This one’s got a peculiar ingredient, but trust me it works!

Buttered Shrimp
Ingredients:

1lb. fresh shrimp
2 C. 7 Up or Sprite
¼ C.Butter
3 to 4 cloves of minced garlic
5 tbsp. tomato paste
Salt and pepper

A few words before starting:

• Wash but do not peel shrimp.
• Cut off the antennas and the rostrum (the part of the head that is pointy) beforehand.
• Soda gives more flavor than regular sugar.
• Be careful not to overcook the shrimp.

Directions:
In a large shallow pan, boil the shrimp in soda. Add a pinch of salt.

Boil until all the soda has evaporated. If the shrimp is done cooking before it is dry, drain some of the liquid. Add butter and garlic. Mix well. Add the tomato paste. End product should only be very slightly sticky from caramelized sugars in the shrimp, soda, and garlic.

Done! You can squeeze some lemon juice if you like.

I saw these little pizzas at a new restaurant opened near my place called Urban Plates. They were small and thin and topped with some interesting ingredients. I just knew I could recreate these at home without much trouble. I used the same dough recipe from my pissaladièr Here’s my take on a few…

Old reliable: sauce and cheese.

Summer Veggie: zucchini, fresh tomato, and mozzarella.

The little stinker: Blue cheese, apricot jam, walnuts, and micro greens.

Pesto Mesto: Cilantro pesto, egg, and micro basil.

Obviously you can top these however you’d like. Since they are so small, you should try all sorts of combinations; if they don’t work, there’s always another one waiting!

Several times each year the Apprentice makes the trip to San Diego to hang out, eat fish tacos, and escape from the New England weather. On this trip back to San Diego, he brought with him stories of his trip to Uganda and a new street food he ate while he was there, the rolex.

The rolex, as you can see, is a rolled up snack much like a burrito that is filled with a mixture of eggs and assorted vegetables. The wrapper is made of a thinly rolled, skillet cooked wheat bread called a chapati. The eggs are mixed with tomatoes, shredded cabbage, salt, and cooked much like an omelette. The whole thing is then flipped over, the bread is put on top to steam a little bit, and then flipped again. At this point, the cooking is completed and the concoction is rolled up, burrito-style, and served immediately. If you want the true street-food experience, the rolex is rolled tightly in newspaper for easy transport.

Rolex
Per Rolex:

1 chapati (I used this recipe. If you don’t want to make your own, flour tortillas are a pretty good substitute.)
2 eggs
3-4 thin slices of tomato
small handful of shredded cabbage
pinch of salt

Preheat large frying pan or skillet over high heat. (I found a 12 inch cast iron pan worked well for making these.)

Break eggs into small bowl. Add cabbage, tomatoes, and salt, and mix with a fork until combined.

Add a small amount of oil to the pan and make sure the pan is coated all over. Pour eggs into pan trying to keep the mixture in a circular shape. In a 12 inch pan, the eggs will not run all the way to the edges of the pan.

Using a large spatula, check the under the edges of the egg to check for doneness. When the eggs are set, flip the entire mixture over. This can be a little difficult with a small spatula so use the biggest one you have. If you’re using a light pan, feel free to try and fling it in the air and attempt to flip them like a pancake. (extra difficult!)

Place chapati over the top of the eggs while they continue to cook for one to two more minutes. Using the spatula on one side and your hand on the other, flip the whole thing onto a plate.

Roll the egg and chapati up, burrito-style, to complete your rolex.

Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Yogurt Dipping Sauce

Three friends and I left Las Vegas early to go to an archaeological dig in New Mexico. We stopped by Chaco Canyon to camp and see the ancient ruins. We grilled hamburgers for dinner but we also wanted french fries. It’s really tough to make fries on a portable grill in the middle of nowhere, you know. So the idea of roasted sweet potatoes was born. The dipping sauce came later.

Ingredients:
2 medium sweet potatoes, sliced thinly in rounds
2 tbsp. chopped rosemary
1/3 C. olive oil
1 clove of garlic, finely minced
Pepper + salt to taste

Sauce:
1/4 C. plain greek yogurt
4 basil leaves, sliced thinly
1 small clove of garlic, super finely minced
Splash of red wine vinegar or lemon juice + zest
Pinch of cayenne pepper (optional)
Pepper + salt to taste

Directions:

A few words before starting:

Choose a potato that is uniform along the length. I prefer one that is approximately 2 inches in diameter. It’s just easier to slice them this way.

I like to use garlic infused olive oil. I add the minced garlic into the oil and leave them overnight. This makes it more fragrant and more garlicky, I think.
I prefer to use Voskos Greek Yogurt. This one is creamy and does not have a chalky taste compared to other Greek yogurts I’ve tried.

Preheat oven now to 350 if you’re a fast potato slicer, otherwise, wait till you have 10 -15 minutes left of slicing to preheat. Slice the sweet potatoes in thin rounds. Mince the 2 cloves of garlic; save half for the yogurt sauce. Chop the rosemary.

To a bowl, add olive oil, garlic, rosemary, pepper, and salt. Add the sweet potatoes and toss to coat. Add a little bit more olive oil if the slices look a little dry. Spread them onto a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil in one layer. Roast in the oven for about 20 – 25 minutes, or until the sweet potatoes are golden brown and crispy around the edges.

For the sauce:

Slice the basil leaves. In a bowl, mix together the yogurt, garlic, basil, and cayenne.

Add the red wine vinegar. Adjust the taste with salt and pepper.

Eat.

Broccoli Rabe
Sausage
Pasta
Tomatoes
Garlic
Onions
Wine
Red Pepper

I’m using these ingredients to dig out of my food rut:

Bacon.

Cheese.

Eggs.

Parsley.

Pasta.

The kitchen has been a lonely place in the Food Geek household lately. Lately, instead of creating masterpieces in the kitchen, I’m eating fast food, fish tacos, Mexican food, and whatever else I can find that is cheap and fast. I’ve been in a food rut. There’s only one way out, start cooking, STAT!

Tonight I whipped up a quick pasta carbonara. Interestingly enough, I’ve never made or tasted this dish before. It has all the right ingredients in it to make the dish fast and tasty. Maybe all that bacon will help me get out of this food rut.

Seeing my mood, there wasn’t much of a recipe here, but I’ll give you something quick.

• Get the pot on for some pasta
• Cook bacon until almost done
• Add some garlic if you want
• Cook pasta until just about done
• Grate some cheese into a bowl, add two eggs, and mix it up
• Drain pasta and add to bacony goodnees.
• Remove from head, stir in egg mix and parsley
• Eat your way out of a food rut

Sunday breakfast:

Potatoes. Spam. Eggs.

EAT!

It’s been a while since I’ve done much interesting cooking. Things have been quite busy for the foodgeek household with moving, new jobs, and getting back to daily life. We’ve got just about everything back in order, including joining a new CSA, Garden of Eden.

With CSAs in San Diego, you get lots of greens. It’s like we have eternal spring and the greens just keep on growing. This week, the winner was chard. We had a small bunch leftover from last week and got a new bunch of rainbow chard this week so something with chard was in order. Poking around on the internet I stumbled on this recipe

The recipe is pretty much everything you want in a quick-to-put-together weekday meal. The ingredient list is short, the pastry comes together without a fuss, and by the time it is cooked, the kitchen is clean. Big thanks to AppleSister for this recipe (which I shamelessly copied here).

Tourte Aux Blettes (Savory Swiss Chard Tart)

Pastry:
1 cup flour
¼ t. salt
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup water

Filling:
1 lb. swiss chard leaves
Salt and freshly ground pepper
3 large eggs
1 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Combine flour and salt; add water and then the oil, mixing until thoroughly blended. After kneading briefly, the dough will be very moist like cookie dough. Press dough into loose-bottomed metal tart pan.

Wash and dry the leafy portion of the chard and coarsely chop the leaves. Wilt the leaves in a skillet, seasoned to taste with salt and pepper. Heat until most of the water has evaporated.

Combine the eggs and grated cheese; add the chard and pour mixture into the pan.

Bake for about 40 minutes, until crust and filling are golden.

I’ve been having a huge bread jones these days. After lurking on www.thefreshloaf.com for several hours looking at all the recipes, tutorials, and message boards, I decided on making a plain white French bread. This French loaf uses only the simplest of ingredients: flour, water, yeast, and salt; yet, made properly, has a flavor that you would not expect from such a miserly array of ingredients.

I didn’t have to do all that much to get a recipe together that I liked. I took my inspiration from the blog’s creator, Floyd. Floyd’s daily bread is a very wet dough that produced a real nice loaf with a very good open crust. I wasn’t happy with the huge mess it made so I modified his daily bread recipe somewhat. I made some adjustments in the flour and water measurements he used, converted it to a more friendly and scalable format, IE grams/weight, and tested it out. The overall result was just what I wanted: open crumb, good flavor, and a great crust.

In modifying this recipe, I also got to learn a new way to prepare the dough. This dough is not kneaded in the usual sense. After the poolish has risen, all the ingredients are mixed together into a rather ragged dough and left to sit. This process is called autolyzation. While sitting, the gluten forms in the dough on its own without any outside assistance. After the prescribed amount of time, the dough is turned onto a flour surface and folded, much like puff pastry, and let to rest. The process is then repeated two more times and then the dough is shaped, proofed, and baked.

This new method of making bread helps create the open crumb structure that is much desired in an artisan bread. It’s also a good technique to keep in your bag of tricks if you want to make some bread and don’t have a mixer or the desire to knead for 10-15 minutes.

French Inspired White Bread
Recipe adapted from Floyd’s Daily Bread, http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/mydailybread

Poolish:
110 g flour
230 g water
1/8 teaspoon yeast

Dough:
520 g flour
300 g water
1 teaspoon instant yeast
2 teaspoon salt
All of the poolish

To Make the Poolish:

Combine all the ingredients together and mix with a spoon until all the flour is incorporated. Leave overnight (8-16 hours) in a bowl covered with plastic wrap.

Making the Bread:

Combine all ingredients together is a large bowl and mix with a wooden spoon until all the ingredients are mostly incorporated. Cover the bowl with a towel and set aside 30-60 minutes (autolyse). The mixture will not look like a dough at this point, don’t worry, it will soon.

Flour your work surface generously and gently remove the dough from the bowl. Flour your hands and the top of the dough and gently stretch out to a rectangle. This will be a little messy, but work quickly and gingerly and you won’t get too messy. Fold the dough into thirds by folding the left side of the dough into the middle and the right side over the left. Fold into thirds from the top to the bottom in the same fashion.

Place in a bowl and cover with a towel and set aside 30-60 minutes.

Repeat the process two more times, flouring and folding the dough each time. Place the dough back in the bowl each time and let rest for 30-60 minutes.

Remove dough from bowl and preshape the dough. Allow the dough to rest for 5-10 minutes and then complete the final shaping. Allow the dough to rise until 1.5 times bigger. Slash bread and bake in 425F oven for 30-50 minutes.

On one of my last weeks in Massachusetts I had dinner at a French Bistro on Newburry Street with my good friend, and apprentice, Marcelo. The Bistro had all of the normal French classics that you would expect but this French pizza, or pissaladière, caught my eye. Normally when you think pizza the first thing that comes to mind is Italy, or at least red sauce and mozzarella cheese. This Pissaladière did not have either.

The French pie was thin and crisp, topped with thinly sliced beef, a stinky blue cheese, and dressed baby arugula. It was nothing like the pizza you would expect from Boston’s North End, this pizza was light and crisp and packed with flavor. With the geeks changing coasts again I knew that I would have to come up with something of my own to taste this again.

I set out to recreate the thin, crispy, cracker-like crust using a basic pizza dough recipe. The proportions of several ingredients were changed and I added rice flour to try to cut back the gluten count; pastry flour could have been used instead, but there was none in the house. The dough was rolled as thin as I could get it and cooked in a very hot oven. The crust was very light, crisp, yet not overly chewy. The dough could take a bit more cooking, but overall it was almost a match.

For my pizza, I decided to change the toppings up a bit: apples, caramelized onions, spinach, and brie. Everything almost worked out perfectly except for the part where I put the spinach on BEFORE cooking the pizza; it pretty much wilted into nothing. Hindsight tells me I should have waited until the cooking was completed, and, taking a play from the bistro, place the dressed spinach on the pie prior to serving. When I make one of these again, this knowledge will come in handy.

Please don’t be too afraid to make this dough yourself. The dough comes together fairly quickly and isn’t all that hard to put together. I used my kitchenaid to mix the dough but you could very well do it by hand if you so desired.

Pissaladière

1 cup water, room temperature
3/4 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup rice flour
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon olive oil

Combine water, sugar, and yeast in a the bowl of a mixer and stir to dissolve.

Mix the two flours and salt together in a separate bowl.

Turn the mixer on low and slowly add the flour until a dough forms. Continue to mix until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl. Add more flour if the dough feels a little sticky. Stop mixing when the dough is slightly tacky and soft-to-firm.

Remove the dough from a mixer and place in a lightly oiled bowl covered with a towel. Let the dough rise for about an hour.

Preheat oven to highest temperature (mine is 550F).

Roll out dough into oval shape, top with your favorite toppings, and cook until golden brown.