cumin lamb stir fry/melted leeks

Sometimes it's good to make something a little different, and when you work until 6:00, it's good if that something different is also something EASY. That's where Mark Bittman comes in, with his seemingly endless supply of fast, cheap, tasty meals from all across the globe.

Nathan picked out this particular dish from Bittman's last Bitten column, in which the writer had compiled a list of his 25 favorite recipes published over the years. It's a damn good reference and I really should look to it more when trying to decide what to make.



I don't do a lot of stir frying, so that made this Asian inspired lamb dish a bit of a departure for me from the start. When I cook meat, it's more often than not on the bone, or cut into large steaks or filets. Here, the lamb shoulder is cut into cubes, which is a great way to cut down on cooking time in the evening.

So far so good, for sure, but fairly boring I'll admit. What makes this dish exciting is the bold flavors that come from toasted cumin seeds, scallions, cilantro and red chili pepper flakes. The lamb should marinate with the cumin and red pepper, garlic and soy sauce before being cooked briefly over high heat with the scallions. It tastes great over rice and is ready in minutes.



I served it with some leeks that I tried to caramelize. They were good, but Bittman's lamb was certainly the star.

corn pepper soup/tomato paella

Here's more of what I did with my late summer corn:


corn pepper soup

I made this back in September on a Friday night. Lauren and Hannah came over for dinner and I made this soup. I used homemade chicken stock and lots of corn, pepper and onions. I sauteed the peppers and onions, added the corn and stock and let it all simmer. I blended it all up and topped it off with a hefty sprinkling of cilantro and freshly cracked pepper.

I have to say that while I like both corn and peppers, I had been getting tons and tons of them from the co-op at that point in time. I think I must have been pretty sick of them because I don't really remember that much about this soup. It was sweet and peppery, but at the time it just wasn't the most inspiring flavor combination. Whether I was sick of those particular veggies, I didn't showcase them to their best advantage, or if it just wasn't to my taste, this soup was still relatively tasty and markedly better than the other component of the meal.

I also made Mark Bittman's tomato paella. The way the blogosphere tells it, this summer tomato recipe is just divine. Crispy arborio rice, juicy ripe tomatoes and a rich yellow color from a few precious strands of saffron. All the flair of a fancy seafood paella, minus a great deal of work and expense. Sounds like a story that guarantees a happy ending, no?


Mark Bittman's tomato paella

Well I have a different tale to tell. One of dry, chewy rice, overly herbaceous tomatoes and saffron that was sadly completely undetectable. It didn't taste bad, persay, but either I am way out of step with the online foodie commmunity, or something went really really wrong with this recipe. I totally wanted to love it, but it was a total flop.

Although it was great having Hannah and Lauren over for dinner, I think I owe them a more inspiring dinner!

spinach pancakes and "fried" chicken wings

chicken wings and spinach pancakes

My friend Becky came over for dinner a couple of weeks ago, and we made my mom's toaster oven chicken wings and some Mark Bittman pancakes by way of some food blog. We rounded things off with a little salad with grape tomatoes and my fast-becoming-standard red wine vinegar dressing. You should really give this a shot— According to Mario Batali, "a great salad dressing has great olive oil and an inexpensive red-wine vinegar."

Anyway. The pancakes were the most labor intensive part of the meal, which was pretty damn easy overall. We trimmed and washed ten ounces of spinach, and briefly sauteed it with a little garlic and oil. Then we squeezed out the water, chopped the spinach up, and mixed it into the pancake batter. This consisted of one and a half cups buttermilk, two beaten eggs and 2 tablespoons melted butter, which we mixed together and then stirred into the dry ingredients: 2 cups flour, a tablespoon of sugar, half a teaspoon each of baking soda and salt, and a dash of nutmeg. Finally, we added the spinach.

We fried the pancakes up with butter over medium high heat until crisp and golden on both sides. A good rule of thumb for flipping pancakes is to wait until the surface is full of little bubbles. Becky handled our pancakes, and did a bang up job. They were great. We served them with sour cream mixed with lemon zest and some shredded parmesan. Dee-licious.

Before we started cooking the pancakes we prepared our chicken wings and stuck them in the toaster oven. I grew up eating these chicken wings, and they are so good. Crispy and moist with a delicious breading... as a kid, this seemed like perfection, and even now I think its pretty wonderful, especially since they're so easy. Obviously, these are baked, but as a kid I always assumed they were fried, and I don't think I stopped thinking of them as such until a few years ago. They are that damn good.

First, season some breadcrumbs. I generally buy a canister of plain ones at the grocery store and jazz them up with some garlic powder, black pepper, grated romano cheese, dried basil, oregano and parsley. I like to keep a container of these in the fridge for making scrambled eggs or breading pork chops, chicken cutlets or eggplant. They really do come in handy.

Once your breadcrumbs are ready, spread some out on a sheet of wax paper. Then you want to coat your wings with a little bit of mayo and then roll them in the breadcrumbs. This bit is a little gross, because your hands wind up covered in raw chicken, mayo and breadcrumbs, but once you're through it, you're basically done. Pop those wings into the toaster oven on a little tray, and cook them at 350° for about 50 minutes. So easy!

After enjoying our delicious supper, Becky and I also made ourselves a strawberry shortcake for dessert. I'm not sure if it was because we slightly undercooked it or if the recipe was just a dud, but the cake had a slightly unpleasant doughiness to it, or something. I suspect it may have been our fault as over eager cake eaters, but ultimately, it was not that good. Becky is supposed to guest blog the recipe, so stay tuned for that. Until then, I leave you with this parting shot of the two of us with our just desserts.


strawberry shortcake cream on top, tell me the name of your sweet heart

Fried Chickpeas with Chorizo and Spinach

This is another recipe from Mark Bittman, the dean of people who mean well but don't want to spend a million years in the kitchen getting all messy and irritable as they slave over some complex hogwarsh. I made it one night after seeing it on the Times' website.

Ingredients:
- 2 cups canned chickpeas (no need to get fancy, I just got one of those big Goya cans)
- 4 oz. diced chorizo (Goya to the rescue again. Just get a whole one and cut it up.)
- half pound spinach
- bread crumbs

The original recipe also called for sherry, but I'm not the sort of moneybags who keeps a well-stocked bar filled with all sorts of exotic liqueurs. I have a minibar area in my bedroom but it currently consists of a bottle of red, a bottle of rum, a chocolate bunny, and some cookies. In the freezer there be gin and vodka, but no sherry. Sorry haters. Anyway, I just used red wine vinegar instead and so should you.

First, put like 3 tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a pan, and heat it up. Put all of the chickpeas in there (after draining their fluid from the can) and salt/pepper them. Bring the heat down to medium-low and let the chickpeas cook for ten minutes or so until they start to turn brown. Then add the chorizo, and let it cook for another 5 minutes, maybe a bit more, until the chickpeas start to crisp up on the outsides and they start to get some nice chorizo flavor on them.

Remove all of that stuff from the pan and then cook the spinach in the oils that remain. At this point you can add a quarter cup of sherry, or if you're awesome like me, red wine vinegar. Add some salt and pepper too, naturally. When the spinach is nice and soft, pretty much cooked, put the chickpeas and chorizo back in and toss everything together for a bit.

To finish it off, put breadcrumbs on top of the whole thing and put it all in the broiler for a little bit, just to brown the breadcrumbs and give the dish a nice crust. Then eat.


chickpeas, chorizo and spinach with a nice crispy top

I really enjoyed this dish - it was great and it easily cost less than ten bucks. The chickpeas had a great texture, nice and soft but just crispy enough on the outside. The chorizo was luscious. The spinach provided a nice clean backdrop, keeping the dish from getting bogged down in starch and meat. Best of all, it only took like 20 minutes to make.

sausage and polenta/ginger fried rice

I'm going to start off this entry with a totally superfluous plug for Mark Bittman, who many of you are probably familiar with if you have even a passing interest in food and cooking. If you don't know Bittman, he writes both a column (The Minimalist) and a blog, (Bitten), for the New York Times. He's a fountain of food knowledge, and he can quite literally tell you how to cook everything. Today's entries cover two of his recently published recipes, which cover all manner of cuisines and always sound delicious and simple and like exactly what you want to make for dinner.

The first is the incredibly easy creamy polenta with sausage and parmesan. The recipe can be found here, along with an accompanying article in which Bittman attempts to take the fear out of polenta.

creamy polenta with sausage and parmesan

As exotic as it sounds, polenta is really only cornmeal cooked in hot water, and it makes a great change of pace from rice, pasta or potatoes. Nathan and I have made several batches of polenta in the past few months, and at first I tried adding the polenta to boiling water, as I had seen recommended online. This method requires a steady hand and great deal of patience, as the cornmeal will clump if you add too much at once and do not stir constantly. Bittman suggests mixing the cornmeal and cold water into a slurry and then cooking it, adding water as needed. This is definitely the way to go. After cooking for about 20 minutes, I finished off the polenta with butter and grated romano cheese (which I almost always use in lieu of parmesan), and served it with some sliced sweet Italian sausage, making sure to scrape up the pan drippings for a sauce. Served with a salad, this was an excellent and extremely easy dinner.

simple and full of flavor

The second Bittman dinner I've recently prepared is his ginger fried rice. I'd been wanting to make for a few weeks now, especially after it was featured in another one of my favorite cooking blogs only days after I first found the recipe. The reason I had put it off was that I didn't have ginger, but I came home one night and was pleasantly surprised to find that Laura had bought some. How serendipitous!

ginger fried rice topped with a fried egg

Of course, I still had to switch quite a few things around based on other missing ingredients, but that's par for the course when I'm in the kitchen. I used scallions instead of leeks, vegetable oil instead of peanut oil, and toasted sesame seeds instead of sesame oil. I do love some sesame oil though, so I intend to buy some and make this again some time. I also don't have soy sauce, but I never like that too much anyway. Other than those substitutions, I pretty much followed the recipe. Minced and fried the garlic and ginger with some sesame seeds, and then set them aside. I then fried up the scallions until they started to crisp up slightly, and added the rice. I cooked the rice until it got stickier and browner, because that's how I like my fried rice. I seasoned it with salt and pepper and topped with the garlic, ginger, sesame seeds and a runny egg fried sunny side up. I won't say it couldn't have used a splash of soy, and I might have used a few too many sesame seeds, but all in all I was satisfied. Not bad Mr. Bittman, not bad.

UPDATE 6/1/10: Here is another photo of this fried rice, with an unbroken yolk and the addition of sliced mushrooms. I also had the proper sesame oil and soy sauce. The former is a nice touch, but without the latter I would not bother making fried rice ever again. It really does make a world of difference.