But, somewhat fearing the effects of splitting my attention between two blogs, I've decided to keep the cooking stuff here with everything else, at least for the time being. If there is enough interest (and I have enough time), "Cooking on Orange Street" will become its own blog at some point.
Anyway, for my inaugural cooking post, I wanted to share not only one of the most delicious home-cooked meals I've had in recent memory, but also some of the home-cooking philosophy I've come to adopt through years of cooking on my own and, most recently, cooking with my BF, a professional chef. (The BF will hereby be known as "Chef K" -- hee hee!)
In the past, my cooking experience consisted mainly of what my wonderful grandmother taught me. As she was Buddhist, we would always make vegetarian food together. Even now, years later, I remember the days we would slowly make our way to Chinatown with the granny cart (ha ha, literally!) and pick up supplies. Later, in the Bronx kitchen with no AC, she would sit at the enamel-topped table as I stood by the stove, cooking from the blackened wok with no handle, and ever-so-gently give me directives like, "eggplants like oil" and "not so much salt for me!" In those days -- and for the frugal years afterward -- my repertory consisted of things like sauteed spinach with garlic, sauteed mushrooms, egg with scallion (a special treat), curry cauliflower with tomato, seasoned tofu with chives.
Then came a number of years when I expanded the repertory in a by-the-book manner, cooking primarily out of Everyday Food magazine. It was a definite change from the traditionalist "pinch of this, pinch of that" school of cooking I'd been raised in. In a strange way, I found a kind of freedom in measuring cups and tablespoons in set recipes, as if it represented independence from my childhood. It also represented a literal independence -- I was living by myself for the first time, cooking in a kitchen I had gutted and custom-designed.
Since meeting Chef K, things have changed once again, and I've come full circle back to instinctual cooking -- keeping it loose, never cooking from a recipe, working creatively with whatever happens to be in the fridge and cupboard. At the same time, I've picked up a pro's snippets of wisdom. Things like, you generally shouldn't wash mushrooms, because they will soak up the moisture and then go badly more quickly (a damp paper towel is fine, in case you were wondering). Maybe this is stuff that everyone knows, but I didn't. Chef K has taught me about different cuts of meat (always pointing out when the butchers mislabel them), how to debone chicken and fish (I almost fainted one time), how to cut vegetables "properly," how to plate things up so they look nice.
I probably won't be posting a whole lot of recipes (unless anyone asks), but I do hope you'll enjoy the photos and commentary...
Here is the salmon and shrimp papardelle with spring vegetables that we made recently. SO yummy!!! I highly recommend this dish. Five stars.
We bought a half pound of Alaskan wild salmon (Chef K is very particular about his salmon and detests the Atlantic variety because it's blander than the West Coast kind) and cut it into quarters. The salmon was seasoned with salt and pepper, then seared on each side for a few minutes before being popped into the oven at about 325 for a few more minutes. Same for the shrimp. For the veggies, we sauteed fresh peas (shelled), shiitake mushrooms, asparagus (Chef K cuts off the bottom third of all the stalks and runs the peeler over any particularly large stalks to ensure tenderness) and fava beans for a very short time, with salt, pepper and olive oil.
At the very end, add a little sambal and rice wine to taste, just to bring out the flavors. (I would go so far as to call sambal and rice wine Chef K's secret weapons, as he uses them just as frequently as salt and pepper!) The papardelle we got at Fairway. Voila, a delicious, healthy and beautiful meal.
No comments:
Post a Comment