What to do with shishito peppers

Shishito peppers have got to be one of my favorite foods. I love how it's like playing pepper Russian roulette - one in every ten peppers is spicy, according to Wikipedia, but in my experience it's often closer to three or four out of ten! Seems to vary on the batch though. They're related to the Spanish padron pepper. We usually get them at our local Japanese market, so you can imagine my excitement when they were in our CSA box this week. I called them up and requested two extra pints.

Ready for business!

My favorite way to make these is to grill them - usually in a pan, but we've threaded them on skewers and made them on the grill as well. First up - wash them thoroughly, and most importantly, pat dry! Otherwise you will regret it when it's grilling in the pan, and the hot oil is sputtering in your face. (Hypothetically)

Drizzle with a little oil. I did this in a separate bowl to minimize oil in the pan, but Christian reminded me that I could have used our new olive oil pump spray thing - will do that next time.

Ready to go!

Toss in the pan. Make sure you turn up the heat to HIGH - or at least close - you really want to make sure these peppers grill and not sautee.

t=0

Personally I like my peppers on the dark brownish, blistered, exploded and deflated style, but you can adjust to personal preference. Keep a close eye on these, but at the same time, you don't want to stir *too* often - you want them to blister and char in spots. Stir occasionally though so they cook on all sides.

Starting to blister

Like I said, I like mine really on the done side - these aren't burned, I swear, they are delicious!

How I like them

This should take 5-10 minutes, depending on the batch. Remove from heat, sprinkle with sea salt, and you're good to go!

Delicious!

Someone decided to start in on the bowl before it even hit the table.

He was totally caught green-handed, looking guilty.

These were delicious! I was a little disappointed though that the CSA ones were so mild - not a spicy one in the bunch. I really like the batches where it seems like 5 out of every 10 is a mouth-scorcher - and you're cursing and crying and drinking wine to kill the pain which only makes it worse... and shoveling more peppers into your mouth... until you're a sniveling mess... and it hurts like a mother... but when they are done, you talk about how fun it was.

Maybe it's just me. Christian said he didn't miss the spicy ones...

Veena

Mirabelle chutney recipe

Here's how I made a mirabelle chutney. I started by investigating recipies for plum and mango chutneys, and adjusted them to our taste.

3 shalotts, finely chopped
1 Tbsp. of olive oil
1 Tbsp. of ginger, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
1 Tbsp. black mustard seeds
1 cup of water
seeds from 7 cardamom pods, ground in mortar
1/2 Tbsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 Tbsp. red chili flakes
1 cup of raisins
1.5 cups of sugar
6 cups of mirabelle puree, prepared as described here (Probably about 4-5 lbs of fresh unpitted fruit?)
apple cider vinegar (optional)

In a big pot, brown the shallotts in the olive oil, then add ginger and garlic, and brown those a little bit. Add the water, remaining spices, and raisins, and boil for 5-10 minutes. Add the sugar and mirabelle puree and bring to a boil.

Adjust the flavor to your taste with more spices, sugar, raisins, or fruit puree. This mix is already quite tart, but you can add some vinegar if you like. Let the mixture boil on a small flame to thicken it (about 45 min), stirring often so it doesn't burn. Fill the hot chutney into sterilized hot jars, just like any jam. Wash your dishes and clean off any spilled chutney before it has had time to dry. Keep the jars in the fridge after opening.

     Christian

Mirabelle cake recipe

As promised, here's the recipe for mirabelle cake. While the mirabelle claffoutie is richer in eggs and less fluffy, this recipe is aiming for something more similar to Austrian "Marillenkuchen" (apricot cake). You can probably use this dough for many other fruit cakes (plums, cherries, ...) - in fact, I adapted it from a recipe for rhubarb cake.

Wash, half and pit the mirabelles. Determine the amount you'll need beforehand by putting the whole fruits close to each other on the baking dish you're going to use. The mirabelles should cover about 60% of the surface in a single layer. The dough is going to rise a bit, so a deeper dish is preferred. I use a 13x9x2 inch pyrex glass dish for this recipe.

Add the following ingredients to a mixing bowl, mixing thoroughly when indicated:

7 Tbsp. of melted unsalted butter
1 cup of sugar

     - mix -
4 eggs

     - mix -
1 tsp. of lemon zest (preferably from untreated lemons)

1 tsp. of vanilla sugar or extract

seeds from 3 cardamom pods, finely ground in a mortar

    - mix -
1 cup of flour

1 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

     - mix -
2/3 cup more flour

     - mix -

Grease your baking dish with butter, and pour the dough into it. Preheat your oven to 375 F. Put your halved mirabelles on top of the dough, skin-side down, as close to each other as possible. No need to push them down. Bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes. The cake is ready when the top is turning golden, and a clean toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean, without dough sticking to it. If this recipe turns out not sweet enough for your taste, you can cover the cake with some powdered sugar. If you like it more tart, use a bigger dish or less dough to adjust the cake/fruit ratio.

Enjoy, Christian

Fiesta Prawns! In a Garlic-White Wine-Butter Sauce

We've been trying to cut back a little on going out to eat (San Mateo has so many awesome restaurants such a short walk from us that it's always tempting... some people call it "Date Night" but we call it "Tuesday"...) But the reality is that we like artisan cocktails, so throw in a few of those with your meal, and it adds up quickly. I thought about it and realized that since we're both well-versed in the kitchen, we could easily splurge a little on raw ingredients, invest in some premium liquor (we have one heck of a homemade infused liquor stash already, maybe another post...) - and we can have a restaurant-quality meal at a fraction of the price, complete with al fresco dining in our backyard if we choose.

So I tried to ignore the voices in my head screaming "Sushi!" (which is better than what they're usually screaming...) Fri night as I made my way home from sweltering Palo Alto, and instead thought about the prawns stashed in our freezer. Shrimp/prawns are awesome because they're delicious and you can get a gourmet-style meal that's fast - shrimp cook in ~5 minutes, pretty amazing! Christian suggested using up our CSA haul this week (squash, red onions, garlic, sweet peppers) and we were off!

Somehow we ended up with 12 heads of CSA garlic. We used an entire head in this dish. Peeling was kind of a pain, but I love garlic so it was worth it. (Note to self: learn those clever hints to peel garlic faster - this was actually the most time-consuming part). 

I <3 alliums. Most of this is from our CSA (the rest of our CSA garlic wouldn't fit!)

Cooking this was simple. You could almost certainly do this faster, but I was trying to coordinate the cooking of all these vegetables without overcooking anything so they still remained slightly crispy, so I used lower heat than I usually do (working on my patience here!) which actually worked exceedingly well.

Started with chopping a whole head of garlic and heating it on very low heat in as much oil as I planned on using for the whole dish. I wouldn't even call this "sauteeing" - more like a very gentle heating, allowing the garlic to perfume the olive oil. I think I got this from Mark Bittman. You don't want the garlic to really turn brown at all here, really just perfume everything. This was probably ~10 minutes - during which I chopped everything else, and make sure to keep an eye on it/stir occasionally.

Chopped all the squash/sweet peppers we had. Christian chopped the red onion, added it to the garlic after probably about ~10 minutes, kept the heat on very low. This worked well in the final dish, since the onion was still a little crispy. After a while, threw in the sweet peppers as I worked on peeling the prawns.

Fiesta!

Got distracted and added the squash later than I meant - oops! Would have sped things up a bit. You really want to keep the squash a little crispy here - which is why I was delaying adding them initially - so be mindful to not overcook. Turned up the heat though as we really had a pile of veggies at this point.

Last summer we had a ball slow-roasting tomatoes from the farmers' market (these are amazing!) - we would buy pounds of them, slow-roast them (another post on these to follow?), and use them in all sorts of recipes. The flavor really develops in an amazing way. Faced with the end of the summer, we froze a lot of slow-roasted tomatoes so we could continue to have a taste of summer whenever we wanted. We threw in a healthy dose of them here too.

Tray of slow-roasted tomatoes from last summer

So while the squash seem nowhere near done, throw in the prawns. Added some butter for flavor (~2 tbsp?) and a healthy dose of white wine too (1 cup?) Shrimp cook quickly, so be careful not to overcook them, but also make sure the wine boils down.

The HerbMaster (Christian) chose the herbs to accompany this - tarragon and parsley fresh from our garden.

HerbMaster with his lemon verbena harvest last year

Completed dish:

And dinner is served!

This made an awful lot of food (I love leftovers!), was definitely restaurant-quality (and restaurant shrimp seems to be ~$20/plate, so...), and was the perfect summery gourmet fare for a nice Fri night dinner. :) Really, how can you go wrong with prawns in a garlic-white wine-butter sauce, with CSA veggies and herbs from your garden? You could sub in any veggies you have on hand here. Delicious and easy!

 Veena

The first Aperol Spritzers of the season!

I love summer so much - nothing like hanging out in the sun! I was introduced to Spritzers when we went to Austria two years ago; they are very popular summer drinks there. Spritzers are basically white wine, sparkling water, and some kind of other apertif/flavoring - for instance, Aperol, an orange-y herbal-y apertif similar to Campari. We then proceeded to spritz our way through Austria.

This was at Christian's former university in Vienna.

Hanging out by the Danube:

And about an hour after our engagement, of course we had to celebrate with Aperol Spritzers when we got down from the top of the Alps:

Anyway, today was such a gorgeous summer afternoon that of course we had to break out the Aperol for a spritzer! The classic uses Grüner Veltliner, but barring that, we decided to experiment with a sauvignon blanc from Washington State because Christian thought it might have the right characteristics for a spritzer. Add Aperol to taste, and some sparkling water.

Throw in an authentic Austrian and you're good to go.

Whenever someone asks me what my hobbies are, I'm tempted to say "Hanging out!" Because really, what's better than hanging out with a cocktail in the summertime?

 Veena

What to do with mirabelles

We love mirabelles. They are a type of yellow plum, that is very delicious. Like other stone fruit, mirabelles are mild in flavor when fresh, and more tart when cooked. Our neighbor has a mirabelle tree with a few branches hanging into our backyard, and just from those we get quite a harvest every year.

Mirabelle tree in spring...

... and in summer. Here, most of the fruits have already fallen down.

There's two problems with mirabelles: 1) they all ripen within a few days, and 2) once ripe, they don't keep very well (which is probably why you usually don't see them in stores). So you'll get a lot of them at once, and then you'll have to act quickly before they go bad. Once they are ripe, they fall easily off the tree (shaking the branches also helps). This year we put out a plastic tarp under the branches, and that made things a lot easier. Here are a few things you can do with them (besides just eating them raw, which also works really well).

Wash and halve them, and take out the pits. With that, you can make:

• Mirabelle cake: recipe will follow.

• Mirabelle clafoutis: try for example this recipe. 

• Store them in the freezer: Place the pitted fruits in a thin layer in a ziplock bag and freeze them, for more cake throughout the year.

Pitting is a lot of work - here's an alternative, if you are going to make something jam-like anyway: Wash the mirabelles, throw them in a big pot with some of water (about one cup), and slowly heat them to boiling, stirring constantly. Careful that they don't burn. If they do: don't scratch the bottom, or you'll end up with tiny black flakes everywhere. Once everything is boiled soft, let it cool a bit. Mush the remaining intact fruits with a potato masher or something similar. Then scoop the mixture into a big-holed colander/wide-mesh strainer that is placed above another pot, to filter off the stones. Use something as wide as possible, it really just has to hold back the stones. Otherwise it will take too long. I used our plastic pasta colander. You might have to stir the mixture inside the colander to get the puree through. With this fruit puree you can make:

• Mirabelle jam: Add sugar to taste (probably about 2:1 puree to sugar), boil it to thicken it down (don't forget to stir), and fill into sterilized glasses while hot. There's no need to add pectin, as it's already pretty thick. There's lots of more detailed recipes out there.

• Mirabelle chutney: recipe will follow.

• Mirabelle ice cream: mix 4 cups of the above puree, 1 pint of heavy whipping cream, and 1.5 cups of sugar together in the blender. Cool the mixture in the fridge, then pour it into your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's instructions. This gives a soft, very intense and refreshingly tart, delicious ice cream. Use less purree/more sugar to make it milder/sweeter.

• Store it in the freezer: pour the puree into ice cube trays, freeze, and fill frozen cubes into a plastic bag. Make more ice cream at a later point, or experiment with it in cocktails.

Speaking of alcohol - you can make infusions by soaking mirabelles (washed, whole) for a couple of weeks or months in wodka, rum, or gin. This method also brings out the tartness of the fruits, so sweeten it by adding sugar afterwards.

Lastly, you can make compote, either with pitted or unpitted mirabelles, water and sugar (quantities are really up to, depending on how liquidy or sweet you like it), which you boil in a pot until the fruits are soft. Keep it in the fridge for a few days, or fill it into sterilized jars while still hot.

     Christian

Testing our new Dutch oven, with a Bahamian Chicken recipe

Yesterday I decided to try out our new Dutch oven! We bought it together with a recipe book called "Glorious One Pot Meals", which introduces a method called "infusion cooking". Basically, meat and vegetables are layered in a Dutch oven, which is then closed and heated in the oven at high temperatures for a relatively short time (usually 45 min at 450 F). It uses only small amounts of liquid and thus resembles more steaming than making a stew.

I used the recipe for "Bahamian chicken" (somebody else posted it here), for which we had most ingredients ready. I substituted cherry tomatoes and kale for the bell peppers, because that's what we had and needed to cook. We decided to use about four times the amount of listed ingredients (the linked recipe above uses twice as much as what's in the book), which filled our 6 quarts Dutch oven basically to the rim. Since we noticed halfway through that we did not have quite enough oranges & vinegar for this batch, we just added some lemon juice and mirabelle jam instead. That's also sour and fruity, and worked just fine. Cooking took considerably longer with this amount (about 1 hrs 15 min), until the potatoes were done (next time I will cut them smaller).

Everything came out nicely - the meat was cooked thoroughly and really infused with the seasoning, while the squash and broccholi were still firm. It tastes very light, thanks to the low amount of oil that is required.

I was at first sceptical whether this method is going to be any different from our slow cooker, or our much lighter metal roasting pan, but it actually is! We'll definitely experiment with it some more.

Downsides: The full cast iron pot is heavy, even heavier than the slow cooker. And other  than with the latter one, you have to actually move it while it's really hot. Maybe we'll get a smaller pot for smaller portions.

Important observation: Not only will the lid, including the handle, be hot when you take the whole thing out of the oven (at which time you'll probably be wearing oven mittens anyway), but also when you have taken out your portion and want to close the pot again (no, I didn't get any blisters, but close...).

     Christian