Pizza

Pizza with artichoke, roasted pepper, pesto (thanks mom!) And half anchovies.

I know lots of people will get annoyed with my use of store bought dough, but its from Eataly. So is the mozzarella.

I'm beginning to learn that the products made in house at Eataly are a really good value for the quality. Mozzarella, bread, some pastas, basic staples that aren't imported and excessively expensive.

Rosemary rubbed pork chops

Pillaged the herb garden at my parent's townhouse balcony for a quick and easy rub for searing pork chops.

The rub contained chopped rosemary, brown sugar, salt, black pepper, and a tiny bit of cumin. Brined chops seared for 5 minutes per side, quick pan sauce with some wine for deglazing and flour for thickening. Yum!



Paired along with some roasted broccoli and brussel sprouts.

Polenta and Sausage

Polenta is one of those rare dishes that I'm glad Mark Bittman decided to dumb down. His version of polenta is pretty classic, just with less stirring of the pot.

I've been making lazy man's polenta for a while. A good way to be incredibly lazy about it is to use the oven. Simmer the polenta first on the stove for about 10 minutes until a thin porridge emerges. Then cover and throw it into 350 degrees. It's very hard to overcook polenta, but very easy to undercook it. Give it at least 20 minutes.

One key note is to add the fats LAST. You kind of want the cheese and butter to coat the kernels. Use room temperature butter to bring the whole mixture to a perfect texture and temperature.

Roasted potatoes

Contrary to popular thought, waxy red potatoes roast very well. Forget those puffy starchy russets or those expensive fingerlings.

Wedges of new potatoes tossed in a mixture of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, rosemary and smashed garlic, salt and pepper (let the mixture stew for a while so the oil gets infused with the herbs).

450 degree oven for 30-40 minutes, flip the wedges twice.

Learned this vibration from the old master (my dad).

The Koreans got it right

Add a billion things to a plate of rice and it tastes GOOD. Hot, cold, sweet, salty, spicy, multiple sauces. It might not be actually Korean, but it works for me.

Reinventing pasta sauce

What bachelor doesn't rely on a hot bowl of pasta as a quick weeknight meal?

Boil pasta, drain the pot, add the sauce to the pot, now you have a dinner that covers at least one food group.

But it gets boring sometimes. So you add protein, like ground beef, or meatballs. But then that gets boring.

This doesn't taste boring:


Combine:
Jarred pasta sauce
Crushed red pepper
Roughly chopped olives
White beans

Add it to:

Arugula
Plain pasta

Texture, color, and now we're upwards of TWO food groups!

Quinoa salad

Uncovered a half used box of quinoa while looking for something to eat. Turns out I had all the right ingredients for greek quinoa salad!

Quinoa seems like it would be a hassle to cook, but in my experience you just need a touch less water than the recommended amount and it comes out perfectly.

This salad is really just quinoa plus a mix of "Greek", or generic mediterranian, ingredients:

• Olives
• Red onion
• Feta
• Sundried tomatoes
• Olive oil
• Red Wine vinegar

I added cashews and golden raisins to make a greek/middle eastern hybrid. The presentation could really use some green, so definitely use parsley if you've got it (none of that italian flat-leaf stuff...go with the curly kind).

Veggie Shepherd's Pie

This was kind of a spur of the moment dish, made for a vegetarian friend.

3 things that make this different from your normal Shepherd's Pie:

1. No meat (instead I crushed up some vegetarian meatballs from Trader Joe's)
2. Actual crust
   
3. It is gigantic

The basic assembly first required cooking both the meat/veggie filling and the mashed potato topping separately. The filling is sauteed onions, carrots, meat (or meat substitute), broth, tomato paste, flour/corn starch, and some frozen peas and corn.

The filling was the first to go into the pie shell. Unfortunately, it almost came up to the brim without any mashed potatoes. The potato topping ended up being pretty swollen looking.



Looks amazing when cut into:



And even better just prior to entering my mouth!

Getting huge

I went on a weight-lifting stint this winter in order to add some body reserves before I start residency this summer. My goal was to evenly distribute 10 lbs more to my frame. The easiest way to do this?



Protein! This stuff actually worked pretty well as a work-out shake, and was generally pretty palatable. But Table Vibrations is not about filling your body with chemicals produced in some factory (my friend refers to the term "edible food substitute").

I decided to turn to the good old egg to fuel my muscle-building adventure. How do you make an omelet in 5 steps?

Beat eggs --> scramble briskly in preheated nonstick pan for 10 seconds --> add ingredients down the center --> fold one third of the egg over the ingredients and wait --> flop it onto your plate free edge first, so you complete the 2nd fold.







I think I gained about 3 lbs and promptly lost it all after a week of working again. Foiled by my own metabolism!

Shortbread cookies

Thanks to the Grand Central Bakery Baking Book I received for Christmas, I decided to try these chocolate shortbread cookies. I've never made roll cookies before. Drop cookies, sugar cookies, slice and bake Tollhouses, but never authentic shortbread cookies.

Basically, sugar + butter + chocolate + refrigeration. They turned out alright, but I think I'm more of a soft/chewy cookie guy. These are more crumbly, though the chocolate flavor was amazingly rich.

Before: (insert obvious joke here)



After:

Popcorn

After college, I decided that popcorn did not have to be made in a microwave covered in yellow, salted trans-fats. However, it took me a while to figure out how to make popcorn just as tasty as the gooey disgusting kind that comes from a paper bag.

I tried regular stove top popping. This requires some skill, patience, and the right vessel (I use a nice large saucier). It turns out nicely, but you need a high smoke-point fat like peanut oil and plenty of practice using a lid as a shield against over-excited kernels. Plus, there is a good amount of clean up involved.

You might ask why I didn't try one of these stovetop popcorn contraptions. I live in a studio apartment...there's no room for that unitasker.

DIY microwave popping was next. Throw some kernels in a paper bag, staple it shut and hope for the best. This never seemed to give me a high enough kernel yield. Plus, it seemed like cheating.

Air popping was the next logical solution. I dropped some dough on a used air popper and it turns out to be almost exactly what I wanted.

I use a mixture of yellow and blue popcorns - both organic and locally produced by the Pennsylvania Dutch. It adds some variety of texture and flavor.



Remember to use a big bowl to catch the popcorn - you'll need it to distribute the toppings later.



After some topping experimentation, I've found that equal parts butter and olive oil, microwaved for 40 seconds and mixed with a pinch of sea salt works well.



Shake it up. Then add another sprinkle of salt and/or black pepper. Shake it again (but not too vigorously this time).

Potato Leek Soup

This recipe is unbelievably easy (read: you can buy everything at Trader Joe's), and makes for a good couple of meals because it reheats so well. Non-pureed soups often don't reheat well because the chunky ingredients tend to get soggy after sitting for a while.



Saute leeks --> diced potatoes --> wait for a touch of color --> season --> veggie broth --> add whole peeled potato -->



45 minutes --> remove and finely dice cooked whole potato --> immersion blender! --> add dairy (cream, buttermilk) and potato pieces --> serve with chives



Eat with fresh bread (made in the same dutch oven earlier that day).


Original recipe courtesy of Alton Brown.

Christmas time is here

Ginger molasses cookies with orange zest. Very tasty. I was too lazy to take an "after" picture, but the "before" picture looks like space boulders or something. Credit goes to my sister for helping to tackle this cookie job.

Yelp!

I'll admit, it's hard to keep up with a blog. Though it's not an excuse, I've been moonlighting as a food writer on Yelp. Check out my reviews, which have been featured a couple of times on the Philly website.

Would you like some cream cheese with those veggies?

Veggie cream cheese is something I gladly pay the extra 50 cents for at a bagel place, but I never tried to make it at home.

Seemed easy enough...fine dice carrot, celery, and green onion, mix it with cream cheese, add some salt (if you can't tell I'm a salt addict).


Turns out you should only try this with a surplus of cream cheese. A 1:1 veggies to cream cheese ratio is a little too high. Next time I'll try it when I have more than a few tablespoons of cream cheese to work with.

Tomato salad

Got some unreasonably expensive mini heirloom tomatoes from Trader Joe's last weekend. To my surprise, they didn't taste nearly as good as normal cherry tomatoes, but the texture was beautiful. I decided to let them rest in a paper bag in my fridge for the next few days and give the benefit of the doubt with a tomato salad after they ripened a bit.



Not sure if I've done tomato salad on Table Vibrations before, but the dressing is a mix of sherry vinegar or sweet balsamic, olive oil, mustard, and black pepper. Tossed with halved cherry tomatoes, minced parsley (or basil), and some celery slivers for texture. Add coarse salt at the end, as it's best when the salt coats the dressed ingredients.

Oyakodon

Donburi is a Japanese rice bowl dish, similar to what you might find at Yoshinoya, and Oyakodon literally means "parent and child" donburi since it contains chicken and egg. I have had trouble with getting this dish right in the past, but I think I found a good basic recipe that allows for some vibration. It's from a youtube channel called Cooking with DOG!. (note: this is not a video about eating dogs)

Basically you make the sauce in the pan and simmer everything cumulatively in the same pan. The hardest part is boning the chicken thighs...which really isn't all that hard if you've done it before.



I added chopped scallions as well as roughly chopped parsley.

Pork chops revisited

This time with roasted garlic polenta! Now it's a complete meal.

Butterfly chicken

The only recipes I like to follow precisely are by Alton Brown. He's someone who actually tweaks his recipes scientifically. This is Alton's butterflied chicken.



Kosher chickens are pre-brined so they are flavorful and juicy. Plus, if you live in a Jew-less place like I do, kosher meat goes on sale often because they can't sell this stuff! $0.99/lb for kosher meat is a steal.



I guess the only different thing about roasting a chicken in this fashion is the butterflying. You basically yank out the keel bone by dividing the breast meat and dislocating the clavicles. Alton calls for broiling, but I wanted my veggies to soften up properly and I didn't want to babysit it. This took about an hour at 400 degrees.



Those dark spots under the skin are peppercorns. Alton wanted me to make a garlic lemon pepper paste, but I didn't have a mortar and pestle, so it's super rough. Next time I would just use ground pepper.

Big and open (faced)

I like making lunch at home. Usually I'm at the hospital for lunch, but it's nice to think about what I'm going to eat rather than just open up my lunch bag or settle on whatever is at the cafeteria.

I wanted to eat these amazing little Trader Joes smoked herring that I've fallen in love with. I put it on some toast, cream cheese, beefsteak tomatoes, greens and topped it with capers. Turns out this makes for a gigantic mountain of a sandwich that required some clean up with a knife and fork.