Goodbye Tomatoes, Hello Fall

I pulled out half of my tomato plants today. The other plants are still producing so I left them for now.
Luna immediately took advantage of the situation by sleeping in the soft dirt where the tomatoes had been.

Recipe Geek: Glazed Butternut Squash

I'm getting my cooking mojo back slowly. It helps that I am not longer doing large chemical syntheses in lab. Anyway, I got a trial copy of "Cook's Country" magazine in the mail today. This is the sister publication to "Cook's Illustrated". In the past, the recipes tended to be very retro, down-home style stuff, but now it seems like it's more diverse, with a greater emphasis on easy recipes. (Nonetheless, there are still a lot of pork and meatloaf recipes)
After my last few Recipe Geek disasters (including a few that went un-blogged), I wanted something that would actually work as described. I've made the mistake of not trusting my instincts and then regretting it. Every recipe from the America's Test Kitchen folks gets tested and optimized multiple times, so you don't have to worry about using the wrong oven temperature, improper procedures, etc.
There was a recipe for Glazed Butternut Squash which caught my eye, since I had three butternut squash on the counter. (What can I say, I got a good deal at the farmer's market!)
Here it is, since I can't include a link

Glazed Butternut Squash
1 butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1 inch cubes
3 tablespoons butter, melted
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
Adjust the oven rack to the middle level in the oven. Heat oven to 425F. Line a cookie sheet with foil. Toss squash cubes with butter/sugar/salt/pepper until mixed thoroughly. Place on cookie sheet and bake for 45 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes. Remove squash from oven and sprinkle with vinegar.

This recipe works exactly as described. I'd expect nothing less from the recipe geeks at America's Test Kitchen. The squash was tasty, tender, and not dried out, and it looked very pretty. It was a bit too sweet, so if I made it again I'd use a bit less butter and sugar. The vinegar sounds like a weird thing to add, but it did give it a nice zing and balanced the sweetness. I might try lemon juice next time - it would do the same thing but give a touch of lemon flavor.

Recipe Geek: Impossible Coconut Pie

I'm a sucker for really weird recipes. I'm also a sucker for coconut. This week, my local newspaper had an article about "pies" with self-preparing crusts. I hate making pie crust, so this was right up my alley. Basically, you make a thin batter and then the flour sinks to the bottom and forms a crust as the pie is baking. This sort of recipe was popular in the 50's and 60's, I think. I vaguely remember it as being sort of retro when I was a kid. I decided to make the coconut pie. I mixed all the ingredients in my stand mixer and poured it into a glass pie pan. You could also mix it in a blender. Then I popped it into the oven.
As it baked, it puffed up a lot and turned toasty golden brown. It smelled pretty good. It was still jiggly when I took it out of the oven. I let it cool or a while and tasted it. Bleah! It was too greasy and kind of eggy. I should've trusted my instincts and used less butter. I gave the rest of my portion to Recipe Geek Taster Cat. She liked it better than I did. I put in the fridge to chill overnight. Being cold did not improve it. I dumped it in the trash, which I NEVER do. For the next few editions of recipe geek, I'll be sure to avoid recipes in which the proportions seem off or the synthesis is unusual. Or I'll just avoid pies.

Recipe Geek: Enjococado Sauce (First Attempt)

As I mentioned in a recent post, Fiesta del Mar and their sister restaurants all serve various chicken dishes with enjococado sauce. It's a delicious creamy, mildly spicy orange sauce and they fiercely guard the recipe. Maybe my palate is not very sensitive, but I could not guess the mystery ingredient(s) other than to hazard a guess that there were ground pumpkin seeds in it.
A quick Google search turned up two kinds of recipes. Yogurt/sour creme is common to both types of recipe, since there is a type of Mexican yogurt called jocoque. One type is mainly pepper based, and the other one contains oranges and almonds. The latter recipe sounded more like what is served at the restaurant, although not exactly. Here's the recipe, and the story behind it can be found here.
Pollo en Jocoque (Chicken in Yogurt)
4 to 6 persons
1 mandarin (a mandarin is somewhere between
an orange and tangerine and more sour)
1 orange (large)
3 large garlic cloves
3 green onions
2 -3 red poblano chiles
3 tbl olive oil
1 cup cooking oil
2 cups jocoque (jocoque is a type of yogurt
that is close to "creme fraiche")
2 lb chicken pieces
1 cup sliced almonds (soak in hot water and
remove skins)
Preparation:
1) Wash chicken and dry well
2) Char chiles over open flame or in frying
pan and place in plastic bag for 5 minutes
to sweat.
3) Remove from bag and remove charred skin,
inside veins and seeds.
4) Heat cup of oil until very hot and fry
chicken until done and remove from pan..
5) Remove remaining oil from pan, leaving
chicken residue and add olive oil to same
pan.
6) Chop garlic. onion, almonds and chiles
and saute in olive oil until done.
7) Add chicken, orange and mandarina juice
and cook for 10 minutes, stirring gently so
as not to break up chicken.
8) Add jocoque and salt to taste (do not
add pepper)
** you can add more juice or jocoque to
taste as you play with the recipe
This afternoon I headed off to the Mexican market in search of ingredients. I shouldn't have bothered, since my local supermarket actually has a bigger selection of peppers and Mexican dairy products. I bought a couple of mandarins, two green pasillo peppers (I couldn't find red poblanos, but the green poblanos are also called pasillos), some green onions, and some yogurt and Mexican sour creme.
I followed the recipe fairly closely, but used twice as many green onions since I know that Mexican green onions are picked later so they're bigger than the ones I bought. I added some orange zest and coarsely ground up the almonds. I used mostly yogurt with a blob of sour creme. Lastly, when I fried the chicken, I used about half the oil that was called for, and put the cooked chicken on papers towels to sop up the oil.
Given my recent recipe geek experiences, I was expecting a nasty color and texture. Ground almonds + green peppers + yogurt and orange juice just did not sound promising. Much to my surprise, the sauce looked OK - pale yellow orange with green pieces of peppers. I served myself a bowl and ate it with a corn tortilla.
Results: It was very tasty. I wanted to lick out the bowl, but Recipe Geek Taster Cat (aka Rugrat) was intent on doing the same thing, so I let her. She liked it, even though there was no chicken left in it. It did have that certain je ne sais quoi of the restaurant dish, although it was not identical. The combination of oranges, garlic, almonds and yogurt is right. I think the restaurant uses more peppers, and red rather than green ones. They puree the sauce, too. They may add a bit of chicken broth too.
As a stand alone recipe, I will make it again, although I will lighten it a lot and just saute the chicken instead of using so much oil. I will probably add more peppers. The yogurt really toned them down. The almonds were tasty and I'll add them if I have them, but I think it would be tasty even without them, or with less of them. Likewise, the sour creme wasn't necessary.
I'm going to try one of the pepper based sauces to see how it compares to the restaurant version, and may try to come up with my own version based on what I learn. Nonetheless, this recipe is a good start.

Recipe Geek Extreme Edition: Chocolate Almond Pie, aka Vomit Pie

Sometimes I go overboard when I try new recipes, and make stuff that just doesn't work out. Usually this happens when I am trying to cook something extra nice for a special occasion, like the Valentine's Day Steak Disaster. Last weekend I made chocolate-almond pie in honor of my mom's birthday. It sounded so good - the filling was supposed to taste like cannolli filling, and contained ground almonds, ground chocolate, mascarpone and ricotta cheese, and whipping cream. The filling was put inside a cookie crumb crust and chilled. I improvised and made a crust out of some leftover biscotti. That part worked well, at least.
The proportions and order of addition for the filling seemed a bit off, but since i don't make a lot of pie fillings I ignored my instincts. Making matters worse, I messed around with the recipe and scaled it up slightly non-proportionately. It tasted great, but had the color and texture of vomit. It was kind of curdled, rather than smooth and creamy I filled the pie crust and chilled it. It firmed up but still looked nasty.

I covered it with grated chocolate. It looked slightly better but was still disappointing.

It tasted ok, but even the combination of cannolli-filling and biscotti flavors couldn't offset the weird texture.

Recipe Geek: Noodles with Red Curry Almond Sauce

It should come as no surprise that I enjoy reading cooking blogs. 101 recipes is one that I like. It's all vegetarian, mostly vegan, but the blog is well written and there are some interesting recipes. This week's was soba noodles with almond sauce. It sounded good and I'm a big sucker for noodles with nut based sauces, having subsisted on noodles with thai peanut sauce and tofu in my grad schools years. $2.50 bought a big portion from the food truck - it was enough for lunch and dinner. You can still get similar lunches there, although the price has risen to a whopping $4. $1.50 bought a massive slice of spinach pizza, which was my other favorite lunch. I was mostly vegetarian back then. But enough of my grad school nostalgia.
Now, one of my problems with the 101 recipes recipes is that they usually call for unusual ingredients. Believe it or not, I had most of the ingredients for this recipe*, save for the pea shoots. I decided to substitute baby spinach instead. Upon closer inspection, my soba noodles really weren't soba, but that wasn't a big deal. I cooked them up and then made the sauce, which contains almond butter, red chili paste, water and lemon juice. I wasn't paying close attention to the recipe, so I misread the amount of red curry paste to add. I added 3 tablespoons instead of two teaspoons. Ooops. Fortunately for me, my red chili paste is fairly wimpy. The sauce was very red and moderately spicy. I mixed it with the noodles and braised the tofu and spinach. It was tasty, and only a slight bit too spicy. (Disclaimer-I did eat a bowl of jello to quell the burn). If I were to do it again, I'd add less curry paste and would maybe add some ginger and sesame oil, because everything tastes better with ginger and sesame oil. I'd probably also go back to using peanut butter, since it reminds me of grad school.

*it was purely random that I had all the ingredients, but I guess it's like the proverbial monkeys typing - given enough time and they'll replicate Shakespeare's works, and given enough time I'll have all the ingredients for a 101 recipes recipe.

Tomato Geek

As most of you probably know, I'm a little bit obsessive about my tomato plants. I plant about 6-8 plants per year, mostly heirloom with a few early hybrids thrown in for good measure. I'll plant a few token squash,eggplant, herb and pepper plants, but they all play second fiddle to the tomatoes.
My dad is pretty much the same way about his tomatoes, so we have a friendly competition. The two main differences between us are that he only plants hybrids, and that his garden has a lot more sun. So the typical outcome is that he gets a lot more tomatoes, but my plants are bigger and my tomatoes have more flavor
Because I was out of town for five weekends in a row, I was very late in planting them this year. As usual, I planted them in a rich mixture of dirt and aged manure, with an added dose of abalone guts for good measure. They grew like gangbusters right from the start, but it wasn't enough to make up for lost time. It's currently early July, and it'll be at least three weeks until I get rip tomatoes. That's about a month behind schedule. Its been relatively cool so far this year, so that hasn't helped things. My dad isdefinitely winning the tomato competition so far this year.
Nonetheless, I have high hopes for my tomatoes. I've got a lot of interesting hybrids I haven't tried before, including several purple varieties, such as Black Trifele and Black Krim, as well as "Kellogg's Breakfast Tomato" (a big orange variety) and something called "Red Fig", which makes small pear shape tomatoes which can be dried in sugar to makes sort of a fake fig. Not that I'm going to do that. The big tomatoes don't have much fruit - it's been too cool for them to set much fruit. I'll report back on the results once the fruit is ripe.
If you're a tomato geek like me, the tomatofest web site is a fun way to waste time.