School's Out for Summuh

Not that it actually makes much difference in terms of what I do on a daily basis, but the semester ended a little over a week ago. At this stage in graduate school, I pretty much should be steadily working on research regardless of whether classes are in session, but it is still really nice to not have any immediately pressing deadlines. I did manage to take one wonderful restorative week off after I handed in a revised proposal to do a tremendous amount of cooking. I cooked as many blogworthy meals in last week as I did in the month before. As will become clear by the pictures below, David and I had access to a grill at the house he was 'sitting' while its owners were on vacation, and we grilled like it was going out of style, cramming a whole summer's worth of cravings into a week.

But first, I continued to use up some of what we had in the fridge. This will continue to occupy me as we are leaving this apartment in a little more than a month and we need to use up all of the food in the house. This was Fusilli pasta with fava beans, and cilantro-tahini sauce. This used up the last of some homemade yogurt, some cilantro that was losing its green, a box of pasta, and some of the tahini I bought to make hummus. I used up the rest of the frozen mixed seafood and a package of rice noodles to make yellow curry noodles. Curry paste is the ultimate convenience food. Mixed with a can of coconut milk and some vegetables, curry paste makes a quick, luxuriously rich and filling meal.
I've had an octopus in the freezer for months now that I have saving for a special occasion, which never really came around. But I saw a recipe in the new your times that seemed easy and appealing so I decided to try it out. The basic format of the recipe was good, the octopus bakes and slowly tenderizes in its own juices and a hefty amount of olive oil and garlic for more than an hour. But as it was written, the recipe would seem pretty bland. I added a tablespoon of paprika to make it more interesting and ensure that it had a deep red color, and ended up adding quite a bit of salt, though the recipe says to add it only 'if needed.' I cut the potatoes into very large chunks, as suggested by the recipe, and they still came out a bit over cooked, so I next time, I would cut them smaller, brown them separately and add them to the octopus closer to the end of cooking time. Still, the rich garlicky broth was delicious sopped up with some bread, and the leftovers the next day were even better.
Perhaps it will become a tradition, but we marked the end of the semester with another cheeseboard from capone's, though more modest than our last few. This one had two semi-firm sheepsmilk cheeses, a pecorino toscano and a french sheepsmilk that was wonderful. We also picked up a bottle of cheap Côte-du-Rhone, and what Capone's called "perhaps the best salami we have ever had." If they still have it, it is definitely worth getting.
Thus began the week of grilling. First, we made grilled portobello mushrooms. I made a marinade from olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar, sherry, and fresh rosemary from the balcony. They grilled up perfectly juicy and plump like steaks, fulfilling the promise that grilled mushrooms hold out as a satisfying vegetarian option that is so often broken at restaurants.

I served the mushroom steaks up with a green bean salad with grape organic tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese.
Craving some grilled fish, we went to what is probably Boston's best fish market, New Deal--described in this fish blog, and got a red snapper to grill up. The marinade was from Rick Bayless's version of the chile-bathed grilled Pescado Zarandeado that you get in Puerto Vallarta.
The next day, we had a lunch of Vietnamese fresh spring rolls, filled with hoisin-marinated tofu and fresh herbs, and homemade peanut sauce. These were so flavorful, fresh, and light, and invovled no cooking at all, only assembly.
We also picked up some of the freshest, largest shrimp I've ever seen at New Deal Fish Market. They were wild-caught Florida gulf shrimp. I used some of the left-over marinade from the fish and grilled the shrimp with the shell on so they could get lots of grilled flavor without drying out. The trick is to cut through the top of the shell down the length of the shrimp with a sharp knife to clean out the 'vein' and make for painless shell removal when your eating them. Across the street from New Deal is Mayflower Poultry, with a big sign stating "fresh-killed poultry" and we picked up a whole cut up chicken. I marinated it with tandoori spices and yogurt overnight. Yogurt makes for a bit of a messy grill, but chicken always comes out so tender and juicy after a yogurt bath that its worth it. Sake made for a bit of an odd pairing, but we needed to spend more than $10 at the Japanese market where we bought the spring roll wrappers in order to put our purchases on credit card.
At Shaw's supermarket, we meant to pick up some hamburgers for the most traditional of grill fair but ran across some wild Alaskan salmon that looked too fresh to pass up--particularly compared to the pale, color-added, polluting, farm-raised atlantic salmon that crowds the fish counter most of the year. Its accompanied by grilled leeks with mustard dressing.

We still would have picked up some burgers, except that these 'naturally-raised' baby-back pork ribs seduced us. I made a dry-rub from an unreasonable amount of spices which grilled up into a smoky-sweet crust as they slowly tenderized on the grill. We grilled up some sweet plantains to serve with organic avocado guacamole.
Rounding out our week of grilling was warm grilled mangoes and plums with vanilla ice cream and a balsamic-Chinese-black vinegar reduction. Chinese black vinegar is sweetened and spiced, so its perfect for reducing to a syrup for deserts or glazes. This was a great way to round out our week of grilling.

Month in Review

My deepest apologies to all my fans. This has been an unforgivable absence. The end of the semester just took over me, and I haven't been able to post. This weekend was particularly crazy, as David graduated from his masters program--he now has a Masters in Music Performance! and his mother and friends were staying with us. On top of that I had three different performances to sing in myself. But we have definitely been eating and taking pictures. So here is about three weeks worth of meals:

We are in and out of the poor house these days, so as our economic situation changes, we have been going to the grocery store less often and looking for stuff on sale, and trying to do the best we can with what we already have at home. This has involved really cleaning out my freezer of all the ingredients, partially prepared meals, leftovers, and frozen staples that have been sitting and accumulating in their over the past year. One night we had very little in the house and David used the last of the homemade wheat bread to make these tuna melts. Not bad for a cheap dinner.
We've also been eating a ridiculous amount of pizza. It's cheep and we have been using the cans of tomatoes and frozen meats left over from our days of plenty. I believe this one actually used up the leftover sauce, including mushrooms and italian sausage, that I made for the black pepper fettuccine in the last post. It was perfect.
This was the second one out of the oven to which we added some leftover prosciutto. It was a bit dry and old for sandwiches but it crisped up perfectly on the pizza.
I don't remember if there was some occasion, I doubt it really, but one morning David decided to make a nice breakfast: molasses buckwheat pancakes with blackberry syrup and peach mango smoothy using homemade yogurt.
We had left over dough from the earlier pizza, so I had to invent a use for it using the ingredients we had. I know that this is going to sound a little weird, but believe me, it was delicious. It was sort of a pizza nicoise. Pizza with a very small amount of cheese, tomato sauce, tuna, and fresh chopped capers, shallots, hard boiled egg, and parsley. They eat pizza with tuna in Paraguay, and I always thought it was weird (well really it is) until I ate some this last time, and, given that canned tuna and pizza dough is about all we had around, I was lucky that I liked it.
My good friend Hanna stayed with us a few days when she was in town for a class we are taking together, and I made some dinner for a late night study session: golden beet and carrot soup spiced with saffron and garnished with homemade yogurt and fresh chives. This is actually a picture of the leftovers the next night, when we fried up some croquetas de carne y papa that I had made a long time ago (actually out of the meat from the soup bones I used to make the last pho I posted about) and stashed in the freezer. It was the perfect no-extra-cost way to round out this meal.
The next budget-inspired meal was hummus with white-flour tortillas. Hummus has to be the cheapest dinner in the world to make, given that large quantities of dried chick peas cost only cents. To my dismay, tahini is actually a bit expensive, but it doesn't break the bank. I can never get my flatbreads flaky enough, and David makes pretty fantastic flour tortillas (I make the corn ones better), so we decided to let authenticity slide.
We used the left over broth from the aforementioned pho, which had been frozen, some curry paste, the last of some cabbage that had languished far too long in the vegetable crisper, a bag of mixed frozen seafood, and the latest crop of thai basil from our window sill to make a quick seafood noodle soup. It's alarming how cheep frozen seafood is sometimes. We only used half of this bag of squid, cuttlefish, octopus, shrimp, and mussels which was a product of Thailand for only $3.50. I'm sure we are not paying the cost of the mangrove the fish farms are poisoning or of the coral reef that fish trawlers destroy. I looked for a 'responsible' choice, but the only thing I could find was a $50 bag of frozen wild-caught gulf shrimp. I rationalized the purchase by thinking it was only once, because money was tight. But it makes me worried that there is no hope for saving the oceans fisheries if even I, who things about this all the time, gives in to a 'good deal.'
Speaking of the ocean and its frailty, here is another tuna meal. I found out recently that albacore tuna are very plentiful, so we started to eat it again after probably a year of nearly none. There is still the mercury to worry about, but I'm already a little crazy, and I'm not worried about getting pregnant. This was dried pasta with tomato sauce (left over from the pizza), capers, sauteed tuna, and parsley. This is a common enough recipe, and it is very fast, easy, and tasty. It also happens to be the first meal I ever cooked for David about four years ago. I was at is apartment in college and we were hungry. He and his roomate almost never cooked, and their fridge was mostly full of condiments. But I did my best, using a can of tuna, a can of tomatoes, some jarred garlic, and a bit of serracha (rooster sauce). I'll never forget how impressed david was with the magic of making something out of what seemed like nothing.
Finally, I cooked a meal for David, his mom, and our very good friends from portland, OR who were here visiting. We made a trip to whole foods for this one, so no leftovers, frozen meals or canned goods here. The night before, we went out to a brazilian grill for rodizio, an all-you-can-eat meat fest, so I wanted to make something really light and fresh. After looking around a bit, I settled on golden beet salad with arugula, chevre, and lemon-thyme vinaigrette and manila clams steamed in vermouth with chile, garlic, and fresh cilantro. This was an amazing meal, and the pictures turned out so well that I couldn't help posting more than one.
I think this will go into the food memory bank for a long time. It was another really wonderful meal with friends of the sort I wish we had time to have much more often.

Here is a close up.