Anyone who was cracked open a thing of canned salmon and asked this question is not alone. Driven by some invisible force (mixture of a desire for more protein and a culinary curiosity) about a week ago I decided it would be a good thing to make use of two of the cans of salmon I had purchased roughly a year ago during a canned salmon sale at my local cheapo market.
I've had a rough history with canned salmon. My original introduction to it was through salmon latkas which my Bubbie (grandmother) would serve during dairy meals when we visited. Despite how good anything was at one of these dairy meals, as a kid who loved to eat meat and looked forward to the meaty delights of my Bubbie's kitchen, I was always a little discontent. It took me a while to develop a taste for things fishy, so as a young kid I stayed away from the latkas and always assumed they were pretty gross. A few years ago, however, I was taking a bus back from Bubbie's to boston and she decided to pack me a lunch for the trip. In a roll (I think it was an onion roll) she put some salmon latka and dressed it up like a hamburger (for those who don't know what a salmon latka is, its essentially a burger made from canned salmon). To my utter surprise I really enjoyed this way of eating the salmon latka.
Still, in the time since I've realized a liking for canned salmon, I had been pretty scared to actually use it. I had one good experience making pasta with chunks of the canned fish and some creamy sauce... but generally the cans have been pushed further to the back of my cupboard, unused and unwanted.
My first thought, upon opening the two cans of salmon last week, was to make salmon latkas. I had on hand some carrot, pepper, onion and garlic. After dicing these up with some chopped frozen ginger (freezes really well) I sauted these vegetables for a few minutes so they wouldn't be too tough in the latkas (it was my plan to pan fry them and hence vegetables would not get cooked too well). The salmon went into a large bowl where I worked hard to mix it all together. I added in some salt and pepper (I could have done without the salt since the canned salmon was pretty salty to start with) and then added in the vegetables, after having let them cool for a little. To bind this together I added about two or three eggs and a good portion of chickpea flour (any type is fine... but I like the color this gives to things when fried). In the end I have a nice thick batter of fish and vegetables. Tasting it (which I probably should not have due to the egg) I realized it needed a little sweetness, so I added in a few squirts of honey.
A hot cast iron pan did a pretty good job of cooking up three midsized latkas which served as my dinner. I was not that happy though since pan frying tends to leave the insides a little mushy and requires lots of oil. At this point it was pretty late in the evening and I had a large bowl full of slightly fishy smelling batter sitting in the kitchen. Not wanted to spend the hour to fry up another 30 latkas, and not that happy with the results of such frying anyway, I did what anyone sick of cooking, yet with ingredients leftover, would do --- I made a kugel.
You ask what it means that I made a kugel? If it sounds impressive it is not. All I did was grease up a glass pan and pour all of my batter into it and then throw it in the oven for 45 minutes (for part covered with tin foil). After cooking the moisture which plagued my fried prototype latkas had cooked out and I was left with a nicely browned, and very mild (on the fishy scale) tasting kugel. The flour and egg helped it hold together nicely, and the honey give it an extra nice sweetness (after all it is the season of Rosh Hashana where we wish people a Happy and Sweet New Year). The great thing about a kugel is that once its made, you can cut it into individual sized pieces and freeze. In my experience, reheating in the microwave works really well for these single portions.
So, what is the lesson to be learned here? If you start making something and then get sick of it or disillusioned with it just turn it into a kugel.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Food and beer this summer
I did a fair amount of traveling over the summer and I'd like to briefly recount the highlights and lowlights of that which I ate.
Lets starts with a low. Berlin, a vegan restaurant called Cafe V -- after spending the entire day wandering through the city seeing the sites I was in dire need for a nice relaxing meal. I found my way to a nice restaurant my cousin had mentioned (a friend had told her about the place). I found a seat outside of the place and considered my menu options. It was nice to have so many options, especially after having been in Prague where my options were generally limited to one or two things on the menu. I settled on a tofu curry with zucchini. Despite sitting outdoors, I could not escape the annoying cigarette smoke which wafted towards me from the other few patrons outside. There were probably three people sitting outside, yet at any given moment at least one was smoking --- makes you wonder how they had time to eat. Besides gripping about the smoke, my other distraction while waiting for the food was the occurrences going on a little further up the block. I was convinced that there was going to be a mafia hit in the apartment building next to the restaurant. These really smarmy looking fellows kept going in and out, and going to the trunk and looking at some envelops and inside a duffel bag... But, thankfully, no hit occurred (to my knowledge).
These mob fantasies were abruptly interrupted by the arrival of my food. The dish looked very nice -- and the waitress also brought me a free order of garlic bread. Great! Well, maybe not. Upon tasting the sauce and tofu I immediately realized why I was compted the garlic bread. The tofu tasted, well, like tofu --- plain, unmarinaded, uncooked tofu. As far as the curry sauce, there are many varieties which exists but I'm pretty sure that turmeric and water does not constitute a curry sauce. The sauce was so thin and flavorless. The only redeeming elements of the meal were the zucchini and the garlic bread. But then again those are probably two of the easiest things to not mess up. As I was alone at the restaurant and had noone to gripe about it to I had a running inner monologue in which I berated the food and came up with craftier and craftier ways to insult the quality of the restaurant. Someone should really tell them that they suck --- but my German is... well... as bad as their tofu.
I had another bad food experience in Berlin, but enough bad. Despite not being able to eat much of the local fare, I had a pretty good culinary experience during my visit to Prague. First of all, I was happily surprised to discover that Prague has wild pears, apples, plums and even some figs.
[Insert photos]
The wild fruit was not as impressive as in Berkeley where the plums are super ripe and incredibly ample, as are the figs. A moment more of bashing Berlin with respect to fruit -- the last day I was there I decided to go to Potsdam which is outside of the city and where there are gigantic palaces and parks. One of the palaces had a terraced garden leading up to it. At each level of the garden were about 20 recessed sections of the terrace wall and in each of these recessions were two fig trees. In totally there were roughly 200 fig trees. Between these recessions, the wall was covered with grapes. I was hungry for a fig was had some time to spare so I decided to look at each tree until I found a fig. To keep my mouth busy during the hunt I made sure to have a constant supply of grapes (nice and sour ones). After roughly an hour of looking I had inspected every fig tree and come to the conclusion that there were no rip figs in Berlin. Such a shame considering that in Prague I had eaten some wonderfully rip figs at the Wallenstein gardens.
Beyond found fruit, Prague offered some wonderful beer and also some pretty yummy preserved fish and cabbage. The beer was super cheap and I made sure to have at least one with lunch and one in the evening every day. Half a litter of the beer cost about $1.50. Not too bad. It was always cheaper to get beer with a meal than water (which is not free there and always comes in bottles owing to old pipes which evidently make the water undrinkable). I've been lucky enough to try a lot of good beer (most recent before Prague was in San Francisco which has excellent local brewing). I thought that the Czech beer was very refreshing and smooth and drinkable, but not as interesting as Belgian or even some local American beers.
Since most of the restaurant food was patently unkosher I didn't eat out much but rather went to the super market and purchased the following wonderfully cheap and tasty items: Crusty brown rolls, Edam cheese, preserved fish (salmon or trout or sardines), arugula, sweet red pepper, watermelon and chocolate. The deals were great for these items -- more than enough smoked fish to fill me up cost something like 40 cents, and the watermelon was cheap as cheap can be. I ended up eating these items for most of my days and enjoying every bite of it.
I did have a few nice restaurant visits. At one place I bought herring (for maybe $2's) and was brought a plate with a fist sized rolled up chunk of herring with shredded onion and three bread dumplings. The herring was really fishing and really good and I definitely smelled like fish for the rest of the day. Another nice "meal" I had was a plate full of red and white cabbage which had been dressed with a nice acidic dressing. I think I surprised the waiter by getting this side dish and then eating it all myself (other groups split one of these plates among many people).
There was a kosher restaurant which I did go to one night called King Solomon's. For, by Czech standard, a fortune ($30) I had a nice three course meal there which started with a slightly nicer version of hotdog soup (it had some kosher sausage and a tomato base) and focused on a braised turkey chunk served on a tomato, zucchini, onion ratatouille. The turkey was probably the best preparation of turkey I've ever had. It was incredibly flavorful and juicy and went really well with the ratatouille.
To sum up ---
Berlin = crappy food;
Prague = limited but good food;
Fish = ate too much;
Fruit = always makes a place better in my book;
Beer = good, especially when cheap.
Lets starts with a low. Berlin, a vegan restaurant called Cafe V -- after spending the entire day wandering through the city seeing the sites I was in dire need for a nice relaxing meal. I found my way to a nice restaurant my cousin had mentioned (a friend had told her about the place). I found a seat outside of the place and considered my menu options. It was nice to have so many options, especially after having been in Prague where my options were generally limited to one or two things on the menu. I settled on a tofu curry with zucchini. Despite sitting outdoors, I could not escape the annoying cigarette smoke which wafted towards me from the other few patrons outside. There were probably three people sitting outside, yet at any given moment at least one was smoking --- makes you wonder how they had time to eat. Besides gripping about the smoke, my other distraction while waiting for the food was the occurrences going on a little further up the block. I was convinced that there was going to be a mafia hit in the apartment building next to the restaurant. These really smarmy looking fellows kept going in and out, and going to the trunk and looking at some envelops and inside a duffel bag... But, thankfully, no hit occurred (to my knowledge).
These mob fantasies were abruptly interrupted by the arrival of my food. The dish looked very nice -- and the waitress also brought me a free order of garlic bread. Great! Well, maybe not. Upon tasting the sauce and tofu I immediately realized why I was compted the garlic bread. The tofu tasted, well, like tofu --- plain, unmarinaded, uncooked tofu. As far as the curry sauce, there are many varieties which exists but I'm pretty sure that turmeric and water does not constitute a curry sauce. The sauce was so thin and flavorless. The only redeeming elements of the meal were the zucchini and the garlic bread. But then again those are probably two of the easiest things to not mess up. As I was alone at the restaurant and had noone to gripe about it to I had a running inner monologue in which I berated the food and came up with craftier and craftier ways to insult the quality of the restaurant. Someone should really tell them that they suck --- but my German is... well... as bad as their tofu.
I had another bad food experience in Berlin, but enough bad. Despite not being able to eat much of the local fare, I had a pretty good culinary experience during my visit to Prague. First of all, I was happily surprised to discover that Prague has wild pears, apples, plums and even some figs.
[Insert photos]
The wild fruit was not as impressive as in Berkeley where the plums are super ripe and incredibly ample, as are the figs. A moment more of bashing Berlin with respect to fruit -- the last day I was there I decided to go to Potsdam which is outside of the city and where there are gigantic palaces and parks. One of the palaces had a terraced garden leading up to it. At each level of the garden were about 20 recessed sections of the terrace wall and in each of these recessions were two fig trees. In totally there were roughly 200 fig trees. Between these recessions, the wall was covered with grapes. I was hungry for a fig was had some time to spare so I decided to look at each tree until I found a fig. To keep my mouth busy during the hunt I made sure to have a constant supply of grapes (nice and sour ones). After roughly an hour of looking I had inspected every fig tree and come to the conclusion that there were no rip figs in Berlin. Such a shame considering that in Prague I had eaten some wonderfully rip figs at the Wallenstein gardens.
Beyond found fruit, Prague offered some wonderful beer and also some pretty yummy preserved fish and cabbage. The beer was super cheap and I made sure to have at least one with lunch and one in the evening every day. Half a litter of the beer cost about $1.50. Not too bad. It was always cheaper to get beer with a meal than water (which is not free there and always comes in bottles owing to old pipes which evidently make the water undrinkable). I've been lucky enough to try a lot of good beer (most recent before Prague was in San Francisco which has excellent local brewing). I thought that the Czech beer was very refreshing and smooth and drinkable, but not as interesting as Belgian or even some local American beers.
Since most of the restaurant food was patently unkosher I didn't eat out much but rather went to the super market and purchased the following wonderfully cheap and tasty items: Crusty brown rolls, Edam cheese, preserved fish (salmon or trout or sardines), arugula, sweet red pepper, watermelon and chocolate. The deals were great for these items -- more than enough smoked fish to fill me up cost something like 40 cents, and the watermelon was cheap as cheap can be. I ended up eating these items for most of my days and enjoying every bite of it.
I did have a few nice restaurant visits. At one place I bought herring (for maybe $2's) and was brought a plate with a fist sized rolled up chunk of herring with shredded onion and three bread dumplings. The herring was really fishing and really good and I definitely smelled like fish for the rest of the day. Another nice "meal" I had was a plate full of red and white cabbage which had been dressed with a nice acidic dressing. I think I surprised the waiter by getting this side dish and then eating it all myself (other groups split one of these plates among many people).
There was a kosher restaurant which I did go to one night called King Solomon's. For, by Czech standard, a fortune ($30) I had a nice three course meal there which started with a slightly nicer version of hotdog soup (it had some kosher sausage and a tomato base) and focused on a braised turkey chunk served on a tomato, zucchini, onion ratatouille. The turkey was probably the best preparation of turkey I've ever had. It was incredibly flavorful and juicy and went really well with the ratatouille.
To sum up ---
Berlin = crappy food;
Prague = limited but good food;
Fish = ate too much;
Fruit = always makes a place better in my book;
Beer = good, especially when cheap.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Have I been fasting for the last two months????
No -- thankfully I have not been fasting, but I have been generally away from my kitchen and, more recently, have been overly involved with my math. Its hard to think of math and cooking as really being mutually exclusive, but they have been for me. The main reason is that when I'm working hard on math I go into my office at 9 or so, and then don't leave, generally, until 9 or 10 in the evening. The result of this is that I can't go shopping in the cheap stores I like to frequent, and also when I get home I'm super hungry and want something immediately. A sad state indeed, but it should improve as the school year begins again and I recover the semblance of a schedule.
Enough gripping though. This is a food blog not a complaining blog, and I write today to report on progress in the battle between math and food. I today, due to hunger, cheapness, a desire to cook, and a bag of eggplants from Chinatown, decided to do some morning cooking. As my parents were visiting this weekend I ended up wandering with them down to Chinatown. There is a very strong magnetic force between me and the outdoor markets along the Manhattan bridge, so once I was within a few blocks I couldn't fight the attraction. Having only seven dollars in my wallet I needed to be careful. After surveying the deals I bought 3lbs of leeche nuts for $3, 2 lbs of eggplant for $1, 10 plums for $1, 2 lbs of Chinese broccoli for $1 and an ample amount of garlic for my last dollar.
My morning task was to make use of all of the non-fruit ingredients, plus some leftover carrots from a previous Chinatown trip. The first project was to make eggplant parmigiana. This was inspired by a friend who mentioned that he had made this a few days ago and it had been really good. I was dealing with Chinese eggplants which are long and skinny, so I sliced them at a pretty sharp diagonal to yield large enough pieces. These went into a drainer with a lot of salt and dessicated for about an hour. More on this in a moment.
While the eggplant was loosing water weight I decided to make use of the Chinese broccoli and prepare a dish which is a mix between something my mom loves to make with any dark leafy green, and a dish which I had prepared for me when I was visiting with a professor in California earlier in the summer. The general idea is to cook the green with some garlic, ginger, raisin, hot pepper, and soy sauce until it is nice and tender. It works best to use a little oil and cook the non-greens for a minute and then to add the tougher, stems of the greens, and a few minutes later the leaves. The cooked out liquid and soy sauce makes a nice thin liquid. Along with the cooked greens I toasted some pine nuts and then grated some parmigiana cheese. These are for sprinkling over the greens. Finally, a great way to serve this is to cook some soba noodles and in a bowl put a base of the soba, then the greens, nuts and cheese and some of the liquid. This constituted the second dish I prepared this morning.
But back to the eggplant. Once enough water was drawn out I wanted to bread and fry the pieces. My technique here was lacking, but due to the power of cast iron it ended up alright. Ideally one would pat the pieces dry and then dredge in flour and then fry in a heavy skillet with some oil. I guess I forgot to pat dry, because the flour got pretty clumpy when I was handling it. None-the-less the breaded eggplant still managed to get nice and browned. All the meanwhile I had been preparing a simple tomato sauce from crushed garlic, diced onion and pepper (hot and green) and crushed tomatoes which simmer for 20 minutes of so. Part of the sauce went in the bottom of a large rectangular glass pan, then a portion of the eggplant, a portion of slice mozzarella, some more sauce, some more eggplant, some more mozzarella, some more sauce and finally some grated parmigiana. Sounds like a lot of layering, but I imagine it doesn't actually matter. I baked this for about 25 minutes, or how ever long it took me to clean up from all of the cooking. Turned out pretty good in the end.
The third dish, which has gotten lost in the narration, was a quinoa recipe suggested in the comments of an earlier post on quinoa. I've made it before and enjoyed it, and this time it turned out just as well. I'll leave it to the interested reader to track down the old post (hint: just search for quinoa on my blog).
In any case, I'm happy to say that I'm back in my apartment with my trusty cast iron, so there should be plenty to post about. Also, at some point I will need to give my culinary opinion about food I eat during my travels this summer. Preview: I ate a lot of dried and smoked fish when in Prague since everything else is meat.
Enough gripping though. This is a food blog not a complaining blog, and I write today to report on progress in the battle between math and food. I today, due to hunger, cheapness, a desire to cook, and a bag of eggplants from Chinatown, decided to do some morning cooking. As my parents were visiting this weekend I ended up wandering with them down to Chinatown. There is a very strong magnetic force between me and the outdoor markets along the Manhattan bridge, so once I was within a few blocks I couldn't fight the attraction. Having only seven dollars in my wallet I needed to be careful. After surveying the deals I bought 3lbs of leeche nuts for $3, 2 lbs of eggplant for $1, 10 plums for $1, 2 lbs of Chinese broccoli for $1 and an ample amount of garlic for my last dollar.
My morning task was to make use of all of the non-fruit ingredients, plus some leftover carrots from a previous Chinatown trip. The first project was to make eggplant parmigiana. This was inspired by a friend who mentioned that he had made this a few days ago and it had been really good. I was dealing with Chinese eggplants which are long and skinny, so I sliced them at a pretty sharp diagonal to yield large enough pieces. These went into a drainer with a lot of salt and dessicated for about an hour. More on this in a moment.
While the eggplant was loosing water weight I decided to make use of the Chinese broccoli and prepare a dish which is a mix between something my mom loves to make with any dark leafy green, and a dish which I had prepared for me when I was visiting with a professor in California earlier in the summer. The general idea is to cook the green with some garlic, ginger, raisin, hot pepper, and soy sauce until it is nice and tender. It works best to use a little oil and cook the non-greens for a minute and then to add the tougher, stems of the greens, and a few minutes later the leaves. The cooked out liquid and soy sauce makes a nice thin liquid. Along with the cooked greens I toasted some pine nuts and then grated some parmigiana cheese. These are for sprinkling over the greens. Finally, a great way to serve this is to cook some soba noodles and in a bowl put a base of the soba, then the greens, nuts and cheese and some of the liquid. This constituted the second dish I prepared this morning.
But back to the eggplant. Once enough water was drawn out I wanted to bread and fry the pieces. My technique here was lacking, but due to the power of cast iron it ended up alright. Ideally one would pat the pieces dry and then dredge in flour and then fry in a heavy skillet with some oil. I guess I forgot to pat dry, because the flour got pretty clumpy when I was handling it. None-the-less the breaded eggplant still managed to get nice and browned. All the meanwhile I had been preparing a simple tomato sauce from crushed garlic, diced onion and pepper (hot and green) and crushed tomatoes which simmer for 20 minutes of so. Part of the sauce went in the bottom of a large rectangular glass pan, then a portion of the eggplant, a portion of slice mozzarella, some more sauce, some more eggplant, some more mozzarella, some more sauce and finally some grated parmigiana. Sounds like a lot of layering, but I imagine it doesn't actually matter. I baked this for about 25 minutes, or how ever long it took me to clean up from all of the cooking. Turned out pretty good in the end.
The third dish, which has gotten lost in the narration, was a quinoa recipe suggested in the comments of an earlier post on quinoa. I've made it before and enjoyed it, and this time it turned out just as well. I'll leave it to the interested reader to track down the old post (hint: just search for quinoa on my blog).
In any case, I'm happy to say that I'm back in my apartment with my trusty cast iron, so there should be plenty to post about. Also, at some point I will need to give my culinary opinion about food I eat during my travels this summer. Preview: I ate a lot of dried and smoked fish when in Prague since everything else is meat.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)