Karaage (Japanese Fried Chicken)

LJ and I use to live across the street from an excellent little Japanese restaurant.  It was also a bonus that a friend worked there and if we went in when he was working by himself he would tell us "Your money is no good here," and then load up our plates with double portions of whatever we ordered.  I'm sure he had no authority to do this so don't go in there expecting the same sort of treatment.  The food is completely worth paying full price for.

On one visit our friend recommended that we try karaage, or Kara-age which he described as fried chicken.  Usually I am not a fan of fried chicken (mostly dealing with my dislike for eating any meat that is on the bone) but since karaage is made from boneless chicken thighs I figured it was worth giving a shot.  After trying it the first time I was hooked.

Karaage is actually very simple to make if you have any experience frying foods (my time as a cook at Skippers almost makes me a master fryer).  You start with boneless chicken thighs and cut them in to pieces that would be considered bite size (or two or three bite size).  You then marinate the chicken in soy sauce, sugar, garlic, ginger root, and sake (or white wine).  After the chicken has marinated you coat it in a light starch (usually corn starch, though from what I've read peanut starch is most traditional).  Avoid using all purpose flour because the heavier starch forms too thick of a crust.

Once the chicken is dusted in starch it is ready to be fried.  I use a cast iron pan about half full of vegetable oil but you could use a wok, dutch oven, or electric fryer depending on what you have available.  One of the beautiful things about using chicken thigh meat is that it is difficult to overcook the meat, so you can fry it until the crust is nice and crispy.

We learned to eat the chicken with a squirt of juice from a lemon wedge, though I have no idea if this would be considered traditional.  For this batch I cut the chicken a little smaller than was preferred but you can adjust for your own surface area-to-mass preferences.

This YouTube video is helpful if you want to see the whole process from start to finish and you can use this recipe for measurements and ratios.

Rockamole

I mentioned recently that LJ got the idea to make fondue for the Superbowl.  This wasn't the first time the big game inspired her to try making some new party food that sounded delicious that we weren't planning on sharing with anyone else.  A number of years ago (it must have been when we still had cable and watched a lot of the Food Network) LJ was inspired to make this recipe for rockamole.

I was a little skeptical mostly because I'm a fan of traditional guacamole and didn't see any need to mess with the original.  However, after the first bite I knew I had a new favorite use for avocados.

This recipe removes the traditional Latin American flavors of guacamole (cilantro, onion, lime) and replaces them with more Mediterranean flavors (basil, Parmesan cheese, lemon).  By cooking the basil and garlic the flavors become more mild and by grilling the avocado caramelization is added.

Many American's don't like the taste of cilantro so this version of avocado dip may have even more wide appeal at your next party.

I forgot to pick up a lemon at the store so I had to settle with using a lime

Oatmeal

HH has mentioned before that we don't eat boxed cereal for breakfast anymore. He rotates between English muffins, bagels, and regular muffins, while I stay true to my trusty instant oats. Not the kind of instant oats that are packaged into little paper sacks with powdered flavoring at the bottom, but the kind that come from a cardboard canister or, preferably, the bulk section at Winco. HH knows that I need a good breakfast to start my day (otherwise I tend to get very cranky and may even pass out - yes, that has actually happened before), and this definitely fits the bill.

Here's how I make my daily breakfast:

Put a kettle of water on to boil. Scoop 1/3ish cup of oats into a bowl. Sprinkle in some sugar (if using fresh berries instead of jam or honey for flavor and sweetness). Scoop a hearty spoonful of peanut butter in with the oats. Once the water is boiling, add enough to cover the oats and peanut butter (it will look very watery at this point). Walk away. Prepare lunch, get my coffee ready to go, catch up on Facebook, etc. After several minutes, check to see if the water has been absorbed by the oats, and stir it all up. Slice a small banana into the bowl. Add a little more water if needed and mash the bananas up a bit. Throw in some fresh berries, preferably blueberries or raspberries. If I don't have any berries from Teddie's Berries or gleaned from our parents' backyard, I use a spoonful of HH's jam or some honey and omit the sugar.

Wine Rules

The past year has brought several big changes for our household. I finished grad school and got a big-girl job, we moved to the other side of the Cascades, HH has been living his dream (or is it now a nightmare?) of becoming a House Husband, and we started to drink wine on a regular basis.

Whether or not wine has any real health benefits, we do enjoy a glass (or two) with dinner on many nights. Since this change has taken hold, I have developed a set of 3 wine rules to guide our purchasing habits at the grocery or liquor store:

1. It should be red.
2. It should be from Washington.
3. It should be under $10.

These rules enable us to enjoy wine we like while supporting area businesses without spending too much money. At many grocery stores, you can even get a 10% discount if you buy 6 or more bottles at once, which suits our new habit just fine.

Chocolate dipped pretzels

My parents stopped by the other weekend on their way through town and left us with a special surprise.  My dad (Great Fan of the Blog, GFOB) works in a candy making operation and some of their ingredients had been compromised (basically a hole was punched in a piece of plastic) which meant that some ingredients would have to be thrown out.  Since my family has a strong frugal gene, my dad brought me a hunk of dark chocolate that he liberated from the dumpster.

I was tempted to gnaw on the block for the next few hours until it was gone but I decided it was best to find a way to spread out my enjoyment instead.  Since we had a bag of pretzels leftover from our adventures in fondue making, I decided to melt down the chocolate to dip the pretzels in to.

Our small soup pot has a double boiler attachment but using a metal bowl would have been just as easy (probably even easier since the chocolate would pool at the bottom).

We took two or three pretzels at a time and dipped them in to the chocolate.  We set the dipped pretzels on to waxed paper to cool and harden.

I've mentioned before that we don't keep desserts around often because of our tendency to eat them all in one sitting.  So far we have managed to have some semblance of self control with these, though it has been a challenge.  It still is probably easier to just keep sweets out of the house, but when a GFOB shows up with a sweet hunk of chocolaty goodness, it is hard to say no.

Kale chips

On the farm I was recently trained in the art of harvesting kale.  Since it was just practice and this kale had no market destination I was able to take it home to enjoy myself.  I ended up with two full produce sacks with a mix of three different varieties of kale.

Kale is a hardy cool season green (as evidence by the fact that I was doing this harvesting in January) that is mostly used in soups and stews.  It can be used in salad mixes though some people find it to have too overpowering of a flavor.  To me it mostly tastes like broccoli, so mixed in with a salad is just fine.

With so much kale on hand I knew I'd need to find alternative ways to use it so that it wouldn't wither away in the refrigerator.  Luckily I had a bit of experience with massive amounts of kale since I had planted a full row in the garden of LJ's parents last spring.  Over the summer when we visited them I had harvested a bunch of kale to make kale chips for an upcoming party.

Making kale chips is a pretty straight forward process involving cutting the stems out of the leaves, tossing greens with oil and seasoning, and baking in the oven.  Through trial and error I found that a lower temperature oven and a longer cooking time produced more consistent results and the chips were much less likely to burn.

I don't snack on kale chips the same way I do potato chips or crackers.  The drying process seems to intensify the bitterness of the kale so it makes it difficult to eat a larger number.  However if you are looking for a little crisp, salty snack, they are very satisfying.

Squash Gnocchi

HH and I were introduced to gnocchi a couple years back and have made it many times since. We usually make it with potato, but this recipe presented itself to us recently and looked like a good way to use up some more of the ever-present CSA squash that is still lying around on our counter.

If you have some cooked and pureed squash already waiting for you in the fridge, mix it together with ricotta, parmesan, eggs, and salt. The first time around, I forgot to add parmesan to the dough which was unfortunate, but not disastrous.

Then add some flour and mix it all together until it combines into a dough that holds together nicely. Keep adding flour until it gets to that point.



Cut off a chunk and roll it into a long rope. It might help to pretend you are back in preschool and making snakes out of play dough.

Chop the rope into 1/2" pieces and indent with a fork or with your finger. This creates more surface area for sauce to cling to.

Toss the shaped gnocchi into a pot of salted, boiling water and cook until they float to the top. Fish them out with a slotted spoon or spider if you have one and put them in a saucepan with whatever sauce you choose.

We have eaten these with a browned butter and sage sauce (below), with butter and parmesan, with sausage and white sauce, and with pesto, all of which were delicious.

Knowing that there will be much more gnocchi than we could possibly eat at one sitting, we put the extras on baking sheets and put them in the freezer until solid, then gather them up and portion them into containers that are ready to be pulled out and cooked at a moment's notice.

Italian Dressing

After watching Forks over Knives, I have been convinced that LJ and I need to work more vegetables in to our diet.  So far this has only really involved picking up a bag or tub of salad mix on my trips to the grocery store, but it is a start.

I've realized that most salad dressings can be easily replicated or improved using a few staple ingredients so I will document our experiments in salad dressing occasionally on the blog.  I have been working to replicate the secret recipe for my Grandma M's salad dressing but it still hasn't passed the taste test of my brothers, but when it does I will pass it along.

We have been pleased with this most recent attempt at making an Italian dressing.  I like the simplicity of this recipe once you have created the seasoning mixture.  To store the dressing, we have saved a few old salad dressing bottles that we now use to mix up our own creations in.

One word of warning.  We ignored the call for canola oil in the original recipe in favor of olive oil which seemed more consistent with Italian dressing.  When we stored the leftover dressing in the refrigerator the olive oil caused the dressing to solidified.  As long as you remember to pull out your dressing ahead of time to return to room temperature you are fine using olive oil.

Potato chips

I made these potato chips because three things happened at the same time:

1. I had the mandoline out
2. I had potatoes on the counter
3. I had a cast iron pot sitting on the stove with oil in it from a previous frying project
4. I was bored

OK, so maybe it was four things.  Plus I wanted a snack.

There wasn't much to this process.  I sliced the potatoes as thinly as I could and soaked them in water until I was finished with the batch.  I then dropped a few at a time in to the pan with oil which was over medium heat.  I fried them until they looked crispy and then fished them out, placing them on a paper towel to drain.  I sprinkled them with salt and then gobbled them up while they were still warm.