by Sam Tackeff | Jul 7, 2012 | Cookware
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Holy Scandinavian Design, Batman!
I was shopping around at Crate & Barrel and noticed that the re-issue of Dansk Købenstyle are in stock!
Købenstyle originally came out in 1956, created by the prolific Danish industrial designer Jens Quistgaard – for Dansk, an American company founded by Ted Nierenberg – and quickly became one of the most iconic cookware designs of the time. Known for it’s bright, cheerful colors, and innovative design (the lid flips over to become a trivet), it’s not surprising how popular this line became.
Since Crate & Barrel doesn’t have them up on their site yet, I’ll report to you that I found the red, white, and very dark blue (I actually thought they were black) in various sizes. The enamelware is lighter than your typical cast iron, which means that it won’t strain your back on the way to the sink, and it won’t strain your wallet as much as a new Le Creuset. Even the big pieces were around $100 – the 6 qt. I spotted was $119.95, the large baker $99.95, and the 4 qt. $99.95.
I want them all.
They don’t however carry my favorite color – bright yellow. You have to shop vintage for that.
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by Sam Tackeff | Jun 18, 2012 | Lunch, Meat, Quick and Easy, Vegetables
Last month I realized that I had spent nearly three months without doing any real exercise… at all. It happened slowly, crept up on me. First, my three mile walks to work stopped, then my 45 minute long lunch walk was traded for a meal at my desk. My weekend outdoor sojourns with my beloved RadioLab (the best!) ceased to happen. The gym? What gym. Weights? No. I had turned into a sedentary blob.
As I stopped moving, I started getting more and more tired, which of course made it so that I had no more energy to move… or read.. or write. It’s a vicious cycle. I thrive on being fit and healthy, so finally, I decided to do something about it. And that something… was CrossFit. You may have heard of it, it’s basically giving your body a beating, in order to get stronger, fitter, and awesome-er. It’s non-repetitive, challenging, and most of all a lot of fun – which is exactly what I need to stay motivated. Watching Annie Thorisdottir bring it at the CrossFit games on ESPN was pretty much the most exciting thing ever – so I’ve been trying to channel her every time I step into the gym to get my ass handed to me.
This is her doing handstand pushups. Ridiculous.
I’m… not quite there yet.
(Photo via a random tumblr on the internets – I couldn’t for the life of me find the original source. Edit: actually by Fitbomb – see below! )
The one thing that becomes clear when you are doing this type of intense exercise is that in order to sustain energy you have to clean up your diet, and clean it up fast. Many CrossFitters have jumped on the Paleo bandwagon, and while I don’t subscribe to diets that cut out major food groups, I do tend to gravitate towards an eating style that champions proteins, vegetables, and slow-burning carbs.
Recently I’ve been getting a whole bunch of culinary inspiration from my blog-crush Michelle of Nom Nom Paleo, who to my absolute delight won a Saveur Best Food Blog award this year!
Now before you get all worried that I’m obsessed with a crazy-person-woo-woo-nutrition blog, you should know that Nom Nom Paleo is first and foremost a food blog with delightful food photography – it ain’t no preachin’ blog. Michelle and her husband Fitbomb, and two adorable kiddos Lil-O and Big-O live in the Bay Area. They have a gorgeous kitchen filled with some fun toys including the Sous Vide Supreme, and some beautifully seasoned cast iron pans. By night she’s a vampire drug-pusher (she works the graveyard shift at a hospital pharmacy), and yet she still manages to make meals for herself and her family daily.
The recipes on her site are just great. Things that I’ve made and savored: her damn fine chicken which, is in fact, damn fine, her rice-less Asian cauliflower fried rice, world’s best braised cabbage (a Molly Stevens recipe, but I love her too!), and her sister’s phenomenal grilled green chicken to name a few.
She also has a well-designed iPad app that I’ve taken in the kitchen and cooked from as well – last night we had her roasted pepper salad with dinner, and her magic mushroom powder seasoning is next up on my kitchen docket.
So, today, I have a recipe for you of sorts that I’ve adapted from her blog. It’s another one of those not-quite-a-real-recipe, core concept meals that I try to use every day to feed myself when I’m not feeling very creative in the kitchen.
Nom Nom Paleo’s Emergency Protein
Adapted from the original recipe here
1 pound organic ground meat or protein (I most often use ground turkey)
2 tablespoons delicious fat (ghee, coconut oil, lard)
½-1 cup of an allium – onions, leeks, or shallots – diced
A few handfuls of vegetables (mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots, asparagus, zucchini, etc.)
Several handfuls of leafy greens (baby spinach, kale, chard)
1-2 tablespoons coconut aminos (or Braggs, tamari, soy sauce, or dried spices)
Salt & Pepper
Here’s today’s version:
I first started by sautéing a shallot and a handful of garlic scapes in some organic ghee with a pinch of salt. Garlic scapes are some of my favorite summer vegetables that I usually make into this pesto. They are great in stir-fries because they impart a sort of sweet-garlicky flavor, and excellent crunch. If you can’t find garlic scapes, by all means use some more shallots, or an onion, or some leeks. You could also use scallions, but I find them to be a little too zippy.
I used ghee here, because it’s sweet and buttery and delicious. You could also use coconut oil, or lard, or good olive oil.
After the shallots and scapes softened, I added the longer cooking veg – in this case two chopped portobello mushroom caps – and stirred everything around until they cooked down a bit. The mushrooms are a great addition because they add some heft and volume, and are supremely nutritious.
You can add any sort of vegetable you want to this dish. Sometimes, I’ll add carrots, or chopped tomatoes, or asparagus. I typically try to use what is in season and looks the freshest at the market.
After a few minutes of stirring, I added my ground turkey. I like using ground dark meat because it tastes better and has some more fat. Sometimes though I’ll use lamb, chicken thighs, ground beef, or bison. To season, I added a good pinch of salt, a grind of pepper, and a tablespoon of coconut aminos.
Coco-whats-ohs?? Think of these as magic seasoning liquid. Coconut aminos lend some funkiness and depth of flavor, or umami similar to fish sauce or Worcestershire (which you could use here as a substitute) but are soy-free, gluten-free, and vegan. You can pick up a bottle of the stuff at Whole Foods for about 5 bucks, and it’ll last you a while.
When the turkey was cooked through, I tasted for seasoning and opted to add a pinch of my grandmother’s Turkish spice mix she makes in the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul. It’s a combination of a million things, but the main notes are cumin, hot pepper, and oregano. Another favorite addition is taco seasoning – I have my own mix, although in a pinch the Trader Joe’s taco seasoning works well here.
Finally, after giving it a few more minutes to let the flavors meld, I turned off the heat and added several big handfuls of baby spinach. Sometimes when I make this I use kale, or swiss chard, but baby spinach is my favorite.
Let the spinach wilt down, and voila!
The great thing about this dish is that it’s easy to make, keeps for a couple of days, and is really flexible. Leftovers work great for breakfast (topped with an egg), or for lunch in your lunchbox.
I could eat a variation of this every day without getting bored.
by Sam Tackeff | May 10, 2012 | Lunch
Today marks the end of my week working from home at my kitchen table. It’s been good here, and I’ve really enjoyed drinking tea all day, sitting alone quietly, and pausing to make myself restorative lunches.
This was a bowl of creamy goodness after a long morning of things not going quite right. At the bottom is a sea of cauliflower “mashed potatoes”, topped with a few fried eggs, some salt, and a pinch of bourbon smoked paprika that really brought everything together.
The cauliflower mash is my favorite re-discovery, via Nom Nom Paleo. I used to make this quite often – it’s one of the best ways to get in your vegetables. Sometimes I’ll add some beans, or even a real potato into the mix, but usually just the cauliflower itself is satisfying.
It also fills my craving for big bowls of warm white food. When I’m needing comfort, I find myself turning to bowls of mashed potatoes, or rice mixed with yogurt, or Annie’s macaroni and cheese – no judging! Cauliflower mash seems to do the same trick, except I get to feel good about myself because I’m gorging on nutrients instead of an entire day’s worth of calories.
by Sam Tackeff | May 7, 2012 | Filipino, Restaurants
Let’s pretend here that the photos in this post have proper white balance and focus, and ignore the cold, harsh reality that even if you get a fancy new camera with a phenomenal lens, it does not mean that you will be able to properly shoot with it if you don’t know what you are doing. Also, if you hand the camera over to anyone at all, you should watch carefully that they don’t adjust the settings resulting in all your colors being off. I’m learning! – Sam
To say I’m an adventurous eater is an understatement – I’ll likely consume whatever you put down in front of me, and happily so if it has strong flavors, is fermented, or is a recognizable part of an animal.
What I’m less comfortable with is going into a restaurant for the first time where I’m the only person not speaking the native language, and ordering with confidence. Even if I’ve done my research, which I always do, and usually fairly thoroughly, I’m skeptical that I’ll be served a traditional dish in it’s full glory. I worry that the spice will be dialed back, or I’ll get fewer banchan, or the fish paste will be curiously absent from my table.
There’s a reason why Anthony Bourdain meets up with a fixer in each episode – it always helps to have someone who knows what they are talking about, and can cry foul if something is amiss.
So here I found myself craving Filipino food, and needing some dining partners and a fixer. Enter Bianca, of the delightful blog Confessions of a Chocoholic who agreed to come with me and Alex (my boss at Tasted Menu, and the creeper up there in the photo) to JnJ Turo-Turo, the ONLY Filipino restaurant within a several hundred mile radius.
From everything I had heard, it was so-so. But, after regular breakfasts in San Francisco of Silog in my old neighborhood, Hopia from Hilda’s, Señor Sisig, Hapa SF and the Adobo Hobo trucks, and Mitchell’s Ice Cream two blocks away serving up classic flavors from the Philipines including Buko (baby coconut), Langka (Jackfruit), Macapuno (coconut), and my favorite Ube (sweet purple yam) – I have learned that even not-very-good Filipino food is better than no Filipino food at all!
First we had to get there. This place is in Quincy, which is a bit of a hike from Boston. A thirty minute drive outside of the city got us there without too much hassle.
We made a quick detour to Kam Man Superstore right around the corner before heading in to dinner – a Chinese market about double the size of the Super 88 in Allston, and one of my favorite local places for Bento supplies. After picking up a coconut bun and a custard filled mocha bun – you can’t leave this place empty handed, no matter how hard you try – we headed over to the restaurant.
JNJ Turo-Turo isn’t exactly upscale. Turo-Turo means “point-point” in Tagalog, and generally refers to a small eatery where they have a few rotating dishes on the menu and you simply point to the ones you want. It reminded me of the places in Istanbul, neighborhood joints where working people eat or might pick up some dinner to take home after a long day. I found the place charming though, with it’s Ikea furniture, a group of friends speaking Tagalog at the next table, a quiet smiling woman cooking and serving our food, and Filipino tele-novelas dramatically unfolding in the background on the TV hanging above our table.
Bianca did the ordering, and I put in my requests – lumpiang shanghai, kare-kare and adobo and whatever else we needed.
To start, we got plates of cigarette shaped lumpiang shanghai (fried pork spring rolls) with a sweet chili dipping sauce, and slightly shorter and plumper lumpiang gulay (vegetable spring rolls filled with bean sprouts, carrots, potato and tofu) with a slightly tangy vinegar dipping sauce called sawsawan.
Taste-wise, these reminded me curiously of the latkes (Jewish potato pancakes) and mücver (Turkish vegetable fritters) my mom makes – I take particular delight when my brain allows me these cross-cultural associations when trying new foods.
The next dish that came out was our chicken adobo, which for me was the low point of the meal. While the chicken was moist and tender, the sauce was sweet and not particularly tangy at all.
From my limited experience with adobo, I was disappointed, and felt for sure that my imaginary grandmother in Manila would have made a better version. I really like the one Amy Besa makes, which I have the recipe for on this here website and have cooked many times. After thinking about it in retrospect though, I remembered when I posted a few years back about adobo, a reader mentioned that the adobos of the North were sweetened with sugar cane and are much less acidic – so it’s possible this was a good example of that? I digress.
To my delight, the next dish to come out of the kitchen was a whole fried milk fish, (called Bangus) served split, and boneless.
This fish, commonly eaten in the Philippines, but new to me, was crispy and brilliantly flavorful. I’m always happy when I get served a whole fish in a restaurant, and ashamed that I cook it so rarely myself at home, as it’s one of the more satisfying eating experiences one can have.
A bowl of kare-kare, a stew made with peanut sauce came out next, and was served with bagoong (shrimp paste) – which the cook looked at us skeptically and asked if we’d want. Of course I wouldn’t have turned down the opportunity to try it, and while I didn’t dislike it, I will advise you that it is not for the faint of palate.
The tripe in this was cooked well, and tender, but I had been hoping for oxtail which was sadly missing from this rendition.
Even though from all that I’d read about kare-kare it’s usually described as fairly bland, I think I was hoping for a punchier dish, and the foreigner in me wanted to douse it with something acidic or spicy. Sometimes though, learning to appreciate subtlety is more important than assaulting the tastebuds – although I’m guessing that this dish would be much more flavorful with better quality nuts, cuts of meat, and the ministrations of that imaginary grandmother from Manila. I’ll be sure to try it again.
Finally, my favorite dish of the evening, the Sisig:
This was my first sisig experience (Señor Sisig, my favorite food truck in SF, while delicious – the California burrito, silog style with the egg is a perfect food – doesn’t actually serve it’s eponymous dish on their truck.)
Sisig is a dish comprised of the bits and pieces of the pig, ie: the good parts, and is served on a sizzling hot platter. This one was full of crunchy cartilage, and liver (my favorite) seasoned with onions, garlic, and hot pepper. I contentedly scooped my second and third helpings to eat with rice, and pitied all the folks out there who can’t deal with texture in their food.
While eating, I couldn’t help be reminded of the Turkish dish called Kokoreç, a chopped plate of intestines and other bits of offal – which I stupidly refused as a child because intestines were pretty much the grossest things that I could think of, and the last three letters of the word are pronounced “retch”. You can imagine the fuss we kids put up.
After eating our fill (ie: everything on the table), we managed to leave room for dessert: the Halo-Halo.
This took me straight back to summer nights when we’d walk down the street in Noe to Mitchell’s, braving the lines for a late night cone. After moving away, I’d been feeling sorry for myself that I didn’t have access to their ice cream flavors… and then BAM – finding some dee-licious Ube ice cream topping my Halo-Halo at JnJ Turo-Turo pretty much made up for the entire year of Ube-withdrawal.
So, we had … beans, banana (which I could have sworn was plantain), assorted tapioca and jelly at the bottom of the plastic Solo cup, topped with shave-ice and two scoops of Ube ice cream the exact shade of purple I would have been obsessed with in 1992. This sounds and looks a little terrifying, but I was thrilled, and ate the whole thing despite being well past the point of uncomfortable fullness.
At the end of the evening, we were politely ushered out, having extended our welcome a whole half hour after they had closed, and we stumbled out smiling.
I found that while I’d gone in skeptical, this place had exceeded my expectations: it was a lovely evening, the food filled some deep needs of mine, and I was with excellent company. What more can you ask for?
JnJ Turo-Turo
143 Water St.
Quincy, MA 02169
(617) 471-8876
For more fun, here’s Bianca’s write-up of the very same dinner.
