Photo by dylan

Assembly Line Sushi

The first time I had sushi I was home for the summer from college. My best friend invited me to dinner with his family. He has two siblings and invited a couple other friends, so we had a large enough group to get a private room. When the sake came I knew I was going to like the dinner. Then the waiter brought in two large boards with about a dozen rolls on each. There were California Rolls, Hawiian Rolls, Philadelphia Rolls, Seattle Rolls, Tampa Rolls. I didn’t realize how Americanized sushi was. I was having a hard time with the suction cups on the ocotopus. It took a few shots of sake before I mustered up the courage, but I popped that sucker in my mouth and chewed, and chewed, and chewed. It wan’t bad, but it wasn’t my favorite. My favorite is the Dynamite Roll (yellowtail, prawn tempura, bean sprouts, carrots, avocado, cucumber, chili, and spicy mayonnaise) and the marinated sea eel.

Sushi is a bite-sized piece of sticky rice dressed with vinegar and traditionally topped  with raw fish but also with egg or vegetables. The two main kinds are Maki and Nigiri. The maki is the kind we are most familiar with in the states. The rice and ingredients are pressed into seaweed paper and wrapped into a roll. Nigiri is a more delicate presentation of an oblong mound of rice topped with an expertly cut piece of raw fish. The art of preparing nigiri takes many years to perfect. Traditionally, the ancient art of Sushi etiquette and technique is taught by a master sushi chef, or Itamae (literally, “in front of the board”), who trains the wakiita (literally, “near the cutting board”) for decades. Today, you can become a certified sushi chef in the U.S. in as little as twelve weeks.

Since my first encouter with sushi, it has really taken off in the U.S. Sushi restauarants are popping up all over the place. You can even get sushi in quality grocery stores. And it’s even the #42 thing Stuff White People Like... “Regardless if you are vegetarian, vegan, or just guilty about eating meat, all white people love Sushi.  To them, it’s everything they want: foreign culture, expensive, healthy, and hated by the ‘uneducated.’” stuffwhitepeoplelike.com

And now, sushi has joined the ranks of the Subway and Chipotle-style restaurants.  U Sushi  is an assembly line–style sushi restaurant. You tell the guy by the cutting board what you want. He passes it down to the next person who adds more toppings and passes it to a third person who rolls it up, cuts it, and warps it to go.  What a great concept, but there’s nothing like the traditional sit-down, hours-long, feast. Our fast-food culture is good in a pinch, but it shouldn’t replace the companionship of friends and family enjoying sake, sushi, and a little sumpin sumpin.

Geoffrey

We've Got the Beet

We’ve Got the Beet

Beets, where have you been all my life?   I believe a mini-traumatic early experience with beets (my grandmother serving beets out of a can) made me shun them for a good couple of decades. Luckily, I’ve become reacquainted (and now absolutely enamored!)  with them—thanks to a couple of magical methods and recipes, which I’ll share.

But first, to sing the beet’s praises:   They’re almost too good to be true.  If all the internet-gleaned facts can be believed, beets will do everything for you except do your taxes:  clean your liver, detoxify your blood, ward off cancer, cure anemia, and make your skin look radiant.  Yet people still resist eating them, I think due to two factors:  1) raw beets take some time to cook—they aren’t exactly instant gratification.  And 2) red beets stain your hands, your countertop, and possibly your clothes if you’re not careful.  My methods below make it as easy as possible for you to avoid these hazards.

Okay, now to reveal some secrets to making delicious beets with a minimum of fuss:

1.       First, you don’t HAVE to buy raw beets.  Many supermarkets (my local Trader Joe’s, for instance) offer them already boiled.  All you have to do is unwrap the plastic that encases them (I know, not exactly great) and be careful to rinse, drain the beet juice, then slice  OR

2.      You can roast them—Take each raw beet (don’t try to peel, just give it a light scrub) and wrap in aluminum foil, then put in your oven at 400 degrees for about an hour.  When you take them out of the oven and let cool, their hard outer layer will just fall away, and you’re left with the ruby-jeweled insides to cut and cube.

Whether you have store-bought boiled beets or your own roasted beets, here’s how to make them absolutely delicious:

1.      Mix 3 tablespoons olive oil with 2 tablespoons of White Balsamic vinegar.  Add a squirt of honey and a whisper of soy sauce, then whisk.  Trust me, the sweetness of the honey, the saltiness of the soy sauce, and the tartness of the vinegar will combine on the blank canvas of olive oil and produce an amazing result.  Arrange sliced beets on a bed of lettuce (preferably mache), sprinkle with bleu, feta, or gorgonzola cheese, top with dressing—and prepare to have your mind blown.

2.      Or, for a delicious brown-bag lunch, try mixing the cubed beets in with some quinoa, couscous, or brown rice.  Add some other veggies if you’re so inclined.  Add some cheese and a touch of the dressing.  Spend your work afternoon detoxifying your blood as you get your work done.  Who said people can’t multi-task?

3.      One last side note—don’t always be so quick to throw away those beet greens (which, if you get from a farmer’s market, I admit are a pain-in-the-neck because they’re full of dirt).   When thoroughly rinsed, there’s all sorts of things you can do with them—but that’s for another blog post!

Go-Go Get Some Beets,

Jennifer

Photo via here

Pure Ground Beef

Photo by Jeremy Vohwinkle, genxfinance.com

Pure Ground Beef

When I was a kid I used to love beef, mostly in the form of cheeseburgers. I liked meatloaf too, but not as much as I liked cheeseburgers. We also put ground beef on our pizza, in our tacos, and occasionally with some Hamburger Helper. As a child, the one problem I had with the beef was the bits of gristle and things I’d run across periodically. After a few times of having to remove of piece of something from my mouth, I’d pretty much be done eating. I always chalked it up as something that happens when you eat ground beef. Perhaps I was wrong.

Recently there’s been an article floating around the Internet about pink slime: http://yhoo.it/zhBiKB. (I’ll spare you the picture.) Apparently, the FDA allows lean finely textured beef (LFTB) to be marketed and sold as 100% beef. It’s reported that the USDA plans to purchase 7 million pounds of beef with this LFTB for school lunches. So what is LFTB? It sounds like a healthy alternative to a high-fat beef. Actually, it’s the reject pieces from the butcher like connective tissue and excess fat. At one time these pieces were only used in cooking oil and dog food. Now, they are approved for human consumption—after they’ve been treated with ammonia, of course, because it’s in the rejected pieces where pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella are typically found in high concentrations. “It’s pink, therefore it’s meat,” our government scientists claim. Gotta love those government scientists.

Now, I don’t know if this LFTB was around when I was eating my burgers as a youth. Maybe I was biting into some connective tissue. Or maybe even something worse. Have you ever seen Jamie Oliver demonstrate what chicken nuggets are really made of? http://youtu.be/XKSoiDtdi9s... Eeeww!

Rather than abandon burgers and tacos and meatloaf, I think I’ll look to a healthier alternative: pure beef. According to Lynne Curry, author or Pure Beef: An Essential Guide to Artisan Meat with Recipes for Every Cut, before it was associated with heart attacks—and ages before mad cow disease, E. coli, environmental degradation, and global warming—beef was a wholesome, nourishing, and desirable food source. Today, 95 percent of the annual calf crop are taken from the farms to feedlots where they stand around all day being fed a blend of cereal grains and by-products. No wonder they’re fattier. And then their connective tissue and fat and by-products are ground up for our consumption. No wonder we have health problems.

When looking for beef, consider grass-fed beef. It is higher in omega-3 fatty acid and has more antioxidants, which protect cells against cancer-causing free radicals, than the feedlot variety. If you can’t find or afford grass-fed beef, learn how to grind your own hamburger at home. You save money and ensure that you are at least getting pure ground beef, and then maybe your hamburger won’t need a helper.

~Geoffrey

Kelsey Banfield, The Naptime Chef

KELSEY BANFIELD'S, THE NAPTIME CHEF,  

IN STORES NOW!

Photo: The Merry Gourmet

Being a parent doesn’t leave too much time for preparing those delicious gourmet meals you used to have time for. But now parents who love to cook can make the delicious meals they remember from their pre-baby days—all during Baby’s naptime! Kelsey Banfield has culled her favorite recipes with preparation tips and tricks that allow you to prepare a meal hours or days ahead of time, leaving only the shortest and easiest parts for last. Having children changes your life, but it doesn’t have to change what you cook.

We'd like to thank all the terrific food bloggers out there for participating in The Naptime Chef blog tour! (Full round up of blog posts below.)

Please join the Twitter Party Wednesday March 14th from 12 – 1pm ET and use the hashtag #naptimecooking to chat all things cooking!

Photo: Big Girls Small Kitchen

Photo: Brooklyn Supper

Aggie’s Kitchen

Big Girls Small Kitchen

Brooklyn Supper

Cooking with my Kid

Gluten is My Bitch

La Fuji Mama

Merry Gourmet

Momtastic

The Wicked Noodle

Recipe Girl


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Comfort Me with Apples

COMFORT ME WITH APPLES

Well, the results are in: we didn’t win the Philly Chili Bowl this weekend. I know! But reader, the competing chilis were not only respectable: they were delicious! They were inventive! One memorable brew used Chinese five-spice powder instead of a traditional chili powder. It was an ingenious spin: Chinese five-spice powder is a custom blend of punchy flavors, much like a chili powder. Think of it as a first cousin by marriage. It’s pungent, it’s full, it’s balanced—try it in your next chili. Other noteworthy stews were spinoffs: there was a seafood chili with a creamy cheesy broth that packed a punch. There was a chili gumbo: fresh, peppery, and full of good acidic flavors. And the meats—by golly, the meats! There was beef, pork, shrimp, chicken, venison, rabbit, oxtail, bison, and tofu, the Great White Not-Meat. And to make a killer evening even better, a portion of each chili was siphoned off for donation to Project H.O.M.E.

It was a great experience, and I can’t wait for the next cook-off. But of course, a win would have been a welcome result. While we licked our wounds, we settled in with some forgiving wedges of my husband’s apple pie.  The recipe is a riff on Sam Sifton’s recent offering in the New York Times Magazine. A few Golden Delicious storage apples later, and the smell wafting from the oven was balm for our dented pride.

From Pie Fidelity, Feb. 19, 2012

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 1/2 pounds apples, peeled and cored, then cut into wedges (5 large will do it)

1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

2/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon sugar

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons cornstarch

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

1 recipe all-purpose pie dough

1 egg, lightly beaten

1. Melt butter in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat and add the apples. Stir to coat the fruit and cook. Meanwhile, whisk together the spices, salt and 2/3 cup sugar, and sprinkle this over the apples, stirring to combine. Let the apples soften, approximately 5 to 7 minutes. Sprinkle the flour and cornstarch over the apples and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, for another 3 to 5 minutes. Remove pan from heat, add cider vinegar, stir and allow to cool completely. (The fruit mixture will cool faster if spread out on a rimmed baking sheet, but why dirty another dish?)

2. Place a large baking sheet on the middle rack of oven and preheat to 425°F. Remove one disc of dough from the refrigerator and roll it out on a lightly floured surface until it is roughly 12 inches in diameter. Roll it onto the pin, and using the pin, move the dough over the pie dish; unfurl it directly into the dish. Press to fit neatly, trimming it to leave a 1/2-inch overhang. Place the pie dish in the freezer while you work with the top crust.

3. Roll out the remaining dough on a lightly floured surface until it is roughly 10 or 11 inches in diameter.

4. Remove pie crust from freezer and spread the cooled pie filling into it. Cover with remaining dough. Press the edges together, trim the excess, then crimp the edges with the tines of a fork. Using a sharp knife, cut three or four decorative steam vents in the top of the crust. Lightly brush the top of the pie with egg wash and sprinkle with remaining tablespoon of sugar.

5. Place pie in oven and bake on hot baking sheet for 20 minutes, then reduce temperature to 375°F. Continue to cook until the interior is bubbling and the crust is golden brown, about 30 to 40 minutes more. Remove and allow to cool, about two hours. If you have a windowsill handy, cool it there. Eat with a schmear of self-pity.

Better luck next time.

--Kristen

Swedish meatballs

I’ll Take that Particle Board....with a Side of Meatballs

I have a confession to make.  One of my favorite restaurants is ...IKEA.  I absolutely adore their Swedish meatballs—with that special cream sauce and the sweet Lingonberry sauce on the side.  So simple, so substantial, so affordable.   Wait, am I talking about the cuisine or the furniture?   Whether or not you favor the Scandinavian sensibility for your home décor—you simply MUST make a special trip to your local IKEA for the meatballs.  While there, you should also sample their raspberry crème cookies (to die for!) with their Swedish coffee, as well as their smoked salmon and vegetable medley.  But I digress...

Admittedly, I know it’s difficult for many of us to make it to our neighborhood IKEA on a regular basis.  So luckily I can offer this recipe—no more meatball withdrawal symptoms!  It’s an Americanized version (using the not-so-Swedish Campbells’s Cream of Mushroom soup)--adapted from  The Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Sixties Cookbook, to be published next month.  You can serve these IKEA-style, with a side of mashed potatoes and Lingonberry sauce (substitute raspberry or red currant jam in a pinch).  They're also delicious over egg noodes with a sprinkling of parsley.  Other options:  spear them with toothpicks, and serve for cocktail hour . . .   or an Ingmar Bergman movie night?  Perhaps you could settle in your IKEA armchair and snack on them while you read the Stieg Larsson trilogy?  There are so many ways to celebrate all that Sweden has to offer—make these meatballs a regular part of your Swedish-appreciation festivities.  

 Smaklig måltid!

Jennifer

Americanized Swedish Meatballs

(adapted from The Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Sixties Cookbook by Rick Rodgers & Heather Maclean)

Take 1 pound ground beef (85% lean) and 1 pound ground pork.  Combine with 1/3 cup breadcrumbs, 1 egg, ¼ cup minced yellow onion, 1 ½ tsp salt, and a pinch of pepper.  Form into 24 meatballs (about 1 heaping teaspoon for making 1 meatball), then roll each meatball in a little flour.

Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in a large skillet.  Cook meatballs in batches without crowding, turning occasionally until browned, about 8 minutes.  

Once meatballs are all cooked and transferred to a plate, pour out any remaining fat from your skillet.  Then add 2 cans of condensed cream of mushroom soup, and one cup of milk (and a splash of dry sherry if you’re so inclined).  Bring to a gentle simmer—and stir to break up any browned bits on bottom of skillet. Return meatballs to skillet, and simmer for another 15 minutes.  Refer to serving suggestions offered above.

Photo via here.