Chum Salmon with Roasted Hakurei Turnips and Gai Lan

As an East Coaster, I'm always surprised at the dearth of fish species that we have in our markets out here in the Pacific Northwest. Granted, a lot of what we harvest goes to Asia, but still, compared to what I am used to, we have very little variety out here.

Very little variety except for one fish family: the Salmonidae, the salmons. We have the very famous species that everyone knows: King/Chinook, Coho, and Sockeye. Also famous, but rare, is my favorite, the ocean-going rainbow trout that we call Steelhead Trout. Finally, we also have Pink Salmon, which in general ends up canned, and Chum, our most numerous salmon, but which is not held in very high regard, being associated with the salmon that the sled dogs eat.

Because of the stigma, Chum Salmon doesn't command the price of King, Coho, or Sockeye. But when caught out in the ocean in its silver phase, it's a delicious fish, milder and less fatty than the other salmon species, and a great buy for people looking for wild-caught salmon at an affordable price.

I scored a pretty piece of chum and some fresh hakurei and gai lan at the farmers market recently and decided to plate them all together for a delicious fall dinner.

Chum Salmon with Roasted Hakurei Turnips and Gai Lan

Everything on this plate is done simply. The salmon is seared in a black steel pan. The gai lan is blanched and then finished in garlic olive oil. The turnips are roasted at high heat until their cut surfaces brown. Everything in this dish is of pristine quality, so I didn't need to do anything cheffy to help it out, no sauces, no tricks, no pizazz. One of the great secrets of fine cooking is to start with the best ingredients. I used to tell my line cooks, "My job is to source the finest ingredients and yours is not to fuck them up."

Blooming Gai Lan and Hakurei Turnips

Gai lan is also called Chinese broccoli and is in the same family as our familiar broccoli. This bunch of perfect gai lan is in bloom. A bit of bloom like this is just fine. What you don't want is any kind of broccoli in full flower. Broccoli flowers, like all Brassica flowers, are edible and make fine garnishes for dishes and salads. I especially like radish and arugula flowers for garnishes.

Roasted Hakurei Turnips

Hakurei turnips are mainly sweet with just a tiny hint of radish bite. Although you can use them like any turnip, I prefer them for raw applications and roasted like this, in which case, they become very mild and melt in your mouth.

Browning Slivered Garlic in Olive Oil

When doing garlic oil as a garnish for vegetables, I like to sliver the garlic and serve bits of the browned garlic as an additional garnish. You can see in the very first photo that I have put some of the garlic on top of the gai lan. After blanching the gai lan, I reheat it in the garlic oil just before plating. In this way, you can blanch the broccoli hours before service, if you shock it in an ice bath to stop it cooking and from turning olive drab. I cooked my broccoli an hour before dinner so that I could concentrate on cooking the fish to perfection.

Seared Chum Salmon

I cook salmon skin-side down until the skin becomes very crisp and delicious. The skin is always the best part. Chum salmon, because it is very low fat when compared to red or silver salmon, wants strict attention in the pan. It is not a fish that can really tolerate extra cooking, so take it off the heat a little sooner than you might other salmon. In the lead photo in this post, you can see that mine went on the plate still showing a bit of pink in the center of the portion. By the time we got to the table to eat, it was perfect. Fish timing is not something I can teach in a blog post; it's just something you figure out by doing it over and over. You can't teach experience, alas.

Roasted Chickpea and Broccoli Salad with Yogurt Dressing

We're starting to eat more and more vegetarian meals and I got to thinking about a salad of roasted chickpeas and broccoli with some sort of yogurt dressing. 

Roasted Chickpea and Broccoli Salad with Yogurt Dressing

The salad turned out pretty well, but without a good bit of dressing, I found the roasted chickpeas a bit dry. If I had dried them and coated them in olive oil, they would have crisped a lot sooner, but we are watching the fat intake as we near 30 pounds of collective weight loss.

Drained Chickpeas Tossed with Salt and Pimentón

I drained the chickpeas and used the remaining moisture to help the salt and pimentón adhere. If you're not watching the calories, pat the chickpeas dry and toss them in olive oil before adding the seasonings: the quality is definitely better.

Roasted Chickpeas

Broccoli on a Sheet Tray Coated with Pan Spray

Broccoli Roasted for 20 Minutes in a 425F Oven

Finishing the Broccoli by Steaming

Once the chickpeas and broccoli are roasted, toss them with as much or as little of the yogurt dressing as you would like. Season to taste. If the broccoli is nicely brown but still a bit crunchy for my liking, I like to put it in a bowl covered in film so that it can steam just a bit more and even out the cooking. File that away under school-of-hard-knocks lessons that they don't teach in culinary school.

Cumin-Chipotle Yogurt Dressing

This is a really easy, very low-fat dressing that is super tasty and versatile. I don't ordinarily like low-fat yogurt: it tastes and feels funny and fake to me. But as the base for a flavorful lower-calorie dressing, it works fine.

1 cup plain low-fat Greek yogurt
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon freshly ground cumin
1 tablespoon chipotle adobo
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
1 pinch dehydrated garlic

Mix everything well. If you need to, thin with additional water and adjust seasonings to your preference. The cumin flavor will expand as the dressing sits in the refrigerator, so go just a little lighter than you think you want, if you are not going to use the dressing immediately.

Ugly is Beautiful

One of our favorite flavor combinations is white beans, onions, and artichokes. Ann asked me if I could make a soup of white beans, caramelized onions, and artichoke hearts. It turned out to be delicious, but it's not something that I could have ever served at the restaurant. This dish is definitely an ugly duckling.

White Bean, Caramelized Onion, and Artichoke Purée

As the old saw goes, "people eat first with their eyes." This soup, while really delicious, is not much in the looks department to the point of looking somewhat unappetizing.

Cooked Peruano/Mayocoba Beans

Two Kilos/Four Pounds of Onions to be Caramelized

All Those Onions Cook Down to This

After caramelizing the onions, I added two liters of white beans (500 grams dry before cooking), a kilo of artichoke hearts, the zest of a lemon, a bit of salt, and four liters of water. This simmered for twenty minutes before I knocked it down with the immersion blender and seasoned it to taste.

Delicious flavors, but ungainly looks. It's OK. This is home cooking.

Jerked Chicken Tacos with Mango-Chipotle-Vanilla Salsa

I don't guess it comes as any surprise that we eat a lot of tacos here at the casa. I love street food and a tacos are a big part of that for me. You can find a taco truck anywhere out here. I'm always thinking of new taco ideas just to shake things up and this week I decided to make jerked chicken tacos.

Jerked Chicken Tacos with Mango-Chipotle-Vanilla Salsa

You can see the tacos above in the photo. They also got some slaw on them before we ate them, but I wanted to photograph them without the slaw so you could see how attractive the mango salsa is with its contrasting flecks of chipotle. There's a recipe for the salsa at the end of this post.

Jerk Paste Ingredients

I'm a big fan of jerked chicken (pork and goat too!) and I like to make it even though I don't have any pimiento wood over which to smoke the chicken. We used to mimic this at the restaurant by adding allspice berries to the wood chips when we were smoking the meat. At home, I skip this step.

Jerk paste varies from person to person as do most things in life, but all versions are good. The one time that I wanted a habanero or Scotch bonnet pepper from my store, they don't have it. So I substituted serrano instead. Serranos have straight ahead heat and lack the apricot fruitiness of a good habanero or Scotch bonnet, but what's a guy to do?

My paste consists of ginger, shallots, green onions, serranos with seeds, fresh thyme, and lots of freshly ground allspice. After mincing everything by hand, I let the food processor combine everything and then I finished the paste to taste with some salt and equal parts of brown sugar and vinegar.

Shallots are not super traditional in jerk paste, while garlic is obligatory. I find that shallots help bulk out the paste and they turn plenty garlicky when puréed in the food process or blender.

Boneless Chicken Thighs in Jerk Paste

I skinned and deboned a bunch of chicken thighs (saving the bones and skin for stock) and covered the thighs in jerk paste. They stayed in the refrigerator overnight.

Jerked Chicken on the Grill

If I had the right set up, I'd love to smoke my chicken low and slow, but alas, I am limited to my grill. Still, it gives great flavor to the chicken, just not quite the traditional flavor.

Mango-Chipotle-Vanilla Salsa

To accompany the jerked chicken on our tacos, I made a spicy mango salsa. The unique thing about this salsa is something that I stumbled onto while playing with mango salsa years ago at the restaurant: vanilla is a haunting dance partner for mango. We used vanilla beans at the restaurant; at home, all I have is extract, good quality extract to be sure. I don't use enough vanilla to warrant purchasing beans. We bought them buy the half kilo at the restaurant and would use a dozen or more beans a week, mostly in flavoring desserts, but sometimes in more savory applications such as this salsa:

1 large very ripe mango
2 chipotles en adobo
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup agave nectar
1/4 cup rice vinegar

2 cups water 

few drops of vanilla extract

Put all the ingredients in the blender except the vanilla and process until smooth. Season to taste with salt (which will help pop the vanilla). Then add vanilla a few seeds or drops at a time until you are happy with the flavor. But remember, too much vanilla is too much: go easy. If your mango was not very ripe, you may need more sugar to balance the sauce. I would use brown sugar. You could also use lime juice in place of the milder rice vinegar for a more tropical effect, but for this salsa I prefer the milder less puckery rice vinegar.

Osso Buco for Ann's Birthday

I'm way behind in posting this, but I've been busy building a new shelf/bookcase for the kitchen and doing the design work for a new wine bar in our living room.

Months ago in the summer, I saw some beef shanks on closeout at the grocery store and bought a couple for the freezer for cooler weather. Osso buco is not something I really crave when it is warm out, but just let the cool fall weather set in and I am game.

Osso Buco on Polenta

We have really been watching what we eat trying to lose our COVID babies and have had some luck, down something like a collective 22 pounds. I promised myself and Ann that damn the diet, we were celebrating for her birthday as a reward for being so disciplined. Enter osso buco on polenta.

The Shank, 2-1/2 pounds

Here is the shank from the store. This is not a high-quality portion, but the price was very right. This one weighed in at over 2-1/2 pounds on the scale, but the vast majority is marrowless bone. You can't see the back side which is nearly all bone and no meat. Still, I managed to get 12 ounces of meat from the shank, enough to feed the two of us. A piece of shank such as this will never give you a photo-worthy, restaurant-style portion of osso buco with a nice marrow bone in the center, but it tastes no different and is plenty good enough for home cooking.

Browning the Shank

I started by dusting the shank with salt, pepper, and Wondra flour and then browning both sides in a nearly oil free heavy-bottomed pan. Notice the fond, the browned build-up on the bottom of the pan. This is a very good thing.

Soffrito in the Pan with Rosemary

Once the shank was browned, I removed it to the crock pot and added my soffrito and a branch of rosemary to the pan. Don't hate me, I put a bushel or more of rosemary in the compost bin this year after pruning. Rosemary grows like a weed here. The soffrito is celery, carrot, and leek, in roughly equal proportions: one leek, two carrots, two stalks of celery. In the photo, I have cleared away the soffrito in the center of the pan so that you can see the fond. This is where the flavor is.

Adding White Wine, Tomato, and Basil

Once the vegetables started going limp, I added a splash of dry white wine, call it a half a cup, to the pan and using a wooden spatula, carefully scraped all the bits of the fond off the bottom of the pan so that it can contribute its flavor to the dish. In went a 28-ounce can of peeled and diced tomatoes in juice, a handful of basil (still in bloom), and call it a teaspoon of salt.

Shank and Soffrito in the Crock Pot

I let everything cook together for about five minutes and then transferred it all to the crock pot, one of my favorite braising devices. Talk about easy: set it and forget it!

7 Hours Later

We went about our day and came back to the braise towards dinner time. See how wonderfully brown everything is: that's exactly what you're aiming for. I removed the herbs from the sauce, separated the meat from the bones and gristle, recombined the meat and the sauce, and seasoned to taste.

Meanwhile, I had a pan of polenta cooking. I have devised a no-worry means of cooking polenta that I discussed in an earlier post. This method eliminates almost all of the stirring and makes delightful polenta. I plated the deconstructed osso buco over the polenta as you see in the very first photo.

Pregame on the Porch with McKinlay Pinot Noir

The weather in early October is always a crap shoot in that we are on the cusp of our rainy season, but today our weather was delightful to the point where we shared a bottle of McKinlay Pinot Noir on the front porch before going in to dinner as it got dark and cool. This is a relatively unknown local bottle in the Burgundian style with restrained fruit and gobs of mouthwatering acid.

With only twelve ounces of beef and only cooking a half a cup of cornmeal for polenta, we managed to both eat decadently but with sensible portion sizes. This osso buco was a great splurge for us.

Chicken Paillards with Artichoke Piccata

I've said it before and no doubt I will say it again. I don't really like flavorless, cottony chicken breasts. But Ann asks me to buy them for her for some of her recipes because they are a low fat, high quality protein. I get it, but I'd rather eat fewer thighs than more breast.

I got home from the store the other day bearing her chicken breasts and I was starving and looking for something other than leftovers for lunch. I decided to cook one of the chicken breasts and make it flavorful. It's a rare day when I actually cook lunch.

Chicken with Artichoke Piccata

Chicken breasts are so huge anymore than they are nearly impossible to flatten so that they cook evenly. Even cooking is essential with low-fat chicken breasts: you do not want any overcooked meat that is stringy and tough.

Paillard: Split, Pounded Chicken Breast

To help with this, I create what we call in the trade paillards ("pie yarr") by slicing the breasts in half into equally thick portions, then flattening them to even thickness. To flatten each paillard, I cover it with a piece of film and then using a heavy frying pan (my black steel French pan called a poêle) I gently pound the chicken breast out to even thickness. It takes a little practice to flatten chicken breasts without tearing them and to get them to even thickness. It helps to start in the center and work your way out to the edge, just like making a flatbread such as naan or pita.

Cook Until the Breast Turns White all Around the Edge

When I am frying a protein, I put it show side down in the pan and I do not move it until I am ready to flip it. This will give the best color for the show side, something that is important in restaurant presentation, but not so much at home. Still, old habits die hard. When you are cooking any protein, you are going to cook it longer on the show side than the flip side. Because the protein is cold throughout, it takes longer to warm the protein to the center when cooking the show side than it does to cook the flip side when the protein is already warm.

When you are cooking a protein, you are watching as the bottom side cooks. You will see the flesh turn from translucent to opaque all around the edge. When the opaque layer starts to move towards the upper surface, you will know that it is time to flip the protein.

In the photo above, the upper paillard is just about ready to flip. The lower one is not. You cannot see any white chicken on the righthand side where it is the thickest.

Build the Sauce After Flipping Show Side Up

After flipping the chicken paillards, I start to build the pan sauce. In goes a clove of garlic to cook for a few seconds, followed by a tablespoon of capers and a little caper brine. Next in go two cups of quartered artichoke hearts and the juice of half of a lemon.

Just as the chicken gets cooked all the way through, remove them from the pan. Over time, you will learn to feel with your fingers when a chicken breast has cooked all the way through. If in doubt, cut a slit in it with a knife and check visually. Remove the chicken from the pan and bring the sauce down as tight as you want, then stir in two tablespoons of chopped Italian parsley and plate.

In the restaurant, we would probably finish the sauce with a pat of butter, but at home, we are not trying to consume all those extra calories.

Chicken Paillards with Artichoke Piccata

The procedure for this dish is detailed above. This is a recap for two servings.

2 flattened chicken breast paillards

salt and pepper

olive oil

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tablespoon nonpareil capers and brine

2 cups quartered cooked artichoke hearts

juice of half a lemon

2 tablespoons minced Italian parsley

Season the paillards with salt and pepper. Film a skillet with olive oil and sear on high heat until half-cooked.

Flip and add garlic to the pan. Let the garlic cook for a few moments so that it is not raw.

Add capers, artichokes, and lemon juice in quick succession.

Remove the chicken when done. Reduce the sauce as necessary. Add parsley and plate.

Kitchen Basics: Cutting Boards

I recently replaced my ancient cutting board. This is a notable event in that I don't willingly part with good gear, especially gear that has served me well. Kitchenware is not like electronics and so many things in our lives today: it does not become technically obsolete and need to be replaced. Often, the older gear is better than what you can buy today.

My cutting board is something that I use each day, multiple times a day. I often take it for granted. But as I realized when I replaced it with a new board, I had a decent amount of unexpected attachment to it. I'm not super sentimental, but that cutting board and I have been through a lot together and parting with it was cause for some reflection.

Out with the Old

During college when I was broke, I made my first cutting board by recycling an old pine chair bottom. Being a very soft wood subject to rot and staining, pine was largely unsuitable for a cutting board, but it served me until I had some income and could replace it.

I replaced that oddly-shaped pine board some 30 years ago with a thick polyethylene one, the one in the photo above, then quite state-of-the-art and especially difficult to find. Part of my attachment to that board has to do with finding it. Back then, there was no web, no Amazon, and no kitchenware store in every town. Buying restaurant quality gear took a lot of effort, even in a town the size of Washington DC where I lived.

I ended up finding the polyethylene cutting board in New York City on one of my trips up there for business. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the best place to buy kitchenware on the East Coast and perhaps in the country was in midtown Manhattan, just a couple blocks off of Park Avenue. I made it a priority to stop at Bridge Kitchenware on E. 52nd Street every visit to the City.

The owner, Fred Bridge, was a renowned grump. Though he was brusque and efficient in his use of words, he was always tolerant of my questions. His wife Carolyn always seemed more chipper and was usually to be seen somewhere in the store, which had things piled on top of things between things behind other things. Fred had an encyclopedic knowledge not only of esoteric kitchenware, but of where everything was stashed.

The cutting board that I bought in NYC and schlepped all the way back to DC (either on a plane or on the train, I forget) served me well over the years, about 30 of them in fact. But over time, the soft polyethylene developed deep knife wounds that harbored mildew and would stain beyond my ability to bleach it white again. You can see the residual chipotle stain in the upper right quadrant of the board. For these reasons, the then-state-of-the-art soft polyethylene has largely been replaced by harder high-density polyethylene (HDPE).

In with the New

Ultimately, it was the mildew that damned the board to the recycling bin in favor of not one, but four new boards.

The impetus to replace my old friend came from cooking again. After a 2-year hiatus from cooking after I hung up my chef coat, I find myself back in the kitchen a lot. And I'm finding some joy in cooking, something that I thought might never come back, the rigors of restaurant life possibly having killed it forever. But since I retired in May, some of that old desire and passion is coming back, tempered by the desire to spend as much time with my wife as possible and to cook within the limitations of a home kitchen.

And so with renewed purpose, I am making some changes to my home kitchenware in favor of more restaurant-typical gear to which I am accustomed, such as color-coded cutting boards.

Although I am accustomed to HDPE plastic boards in the professional kitchen, I chose a wooden teak board as the primary board for my home kitchen, mainly as an olive branch to my wife.

Ann has this thing about items being on the counter. While I am comfortable having all my gear out and within easy reach like it was in the restaurant, she wants a leaner, cleaner, less industrial look for our home kitchen, and who can blame her? Because I use the cutting board all the time, I would never put it away and that would rankle her. Extending the olive branch, I decided to go with a board that is also a work of art. If it is going to remain on the counter, at least it can look nice, hence the decision to go back to a wooden board.

Ever since working in a professional kitchen, I have been concerned about food safety and cross contamination. With my previous cutting board, I had to be very careful when prepping vegetables and chicken to prep the chicken last, after all the vegetables, and to sanitize the cutting board well when done. We just don't need salmonellosis because of inadvertent cross contamination.

To help with food safety, I also bought three color-coded HDPE boards sized such that they will fit in my dishwasher. After I use them, they go directly into the high-temperature dishwasher. Now, I can forget all about using tons of bleach to sanitize the boards. The plastic boards are also small enough to get stored in the pantry until I need them, which really is not that often as our diet is not based around meat.

I use each of the four boards for food that must be cooked to different temperatures. The teak board is for vegetables and most ready-to-eat foods. The blue board is for seafood, the red for meat, and the yellow for chicken. In this way, I will never have to prep vegetables and chicken on the same board again. And if we have a guest to the house with a seafood allergy, I can guarantee that I will never have sliced scallops on the teak board on which I prepped the ingredients for our salad.

This piece of mind comes at minimal expense: each of the colored boards was about $6 at a restaurant supply house. And in 2020, FedEx brought them straight to my house for a minimal fee. No more schlepping them back from New York City!

The teak board is still so new that I am not used to the feel of my knife on it: wood feels different than plastic. The new board is taller and so I am holding my knife a half inch higher, which feels a bit weird, but not so weird as transitioning from restaurant kitchen counter height to home kitchen counter height. And the new board is louder than the old. Still, in a few thousand cuts, we'll become acquainted and make some new memories.