Tenderloin Filet Mignon and Fingerling Potatoes with Bearnaise Sauce

Another amazing dinner from my husband Joe, who has gone during the course of our relationship from a vegetarian to a steak connoisseur. This was amazing, largely because the quality of the meat and the potatoes, both from Trader Joe's, was excellent. I can't get over how flavorful fingerling potatoes are, especially when fried shallots are involved. Here's Joe's recipe:

Tenderloin Filet Mignon and Fingerling Potatoes with Bearnaise Sauce

Two 2 inch thick Filets
Salt and Pepper
1/2 Shallot
Half pound Fingerling Potatoes

Bearnaise Sauce:

2 Egg Yolks
Juice of one lemon
One stick of butter
1/2 Shallot
One shot of bourbon

Allow filets to come to room temperature as you prepare the ingredients.

Slice the fingerlings on the bias in about half inch thick slices while you boil a pot of water. Boil them until a fork slides in easily but with some resistance. Drain. Set aside. Chop a half shallot finely for the sauce and slice the the other half in thin half moons for the potatoes.

Generously salt the steaks. Heat a cast iron pan on high until it is very hot. At the same time heat another pan on med high and put a generous amount of veg oil (canola) in the pan to get nice and hot for the potatoes. Lightly coat the filets with a bit of oil. I just poured oil on my hands and gave them a little massage. To achieve a nice crust you want to use as little oil as possible.

Put the potatoes in the pan with the oil. Brown on each side and add the shallots toward the end. You want them to cook and crisp a bit but not burn. Place in a 200-degree oven to keep warm until time to serve.

At the same time put the steaks in the cast iron pan, which by now should be smoking slightly. Cook four minutes per side and remove to let the juices settle. The goal is a dark crispy crust on the outside and medium rare on the inside. It worked perfectly last night.

While the steaks settle make the Bearnaise sauce. Bring a small amount of water to a light boil in the pot you boiled the potatoes in. Put a stainless steel bowl over the pan as a double boiler. Put the two yolks in with a pinch of salt and whisk constantly over the heat. Remove from the heat from time to time. You don't want the eggs to cook and solidify. Whisk until they start to turn a light yellow. Add the lemon juice and whisk until the sauce is about doubled in size. Add the butter cut into 7 or 8 pieces. You want to keep the butter cold until it's time to add it to the sauce. Add little by little. The sauce should get very thick. Add the shallots and whisk some more (30 seconds or so). Add the bourbon (classically it should be white wine but I like this little variation). Turn off the heat.

Serve with Bearnaise sauce poured over the steak or in a side bowl for dipping. Garnish with chopped chives for presentation. We had none last night so we just poured the sauce on the steaks and a little dab on the side to dip the potatoes in.

We had this with a nice Argentinian Malbec from the Chairman's Selection (a great program by the PA state stores that makes high-quality wines affordable and accessible). A great meal overall if I do say so myself.

Eating Beyond Sichuan

I'm back from Chicago and ready to cook tonight! In the meantime, read this: a call for real Chinese food in the US, from the Zagats, whose job I would love to have. From yesterday's New York Times. I'm not sure what sous-vide cooking is, since unlike the Zagats I am not a rich gourmet, but the few tastes of un-Americanized Chinese food I've had in the obscure corners of New York's Chinatown make me wholeheartedly support this call.

Eating Beyond Sichuan
By NINA ZAGAT and TIM ZAGAT
Published: June 15, 2007

TWENTY years ago, American perceptions of Asian food could be summed up in one word: “Chinese.” Since then, we have developed appetites for Korean, Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese fare. Yet while the quality of the restaurants that serve these cuisines, particularly Japanese, has soared in America, Chinese restaurants have stalled. For American diners, the Chinese restaurant experience is the same tired routine — unimaginative dishes served amid dated, pseudo-imperial décor — that we’ve known for years.

Chinese food in its native land is vastly superior to what’s available here. Where are the great versions of bird’s nest soup from Shandong, or Zhejiang’s beggar’s chicken, or braised Anhui-style pigeon or the crisp eel specialties of Jiangsu? Or what about the tea-flavored dishes from Hangzhou, the cult-inspiring hairy crabs of Shanghai or the fabled honeyed ham from Yunnan? Or the Fujianese soup that is so rich and sought after that it is poetically called “Buddha Jumps Over the Wall,” meaning it is so good that a Buddhist monk would be compelled to break his vegetarian vows to sample it?

Like so many other aspects of Chinese life, the culinary scene in China is thriving. As capitalism has gained ground there, restaurants have become a place for people to spend their newfound disposable incomes. Cooking methods passed down within families over the centuries have become more widely known as chefs brought the traditions to paying customers. Today, there are a number of regional cuisines known in China as the Eight Great Traditions (Anhui, Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan and Zhejiang cuisines). Unless you’ve visited China, they most likely have never reached your lips.

That’s because the lackluster Cantonese, Hunan and Sichuan restaurants in this country do not resemble those you can find in China. There is a historic explanation for the abysmal state of Chinese cuisine in the United States. Without access to key ingredients from their homeland, Chinese immigrants working on the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s improvised dishes like chow mein and chop suey that nobody back in their native land would have recognized. To please the naïve palates of 19th-century Americans, immigrant chefs used sweet, rich sauces to coat the food — a radical departure from the spicy, chili-based dishes served back home.
But today, getting ingredients is no longer an issue. Instead, the principal obstacle to improving Chinese fare here is the difficulty of getting visas for skilled workers since 9/11. Michael Tong, head of the Shun Lee restaurant group in New York, has said that opening a major Chinese restaurant in America is next to impossible because it can take years to get a team of chefs from China. Chinese restaurateur Alan Yau planned to open his first New York City restaurant last year but was derailed because he was unable to get visas for his chefs.

If Henry Kissinger could practice “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” perhaps Condoleezza Rice could try her hand at “dumpling diplomacy”? China and the United States should work together on a culinary visa program that makes it easier for Chinese chefs to come here. With more chefs who are schooled in China’s dynamic new restaurant scene, we would see a transformation of the way Chinese food is served in this country.

Imagine, if you will, what it would be like to discover for the first time Memphis-style barbecue, New York deli food, soul food and Creole, Tex-Mex, Southwestern, California and Hawaiian cuisines all at once. Eating food prepared by an influx of Chinese chefs would be like opening up a culinary time capsule.

When authentic Chinese cuisines reach our shores, we can expect a revolution in ingredients and styles that will change the way we prepare food for years to come. Look how quickly our taste for offal, sous-vide cooking and tasting menus have grown. We have a much more ambitious dining culture today than we did 150 years ago.

So, we welcome Chinese chefs to share their authentic cuisines with us. American palates, unlike those of previous generations, are ready for the real stuff.

Nina Zagat and Tim Zagat are the co-founders of the Zagat restaurant survey.

Chana Dal with Lamb

This is the first real dal recipe I've done from the Jaffrey cookbook. It's kind of an unusual one, because it contains lamb, and also you don't let the lentils fall apart-- they stay whole and a bit al dente.

I know I say this a lot, but... this was easy but time-consuming! My Indian foodie friend Nagesh thinks that some of Jaffrey's recipes are needlessly complicated, which is interesting. It's certainly true that it's hard to make a Jaffrey recipe without dirtying half the dishes and pans in your kitchen.

First, you fry four onions' worth of onion half-rings, till they're brown and sweet. Don't burn them. Also, don't hover over the pot so much that your eyes start stinging and you have to call your husband over to help you scoop out the onions because you can't see. Not that such a thing would ever happen to me. Set aside.

Next, put your lamb chunks (we got some nice local lamb stew meat from the Fair Food Farmstand) into the hot onion oil and brown them on high heat. Set aside.

Meanwhile, you will have blended your Indian mirepoix (onions, ginger, garlic) into a fine paste in the mini-food processor. Dump this into the oil and fry for close to ten minutes, until it starts to cook off a bit. Then add your turmeric, coriander and cumin. Give it a minute, then stir in a tablespoon of tomato puree (I used paste). Next, the warm spices: mace, nutmeg, cinnamon and ground cloves. I hadn't used mace before-- it has a strong flavor and goes well in the warm-spice mix. Give that about five minutes, then add 4 oz chana dal, the lamb, salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and a cup of water. Stir well, bring to a boil, and simmer for an hour, pausing your movie every ten minutes to stir.

Before service, stir in a few tablespoons of lemon juice. I served this with rice and topped it with the fried onions and chopped coriander, which made for a nice presentation.

This was delicious! It had a nice kick-- definitely the spiciest recipe I've made yet, which isn't saying much, but still. Tasty. The lamb was very tender, and the dal had this al dente not-quite-crunch to them that was very pleasant. The sweetness of the onions was a nice counterpoint to the heat and the richness of the lamb.

I'm packing some of this for my trip this weekend, and I have a feeling it's going to get very happy in the fridge!

Notes:
-Next time, I think I can drain off some of the oil before putting in the mirepoix. It was a little oily.
-Good lamb really makes a difference. We were surprised at how meat-heavy this dish was- we actually used only half the amount of meat called for in the recipe, because that's what we had on hand, and it was still very meat-centric.
-Be careful when frying onions! I need some goggles or something. Except that if I actually wore goggles around onions, Joe would never, ever let me live it down!

Joe's Chuck Roast

So we bought this great big chuck roast from Livengood Produce's farmstand in the Reading Terminal Market. Livengood is one of the sustainably farmed, nature-based "grass farms" Michael Pollan discusses in his wonderful book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Their cows are raised eating actual grass and clover in a real pasture. They are treated humanely and killed humanely (to the extent that such a thing is possible), and the family who runs the farmstand sells only what is in season on their farm right now. They usually have a small cooler with whatever meat they have right now, and it is uniformly excellent. You know how sometimes, with commercial meats, the fat on the side tastes kind of gristly and awful? The fat on this meat tastes like... beef. And grass. And the meat is incredibly flavorful-- after you have a few of these, it's hard to go back to the nasty factory stuff. If you're in Philly, you need to check them out. The cute guy at the farmstand says they're having a customer appreciation day the last weekend in July-- who knows, if all works out, maybe we'll get CarShare for the day and head out there to check it out!

And now, the food. I had a really long day on Monday, so my wonderful husband did the cooking. He actually used to do almost all of the cooking before I started getting serious about learning, and he said he particularly enjoyed doing this roast.

Since we've stocked our spice cabinet with all manner of delicious seeds and powders, Joe decided to do a rub with some Indian spices, get the outside nice and seared, and keep it rare inside. It was delicious; we served it with fried potatoes, but I think it'll make excellent sandwiches. Here's his recipe:

Chuck Roast

Rub:
2 Cloves of Garlic
Black Caraway Seeds (1Tbsp)
Cumin Seeds (3Tbsp)
Teaspoon of Cayenne Pepper
Fennel Seeds (2 Tbsp)

I didn't measure the seeds. I just put what I though would be enough to cover the roast. I put approximates in parentheses.

Put in cuisinart for five minutes or until well ground.

Generously salt the roast. Wait 5 minutes. Pour rub out on foil or in a bowl and cover roast with an even layer of the rub. Cover as much surface area as possible.

(Credit to Alton) Put roast in a 250 degree oven until the internal temp reaches 125-128 degrees. Remove from oven and cover with foil. Crank up the oven to 500 degrees. After the oven comes to temperature, put the roast back in and bring the internal temperature to 135-140 degrees. Remove from oven. Let rest for at least 20 minutes. Roast should have a nice crust and be medium rare inside. The time period will vary depending on the size of the roast. Ours took a total of and hour and twenty minutes.

Pork chops cooked with whole spices and tamarind juice; Maya's Potatoes with Yogurt

It's a lazy Sunday in Fishtown, Mythbusters is on the tube, and the weather is cooling off. Time for some nice Amish pork chops and potatoes. I was raised on meat and potatoes; this is just a more interesting variation.

First of all, you have to get good pork chops. We get ours at L. Halteman Amish Foods in the Reading Terminal Market. The preparation is really easy-- time-consuming, because of all the simmering, but not difficult. (Which is actually a common theme in the dishes I'm making.) You heat just enough oil to coat the bottom of your stockpot, and brown the pork chops. Jaffrey says to do this in two batches, but I was halving her recipe-- she called for 8 pork chops, and there are only two of us. Still, I had trouble fitting all four pork chops until they cooked down and shrank a bit. Brown them, take them out, put them on a plate for a minute. Put in two whole garlic cloves, a cinnamon stick, a couple of dried red peppers, and some cloves, peppercorns and cardamom pods. Fry for a few seconds and then add a bit of salt and a cup of water. (You have hot oil going here, so I'd really recommend shielding yourself with the pot lid while you do this.) Re-introduce the pork chops and simmer for half an hour, turning occasionally. Things will be smelling really good right about now. When the half hour is over, time for the remaining ingredients. Jaffrey doesn't tell you to do this, but I took out the pork chops for a minute while I whisked in the tamarind paste, sugar and salt-- it just seemed like a real pain to mix otherwise. Reintroduced the pork chops and simmered for another half hour, turning occasionally.

Now for the potatoes. I didn't start them until I had the pork chops simmering, which was a bit of a miscalculation-- the chops were done well before the potatoes. Best to start these at the same time. I made these potatoes back at the beginning of this blog, and they were quite tasty. But between then and now, I've made a few spice-buying trips, so I had things like dried chillies, fenugreek, caraway seeds, and fennel, which were missing before. I also decided to do the variation with yogurt. (Jaffrey has you prepare Maya's Potatoes and then adds a paragraph about adding the yogurt.) You fry your potatoes till they're nice and golden brown, then drain the oil. If you're me, you'll lose control of the heavy cast iron pan and end up dumping some potatoes into the sink and almost burning your hand. If you're not me, you may be able to avoid this.

Next, fry your spices. Now, technically, you're supposed to make this mixture in the stockpot, then introduce the potatoes from the frying pan and simmer in the stockpot. However, my stockpot was busy simmering pork chops, so I had to be creative. I made the spice/tomato mixture in a small saucepan-- fried the spices, then added the onion/garlic paste from the blender (no ginger this time) plus turmeric, fried that for five minutes, added tomatoes and sugar, and fried that for five minutes. The mixture smelled absolutely incredible. I added it back into the frying pan and coated the potatoes. I added in a pint of water, then remembered that I was supposed to be halving the recipe and that it should be half a pint. Yeah, I'm not too bright. I compensated by cooking this uncovered for longer than called for, then covering. This gets about 20 minutes of simmering, all told.

When that's done, turn off the heat and let the potatoes cool for a few minutes. Jaffrey says to mix in the yogurt and heat on low heat, not enough to boil it (that would curdle the yogurt) but enough to heat it through. I found that the cast iron pan retained enough heat that merely folding in the yogurt and waiting for a minute was enough to heat the whole thing through.

Served with Flying Fish HopFish Ale. The pork chops had a nice flavor, but were a little dried out. Spooning the pot juices over the chops helped, but I'd shorten the cooking time next time.

As for the potatoes-- holy shit, you guys. We both ate too much because we couldn't keep away from these potatoes. I can't tell you how much of a difference having the right spices made. We could taste the fenugreek and caraway seeds. It had this wonderful toasty, complex flavor that wasn't there before. So nice. Oh my.

Notes for next time:
-Don't cook the pork chops for the full half hour each time. Not necessary.
-Remember, Sarah: cast iron pans are heavy.
-Spiciness! One of my continuing critiques throughout these posts is that whatever I make "could have been spicier." I'm thinking that Jaffrey, in writing an Indian cookbook for Brits, decided to be really conservative with the hot spices. She usually gives a range-- one to three chili peppers, to taste (optional). And when she does, I use three-- and it's still not that spicy. Screw that. Next time she tells me one to three, I'm adding four.

To be clear: I'm a recovering spice wimp. I grew up eating food with no spices whatsoever-- maybe some garlic salt if we were feeling really adventurous. When I went to college and started hanging out with Indians, my friend Deepa used to make her kebabs especially mild just for me, and I'd still be sweating and tearing up while I ate them. I've evolved since then, and I love spicy food, although I'm not a hot-sauce daredevil like my stepbrother AJ. In the last year or so, I've been deliberately trying to train my palate to tolerate hotter spices-- I plan to visit India in the next few years and I don't want to die! So: spice levels are going to rise. Be prepared.

I'm leaving on Thursday for the Socialism 2007 conference, and the food at the hotel is not allergy-friendly, so I'll be making several dishes this week to pack and take with me to Chicago. There's a big grass-fed chuck roast from Livengood Farms waiting for me, and some Fair Food Farmstand lamb stew meat that's going into a chana dal recipe. Mushroom dal is also on the agenda. Stay tuned.

Chicken with Tomato Sauce and Butter (aka Butter Chicken) and Chapatis

Hello again! Joe and I have had rough stomachs for a few days, so we haven't been doing much cooking. But I've been enjoying this experiment so much that I actually got a little twitchy after not cooking for a few days! I'm really finding it relaxing to cook-- I put on my apron and my music and just get into my "zone," you know? And I'm really becoming much more confident in the kitchen. I read a new recipe, in the New York Times or whatever, and I think "that would be easy." I'm more competent every week-- and it's such a gratifying skill to learn!

Anyway. On to dinner. I made this dish-- Butter Chicken, Chicken Makhni, or in Jaffrey's case, Chicken with Tomato Sauce and Butter, it seems to be pretty much the same dish wherever you go. This dish was popularized by a restaurant in Delhi called the Moti Mahal, which seems to be mentioned in just about every article about Indian food as it appears on non-Indian tables. Apparently the Moti Mahal introduced this dish in the eighties, and pretty much immediately went from being a no-name hole in the wall to being a famous, tourist-destination hole in the wall. That's exactly the sort of restaurant I seek out in New York City, so the Moti Mahal is definitely first on my list of things to do when I get to Delhi (whenever that will be). (On that note: if you're in New York, check out Fresh Dumpling in Chinatown, Kabob King in Jackson Heights, Jorge's in Ridgewood and Tacqueria la Fonda in Morningside Heights.)

This dish takes a while, but it's pretty simple. Indian mirepoix (onions, ginger, garlic) goes into the blender, along with lots of whole spices. There are several spices in the mix that are normally cooked whole and taken out-- bay leaves, red peppers, cinnamon sticks-- that are crumbled and put in the blender in this dish. Whole cloves, peppercorns and cardamom pods also go in. Blend all that into a paste.

Brown the chicken in the bottom of the stockpot. (You're supposed to use breasts and legs, but we used tenderloins from Trader Joe's, chopped into cubes.) Take out and set aside. Put the blender paste in and fry for 5 minutes. Add a pound of chopped/crushed tomatoes (we used canned organic tomatoes), half a cup of water and a teaspoon of salt. Boil, cover, simmer for half an hour, stirring periodically. Then add the chicken, simmer and stir periodically for another half an hour.

In the meantime, make your chapatis. I rolled them thinner than before, and they puffed up beautifully when Joe put them over the flame. He brushed them with butter (a bit too much, I think, given the buttery nature of the chicken dish) and kept them in foil.

When the second half hour of simmering is over, take 4 tablespoons of butter, cut into pats, take the pot off the heat and stir in the butter until it's melted. This changes the color of the sauce from red to orange, which is cool. Serve over rice, with chapatis. I had it with a Flying Fish Belgian Dubbel, 'cause that's just how I roll.

This was very tasty and very rich. Jaffrey has you put the spices whole into the blender, but I think next time I'll grind them with the mortar and pestle before I put them in. They didn't really break up in the blender, and we spent a lot of time trying not to bite into whole peppercorns. I probably could have gone heavier on the red chillies, as well. That, and not so much butter on the chapatis. But definitely a success.

So full...

Next up: masoor dal with assorted local mushrooms. Yum!

Two excellent articles

Two excellent articles on food and allergy-related subjects from Orion Magazine:

A Place-Based Malady
How we help create our allergic landscape
by Gregg Mitman
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
The scream of chainsaws gnawing through full-grown oak trees abruptly announced summer’s arrival in 1987 in the leafy enclave of Lake Forest on the Lake Michigan shore north of Chicago. Most residents of the exclusive historic neighborhood treasured the trees that shaded their mansions, but Laurence Tureaud wasn’t like most residents. Tureaud, known to Americans as Mr. T, star of the 1980s hit TV show The A-Team and Rocky’s nemesis in Rocky III, had moved to his seven-acre estate the previous fall, when the hundreds of oaks and other native plantings lay dormant. That spring, as the trees came into bloom, the six-foot-tall, 220-pound, well-muscled actor suffered terribly. Pity the fool, or in this case the tree, that tangled with Mr. T. Saying that allergies to tree pollen provoked him, the man who wore gold chains to remind him of his slave ancestors took action. With a chainsaw in hand and the help of hired workers, Mr. T cleared the property of more than seventy trees, many of which had been planted in the early twentieth century under the direction of famed landscape architect Jens Jensen.

and:

The Tortilla Cycle
by Rebecca Allen
Published in the May/June 2007 issue of Orion magazine
Rosa can, and does, make tortillas in the dark. The ancient generator needs a new belt and a prayer and can’t always be counted on to power the light bulbs of Unión Victoria, the Guatemalan village where I live with Rosa and her two young daughters. Rosa’s husband works in Florida. In his absence Rosa carries on, feeding her pigs, hauling firewood, planting crops, and making three meals a day. In the midst of all this, she insisted on teaching me to make tortillas.