creamed corn two ways/warm corn and tomato salad with sesame oil and soy sauce

It's still pretty warm here in New York. Yesterday it was like 65 degrees, and as I sat outside in a blazer at lunch and read my book, and I could almost imagine it being a cooler June day! But alas, it is November, and the holidays are rapidly approaching, and beautiful fresh summer corn is a distant memory....

But I am still going to talk about it. Three different recipes for it, no less.

brown sugar and sesame zucchini and summer squash

Food co-op members, consider this entry my small part in our ongoing fight to consume all our summer squash and zucchini. A small but powerful weapon against excess zucchini!


sesame oil and brown sugar glazed zucchini and summer squash

My dad came up with this dish last summer when we were trying to get rid of a squash surplus. I'm facing the same mass quantities of zucchini this year, so when I remembered this dish, I had to make it. I had tried once before, but ended up switching gears midway through and wound up with an overly salty stir fry of sorts. This time, I committed to the brown sugar and sesame, and was much more satisfied.

There really isn't much to this dish. Slice the zucchini and squash into thin rounds, drizzle with sesame oil and brown sugar, season with salt and pepper, and bake until soft. You can also add a little butter, but I forgot to and did not miss it. This may be simple, but it's a nice tasty side dish, and it's certainly a bit out of the ordinary. I make mine in the toaster oven to avoid heating up my whole kitchen, but it would obviously work in the real deal as well.

I don't really have much to add, except to say that this might be even better if you tossed the squash and other ingredients in a bowl to get full and even coverage. Sesame oil is very strong, so a little goes a long way, but you have to spread it around. One small drop is all each round needs to give the dish a pleasant sesame taste.

beet top fried rice

ginger fried rice with beet tops and a fried egg

This is definitely one of those meals you make just to get rid of excess produce, so unless you've got an excessive amount of beet tops in your fridge, I doubt you'll want to replicate this at home. However, it was still damn tasty and fried rice is always easy and delicious.

I've covered fried rice a couple of times before, and aside from the addition of the beet tops, this dish was very similar to its previous incarnations.

I start with minced garlic and ginger, and crisp that up in some hot vegetable oil. Then I sautee whatever mix ins I am using— beet tops in this case, but that could very easily be mushrooms or pork or scrambled egg or even just frizzled scallions, (or leeks, as the Marc Bittman original called for).

In this instance, I kept the garlic and ginger in the pan and added my chopped beet tops, which were dripping wet from just having been washed. I let them get nice and wilty, and then I emptied the pan. I added more vegetable oil, and cooked the leftover rice until it got sticky. A dash of soy sauce, a splash of sesame oil, mixed to combine, and then add back in the greens, garlic and ginger. Topped with a fried egg, it was a typically yummy fried rice. The stems of the beets did start to turn things pink, which was funny and cool, but other than that it was fairly standard.


fried rice with beet tops

buttermilk carrot pancakes/cilantro ginger and lime marinaded chicken, and orrechiette with bacon, wilted radicchio and cabbage/pork fried rice

These three dinners are quick things I've whipped up in the last few weeks based on what I've had lying around in the fridge. The pancakes were only alright, but the other two meals were definitely winners.


carrot buttermilk pancakes with sour cream

These I made to try and use up some of the extra buttermilk I had after I made Irish Soda Bread. I was in a rush to get out the door, so I was just trying to do something simple and easy. Pancakes are the obvious use for buttermilk, but I wanted to make them a little more substantial for dinner, so I decided to grate in two carrots from the co-op to make them into a sort of latke. I also added two eggs, a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil, and enough flour to make it into a spoonable batter. Fried in butter and served with a hefty dollop of sour cream, these were palatable enough, but I'm sure I could make better pancakes if I gave it another shot.


cilantro ginger and lime marinaded chicken, pasta with cabbage, radicchio and bacon

This was my favorite of the three meals. Laura had cooked some chicken earlier in the week, but there was still one breast in the fridge, begging to be cooked rather than be left to spoil. I had a bunch of cilantro and some limes left over from making spinach dip for my birthday party, and we still have a huge ginger root in the fridge that we are only slowly chipping away at. A little fresh ginger goes a long way. I had an inkling that I could combine the three ingredients with some white wine, sesame oil, garlic, salt and pepper for a decent marinade, as it was similar to a preparation my mom uses. A quick peek in my Flavor Bible confirmed my suspicions. I let the chicken marinade for about 45 minutes, and then I just cooked it in the cast iron skillet. SUCH a good flavor combination. I only wish that I had had more than one measly chicken breast.

Meanwhile, I also had half a head of cabbage leftover, and small amount of radicchio from that bloggers' favorite pasta dish. I thinly diced three or four slices of hearty bacon, and fried that up til nice and crispy. I removed that from the pan and cooked half of my remaining cabbage, a fist-sized head of radicchio and some sliced garlic with salt and pepper in the drippings. I added some balsamic after it was starting to get soft, which reduced nicely. I also cooked some orecchiette, and just tossed that with the bacon, cabbage and radicchio. I think I added a little butter to make sure the pasta was all coated, and to make the dish even less healthy. I probably could have sprinkled on some romano cheese, but it didn't occur to me at the time and it was still pretty delicious. Oreccheiette is a pretty hefty pasta, so it stood up well to the hearty mix-ins. Even though I completely winged this and it seems like a strange dish, I would definitely make this again. More specifically, I would highly recommend cooking radicchio with balsamic, as it loses all its bitterness and becomes so sweet and delicious.

The pork fried rice I did not photograph, but it was very similar in spirit to the Mark Bittman recipe that I featured on the blog last month. Once again, I minced up garlic and ginger and fried them in vegetable oil. I used the sesame seeds once again, but I dry toasted them in the pan, in the hopes they'd be crunchier. I think this worked better than frying them with the ginger and garlic. Next I defrosted an old pork chop and and diced it up, sauteing it with scallions, salt and pepper. Then I scrambled an egg and chopped it up. Finally, I took some old rice from the fridge and cooked that until it dried up and got sticky. I still didn't have soy sauce or sesame oil, but I went out and bought some the next day, and they made a world of difference on the leftovers. Fried rice is a great, versatile dish, and I look forward to experimenting with it more in the future.

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.