Posts tagged ‘garlic’

Tomato sauce made from chopped raw tomatoes, crushed garlic, olive oil, and torn basil leaves is simply the easiest and most elegant dish for a late summer evening. When tomatoes and basil are in season, you almost owe it to them to prepare a dish that lets their freshness shine.

Truly, this is something that you can only enjoy in these parts for two to three weeks of the entire year. I’ve done this sauce with beefsteak tomatoes, plums and heirlooms. Surprisingly, heirlooms are too sour for the sauce, beefsteaks too, um…beefy, but plum and cherry tomatoes are just perfect. I just kissed the tips of my fingers.

That said, this is something I’ve made at least a dozen times and as I contemplated what to do with the nearly thirty tomatoes I received with this week’s CSA delivery, I decided to try something new. I wanted to push the sauce beyond mild and sweet and instead make it bold and hot. The answer was right under my nose…

>> How to heat up your raw tomato sauce, after the jump. >>

Want to meet your favorite Good. Food. Stories. editors up close and personal and sample some of our signature dishes? If you’re in New York this summer, you’re in luck, because we’ll be showcasing our favorite seasonal foods with locally-grown ingredients at the New York Botanical Garden’s Edible Garden.

On Sunday, August 1, Danielle and Casey will be demonstrating our famous Spaghetti Carbonara as we celebrate all that is good about garlic. And on Sunday, September 19, we’ll show you how to make a Roman gladiator salad with shaved fennel and oranges.

Cooking demonstrations are at 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm on both days, and we’d love to see familiar faces in the audience. Allow yourselves time to stroll through the NYBG’s 250 acres of more than a million plants; The Edible Garden itself has four (count ‘em, four) kitchen gardens—including a culinary herb garden curated by Martha Stewart!—and the Conservatory Container Garden, which helps all you small-spacers out with ideas for growing on your balconies and rooftops.

If you’re working on your own homesteader’s plot of land, home gardening demonstrations are happening each weekend too. Take a look through the complete schedule of events to see if anything else strikes your fancy, and if you buy tickets online, you’ll save $2 off each ticket with waived print-at-home fees. Plus, all proceeds benefit the Children’s Gardening Program.

The Edible Garden runs through October 17 at the New York Botanical Garden (directions here—easy as pie using Metro-North), but mark your calendars now for Sunday, August 1 and Sunday, September 19 at 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm. And bring your appetite.

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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 of 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!]