Moroccan-Spiced Lamb Chops with Charmoula

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Moroccan-Spiced Lamb Chops with Charmoula

Serves: 8 appetizer, 4 as entrée

Difficulty: Easy

 

Moroccan-Spiced Lamb Chops with Charmoula

I was looking for an easy, quick lamb chop recipe to pass as an appetizer with an interesting sauce – something unique.  Charmoula is a classic Moroccan aromatic, paprika-spiced herb sauce used to marinate or as a dip for vegetables, fish or meat. It is also great with all sorts of other dishes, such as roasted cauliflower, roasted winter squash or chicken. An overnight dry rub on the lamb chops completely transforms this lamb chop to a new level of taste treat.

Roasted Eggplant, Tofu & Pluots Salad with Soba Noodles

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Roasted Eggplant, Tofu & Pluots Salad with Soba Noodles

Serves: 6

Difficulty: Easy

 

Roasted Eggplant, Tofu & Pluots Salad with Soba Noodles

Another wonderful vegetarian entrée salad featuring tofu, soba noodles, sweet fruit and eggplant. It would be great as a substantial starter or a main course. One could substitute any sweet fruit – I used a mix of plums and pluots – and offers a contrast of the savory/spice and fruity/sweet.

Key ingredients

Soba is the Japanese name for buckwheat and synonymous with a type of thin noodle made from buckwheat flour. It has a correspondingly strong, nutty flavor. Generally we find dried soba in packets, but keep your eyes open for fresh soba at Asian markets.

Lebanese Roast Chicken with Chickpeas, Hazelnuts, & Sumac Over Rice with Yogurt

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Lebanese Roast Chicken with Chickpeas, Hazelnuts, & Sumac

Over Rice with Yogurt

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

I love this exotic mix of Lebanese spices and flavors with some Turkish and Israeli influences.  Lebanese cuisine includes copious amounts of garlic, olive oil and lemon.  Poultry is eaten more often than red meat. Frequently used in Turkish cuisine are lentils and nuts…in this case featuring chickpeas and hazelnuts.

 

Hazelnuts, raisens and currants for the recipe

Who doesn’t love roast chicken? You could make this dish with a whole chicken or with whole chicken legs as I have described here. I love the crackly, crisp salty skin and moist tender meat. But, most of the time, I don’t like roast chicken because most of the time, well, you end up with dry breast meat in order to cook the leg meat adequately. It also makes a mess of my oven. Lately if desiring a whole roasted or grilled chicken, I have been butterflying the chicken in order to achieve the 150-degree F for the breast simultaneously with the 170-degree legs. It is relatively simple to butterfly the chicken by cutting out the spine and flattening the carcass. I promise to share pictures of how to do this in the near future, but today, we use whole chicken legs.

Fall Comfort Food: Sausage and Black Bean Stew

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Fall Comfort Food: Sausage and Black Bean Stew

Serves: 6

Difficulty: Easy

Sausage and Black Bean Stew 

This is a wonderful stew to serve as the weather cools. Mostly, this is a cozy meal, the perfect antidote to weeks of excess without feeling excessive. It is quite flexible, and you can try it with turkey sausage, chorizo or Italian sausage, sweet or hot. I used a combination of Italian sausages for this recipe. You can also vary the beans. We love black beans but one could also use garbanzo, pinto, white or a mix. Throw in some chilies for heat and rainbow chard and you are on your way to a wonderful crowd-pleasing mix of flavors. You can swap chard with kale, spinach or another green. (If you are unfamiliar with chard but like spinach, trust me, you’ll love chard.)

While onto to warming, healthy food, check out Curried Chickpea, Lentil and Swiss Chard Stew http://cookingwithlarue.blogspot.com/2012/10/curried-chickpea-lentil-and-swiss-chard.html

Lentil & Radicchio Salad with Walnuts

Lentil & Radicchio Salad with Walnuts

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

This is one of my favorite Yotam Ottolenghi recipes. It is truly a meal in a bowl with a richly flavored layered salad resplendent with fresh green herbs and crunchy sweet walnuts and lentils. When I first made this dish, I used manuka honey, which can be found in health food stores. Manuka has a strong, woodsy flavor that colors the whole dish with a unique aroma. However, manuka is expensive and not available at your local grocer, so feel free to substitute with your favorite full flavored honey. 

The radicchio’s bitterness offers the right balance to the sweetness of the honey, but if you wish to substitute, try replacing with Belgian endive. Make the effort to find the slate-green Puy lentils.  They have a unique peppery flavor and hold their shape during cooking. They are the only lentils to be identified by area of cultivation – grown in the Le Puy region of France.

Radicchio

Sweet Corn & Bacon Frittata

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Sweet Corn & Bacon Frittata

Serves: 4-6

Difficulty: easy

Sweet Corn & Bacon Frittata

You can throw anything into a frittata and call it breakfast, lunch or dinner. A well-made frittata is one of the world’s most perfect foods. It’s cheap, quick cooking, and an efficient vehicle for leftovers. But sub-par frittata is not so lovely.  They can be spongy rather than custardy, dry and flavorless. To avoid this horrifying fate, we use a bit of dairy. Any dairy will do but be aware that anything less than a full-fat product will produce a sub-optimal frittata. This recipe is filled with the finest sweet summer corn and smoky bacon with some heat provided by Serrano and jalapeno peppers. 

Sweet summer corn

The bacon, cooked just to the point of crispness, gives the frittata its smoky, salty flavor. It also uses gruyere, which is a type of Swiss cheese named for the town of Gruyeres, Switzerland where it was originally made.  It a firm cheese with a pale yellow color and a rich, creamy, slightly nutty taste. It is a great table cheese and also an excellent melting cheese. You could substitute with other melting cheeses such as fontina or even cheddar.  A soft cheese, like ricotta, does not melt well so I would not recommend this one.  Harder, aged cheeses, like Parmesan or Pecorino Romano, adds a sharp hit of salty, nutty flavor, but they are not prime melters. You can use them as a sharp wallop of flavor on top if you wish. I cubed Gruyere in this recipe instead of grated so that some bites will result in an explosion of cheese gooeyness. Try it….you’ll like it!

For another frittata, try Mushroom, Leek & Fontina Frittata posted earlier: http://cookingwithlarue.blogspot.com/2013/06/mushroom-leek-fontina-frittata.html.

Crème fraiche was used as the dairy with eggs.

Old Bay Shrimp Cakes--PRE-HOLIDAY HIATUS RECIPE

Old Bay Shrimp Cakes

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

Old Bay Shrimp Cakes

Simple, simple, simple. We love Old Bay seasoning.  It adds a bit of zip as well as a orangey hue to seafood evoking memories of steamed crabs strewn over newspapers in Baltimore…founding city to the Old Bay Company in 1939 (and where my husband grew to love this amazing spice). How can you avoid a seasoning that has been around that long? Give it a taste. Lick a pinch on your hand, close your eyes and you will find yourself seaside. Add it to your next Bloody Mary, boil frankfurters in an Old Bay-infused bath, sprinkle on potato salads, and popcorn! Sprinkle it everywhere. In this recipe, I use it to form shrimp cakes.  Again – simple, simple, simple.

Heading into the holidays, I would like to wish all of you a healthy happy New Year, chock full of great food, of course!

 

Old Bay....one of the world's great spices!

Lamb Loin Chops with Pan-roasted Grapes & Zinfandel

Lamb Loin Chops with Pan-roasted Grapes & Zinfandel

Sous Vide and Grill Methods

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

Sous Vide Temp: 131- 134 degree F; Time: 2-4 hours

 

Lamb Loin Chops with Pan-roasted Grapes & Zinfandel

This is a simple recipe and a spectacular one. In the heart of the Paso Robles wine district, you will find wine and food paired in cooking as well as serving. This recipe includes actual grapes into the sauce adding an additional sweet note. One thing we know about California’s zinfandel: it is a far, far more food versatile wine than usually assumed.

But it wasn’t always like that. A couple of decades ago the country was still awash with pink colored “white zinfandel”; and focusing on the other two “fighting varietals,” chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon, many of the mainstream California wineries went so far as to drop red zinfandel from their lineups. This may have been good thing, because all it did was dramatize the inevitable resurgence all the more; towards the end of the nineties, when artisanal producers began pushing their big red Zins, recalling some of mammoth Zins that came and went with the seventies. Like micro-minis, fondue, VW bugs and martinis, there are many things never really go away – they just come back with a vengeance.

Amazing braised Indian-spiced Chicken with Peas, Tomatoes & Potatoes

Amazing Braised Indian-spiced Chicken with Peas, Tomatoes & Potatoes 

Serves: 6

Difficulty: Moderate

Amazing braised Indian-spiced Chicken with Peas, Tomatoes & Potatoes 

This is a surprising (shocking actually) great tasting entrée….and so easy too! The fragrant sauce includes a mix of dried spices – all are important to create the perfect storm of flavor! If you are a fan of Tikka Masala or Butter chicken, you will love this one. It is flavorful, hearty, spicy and a great “throw everything in a pot and let it cook all afternoon” kind of dish. The resulting sauce is delicious and plentiful, great for sopping up with the naan bread.

OMG Dry-Aged Rib-eye Steak – Sous Vide

Dry-Aged Rib-eye Steak – Sous Vide

Serves: 3-4

Difficulty: Easy

Sous Vide Temp: 131 degree F; Time: 3 – 4 hours

OMG Dry-Aged Rib-eye Steak – Sous Vide

Dry aging is the process by which large cuts of beef (like half of a cow) are aged anywhere from several weeks to several months before being trimmed and cut into steaks. The method not only helps the steak develop flavor, but also makes it tenderer than it would be completely fresh. It involves considerable expense, as the beef must be stored near freezing temperatures. Subprimal cuts can be dry aged on racks either in specifically climate-controlled coolers or within a moisture-permeable dry bag.  Moreover, only the higher grades of meat can be dry aged, as the process requires meat with a large, evenly distributed fat content. The key effect of dry aging is the concentration and saturation of the natural flavor, as well as the tenderization of the meat texture. 

Dry aged ribeye....gotta have the marbling!

The process changes the beef by two means. Firstly, moisture is evaporated from the muscle. This creates a greater concentration of beef flavor and taste. Secondly, the beef’s natural enzymes break down the connective tissue in the muscle, leading to increased tenderness. Older isn’t necessarily better. Two or three weeks of aging is usually the minimum for any sort of tenderness to occur, while the funkier blue cheese characteristics start to pop up around 28 – 45 days.

Thai inspired Chicken & Rice Noodle Salad

Thai inspired Chicken & Rice Noodle Salad

Serves 4

Difficulty: Easy

Thai inspired Chicken & Rice Noodle Salad

Hang on to summer a bit longer and make this easy salad before resorting to heavy winter fare.  This can be great for a picnic, comes together in minutes and is surprisingly healthy! Resist the tyranny of a heavy peanut sauce and give this summery Northern Thai inspired rice noodle salad a try. It is loaded with vegetables, herbs and chicken with an addictive dressing of lime, savory umami-laden fish sauce and chilies. Made with those wonderful springy rice noodles, mixed with handfuls of torn mint, cilantro, basil, sliced cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and shredded chicken all doused with the most amazing sweet-sour dressing.  Feel free to add more vegetables such as shredded Napa cabbage and grated carrots. Adjust the number of chilies pending personal “heat” preferences. Finish with a garnish of peanuts on top if you crave a more “peanutty” dish – adds great additional crunch. It is best served cool or at room temperature – and even great the next day.  How perfect is that!!

Thai chicken with amazing hot-sour-slaty-sweet sauce

http://cookingwithlarue.blogspot.com/2013/03/thai-chicken-with-amazing-hot-sour.html

Thai inspired tomato soup

http://cookingwithlarue.blogspot.com/2012/02/thai-inspired-tomato-soup.html

Pistachio Crusted Salmon

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Pistachio Crusted Salmon

Serves: 4-6

Difficulty: Easy

Pistachio Crusted Salmon

How often can you make a gourmet meal in less than 30 minutes that is both healthy and over-the-top great tasting? Fresh buttery, rich tasting salmon is topped with mustard sauce and finished off with a crunchy topping of panko and chopped pistachios. With only a few ingredients and so easy to make, this just may become your new “go-to” favorite salmon recipe.

Roasted Brussels Sprout with Sweet Chili Sauce

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Roasted Brussels Sprout with Sweet Chili Sauce

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

 

Roasted Brussels Sprout with Sweet Chili Sauce

Personally, I love Brussels sprouts –roasted. Like so many vegetables, roasting brings out the toasted sweeter flavor. Brussels sprouts might just be the rising stars of the vegetable patch. These once-reviled cruciferous vegetables – cousins to cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and kale – are increasingly ubiquitous on restaurant menus and at farmers markets. The flavorless boiled version is now most likely to be served roasted, fried or even raw and shaved into a salad. Perhaps best of all, Brussels sprouts are nutritional powerhouses, loaded with vitamins, cholesterol-reducing fiber, folate and antioxidants. The addition of the Sweet Chili Sauce is a great thing, because the flavor combination of salty/sweet/savory/garlicky/sour PLUS the nuttiness from roasting will

make you forget the very first time your mom made you eat plain, soggy, bitter Brussels sprouts when you were a kid.

Mahi-Mahi with Green Gazpacho Sauce

Mahi-Mahi with Green Gazpacho Sauce

Traditional and Sous Vide Methods

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

Sous Vide Temp: 125 degree F, Time: 12 minutes

Mahi-Mahi with Green Gazpacho Sauce

Mahi-Mahi, also called Dolphinfish and Dorado, is found in warm waters throughout the world. It is a lean fish with firm, flavorful flesh and often best prepared simply and served with a sauce to enhance the delicate, almost sweet, flavor. Most U.S. harvest of mahi-mahi comes from the Pacific, mainly Hawaii. If the fish market sign reads “Fresh Dolphin” do not gasp in horror. Even though the brightly colored mahi-mahi is occasionally labeled dolphin, it’s very much a fish, and is completely unrelated to dolphins and porpoises, which are not fish at all but air-breathing marine mammals.

Grilled Baby Bok Choy with Miso

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Grilled Baby Bok Choy with Miso

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

 

Grilled Baby Bok Choy with Miso 

Bok Choy is one underestimated vegetable in the typical American diet.  What a shame it is such a misunderstood and unappreciated gem. We are fortunate in that it is available year-round in almost all grocers. As an increasingly popular member of the cruciferous vegetable family, bok choy is recognized more and more often for its standout nutrient richness. This member of the cabbage family is one of our highest nutritionally ranked vegetables and it provides good to excellent amounts of 21 nutrients. Unlike some other members of the cabbage family, these nutrients include omega-3s, as well as the antioxidant mineral zinc.

Flat Iron Steak with Red Wine Sauce

Flat Iron Steak with Red Wine Sauce

Sous Vide and Grill methods

 

Flat Iron Steak with Red Wine Sauce

Serves: 6

Difficulty: Easy

Sous vide temp: 131 degree F; Time: 5-12 hours

Steak, cooked sous vide, is the most exciting advancement in carnivore cooking! Flat iron steak, my favorite cheap steak, is cut from the chuck blade roast – the shoulder of the cow. That’s right, this is a piece of a chuck roast. It grills well on its own, but after several hours tenderizing in the sous vide, it cuts like a filet mignon. Sous vide precision cooking offers unparalleled control over the results of your steak, letting you very precisely cook the steak to the level of doneness that you prefer. No guesswork or poking with a thermometer, no cutting and peeking, no jabbing with a finger – just perfect results each and every time. Finally, sous vide offers results that are not attainable by cooking with traditional methods. With standard high heat cooking, you develop a temperature gradient within the meat. The very center, where you shoved the thermometer, may be perfectly medium rare but the steak will be increasingly more well done as you approach the exterior. With sous vide, the steak is evenly cooked from edge to edge. I added a simple red wine sauce to accompany the steak. But, it truly can stand on its own. 

Spinach Salad with Almonds & Dates

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Spinach Salad with Almonds & Dates 

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

 

Spinach Salad with Almonds & Dates

Now that I have reminded you about the perfect CLASSIC spinach salad (http://cookingwithlarue.blogspot.com/2015/06/spinach-salad-extraordinaire.html), it is time to do some variations.  This is an Israeli interpretation with use of pita croutons, dates, almonds and sumac. I think you will find this a wonderful spinach salad variation. It is a balanced taste of crunch, sweet and tangy vinegar! Sumac is a widely used, essential spice in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cooking. The sumac bush, native to the Middle East, produces deep red berries, which are dried and ground into coarse powder. Ground sumac is a versatile spice with a tangy lemony flavor, although more balanced and less tart than lemon juice. It is great over vegetables, grilled lamb, chicken, fish and hummus. It’s used in everything from dry rubs, marinades and dressing. I love to sprinkle it over food just before serving. A small amount also adds a beautiful pop of color to any dish.

Roasted Cauliflower with Mustard Brown Butter Sauce & Pappardelle

Roasted Cauliflower with Mustard Brown Butter Sauce & Pappardelle

Serves: 6

Difficulty: Easy

Vegetarian

Roasted Cauliflower with Mustard Brown Butter Sauce & Pappardelle 

This is a wonderful any-time vegetarian pasta dish. We have adopted Meatless Mondays in our house. (Well, truth be told, some of the Mondays….and maybe a little bacon sometimes!).  This dish is sure to please even the most ardent carnivore. I have been a huge fan of roasted cauliflower ever since I first tried it. There is just something about roasted cauliflower…roasting it takes something that is pretty boring and transforms it into something that is extraordinary. Even in its simplest form as posted– Oven Roasted Cauliflower or as Spiced, Whole Roasted Cauliflower (links below)– it is ridiculously addictive. I could easily chow down on a bowl of it rather than popcorn while watching a movie. Really.

Sweet & Spicy Jicama Salad with Pumpkin Seeds, Mint, Avocado & Arugula

Sweet & Spicy Jicama Salad with Pumpkin Seeds, Mint, Avocado & Arugula

Serves: 6

Difficulty: Easy

Sweet & Spicy Jicama Salad with Pumpkin Seeds, Mint, Avocado & Arugula 

You will not believe the complexity of flavor and crunch with this unique salad. Better yet, as jicama is widely available nearly year long, you can make it anytime. Jicama, native to Mexico, is part of the legume family and grows on vines. It is the tuberous root of the plant.  The exterior is yellow and papery; while its inside is a creamy white that’s mild in flavor with a sweet, nutty taste (think of it as a cross between a water chestnut and a pear). Jicama provides a good deal of crunch in this salad along with the roasted pumpkin seed.  Next time you are looking for a healthy different salad to serve – look no further than this gem!

Sous Vide Cooking: Swordfish with Olive Gremolata

The Art and Ease of Sous Vide Cooking:

Swordfish with Olive Gremolata

Serves: 4

Difficulty: Easy

Sous vide temp: 130 degree F; Time: 30 minutes

Traditional cooking method also included

Swordfish with Olive Gremolata 

Sous vide is a French phrase that is translated as “under vacuum.” However, the defining feature of the method is not packaging or vacuum sealing; it is accurate temperature control. A heating element can warm a water bath to any low to moderate temperature you set, and keep it there for hours – or even days. For more information on the how’s and whys of sous vide, please see post: All About Sous Vide at http://cookingwithlarue.blogspot.com/2015/06/all-about-sous-vide.html.

Sous vide is especially useful for cooking seafood, for which the window of proper doneness is often vanishingly small when traditional methods are used. When you fry a piece of fish, the flesh is most succulent and tender within a very narrow temperature range. Because the cooking temperature of the pan is considerably hotter than the ideal core temperature of the fish, the edges will inevitably be far more cooked than the center when pan-fried. Traditional cooking with a range, oven, or grill uses high and fluctuating temperatures, so you must time the cooking exactly; there is little margin for error. With just a moment’s inattention, conventional cooking can quickly overshoot perfection. This is particularly problematic with fish…especially lean fish, which can dry out quickly. Sous vide cooking is ideal for such fish, in this case swordfish, but also albacore.

Swordfish was taboo for a while, but now many varieties, especially domestic ones, are sustainable. In particular, the North Atlantic swordfish have really rebounded thanks to a 1999 international plan that rebuilt this stock several years ahead of schedule.