steak and polenta

At Martin's wine cellar, about three blocks from where I lived for the last couple of years in New Orleans, there was a deli. I used to go there all the time, mostly because they had great sandwiches and fries. But they had specials, and one of those was a steak on grits. Grits are basically cooked ground coarse cornmeal, usually cooked in water and butter. The steak, with some sauteed vegetables, was placed on top of the grits and then blanketed with a sauce.

Polenta is not very different from grits. Often cooked in water as well, it is a staple in Italian food. It can be served, as shown above, as a kind of porridge and goes with almost everything, from meat to chicken to seafood... it has a mushy consistency, as expected, but it has a nice subtle play of flavours that tend to highlight flavours from what you serve with it. It can also be allowed to dry and then be cut into blocks and fried for some crunch.

I haven't played much tennis in the last few weeks, so my cooking output had reduced. Strange how they're linked. But I've started again with dedicated intent and my food production will provide me with the energy I need. The plate you see above is basically polenta cooked with milk and cream, sauteed peppers, zucchini and mushrooms, and steak. The flavours went very well together, as expected. I based this on a recipe from Locatelli's book but changed around some things. His suggestion of some rosemary with the steak was maintained and it helped to marry the steak and the polenta even more. He had another recipe close a few pages off from this one that had a lamb stew with peppers and polenta. I think the extra sauce from a stew will help the experience. The polenta wasn't dry but the consistency of cornmeal and milk needed another flavourful liquid, a stock, a demi-glace or something similar. I will try that next time.

potato salad

i seem to be keeping an interest in side dishes these days. i made this salad recently for a bbq / outdoor food event at my sister's the other day. eating it within minutes of a perfectly grilled burger was great.

just a side note:  about the burger. it was a wagyu striploin burger. i was not eating it like i would any other burger. it's practically a reformed steak. sacrilege to overcook. the red velvet juices soaked up into the standard kuwaiti white burger bun were perfect.

back to the potato salad. mustard in two forms, dill, celery, and the sauce. the mustard seeds explode as you eat them, releasing a haphazard, yet delicate, punctuation to the experience. as do the other ingredients. they are balanced with the undertones of the potato, baby and cooked until just done. i also like this salad with red potatoes.

there is nothing wrong with focusing on the side notes of a meal. in fact, in a true study of anything one must pay attention to everything. understand the composition, the cosmology of the experience. the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, but you have to know the value of the parts first to understand what the whole is. and more specifically, every part of a meal has to be great, from the smallest to the greatest detail.

gnocchi with taleggio

taleggio has become one of my favourite cheeses over the past few years. in kuwait, dean and deluca had some taleggio every once in a while, but as usual, they'd have a small quantity then nothing for months. then they changed their supplier and the taleggio they have now is pretty awful. carluccio's opened up and their deli has taleggio. i'm a happy man.

pictured above is a meal that took me no longer than five minutes to put together. gnocchi is one of the easiest, and quickest, pastas to cook. i make it myself sometimes, but this was from sultan in a packet. the sauce was basically taleggio, a spoon of milk, a couple of sage leaves, some nutmeg that i let melt in a separate pan. once the gnocchi started floating, i transferred it straight away and let it cook for a minute more, the sauce being absorbed by the potato and flour pillows. shredded some parmesan on top, done. didn't even add salt or pepper, it didn't need it.

taleggio isn't a very mild cheese, nor a very strong one either. it smells stronger than it tastes. but the complexity of flavour is what's great about taleggio - the strong aromas, the salty taste, hints of fruit maybe... i'm not really good at explaining these things. it's texture is also great. by my estimates, somewhere between a double- and triple-cream cheese, this cheese is made for melting. it doesn't need a strong temperature before the barely firm cheese turns into rivers of white, as i would imagine warm marshmallow in the factory before getting cut up into smaller pieces.

recently i had some taleggio and raclette that were going to be going bad soon, so I made some great grilled cheese sandwiches. just with some standard kuwaiti white bread, cooked in a pan with some butter. i though honey would be a good dipping sauce for it, and it was. this cheese also goes really well with leeks on some pastry. it needs that accent, either sweet or savoury, to bring out the subtleties of the flavour.

edit: yes, according to wikipedia, taleggio is 48% fat, which puts it right between double cream (40%) and triple cream (60%)

sides to go with everything

the eating experience should be a balance of tastes, textures, colours and aromas. sometimes you get a beautiful cut of meat and grill it, but you can't just have a steak without anything on the side. steak and chips, steak and salad, steak and vegetables. sometimes I want nothing more than a few of the freshest vegetables simply prepared. lightly marinated with some olive oil, salt and pepper as well as an acidic elements as well - vinegar, lemon juice, etc. in fact i could eat grilled green onions with every meal.

blood orange sorbet

As promised earlier, here is something I made with an ingredient that's been available for the last couple of weeks. i know i always talk in superlatives, but blood oranges really are one of my favourite fruits, definitely the most balanced citrus. You have to watch out, though, that sometimes they advertise pink oranges as blood oranges. the only similarity is the colour, although barely, but they taste like orange oranges. They are good, but not as good as blood oranges. The juice has to look like this...

All you really have to do is juice it, add about 50 g of sugar for every 250 ml of juice (put the sugar in a pan and put just enough juice to start dissolving the sugar into it) and then put the mix in the machine. Two ingredients, that's it. I could easily just have the juice by itself, but it's really nice in this form as well.

fettucini bolognese

well worth the wait. this sauce took over a couple of hours to cook. first, the carrots, onions and celery were fried in some olive oil. they were removed, then the minced meat was seared before adding the vegetables back and cooking, then adding flavouring, pureed tomatoes and water. then a two hour wait.
served on fettucini and topped with some parmesan. i had more a couple of hours later. 

ode to spinach

Spinach has to be one of my favourite all time vegetables. To me, it represents vitality and strength. Maybe I watched Popeye too often as a kid, but I honestly love the stuff. Always did. I love a raw spinach salad with crushed walnuts, some very thinly sliced red onions and a nice slightly sweetened balsamic vinaigrette. Spinach is also one of the key ingredients in my much-beloved shabzi. It's a versatile vegetable that works well in many combinations.

Unfortunately time moves on, seasons come and go. As the season for nice winter greens is coming to an end, I decided to go all out with an italian version of creamed spinach. I love original creamed spinach, flavoured with onions, milk and bay leaves, but this version has cream, some garlic and parmesan cheese.

However, as seasons end, they begin for other things. Tonight I will make one of my favourite desserts featuring an item that just started showing up in the vegetable market last week, or the week before. Stay tuned!