We recently had the great pleasure, while visiting New York City, to have an early dinner at Empellón Cocina, a new restaurant recommended by Gavin Kaysen for their creative interpretation of Mexican Cuisine.  We were curious about the meaning of Empellón and learned that it means “push or shove”, which tells you that this must be an adventuresome chef who wanted to infuse a bit of fun into the atmosphere.  Rising Star Chef Alex Stupak has created an incredible menu with offerings that must only exist on his menu, as we have never seen them anywhere else.  Guacamole made with pickled Jalapeños, Pistachio Guacamole, instead of the usual corn chips, the guacamole and salsas are offered with Masa Crisps.  All seven salsas can be sampled for $15.  There were so many tempting selections, but the portions were too generous to try everything on the menu.  We shared the Soft Shell Crab Tacos and the Shrimp Tacos after our starters of Pistachio Guacamole and the 7 Salsas, my favorite was the the Smoked Cashew Salsa (with smoked cashews and chipotle pepper).

Shrimp Tacos with Smoked Potatoes, Brown Butter Crema and Pickled Pasilla Oaxaquena.

7 Salsas, including such flavors as pumpkin seeds, smoked cashews, tomatillos, chipotle peppers, and the spiciest of all : Salsa Habanera.

Soft Shell Crab Tacos with lightly roasted tomato petal and lime mayo.

Chef Alex shared the recipe for the Arbol Chile Salsa – Recipe and below commentary from the Chef:
This salsa lasts indefinitely and improves with age. It is extremely picante and can be used in place of pretty much any store bought hot sauce. We use this salsa on our tongue tacos as well as in our micheladas but it goes well on just about anything.
Ingredients
100 each Arbol Chiles
1/4 cup Sesame Seeds
1/4 cup Hulled Pumpkin Seeds
1/2 teaspoon Cumin Seeds
10 each Allspice Berries
5 each Whole Cloves
1 tablespoon Mexican Oregano
1 tablespoon Kosher Salt
1 tablespoon Sugar
5 each Garlic Cloves
2 cups Cider Vinegar
Method
1. Remove the stems from the chiles and discard.
2. Roll the chiles between your fingers to remove all the seeds and discard seeds.
3. Place the chiles in a blender.
4. Toast the sesame seeds in a dry skillet until they begin to pop and turn a deep brown color. Add the sesame seeds to the blender.
5. In the same skillet, toast the pumpkin seeds until they pop and all turn a golden color. Add the pumpkin seeds to the blender.
6. In a molcajete or spice grinder, pulverize the cumin, allspice, cloves and oregano. Add the ground spices to the blender along with the salt, sugar and vinegar.
7. Blend the mixture for several minutes. It should be quite smooth.

Katrin ready to put “kuchen” in the oven

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by Katrin Hakenesch

Quarktorte

 I love all kinds of cakes and this one is one of my favorites. Quarktorte is not exactly a cake (Kuchen), it’s rather a “fancy cake”, a little special. My husband told Karin about my Quarktorte and that he loves it so much. This way I came to the honor to bake one for Karin and Gary and would like to share the recipe with you.

Two notes:

It is a German recipe, which calls for Quark. You can find Quark at special grocery stores like Jonathon’s in La Jolla, but it is fairly expensive compared to the very reasonable Quark you can buy in stores in Germany. In the US I substitute the Quark with Greek Yogurt and use less milk then the original recipe calls for.

The recipe is metric. I do recommend using a digital scale for measuring ingredients for baking because it is more accurate then the traditional way.

You need one 24 cm springform pan. I cover the base with parchment paper and cover the sides slightly with butter. Preheat the oven to 350 F.

Base:

160 g flour
60 g butter
60 g sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon backing powder
1 pinch of salt

Filling:

750 g Quark or whole milk Greek Yogurt
200 g sugar
300 ml milk (with Yogurt 200ml)
150 ml canola oil
1 package Vanilla pudding powder
Juice from ½ lemon
1 whole egg
2 egg yolks beat the egg white in a separate bowl until stiff

Optional: add grated lemon zest from 1 lemon

Prepare the dough for the base and fill into the springform, spreading the dough over the pan and forming a little rim around it. Place in refrigerator.

Mix the other ingredients with a handheld mixer until well combined. At the very end carefully fold the egg white into the mixture. Fill into the springform and bake for 1 hour. Check during the last 20 minutes of baking that the top doesn’t darken too much. If it gets too dark, cover the top loosely with some aluminum foil. Take out of the oven and let cool before you remove the springform.

Enjoy!

Roasted Pork Shoulder for Carnitas

We love Mexican cuisine, everything from fish tacos to chicken mole to the traditional Chiles en nogada. This weekend we made carnitas. This dish requires a pork shoulder. Naturally, in Costco fashion, the only pork shoulder available was over 14 pounds. So we cut the large piece in half and froze half. We trimmed the meat of most of the excess fat, then salted it. It’s best to then refrigerate for a day before beginning on the prep.

Here is our recipe for easy carnitas that earned rave reviews from our guests:

5 pounds pork shoulder (after trimming fat)
1 tablespoon Kosher salt
Canola oil
1 cup chicken broth
1 tablespoon Gary’s Rub (from Cook the Part, page 26)
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
6 cloves garlic
Water

Heat oven to 325 degrees on convection roast.
Cut the pork shoulder into 6 inch chunks.
Heat a few tablespoons canola oil in large iron skillet on the stove top. Brown the pork pieces until well-browned. Add chicken broth to the frying pan and scrape all the browned bits from the frying pan and add to the roaster.
Generously sprinkle the rub on the browned pork.
Place the browned pork pieces into a large roasting pan.
Add the cinnamon stock, bay leaves, cumin and garlic to the roasting pan. Add water to the pan until the pork is about 2/3 covered with the liquid.
Roast for 4 hours or until liquid cooks down and pork falls apart when probed with a fork.
Remove pork from the liquid and shred, discarding any additional fat.
Place in a large roasting pan and pour a few tablespoons of liquid over the meat.
Cover with foil and refrigerate.
Before serving, remove the foil and heat in the oven in 350 degree oven until warm or crisp up as much as desired.
Serve with guacamole, chopped red cabbage, red onion, black beans, purchased or homemade salsas.
We served this with warmed corn tortillas or lettuce to be used for lettuce wraps.

Good with a fresh Mexican salad to start.

By Bryna Kranzler

Maybe this isn’t how you have fun with your kids, but it is how I do.Last summer, when Jesse was home for a visit, we had a free day together so I broke out a molecular gastronomy kit we had bought, and decided to have fun with it. After watching the video about all the amazing things we could do, we picked a few projects.

First we thought we’d make fruit caviar. So we pureed some peaches and squeezed the grapefruit…

then mixed each juice with sodium alginate.

And dropped little pearls of it into a mixture of calcium citrate in water.

Although Jesse had gotten an A in AP Chemistry, and I had been in Honors Chemistry (back at a time before molecular gastronomy existed and the laws of chemistry were different), it hadn’t occurred to either of us that citric acid (we had added OJ to the peach puree to thin it) might interfere with the ability of sodium alginate to gel.

So that didn’t work. Or look very appetizing.

So we decided to make balsamic vinegar caviar. Start by putting a cup of oil into the freezer to chill.

After heating balsamic vinegar and agar agar, we extrude droplets of it from the syringe that arrived with the kit into the cold oil. It worked!

This is what Balsamic Caviar looked like when we were done:

So we got more ambitious and decided to make balsamic spaghetti.

Worked beautifully (even if it looked more like squid ink pasta)

We set it aside to serve over fresh strawberries. So we mixed some peach puree with agar agar, and that worked, too!

Peach puree spaghetti

On to the main course: Goat cheese spheres, which we would serve with balsamic spaghetti.
First we blended water and calcium algenate.

Next, we combined goat cheese with a little milk and calcium lactate, and dropped it into the mixture of water and calcium algenate.

Voila! Goat cheese spheres with heirloom cherry tomatoes, balsamic spaghetti, olive finishing salt and olive oil.

But that was only the appetizer and Jesse needed dinner, too. So he sautéed garlic and heirloom cherry tomatoes in olive oil with fennel seed and chilies, then removed them while he sautéed pasta.

Once the pasta browned, he added back the sautéed garlic and heirloom cherry tomatoes.
We finished off dinner (since we’d had the strawberries with balsamic spaghetti for a snack) with a ‘simple’ dessert: Peach spaghetti, fresh raspberries, and one of my homemade cranberry-kumquat-ginger macaroon.

The process took 6 hours, and was some of the most fun we’ve ever had together.

Deconstructed Nicoise Salad

Planning a party can be daunting. We are always looking for fresh ideas, but the workload must be reasonable. Today, my daughter-in-law, Maria, and I hosted a baby shower for my niece, Leigh. The challenge was a fresh idea for a luncheon for 25. Having attended several baby showers over the past year, we experienced many nice events, but we wanted to do something a bit different. At a recent book club gathering, my friend Lynn Muto served a “deconstructed Niçoise” and I loved the term, so I decided to do a luncheon version of her idea.

The menu included poached salmon, prepared in a small amount of water, shallots, lemons, parsley and dry sherry. The salmon was perfect when poached approximately 8 minutes. We served the salmon with capers and sliced Kalamata olives, surrounded by dill and lemon wedges. With the salmon, we served traditional tri-colored fingerling potatoes, which I roasted with a bit of olive oil and kosher salt for 45 minutes at 375 degrees. The potatoes were cooled to room temperature, but not chilled. Green beans, an important component in any Niçoise, were steamed for approximately 7 minutes to keep them crisp, but not raw. A cherry tomato and Kalamata olive medley in a balsamic vinaigrette and truffled deviled eggs completed the line-up. For the deviled eggs, just add a teaspoon or two of truffle oil to your standard deviled egg recipe.

Two toppings were provided with the salad: a yogurt and chopped dill topping and our champagne vinaigrette, the most popular of the two. The centerpiece of the luncheon table was homemade lemon scones, coming from my new cookbook, Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis (Author), Renato Poliafito (Author), Tina Rupp (Photographer).
A purchased cake and lattés were offered as a break from opening the many beautiful baby gifts.

MARY’S FREE RANGE WHOLE CHICKEN “IN A POT”

You don’t have to go to Brooklyn to have a Brooklyn experience. We have now found Brooklyn right in Mission Hills, a fun neighborhood in San Diego. Brooklyn Girl was created by Michael and Victoria McGeath, formerly of Trattoria Acqua in La Jolla. They have now brought their restaurant skills to this fun, urban hang-out. A huge cocktail menu awaits you and if you are a wine-lover like me, the wines are reasonably priced and there is a decent wine list. (We had the Whitehall Lane Merlot for $59).

Pan Seared Wild Salmon

The entrees are huge and are intended for sharing. We enjoyed MARY’S FREE RANGE WHOLE CHICKEN “IN A POT”, which was more than enough food for two. A delicious wood-oven roasted treat with onions, carrots, red potatoes and thyme butter for $28. Everything is organic, homemade, and delicious. The PAN SEARED WILD SALMON with Mushroom ragout, Savoy cabbage, Baby Heirloom Potatoes, fresh Yellow Corn Veloute for $23. was enjoyed by others in our group. My favorite aspect of the restaurant is the Brooklyn decor. A huge open room with an open bar and fun photos and signs adorning the walls, interesting artifacts and light fixtures creating the Brooklyn scene. This is definitely a happening place…we were 20 miles away from our own zip code and still ran into several friends over the course of the evening. So if you’re in the mood for a noisy and crowded, but fun atmosphere, this is the spot. The menu is broad enough that you can enjoy something new for many visits to come.

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The Partners of Woodruff Sawyer & Company, San Francisco, recently gathered to cook up some teamwork.  The menu consisted of the “Dinner in Athens” chapter of Cook the Part.  The participants gathered at the home of Susan Miner.  The objectives were clear:  1)  get to know each other better  2)  get to know spouses better  and 3)  create a fabulous dinner, while having lots of fun together.  Gary and I were honored to be invited to participate the cooking and dining.    Quotes from two of the WS partners:

Laurie’s Comments:

I thought the team cooking was superb.  Although I know all of the Woodruff partners at the dinner, most of us were meeting each others’ spouses for the first time.  We mixed the teams, and it proved to be a great way to get to know everyone!  And you of course get to know your colleagues a bit better when you spend two hours cooking with their spouse!  The food was wonderful and we could really appreciate how our different contributions made the whole meal come together – clearly a great metaphor for business… and life!

I’m looking forward to hosting my own in a few months – and plan to do a more casual version with my family over the holidays.

Jenn’s Quote:

Everything about the evening was fantastic…the time spent preparing the food was a great way to get to know others at the party. Although we do very little cooking in our day to day lives the instructions were clear and we felt like as novices we could still contribute. The food was delicious and the only negative thing that could be said was that we ate the equivalent of about 3 dinners because we just couldn’t stop ourselves…

Susan’s Comments:
Dinner in Athens was a great way to “host” a party!  Instead of scurrying around trying to finish cooking, serve drinks, and socialize, I was just another member of the team.  The whole process was very interactive, with lots of casual chatter and joking.  And what a pleasant surprise tasting each dish – great quality even with inexperienced cooks rolling out pita dough and working with puff pastry.  Much more of an event than a dinner, made memorable and special because everyone contributed to the success.  We’re already planning the Spanish Wine Dinner…
 
 

Linda with Tamales

By Linda Sierra

I’m happy to report the tamales were a hit yet again this year.  We made more than 6 dozen and it is done in a sort of assembly line where one puts the masa on the cornhusk, the next puts the meat and olives and the next folds them up.  This is a blast.

This recipe has been in my family since I was a child.  My  mother has been using it since I was about 5 years old.  So it is at least 40 years old.

Feliz año nuevo!

Tamales

3 lbs – 1 inch chunks beef stew meat
2 cans – 28 oz. enchilada sauce (Las Palmas “mild”)*
2 lbs – 1 inch chunks pork stew meat
2 Tbs – Oregano
4 – Cloves garlic minced
Salt
60 – Dried cornhusks (~1 pound)
8 cups – Instant Masa (Maseca brand)
2/3 cup – Vegetable oil
2 2/3 cups – Shortening (Crisco) or lard (I use Crisco)
2 – Medium onions chopped
2 Tbs – Baking powder
2/3 cup – Flour
60 – Black pitted olives cut in half

• In large pot put beef, pork and garlic with enough water to cover. Heat to boiling. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 1.25 hours until meat is tender and stirring occasionally.
• Soak cornhusks in warm water for about an hour, they will become soft. Drain, keeping them damp on paper towels.
• In large skillet over medium heat cook onion until tender in hot vegetable oil. Stir in flour until blended. Add enchilada sauce, oregano and 2 teaspoons of salt. Drain meat, reserving the liquid. Add meat to the sauce and cook for 30 minutes. Stir occasionally with a fork to shred the meat. The sauce will be very thick.
• Beat at low speed with hand mixer instant masa, 5 1/3 cups reserved meat liquid, shortening, baking powder and 4 teaspoons salt.
• Assembly: place cornhusks tip away from you. Use a small spatula or large spoon and spread 2 Tbs of masa onto center or cornhusk in a rectangle about 5” x 4”. You can paste two corn husks together with a little masa if they are too small. Put 2 Tbs of meat on the center of the masa, place 2 olive halves on top of the meat mixture.
• Wrapping: Lift up right side and fold 1/3 of cornhusk over filling, fold the left side over the last. Fold the tip of the cornhusk backwards, about 1/3 of the way down. Tamale will be open on one end. Place the folded tamale with the folded side down so it won’t open.
• Steaming: In a large pot with a vegetable steamer add an inch of water. Place tamales with the open end up, folded side down, standing up in the pot, over medium-high heat, heat water to boiling. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Be sure to add water if it is evaporated to keep the moisture right for proper steaming.
• Test for doneness: Remove and unwrap 1 tamale. If the dough is firm and does not stick to the husk they are done.
• Yield: 5 dozen. You can cut the recipe in half. I usually double it.
• You can find most of these items in the Hispanic Food section of most grocery stores. Northgate Gonzales has everything you’ll need if you have trouble finding everything.
• *You can also make your own enchilada sauce but run the risk of making the sauce too spicy. I can help you if you want to make it from scratch. That is why I recommend the “mild” Las Palmas enchilada sauce because the flavor is rich and not hot. Be sure it says “mild” on the label or it will be very hot.

The Menzies women, Lou Ann, Nora and Sara, have established an annual tradition: create variety in holiday cookies….not by slaving in the kitchen to create unlimited sweets, but calling all friends to mix it up! This year was no different. About 40 women brought 4 dozen cookies each, enjoyed a glass of champagne with pomegranate juice and a blackberry accent, and went home with a four dozen different cookies. The result was a complete transformation to the holiday cookie platter, for family and Santa. Here are some of the creative cookies that were exchanged. Prizes were awarded for the most creative cookies…a big hit was the melting snowmen, both vanilla and chocolate versions.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve in 1/2 inch slices.

If you want to serve a great treat with your Christmas morning coffee, prepare a few nut rolls and even give some away as holiday gifts.  Our Christmas is not complete without a few of these “old country” sweet breads.  Nut rolls are sweet, but not too sweet….they fall into the “kieflie” world of must-have Christmas delicacies.  My mother was noted for her yeast-dough baking and this is one of the many Christmas breads that was a staple in her holiday preparations for over 50 years. This recipe will make four nut rolls, so wrap a few up in saran wrap and tie a red ribbon around them – your friends will be delighted to receive this gift from your kitchen.

Nut Rolls

4 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 lb. unsalted butter
2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup warm milk
1 oz. cake yeast (use fresh yeast if you can find it.  If not, this is equal to 2 1/2 teaspoons dry yeast)
3 egg yolks, beaten

Sift flour, add sugar and salt.  Cut in butter.  (I do this in the food processor).
Add yeast to cup of warm milk.  Stir until dissolved.  Add egg yolks.  Combine with dry mixture.
Place in plastic bag and refrigerate overnight.

Separate dough into 4 parts.
Roll out 1/4 inch thick, spread 1 cup filling across dough, but not too close to the edges.  Roll like a jelly roll and let rise 1 hour on prepared cookie sheet or parchment paper.

Roll out dough to 1/4 inch thickness, spread 1 cup filling over dough

Roll like jelly roll and let rise 1 hour on prepared cookie sheet or parchment paper

Brush with egg white before baking.

Bake at 325 degrees for 30 minutes until nicely browned.

Filling (Make at same time you make the dough and stir the next day before using)
3 beaten egg whites
1 pound shelled walnuts, finely chopped in food processor
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 cup milk

Fold nuts into beaten egg whites. Fold in powdered sugar and slowly add milk. Mix thoroughly.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve in 1/2 inch slices.