Mexican sopes

Sopes filled with mashed beans, roast chicken and salsa verde

Sopes are kind of like small fat tortillas with the edges pinched up to hold your fillings.  They are delicious and are crisp on the outside and nice and soft on the inside.  You can fill them with whatever you like - mashed beans, any meat really, cheese, salsa, slices of avocado, and any combination of fillings.  I like putting a layer of mashed beans on the bottom, then topping with cheese and salsa for a veggie version, or a little cooked chicken, chorizo or carnitas on top of the beans with a bit of salsa verde and cilantro.  You could even do a breakfast or brunch dish and do some eggs and cheese, or huevos con chorizo (eggs scrambled with chorizo).  If you're having a few people over, fry up a bunch of them and put out a table full of different fillings and condiments so every diner can top however they like!

Sopes are made in two steps - cooking first on a griddle or heavy skillet to just set and brown on each side, then while they are still warm, use your fingers to pinch up the edges all around to form a rim.  Once you're done with the first part, you'll heat up a bit of oil and then quickly fry them until just crisp.  You can keep them warm in a low heat oven until you're done frying up the whole batch and are ready to serve.  Don't let them sit too long though - they may dry out a bit.

Sopes

Sweet and spicy soy glazed chicken wings

Sweet and spicy soy glazed chicken wings

With such big NFL playoff games and the Super Bowl coming up, maybe you are hosting or attending a football party, or just want an excuse to eat all those foods that seem to be standards for football watching gatherings :)  What's better than whipping up a bunch of chicken wings?

And yes, you can get them really crispy without frying them first!  Chicken wings are easy to make in the oven and get really crispy under your broiler without the mess or calories of frying them.  They do, however, spatter a bit and will probably cause a little bit of smoke in your kitchen, so be prepared and disable your smoke detector for a little while!

I've been making simple roasted chicken based on Thomas Keller's method in Bouchon for a while now - high heat, dry chicken simply seasoned with salt and pepper and that's it to get a beautiful crispy skin and moist chicken.  So the same thing applies here for these simple chicken wings that are browned and crisped under the broiler - pat them dry, sprinkle some salt and pepper over them, and let them crisp up in the oven until cooked through the skin is nice and crispy.

The sweet and spicy soy glaze is made up of a bit of rice vinegar, chile flakes, honey and kecap manis, or Indonesian sweet soy sauce.  If you can't find it, go ahead and use some regular soy sauce and add some brown sugar to your desired level of sweetness.

Crisp up the wings first under your broiler, then toss in the glaze right before serving.  They are sweet, spicy, sticky and delicious!

This recipe is easily doubled or tripled depending on how many people you are serving.  One pound of chicken wings is about 3 - 4 whole wings - I split them at the joints and serve as wingettes and drummettes, using the wing tip part for making chicken stock.  But you can leave them whole if you prefer.

Torrisi Italian Specialties

Waiting outside in the cold at Torrisi Italian Specialties

Last night, on a really cold Friday night, we finally checked out Torrisi Italian Specialties and it was definitely one of the better meals we've had in New York.  It's a sandwich place by day serving antipasti by the pound, sandwiches like chicken parm and house roasted turkey and I've heard the eggplant parm is great too, and then at night,  it's a tiny restaurant with only about 20 seats I think.  They have three seatings each night, don't take reservations, and people start lining up sometime after 5 to put their names in to snag a table.  The $50 prix fixe menu changes daily with whatever the chefs/owners Rich Torrisi and Mario Carbone want to cook that day.  It made lots of best of 2010 lists and I've been curious about it, checking the menu occasionally whenever I thought about it just to see what they were cooking up that day.

Watercress salad with chayote, grapefruit and vanilla

Watercress salad with chayote, grapefruit and vanilla

This salad is inspired by one featured in The New Brooklyn Cookbook from Palo Santo restaurant.  It is so bright and refreshing, and the vanilla adds a really interesting dimension to it.  I've never had chayote raw before - it's similar to raw kohlrabi, and has a texture like a crisp apple but just isn't sweet like an apple.

The original recipe is for a more composed salad where there is a fairly equal ratio of watercress to chayote to grapefruit.  I wanted to beef up the greens so made this more of a watercress salad with chayote and grapefruit.  I also tweaked the dressing a bit and added a little lemon juice and honey to round out the flavors.  Taste your dressing before adding honey - if your grapefruit is pretty sweet, you may not want to add more sweetness.  I just felt like mine needed more, and also the lemon juice adds a little more brightness that maybe the grapefruit reduction loses after cooking.

Chicken liver and herb spread

Chicken liver and herb spread

So, this isn't really a pate as it omits the butter to save a few calories, and isn't a chopped liver because it doesn't have the chicken fat and chopped eggs in a typical chopped liver dish- so I'll just call it a chicken liver spread or an "almost" pate - similar flavors and technique, just without butter.  I also added a lot of herbs so it makes it a little less traditional in its flavors, especially with the addition of chives, but I think the chives are really great in this, and taste great sprinkled on top too. But if you want to make it more of a traditional pate, you can omit the chives and sage, and just stick to thyme, and then add two sticks or 1 cup of good quality butter - it will of course add substantial fat and calories :)

Chicken liver crostini - with mayo and pancetta

Serve with a good crusty baguette, some good, toasted bread or make crostini, and, if you like, serve the spread over a little mayo and topped with a little pancetta or bacon as pictured here, inspired by the recipe from Franny's restaurant in Brooklyn published in The New Brooklyn Cookbook that came out this year.  I made my own version of a chicken liver spread, inspired by one my sister made on Christmas Eve where she added some sauteed apples later to add more sweetness, and also taking a cue from the Franny's recipe by adding some anchovies.  I loved the idea of adding a little mayo and topping it with pancetta (or bacon if you don't have pancetta) - and when you take a bite, it really makes you do an audible "mmmmm..." - it is so good!

Cooking again on NYE 2010 and New Year's Day 2011

Chicken liver crostini

Hope 2011 is off to a great start for everyone!

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I haven't cooked much lately as December was just really busy!  But over New Year's Eve and on New Year's Day, I definitely went a little crazy cooking up all kinds of treats for just Rick and me to celebrate the new year.  It's actually the first NYE we've had at home just the two of us in a few years and it was really fun to just cook all day and night, and drink good wine :)

We went to Chinatown late in the morning to pick up some seafood and ingredients and picked up some scallops, a dozen clams, a couple of fresh sardines and chicken wings, as well as a pound of chicken livers and a bunch of veggies.  We also ran out in the afternoon to buy a little bit of wine at The Greene Grape, one of our local wine shops - it was hoppin' with lots of people buying wine and bubbly for New Year's Eve - but the guys kept the line moving and it was fairly painless.

I had recently received The New Brooklyn Cookbook: Recipes and Stories from 31 Restaurants That Put Brooklyn on the Culinary Map by Melissa and Brendan Vaughan as a holiday gift (thanks Diana!)  and so far I am loving it.  The book is nicely done with great recipes and I love reading the background pieces on all the restaurants.  It not only makes you want to try a bunch of the recipes at home, but is a good guide to checking out some of these restaurants. I've only been to a few of them so far, including a few faves like The General Greene, Franny's and Marlow and Sons, so it'll be fun to start making our way through the others.

Over New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, I made three dishes inspired by recipes from the book with a few twists of my own (I'll do separate posts on how I made them once I've written them up):

• Chicken liver crostini - I made my own chicken liver spread but loved the idea of serving it over a layer of mayo and topping it with pancetta!  
• Diver scallops with white bean puree, chorizo and pine nuts - with a few substitutions based on what I had at home
• Chayote salad with grapefruit and vanilla - I used a lot less grapefruit and chayote so it was more of a watercress salad with slices of chayote and grapefruit.  The grapefruit and vanilla dressing was lovely!

On New Year's Eve, we started with a bit of cheese to snack on and a nice bottle of red while I got the chicken livers going to make my version of a chicken liver spread.  I also turned the broiler on and got the chicken wings going for my sweet and spicy soy glazed chicken wings.  If you've never made wings in the oven under the broiler, try it sometime - easier and a bit healthier than frying them up and they get super crispy - check out the recipe.  They do smoke up your oven a bit though, just a heads up.

I had only bought about a pound of chicken wings since it was just the two of us, which yielded 3 whole wings, which I split at the joints (and used the wing tips for chicken stock) - this was about the perfect amount for the two of us but we easily could've ripped through a bunch more of them if I had made more - super crispy, sticky, spicy and sweet in kecap manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce), rice vinegar, chile flakes and a bit of honey.  Once we were done with those, we took a little break and drank a little more wine :)

Sweet and spicy chicken wings

Later on, we made chicken liver crostini, pictured at the beginning of this post - topped some toasted baguette with a thin layer of mayo, some of the  chicken liver spread I had made earlier, and then a nice piece of pancetta on top and a sprinkle of snipped chives - this was so ridiculously good!  You have to try it if you are into chicken livers and pate and all that.

We took another little break and after a bit, we got the broiler going again to cook up some fresh sardines.  We've made them at home before, and it was fun to see Mark Bittman do a piece on them in the New York Times recently (click here for his recent article).  So, taking a cue from his piece, I cooked ours up by stuffing some fresh thyme and slices of lemon in the cavities - it's amazing how much flavor gets into the sardines when you are literally only cooking them under the broiler for about 5 minutes or so!  They were fantastic.  If you buy fresh sardines in Chinatown, you will have to clean them yourself but they aren't too bad - check out my earlier post on fresh sardines (and razor clams) here.  They don't really have much for scales but I do recommended just running a small knife gently along them to get any that might be there, especially closer to the head.

Broiled sardines with thyme and lemon

We were definitely getting stuffed but we still had clams in the fridge!  I didn't want to risk leaving them overnight and we had only bought a dozen to begin with thinking it would just be a little dish.  I cooked up a little chorizo and some garlic, threw in a bit of wine and some sherry, thyme and parsley, and dumped the clams in and we had our final dish for the evening.  The chorizo was pretty salty but added some nice flavors.  I would probably use less next time if I really wanted to sop up the broth later - we were too full to want any more bread so didn't really bother.

Clams with chorizo and herbs

Tofu chocolate pudding

And much later on, we ended the night with a little bit of tofu chocolate pudding (click here for the recipe) - make a double batch so you can eat it all week or weekend in small doses!

It was a fun and food and wine filled New Year's Eve, and it was nice to do some real cooking again!  It may seem like we overdid it a little bit, but I didn't make much of any one thing - just small portions of several dishes.  And really, the sardines and clams weren't much once you discarded the bones, heads and shells :)

On New Year's Day, we had a little more of that fantastic chicken liver spread (yum!) for lunch and I made the watercress salad with chayote, grapefruit and vanilla salad from The New Brooklyn Cookbook. It was so fresh and light, and just really nice.  The bit of vanilla in the dressing was so interesting, and I ended up tweaking the dressing a bit by adding a little lemon juice and a little honey to give it a little more sweetness.

Watercress salad with chayote, grapefruit and vanilla

Scallops over swiss chard and white bean puree

We geared up to watch the Rose Bowl at home (unfortunately our Badgers lost) and giggled about the fact that rather than beer and brats, we were having scallops over white bean puree, again, inspired by the cookbook.  I decided not to use the chorizo I had since it seemed a little too salty in the clam dish the night before so I just omitted it - next time I'll try a different kind of chorizo in this.  I also subbed golden raisins and chopped Marcona almonds for the currants and pine nuts because that was what I had in my pantry, and subbed Swiss chard for the Tuscan kale, which I couldn't find at the store that day, but it was all really good together and while the chorizo would've been nice, it was still great without it, and a bit lighter.  The fried shallots and lemon in the raisin and almond topping was great, and it was just a lovely dish with a nice glass of Sancerre!  I made a very simple white bean puree with canned beans and kept the flavors minimal - just some olive oil, a little water to thin it out a little, and salt and pepper.  It was great with everything else and I definitely think I'll be making it again as a base for something else another time, though maybe I'll try making the puree from dried beans next time.

So, I'll post some recipes as I write them up - stay tuned!  Happy 2011!

Happy New Year! Ending 2010 with lots of good food!

Happy new year everyone!  I hope your 2011 is filled with lots of love, laughter and adventure!

I have not done much cooking at all lately!  December just got so busy with things going on after work, seeing a few shows, and seeing friends.  But, we did do some good eating over the holidays, both at some great restaurants and some great home-cooked meals with family and friends.

tablier de sapeur - or crispy tripe

Throughout the month of December, Rick and I tried a few restaurants we had been meaning to try for a little while - Marea, DBGB, and Ma Peche.  We just got caught up on Top Chef All -Stars this weekend, and didn't realize that 2 out of the 3 were just featured on the show so it was fun to see them on TV after we had eaten at Marea and Ma Peche.

We went to DBGB, Daniel Boulud's more casual beer and sausage place, and loved it. It's a more casual and lively place. We started with some really great oysters and the Lyonnais-style crispy tripe, pictured here. It was basically a square of tripe, breaded and fried and then served with a tomato and tripe salad and a really great mustard. I don't know that we were expecting breaded and fried tripe, but together it all worked. The fried part of it could've been almost anything, but the tomato and tripe salad was lovely. We then had the country pork and chicken liver pate, ordered two of the sausages, the boudin basque, a blood and pigs head sausage over scallion mashed potatoes, and the beaujolais, a pork sausage with bacon, mushrooms and red wine and served over lentils. they were both terrific. Definitely check it out when you are in the mood for some sausage!