Picadillo con Arroz

I’ve had a bad day… Work is uber stressful, Lee is working the graveyard shift all week (Circadian is all off), and to top it all off, the LivingSocial deal I bought for vacation closed its booking period… one measly day before I booked. So a fully paid LivingSocial deal is going down the drain, all $375 of it. It’s not that it isn’t partially my fault, but c’mon! What is it, Tuesday the 13th? We, Cubans, don’t “celebrate” Friday the 13th, instead we fear “martes 13″. That being said, comfort food was in order tonight. I won’t make it on a tilapia filet and a salad. I need something that screams home, warmth, comfort, and my mom when she’s quiet. Ha!

I needed Picadillo con Arroz.  STAT.

I didn’t grow up on mac & cheese or fried chicken (not that I don’t love these, helloooo crispy skin!), I grew up on lentejas (lentil “stewp”, so good) and bistec de palomilla (thin sirloin steaks, YUM!). Being that I’m walking around with my Money Bags PJ Pants and a mug of wine (uh-oh) moping about the Coconut Grove hotel  I won’t see (new “unicorn“, perhaps?)… I needed some TLC.

To the kitchen!

Picadillo con Arroz

Ingredients:
1 lb lean ground beef (93/7 mix)
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 red onion, diced
1 TSP thyme
1 TSP paprika
1 can (8 oz) tomato sauce
1 TSP tomato paste
olive oil
salt & pepper to taste
water

Directions:
Start by making your side dish. I always pair my picadillo with a little dome of white rice to balance the richness of the beef. I make my rice in a rice maker, so it’s going while I cook. I highly recommend you get one if you don’t already have one. You can even use it to steam veggies!
Once that’s done, heat up a large saute pan or skillet on medium heat. Add your olive oil and wait till it gets shimmery and dimpled. Once your oil is hot, add your diced onions and some salt to help sweat the onions. Cook these until they have begun to caramelize a bit, this is the foundation for that deep, rich flavor. Once the onions are a bit caramelized, add the garlic.

Never keep garlic on heat for too long because it will burn and turn bitter. Once it gets fragrant and you smell that garlic-y perfume, time for the next step. Quickly add you spices (thyme, paprika, cracked pepper, and more salt to taste) and mix. Then, add a 8 oz. can of tomato sauce and refill the can with water to get some liquid in the pan (and the rest of that sauce out of the can)!

You can substitute water for chicken stock, vegetable stock, beef stock, anything you’d like. Once you’ve reached this step, you’ve assembled your sofrito.

Latin cuisine often uses a sofrito as the base for a dish, whether it be a stew or a beef dish. There are several variations, but for Cuban cooking you need onions, garlic, and tomato sauce.

So, now that you’ve got your delicious sofrito going that you almost want to eat it all up with a nub of bread, you have to let it SIT. Let it simmer on low heat. The longer you can let it sit the better, but if you’re in a hurry to get dinner on the table, crank up the heat to medium and let it reduce until it gets thick and delicious looking.

Once you’ve reached that stage, add your lean beef. Break the ground beef into pieces so that it melts into the sofrito quicker. If the pan looks a bit dry, don’t worry about it. The meat will begin to let out its juices and will incorporate into the sauce. Stir the meat around with the sofrito to get even coating and heat on all the meat. Once the meat is browned, let it simmer in the sauce till the liquid reduces and it looks almost like a thick meat sauce. At this point, you can de-glaze the pan with some dry wine to get an even richer flavor in the meat.

To de-glaze with wine, please pull the pan away from the flame, add the alcohol and then return to the heat. You do NOT want to burn your eyebrows off to a stove fire.

Once it’s all cooked, get a nice scoop of white rice onto your place, create a little well inside the middle, and scoop in all that meaty richness.

You will not miss your boxed mac & cheese tonight.

All the best,
-L

Salmon with Spinach and Cheese Pasta

Salmon was, for a long time, quite the unicorn in our household. The Unicorn story will have to wait for another day, but I’m sure you’ll gather enough information on it as we go on. As my 10th grade English teacher would yell at us, “CONTEXT CLUES!”

It all started with a promise, long long ago, from my father to my bottomless pit. A promise of a grilled salmon steak so succulent and tasty, you would suck your fingers off. A promise made almost five years ago. A promise never kept.

My poor Lee waited… and waited. We visited top-notch restaurants throughout those five years, and Lee never wavered. Lee had promised himself to my dad, and for my dad he would wait. We visited my parents often throughout those years, and somehow, the salmon got away every time.

I mean, a guy can only wait for so long, right? A man has needs! That’s what I hear, anyway…

So, finally came the day when he could wait no longer. And as these things usually go, your first time ain’t so great. I had heard a tip about marinading the it in Italian Dressing. It was mediocre at best.

So for his second time, I just shot from the hip. I just did what I thought would work. I’m sure he craved a cigarette after that meal. He is a sucker for anything in a cream sauce…

Salmon with Spinach and Cheese Pasta
serves 2

Marinade for Salmon:

3 garlic cloves, minced
juice of 1 lemon
1 TBSP ground sea salt
1 TBSP cracked pepper
1 TSP sesame oil
dash of paprika (optional)
2 salmon filets, halved

Pasta Side:

3 TBSP butter
2 TBSP flour
3 Cups fresh spinach
1 TBSP basil, julienned
1 Cup whole milk
1 Cup chicken stock
1/2 Cup shredded Pecorino cheese
1 lb linguine pasta
salt & pepper to taste

Directions:
Start by prepping your marinade. Mix all the marinade ingredients (garlic, lemon juice, salt, pepper, oil, paprika) into a bowl. Once the marinade is well mixed, add your filets. Coat the filets in the marinade as much as possible. One of my favorite tricks is to use a smaller bowl for marinading so that my marinade covers as much of the protein as possible instead of spreading down the bottom of the bowl. With 4 fish filets, you can use a soup bowl and get the filets almost fully submerged into the marinade. More flavor and less marinade required! Let the filets sit in the marinade for about 2-4 hours. Salmon is a dense fish, so it needs its time to absorb flavor.

Next, start on your pasta side. Begin by bringing a skillet or saute pan to medium high heat. Add your butter and let it melt and brown a bit. Once browned, add your flour and mix. You want a thin roux, not something too thick and globby. We don’t want the pasta sauce to overpower the dish. Cook the roux for about 5 minutes to get the flour taste out, then add you milk and your chicken stock.

It’s gonna look like a mess, you didn’t screw it up.

(Now’s a good time to get that pasta water boiling in a big stock pot with some oil and lots of salt.)

The roux will glob up and separate from the liquid. Don’t worry, just keep stirring and try to break up the pieces of roux with a whisk to begin to incorporate the roux into your liquids. Once it’s all mixed, you should have a silky smooth sauce, that doesn’t taste like much… for now…

(Now’s a good time to get that pasta in the stock pot. Now’s also a good time to get your salmon out of the marinade onto an oiled non-stick pan at medium heat.)

Now add everything else. Your basil, spinach, cheese, salt, pepper, and any other spices or herbs you’d like to include. The cheese will have a good bit of salt, so wait till your cheese has melted to add salt. Always taste your food as you go, it’s always easy to add salt… not really to take away. Mix the sauce, and keep the pan at a low heat, you don’t want to scald the milk and have the sauce stick to the bottom of your pan.

(While your sauce is bubbling away, make sure you get good caramelization on your fish. Don’t keep turning it around over and over. Set it on the pan, and let it do its thing. Once you can see the edges browning, turn it. This will give you a nice moist center that is perfectly cooked.)

If your pasta is done (and you have space in your saute pan), take it out of the pot and into the pan. You want to mix it with the sauce while the pasta is al dente so that it will absorb some of that sauce as well. Toss it all together (don’t worry about some pasta water getting into your sauce. It adds flavor and some of the starch from your pasta; so while it adds liquid, it also thickens. Boom.

If your fish is done, set it aside while you plate. Lay a bed of the pasta down, and top it with your filet.

I’ll be impressed if you make it out of the kitchen with this one…

 

To first times, and catching those unicorns…

BON APPETIT!
-L

Mustard and Bay Leaf Brine

Hello out there!

While I have been missing in action, I’ve been thinking…
Food is an expression of who we are at the current moment. What we eat, what we make, what we crave, it all speaks to our nature.

That being said, what does say about me if I have a brined chicken baking in the oven and a slice of reheated pizza on my lap (and Boardwalk Empire re-runs on TV)?

I think it says “This chick’s into indulgence.” Yeah, I’d have to say that’s true. So I’m going to share my delicious chicken brine recipe, inspired by Thomas Keller’s Lemon Brine for fried chicken .

Mustard & Bay Leaf Brine

Ingredients:
2 TBSP mustard seed
5 cloves of garlic, smashed
2 bay leaves
1 TSBP red-pepper flakes
2 C sugar
2 C salt
1 gal water

Directions:

Fill a stock pot with water (about 1 gal of water) and set to boil. Add all ingredients to pot (salt, sugar, red pepper flakes, mustard seed, bay leaves, garlic) and cover to boil. Cook liquid until the water is a yellow mustard color and fragrant. Feel free to taste the water to adjust seasonings. Boil till the liquid reduces by half. Once reduced, let it cool (or boil longer and add ice to bring to room temperature). Once cooled, submerge chicken, turkey, pork, even fish into a large container and let brine for 24 hrs or more.

Here’s my brined chicken out of the oven!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Labor Day weekend, everyone!

Cranberry Orange Sparkler

I’m an excited kind of girl. One can say that I like to live looking towards the future. While it makes me intrinsically optimistic, it sometimes means… that I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing in the present.

Hence my fatal cooking flaw: I don’t fully read recipes before I start cooking.

For example:
“Oh, I was supposed to let the butter come to room temp. Damn.”
“Oh, I was supposed to add one egg at a time. Damn.”
“OH! I was supposed to cook the sugar before adding the cream. I just made completely unusable hot cream with sugar. DAMN!”

:sigh: I know, it’s a very big problem!

This just happened, while I re-read one of my “unicorn” recipes from Smitten Kitchen (the “Unicorns” story will be for another day). Deb makes awesome food (and has the cutest baby boy!); food that a girl who isn’t afraid of eating would enjoy. And such was the feature on this particular post, the cranberry syrup. “FOOD?” Yes, syrup is food in my world. Deb describes the multiple uses of fruit syrups, and why it’s so cool to make your own! So I decided to go for it… except, I didn’t re-read the recipe before I started cooking.

Here we go again.

“Oh, I was supposed to melt the sugar before adding the cranberries & water? Damn.”

Luckily, I didn’t screw up… this time.

The cranberries suddenly started to bleed their wonderful red hue into the sugar and water, and the whole apartment smelled like Christmas. I used the syrup to make some “sparklers”. Yum.

Cranberry Orange Sparklers

Recipe:
2C orange juice
2C sparkling water
4TSP cranberry syrup (recipe below)

Add 2 teaspoons of syrup to the bottom of your glasses (2 is just to get a good taste of the fruit but not too much sweetness, add to taste). Then add 1 cup of orange juice to glass, and top with sparkling water to the rim (I had pomegranate sparkling water at home, you can use whichever you like, or even some champagne and make it a snazzy mimosa!). Play with the proportions of the drink to taste.

And now for the star of the show… may I present you with…

Cranberry Syrup
from Smitten Kitchen

Recipe:
1/3C sugar
3/4C cranberries (fresh or thawed frozen) (I used bagged Ocean Spray)
1/2C water

How you should make your syrup:
Cook sugar in a dry 1 1/2-quart heavy saucepan over moderate heat, undisturbed, until it begins to melt. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally with a fork or flat whisk, until sugar is melted and turns a deep golden caramel. Tilt pan and carefully add cranberries and water (caramel will harden and vigorously steam). Simmer over moderately low heat, stirring, until caramel is completely dissolved, then pour syrup through a very fine sieve into a heatproof bowl, pressing hard on solids. Let cool.

How I made my syrup (I recommend Deb’s method):

Add all ingredients into a pot over medium heat and let come to a simmer. Lower heat to medium low and let fruit mixture cook down until fruit is soft and mixture is thick enough to coat a spoon. Pour mixture into a sieve with cheesecloth lining the inside and let drain. To aid the process, pick up the corners of the cheesecloth and slowly wring out the liquid over a bowl (this will burn your hands, use a sieve). Let cool before using.

Follow any of Deb’s suggestion for usage of this syrup. Spoon it over ice cream or yogurt, or spoon it straight into your mouth!

Enjoy!

All the best!
-L

UPDATE: The syrup gets a little lumpy when it comes out of the fridge, this could have something to do with the “method” I used to make it. I spooned some into some Perrier and it sank right to the bottom. I suggest letting the syrup come to room temp before using to ensure it has the right consistency.

Cheesy Broccoli Rice

Please don’t say it.

I would rather rip an eyelid than attempt to conjure an answer to this question.

Please, don’t ask me…

“What do you want for dinner?”
(insert sighs, gasps, sobs, or expletives… any of these will do)

This question has often thrown me in for a tizzy (understatement!). Where do you begin with such a question? You search cravings, the fridge, your memory for food commercials seen in the past 48 hours, blogs, apps, ANYWHERE!

Then the following:

“babe, let’s just order a pizza”
::sigh::

I just hate throwing in the towel like that! But, when it’s 10:21pm, still haven’t eaten, and The League is about to come on, it’s time to make an executive decision.

Delivery wins once again.

For days like that, I have this. DON’T GIVE IN!

Cheesy Broccoli Rice
(Asiago Cheese Rice with Roasted Broccoli)

Have leftover rice from another meal?
Have some veggies in the fridge begging for a chance to shine?
This is for you!

Recipe:

2C leftover white or brown rice
1/2TBSP butter
1/2TBSP flour
1C heavy cream
1TBSP italian seasoning (dried sage, thyme, rosemary, basil)
1TBSP salt (more or less depending on your preference)
1TSP pepper (to taste)
1/2C cheese (I used Asiago; you can use Parmesan, Fontina, Gruyere, whichever you prefer)
1 head of broccoli (approx. 2 cups of broccoli florets)
olive oil

Directions:

If you don’t have leftover rice, make 2 cups of rice (if you haven’t tried brown rice, this is a good way to get in some healthy whole grains!).

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Prep your broccoli by cutting the thick stalks down to the florets. Quickly wash your broccoli (don’t let it sit in the water, it will begin to lose nutrients) and pat dry. (You don’t want your broccoli to steam in the oven, you want it to roast and caramelize giving it great flavor.) Season with salt and pepper to taste, drizzle with good olive oil, and toss to coat. Put in the oven for about 20 minutes, but begin checking around the 12-13 minute mark.

To make the cheese sauce, start with a béchamel base. To make béchamel cook equal parts butter and flour in a saucepan to make a roux. Melt the 1/2 TBSP of butter in a saucepan on medium heat, then add 1/2TBSP of flour and stir. The result will be a thick paste. Let it cook for a few minutes to cook out the raw flour taste. Then add the cream (if you don’t have cream, you can use milk or half-and-half) and whisk to remove any lumps. Once cream is incorporated and simmering, flavor and season to taste. Add seasoning, salt, pepper to taste. Once incorporated, slowly add cheese and whisk until melted. If the sauce gets too thick, just add more liquid (water is fine) to thin out.

In a large bowl, add some sauce, serving of rice, and serving of broccoli. Mix with large spoon to coat and serve. Top with extra cheese, a squirt of lemon, and pair it with a pan-fried egg, and you’re golden!

Enjoy!!
Sorry for the crummy photos, hope to get a better setup/camera soon.
-L

so… here goes another food blog

Well, I’m here to make a fool out of myself (a skill I have very well mastered). I am here to chronicle my trials and tribulations on this crazy e-world we live in. I do hope to posts some successes, and hope you all will enjoy the ride. I hope to be able to convince (I’m not interesting enough to inspire anyone… yet!) you all out there to try some new things. Maybe a Brussels sprout, maybe bungee jumping; maybe I should have someone convince me to do that one myself.

Regardless, I am here to voice what my twenty-something life is like, in the kitchen and out.

I look forward to spending many more nights off of Facebook, and on here sharing my perspectives with you all.

Welcome, and bon appetit!

-L