A homemade PAP Sandwich (better than it sounds)

Take a long look at this sandwich. Notice anything different about it? Eeeew, just cuz I put that in the title? No, PAP stands for Pancetta, Arugula and Parmesan, the ingredients in this tasty morsel. But even better than that, I made it all. I baked the bread for the sandwich last weekend (didn’t post on it, not as good as it ought to be. Will be trying that one again). My co-worker, Lauren over at CheeeseToast and I had cured the pancetta. Either she or I will post the details on that shortly, but it was an extremely fun and scrumptious experiment which we will definetly be repeating. Then I added some arugula from last weeks farmer’s market and a bit of parmesan, and I had my own perfect little homemade sandwich. A PAP Sandwich.

Does Serious Eating Run in the Family?

My little brother is coming to town this weekend. Here is the conversation between the brother and myself:

from N

to B

date Tue, May 13, 2008 at 9:59 AM
subject Schedule of Events

Ha! I’m scheduling you in for events since  my usual partner in crime will have abandoned me for Japan for the week. Please let me know what you do or don’t want to participate in.
 
Sunday: There is a cheese festival at the pike place market. It’s supposed to be nice out. And there are cheeses. And wine. Should be a good time. I’ll need you here, you don’t want to be at a cheese festival with a wussy eater.
Monday: I don’t work. I’ve never had a paseo sandwich and was considering a culinary research trip to fremont to investigate. Evening: I’m probably doing a review of the new Vietnamese place next door to that Thai place we went last time you were home, I’ve been before, it is pretty good and there are delicous spicy baby clams.
Tues: Perhaps a trip to ballard for pub trivia at the place I used to give them? I have like $100 in free food/beer there. I wouldn’t eat the food though. That’s a lot of beer.

from B

to N

date Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:06 AM
subject RE: Schedule of Events
  yep, sounds great sign me up.

 

***

In non-brother related news I was on a run yesterday and started thinking about how I don’t own a kitchenaid stand mixer. Yes, this is pretty much what I think about like 20% of the time. At least 20% is on my next meal, and another 20% is on the the meal after that. That leaves 20% for future meals and another 20% for not tripping and falling on my face. But back to the mixer, or lack there of. Then I got to thinking about how I currently have a cruddy hand held mixer that only has one beater. It was a hand me down, and I was only handed down one (small) beater. There were also two large ones, but upon investigation, these did not fit into the mixer I was given. There is a line in a Bloodhound Gang song where they just sing “The drummer from Def Leopard’s only got one arm” over and over again. Well, while I ran I sang “The mixer in my kitchen’s only got one arm” over and over, to the same tune.

I am such a food nerd. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed running to it.

Sundays are Good Days

I woke up this morning and went up to the first day of the Broadway Farmer’s Market as it opened at 11am. Perusing the market, I actually managed to get out with out spending ridiculous amounts of money, but with a large amount of delicious food. I’ve only been home for about an hour and I’ve already had two different kinds of arugula salad. Here are my variations for home use: anchovy filets, sauteed in olive oil, hot oil poured over the top of the arugula to wilt it, then crisp up asiago cheese in the oven and sprinkle for crunch. Salt, pepper. Version two, used oil left clinging to the pan to make an egg white omelette (had eggs whites leftover from making ice cream yesterday), stuffed the omelette with a whomping pile of arugula and a touch of parmesan, sprinkled with red pepper flakes. 

Now that I’m suitably fed, I want to tell you about the corner store by my house. “Don’t go there late at night!” warned a friend of ours. She is from Arizona, so I don’t really trust her on these things, but still, I must admit that this place has its fair share of crack addicts and hangers on sitting outside at all times. But in I wandered, on a tip from B that they had all kinds of spices and stuff. Yeah, all kinds. Saffron boxes for 3.99 (usually about $6.50) and bulk spices of all kinds–turmeric, star anise, you name it. I bought sardines in tomato and chile sauce, because they intrigued me. It was amazing, from the outside your average ghetto mart, but inside an Indian grocery store. I resisted buying any of the many kinds of chutney or Indian dinners they had, but I know I’ll be back. There is nothing as great as wandering on a sunday and making a great discovery.

On People Who Don’t Like Food

I know I’m a snobby person. This has never been a doubt in my mind. Snobby in that if people don’t agree with me, I have trouble keeping my sharp tongue in check (this never gets me in trouble. Ever.). As I recently got into good food (you noticed?) I have become snobbier about food. I try to claim I don’t dislike foods, that I’m willing to try anything–though you’ll rarely find me ordering marinara or chicken. But the biggest change is how snobby I have become towards people who don’t enjoy food.

This weekend, in Vancouver for my half-marathon, Vancouver my favorite food destination for delicious Izakaya treats and dim sum delicicies, I discovered I was with three food haters. They don’t come out and say “oh I don’t like food” but they don’t enjoy good food. They eat for the sole purpose of survival, not for enjoyment. It hurts me to watch. I hadn’t yet realized the extent of this when I suggested my favorite quick cheap dinner spot in the area, Legendary Noodle. The vegan (who eats seafood) among us ordered steamed chinese broccoli hold the oyster sauce add extra broccoli. I hung my head in shame. Other culinary disasters that were ordered included pan-fried dumplings, but steamed, and with chicken. Chicken, my friends, was not made for dumplings. If it must be in them, frying them can save it, but this, this was not saved. I can’t begin to recount the many culinary travesties that were commited this weekend (”Can I get the smoked salmon appetizer, but as my meal. And can you add something to it so that it isn’t just salmon?”), but there were alot. A favored meal for the weekend was accomplished by a trip to the grocery store: white bread, sliced chicken breast, provolone cheese (no condiments please), for one girl, plain whole wheat tortilla with bean dip for another.

So what is my point? In my striving for great food, have I lost the ability to enjoy food with normal people? Or are these girls abnormal? I make fun of vegetarians for sport, but let’s be honest, my friends that are vegetarians eat well, they still love food. Maybe I don’t have a point and I just wanted to complain about my weekend. Maybe I’m internally chastising myself for being unable to resist snarky comments about what these girls wanted to eat. Or perhaps I’m just said nobody understood why I was upset when my tagliatelli came and was actually fettucini and when my croque madame had tomatoes on it!

Deconstructed Vietnamese Shrimp Wraps

I was going to make summer rolls. You know, the kind you get at every Vietnamese restaurant. They are like the perfect food–fresh, delicious, healthy. The fact is, though, it takes a fair amount of work to make them for dinner. You have to soak each wrap individually, then quickly make the wrap, store them under a wet towel while you make the other ones and hope they don’t dry out too quickly. So tonight, as I prepared to make them, I felt a bout of laziness waft over me. No, I wasn’t making summer rolls. Now I had to think on my feet. Pretty much all we had were summer roll ingredients (why I had chosen to make them in the first place). Then it hit me, I could make them, just without actually MAKING them. I grilled the shrimp, I made the peanut sauce (3 parts peanut butter, 1 part coconut milk, 1 part soy sauce) and I ripped up the basil and mint leaves. Instead of the work of wrapping them all up individually, though, I just tossed them on a pile of rice noodles. Easy as hell, probably took like 5 minutes total. Swashed the whole thing with sriracha, and there you have it.

Restaurant Review 360: Jasmine and The first SFBA

Two very exciting and cool events coming up here on the blog. First off, I’m hosting the May Restaurant Review 360 event. First hosted last month on Herbivoracious, this means that a whole slew of us Seattle area food bloggers all review the same restaurant, then I’ll round them up and post an overview of the reviews. I’m very excited to take on the event, and have chosen Jasmine Provincial Vietnamese Restaurant. It is relatively new and has recieved complimentary reviews, so I think it fits as a candidate.

Bloggers: All you’ve got to do is review this restaurant by May 20th and link back to this post and I’ll get you included on the event. If you have any questions, you can leave a comment or find my info under “about”.

The First SFBA: What? You don’t know about the SFBA?? Ha! That’s because I just invented it! No, seriously I was thinking of all the great Seattle food blogs I read and how I wish there was a way to honor the best posts and bloggers who are really doing great work for the local food blog community. It is the Seattle Food Blogger Award. I had previously commented that Keren over at Frantic Foodie does great work with her food blogger dinners and the folks over at MSG150 are doing with their round up of the ID. So now I’ve instituted a new monthly feature here, and I’m kicking it off a day early so it coincides with the Restaurant Review 360. Why? Because the first award is going to Herbivoracious for the starting of the Restaurant Review 360.

Thanks, Herbivoracious, for providing Seattle food bloggers a way to connect with each other and get to know each others’ views of the same stuff, all on their own schedule. It is fun, informative and very cool. The very first Seattle Food Blogger Award goes to you!

(I’m working on designing a widget for you!)

Thoughts on Eating Locally

Eating local is something that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue these days–you’ve heard it–look at labels, shop at farmers’ markets, etc, etc. I agree, I would rather have my food come from nearby than shipped halfway across the country where it had to be picked before ripening so it could hold up to the shipping process. I do shop at farmers’ markets, a fair amount, though mostly for the cheap stuff, since I can’t often afford $14/lb lamb and the such.

Where my issue with this is comes from who I’m supporting. I love the idea of supporting my local farmers’ over the huge coporate stores, but I don’t often shop in those, so when I am shopping at the farmers’ market, it is the mom and pop asian markets that are losing my business. I used to feel guilty when I went to the asian market, I don’t know how my duck was raised, I don’t know where my greens were grown. I know the tofu comes from the factory down the street, so that is nice (though it is 50 cents cheaper at the factory). For a while I had felt guilty buying at the asian mart, supporting the wrong people, not getting local produce. Then today I realized I am eating locally, a different kind of locally.

When I say I eat locally, I want it to mean I support my community. Whether this means that my greens are grown in Carnation or it means that I’m supporting the immigrant couple that run the Ethiopian store down the street (Piassa Market), I know that my money is staying here in Seattle. Maybe my lentils aren’t grown nearby, but the money I’m paying for them is paying for my neighborhood to remain diverse. Perhaps my bok choy comes from California, but the money I pay for it is going to pay to raise children here in Seattle. I may not know where my mango comes from, but I know that by eating locally that no company in Minnesota or Boston is hording my milk money.

I’m going to a dinner entitled “Eat Local” tonight. I’m interested in where the organizers feel these options lie on the spectrum of locality.

Know Your Limits

There is a reticence I feel when writing about screwing up a dish. Nobody wants to read about bad food, why would they read articles by someone who makes the same mistakes they could? So after a failure this weekend, I was hesitant to write this morning. Never-mind that I successfully made ice cream twice this weekend, my first two times (caramel and sea salt and honey-rosemary). That is not what I think about as I sit down to inform my readers out there in internet land. I can think only of my screw ups this weekend.

I’ve long known that baking is not for me. I don’t like measuring and I hate recipes, baking is an exact science, these are necessities. With cooking I can toss and taste and fix and play, but with baking everything must be done as told. Last fall I posted about a messed up pumpkin pie. Today it was meringues. I had 10 leftover egg whites from making ice cream with the yolk and, of course, plenty of baker’s sugar. So the thing that came to mind was meringues. They didn’t work. An hour and a half, three tired pairs of arms and one wussy one armed mixer later, we gave up. It only went on this long because I have great friends who helped and tried to encourage me to keep trying, helping to whip while I prepared the salmon for dinner. But in the end, it was a failure.

So what comes out of this? I think the lesson is that I’ve learned my limits. I just won’t follow a recipe, so why should I try? Yes, it would make me a more well rounded cook, but it is just painful when it happens, and let’s be honest, I don’t really like sweet stuff anyways (except caramel and sea salt ice cream!). So I will continue to perfect my ability to cook delicious savory items and if you ever come to dinner, expect your only dessert to be ice cream!

A Thai Treat

On the street that I work, like so many in Seattle, there are multiple Thai restaurants. I happen to prefer Samui over Jamjuree, but my boss and the controller disagree. So when we take the occaissonal lunch outside of the office, it is usually to Jamjuree, as was the case today.  It was the usual fare, nothing out of the ordinary, fairly Americanized Thai fare. What stood out to me was not the food, nor the service (which was actually a cut above, friendly, prompt and overly curteous).

Everything on the menu, in classic Asian lunch special fashion came with rice, except for the noodle meals, which made it difficult for me to order anything. It is, you see, Passover, the Jewish holiday during which I am forbidden to eat anything with wheat or grains, basically. No rice, no noodles. I ordered the Tom Yum noodle soup, a seafood soup (yes, I eat shrimp, yes, I see the irony), but with out the noodles. When it came, lo and behold, there were no noodles, which in and of itself was impressive.

As I began eating I noticed a ton of bean sprouts. You know, the kind that they give you too many of on bad phad thai. But instead of annoyingly being in the way of my noodles, here they were amazing. I looked over at J’s soup, as he had ordered the same thing, but with the noodles. Nope, no bean sprouts. The restaurant had kindly realized that my soup would be lacking without the noodles and replaced them with the nearest noodle like vegetable. My heart was warmed. So was my mouth, but that was more due to the amount of hot sauce I added.

Doing Things Twice: Mango Salad and Duck Prosciutto

Some parents have to ask their kids “if Jimmy jumped off a bridge would you” because their kids are liable to follow. Not me. My parents had to be out in front, pulling dangerous objects (electrical sockets, sharp knives) out of my path, hoping that I did not get the idea to jump off a bridge. I never feared trying things once, and I certainly didn’t need a friend to do it first. No, my problem is with doing things a second time.

This continues to be true with my cooking. I have a lot of mangoes and duck prosciutto, I’ll make a daringly spicy salad. That’s easy. What’s harder for me is to go back and try it a second time. To make those improvements. As you can see on my blog (and all of my elementary school teachers knew) I don’t like to go back, to check my work, to re-do anything. But this is my big area for improvement. Instead of just making things once, I will make them a second time. And you know what? My mango salad was better the second time! The picture above is from the first time, we discovered the prosciutto imparts more taste when it is chopped up in small pieces where they coat and stick to the mango chunks. I chose this picture, though, because it is prettier with the swoosh of prosciutto running through.

This makes enough for 8-10 people as a side dish or appetizer:

2 Mangos, diced

1/2 red onion, diced

Juice of 2 limes

1 Tablespoon Sambal Oelek (Sriracha aka rooster sauce should work too)

1 Teaspoon of Soy Sauce

1 Teaspoon sesame oil

7 thin slices of duck prosciutto, chopped

Mix the soy, oil, lime juice and sambal together, mix the onion and mango together. Pour the dressing over the onion and mango and toss to coat. This was an important order to do things, because it really helped adhere the small pieces of prosciutto to the mango instead of letting them fall to the bottom of the bowl. Toss in the prosciutto and mix well, serve immediately or chill up to 2 hours in the fridge, then return to room temperature to serve.