SusteNation

Lucy's Saigon Sandwiches

One of the absolute best things about summer coming to Pittsburgh is the return of Lucy.  Lucy is the mother of the woman who owns the My Ngoc restaurant in the strip district.  Every summer, usually sometime around late April or early May, she makes the trip over from Vietnam and spends the summer with her grill out in front of the restaurant making the best sandwiches you've ever had.  You can order a $4 or $6 hoagie, and I recommend you get everything (grilled chicken, onions, carrots, cucumber, hot peppers, and cilantro) on it.  The $6 hoagie is huge, and in all sizes they are delicious.  If you're sensitive to spicy foods, keep your eye on the peppers, they can be really hot!

Quick Pasta and Veggies

Here is a recipe that I make some variation on with great regularity.  It varies according to what I have on hand, but with some basics stocked (pasta, garlic, oil, butter, veggies), I can make it just about any time, and it cooks up really fast.  This recipe is somewhat vague because there's a lot of "winging it" involved :)

The basics are this.  Start some water boiling.  Saute up a liberal amount of fresh garlic with some butter and olive oil.  Add some pine nuts if you have them.  Add chopped up vegetables, in this case broccoli, but you can use all sorts of things, squash, mushrooms, etc.  Let that cook for a little while, and while this is going on, add some angel hair pasta to the boiling water.  It only has to cook for a few minutes, so watch it closely.  Add chopped tomatoes to the other vegetables (I always add the tomatoes later so they don't overcook.)  Then crack some green or black peppercorns with the flat of your knife and add them in.  Add some cheese if you have it.  Obviously parmesan works great, but here I used Fontanella.  Stealing a trick from this recipe, add a ladle or two of the pasta water, and stir it up.  Drain the pasta and add the veggies.  That's it!

The Garlic is Alive

After my total failure as a gardener, I was cleaning the kitchen, and discovered this head of garlic.  As if to mock me, and show how brain dead simple it is to get things to grow, this garlic that I simply left out on the counter decided to sprout.  Taking this as some sort of sign that I had simply been trying to grow the wrong things, I immediately took it out to the yard and planted it.  I did a little reading on the web, and you're supposed to plant garlic in the fall, so I don't expect much out of it, but at least it can't be any worse than the sprouts.

Cafe Zinho, my neighborhood bistro

Cafe Zinho, which calls itself "your neighborhood bistro", and used to indeed be 2 blocks from my house, is very much a diamond in the rough.  It is a cute little restaurant set in what seems like an old garage, with yard-sale style furniture and a ceramic goose lamp.  It is very casual, and a friendly atmosphere.  Don't let that fool you though, the food is top notch.  I have eaten just about everything on the menu, and haven't been disappointed yet.  On my most recent trip, I had the Pork Loin Stuffed with Morello Cherries and Roasted with Cherry Brandy Sauce, while my fiance had Duck Roasted with Grand Marnier Sauce.  It is a BYOB restaurant, so we brought a small bottle of Petit Claret from the Nissley Vineyards, a winery in central Pennsylvania that we visited once about a year ago.  Every time we go here, we have a lovely dinner.  A great place to take a date, and it won't break the bank!

See you in a week

I am off this weekend to spend a week climbing in the Canadian Rockies.  I've queued up a few posts, so hopefully there will be no interruption of service.  If something goes wrong and the posts don't show up, I'll be out in the wilderness, and probably not too concerned about it!  Won't be too much food related to report back on, since it's mostly freeze dried dinners up there, but maybe I'll post some pictures.

Eden Organic Dried Blueberries

I like to try out healthy snacks, so I recently picked up some Eden Organic Dried Blueberries I tried them out the other day while I was at work.  They are tasty, but a little dense, and I don't think they work great as a standalone snack.  I couldn't eat more than a small handful of them at a time, too rich.  However, they are good, and I could see putting these in a trail mix style snack mix, or as a topping, like on your cereal.  It seems like they're pretty healthy too!

Hot Sauce Redux: The Mash

Last year's experiment with making my own hot sauce had mixed success.  The various recipes I put together were not so great, but the jar with all the leftovers came out pretty good.  For this round I decided to build on that, and try something a little more advanced.  I'm going with a blend of cayenne and habanero peppers, and I decided to try making a mash and aging it.  If it works for Tabasco sauce, it's probably worth a try, I figure. 

I found a site that gives a rough description of the Tabasco making process, at least more detail than the McIlheny website will give you.  The key takeaways for me were that they mix 15% by volume of salt in with the peppers, and then use salt to seal it in the barrels. 

I basically chopped up the peppers, mostly cayenne with some habanero thrown in for heat, until I had about 1 cup of chopped peppers.  I then mixed in about 2.5 Tablespoons salt.  I packed it into a jar, and then layered on sea salt until it formed a solid layer that would hopefully keep anything from growing in there, but let it breathe a bit.  I put the lid on loosely, and it's been sitting in my cabinet for a few weeks now.  It smells pretty good, a nice, rich and spicy.

Here are some pics from the making of (the last one is after about a week of fermenting):

Kashmiri's Food Truck

Next on the list of great restaurants in Pittsburgh is Kashmiri's.  Near the University of Pittsburgh, one can find several food vendor trucks, that are extremely popular when the weather gets nice.  Most of them are nothing to write home about, but a friend turned me on to Kashmiri's, which has very high quality food for being served out of the back of a truck.  I am a fan of the Vegetable Biryani, which you can get a huge pile of for $5.  The Chicken Tikka Masala is also very good.  The truck is usually parked near the Soldiers and Sailor's Memorial these days, which means that in nice weather there are lots of nice places to sit in the grass, or under a tree to enjoy your meal.  My only warning about this place is that if you eat a full portion, staying awake when you get back to work will be a monumental struggle.

RIP Sprouts 3/25/07 - 5/5/07

Well it appears I'm not very good at this.  Remember when I mentioned that I thought my sprouts needed some sun?  Well, it was finally warming up, so I put them out in the sun.  One and a half hot days later, they had completely shrivelled up.  Damn.

Looks like I'm going to be planting seedlings again this year.

Sugardoodles

You may or may not remember the last time I had the cookie urge.  I had just moved in, the cupboard was pretty bare, and it was a bit of a stretch to call them cookies.  This time I feel that I acquited myself a little bit more respectably.

I was going to make snickerdoodles, but the recipe for that called for cream of tartar, which is something I do not happen to keep on hand.  So I figured sugar cookes with cinammon on them would come pretty close to what I was looking for.  I grabbed a recipe for sugar drop cookies from the Joy of Cooking, and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on top, and voila, you have what I dubbed sugardoodles.  They were a little bit meh, but a big step up from my last attempt!

Sugardoodle Recipe

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg (optional)
• 1 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla
• cinnamon sugar

Preheat the oven to 375F. 

Sift together the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. 

In a separate bowl, mix together the sugar and vegetable oil.  Add the two eggs and the vanilla, and beat well until smooth.  (I like doing this with a wooden spoon, but you can probably use an electric mixer.)

Add the flour mixture and beat well.  Shape the dough into 1/2 inch balls, place them on a lightly greased cookie sheet, and press them with a fork in a cross-hatch pattern.  Cover with a layer of the cinnamon sugar mix.  Bake 1 sheet at a time if you need more than one sheet, for about 10 to 12 minutes, until golden brown.  Let stand briefly, then remove to a rack to cool.