Buffalo Steak Salad

Sometimes a simple salad can be a beautiful, elegant, and delicious meal that's both hearty and satisfying. In the summer months, people rarely want to sweat away in the kitchen, and this dish has minimal cooking time with great results. Mixing bright summer vegetables with lean steak and nutty parmesan makes for a tasty mix of flavors that combine for the right balance that's healthy and satisfying.

Chicken and Spinach Burritos

I've recently been very into chicken and spinach burritos from this tiny hole in the wall Mexican place in the East Village called Downtown Bakery on 1st Ave. It's a very simple burrito, but for some reason it's the perfect balance of healthy and unhealthy that you want from a burrito. Because much of recipe inspiration comes from what I eat out, I decided to make my own take on the chicken and spinach burrito.

Fish Tacos and Fried Plantains

A warm summer night called for a light and refreshing meal, so I came up with blackened hake tacos with lime-avocado spread and a sweet chili sour cream. I picked hake because it's a nice flaky white fish like cod that goes well with all different types of seasoning. To go along with this, I made a cucumber salad and fried plantains.

Father Son Cooking Class

This past weekend, my father went back to Trinity College to celebrate his 50th Reunion. Prior to the weekend, the alumni coordinator had inquired if he had any interest in giving a lecture or teaching a class about something he is passionate about. He enjoys cooking as much as I do, so he proposed a cooking class. Being that both of us went to Trinity, the class was a perfect opportunity for a father/son cooking combo.

The dish he decided to cook was a Mediterranean fish stew with an avocado and onion salad. He first learned of the stew when my sister ate it in Israel with rave reviews. He figured out how to make it using cod in place of a typically Mediterranean fish like Sea Bream.

Once we setup the kitchen for the class and the audience arrived, we began cooking the meal, talking our way through the dish step by step. To begin, we boiled water and made white rice to serve the stew over. While the rice was cooking, we chopped up 2 yellow onion and 8 cloves of garlic. We began the stew by sauteing onions with a little salt and pepper in a large pot. Once the onions were translucent, we added garlic, a teaspoon of saffron, and some crushed red pepper. Once the garlic was cooked through, we added 2 cans of whole peeled tomatoes (breaking them up with a spoon in the pot), and 2 containers of Kitchen Basics fish stock, and let it cook for about 15 minutes.

While the stew was cooking, we made our avocado and onion salad. We sliced up 6 avocados and 2 sweet vidalia onions, and then made a simple dijon vinaigrette using lemon juice, red wine vinegar, dijon, salt, and olive oil. We tossed the salad with the dressing and set aside.

Once the stew had cooked for a bit to expand the flavors, we added the cod (6lbs for 15 people), which we had cut into 2x2 pieces, and some chopped cilantro. The fish was cooked through in about 12 minutes, and we served the stew over the white rice alongside the salad.

The class went really well. The audience was very engaged and asked a lot of good questions, and they were impressed with the ease and efficiency of making the dish. My dad and I had a great time teaching, and we're hoping to do it again at another Trinity alumni event.

Is it snooty to define a dish as "deconstructed"?

 
I was feeling very creative earlier this week and I wanted to make something unique in concept but familiar in flavor. I am a huge fan of a good gazpacho, so I decided to make seared scallops with deconstructed gazpacho. A deconstructed dish is when you take all of the ingredients of a dish, separate or change them in cooking, and compose a plate. Usually a full bite of a deconstructed dish will taste like the original dish concept, despite the broken up nature of the ingredients.
I wanted to try this with gazpacho. A standard gazpacho is made of tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, bread, garlic, cilantro and often avocado either in the soup or on top. I took all of the ingredients and mixed them up, creating an inventive dish that tasted like a simple yet delicious gazpacho soup.






To start, I finely chopped the tomato, cucumber, onion, and cilantro, and mixed them with a splash of red wine vinegar, salt, pepper, lime juice, and some sugar. This was the base flavor of my gazpacho and was more of a tomato cucumber salad.

I then took a roll, cut off the crust, and put it in a food processor to make bread crumbs. I also thinly sliced a few garlic cloves. While I was making my bread crumbs, I heated canola oil on medium in a shallow pot. Once the oil was hot, I put in one slice of garlic to make sure it was hot enough, and then put in the rest, stirring a bit so the garlic didn't stick together. After about a minute or two, the garlic was brown and I removed it to a bowl lined with paper towel.

I then put the bread crumbs in the oil, frying until golden. To remove them, I held a fine sieve over an empty tomato can, and poured the crumbs and oil through. This gave me a receptacle for the oil and made sure I got all of the bread crumbs. I added these to the paper towel lined bowl and tossed with some salt.

I then pureed an avocado with some lime and salt, adding a little water to make it smooth. The result was a bright green paste.

Finally, I had patted the scallops dry with paper towel and sprinkled them with salt and pepper. I heated my cast iron pan until it was nearly smoking, added some olive and butter, moving the butter around so it didn't burn, and added the scallops. The key to perfect scallops is to put them in the pan and leave them in place for about 3-4 minutes. They should be golden brown when you flip them to finish them off for another 3 minutes.

To plate the dish, I spooned some avocado in the center of the plate, spread it down the middle of the plate with the back of a spoon and spooned some of the tomato cucumber salad in the "bowl" made of avocado paste.

I then placed the carmelized scallops around the avocado bowl, and sprinkled the garlic and breadcrumbs over the whole thing along with some cilantro.

The final dish was really delicious, possibly one of the most inventive and flavorful I've ever made. The presentation was beautiful, and each bite had a personality of its own between the balance of crunch from the breadcrumbs, sweetness from the scallops, and tang from the tomatoes and cuke salad. On top of it, the dish really was not that difficult to make!

Ingredients: .5 medium red onion, 1 vine ripe tomato, .5 cuke, 3 garlic cloves, 1 Portuguese roll, 4 scallops per person, 1 bunch cilantro, 1 avocado, 1 lime, 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar, 1 teaspoon sugar, 2 cups canola oil, 1 tablespoon olive oil, .5 tablespoon butter, salt and pepper to taste