Soup's on!

Sometimes my home-kitchen explorations leave me feeling much like the little rat from the Pixar flick "Ratatouille": bedazzled by the perfect pairing of certain foods. Take, for instance, the fragrant marriages of carrots and ginger, and onion and cumin...
And meld that with earthy lentils and sweet dried apricots:
Put it all together in a soup pot with some chicken stock, and you've got yourself some really delicious soup, blended till silky smooth and easy to store and reheat on a cold winter day.
Turkish Apricot & Lentil Soup (adapted from 101cookbooks)
Makes about 6 cups

- 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
- 1 medium onion, diced
- 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
- 2 teaspoons ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon grated ginger (or 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger)
- 1-1/2 cups red lentils, rinsed
- 5 cups chicken stock (or water)
- 6 oz. dried Turkish apricots, chopped
- salt to taste

1. Sweat the onion and carrot in oil over medium heat, about 10 minutes. Add the cumin and ginger, lower heat to medium-low, and cover for 10 more minutes.
2. Add the lentils and chicken stock. Simmer for about 20 minutes, until the lentils fall apart and the flavors and come together. Add salt to taste.
3. Remove from heat, stir in the apricots, and adjust seasoning. Also, you can add more liquid here if necessary.
4. Once cooled a bit, puree in a blender until totally smooth. Serve hot with some toasted baguette, or let cool and store in containers, up to 3 months in the freezer.

Happy fall! Welcome back, soup season...

A seedy bar full of nuts

No, I'm not referring to the sketchy hangout down the block; I speak of a healthy and economical alternative to the rather expensive snack bars currently lining supermarket shelves!

This bar is an invention/experiment that was born out of a survey of about 5 different snack bar recipes on the web, all of which included some nibbly bits that I found appealing. These are no-bake bars (hooray!), based on a simple yet ingenious principle: (sticky + dry) + freezer = snack. You follow? Stay with me now...


Seedy Nut Bars
(makes about 10 bars, but depends on how you cut them)

- 4 oz. bar unsweetened baking chocolate (I dig Ghirardelli's)
- 1 cup walnuts
- 1 cup almonds
- 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
- 1/4 cup ground flax
- 20 mejdool dates, pitted
- 1/2 cup raisins
- 1/4 cup natural peanut butter (I prefer salted)
- 2 tablespoons agave nectar (or other sticky sweetener of your choice: maple syrup, brown rice syrup, etc.)
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1. Break up chocolate bar and pulse in food processor until you get chocolate chips. Set aside.
2. Pulse walnuts and almonds in the same food processor. Set aside.
3. Combine pitted dates, raisins, peanut butter, and agave nectar in food processor until you get a paste.
4. Combine the chocolate, nuts, seeds, flax and cinnamon in a large bowl. Add in the paste and stir until well mixed - this will seem difficult, but trust me, you'll get there. A large metal spoon works well here, to break up any large chunks of paste.
5. Line an 8 x 8 glass baking dish with parchment paper, and flatten the mixture into the bottom, using lightly oiled hands or the bottom of a cup.
6. Put the dish into the freezer until hardened, then transfer to a cutting board and cut your bars. I suggest wrapping them individually with press'n seal wrap and keeping them in the refrigerator. If you wrap them tightly enough, they should hold up all day in a big shoulder bag or backpack.

Enjoy!

Burrito + Samosa = Burrosa!

Last night, one of my classmates from the Natural Gourmet Institute, Toshiko, was thrown a going-away party as she will be leaving us for the isle of Japan next week. We'll miss you Toshi!! (But we know you'll be back soon.)

To the party, I brought an experimental cross between a burrito and a samosa, which Dan and Anna deftly named the Burrosa. Stuffed with warmly spiced squash and hot pepper-spiked black beans, these crispy little pockets are a delectable identity crisis for the unsuspecting tongue.

I wrapped them up into triangles using half sheets of spring roll pastry:

Then I baked them at 375 for about 15 minutes, until golden and crispified.

The new kitchen

Ok, I've kept my whereabouts and whatdoings shrouded in mystery long enough. It's time to expose the truth: I have a new kitchen, and it's fabulous!!! Which is to say, I have moved to a new home, a lovely, light-drenched 1-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens which I share with my most favorite roomie, Dan. We've been having a delicious time setting up and making elaborate breakfasts, like this one: Eggs in a frame (by Dan) with Moroccan roasted butternut squash (by Eve). Dan proves himself to be quite the masterful coffee- and egg-maker.

Just lookit him go!

View of the big breezy tree outside our living room window:

And a sampling of Dan's refrigerator poetry (quite a Renaissance man, that one):

All in all, life is shaping up to be beautiful and tasty in Astoria!

End of summer retreat

As things stand, I will have little time to do much else but eat, sleep, and work. I'm training at Mercer Kitchen tonight, 3pm to midnight! (More to come on the unfolding of that underworld...)

But, before I settled into this newly chosen life/work-style, I took a long weekend up in Connecticut with family and friends and, as usual, the requisite cooking and feasting ensued. Unfortunately for those in my immediate vicinity, being surrounded by nature makes me prone to leaping out of bed at 5:30am, dashing straight to the kitchen, and proceeding to make way too much food. Oh, and how much food we had! Two baker's dozens of sweet August corn were consumed, along with much else...


Here's one of our many spreads, of corn, grilled cumin-salt encrusted lamb chops with a mint-yogurt chutney, and farm-fresh tomato and peach salad with red onion and cilantro.

New post about my New Post!

Attention dearest readers: I am soon to be a professional cook! I've been hired to work the garde manger (read: salads and apps) station at Mercer Kitchen, a restaurant operating under the purview of the Jean-Georges empire. My feelings on this are: EXCITED! grateful. hopeful. jittery. OK, just flat out NERVOUS.

But really, really psyched. My hours will be wacky. My life will be abnormal, for a time. But I'll be sure to continue blogging when I can, probably interspersing more journalistic elements alongside the usual cookery.

So, be sure to tune in and enjoy the ride with me!

PS: Vesta, a small Italian trattoria in Astoria (catchy...) serves up some spectacularly hearty brunch, for a very agreeable price. Here you see the "hangover pizza," schmeared with tomato sauce, topped with pancetta, sausage, potatoes, and two fried eggs. The foreground pictures a small skillet of fried eggs, asparagus and wild mushrooms over creamy polenta, with a side salad. All produce comes from Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, BKLYN, which, as the name suggests, is a 6,000 SF agricultural enterprise located atop a building. Pretty fab.

Portland grub

I've been in Portland visiting my twin brother Paul since last Wednesday, and in this past week I've experienced a lot of food. This is a city of food carts serving up some of the best tacos I've ever eaten, and good ol' casual-American cuisine prepared by dedicated locavores. Most of the time, I've been too excited to photo-document the deliciousness on my plate. But, thankfully, I was able to exercise some restraint and capture a few morsels.

Here are some food carts, these ones arranged in a parking lot in downtown Portland. Very diverse options abound, from Mexican to Indian to Thai to burgers to Czech!

This is the first meal I ate out in Portland (a city that's early to rise, and values its breakfast fare), at a Swedish-American place called Broder on SE Clinton. I got the smoked trout hash with 2 baked eggs and walnut bread, washed down with some Stumptown coffee (of course!)
As you can see, I enjoyed my breakfast thoroughly:
Sundays at Paul and Leigh's tend to be BBQ time; the following is a breakdown of the feast:

I made a straightforward bruschetta with tomatoes from the Saturday farmer's market downtown and basil from the backyard, left to marinate for hours and served room-temp with pasta and freshly grated asiago: I also put together a cucumber, summer squash, and canteloupe salad (all from the yard and the farmer's market) with a lemon-yogurt dressing laced with coriander and cinnamon, garnished with mint (also from the yard!):

Leigh, masterful food artist that she is, arranged a handsome plate of baguette and fresh mozzarella:
(You can check out Leigh's blog here!)

The above was served with some of Leigh's finger-lickin' guacamole and chicken pieces that I marinated in lemon juice and zest, olive oil, fresh herbs from the garden, and garlic, and grilled outside on the BBQ.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'm stuffed! Hopefully this sustenance will hold you over until I am able to write again. Best wishes from the West Coast!