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I feel like there’s been some topic drift in this blog since I started it. Not that it’s obvious from its name what it’s about (I’m sure most people who come across it think it’s some sort of radical granny group’s mouthpiece–the Million Granny March!). Still, since I’ve always been a stick-to-the-recipe kind of cook, it never occurred to me that I might just suddenly start cooking off-the-cuff as much as I have been lately, letting go of Grandma’s apron strings, as it were.

Oh well, things change, and I’m kind of proud of some of the stuff I’ve come up with–like this dish. David’s co-worker Josh gave him a bit of the pork that he’d smoked over the weekend (which was absolutely fabulous–I snuck a bit while I was chopping it up), and since I’ve been cutting back on carbs lately, and as a result have been thinking a lot about variations on the poached egg over veggies (Momofuku’s egg over asparagus with miso butter has been a big hit with us), I thought, why not make a hash out of the pork with some sweet potatoes and top that with a poached or fried egg, and maybe drizzle some olive oil and sprinkle a bit of ancho chile powder on top?

Voila!

Three minutes after I’d finished the last bite I was already thinking, “I need to make this again.” Sadly, I’d used up all the smoked pork, and even if I were game to try smoking my own, I don’t think the neighbors would appreciate being smoked out of their condos (despite the fantastic smell). I suppose I could use lardons of bacon, or maybe caramelized onions. (Or go for broke and use both–mmm.)

Smoked Pork-Sweet Potato Hash

Serves 2

1 largish sweet potato (about two cups chopped into small dice)

1 cup diced smoked pork shoulder

1 large eggs

Olive oil (for frying and drizzling over top)

Ancho chile powder

Salt and pepper to taste

With olive oil coat the bottom of a large frying pan (I used non-stick, for insurance) preheated over a medium to medium-high burner. Add sweet potato and about a half cup of water, put the lid on and let steam-sauté, until water has cooked off and the sweet potato is starting to sizzle (about 5 to 10 minutes). Keep sautéing the potato cubes, stirring occasionally, til they’re starting to get browned (about another 5 minutes or so), then add the pork. Cook and stir for a few minutes more, adding salt and pepper to taste, till the kitchen is full of the wonderful scent of smoky pork goodness, then remove from the heat and divide the hash between two bowls. Drop the burner down to medium to medium-low (you might also want to leave the pan off the heat a minute or two, so you don’t incinerate your eggs), film the pan with olive oil again, crack the two eggs into it and fry them. I basically give them maybe 30 seconds on the first side, until more than half of the white is set, then (carefully) flip them over and give them another 15-20 seconds–you want the whites to cook but leave the yolk liquid, so it will ooze out over the hash when you cut into it (yum). Top each bowl of hash with a fried egg, drizzle some more olive oil over it all, sprinkle on a bit of ancho chile powder, and devour immediately.

There are definite disadvantages to being the sort of person who is addicted to trying new recipes, chief among them being those times when I find a recipe I just have to try, which then turns out to be a total flop, usually because the recipe was poorly written or poorly tested. (Not that I don’t make mistakes, too—I in particular have this little problem with reading recipes all the way through before I start them, which has led to derailed dinner plans more than a few times.) Last weekend, however, I got sucked into making a recipe I should have known was going to end in disaster, and of course, it did.

It was such a cool-sounding recipe, though. I was searching Epicurious for just the right recipe to make for this month’s Spice Rack Challenge—I decided I didn’t want to do anything sweet, and I wanted something that really highlighted the taste/aroma of cardamom (while there’s no shortage of recipes incorporating cardamom, an awful lot of them just use a tiny amount, mixed in with several other spices). Sifting through dozens of recipes for curries and chai, berbere and braises, I came across one for Shami Kebabs, a Pakistani recipe. Reading through the instructions, two steps caught my eye and made me think “I have to try this”: after combining most of the main ingredients, including ground beef, in a pot, you boil, then simmer them till the beef is thoroughly cooked (which runs against everything I’ve ever heard about cooking ground beef). Then, after that has cooled, you grind the whole mess up in a food processor, to get a sort of lumpy paste.

I really should have known better, especially since one of the reviews of the recipe described major problems getting the paste to form coherent patties that could be fried without crumbling. But I thought I knew what had gone wrong for that reviewer, and I forged ahead, totally seduced by the novelty of the recipe, and convinced I’d get it right. Well, you can pretty much guess what happened. When I hit the food processing part of the recipe, I realized something was really, really wrong with it—I don’t know what kind of food processor the recipe’s author has, but mine can’t simultaneously grind whole spices (whole cloves and cardamom pods, not to mention a whole cinnamon stick!) to edible bits, and grind cooked ground beef to anything but a sticky mess, which even after chilling in the fridge refused to cook up into nice little patties. I suppose the result tasted okay, but it was hardly worth all the work for an ugly pile of browned ground beef.

While I can’t really recommend that recipe to anyone (unless you can figure out how the author got the results she did), I can recommend the following one. It’s not terribly difficult (I managed to put it together even though I was already in the middle of round two of the fight with the virus from hell), and the cardamom definitely makes a major contribution to the flavor.

Cardamom-Scented Chicken with Ginger and Garlic

(from 660 Curries, by Raghavan Iyer)

2 Tbsp ginger paste (I used jarred “chopped” ginger, which is really more of a paste anyway)

1Tbsp garlic paste (again, chopped or pressed would probably be fine; I made Iyer’s garlic paste, which is just a whole lot of peeled garlic cloves (50!) whizzed in a blender with a bit of water)

2 tsp ground cardamom

1 tsp cayenne pepper

1 tsp kosher or coarse sea salt

1/4 tsp ground turmeric

8 chicken drumsticks, skin removed (or a lesser number of other skinless chicken parts—dark meat is best for this, though)

2 Tbsp canola oil

1 medium red onion, cut in half and sliced thinly

4 bay leaves, fresh or dried

2 cinnamon sticks

2 Tbsp chopped cilantro (optional—I left this out because David hates the stuff)

Combine ginger paste, garlic paste, cardamom, cayenne, salt and turmeric to form a wet paste, and smear all over chicken pieces. Cover and refrigerate the chicken at least half an hour (overnight is best, though).

Heat the oil in a large pan (seriously, unless you’ve bought really tiny drumsticks, you’re going to want the biggest frying pan or similar sort of pan you have) over medium heat. Add the chicken parts, and once they’ve started sizzling a bit, strew the onions, bay leaves and cinnamon sticks over top. After about 8 to 10 minutes, when the chicken has browned nicely on the one side, flip it over, mixing things up a bit so that some of the onions and bay and cinnamon are now under the chicken. Continue browning for another 10 minutes or so, until the mixture smells menthol-like (that’s the cardamom).

Pour 1 cup of water into the pan and scrape the browned bits off of the bottom (don’t bother to take the chicken out, just shove it around to get at the bottom of the pan).  Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover the pan, and continue to cook another 25 to 30 minutes, spooning the onion mixture over the chicken occasionally. If need be, once you’re done with this step, you can remove the chicken pieces and reduce the sauce over medium-high heat for a few minutes (I didn’t find this necessary, however). Remove the bay leaves and cinnamon sticks (if you can find them—if not, some lucky winner will get a prize! 🙂 ), stir in the cilantro if you’re using it, and serve the chicken with the sauce spooned over it. Iyer also suggests adding 8 oz. of  baby spinach leaves to the sauce while you reduce it, which I didn’t try, but certainly sounds good.

Okay, this is going to be an abbreviated post, because I lost track of the deadline for posting (thanks for the reminder, Cheryl!) and my brain is currently mush due to the plague. The recipe I chose for this month’s challenge was—

La!!!

Meyer Lemon and Blood Orange Marmalade, courtesy of Melissa Clark’s “A Good Appetite” column in the New York Times (and whose recent book “In The Kitchen With A Good Appetite” I can heartily recommend–I got it for Christmas and read it cover to cover). It was really absurdly simple to make–I could probably even make it now, in my present addled state. And, as a marmalade-delivery device (because even I’m not so big a fan of marmalade that I’d just scarf it up with a spoon … more than once or twice), I made Oatmeal Popovers. Cute as they were, they were a bit on the tough side for popovers–maybe it was the oats, or maybe I let them cool a little too long. The marmalade more than made up for them, though.

Don’t ask me what inspired this cookie experiment–maybe it was the fact that everyone seems to be revamping the tried-and-true Tollhouse recipe lately. Maybe it was the sheer hubris of America’s Test Kitchen calling their latest version “perfect” (not that I don’t like their work, and that cookie is damn good). Whatever the reason, some time recently I started wondering, what if I took the distinctive bits of the various chocolate chip cookie recipes I really like and mashed them all together into one super-recipe? Or as my husband has dubbed it, the Voltron cookie?

Finally, on last Wednesday’s snow day, I narrowed the field down to three recipes: ATK’s “Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie” (whose chief innovation is using browned butter, instead of creaming soft butter with the sugar), the NY Times’ super-fussy, fancy-pants version, and the “Mrs. Fields” recipe (see snopes.com for the fascinating story behind this urban legend), which I got years ago from my Mom. Since the recipes were fairly dissimilar, I used the ATK’s as the base recipe, swapped half the flour for oats finely ground in the food processor and added some grated semi-sweet chocolate to the dough, because I like the hearty chewiness and extra chocolaty-ness of the “Mrs. Fields” cookie. Then I topped the dough balls with sea salt before sticking them in the oven (à la the NY Times).  I also let some of the dough sit in the fridge for a couple of days, again per the NY Times’ recipe (the fact that we made–and ate–half of the cookies immediately was purely in the name of science, you understand).

Alec Baldwin, eat your heart out!

The first batch turned out pretty well, thoroughly chocolaty (they actually looked more like a chocolate-chocolate chip cookie) and nice and chewy in the middle, with a crisp edge. The second might have been just a tad better–but probably not worth waiting around the extra couple of days (which is how I felt about the NY Times recipe–the addition of the salt is really the best part of that one). David was of the opinion that the ground oats and the grated chocolate mostly swamped the taste of the browned butter. I suppose I agree, and I’d probably use a smaller proportion of oats in the future, and less grated chocolate. Still, they went awfully fast!

Mmm--chocolaty!

Almost Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

(adapted from America’s Test Kitchen’s “Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie”)

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 3/4 cups finely-ground old-fashioned oats (about 2 to 2 1/4 cups before grinding)

1 tsp baking soda

3 1/2 sticks (28 Tbsp) unsalted butter

1 cup granulated sugar

1 1/2 cups packed dark brown sugar

2 tsp salt (plus more to sprinkle on cookies)

4 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

2 large egg yolks

2 1/2 cups chocolate chips or chunks (I like bittersweet, personally)

2 to 4 oz. bar semi-sweet chocolate, finely grated

Preheat oven (with a rack in the middle position) to 375 degrees. Whisk flour, oats and baking soda together in a bowl and set aside.

Brown the butter: melt 20 Tbsp (2 1/2 sticks) of butter over medium-high heat (use a largish skillet–not non-stick, because the dark coating makes it difficult to see when the butter changes color). Continue cooking, constantly stirring or swirling, until the butter starts to turn a deep gold-brown, then pour into a large heat-proof bowl immediately. (Watch the butter carefully–it can turn from perfectly browned to black in an instant.) Whisk remaining butter into the browned butter until melted.

Mix both sugars, salt and vanilla into butter. Add eggs and yolks and whisk till smooth. Now this is one of the keys to the ATK recipe: let the batter stand for 3 minutes, then whisk again for 30 seconds. Let stand and whisk a total of three times–the mixture will look smooth and shiny. Stir in the flour, oat and soda mixture till just combined, then add chocolate chips and grated chocolate.

Make balls of about 3 Tbsp dough each (these are big cookies, and for a reason–the centers of big cookies stay chewy!), and place about 2 inches apart on a large cookie sheet (I line my cookie sheets with parchment paper, but you can use a Silpat or a non-stick sheet if you like). Sprinkle each with a bit of salt (a salt with largish crystals, like kosher or sea salt, is best). Bake cookies for 10 to 14 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through (they’ll be puffy, and the centers should still be soft). Let cookies cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes, till they’ve set a bit, then cool completely (or as long as you can stand to) on a wire rack. Makes approximately 32 cookies (assuming you don’t sneak too much cookie dough).

Just a brief post–in addition to doing the Spice Rack Challenge, this year I’m hoping (in anticipation of possibly having a whole lot less time to cook in the near future) to amass a collection of good, simple slow-cooker recipes. I already have a good chili recipe (which I may post about some other time, if there’s any demand for yet another chili recipe), and a good salsa chicken taco filling recipe (courtesy of my friend Cheryl), and recently I came across an amazing hoisin pulled pork, which is another “dump it all in the crock pot and go” recipe–no pre-searing or sauteing required (and although I haven’t tried making it with chicken yet, I’m sure it would work fantastically). And, it came with a recipe for an equally amazing crunchy peanut slaw–I honestly wasn’t expecting much out the slaw, because nothing in the ingredient list screamed “yum” to me, but it ended up being so good I’d happily eat it all by itself. (I did substitute brocco-slaw-in-a-bag for the shredded cabbage–after the deluge of CSA cabbage this past summer, I just couldn’t bring myself to make another cabbage slaw–and it worked wonderfully.) Anybody else out there have a really killer, dead simple slow-cooker recipe?

BTW–The Kitchn (which is where these recipes, and many more recent winners I’ve come across, come from) has had a couple of interesting theme weeks lately–last week was gluten-free recipes, and the week before that they did vegan.