Zambra (Ashville): two smiley faces. Good, creative tapas and cocktails, nice wine list, good service (particularly considering the size of our group), nice atmosphere.
What happens if you go back after 15 years?
hmm, I've definitely fallen out of the habit of doing this... but that's no reason not to do some nano-restaurant reviews.
From our visit to Toronto... in no particular order:
I'm not sure how the anise-chocolate pairing came to mind, but there it was...
Roasted chicken using Ruhlmann's technique.
Belgian endive caramelized with butter, brown sugar, and lime juice (recipe from Hesser).
Multi-grain "risotto" drizzled with the chicken pan drippings and topped with green onions that were roasted with the chicken.
Big spitzkohl salad.
Very, very good eating.
I'm not quite sure how it ended up being a salad day...
Salad one: grated carrots, reduced orange juice (reduced by about a factor of three), olive oil, cumin, piment d'espellette, salt, white pepper.
Salad two: small green lentils cooked with bay leaf and clove, diced and browned bacon, diced carrot, minced red onion, garlic, caramelized leek, chives, chopped parsley, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, white pepper.
Salad three: lettuce with a creamy dressing
We ate this with a nice baguette.
Something like steak and potatoes. :-)
I did my standard roesti approach (floury potatoes this time since that's what we had) and paired that with "charbonnade" cuts of beef that I seasoned and seared.
Together with a big salad we were happy eaters.
After reading this incredibly minimal chocolate mousse recipe there was no question about not trying it.
I used a good dark (70%) chocolate and the result is really amazing. It's almost a better way to taste chocolate than straight-up.
Been a while since we did the Bittman chicken, chickpea, and vanilla tajine... that's too bad because it's good stuff.
To accompany the expected: cous cous
This was a random one after getting back from a long weekend of snowshoeing.
Half some belgian endive then put them cut-side down in a very hot pan with a bit of oil. Let sear for a couple minutes then add the braising liquid (veal stock, grainy french mustard, tomato paste, honey, black pepper), cover and let simmer until the endive is tender, about 45 minutes.
We ate this as a main course, toppped with grana padano and accompanied by brown rice.
Hooray for making it up as you go along!
With all the cold weather making a fondue was the most natural thing in the world.
Standard approach: 400g cheese mixture from the shop around the corner, 200ml white wine, 1/2Tbs corn starch, one garlic clove, a shot of kirsch, black pepper, and nutmeg.
Served with good farm bread (also from the cheese shop), peppermint tea, and a carrot salad.
It's the BittmanWorld thing again...
Melt some sugar and get it to a good dark caramel. Add lime juice and stir well. Once the fierce bubbling has settled down some, stir in some fish sauce too. Stir until the sugar is dissolved and then let stand over low heat.
Brown some chicken leg quarters well in neutral oil. Pour off the oil, add some dried chilis (I used piri-piri, because that's what was there), toast a minute or two, then add the sauce and a bit of water. Cover and let simmer for about an hour, turning occasionally.
Serve with sticky rice, sprinkled with some chopped cilantro.
To accompany I shredded some savoy cabbage, tossed it with salt and let stand for an hour, then rinsed, squeezed it out well and tossed with lime juice, sesame oil, and chopped cilantro.
The head of savoy cabbage in the fridge led both of us to the idea of doing rouladen. I deviated from the usual ground beef preparation since it was the weekend and I felt like playing around a bit.
A variant on the standard potato-leek soup.
Cook some sliced leek with a pinch of salt in peanut oil until it starts to soften. Add diced carrot and celery root and let cook another 5 minutes or so. Add diced potato and water and let simmer until the potato is soft. Puree. Season with Old Bay, cardamon, curry powder, black pepper, and piment d'espelette.
A soup that kind of just kept on evolving as I was making it:
This started off as pork and beans, but somewhere along the way I realized that some greens would go nicely.
Soak soisson beans overnight. Drain and transfer to the slow cooker with water to cover by 1-2cm. Add diced carrot and celery root, sliced leek, bay leaf, and cloves. Cover and turn the heat on the slow cooker to "high". Cut some pork shoulder into 2cm dice. Brown that well and add to the beans. After 2-2.5 hours of cooking use a couple spoonfuls of the liquid to thin a mixture of ketchup, tomato paste, some molasses, and a bit of sriracha. Stir this into the pot and adjust seasoning. Cook however much longer it takes to get the beans cooked through. About half an hour or so before serving, stir in some chopped spitzkohl.
I forgot to soak the beans overnight, so they only had a few hours of soaking in the morning. After 4 hours of cooking they still weren't soft, so I tossed everything in the pressure cooker for 10 minutes; that finished the beans.
This was really nice food.
A nice side:
Sweat some diced onion and garlic with a good pinch of salt in olive oil until the onions are nicely translucent. Add diced carrot and cook another five or so minutes until the carrots start to soften. Add coarsely chopped radicchio and some herbes de provence and cover. Let cook, stirring occasionally, until the radicchio softens.
At some point the beets in the fridge prompted the idea of borscht. We had all the ingredients (aside from the beef, dill, and sour cream) to do the recipe in Hesser, and that recipe sounded awfully good. So... that's what I did.
I followed the recipe pretty much verbatim and we ended up with something very, very good.
It takes a long time to make, but wow is this great stuff.
I got back from a long trip craving vegetables, this is where that led.
We both had a craving for Mexican, so that's what I did.
For the sauce: roast, peel, and chop some red peppers. Sweat chopped leek together with garlic and a pinch of salt until it starts to take on some color. Add sliced chiles and cook another few minutes. Add the chopped red peppers, some crushed tomatoes, and enough water to loosen it up a bit. Simmer, covered, for 30 minutes. Puree with a stick blender. Add sweet paprika, oregano, and black pepper and let simmer another few minutes.
For the beans: cook soaked pintos in the pressure cooker with onion, garlic, bay leaf, salt, and water (not too much!) for 20 minutes. Remove the lid and simmer, partially covered, until the beans are soft and the overall water level looks good. In a separate pan, cook chopped onion and garlic until the onion is nicely translucent and taking on some brown. Add the beans and mash with a potato masher. Adjust seasoning and simmer a couple more minutes.
For the enchiladas: season some turkey-breast cutlets well and then search on both sides. Slice into strips. Combine the turkey with diced feta cheese in a tortillas. Roll them and arrange them on a bed of sauce in a baking dish. Top with more sauce and grated cheese. Bake at 180C until the top is brown and bubbly. Serve the beans on the side
goooooood food.
One of my rare roasted chickens (last one was in 2010).
When a nice head of escarole shows up in the biokiste, it's really hard not to just make beans and greens with it...
This time it was a pretty minimal variant: sweat the onions in olive oil with garlic, piri piri chiles, and some diced bacon until nicely transparent. Add the coarsely-chopped escarole, a splash of white wine, and some salt and cook until the escarole is about ready to go. Add canned cannellini beans with their liquid and another splash of wine. Let the beans heat through, adjust seasoning, and then serve drizzled with good olive oil and sprinkled with parsley.
Almost rule_of_five, almost vegetarian, fully good. :-)
Another iBittmanVeg recipe followed incompletely. I should add a "substantial_deviation_from_published_recipe" tag or something. ;-)
Cut some potatoes into wedges and toss them into a pot of water with a thickly sliced onion. Salt and bring to a boil. Add quinoa. Cook for another five minutes, then drain. Add to a baking dish with some olive oil. Salt and pepper and mix well. Bake at 210C for 15 minutes. Stir. Bake another 10 minutes. Stir in some piment d'espelette and more black pepper. Top with grated cheese and bake until the cheese is brown and bubbly.
The potatoes unfortunately didn't get crispy, but the grain had a nice crunch and the whole thing tasted great.
Derived from a recipe in iBittmanVeg
Cook a cup and half of brown rice together with a half cup of small green lentils in boiling salted water for 15 minutes. Drain. Meanwhile cook a sliced leek in butter with a good pinch of salt over medium-high heat until it starts to take on some color. Add some pine nuts and a pinch of saffron and let cook until the leeks are nicely caramelized. Toss the rice and lentils with salt, a lemon's worth of zest, and some coarsely ground cardamom (about 1/2 tsp). Melt more butter together with some olive oil at the bottom of a heavy pan and stir in a handful of saffron. Layer on half the rice/lentils, the leeks, and then the other half rice/lentils. Add a splash of water, cover with a tight-fitting lid covered with a towel, and cook over medium-high heat until it starts to sizzle. Reduce the heat to low and cook for another 30 minutes. Let rest 5 minutes and then serve.
I was a bit nervous about this being heavy or in the "sawdust and cardboard" school of vegetarian, but I didn't need to worry: the dish ended up being quite good.
Some simple comfort food to help recover from the holidays:
Sweat diced onion together with diced carrot and bacon in a bit of neutral oil in the pressure cooker until the onion is glassy (5-10 minutes). Add washed yellow split peas, a good pinch of salt, black pepper, herbs de provence, white wine, and water, put on the lid, and bring up to pressure over high heat. Drop the heat to medium-low and cook for 20 minutes. Remove the lid, stir well to break up the remaining peas, add a splash of wine, adjust seasonings, and serve with good bread and butter.
To accompany this I did a salad of grated carrots tossed with OJ, olive oil, salt, black pepper, cumin, and ras al hanout.
We did this last year too.
This year's contents: beef filet, pork belly, pork loin, chicken breast, yellow peppers, scallions, carrots, mushrooms, broccoli, zucchini.
Dipping sauces: ketjap manis and garlic; ketjap manis and ginger; soy sauce, chile oil, and ginger; chile oil.
It's great food and makes for great pictures.
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| The spread |
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| In progress |
