Farmer's Market!

Aubrey stopped by the farmers market in Lincoln Square the other day and came home with some simple organic ingredients for me to play with. "She basically said, I got some beets, carrots, onions and mushrooms. Think you can make something with that?"

Sure... Why not?

Here are some pics and descriptions of how I turned these ingredients into a simple, dinner for the two of us. Farmer's markets rule so I am down for this kind of cooking any time.

First I prepped the veggies by peeling and lightly blanching the carrots. Cleaning up the onions and separating the beet greens from the beets. I washed everything and set it out on a sheet pan.

The got wrapped up in some foil, with some peeled garlic, olive oil, truffle salt and black pepper. I roasted this little bundle together for about an hour, then set it aside to cool.

I picked up these short ribs from farmers pride produce down the street from my place. Marinated them in some garlic, olive oil and black pepper and then grilled them along with the carrots, and green onions. I satueed the beet-greens in olive oil and a little sherry vinegar to finish. The onions and carrots got a little sprinkling of Maldon sea salt as well as a dash of sherry vin as well. The beets had a light truffle/garlic flavor from being roasted in that bundle so I just quartered them and left them alone as far as further seasoning goes. All this went down on a plate with the short ribs and a little feta cheese.

Oh.. and the mushrooms got rubbed lightly with paprika and smoked for a short time on the Green Egg. This added a nice little depth to all the veggies. All in all, we were very happy with this food. There will be many more trips to the farmer's market this summer for sure!

Intermissions

Copy Cat

Oh... Ohh.. Eric got one... I want one...

Yea yea... So I stumbled upon Eric Ripert's new site where he uses this Cuisinart convection toaster oven for all his cooking and there was that damn link to buy it for like 50% off on amazon. I have a small problem with amazon.com. There is something about that "buy in 1 click" button that gets me every time. I have been wanting a toaster oven ever since the "melty sandwich" phase that I went through last winter. All it took was seeing this thing in action, then finding it on amazon.com for me to give in. The fact that it's also a rotisserie helped quite a bit as well.

Simple dinner last night. A roasted beet and zucchini starter with goat cheese and Maldon. Followed by a roti-quail, some charred red onions, grape tomatoes and basil leaves.







Oh, and Karl brought up a good point in the comment section of this post... I never mentioned how the little oven worked. Well.. It worked awesomely. Did exactly what I expected it to do and was true to temp. Next time I do a small bird on the roti I'm going to glaze it in order to really show off the potential of this thing. I see a dark mahogany colored bird sometime in the near future. I will continue to use this for most of my indoor oven cooking over the next few weeks in order to explore some of it's other abilities... Although you can focus on Ripert's site for this info in the long run.

Hell Yes!

It just so happens that my wok fits perfectly inside the green egg. I may never use it on my stove top again.

Yesterday I went to Super H Mart to restock my Asian pantry. I can't walk out of that store without wanting to cook some kind of Asian food so last night we had some friends over and played with the big green egg. A friend of mine recently gave me 2 wild pheasants which she did not have room for in her freezer so I decided to smoke-roast them as part of our dinner. About 15 hours prior to cooking them I put them in a sort of brine/marinade that consisted of soy sauce, Korean red pepper paste, and water. Before they went on the smoker, I dried them off and sprinkled them generously with Shichimi Togarashi (a spicy Japanese pepper mix), salt and sumac. I roasted these guys for about 2 hours at 220 degrees and brushed them with Hoisin during the last 20 minutes of cooking for a tasty little glaze affect. These birds rested on my counter while I finished the rest of the food.


Next it was time to take the Egg from slow and low, to very hot. This is a simple process. I just pulled out the cooking grate and the plate setter and opened the lid and vents. Once the coals got plenty of air the fire got really hot and I just dropped the wok right down in on top of the coals. It was really quite awesome because the handles of the wok suspended it perfectly over the heat source and still allowed plenty of airflow for the fire to breath. This has by far been the best wok cooking experience I have ever had. My wok is actually happier because of it as well! The wide, extra hot heat source of the egg crept up on all sides of the wok so it totally improved the seasoning that I have been working so hard to create inside this thing. Trying to properly season a real wok on a home stove is annoying and difficult. The small flame source requires me to constantly move to wok around in order to get heat on the entire thing. It takes forever to get even a little seasoning on the surface of the metal like this. On the Egg, however, there was plenty of heat all around the wok and I didn't have to move it once during my cooking process. This is really the only way I want to use my wok from now on.

At H Mart I picked up some shucked muscle meat, baby bok choy, sesame sprouts, baby broccoli, little half crabs, and various pastes, and seasonings. I also got 3 kinds of Kimchi. Wild garlic, green onion and the more common cabbage kind. All three were eaten with this dinner. The crabs, muscles and veggies were all stir fried in different combinations that Helge and I came up with on the fly as the wok was heating up.

Here are some pics of the various dishes being made.

Expect a lot more of this kind of cooking from now on. It was really cool.

... And NO, I do not work for Big Green Egg.