Cookbook review: The Sriracha Cookbook

If you don't know about Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce, you need to.

It's a Thai chili sauce that comes in a bottle with a rooster on it (hence the term "rooster sauce"), and is pretty much the most awesome condiment ever. Outside barbecue sauce, anyway. It was named Bon Appetit's Ingredient of the Year. It's sweet, garlicky, and really hot all at once.

The Sriracha Cookbook shows you all the billion different ways you can use this sauce. My favorite is to mix equal parts Sriracha and mayo for an impromptu aioli, served with sweet potato fries. You can also mix it with ketchup for a kicked-up version of ketchup; served with regular fries, you'll never go back to plain ketchup again.

But there are other things you can do with it--make Sriracha pesto, Sriracha-sesame vinaigrette for salads, cheddar-Sriracha swirl bread, bacon-Sriracha cornbread, even make a peach-Sriracha sorbet. (That's in addition to putting it on your sandwiches, ribs, burgers, etc.)
I'm gonna be using a lot more Sriracha in the near future.

What my pantry really looks like

My dear friend L came over to housesit/catsit for me while my hubby and I were visiting relatives over Christmas. It was the first time she'd been over to our new house, and the first thing she said when she came through the door was, "I want to see your pantry."

"My pantry?" I said.

"Yes, I want to see your kitchen and pantry and all. I've been reading your blog all this time, I want to see it."

"Well, ok," I said, and gave her the tour.

"You should totally post pictures of this on your blog," she said afterward.

"I should? Why?"

"Because it's all so normal," L said. "All this time I've been picturing some crazy professional setup, but your kitchen looks like mine, just with more stuff. You've got the bottomless pit of mismatched Tupperware, the refrigerator door full of condiments, you should let people know that your kitchen looks just theirs does."

So here you are, dear readers: my kitchen and pantry.

The wall of cookbooks, along the back of the dining room, adjacent to the kitchen.

Bowls of things.

Flours, grains, etc.

Which are next to the pans, which are above the prep table, which is filled with the fixings for several projects. Plus my cat.

China cabinet.

The refrigerator. Note bulk quantities of things, and the prevalence of Tupperware. What you can't see: all the broth in the back.

The cheese drawer, just after a trip to Costco. It's full.

The freezer. Note all the fish stock up front. You can also make out a couple boxes of butter, several containers of ground turkey (shrink-wrapped, up top), some nuts, some puff pastry, some frozen vegetables. There's a lot of other stuff crammed behind. My freezer is always full, and always in danger of being booby-trapped--things falling out on your foot whenever you open it.

The pantry, next to the stove. Flours, canned stuff, Tupperware, bakeware on the bottom three shelves.

The spice cabinet.

Next to the spice cabinet.

The countertop. The butter stays out at room temperature, so it's spreadable.

More countertop.

Next to the stove, under the spice cabinet.

So that's it! My crazy, unorganized kitchen, which is bigger than any kitchen I've ever had before, by a factor of about seven.

Wheatberries with roasted root vegetables

I picked up some wheatberries for the first time the other day. As the name indicates, these come from wheat--ground up, they make flour. They're sort of like a chewier quinoa.

1 1/2 cups wheatberries
2 quarts salted water
2-3 lbs worth of winter vegetables: I used some purple potatoes, a big turnip, a butternut squash, several carrots, and a beet. You could also use parsnips, rutabagas, celery root, whatever.
1 onion
dried cherries or cranberries

Bring the 2 qts salted water to a boil and add the wheatberries. Cook until done (chewy with just a hint of crunchy), 30-60 minutes. Drain. Meanwhile, peel chop the vegetables into a small to medium dice. Toss with olive oil, and roast in a 400-degree oven until tender all the way through. Mix the wheatberries and roasted vegetables together, season with salt, pepper and thyme, and add the dried fruit. Stir together. Serve hot or at room temperature. Yum yum.

Salt-baked whole fish with Meyer lemons

This is a great way to cook fish, and looks really pretty for a dinner party or something. Caveat: make it for people who don't care about the final presentation, as it's tricky to pull off clean fillets. For me, anyway. When the fish was done, I ended up with a plate full of fish pieces. Which, fine, they taste just as good, but clearly I'm going to need some practice in table-side fish dissection.

The fish doesn't taste salty at all--the salt forms a crust on the outside of the fish, locking in moisture. The fish turns out really tasty and juicy, and the salt crust cracks right off when it's done.

Take a whole fish, any kind, head, tail and skin still on. Rinse and pat dry.

Line a big roasting pan with kosher salt (you'll need a couple of pounds of kosher salt, total) and a couple bay leaves, like so:

Then lay the fish in there.

(This is a haddock, btw.)

Quarter a Meyer lemon, and stuff the inside cavity with the quarters.

Isn't that cute?

Then pour more salt over the fish, like so:

Bake at 400 for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of the fish. This one was pretty big, probably at least 2.5 or 3 pounds.

When it's done, it'll look like this:

...which is pretty much exactly the same. Crack off the salt, peel back the top layer of fish, and remove to a plate. Grab the tail and pull toward the head--the tail, skeleton and head will all come off at once. Drop that into the trash can. This is what it looks like after that:

Then remove the bottom layer of fish to a plate.

There. Done. Juicy, fresh, whole fish with a minimum of effort. Squeeze more lemon juice over, and enjoy.

How to clean and gut whole fish

(Note: this is not about how to fillet fish. I still haven't figured that out yet.)

But it is a basic tutorial in how to clean and gut whole fish, for the purposes of cooking them whole. Which I prefer anyway, because when you cook whole fish, you can remove almost the entire skeletal system in one fell swoop. Bones separate from cooked flesh much easier than raw flesh.

Anyway, so when you get a bunch of big beautiful redfish in your fish CSA like I did (above), here's what to do with them:

1. Wash the fish.

2. It's up to you whether you want to scale it (remove the scales)--I haven't been.

3. Using your super-awesome heavy-duty Shun kitchen scissors, snip off all the fins.

4. Cut the fish open along the belly, from the tail to just under the head.

5. Scoop out all the guts. You may want to wear gloves for this part. Sometimes things are more firmly attached than you would like, and you may have to snip out bits with your scissors.

6. Make sure to also get the parts that attach to the mouth (the esophagus, or whatever that's called in fish).

7. Throw all that stuff away. Rinse out the inside of the fish.

8. Now the fish is ready for baking or roasting or whatever. But if you want to remove the head, you can do so now with the heavy-duty kitchen scissors--just start cutting it off right below the fins, all the way around.

If you do that, you'll end up with something that looks like this:

If you cut the tail off and skinned them (above), you could manage eight fillets out of that.

9. But I froze the bottom half of the fish like they were, and popped the heads in a stockpot full of water (and other frozen fish detritus, bones, heads, etc., leftover from the last fish CSA) and made fish stock from it all.

I'll be making some variety of seafood stew soon with all that stock.

Preserved Meyer lemons

Preserved lemons (the regular kind) are used in Moroccan and Middle Eastern cooking quite a bit. They're salty and tangy all at once, and since I had both a box of Meyer lemons and some canning jars, I decided to make my own. These babies will be delish with some Israeli couscous and butternut squash and maybe some dried cherries.

You can use regular lemons for this, as well (preferably organic/unwaxed). Either way, scrub them good to clean the outsides, and sterilize the jar by boiling it for 15 minutes. You'll need around 6 lemons to each quart jar.

Once the lemons are cleaned, slice the end off, and cut an X into each lemon, stopping about 2/3 of the way down. You don't want to cut it all the way into quarters. Put a couple tablespoons of kosher salt in the bottom of the jar. Get a good tablespoon of salt inside each lemon, rubbing it in thoroughly, as well as a little on the outside. Squish each lemon into the jar. Keep squishing. The jar should be filled with juice when you're done cramming all the lemons in. If not, add a little more juice to the top. Add a couple more tablespoons of salt to the top, and seal the jar.

Leave at room temperature for 2-3 days, flipping the jar upside down each day to redistribute the juice and salt. Then put it in the fridge and continue the flipping process, every other day.

The lemons will be ready in about three weeks. Wash off the excess salt when using (you'll use the peel and everything, which is why it's important to get unwaxed lemons if at all possible). They'll keep in the fridge for six months or so.

I just jarred this batch yesterday, so I'll report back in a month to let you know how they turned out!

Meyer lemon whiskey sour

It's Meyer lemon week here at Broke Foodie!

Well, not quite, but I found a box of Meyer lemons at Costco the other day, and I'm in foodie heaven right now as I explore all the many things I can do with Meyer lemons. For those who don't know, Meyer lemons are kinda like a cross between a lemon and an orange, with a little bit of honey and thyme thrown in.

Aren't they pretty? They smell divine, too.

Step one: explore the cocktail possibilities.

I made a whiskey sour with good bourbon, Cointreau, and the juice of one of these beauties. The proportions are about two parts bourbon to one part each Cointreau and lemon juice, but that's highly variable, depending on how sour/sweet you like your cocktails. Play with it until it tastes right to you. Add a cherry (I used dried cherries). You could also substitute simple syrup for the Cointreau.