Category Archives: Cooking

Eggs

Posted on March 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

Forget hand bumps of caviar. Springing for pasture-raised organic eggs these days is the real flex; that is, if you can find them in the grocery store. Eggs are expensive right now, and inflation isn’t the only culprit. Apparently a bird flu outbreak has contributed to the high prices with millions of birds needing to be culled.

Still, we can’t get enough eggs. Americans eat an average of 300 eggs per year per person. Whether you like them poached, fried, scrambled, deviled, or in a cake, eggs have a seemingly infinite number of uses. You can use egg whites to clarify stock, as a face mask, and for a myriad of other uses if you are feeling like channeling your inner hippy.

As a savory breakfast kind of gal, eggs are an essential part of my morning plate (or afternoon, or midnight…eggs can happen at any time of day!). As a kid, my mom made me soft boiled eggs for breakfast. So simple and delicious – two soft-cooked eggs in a small bowl with salt and pepper. And hard boiled eggs for an afternoon snack – cut in half and sprinkled with salt and pepper, maybe some hot sauce.

In college, I cracked an egg into my almost cooked instant ramen and crowned it with a slice of american cheese and a drizzle of sriracha. I considered myself a fully formed adult when I started using egg cups for soft boiled eggs. Boil some water and, when bubbling gently, carefully lower your room temp eggs into the water. Cook and swirl for one minute so that the yolk settles in the center, and then cook for an additional 3 minutes and thirty seconds. Use a slotted spoon to transfer your eggs to the egg cups, narrow end down. Cut the very top off the eggs with a sharp knife and sprinkle on salt and pepper. Use buttery toast cut into spears to transport the egg goo to your mouth. Then more salt and pepper, and use a spoon to scoop the white out. Chef’s kiss!

Egg yolk also makes for a creamy vinaigrette or a luxurious pasta sauce. Spaghetti carbonara anyone? Save the whites for meringue. Ha! Who am I kidding? When was the last time I made a meringue? NEVER, actually. Sure, I save the whites in a plastic container with the date written neatly on top. They sit in the fridge until I discover them a month later and toss. Egg whites only keep for a week in the fridge (several months in the freezer though). Honestly, I don’t feel bad about it. The white is kind of bs. Even the crows leave that behind.

Times may be tough for egg lovers, but my egg-thusiasm shall not be cracked! Please enjoy these snaps from a few recent egg-centric meals. And let’s take a moment to appreciate all those egg-layers that make our breakfasts brighter.

Photo by Oleksandr Pidvalnyi on Pexels.com

The Limit & The Luxury of The Recipe

Posted on November 10, 2022 | Leave a comment

Have you ever made a recipe so often that it begins to evolve? Maybe you start combining two versions of a recipe, taking what you like best from each. Or you use an ingredient in a different way and it ends up being better. However it comes about, you find yourself finessing, rather than following (directions). Congratulations, you have leveled up your cooking skills!

In my experience, cooks (and I am speaking about home cooks here, because I don’t feel qualified to make generalizations about our professional counterparts) generally fall on a spectrum that ranges from those who follow recipes to those who do not. For some, recipes are commandments not to be ignored, lest the culinary gods bring down the holy hell of a broken sauce, an over-spiced soup, or a rubbery scallop, on your next dinner party. Others intuit their way through the process. To them, recipes are suggestions, inspiration. I envy these people because I have always been in the former camp. That said, I would love for my cooking to be easy, casual; a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Taste, adjust, and voila! Instead, I am reading a recipe, then reading it again, and mentally checking off each step as I go. I am pretty good at following recipes while leaving a little room for inspiration, so my dishes generally turn out well. However, I am not doing anything original or innovative and I am not really challenging myself. More recently though, I have noticed that I feel more comfortable veering off the rails, and I believe it is because of the simple fact that at this point in my life, there are certain dishes that I have made a lot.

Chicken Piccata is one of them. Sometimes I use Ina’s recipe and sometimes I use Giada’s recipe. I like the crunchiness of Ina’s cutlets and the silkiness of Giada’s sauce. I like lemons and capers, so why not use both? I like a lot of sauce, so why not use chicken stock, wine and lemon juice? Let’s live a little!

Small adjustments such as the above are great, but sometimes a whole “new” recipe is born. Wanting to preserve the spirit of chicken picatta, but use my preferred chicken parts (bone-in thighs) and give Andrew a break on dish duty, I created a sheet pan version I am calling Piccata’ed Baked Chicken Thighs.

Piccata’ed Baked Chicken Thighs

This is a simple, easy recipe that requires only a few ingredients and pretty straightforward steps. It is also a recipe that benefits from some prep ahead of time (the salting) though this is not strictly necessary.

Serves 4

4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
1 lemon
8 cloves garlic
1 heaping tablespoon capers
salt and pepper
olive oil
1 cup chicken stock

If able, salt the chicken a couple hours ahead of time with about half a teaspoon of salt per thigh and leave uncovered on a plate in the refrigerator.

Mash up the garlic and capers in a medium bowl with the juice of half the lemon. Season generously with salt and pepper. Taste. This should be almost too salty and tart.

Add the chicken and a few glugs of olive oil and toss. Let sit at room temp for 30 mins while you preheat the oven to 425 F.

Stuff some of the garlicky, capery marinade under the skin of each thigh along with a thin lemon slice from the other half of your lemon.

Arrange the chicken on a foil-lined half- or quarter-sheet pan then dump the remaining marinade all over.

Add the chicken stock to the pan and cook for 30-45 mins. The chicken is done when it reaches 165 F.

Serve with rice, pasta or mashed potatoes, spooning the sauce from the pan all over.

Non-traditional but still delicious. Cries out for some crusty bread for dipping!

Enjoy!

I am happy that I am at a place in my cooking journey where I can start to improvise more and use the skills that I have learned by following recipes to branch out and make food that I can be especially proud of as my own. Occasionally I hope to share these recipes on the blog under the title “Hungry Ginger Original.” Keep an eye out!

A Culinary Resolution: An Update

Posted on September 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

In an effort to cook more out of the cookbooks I own, I decided that for 2021, I would cook out of cookbooks I own, but have not used much (if at all). Generally, I would make an effort to regularly cook dishes from these cookbooks, snap some pics and try to learn a few new things. For the first cookbook, being indecisive, I decided to let the internet make the selection for me. I asked my friends on Facebook to vote for three options: Chez Panisse, Moosewood Cooks at Home, and Together. Moosewood Cooks at Home won by a hair.

Moosewood is the lauded vegetarian restaurant collective in Ithaca New York. Their most famous cookbook is simply titled Moosewood. I have cooked out of it before and loved the recipes so much that I bought their other two cookbooks, one focusing on world cuisine and the other easy home cooking recipes. I was looking forward to trying it out.

Flipping through the recipes, they looked a tad on the simplistic side but, in my experience, it is often the most humble dish that truly satisfies. I had some silken tofu in the fridge that needed using, so my first recipe was a Tofu Basil dressing. One of the suggested uses for it was as a dressing for new potatoes. I used red potatoes, diced them and boiled them un-peeled, and added the dressing when they were still a little warm. I think I didn’t cook the potatoes enough and I should have peeled them. The end result was potatoes covered in a thick, white, viscous substance reminiscent of…

So, 0 for 1. Soldiering on. The next two recipes I tried were cuban black beans and mango salsa. The beans wanted for flavor and were more sweet than savory as there was fresh squeezed OJ. I added some Tabasco to them which greatly improved the flavor. The mango salsa was also good and I served Jasmine rice, seasoned with lime juice and parsley and cooked with a little more liquid than usual so that the rice was slightly sticky and could be molded as you sometimes see in Caribbean restaurants.

Overall, I was pretty unimpressed with Moosewood Cooks At Home so the best thing that came out of Month 1 was that I gave that cookbook to Goodwill (and now have room for another cookbook!).

February’s cookbook was the January runner up, Chez Panisse. The first recipe I made was scallops with prosciutto and Mayer lemon relish. First I made the relish, which was just finely diced meyer lemons, shallot, parsley, chive, lemon juice and oil. It seems odd to eat something that is primarily diced up raw lemons but meyers are so sweet, that it was not sour but piquant and refreshing. I let the relish hang out while I made the scallops. Scallops are notoriously easy to overcook and whenever I make them, I think of the season of Top Chef where several contestants failed when cooking scallops, earning the show, briefly, the name Top Scallop. The trick with scallops is to cook them in a hot pan, briefly on both sides so they caramelize on the outside but remain creamy on the inside. It’s easy, if you don’t have a very hot pan, to leave them on too long, waiting for that maillard reaction to take place and ending up with rubbery scallops. The cookbook suggested heating the pan up, putting the scallops in and cooking in a 425 degree oven for 5 mins. I did this but flipped the scallops right at the end so both sides were browned.

I served the scallops with prosciutto slices and the relish. The saltiness of the prosciutto complemented the creaminess of the scallops and the relish really set off all the flavors. Delish!

The second dish I made out of Chez Panisse was a Rustic Pizza with anchovies. I have since made this pizza twice. When we got our gas stove put in, we started making pizzas pretty regularly. Dough from Trader Joe’s made this an easy weeknight endeavor. We take turns making a traditional combo pizza with sausage, mushrooms, olives, and peppers for Andrew and my kind of pizza which usually includes, kalamata olives, anchovies or pepperoncinis – sometimes all three!

After February, this resolution went the way of most resolutions and fizzled out. However, I consider it a win because it inspired me to cook more out of my cookbooks in general. I rediscovered my Alison Roman Dining In cookbook as well as Marcella Hazan and am seriously eyeing some of my “cooking project” cookbooks and planning a whole weekend of culinary exploration.

Post-script: If you too are wanting to use your cookbooks more often, I highly recommend the website Eat Your Books. For free, you can “upload” five cookbooks. By upload, I mean add the titles from their extensive database. When you have done this, you can search by ingredient. It’s like a digital index for your paper cookbooks. They don’t show the recipes of course but often, it says which page the recipes falls on. The website does not have great UX but it works for what it is. After uploading five, you need to pay to be able to upload as many as you want. At $30/year though, that it is totally worth it for me.

A Culinary Goal for 2021

Posted on January 2, 2021 | 1 comment

Each new year, January brings with it an inner struggle for me. I appreciate the New Year – fresh start mentality, but I also shudder at the thought of lofty resolutions abandoned and the feeling of failure this engenders. I read about a book called The Power of Ritual which, among other things, discusses the power of everyday practices to increase our wellbeing. Perhaps 2021 will be the year I focus on rituals to improve my life, rather than big goals or resolutions. To that end, cooking and eating can certainly be defined as rituals, so I will start there as I strive to make 2021 better than 2020. How hard can this be, really? The bar is set so low.

Something that I have been wanting to do for a long time is cook out of my cookbooks more. I feel I am often stymied by choice when I sit down to meal-plan on Thursday or Friday. I receive the New York Times Cooking newsletter. I have an ATK subscription. I follow Food 52 and The Kitchn. So. Much. Content. Then I look at my bookshelves and see dozens of cookbooks that I have barely opened or cooked only one recipe out of. Something has got to give! I have tried to stick to cookbooks (rather than finding recipes online) but I come up against two roadblocks again and again.

Roadblock #1: Which cookbook do I choose? What do I feel like cooking? I don’t know what I feel like cooking, which is why I am asking this question. And round and round it goes.

Roadblock #2: I am meal-planning and I need to use up the ingredients I have. I can’t just pull up an index of all the recipes in all my cookbooks and easily find a couple recipes to use up those pork chops in the freezer and the carrots in the crisper that are threatening to go flaccid. That is what the internet is…and I am trying not to do that…

So, how can I slightly alter my cooking ritual to address these roadblocks?

I’m going to focus on one cookbook per month. I’ll cook a selection of recipes primarily from that cookbook. This will take the selection paralysis out of the equation, and encourage me to really dig into a cookbook which I may otherwise just dip into for specific things. I could even discover some new favorites! While I am focusing on that cookbook, I’ll allow myself to use the internet and my own repertoire of favorites, or even other cookbooks to supplement. I’ll sit down on Thursday with that cookbook in front of me and pick 1-2 recipes to make from it (let’s not get too crazy to start). I will strive to select recipes for which I already have 50% of the ingredients. This might be difficult, but it’s something to strive for to keep the grocery bill low, and cut down on food waste. Then at the end of each month, I will write about my experience here on the blog and share my favorite recipe from the month.

Below are some ground rules to keep me honest and sane.

One cookbook focus per month.
1-2 recipes per week at first, more if it is going well.
50% of the chosen recipe’s ingredients should be ones I already have on hand.
Don’t make the same thing twice in the month.

For January, I have narrowed down my selection to 3 options. One is a cookbook with recipes from immigrant women who work in a community kitchen in London. Another is a Moosewood cookbook from the iconic restaurant collective in Ithaca New York, which focuses on easy, quick comfort food recipes. Lastly is a cookbook from the famed French-inspired Californian restaurant Chez Panisse. With two of the cookbooks being from famous restaurants, and all written by women, I am pretty sure I can’t go wrong. I have posted on social media to ask my friends to choose for me and I will make my selection tomorrow.

From the Left: Together: Our Community Cookbook, Moosewood Cooks at Home, and Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook

Here’s to cooking more in 2021, discovering new favorites, and banishing my cookbook hoarder guilt for good!

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Tagged cookbooks, Cooking, new year, resolutions

Induction Cooking in My Half-formed Kitchen

Posted on December 5, 2020 | 2 comments

I have cooked on both gas and electric and gotten pretty familiar with the quirks of both. There is always a readjustment period when switching from one to the other, but both are pretty predictable and I can usually hit my stride quickly. Induction cooking, however, is another beast entirely. Rather than relying on indirect radiation, convection, or thermal conduction, induction cooking uses an electrical current to produce a magnetic field that excites iron molecules, heating the pan and its contents very rapidly. It is more efficient because it has good electrical coupling between the pan and the coil, and can be quickly turned on and off. The cook surface both heats the pan quickly and cools off quickly so there are safety benefits as well.

When we moved in with my mom last May to start seriously saving for a house, we did not have our own kitchen which drove. Me. Crazy. A Hungry Ginger without a kitchen is a Hangry Ginger indeed. To improve our transitory situation, we got a beefy Breville Smart Oven and a two “burner” induction cooktop. Luckily we did not need to get new pans for the cooktop, as our Demeyer cook set is induction compatible. The controls took some getting used to as they measure in temperature rather than heat level. This would seem more precise, but when you are used to things cooking on low, medium or high and all recipes use these metrics as well, choosing a temp between 140 and 460 can be a tad confounding.

Because it is so efficient, the induction cooktop heats very quickly and much less energy is lost in the process of heating. The following is not 100% scientific, but it helps me conceptualize the differences a bit: Think about traditional heating methods as two step systems: Electricity must heat an electric coil and gas creates a flame before heating the pan. With induction cooking, the stove and the pan are, in a sense, one system with the electromagnetic field produced in the stove being carried seamlessly into the metal of the pan.

The first time I made bacon on it, I burnt the shit out of it in the blink of an eye. Eggs seemed to go from runny to seared to the pan in seconds. I solved the bacon issue by using the aforementioned Breville oven to bake it and learned that for eggs, I should heat up the pan at 300 for a min, crack the eggs and then turn the temp down to 210 or 260. Through trial and error, I gradually got used to the induction cooktop.

Bacon a little too dark, nailed the eggs

Here are a couple things I have learned about different types of induction cooking over this past year and a half. Keep in mind that I am working with a portable induction cooktop that cost me all of $200 on amazon. Built-in ranges from the major manufacturers are surely more consistent and less finicky.

Induction is great for:

Heating up water quickly for pasta or mac and cheese emergencies.
Related to this, steaming anything.
Soups and stews – Basically anything that doesn’t require really precise cooking (there are only 4 temp settings and there is no “in between.”)

Induction works well if close attention is paid for:

Eggs – switch between a couple settings to finesse them to your perfect doneness.
Sauteed veggies – as with eggs, start on a higher heat and turn down for more long term cooks or else you will get crispy critters or flaccid failures.

Induction is ok for:

Meat – It can be difficult to get an even brown (at least on my portable cooktop) and I found myself having to rotate pieces of meat to ensure an even brown. The brown they did get was always good, but a little too labor intensive and uncertain in my opinion.
Anything else that requires a consistent steady heat. I noticed that with this cooktop, once the pan reached the target temp, it would stay there briefly but then cool down and heat up again to get back up to temp. This cycle wreaked havoc on an ill-fated attempt at crepes and more than one chicken thigh.

Overall, the induction cooktop has been great because it has enabled me to cook meals in my own little makeshift kitchen. I’ve needed to get pretty creative at times because of the whole two burner situation (I’ve made good use of trivets and try to do a mix of stovetop cooking and oven cooking for most meals so I wouldn’t need more than two burners). However, as a nice bookend to the whole experience, I am happy to say that I am on the cusp of getting a big girl gas range. I am looking forward to being able to make more than two things at once on the stove (though the hubby is probably not looking forward to more dishes). And I will be doubling my counter space because it will no longer be taken up by the Smart Oven and the induction cooktop. I appreciate this experience though and I think it has helped me to become a more intentional cook who savors the small joys, like four burners and familiar heat settings.