What's Cooking?: Beef Lo Mein

In an attempt to save money, I have been scouring the grocery for deals on meat.  I found some "stir fry beef" marked down to a ridiculously low price, probably because it was nearing its expiration date.  So I had to figure out something to do with it.

I have attempted stir fry on many occasions but am always disappointed.  I wanted to make something that tasted similar to lo mein, sort of a cross between a stir fry and a lo mein.  All previous attempts of this had registered somewhere between disastrous and just blah.  So I scoured the internet, comparing different takes, and ultimately decided to take a little bit from each recipe to create my own.  As I told my husband, it would either be amazing or absolutely horrific.

This is what I came up with.  I do not claim that it is authentic Chinese.  Let's just say it's my take on things.  And it was by no means horrific.  In fact, I loved it.

Beef Lo Mein

1/2 pack of linguine or spaghetti (I'm a linguine fan)
1 lb stir fry beef
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger (I love ginger, but you could add less if you'd like)
1/2 of a red onion
1/2 a bag of shredded carrots
2 cups chopped up broccoli
2 tablespoons corn starch
1 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons dry cooking sherry
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
1/3 cup soy sauce plus extra for meat

Salt and pepper the beef and pour some soy sauce over it as a marinade.  Let sit for as long as you can (mine sat for a mere hour).  Cook noodles according to directions.  Put vegetable oil in skillet and get skillet very hot.  Cook the beef on one side, then flip and cook on the other.  Grate the ginger over the beef.  Add onions, carrots, and broccoli and stir fry for about 8 minutes.  In a separate bowl, mix together the corn starch, rice wine vinegar, cooking sherry, fish sauce, and hoisin sauce.  Pour mixture over the meat and vegetables and stir together to combine.  Take the pasta and fold it into the meat, vegetable, and sauce mixture until it is incorporated.        

Salmon Orzo and Zucchini Salad

I wanted to cook something light, airy, and healthy but still manage to fill us up. My husband never really ate salmon until he met me, but now he enjoys it (at least so he says).  I searched the web, compared various recipes, and this is what I came up with.

Salmon Orzo Salad

You will need:

2 salmon fillets
Olive oil
Salt and Pepper
1 lemon
1/4 cup white wine
2 cups spinach
1 green bell pepper
1/2 cup shredded carrots
1/2 cup feta cheese
torn basil (optional)

Preheat oven to 425.  Take two salmon fillets.  Generously coat them in olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Squeeze half a lemon over them, then add 1/4 cup of white wine.  Roast salmon for approximately 10-12 minutes.  Remove salmon, let cool, then take fork and shred into small pieces.

While the salmon is roasting, cook 2 cups of orzo according to the direction on the package.

Chop up two cups of spinach and one green bell pepper.  Combine in a bowl.  Add half a cup of shredded carrots and half a cup of feta cheese.  Mix in the orzo and spinach.  Sprinkle with remaining half of lemon and salt and pepper.  Torn fresh basil would also make a nice addition.

Marinated Zucchini Salad

You will need:

• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 small red onion, halved and thinly sliced
• 1/3 cup red-wine vinegar
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• Salt and pepper
• 6 medium zucchini, thinly sliced

1. In a large skillet, heat oil over medium-high. Add onion and saute until translucent, 3 minutes. Add vinegar and sugar and season with salt and pepper.
2. Transfer to a nonreactive bowl. Add zucchini and toss. Let marinate at room temperature 30 minutes.
   Recipe is from Martha Stewart.
   
   

Rosemary and Lemon Chicken

You will need:
Salt
Sprigs of fresh rosemary
4 cloves of garlic
red pepper flakes
dijon mustard
2 lemons
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 to 6 skin on, bone-in chicken thighs
cremini mushrooms

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Put salt, garlic, some of the rosemary (off the stem, of course), red pepper flakes, a couple teaspoons dijon mustard, juice from one lemon, and the olive oil in a food processor.  Pulse until a paste is formed (it may be slightly watery---that's okay).  Blot the chicken off with a paper towel (damp meat won't brown).  Gently pull the skin away from the meat and stuff part of the paste into each chicken thigh.  Toss a bit of olive oil in a cast iron skillet.  Put the chicken skin side down in a cast iron skillet and cook for about 5 minutes on medium heat.

Turn the chicken over and add in the juice from the remaining lemon.  Add the cremini mushrooms (chopped) into the skillet, along with the lemon halves and leftover sprigs of rosemary.

Put in the oven and roast for approximately 25 minutes.  

The best part of this meal is that the lemons were fresh off my father's lemon tree from his garden and the rosemary was clipped from my potted rosemary plant on my balcony.  Nothing beats fresh and home grown!

Snap Beans and a Little Cooking Philosophy

Not green beans.  Not plain old beans.  Snap beans.  That's what we always called them growing up, and that's what I call them still.  I'm sure my French Creole ancestors called them haricots verts, but their twentieth century counterparts have always referred to them as the above.  They are snap beans because you have to snap off the ends, at least if they are fresh, which mine happily were.  Instead of the proverbial midlife crisis, my father planted a garden.  And then he made a bigger garden.  And finally an even bigger garden.  He grows all the best of South Louisiana, including the delicious Creole tomato, my favorite variety of tomatoes.  We have a long growing season here, and my dad takes advantage of it.  Right now he has lettuce just coming up and sugar snap peas starting to bloom.  But back to the snap bean, that crunchy, green delicacy.  Here is how I cooked my snap beans on Sunday evening:

1/2 lb of green beans
1 slice of bacon, cut up (I kept it at one because I was trying to keep down the fat, but you could go for more)
balsamic vinegar
salt
pepper

Fry down the bacon.  (I used my wok, but you could use whatever is convenient.)  Throw in the beans and toss around with the bacon.  Add balsamic vinegar; I used about a quarter to a third of a cup, but you can do it according to your personal taste.  Cover and cook on medium heat for 10-15 minutes (less for al dente beans, more for beans with less bite).

Can you tell I am all about personal freedom in cooking?  Be aware of the main rules of cooking (don't put red wine in the fridge, use wine that you would drink while cooking, salt your pasta water, etc.) and then build upon them.  By main rules, I mean most basic tenets.  Truly, there are only a few from which you cannot deviate.  If you've mastered the basics, you can start breaking the smaller, more inconsequential rules.  You can experiment, add, subtract, and multiply ingredients.  The key is to know your own palate and that of your family and to create dishes that suit those needs.

(Sorry for the awful picture.  I forgot to take a photo right after cooking and wound up using my camera while sitting at my desk eating during lunch at work the next day.)

Tomatoes!

For a single girl like me, purchasing an entire sack of vine ripened tomatoes is a bit of a commitment.  Or a waste.  Whichever you'd prefer.  A commitment to either eat them all---and quickly---or to waste them.  It's so hard planning meals just for you.  You wind up cooking way too much food and tiring of eating it over five days, or not wanting to cook at all.  And I love to cook, so it's always sad when I resign myself to take out simply because it's "just me."  So what to do with the tomatoes. . .SANDWICHES!  Lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich, with a twist.  I used mozzarella cheese, lots of fresh basil leaves, and tomatoes.  A sandwich take on the Caprese salad.  Dinner was an enormous BLT with corn on the cob, fresh not frozen. . .yum.  (Btw. . .I had tomatoes on both sides of the sandwich and used 2 tomatoes on it.)

I try to find those sweet, little things that make me smile; there are so many of them that they often add up to a pretty BIG thing in a day if I let them.  Something happened today that really made me smile.  One of my little girls drew a picture for another one of my little girls.  Walking by the desk of the recipient, I found that she was writing her a sort of notebook paper thank you note:

"[Name] your drawing was so pretty it belongs in an art muzeum"

How sweet and smart is that?!

Also, I said the rosary yesterday, and I intend to say the rosary again today.  It brought me so much peace and helped me to relax after a stressful day.  Of course, it helped me relax so much that I almost fell asleep!  Not a good thing at only 7 p.m.!  Looking forward to the school year coming to its natural end, but I'm going to miss my kids so much.  I don't think it's really hit me yet that they aren't going to be mine anymore.

From the Farmer's Market to the Table. . .

MIRLITON

Apparently elsewhere it's known as chayote.  A cross between a squash and a pear.  Here in New Orleans, we call it a mirliton.  The only place else in the world you can find it referred to as a mirliton is in Haiti, the former French colony of St. Domingue, from which we in New Orleans received so many refugees after the massive slave revolt that occurred.

My memories of mirlitons. . .ALWAYS at Thanksgiving and ALWAYS something of which to be skeptical.  My grandmothers are two different sides of the spectrum---one a Creole from the New Orleans metropolitan area, the other a Cajun from Southwestern Louisiana.  It was my Creole New Orlenas grandmother who put out the mirliton dish at Thanksgiving.

Mirliton casserole was something I was at least willing to try as it contained shrimp, my favorite food.  However, it also was a heavy, slimy, olive green mass of a seriously breaded casserole.  Probably not something Martha Stewart would allow on her table.  But that never stopped New Orleans mamas or Maw Maws.

During my trip to the farmer's market this week, I purchased three mirlitons.  I am a very traditional person, and I wanted to carry on the New Orleans tradition of having a mirliton dish at Thanksgiving.  Apparently, mirlitons are somewhat of an endangered species, not the kind you find in the grocery store, but the kind that are considered a quintessentially New Orleans plant.  Mirlitons were not something New Orleanians went to the grocery and purchased.  The vines grew in their backyards, and they picked them, boiled them, chopped them, stuffed them, and served them.  However, Hurricane Katrina managed to wipe out our backyard mirliton population (among other things).  So now mirlitons, like oysters---a whole other post---are a New Orleans delicacy.  I became more determined than ever to somehow incorporate them into my holiday cooking.

I bought the ingredients to make the dreaded casserole.  Half way through the day on Wednesday---in fact, as my mirlitons were actually boiling---I became determined to use them for something else.  None of that heavy, horrible, slimy, breaded casserole stuff for me.  I wanted to use the mirlitons but transform them into a unique dish.  I accessed the Times Picayune's recipe index---a website which every cook from Maine to California should regularly access---and discovered a recipe for mirliton bread.  I was highly skeptical at first.  But I figured, what the hell.  Let's give it a shot.  At any rate, no one will EVER believe what the main ingredient is!

Mirlitons can be hard to work with.  They are literally hard.  And they have spiny ends.  You have to boil them for an hour.  Then when you cut them open, they resemble pears.

I am a big fan of spices.  When I saw that the recipe contained cinnamon and nutmeg, I piled it on!  I probably wound up putting twice the amount of spices, but ultimately, this would work in my favor.  It tasted so much like a spice cake or spice bread.  The mirlitons helped keep the bread moist, very similar to what bananas do for banana bread.  You could add nuts to this bread; I just didn't have them on hand, as I decided to make them it on the fly (remember, casserole was the original goal).



And voila!  The finished product:

My grandmother raved about it.  She is an accomplished cook and would be very honest with me if it did not turn out right.  We had the best time getting the aunts, uncles, and cousins to sample the bread at Thanksgving and guess what the main ingredient was!  No one got it, but once they were told, they said, "Uh huh!  I see it now!"  So much fun!  And so yummy!

For information on growing your on mirlitons and keeping the tradition alive, see the following article on the Mirliton Man.

My recipe, modified from the Picayune's version, submitted by Mary Cooper in 1992.

½ cup butter 

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 cups cooked seeded peeled mirliton, smushed as you would mashed potatoes

2 ½ cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon nutmeg

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Butter and flour one  loaf pan 

Cream butter and sugar. Mix in eggs. Add mirliton and mix well.

Sift together dry ingredients. Add to mirliton mixture and mix well.  Transfer batter to pan.

Bake for about 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.