Posts tagged ‘garlic’

We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog posts due to illness. My sinuses are so clogged I feel removed from myself; kind of  like the omniscient narrator of my own life.

Danielle stumbled into her kitchen after a day of work, searching for something edible. She stared into the cold light of the near-empty fridge with glassy Muppet sized eyes and sneezed for the umpteenth time. Being sick sucks, she thought, and chicken soup is overrated. Her taste buds had the strength of  a Sprint cellphone signal so she decided on something intense, spicy and garlicky. While the fridge offered little more than a few cloves a garlic, ginger root, tofu, and a handful of mushrooms, the freezer held a pleasant surprise–a bag of frozen shrimp. Finally, a bottle of Sriracha sauce offered spicy salvation.

Oddly enough, this thrown together meal was one of the best I have cooked in a long time. The ginger and garlic opened up my palate, allowing me to really taste the shrimp and mushrooms which lightly caramelized and added more flavor to the pan. Even the tofu tasted good! Because I am a heat fiend, I Jackson Pollock’d the Sriracha sauce over all the ingredients before giving it all one last stir. Next time I’ll toast some sesame seeds to top it. But for now, here’s my simple recipe to blaze through an early spring cold.

>> Click here to get the full spicy garlic ginger shrimp recipe. >>

A good pork tenderloin is something special. It’s perfect for a small dinner party or a romantic Saturday night at home with your sweetie. You can quickly season it with salt, pepper, and a few herbs before popping it in the oven and it will be delicious. If you plan ahead, you should marinate it overnight in soy sauce, chopped garlic, and grated ginger. Either way, the prep is simple, but the trick is getting the temperature just right. You can cook it just 2 or 3 minutes too long and the dryness will set it. If you do, all is not lost, because you can always make a quick sauce to compensate with the pan drippings and a bit of flour or cornstarch, but pork tenderloin is best enjoyed when it has cooked just a minute past the pinkness.

The obvious solution is a meat thermometer. Ideally, the pork is perfect when the internal temperature is between 140-160 degrees F. Ideally. I only recently purchased a meat thermometer and found it to be less accurate than my previous and recommended indicator for achieving the perfect pork tenderloin—bacon. Wrap your roast in strips of bacon, stick it in the oven at 400 degrees F and leave it there until the bacon is well cooked and just starting to get crispy.  When I used the meat thermometer, I found the tenderloin to still be frighteningly pink inside, even as the thermometer confirmed the proper temperature. The bacon has never lied.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to eat meat more responsibly and avoid the factory-farmed stuff as much as possible. If you live in New York, you can easily find local, organic pork at many of the greenmarkets around the city (click to find one near you) or at Dicksons Farmstand Meats in Chelsea Market. For those beyond our little island, check out Eden Farms, as they have distributors all around the country.

Without further ado, here’s my very best recipe for the perfect pork tenderloin:

• one pork tenderloin
• 4 slices of bacon
• one stick of salted butter
• 4 springs of rosemary
• 2 cloves of garlic, roasted in their skins

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Create a rosemary compound butter by mixing a stick of butter, 2 cloves of roasted garlic, and the chopped leaves of 2 sprigs of rosemary. Combine everything together in a food processor (or just grab a fork and work out your low-lying hostility) and slather it all over your tenderloin. Wrap the bacon slices around the buttered tenderloin and place it in a baking pan with the two remaining rosemary branches. Cook until the bacon starts to crisp. (Approximately 35 minutes.)

In the unlikely event that you have leftovers, you should wrap the unsliced pork with the rosemary branches in foil. It will taste even better the next day. Slice it thinly while still cold and make yourself a sandwich to bring to work for lunch.

Related: when the weather’s not sub-zero and you’re ready to grill, you can also make a perfect spice-rubbed tenderloin.

I hate to use this term–but I recently hosted a semi-homemade dinner party.  I had just a few people over for dinner on Wednesday night, but didn’t want to do too much cooking because a) it was my birthday and b) it’s hot as frick.   Hence, I turned to El Rey de Pollo.

El Malecon is a Washington Heights institution and a foodie fave. It’s been written about on a million food blogs and was prominently featured in Gourmet two years ago. Fortunately, the King of Chicken hasn’t let the attention get to his head. Located right next to the George Washington Bridge Bus terminal, it’s open from 7am to midnight and always packed. Given the large Dominican community in Washington Heights, we don’t lack for good chicken. Yet, Malecon’s chicken really is the best.

First of all, the chicken itself is lean, tender, and moist. (It’s a quality bird.) The skin is slowly blackened on rotisserie spits to crispy, non-fatty perfection. The final addition is Malecon’s signature green sauce—a deceptively simple combination of lime juice and garlic. The cost of three chickens, a giant order of fried sweet plantains, and an avocado salad was a mere $34. And they delivered it right to my door. You know how people often say things like, “I feel like I was born in the wrong time”? Well, I never say that. I was born in the right time. A time with air conditioning, salad spinners, and delivery.

From my own kitchen I added sweet corn, microwaved for six minutes inside the husks and served with  chili-lime compound butter and cotija cheese. Never able to stray too far from things Italian, I also served Falanghina wine from Campania in glasses filled with peaches. [Co-Editor Casey notes that though Danielle omitted the cayenne from the butter recipe in deference to the more, shall we say, faint of heart among us, she served it on the side to dust on top of the corn and cotija cheese. A perfect compromise and a most excellent birthday!]

Welcome to Well-Stocked, a regular series on items that everyone should be keeping in the pantry and why they’re so multitalented. I’m starting out with compound butter, a freezer staple that takes a minimal amount of work to make but will pay off handsomely for months to come (sometimes years if you look at what’s in my own freezer!).

Compound butter is one of my go-to solutions for nights when we’re low on groceries and I’m trying to stretch things out with a basic grain or wondering how to cook a piece of fish for myself. It’s got all your great seasonings and fats rolled into one, so you don’t have to spend the time chopping and building a sauce on a weeknight.

You don’t really need a specific recipe for compound butter – it’s really just a stick of room-temperature butter mashed together with whatever herbs or flavors you happen to have around, then rolled into a log and frozen. But here are a few of my favorites:

Garlic-Rosemary Butter

• 1 stick softened butter
• 1 head garlic
• 1 small shallot, finely chopped
• olive oil
• 2-3 sprigs rosemary, finely chopped
• salt to taste

Roast the garlic, sprinkled with olive oil and salt and wrapped in foil, in a 400-degree oven for about 20 minutes or until it is brown and soft. This is perfect to do in a toaster oven or on your grill (it will likely take less time on the grill) or while you’re cooking something else in the oven so you won’t have to waste time and energy heating up the kitchen for one little head of garlic. When it’s cool enough to handle, squeeze the cloves out of the husks.

Saute the shallot until soft but not brown, remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.

Process all ingredients in a food processor or mash by hand until well incorporated. Refrigerate until firm enough to hold its shape, then spoon out onto a piece of waxed paper and roll into a log, twisting the ends to get any extra air out. Wrap that log in foil and place in the freezer. Just slice off as much as you need – this one is devastatingly good with your summer beans, an easy topping for pan-roasted cod, and of course makes some awesome garlic bread if you have a loaf of ciabatta.

Bagna Cauda Butter

• 1 stick softened butter
• 4 cloves chopped garlic
• 3 anchovies, finely minced (I like the ones packed in oil with red pepper flakes for extra heat)
• olive oil
• salt to taste

Saute the garlic and anchovies in olive oil over low heat until the anchovies dissolve and the garlic is golden. Let cool to room temperature.

Combine the garlic/anchovy mixture with the butter and salt in a food processor or mash by hand…. follow all the directions above. I like this one over linguine and clams a la Michael Chiarello.

Chili-Lime Butter

• 1 stick softened butter
• 1 lime, zested and juiced
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 small shallot, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon honey
• salt to taste

Combine all ingredients as above. I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t want to slather this all over grilled corn, but it’s also amazingly tasty melted over popcorn or on cornbread.

I could keep going – it would be so easy to do an Indian-spiced butter if you’re a curry fanatic, or even an Old Bay butter to keep in your beach house all summer for shrimp, crabs and clams. Leave your ideas in the comments, and we’ll add to the compound butter library….

One thing I’ve learned from my CSA farm share—organic vegetables go bad fast.  It makes me wonder if the folks over at Whole Paycheck are playing fast and loose with the organic label.  (I tease because I’m jealous. Their produce section makes me happier than Bloomingdale’s.) So when I bought a big, beautiful bunch of cilantro at Saturday’s farmer’s market, I knew I needed to do something delicious with it before the end of the weekend.

I improvised with a few basic ingredients to create an Asian inspired cilantro pesto.  What I love about pesto is that you don’t have to be to precise about your ingredients. Like garlic? Add a ton of garlic! Add cheese to make it creamy or more oil so that it soaks well into sandwich bread. It’s done best when suited to your taste.  My taste buds craved the perfect balance of brightness and heat.  Out came my very handy mini-chopper and in went:

• a handful of peanuts
• the whole darned bunch of cilantro leaves
• juice of half a lime
• about a tablespoon of sesame oil
• a clove of raw garlic. Back off vampire trend!
• Finally, a few splashes of Sriracha.

I served my pesto over Japanese wheat noodles. They have a nice bite that pairs well with the boldness of these flavors. Now tell me your pesto secrets!