Broccoli and scallion frittata

Just in time for a nice weekend breakfast - frittatas are so easily adapted to whatever veggies and cheese you have on hand.  I like to make my frittatas very full of veggies so that it's mostly veggies bound with a little egg. This Sunday morning, we had broccoli, scallions, a chunk of pecorino romano and parmigiano reggiano cheeses.  You could also use a more melting kind of cheese if you prefer like cheddar.

Broccoli and scallion frittata
6-8 servings

• 2 cups chopped broccoli
• 8 eggs
• 4 scallions, sliced
• 2 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 3/4 cup grated parmigiano reggiano or pecorino romano, or a combination of both
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. ground pepper
• 1 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 Tbsp. butter

Preheat the broiler on your oven.  Cook your broccoli just a bit but you want them still to be crunchy - steam, or place your broccoli in a heat proof ceramic or glass bowl and cook in microwave for 2 minutes or so.

Beat eggs together with 1 tsp. salt and pepper.  Add 1/2 cup cheese and mix in well.

Heat olive oil and butter in a cast iron skillet or oven proof nonstick skillet over medium high heat.  Add scallions and garlic and saute until soft, about a minute.  Add broccoli and the other tsp. of salt and saute for about 30 seconds.  Pour egg mixture over and turn heat down to medium.  When the egg has mostly set on the bottom and the edges have mostly set, after about 4-5 minutes, sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup grated cheese over everything and put the skillet in the oven under the broiler.  Broil for about 2 minutes or so until the top is golden and the egg has all set.  Slice into wedges and serve.

Tuna, chickpea, roasted pepper and bulgar salad

This is a quick and simple, protein and whole-grain packed salad that can be put together almost completely from pantry staples with the addition of some fresh parsley and a few spoons of dressing - try my  cumin lime honey dressing.

You can serve this slightly warm or you can refrigerate and serve cold.

You can also make this vegetarian by omitting the tuna, and vegan by omitting the honey in the dressing and replacing with a little agave syrup or brown sugar.

Tuna, chickpea, roasted pepper and bulgar salad
4 - 5 servings

• 1 jar high quality tuna in olive oil, drained
• 1 jar roasted red peppers, drained and chopped
• 2 Tbsp. chopped parsley
• 1 cup bulgar wheat, cooked
• 12-14 oil cured olives, pitted and chopped
• 4 Tbsp.  cumin lime honey dressing
• 1 Tbsp. orange juice or sherry vinegar
• 2 tsp. salt, more to taste
• 1 tsp. ground pepper

Cook bulgar according to directions.  Put all ingredients in a large bowl and toss together.  Taste and adjust seasoning with more dressing, or salt as needed.

Note on cooking bulgar:  The typical ratio is 2-1/2 cups water to 1 cup bulgar.  There a few different types of bulgar - fine, medium, course and there is also cracked bulgar, where the grain is broken down a bit.  Most would say you can just add boiling water to the bulgar and let it stand for up to a half an hour as it soaks it up.  I had a course bulgar and it seems to do better actually being boiled a little while in water until it is tender, and then drained and rinsed.  If you're buying a bulgar with cooking directions go ahead and follow the directions.  If you're using a bulk product with no directions, I'd recommend pouring boiling water over bulgar and letting it stand about 1/2 hour for fine and medium bulgar wheat and boiling course bulgar until tender.

Lemon zest macaroons

I made these lemony macaroons recently to bring to a friend's Passover dinner.  The lemon zest and lemon juice add a nice brightness and keep the macaroons from being overly sweet.  You could also swap the lemon for lime instead if you like.

Watch them carefully - I did end up with a pan full of really burnt sugar with my terrible oven but managed to salvage most of the macaroons!  So, my suggestion is to bake one sheet at a time unless you have very even heat distribution in your oven.

Lemon zest macaroons
Makes about 14-18 depending on how big you make them.  Recipe can be easily doubled.

• 1 x 7oz. bag of sweetened shredded coconut
• 1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 5 egg whites
• 1-1/2 Tbsp. lemon juice
• zest of 2 lemons
• 1/4 tsp. salt

Stir the egg whites well so they come together, and then thoroughly mix in sugar.  Once the sugar is dissolved, add the salt, lemon juice and lemon zest, and then the coconut. Line two cookie sheets/baking trays with parchment paper or silicone mats. Form balls or piles about 2" in diameter and place them on the baking sheets and let them sit for about half an hour.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and put a rack in the upper third of your oven.

After the macaroons have rested a bit, if any of the liquid has seeped out, with a small spoon, push it back into the mound of coconut. Put them in the oven - bake one tray at a time if your oven tends to burn the bottoms and is too hot in the lower part of the oven, or you can do both if you have very even heat distribution - and let them bake for about 10 minutes.  If they've started to run or spread out, take the tray out and with a small spoon, push them back together a bit. Turn down the heat to 300 degrees F and let them bake another 10 or so until lightly browned.  Remove when they are lightly toasted and let them cool.  You may need or want to form re-form them back a bit into round balls.  This is best done shortly after you've taken them out of the oven.  Let them cool before serving.

Razor clams and fresh sardines

We love, love, love razor clams and grilled fresh sardines - we had amazing versions of both on our trip to Spain last year and ever since, are always on the lookout for them on restaurant menus.  Both sardines and razor clams can be cooked on a grill or a la plancha, or just in a pan or cast iron skillet and served simply with a little parsley, garlic shallot butter sauce or olive oil, and lemons and they are so good!  Razor clams are also big in Chinese seafood cooking, typically stir fried with black bean sauce - also delicious.  We were excited to see them at the fish vendors on Grand St. in Chinatown this morning and bought a pound, which gave us 13 clams.  We also bought a few fresh sardines, and made a nice, simple lunch of razor clams and sardines with a little garlic and shallot butter sauce, parsley and lemon juice, and served them with a little bread. Not only are sardines sustainable and low on the food chain, but they really are delicious and I hope you'll give them a try sometime- canned sardines can be great (try eating the ones in tomato sauce with a little rice sometime - an easy and tasty dinner!), but fresh sardines are really a whole different thing - so good just really simply seasoned.  If you're a little squeamish about whole fish, or fish with bones, take baby steps and soon enough, you'll get past it :)

Razor clams

It was hard to figure out how to clean them since everything online seems geared at Pacific razor clams that are rounder and more clam shaped.  The Atlantic razor clams have 5-6" long, dark, mostly straight shells a little less than an inch thick.  So, I texted a friend and my sister who cook professionally, and they both said to cut off the siphon end (it'll be the opposite end of what you see sticking out here - don't worry, you'll be able to tell which end is the siphon end), and my sister said I could probably soak them in a little salt water for a while to get them to spit out their grit a little. So, we did, and I think it helped because they were pretty much grit-free.  We had them at a great restaurant once where they were super gritty so we were definitely a little hesitant about trying to cook them ourselves.

We heated up our cast iron skillet with a little olive oil and got it really hot and tossed them in.  After they all popped open, we pulled them out and trimmed off the siphon end.  We had made a little garlic and shallot butter sauce (melt some butter in a small sauce pan and add some minced garlic and finely chopped shallots, a little salt, and cook until the garlic and shallots are tender) and drizzled that over the clams, squeezed a little lemon and sprinkled them with some chopped parsley.

Grilled or pan-seared fresh sardines

If the sardines aren't sold already cleaned, as you'll probably find them in Chinatown, look for the freshest ones with the clearest eyes and without any blemishes or tears anywhere - they're easy to bruise up.  When you get them home, run a small knife gently along them from tail to head to scrape off the scales - their scales come off very easily - until they feel pretty smooth and free of any scales. Don't worry too much about scales on the head as you probably won't get much from it anyway.  Very gently, remove the little fins along the stomach and along the top of the fish - hold the fish and gently twist and pull them off.  Be really gentle along the stomach or you could end up ripping it open.  With your knife, cut gently and cleanly along the bottom of the fish.  Just run your finger along the inside to pull out the insides - it's not as awful as it sounds and is pretty easy.  Give them a good rinse under running water.

Dry them off with a paper towels, drizzle with a little olive oil and salt, and then add them to a hot cast iron skillet or griddle, or if you have a grill, go ahead and throw them on a grill - make sure you oil the grates well so they don't stick.  We don't have one, so after cooking the razor clams, we then cleaned out the cast iron skillet a bit, heated up a little olive oil, and cooked up the sardines.  Cook them for a few minutes, maybe 2, on each side,  and then you can also drizzle a little of the garlic butter sauce,  or just a good olive oil, squeeze some lemon juice over them and sprinkle chopped parsley and a little fleur de sel or sea salt on top. There meat on the top half (horizontally) of the fish will be easy to remove with your fork and get off the skeleton or bones.  The bottom half of the fish have softer, longer bones that run around the stomach cavity.  You can pull these out, but they'll most likely be soft enough to just eat without much notice.

Lemongrass pork over rice noodles and vegetables - bun thit nuong

Bun thit nuong translates to noodles or rice vermicelli (bun) with grilled (nuong) meat (thit).  This dish can be served with pork or beef typically, or a Vietnamese sausage kind of thing called nem nuong. Often, you'll also see this dish served with cut up Vietnamese egg rolls, or cha gio. The grilled meats, and egg rolls, are served over a bed of rice vermicelli and served with shredded lettuce, cucumbers and herbs, typically mint, cilantro and maybe some thai basil.  It is also often served with a little scallion oil, do chua, Vietnamese carrot and daikon pickles (click here for the recipe), and then chopped peanuts.  We didn't have any scallion oil or peanuts on hand, so rather than slicing up a bunch of scallions, we ended up cutting a few scallions into 2" lengths and adding them to the pan and serving them on top of the dish.  Scallion oil is pretty easy if you want to make it though, and keep it on hand - it's great drizzled over grilled meats and noodle dishes like this - click here for the recipe. And finally, serve it with nuoc cham, the classic Vietnamese sauce with made with fish sauce, garlic, sugar, vinegar and/or lime juice, and a little chili - click here for the recipe. If you don't love fish sauce, try my nuoc cham chay, a similar sauce made with soy sauce instead of fish sauce.  You can also serve this dish over rice rather than rice noodles if you prefer.

We don't have a grill, and so we cooked our thin pork chops in our cast iron pan. If you are lucky enough to have outdoor space and grill (probably one of the things we miss most about our place in Chicago), definitely go ahead and grill your pork chops.

Also, if you're  not a huge fan of lemongrass, this really isn't overpowered by lemongrass flavor but feel free to leave it out if it's not your thing.  At restaurants, you'll find that the meat is sometimes flavored with lemongrass, and sometimes not.

Checking out the other New York Chinatowns with our landlord

So I've mentioned our very sweet landlord before on this blog - see my earlier post, the lobster story.  Since the day of the lobster story, he has taken Rick out to lunch a few times, bought us some fruits and veggies, and one day, even some salmon and shrimp.  Recently, on a Saturday morning, we were heading out to the farmer's market and ran into him in the building.  He invited us to lunch so I finally got to tag along, and then lunch turned into a tour of his home, a tour of the Chinatown out in Flushing, and a fantastic Chinese seafood feast dinner.  And we went ended the night with drinks at our friend's place later on in Astoria - a lovely and unexpected Saturday!

Easter-inspired dinner

Today was a beautiful Sunday - we woke up and had a delicious baked turnip bun from Chinatown Flushing that we had never tried before for breakfast, we went back to sleep for a little bit more, then later walked over to the Brooklyn Flea and had Asia Dog - one hot dog with kim chee and toasted nori, and one with braised pork belly and scallions, we lounged in the sun and met up with friends for a bit in the park by our apartment, and then came home and baked a Vietnamese banana cake, banh chuoi, and made an easter-inspired dinner. And we had a spicy bloody mary with McClure's bloody mary mix (give it a try NYers - just a warning though, it definitely has some major spice!) while the ham was baking.

When we came home from the park this afternoon, I started by baking the banh chuoi since it would take about an hour or more to bake.

Then, I made some quick fresh ricotta with some whole milk leftover from the cake, seasoned it with a little lemon juice, salt and pepper, topped some leftover baguette slices from the other night and put it in the hot oven for a few minutes to toast. Fresh ricotta is so delicious and easy to make - try it out sometime - click here for the recipe. I then started got the ham in the oven to start roasting, and boiled some sweet potatoes and a few eggs. We started the meal with deviled eggs and the crostini with ricotta, and then followed those with some roasted ham with a simple crushed pineapple, dijon and brown sugar glaze, some mashed sweet potatoes, and some roasted broccoli and garlic with parmigiano reggiano and a little lemon juice. Admittedly, by the time we got to the main dinner, we were both feeling kind of full - deviled eggs are so good every once in a while! - so we didn't each much but will have plenty of food for the week.

This is a pretty easy meal to put together - including the banana cake, or banh chuoi, which is about as easy as it gets for baking. It's a fairly dense cake so it may not be everyone's kind of dessert but it really is delicious so give it a try - I've posted the recipe separately here.

Banana cake or banh chuoi

This is a super easy cake to make whenever you have a few really ripe bananas sitting on the counter.  You can do everything in one bowl and it bakes for about an hour without any supervision needed really.  I made this tonight to end our easter-inspired dinner.

It's a moist and denser cake in texture, rather than a fluffy kind of cake, that is typical of Vietnamese desserts.  Also, I've kept the sugar to a minimum here b/c the bananas were quite ripe and I try not to make my desserts too sweet, but you can certainly increase the sugar a bit if you prefer.

March restaurants

So I thought it'd be nice to keep track of the different restaurants I've been checking out each month, either with my husband Rick, friends, or with co-workers at lunch, and offer a few thoughts and highlights from the meals.

So, this is where I ate in March.

PS- I realized I had originally forgotten my out-of-town meals in DC and Indianapolis, which are now included.