What I Just Cooked: Leek And Potato Soup

Leek and potato soup. This is such a simple soup to make. All you really need is water, a potato, and 1 - 3 leeks, depending on the size of the leeks. To make it richer, you can add the optional ingredients of milk or half-and-half or cream (depending on how rich you want to make it) and maybe some nice cheese (I like provolone but pecorino is nice too). To make the soup, you just need to peel and wash the potato, cut it into smallish cubes and put it into a medium pot. Add water just to cover. Bring water to boil, then reduce the heat to simmer. Add about a tablespoon of salt (or less to suit your taste or dietary requirements) and a sprinkling of pepper. Cook for about fifteen minutes. In the meanwhile clean the leeks. This is the only really tough part because leeks are a pain.

The way I clean leeks is this: first trim the leeks and get rid of all the tough green parts (the yellow and yellow-ish green parts are still good for soup); after trimming, take a large knife and cut the leek in half, beginning from just below the root (you want to keep the root attached because this will make it easier to clean); now clean the leek under running water, making sure to check between all the layers of the leek. But another way of cleaning leeks is this: cut off the root end; cut the leek in half; slice the leek the way you would slice an onion; put the cut-up leeks into a bowl; put water into the bowl; swish around and get the leeks clean; drain the leeks into a colander; rinse again with water; let drain.

If you cleaned the leeks my way, slice up the leeks. If you cleaned the leeks the other way, you're ahead of the game. By this time, the potatoes which have been simmering should be ready. Add the leeks and cook for another five minutes. Then, using either a blender or a food processor, blend the soup until it's nice and smooth. At this point, you can add the optional ingredients, the milk or the cheese or both. And serve.

Today I served the soup with little rectangles of toasted sour dough bread.

How did it turn out? I'd give it an A. It's a very filling soup. I used cream and cheese, with a garnish of sour cream. For a really cold day like today, boy, did I need the cream!

Cooking Korean Food with Maangchi

My husband found Maangchi's Korean cooking videos on YouTube. I liked them so much I went to her site and found a wealth of no-nonsense information on home-style Korean cooking. Even if you've never tasted Korean food, her recipes and instructions will have you making Korean food like an old Korean grannie. The fun and instructive videos are what really makes the site special. And what makes the videos special is Maangchi's sweet and out-going personality.

Here's Maangchi making tang su yuk, which is sweet and sour pork remastered to suit Korean palates. It's basically a Chinese dish which you'll usually find in Chinese restaurants catering specifically to Koreans, as well as in some Korean restaurants. I'm classifying it as sweet and sour pork but tang su yuk is usually made with beef, although more and more restaurants are now letting you choose either beef or pork. Personally, it's not a dish I like making at home. It's a lot of work and you have to really love deep-frying. And I don't. I've had most of my worst accidents deep-frying*. It's also one of those dishes that will almost always taste better at a good restaurant. There's something to be said about cooking a dish over and over again, night after night. Like practicing the scales on the piano.






*If you cook on a regular basis, you will not be able to avoid burning yourself. That's why I always have a tube of organic aloe vera handy, one with a very high concentrate of pure aloe vera. I've had extremely severe burns heal before my eyes using aloe vera. The trick is to slather it on thick and often. The gel becomes like a second skin, healing and protecting.

What I Just Cooked: Schweinshaxen

Schweinshaxen. I bought a small piece of pork leg, mainly because it was so cheap. Usually I steam-roast it, smearing it in fresh ginger and garlic. But I decided to go German this time. In a roasting pan (which at the moment is my old Cuisinart skillet), I made a bed of leeks, mainly using the tough green parts that aren't good for anything but flavoring soups. There, on the bed of verdant green, I gently rested my pork leg. This one had a nice layer of skin. In order for the flavors to seep in, I slashed the skin in several places. Then I gave the pork a rub down of coarse salt and pepper and garlic. It was now ready to go into the oven, which I turned up to 450 degrees. I also put a layer of foil over the roast to let it steam a little. After fifteen minutes, I turned the oven down to 300 degrees and removed the foil. I also poured some Paulaner Salvator beer over the top. From then on, every thirty minutes, I continued to shower the pork with Salvator. This is why I'm calling this Schweinshaxen. The overall cooking time was about five hours.

How did it turn out? I'd give my faux Schweinshaxen an A. Because the next day, the leftover pork had the most amazing aroma of beer. I love boozy meat. Absolutely amazing to eat cold!

What I Just Cooked: Twice-baked Potatoes

Twice-baked potatoes. It turned out to be an all-day project. I had two massive russet potatoes that took almost two hours to bake in a 375 degree oven. When the potatoes were nice and fluffy inside, I scooped out the flesh and mashed it with half a stick of butter, half a cup of sour cream and half a cup of half-and-half. Salt and pepper, of course. I also gave it an extra whipping with my hand-held blender before piling the creamy concoction back into their skins. I wanted to pipe the filling to give it a nice look, but I had a mild fever, which gave me a headache, so in the end, I just made some swirls with a fork. When I was ready for dinner, I popped it back into a 375 degree oven and cooked it for about forty minutes. Oh! Before popping it back, I topped the potatoes with a snow of pecorino cheese, hoping for a nice gratineed effect.

I wish restaurants had twice-baked potatoes on the menu. Potatoes, in general, seem to be on the decline. Yes, you will find plenty of french fries and the occasional mashed, but remember the glory days of baked potatoes with every main dish? When the potatoes would come with a silver carousel filled with wonderful topping options like sour cream, whipped butter, green onions? And what happened to potato skins served a hundred different ways? Looking back, I guess the late 80s were the golden days of the spud. At least, when you're looking at it from a restaurant point of view. When looking at it from the supply perspective, things have never been better. Even Ralphs has at least four different kinds of potatoes, from lovely yellow ones like Yukons to dark purple delights. I even found one called White Rose which I'm dying to try.

How did it turn out? I couldn't resist garnishing the final golden spud with very finely minced green onions. You have to cut the fat somehow. Since I considered the potatoes as the main dish, I served Italian-style sausages on the side, more as something to dip into the mashed potatoes than anything else! I'll give my try at twice-baked potatoes a solid B. It's been a few years and I'm out of practice. :(

Secrets to Cookies

I love butter cookies but whenever I try making a batch, something generally goes wrong. Usually I've somehow put in too much flour or too much butter or too much something so that the poor cookies come out dry and tasteless. And the kitchen is usually a mess, too, with flour just about everywhere. And flour is pretty darn hard to clean up. All that work and sweat for hockey-puck cookies. :(

Of course, I always blame it on the recipe, which doesn't make much sense because I can use the same recipe twelve times and end up with twelve entirely different textured cookies. So I was really happy to find "Butter Holds the Secret to Cookies That Sing", a NYT article by Julia Moskin. According to the article

“Butter has that razor melting point,” said Shirley O. Corriher, a food scientist and author of the recently published “BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking” (Scribner).

For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68 degrees, it begins to melt.

Not only that, but you can't rechill the butter. At least not for baking purposes:

“Once butter is melted, it’s gone,” said Jennifer McLagan, author of the new book “Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes” (Ten Speed Press).

Warm butter can be rechilled and refrozen, but once the butterfat gets warm, the emulsion breaks, never to return.

I think this is an article Julia Child would have been very happy with and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know why their butter cookies stink. As for me, having read the article, I am so exhausted, I think I'll just go to my local Italian deli the next time I want a nice butter cookie. They've got those great ones that are half dipped in chocolate.

What I Just Cooked: Chicken Faux Crepes

Chicken Faux Crepes

I had a bunch of scraps in the refrigerator so I thought I'd make chicken crepes for dinner. But come dinner time, I just felt too shitty to make crepes from scratch. So I decided to use Whole Food's homemade flour tortillas instead of making crepes.* For the filling I sauteed diced white onions, left-over chicken, squash, and mushrooms. I added a cube of homemade chicken stock (I always keep some in the freezer), about a half cup of water, and about a quarter cup of cream. After reducing the liquid a bit, I added about a cup of sharp cheddar. Meanwhile, I was warming the tortillas in a 300 degree oven. When the filling was ready, I put the two things together and voila.

How did things turn out? I'd give the dish a C+. But dishes don't tend to taste very good when the cook is feeling out of it.

*Whole Foods makes their own flour tortillas in-store, but only at a very few locations. We have to go all the way to Pasadena, where they have a super store in the middle of downtown. Who knew you can get Eco bras at Whole Foods? The super store has everything, unless you actually need it, and then they're out. Murphy's Law.

BTW, Julia Child grew up in Pasadena.

Hollandaise Sauce

I love hollandaise sauce but I'm not too crazy about making it. Worrying about the butter, the eggs, all that stirring — ahhhhhh! I just get scrambled eggs in the end, anyway (if you do, just put the sauce through a sieve). And frankly, anything requiring a double boiler turns me off. That's why I was so ecstatic at finding this recipe on the BBC Food site. The eggs never go near the stove. Absolute genius. The recipe is by Holly Jones and requires a food processor. At the moment, I am without one :( so I used an ancient Braun hand held blender and it worked out fine. I cannot begin to tell you how easy this recipe is. Good bye, Julia Child.

Ingredients
3 tbsp white wine vinegar
6 peppercorns
1 dried bay leaf
2 eggs, yolks only
125g/4oz butter
lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste

Method

1. Put the vinegar in a small pan with the peppercorns and bay leaf. Reduce the vinegar over a high heat until there is only 1 tbsp left. Strain the peppercorns and the bay leaf from this reduction.
2. Put the egg yolks in a food processor with the vinegar reduction.
3. Gently melt the butter so that the butter solids fall to the bottom of the saucepan.
4. Turn the food processor on and slowly pour the butter on to the egg yolks with the motor still running. The sauce will start to thicken. When only the butter solids are left, stop.
5. If the sauce is too thick, add a little hot water.
6. Season to taste with salt and pepper and a little lemon juice.

If you want to link directly to the BBC site, click here. The BBC food site is pretty good. I love their print option because there isn't the advertising junk you get with epicurious.com or NYT so the recipe prints out with a very clean look (and you use less paper), but you do get a picture. I always think it's nice to have a picture with the recipe.