Dessert for dinner

After a work happy hour last month, a couple of us decided to grab some food. Our original plan was to get ramen at Ippudo, but that turned out to be a huge wait, so we headed a couple blocks east and north to go to Milk Bar, one of David Chang's restaurants.

We started out with a couple orders of pork buns - high-end versions of northen Chinese cuisine staples. These were made with pork belly, cucumber, hoisin sauce, and scallions all stuffed into a white mantou.

This little Asian version of a slider was delicious. The pork belly was rich and flavorful and the fat had been rendered all soft and clear so it wasn't overwhelming. The cucumber and scallions added some veggie flavors and also cut down the richness of the pork.



I also had a milk - wild strawberry flavor. Kind of like a milkshake, but not as rich or thick, but just as sweet.

Then for dessert, we split 2 kinds of cake - dulce de leche and banana. These cakes were served cold and were 3 to 4 layer cakes with a filling (or fillings) between each layer. The banana cake was tasty, but anything cooked with banana is not my favorite so I concentrated on the dulce de leche one. This was amazing! The cake was light and fluffy and the cream filling was rich but not overwhelming or oily. It was like a mousse filling. It was so good!

Milk Bar was a fun stop but I wouldn't go there for a full meal. I'd rather try David Chang's other places, Ssam (right next door to Milk Bar) or Ko (with their impossibly hard to get reservations) for dinner. Even though the pork buns were delicious and super high quality, I can probably get something a lot cheaper and maybe half as good in Chinatown. Milk Bar would be a fun place to just grab dessert (like yummy dulce de leche cake) after dinner or after going out for the evening.

Homemade cheesy mac

Another modified recipe from Martha Stewart - Macaroni and Cheese.

All of the ingredients set out mise en place.


After the pasta was boiled and drained, I started working on the cheese sauce. First we cooked some onions in butter. FI was a little unsure about including onions in a mac and cheese, but they added so much flavor to the dish, that he became a big fan.


Next we added the milk and flour and the spices (salt, pepper, cayenne) to make the bechamel sauce. I also threw in a pinch of nutmeg because I've always read in other recipes to add some to cheese sauces.


Then I stirred in the shredded cheddar cheese. Buying packages of shredded cheese made the recipe a lot easier. After the cheese was melted, we poured in the pasta. Notice we didn't use elbow macaroni, but the penne with the tubes and ridges collected the mac and cheese just fine. Martha's recipe also called for ham to be chopped up and stirred in, but we figured this was going to be rich enough and didn't need extra salt or calories.


Then we poured everything into a baking dish and sprinkled bread crumbs over the top. Again, buying pre-made bread crumbs made this a lot easier. We also didn't bother sprinkling more cheese on top as we already had a lot of cheese in the sauce.


The finished product! It was delicious! Since we had cut out the ham and didn't put so much cheese, it wasn't super salty at all. But the onions, cayenne, and nutmeg all added some nice flavor nuances to the dish.


We ate our mac and cheese with stir-fried broccoli we made as well. There was plenty left and I got to eat it for the next two days' lunches. I also finished off a serving after coming home late from a night out with work friends. Yummy greasy cheesy food is the best after a night of drinking!

High-end Mexican food

For one of our date nights out, FI and I decided to stay around our neighborhood. "Support the local economy!" is one of our rallying cries when one of us wants Pinkberry from up the street (usually me) or have another beer at a local bar (both of us). Another one of these rallying cries is "Keep the property values up!".

Anyways, we decided to head to Zarela's. The owner, Zarela Martinez, I later found out (while researching Paladar), is the mother of Aaron Sanchez, where we had gone to eat last fall.

We started out with chips and salsa and a chili sauce. Delicious and hot as the chips were fresh out of the fryer. But we tried not to eat too much so as not to ruin our appetites. Which is what tends to happen when you go to Mexican restaurants and they provide unlimited chips and salsa.


Our vegetable dish was a sauteed spinach dish that was then rolled up and batter-fried with melted cheese on top. This was delicious and cheesy but kind of heavy and not really the "healthy" vegetable side we were going for.


FI had the fish special of the day. It was some filet cut of fish with a bread coating and fried. The fish was soft but kind of bland.



I had grilled salmon with a smoky chipotle, onion, oregano, cilantro and lime juice sauce (according to their menu). This sauce was the tastier of the two and we both kept (since we always switch our dishes midway through the meal) spooning it over the fish.


Overall the meal was okay. It's a little disconcerting to pay more for a Mexican meal (similar to paying for higher-end Chinese and Vietnamese food; it feels wrong to be paying more), but I'd like to go back and try some of their non-seafood dishes.

Plus - "Support the local economy!"

Our version of stone soup

One weekend, while wandering through Chinatown, FI and I were chatting about what we wanted to do for dinner. We bought some bok choy and decided to make a meatball-tofu-bok choy soup. We had ground turkey, tofu, and vermecelli all in our kitchen, so we cobbled ingredients together for a stone soup.

First we made the meatballs. We chopped up garlic, ginger, and scallions (the Chinese version of the holy trinity, more on that here and here). As I've mentioned before, these 3 (especially garlic) are staples in all of our Asian-influenced cooking.


Then I mashed up about a fourth of a block of tofu, which would be our binding agent.


The rest of the tofu was cut into small cubes.


The ground turkey was mixed in, along with soy sauce and rice wine.


We sauteed the bok choy with dried mini shrimp and garlic.


Then we added water to make the soup.


While we waited for the water to come to a boil, we made all the little turkey meatballs.


Then we threw the meatballs and tofu into the pot and let it cook away.


We let everything cook for about 30 minutes to an hour to really get the flavors going. Then about 10 minutes before we ate, we threw in the vermecelli. The dried noodles had been soaking in a bowl of warm water the whole time.


Ready to eat!


We made a TON of soup. I think I had that soup for three lunches the next week. The broth was very light and not salty at all. The meatballs were also very light. I think a lot of the flavor leeched out during the cooking process. Both FI and I don't like super salty stuff, so this turned out okay. The bok choy was super soft and almost mushy and the tofu and vermecelli also soaked up some of the meatball flavor. Overall, it was a light and filling dish without a super strong flavor. Which worked, since we didn't have any rice to eat it with.

Creating our own spaghetti sauce

We had a lot of vegetables left over from a few cooking adventures and were trying to figure out what we should make for dinner. FI was in the mood for Italian, so we set out to create a spaghetti sauce.

I had a ton of carrots left over from making carrot cupcakes, so those got peeled, cut up, and put on the stove to cook.


We also cleaned up some broccoli and chopped them up to add to the pot.


Then we sauteed some chopped up onions.


And added ground turkey to brown.


Then the carrots and broccoli (drained) were added to the turkey and onion and a can of tomatoes was tossed in as well. As the sauce simmered, we added some salt and pepper to taste and some oregano.


Our own homemade spaghetti sauce, ready to eat!


This was a super easy dish to throw together. Since we put it all together ourselves, we could control how much salt and oil were added to make the sauce. Plus have fresh veggies cooked as part of the sauce made it really healthy too.

Trying out a new cuisine

After seeing a movie at the AMC Times Square in early February, FI and I wandered around midtown west looking for someplace to eat. We checked out Yelp and Citysearch and tried to pick a genre of food, but weren't really getting anywhere. Finally we ended up around 50th and 51st by 9th avenue and surrounded by Mexican, Thai, Italian, and we decided to go Greek!

We ened up at Uncle Nick's Ouzaria for Greek tapas. FI and I had not enjoyed Greek food together before so this was a fun new adventure.

First we had the Stuffed Vine Leaves, which were a cold appetizer. They had a bit of acidity to them and the rice was filling, but not a lot of flavor besides the lemon.


Then we had Lamb with Seasonal Vegetables wrapped in Phyllo. This was hot and flaky and delicous. With all the food we had, we ended up taking half of this home for lunch the next day.

For our veggie, we had Fried Zucchini with Scordalia Dip. This was delicious. The zucchini was hot and crispy on the outside, but soft and mushy on the inside. The Scordalia dip was a yogurt with some seasonings and it was cool and cool-tasting. It helped reduced the hot temperature of the fried zucchini nicely. We also took a few of these home to eat the next day.

Finally we had Baked Clams. These were also super hot and straight out of the oven. The toppings were nice and crispy and it added a layer to the squishy clams underneath.


This was a delicious meal with plenty of leftovers to enjoy. Uncle Nick's menu is pretty extensive, so I definitely want to go back there (whenever I'm back in Midtown West) to try some of the other dishes.

From the book: Turkey Burgers

One of the first recipes we tried from the Everyday Food: Great Food Fast cookbook by Martha Stewart was Favorite Turkey Burgers. FI loves, loves burgers and requested this dish.

Here are all the ingredients for turkey patties in a bowl before we mixed it up. We actually didn't use guyere cheese (FI couldn't find it in the store) and instead used blue cheese (which FI did find).


The finished patties, ready for grilling. They were really big! Based on our experiences with making hamburgers, we smooshed these out really flat and large so when they grilled up, they wouldn't be so thick.


We cooked them on FI's George Foreman Grill. While turkey meat is pretty lean, a good amount of fat still was cooked off.


The finished patties with beautiful grill marks.


We also swapped out the burger buns for English muffins. The burgers were really good. The blue cheese was pretty strong so we didn't add as much. All in all a tasty and lean dinner!

Two Ways to Meatballs

For a potluck dinner last fall, FI decided he wanted to bring meatballs. He wanted Italian style and I wanted Chinese, so we ended up using 5 or so pounds of ground turkey to make 2 kinds of meatballs.

Here are the ingredients, mise en place.


FI chopping up some scallions for the Chinese meatballs.


Ready to mix! We threw in garlic-flavored breadcrumbs, an egg, grated parmesan cheese, scallions, oregano, and I'm not sure what else.


FI mixing up the meat.


The binder (egg and breadcrumbs) made it super easy to make super nice round meatballs. Here they are all ready for baking.


FI spooned a little olive oil over each of them so they wouldn't burn.


I'm chopping up garlic for my Chinese meatballs.


Cutting up tofu, which would be my binding agent.


Mixing up the meat. This had tofu, garlic, scallions and ginger (the holy trinity of Chinese cooking), soy sauce, rice wine, vinegar, and maybe some sugar?


Tofu is not as strong as a binding agent, so these weren't quite as round and sturdy. Especially when we baked them. There was a lot more water in these, so they were more mushy and not so round.


Finished meatballs ready to go!


Our friends liked both kinds and we were able to bring some home as leftovers. The Italian ones we ate with spaghetti and sauce. The Chinese ones we ate with rice and veggies.