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Posts filed under ‘American’

As the temperature is firmly in the 80s around here, comes the realization the summer is well and truly upon us. And what better way to celebrate summer sunday’s that with those old-fashioned childhood treats of icecream sundae’s (get it?). While ice cream tastes great during any season, sundaes work best during summer, when the ice cream melts quickly but the addition of a few other select accouterments go a long way towards dragging out the dessert into a delicious meal-ender.

For my first sundae of the season, I chose to keep it simple – because, like with most things in life, sundaes are best when kept simple. Throw on too many ingredients and you lose the essence of this wonderful melding of flavors. So start with your favorite ice cream flavor (or 3, if you really must), add some textured toppings, and a sauce of some sort to bring it all in together – and voila, a perfect sundae. Here, I used vanilla icecream which really is the best base for all kinds of sundae toppings – and complemented it with some of my homemade ganache and some toasted walnuts. Done.

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Filed under American, Dessert, Quick and Easy

Posted on June 6th, 2010 |

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Scrambled Eggs with Green Peppers and Pastrami

Scrambled Eggs with Pastrami

This will be a quick post, in honor of the food item the post describes – scrambled eggs. They are one of the best breakfast items – short, quick and easy to make. They are much more forgiving than an omelet (a broken omelet being very easy to transform to scrambled eggs, ofcourse!), and equally customization. All you need is a saute pan, some butter or olive oil, eggs, and whatever other meats or vegetables you want to add in to the eggs.

Scrambled eggs with onions, peppers and bacon is a classic breakfast item in countless diners across the country; I decided to switch it up a bit by using Pastrami for bacon – it retained the salty punch of the bacon in the dish, but also added a nice dollop of the cured-meat flavor to the eggs.

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Filed under American, Breakfast

Posted on May 8th, 2010 |

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Quickie Cooking – Puff Pastry Pizzette with Broccoli and Corn

I love pizza, but I have become something of a pizza snob recently – I’ve tried most of the home delivery options available and they are, to put it kindly, eatable maybe once an year. There is definitely some good pizza to be had in little restaurants and pizza places all over New York, ofcourse – but for days when we are just looking to stay home I and have a pizza nothing but my own home-made pie will do.

For days when I don’t have a ball of pizza dough waiting for me in the freezer, I’ve come up with a way to get the same thin-crust crunch and cheesy goodness that a pizza provides – Pizzettes (or tartlettes, or flat mini pizzas, or whatever you want to call them) made from good old Puff Pastry sheets! We always have some sheets lying around in the freezer – and these little pizzette are so easy to put together individually that they can be customized to whatever toppings we are in the mood for.

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Filed under American, Dinner, Quick and Easy

Posted on April 2nd, 2010 |

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The ‘wake me up’ egg salad

I am a big fan of having eggs for breakfast – they are easy to eat, fill you up with a nice dose of protein, and are damn tasty in whatever form you choose to have them – half-boiled with a pinch of salt, omelets, or heuvos rancheros if u’re feeling frisky. An egg salad, however, often gets treated as a lunch – but lately I’ve been making a simple version of it that really hits the spot for breakfast and almost makes me wake up a few mins early just to enjoy it in peace.

Using celery adds a nice crunch to the salad, and I add a nice dollop of dijon mustard to punch up the flavor. Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper round out the flavorings - eggs and mayo being the building blocks that make up this really easy to put-together recipe. Eat it by itself for breakfast (great cold out of the fridge), or if you really want you can make a lunch of it by bringing it to room temp and sticking it between some deli flats.

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Filed under American, Breakfast, Quick and Easy

Posted on March 3rd, 2010 |

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Hearty Pastrami on Kaiser Rolls

There is a Subway outlet right below my apartment building, and when I first moved in here (which was the first time I’ve lived by myself, away from family), it became my source of sustenance for a few weeks till I learnt to cook for myself. I convinced myself that it was a cheap and healthy way to eat out, loading my sub with veggies and taking advantage of half-priced footlong deals (this was before the ubiquitous $5 footlong was introduced).

One of my favorites used to be the pastrami sub; I’d never eaten Pastrami before, and started really enjoying the delicious flavor of the thin slivers of meat. Honey mustard sauce was my condiment of choice, cheddar my cheese and pile on the cucumbers and onions. I miss those sub nights, so I’ve started building my own pastrami sub – its is much cheaper, I get to use my choice of bread, and use much tastier, fresher, deli pastrami instead.

I kept the building blocks the same – cheddar cheese to top the pastrami with, cucumbers and tomatoes to go with the meat, along with a few leaves of spinach nestled under the pastrami, and a nice dollop of store-bought honey mustard sauce. Fresh whole wheat kaiser rolls from the neighborhood bakery worked best; they were hearty and thick enough to handle extra slices and all the veggies without disintegrating into a wet mess that normal sandwich rolls would. A couple of minutes under the broiler (open-faced to melt the cheese), adding in the veggies and my better-than-Subway Pastrami sandwich was ready to be devoured! (Minus the Jared guilt trips!)

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Filed under American, Dinner

Posted on February 27th, 2010 |

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Veggie Thursday – Roasted Butternut Squash

One of the tastiest and easiest ways to get a quick side of veggies prepared is to roast them, as I’ve written about before. This is especially true for vegetables that have a nice, sweet flavor of their own, like the ubiquitous butternut squash, which has lately been bandied about in food magazines and TV shows as the perfect winter vegetable. Roasted butternut squash, which you can thrown in to the oven without much of a fuss as you go about your other baking, added a perfectly light side of vegetables to my Thursday dinner; I can also see it being a good complement to heavier meat dishes like tandoori chicken or a roast loin of pork. Plus, this is a veggie that is chockful of vitamins and minerals that will help you brave the chill.

The butternut squash has a subtle flavor reminiscent of pumpkin (and from what I read, it treated interchangeably with a pumpkin Down Under), which gets concentrated through a nice long roast in the oven. To intensify the sweetness and to get a nice caramelized exterior, I tossed the cut cubes with some olive oil (side-stepping the melted butter a lot of the recipes called for) and brown sugar – this resulted in a lovely golden brown char on a few pieces and infused the vegetables with a gentle, warm sweetness.

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Filed under American, Dinner, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on February 18th, 2010 |

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In my lunch bag: Curried Chicken Salad Wraps

Go to any personal finance sites or blogs over the past year, and one of the ‘tips’ you are sure to find ‘brown bag lunches’ as one of the first mentioned in saving some extra dough every year. I figured out that packing lunch at home rather than wasting $5 for insipid cafeteria food was an easy way to leave myself with some extra cash after a few months of graduating – though at that time, I relied on mostly rice and curry to lunch on.

I soon found however that one cannot subsist on the typical Indian lunches alone; you get bored and may get tempted to just eat out for a few days. So I learnt to mix up my lunches, taking a variety of wraps, sandwiches, pastas and leftovers from dinner – it made planning for a week of lunches fun, and made me actually look forward to unpacking my brown bag on most days!

One of the easiest lunches to take are wraps; a wide variety of filling work well when rolled up along with a few greens within a pliable wrap, and for the most part you can pre-assemble them the night before or even a few days before. If you are lucky and have access to a toaster oven at work, you can warm up your wrap ahead of lunch and snicker at suckers paying top dollar for cold / stale / over-sodiumed wraps at the cafeteria. Our old floor at work had a beat up old oven that worked well enough for me to crisp up hummus wraps or tuna sandwiches. A few months ago we moved in to a brand new floor with luxurious wooden paneling, fancy paintings, a huge kitchen area, 3 microwaves but alas, no toaster oven! So I had to come up with a filling that would taste great cold or at room-temperature – and nothing fit the bill better than a spicy, smooth curried chicken salad.

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Filed under American, Lunch

Posted on February 12th, 2010 |

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Looking to spring: Orange Creamsicle Soda

The end of Superbowl Sunday marks the beginning of a couple of dreary, cold, dark winter months – February and March continue to be cold in Jersey, with no sports to look forward to till the April NFL draft and no warm weather to look forward to till spring. So to cheer myself up, I’ve started treating myself to a weekend soda-pop treat – orange creamsicle sodas. The bright orange color and fizziness of the drinks offer a wonderfully zesty alternative to the snow and cold outside, and they are a cinch to make so you can enjoy them on a moments notice.

Get yourself some orange-flavored soda (I prefer Fanta, but Crush is easier to find around here), some heave cream, and a tall glass – that’s all you’ll need. The creaminess of the drink is balanced by the sweet, orangey fizz of the soda – and the white foam that forms magically on top is a thing of beauty to look at, and also offers a nice head comparable to some of the best draughts. Sit back, sip your creamiscle soda and wait for the warmer days of spring (and add a peg or two of vodka if you need a little more cheer!)

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Filed under American, Beverages, Quick and Easy

Posted on February 10th, 2010 |

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Quick and Easy: Deli-Flat Pizzettes

Sometimes you want the taste of pizza without going through all the effort of getting a pizza crust ready, crank up the oven, load up the pies and wait for the piping hot pizzas. And sometimes, you have some left-over pizza sauce you need to use up, some veggies about to go bad, and some cooked chicken that you’ll too lazy to make chicken salad from. On those days, using deli-flats and the toaster oven to pull all these ingredients together into mini pizza-type ‘pizzettes’ is the perfect answer to getting a quick pie fix.

Deli-flats (we get the Whole Grain Pepperidge Farm version at our local mart) are 100-calorie flat breads cut in rounds – you can use them for putting together some healthy sandwiches, or use each half of the flats as a base for these pizzettes. The recipe is customizable to whatever odds and ends you have left in your fridge, and any cheese you throw on there will work – just make sure you broil them enough to melt the cheese fully to get a nice pizza taste. They make a great dinner along with some soup, or for a weekend lunch.

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Filed under American, Dinner, Lunch, Quick and Easy

Posted on February 5th, 2010 |

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Homecookin’: Fried Chicken and Waffles

No recipe for tonight – just a simple ode to one of my favorite home cooked meals of all time – fried chicken and waffles. I have never been ‘down south’, but given my love for most southern dishes, I feel like I’d fit right in down in Savannah! Shrimp and grits, buttermilk biscuits, peach cobblers, and ofcourse fried chicken with waffles – as the song goes, these are a few of my faaavotire things!

Fried chicken with waffles is just one of those perfectly balanced food pairings that offer such a delightful contrasts of tastes and textures- sweet and savory, crispy and soft, tender and with a bite. The dark golden skin of the chicken pairs with the light brown waffle to present some form of a foodie yin and yang – yes, my friends, the first time I savored these two items together in one place, at a now defunct hole-in-the-wall in St.Mark’s Place, the experience was nothing short of religious.

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Filed under American, Breakfast, Favorites, Lunch

Posted on January 25th, 2010 |

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