California and Texas Vacation Food

Vacation revisited

It's a gloomy day in Harlem - a perfect day to revisit the meals we had in sunny California and Texas where we went for a brief vacation... lots of fish, lots of meat too and plenty of meals out and in with lots of family and friends. Here are a couple of the memorable ones:

Korean: I love Korean food. Erin does too. It has that perfect mix of spice, vegetables and meat served over a big bowl of rice that makes for good comfort food somehow. We had a great night ordering in from a place in La Jolla; had planned to go out but then Atticus intervened at the restaurant and home was much easier. The vegetable gopdol that Erin had was fantastic and my bulgogi had a really spicy barbeque sauce that came with it that just made my night. 

Sushi Ota: There are many sushi houses in San Diego. I used to work in one. Many serve decent fare. None are sushi ota. After working in a sushi bar for 2 years, a Japanese friend of mine took me to Sushi Ota as a going away present from San Diego. It's amazing. It's not in a tourist locale, it's in a smallish little mall, and it has the best sushi I've ever had. We were the only non-Japanese folks in there; actually there were a couple of Anglos at some of the other tables but they were speaking Japanese. Erin had a sushi bowl with 12 pieces of buttery sashimi that made a veritable rainbow; I had a few specialty rolls and some orange clam sashimi that was intriguing. It's a little hard to eat other places for a while after Sushi Ota.

Mexican up the yazoo: Both Texas and California served up delectable variations on Mexican food and I'm not about to get in the middle of which variation is better. We had awesome fish tacos in San Diego and Andale's in Los Gatos; solid (nearly literally with beans) breakfast tacos in San Antonio and some great enchiladas in La Jolla. One of the standard things in those two great states that seems to be lacking here is a bowl of fresh salsa and tortilla chips - it's almost always free and always a good introduction to the restaurant - a good telltale sign of whether to dive in at this place or play it safe.

Steak and wine: My dad treated us to a great meal of steak, scalloped potatoes and salad while we were visiting. When I think of gourmet home-cooked food, my dad's cooking is the first thing that comes to mind... these days I think I may cook a wider variety, but I still think of his cooking as the best. We had some excellent Cabernet from Santa Cruz and the steaks were cooked in my dad's Green Egg - a kamado style cooker that resembles a barbeque and has its roots in Japanese cooking. Good stuff.

Clam chowder: this was good and worth remaking when good clams are available:
- scrub clams and put in pot with a little olive oil and cook on high for a few minutes by themselves, then add garlic, onion and thyme to the mix for a couple of minutes. Finish the clams by adding some white wine, a bit of water if you like and covering the clams to steam until open (10mins).
The base can be made by stewing some potatoes in 2 cups of cream until they're nice and mushy.
Finally the veggie mix starts with bacon (of course), then add celery, green onion, kale or whatever else you'd like to toss in the mix.
Make the clam part first so that you can take the clams out of their shells while the rest is cooking and then keep some of the shells for decor.
It's worth the effort!

It's just been a week since we've been back and we've been relying on old favorites this week. Will update the blog again next week as things get more exciting... rumors of curried lentils with spiced cauliflower, grilled tilefish with broccolini and pecans...

First date and revisions of old favorites

I've included the revised mac and cheese, our first date by ourselves without Atticus and a couple photos of the little man and a video too!

Mac and cheese (revised)
I did re-do a version of mac and cheese (previously posted as elbows I think), and because Erin is trying to replicate things much more these days, I'm going to be more explicit about the process. The first post went something like: make sauce, pour sauce over maccaroni and then bake.
- Melt 1/2 cup butter in pot (big) over medium heat
-Stir in 2 tablespoons mustard seen, 1 teaspoon cumin and 1 teaspoon cayenne (or to taste) as butter is melting

- Stir in 1/2 cup flour and mix for about 1-2 minutes on low heat
- add 4 cups of milk and bring to boil, then keep on simmer while adding 2 cups grated cheese
- Sauce is done!
- Add sauce to cooked pasta (according to package but definitely underdone by 1-2 minutes)
- Mix in any veggies (uncooked broccoli chunks for example) with the pasta and the sauce in a giant bowl
- Pour into baking dish (leaving room for boiling over) and then top with some breadcrumbs if desired and another 1 cup of grated cheese (I like mix of blue and cheddar/parmigiano).
- Bake at 375 for about 30mins

Brunch at Alias:
After brunch, a picture of the boy (we didn't make him wait in the car the whole time):

His parents are notably both delighted at the time the photo was taken as well. They had just had a delectable brunch with two good friends on the lower east side - http://aliasrestaurant.com/brunch/ where Erin had both an ABLT (avocado) and a side of biscuits (with gravy) - it's good to be breastfeeding sometimes. I had a brisket breakfast burrito that was divine with good salsa and a couple spoonfuls of gravy at the end.

Here's also a video of the little dude in the morning (I'm getting ready for work) - he's his most active and happy self in the morning (his mother's chromosomes).

JoJo
Pretty quiet place on the upper east side - one of the Jean Georges empire. They had a special for restaurant week so we went... it does feel like an apartment when you go in; the service was top notch, polite but engaging. We felt like two kids out on the loose too - I'm sure there was delight written all over our faces.
Started with a bourbon-chili-passion cocktail for me and Erin with a spiced ginger mixer.
The appetizers were impressive: shrimp with a mango-ish puree and roast pumpkin seeds and a goat cheese fondue with endive and roasted walnuts for dipping that was just perfect.
Dinner: Chicken roasted with orange, olives, ginger and coriander and salmon with a truffel-potato puree! 
Dessert: Basil ice cream with a chocolate cake

Man that was good. Something to aim for... I may well try the shrimp and the roast chicken is something I think we could improve on at home too!

Texas food and smiles

Ahh smiles. Finally! In the near future, I will commit to not posting endless photos of our son on the blog and revert to a truly food-themed site (and he is only still drinking breast milk).

This past week we tried a menu from the Homesick Texan cookbook that we got for Christmas. Had some good favorites as well with grilled sausage, sesame broccoli, fried catfish and others rounding out the week but here was the Texas meal:

Grilled Flank Steak with Fried Okra, Texas Caviar and Homemade Biscuits
Here is my recapitulation of the details:
The grilled flank steak is my own recipe - 1 jalapeno, some cilantro, 3 limes, cumin and garlic all go into the marinade and letting it rest for >2hrs is key. The spice cooks off but the cumin, garlic and lime flavor brings out the meat really well I think.
Texas Caviar is a new favorite - basically named because of the appearance of the main ingredient, black-eyed peas. Mix a couple cans of them with some tomatoes, cilantro, garlic, green onion and some spices (cumin for one).
The fried okra was good but a lot of effort for just an ok outcome. Basic breading process but with a twist at the end that was brilliant - roll them in crushed Saltines just before adding to oil - gives a nice crunch.
The biscuits were a flop - edible for sure, but not the fluffy, delicious melt in your mouth taste I was going for. I beat them with a rolling pin and flipped and flipped the dough... next time. This is definitely something that I would like to perfect...

Dinners week of sometime in January

I sort of lost track of where we were with meals and postings, but we've had some good ones in the last couple of weeks that are worth posting. Atticus is still growing like a mad man and one of my favorite things to do with him is cook with him strapped in, listening to the recipe unfold both in word and in spatter. Sometimes he gets little pieces of food in his hair but that's a hazard of the job!

Here's a photo of him looking quite quizzical or maybe just confused about what is in front of him... 

 and another of him (this is thankfully a much more common expression) of some sort of mix of curiosity and wonder while also thinking about food...

Yellow tail sushi with miso soup
- we got the yellow tail from Fresh Direct; not cheap at all but the first tuna they've had in a long time that's been well rated in terms of being ocean-friendly. Anyway, the rice I think is key to this along with the spicy sauce. Aside from that, making sushi is just a matter of careful prep making sure you slice everything thin enough to be both pretty and easy to eat. I flash cooked the tuna for 15-30 seconds a side since it smelled just a bit of fish and wasn't quite sashimi quality, but the inside was still raw and wonderful.
For sushi rice: 
Make either with sushi rice or arborio rice (want a short rice that's stickier than jasmine etc) and make about 4 cups for 4 people worth of sushi (or Erin and Alex hungry). Make the rice just like you would normally.
- while the rice is cooking, add 4 teaspoons sugar, 2 teaspoons salt and 3 tablespoons of rice vinegar to a small pan and cook until salt and sugar dissolve but not boiling. Add this mixture to the rice after it is cooked and cooled in a bowl for a bit...
We assembled everything together and in the end had:
Philadelphia rolls 
Spicy Tuna rolls
Tuna Sushi and Sashimi
Vegetable Roll with Carrot, Cucumber and Basil

3 tablespoons unseasoned rice vinegar

4 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or coarse sea salt

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sushi-Rice-351070#ixzz1jxSX92Tq

3 tablespoons unseasoned rice vinegar

4 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or coarse sea salt

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Sushi-Rice-351070#ixzz1jxSX92Tq

Lemon garlic fish skewers with couscous and green beans with fried sage
I haven't done much with fish kabobs in the past, but I will from now on - I grilled the mixed fish (salmon, blue fish, swordfish and snapper) with peppers and onions on the grill first and then finished in the broiler... oh man that was good (good marinade of garlic, cilantro and lemon before hand too). 

Sausage onion and pepper pizza with red leaf walnut salad
- had a good friend over who had made pizza for us at her house so I had to compete. I won. The crust was not quite as thin as I would have liked, but the pizza stone was hot enough to crisp it perfectly in any case. Ah the sweet taste of pizza and victory at the same time!


Fresh pesto penne
- Erin made a fabulous pesto out of some left-over fresh basil we had: used the original recipe from the Silver Spoon plus a bit of garlic... I could eat it by itself by the forkful! 

balmy January

With all of our holiday visitors returned to their homes, it was time this week to get back into a rhythm of cooking again. Back to some sort of normalcy, although this time with a new person in the household.

It's been an unusually warm winter this year- after the freak snowstorm over Halloween weekend- so the usual comfort foods aren't quite as delicious as usual. I was looking for some changes from the usual, so I used different sources for the recipes this week. The recipes were chosen with an eye toward swift preparation, since William Atticus has been fussy at night, Alex has returned to work, and I am sleep-deprived.

-Hamburgers, using the spicy olive oil mix from Mexico that Lily gave us, with baked sweet potato fries from the Barefoot Contessa's Back to Basics cookbook and a salad. The hamburgers were on challah buns, which are my favorites for absorbing the juices.

-Corn and chipotle soup, with a recipe from the Blue Corn Cafe in Santa Fe.
http://bluecorncafe.com/
Hands down, one of my favorite fall/winter soups, although the spice level was a bit hot this time- I cut the recipe in half but still added 2 full chipotle peppers, which was a little bit too much.

-Grilled salmon (Alex marinaded in butter and fresh lime juice- delicious!) with a grilled fennel salad from the new CIA grilling cookbook that Graham gave us for Xmas. Since we don't have an actual grill, we had to revise the recipe a bit. We baked the fennel after marinading it, then put it on the grill, and then combined it with orange slices, red onions and oil-cured olives. I loved the combination of new flavors and the crunch of the fennel. A surprise hit and definitely one to cook again.

We are nostalgic for our big, empty weekends before WA arrived, ready to fill with whatever plans we wanted to make. But the "little devil" or "little monster" or "little angel" or "little piggy" (we are trying to not pigeonhole him :) is pretty cute most of the time. Wonder what he thinks of our varied menu?

End of the Year

Last big dinner of the year we made was Christmas Eve dinner, menu is below. The real hits in my book were the soup and the tenderloin. The salad was a bit of a flop but the broccolini, potatoes and carrots/parsnips were all solid.

Appetizer:

Lemon Ricotta with Squash and Sage on Crostini

Soup:

Spicy Pumpkin Soup with Pepita Streusel and Cinnamon Marshmallows

Salad:

Arugula with Figs, Ricotta, Prosciutto, and Smoked Marzipan

Sides:

Broccolini with Pecan Brown Butter

Honey-Glazed Roasted Carrots and Parsnips

Mustard-roasted Potatoes

Main:

Roast Beef Tenderloin with Port Sauce

Dessert:

Pecan Pie

Pumpkin Cheesecake

A couple of pics of the little fellow - he is a lucky man with all the love that has been lavished on him now in the first month of his life!

Baby food!

We have a son - William Atticus Foster! Erin labored for a relatively short time though it was not easy in any way. He was born December 1st at 6:15am in our bathroom at 38.5 weeks and 8lbs, 40z!

He is perfect in every way. We are just spending lots of time at home with him these days enjoying every moment, every poop, every full-body yawn, each half-smile and his big, curious eyes.

Atticus is now a week old, so I thought I would write a little about what he's been eating... breast milk! And below is the video I compiled of his first week's adventures:




Breast milk:
This is fascinating stuff. Reading about breast milk ties all sorts of things together from geo-political controversy around Nestle marketing formula aggressively in South America to evolutionary biology in how boys who breastfeed get different milk than girls that breastfeed (who knew!!) to the disparity in groups of people who breastfeed to the immunology and the nutritional aspects of the stuff to the anthropological concept of technology=advancement... I'm going to try and stick to the more nutritional aspects here.

Immunologic benefits: Since the 1930's when the first studies were published, we have known that there seems to be a immunologic benefit to breastfeeding with the largest reduction seen in respiratory and gastrointestinal illness. One of the coolest things I read was that the IgA (a type of immunoglobulin) that is in breast milk is produced by B-cells in the woman's breasts that migrated there from her gut! So basically all of the immunologic memory that the mother has from the exposure that she has had in her gut get passively transferred to the infant providing huge amounts of protection against diarrheal disease which is the second most common cause of infant mortality worldwide (used to be the first)!

IQ benefits: This is one of the more poorly understood aspects of breastfeeding in part because at least in the developed world where most of the data comes from, women who breastfeed also tend to be more educated, wealthier etc - so teasing out the effect of breastfeeding on intelligence is fundamentally a statistical problem of dealing with bias and confounding since no one will every be able to randomize breastfeeding vs not. In any case, at this point, there definitely does seem to be a real association between breastfeeding and IQ of probably about 5-10 points, and it is probably NOT solely the result of higher maternal education, better bonding or attachment etc - it is in the milk!

So then the question is why does breast milk and not just breastfeeding give this advantage? There has been a lot of research into the role of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids - mainly docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachadonic acid (ARA). These compounds are required for efficient neurotransmission and are involved in neurite outgrowth, dendritic arborization, and neuron regeneration after cell injury - all good things and necessary for brain development. Of course the formula companies have jumped on this and market their products as including these compounds now - what is not yet known is whether this attempt to simulate breast milk will translate into outcomes, so far the results have been mixed.

Last thing about this (I promise): while one my least favorite phrases in medicine is that there is a genetic and environmental component to a disease or condition because I think that is basically a meaningless phrase, there is a cool example of gene-environment interaction in this case. A study published in 2007 showed that the beneficial effect of breastfeeding was only seen in a subset of children who had a particular variation in a gene involved in the metabolism and regulation of DHA and ARA in the brain! In the children without the variation, there was no benefit to breast milk, in the children with the mutation, they did see a benefit that largely accounted for the 5 or so points seen in epidemiologic studies - how cool is that??!!

So here's to Atticus on completing his first week of life, to his beautiful and loving mother, to his having the mutation in FADS2 :), and to his own exploration of food - breast milk and beyond!