Tuna – Avocado Don

I’m having a lot of fun playing with the different flavours here. At home, I nearly always start dinner with three things: wine, butter, and garlic. It’s different here. Their staple flavours are: soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar, & sake, although miso and sesame oil often play into that.

I wanted to share dinner from last night with you. Jon always gives me funny looks for taking pictures in the kitchen, so I thought I should put them to good use.

We’ll call this Tuna – Avocado Don, and it was adapted from a cookbook I was reading in the bookstore. (don just means “rice bowl”)

Shopping list (serves 2):

• ~10oz of the best-looking tuna you can find. (I used a brick of blue fin (maguro).)
• 1 large, firm avocado
• 1/2 T lemon juice
• 1 T spicy something (I used house seasoning, but chili oil, tabasco, or sliced jalapeños would also work well.)
• 1 t extra virgin olive oil
• 1 t soy sauce (Japanese brands, like Kikoman, seem to be milder than the Chinese versions, like La Choy.)
• 3/4 t wasabi (if it was easier to find, you could also use horseradish for the same kick)
• 1 c rice (Italian risotto rice (arborio) works well in place of sushi rice because it’s also small and starchy)
• Nori (the toasted seaweed that goes around sushi), cut up into teeny-tiny strips
• sesame seeds

I had a lot of this on hand, but splurged on the tuna ($10). Dinner ended up being around $15 for both of us.

Once you’ve got all your ingredients, cooking rice and chopping into squares is about as complicated as it gets. As soon as you even think about starting dinner, get your rice maker going. Rice is the most time-consuming part of dinner. You should also pour yourself a glass of sake about now. White wine will do in a pinch, but let’s get authentic here, people!

1. Whisk the following in a large bowl: lemon juice, spicy, evoo, soy, wasabi
2. Chop your tuna and your avocado into equal sized squares, about a 1/2 inch big. Take caution not to shred your tuna – you spent a lot on that! Use a sharp chef’s knife and run it under water to clean it off before each new slice.

1. Gently toss the tuna & avocado with the wet ingredients, until they’re well coated.
2. Equally divide the mixture over two bowls of rice.
3. Top with nori (salty flavour) and sesame seeds (happy toasty flavour)

I love this dish because it’s flavourful, but really delicate. Japanese cooking doesn’t use a lot of big, bold flavours but instead relies on the tastes of a few high quality ingredients to really shine.

Lobster Carbonara

After the mushroom’ing adventure, I knew I wanted to make something that really highlighted the characteristics of lobster mushrooms.  How often would I have a pound on hand?

I did a bit of googling, and found out that they pair really well with eggs.  Because of this, a frittata is a really classic preparation for them.  I found a mushroom carbonara recipe from The Chubby Vegetarian and decide to ad lib off of that.

I should also note that we were staying at Heather & Tom’s house around this time, puppy sitting while they were at DisneyWorld.  This is Fifa, the adorable French Bulldog. Aside from her penchant for wanting to chase leaves at 1am, she was a spectacular roommate.

You’ll remember, this was the mushroom we’re working with:

We also want the following on hand:

• 4 cloves of garlic (minced)
• 1 shallot (cut up)
• 2 strips of Bacon (finely chopped)
• 1/2 cup wine (recipe called for white, but we were drinking pinot at the time)
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup of milk
• 1 tablespoons of olive oil
• 1 tablespoon of butter
• 8 ounces spaghetti
• parmesan cheese (to taste)

I washed my beast of a mushroom, and chopped it up into bite sized pieces.

Meanwhile, I’ve got my oil and butter melted in a pan on the stove.  To it, I’ll add the bacon, garlic, and the shallots.  The original recipe called for vegetarian bacon, and if you’re using that you’ll want to add it AFTER the mushroom mix. Let this cook on medium heat until the bacon’s crispy and the shallots are translucent. (maybe 10 minutes?)

It’s also worth saying that this recipe originally called for different types of mushrooms. There’s a real good chance that you’re not going to have a 1lb lobster mushroom sitting in your local supermarket, so feel free to improvise.

Toss your mushrooms in the shallot/bacon pan and let them go for about 15 minutes, or as long as it takes for them to cook down to about half their original size.  If they’re not letting out enough juice, and they start sticking to the bottom of the pan, just add a little bit of the wine that you’re drinking.  Stir a little bit, but for the most part, just leave them alone.

This might be a good time to pour yourself a glass of wine.  Jon and I were drinking Torii Mor that night – a vineyard that we’ll definitely check out on this month’s trip to the Wilamettee Valley.  The earthiness of oregon pinots seemed like a natural pair with the mushroom carbonara.

Start a pot of water boiling.

Okay. So at this point, you’ve got crispy bacon, garlic, shallots, and mushrooms in the pan.  They’ve reduced and caramelized for about 20 minutes.  Add your 1/2 c of wine to the pan, deglaze, and reduce to about half.  Spepper and taste, taste, taste.

As you remove your mushroom mixture from the heat, start cooking your pasta.  While the pasta’s cooking, whisk together your eggs and milk.  The heat of the pasta is what’s going to actually cook the eggs, which is kind of neat.

When the pasta is ready, remove from the water with tongs and put it straight on top of your mushroom mixture. Toss mushroom mixture and the cooked pasta together, and then pour the eggs & milk directly on top of the pasta. Toss the pasta in the pan until you notice that the eggs have set. You will know it when you see it. If you want the sauce to be more “saucy”, use some of the pasta water to loosen it up a bit.

Garnish with cheese.

A tasty morning

Jon’s been obsessing over biscuits and gravy lately, and I decided it was high time I learned how to make it.  After a quick trip to the store, I came home with enough ingredients for bloody marys for a month and some sausage. Turns out, it’s *really* easy to make white sausage gravy.  really not good for you, but whatever.

Fry 1 pound of lean sausage (like Jimmy Dean).  I decided that buying “reduced fat” sausage was a good idea, but after cooking it, I realized that you don’t get any fat drain off from reduced fat sausage.  Ugh. The base of white gravy is the sausage fat + flour, so I had to improvise and decided to make some bacon-swizzle sticks for our bloody marys.

After the sausage is cooked, move it to a paper towel + plate, cover and set aside.

You want about 4T fat.  How you get this is up to you. Since my sausage was woefully inadequate, i went with a combination of bacon fat and crisco. I could hear my arteries clogging, but hey.  Sometimes we do questionable things for the ones we love. By the way. Make sure you’re not using a non-stick pan. Two reasons: 1. you’ll want to use a wire whisk in the next step, and 2. you’ll want the stuck-to-the-bottom stuff.

About this time, you’ll want to put your biscuits in the oven.  Maybe next week I’ll be more Martha Stewarty, but for my first experiment with B&G, I didn’t want the potential to fail in two places. I opted for the pre-made crack-and-bake kind. You’ve got about 10 minutes on your biscuits.

You may also want to pour yourself a bloody mary at this point because the part where you can’t really leave the stove is about to start.

Add 4 T flour to your 4T fat. Mix mix mix.  You want it to brown, but not burn.

Slowly add 4 cups of room temperature skim milk to this. It’s going to look really thin, but that’s okay.  Once everything’s incorporated and all the browned bits are scraped up from the bottom, crank it up to medium high and let it boil.  After a boil (mixing the whole time!), turn the heat down to low so that the sauce thickens. Spepper. Taste, taste, taste.

This part should have taken about 10 minutes. When the timer goes off on your biscuits, turn off the heat but leave them in there until you’re ready to plate.

Split the biscuits in half, so you’ve got maximum absorbency area for the gravy.  Ladle. Eat. Enjoy.

This recipe was really basic, intentionally. Next week I think I’ll add some herbs and maybe a bit of spice.  I’ll also try the biscuits from scratch next time too. Wish me luck.

Good Eats

Hi Blog.

You’re neglected more than inner-city youth. And for that, I’m sorry.
Not sorry enough to really do anything about it, you know, but if there were a social reform initiative on the ballot, I would totally support it.

Anyhow. I just took my office plant to be re-potted (above) and picked up a new friend while I was there (below). I’m pretty excited about it. I’m not the best at keeping them alive all the time, but I really like having plants around.

Tonight j and i are going to the Sunset Supper at the Pike Place market. We’ve gone a couple times now, and we always have a spectacular time. After the market shuts down for the day, and the fruit and flower vendors pack up their wares, local restaurants and wine distributors take over. For one night, you have the opportunity to taste and sip among the swanky spots in town, in one spot.

The first year we went as budding culinarians, learning about things like Manchego and Dry Sodas. I love jon for his love of trying new things. The second year I may have stopped by the Champagne booth a few too many times, as I remember Perrier Jouet most clearly.

I look back at what I knew when I moved here and the things that I now hold most dear, and realize that I’ve been shaped pretty significantly by Seattle. Or perhaps that’s just a matter of “growing up”.

Red Wine Vinegar

Hat Tip to Andreas for pointing me to this resource that talks about making wine vinegar from leftover wine. It basically says you buy a vinegar starter, dump in a bunch of wine and let it site for 3 months while it forms this oozy, gelatinous protective coating. Oh, and don’t forget to feed the mother.

Red wine vinegar takes about 3 months to make, but white for some reason takes about twice that. I wonder if there’s any culinary benefit (aside from colour?) to using red vs. white wine vinegar. I’ve always substituted one for the other based on what was in my cabinet at the time.

This web site goes on to say that cheap zin, cabernet or merlot make fantastic starters for your vinegar (zin vin? hehe).

[note: photo above is courtesy of Gang of Pour]