Stolen Inspiration: Chipotle Poached Shrimp Tacos

Chipotle Poached Shrimp Tacos

I find that inspiration for new dishes comes from a multitude of sources: childhood memories, fantastic restaurant meals, conversation with friends, bizarre dreams (yes, it’s true – I do dream about cooking from time to time), etc. But I think the most often used source of inspiration comes from the plethora of cooking and travel shows with which I seem to fill my television-viewing time.

The local PBS station has added an additional HD channel to its line-up called Create. It’s full of familiar PBS programs that show you how to build, garden, paint, sew, travel, and cook. The travel hosts are these intrepid globe trekkers hopping from country to country, showing us not only the history, art, and architecture of each place, but also the unique cuisine of the region (always makes me alternate from cringing to salivating as I see what they eat). One recent afternoon, sandwiched between trips to London and Paris, was a repeat of America’s Test Kitchen, which was tackling Mexican food. Don and I both stopped in our tracks as we watched them work their magic on chicken tacos. They came up with a preparation that I knew I needed to steal pay homage to in a recipe.
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Recipe:

Chipotle Poached Shrimp Tacos

Extras Credit: Lomi Lomi Pupu

My friend, Jennifer, is a great big thespian. That’s right, she’s a stage actress – educated and professionally trained. Jennifer is also married to Phillip, a naval officer, so they have hop scotched around the globe, landing at various naval bases. Because of that, she hasn’t had the opportunity to run to New York or LA and be ‘discovered’. Instead, she’s landed in Jacksonville, Dallas, and now Hawaii (and I don’t see the Navy building major installations in either LA or New York anytime soon).

Hawaii is the first place she’s landed that hasn’t had a large theater community, so Jennifer has branched out – she’s auditioned for the circus and for some television shows that film in Hawaii, including Lost, which is one of my all-time favorites – except for the finale (oh, don’t get me started).

Now there’s a second television show filming in Hawaii, the CBS remake of Hawaii 5-0. And guess what – Jennifer was cast in a major role! OK, maybe ‘major’ is overstating it a little. But the part has lines and everything!

Since Hawaii 5-0 is a crime drama, it has to set-up the murder to be investigated – that’s Jennifer’s part. She plays a mom with a pre-teen son who discovers the body of the murder victim. Alright, it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part, but it happens on a submarine!

Jennifer’s mother is one of my best friends, so I knew I had to organize a viewing party to watch her big Hawaii 5-0 debut, but I don’t know anything about Hawaiian food (because I don’t think ordering ham and pineapple on my pizza counts). I’ve never been to Hawaii, so I hit the interwebs to do a little research. Of course, I focused in on some classic luau dishes, and found one that really spoke to me: lomi lomi salmon. (Lomi means massage in Hawaiian, so it’s twice-massaged salmon.)

It’s a salt-cured salmon dish that is served with tomatoes and onions. Think gravlax meets ceviche meets salsa. I’m a sucker for all three, so I thought that this would be perfect. Then, when I found out the Hawaiian word for appetizer, the adolescent in me decided that I had to put my own spin on it and turn this into an hors d’oeuvres, just so I could call it Lomi Lomi Pupu.

Turns out that it’s an incredibly easy dish to make, Curing the salmon takes about 5 minutes to set up, but it has to set for 6 or 8 hours, so you need to plan ahead. Most of the recipes I looked at also called for peeling the tomatoes, which is no big deal if you first dunk them in boiling water for 30 seconds. I also thought the dish was in desperate need of some color, so I swapped out the sweet onions for scallions and used a yellow tomato as well as a red one. Some recipes called for some heat, while some others didn’t – I chose to add a little jalapeño to give it some background flavor.

One other tip – do not fall victim to the desire to season the vegetation before you add the salmon. Even after washing off the excess, the salmon is quite salty. Once you add the tomatoes et al, it balances out – but it certainly does not need any more salt.

To make it finger food, chopping it into smaller chunks turned out to be the best thing (the small-chop made it easier to get the filling in). I hollowed out some cherry tomatoes, used a melon baller to create some cucumber cups, and perched some of the salmon mixture on top of thick-cut pineapple. The pineapple turned out to be the favorite in the test run – the salty Lomi Lomi needs that sweet counterpoint for the best balance. In fact, the next time I make this, I think I’ll add a little pineapple to the mixture.

Jennifer and her "son" hanging out in her on-set trailer

So Jennifer is scheduled to kick off Episode 4 of Hawaii 5-0, which means that her episode should appear October 11 (Hawaii 5-0 airs Mondays at 9pm EST on CBS). Make sure you watch the beginning – look for the woman who is trying to make a cell phone call on a submarine while she ignores her son (yeah, I really don’t understand this set-up either). Then, all it will take is for the producers to see what potential her character has – they could bring her back. Oh! I know! She could have a torrid affair with Daniel Dae Kim’s character. OK, maybe that’s just a little projection on my part – but it could happen! Hey, at the very least, Jennifer ought to finally get a page on IMDB out of it – they always credit the extras.

Recipe: Lomi Lomi Pupu

Summer Squeeze: Roasted Corn and Tomato Salad

When I was coming up with side dish ideas for the pasta tasting I did a few weeks ago, I knew I wanted to use tomatoes and fresh corn for one dish because they were in such abundance, and both crops have tasted better than average this year. When I showed the idea to a friend, she said “but it’s so everyday and boring.” Well, of course she’s right, but I would not be daunted. I set out to come up with a couple of twists that might look a little less everyday.

I love to squeeze every bit of flavor out of the ingredients I have, so instead of a raw salad, I thought I would roast the vegetable. Besides, I thought a roasted salad would pair better with a raw pasta sauce (pesto).

To try and make it a little more elegant, I decided to serve the salad in tomato boats – just hollowed out the tomato halves and roasted them along with the corn. It makes portioning much easier (don’t you sometimes hate trying to figure out how much is enough?), and I used the tomato flesh for another dish later on.

The salad dressing couldn’t be simpler – just oil and vinegar with a couple of dried herbs thrown in. And I used one of my favorite inexpensive flavor weapons: roasted garlic.

Roasted garlic is such a breeze – I just throw a halved-head of garlic and some olive oil into foil and toss it in the oven for 30 or 45 minutes. It comes out so fragrant and rich. I mash it down, combine it with a touch more olive oil, and stash it in the fridge for weeks. I’m not sure how long you can realistically expect to keep it in the fridge, but I’ve worked off of the same head of roasted garlic for a month or more. The trick is to make sure the oil covers the garlic – it acts as a great preservative. You’ve got roasted garlic add at a moment’s notice, and it costs about 45 cents to make.

Roasted garlic can make all the difference in a simple dish like this. Raw garlic could easily overpower the other flavors, but roasted boosts the overall flavor without drowning out the corn and tomatoes.

This dish was part of the winning combination for the pasta tasting party. You could say that it squeezed out a win.

Recipe: Roasted Corn and Tomato Salad

The Never-Ending Propane Tank: Asian Marinated Pork

Do you remember Willie Wonka and his Everlasting Gobstoppers? Well, I’ve got the propane tank equivalent. We last traded out the propane tank in September – nearly 11 months ago. Granted, we didn’t use it prodigiously throughout the winter (it was freaking cold this year – even if you did live in Florida), but the thing has been near-empty for the last two months. Every time I use it, I assume I’ll have to finish the dinner in the oven when the tank fizzles. But it just keeps going and going (Maybe the Blue Rhino is somehow related to the Energizer Bunny). READ MORE

Recipe: Asian Marinated Pork

Bothersome Baby Brunch: Ham and Tomato Mini Frittatas

My good friend, Carol, is on her way to Hawaii as we speak (I know – we hate her). She’s headed there for her first grandchild’s christening. OK, it’s not a ‘christening’. It’s a New Age, hippy-dippy, nondenominational, waterside, baby-blessing (but ‘christening’ is so much easier to write). Either way, she’s thrilled. Of course, she’s been there two weeks out of every month since the baby was born (and she wonders why she’s always tired), so you would think the ‘new’ would wear off after a while, wouldn’t you?

Anyway, a couple of nights before she left, she casually said, “I meant to ask you: could you come up with a recipe for me? We’re doing a brunch for 30 people after the waterside baby blessing. Oh, and I leave day after tomorrow, so there’s not much time.” (Some days I really don’t care to be the food and entertaining expert of the group, you know?)

Luckily, the day in between was Sunday, so I had some free time to kill (yeah, right). She wanted something egg-y that could be done ahead of time and could be used as finger food. On top of all that, it also had to be fairly easy to make because everyone’s hands would be a little full, what with a newborn to look after and thirty guests and all. (Anything else? Want me to solve world hunger for you too while I’m at it?)

So that’s what I set out to do: easy, egg-y, finger food. What I came up with was a ham and tomato mini frittata. I think it fills the bill pretty nicely.

I tried desperately to figure out a way to crisp up the ham and use it as the shell, but I didn’t have any luck. When I used just the ham, the egg bled through and you couldn’t get it out of the muffin tin. I tried baking the ham first, then setting it inside a paper liner, but that didn’t get anywhere either. I finally gave up on crispy ham and settled on a paper liner, then lined the liner with ham as well (maybe if I’d had more time).

And evidently the grocery stores in Hawaii don’t stock quite as wide a variety of items as stores here on the mainland do, so I kept to a pretty simple set of ingredients. (Carol loves to tell the story of trying to find smoked salmon while in Hawaii. The clerk said, “You mean, for Jewish?” Turns out, they didn’t have it.) The tomato slice on top helps keep the eggs from being too dry, and the cheese, both in the eggs and on the top, give the whole thing quite a bit of richness.

Personally, I like to eat them warm, but they’d be perfectly fine at room temperature too. And it’s stable enough to make a day or two ahead, stash in the fridge, and just bring back to room temperature on the morning of the brunch. Should be a snap (these are all subliminal directions for the party throwers).

Like I said, being the resident party authority can be bothersome – then again, how could anything be too much trouble for a face like this?

Macy, the Party Girl

Recipe: Ham and Tomato Mini Frittatas

Stupidly Simple: Grilled Cabbage Slaw

Don’t you hate it when life gets in the way of the things you want to do - like cook? Me too. We recently attended the monthly Gathering of the gourmet club we belong to (Get Together Gourmets), and time was not on my side. The theme for the month was BBQ – not only did I need to make a BBQ dish, but I also had to come up with a side dish to accompany it as well.

I have this self-inflicted rule about the dishes I take to these things: I have to make an original recipe for the Gathering. I’ve fallen short of that a few times (Chinese New Year being a prime example), but by-and-large I keep to my rule.

It turned out to be a particularly busy week – multiple jobs, a fussy client, and a minor emergency all piled on one another until it became the morning of the Gathering, and I still really didn’t know what I was going to make. I decided to fall back on my Balsamic Rosemary Glazed Chicken that I blogged about a couple of months ago, but I still couldn’t figure out the side dish.

At the eleventh hour (and out of desperation), I decided to throw all of the ingredients for cole slaw on the grill and see what happened. The results turned out to be fantastic. The grill brought out all of the amazing natural sugars of the cabbage, carrots, celery, and scallions. It was absolutely surprising. Mingled with the smoky flavors that the grill infuses, I was well on my way to a pretty decent dish.

Don and I held an impromptu tasting to decide on a dressing. I didn’t want to do a mayonnaise-based dressing after I tasted the sugary-grilled marvel of the vegetables, so I switched gears and we tried to figure out which vinegar would compliment the slaw best. We went through cider (too sharp), rice wine (too delicate), white wine (too blah), and balsamic (too overpowering) before finally settling on simple, everyday red wine vinegar.

I had drizzled so much olive oil over the veggies before I slapped them on the grill that it wasn’t even necessary to add any more for the vinaigrette. Just some salt, pepper, and an extra tablespoon of sugar (I like my slaw on the sweet side) was all it took to give this salad the perfect flavor balance it needed. (Of course, the fact that we were doing this about 30 minutes before we had to walk out the door had absolutely nothing to do with the nakedly simple dressing either).

I think we ended up sampling 9 different types of barbeque and almost as many side dishes that night, and not a clunker in the bunch. Of course, I don’t think anyone else was trying to finish creating their dish as they ran out the door. It just goes to show you – sometimes it pays to keep it stupidly simple.

Recipe: Grilled Cabbage Slaw

Crepe Crusader: Sweet Corn Crepes with Scallion Dill Sauce

Don and I found ourselves with an unusual set of circumstances – a rare Saturday night with no work and no plans with friends. What better opportunity for a date night? Unfortunately, it was the first of the month – the mortgage was paid, and not much was left over for dinner and a movie.

So date night at home it was. I didn’t want to do just a regular every night meal. I wanted to make something a little special, but I wasn’t sure what. What eventually came to my rescue? Crepes. What was my inspiration? IHOP, of course. I mean, when you think of a special meal with a gourmet twist, my thoughts automatically go to IHOP, don’t yours? (OK, I saw an IHOP commercial with crepes in it – what do you want? Every great idea can’t come with a flattering story to tell, can it?) READ MORE

Recipe: Sweet Corn Crepes with Scallion Dill Sauce