Fresh Egg Pasta (HCE)

Fast Tomato Sauce (HCE)

• Salt
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil or butter
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 1/2 pounds canned tomatoes, drained and chopped
• Freshly ground black pepper

It's been a rather long time since I could bring myself to buy jarred pasta sauce. Even on occasions where I almost rather not go to the additional trouble of making sauce from scratch, I inevitably do so since... There's no good reason for tomato sauce to have high-fructose corn syrup in it among a million other different things.
Out of Mark Bittman's "20 Quick and Easy Ways to Spin Fast Tomato Sauce", I typically go for a copious amount of tomato paste and dried rosemary/thyme/oregano.


Sauteing onions until they're soft.


A quarter cup tomato paste.


The finished sauce.

Fresh Egg Pasta
Fresh pasta is one of the handful of very foodie things I enjoyed long before I became a bonafide nutcase over food. My first ex-boyfriend John G. exposed me to the wonders of the stuff when we occasionally picked up a batch to heat up at Capone Food in Somerville's Union Square. It was hard to pry me from my favorite pairing Spinach Fettuccine and Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto.
Anyway, I've eagerly looked forward to the day I would actually attempt it myself nearly since I started taking this hobby seriously. And after some trial and error and grumbling from hungry friends, I can proudly say that I've done this at least once. I look forward to mastering the art.

• About 2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more if needed
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 whole eggs
• 3 egg yolks

The pasta machine and drying rack that I've procured gradually in the last year through Amazon. Though my sister bought me the pasta machine for my birthday.


Clamped to the side of the table, all shiny and new, and ready for action... Whenever I'm finally ready for action. Which will take some time and trouble on my part.


Oh la di da. I was certainly planning on just using the all-purpose flour I had on hand, but the idea of using actual semolina flour while I was picking up some things for crack pie at JP's Harvest was hard to resist.
No, I stopped the processor after it seemed like it was having trouble processing through the "dough." No, I didn't process until the "dough" formed a ball. Maybe I should have realized my problem here.


Oh the shock when I tried to work these balls of "dough" for my pasta maker.
My friends Joe A, Eric S, and Trista C had all shown up in time to watch my failure. I dumped it all into the trash: fancy Bob Red Mill's flour, free-range eggs, and all. I start making it the old-fashioned way on the table with normal all-purpose flour. I lose an egg to the floor at some point. Joe asks me if I'm improvising while I continue asking Eric to "flour me." Yeah, I was, but at least we didn't have to resort to eating dried pasta from the pantry.


I apologize for not photographing what it took to this this ball of dough, but I couldn't quite document the process pictorially with my hands covered in flour and egg. They all ask me if that's all there's supposed to be and how hungry they are.
Hey, PALS/FOOLS, you guys didn't manage to eat all of this.


Perhaps I'd care more about the holes in the pasta if I was making lasagna with the noodles. I imagine I would just patch up the whole while assembling the dish with more pasta.
Oh I always imagined myself making fresh pasta one day and using a pasta machine!


Eric and Trista helped array the strands of fettuccine on the rack while I passed the dough through the machine.


Almost there.


Pasta and sauce garnished with some fresh Parmesan (extra hard from sitting in the fridge for a few months) and freshly ground black pepper.
Next time I make this I'll probably skip the final, thinnest setting on the pasta machine and flavor the pasta somehow; perhaps spinach, more freshly ground black pepper, or saffron... The possibilities are endless.
And now I know how to make another classic thing I love to eat when I can.

Crack Pie (MMB)

Now if Momofuku in general is famous for its pork buns, Momofuku Milk Bar is perhaps even more famous for its Crack Pie merely because it's been lauded by celebrities as ubiquitous as Oprah Winfrey.
Somehow thus far I've never had any of MMB's pies before (cookies, cake truffles, soft-serve, flavored butter, savory breads, I've had all of these). After eating a slice of it this early afternoon and looking forward to eating it as dessert after my initial stab at fresh pasta, I'm not sure I'll be able to restrain myself from eating a slice in between.
I can honestly say that I've never smoked crack cocaine, but eating this pie is far more addictive than I ever allowed myself to believe it would be.

First we start with the components: Oat Cookie and Crack Pie Filling. I apologize if I neglected to take as many pictures this time.

The recipe from the actual MMB cookbook is far more finicky than the ones I viewed found from Bon Appetit or the LA Times. Hey, I understand if you don't want to spend money on the cookbook (Though if you've enjoyed all my entry about cookies and cakes, you really should.) or don't want to have to try to buy corn powder (I assumed that the Bob's Red Mills Corn Flour Harvest in JP was probably more or less the right thing). That and you don't want to bother the trademark step where you freeze the pie for 3 hours and defrost? What's so wrong with leaving that in the recipe you Media People?
Of course I'm using the list of ingredients from the official recipe.

Oat Cookie

• 115 g butter, at room temperature (8 tablespoons [1 stick])
• 75 g light brown sugar (1/3 cup tightly packed)
• 40 g granulated sugar (3 tablespoons)
• 1 egg yolk
• 80 g flour
• 120 g old-fashioned rolled oats (1 1/2 cup)
• 0.5 g baking powder (1/8 tablespoon)
• 0.25 g baking soda (pinch)
• 2 g kosher salt (1/2 teaspoon)
• Pam or other nonstick cooking spray (optional)

Mise en place.
Using an awful lot less of everything than is called for in "traditional" Christina Tosi cookie recipes.


A good 80% of the cookie dough wound up collecting on my stand mixer paddle. Oat-Cookie goodness soon too be something measurably more devious.

Pam-ing up my quarter-sheet cake pan. First time baking with it since failing to get it spotlessly cleaning after roasting pork belly and shoulder in it for 8 hours total for ramen.
Failed to take a photo of the finished Oat Cookie though perhaps none of the pictures just satisfied me. There were several occasions later in this entry where I clearly knew I had simply forgot to document something. Or nearly failed to.

And now for the part where your jaw starts to hurt. "I can actually feel my teeth decaying," says Eric S. about my Crack Pie.

Crack Pie Filling

• 300 g granulated sugar (1 1/2 cups)
• 180 g light brown sugar (3/4 cup tightly packed)
• 20 g milk powder (1/4 cup)
• 24 g corn powder (1/4 cup)
• 6 g kosher salt (1 1/2 teaspoons)
• 225 g butter, melted (16 tablespoons [2 sticks])
• 160 g heavy cream (3/4 cup)
• 2 g vanilla extract (1/2 teaspoon)
• 8 egg yolks

Separating out the yolks from the whites. Hey, it's okay that I effed up the white side since that isn't going into the menu, but try as I might you can see that there's still totally some white in the yolks dish even though Mama Tosi (I've never cooked this much repeatedly from an executive chef before) says: "It will be the death of your wildly dense pie if there is any bit of egg white in the mixture."
I separated them with my hands and all too! PLUS, my pie didn't fail.


Mise en place.


The finished component. Eventually I scoop some up with my fingertip and test it out; already I realize I'm in trouble.

Crack Pie
Blargh at the moment I feel as if Crack Pie won't just suddenly turn me diabetic over the course of the next few days, but the first slice I had was incredible. This major irresistible sugar rush.
Now I realize that I can stop eating it, but if I don't it'll go bad and then I'll have wasted Crack Pie!!!

• 1 recipe Oat Cookie
• 15 g light brown sugar (I tablespoon tightly packed)
• 1 g salt (1/4 teaspoon)
• 55 g butter, melted, or as needed (4 tablespoons [1/2 stick)
• 1 recipe Crack Pie Filling
• confectioners' sugar, for dusting

Oat Cookie as actual cookie but not for very long.


Whizzed up in the food processor. First time I've broken it out since moving to Forest Hills. First time I'm using the stand mixer since the start of my vacation and also the first time I've had to wash and dry it out completely and using it a multiple time in a recipe.


Combining enough melted butter to get the cookie to potentially form a crust.


Later I would wonder if I should've broken out the scale while splitting the two mixtures between 2 pie plates. Maybe I should have Pam-ed the pie plates as well.
Anyway, here I've finally managed to do a half decent job of pressing the crust into the plates.


Oh no, I had already had them popped in for a minute before I realized that I had failed to document their unbaked stage.


Ooh, baked stage. Now at least 3 hours and up to a month in the freezer to get the signature MMB texture (somehow this step missing from both Bon Appetit and the LA Times).



I've said enough about this already.

Gumbo (CATKTVC)

So back last fall at some point, I decided to execute Jambalaya (CATKTVC) thinking for some reason that it was Gumbo. Perhaps I could blame this foolish mistake on the fact the former recipe wasn't accompanied by a photograph, but it's more likely that I really wasn't paying attention.

There's plenty of overlap between the two dishes when it comes to flavor profiles and ingredients, but jambalaya is a hearty rice dish and gumbo is a hearty stew or soup. Unsurprisingly, the process for each dish is quite different. Maybe I'll make jambalaya again someday and you can compare the two blog entries, but I don't remember particularly loving the dish. Do some damn research on your own if you're really curious!

• 1 1/2 pounds small shrimp (51 to 60 per pound) [Sizing can vary wildly from brand to brand. One company's medium could very likely be another's small. Any good recipe will tell you the count per pound which is a much better, infinitely more consistent measure than ES/S/M/L/XL.] shells removed and reserved
• 3 1/2 cups ice water
• 1 (8-ounce) bottle clam juice
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, preferably bleached [Eh, I only have unbleached]
• 2 medium onions, minced
• 1 medium red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and chopped fine
• 1 medium celery rib, chopped fine [Yet another ingredient that failed to make it to my grocery list]
• 6 medium garlic cloves, minced or pressed through a garlic press (about 2 tablespoons)
• 1 teaspoon dried thyme
• Table salt
• Cayenne pepper
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 pound smoked sausage, such as andouille or kielbasa, sliced 1/4 inch thick
• 1/2 cup fresh parsley leaves [If you've been thoroughly following my blog, you'll already know I don't believe there's much point in garnishing meals I usually only cook for myself]
• 4 medium scallions, white and green parts, sliced thin [ditto]
• Ground black pepper

Mise en place minus the clam juice still sitting in my pantry at this point.


I simmered shrimp shells in water for 20 minutes over medium-low heat to create stock.

Cooking a Cajun-style roux for the first time (I've made bechamel a few times in the past. Oh, to varying degrees of success.):

"Roux ( /ˈruː/) is a cooking mixture of wheat flour and fat (traditionally butter). It is the thickening agent of three of the mother sauces of classical French cooking: sauce béchamel, sauce velouté and sauce espagnole. Clarified butter, vegetable oils, or lard are commonly used fats. It is used as a thickener for gravy, other sauces, soups and stews. It is typically made from equal parts of flour and fat by weight.^[1] When used in Italian food, roux is traditionally equal parts of butter and flour. In Cajun cuisine, roux is almost always made with oil instead of butter and dark brown in color, which lends much richness of flavor, albeit, less thickening power. Hungarian cuisine uses lard (in its rendered form) or—more recently—vegetable oil instead of butter for the preparation of roux (which is called rántás in Hungarian)."

A Cajun-style roux involves constant stirring for about 20 minutes. There were a few seconds where I left the roux unattended to turn down the heat on the stock, consult with my copy of CATKTVC on the kitchen table all the way on the other side of the room, and set timers.

It didn't burn. I wasn't keeping track, but I'm also pretty sure it didn't take 20 minutes. I thank God on both counts, perhaps not literally.

Vegetables and spices stirred into the roux and cooked until softened.

What can I say? Me and spicy food go WAY back though occasionally I overdo it.

Was worried that would be the case here, but I successfully stayed on the edible side of the line.

Quite delicious. Jessica D, I'm pretty sure your boyfriend Junior would enjoy this rendition and not claim that it was way under-seasoned. I assume there are so many ways in which you aren't doing this right.

Ramen! 2.3: Day 3 Prep

Slow-Poached Eggs

Basically you take the largest pot you own, fill it up with water, and bring that water to 140 degrees Fahrenheit over the lowest possible heat. That's going to take the better part of a hour.

You rig up a steamer rack or "a doughnut of aluminum foil or a few chopsticks scattered helter skelter across the bottom of the pan." The goal is to keep the eggs from the bottom of the pan where the heat will be decidedly above the temperature you're aiming for. Using the largest pot of the pan also helps to ensure that the eggs are most likely cooking at 140 degrees F since the water at the top will be cooler than the water in the middle.

In any case, once you get this all set up, the eggs will poach in about 40 minutes. If you're looking to poach a lot of eggs, this is way easier than the traditional method (which, for the record, I have yet to attempt). Also, it's pretty damn dramatic looking to crack what looks like a raw egg into a bowl of ramen, bibimbap, or what have you. They've been cooking eggs this way in Japan for eons when old ladies would bring eggs to cook in natural hot springs.

Seasonal Vegetables

Though they'll prep English or shelling peas in spring and early summer and cut corn off the cobs in late summer, Momofuku Noodle Bar adds collards to their ramen the rest of the year. When I eat BBQ (mostly at Redbones in Davis Square), I must have collard greens (succotash occupies a very close second-place in my heart). I've never cooked them before and I can say that David Chang's recipe totally hits the spot.

• 1 bunch collards
• 1 piece bacon (Frankly, I think an additional piece of bacon was required. Thankfully, there was rendered pork fat from roasting the pork belly on hand to make up for the collards' lack of oomph.)
• large pinch kosher salt
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar ("white is fine if you don't have brown")
• 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
• 1 cup water

Collards tossed in the rendered fat and wilted a bit.

Forty minutes later on medium-low. Yum.

There was the prepping of individual bowls of ramen as I finally got everything set up. But eventually I got to kick back, relax, and gorge myself on my own serving of this extremely laborious process. Never again will I spend 2 1/2 long days making this dish (Far easier and more reasonable to take the Fung Wah to NYC and eat ramen in numerous restaurants across at least Downtown, Midtown, and Brooklyn).
I'll never make this again, but perhaps I'll spend a similarly long-assed, involved time cooking something else. Though really I'm not quite sure what.

RAMEN! 2.2: Day 2 Prep

As I wait for my pictures to upload onto blogger for this entry, I may as well provide for you the one recipe everyone kept asking me for on Ramen Day (why not make it a proper noun by now): Pickled Shiitakes.
I made these as a relatively smart way of using up the shiitakes I had reconstituted while making Ramen Broth the night before. I assumed I wouldn't be able to utilize and eat them all myself so I decided to execute Momofuku's recipe. People loved them. I think they're fine, but I passed off the rest to my parents a few days ago.

 

Pickled Shiitakes

• 4 loosely packed cups (about 1/3 ounce) dried shiitake mushrooms or use spent shiitake caps from the Ramen Broth)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup usukuchi (light soy sauce)
• 1 cup sherry vinegar
• Two 3-inch knobs of fresh ginger, peeled

1. Steep the shiitakes in boiling water (or really hot tap water) in a medium mixing bowl until softened, about 15 minutes.
2. Lift the shiitakes from the steeping water, trim off and discard their stems, and cut the caps into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Reserve 2 cups of the steeping liquid, and pass it through a fine-mesh strainer to remove any sand or debris.
3. Combine the reserved steeping liquid, the sugar, soy sauce, vinegar, ginger, and sliced shiitakes in a saucepan. Turn the heat to medium, bring to a simmer, and simmer gently (bubbles should lazily rise up to the surface), stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes. Let cool.
4. Discard the ginger, and pack the shittakes (and as much of the liquid as necessary to cover them) into a quart container. These pickles are ready to eat immediately and will keep, refrigerated, for at least 1 month.

 

Pork Shoulder

• 1 3-pound piece boneless pork shoulder
• 1/4 cup kosher salt
• 1/4 cup sugar

Cure for at least six and no more than 24 hours. Assumed I wasn't risking much by putting off curing until the broth was really chugging along.


Ready to roast at 250 degrees F for 6 hours.


Two hours in. Lots of juices to baste with.


The results after 6 hours. Eventually the juices developed into fond and I started de-glazing and basting with mirin.


Got the plan clean enough through some lengthy de-glazing. Nothing compared to final de-glaze that appeared to take me like a hour. More on that later.

Pork Belly

• 1 3-pound slab skinless pork belly (God damn you, Whole Foods butchers. Couldn't I have had a whole 3-pound slab?)
• 1/4 cup kosher salt
• 1/4 cup sugar

Perhaps they would have skinned it for me if I asked, but hell, it's an experience. I also realized I had the potential to make
But not if that entailed staying up until dawn again. Perhaps when I try my hand at making bacon I'll bother to do so.


Skinned pork belly. it would've been so much more bad-ass if it was just one big slab.
I lightly cut my left pointer finger in the transaction, but washed up with anti-bacterial soap and slapped on some latex gloves.


Thirty minutes at 450 degrees F.


Another 30 minutes at 450 degrees F.


One hour to 1 hour 15 minutes at 250 degrees F. Look at all that golden jelly.


The state my quarter-sheet cake pan is now in. Sigh.

Bamboo Shoots

• One 12-ounce can sliced bamboo shoots
• Splashes of grapeseed and Asian sesame oils
• Splash of usukuchi (light soy sauce)
• 1 Pickled Chile, if you've got it, seeded and chopped
• Salt, possibly

Mise en place.

Day 2 Prep list. Time for bed.