Roasted Garlic and Red Pepper Pasta Sauce

I don't think I'm cut out for canning. It sounds like it has all of the things I love: delicious things, fiddly precise instructions, pots that sound like types of light water nuclear reactors, SCIENCE! But this is the sort of thing that my inner computer scientist ruins. Inner computer scientist starts trying to find shortcuts or "better" ways to do stuff when tasks are repetitive and boring. Canning is kind of like remedial chemistry lab, except instead of causing a professor to wonder how someone who made it through three years of physics labs without eating a disk of thorium or staring into the lasers could screw up so thoroughly, the CDC sighs and adds a footnote to a report on food borne illnesses. And everyone gets botulism.

If I've learned anything from watching the Cooking Channel (the Food Network's dumping ground for pretentious or Canadian food shows) it's that there are a bunch of dirty hipsters shoving all sorts of food into jars in dingy apartments across New York and Seattle while charging some serious cash for the experience. If these dudes can manage to not kill people cooking with their vintage-stained stoves and ironic dirty beards, I am probably fine.

There's been a bunch of unopened canning stuff (pot, jars, lids, etc) in my parents' basement for a couple of years. The backyard produces just enough produce to have slightly too much to eat fresh but never enough ripe at the same time for canning. And the squirrels appear to have a taste for heirloom tomatoes. The canning book I have is full of pretty pictures of tomato sauces. I didn't think I'd be able to find twelve pounds of ripe tomatoes for a reasonable price.

I was correct. I found thirty pounds of tomatoes for a reasonable price at the Jeffersontown Farmers Market. One of the stalls had boxes of tomatoes marked "Canning tomatoes" and I was sold. Aside from some extremely minor blossom end rot scarring (which is why I assume they were being sold this cheaply), the tomatoes were beautiful. No smashed, bruised, rotten, or green things hiding further in the box. The tomatoes themselves were not very seedy or watery. They seemed to be between an actual sauce tomato, like a roma tomato, and a slicing tomato. My plans were two batches of roasted garlic and red pepper pasta sauce and a batch of tomato basil jam.

The real test was whether I'd be able to peel, chop, and process thirty pounds of tomatoes before they went bad or my attention wandered too far. Success. I ended up with ten and a half quarts of pasta sauce and five 8 oz jelly jars of jam. Because I can't ever leave anything alone, I added some carrots and onion and fennel seed to the sauce; the sorts of things that generally make pasta sauce delicious. I'm not sure how the jam turned out because sweet tomato things aren't my style. Worst case scenario, I mail it to people too shy to tell me it sucks. And hope they don't get botulism.

Roasted Garlic and Red Pepper Pasta Sauce

adapted from Better Homes and Gardens, changes are in brackets in case you are less interested in food poisoning

for six pints of sauce

12 pounds of ripe tomatoes

6 [or 4] sweet red bell peppers

[2 carrots]

[1 sweet onion]

6 heads of garlic

2 tbsp oil

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

2 tbsp kosher salt

3 tbsp brown sugar

[2 tbsp tomato paste]

[2 tsp fennel seeds]

[1 tbsp red pepper flakes]

2 cups (or 2/3 cup dried) basil

1 cup (or 1/3 cup dried) other herbs, such as parsley, thyme, sage, oregano

lemon juice or citric acid, 1 tbsp or 1/4 tsp per pint jar

Canning equipment: jars, lids, bands, boiling water canner, towels

1.) Weigh out 12 pounds of tomatoes. Skin the tomatoes: score the bottom of the tomatoes and blanch in boiling water for a minute or so. Plunge into cold water. The skins will come off when pulled. Seed and cut the peeled tomatoes into chunks.

Because it takes forever to peel and cut that many tomatoes, start roasting the garlic and peppers [carrots and onion too]. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Peel the paper off the garlic (but leave the cloves on the head) and cut the peppers in half, removing the seeds [quarter the carrots and onion]. Place vegetables in a roasting pan, drizzle with oil and roast for forty minutes. When the pepper skins have blackened, remove from the oven and place the pepper in a paper bag (or a foil pouch). Let rest for ten minutes and then peel the charred skin away. Cut into pieces. You can add them now to the chopped tomatoes, if you want them pureed, or you can cut them into tiny pieces and add them to the end of the cooking of the sauce, if you want them to retain their shape [same with the carrots and onions]. Squeeze the roasted garlic out of the bulbs and add to the tomatoes.

2.) Puree the tomatoes and garlic to make a sauce. I started out with a potato masher to get things going...

...and finished with an immersion blender. You can use just a masher, a food processor or blender, or a food mill. Whatever it takes to get the consistency and tomato size you want.

3.) Add the sauce flavorings. Add the vinegar, salt, sugar, [paste, fennel, red pepper], dried herbs (if you're using fresh herbs, save them for later in order to not cook them to death). Heat the sauce to boiling, reduce to a simmer, and cook for 50 minutes if you didn't already added roasted peppers and dried herbs. If you saved the peppers and/or fresh herbs, add them after 40 minutes and cook for another 10 minutes.

While the sauce is cooking, sterilize the jars, lids, funnels, and ladles.

4.) As soon as the sauce is done and the jars are sterilized, pack the jars (this is hot packing, meaning the jars and contents are hot). Place 1 tbsp of lemon juice or 1/4 tsp citric acid per pint in the bottom of each jar and fill to 1/2 inch of the top of the jars. Wipe the top clean to ensure proper seals and put the lids on, tightening the bands to finger tightness (don't try to screw the bands on like you'd expect on a jar of store bought pickles).

5.) Process the jars. Place the jars in a boiling water canner. When the water boils, time for 35 minutes if using pint or half pint jars or 40 minutes if using quart jars.

6.) Remove the jars from the canner and allow 12-24 hours to cool completely. Do not mess with the bands or poke the tops until completely cool. If after the cooling period some lids did not seal (meaning the top moves up and down when you press on it), you can try to process them one more time or put the affected jars in the fridge, to be used within a week. Properly sealed jars are good for a year, unopened.

Garbanzo and veggie stew

Okay, you're seeing it in its reheated, tupperware-vesseled form, as captured by my webcam, so it probably doesn't look great. But it is so tasty! I like making and eating this stew so much that it has motivated me to finally post to this blog. APOLOGIES that it is not nearly as fancy as the chicken tandoori or naan or whatnot and is in fact so simple that you could definitely figure out how to make it from the name of the dish.

The core of the recipe is this:

1-2 T. olive oil

1 onion, thinly sliced

2 carrots (or 1 big carrot) in 1/4 inch slices

1/2 t. cinnamon

1/4 t. cayenne pepper

1/4 t. turmeric

1 can garbanzo beans

1 T. capers

Salt and pepper; you know the deal

Saute the onion and carrot in the olive oil on medium heat until the onion is soft and golden and looking pleased with itself. Then add the spices and push them around for a while. Then add the can of garbanzo beans (with its liquids), cover, and leave it mostly alone for 15-20 minutes, stirring once or twice to make sure the beans are not sticking to the pan. Then take the lid off and add other stuff if you want (see below) and if there's too much liquid, let it evaporate for a few minutes. Garnish with capers. Eat.

You can also add other veggies. I recommend it. I used a big handful of green beans and a red bell pepper this time. I added them, plus the juice from half a lemon, near the end and cooked it for a few minutes. It is delicious, the end.

Tandoori Chicken

Shira mentioned a few weeks back that she wanted an excuse to make naan. You may be wondering why grilled garlic flatbread needs an excuse to be made. Two reasons: one, I will mercilessly mock a bread dinner (while eating a sandwich) and two, naan does not go well with many of the East Asian rice dishes I tend to make all of the time (sushi + naan, anyone?). When I first started making the naan, I made it to go with dahl back during my summer of vegetarianism. More recently, it's been a faithful companion of delicious lamb curry. I had some sort of mental block which prevented me from remembering which recipes I prepare to go with naan (yes, what sort of entree should I prepare to go with bread?) so I didn't make much of an effort to entertain the idea of naan dinner.
 
As previously mentioned, Shira nearly forgot to go to New Orleans. In what I can only assume was an attempt to distract herself from the intense awesomeness of rocketing to the top of her class of cadets at Space Academy, she picked up Cook's Illustrated Cooking For Two 2010 to read. While I think a lot of the "shortcuts" in Cook's Illustrated are wacky (or solved by buying the most expensive gadget) and sometimes the techniques are convoluted, it's hard to argue that I won't know how the recipe will turn out. I very much appreciate the rigorous testing a recipe goes through. I was quite excited to see a recipe for tandoori chicken because I it meant that I at last knew what to make with naan. I even had the chicken to do it with. A quick run to Weaver Street secured the yogurt but they were out of garam marsala. Luckily, CI provides an simple equivalent (well, simple if your spice pantry is full of curry spices) of coriander, black pepper, cinnamon, and cardamom.

I started the naan before Shira came home because even though the dough rises quickly, it takes forever to grill the naan because we don't have a large griddle. I made a modification to the recipe Shira posted below and used yogurt instead of milk (plus a tiny amount of extra water because the dough was a bit dry). The naan recipe I used before I found this one used yogurt and I wanted a bit of tang. The yogurt also made the naan easier to stretch (though it's not ever that difficult). Thanks, lactic acid. My next modification was to the yogurt sauce that went with this dish. Because I had half of a cucumber in the fridge, I looked up the raita recipe in a curry book that I have. While I had the book open, I checked out their version of Tandoori Chicken. It was very similar, save for the addition of paprika and red food coloring. I also did not have chili powder, so I used a combo of paprika and cayenne. I did not make a direct volume substitution, but the resulting chicken was pleasantly spicy.

The chicken was great, tangy from the yogurt and lime juice and deliciously spicy thanks to the cayenne pepper. The chicken was a little dry but that's usually what happens to chicken breasts. And there was raita to make up for it (and the heavy handed pepper). The pile of naan, which seemed to be in ridiculous excess, was decimated by the end of the meal. I was a bit sad to remove the skin from the chicken but I don't think it would have been crispy at the end of cooking. Another delicious meal at Ten Forward and one which did not require exhaustive efforts.

Tandoori Chicken
Adapted from America's Test Kitchen's Cooking for Two, 2010

Serves two

Raita
1/2 cup plain yogurt (I picked up low-fat by accident, feel free to be a fatty and use whole milk)
1 tbsp chopped cilantro
1 tbsp chopped mint
1 minced garlic clove
1/2 cucumber, grated, salted, and drained (see below)
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp paprika
salt and pepper to taste

Grate the cucumber coarsely. Cover with 1/2 tsp of salt and let sit for 30 minutes. Gently squeeze the excess water out of the cucumber. Combine with the yogurt, herbs, garlic, and spices. Taste for salt and add more if necessary (usually the salt on the cucumber is sufficient). Place in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before use, to let the flavors combine.

Garam marsala
1 1/2 tbs whole coriander
1 cardamom pod
1/2 tsp whole peppercorns
1/8 tsp ground cinnamon

Heat a small skillet over medium heat. When the skillet is hot add the coriander, cardamom seeds (remove them from the pod), and peppercorns. When almost done toasting, add the cinnamon powder. Remove from the skillet one the coriander starts to lightly brown. Grind the spice mixture together.

Chicken
2 tbsp oil
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tbsp minced fresh ginger
1 1/2 tsp garam marsala (either what you have on hand or the mix above)
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 cup plain yogurt
2 tbsp fresh lime juice
1 tsp salt
2 bone in, split chicken breasts, cut in half (You will most likely find these with the skin on. Just remove it)

 1.) Heat the oil in a skillet at medium heat. Add the garlic and ginger and cook for about half a minute. Add the garam marsala and cook for another thirty seconds. Remove the skillet from the heat.

2.) Trim the ribs from the chicken using poultry shears. Score the chicken pieces with a knife, making cuts about one inch apart and 1/8 inch deep. Combine the rest of the spice paste, lime juice, and salt. Rub this mixture on the chicken pieces and let marinade for 30 minutes at room temp.

3.) Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Line a sheet pan with foil (to catch chicken drippings) and place a baking rack on top of it.

4.) After the chicken has finished its thirty minute marinade, dip the pieces in the yogurt coating (from step 1, not the raita). Place skinned side down on the rack and bake for 15-25 minutes or until the chicken breasts reach an internal temperature of 125 degrees.

5.) Remove the chicken, turn the pieces over, and turn the oven to broil. Once the broiler has heated up, put the chicken on the top rack under it and broil for 8-15 minutes or until the chicken reaches an internal temperature of 160 degrees.

6.) Let rest for ten minutes at room temperature and serve with the raita.

Grilled Garlic Naan

I really, really love naan. I had never made it myself before moving to Ten Forward with the Captain - she found this recipe online a few summers ago, and sometime in the past year it turned from one of the things that she is usually in charge of making from one of the things I am usually in charge of making, which in my opinion is pretty great. Most likely I started making it under her supervision because I wanted her to teach me, then it just became habit. Regardless, naan is wonderful and this recipe is pretty stellar. It is rather time consuming - very much a slaving over a hot stove/grill type of thing - but I think it's worth it and I'm always confused about why we don't make it more often. I had been mentioning for a while that we needed to make something it would go well with, then Monday I came home from a trip to New Orleans (which I almost forgot to go on! This is true.) with a copy of the latest America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated Cooking for Two magazine which had a pretty excellent looking tandoori chicken recipe ins. Captain Letdown made that, and started the naan while I was at work, and I took it over when I got home. Also there was raita, but I believe she's going to be posting about the chicken and the raita, since she made them. It was a very excellent food evening, and there was much naan-documenting, so here we are. Incidentally, this makes an extremely good amount of naan. Four people (maybe three, I can eat a pretty spectacular amount of naan) who love bread can finish it off in one sitting, but the leftovers are excellent, so we never cut the recipe down.


Grilled Garlic Naan
original recipe

2.25 t (teaspoons) active dry yeast (this is the equivalent of one packet, if you don't buy by the jar like we do)

1 cup warm water (like any bread recipe, you want this to be lukewarm to skin temperature, but not hot, which will kill your yeast)

1/4 cup white sugar

3 T (tablespoons) milk

1 egg

2 t salt

4.5 cups bread flour

oil for the bowl and the grill

2 t minced garlic (optional, but really, why wouldn't you)

1/4 cup butter, melted

     About three hours before you want to be eating naan, start by proofing the yeast - dissolve it into the warm water with a pinch of your sugar and let it stand about ten minutes, or until it's frothy and excited. I usually just proof in the liquid measuring cup I was measuring the water into. If it doesn't get frothy and excited, either your water was too hot and you killed the yeast, or the yeast wasn't good to start with. Try again!

      While the yeast is proofing, whisk together your flour, salt, and the rest of the sugar in a large bowl. Add your egg - either it should be already beaten, or you can push the dry ingredients to one side, add the egg to the empty side, and beat it there. I do this because I am lazy and want to wash fewer dishes. Add the milk and the yeast, when it's proofed, and stir it together to make a soft dough. Knead it together until it's smooth, about 6-8 minutes.

 You can transfer it to a lightly floured surface, or do it right in the bowl (again, fewer dishes) if your bowl makes this practical - that is, if it's large enough and not sharply angled. The bowl really should be pretty big, as the doubled dough is sizable. We use a giant metal mixing bowl we somehow inherited from Mary Menville. Oil your bowl pretty well (before you move it back, or just pick the dough up for a minute) and put the dough in it, turn it over to get both sides with oil (this keeps it from drying out during the rise) and cover your bowl with a damp towel or cloth (this also keeps it from drying out during the rise.)

Put it somewhere  warm and draft free and let it rise until doubled in volume - this takes roughly an hour, depending on how active your yeast is and how warm your rising spot is. We tend to put rising dough in the oven, with just the oven light on to generate a bit of warmth. Towards the end of this time you should prepare your garlic, if you're using it, which you should.

       When the dough is doubled, punch it down and knead in the garlic. Pinch off small handfuls of dough and roll them into balls about the size of a golf ball, and place them on a tray (we use two baking sheets) to rise again, once more covered by damp towel(s). 

This rise, also until doubled in size, should only take about half an hour. Toward the end of this time you should preheat your grill - as you can see in the pictures, we use a cast iron grill pan on the stovetop, which I keep at medium to medium high heat. The original recipe says high heat, but our heavy cast iron gets very hot, so medium high is plenty. Due to the melted butter that's coming up, the recipe generates plenty of smoke even without actually burning your naan, so, you know, watch out for that. We usually end up cracking a window, but we've never set off the smoke alarm making this (hooray!).
 

     When your balls of dough are doubled and your grill is hot, lightly oil the grill and melt the butter and put it and a brush of some sort by the grill. Now is when the slaving over a hot stove comes in. Also the smoke. Take the first ball of dough, and stretch it with your hands (the original recipe says roll it out, but I think this works better) into as thin a circle as you can -

I look for maybe five to seven inches across, and the circle idea can get pretty vague. Many of mine end up shaped approximately like one continental mass or another. So, the stretching: I start by flattening the dough a bit with my palms, then grasping the edges of the disk between my thumb and forefinger and putting my other fingers under the edge and then spreading them apart a bit. Turn a bit, repeat, turn, and so on until it's about as thin and regular as it seems like it's going to get. I hold it at the top and let gravity stretch the bottom a little at the same time. It ends up with a bit of a thicker rim around the edge, but that's fine. Alternately, stretch or flatten them however works for you. Regardless, flatten the first one, then place it flat on the grill.

Brush some melted butter on the exposed side. Let it cook until it gets a bit puffy and the bottom is nicely grill marked, one to three minutes (this is when I start stretching the next piece of naan) turn it (I use tongs) and brush the newly exposed other side with butter. Grill until this side is marked and doesn't look like raw dough - this will be shorter than the first side, maybe just a minute. Remove to a plate, and place your next piece on the grill, and repeat the whole process over (and over and over!). When all the naan has been grilled, feast upon it with gladness. (Illustration: a happy girl with a massive pile of naan.)

White Chocolate Cranberry Scones

Sometimes I crave white chocolate. This is weird, not because white chocolate is the obviously inferior chocolate, but because the creamy sweetness that I enjoy also makes me slightly queasy in sufficient quantity. None the less, I had been putting off making a batch of oatmeal cranberry white chocolate cookies for a few months. The cookies (along with homemade bread, experiments from Rick Bayless' Authentic Mexican cookbook, and an endless supply of coffee) were part of a fond tradition of baking with Mary Menville in the kitchen of her dorm and bitching about how much we hated everyone at the college we went to.

I kept defaulting to cookies, part out of nostalgia, part out of laziness, and part out of not having an idea what else to hide it in. Accusing the entire Internet of conspiracy to cover up white chocolate recipes seems silly. The truth is, I probably just glance over them. I thought about doing scones before. My Betty Crocker Cookbook (don't hate, this was a fantastic book to have in college because anything you wanted to cook from it could easily be obtained by rummaging through cabinets or knocking on a few neighbors' doors. And the desserts usually turn out perfectly) has a picture of some sort of white chocolate scone in it. I'm sure it was the large crystals of sugar glistening on top which attracted me. I mentioned making them a few times to Shira. Her response was usually to shrug and talk about orange-dark chocolate scones. Foiled.

The pieces fell into place: a craving, a stumbled upon recipe, a visiting friend to foist baked good upon (especially if I botched them). I could do a breakfast thing, fulfilling Ten-Forward's mission of non-stop delicious food, and finally scratch the white chocolate itch. The recipe I used was not from the Betty Crocker Cookbook (to be honest, I forgot about it until I was writing this up). It was supposed to be much fancier: buckwheat flour and fine cornmeal were used in addition to all purpose flour. In my early morning grogginess at the coop I forgot to grab buckwheat flour. The rest of the modifications came as a result of what I had on hand: cranberries for the cherries, less white chocolate because I didn't feel like getting two bars and leaving half of one to sit in the fridge for an eternity, and no added corn meal because I didn't feel like it.

Despite all of my modifications, I really enjoyed these scones. They had a wonderful texture. And even though I only used two-thirds of the chocolate the original recipe called for, it was quite enough chocolate for me. Springing for a nice white chocolate probably helped mask that there wasn't a ton of it. Check out the original recipe here: David Lebovitz's White Chocolate Sour Cherry Scones.

White Chocolate Cranberry Scones

This is a modified version of David Lebovitz's White Chocolate Sour Cherry Scones. I encourage you to check out the original, which is a much more interesting and complex (in terms of ingredients, not effort) scone.

Baking time: around 25 minutes, at 400 degrees

2 cups all purpose flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup sugar
6 tbsp unsalted butter, cubed
1/2 cup cream
1 large egg
1 cup dried cranberries
3/4 cup (100 g) chopped white chocolate (for me this was one bar of Green and Black's white chocolate)

Glaze
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp milk

Makes six or eight scones.

1.) Mix the flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt together.

2.) Cube the butter and chill it. I put it in the freezer because I was going to take the food processor route. If mixing by hand or with a pastry cutter, the fridge should is fine. Once chilled, cut into the flour mixture. I put it in the food processor which created more stuff to wash but satisfied my early morning(ish) laziness. (One day, I will own a pastry cutter). You're looking for pea-sized chunks of flour and butter. Be careful not to over mix in the food processor. I did around ten quick pulses.

3.) Mix the egg and the cream together and then add to the flour and butter mixture. Mix until just combined and then add the chopped white chocolate and the cranberries. Mix until the dough comes together. It will be quite crumbly. Do not add any extra liquid yet.

4.) Dump the dough onto a floured work surface. Bring it together and fold it over itself a few times. The crumbs should magically come together, where once you had a pile of dry failure shedding white chocolate and cranberries. Press any escapees into the dough ball and form into a round about eight inches in diameter.

5.) Cut into 6 or 8 wedges. Place the wedges on a baking mat or parchment paper (the bottoms do get burned otherwise). Mix the yolk and milk, then glaze the tops of the scones. Sprinkle lightly with sugar.

6.) Bake until golden brown, about 25 minutes.

Black pepper and sesame crusted tuna steaks with ginger-shiitake cream sauce

Rather than just the title recipe, this post covers the entire dinner that we made to go around it.

I've made this meal a few times, always with one of my Nom Collective comrades: twice with Captain Letdown, my esteemed roommate, and once while visiting the lovely Missy. The centerpiece of the dinner is the black pepper and sesame crusted tuna steak with ginger-shiitake cream sauce of the post title. Captain Roommate found this recipe on Epicurious, and it is pretty spectacular. The tuna itself is just delicious seared steaks, but the sauce is INSANE. In order to enjoy this sauce as much as possible, by putting it on everything ohmygoodnessitissogood, we served it with wasabi mashed potatoes, which are an excellent vehicle for it. Here at Ten Forward, we had a seaweed salad for the vegetable. Captain Action made it, so I can't really speak to a recipe, but it was two or three types of dried seaweed that we keep in the cabinet, soaked  and drained and then dressed with a rice wine vinaigrette with sesame. Also there were carrots ins. This is a pretty wonderful, fancy-ish meal, but it really comes together very quickly. There's a decent amount of prep work, but the only part of the cooking that takes any time at all is boiling the potatoes. (And as noted above, I don't know how long the seaweed needs to soak for.) The tuna is only seared, and the sauce takes five or six minutes, max, to make. I'm going to separate the recipes out (tuna and sauce/potatoes) but my advice in terms of order is that you put the potatoes up, then do all the prep work for the sauce while they boil, then mash and season the potatoes, then cook the tuna and make the sauce. Because the sauce only cooks for a minute or two at each stage, and the tuna is only seared, it's really important to have everything chopped up and ready to add before you start. The potatoes retain heat well, and since the oven is on low (200ºF) for the fish to sit in anyway, they can hang out in there while other things happen as long as they're in something vaguely oven-safe. On to recipes!


Wasabi mashed potatoes
(Disclaimer: I've never in my life used or made a recipe for mashed potatoes. I'm keeping this one vague, because in my opinion the levels of everything are taste-dependent and should be personalized. So: instead of precise, conversational.)

Potatoes
salt
pepper
milk or cream
butter
wasabi (paste or powder)

Put a pot of salted water on to boil. There should be enough room and water for the potatoes to be covered with an inch or so to spare. Meanwhile, cut the potatoes into roughly regular chunks. (You could peel them first, if you like, but I like the skins.) I usually use small potatoes like Yukon Golds, and cut them in half or in thirds depending on how big they are, but all that really matters is that the pieces are about the same size. When the water hits a rolling boil, lower the potatoes in and cover, (or don't, really.) Keep the water at a steady boil and boil until the potatoes are tender when you stick a fork through them. This should take something like ten to twenty minutes, and as mentioned, it's a perfect time to be peeling and chopping garlic and ginger and all that. Also, if you're using dried wasabi powder, you can prepare it now - the brands we get tend to want you to let it sit, covered, for at least five minutes after mixing with water and before use. I recommend you make more than you think you'll need, so you can add it gradually to taste. When the potatoes are tender, drain them, transfer to a bowl and mash with a masher or a fork or, you know, anything else that works. Now is when all the amounts depend on your taste and preferences. I start by adding butter, salt and pepper, but less than I think it will end up needing. After that, I adjust by taste, adding more butter, and/or milk and/or cream, until I have a texture I like, and more salt and pepper until it is delicious. Ordinarily, I like significant amounts of black pepper in my mashed potatoes, and often cracked red pepper flakes as well, but for wasabi-flavored ones I hold back on the pepper- there's plenty more bite coming, and I don't want to overshadow the wasabi's taste. I like to add the wasabi last, after the potatoes seem delicious and balanced. Who can say why! I just think it's a good idea. The wasabi should definitely be added gradually, and to your taste - I like it to be a noticeable but not overpowering flavor, and my potatoes tend to end up tinted slightly green. When they are how you want them, set them aside (perhaps in the oven!) until serving time. 

Black pepper and sesame crusted tuna steaks with ginger-shiitake cream sauce 

From epicurious.com. The original is supposed to make enough sauce for six tuna steaks, but clearly Bon Appetit magazine did not fully appreciate the glory of this sauce. Last time I made it, we made two tuna steaks, but only halved the sauce recipe. Next time, I'm just going to make the full sauce recipe, because it is wonderful and leftover sauce on a baked potato would center a very fine dinner, in my opinion. Accordingly, I'm including the full recipe here, not a halved one. Depending on how much sauce you want, it would work for two to six people; adjust as needed. 

tuna steaks (one per person)
coarsely ground black peppr
coarse salt

sesame seeds (we used a mix of black and regular, because we had them around and it's pretty)

oil for the frying pan


sauce:

3 tablespoons butter

1/3 cup thinly sliced green onions

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

2 tablespoons finely chopped peeled fresh ginger

4 garlic cloves, chopped

8 ounces fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed, caps sliced

6 tablespoons soy sauce

1 1/2 cups whipping cream

3 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Pan-Seared-Tuna-with-Ginger-Shiitake-Cream-Sauce-100670#ixzz0u4jbtbdy

3 T (tablespoons; t = teaspoons) butter
1/3 cup thinly sliced green onion
1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro
2 T finely chopped peeled ginger root
4 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
half a pound of fresh shiitake mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed, and sliced
6 T soy sauce
1.5 cups whipping cream
3 T fresh lime juice

Preheat the oven to 200ºF - this is where the tuna will wait while the sauce is being made. Heat the oil (a tablespoon or two) in a large, heavy skillet on high heat. Mix the coarse black pepper and the sesame, along with a sprinkling of coarse salt, together on a plate, and lay one or both (up to you!) sides of each tuna steak on it to coat. If you only coat one side with the sesame, you should still season the other side with a little salt and pepper.When the skillet is heated, place the tuna steaks (or some of them, if you're making too many to fit) in the hot oil.

Now, the original recipe says to leave them for two minutes, but that is crazy talk. You want a delicious crust, but you don't want the fish cooked through (I mean, unless you do, but that is not what I am looking for from tuna steak.) Watch them, but I advise leaving them no more than a minute. Turn over and, again, sear to desired doneness- again, they think two minutes, I think more like one.  When you've got them where you want them, remove them to a baking sheet and pop it in the oven to stay warm. To the same pan, with its bit of oil and peppery-sesame-y tuna crust bits, add the butter, ginger, garlic, green onion, and cilantro, and saute until it smells wonderful, about thirty seconds. Add the soy sauce and the mushrooms, and simmer another thirty seconds, then add the cream  (you probably want to ease off the heat at this point) and simmer merrily until your sauce lightly coats the back of a spoon, roughly three minutes during which you can start plating everything up. Mix in the lime juice and serve.

3 tablespoons butter

1/3 cup thinly sliced green onions

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

2 tablespoons finely chopped peeled fresh ginger

4 garlic cloves, chopped

8 ounces fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed, caps sliced

6 tablespoons soy sauce

1 1/2 cups whipping cream

3 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Pan-Seared-Tuna-with-Ginger-Shiitake-Cream-Sauce-100670#ixzz0u4jbtbdy

3 tablespoons butter

1/3 cup thinly sliced green onions

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

2 tablespoons finely chopped peeled fresh ginger

4 garlic cloves, chopped

8 ounces fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed, caps sliced

6 tablespoons soy sauce

1 1/2 cups whipping cream

3 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Pan-Seared-Tuna-with-Ginger-Shiitake-Cream-Sauce-100670#ixzz0u4jbtbdy

Goya chanpuru, Okinawan Bitter Melon Stir Fry

The Carrboro Farmers' Market usually has a surprise or two lurking in with the boxes and boxes of tomatoes and eggplants. This visit, I was greeted by a small pile of bitter melon at the first stand. Because I usually make one pass at the market before I buy anything, I was worried that someone would buy all of the bitter melon before I could get to it (haha). The market was packed and I didn't have a lot of patience after having to fight through isles and stands where people were standing around having conversations in the worst place physically possible (if only I had taken fluid dynamics, I could have at least distracted myself with physics). After braving people and a blueberry spill at the bitter melon stand, I at last secured two smallish bitter melons. The woman working the stand asked if I had eaten bitter melon before. Naturally, I lied. I've had arguments at stands before where vendors tried to talk me out of buying things and I didn't feel like getting lectured—a tiny delicate flower such as myself cannot possibly tolerate spicy, bitter, or flavorful foods.

Yes, I realize that she was probably going to offer friendly advice on how to prepare it and she probably could have helped me to pick riper and less bitter melons. But I am to personal interactions as coarse sandpaper is to your face. The melons were mostly the same color anyway. Bitter melons start off dark green with white pulpy interiors and eventually ripen and turn yellow and split open to reveal bright red pulp and seeds. They become less bitter as they ripen, so a lighter more yellowish green is desirable, to a point. The fruit of the melon is too mushy and bitter to eat when it turns yellow/yellowish orange.

You can see that mine were pretty dark green. Another way to mitigate the bitterness is to blanch the melons. You can also salt and drain them. I went the salting route in order to keep as much crispness to the melon before cooking as possible.

Bitter melons are prized for their pleasantly bitter flavor (when properly prepared) and their reported cooling effect. They are also many health benefit claims from aiding digestion to lowering blood glucose (always a welcome side effect, given Ten-Forward's proclivity towards dessert). I halved my melons, lengthwise, and scooped out the pith and seeds. I then chopped the melon into half inch slices. Curious, I bit into a piece. The texture was like a cross between a cucumber and a bell pepper. It was bitter, but not terribly so, until the aftertaste: it had that familiar medicinally bitter taste. I was not tempted to spit the piece or vomit, which I took as a good sign. It was certainly edible and I was interested in tasting it after salting and eating it with other food.

One thing I left out of the stir fry was the pork. Pork is not cooked in Ten-Forward when Shira is around. I didn't replace the pork with another protein. I think the balance of the dish was thrown off. Perhaps I should have added more egg (keeping it at least ovo-vegetarian) but I think some other meat would be better. The melon was bitter but was delicious with the pieces of egg. It was slightly less bitter after salting, cooking, and coating with sweet miso sauce. Not bad, but definitely better paired with something else.

Would I try bitter melon again? Yes. I would even try goya chanpuru again. There are many different ways to prepare this vegetable, from soups to stir frys to even deep frying it. It was far from the most bitter thing I have ever eaten and I think that in a well balanced dish, the bitterness is very enjoyable.

Goya Chanpuru [ゴーヤチャンプルー]

You can watch this dish be prepared (not by me, of course) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp-a5y8rY28. Cooking with Dog is a wonderful channel for learning to make Japanese food and is one of my favorite Japanese cooking resources (a nice way of saying, expect more posts of Japanese food from here).

Makes two servings

2 medium sized bitter melons or one large melon
salt
half of a chopped onion
half a block of firm tofu
2 eggs
pinch of pepper

Sauce

2 tbsp white miso
1 tbsp sake
1/2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp soy sauce

Katsuobushi, for garnish

1.) Prepare the bitter melon and tofu

Cut the melon(s) in half, lengthwise. Scoop out and discard the seeds and white pith. Chop the melon into half inch slices. Place the pieces in a bowl and salt them. Wrap the tofu in a paper towel and set a weight on it. Allow both to sit for half an hour. Rinse the bitter melon and drain. Wipe the tofu with a dry paper towel and cut into half inch slices.

2.) Precook ingredients

The key to stir fry is to remember that, usually, the ingredients do not cook at the same rate. By the time the tofu is browned, the eggs would be tiny, tough blobs and the melon overcooked and mushy. Precooking lets you control when everything will be done. Heat up a pan on medium-high heat with a tablespoon or so of oil. Add the tofu and cook until browned on both sides. If you didn't drain the tofu well, it will spit hot oil everywhere. After the tofu is browned, I precooked the onions. If you like crisper onions, you can cook them alongside the bitter melon later. Finally, beat the two eggs with a bit of salt and pepper and cook them half way. Enough that they will congeal together, not create an omelet. This keeps the eggs from overcooking and becoming rubbery in the stir fry while keeping the eggs in larger chunks.

3.)Prepare the miso sauce

Combine the miso, soy sauce, sake, and sugar. Set aside.

4.) Assemble the stir fry

Heat the pan back up to medium high. Add a bit of oil and then stir fry the bitter melon (and the onions, if not precooked) until the melon is softened, about a minute or two. Add the tofu, onions, and sauce. Toss to coat. Add the eggs and stir to mix in and to finish cooking the eggs. When the eggs are cooked, remove and plate. Top with katsuobushi, if desired.