Category Archives: Home Cookin’

Ba Bao Cai

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Instagram Post 2/21/2018

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More of my home cooking, this time from China 🇨🇳 by way of Brooklyn 🇺🇸!

One of the dishes I like to make for Chinese New Year is Bā Bao Cài (Eight Treasure Vegetables) 八宝菜. By way of identification, the object that looks a slice of potato in this photo is arrowhead (sometimes called Chinese arrowroot), easy to find in Chinatown this time of year; behind it is a chunk of gluten (seitan) – it soaks up sauce like a sponge; a bean curd knot – you can buy these fresh, frozen, or dried and they’re adorable; up near the chopsticks is a piece of sweet & spicy prepared bean curd; peanuts; and less obvious in this photo are dried lily buds, an indispensable ingredient in Moo Shu Pork; dried bean curd skin; smoked tofu; dried shiitake mushrooms; and wood ear (black fungus). Trust me, they’re in there; dig for buried treasures if you like. You could almost play Where’s Waldo with it! Lots of seasonings went into the savory sauce, too many to list here. (You think I’m gonna give away my recipe?! 😉)

So there’s my spin on Eight Treasure Vegetables. Oh wait. That’s ten treasures, not eight. So I guess I made Shí Bao Cài!

恭喜發財!
 
 

Linzer Cookies

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Instagram Post 12/15/2017

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Homemade Christmas Cookies – Day 5
🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪
Linzer Stars. Finely ground almonds figure into in the sweet, tender dough; the filling is made from red currants that I bought when they were in season and preserved in anticipation of this maniacal operation. Why maniacal? Look closely and you’ll see that the powdered sugar blankets only the outer section of the star, yet the inner red star shines snow-free. Follow along to see how I do it:
(1) Start with solid backs.
(2) Add preserves around the perimeter but not in the center. (Neatness doesn’t count.)
(3) Match tops to bottoms.
(4) Let it snow, let it snow, etc.
(5) Squirt a blob of preserves into the cutout.
(6) Now here comes the maniacal part: For each cookie, use a toothpick to draw out the five points of the star.
(7) Et voilà!
(8) The cookies are complete and packed up. Here’s the negative space that was left behind!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!
🎅🎄☃️❄️
 
 

Marzipan Cookies

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Instagram Post 12/14/2017

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Homemade Christmas Cookies – Day 4
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Marzipan Cookies. Crispy toasted almonds and a double chocolate grid (white and 60% cacao) grace the tops of the chewy marzipan base. Final decorating stage shown here. Stay tuned: more cookies to come!
🎅🎄☃️❄️
 
 

Chocolate Pecan Whiskey Balls

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Instagram Post 12/13/2017

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Homemade Christmas Cookies – Day 3
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Chocolate Pecan Whiskey Balls. Named for the chocolate and toasted pecans in them, but especially for the pecan whiskey (yes, it’s a thing). Sparkling sugar adds a crunchy, festive touch. Stay tuned: more cookies to come!
🎅🎄☃️❄️
 
 

Biscotti

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Instagram Post 12/12/2017

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Homemade Christmas Cookies – Day 2
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Biscotti! These twice-cooked treats (aka cantuccini) are laden with toasted almonds and dried cherries that I simmered in Amaretto. Delicious dunked in coffee for breakfast, wine for dessert (as they do in Italy), or cocoa for snowstorms. Stay tuned: more cookies to come!
🎅🎄☃️❄️
 
 

Identity Crisis Cookies

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Instagram Post 12/8/2017

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Homemade Christmas Cookies – Day 1
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Identity Crisis Cookies – so named because I couldn’t decide whether to make chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin or toasted coconut pecan and since I had all of those on hand…well, you get the picture.
🎅🎄☃️❄️
 
 

My Roast Beef Sandwich

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Instagram Post 11/17/2017

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I was just writing to a friend about how I’m in the throes of Thanksgiving cooking and baking. Seems like I get a little more ambitious each year, adding something new here or there, finding more stops to pull out; the meter’s not on “totally overwhelmed” yet, but it’s getting there.

So what can I make for dinner that isn’t a time sink when I’m up to here (my hand is under my chin) with work in the kitchen? Easy. My favorite sandwich: oven-toasted, buttered Italian bread with roast beef, melted brie de meaux, arugula, watercress, scallions, alfalfa sprouts, sliced tomato, and most important, my signature slightly smoky, trifle tomatoey, heavily horseradishy sandwich spread.

If anyone were ever to name a sandwich after me, it should be this one.
 
 

Japanese Potato Salad

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Instagram Post 11/3/2017

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More of my home cooking from Japan 🇯🇵 by way of Brooklyn 🇺🇸!

Here’s my rendition of Japanese potato salad. (Yes, it’s a thing.) Its name, ポテトサラダ, is pronounced approximately “potato salada”; needless to say, there’s a word for potato in Japanese, じゃがいも, “jagaimo”, but since the dish is rather American, the English name is used more commonly. The texture is key to this dish: the potatoes are partially mashed but there are still abundant chunks. It works because the mashed potatoes meld with and become an integral part of the dressing; the chunks remain to provide occasional bites of straight ahead potato.

My ingredient list cleaves pretty closely to the canonical Japanese version: potato 🥔, carrot 🥕, cucumber 🥒, hardboiled egg 🥚, sweet onion, ham; and the dressing is fairly authentic: mayo (only Kewpie of course!), rice wine vinegar, and neri wakarashi (Japanese mustard paste) but I’ve added a little sweet miso paste as well as a few shakes of ichimi togarashi (dried Japanese red pepper) and sansho (dried Japanese green pepper peel) to kick it up a little, and a sprinkling of shichimi (a seasoning mix of Japanese red pepper, sesame seed, orange peel, yuzu, etc.) and black sesame seeds on top. Simple, but most satisfying.

Of course, the ingredients’ proportions are what distinguish one recipe from another, so I haven’t really revealed any secrets here!

Those are Thai spicy pickled mangoes on the side for flavor and color contrast.
 
 

Home Cooking – Makizushi

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Instagram Post 10/30/2017

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More of my home cooking, this time from Japan 🇯🇵 by way of Brooklyn 🇺🇸!

An exercise in 🍣 makizushi – sushi rolls. The first photo is a tuna roll with two kinds of tobiko (the green one is enhanced with wasabi) and two kinds of sesame seeds. The rose is crafted from gari (pickled ginger) with cut and shaped shiso leaves on either side.

The second photo shows what happens when I’m left to my own devices: regular and inside-out rolls. Ingredients varied a bit from one roll to the next (because that’s my idea of fun!), but my mise en place (in addition to sushi rice and nori) included cucumber, pickled daikon, avocado, radish sprouts, tamago (sweet omelet), kampyo (dried gourd), denbu (sweet, pink, fluffy fish flakes – so good!), tobiko (flying fish roe), kani (crab stick), eel, tuna, salmon, and yellowtail along with sesame seeds and furikake (the magical Japanese seasoning that when sprinkled on top of anything makes it wonderful).

A visit to Mitsuwa Marketplace, just across the Hudson at 595 River Rd, Edgewater, NJ made shopping a piece of ケーキ!
 
 

Homemade Pumpkin Pie

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Instagram Post 10/13/2017

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More of my home cooking!
🎃
It’s pumpkin season and I’m preparing my perennial parade of peak-of-perfection pumpkin pies! I’m pleased as punch and proud (okay, enough with the p’s) that there’s so much 💖 for these babies; I seriously did go through countless iterations developing my recipe until I got it to exactly my idea of what the ultimate pumpkin pie should be. (One of the tricks is to use only fresh pumpkin – none of this canned stuff.) That’s homemade pecan brittle adorning the top and real honest to goodness snow on the plate. (Okay, I lied about the snow – it’s powdered sugar – but the rest is gospel!)