting to caramelize add the rice (if the pan is looking dry, you can add a bit more oil and let it heat just before you add the rice).  Let the rice heat and crisp up for a few minutes; the grains will be easier to separate once the rice is hot.

The amount of nam prik pao and fish sauce that is added is variable and should be done to taste.  Mix in a dab of nam prik pao and some fish sauce (2 to 4 cups of rice will need approximately 1 Tbsp of nam prik pao and 1 Tbsp of fish sauce, so estimate your quantities accordingly).  Taste and add more nam prik pao if you want to increase the sweetness and sourness;  add more fish sauce if it isn't salty enough.  It should be salty sweet sour combination with a lot of umami from the fish sauce and shrimp paste in the nam prik pow.  Optionally mix some fried shallots into the rice.  Put the rice on a serving plate or in individual dishes.

Reheat the pan and add some oil.  When the oil is hot, pan fry 1 egg for each serving; preferably the yolk should be runny.

Serve the fried rice topped with the egg.