Day 328: Perfect Night For Takeout

Takeout was invented for nights like tonight.  I didn't get home until after 8pm and my thumb is still healing from Monday's kitchen accident so cooking was just simply not going to happen.  We hadn't supported our favorite neighborhood Chinese restaurant in a long time, so Country Sky takout it was!

Primarily, I focused on my favorite CS dish, Spicy Prawns with Mango.  In addition to the obvious ingredients, this dish includes mushrooms, broccoli, and zucchini.  Over brown rice it makes for a very yummy, quite spicy dinner.

I also allowed myself a treat in the form of the Singapore Style Noodles that my husband ordered.  These super thin noodles are tossed with curry seasoning, pork, chicken, shrimp, fried egg, and veggies.  It is really amazing.

Of course, there is always a dessert when you have Chinese food - the fortune cookie.  Despite the fact that most of the time these days you don't get a fortune (you get a proverb or a friendly suggestion to do something), these are still tasty treats that I always look forward to.  Hopefully my real fortune  is "your thumb will heal quickly"!

Day 174: Merry Christmas to All!

If you grew up in a Jewish household in the US, you likely celebrated Christmas just as I always did.  Say it with me now - Chinese food and a movie!

Having married someone who is not Jewish, the Chinese food dinner has been replaced with a gourmet Christmas dinner, usually prepared at home.  But I'm not ready to abandon my idea of a traditional Jewish Christmas and so we switched things up this year and went out for a Chinese food lunch.  Or, I should say, we tried to.  I was saddened to find our local Chinese restaurant closed - especially since we phoned them up yesterday to make sure they'd be open.  And so, no Chinese food for me this year - instead, I had a tuna melt.

Fortunately I had an amazing meal in which to drown my sorrows tonight.  Late in the afternoon, we began with sparking wine, shrimp cocktail, and goat cheese with baked whole grain crackers.

After we had enjoyed that, my husband lit up the grill and began to cook a 4-rib rack of pork - low and slow.  We saw this cut of meat prepared by Guy Fieri on the Food Network a couple of weeks ago and decided to give a try as something special for our Christmas dinner.  The best part?  My husband was more than eager to be in charge of this meal - after all, it involved a huge piece of meat and the grill.  A man's dream!

My husband created a yummy homemade marinade last night and the pork bathed in it for about 20 hours prior to cooking.

Marinade:

3 T honey

4 cloves of garlic, chopped

1 tsp Chinese Five Spice Powder

1/4 cup whiskey

Prior to putting the meat on the grill, he strained the marinade to avoid burning the garlic, added 3 T olive oil, and used that mixture to baste the pork every 20-30 minutes.  In all, the pork spent nearly 3 hours on the grill until it reached an internal temperature of 160 degrees.

To accompany the pork, I made a simple side dish of sugar snap peas and shitake mushrooms.  The peas marinated for about an hour in the juice of 1/2 a lemon, 1 T white wine, 1 T olive oil, 1 tsp honey, 2 smashed cloves of garlic, and two shakes of cayenne pepper.  I added the mushrooms to the mix about 15 minutes before I was ready to cook them.

The whole mixture - marinade and all - was sauteed in a heavy saucepan, preheated with about 1 T of olive oil.  As they were cooking I added S&P and cooked everything for 6 or 7 minutes.

All of this was enjoyed tree-side.  Who needs Chinese food.  Merry Christmas to all - and to all a good night!

Day 164: Not My Best Work :(

I've recognized a trend.  Nights when I come home cranky, I just do not cook very good food.  Tonight was one of those nights - I was cranky to begin with and only got crankier after grocery shopping & cooking complications.   

Tonight's dinner was 5-spice crusted pork with roasted cauliflower and asparagus.  Let's start with the pork chops.  My plan had been to purchase pork tenderloin, which I have absolutely mastered.  Unfortunately, Whole Foods was out of them (huh?) and with no back-up plan, I settled for a couple of super thick boneless pork chops.  I ignored my instinct to take a mallet to those chops to flatten them out a bit and speed up the cooking time and therefore, had a really difficult time cooking them through.  I managed to get a lovely crust on the outside, but the middle was still too rare so I wound up slicing and nuking them for a minute.  That, of course, caused them to toughen up and dry up.

Despite the toughness and dryness, the flavor was good.  5-spice powder is a Chinese seasoning that is absolutely divine on pork.  If you've never tried it, give it a shot.  You'll find it in the seasoning section at most supermarkets.

Our cauliflower and asparagus side dish was inspired by a recipe I found on Epicurious.com and prepared for our Thanksgiving meal.  I sliced up a head of cauliflower and laid it flat on a rimmed baking sheet and then sprinkled salt and cayenne pepper over the top.  I laid a bunch of thin asparagus over the top and salted that layer.  The veggies roasted at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes.  While they cooked, I melted 2 T butter in a small saucepan and whisked in 1 T olive oil, 1 T lemon juice, and 1 heaping tsp dijon mustard.  

Using a pastry brush, I coated the veggies with the mixture and returned them to the oven for another 10 minutes.

The only thing I really did wrong with the veggies was the over generous sprinkling of cayenne.  It was really a bit too spicy.

So lots of lessons in tonight's entry:  wield the mallet when necessary, take it easy on the cayenne, and when cranky...order in!!

Day 157: Chinese Penicillin

I woke up today and, pardon my French, I felt like crap.  By the end of the day, I felt better, but still some queasiness remained.  Whenever I don't feel particularly well, I crave a big bowl of won ton soup from our neighborhood Chinese restaurant, Country Sky.  

You may know that chicken noodle soup is often referred to as Jewish penicillin but did you know that won ton soup is Chinese penicillin?  At least it is for me!  I almost always feel tons better after a big bowl of it.

Do you have a favorite food remedy when you aren't feeling well?