Scrumptious Street

Return to NYC Banana-Mustard Potato Salad

Scrumptious readers, thank you for being patient.  In the past month I've packed up our life in Northern California and moved back to my beloved New York.  It's been a crazy and intense month, with no time for cooking anything other than the very quick basics that I know you've already mastered! Mr. Scrumptious and I are positively thrilled to be back in New York and have spent the first week completely over-indulging in the fantastic new restaurants that have popped up in the 20 months we were away.

So, soon, I know I'll be cooking and cranking out the recipes and postings again.  But since it's a huge picnic weekend here in the States, I thought I'd post a repeat from a couple of years ago.  Still phenomenal, my potato salad standard now which will be heading to Central Park with us tomorrow.  It's my "Banana-Mustard Potato Salad".  Many of you may not have seen this before, for those of you who have maybe now is the time to give it a whirl!  It's fantastic!  I like to keep the recipe for potato salad simple:  no raw onions, no pickles, no celery.  Make it the way you want of course, but you really need to try the banana-mustard at least once to put an amazing twist on your regular recipe.  

Ingredients:
Serves 4

2 lbs. small white creme potatoes, skins on
1 large egg, hardboiled
1/3 c. banana-mustard
1 T. extra virgin olive oil
3 T. mayonnaise
1 fresh scallion
1/8 tsp. paprika
kosher salt to taste
freshly ground white pepper to taste

Method:
1. Make banana-mustard according to recipe.

2. Bring a large pot of salted water to boil and submerge potatoes in the boiling water.  Let potatoes cook until fork-tender, about 15-17 minutes if using small ones.  I also boil the egg with the potatoes, and just remove it after 10 minutes.

3. Add the banana-mustard to a bowl.  Add the mayonnaise and whisk briskly to incorporate.  Slowly drizzle in the extra virgin olive oil and set the banana-mustard mayonnaise dressing aside.

4. Drain potatoes, let cool and peel by scraping the skin off with the back of a knife.  Cut into quarters and dice the egg.  Season the potatoes and egg with kosher salt and freshly ground white or black pepper.  Toss gently.

5. Pour in banana-mustard-mayonnaise dressing while the potatoes are still slightly warm, to coat the potatoes evenly with the dressing.

6.  Chill for at least three hours in the refrigerator.  When ready to serve, garnish with the diced scallion and paprika.

Smoky Grilled Eggplant Dip

I spend a lot of time in my cooking classes teaching people to like things they thought they hated.  In most cases, we dislike food because it's been mistreated or otherwise misunderstood  in some way.  Whether it's over-cooked, under-cooked or simply not understood, we can often lose the maximum flavor and deliciousness for food. This is especially true for vegetables. One of the most common examples is eggplant or aubergine.  Even I, as a child, hated eggplant.  But, it can be incredibly delicious, rich and complex.  The trick is knowing what it wants! It wants to be released from its bitterness and appreciated and coaxed to complexity.  Don't we all? 

Here's my favorite variation on an eggplant dip that is just phenomenal.  It's similar to Baba Ghanoush, but is even more mysterious and zippy due to some of the little twists I put into the recipe.  This is my "Smoky Grilled Eggplant Dip", just in time for Summer parties!

It's light but feels rich because of the texture and the wonderful note chili and lemon juice.  It's deeply complex from the smokiness of the eggplant.  And, because there's no trace of bitterness or sliminess that people associate with eggplant, my guests were hard-pressed to identify it at all!  Many thought of hummus, but knew that wasn't right.  To make eggplant delicious you should always purge it of the bitterness (described in recipe below) and roast or grill it to the point of having a little charred flavor. Eggplant loves to be charred!  If you're frying it you must not only purge it but also squeeze it completely dry and then make sure your frying oil is always 350˚F and never lower.  If the oil isn't hot enough and you're frying eggplant, it will absorb way too much of the oil and that's what turns it into a slippery, slimy mess that can be so unappealing.  This recipe skips all of that by grilling it to soft texture with nice charred grill marks. Sorry, I didn't get a picture of that before I spun it through the food processor.

I think it best to serve the dip with some olive oil flat-bread or something more Mediterranean than a simple cracker. I love these Olive Oil Crisp Breads from Spain, and also like the lightly sugared variety as a contrast to the smoky and tangy flavors from the dip. 

 

Yum! Make this for your next party and I'm telling you -- people will love it and be positively stunned that it's eggplant, likely something on their "Top 5 Foods I Hate" list.

Ingredients
Serves 6-8 as snack

1 medium Italian eggplant, sliced in 1/2" slices, purged of bitterness (see below instructions)
1 T. kosher salt
1 hot long red Italian chili pepper
1 T. pine nuts, toasted
1/2 lemon, juiced
1/3 c. extra virgin olive oil
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1 package olive oil crisp bread or other crispy Mediterranean flatbreads

Method:
1) Slice eggplant and place in large colander. Sprinkle each slice evenly with the kosher salt, making sure the slices are all covered.  Let the colander drain in a sink or over a bowl for 30 minutes.  The salt extracts some of the juices from the eggplant and particularly, the bitterness.  You'll see the liquid that strains out is dark brownish.  That's bitterness you're removing!  Lightly rinse the salt off the eggplant slices and wrap each slice in paper towels and squeeze dry.  Get as much moisture out without damaging the eggplant.  Spread the slices out flat on a cooling rack and let them sit another 30 minutes.

2) Light a grill our stove burner with grill pan and preheat.  Lightly brush a layer of olive oil on the eggplant slices and grill until soft and nicely blackened, about 4-5 minutes each side.  Remove the eggplant from the grill.  In a small skillet, toast the pine nuts until golden brown and fragrant, bout 3-5 minutes.

3) Add the eggplant, red chile pepper and pine nuts to a food processor and pulse into a thick paste. Add in the lemon juice and ground black pepper and puree until smooth.  Taste and adjust any seasoning.  You may need a pinch of salt since the only salt we used was in the purging at the beginning.  Slowly drizzle in the olive oil, while the processor is running until the dip is soft and creamy. 

4) Scrape the dip into a serving bowl and serve with olive oil crisp bread or flatbreads immediately.

"Spring Chicken" with Asparagus and Morels

I know that sometimes we cooks, chefs and bloggers get predictable.  But, every year there are certain foods or ingredients that really get our juices flowing, our kitchens humming, our hearts buzzing. Typically, they are items that are only at their peak a short time each year and we wait all year long for them.  For me, one such example is my penultimate Spring combination of baby asparagus and fresh morel mushrooms.  EVERY YEAR, I feel like Spring hasn't begun until I've successfully hunted them out in the Farmer's Markets, reminisced about my Dad gathering morels in the woods when I was young (he can smell them 1/4 mile away I swear) and cooked up the first batch of the year!  Here's this year's creation, my "Braised Chicken Thighs with Asparagus Tips, Green Garlic and Crispy Morels."

This was wonderful, Spring on a plate.  Healthy, light, earthy and succulent. This dish really exemplifies how cooking with the simplest and freshest ingredients is so fulfilling and delicious.  Pay attention to textures here and it'll be perfect.  You want juicy and tender chicken with soft yet still firm asparagus.  You want peas just the other side of raw, so they pop in your mouth but are still tender.  You want the morels to be like well-seared meat: moist on the inside and crispy on the outside.  Rather than following exact times in my recipe, keep your focus on getting these combination of textures, taste as you go and don't let anything go past done into the land of soft of mushy. (Oven temps and equipment make it vary anyway,)  If you put care and attention into this dish and focus on flavor and texture, you'll be thrilled with the delicious result! Next year, I'm hunting my own morels because even what you get in the Farmer's Market don't compare with what you find in forests!

Ingredients

Serves 2

4 chicken thighs, bone-in and skin on

2 T. extra virgin olive oil

1/2 tsp. kosher salt

1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1/2 c. dry white wine, such as Pinot Gris

1 fresh bay leaf

1/2 tsp. fennel seeds

1 tsp. Herbes de Provence

1 small shallot

2 T. fresh green garlic, minced

2 c. fresh baby asparagus tips

1 c. fresh morel mushrooms

1/2 c. fresh English peas, shelled

1/2 lemon, juiced

Method:

1. In a small bowl add 2 T. kosher salt and 2 c. water and stir to dissolve.  Slice the morels in half lengthwise and add to the salt water.  This helps remove any small bugs that may be in the mushrooms.  (Yes, they could be there but this gets them out.) Soak the mushrooms for 20 minutes.  Gently skim the mushrooms off the surface and rinse thoroughly with cold water.  Squeeze dry with paper towels and let the mushrooms continue to dry on a plate.

2. Preheat oven to 350˚F.  Pat the chicken thighs dry with paper towels and season with the kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper.  Take out a oven-proof skillet or braising pan with lid and place on medium-high heat on the stove.  Add 1T. of the olive oil.

3. Brown the chicken on all sides, starting skin-side down until a dark golden brown, about 5-8 minutes.  Add the bay leaf, herbes de Provence and shallot and saute until the shallots begin to soften, about 4 minutes more.  Pour in the white wine, add the green garlic and asparagus and toss to combine.  Cover the pan with a lid and place in the oven.  Bake for 35 minutes.

5. At 30 minutes, take out another small skillet and heat the remaining 1 T. olive oil over medium heat.  Add the cleaned and dried morels when the oil is smoking hot.  Fry the morels until crispy, about 8-10 minutes. 

6. When the chicken has baked 35 minutes, quickly remove the pan from the oven and add in the fresh peas and toss.  Return the pan to the oven without the lid and braise another 5 minutes.  Finish frying the morels to crispy brown and set aside.

7. Remove the pan from the oven and spoon the chicken and vegetables onto plates or a large serving platter.  Squeeze half a lemon over the chicken and vegetables.  Lastly, top with the crispy fried morels and serve immediately.

Indonesian Corn Fritters with Sweet-Hot Chili Sauce

Rarely do I cook from another person's recipe and when I do, I often regret it.  When cooking, I have a specific vision in my mind and my tastebuds can "imagine" exactly what the result should be.  Often, if I cook from another person's recipe, the results are not what my culinary imagination craves.  So, I end up tossing it out and starting over, utilizing any new concepts the recipe might have introduced but basically executing on my vision.  It's a good thing I try again, however, because the second-efforts are always much more successful.  Here in San Francisco, I've been incredibly inspired by the fantastic produce available year-round and the plethora of Asian markets.  I've also met some great chefs, one of whom happens to be Malaysian.  I consulted her on this concept and thank her for some great ideas and starting points.  In the end, however, I came up with my own recipe, which still is quite authentic and yet even more flavorful than the other variations I tried.  This is a typical Indonesian street food called Perkedel Jagung, otherwise in English as "Indonesian Corn Fritters".  

I also made my own riff on a sweet and hot chili dipping sauce to accompany the fritters and add great spice, coolness and that addictiveness I always crave from hand-eaten snacks.  It's too bad I didn't photograph the first attempt to show you the difference.  Mr. Scrumptious is always encouraging me to do that, but I'm usually so disgusted by the failed expectations that I don't want to make it permanent.  The first attempt was doughy and dense like a hush puppy and I was craving more moist inside/crispy outside and flatter like a crab cake.  It was poorly seasoned but with overwhelming spice and bite of raw garlic and raw shallots.  Often in my cooking classes I focus a lot on the difference between seasoning and spice.  They are very different things and one should never forgo seasoning for spice.  Otherwise you have bland, hot food that burns but doesn't taste like anything.  Properly seasoned food should taste like the main ingredient and that ingredient should be elevated and showcased.  In this variation of the dish, the corn is that main ingredient and everything else is there to make corn taste deep and fresh I want the layers of flavor to be built from the corn up. Tangy, sweet, crispy, soft and salty all come together for a complex and fantastic celebration of corn at its most exciting, instead of corn as a staple at its most bland.

So here's how I did it and please, if you try this and don't like MY recipe, please let me know!

Ingredients

Serves 4 as appetizer

1 tsp. freshly toasted and ground coriander

1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1 medium shallot, minced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 tsp. fresh galangal, minced

1/2 tsp. fresh ginger, minced

1 tsp. kosher salt

1 T. sugar

4 ears fresh sweet corn, kernels cut from cob OR 3 c. frozen corn thawed and squeezed dry

1 T. minced green garlic (now in Farmer's Markets!) or green scallions

1/2 lime juiced and zested

4 T. brown rice flour

1 large egg, beaten

canola oil for frying

For the Sweet-Hot Chili and Cucumber Dipping Sauce (Saus Lado)

4 fresh red Thai chilies, finely sliced

1 clove garlic, sliced lengthwise in four pieces

1 T. seedless English cucumber, minced

1 lime, juiced

3 T. sugar

1/4 tsp. kosher salt

1 tsp. palm vinegar or rice wine vinegar

2 T. ketchup (optional)

2 T. warm water

Method:

1. Make the dipping sauce first so it has time to meld flavors and lose some of the raw taste.  Make sure to leave the garlic in big chunks.  You want the flavor of garlic, but not small pieces of raw garlic to stick to the fritter when you dip.  In a small bowl add the chilies, garlic, cucumber and lime juice.  Stir to cover all veggies with the lime juice.  Add the sugar, kosher salt, rice wine vinegar and ketchup if using.  Go for ketchup if you want a milder and sweeter flavor, leave it out if not.  Stir thoroughly and add in the warm water to thin slightly.  Set aside.

2. In a small skillet toast the coriander seeds and let cool.  Put the coriander, black pepper, shallots, garlic, galangal, ginger, kosher salt and sugar in a small food processor and puree until a smooth paste.  A mortar and pestle is an even better tool for the job if you have one and the inclination to do it manually.

3. In a medium bowl, lightly mash some of the corn kernels with a fork and leave others whole.  This helps create a combination of textures and the mashed corn helps in binding the fritters.   Add in the spice paste mixture and combine well.  Add in the green garlic or scallions and lime zest and lime juice.  Let sit for 20 minutes or so to let the flavors meld.   

4. Add in the rice flour to the corn mixture after sitting a bit and toss thoroughly.  Pour in the beaten egg and stir lightly until well incorporated.

5. In a large skillet, cover the bottom of the pan to 1/4" in high, for a shallow fry.  Turn the heat to medium and when the oil is shimmering hot and sizzling, it's ready.  Drop carefully a large tablespoon of the corn batter into the oil.  You can drop probably 3-5 into a normal sized skillet but do not crowd the pan.  Lightly press each one flat with the back of the spoon.  Fry until the fritters are golden brown on the first side, about 2 minutes and then flip.  Fry the second side until deep golden brown, anothe 2-3 minutes.  Remove fritters from the oil and let drain on a cooling rack with paper towels underneath to catch any excess oil. Repeat in batches.

6.  Serve the fritter while still hot, on a large platter and garnish with chopped chives and lime wedges.  Put the dipping sauce on the side.  Encourage people to give a quick squeeze of lime over the fritters and then dip in the sauce and enjoy!

Oyster Mushroom, Asparagus and Fontina Quiche

The Spring vegetables are looking fantastic here in the Bay Area and on a recent trip to the Farmer's Market I discovered these gorgeous Oyster Mushrooms.  Also finding beautiful tender asparagus there, a simple dish to boast the vegetables was in order.  I think egg dishes are wonderful ways to show off delicate vegetables and this time a beautiful quiche was my canvas.

I often go for a frittata for speed, but a quiche is perfect when you want simplicity yet a sense of elegance and sophistication.  A flaky, buttery crust adds so much texture to an airy custard studded with crisp and delicious tender vegetables.  Here's the final "Oyster Mushroom and Asparagus Quiche".

The great thing about egg dishes is that you can honestly just hunt in the markets for whatever looks beautiful, fresh, perfect and tasty and then whip one up depending on the time you have.  An omelette, a frittata, a quiche, a tart... you name it.  Actually, a quiche is a savory tart.  Did you know that?

Here's my very simple recipe with spectacular and scrumptious results.  It'd be perfect for brunch this weekend!

Ingredients

Serves about 4, makes 1 quiche

1 9" pie crust, rolled flat to 1/4" thickness

1 bunch fresh asparagus, washed, and chopped using tips and tender parts of stalks

6 oz. fresh oyster mushrooms, wiped with damp towel and chopped

1 T. butter

1 T. olive oil

1/4 tsp. kosher salt

1/8 tsp. ground white pepper

3 medium eggs

1 1/4 c. milk

1/2 c. grated Fontina cheese

1 tsp. fresh thyme, chopped

1/2 tsp. fresh tarragon, chopped

1/4 c. grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 400˚F.  After dough is rolled out, press the dough into a quiche pan or tart pan with removable bottom.  Refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes to rest after pressing into the pan.  Line the dough with aluminum foil with enough to cover the top and sides of the dough and fill with dried beans to weight the dough.  I use dried chick peas, see photo here.   This process is called "blind baking" and helps make sure your crust will be fully cooked and is not soggy. Bake the crust for 20 minutes and then remove from oven and cool.  Reduce the oven temperature to 350˚F.

2. In a skillet, heat the butter and oil over medium high heat and  saute the asparagus and mushrooms until tender.  Season with the salt and white pepper and set aside.

3. In a bowl, whisk the eggs and milk.  I'd recommend whole milk here, don't go with skim.  Stir in the Fontina cheese and chopped herbs.  Sprinkle with a little more ground white pepper.

4.  Over the quiche crust has cooled, remove the beans and foil and spread the sauteed mushrooms and asparagus into an even layer on the crust.  Pour in the egg custard mixture and distribute evenly with a fork or rubber spatula.  Sprinkle the parmigiano-reggiano cheese on top.

5.  Gently place the entire quiche pan onto a rimmed baking sheet.  This will catch any possible leaks or spills.  Bake in the oven about 40-45 minutes or until the quiche is golden brown and knife comes out cleanly.  After baking, remove from the oven and cool another 10 minutes.  Then, if using a tart pan with two pieces, take out the bottom from the rim and slide the quiche onto a cutting board.  Cut into wedges and serve immediately.