Haitian Codfish

Recipe Source: Mom

Recipe Result: Still trying to get it just like I remember from childhood, but it gets a very good reaction from friends.

In Haiti, they call it morue. In Jamaica, it's saltfish. They use it a lot in Portugal and call it bacalhau. But whatever you call it, it's cod fillet dried and preserved in salt, and it's damn tasty when done right.

This is one of those dishes that my mom would make once in a while, maybe every 2 months. But every time she made it, I'd devour it like there was no tomorrow. I remember it being even better as cold leftovers on crackers. Then again, I remember the smell that it would leave around the house while it was being prepared, and realize that there must have been a reason why Mom would make it so infrequently. But then I also think of the slightly chewy and flaky texture of the cod, the mild residual salt, and the mix of leeks, tomatoes, and herbs that Mom cooks it with, and I remember how I could just munch on it straight out of the fridge.

But when I was back home in NY a couple years ago, I asked Mom to make it for me, so I can understand the process. At first, it seems a little involved, but all it really takes is just an extra 24 hrs of passive prep time. I've tried it a couple times on my own, plus a variation on it from my Spanish/tapas cookbook, and it's rather simple. A few months ago, I made it for a pot-luck with some friends and it got rave reviews.

Let's meet the star of the show: Señor Bacalao

"Hola"

You'll almost always find it in a small wooden box within some plastic wrap. Inside the box, the fillets are hard and dry as a bone, caked in salt, and smell really fishy. Don't let that deter you, the process is worth it.

Step 1: Soak the fillets in cold water in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Change the water 2 or 3 times.

Before

After

This is in order to remove a lot of the salt, and to reconstitute the fish. You didn't think that you were going to be chewing on some messed-up version of fish jerky, did you?

Step 2: Submerge the fillets in water in a large pot and put it over high heat. As soon as the water comes to a rolling boil, turn off the heat and take the pot off the burner. Drain out the fish, and set it aside. This is to remove most of the remaining salt, and to actually cook the fish. When it's done, the fillets will be nice and flakey.

From here, you can get creative with your recipe. Growing up, Mom always made morue with fresh leeks, tomatoes, garlic, and some other herbs.

Step 3: Prepare your veggies.

- Blanch, peel, seed, and chop 2 large vine-ripe or Roma tomatoes.

- Finely chop the white part of one leek. And make sure you clean it off well, they tend to have residual dirt between the top layers them when you just get them from the store.

- Mince 2 large cloves of garlic.

Leeks, gotta use them more often

Step 3: In a large saucepan, saute the leeks in 1 Tbsp of olive oil for 1 or 2 minutes on medium heat. As they go soft, add the garlic, and let it saute and become fragrant. Then add the tomatoes, give it a stir, and let it heat up until the tomatoes start to soften and break down.

Step 4: Before you add the cod to the pan, flake it up with your hands, and then chop it coarsely. Add it to the pan, stir it into the veggies, and season with salt and pepper to taste. You probably on't need a lot of salt because of the residual salt from the preservation. I also like to add 1 or 2 tsp of red wine vinegar, or some dashes of Frank's hot sauce for acidity and spice.

Step 5: Stir it all together, allowing the chunks of cod to break up even more. Let it continue to cook for another 5 minutes on medium heat, so the fish absorbs the flavors from the vegetables.

Cranberry Almond Quinoa

Recipe Source: Experimenting

Recipe Result: Tasty side dish, would make it again

My mom's really into health food. When I was in high school, she used to buy books by Dr. Andrew Weil all about natural healing foods and whole foods and such. That being said, she can get kind of obnoxious about eating only organic meat and produce. For example:

The scene, Downtown Whole Foods market, produce aisle.

Mom: "I want to buy some strawberries... can't find any."

Me: "There's a huge display of them right here. You're holding a box of them."

Mom: "They're not organic."

Me: "Mom... this is Whole Foods. Pretty much anything they sell comes from a reputable grower. It doesn't have to be organic to be good."

Mom: "Still... I want organic only."

Me: "But..."

Mom: "Do you want to eat pesticides?"

But she is kind of ahead of the curve when it comes to the new "trendy" health foods. When I home in 2006, she introduced me to quinoa. It cooks a lot like rice, and it has a considerable amount of protein for a plant. Buuuut, by itself it's kind of bitter and unexciting. So I did a little googling to see what else people have been doing with quinoa, and I decided to experiment with sweeter flavor additives: dried cranberries and sliced roasted almonds.

Ingredients:

- 1.5 Tbsp olive oil

- 1/4 cup finely diced sweet yellow onion

- 3 Tbsp dried cranberries (unsweetened)

- 3 Tbsp sliced roasted almonds

- 1 cup dry plain quinoa

- 2 cups water

- 1 dash garlic powder

- Salt & pepper, to taste.

Procedure:

1. In a small stainless steel saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat (but not so hot that it makes the oil shimmer and smoke). Saute the onions until they start to go translucent, but not brown.

2. Add the cranberries and almonds, stir, and let it heat up for a minute or 2. Then add the dry quinoa, and stir to coat all the grains in the oil. Let it heat up for a minute.

3. Add the water, turn the heat to high and bring the pot to a boil. Add the garlic powder, salt and pepper, and stir well. It's a good idea to taste the liquid, because that's how the quinoa will ultimately taste like. Once it's up to a good boil, turn the heat as low as possible, cover the pot, and let it sit for 8-10 minutes.

4. After about 8-10 minutes, lift the lid and give it a stir to make sure it's all cooked through. A good indicator that it's done is that the little thread-like things are separated from the grains. When you see it, you'll know what I'm talking about.

And Another New Contributor

Good lord, this "work" thing is taking too much of my time. Anyway, I've got another friend who's offered to provide content here and there. Welcome Adley. A little while ago, he and I devised a couple of scales to rank new restaurants we visit, a little better than the standard Yelp 1-5 stars. I'll let him fill in the details.

New Contributor!

I love new blog content as much as the next person, but we all know life gets busy and I get easily distracted. So here's something new, I invited a couple of friends to be contributors to the site.

The first is Ryan, a friend in Austin, and a badass on a gas grill. Welcome aboard, man.

Rice-Cookers Are for the Weak

I grew up on diri (rice). The vast majority of the Haitian meals my mother and my grandmother would make would be served with rice. The same goes for my aunts, family-friends, etc. All of this has spoiled me on rice side dishes at American restaurants.

I remember once, when I was a kid, trying rice at a Red Lobster or Sizzler or some other fantastic establishment. I knew something was off when it looked like a little fallen mound of individual grains, no cohesion at all. And it tasted like nothing but chicken broth. Literally, it was as if they just poured the dry rice out of a bag and into boiling chicken broth, and drained it out before it was cooked through. God awful.

East and South Asian cuisines definitely understand rice better. It's given great body and texture to serve as a vehicle for the main dish. They do so with pressure cookers and rice steamers. In Haiti, rice cookers and pressure cookers are a real luxury; as far back as I can remember, every Haitian relative or family-friend I know has cooked rice with nothing more than a cast aluminum or stainless steel pot.

Anyone who's accustomed to a rice cooker will immediately say "but you have to watch it so much more closely," or "but don't you get burnt stuff on the bottom of the pot?" I say "not necessarily," but it does take a fair amount of practice. But once you get it down, and learn how to give rice real flavor, you'll realize it was worth the work. Below is a recipe for basic, plain Haitian-style rice.

Ingredients:

- 1/2 cup of diced yellow onions

- 1 Tbsp olive oil

- 1 cup white long-grain rice

- 2 cups water

- heaping 1/4 tsp garlic powder

- salt and pepper, to taste

- 2 cloves

- pinch of dried thyme

Procedure:

1. Bring the olive oil to medium-low heat in a small saucepan, and sauté the diced onions until they are translucent (but not browned).

2. Add the dry rice to the pan, still on medium to medium-low heat, and stir until all the grains are exposed to the oil. In the oil, the grains will get a little translucent. Heat the rice until you see some of the grains start to become opaque, about 1 or 2 minutes.

3. Once the grains start going opaque, add the 2 cups of water (and enjoy that sound of the water sizzling on the bottom of the pan for a second). Turn the heat to high and bring the water to a boil. Add the garlic powder, salt, pepper, cloves and thyme to the water, give it a good stir and let it boil for another minute. It's a very good idea to taste the liquid to make sure the seasoning is right. That's how your finished rice will taste.

4. Turn the heat to the lowest possible setting, cover the pan, and let it sit for about 10 minutes. By then, the water will have been absorbed into the rice and the grains will be cooked through but give the rice a stir down to the bottom of the pan just to make sure.

Yields about 3 servings.

Like I said, this is the stripped down, plain recipe; my mom would only prep it this way if she was planning to serve it with black bean sauce. Once you master the plain recipe, you can move on to more common Haitian rice recipes, like rice with red beans, or with sweet peas, or (one of my favorites) with Haitian mushrooms and shrimp.

Quick Stir-Fry Sauce

I don't have any photos for this post, or a nice story to go along with it. I'm just trying to get into the habit of updating a little more regularly, plus I wanted to log this before I forget.

The other day I was craving some stir-fried pork and tofu with veggies, and I wanted to pick up this "House of Tsang" spicy Sichuan stir-fry sauce I used to use for a similar dish in college. This stuff really delivered the heat, and had a really nice consistency to it, from what I remember. But I realized I'd have to stop by the store on the way home from work to pick some up. But then I figured I roughly know how to make my own stir-fry sauce and I have a lot of chili-sesame oil, to hell with the store-bought sauce.

So for 1 standard block of firm tofu, 2 large peeled and sliced carrots, and 1 small crown of broccoli, I made my stir-fry sauce out of the following:

- 2 Tbsp dark soy sauce

- 2 Tbsp rice wine (shao xing)

- 1 Tbsp oyster sauce

- 1 or 1.5 Tbsp hot chili-sesame oil

- 1 tsp cornstarch dissolved in 2 tsp water

- 2 tsp minced fresh garlic

- 2 tsp grated fresh ginger

- 2 stalks of scallion, finely sliced

1. Combine the soy sauce, rice wine, oyster sauce, sesame oil, and cornstarch mixture in a bowl, and whisk it well.

2. In the clean pan on medium-high heat, fry the ginger, garlic, and scallion in 1 or 1.5 Tbsp of cooking oil for about 30 seconds (enough time for it to get fragrant but not burn).

3. Pour the soy sauce mixture from Step 1 into the pan on medium-high heat. Keep stirring while the sauce begins to thicken from the cornstarch.

Crepes in Strawberry Syrup with Whipped Cream

Holy sh-t, I need to update more often. Work and miscellaneous travel has had me really busy for the past few months, and my cooking has slowed down noticeably. But things are easing up a little, thank God, and I'm starting to try some new dishes out. This one is from mid-June. My then girlfriend offered to make me dinner, as long as I made a sufficiently sweet dessert. Bear in mind a couple of things:

1. Growing up, my family didn't really do dessert very often. We'd have the occasional Haitian sweet potato pudding at a big family dinner, or store-bought desserts at parties. But the concept of "I just finished dinner on a regular weeknight. I need dessert!" is just foreign to me.

2. I don't like really sweet foods. I go as far as sweet fresh fruit, but anything with loads of refined sugar is just too much for me. The smell inside a Krispy Kreme shop makes my stomach turn. Not exaggerating.

Hence, I don't make dessert often... or ever, actually. But I have made crepes in the past, relying on fruit and fresh handmade whipped cream to provide the sweetness. To kick up the sweetness, I figured you can't get much sweeter than syrup. The end product was considered a success. Continue reading for the crepe, syrup, and whipped cream recipes.

Prosciutto-Wrapped Sea Scallops

I guess I haven't posted anything new for a minute, work has been consuming all of my time lately. I'm talking about some real I-Already-Work-Around-The-Clock stuff. I'm actually writing this while I'm collecting data on the test floor, too.

It's gotten so bad that I actually went a whole week or more without cooking, because I stay at work so late. I've had to rely on the cafeteria for lunch, and dinner has been catered by the program managers of one of the products I'm on. Granted that Jason's Deli is a healthier option than most other places that could have catered, I still want something hot and homemade.

A few weeks ago I saw Whole Foods had these monster sea scallops on sale, so I had to grab a few. In trying to decide how to prep them, I passed by the deli counter and saw this really good looking hunk of prosciutto. I've heard of bacon-wrapped scallops, and I am a fan of bacon-wrapped anything. But I do love me some prosciutto, with melon, on pizza, with arugala and olive oil in a panino. Why not on scallops?

So I carefully wrap each scallop in a slice or 2 of prosciutto, leaving the flat sides exposed. Skewer the scallop and prosciutto with a toothpick to hold it all together for cooking. I seasoned with some crushed black pepper and not very much salt at all, the prosciutto would be salty enough. I pan seared each side in butter (Whole Foods carries Kerrygold!) for a little less than a minute. You want the flat sides to be nicely singed but the insides to still be soft and just warmed. When the scallops were done, I sauteed some shallots, deglazed the pan with a cup of white wine (I think it was a pinot grigio), and melted in another couple teaspoons of butter. It was served with some asparagus, oven-roasted with salt, pepper, olive oil, lemon zest & juice, and minced garlic.