These originally started as corn fritters and kind of morphed from there. I made these for picnic of dietetic students this last weekend. I was assigned to make an appetizer for the potluck and was intrigued by the idea of a corn fritter and hush puppies recipe I saw in an old cookbook. They obviously wouldn’t work for this exact occasion (they need to be hot, and I wasn’t really cooking for a fried food audience), but they got me thinking about flavors and ingredients.
On to the second week of school, and I had to give an in-class presentation worth 25% of my total grade. Oof. And then head to Joslin for a few hours of data analysis. And then head home and make… a tart dough. Uff da. But I’m the kind of person who volunteers to go first for these kind of projects (now I don’t have to worry about it again).
One of things that is sometimes hard when you blog what you cook is the fact that you have to snap a few photos of the finished project before digging in. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, and the post gets lost altogether, which is what happened last weekend when it was dark and stormy in Boston and I made the Cook’s Illustrated version of Pad Thai. Today I made these goat cheese and roasted figs on baguette, drizzled with a port wine reduction. It was a light and quick lunch, and I really couldn’t spend the time getting the just-so photos because the food was hot, and it looked delicious, and it needed to be eaten.
Leftover ingredients can sometimes take you to an unexpected dish. I already had pancetta on hand, and a bunch of chives were starting to go bad in the fridge. Based on this pairing, I searched the web for a recipe that would help me use up a lot the chives before they went to waste, and I found this dish. Despite trying to use up the food I already had in my fridge, I brought home nearly a pound of swordfish.
The recipe is called oil-poached swordfish, which makes little sense to me. Poaching involves using a moderately low temperature “bath” to cook delicate meats like fish. The original recipe called for a lot of oil (4 cups!) – although the fish won’t absorb all that oil (over 7,000 calories), it will absorb some. I made a couple of changes to this recipe to simplify it, starting with searing and pan-frying the swordfish. Swordfish is a meaty fish, and it doesn’t need the delicate treatment of poaching. I’m also a fan of using (and washing) as few dishes as possible, so instead of making a chive oil suspension, I muddled the herbs in the oil for a chunkier dressing.
These originally started as corn fritters and kind of morphed from there. I made these for picnic of dietetic students this last weekend. I was assigned to make an appetizer for the potluck and was intrigued by the idea of a corn fritter and hush puppies recipe I saw in an old cookbook. They obviously wouldn’t work for this exact occasion (they need to be hot, and I wasn’t really cooking for a fried food audience), but they got me thinking about flavors and ingredients.
