Cooking on Orange Street: Beef Stroganoff

Beef stroganoff somehow felt right the other night -- something homey and filling. I was flying out to California the next day, and there was too much on my mind. I just wanted to be comforted. In fact, Chef K was incredibly kind and took this on solo that night, so I could have time to pack and take care of everything else I needed to do. Consequently, I don't have that many details on how this was made, but I do have the picture. :) Indeed, it was very comforting.

Cooking on Orange Street: Pounded Sirloin with Roasted Potatoes and a Vegetable Medley

This is another one of those meals that's a good one to keep in your back pocket when you don't have a lot in the fridge, yet you don't want to go out and spend a ton of money on new supplies, either. For this dish, we got a pretty ordinary-looking package of sirloin at Gristede's (or "Greedy's," as we usually call it -- a place we try to avoid patronizing), which with a little effort became quite delicious.

To prepare the beef, Chef K first trimmed and cut the sirloin so there were four pieces total. Then he seasoned them and sandwiched the pieces, two at a time side by side, between pieces of saran wrap and pounded them thin with the bottom of a small pan. The pieces were cooked in the pan until just brown on the outside, leaving the inside a tender medium rare.

For the sides, we sauteed cherry tomatoes, asparagus and assorted other vegetables, and roasted potato wedges in a marinade of leftover salad vinaigrette, which believe it or not, gave them the yummiest mustardy-vinegary taste (yay for recycling!).

Cooking on Orange Street: Vodka Watermelon Slushies

So this isn't "cooking" per se, but I must say I very much enjoyed making these vodka watermelon slushies the other week -- they're easy to put together, and basically irresistible in this record-breaking heat we've been having in NYC. All you have to do is chop up some watermelon, liquefy it with a blender (hand-held is less of a pain), strain the results, ladle into a cup, and add ice and vodka.

Cooking on Orange Street: Stuffed Squash Blossoms with Shiitake Risotto and Heirloom Tomatoes

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, and boy is there a lot to catch up on! In particular, I'll probably be making a big announcement soon... but not yet.

First things first. The bounty of summer continues, and Chef K and I have made a few interesting things lately for the first time. (Or shall I say, I've had the opportunity to watch Chef K make a few interesting things and contribute from time to time when asked.)

Last summer I was so crestfallen when we bought squash blossoms not one, but two times and I watched them rot in the fridge as they got pushed to the back and we forgot about them. I vowed this wouldn't happen this year. So when squash blossoms reappeared at the market recently we snatched a bag and put them to use the very next day.

First Chef K improvised a pastry bag with this extra tip he had at home attached to a plastic sandwich baggie in order to stuff the flowers with a mix of turkey sausage and chevre...

Then he breaded them with a simple combo of egg and flour and threw them into a pan with oil...

Meanwhile, I worked on the risotto, mixing in carrots, onions and shiitake and stirring constantly just like they tell you to.

We cut up red and green heirloom tomatoes to finish off the dish. Voila, the pretty final product! It was quite tasty, too, I might add. :)

Cooking on Orange Street: Lemon Caper Chicken Pasta

Here's a quick, easy dinner we cooked up this past week when we got home late and didn't feel like ordering takeout:

Ingredients:

4 chicken thighs
A smattering of veggies like red pepper, (leftover) spring garlic, onion, scallion
1 can chicken stock
2 lemons
1 bottle small green olives
1 bottle capers
1 tbsp cornstarch
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Brown small chunks of chicken thigh meat in a large pot and remove quickly.
2. Saute the vegetables, except scallions, until softened.
3. Add chicken stock, olives and capers, then the browned chicken.
4. Add lemon juice.
5. Cook down stock for about 20 minutes, adding cornstarch to thicken sauce.
6. Add scallions and immediately serve over rice or pasta.

Cooking on Orange Street: Chinese-Style Boiled Peanuts

I've been looking forward to doing this post for a while. Boiled peanuts are something we absolutely love to make in the summer, thanks to an accidental discovery in Chinatown last year.

It's not uncommon for street vendors to sell roasted peanuts, but fresh peanuts are different. Just take a close look -- fresh peanuts are moist-looking and often a little dirty, like they've just been dug up from the ground. Some are even a bit green. Most unexpectedly, fresh peanuts have a vegetal, legume-y smell, like peas or beans. It's startling, for something we usually see so hard and brown.

There are a lot of recipes out there for boiled peanuts, especially Southern-style (I've yet to try), but here is what we do:

Ingredients (all measurements approximate):

2 lbs fresh peanuts
2 oz salt
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
2 whole star anise

1. Wash the peanuts of dirt and drain.
2. Place peanuts in a large pot and fill with water until peanuts are almost completely covered.

3. Add seasonings and bring to a boil (below, the star anise).

4. After boiling for 2-3 hours, remove from heat and place in fridge overnight (about 8 hours).

5. Shell and enjoy!

The result is addictive -- the taste savory and meaty, the texture soft. You can actually use a very similar seasoning mix (with a little sesame oil and rice wine) to make Chinese-style braised beef or pork (my all-time favorite dish), or even "tea eggs" (a traditional Chinese snack made from hard-boiling eggs in a mix of tea, salt and anise).

Just for kicks, check out this little peanut -- looks like a man! A reminder that peanuts, when not sorted in a factory, are varied and idiosyncratic:

Cooking on Orange Street: Seasoned Tofu with Garlic Scapes and Shiitake

Since we were going to be in Seattle for the July 4th weekend, Chef K and I made a special effort to clean out the fridge beforehand. Hence this improv dish I cooked up that actually turned out quite well.

A few weeks ago, we got garlic scapes at the market, mainly because I thought they looked super interesting. In reality, they are quite delicious as well, with a nice, mild garlic flavor. I cut these into 1-inch chunks, then sliced them as thinly as possible lengthwise, tossed in a pan with leftover shiitake and finally added sliced seasoned tofu and soy sauce, rice vinegar, salt and a touch of sambal, and served everything over fresh noodles from Chinatown.

Cooking on Orange Street: Peking Duck

Chef K was sooooo excited to try his hand at this Chinese classic. For two weeks in a row, we were denied fresh duck at the farmer's market -- first, because we passed up the duck to make chicken instead, and then the next week because we came too late in the day and they were sold out.

So when we finally got our hands on one, Chef K pounced and right away started brining it and prepping it for its two-day transformation into the dish we all love.

Since the idea of hanging it up overnight (the proper traditional way) made the professional in him queasy, he put the brined duck in the fridge for about 8 hours to dry out:

Then he roasted it and together we shredded it and set out the hoisin sauce, thinly sliced scallions and warmed buns. A definite treat!

Cooking on Orange Street: Smoked Trout Salad

When you have no idea what to have for dinner, just throw together odds and ends from your fridge -- sometimes the results are surprisingly good. Case in point: this smoked trout salad consisting of leftover smoked trout (from the farmer's market), lettuce, red pepper, tomato and green onion, with just a little fresh vinaigrette whipped up from extra virgin olive oil, dijon mustard, red and white wine vinegar, and seasonings.

Cooking on Orange Street: Turkey Sausage Pasta

When Chef K makes something particularly delicious that I can see us making over and over, I say, "Winner!!"

This turkey sausage pasta is definitely a winner. The sausage, like the roast chicken in the last post, was bought at the farmer's market. So simple and delicious.

Cooking on Orange Street: Roast Organic Chicken with Potatoes, Fava Beans and Shiitake Mushrooms

Now that it's summer, Chef K and I have been doing lots of cooking -- and I have quite the backlog of photos! Here is a roast chicken we did recently, with a side of roasted rosemary potatoes and sauteed fava beans and shiitake mushrooms. There are truly few things I love more than eating fava beans in the summer.

The chicken was purchased at the farmer's market and incredibly fresh, according to Chef K -- possibly killed no more than 48 hours before we bought it. After all the bones were taken out (hilarious-looking!),  the chicken was browned on the stove before being put in the oven in the same pan as the potatoes.

Cooking on Orange Street: Chinese Beef Stir-Fry

For dinner with mom, Chef K and I thought it would be nice to cook for her -- a first! As she napped on the couch, we schemed what would be easy yet delicious. In end, what else but Chef K's famed beef stir-fry! We've had it a bunch of times, and considering how easy it is, it's perfect for last-minute meals, whether you're by yourself or expecting guests.

For this dish, you basically need 1-1.25 pounds of beef sirloin, plus any of your favorite veggies. This particular time we used about 10 small mushrooms, one red pepper, a handful of snap peas and half an onion, plus garlic, ginger and one jalapeno for seasoning and scallions to garnish.

First, cut all the veggies. Then, cut sections of meat and pound them thin before cutting them into shreds. Marinate the shredded meat with soy sauce, cornstarch, rice wine vinegar, rice wine and a touch of sesame oil -- just enough so all the meat is coated. (The cornstarch here is key because it will keep the meat moist in the pan.) Stir-fry the veggies until almost done, then remove from the pan and replace with the beef. When the beef is almost done, put the veggies back in and add final seasonings such as the scallion and a touch of salt, lime juice and sambal (for an extra little kick in case the jalapeno wasn't enough, which that night, it wasn't). Result: deliciousness!

Cooking on Orange Street: Papaya, Mango and Peach Salsa

Here is another recent winner: fruit salsa. It all started when my aunt Josephine gave us two papayas at dinner. "What should we do with these things?" I wondered. I'm generally not a fan of sweet things with salty, but trust me, the fruit work perfectly with the avocado here, and nicely offset any type of lighter meat you might get.

Here is the salsa with some blackened chicken and chicken broth-infused rice pilaf...

...and here it is again with snapper a few days later. (The snapper is pan-fried with just olive oil, salt, pepper and a little oregano.)

Yum! As we made a lot of salsa, we even had it huevos-rancheros style with black beans, sunny-side up eggs, turkey sausages and English muffins for breakfast one morning. A very versatile side.

Cooking on Orange Street: Salmon and Shrimp Papardelle with Spring Vegetable Medley

So... I've been toying with the idea of launching a brand-new blog JUST about cooking. After all, I've amassed a ton of photos over the last few years and have always wanted to share them.

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.