I love to cook. Be it alone, where I find an afternoon of solo chopping to be quite therapeutic, or tackling major menus with friends, there’s nothing better than wielding the knife with some music blasting (dub-step was a popular cooking choice of mine this year) and a cold beer next to the cutting board. I’ve learned much more, but have so far to go. I mean, I’ve never done a souffle! Or a standing rib roast! I want to learn Indian cuisine, and how to clean and filet fish, and charcuterie, and…the list goes on. For now, here are a few of my favorite cooking lessons from 2011.

Pasta dishes like aglio e olio, cacio e pepe, and carbonara made many appearances this year. Simple enough in design, to obtain the perfect texture and sauce consistency requires experiential timing and touch. I finally feel like I can make a proper pasta. Beautiful fresh pasta nests like these definitely help.

My favorite pasta all year was a quick pan sauce of salty pasta water and ‘nduja, a hot Calabrian spreadable salami I obtained from Jason at Cured Meats. I must have made that dish four times that week. I did spare a little to make a stunning grilled cheese with basil.

Cooler sous vide – I finally got my pastured pork at that exact right temperature.

Flannery beef. Still the reigning champ of steak in my book. So expensive. But so good. Look at the marbling on this strip!

Lasagna. My ultimate comfort food. I made many in 2011, including a few vegetarian versions so Katie could enjoy it along with me. But my heart belongs to Bologna. I made the bechamel (which I’ve finally nailed) and meat ragu version a couple of times, including once with calf livers, which made it extra funky and interesting. Lasagna for breakfast (with an espresso, in this one photo) is the best. Marone!

Soups. I’m making them quite regularly these days. They used to intimidate me for whatever silly reason, but now I know I can dig around my fridge and pantry and make SOME sort of soup. The Vitamix helps (understatement). This soup below is a mix of frozen peas and water and herbs. Nothing more.

Over the last week I’ve knocked out cheese sauces. I had a mac and cheese break (greasy, grainy) a few weeks ago, so I spent some time researching why this happens, then played around with a few variations of recipes. I wanted a cheese sauce that could take a real sharp cheese, melt smoothly, and hold up even when reheated. I’ve found my easy, no cream method – bechamel held with xantham gum. Mix in small quantities of grated cheese over very low heat.

The veggie plate. Chili oil marinated squash. Gently simmered pink eye peas. Yuzo kosho mashed cauliflower. Tomatoes with chives. No recipes, just preparing things simply and properly and seasoning in a way that makes sense.

Homemade biscuits. Buttery (but not soggy), flaky, crusty on the outside, made with buttermilk and frozen butter. Maybe not the prettiest, but I nailed the texture. It made my day.

Porchetta. Or a version thereof. This one was a picnic pork shoulder, with herbs, roasted for hours, the skin finished under the broiler.

2011 was the year I broke the oven in my kitchen. I began cooking my pizzas at 800F+ on the clean cycle, which is a process that requires some trial and error. I became a little more familiar with making, aging, and working with doughs, though I still need lots of practice there.

Moving on to other people’s food – my brother made some extremely impressive gougères. Better than the last time I tried the French Laundry recipe, and better than any I’ve tried outside of my meal at Per Se.

My friend Brad and I tackled a Momofuku meal. While I wasn’t overly impressed with the dishes, it was once again a great learning experience. This time we got to break down a whole pig’s head, debone chickens, and assemble this dish with meat glue.

And while I learn a lot by trying to follow complicated recipes word for word, my friend Rowdy continues to rock it in the kitchen and be an inspiration with his freewheeling style. I still can’t touch his hot chicken. How did he know that dish of cured, but uncooked bacon with a thyme dressing would be brilliant at 1:30 in the morning? I don’t think he did. But he just gets in the kitchen and experiments, and more and more I think that’s the way to do it.

AWESOME!

Buffalo Chicken Soup. Basically somewhat thinned out buffalo salad dressing.

NOT AWESOME!

(Special runner up: The buffalo chicken omelet special I saw this morning at Atlanta Bread Company!)

Recently I found myself within walking distance of the new location of Saigon Cafe, a local Vietnamese chain with locations in Norcross, Decatur, Duluth, and Woodstock. Their newest location in Peachtree Hills occupies the space that was formerly Mama Fu’s, next door to Black Bear Tavern. Being that this new location is less than half the distance to Buford Highway from my home, I was curious to see if they could satisfy my shakes when I was in desperate need of a pho fix.

As the menu was littered with popular non-Vietnamese dishes such as chicken penang (Thai) and General Tso’s (sort-of-Chinese), I didn’t get my hopes up, but my order of Pho Bac Diet satisfied. It had all the usual suspects – well prepared rice noodles, thin slices of beef partially cooked by the hot broth, tendon, ribbons of chewy tripe, and plump sections of meatball. The broth lacked the complexity of a great pho, not enough star anise and cinnamon spice, and maybe a little too salty, but acceptable. Everything tasted fresh and when loaded up with crunchy bean sprouts and fragrant Thai basil, I had no complaints on a cool Atlanta day. I’m sure there will be those that will smite me for accepting in-town chain pho, but if I’m in the area and I have the craving, I think it fits the bill.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Spoon. It seems every time I want to visit, it happens to be Sunday, and they weren’t open. On my visit this past Friday I saw signage that says they are now open on Sunday evenings. So, there’s that.

I’ve come down with a cold, and thought a bowl of tom yum gai and some spicy curry would be the perfect complement to the chilly temps and my congested sinuses. It hit the spot. I love spooning the sauce over my rice, and it saves me from embarrassing myself by drinking the last remnants of the curry directly from its bowl.

I’d rate the meal as above average, though it was pretty much your standard tom yum soup and red curry. The vegetables in the curry weren’t soggy, a problem I see occasionally. Prices on the lunch menu were fair. It was super crowded for Friday lunch, but service handled it fairly well.

I’d like to try some of their more differentiating dinner entrees, though the prices of the dinner specials listed on the blackboard were between $25-30, definitely not a drop in the bucket, probably only bested by Naan for priciest Thai food in Atlanta.

Yay for summer tomatoes. And gazpacho.

I’ve been browsing a lot of gazpacho recipes, and I decided to make this one. I like gazpacho when it doesn’t taste like bloody mary mix. Some aspect of it needs to say “soup” to me.

Before

After

I served it with a cucumber granita. It was really good. Everyone seemed to like it a lot. Creamy, with loads of basil flavor.

Dinner was chorizo, bacon, jowl, and clams with linguine. The hog pen meats the sea.

Dessert was grilled peaches over local honey, Rainier cherry and grape granita, sliced cherry. Really good.

Grilling peaches is a great way to use peaches if you have some that aren’t quite ripe and don’t have time to wait (like me, who was going out of town for a few days).

This month I cooked the Pickled Shrimp out of December’s Bon Appetit. I’m two issues behind, but I have done a BA post once a month since November of 2008. That’s dedication, homes.

I had pickled GA white shrimp at Abattoir, and it was rockin’, so when I saw this recipe, and my roommate brought back some shrimp from Savannah, I was on my way. It’s a relatively easy process, but it was slightly time consuming. Peeling shrimp sucks.

After peeling the freezing cold shrimp, they were cooked in the boiling mixture. I didn’t have celery seed or whole mustard seed so I cut that out. Personally I think having 6+ spices in a boiling mixture is a farce. There’s no way that after cooking the shrimp, then pickling them, that you’re gonna say “oh, is that a hint of cardamom?”.

The recipe says to boil for 2 minutes, but I think the shrimp were ready after just one minute. Like a goon I let them go another minute though. Why am a slave to instructions???

While the shrimp were chilling out (get it?) I put together the pickling liquid.

…and added the shrimp.

I refrigerated for about 4 hours, which is longer than the 3 specified, but shorter than the 6 hour max window. I’m guessing they get a bit stringy or mushy from the vinegar after 6 hours.

They were tasty, nice flavor, and I enjoyed it with the paired prosecco, but they were missing some of the “snap” of the pickled shrimp I had at Abattoir. I think less cook time and possibly less pickle time could help with that. As these shrimp were previously frozen, that could have something to do with it too. Also, this recipe took a bunch of time, so not sure I’m eager to do it again. I think pickling is more gratifying when the labor is rewarded by the fact that you have tons of picked stuff you can use for a long time, but in this case, you have a 3-6 hour window.

BONUS POST!!!

I made French Onion soup because I was reading about it and craved it afterwards. My soup was loosely based on the Thomas Keller recipe. Here we have a bunch of onions cooking for forty minutes.

Then deglazed with white wine.

Then I used the rest of my Ad Hoc beef stock and added the garni.

Then broiled it with cheese and crouton. Good snack.

* Note – no prize for pointing out my errors, jerk

A far cry from some of the dingy grocery stores on Buford Highway (not including Buford Highway Farmer’s Market, which is very nice now), H Mart’s offer a large variety of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Hispanic produce and dry goods at very good prices. In addition, H Mart’s have fairly large food courts where mom and pop vendors offer everything from sushi to Korean soup. The house wares sections are fairly large too, including a large appliance (rice cookers!) selection.

Not just a specialty store, H Mart is great for your every day shopping – I find the quality and prices to be excellent compared to any grocer. But particularly if you are hunting down an Asian ingredient (kochujang, fish sauce, fermented vegetables) you are going to get a much better selection and value than if you try to find it in that four foot “Ethnic” section your local Publix offers. It makes sense – if your local grocer sells five blocks of tofu a week, they’re probably going to have to charge a higher price for it, and there’s a good chance it’s been sitting there a while. That tiny bag of slimy bean sprouts at Kroger that costs $3? For half that you will get a huge bag of crisp bean sprouts at Super H.

I’ve been to the very large Super H on Pleasant Hill, but this time I stopped at the smaller and less crowded location on Lawrenceville Suwanee Rd, right below 985. Being very hungry, I surveyed the food court options and went with the Kalbi Tang soup. For $7 I was brought a huge bowl of soup, a small plate of banchan (kimchee, fried tofu, bean sprouts, etc), and little bit of rice.

The soup was a simple broth with green onions, lots of egg, short ribs on the bone, sliced cross ways in the normal galbi style. Eating a huge meal before grocery shopping really is economical.

I had been looking to make the Ad Hoc at Home beef stock a few weeks before this, but I called my local Whole Foods, Publix, and Kroger, and none of theses places had beef bones. I was told that they sometimes had them, but they were out.

Not so at Super H. They had a huge floor freezer filled with bags of beef bones at $1/lb.

Super H always has a huge meat selection, particularly because they carry a lot of cuts of meats that aren’t popular with your average white person. Beef heart. Beef tongue. A whole section for pork belly of various precut sizes. Pre-sliced ribeye in 1lb, 5lb, and 10lb sizes.

Below I found short rib that was basically the bone cut side, as if you were removing the bone from a short rib roast. When I had Whole Foods remove the bone from a short rib roast for me, I guarantee you they threw the bone side out. Not so at Super H, they sell it for $0.99/lb. This meaty bone is very valuable for soups and stocks, so I bought some to add a bit of meatiness to my beef stock.

Even if I did find all of these items at in-town grocers, I’m sure the beef stock would have ended up being very expensive.

I have yet to visit the new Super H location (by Shoya Izakaya), but I’m pumped to have one close to town. Anyone have any word on the food court there? Are there some good vendors set up?

Since I got my Mac Book Pro, I’ve been wanting to try my hand at video, so here ya go, my first attempt at a video blog post. Be gentle.