Uncategorized – Page 8 – Table For Two

May 26, 2018July 9, 2018

Spring into Shrimp Salad

It’s transitioning quickly from winter to summer now, as is usual for New York around this time of year. In my experience, I am no longer craving hearty meals during this season. If I am going to be running around outdoors, I don’t want to be carrying around heavy food in my stomach which will only slow me down. Something lighter more refreshing will do. While scrolling through my news feed on Facebook the other day, a friend of mine posted a link to a simple recipe that fits the bill for me and Lauren. The name is “Avocado Shrimp Salad” which already wins the two of us over. This is a simple yet delicious salad that fits perfectly with this time of year and is easy on the budget, another plus.

Serving avocado Shrimp Salad — Serving my darling and myself some avocado shrimp salad.

This is a very straight-forward recipe. All you need is some good shrimp, greens, avocados, and veggies. By “good”, I don’t mean little tiny ones used for stir-fry. (Sorry to Natasha, but I like my shrimp a little bigger) But at the same time, we found out after the fact, that huge shrimp are not the way to go either, unless you cut them up first before serving. Since this is billed as a Cajun dish, big bright flavors are essential – lemon juice, chili pepper and cumin, the works. The avocados serve to cool down some of the spiciness, if you are not a big spice junkie such as me.

The dressing should not be very heavy, something delicate to tie everything together. We followed along with a simple olive oil base, cilantro and lemon juice. In my opinion, cilantro is the bacon of the herb world. You can add it to just about any non-dessert dish, the smell is strong enough to distinguish it from parsley and it packs a punch in the flavor category!

It was my turn to “mise-en place” (French for “Put in place”) the vegetables and tomato this time while Jeremy handled the hot shrimp. We didn’t have any corn or red onion available, so we substituted with jalapeno and poblano peppers, but still had avocado, cucumber, tomato and lettuce. (Don’t you just love how a salad can be so adaptable?) Knife cuts have a three point check list.

Use the right knife for the job. The wrong knife can make it harder to cut through and/or look sloppy, especially soft and juicy foods like tomatoes or bread.
Cut on a clean cutting board. Keep it kosher and don’t let germs spread all over.
Cut evenly so that everything looks similar and cooks at about the same pace. You “eat with your eyes” first.
Don’t they look even? Everything so nice and neat?

I had the loco-motion going smoothly in the wrist. I think of it like my arm is the main rod on a train car cranking the wheels. With a little attention to sizing, my julienne was straight on.

Peeling a cucumber — Can’t you smell the cucumber?

The first sign that shrimp are fully cooked is in the color. They go from gray and black to a peachy pink with red tails. After that, the middle has to cook through until it’s tender and slightly firm. If it gets to be rubbery and chewy, you’ve gone too far. 160 degrees F and opaque are your main goals. You want them to curl up like a “C”. When they’re raw, they kind of stretch out. Betty’s Kitchen Quick Tip #40 shows this in action. Sometimes, you can let them rest off of the heat and let it cook the rest of the way through with the residual heat if it just needs another 30 seconds. You don’t want to accidentally cook the juices out of it. Whenever I cook with chopped garlic, it chars or burns more than I’d like it. The rest period might help with that too. If anyone has any advice on this problem, please comment us your solutions.

Our 8 seasoned shrimp fresh out of the skillet.

Once the shrimp finished cooking among the spices, it was time to put our 2 halves together and toss them around so that the dressing could seep through.

The shrimp was seasoned perfectly, but we could’ve cooked them about a minute longer. The dressing was just right. As it turned out, I forgot to cut all the way through the slices and had to separate them by hand! How embarrassing! Everything else seemed crisp, dynamic and perfect for a summer-like spring day.

Toasting to spring salads — Toasting to spring. *Clink*

May 26, 2018May 26, 2018

The Greater Guacamole

Hola, everyone! Lauren here, and Jeremy. One of my favorite green foods is the avocado. It’s creamy and full of healthy fats that can calm a craving quickly, as opposed to reaching for that vanilla ice cream in the back of the freezer. Now that you’re hungry, let’s have a look at my favorite green dip, guacamole.

My mother and I have 2 very different ways of making guacamole. I’ll go first. I like zesty flavor combinations when it comes to Mexican and try to always have a sense of finesse in my cooking style.

1 avocado

1 ½ Tbs. Plain Greek yogurt

A smidge of chopped cilantro

¼ cup diced jalapeno

All the juice from ½ a lemon

Mine came out very creamy with a pleasant pastel green color to it. I could taste the yogurt too much versus the avocado, but it did cut back on the heat of the jalapeno. Having diced the jalapeno, it gave it a chunky level of texture, so it wasn’t one note. The lemon juice really complimented the spice and herb making it a tad brighter. There was a sequence to the taste. First was the lemon, then the avocado-yogurt, (The combo tastes like cheese to me. I don’t know why.) ending with the spices. Since the yogurt was so powerful, it masked half of the avocado. I think my next attempt will take it down to only ¾ Tbs. Overall, I would give it a 4 out of 5.

Mom took a much simpler route to her guacamole, as suits her usual “less is more” cooking style; keeping the integrity of the main ingredient by using only the necessities and a gentle hand when seasoning.

1 avocado

Lime juice

1 garlic clove

Finely chopped onion

A pinch of pink salt

Hers seemed a bit one dimensional at first taste. There wasn’t that same surprise heat which I’m sure would be appreciated by some. Mom’s classic onion and garlic duo complement each other well with the pinch of pink salt, but the question lays in how much is masked by the avocado. It takes some effort for that onion to come through. Note that she used a finely chopped onion rather than the flakes or powders. I couldn’t help but re-think the texture. If it were me, I would have probably gone with the more traditional route and diced up a purple onion to throw into the mix, maybe even a roma tomato or two too. That way, you get the nice acidic note to cut through the creamy fattiness of the avocado giving the guacamole more dimensions to its taste. Hers was thicker and didn’t have the overwhelming creaminess of mine, but not enough to call it pasty either. The element of acidity in hers was pretty much the same, but hers hit in a more concentrated way, as opposed to being bright like the lemon. I would call hers smooth, familiar and satisfying.

If I didn’t know better, I would very easily mistake hers for the guacamole served at “Mexican Connection” in Saratoga. http://www.mexconx.com It was the exact same texture and color, but theirs was missing that slight sour kick. There was that same sense of consistency and no tricks out of the hat to throw me off-guard. It was a normal, elementary, and easily recognized guacamole. The fact that when Jeremy and I opened up our leftovers the next day and saw that it had already started to brown tells us right away that this was home-made. No preservatives or additives were added anywhere. It goes to show that with real guacamole, you either eat it now, or throw it out 3 days later.

If we had to rank the 3, we would definitely put Mexican Connection’s on the bronze podium. It was a nice creamy bite to cool me off after a dunk in the hot sauce. It tasted great with the tortilla chips they were serving by the buckets, but there was nothing exciting about it to tempt me to take another bite.

Her mom’s guacamole would be in second place because hers had all of the same great points for taste, texture and uniformity, but with that slight kick of acidity to please more than just an avocado craving.

Mine I would put on top because it had a trio of flavor, and a few different sensations that went well together. But since it came out unevenly and the yogurt was a blob too much, it’s no run away. There is work to be done with mine and much to be said about when it is too much and when to stick to the basics.

The winner of the unofficial guacamole contest — The winner of our unofficial guacamole contest!

What do you think of these dips? How you do make a guacamole grand? Tell us in the comments! We would love to hear from you. Adios!

April 15, 2018July 9, 2018

Moonstruck & Mermaids

Inspiration gives the artist a reason to create, and in turn, that art moves us to create our own. The art of cinema is no exception. Movies have inspired me from when I was a little girl. I recently took inspiration from “Moonstruck” and “Mermaids” (both starring Cher) and brought it into the kitchen for breakfast. Near the end of “Moonstruck”, we see the mother at the stove making a Brooklyn-Italian toad in the hole in a slice of crisp Italian bread. In “Mermaids”, we see young Winona Ryder building a big deli sandwich -the kind a man can sink his teeth into and use both hands to hold- to take along to meet a local stud. I put the two ideas together and created what I am calling, “Moonstruck Mermaid Sandwiches”.

The first order of business was to cut out the hole in my whole wheat bread for the egg and peppers to fit inside. As much as I love Italian long bread, there was only whole wheat in the bread drawer, and since I was playing on two different themes, both needed equal representation. I suppose the hole could be any shape that will fit the slice, but wanting to stay authentic to the films, I chose the star cookie-cutter for my hole, the kind that Cher plunged into Winona’s masterpiece without a word whatsoever. If you don’t have solid metal cookie-cutters, (or just don’t like the shapes you have) I’d suggest using a knife and cutting your own shape. Plastic barely breaks through, and when it does, the piece doesn’t come out cleanly.

cutting out the shape into the bread — Good thing my hands were clean.

Don’t forget to butter or oil your bread so that you get a butter-infused golden crunch on the outside.

Buttering the bread — Buttery star-cut bread

In “Moonstruck”, the mother cooked the peppers separately and simply placed them over the finished egg. It’s a clever one-pan method for those who don’t want to dirty a bunch of bowls and need to condense the process of making breakfast into only 3 minutes. Yet, that seemed a bit bland to my imagination. Instead, I scrambled two eggs in a separate bowl, mixed them with some diced red pepper and let it cook inside as a sort of mini-omelet.

Diced red bell pepper — Our knife cuts need work.

Since “Moonstruck” takes place in the Italian part of Brooklyn, I chose the classic simple salt, pepper and garlic trio of seasoning. Since the red peppers would bring boldness to the dish, keeping spices simple would be more tasteful. It’s usually easier to keep the number of spices to a minimum than to risk overpowering your ingredients with seemingly your entire spice rack.

We scrambled and seasoned the eggs in a separate bowl. — Scramble and season the eggs and peppers to the side before they go into the pan

The trickiest part is definitely trying to fit every gooey morsel into such a tiny hole. I used only half of my mixture per slice. The thinner the bread, the less space you have to pour and the more likely, you’ll have a monsoon over your bread. Yet, with a thicker slice and more egg to fill it, the cook-time is harder to estimate. I’ve had eggs not cooked all the way through and by accident, felt semi-cooked mid-egg slime over my lips. Gross! It’s a sort of trial & error. I’m by no means a pro, but it’s roughly a minute maximum on medium heat per side as suggested by Anne Burrell on “Worst Cooks in America”. They cover the four basic egg breakfasts every season; over-easy, sunny side up, scrambled and poached.

An evenly filled slice toasting in the pan — This time, it didn’t over-fill.

Once both sides were done, it was time to get busy. The fridge was totally out of cold-cuts, so sauteed spinach was my best option. Making it a second time, Jeremy and I found that a sharp cheese adds depth to the egg and using a sweet bread compliments the spice of the pepper. We also had some extra egg, so we heated it up in the pan and slid it in with some fresh romaine lettuce instead of spinach. We wished there was a way to maintain the crunchiness of the toast without burning it, but we agreed it beat biting into a crusty rock.

Why not try this out with mushrooms and onions? Maybe you want to add condiments like salsa, mustard. Maybe you prefer sausage, eggplant, or chicken in the middle. You can have the middle be anything you want in a breakfast sandwich. We recommend mushrooms. For all we know, you may like it best with carrot and apple slices. In short, make it your own.

The ingredients we used, eggs, cheese, lettuce, toast and butter. — Got to be prepared!

Now, what to do with the cut pieces? What else, but toast them up and make a “Mermaids” finger sandwich? Breakfast like this may have seemed like “too much of a commitment” to Cher’s “Mermaids” character…

Our Moonstruck Sandwich tasted zesty with cheese. — Ours tasted zesty with the sweetness of the bread complimenting the spicy pepper.

but honestly, this combo is totally worth it!

March 24, 2018July 9, 2018

Cloudy with a Chance of Eggs

Food trends in the 2010’s are getting more and more mystical and whimsical by the minute. A recent one follows the lovable unicorn path with the name, “cloud eggs”. It’s a variation of the sunny-side up that requires the whites to be airy, fluffy and form a cloud shape, as the name suggests. I put my hand to the version offered in a YouTube video by Tasty. The whites are whipped and seasoned with a little salt and pepper and baked separately in the oven before the egg yolk is placed inside, where it cooks as one unit to ensure a runny but cooked yolk without losing the puffiness of the whites. This is not only artistic, but made without a frying pan or excess oil and butter which will cut down on trans-fats.

There is no question in using a mixer or whipping by hand. The quickest way to achieve that foamy cloud is to use a hand-mixer, especially for those who (like me) have some sort of tendonitis, arthritis or hand-injury. Comments for this recipe said that it took others a half hour to use a manual whisk. The consistency is thick so the whites don’t ooze over the pan out of shape. To be specific, this is how to make a basic “meringue”. Tasty uses a step-by step video without mentioning terms so that the average cook from teen to adult can follow them without any confusing logomachies. Be sure to scoop a hole in the center for your yolk later on, or it won’t be able to sit properly in your cloud.

The trickiest part is the oven. I wonder if the Tasty oven is convection, because they had given the temperature 450 Fahrenheit for 8-10 minutes. I tried 10 using a convection oven and found myself scraping off crispy brown clouds similar to pork rinds. Not only that, but I had forgotten to grease the pan and scoured the pan clean. I was surprised at the difference. However, I found another video by Tech Insider that marks the same temperature, but at half the time. Considering that the oven is used twice, I believe that the Tech Insider video would be more convection oven friendly. My mother has had similar mishaps when transitioning from a standard oven to a convection oven in her muffin making. Based on basic physics, the convection oven seems more appropriate to fill the meringue with hot air and better prevent them from falling vs. flat conduction. As for seasonings, do it to taste. This simple duo comes through strongly, so it’s best to opt for a pinch in the hand, not a shake from the container.

Although I never fully finished making the cloud eggs, (so help my pan!) I did try the crunchy outcome and saved the yolks for later recipes that may require them separated. I found they tasted much like air-popped popcorn with a hint of Styrofoam on the outside. Overcooking not only affects the flavor, but texture as well. The inside stayed a somewhat middle consistency and tasted as I would guess was intended, warm, foamy and slightly sweet bliss. From this we learn to know your equipment, be able to compensate for different gadgetry and more importantly, grease the pan before it goes into the oven!