Seco de Res (Peruvian Cilantro-Beef Stew)

A couple years ago, we found ourselves hungry for lunch in downtown Denver. We were near the convention center, and wandered about for a bit looking for an interesting restaurant - preferably with a lunch buffet. We came across a small restaurant called Los Cabos II, a Peruvian restaurant with a reasonably-priced buffet option. At the time, we weren't very familiar with Peruvian cuisine, but we knew we liked aji de gallina, so for that alone, went inside to check it out. 

It was that day that we came across this dish, Seco de Res (or also Seco de Carne, depending on who you ask). It's a hearty green stew with big chunks of succulent beef, usually served on rice or with stewed wheat. Unfortunately, at the time, we had this at the buffet, and didn't catch the name of it. We had to wait several months to visit the restaurant again on an unrelated trip to Denver, and check the name again. We've since learned how to make it, and it's delicious.

Aji de Gallina de Rocoto

We recently posted a recipe for Aji de Gallina, a wonderful Peruvian chicken recipe which makes use of the aji amarillo pepper. In that post, however, we also said that the dish is wonderfully suited to showcasing different pepper flavors by simply using a different pepper in place of the aji amarillo. So just a few days ago, we tried it with a pepper we had not used in this dish before - the rocoto pepper.

You may remember that we first made use the rocoto pepper, which is also South American, in a Secret Ingredient Improv post, in which I used it to make a mango salsa. It's quite a hot pepper, actually, significantly hotter than the aji amarillo (which already doesn't mess around), so this version of aji de gallina was a bit overzealous. We used less of the rocoto here than we did of aji amarillo in our usual recipe, but it was still very spicy, and in the future, I would use less still. To maintain the color, however, one could add a touch of tomato paste or paprika (not too much, or either may dominate the flavor). Annatto would also work.

Despite it's excessive heat, I think the rocoto is a tasty pepper. It's sweet, and has a slight, pleasant bitterness like a citrus zest, but you'll really only notice that for a few seconds before the heat kicks in. Then it's hot, very hot. I think my initial use of this pepper in a mango salsa was a more appropriate dish for the rocoto, for though it's tasty, it's too hot to be the star of a dish.

Bulghur-Spinach Casserole

Bulghur is a type of parboiled durum wheat popular in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and India, which can be reconstituted for consumption by soaking or cooking in water. There are a number of uses for bulghur, including tabbouleh, kibbeh, various pilafs, and even as a sweet cereal with sugar and milk. In future posts, we will talk more about some of those more conventional uses for bulghur, but right now, we would like to post a recipe for a vegetarian casserole that really highlights the nuttiness and earthiness of bulghur, and may serve as a good introduction to this grain for someone who hasn't had much experience with Middle Eastern cuisine.

Bulghur can be found in most Turkish, Lebanese, or Middle Eastern markets, and may show up in some gourmet supermarkets alongside other fashionable grains like quinoa and cracked rye. It's usually available in the US marked by a number between 1 and 4, indicating the fineness of the grind, with 1 being extra fine, and 4 being extra coarse. When buying bulghur, pay attention to the grind coarseness, as it will affect the cooking time, as well as the mouthfeel of the finished product.

Aji de Gallina

One of our favorite meals is this simple Peruvian chicken dish, Aji de Gallina, which we first learned about from a cookbook my mom lent to us (and which we still have - sorry) filled with recipes contributed by UN diplomats. We've since had it, done a few different ways, at restaurants, and have found several recipes for it elsewhere. However, the way we make it is still quite similar (but not identical) to that first recipe we found in The Cookbook of the United Nations (Barbara Kraus, 1970).

This is a simple recipe with only a few ingredients, which yields a peculiarly textured bread sauce flavored by a particular Peruvian pepper called the aji amarillo, or simply in English, the yellow pepper. This pepper might be hard to find, depending on where you live - in Houston, jars of the pepper or a paste made from it are readily available at any Fiesta supermarket. Otherwise, you should try searching for a Latin supermarket, preferably catering to Central or South Americans. Gourmet markets might carry it, though I've personally never seen it at either Whole Foods or World Market. On the other hand, you could just skip all that torquing around town to find this stuff, and just try Amazon.

Why just ONE?

Diet Pepsi is labelled, and has been marketed, as no-calorie since its introduction in 1964. Originally, it was sweetened by saccharin, but the formula was changed in the 1980s to use aspartame in order to avoid the metallic aftertaste often associated with saccharin. Aspartame is still the principal sweetener of Diet Pepsi, though now supplemented by acesulfame potassium. If you pick up a can of Diet Pepsi, and look at the nutritional information on the back, it will read zero calories, due to its total lack of sugar, in contrast to ordinary Pepsi, which is usually sweetened by corn syrup (or cane sugar, depending on the region). Of course, the lack of calories is the selling point for any diet soda like Diet Pepsi, and for a diet beverage, you really can't beat that - zero calories, I mean. There's nowhere else to go, no further reduction in food energy that can be made. Pepsi completely removed the sugar, and wouldn't you know it, the result was a no-calorie drink. Problem solved. Diet achieved.

But in 1998, Pepsi launched a new diet soda under the style of Pepsi ONE (rather obnoxiously spelled with all caps so that it's impossible to type the name without looking like a jackass). Pepsi ONE, which is, of course, still sold today, and quite popular, is an artificially sweetened version of Pepsi's flagship cola, much like Diet Pepsi. I often have wondered why it exists - the launch of another, parallel diet cola brand in the Pepsi pantheon seems intuitively counterproductive for Pepsi. Wouldn't they simply compete with one another? Is there a difference, and what is it? Just what is the deal with Pepsi ONE?

Secret Ingredient Improv IV: A Caribbean trip

It is Friday again which means I get to go shopping for ingredients and watch how Ian "transforms" them into dinner. I don't like shopping alone. I also don't like spending a lot of time in the supermarket either. Ian does. Ian in the supermarket is like a lady in a shoe shop. He has to pick up every bottle, jar or can and consider buying it, especially if he cannot read the labels. I, on the other hand, only go shopping with a list in my hand. I can't just casually walk into a supermarket and buy a jar of Branston pickle. I'm like the guy who needs a new pair of jeans so he walks in the first store and buys a pair of jeans and drives back home. Done.

I have a lot of difficulty putting four ingredients together for our improv cooking nights. I don't want to make it too easy, I don't want to make it too hard and most importantly I want to have a nice dinner. For me the improv cooking is not about weird ingredients. It is about experience. It is about forcing Ian to cook with something he has little experience with. For me it is all about learning and knowing the ingredients and once in a week having the courage to think out of the box and create a new thing.

A long time ago, Ian bought this jar of rocoto peppers which we ended up never using. So that automatically goes on the list. I hate it when we buy things and don't use them. I got an email from a blog reader, Kendall, who had mango on his list and we have actually never cooked with mango before, we only eat it as a fruit so I thought that will be interesting. I also get some chicken tights because I wanted chicken and not fish sticks for dinner. And finally I get some plantains. I think I just crave fried plantains.

So these are my four ingredients for Ian:

Rocoto peppers
Mango
Chicken thighs
Plantains

Secret Ingredient Improv III: A Man Named Gorton

After my rather lackluster performance last week, it was Mariam's turn this week to cook for Secret Ingredient Improv, and my turn to shop. It's tempting, when purchasing the secret ingredients, to be mean. It's tempting to buy crazy things that are impossible to cook together - cheez whiz and caramel apples, for instance. It's tempting to pick these things up from the supermarket shelves and laugh, laugh like a maniac thinking about how she could possibly make dinner from just four different kinds of non-dairy milk, or Reese's pieces and whitefish caviar. Yes, the shopping is fun.

But I also remember, of course, that whatever I buy for her to cook with, I will be eating for dinner. This is the restraint. This keeps Secret Ingredient Improv interesting, but sane. It must be possible, in some strange way, perhaps, but still possible, for the ingredients I get to be combined into something resembling a decent meal. Last time Mariam cooked, in our first Secret Ingredient Improv, I thought I did a good job getting her interesting ingredients that didn't look like they went together, and I think she did a good job proving that intuition wrong.

The hardest part, for me, when shopping, has been the selection of an interesting and unorthodox protein for the meal. One doesn't just want to buy chicken thighs - there are simply too many "standard" things to do in that case. We have too much familiarity with that ingredient - it's no longer much of a challenge. Of course, last week I thought initially that Mariam was being kind to me by giving me beef, but the challenge came from the way the beef had been pre-prepped into thin strips. This week, I thought about that - about how the preparation of an otherwise ordinary ingredient might make it interesting or difficult to work with.

So this week, I got her:
Frozen fish sticks
Branston pickle
Kale
Green acorn squash

Ratatouille

Since the first time I watched the movie Ratatouille, I always wanted to make the dish but not in the traditional way, in the way it was made in the movie by Remy, the rat. Ratatouille is a French provincial stewed vegetable dish traditionally made from tomatoes, onions, garlic, eggplants, zucchinis, bell peppers and herbs like basil and marjoram. I recommend this dish to every vegetarian and to meat lovers as well. If you have not seen the movie Ratatouille, I recommend watching the cooking scenes here.

I learn from Wikipedia (of course) that Remy's take on the traditional Ratatouille was the work of Chef Thomas Keller and later became known as confit byaldi.

Secret Ingredient Improv II: Cooking with Arnold Palmer

As you know Ian and I started our own version of Chopped. Every Friday one of us goes shopping and buys 4 secret ingredients for the other to use in an entree. We don't have a time limit but we do want dinner at the table at some point.

I did the first round and I really enjoyed cooking with ingredients that you don't normally put together, it needs a bit courage but it helps you understand your ingredients and develop a deep idea on how food flavors, textures, smells and color work together. It forces you to make something new which is what I really like about our improv cookings.

It was my turn to buy the ingredients. I had one in mind. It was tea. Yes tea. I know it is crazy but Ian always had this crazy idea of cooking with tea and he had theories of how to incorporate it into a stew. But, he never actually tried to do it, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to let him live his dream.

I bought these four ingredients:
Beef, cut in strips for stir fry
Brussel sprouts
sunflower seeds
Arizona lite half and half Arnold Palmer (a half and half mixture of black tea and lemonade)

Secret Ingredient Improv

IAN:
This is the first in what we hope will become a series of posts about secret ingredient cooking. Everybody is familiar with Iron Chef, the television show in which a competitor must cook a five course meal with every course incorporating a specific secret ingredient. Mariam and I prefer the show on Food Network called Chopped, wherein competitors must cook a single course in each round, each time incorporating all four of the ingredients in a secret ingredient basket. Frequently, these ingredients are strange or unusual, and almost always, the combination of ingredients is intuitively very weird. But usually these chefs manage to pull off something that, at least in theory, sounds like it ought to be pretty good, and the tasting judges often agree (though sometimes, disasters happen). It's improvisational cooking at its finest.

We were inspired by Chopped to try this ourselves. We like improv cooking - usually because we're too lazy to go look up a recipe and drive to the market to get the one or two ingredients we don't have, so we just make something up with what we've got in the fridge. I think improv cooking - that is, just cooking something on the fly with no recipe - is the test of a competent cook. Following directions is pretty easy, but to cook without directions, without a recipe, one has to understand the ingredients and techniques very well. It's also, of course, an opportunity to experiment - and that's why we wanted to try something like Chopped, with secret ingredients. It's an opportunity to experiment and try to understand ingredients and combinations of ingredients we've had no or little experience with in the past.

Our Secret Ingredient Improv works like a single round of Chopped with a looser time restriction. Four secret ingredients are provided, and the cook must prepare a single course using all four ingredients. For our first round, I selected four ingredients for Mariam to cook dinner. She had access otherwise to everything in our kitchen, which I tried to stock with as many ordinary or essential ingredients as possible, to give her all the options she could have.

This time, the secret ingredients were:
Mint Chutney
Tomatillos
Soppressata
Ground Dried Shrimp

Fast-food Burger Eat-Compare

Burgers are great. Burgers are also terrible. What I mean by that is that the concept of a burger is superb, but the execution is almost always wrong. Or worse, the "correct" execution is just boring. At face value, it seems simple to make a good burger - a big, grilled slab of ground meat on a bun, with onions, tomatoes, ketchup and mustard. What can go wrong? So much.

Most burgers end up overcooked to the point of dessication. Condiments can be difficult to balance properly - I've had plenty of burgers that just tasted like ketchup, or worse, mayo. The bun is often neglected, and any old cheap by-the-gross "hamburger-style" bun is deemed sufficient. And I can't count how many times I've been served a burger without dressings at all, but only condiments - yes, I do actually want a salad on my burger, thank you! But even when properly executed, there are mistakes to make. The biggest mistake (in our humble opinion) is the fixation on having a 100% beef patty. Put some diced onion in there! Or some tomato paste! Or some spinach! Season the meat, for goodness sake! Mix beef and turkey! Go nuts! Beef, by itself, is really about the most boring flavor in the world. My mother says it tastes brown. I disagree - it's more like a gray.

The worst offenders against burgerkind are fast-food vendors, usually, even though this is supposedly the product that they make all their money of off. You might suppose that a global corporation with billions of dollars and entire teams of test chefs and engineers behind them would be able to discover the concept of "seasoning meat", but I've yet to encounter a major fast-food chain that could pull it off properly. Fast-food burgers are usually greasy, thin, dry, underseasoned, and underdressed - or so we supposed.

Mariam and I rarely eat fast-food anything. On the one hand, this is because we actually can cook, and enjoy our own cooking - nevermind fast food, we rarely eat out. But fast food holds a special place of disdain for us. If we're going to go out somewhere and pay somebody else to cook food for us, we might as well go somewhere good and sit down. Fast food? I know my way around a kitchen - don't tell me you can properly cook meat in twenty seconds! Can't be done! But here's the thing - this disdain, this indifference even to the offerings of fast food means that we don't eat it - ever. So realistically, do we actually know what we're missing? Are fast-food burgers as bad as we suppose? We think we've got burgers figured out, with our own methods and ingredients, but do we? To what, really, are we to compare?

This prompted us some time ago to actually do the test, and eat-compare some fast-food burgers. We went around to six major fast-food chains, as well as to two "high-brow" fast-food chains to pick up what we considered to be flagship burgers. That's eight different restaurants, and eight burgers to compare, chosen for their relative superficial similarity, and how much we thought they represented the brands of their respective chains.

Lavashak

When I was a kid we used to have these fruit rolls called lavashak (لواشک). These were made of different kinds of pureed fruits and were dried into rolls and kids really liked them. They are made of plums, barberries, dogberries, sour cherries, apples and apricots. Of course, I never liked the sweet ones made of apples and apricots. My favorite ones were the homemade plum ones. The store bought rolls usually had a mix of apples to keep it cheap. And I remember whenever I was eating lavashak my parents would sort of get angry and tell me not to eat that junk food. Comparing to the garbage kids eat these days I was on the rather healthy side, at least I was eating fruit. Real fruit with real colors.

Good thing I grew up and can do as I please. I came to the US 4 years ago and was so excited to see fruit rolls in supermarkets. I did the mistake of buying some and being terrorized by the super sugary fruit flavor garbage I got. Being disappointed and deprived from my tart vitamins, I decided to make my own fruit rolls.

Three-Layer Enchilada Casserole

Mariam and I were recently visiting my parents, and before we left, my mother mentioned that she would soon be making an enchilada casserole for some others of the family. At first, we were bummed that we wouldn't be able to taste this, as we were leaving town. But then we thought, well, we could do that, too. And then we thought, well, we might be able to do that better. Then, well, we tried to do it better. My mom doesn't know it, yet, but we were competing for the best enchilada casserole. By default, we win. Sorry.

Anyway, as with most of our cooking these days, this was mostly improvised, so the recipe is largely approximate. Pretend I didn't just tell you that. THIS RECIPE IS PERFECT AND REFINED. Yes. That'll work.

Making Mushroom Smoke

When I (Ian) was about ten years old, my parents and I lived in England for a little over a year on account of a job my dad had there. There are plenty of culinary stories to tell about that, but for right now, I want to focus on just one thing - Shake O'Cini. In Britain, there's a large supermarket chain called Sainsbury's, and there my mother discovered this product, Shake O'Cini, which is essentially a metal shaker tin full of pulverized dried mushrooms. I had completely forgotten about it until recently, when she reminded me. And then I thought - well, I can do that.

Shake O'Cini - which is still available, as it happens, though apparently not at Sainsbury's, if their website is to be the definitive word - is really kind of an MSG workaround. A delicious workaround, to be sure, and absolutely worth doing - but it's a workaround. The reason that anybody uses MSG - and you probably should, despite its reputation - is for its incredibly strong umami flavor. Umami, if you're not familiar with the word, is one of the five principle flavors, and is the sort of indescribable meaty, savory flavor that's lent by foods high in protein. Meats, nuts, beans, cheese, fish, and of course, mushrooms all primarily carry this flavor. MSG is what happened when somebody figured out that, strictly speaking, protein doesn't taste like umami, amino acids do, especially the abundant and relatively easy-to-purify glutamate. Mushrooms are incredibly rich in glutamate, and ground mushrooms are pretty much MSG plus impurities. Delicious impurities.

A Word About Salt

I tend to distrust salt. It's got nothing to do with sodium in my diet and blood pressure or any of that - as far as I'm concerned, if you want your food to taste like anything, you've got to have a salty flavor in there, and that usually means sodium, so nuts to it. What I mean is I don't trust salt. Just salt. Not salty things, mind, but salt itself.

Table salt.

There's nothing wrong with it. Not really - it's just sodium chloride, a basic cubic crystalline solid that makes up a decent portion of the oceans and tastes like salt, rather appropriately. By itself, it's not flammable, corrosive, or especially toxic, even in quite disgustingly large doses. Truth is, you need it to live - our brains rely on sodium ions to maintain voltage differentials that allow synapses to fire. Your blood needs to have a certain concentration of salt to prevent your blood cells from swelling up and bursting. Salt's really pretty good stuff.

But from a culinary perspective, I just don't trust basic table salt. The reason is simple - it's a pure flavor. There's really nothing else in your pantry or fridge that can deliver a more pure essence of one of the five principle flavors, save for perhaps refined crystalline fructose, if you happen to have that lying around. While that kind of sounds poetically beautiful, it's actually quite dangerous - you can really irreparably destroy a good meal with a teaspoon of table salt. And I have done that! Several times! The thing is, you really need salt - salt is the foundation of so many other complexities of flavor, that without it, you often can't really taste anything else. Most soups are pretty much dirty water unless there's some salt in there, and meats all just taste like gray until you put a pinch of salt on there. But two pinches of salt? Then that might be all you taste. Dangerous stuff.

I try to avoid salt whenever I can, as a result, and use less concentrated, more flavorful sources of salt. Spaghetti sauce? Add some olive brine. Thai curry? Fish sauce. Risotto? Anchovy paste. Stir fry? Soy sauce. Chili? Chicken stock. Goulash? Worcestershire. All of these are salty things we always have in our pantries (well, maybe not anchovy paste for most of you) that have a depth of flavor by themselves that they'll lend to whatever dish you put them in. Salt isn't just dangerous, it's boring, and by using a less concentrated salt source, I can make a more interesting dish without ruining everything because the appropriate amount of salt to add was actually an eighth teaspoon, and I had the utter gall to add a quarter. (You know another dangerous principle flavor? Bitterness.)

So I don't trust salt. To be sure, I use it when I have to, and there are several different varieties of granulated salt that have interesting flavors all their own - I have a special regard for smoked salt, for instance. But it's an edgy relationship I have, and only when I'm absolutely sure that no other salt source will work with the flavor I'm building will I pick up that shaker of sodium chloride, and slowly, hesitantly, lower it over my pot.