Ribs. Beer. Boom.

Yesterday morning I woke up to find that my man and his friend who had crashed on our couch (this is a different friend from the one who usually sleeps on our couch, but who’s counting) had, the previous evening, left two almost-full bottles of Corona undrunken when they—wait for it—crashed on the couch. (YES, "UNDRUNKEN" IS A WORD, I JUST MADE IT A WORD.)

Gentle reader, I largely do not live my life in accordance with societal conventions, or ethical standards, or...well, probably the less said on this topic the better—but I do have one inviolable rule governing my household and existence in general: YOU DO NOT WASTE BEER. So, I did what anyone else would do in this situation, and dumped the leftover beer into the slow cooker along with some bone-in spare ribs (sprinkled with salt) and a squirt of barbecue sauce.

Adventures in Slow Cooking: Baby-Back Ribs

Gentle reader, you may have noticed that I am no longer numbering installments of the Adventures in Slow-Cooking series, as it has become readily apparent that they are accumulating too quickly to keep track of, and I was told there would be no math on the blog. I don't even like measuring ingredients.

Anyhoo, baby back ribs in a slow cooker, you can’t beat that. Especially if yours, as mine were, are labeled as “pork loin back ribs,” which just sounds so deliciously dirty.

I severed and peeled off the membrane (that plastic-wrap-like layer on the back of the ribs) and rubbed into the meat a dry rub consisting of the usual suspects: kosher salt, paprika, garlic powder. Kept it simple. Let it sit in fridge overnight.

Adventures in Semi-Homemade Ignorant American Fusion Slow Cooking: Korma Is Not a Bitch

Gentle reader, I’m not gonna lie: I have not been employed full-time for some time. (What, how did you think I made time to suddenly and vociferously resurrect this blog?) And while I was extremely, extraordinarily grateful to have scored a week’s in-house freelance assignment in Manhattan, I was unprepared to be thrown back into the cowpen of personal-space violation that is the C-train morning commute. (Pro tip: Ladies of the C train, if you have ever lamented aloud to your significant other that you’d like to spoon more often, BE MORE SPECIFIC about whom you'd like to spoon with, because if you don’t, all I have to say is, BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.) Mind you, this was morning time I would ordinarily spend Instagramming my breakfast while watching "In the Papers" on NY1, then observing the progress of Jamie Shupak's baby bump, then wondering just how drunk everyone on the Today show is, then maybe throwing some stuff in the slow cooker, then maybe going back to bed until like 11. Okay, fine, noon.

Anyhoo. I determined to still make at least a couple of weeknight dinners in the course of the week, even though I would probably not be able to get home before 7PM, given the bashful C train's tendency to wait for FOUR FREAKING A TRAINS TO GO BY before it works up the courage to pull up into the station.

But oh right, the slow cooker—that part of my morning ritual could actually carry over! This, I realized, would be a good opportunity to continue evolving my slow-cooking skills, which I will definitely need to rely heavily on if I am ever again gainfully employed full-time. I resolved to purchase a jar of premade Indian sauce, slather it on a chicken, and call it a day before starting my day. I figured, hey, if the semi-homemade approach is good enough for the plucky unofficial First Lady of New York, Sandra Lee, it’s good enough for me.

I also thought that leftover chicken could be used for lunches, because another traumatic memory that came rushing back this week was HOW FREAKING MUCH A MEASLY SOGGY SANDWICH COSTS IN MANHATTAN! (Don’t get me started on what happens if you want a salad. Let’s just say it’s a good thing that I never want a salad.)

Ignorant American Fusion: Chicken Tikka Masala

Photo of Minar buffet via Midtown Lunch

Happy New Year!

Speaking of New Year's... Back when I worked in Times Square (cut to Marlon Brando hissing “The horror... the horror...”), one of the few bright lunch spots in the area was an Indian take-out joint called Minar, at 46th just off Broadway. (There was also Sophie's Cuban Cuisine on 45th between 5th and 6th, and an exellent biryani cart at 44th off 6th, where a disheveled and disoriented Pauly Shore once, moments after devouring a hot dog from the adjacent street cart, snagged the chicken kati roll I had ordered, but that’s another story.) (Well, actually, that’s the whole story. The only postscript is that now I see why they used to call him the Weasel.)

Anyhoo, at Minar, I always got the chicken tikka masala. It's amazingly delicious, although it costs $10 for an 8-oz. container with like 4 or 5 pieces of chicken floating in the amazingly rich and delicious sauce. Everything is out buffet-style, so it's a very quick grab-and-go lunch (although you can eat in, it's not the most ambiancey spot). You can get your meal with rice or naan, and if you select the latter, the woman behind the counter will turn toward the kitchen and yell “NAAN TO GO!!!,” and you will promptly begin salivating like a Pavlov dog. Damn, that is some good naan. It's a huge fluffy disc with crispy bubbles, all nice and warm and soft. You dip it in the sauce to sop up every drop after you've finished those measly 4 pieces of chicken.

Sadly, I do not know how to make that naan. (Sorry, gentle readers, for being a naan-tease.) But I did figure out a super-easy Ignorant American Fusion hack for the tikka masala, and you can feed dinner to 3 to 4 people with this chicken dish for the amount of money it would take one luncher in midtown to consume those 4 or 5 floating pieces.

Strawberries. What?

Well hello dear readers!
Wait do we have readers any more?

I'm sure you're out there, so hi, happy 2014 and how's everything?
Things are good with me, hectic, but good. But get this, I was at the Red Hook Fairway last night for some quick kitchen restocking, and right as I walked in, my eye was caught by the sign that said 3 lbs of strawberries for 5 dollars.
Wait, is it strawberry season? My mom who's down in Florida says it is there, so I figured what they heyo. They were definitely overripe, which also struck me as a little strange, but I went for it anyway, and bought a whole bunch of strawberries.

Good Catholic Girl's Marinara

Gentle reader, I have a most terrible confession to make. Once upon a time, in a dark hour, a moment of weakness I shall regret forever, I actually entertained the idea of...using red sauce from a jar. (I know! I know! I need to go to Our Lady of Perpetual Pasta and say ten Hail Mama Celestes in penance.) Thankfully, my soul was saved by a good Catholic girl who would not allow me to abandon my faith in the healing power of cooking from scratch. Hence this recipe is named in her honor.

Here’s how this narrowly averted sin went down. One lovely summer weekend, I was invited to my friend Karen’s house in Woodstock for a girls’ weekend. The deal was that each of us would contribute a meal, and I said I’d make pizza on the grill. But I didn't have time to grocery-shop before leaving, and to my eternal shame, I—after much agonizing, soul-searching, and conscience-wrestling—suggested getting a jar of spaghetti sauce to save time.

Karen, a good Catholic girl, responded by visibly shuddering, making the sign of the cross, and saying she would get the ingredients for me to make the sauce from scratch. Hallelujah! She kept me from wandering into the valley of prepackaged, overpriced, preservative-laden darkness.

Making the sauce is, and was, easy—even after the many glasses of wine our group of girlfriends had consumed by the time I started cooking (gentle reader, our conversation that evening would have made Madonna blush—and I don't mean the virginal one). This sauce is of course perfect for pasta or any other dish that calls for red sauce, and it freezes great to reheat for a spaghetti dinner in 10 minutes (more on this after the jump).

Thaaat Sauce Is Hoisin

Gentle reader, welcome to another lesson in cooking the cuisine I like to call Ignorant American Fusion! In this installment, I’d like to tout the virtues of having a jar of hoisin sauce tucked away in the side door of your fridge, so you can quickly and easily make a dish with a passing resemblance to Chinese food (and by Chinese food, I mean the food you get in Chinese restaurants here in ’Mericker. See how this cuisine works?).

On a recent Saturday, I got three turkey drumsticks from the awesome turkey farm vendor at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket—at a very reasonable price of, like, $3/lb.—and prepared them in a manner that bore a passing (and I mean just barely passing) resemblance to Peking duck. I sprinkled the turkey legs with salt, pepper, garlic powder and red pepper flakes, and roasted them on a rack set over a pan filled with about an inch of beer. I roasted them at 400° for about 2 hours, flipping them a quarter turn every half-hour or so; let them rest 10-15 minutes; and then pulled the meat off the bone and served it (as shown above left) with scallion pancakes and snow peas. And, of course, hoisin sauce to line the pancakes! The rich turkey drumstick meat really is a great variation on duck, though I would never call it a substitute.

At a couple of bucks for a jar that will go a long way, since the flavor is quite intensely concentrated, hoisin is a really simple way to liven up weeknight dishes. You can use it sparingly, and you really don’t need to add much in the way of other seasonings, since they would either be overpowered by the hoisin or compete with it.

Here are a few of the many other things you could do with hoisin:

Awesomesauce!

For most people, “awesomesauce” is a figure of speech, and a pretty inane one at that. For me, awesomesauce is an actual condiment, and a pretty—wait for it—awesome one at that.

Awesomesauce is basically a variation on chipotle mayo that I have whipped up in various forms/ingredient ratios for various purposes. Like salad dressings, it’s one of those things you make to taste, so I’ll tell you roughly what I did last time (gentle reader, I certainly did not measure) and you experiment with your own custom blend, ’k?

One note before starting: I may have mentioned this before, but I always have some chipotles in adobo on hand—you only need one or two for most recipes, but a can is usually under a couple bucks, and the remainder will keep in the fridge almost indefinitely as long as you decant it into a glass jar. (Once opened and exposed to oxygen, the metal can will react with the chipotles, and unless you’re a goat, eating rusty can is not a good look.) I recommend washing out and saving empty jars of mustard or jam or salsa for just such a purpose.

Double Leftovers Love: Baked Stuffed Potato & “Taco Shells” Pasta

My two-prong 2012 resolution was to do more cooking at home, and to end up throwing out fewer leftovers by repurposing them for future dinners and/or work lunches. This resolution seemed like a manageable, money-saving one that will yield some good meals and blogging inspiration. Plus, I figured, if the world is going to end this coming December, there’s no point in resolving to exercise, eat healthy, or quit smoking—amirite, gentle reader?

Anyhoo, I have done pretty well thus far—I've brought lunch to work more days than not, and managed to make some creative use of leftovers. The Taco Night I recently blogged about actually occurred twice over the course of a few weeks—once with corn tortillas, once with flour. And following both occasions, I came up with excellent ways to use up the leftover ground beef filling.

Saturday Night Comfort Food: Ravioli alla Tortorella

Last night, I invented this dish and named it in honor of the New York Rangers’ coach John Tortorella. There is no particular significance to the ingredients as pertaining to him; I just wanted to pay tribute to the man who has led my secret boyfriend Henrik Lundqvist and his teammates to be NUMBER FREAKING ONE IN THE NHL AND WINNERS OF THE WINTER CLASSIC!!! And whose name just sounds like it should be a pasta. Originally I was actually thinking of inventing a Tortellini alla Tortorella (you know how I love geeky wordplay, gentle reader), but I figured ravioli would work better, because the meat sauce would mingle with the cheese filling once you cut into the ravioli, whereas tortellini are all wound up tight (much like Tortorella).

While heating a large pot of salted water for a package of cheese ravioli (13 count), I sautéed a little over a pound of ground pork in a couple tablespoons of olive oil with a medium chopped onion, a bunch of minced garlic, and a 10-oz. package of cremini (a.k.a. "baby bella") mushrooms sliced and halved. Oh, and coarse salt and pepper of course, and some fresh thyme leaves. I broke up the meat with a wooden spoon as it cooked.

Once the meat was cooked through (it doesn’t really brown, it more like…whites), I added maybe 1/2 cup frozen peas, stirred them in to mix, and transferred the meat mixture to a bowl.

Who's Bad? (Scape it up)

In the face of an excess of garlic scapes (thanks CSA!), as well as a bunch of produce that was calling "cook me now or lose me forever", I decided to cut up a bunch of crap and make something with it.
Literally, that was my approach- I stood in front of my open fridge, grabbed the bag from my CSA pickup Saturday (damn! the broccoli was already yellowing), saw some carrots that had to be weeks old, red peppers that didn't make it onto veggie skewers at the bbq, celery, oldish lettuce, lettuce and tomato pre-cut for bbq burger toppings, and an open package of andouille sausage i didn't use up from shrimp-sausage skewers assembly. I turned to my cupboards for garlic and onions that had been up there for too long, and finally on the counter, one huge and one small tomato, red and about to start severely wrinkling.

Branzini- what's that?

Greetings all,

Apologies for my extended absence. There has been an addition to my family (new nephew!) and then i got sick. really sick. so all the soupiness that BGC has been focusing on has been even more helpful in my time of ill.

My mom was in town over the weekend, taking a little tour of the NY, NJ, Philly area to see some family members (who knew October was such a family-oriented month?) and in her Fairway run to pick up the additional ingredients we needed to make a soup for sick ol me, she couldn't resist the fish counter- they had fresh whole branzini (aka mediterranean sea bass).

So they filleted them up for her, and she brought them home. By the end of the day, our soup making and general lazing about had both exhausted us and filled our tummies, and the branzini fillets remained in the fridge untouched. I promised her that I would cook them up today, while i stayed home and continued my recovery, and I figured it was worth documenting for the fantastic cause of Operation DATES (Developing A Taste for Eating Seafood).

Mushroom Gravy

The expression “It’s just gravy” suggests that gravy is something optional, a gratuitous bonus above and beyond the essentials … the proverbial icing on the cake. Gentle reader, this is not the case in our household, for The Rob regards gravy as effectively being a food group. He considers it as essential an accompaniment to a steak, a pork chop, or a piece of chicken as a green and a carb, and I can’t say I blame him. (Come to think of it, a cake without icing is pretty incomplete as well, but that’s a post for another day.)

These proportions will serve two people with a couple of steaks or chops or a chicken, but can be easily multiplied. I served it with grilled pork chops in a soy/mustard-based marinade; green beans with shallots, bacon, and garlic; and mashed potatoes, which are also, to The Rob, incomplete without gravy.)

Like Ketchup, But Better

I like to think of this DIY condiment as being to ketchup what Avatar is to 2-D movies. (Of course, I haven't seen Avatar, because I always have to be different -- hell, I never even saw Titanic -- but that's beside the point. It's an analogy, people.) Basically, it's a roasted tomato relish with a rich tomato flavor and a hint of sweetness. You know, like ketchup, but better. (Hence the title of this post. Come on, try to keep up.) It can be used as anything from a sandwich spread to a sauce for fish (more suggestions below, under the jump).

This is a great way to use up tomatoes from your garden, or ones that are starting to get squishy. If your market has a section of discounted-because-it's-about-to-go-bad produce, this is a perfect opportunity to utilize it. If you've got options, plum tomatoes (the oval kind) might be best for this, but obviously, since I just told you to go ahead and use tomatoes that are about to go bad, we're not going to be too particular here.