Video: Mongolian Beef!

This recipe is already on the site in written form, but because it’s so popular I thought I would share with you all the video I made for fashionstylebeauty.com where I’m actually making it!

Goat-aster

I am fully aware that I’m not going to hit it out of the park every single time I get in the kitchen. Ok, my ego says not really, but my reason tells me that for as much as I cook, and as many new things as I try this is going to happen. I have made things where I thought: “Don’t love it won’t make it again, but it’s ok.”

I’ve had the: “ This doesn’t work for my palate but I can see why someone else would love it.”

I’ve had the: “Why do I bother to try and bake?” a lot.

But I cannot remember the last time that I had to throw food away that I made. This week it happened not once but twice, and I’m getting a little nervous having this kind of disaster run so close to Thanksgiving. I’m nervous now to brine my turkey, worrying that I’m just going to create a salty mess, worrying that somehow the years of all of my skills have been erased from my memory.

Let’s start with the Aztec Chocolate Rice Pudding. I don’t know if I had a mini stroke when I was putting the cayenne into the chocolate rice pudding or if the cayenne fairy descended on my kitchen playing a mean practical joke but even though the rice pudding smelled delicious it was too spicy to eat and had to go in the trash. Bad fairy!  I made it again the next day without cayenne and used 1/2 Ronnybrook eggnog and ½ milk and the rice pudding was delicious. Next time I will choose either chocolate or eggnog, I think that I was just desperate to create something rich and wonderful and at least out of the initial nose hair singeing misadventure something delicious eventually emerged from cayenne fairies visit.

The second misadventure was far worse and much more heart breaking. A few months ago I was at the Essex Street Market and I saw at one of the butchers there an entire leg of goat. I stood there chewing my lip and resisting the urge to impulse purchase a leg of an animal that I had never eaten, never cooked, or even read a recipe for. I talked myself out of buying it right there and then by promising myself that once the proper amount of reading was done I would indulge and buy, cook and eat the goat. As a lover of venison, duck, elk, lamb, buffalo and nearly everything else in between, not to mention my love of goat cheese and goat yogurt it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t like the taste of goat meat. Retrospectively, I should have gone to a restaurant and tried a goat dish before I embarked on this project, but self admittedly I can be unbelievably bull-headed stubborn.

Them Apples had a recipe for goat curry and not only was his picture beautiful, the recipe was accessible to me since I have been cooking a lot of curry recently. Reading the post and compiling the recipe from his narrative, other than the long marinating time and the long cooking time, the recipe was really quite simple. To begin my adventure I went off to my goat cheese vendor at the farmers market whom I noticed was also selling goat meat and I bought 2 pounds off of her. While the goat meat was thawing, I toasted the spices and ground them in my freshly cleaned grinder. I chopped up the onions, garlic, 3 large tomatoes that I had blanched to get the skins off, and the stems from a bunch of cilantro. I then minced my one scotch bonnet and added it to the whole shebang. The crisp clean cilantro smell wafted up from the bowl tinged with sharp twang of pepper and I thought; “This is going to be awesome!” Once the goat meat thawed I took 3-4 tablespoons of the spice mixture and coated the goat meat with it. I put the spiced goat meat and vegetables in a bag to marinate for 24 hours per instructions.

One day passes.

The next evening I open the bag and separate the meat from the marinade, heat safflower oil in a pan and brown the goat meat in batches. The smells coming up from the pan were delicious, what’s not to love about the smell of cooking meat? Once all the meat was browned I dumped the marinade into the pan and cooked it until the onions were soft. About 10 minutes. I deglazed the pan with a little water and poured all of that over the browned goat meat. I added one teaspoon salt and water just to cover the meat and put it into the oven at 120 C, which is 250 F for 3 hours. This is where things went badly. Three hours later the goat meat was fork shreddingly tender but the liquid in the casserole dish hasn’t cooked down at all. I decided to take the curry out of the oven and cook it down in a pan on the stovetop. This seemed to work. The liquid quickly cooked down and the color and smell seemed spot on. I poured a healthy serving over white rice, sprinkled the curry with micro cilantro and happily sat down to eat. I got about 4 bites in before I realized that this was one of the worst things that I had ever eaten and certainly the worst thing I had ever cooked. There was something both plastic and metallic tasting about the meat. The curry though smelling good had a heavy soap quality and was way to liquid. I tried to convince myself that this was something new, and I just wasn’t used to it, and I did finish a serving, but I couldn’t bear to eat it again. Even my boyfriend who has a ridiculous metabolism and will eat anything turned his nose up at the curry. I don’t know where it went wrong exactly, and I’ve been thinking about it for days. Maybe I didn’t put enough love into the dish, maybe I was getting a cold. Maybe the evil cayenne fairy has a sister who came into my kitchen and switched all my spices around.

I’d like to think that I’d try goat again, and I probably would if someone else cooked it. Or maybe I just have to admit to myself that I have finally found a food that I don’t like and would prefer never to have to eat again. For those readers who are goat lovers and know it, here is the recipe, as I understood it from Them Apples posting.

Goat Curry

2 lbs cubed goat meat

2 onions finely chopped

3 large tomatoes, skinned and chopped

1 bunch of cilantro, stems chopped and set aside

3 cloves of garlic minced

Leaves from a handful of thyme

1 scotch bonnet minced (be careful they are truly hot)

1 tablespoon of each: coriander seeds, black peppercorns, and fenugreek seeds

12 cardamom pods

1 cinnamon stick

1 tablespoon ground ginger

1 tablespoon ground turmeric

1 teaspoon salt

3-4 tablespoons safflower oil

Preheat oven to  250 F. Dry toast the coriander seeds, black peppercorns, fenugreek seeds, cardamom pods and cinnamon stick together. Once cooled, grind. Add to this mixture the ginger and the turmeric. Coat the goat meat with as much of the spice mixture as you need, I needed 4-5 tablespoons. Add to the spiced meat the onions, tomatoes, scotch bonnet, garlic and cilantro stems. Mix together well and marinate in the fridge for 24 hours.

Heat the oil in a pan. Scraping off as much as the marinade as possible brown the goat meat and put into a casserole dish. Add the marinade and cook it until the onions soften, about 10 minutes. Deglaze the pan with water and pour this over the browned meat. Add one teaspoon salt and add just enough water to cover the meat. Cook for 2-3 hours until the meat is tender. Sever over white rice and with chopped cilantro leaves.

Good luck!

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)

Recipes From Around The Web: Pho, Pumpkin Stew and Olives

Normally my taste buds run in streaks. I’ll get a taste for duck and I’ll make duck several times in several different ways for a month and then I’ll be done. Or pumpkin, for about 6 weeks of the year everything I touch has pumpkin in it, near it or I have shaped to look like a pumpkin. Either I am losing my attention span or my taste buds are changing, but for the last two weeks I have been all over the map. In keeping with my normal taste bud streak I have been quite literally pickling everything I can get my hands on. I am lucky enough to have several friends in my life who are more than happy to pick up the ‘slack’ because although nutritionally, pickled produce isn’t the worse thing that one to eat, it will take its toll on your kidney’s eventually especially if you eat nothing else.

Speaking of pickling, well technically, brining, I decided to kick the preserving up a notch and make my own olives. This is at the long end a 6-month process and on the short end a 6-week process. After reading several different recipes and watching a lot of youtube videos like this one:

I decided to go with Apple Crumbles. Her recipe was the most clear to me and I liked that she had pictures most steps of the way. Since I don’t own a pickling kettle I just have the olives in mason jars that I am draining and refilling with brine daily. Apparently, the more you change the brine the quicker the process. My goal is to have these olives ready for Thanksgiving. I am cutting it pretty close.

It being pumpkin season and all, I was pretty excited when I came across Jehan Can Cook’s recipe for Chicken and Pumpkin Stew. What attracted me to the stew was that it was a slightly spicy coconut milk based stew. The recipe pulls together a lot of the flavors that I like, cumin, garlic, ginger, pumpkin (technically calabaza squash), and coconut milk. The recipe does call for chicken bouillon, which I just never have, so I added a little homemade chicken stock instead to bump up the flavor. The recipe says to cook the stew for 20-25 minutes or until the pumpkin is tender, I cooked it for close to 40 minutes, only because my pumpkin was taking bit longer to break down. It was wonderful that this was a one-pot stew and I did end up with a delightfully spiced stew in under an hour that I served over brown rice, but would probably just serve with crusty bread next time.

This week’s final treat was Vietnamese Beef Pho Soup. The two recipes that I found most helpful, and I’m a little chagrined to say this were the recipes at epicurious and at Food Network.  My first try out on this, I had pork stock in my freezer so I went ahead and used that. To give the broth the unique Pho flavor I toasted my star anise, cloves and fennel seeds and then put them into a cheesecloth with chunks of ginger, dropped the spice packet into the broth and simmered for a good 20 minutes allowing the spices to infuse the broth that way. As I am typing this I have a beef broth cooking on the stove to try the recipe again to see if the difference is that huge. Both recipes called for either knuckle or oxtail to make the broth, and my butcher was sympathetic as he told me he was out, but then he suggested that I use the shank instead. What is lovely about Pho is that it is so simple and so delicate in flavor. The cilantro, mung beans, scallions and lime juice keep the soup fresh while the rice noodles and beef fill you up. I will admit that putting the raw sliced flank steak into the soup was a little nerve-racking, until after delivering myself a swift kick in the shins I reminded myself of all of tartares and carpaccios I have eaten in my lifetime with no harm.

If anyone knows of a stunner Pho recipe I would love to hear about it!

Related Articles

• Cooking with Pumpkins (greenandcleanmom.org)
• Weekend Menu Planning: Pumpkin Recipes for Soup, Chili, Stew, and Drinks (blogher.com)