Killer Carrot-Ginger Superfood Salad

If you're new the internet you'll know that it has a peculiar habit of falling apart as time goes on.  There's a bizarre kind of kill or be killed entropy to the web that causes many websites to fall off the internet, and others to live on forever( do yourself a favor and go relive the awesomeness of that old website). In this edition I'm perserving for posterity a recipe that I found on a tumblr blog. The original website the recipe came from and the original tumblr that posted it have all gone dark. To make it easier to find when I want to make it later I'm posting it here on my bloggy blog. I claim no credit for photos or recipe. I'm linking via the wayback machine and to the tumblr I found to give as much credit to where I found it as I can.

So credit to Chompandthrive.com for photos.

Ingredients:

Dressing:

1.5 cups of carrots, peeled and roughly chopped (about 3 large carrots)

1.5 cups of water

1/3 peeled and chopped ginger

1 clove of garlic

1 teaspoon of apple cider vinegar

1.5 tablespoons of honey

juice from 1 medium lemon

1 cup of olive oil

Salad:

2 heads of broccoli, chopped

3 ounces of shiitake mushrooms

1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of pepper

6 cups of red organic kale

5 cups of shredded red cabbage

2 cups of edamame

2 medium avocados

1 pint of blueberries ( 2 of the smallest boxes)

1 cup of pepitas (pumpkin seeds without the shell)

Directions: 

Killer Carrot-Ginger Dressing:

Add the water and carrot to a saucepan and boil for 7-10 minutes, or until the carrot is able to be pierced with a fork. Remove from heat and let cool, about 10 minutes. Reserve all of the cooking liquid and add it to a food processor with the carrots, chopped ginger, garlic, apple cider vinegar, honey, and juice from 1 lemon. Blend until contents are smooth. Drizzle in the olive oil last until an emulsion forms.

Superfood Salad:

On low heat, in a saute pan, add the shiitake mushrooms and chopped broccoli pieces. Season with garlic powder, salt, and pepper, and drizzle with olive oil. Cook over low heat (2 out of 10) for about 10 minutes, just until the vegetables are no longer raw. Set aside. Chop the organic red kale and add it to a bowl. Layer on the shredded red cabbage, broccoli and shiitakes mushrooms, edamame, avocados, blueberries, and pepitas. Top with the carrot-ginger dressing and serve.

Fried Quinoa (like Fried Rice)

The other day I made a very large batch of quinoa for making this dish, and had a good deal left over so I put it in the fridge. I needed a meal idea and had chicken on hand so I looked around for recipes to use leftover quinoa and found this one.

The breakdown is really simple, if you've made fried rice it's the same.  Rice/quinoa for frying is best chilled overnight, if you cannot cook it and spread it out on cookie sheet and put it in the freezer.  The chilled starch is the secret to making amazing fried rice/quinoa at home.

Make two eggs dice and set aside
saute your protein, then the onions, garlic and ginger
add diced up eggs, quinoa, peas cook a few minutes then add soy sauce and fish sauce (I used Sesame ginger salad dressing instead)

I liked this better than fried rice, because it was lighter in texture and really packed a flavor punch.  In all I think prep and cook took about 15 minutes, so if you've got some left over quinoa this is really good.

File this link under awesome

So Lifehacker hit me up with a little shot in the arm about DIY Cheez-its.  Cheez-its you can make at home, yeah, never leave your fortress of solitude with cheezy goodness.

That is all.

Mason Jars in the kitchen

So on some of our Culinary adventures in the last few months I've taken to using Mason Jars a fair amount.  I'm sure that this article from Popsci was related since it's in my draft folder, so I thought I would share.

I've been making a Strawberry Banana Spinach smoothie for breakfast and one quart sized mason jar is an excellent serving size for one.  Turns out that many blenders fit the narrow mouth mason jars just fine, so you can throw in the ingredients blend and go.  I thought that was pretty solid.




That was the only one from the popsci article I found interesting, but we have also been making summer porridge in the mason jars and got Regular Mouth Mason Jar Plastic Lids[?] to make it easier to carry to work.  The recipes I've been following come from YummyLife, but I'm sure you could free form something in a pinch.

I found this Big Red Kitchen blog post while I was looking for some more ideas for this particular short and semi-useless article, and am going to try her once a week mason jar style cooking.  The blog's author is doing crossfit and a mom, that wanted meals that she could heat and serve during the week to free up time in the evening.  I empathize with the author about how much time each week it takes to make meals, and the creativity that it takes to come up with something every weeknight.

I'm a fan of lists, so this 31 uses for mason Jars was interesting (and a touch hippy, but hey if the shoe fits).

Bonus link for kicks Thedecoratedcookie also had a mason jar meal that looked pretty acceptable.

And finally a Local, up in my neck of the woods NWedible on fermenting in a mason jar.

BBQ Corned Beef

So in the spirit of that last post, I made this BBQ Corned beef a while ago on my Weber kettle grill, and forgot to finish posting about it.  Really I found the recipe after there was a sale on corned beef (after St. Patrick's day).  I liked the idea of this recipe because the sauce was mustard based, and I had just gotten into Lay's Tangy Carolina BBQ chips.

While you could technically say that the process worked, I started the grill at 6 PM on a weeknight and didn't finish until 3:30 AM the next day.  Now I've mentioned that I'm a huge masochist for food prep, I did a second pitch of yeast on my 1 year old Vanilla Bourbon Porter and plan on sitting on it for another 8 months.  I know how to play long ball with food prep.  I've made vegetable stock in my 7.5 gallon stock pot and roasted several dozen head of garlic to prep for a dinner date with some friends.  This little BBQ adventure in minding the fire was the most exhausting thing I have ever cooked.  Hard Lump charcoal is an adventure unto itself, and the propane torch I was using to accelerate the lighting of it was not helping matters.  You have to let it warm up on it's own accord, and since watching Alton Browns little BBQ show I learned that Propane emits moisture so I was messing myself up by using it to help maintain temperatures on the grill while the charcoal get going whenever I needed to feed the fire.  In this regard the Smokenator would have been a huge help, as I wouldn't have had to fully remove the lid and loose all of the heat to toss a little extra charcoal on top of the already lit stuff.  That would have helped get the new stuff going and helped keep the temperatures more even.

For all the hours I spent doing this cooking I somehow managed to not take a picture!

So I suppose I'll just have to make it again.

Alton Brown DIY Smoker with upgrades?

This post is more of an open ended question about future projects and whether or not to undertake them.  If you've never seen Alton Brown's show good eats I won't lie I had never watched it either.  It was early food porn, with cheesy editing and acting, but this episode in particular launched a thousand copycat's and they come up in my feeds fairly often.



The question is do I go with a version of the Alton Smoker or do the Gizmodo BBQ upgrades?

I have a Weber Performer Grill, Black (Google Affiliate Ad) already, and have gotten some solid use out of it in the 5 years I've had it.  Recently I did a 8 hour smoke of a brisket on it with some measure of success, but I had to mind it carefully. I was adjusting temperature every hour, but checking more like every 20 minutes and even then my temperatures ranged greatly from 200°-300°F.  That method was way too much work.  Gizmodo recommended the smokenator for holding the fuel, and liquids, and The BBQ Guru (which I'll admit I don't fully understand the purpose of) as upgrades to the standard kettle grill.  I'm not sure that the smokenator alone will give me the smoking capabilities of the Alton "Macgyver" Brown's smoker.

The final, and surely less exciting option is the Bronze Medal kitchen hack from Food52 of using a soldering iron and a tin can to cold smoke on your grill.  I obviously saw it on lifehacker.  It's an option for smoking things but not bbq.  My current gut feeling is I should get the Smokenator, and make the cold smoker and save myself the heartache of some of the ocd and fancy upgrades I've seen of the Alton Brown backyard smoker.

If you needed evidence that the French are crazy...

Look no farther than this recipe on the Wall Street Journal.  I'll admit that I'm interested in trying it, but mostly because I'm a huge masochist when it comes to food prep.  One ingredient in this needs 36 hours of salt curing, and then is slow poached in the oven for 4-10 hours.  Read that first part there, one of the ingredients!  Another of the ingredients is garlic simmered in oil for an hour but the oil cannot boil, how's that for a balancing act!  And finally the thing that draws me to this recipe is the cookware you need to do it in.  I really like enamel covered cookware, both for appearance and the even heating.

Kitchen tools and stuff

Well this post is a little nostolgic for me.  I stopped reading Gizmodo over the summer as I finally admitted to myself that I didn't have enough time for my 200+ blog feeds as it was.  It doesn't stop the fact that Gizmodo always posted some really interesting gadgets for the home and kitchen.

This little toy caught my eye because really all of the items in this kit would be fairly useful and in that package I could keep it on the counter without much guilt.




And next Grill Clips.  They are exactly as bad ass as they sound.  Sure they are from Sur La Table[?], but only $15 and grilled veggies are the best part of summer.

More Saveur Recipies

Just flushing out old drafts not much to see here, it's sort of a follow on from this post if you will.

Greek Mac and Cheese. So I think the title says all that you need to know about the recipe, but the reason I was a huge fan of it was the picture on Saveur's site, I want that cast iron thing the mac and cheese is in.

Cheesy Corn Casserole looks like a pretty sweet side dish for some BBQ and well I'm a sucker for corn recipes.

Crème fraîche

So I'm going to imagine my fellow American haven't had much exposure to Crème fraîche , but how about you international fellows?  I've been working on pulling sugar out of my diet, but I still want rich food from time to time.  I was thinking an unsweetened fruit desert with Crème fraîche for a treat.  I've also got a few soups that I'm eyeing that you can place a dollop as a garnish.

I don't remember what the genesis of this idea was, but here is the Joy of Baking how to video that got me interested in making some crème fraîche and using it in cooking.  I also thought I'd throw around some recipes for the fun of it

Crème fraîche Mousse with strawberries - I'd play with the sugar here, as 1/4 cup seems like a lot for a small desert.  Also for those wondering caster sugar is the half step between white sugar and powdered sugar.  You can just pulse some white sugar in you food processor to make it.

Milk Chocolate Mousse with Port Ganache and Whipped Crème Fraîche - I'd just go with this one.  The port is sweet, but only 2 tablespoons of sugar are added so it's really not over the top sweet.

I need to use my sourdough starter again so I could just use the crème fraîche as a topping for crumpets.

Any idea's?  How would you use the crème fraîche?

Saveur corn recipies

It's a little late in the corn season, but what the heck.  This has been sitting in drafts for long enough it should get the hell out of here.

So first up, chilies stuffed with corn and cheese then battered and fried.  I actually made these and it was delicious.  I used pepper jack and Emerald City Brewing's Dotty lager for the beer batter.   For whatever reason I didn't take a picture of it, but I thought it was pretty damn delicious.

The next recipe is sure to gross out a few people, but if you've ever had fresh corn (like picked that day) I can see how this would be good.  Sweet Corn and Milk Drink is essentially a corn smoothie with cinnamon for some kick.  I would do it if I was growing corn myself.

I like this recipe because I'm a sucker for the word Succotash.  There's nice place called Palomino restaurant that served succotash as a side, since then whenever I see it somewhere I try it.  This is really just a salad, and corn adds a nice sweetness to this type of a dish.

Next recipe is a corn custard.  This looked appealing because custard is typically a desert, and this takes it as a more savory dish.

The final recipe I took a liking to on Saveur was Corn cakes with a pesto sauce.  Though this isn't the exact thing I want, back home there was a little taco stand that had these corn cakes that where the perfect mix of spicy and sweet.  The stand closed down likely because it was in the worst location, but I'm still looking for something to fill beautiful corn cake itch that have.

Egg separation

I'm sorry in advance.  She is way too much sunshine for most of the regulars around here, but the trick is pretty cool

Kitchen Workbench

Damn you gizmodo for sharing this one.  $300 is steep for a cutting board (regardless of how nice), but I might be inclined to try my hand at making something like this.  Talk about mise en place, rawr.

Image via Gadget Review

W is for Watermelon Kegs

Gizmodo shared this link from Watermelon.org on how to make a very (very, very) fancy spodie they call the watermelon keg.  In addition to a fancy cut watermelon filled with booze you need a Chrome Spigot[?] ($27 + shipping!!) to pull this off, but I feel like we can all agree that this is the coolest party drink you will ever have made so it may be worth the money.

image via Watermelon.org

G is for Graham Crackers

Image via Pollystyle

Those bastards at Saveur are always pushing my buttons, and pushing my cooking ability.  This time the posted about Graham Crackers that look amazing.  So amazing that I actually bought some despite the fact that PayPal is their payment processor and I Hate (with a capital H) PayPal.  I really bought them so I would have something to compare against when I try to make these, I feel like you have to have a flavor firmly fixed in your mind to help you when you create something delightful.

C is for Centerboard cooler

This comes by way of there I fixed it (white trash repairs), but I find this to be awesome and perfect for summer.  When I own a farm (notice not if but when) we will do outdoor feeds on tables with these in them.  Whites paired with farm fresh fair, fuck yes.

BBQ pizza

Every now and again someone somewhere creates something genius.  Thanks to Gizmodo for sharing this

And now I need that.  Pizza in the house during the winter is a no brainer, but during the summer I'm loathe to turn on that damn oven if I don't need to and realistically you could use this for bread as well.  It might be harder to control the humidity portion (several bread recipes call for a pan of water to be placed in the oven as well.)

What do you think?  I feel like a reasonable approximation of this could be mad with a piece of steel and a welder.

Juicer

I have a lot of general purpose cooking crap in my life and I don't use all of it all of the time, so when the occasion comes to use a somewhat overlooked kitchen utensil it gives me time to reflect on it's general utility.  I made a cabbage salad that had a citrus dressing so I needed to use my old fashioned juicer.  That SOB doesn't fit over the top of anything, so I ended up juicing into a bowl.  The whole thing was a mess, and left me pissed off so seeing this little thing fleet like insult to injury.  Gizmodo shared a little juice that fits into the top of a water bottle.  It may not be the best way to gather your citrus, but after not having anything that would fit my damn juicer it would be a huge improvement.

Gumbo

When I was in college there was a little hole in the wall Cajun place up the street from the campus called From the Bayou.  The food was pretty amazing for being right next to a college, and the flavors where just not what you would expect to find in the northwest.  Between the great flavors and the fact that my (now wife) and I had our first date there, well southern cooking has a soft spot in my heart.  They had a lovely chicken and andouille sausage gumbo that is still the best I've ever had.  We had the good fortune to get our rehearsal dinner catered by them, but sadly the restaurant has since gone out of business and I still miss having gumbo every now and again.

I'm working off of this recipe from NewOrleanscuisine because it has the things I can identify as what was in the gumbo I loved, and I felt like he had some great tips on both the roux and the rice.  It was good, but I got scared near the end of the roux and started adding broth.  My advice is go into making roux with the knowledge that you may have to throw it out and ride that train as close to burnt as you dare.

Smoker at home

A few weeks ago, I started on a really masochistic streak with my cooking and tried to smoke a Corned Beef Brisket on my barbecue on a week night.  I got it on the coals by 6pm and didn't finish until about 2 in the morning the next day.  It turned out pretty good, but still needed another few hours to be truly fall apart tender. I cheated around midnight and put it on a roasting pan in the oven at 250 so I could try to sleep rather than having to check the coals every half hour or so, but the experience got me thinking about ways to achieve that smoked flavor without all of the work.  Wouldn't you know it Saveur had my back.