Virtual Cruising For Tangible Tastes

From the time that I was 15 years old I have collected my recipes by clipping them from various food magazines and newspapers and putting them in a sketchbook that I organized by section. In these books are also hand written recipes from all kinds of sources including other people’s mother’s recipes and other people’s cookbooks. In fact, before I started this blog 4 months ago I previously wrote a blog called 3×5 collections (better name than Food Thinking I know) that was dedicated to all the recipes that I had collected over the years. My initial idea for 3×5 collections was to create a community where people could share their favorite family/community recipes.

With food blogs being prevalent and increasingly influential, our access to recipes, food pictures and how-to videos has vastly changed the landscape of recipe collection and has thrown to the wind the idea that Aunt May’s buttermilk pie crust is truly the best crust in the world. How does one actually determine this with so many recipes for other people’s Aunt’s best buttermilk crusts available at ones fingertips? Not surprisingly my method of collecting recipes has shifted from the clip and paste with scissors and tape to the clip and paste of command V and command C. I no longer call my Aunt when I want to make buttermilk biscuits I get online and type in buttermilk biscuit recipes to my search engine. I find myself buying fewer cookbooks and reading more blogs. I look for inspiration vicariously through other people’s cooking experiences. In fact a lot of what I decide to cook is informed by what other people’s attempts look like in pictures that give me information based only on one of the senses engaged in the cooking/eating process.  What I decide to cook has in fact become almost entirely divorced from something that I actually tasted, wanted to honor and recreate. Instead, my choices are impulse and slightly competitive driven and I wonder what it means to find oneself cooking for an audience of people with whom I share food with only virtually at least in equal part with the people I actually share food with at a table.

Yesterday, I filled my first Food Thinking notebook and had to buy a new one. Before I put it on the shelf I made a list of every recipe that was in it to put at the beginning of the notebook so I would know where to find the recipes should I want them again in the future. In the spirit of honoring the intrinsic value of a good recipe and the care that it takes to create food, here is most of that list and where I got them. To all of my fellow bloggers who have helped nourish me and mine I sincerely thank you.

Korean BBQ Chicken Marinade- Bill Granger. I pulled this one off the T.V. 1 cup sugar,  1 cup soy sauce, 1 cup water, 1 teaspoon onion powder. 1 teaspoon ground ginger, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 4 teaspoons hot chili paste.

Duck Noodle Salad- Bill Granger

Indian Spiced Yogurt Sauce- Anjum Anand, I use this on squash as well.

Jamie Oliver’s Tray Bake- I know this is his but the link is gone, here’s the recipe. 1 1/2 pounds lamb sausage (any kind will do, but this had balsamic, so a heavier sausage will hold up better. 1/2 pound shallots halved, 1 pound new potatoes halved, 5 sprigs thyme, 3 sprigs rosemary, 5 sprigs oregano, two bulbs garlic stripped but leave the cloves whole, 1 tablespoon sea salt, 1 tablespoon medium ground black pepper, 5 tablespoon olive oil, 1 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar. Preheat the oven to 350. Preheat the empty roasting pan in the oven for 10 minutes. Once the pan is hot add the olive oil and the spices until they get fragrant but do not brown. Add in the potatoes and the cloves of garlic and toss in the oil and herbs. Add the shallots and the sausages and toss. Pour  the balsamic vinegar over the whole shebang and cook until the potatoes are done, about 45 minutes.

Tomatillo Soup with Shredded Chicken- Mariquita Farm

Chicken Tikka Marsala- Jamie Oliver

Sweet Potato Gnocchi- East Village Kitchen, her site had a major hiccup so I’m linking my own post.

Scallion Ginger Sauce- David Chang via You Fed a Baby Chili?

Tomato Jam with Ginger- Healthy Green Kitchen

Hummus- Epicurette In New York

Pad Thai- Ubiquitous Cravings

Unami Chicken Marinade- Bite Me New England

Vietnamese Roasted Game Hens- Ravenous Couple

Chicken Pumpkin Stew- Jehan Can Cook

Cauliflower Mac and Cheese- Jaime Oliver via Eat. Live. Travel. Write

Crispy Chicken with Chili Sauce-Egg Wan’s Food Odyssey

Seasoned Spinach (Sigumchi Namul)- Korean American Mommy

Mung Bean Salad- Korean American Mommy

Beef Jerky- My Man’s Belly

Pickled Carrots with Jalapenos-Southern Fried Curry– as a warning these are delicious but quite hot!

Stuffed Peppers- This Week For Dinner

Curried Goat- Them Apples

Pickles-Kitchen Konfidence

Spinach, Mung Beans and Stuffed Artichokes Caught in the Web!

Fall is cooking season and I am more than content to stand in my kitchen and try recipe after recipe challenging myself to try new foods and new techniques. Admittedly, I’ve been going a little crazy and I’ve tried so many recipes this week, that I have to break them down into a couple of posts. This I will call vegetable side dish heaven.

I love vegetables I do, but spinach is one of those vegetables that I eat more because its good for me rather than out of sheer love, thus I am constantly on the prowl for a spinach recipe that will elevate it from the, “Fine, I’ll eat it.” To the, “I hope they have spinach today at the market so I can make_____.” Interestingly, when I was reading this weeks blog entries for Foodbuzz’s Project Food Blog, two of my favorite blogs, You Feed a Baby Chili?!? And Korean American Mommy both had a recipe up for Korean Blanched Spinach or Sigumchi Namul. This side dish is delicious, just tasting the sauce which is soy, kosher salt, sugar, white vinegar or rice vinegar, a thinly sliced scallion and red pepper flakes, forewarned me that I had found my, “I hope they have spinach today!” dish. Both recipes did call for toasted sesame seeds, but sesame seeds bug me since they insist on lodging themselves in between my teeth so I tossed in a few drops of sesame oil instead.

Korean American Mommy also had a recipe up for Korean Mung Beans Sprouts which caught my eye because I had mung beans leftover in my fridge from all the Pho eating I’ve been doing, I recently cooked a cow shank into a whole lot of Pho stock. It was novel for me to actually cook the mung beans, I have only used them raw where I am throwing them into a soup or a hot dish where the ambient heat essentially quick cooks them, and I have never eaten them as a side dish on their own. This side dish was so delicate, crisp and clean in flavor and I was delighted by the texture that I ate quite a lot on their own before I did end up adding them to the spinach thinking that the crisp texture of the mung bean would be a nice contrast to the spinach. Both of these side dishes had some staying power and where just as flavorful and crispy 24 hours later when the remnants were devoured as a midnight snack.

Last week I asked a bunch of my friends for a list of things that they would really like someone to cook for them, for whatever reason. I got quite an interesting list and one of the things on the list was stuffed artichokes. I love artichokes but had never had them stuffed. Roasted, boiled, steamed, dipped in butter, aioli and cheese sauce yes, stuffed no. I used a recipe from Saveur.

The stuffing was very flavorful and very light, but it did end up being a little soggy. I may have stuffed the stuffing to far down into the artichoke. In the end I liked the idea more than the actual product. I think that I may be an artichoke purist and truly prefer them simply steamed and served with really good melted butter. I certainly wouldn’t turn down a stuffed artichoke if it landed on a plate in front of me, but I probably would not make them stuffed again, however if you are a stuffed artichoke lover this is a great recipe and the failings of the dish were mine alone.

Related Articles

• Celebrate National Spinach-Lovers’ Month With These Recipes (blogher.com)
• Meatless Monday: Here’s How You Can Do It (biggreenpurse.com)
• imabonehead: Almost Bourdain: Come Dine with Me (7): Japanese Spinach Ohitashi; Spice Temple’s Chinese Stir-Fried Pork with Green Onions; Thai Pork Pad Kra Pao with Fried Egg (almostbourdain.blogspot.com)