Recently the lunch crew at work have been visiting Kushi Box at least once a week. They serve some great teriyaki chicken over rice, especially with the spicy miso. One of my favourite things there though is their “P-Toro”, which is pork belly (or jowl depending on who you believe). All of their meat is barbecued there in the store on their grill and tastes great, but the p-toro is out of this world… crunchy, chewy, salty and amazingly delicious.

So when my friend Justin (why are like half my friends called Justin?) mentioned that he’d found some pork belly at a Korean supermarket just a couple of miles from where we live, I had to try grilling it myself. Along with that I decided to do some teriyaki chicken, and Louise made some rice to get the whole experience.

First, I marinated the chicken for an hour or so. This is my marinade:

Juice of one lime
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp red pepper flakes
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground black pepper

I cut the chicken breasts in half through the center, like butterflying them but cutting all the way, to reduce the thickness and therefore cooking time. Put the chicken and marinade in a freezer bag and put in the fridge for a while, turning halfway through the marinating time. It’s best to marinade the chicken for at least a couple of hours.

The marinated chicken and the pork with salt and pepper added, ready to put on the grill.

The pork belly I had was thin-sliced, maybe 1/5 inch thick with no skin on. To prepare just cover both sides with salt and pepper. I tried cooking them two ways – low (around 300 degrees) for around 20 minutes, turning every 4 minutes; and on a medium heat, around 400 degrees for about 8-9 minutes. I overcooked some of the first batch but otherwise couldn’t really tell a difference between the two.

The chicken I put on the grill for 4 minutes per side at 400 degrees, then basted with teriyaki sauce and cooked for a minute extra on each side. Once you add in the time they sat waiting for me to turn everything at once, I think it was probably 12 minutes total and they were a little overdone, a bit dry, so I’ll try them for a minute or two less next time.

Right after cooking, with a beer for the chef.

And how was it all? Well, the pork was amazing, just as good as Kushi Box, and the chicken would have been as good had I not grilled it for too long. I’ll call it a success!

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Had a very relaxing Saturday night this week with some wine, a movie and pasta with a homemade sauce. The sauce turned out great – I found the basic recipe here at Butteryum, but I’ve made a few changes and use different ingredients so I’ll go over my method here too.

Ingredients:

A small onion, chopped
1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp pepper for the onion
2 cans of Unico San Marzano tomatoes
3/4 can tomato paste
6 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 1/2 tbsp dried parsley
1 tsp red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/4 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup red wine
4 pinches of sugar
Parmigiano Reggiano rind

This recipe makes enough sauce for around 4 servings for two people; we freeze most of it after letting it cool.

First, puree the tomatoes in a food processor. I use the Unico brand of San Marzano tomatoes because they’re cheap and easy to get hold of. The first time I made this sauce I used imported San Marzano tomatoes from a local Italian deli which cost almost three times as much, and with Unico I can’t really tell a difference.

Next chop a small onion and fry it in the oil at a medium heat, with salt and pepper, until it carmelizes. Throw in the garlic and stir for just about 20-30 seconds, until just after that amazing sweet cooking-garlic smell starts, then add the tomato paste. Keep stirring and cook for around 4 minutes. Then add the tomatoes, wine, sugar, spices and the cheese rind; bring to a boil and simmer for about 20 minutes. Simmer time seems to be controversial when it comes to these sauces; the original recipe I link above says to simmer for an hour, but I found other links that claim cooking tomatoes for longer than around 10 minutes increases bitterness. Personally I found that a 20-minute simmer tastes better to me than an hour.

For the cheese rind, what I find is that if I buy a small slice of Parmigiano Reggiano and have some grated with pasta every time I have it, it lasts me 3 weeks or so which is coincidentally roughly how often I make this sauce. So I’ve always got a rind to throw in, and honestly it makes a huge difference to the taste. It’s optional but I’d highly recommend it!

The wine we had this time was a pretty good Chianti we found called Melini. It’s not too expensive and is easy to find around Vancouver. We use it for the sauce and have the rest of the bottle with the pasta.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, I’ll throw some in here next time we make it!

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Never fear, even though posts here have been photography-heavy lately, we haven’t given up cooking. We’ve made some really nice stuff lately, including our own tomato sauce for pasta, a truly fantastic standing rib roast dinner, and an original stir-fry shrimp recipe.

Here’s something we made a few weeks ago which turned out to be really good. It’s an olive-stuffed pork tenderloin, which we had with some rosemary-garlic potato wedges. The pork recipe came from Alton Brown’s book “I’m Just Here For The Food” which is a great book for understanding the underlying processes of cooking food. Rather than dividing the recipes up by the main ingredient as is usually the case, each section is arranged around a different method of heating – boiling, braising, roasting, grilling etc. There are some great recipes of course but the book is a bit deeper than your normal cookbook while still remaining easy to understand. I’d highly recommend it.

First we brined the tenderloin in a mixture of salt, sugar, peppercorns and cider vinegar. You boil everything in a saucepan for 10 minutes or so, add ice to bring it down to room temperature, then seal it up with the pork and put it in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Stuffing the pork!

Next, you need to make a tapenade with a cup or so in total of a couple types of pitted olives, olive oil, and a clove or two of garlic. I just put them all into a food processor and pulsed until I had a somewhat chunky paste. Then take your tenderloin and cut it open lengthwise, leaving half an inch of meat uncut on the bottom (so it opens like a hotdog bun). Make two more cuts like this either side of the first cut, stuff everything with the tapenade, and tie it back into its original shape with butcher’s twine.

Then it’s a simple matter of putting the pork on a rack in a roasting pan and putting it in the oven. I used a thermometer to test for the “done” temperature, but things went a little awry here. The recipe said to cook it to an internal temp of 145 degrees, which I did but the pork was still very rare. It took around 45 minutes to reach that temperature, and it needed another 20-25 minutes or so after that. Most other tenderloin recipes I read said to cook to 170 degrees, so maybe there’s a misprint in the book?

Either way it turned out to be delicious, and I’ll definitely be making it again soon. One thing I might try next time is to brown the meat in a pan before roasting it to try and make it a bit more presentable – as you can see from the pictures the final article, while tasting great, is not the most attractive thing in the world!

The finished article. Delicious even if it doesn't look beautiful!

And to finish off here are the potatoes. These are very easy to do, just scrub and cut up some red potatoes into wedges, toss with olive oil, salt and rosemary, and cook (turning every 10 minutes) at 450 degrees for about 30 minutes. Peel some cloves of garlic (as much as you want, I think we had 8 cloves in here) and throw them in after you’ve turned the potatoes for the first time. When they’re done, take a small amount of cider vinegar, squeeze the roasted garlic into it, mix well and pour over the wedges. Add some green onion slices as a garnish. Very easy and very tasty.

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I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned before, but when Louise and I decided to start cooking last year, the very first thing we did was make our own Christmas dinner for the first time. I like jumping in at the deep end I suppose, but really nothing is difficult to prepare individually in a standard Christmas meal. The challenge comes from bringing it all together at the same time.

This year we did the same thing, with one new addition. The lineup: turkey, stuffing, roast and mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, julienned carrots, yam, gravy, and the new item was Yorkshire puddings!

I got the recipe from my mother as usual. She’s experienced enough to judge amounts by eye so wasn’t sure of the exact measurements, but I found a couple of recipes online that were similar enough to cross-reference the right quantities. They came out pretty well for a first attempt!

Ingredients for 6 Yorkshire puddings:

1/2 cup flour
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp olive oil for each pudding

Get the eggs and milk out of the fridge early and allow them to come as near to room temperature as you can (takes 30-60 mins). Beat the first four ingredients together until you have a thin batter with air bubbles on top. Because I’m lazy, I used an electric hand mixer for this on the fast “beat” setting for just 20 seconds or so. Then allow the mixture to stand for about half an hour.

Get a muffin tray and put 1/2 tsp oil into each section that you’ll be using. Put it in an oven and heat it to 425 degrees. When the oven is fully heated and the oil is very hot, take the pan out and immediately pour batter into each section, filling it around halfway, and return to the oven ASAP. Cook for 20 minutes or so.

That’s all there is to it and they’re delicious. Maybe it’s not too traditional to have them with your Christmas turkey but we loved them today!

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It was a hot, oppressive evening, full of ominous portents. An hour or so before we were to cook dinner, our kitchen was invaded by a hundred or more half-inch winged ants. Later, as we began, the largest thunderstorm that I’ve seen in Vancouver rolled in, flashing lightning wildly and bringing a sudden torrential rain. It was as if something was trying to warn me, to prevent me from making a terrible mistake…

I’ve never got on with shrimp. Not to beat about the bush, they’re disgusting. They’re the insects of the sea with their skinny, draggy little legs and their segmented carapaces and their gross tails. I don’t go around sauteing beetles and therefore I don’t do it to shrimp either. However I have noticed over the years that they are frequently the base for some amazingly delicious-sounding sauces, and when I found a recipe in my new favourite magazine (Chile Pepper, thanks Rob!) I had to try it.

The recipe in question was for habanero and garlic shrimp in a lime and white wine sauce. I couldn’t resist the habaneros. I absolutely live for spicy food and this would be my first time preparing anything myself using the habanero, one of the hottest peppers in the world (the hottest is the Naga Jolokia, or “ghost pepper”, originally from India). The great thing about habaneros is that apart from being ludicrously hot, they also have an amazing appearance and of course taste. They are so potent though that you’re supposed to wear gloves when chopping them.

So then, to the shrimp. Ugh. To save time, and reduce hands-on time with the horrible things I was able to find some frozen peeled and de-veined shrimp on sale at Safeway this week. They look pretty damn revolting when they’re raw!

Finally time to cook. Let’s follow the recipe here… “heat oil on a high heat”. OK… wow it’s smoking already. Alright, throw the shrimp in, cook for a minute, now the garlic and chopped habanero… interesting, I appear not to be able to breathe. Excellent. At this point Louise ran for her life (literally, she later claimed) as the kitchen filled with pure capsaicin fumes and I was left to battle on alone. After another minute I added the wine.

Now, what was supposed to happen here is that the wine and (in a minute or two) the lime juice combine to make a nice base, and you’re supposed to reduce it and end up with presumably a fairly thick tasty sauce. What ACTUALLY happened is that the wine instantly flash-boiled away in a furious cloud of steam and capsaicin. I guess the pan was just way too hot. I’m not used to cooking at such a high heat and I took the recipe’s instructions literally, turning the dial right around to “HI”. I now assume that either this is a general no-no or my particular stove is capable of unnaturally high temperatures. Either way, next time I’m sticking to the “8” setting on the dial that gives me such good results when stir-frying chicken.

After setting my teeth and grimly carrying on, throwing in some cilantro and the lime juice and tossing everything together one last time, I was fairly amazed to find that the shrimp was in fact good when it came out. Not just good actually, sort of holyfuckingshit good. It turned out incredibly tasty with a really nice kick. Next time, when I get the sauce right, it should be even better.

So even though the signs were troubling and doom-laden, before and during, the outcome was mostly positive. Apologies, thanks and love to my amazing and ever-patient wife Louise for putting up with my mad scientist kitchen experiments… next time I’ll supply a gas mask for the fumes!

Oh and I thought the Vista weather gadget thunderstorm pic was cool so I saved it for posterity. Who knows when I’ll see it again.

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I found out about this dish by accident when surfing some websites last week. La Zi Ji is a Szechuan term meaning, as far as I can tell, Chicken with Chili Peppers. It’s normally deep-fried in China but I stir-fried the chicken – healthier and if you’re using chicken breast, there’s no dodgy meat to hide!

I basically followed the recipe as laid out on this page, though I used a LOT more marinade (and skipped the eggs in it). Instead of the few teaspoons of rice wine, I used 1/4 of a cup, and 1/8 of a cup each of dark and regular soy, with a tablespoon of corn starch. Marinade for about half an hour, then stir fry it at medium-hot (8 on my burner’s scale) for about 5 minutes. It came out beautifully flavored and juicy.

Then, fry some sliced garlic and ginger in some new oil, throw in the 40-50g of dried chilis that you’ve previously cut in half and de-seeded (the longest part of the whole process!), some spring onions (yeah yeah, green onions now that I’m in Canada; I’ll always call them spring onions though) and a tablespoon of Szechuan peppercorns (found them in the Asian foods aisle in Safeway). Stir the chicken up with the now-fragrant oil, take it off the heat and finally add a bit of sesame oil.

It looks great, with tons of color. We had it with boiled rice. And don’t eat the chilis! You can’t really anyway, they have the consistency of a thin piece of plastic. They’re just there to flavor the oil when cooking and for color.

It tasted really good, lots of different flavors, spicy without being super hot and it had a wonderful aftertaste. I had leftovers the next day and it was a little bit hotter and still great. Can’t wait to make it again, but it’ll have to take its place behind all the other stuff I want to cook first!

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Summer has arrived! We’ve had great weather for most of the last week (except for the 10 minutes that it rained on Wednesday that happened to coincide with me having to walk up to work from the train station). To celebrate I thought I’d try ribs on the BBQ.

Never having done them before, which is the usual state of affairs around here, I did some research and came across this amazing site. There’s more info here on ribs and how to cook them than you’ll ever need. There are a few methods that people recommend; you can either cook them slow on the BBQ for a few hours, or speed it up by boiling or putting them in the oven first. I decided to go the whole hog (pig joke!) and just BBQ them from start to finish, as the Amazing Ribs site recommends.

I bought the meat from Costco in the morning. It cost around $20 for two huge slabs of baby backs. When you start to prepare them, the first thing to do is to remove the membrane on the bone side. It’s like a piece of thin rubber and once I got the hang of the technique (Louise figured it out first) it was easy to get off. Then you cut off any non-uniform ribs at each end of the slabs, and trim any excessive fat or thick meat.

For the rub, I decided to make Meathead’s “Magic Dust”. I divided all the quantities on that page by 4 and still ended up with enough for at least another 4-6 slabs, that I’ve bottled up and put away for next time. Then I added a bit of mustard for a base and applied the rub. The mustard cooks off and you can’t tell that you ever put it on there when it comes to eating.

After doing all that, the slabs looked like this:

My Weber BBQ has “flavorizer bars” (god I hate that non-word) under the grill, and apparently the trick with cooking the ribs for a long time is to fill foil roasting pans with water and put them on the bars, under the grill. Once you do that, you can start getting the grill to the right temperature. You’re supposed to cook them at 225F for around 3 hours, but that’s the temperature at the GRATE, not at the dome where my (only) thermometer is. I just used the center burner, but I’m pretty sure I made it too hot (I figured the dome would read higher than the grate, given that the ribs would be on the non-directly heated sections of the grill), so for next time I’m getting a decent oven thermometer with a cable that I can leave at the grate to get the real temperature. I noticed later in the cooking that as I increased the burner setting, the dome temperature didn’t seem to increase but I’m sure the grate temp did.

So after an hour at an indicated 250F, the ribs were starting to smell great and looked like this!

In total I cooked them around 250F for 2.5 hours at which point they seemed to pass the bounce test for doneness, then put all the burners to maximum and basted the BBQ sauce on (Tony Roma’s Original, we both love that stuff). The idea is that you sizzle them for about 10 minutes per side, in practice I found that too much and they started to char pretty quickly, so I just did 5-7 minutes per side. We kept them warm in a very low heat oven while Louise quickly made some mashed potatoes, and voila!

So how were they? Very very good, but not perfect; not surprising as it was my first time. First, they weren’t the most tender ribs I ever had. I think that I need to cook them at a lower temperature and for longer next time. Also I didn’t foil them – something that I’ll probably try next time and see if it helps. Secondly, I charred the bottom of them a bit. I’m pretty sure this was down to the fact that the water-filled foil pans I used weren’t long enough to cover the whole slabs so I used two side-by-side, meaning there were small gaps between them, and that’s exactly where the charring occurred. So next time I need longer pans.

Otherwise, they tasted great and were a very successful first attempt, I think! It was also a lot of fun, and made for a really enjoyable Saturday afternoon as I prepared them and looked after them as they cooked. I didn’t really think I’d ever make my own ribs at home, and yet here we are!

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Well… lots of things! Been too long since I wrote something here. Since my last post, Louise got me a cookbook for my birthday and we’ve made a couple of things from it – pan-fried cod with potato crust and something they call French Countryside chicken which was really good.

The big news for me though is the BBQ I bought a couple of weeks ago! I got a Weber Spirit E310 after lots of research (I research the crap out of anything I buy, ever… it’s a type of OCD I think). Home Depot had a BBQ sale and I got 20% off. For some reason it came assembled even though we didn’t pay for that which was pretty handy! And yeah, it’s a propane grill, not charcoal. I didn’t want the hassle of lighting coals every time I wanted to use it. I’m sure charcoal smoke does make the flavor slightly better for long cooking times, but convenience and even heating is worth that small sacrifice to me.

So far it’s fantastic. We’ve had some sunny weather finally, and I’ve made my own burgers, marinated and grilled some chicken breasts, but last night I found nirvana with a couple of tenderloin steaks and some seasoned sliced potatoes with onions and garlic. Nothing fancy on the steaks – let them warm up to room temperature, then put on some garlic powder, salt and pepper, and brushed with olive oil. Got the grill as hot as it would go, seared them for 4 minutes a side and let them finish off with a lower indirect heat for another 6 minutes, turning once more. They were slightly overdone (medium instead of medium-rare) but holy crap the char on the outside was PERFECT. Less time on indirect heat next time and they’ll be perfect.

The potatoes were great too. I followed this youtube video almost exactly, though I added some cayenne, marjoram, oregano and paprika as well as the salt and pepper they use in the video (I didn’t have any seasoning salt to use so I figured that would be more or less what was in that anyway). 30 minutes on medium heat, then I took them off while the grill was at melting point for the steaks, and readded them for 5 minutes for the final lower temperature bit.

Looking forward to plenty more BBQ adventures over the summer, though I need to find more healthy recipes; all this red meat will do me in!

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Cooked steak tonight, along with roast potatoes to which I added crushed garlic cloves to the pan while cooking. The end result there was like “hint of garlic” roast potatoes so I need to find a way to make it stronger!

Anyway, for posterity this is the method I used to cook the steaks. They were bacon-wrapped tenderloin from Costco, about $15 I think for 6 steaks, and we’ve cooked them in two batches of three at a time (serving two people each time). Each steak is around 6oz I’d guess so they’re not too big, an inch and a half thick or so.

First, defrost them overnight in the fridge, then get them out about 30-45 minutes before cooking to allow them to warm up to room temperature. About 15 minutes before cooking, I added some sea salt to each side. Start an iron skillet heating on the highest heat on a burner, and preheat the oven to 500F.

When the pan is unbelievably hot, after about 4 minutes for me, drizzle a tiny bit of olive oil on each steak and drop into the pan. Sear for 30 seconds, then flip over with tongs and sear for another 30 seconds. This bit is slightly more involved than it sounds due to the INCREDIBLE amount of smoke produced… it’s like something out of Backdraft, I literally could not see the steaks in the pan to flip them. Don’t worry, I battled through it.

Then flip the meat back to the original side, take the skillet and put the whole thing in the oven for 2 minutes. When the timer goes off, take the pan out, flip them again and put back in for another 2 minutes. When you take the steaks out at the end, let them sit for a minute or two and serve.

This should give you a perfect medium-rare steak. That’s exactly how we like them. If you like them cooked any higher than medium then you are a bad person and your opinion is wrong!

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Been working like crazy over the last couple of weeks. The big deadline is coming up at the end of this week though, hopefully things will get back to normal after that.

So we’ve been making curry! The first recipe we tried was Vij’s family curry recipe from the Vij’s cookbook (available from Amazon). Probably shouldn’t post the recipe but we cooked it exactly as it described, including taking the bones out of the chicken thighs when they were cooked. It was OK, not hot enough though, and it was the kind of yellowish curry that I’m not super fond of.

So last week we tried chicken tikka masala, from a recipe I found on Videojug. It goes like this:

Ingredients (for 4 servings):

• 3 chicken breasts
• 4 Tbsp olive oil
• 5 cardamom pods
• 3″ cinnamon stick
• 1 1/2 onions
• 2 tsp minced ginger
• 2 tsp minced garlic
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp coriander
• 1/4 tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp cayenne
• 1 tbsp paprika
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1 large tomato
• 1 tsp tomato puree (good luck finding this in Canada… we ended up using crushed tomatoes)
• 150ml water
• Small tub of yogurt (or coconut milk)
• Cilantro for garnish

Finely chop the tomato and onions. Cut the chicken breasts into bite sized pieces and salt a little. Mix all the spices together with the ginger and garlic.

Heat the oil in a saute pan over a medium heat (I used 6 on our oven). When it’s hot, drop in the cardamom pods and the cinnamon stick for 30 seconds or so to flavor the oil, then remove them. Add the onions and saute until they brown, then add the spices and stir for a minute. Next add the tomato and puree and stir for another minute or so.

Add the water and bring to a simmer. Add salt if necessary (I did). Add the chicken pieces and stir well, covering them with the sauce. Simmer for 10-12 minutes, stirring every few minutes. Once the chicken is cooked through, you have the option of adding the yogurt here. I added about half a small tub. Stir it in well and simmer for another 5 minutes.

Rough cost:

• Chicken breasts – $7 (protip! chicken breasts are loads cheaper at Thrifty’s than at Safeway)
• Spices – $1
• Rice – $1
• Tomato, onion, ginger, garlic – $3
• Yogurt – $2
• Cilantro – $2
• Crushed tomatoes – $1 (we had to buy it in a tin, and needed only 1 tsp! We stored some but it’s still a waste. Would love to find tomato puree in tubes here)

Total:  $17, makes 4 servings so around $4.25 a serving. Cheap!

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So how was it? Well, it was OK. The sauce was a bit too watery; next time I’ll try 125ml of water instead of 150, and maybe add more yogurt. I’ve read you can use double cream instead of the yogurt, but that stuff’s expensive and unbelievably bad for you! I’m sure it’s nice though. Using the full teaspoon of cayenne made it too hot for Louise, though I liked it. I’d knock it down to 3/4 tsp next time.

Preparation time was around 45 minutes! We didn’t factor that in so we ate later than we expected.

The main problem I have is that neither the curry last week or this alleged chicken tikka masala was really anything like I’ve had in an Indian restaurant either here or in the UK. The “sauce” we end up with is really just small bits of onion and tomato, not a creamy sauce. I’m not sure what to do about this; I asked a friend of mine last week and he suggested just starting with a jar of ready-made curry sauce and adding chillies, spices etc ourselves, and cook the meat separately. I guess we’ll try this sometime but I’m not thrilled at the idea of using someone else’s sauce; it feels like cheating! On the other hand we do that for our pasta and we don’t mind that, so maybe I’m just being snobby.

Anyway, blackened halibut again tonight, finally got my iron skillet so we’re going to try it in that. Looking forward to it, was great last time and I’m hoping for even better results with the skillet!

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