Sushi

Damn straight, we made sushi. and by "we," I mean "mostly Mirna." Because she is awesome like that.

For 6 rolls:
2 cups sushi rice
2 cups water (+ rinsing water)
1/4 c rice vinegar
2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
6 sheets of nori (seaweed paper)
Fillings: totally up to you. We used:
salmon (make sure you buy sushi grade for any raw fish)
cream cheese
avocado
cucumber
asparagus
green onion
Sriracha hot sauce

Utensils: they are actually very important here
glass baking dishes for cooling the rice (metal will change the flavor)
wooden or plastic rice paddle/spoon
small bowl of water for dipping your hands

To cook the rice:
soak the sushi rice in cold water for 5 minutes, rinse it a few times, and let it sit in a drainer for a few minutes to get the extra water out. Using equal parts water and rice, cook the rice as you would normal rice. Okay, fine: bring the water and rice to a boil in a pot on the stove, then cover with a tight fitting lid and turn down the temp to a low simmer (med? depends on your stove). Cook for about 10 minutes, until you no longer see water in the holes that form in the rice (you'll see it, don't worry). Turn off the heat, remove the pot from the stove, and let it sit, covered, for another 10 minutes steaming itself. Fluff.

While cooking the rice, combine the vinegar, salt and sugar in a small pot and heat, stirring constantly, just until the salt and sugar dissolve. Remove from heat.

The rice needs to be mixed with the vinegar mixture and brought to room temperature before making the sushi. To do so, spread the rice out in the glass baking sheets and stir in the vinegar mixture, fanning the rice all the while. Sounds complicated, I know. I am of the belief that there is room for error in this step, but you might prove me wrong.

Once the rice has cooled, spread saran wrap over your bamboo mat for easy clean up (or dont) and place one nori sheet on top, rough side up. This is important. The rice will only stick to the rough side!!!

In terms of placement, make sure the lines of the bamboo mat are parallel to the side of your counter. Lay your ingredients in this same parallel line. This seems common sensical, but just in case...

Cut your ingredients, whatever they may be, into long thin strips.

Wetting your hands first, pat down enough rice to cover all but a couple inches at the top edge of the nori. Add your ingredients in one long line at the side nearest you, parallel to the lines of your bamboo sheet. Using your fingers, wet the exposed top section of the nori.

This part is the trick to good sushi: the roll needs to be tight. Using the bamboo mat, pulling up from the edge closest to you, roll the first 360 degrees of the nori together, and pull it tightly back toward you, using your fingers to keep the ingredients inside. Continue to pull tightly back toward you with the bamboo as you finish rolling the sushi. The last bit of exposed seaweed paper that you wet should stick to the roll, sealing it.

Yay! Sushi roll! Using a VERY sharp knife, start by cutting the roll in half, then cut slices off of each remaining log. The pieces hold together better that way, says Mirna.

Enjoy! Next time, we are going to try spicy mayo from scratch... ballerrrrr

Bosnian savory pastry thing?

The problem with these kinds of recipes is that its really hard to get exact measurements out of the cooks, in this case Mirna and her mother. The awesome thing about these kinds of recipes is that you have to make it up yourself. This round was all Mirna's doing, so Ill try to stick down some exact measurements when I try! consider this post to be in-process.











Ingredients:

Dough:
2-3 cups all purpose flour (King Arthur's Flour!!!!)
~ 1 T vegetable oil
Salt dissolved in warm water: enough to make it a soft dough

Good lord these ingredients are vague. But I would guess about 1.5 tsp salt and about 1.5 c warm water, but you can always add more water, 1/4 a cup at a time if the flour isnt getting absorbed.

Stir the oil into the flour and dissolve the salt in the water. Form a well in the middle of the flour and pour in the water. Stir with a fork, slowly incorporating more and more flour until you have a dough. Add more water if needed.

Knead this until it is a fairly smooth dough.

Rub it down with some oil.

Let it sit for about an hour or more.

Anchor a sheet over your table and sprinkle a handful of flour first. I don't know why.

Using a rolling pin and your hands, and all the friends' hands you can find, work the dough out as flat and huge as you can manage. This took us a lot of time, and a lot of dough skilz, but in the end, us 1: dough 0. woot

A couple tips Mirna showed me: use small amounts of oil to moisten the dough as it gets spread super thin and gets kind of dry. You really want it to be as thin as possible, and it helps if you can get it to the edges of a table as shown in the picture so that you can anchor it around the corners, keeping it stretched out.

Filling:
Another beauty, you can probably fill it with whatever you want. Here Mirna used a spinach recipe, but you best believe my first batch will be made with ground beef.



1/2 - 1 lb spinach
2-3 eggs
about 8 oz cottage cheese
4 oz sour cream
Feta, the more the better, in my opinion
Salt and and pepper


Cut the stems off of the spinach (baby or adult is fine) and stack the leaves into little mounds. Slice them crosswise, making little strips of spinach. Soak this in water for about five minutes, squeeze them dry, and rinse again. Sprinkle some salt in the spinach, toss, and repeat.

In a bowl, stir all of the ingredients together and put the mixture in the refrigerator until you're ready to assemble.


Assembly:

Make a line of filling along the long side of the dough and fold the dough over it, lengthwise. Use a knife to cut a perpendicular line out of the dough so you have a long strip of dough with a similar strip of filling. Fold the ends of the dough in, as shown in the picture, and roll it lengthwise so that you end up with a tube of dough with filling on the inside. Repeat until you run out of dough and filling.


At this point you have two options: you can either wrap each one into an individual spiral, or wrap them around each other, one at a time, to form one big spiral that can be served in slices, as shown here.



Bake at 350 degrees "until its not light on the sides anymore." hmm.... Im going to guess it was about 20 minutes.

Glaze:
After you stick it in the oven, heat together about 1/4-1/2 cup milk with a couple tablespoons of butter.

When the pastry is ALMOST done, drizzle this glaze over top and finish baking.

Once browned all around, remove from the oven and cover it with a cloth as it cools.

Avocado Salsa

SALSA
This is a repeat from blackbeans and rice, but I felt it deserved it's own post. Yes, its that good. This is also more thorough.

Ingredients:
1 ripe avocado (they mark the ripe ones at the store, if you grip it in your fist and gently squeeze it you should feel it give a little and it will leave a mark)
1 tomato
1/2 a red onion
1/2-1 lime, squeezed
a generous handful of chopped cilantro (about half the bushel they come in, minus the stalks)
note: I know cilantro is not something you keep sitting around, but DONT leave it out!!!
salt

Note: Jennifer told me to first skin the tomatoes, but its a lot more work, though its a nice alternative style salsa. If you'd like to do so: score the bottom of tomatoes (draw an x on the bottom with your knife), drop them in boiling, salted water just until the skin starts to crack around the score (30 seconds? a minute?) and then drop them into ice water. Once you can handle them the skin will come off easily. Proceed.

Chop everything, starting with the avocado and quickly squeeze the lime overtop, stirring it with your hand, so that it will maintain its color. Oh the joys of citrus acid.

Note #2: to cut up avocado, first cut the avocado lengthwise in half. The pit will stick to one side. Thwack your knife onto the pit, lodging it into the side, and it will come out easily when you twist the knife. Leaving the avocado in the skin, use your knife to score the avocado into a grid-pattern. Finally, use a spoon to scoop the avocado out of the skin. Or read here. To keep it green, squeeze lime over top of it quickly.

Chop everything else, and use your hand to mix them together, adding salt to taste.

This is my first foray into using red onion, and I have to admit I was a little nervous. But strong flavors are more amazing than scary, so rock on bad breath. You were delicious. and fresh cilantro? I need to come up with some new positive adjectives.

Its good on almost everything: for instance, a spanish omelet this morning!

Black Beans and Rice: But really, its the Salsa

I am officially making "Jon and Mirna" a tag in my recipes. I cannot tell you how awesome it is to have Mirna (and therefore Jon) as a source for food-knowledge. Its like anything you could want, they can tell you how to make it amazing.

And who knew?! There is a fresh produce market two hundred yards from my front door!!! I have been really sketched out lately seeing people duck into this boarded up shack behind Delmar. Yeah, in that sketchy parking lot.

Yesterday, curiosity got the best of me, so I followed a biker into one of those doorways that is guarded by heavy plastic flaps. Following a biker into plastic flaps sounds sketchy, I know. But so far this week I have seen a middle aged orthodox jew, a guy with a basket on his bike, an old married couple, and a few other stragglers in and around the sketchy boarded up building. So I followed him in. Yes, I fully acknowledge this was possibly a bad decision. Yes, I will probably do the same in the future. So far, even the things that go wrong have only taught me difficult lessons, so I shall proceed.

And voila! there was a twenty foot stretch of fresh veggies!!!! For six dollars I got three avocados, four oranges, a lime, four red peppers, and cilantro. Yum. Apparently its just boarded up for the winter. Summer always proves to be less sketch.

woot!

On to the Black Beans and Rice

Vegan note: minus the sausage (which I probably wont use next time, anyway) this should be completely vegan!

Also, Its the salsa that makes it. No joke. Don't leave it off.


Ingredients:
2 cans black beans, or the equivalent in dried beans that have been cooked
3-5 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 sweet onion, chopped
1-2 peppers, chopped: any kind - I used a red pepper, Mirna's had 1 green and 1 jalapeno (hers is always better)
meat, if you'd like: 2 sausages in this version, ground beef is another option
a few tbsp vegetable oil
1 bay leaf
cumin and coriander (My roommate Zen is magic and had whole dried herbs in the cabinet, but crushed is fine)
salt and pepper

Method:
Chop the onions and start them sautéing on medium - medium/high in a large pot. If they start to brown/burn, your heat is up too high, but if you don't hear them sizzling it is down too low. As they start to caramelize, or turn clear (maybe not the same thing, but both mean they're cooking) add the garlic and chopped peppers.

Meanwhile: to cook the sausage, first simmer them in about 1/2 an inch of water, turning as they cook to make sure they cook evenly. As it starts to cook the outside will turn a light, almost white color. Before it is cooked all the way through, take them out and slice them. Forgive the ugly picture, but I thought it might help. You might want to take the skin off if its thick. Mine definitely needed to have the skin off, but I didn't realize it until I was eating. It got kind of messy trying to get it off...

Once the onions and peppers have cooked down a little bit, you can push them to the outsides of your pan so that they dont keep cooking as fast and add your meat into the center of the dish. If its ground beef, keep stirring it until the pink is almost gone, or if you are using sausages cook the slices well on each side.

As the meat finishes, stir everything together and add your spices. Be generous, and make sure to slightly crush your cumin and coriander if you're using whole, dried herbs.

Let these "get to know each other" for a while, and then add your black beans (dont drain the beans from the can).

Simmer on medium low for a while.

SALSA

mmmm salsa

Ingredients:
1 ripe avocado (they mark the ripe ones at the store, if you grip it in your fist and gently squeeze it you should feel it give a little and it will leave a mark)
1 tomato
1/2 a red onion
1/2-1 lime, squeezed
a generous handful of chopped cilantro (about half the bushel they come in, minus the stalks)
note: I know cilantro is not something you keep sitting around, but DONT leave it out!!!
salt

Chop everything, starting with the avocado and quickly squeezing the lime overtop, stirring it with your hand, so that it will maintain its color. Oh the joys of citrus acid.

Chop everything else, and use your hand to mix them together, adding salt to taste.

This is my first foray into using red onion, and I have to admit I was a little nervous. But strong flavors are more amazing than scary, so rock on bad breath. You were delicious. and fresh cilantro? I need to come up with some new positive adjectives.

Cooked Rice:
I realize this may seem really tedious, but adding together a few different pieces of advice, I really feel like my rice has gotten much better. I even stopped using the rice cooker. So I wanted to share:

Ratio: 1 c dry rice to about 1.5 c water
- if you want it a little more moist, add a little more water, but stay below a 2:1 water:rice ratio. I tend to eat my rice (especially basmati) fairly dry, so probably dont go below this ratio unless you are rinsing your rice first, giving it more moisture (see below).

I am torn on this part: You are supposed to rinse rice before cooking it to get rid of some of the gluten. But Mirna taught me to sautee the rice in butter a little bit before cooking it, and I don't think wet rice would do as well. "Wet rice" also sounds weird. It also tends to throw off my water:rice ratio. So I haven't been rinsing it.

That said, a beautiful teacher of mine once told me you should wash rice three times for maximum love in your cooking. Yay for Persian mothers.

So I am torn.

Going with the first: melt 1-2 tbsp butter in a heavy bottomed pot (the heavy bottom part is important for regulating the temperature and not burning the rice)

Pour in your rice, stirring for a few minutes with a wooden spoon to get the butter evenly spread on your rice. It will sizzle at first, but then it will stop making noise.

stir in some salt and add your water.

Bring your temperature up to medium high until the water breaks into a boil and lower the temperature to medium.

Cover the pot and allow to simmer for about 20 minutes, but the cooking time will vary a lot, so make sure to check it (see below). And dont let it boil very vigorously.

You will see holes develop in the rice once the water has mostly been evaporated/absorbed. By looking down these holes you can see if there is still too much water. After 15 minutes or so, simply taste some of the rice from the top of the pile to see if it is fully cooked; meaning, not hard to chew. Do not, however, stir the rice at this point.

When it seems almost done, and there is no water left in the bottom, remove the pot from the heat but leave the lid on. Let it continue to steam itself for 2-3 minutes.

Fluff. Stack. Enjoy. (or fluff and fold, if you wish.)

Mirna and Jon's Roasted Pepper Soup

**Note: I made this at home after Mirna taught me, but made some adjustments according to what I had in the cabinet, and it turned out to be a delicious second way to make it! I added about a cup of cashews before blending, and used 2 bay leaves and marjoram instead of thyme, used a can of cubed tomatoes instead of the Pomi sauce, only had three small red peppers, and also left out the broth, though the tomatoes had enough liquid. I tend to go for thicker soups, and really enjoyed this!**


Soup Night: the best night of the week

4-6 large red peppers
1 large sweet onion
3 cloves garlic
about 1 1/2 - 2 cups tomato puree (Jon suggests Pomi brand strained tomatoes, available at Whole Foods
- you can also use tomato paste, though you will need to add some liquid. Other tomato alternatives would probably work, too, but make sure the seeds aren't left in or it will not blend as nicely
Vegetable broth, about 2 cups
-more or less if you want to thin or thicken the soup
3-4 tbsp canola oil
1 bay leaf
some fresh thyme
salt and black pepper

Garnish:
cheese - try grated Parmesan or something else and tell me about it
chopped (fresh) basil and parsley
kalamata olives (ooo, I bet tapenade would be good)

**Note: Fresh herbs (instead of dried), and those beautiful vegetables you get from fancy grocery stores, make ALL the difference

optional:
1 boiled potato
~To give the soup a more creamy texture add the potato after cooking, before pureeing the soup. Cubing it before boiling is much faster.

Roasting the peppers:
I am SO excited to finally know how to roast red peppers. I feel the world loves me.

Turn the oven to 450 degrees and rub the peppers down with vegetable oil. Sexy. Not olive oil, because the smoking temperature of olive oil is lower (about 420 for virgin olive oil and 375 for extra virgin) so it will start to break down at higher temperatures, keeping you from being able to use the high temp necessary to blacken the peppers as you roast. Just use canola oil and stop asking questions. (I'm going to try vegetable oil, too, and see how it goes)

Put the peppers on a tray and into the oven for around 30-40 minutes, turning the peppers every few minutes so that they cook evenly. When they are blackened in spots and tender, they're done. Mirna say stovetop works, too with a deep pan, but I haven't tried.

Mirna's awesome trick: take them out of the oven and into a bowl, immediately covering them with seran wrap and let them sit for about 20-30 minutes. The peppers steam themselves, making it really easy to peel off the skins.

Which you need to do.

Okay, so finally:
THE SOUP
Chop the onion and garlic. Heat the olive oil in the bottom of a heavy bottomed pot and add the onion first. Mirna says the garlic can burn, so put it in after you sweat the onions (they turn clear).

Then, add the stewed tomato/tomatoe paste/pureed potatoes, your roasted red peppers, chopped, and the bay leaf. Simmer for 5-10 minutes. If you're using the paste you may need to add more liquid before pureeing.

Pour in the vegetable broth and the rest of the seasonings (salt, pepper, thyme), and simmer for another 10 minutes. or dont. whatever. It just makes it taste better if you let the flavors "hang out together."

If you're using a boiled potato for creaminess, add it now.

Blend the soup (definitely take out the bay leaf first) using whatever you have; bullet, blender, immersion blender... until smooth.

Top with chopped basil, parsley, cheese, and or kalamata olives as desired

Great with toasted brown bread!

Bosnian Chicken Soup

This is pretty similar to Jennifer's chicken broth, but with the ingredients added back in and a few different seasonings. So you can check out that recipe for a more detailed description/other ideas

Ingredients:

1-2 large sweet onions, sliced

A few sticks each of the following 3 ingredients, cut into 3-4 inch pieces

-Celery 

-Parsnip (yeah, who knew? But apparently its readily available at the store)

-Carrots

Chicken pieces (leg quarters are the cheapest! three or four should be fine)

A large pot of water

Parsley

VEGETA seasoning (The most amazing all-seasoning ever) - a few tablespoons? 

3-4 cloves garlic, peeled  (not diced)

salt

Pasta of your choice*

The first order of business is - according to Mirna's amazing-Bosnian-cook mom is to burn some onion. Not really burn, but slice it into rings and cook it on the eye of your stove on both sides. Mine is electric, but my guess is gas would be even better. It is fine if you burn it because it wont be eaten anyway.

Next, bring a pot of water to a boil and turn it down to medium high. (the more water, the less potent the broth, but there is a lot of room for error. About 1 and a half gallons?)

Add the chicken, veggies, and seasoning (Jennifer argued for waiting till you  make your soup to season, but Mirna's mom said that making the broth with vegeta is important) and put on the lid of your pot, leaving a crack for steam.

*The pasta gives you some wiggle room with the amount of broth; if it is a little weak or you have a ton of it, add the pasta after cleaning the broth and it will soak up a lot of the moisture. If you wish you had more, boil it separately, strain, and add to the almost finished soup.

Let this simmer for about an hour. Two or three is probably fine, but not all day. Made that mistake. it was kind of nasty.

At this point you have three things in your pot: your broth, the veggies and meat that you want to save for the soup, and some other stuff/pieces you don't want to save. Separate these out using whatever combination of a strainer, a slotted spoon, or whatever you have around.

Once you have a clean broth, put it back on the stove and add back in the veggies of your choice (the blackened onion is not so good). 

Pull all the meat off the bone and add back into the soup along with whatever version of pasta you are trying.

Let it simmer for a while if you like a more dense broth and softer veggies. If not, heat and serve! 

Note: Soup is always better after sitting a while... the flavors are exchanged between ingredients.

Season to taste.

Gnocchi gnocchi... Cooking with Mirna part 2

I love gnocchi. I first had it on one of the last few nights before I left for a year in Asia, and it was one of the foods I craved the whole time... It never even occurred to me that it can be made from scratch.  

This made a huge bowl of gnocchi... 3 or four times the amount shown above. 

2 yukon potatoes (John argued for Russet. Maybe next time?)

2 c all purpose flour

1 egg

salt

Cut the potatoes in half, boil them until you can easily puncture with a fork, and let cool.

~ Allow time for the potatoes to cool in your prep time, it sucks grating hot potatoes

Peel the skin off and grate the potatoes on a box grater (yes, it looks like cheese, but its potatoes)

Add the egg, scrambled with salt and stir into the shredded potato with a wooden

spoon

(If you want to try other ingredients, I would suggest stirring them in now! Spinach? Feta?)

Stir in the flour, a little at a time until a dough starts to form.

Clean and flour a countertop/surface for kneading and turn the dough out onto the flour, making sure to flour all sides of the dough; it will be sticky and for you to be able to knead the dough properly make sure it is well coated with flour (repeatedly) as you knead. This is a very sticky dough.

Use the heel of your hand to fold the dough toward you, pushing in and outward, turning the dough 90 degrees after each push.

Set a large pot of salted water to boil

Once the dough starts to feel more coherent (the glucose bonds are forming) pull off a fistful of dough at a time and - using as much flour as necessary, but not to much... ya know - roll the handful of dough into a long roll, about 1/2 - 3/4 inch thick. 

Use a knife to cut small, 1 inch sections of the dough. Roll these into small balls and use a fork to give them the serrated shape of gnocchi.

Drop the gnocchi into the boiling water without crowding them; for a standard boiling pot I would guess about ten or fifteen at a time? They should all be able to float on the top comfortably. 

When they start to float they are almost done; probably only about five minutes. Lift with a serrated spoon and drop in the next batch.

After all the gnocchi were boiled Mirna whipped up a sauce that was surprisingly easy for the flavor it kicked:

Melt about 3/4 a stick of butter in a frying pan and stir in chopped, fresh thyme. Toss the Gnocchi in the sauce and serve!

Rock on, Mirna. Rock on.

SCHNITZEL!!! A night with Mirna: part 1

Mirna rocks. in case you couldn't tell by the fact that these two posts are schnitzel and gnocchi... who makes these things? Its amazing!

I am not sure how to give you measurements on this for two reasons: first, we made a TON, and two, you're dipping the chicken into everything, not necessarily mixing it in. So basically you can always add more, but whatever you don't use is wasted.

I'll make some estimates, but please don't worry so much about the exact measurements

Chicken

     ~ we used tenderloins, so they're small strips; about 7 of them

     ~ if you use breasts, cut them in half before you pound them; three breasts, cut in half

Salt

1 egg, scrambled

3/4 c flour

3/4 c breadcrumbs

oil for frying; about 1/3in in the pan

Preparing the chicken: 

The first step is to tenderize the chicken. If you have a meat tenderizer, then put it to good work beating the chicken on a cutting board (beware: Salmanilla sucks...). 

If you don't have a meat tenderizer (the thing that looks like a metal judges gavel) put one or two pieces at a time in a plastic bag and use the bottom of a heavy pan to beat it on the countertop. Does granite crack?

The meat will spread and get thinner as you beat it. You can make it as thick or thin as you'd like. The ones I had in Vienna were really thin and made great sandwiches!

Salt both sides of each piece

Coating:

Prepare the flour, scrambled egg, and breadcrumbs on plates/in bowls so that you can easily dip the chicken in them. Now do so, in that order.

Make sure to knock off the excess flour and breadcrumbs as you go.

Frying:

On medium high heat about 1/3 and inch of oil in the pan, turning it down if its obviously getting too hot - like if the oil is all bubbles instead of sitting in the bottom, or if your chicken gets scorched the second you put it in. 

It seems that the amount of oil is a matter of preference. If its not enough then you don't get the even, nice crispy outside. If you're frying a lot, you might have to change out the oil at some point. Pieces of breadcrumbs, for example, will start blackening on the bottom of the oil. This is not so yummy. Hot oil, however,  is hot. Let it cool before handling, and don't put it down the drain!

Put a few pieces of chicken in the hot oil at time, using a fork to check the bottoms. When one side looks done, turn them over. 

This was my first time frying anything, so I was really intrigued by how the oil bubbles all over the chicken. We also agreed that really crispy is best, but I wonder if it would be more tender if we cooked them less.

As each piece finishes, put it on a plate covered in paper towel. This will just make you feel better by making you think some of the excess oil comes off. Or maybe it helps keep them

 crispy. I don't really know.

Dip it in ketchup? Make a french mayonnaise sauce? Sandwiches the Viennese way?