Posted on
Saturday, June 18, 2011
2:47 PM
| By:
Kitchen Roulette
Category:
Posted by Joe
What a difficult challenge! I spent a few days reeling, unable to come up with anything at all cohesive. I had considered lima beans as a challenge to Jason earlier, and doing so, considered what I would do with them, which would be to replace chickpeas in something Mediterranean. I stuck on that train of thought for a bit and realized all I had to do was make a falafel sandwich. The biggest challenge then became the scallops.
My porter went into a beer flatbread recipe that I modified slightly to conform to a pita bread recipe. I literally danced around the kitchen when my preliminary test actually worked. Then I threw blanched lima beans, raw onion and garlic and a handfull of fresh parsley into the food processor and pulsed it around until it was a chunky paste, then pulsed up a bunch of Cool Ranch Doritos (the only kind I could find without cheese in them, which I thought would be weird). I folded the Doritos into the bean mix and threw a patty of it into a skillet of hot oil to test it out. It came out tasting pretty good, but came apart in the oil. I remedied this by adding an egg.
Three ingredients down, one to go. Since I had been cleaning and butchering sea food every week thus far, and I had had such a rough time with the crabs, I wasn't in the mood to seek out and then learn the specifics of how to clean live scallops. I'd seen it done before, and it's gross. I just bought half a pound from the grocery store, already cleaned.
The two ideas I had were making a scallop salad similar to seafood salads you find in stores, but with a Mediterranean theme, or stuffing the falafel balls with them. I opted for stuffing, since I knew Jason wasn't a fan of creamy salads. I just rubbed them with a little dry rub and pan seared them before cutting them into smaller pieces and fitting them into the falafel balls before frying.
To finish, I simply stuffed the pita with the falafel and some arugula and onions tossed in a tahini dressing.
Posted on
Friday, June 10, 2011
4:07 PM
| By:
Kitchen Roulette
Category:
Posted by Joe
With the crabs in season I mentioned how they would be a great ingredient for our then un-blogged challenge. Lo and behold, they popped up the very next week, on my turn.
Since I wanted to continue to do this 100%, I wanted to get live crabs and clean them myself. After half a dozen Youtube instructional videos, I felt confident enough to let the crabs, whom I had let get too comfortable on my cutting board, have it. Apparently, one of the things that I didn't pay attention to, being more interested in the visceral aspects of the endeavor, was that the crabs start to revive quite a bit if you let them warm up too much. Instead of the easy and conscience-sparing project I saw depicted online, I had headless and flayed crabs thrashing all over the place.
Here's what I did with them when they finally stopped moving: pan fried in brioche crumbs. My original idea was to serve a twist on the typical tempura fried Spider roll you find in sushi joints. I had designs on a Vietnamese style summer roll (with a South American twist) stuffed with arugula salad tossed in a honey lime vinaigrette. The plantains were going to be served in the form of crispy potato pancakes topped with black bean dip and sour cream, based on a few recipes I found online for fried plantain, called pisang goreng.
Unfortunately, no matter how I wrestled and forced and tried to crush the crabs into the rice paper wrappings, the rolls kept tearing open, so what I ended up serving was much less ambitious. I put the salad (which contained arugula, red onion, avocado, cucumber, thai basil, jalapeños and cilantro tossed in the previously mentioned honey lime vinaigrette) on top of the crispy pancake and put the crab on top of it with a dollop of the bean dip in the middle.
Get a load of that thumb print on the side! Damn professional presentation.
Posted on
Friday, May 27, 2011
4:35 PM
| By:
Kitchen Roulette
Category:
Posted by Joe
My first question was whether or not there was a specific radish I had to use. I bought a myriad of different varieties before I got my indifferent response. I ended up using daikon.
I started by thinking about how I could incorporate the pretzels into some kind of dough. I considered clam meatballs made with pretzel breadcrumbs over some kinda horrible grapefruit and radish ragout. I never went farther than just thinking about it.
My next idea was clam pot pie with pretzel crust. I opened up a few clams and chopped up a few potatoes and radishes and a few other veggies and made a small bowl of clam stew. But the radishes did not fit well at all and I decided to take them out of the pie. At this point I still hadn't come up with any grapefruit ideas and that was bothering me.
While researching pot pie crusts, I happened across a simple biscuit recipe that I could easily incorporate ground pretzels into. And grapefruit marmalade came shortly after.
I thought a soup and salad combo with a biscuit on the side would be great. I pickled the daikon with some carrots, beets and onions and tossed them all up in a homemade aioli for cole slaw, splashed bourbon into the marmalade to tone down the grapefruit tart and whipped up a classic new england clam chowder.
