Linguine and Clams with Tomato-Fennel Salsa

i’m back! sorry for the super-long delay in posting (and sorry to myself for the super-long delay in cooking!), but i’ve been really busy with work.

but in any case, back to the linguine. i had some leftover basil and red onion in the fridge so i decided to search epicurious to see if i could find something that would use up those ingredients. and voila, linguine and clams with tomato-fennel salsa!

this was my first time cooking with a fennel bulb, and i was apprehensive because i don’t really like the taste of licorice. however, it really does add a nice background flavor to the pasta, so i had nothing to be afraid of! also, at the store, they had littleneck clams and manila clams. the littleneck ones were ginormous – i don’t remember them being that big (and i was afraid they were indeed too big for the dish) -- so i got the smaller manila ones instead. still tastes great!

 

i was also very (very) apprehensive because i only skimmed the recipe before deciding i wanted to make it, and there’s no picture of it on the site, so i didn’t know there was practically no sauce! i normally LOVE sauce because i’m afraid there won’t be any flavor with it, but alas, i was very pleasantly surprised. more than enough flavor to go around!

(my changes: whole wheat pasta instead of regular, omission of fennel seeds).

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some background as to a change in the type of recipes i’m going to be trying to make from now on—a couple weeks ago i went to the doctor for a checkup, my first in five years. and, as part of it, of course, they do a cholesterol test. umm, yeah. so i’m at 257 (you shouldn’t be over 200), so i have three months to diet (HA!) and exercise (double HA!) my way to better health before they put me on meds.

i’ve been eating healthy for the past three days now, and i must say, i’m quite proud of myself. i haven’t had anything junk-y and i haven’t even had major cravings for sweets. i’m going to meet with a nutritionist tomorrow to see if she can give me advice on how to curb my snacking pangs, though. wish me luck!

Salmon with Snap Peas, Yellow Peppers, and Dill-Pistachio Pistou + Käsespätzle

let me start off by saying i have no clue what a pistou is. i thought maybe it was something you make with a pestle (pistou, pestle, get it?), but FINE FINE i just looked it up in wikipedia. oh. a pistou is basically a pesto without a pine nuts. hrmph. (which is a yay since imho that’s the worst part of a pesto!)

ah HA! i knew it! “Traditionally, the ingredients are crushed and mixed together in a mortar with a pestle, (pistou means pounded in the Provençal language).” i’m willing to bet there’s a common word ancestor there.

anyways, this is a blog about food, not about linguistics (unfortunately).

i’d been craving something salmon-y and found this recipe. i was a bit sketch on it because i don’t particularly enjoy dill (the bf does, perhaps a bit too much, but he’s not here so that fact is kind of irrelevant lol), and i don’t really enjoy pistachios, either (suffice it to say, i didn’t bother hunting for or using pistachio oil). OTOH, the combination sounded too good to pass up.

i’m also really unlucky with fish. either i seem to overcook it or undercook it; it never comes out just right, so i really was taking chances with this recipe!

link to recipe on epicurious.

the first thing the recipe called for was pistachios. do you know how hard it is to find them in my local slightly-ghetto supermarket? i had to get a pistachio snack pack! you’d think they’d sell pistachios with the shells removed, but i guess not. :\ “Art’s Good For You California Pistachios” LOL

i haven’t eaten pistachios since i was a kid, let alone cooked with them, so i didn’t know what to do with the little husks that kind of flake off. i tried putting them into a ziploc back and mushing them around to get the husks to fall off, but all i did was make a hole in the bag :\.  some husks did pulverize into into a coarse powder, though, so it was slightly effective. i’m thinking i would have been fine if i left them there.

the recipe said to use a “heavy large skillet” so i brought out the ol’ cast iron. which i hate. it’s not only heavy but you can’t wash it and because of that it LOOKS gross. bah. well, i figure, i never use the damn thing anyways so i might as well, if only to say i got some use out of it.

toasting the nuts: (uhh, how do you know when they’re toasted? i just left them on until i smelled them roasting.)

that chopper i bought when i made the lobster mac and cheese came in very handy during this recipe! nut and herb chopping by hand = bull crap. lol so much better when you can just pound it out, literally!

it was at this time that i started making the spätzle, which i got at dittmer’s when i went there yesterday with dave (i don’t know why i’m regaling you with this; it’s irrelevant as well). suffice it to say, i’ve been wanting to go there for a long time and i stocked up on all sorts of german goodies! there were several brands of spätzle there but i trust knorr. even if the packaging is in english. and even if it’s owned by unilever. (p.s. no leberkäse at dittmer’s? boo!)

here’s the completed pistou (*snort*). it was all very very approximate since i halved the recipe but didn’t really measure anything out. “eh, this looks like the right amount of dill.” “eh, maybe a bit more oil.” you get the picture.

(i was worried it wasn’t going to be enough, but spoiler: it was!)

i used one yellow bell pepper. seriously this sad specimen was the best one they had. i’mma have to start going to the safeway instead of the lucky, even though it’s 5 minutes further away. :\

popped the sliced bell pepper into the skillet and started getting the sugar snap peas ready. psych! (or however you spell it.) thanks to modern technology all’s i needed was a pre-prepared bag! open, dump. easy. yayyy for my lazy ass.

by now the spätzle was all done. i just found the way some bits got stuck in the colander to be a cool picture. so here you go.

i grated up the last of the cheese (a whole block of cheddar, i think) from the mac and cheese adventure and added it in. s&p and voila, easy käsespätzle. if i had some bacon, i’d have tossed that in, too, but alas, no.

  here are the cooked vegetables. let it be known i normally dislike stir-fry everything, too, but another spoiler: it was good! (i find stir-fry vegetables to be really bland; for some reason i prefer boiled!)

ok, the fish. eek! i didn’t like the fact that there was color added and that it was raised on a farm, but at least it was fresh. (maybe i should just buy my seafood from the chinese supermarket. i’m always under the impression it’s better quality there? i dunno. i mean, how often do you see people buying anything at the butcher/seafood counter in a uhh, white supermarket? rarely, if ever. how often do you see people buying stuff at the butcher/seafood counters at a chinese supermarket? all the time! so much so that you have to take numbers!)

the fillets, with s&p, in the skillet:

i  flipped:

and then the tricky part – when to stop cooking! ugh. i thought it was done, but then i cut open the thickest part of one of the fillets and nope. i’m not making sushi here!

i put them back in the skillet, but i think i put them in for slightly too long. the picture in the recipe had some raw meat showing, but i took mine off too late. i remembered from watching cooking shows that meat will still continue to cook for a while after you take it off, so it’s best to remove early, but i didn’t know exactly when or how much it’d keep cooking. oh well.

here it is, though, all assembled! i don’t know why i even bothered to put it in anything fancy, since a) i’m not serving it, and b) it was a b!tch to scoop back out with the high sides :\

all plated up, with the käsespätzle:

so, how did it taste? i was very pleasantly surprised! the dill and green onion in the pistou (*snort* again) made it light and refreshing, perfect for a(n early) summer-ish day here in the bay area. i couldn’t really tell there were pistachios (other than the texture), which was totally fine by me. i was worried that since the pistachios were pre-salted, it would make the pistou too salty, but that definitely wasn’t the case (i didn’t add any extra). to my surprise, the fish and the vegetables were cooked very well. the fish wasn’t too overdone and the vegetables were not too crisp (i don’t like them too crunchy) or too mushy.

hooray me! totally easy recipe, and really yummy! seriously the hardest part was cracking open all those pistachios. i’m still a bit wary of cooking fish, but i think with practice i’ll be ok.

i don’t think i’ll ever be ok with using a cast-iron skillet, tho. bah!

Carrot Cupcakes with Ginger-Cream Cheese Frosting

around lunchtime i was hit with a craving for some cupcakes, and apparently the only cupcake place around me has gotten some mediocre ratings on yelp. well, then! i decided to just go ahead and make my own. besides, it’s been a while since this house was filled with the aroma of freshly-baked goods anyways.

flipped through some recipes on marthastewart.com but decided they were wayyyy too complicated for a quick indulgence, so went back to my old standby, epicurious, and found this one.

extra bonus because the recipe doesn’t require cake flour, so i had most of the ingredients i needed (hooray for getting rolling on this whole cooking thing—the kitchen cupboard is getting well-stocked!).

how keeyute are these cupcake liners i found at the supermarket?

i’ve always cut off the tips and top parts of carrots—is that what people do? i’m not sure why i started doing that.

and y’all, what do you do with the pieces that don’t make it through the food processor? i’m too lazy to cut/chop/shred these leftovers by hand, so i just toss ‘em :\

because my cheap, non-baking ass doesn’t have a sifter, i just dumped the dry ingredients into a bowl and whisked them using the whisk attachment on the kitchenaid. i stopped and manually whisked around a bit to make sure there was nothing stuck at the bottom.

(EDIT: forgot to mention i increased the cinnamon from 1/2 tsp to 3/4 tsp, and in hindsight, i think maybe some nutmeg would also have been nice.)

note to self: paddle attachment likes to fling flour everywhere. turn mixer to a lower speed, pour slowly, or turn off all the way.

after the addition of the carrots and crushed pineapple (which, btw, are a pain to drain):

luckily the dried ingredients that were stuck on the side of the bowl got incorporated once the batter got bulked up with the veggies. (and yes, i’m counting these as vegetable servings.)

into the cups! (and yes, i wiped off all the excess dough on the pan before popping it in the oven.)

while the cupcakes were baking, i tried to make some poor man’s ginger-cream cheese frosting by combining some grated ginger with canned (tubbed?) cream cheese frosting. i grated some ginger but it came out really really wet (and it didn’t give me as much as i thought it’d give me, especially after squeezing it dry/drier), so i supplemented with some ground ginger powder (don’t ask why i have it; i forgot which recipe that went with lol).

i tried to sample it while i was mixing, but i couldn’t really taste any ginger, but i didn’t want to overdo it, just in case. i probably ended up adding 3/4 to 1 tsp of ginger powder?

the cupcakes, fresh from the oven:

i’ve been writing this post since they came out, but i don’t think they’re cool enough to frost yet. :\ ugh, i hate waiting!

btw, i’m writing this post using Windows Live Writer. pretty nifty! it can do fancy things to pictures!

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UPDATE:

the cupcakes have cooled and are frosted. i’m pleasantly surprised. the cake isn’t too sweet (it could maybe have benefitted from another 1/4 cup of sugar, but maybe it’s because i have a total sweet tooth), and the frosting is quite good, with just a hint of ginger. nom nom!

good enough, at least, that i felt comfortable giving 3 away to my neighbors :P

Lobster Macaroni and Cheese

i was browsing around foodnetwork.com looking for things to make when this recipe for lobster macaroni and cheese caught my eye. i love mac and cheese, and i love lobster, so how could this go wrong? (eep!) besides, the bf really likes the neelys, so that was another point in its favor.

i went to target to get another pot (since we only have one big pot and, by watching the video, you can see it goes a lot better if you have two big pots) and saw these mini bottles of white wine! perfect for someone like me who only uses wine for cooking and would otherwise just waste an entire bottle! i don't think i would have noticed except some other people were looking at box wine (is it finally cool to drink box wine?) and these four-packs were on the same shelf.



the first step was to grease a pan with butter. umm, are there any better ways to do it than (literally) by hand? so messy :\ (tho this would pale in comparison to the mess that would come later...)



another thing i bought at target! a chopper! (since we all know by now how terrible i am at chopping!) unfortunately one of the shallots i got at the store had started going bad (i think? it had like black stuff inside) so i only had one instead of two :(



i really wanted to use my favorite shape of pasta, campanelle, but my local slightly-ghetto supermarket didn't have it so i used penne like the recipe called for.



i was all about approximation cooking this. thanks to google, i discovered that 5 tbsp is about .3 cups, so i used a little less than 1/3 of a cup (since who wants to count out 5 tbsp? not i!). i'd also never used tomato paste from a tube before (i usually get canned), but since the neelys used tube sauce, i did, too.



now it gets sketch. in the video the roux looked nice and compact, like dough, but i couldn't get it to look like that, so i added an extra tablespoon or so of flour.




well, then the recipe said to add in the white wine and let it reduce. uhh, i added the wine and there was nothing to reduce! the clump (it was now a clump) stayed a clump! i even added maybe 50% more wine, but it still stayed clumpy. oh well. i gave up. :P




once i added the cream (and paprika and cayenne -- both very approximate measurements -- and bay leaf), though, it looked OK. btw, a big F U to whoever invented milk cartons!




i totally overbought cheese, too (which is pricey!!!). i got two packages each of the gruyere and the cheddar, but it turns out i only need one. now i know -- 8 oz of cheese shreds to be about 2 cups. hrmph. oh well. now i just need to find another cheesy recipe (can't be hard) to use it up with.





the recipe said to wait until the sauce could coat a spoon, but umm, it was able to coat a spoon since the beginning, so i just waited a couple minutes for it to reduce (you know, just for show), then added the cheese.




now, i should have just been smart and bought frozen lobster tails, but no. i had to be adventurous and opt for live. O_O wtf was i thinking? i was hoping at the (chinese) grocery store they could just give me tail, but no, he just quartered them.



i knew i was in for trouble, but it didn't hit me until i took them out of the bag. W.T.F. was i supposed to do with raw quartered lobster?!



i pulled on a pair of latex gloves and went to town, just trying to pull as much meat as i could out of every corner of the lobster, but i soon gave up and was satisfied with just extracting larger chunks of meat. um, did you know the meat really really sticks to the shell? ugh. this was all i was able to (err, was willing to) extract from two lobsters. what a waste of money! ($33!!!)



oh well. good enough! of course, by this time, the pasta had become nicely accustomed to the shape of the colander :\ and yes, the lobster is already in the sauce, but of course you can barely see it given the tiny amount that actually went in!



it all came out nicely in the pan, though. topped with panko and chopped parsley.



and after coming out of the oven, still all bubbly:



ready to eat!



verdict? hmm. not bad. definitely could use some lobster. i've taken 3 bites already but haven't yet encountered any lobster meat lol. i also had to add a bit of s&p; it could probably have used more of both during the preparation process. i can really taste the wine, too -- it's obvious i used too much. not really a bad thing, though.

it's really oily, and i don't know if that's because i used way too much butter in buttering the pan? but still, it's good. i probably won't make it again, but if i do, i'll be sure to use frozen lobster :\

p.s. love love LOVE the panko!!! it gives it such great texture!

UPDATE: p.p.s. i think it might be the cheese that's making it oily. i remember while the sauce was simmering after i added the cheese (while i was trying in vain to get lobster meat...) streaks of oil would rise up to the top. hmm.

and yes, it needs moar lobster!