Joe Cook Me

Coconut Dal with Kale, Flaky Paratha, and Black-Pepper Beef (Rambutan)

January 17th, 2023

Rambutan, by Cynthia Shanmugalingam (who was raised in the UK by Sri-Lankan immigrants), has been touted as the most exciting Sri Lankan cookbook in a long while. I’ve previously really enjoyed cooking Sri Lankan food from the book Ceylon Cookery (including a very interesting cucumber curry), so a newer, acclaimed cookbook with pretty pictures for every dish is worth exploring – let’s take a look!

Originally, I had intended to just make a healthy Coconut Dal with Kale, but an opportunity to cook for my housemates and our downstairs neighbor presented itself and I was soon folding Paratha and seasoning beef strips. The recipes in this book are fairly simple, besides the fact that you might have to chase down fresh curry leaves (hint: Market Basket in Somerville has them cheap and fresh, otherwise, go to an Indian grocer and ask) and pandan leaves. I’ve never seen pandan leaves anywhere, but the internet says you can experiment with substituting vanilla bean. I used 1 scraped/spent vanilla bean pod in place of 2 pandan leaves and this seemed plenty strong.

Cooking Notes: Chop the kale before adding it to the dal. There will be a lot of kale if you weigh it dry. I definitely recommend adding roasted sweet potato. As suggested, drain 80% (or even 90%) of the water from the dal – the kale will still cook in the mostly-dry lentils and the result have a better consistency. Don’t forget to season the dal at the end; it will need salt. I recommend watching videos online of ways to fold paratha (it’s easier to make these than one might expect – make extra!) For the beef – get the cast iron as hot as it will go (I put it in the oven on max temp.) Finally, I forgot to add the lime and dried chiles to the dal at serving, and the lemongrass to the beef – don’t forget this stuff!

Overall, I found the dal to be a bit less impressive than I would like for serving guests. The beef and paratha were better, although I agree with the recipe’s suggestion: try to find a nice enough cut so that there is no chewy fat in the strips – the flatiron steak had this flaw. For now, based on two cooking experiences, I will avoid relying on this cookbook for a big dinner party. If I’m going to do a South Asian regional dinner party, I feel like I can get a more reliable and impressive flavor with the suggested menus in Julie Sahni’s Indian cookbooks. Nonetheless, I look forward to trying some of the black curries and fruit curries in Rambutan to see if the other recipes are a bit more striking.

Joe’s Ratings: 5/6.5/6.5 (Dal/Paratha/Beef)

Difficulty Ratings: 5/4/3.5
Chard and Saffron Omelette (Plenty)

January 15th, 2023

One of my shortcomings as a cook is I don’t make breakfast often enough. Some mornings I will even resort to eating curry, pizza, shrimp, whatever was on the menu last night. So, when I found myself with the opportunity to cook breakfast for a friend on Sunday, the obvious choices in some of my oldest and favorite cookbooks remained untried. Today, I cooked a simple omelette that has been staring at me since my very first serious cookbook: Plenty. Being my 86th of 128 in the book, there aren’t too many recipes left that are easy or appealing to make, so this is indeed a treat! This was amazingly my first omelette (I even got my first large nonstick pan just to make this dish), so I was expecting to make a mistake or two. It turned out just fine in the end.

Notes: Start the heat medium-high, but then cut back to medium low to avoid burning while getting the egg to set. A little burning is ok; presentation will be better if you let most of the egg set. There is a pretty wide tolerance for the thickness of the omelette. Make sure you salt at the end, it will definitely need it. A small amount of hot sauce improves the dish in my opinion; however, it does overpower the saffron. Try it both ways and see what you like.

Overall, this was an impressive-looking vegetarian omelette. The flavor was a bit less impressive, in my opinion.

Joe’s Rating: 5.5

Difficulty Rating: 4
Squash Sambar Spicy Wet Curry (Rambutan)

January 11th, 2023

This was my first go with the new Sri Lankan cookbook Rambutan (see my post from 1/17/23 for more details). I was going for something simple and healthy, reserving the more impressive dishes that interested me for future dinner parties. The dish ended up being light and nutritious, and my intuition was well founded, not really something for a dinner party. More of an everyday affair. It is particularly recommended with dosas, but I opted for the simpler rice, which was fine.

Cooking Notes: Go light on the tamarind: a golf ball is 2.75 tbsp, by the way, but try using about 2 or a touch less, maybe. (I’m not totally sure because I substituted 1.5 tbsp rice vinegar for one of four golfballs and it was too sour; this is my best guess.) The Sri-Lankan (SL) spice is great and you can definitely go 2x-4x the specified amount if you like spicy, or just serve the curry with a dish of spice powder on the side. Also, it definitely doesn’t look nearly as pretty as in the picture. The vegetables seem to get lost in the dal, so don’t rely on this to make a pretty table setting.

Joe’s Rating: 5.5

Difficulty Rating: 4.5
Rummaniyya – Pomegranate-Cooked Lentils and Eggplants (Falastin)

January 8th, 2023

Falastin continues to impress with this lovely vegan/gluten-free dish (however, it is just sooo good with greek yogurt and crusty bread). See my family-dinner spread from July, to be posted soon, for more examples of delicious cooking from this book! I really like how Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley offer plenty of explanation of the techniques used as well as a description of how far in advance all components in a dish can be made, given proper storage (more cookbooks should do this!)

Cooking Notes: Mix the oil into the eggplant as soon as you pour or else it will absorb in just a few. Definitely serve with some kind of fresh bread and acidic yogurt. Could be a main dish at a dinner party!

Joe’s Rating: 7.5

Difficulty: 4
Very Full Tart (Plenty)

January 5th, 2023

My 85th recipe of 128 for Plenty. While I started cooking exclusively from this book in 2016, I now am working through only 2-3 recipes per year, when the right occasion arises. The tart was a delicious, filling savory dinner for 4. It does need some care to get the ratio-to-crust-to-filling ratio correct (see notes, below).

Cooking Notes: This tart is indeed very full – I’d recommend selecting a particularly deep tart pan, or go a bit lighter on some of the filling (e.g. choose small eggplants and sweet potatoes.) If you don’t reduce the amount of vegetables and have a deep enough pan, consider instead increasing the amount of binder (the egg and cream) to pull things together. Mix the binder thoroughly. 11oz of pie crust should be around half a recipe for a full pie. Don’t forget to pick up some beans as pie weights. Blind-baking the pie crust may require a higher temp or longer than stated; make sure it gets golden-brown.

Joe’s Rating: 6

Difficulty: 5
Sauteed Shrimp with Garlic (Gambas al Ajillo) – Curate

January 3rd, 2023

I have a bad habit of getting Spanish and Tapas cookbooks and never cooking out of them (I probably have about 6 of them). Curate is the first of the bunch, which I got when I was experimenting with mussels escabeche for a winter solstice celebration at Fortnight. The “Chilled Mussels in Escabeche Sauce” was my least favorite of the ones I tried and set the stage for my reluctance to try many of the simple small plates of these books.

Fast forward 3 years and I’m ready to start experimenting with some of these again. The situation is we have bean-corn-cheese-avacodo quesadillas with a cabbage-lime salad on the side, and we want to make something small and tasty to compliment this. Sounds like a perfect plate to add some sautéed shrimp with garlic!

This recipe is rather large, serving 10 as a small plate. Even so, the 24 cloves of garlic it calls if is a whole lot; I definitely smelled of garlic in the days following this meal and I wondered if the other diners restrained themselves from eating more due to the amount. Regardless, the shrimp were excellent, if a bit simple.

Cooking Notes: Try using a bit less oil than suggested. Also, you need to use very very high heat for this to work. 2 lbs of shrimp is a lot to brown, and the amount of sherry added will almost necessarily take longer than 1 minute to reduce sufficiently for my liking. I would even consider using a separate cast iron for the shrimp and preheat it in the oven on max, then put over the highest heat and dump the shrimp and garlic-oil in (or use a wok burner.) Also, butterflying shrimp just means going almost through to the other side when you devein them and then spreading them open. Serve with crusty bread to mop up the garlic juices.

Joe’s Rating: 6

Difficulty: 4.5
Friulian Seafood Dinner (Friuli Food and Wine)

December 31st, 2022

So I’m back in Ann Arbor and have promised my friends I will cook dinner on New Years Eve. I wake up and where do I go? The farmers market and (especially at this time of year) Monahan’s Seafood Market. When I see langoustines (known as scampi in Italy) and giant head-on prawns, I know immediately what I am making for the main course this evening.

Appetizer: Tonno in Saor (Marinated Tuna Belly):

My cookbook noted that it would be very Istrian to serve the langoustine main with a cold fish appetizer such as Tonno in Saor. Great, this is the kind of stuff I love – let’s be very Istrian! (If you’re wondering, Istria is a peninsula in Croatia just south of Friuli). I could not find tuna belly, but I consulted with the encyclopedic La Cucina cookbook and found that one could make this dish using albacore tuna loin. This was very good; a quick and easy far superior version of canned tuna. Served with toasted bread. Notes: Be careful not to burn the garlic. Be on the lookout for other recipes (even in other books or regions) that use canned tuna in which the leftovers of this meal may be employed.

Main: Scampi alla Busara (Langoustines in Tomato Sauce):

Monahan’s only had about 3/4 lbs of langoustines, so I added another 3/4 lbs of giant head-on prawns. Upon inspection, the langoustines were pretty bright orange and I worried that they may have been precooked, although looking at pictures of them raw online, this worry may have been misplaced. I was also worried about the raw prawn heads decomposing as I carted them around throughout the afternoon as they are said to degrade rapidly.

It turned out there was no need to worry. The resulting tomato sauce had a lovely and strong seafood flavor (someone at the table compared it to a really good puttanesca). I was very glad I included the prawns as they were big and juicy (they averaged around 4 oz. each). The langoustine meat was hard to get at and a bit flakier. Also, some of the prawns (guessing the females) had a particularly large amount of green slime along the vein; I’m guessing this was roe. I recommend being very careful to remove all of this as we noticed some of these shrimp with roe had an intense fishy flavor that wasn’t exactly pleasant to us. Again, served with toasted bread.

Dessert: Polenta Cake:

I selected this dish because I liked the idea of an herb-heavy baked dessert from Friuli. I later realized that this was not a traditional dish of the region, but the author’s take on what might fit in well with the local cuisine. Nonetheless, this dish was a hit. Everyone loved it! The large amount of rosemary was particularly nice alongside the salty hazelnut and corn. (There is actually more hazelnut meal than corn in the batter.) I made the berry-sage coulis with all raspberries. I would strongly recommend at least doubling the amount of coulis you make as it runs out too quickly. Also, when serving (even leftover), don’t forget to garnish with a sage leaf! The smell is important and delightful! Yogurt made a fine substitute for the buttermilk ice cream. One more tip for serving this the next day: it can get kind of crumbly, but this can be helped by leaving the cake open to the air for a couple hours for it to dry out a bit before attempting to cut and serve it.

Joe’s Rating: 6/6.5/7 (Tuna / Langoustines / Polenta Cake)

Difficulty: 3/4/4.5
Venison with Pear, Onion, and Zuf (Friuli Food and Wine)

December 26th, 2022

It was a couple of weeks before Christmas when I heard that my grandfather had shot a gigantic buck and would be giving me the loins! My imagination set in motion with thoughts of hosting a 12-person dinner party in Cambridge with this lovely loot. When the loin arrived, I saw I was allotted a single loin (and neither tenderloin) – my grandfather had judiciously decided to save these cuts for his table. So, instead, I set out to cook a simpler dinner for 6 my immediate family in Hummelstown, PA. Note that this loin was still huge in proportions, weighing in at 38 oz. The deer was older than most that produce venison that would be acquired at a restaurant, so I was also anticipating some strong, almost smoky and gamey flavors in the dish.

I chose a Friuli dish because it could be made with relative ease compared to some preparations (see the excellent venison dish in Nopi). It was also particularly striking in terms of presentation and color on the table. Overall, the flavor was not quite as gamey as I was expecting, and the dish was not the knockout that some of the other preparations I made have been. My family in particular remembers a venison preparation from “Everyone Eats Well in Belgium” as one of the best meals I’ve ever made for them. The pears and onions caramelized in venison juices were a favorite part of mine. The zuf (polenta with squash) turned out pretty, if a bit less luxurious that I would ideally pair with a deer loin.

Cooking Notes: make sure you get very coarse polenta. It will improve the dish. Don’t under-season the zuf. Use butternut squash instead of pumpkin next time (I needed to add butter and brown sugar when I blended it to get it up to snuff, a practice I’d recommend for this dish.) I wrapped the roast carefully with butchers twine – just ask the butcher at the supermarket for a favor of a yard or two of twine. Take care not to overcook the venison. For this 38oz loin, I had to finish it in the oven for the last 10 minutes (35 minutes total), but this came out a bit over (I rescued it by slicing before it rested, so it probably ended up less juicy than it otherwise would have.) Pull it out when the center averages around 125F. I had to hold up one end of the loin with tongs for most of the 20 minutes on the stove to get it to cook evenly, which worked! Those fresh chives are important; don’t substitute dried or anything.

Joe’s Rating: 6.5
Difficulty: 5
Italian Pizzetta Dinner (Polpo)

December 21st, 2022

For a simple, special, and delicious dinner, pizza is an excellent and safe option. And for really good pizza, Polpo has us covered. The pizzas (or pizzettas) come out thin and small enough to make a meal for a single person (at most). The suggested toppings are great as is, but being so small, it is easy to try out 2 or 3 different combos with a single batch of dough. (for example, see the chocolate-yogurt pizzetta a friend and I made in January 2022). The dough is simple, yeasted, and has a flour to water ratio of 8:5 (which is classic for bread, generally). I think this might make it slightly dry for a pizza dough and perhaps is responsible for working well when very thing, although I’m not really sure about this. The pizza dough doubles as a pita dough too – just throw it on your stone or cast iron without any toppings and you are set.

If you have an extra-large cast-iron pan (15″ for a general pizza, but you could do 12″ for these pizzettas) then you don’t need a pizza stone. When using cast iron, my pizza making strategy involves flopping the rolled dough onto the preheated cast iron and quickly throwing on the toppings (a friend can help!) I think I got the cast-iron idea from Cooks Illustrated. In my experience, you can go as hot as your oven will allow.

Stracchino, Potato & Rosemary Pizzetta

I ended up visiting two Italian specialty shops looking for Stracchino. What I heard is that this fresh cheese (which the book says tastes like “spreadable cheese from a tube”) does not keep particularly long and so is often not kept stocked for that reason. Oh well. Taleggio is supposed to be an ok substitute. The resulting pizza was delicious! Notes: Don’t forget to blanch the potatoes!

Olive & White Anchovy Pizzetta

This was also nice, but we missed the fancier cheese. (This recipe just calls for the cheap grated mozzarella.) Maybe try mixing in some different cheese next time. Also, note that the recipe does not bake the anchovies or basil at all; these are added at room temperature after the pizza is removed from the oven, which seems like a decent idea for the basil, but I would not have thought of this for the anchovies.

Joe’s Rating: 7/6 (Potato / Anchovy)
Difficulty: 4/4
Spicy Okra & Lamb Sauté (Istanbul & Beyond)

December 14th, 2022

It’s Wednesday, and I need to sustain myself through the rest of the week once again! I’m a bit stressed about a grant application I am writing, so let’s not get too complicated. For a quick and satisfying meal, I’m going with something from Istanbul & Beyond: a triple-batch of Spicy Okra & Lamb Sauté. Dishes from I&B are always very simple and usually quite good (especially with some added yogurt and bread).

I decided to make the recommended garlic yogurt and bulgar pilaf. You really only need a 2x bulgar recipe for 3x (or even 4x) this main dish, whereas you can do with the full 2 cups of yogurt for every 1x this dish. Take extra care to not pierce the okra (that’s how you avoid the okra goop). This is a concern during cutting, but also with over-steaming and any vigorous stirring at the end of the sauté. I think I overcooked my okra a bit so be sure to keep a close eye on it.

The dish was a great everyday preparation because it has a strong lamb flavor; however, like many of the Turkish dishes in this cookbook, it is only flavored with a few ounces of ground lamb. You get the best of both worlds: It’s tasty, healthy, affordable, and good for the environment.

Joe’s Rating: 7
Difficulty: 4.5