Lemony Rice Salad

Recently, I took quite possibly the most spontaneous trip I've ever taken.  The Monkey Scientist was down in Florida with his family for Mother's Day and the roommate and I were feeling bored on Friday night.  A lot of our friends were working or out of town, so we didn't have much to do over the weekend.  So around 8 pm on Friday night, we booked a hotel in St. Louis.  We got up at 5 am and drove down there for a couple days.  Just like that.  It was so out of character for me!



We had a blast on our mini vacation.  We've been friends for so long that it doesn't take much until we're both cracking up at each other.  Anyone who knows me well knows I tear up quite a bit when I laugh, and it was only about an hour into the drive that I had to stop and buy a box of tissues.  Once we made it down there, we scalped tickets to a Cardinals-Rockies game and enjoyed the beautiful weather.  While it was cold and miserable in Chicago, the weather was sunny and perfect in St. Louis!



The highlight of our trip was far and away the City Museum.  Have you ever been there?  I don't think I've stopped talking about it since.  It's a giant playground...for adults.  There are caves you can crawl in, tunnels in the ceiling that make you slide along on your belly, and a 10-story slide inside what looks like an old alley between two buildings.  And that's just the inside!  It was absolutely spectacular.  We had no idea what to expect, and we were blown away.  I think we spent almost 4 hours there.  If you're ever in St. Louis it's a must-see!  But I highly recommend you wear work-out clothes, which was the little tip we'd wished we were given!



This rice has nothing to do with St. Louis.  But it is really great.  The roommate had made it a few weeks ago on his night to make dinner, and I liked it so much I insisted he make it again.  It's lemony and fresh - just what I was looking for as we're hitting the peak of Spring.  It would be a great dish to bring to a barbecue this summer since it's just perfect at room temperature.  I know we'll be making this all the way through to fall!



Lemony Rice Salad
from Serious Eats

Ingredients
1/2 cup pine nuts
1 1/2 cups uncooked white rice
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (about 2 lemons)
2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
2 tablespoons white balsamic vinegar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 cup sliced green onions
1/3 cup golden raisins

Instructions
1. In a small skillet over medium heat, toast the pine nuts, stirring frequently, until just starting to brown. Don't let them burn!
2. Meanwhile, cook the rice on the stove or in your rice cooker, following the package instructions.
3. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the lemon zest, lemon juice, orange juice, white balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, and olive oil.
4. When the rice is done cooking, stir together the hot rice, pine nuts, dressing, sliced green onions, and golden raisins. Allow to settle to room temperature and serve.

Gardening in an Apartment

While this blog is about cooking, it's also about how to prepare great food at home even if you're living the apartment life, like me. I have just 1 oven, 4 burners (3 of which are small), and limited counter space. Yet nearly everything on this blog, I made at home. Which means you have no excuses. So when it comes to gardening, I want to encourage you to know that you can do it in your apartment, too! You're not going to grow an apple orchard, but there is no reason you can't grow some herbs and things!



The first thing I've been practicing with is what I call shot glass scallions. This is the easiest thing you can try at home! I have managed to kill many a plant in my day, but this has been a great success!

When you're cutting up your green onions, leave just a little bit more than the roots at the bottom. Instead of tossing the ends, plop them in tall shot glasses with a little bit of water. I forgot to take a picture the first day, but after 2-3 days they had already started to sprout this much.  You can see from my arrow where I had cut them.  The green had all grown in that quickly!  I was excited.



I changed the water once every 3 days or so.  After another week, this is how big my green onions were.  Almost usable!!  I'm so excited.  They needed barely any maintenance: no soil, just a little water and sunlight on our windowsill.  My mom had this great bud vase growing up that was the shape of 6 shot glasses connected to each other.  I think that would be perfect for this if I could find one. I might never need to buy scallions again if I just keep re-growing them!!



This was such a success that I'm going to start trying to grow a few more herbs - basil, rosemary, thyme, and peppermint - in pots outside.  I have a history of killing all of the above herbs (and even letting a small basil plant disappear off my DC balcony in a thunderstorm once) so we'll see what happens.   We're also trying some cherry tomatoes and habanero peppers, which are even more of an experiment.  I have a pretty little flower, too.  So we'll see what happens.  I'll give you an update in a couple of months!

Bulgogi Style Salmon with Bok Choy and Shitake Mushrooms

This weekend we finally made a trip up to my favorite type of grocery store - the Asian market.  We hadn't been in so many months, I was running low on lots of my staple ingredients!  Although there are a few Asian markets on the north side of Chicago, I haven't found any Korean markets, and I hadn't found any markets that were very big.  So this weekend was the grand adventure - we went up to the HMart in Niles.



I've been to HMart's in Maryland and Massachusetts, so I knew generally what I could expect.  But the one in Niles is a Super HMart which means it's the size of the Home Depot next door.  We were literally lost in there for hours.  We watched folks making kimchi, tried lots of samples (except the blood sausage... the woman handing out samples didn't think it was a good idea to offer me any), and loaded up on some of our favorite ingredients.



One fun part of the trip was watching the men at HMart making fresh kimchi.  For those of you who aren't familiar with kimchi, it's a spicy fermented cabbage dish.  It's almost similar to a good half sour pickle.  In Korean restaurants, they often start the meal with a variety of very small side dishes that can include tofu, a type of Korean potato salad, broccoli, and always kimchi.  I'd never seen anyone make it before so this was a special treat for me.  They pull the cabbage to shreds while they're mixing it with the spices and vinegar.  Pretty cool!



This salmon dish was really delicious. It was a nice change of pace from our usual lemon juice and garlic salt preparation.  It was just a little bit spicy from the sambal oelek and was sweetened by the sherry and sugar.  The ginger, garlic, and soy sauce rounded out the traditional Asian flavors.  In Korean tradition, I served a side of the freshly made kimchi along with our meal, which was spicy and pungent.  My favorite!  I especially liked the bed of bok choy and mushrooms under the salmon.  Stay tuned for the final component of the meal!



Bulgogi-Style Salmon with Bok Choy and Shitake Mushrooms
slightly adapted from WeHeartFood

Ingredients
3 large garlic cloves, peeled, divided
1/3 cup chopped green onions
1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce
1 tbsp cooking sherry (Chinese rice wine would work, too)
2 tsp minced fresh ginger, divided
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp sesame oil
2 tsp chili-garlic sauce (sambal oelek)
2 salmon fillets, 0.5-1 lb each
1 tbsp olive oil (or chili-infused olive oil)
1 bunch bok choy, bottoms removed and cut crosswise into 1/2-inch-wide strips
8 oz fresh shiitake mushrooms, sliced

Instructions
1. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F.
2. Combine 2 of the garlic cloves (I broke them up slightly but didn't bother mincing), green onions, soy sauce, sherry, 1 tsp of ginger, sugar, sesame oil, and chili-garlic sauce.  Blend using either your immersion blender or food processor until smooth to create your marinade.
3. Place the salmon in a glass baking dish.  Pour the marinade evenly over the salmon fillets and allow to marinate for at least 5 minutes.  Bake for 8 to 12 minutes, or until the salmon is just opaque at the center.
4. Meanwhile, place the olive in a wok and heat over medium high heat.  Add the remaining clove of garlic, minced, and 1 tsp of ginger to the oil and heat until fragrant.
5. Add the bok choy and mushrooms and saute until the mushrooms are soft and the bok choy is wilted.
6. Serve the salmon over a bed of bok choy and mushrooms.

Dak Bokkeum with Spinach (Korean Stewed Chicken with Spinach)

About a year ago, my coworker took me on a trip up to Maryland for what we called "Coworker's Without Cars Day".  It was my first trip ever to H-Mart and I was so excited to find all of the Asian ingredients I couldn't get at my local grocery store.  One of those ingredients was gochujang, a fermented Korean chile sauce.  Of course, being the klutz that I am, I dumped an entire container of gochujang on my foot while we were in the store and made quite the scene.  I was cleaning it out of my flip flop for months.



Despite the scene, I never got around using the gochujang until now! I know - a total shame and I had promised a recipe last April that I never got around to making.  My gochujang actually technically expired since then, but I looked online and there seems to be some consensus that this stuff never really expires and the date on the back is more a "best by" date (had to look online, all of the description around the date was in Korean).  The top layer did turn a little bit brown rather than bright red, but it tasted fine and we didn't get sick so it seemed good to me.



When you go to buy this, there is a huge aisle of H-Mart with different heat intensities of gochujang. It comes in a rectangular red tupperware and on the back right upper corner it will say gochujang in English in itsy bitsy font and it should say in English just how spicy it is. I think mine is the regular spice level and it was very spicy!  For those of you without an H-Mart or other Asian market, I hear a rumor that Annie Chung has a version of gochujang that's sold in regular grocery stores, though I've yet to see it.  Or, if you live in DC, they actually sell it at Tenley Mini Market, oddly enough.  Not exactly what you expect to see in a liquor store but they have it!



With all of this talk about gochujang, you probably want to know if it's worth it, right?  Man, oh man is it worth it.  This is one of my favorite recipes I've made in a long time and the whole time I was eating it I kept remarking to the Monkey Scientist how much I enjoyed it.  If you cook Asian food frequently, you might even have everything you need at home already so you can make this tonight.  You make the whole dish in basically one pot (and your rice cooker) which makes for fairly easy clean up.  The dish doesn't even need to be babysat while it cooks - you just throw it in and walk away.  That's my favorite kind of meal to make!  And the taste is out of this world! It's got a hefty spice level (the Monkey Scientist barely added any sriracha on top) and is packed with flavor.  It's super filling and healthy (just make sure you trim the fat off of the chicken thighs) as well!  It's a total win-win-win dinner - the two of us couldn't praise it enough.



Dak Bokkeum with Spinach
Korean Stewed Chicken with Spinach
from Cooking Light

Ingredients
1/3 cup gochujang (Korean chile sauce)
1/4 cup (1/2-inch) slices green onion bottoms
2 1/2 tablespoons lower-sodium soy sauce
2 tablespoons minced fresh garlic
2 tablespoons minced peeled ginger
2 tablespoons dark sesame oil
1 tablespoon brown sugar
3/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
2 pounds skinless, boneless chicken thighs, cut into 1/2-inch strips
1 1/2 cups uncooked short-grain white rice (sushi rice)
1 1/2 cups water
1/3 cup water
3/4 cup (1 1/2-inch) slices green onion tops
1 (5-ounce) bag fresh baby spinach
1 tablespoon toasted sesame seeds

Instructions
1. In a large bowl, combine gochujang, green onion bottoms, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sesame oil, brown sugar, and crushed red pepper. Add in strips of chicken thighs, cover, and put in the refrigerator to marinate for at least 30 minutes.
2. Place the rice in a mesh strainer. Fill a large bowl with cold water and place the mesh strainer in the water so that the water covers the rice. Stir the rice gently and then remove from water. The water will be milky. Drain water and then repeat 2-3 times until the water comes out nearly clear.
3. Cook the rice with 1 1/2 cups water in a rice cooker. If you don't have a rice cooker, place water and rice in a pot, and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cover and allow to cook for 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let stand 20 minutes. (I actually added a pinch of sea salt to my rice cooker as well.)
4. While the rice is cooking, add 1/3 cup water to a dutch oven and bring to a boil. Add the chicken mixture and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat, cover, and allow to simmer for 20 minutes.
5. Uncover and allow to simmer for an additional 10 minutes or until the mixture reduces, stirring occasionally.
6. Remove from heat. Stir in green onion tops and spinach and allow the spinach to wilt. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve over the rice.

Mom's Stuffed Mushrooms

This Thanksgiving, Mom asked me to put together a recipe list before I came home for the holiday so she could start getting organized.  My first request for appetizers was her famous stuffed mushroom recipe. She has been making this hor d'oeurve for as long as I can remember and it is one of my absolute favorites.




I always thought this recipe had been my Mimi's and she had passed it on to my mom.  I learned that, actually, my mom got the recipe from her old tennis partner.  I think pre-2006 my mom mush have used a different stuffed mushroom recipe, but this one was such a hit that it must have replaced her old classic.  Either way, I'm definitely not complaining.



This is the first time I remember actually making these mushrooms, and it is way easier than I realized.  I love that you add the stems of the mushrooms back into the stuffing - that way nothing goes to waste.  We were actually able to assemble everything the day before and just throw them in the oven before we were ready to serve them.  Making things ahead is always the key to holding a successful holiday party. (However, I do apologize that since we made them ahead and baked them at night, the final photos are a bit dim.  Someday I'll by a DSLR so I can make manual adjustments to the ISO and make these photos come out better!)



If I didn't make this clear yet, these mushrooms are awesome.  This time they actually came out a little greasy, but that usually isn't the case.  They are the perfect size to pop in your mouth (I love a one-bite treat!) so there is no need for a fork and knife or even a plate.  They're warm and cheesy with depth from the oregano and breadcrumbs.  If you have a holiday party coming up, these are a simple and delicious appetizer that is sure to delight!



Mom's Stuffed Mushrooms
Recipe courtesy of Lisa Dunn circa 2006 via my mom

Ingredients
½ lb medium to large mushrooms
1/3 c dry, seasoned breadcrumbs
2 green onions, chopped (optional)
¼ c butter or margarine, melted
½ c cheddar or romano cheese, grated + extra for sprinkling
Dash white wine
½ tsp Italian seasoning
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp garlic powder
½ tsp Worcestershire sauce
Dash freshly ground black pepper

Instructions
1. Carefully remove stems from mushrooms and chop.
2. Combine stems and remaining ingredients (except mushroom caps) to make the stuffing.
3. Fill caps with stuffing mixture. Sprinkle top with extra cheese.
4. Bake at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes.