Grilled tandoori chicken

I have been remiss in my blogging duties. Primarily, I have been unhappy with my photographic adventures, but now, with the recent time shift, I can often prepare dinner when it is still light out and I can use outdoor light to photograph dinner. I hope I'll have more posts in the future.

Here's a quick dinner you can prepare. It's a delicious dinner for the weekend that can be prepared with a tiny bit of prep time, and about an hour of marination time. I start it towards the end of Bbq Jr's naptime, and we can eat it as a lovely Sunday night dinner.

Modified from Bon Appétit:

1 cup chopped fresh cilantro

8 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon sweet paprika
1 tablespoon coarse kosher salt
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ cup olive oil
1 cup plain whole-milk yogurt
¼ cup fresh lime juice
2 chickens, quartered

Run the cilantro, garlic, cumin, paprika, cayenne, salt, lime juice and olive oil through a food processor to make a lovely, smelly paste.

Pour that lovely paste into a deep pan (I use a pyrex baking pan).



Then gently blend in the yogurt. (Don't blend the yogurt in in the food processor or you'll end up with tandoori butter. Blech).



Mix into a lovely marinade.

Marinate the chicken in this lovely paste. For one lovely hour. In the lovely fridge. (Cause really, you don't want to incubate Salmonella in this paste. So keep it in the fridge.).



Get a medium fire going on your grill. I like to let it burn down a bit for this dish. The dripping yogurt grease is just begging for a flareup, so really, medium fires are your friend. Or charred chicken is your friend. Your call, really. But I prefer medium heat.

Turn the chicken frequently. I find this is a dish I can't really leave the grill. Flaring yogurt explosions are too likely (at least in the first 15 minutes).

Continue moving and flipping the chicken gently. You don't want to tear the skin, so be gentle. But keep moving it, so you don't char it. You want the chicken browned, cooked and untorn. No pressure. No delicious pressure.

Continue cooking, roughly 30 minutes, until the chicken is cooked and nicely browned.

Serve. And love that tandoori flavour. Fresh spice, grease, moist chicken and loveliness. Yum.

No knead bread

I was reminded today of our mortality, our frailty. What matters in life. Family. Time on the beach. A nice dinner with friends.

Here's an easy loaf of bread to accompany a meal, adapted from the book, My Bread. It requires almost no effort, just a little forethought, and a scale:

400 g bread flour

8 g salt

¼ tsp active dry yeast

300 g water

additional flour for dusting

Mix everything together until the flour is wet.

Let rise in a warm place, 12-24 hours.

Coat your fingers with dry flour, then scoop the dough out of the bowl and fold it into a loaf in as few motions as possible. Dust the loaf with flour.

Take a smooth, cotton tea towel (has to be smooth, terry cloth sticks), and dust heavily with flour. Lay the loaf smooth side up on the towel, dust the other side, and cover lightly with the towel. Let rise 2 more hours.

Half an hour from being done rising, heat an enamel pot in the oven (like this one) at 475°F. After half an hour, remove the pot from the oven, and gently drop the loaf into the hot pot (careful, you don't want to burn yourself here). Close the pot, and place back in the oven.

Bake 30 minutes, lid on, and another 10 minutes, lid off to bronze the loaf. The closed lid acts to keep steam in the pot, giving the effect of a humidified oven. Then opening the pot helps to darken the loaf. To give you this:

The extra long rising gives it a nice fermented flavour that I haven't found in other breads. Delicious.

Cool loaf 1 hour, then serve to loved ones.

A Temple of Meat

So we find ourselves in Los Angeles this weekend to go to the Anaheim/Montréal hockey game on Sunday. And it's raining, so outdoor activities are out. (Who said it never rains in southern California - it's been raining for 2 months straight). And what are we to do, but find some delicious eats while we're here? Well, find them we did, at the Temple of Meat (Korean meat, that is): Park's BBQ. (By the way, I'm still not that guy. No pictures, sorry - though I confess I wished several times that I had brought my camera).

Korean BBQ is something pretty special, if you've never had it. They start by setting a fire in the middle of your table. (Every table has it's own ventilation system, to vent out the smoke). And then they bring out meat for you to cook at your table. We ordered the Kobe-style beef and the Seasoned Prime Short Rib. The Kobe style beef was sliced thin and well marbled. It sizzled into delicious caramelized wonderfulness. The waitress brought us a dipping sauce that was sweet and hot (fish sauce based, perhaps?) and a seasoning salt of kosher salt, ground pepper and sesame seeds. We could dredge a tiny bit of that salt on the meat to add to the flavour. She rubbed the hot grill with a cube of beef fat, and threw down the thin slices of Kobe-style beef. Once it was caramelized on both sides, we removed it, and dredged it in the salt-mix. Mein gott, the flavour. Deliciousness. Smokey, just enough fat.

They also serve what they call Wagyu beef, which is the same meat, cut thicker. I think the meat they call Kobe is also Wagyu beef, sliced thin. And meanwhile, as we ate, they piled numerous delicious sides around us. Kimchi. Sesame-seasoned greens. A cabbage salad. Some spicy seasoned crab bits (complete with crab shell). Cubes of flavoured gelatin. A rice noodle mix. And a mild broth. All of this stuff was fantastic, though the crab was a little surprising. I thought it was kimchi until I bit into a crab shell. Yowza.

We finished the meal on the thicker cut Seasoned Prime Short Rib. This stuff we wrapped in small rice sheets, much thicker than the rice sheets I've encountered in Vietnamese cuisine. Teeny, tiny little burritos were folded, and deliciousness ensued. This meat was fantastic. And given that there was charcoal in the grill, there was a nice smoky flavour in this. Really, really nice. And kinda fun for a barbecue enthusiast such as myself to tend the meat. (The waitress kept coming over to turn the meat, but I was more than happy to take over).

I really loved that sesame seasoning salt. Pure genius.

Finally, I didn't know which Korean beverage to order, so I asked my waitress for help. She set me up with some Saan-soju. This is a distilled beverage, and at 20% alcohol, packs a bit of a punch. The flavour was quite mild, and the alcohol was nearly unnoticeable. This stuff could sneak up on you. It reminded me of sake, though the flavour was quite clearly different, it was mild in that way that sake is.

All in all, a lovely evening at a lovely restaurant. We'll be back.

Double chocolate valentine cake

My 4-year old is a Valentine's Day baby, so we recently celebrated his birthday. On the evening before his birthday, I handed him my new copy of Rose's Heavenly Cakes and asked him to pick which cake he wanted for his birthday. Without any prodding, he chose the double chocolate Valentine cake, so I made my Valentine baby a Valentine cake.

This cake requires 2 pints of fresh raspberries - and it's not exactly raspberry season, even here in southern California. I went to pick up some raspberries, and they looked lovely, but at $5 a pint, it seemed a little steep... But it's his birthday, so $10 worth of raspberries it is.

I've been relatively unhappy with my indoor photos of late, so I only have one photo to show - of the final cake. So salivate over this while you read the rest of the recipe.

The cake:

Grease an 8 by 2 inch cake pan. Lay down a piece of parchment paper, cut to fit the bottom of the pan, grease and flour the parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

I've been baking by weight of late - it is a vast improvement in terms of reliability of the recipe, so I report this recipe by weight:

1.5 oz unsweetened cocoa powder

4.2 oz boiling water

4 large egg yolks, at room temperature

1.5 oz water

¾ tsp vanilla extract

5.5 oz cake flour

7 oz superfine (or baking) sugar

2 ½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

9 tbsp unsalted butter, room temp

Dissolve cocoa into the boiling water, mix well to get rid of the lumps and let cool.

Beat the egg yolks until they're light and foamy. Mix in the water and vanilla.

Mix the flour, sugar and baking powder until well combined. Add to an electric mixer bowl, and beat in the butter. When combined, pour in the cocoa/water mix. Beat until just mixed. Then add the egg mixture slowly, while beating. Beat for 30 seconds. Scrape anything the mixer has missed into the batter, and beat for another 30 seconds. Pour into the baking pan and use a spatula to smooth the surface. Bake for 30ish minutes, or until when you insert and remove a toothpick it comes out clean.

While the cake is baking, make the ganache:

¾ cup heavy cream

3 oz 60-62% dark chocolate

Scald the cream in the microwave. (Get it screaming hot without curdling it). Chop the chocolate in a food processor, then add the heavy cream, pulsing until smooth. Cool the ganache.

When the cake is done, remove it from the oven, let it cool a few minutes on the stovetop. Poke a whole bunch of holes in the top of the cake with a chopstick. Slather the ganache over the top of the cake, allowing it to fill the holes. Run a knife around the outside of the cake, place a plate upside-down over the pan, and flip over. Shake the cake onto the plate. Remove the parchment paper, and repeat the chopstick stabbing, ganache slathering routine. Yum.

Allow to cool (I covered it and put it in the fridge overnight, then warmed it to room temperature the next day.).

The following day, melt

¼ cup red currant jelly

the the microwave. Wash your 2 pints of expensive-ass raspberries, and embed them into the top of the cake, bottoms up. Gently paint on the red currant jelly, so it basically glues the raspberries to the surface of the cake. This is challenging. I have nothing of help to offer except to say - go slowly.

Before serving, whip:

1 cup heavy cream

1 tbsp superfine (baking) sugar

1 tsp pure vanilla

Serve each slice of cake with a dollop of whip cream. This cake was a wild hit, with everyone. Even my mother-in-law liked it, and she has rather more conservative tastes than me. Her comment, "When I first saw it, I thought - Raspberries and chocolate? That's just disgusting! Who would combine those things?! But this cake was actually quite good!".

This cake is actually quite good.

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In other news, I'll try to get my indoor photography up-to-speed soon so that I can increase my posting frequency.