chickpeas in pitta bread

Another photo-less post. Ach well. I couldn't be bothered to get all the gear together to shoot a mere chickpea sandwich. (Gear consisting of 1. a small camera, and 2. the light switch.)

So, again, take my word for it: [image]ugly and poorly lit[/image].

Rinsed out some dried chickpeas on Sunday night and left them to soak overnight in the fridge. Boiled said soaked chickpeas for an hour on Monday night after getting home 2 hours after dinnertime (P's fault this time, not mine... yay! oh, at work late. not yay. boo...). Drained off all the liquid before I realised that I normally save two ladles-worth in a bowl. Duh. Put that down to tiredness (or brainlessness). To save us from having to wash too many pans, used the same pan to saute some onions and a smidgen of garlic. Added some curry powder (again, lazy. otherwise would have heated some coriander and cumin seeds, and blitzed them with some ground turmeric and grated ginger) and dry fried for a couple of minutes until the whole place smelled nice. (Who needs Glade when you have curry?) Added some tomato paste (again, lazy. should have added some chopped plum tomatoes or something. Really. It makes a huge difference to taste and texture. But. Lazy.) and chickpeas. Should have added the reserved chickpea cooking liquid at this point, but brainless git here forgot to save some. So added some plain ol water instead. I tell you, it makes a difference. Simmered for another 30 minutes.

And finally, tonight, crisped up some frozen pitta bread and served it with warmed through spicy chickpeas. Not as good as previous versions of my spicy chickpeas. Think I'm losing my touch. Keep blaming the poky and not very well laid out kitchen, but suspect it's because I've lost the will to live cook. Can one get S.A.D. in LA even though the weather is a million times better than in Scotland right now? Or am I carrying some residual SADness from many Northern winters? All the same, the chickpeas were not the same, and that made me quite sad.

everlasting chicken

that chicken in milk and lemon? lasted three meals.

1. last night's dinner
2. this afternoon's lunch (avec ris)
3. tonight's tea (with leftover flat bread)

and that's even with us two being pigs and eating more than normal people would.

chicken in lemon and milk

No photos today. It's strange how on some days we're just trigger-happy, and on others the camera doesn't even come out of its case. So you'll just have to take my word for how good today's chicken in milk was. Originally a Jamie recipe, modified (i.e. made easy for lazy people) by us.

Brown your chicken in a deep pan. Drain off the excess fat. Cut a lemon in two give it a wee squeeze before throwing in the whole thing anyway. Pour in about a (British) pint of milk (that's just over 586ml in metric, but I usually just pour until I remember to stop, so I've never any idea just how much I've used). Throw in several cloves of garlic (we always start with three, but end up adding five or more. Needless to say, our breath honks after.) Stick in the oven at 190C for around 45 min. (There are rules of thumbs for gauging how long to cook a chicken by weight. If I'm being particular, I check them out and follow them. Otherwise, I guess. This was no spring chicken, but no gargantuan either, so 45 minutes seemed sufficient.) In the meantime, faff around and forget to prepare anything to go with the chicken. Remember at around the 45 minute mark, and grab some angel hair pasta from the store cupboard. Take the chicken out while the pasta is cooking. Let it rest. It's a bit exhausted from being in the heat, you know. Don't bin the curdled milk in the pan: reduce it! (um, technical term for boiling some of it away until it's a bit thicker) Shred some of the tender breast into the pasta or noodles, pour over the reduced curdled milky jus, tuck the napkin in and attack with a fork. If being posh, don't bother with all that and serve carved pieces of chicken with some mashed tatties and roasted veggies (yeah right, like we ever plan in advance and have everything in). Bitch about how significant other never takes photos of your cooking even though you've been slaving away over a hot TV watching Stargate. Blog about how crap you are at documenting your cooking.

Technorati tag: roast chicken.

teppanyaki

My parents used to take us out for teppanyaki for birthdays and special occasions, like the end of exams. So I felt the need to go out for teppanyaki today (well, yesterday by now...). I didn't particularly want to be wandering around Downtown LA in the wee hours, so we couldn't try the grill at the New Otani in Little Tokyo.

Instead, we headed for our local branch of Benihana in Santa Monica. Completely different atmosphere to the teppanyaki restaurants of my childhood. It's an open-concept space (or is that open-space concept; couldn't care less), which along with the high volume of customers and high turnover rate, takes some of the cosiness away from the experience. Sure, I could have looked for a more intimate dining experience. But I really wanted teppanyaki for my final hurrah and farewell to my youth. Plus, it was P's first foray into the world of teppanyaki dining, so somewhere he could feel comfortable was also important.

Because of the way they seated different groups at the same table, we didn't feel it would be right to take photos of the evening. Which was a real shame. Every teppanyaki chef has his/her own style and little gimmick. Our chef tonight had two little tricks I'd never seen before. First, he turned our fried rice into a beating heart, earning him delighted claps from the two of us (boy were we seated at a table of jaded or too-cool-to-smile Angelinos). Then he amused the kid in me by turning mere rings of onions into a smoking volcano. It's these little things that make teppanyaki so fun for me. Of course, the squid was perfectly tender, the prawns just so, the scallops tasty and the filet mignon just the right side of bloody. It may be a chain, but our chef for the evening was as good as any posh teppanyaki restaurant's.

And may I never grow so old that I cannot appreciate a bit of fun...

akatsuki eats, 2nd attempt

After a slow start and a lot of tinkering (with minimal thinking), I think it's about time to get this blog off the ground.

Since arriving in LA, I can't honestly say my food intake has been particularly healthy nor inspired. Perhaps keeping an online food diary will guilt me into making more of an effort.

2nd bbq in a week

It's Turkey Day in America. I'm no fan of turkey. It's a pointless meat unless you go the whole hog and prepare stuffing, roast veggies, roast potatoes, brussel sprouts with bacon and chestnut, chipolatas and all the other turkey trimmings you'd normally have for a British Christmas lunch. Over here, they do creative things with sweet potatoes and make weird concoctions with marshmallows.

We were lazy. And I like my BBQ grill (see last post). So we had a repeat of last Sunday's BBQ. This time, we were even lazier and bought marinated beef kebabs and marinated chicken kebabs. To make up for that laziness, I made some tzatziki. OK, I cheated even on that. Normally, the yoghurt has to be strained for several hours to thicken it. I strained whole fat yoghurt for 1 hour, grated a peeled cucumber and squeezed all the liquid out of it (again, you're supposed to let it strain for hours). Mixed the two together, and finely grated two cloves of garlic into the pseudo-tzatziki (sans dill cos I don't like dill... hey, that means it wasn't tzatziki at all, but merely cucumber and garlic in yoghurt). To pretend we care about being healthy, we stuck some peppers and sweet corn on the grill. And we finished off with some chestnuts leftover from the Halloween BBQ.

kebabs and flat bread

The Kosher Market near us on Santa Monica Blvd (intersection with Butler, I think...) has a very tempting grill outside the shop. And you can buy the marinated meat from the meat counter, although you'll get strange looks from the guys when you say you wanna cook it yourself. The beef kebabs were very gently spiced, and I have absolutely no idea what was in it, other than tender beef. As for the chicken kebabs, they were home-marinated bog-standard D-style teriyaki. Flat bread also from the market, slathered in butter and garlic. I like my BBQ grill.

Dragon roll

Cycled to Venice Beach today (have a magic route, as vouchsafed by our biking neighbours; may post it someday should we try it again). Couldn't decide what to have for lunch, so we had sushi! (This makes it something like 4 days in a row that we've had sushi: Thurs monkfish liver sushi with the boss, Fri inari sushi and spicy tuna roll for lunch; Sat chirashisushi in Westwood after a few yucky hours at work. You can tell we're liking this availability of sushi, can't you? Either that or we're just unimaginative.) Today's sushi came from Naked Sushi on Washington Blvd, which hooks up with Venice Beach pier. We initially ordered the spider roll, but they'd run out of ingredients (the crab, I guess) so we greedily asked for the dragon roll instead. There's nothing quite like unagi. And adding avocado to the mix just makes the kiddies in us so happy.

Of course, we only knew to ask for dragon roll after our last happy experience of it in Little Tokyo:

i [heart] angelato cafe

Angelato's, on the corner of Third Street Promenade and Arizona in Santa Monica, is possibly a gelato-lover's heaven. The range of flavours is astounding, the combination adventurous, and the portion size generous. P has been replaced in my affections, naturally.

Face of the day: chocolate mandarin (which P ordered for me; and weirdly enough, I'd had a two scoop combo comprising an orange sorbet and a chocolate on one of my previous visits before his arrival... doo-do-doo-do-twilight zone... or the man just knows me.)

mini corn muffins

There was a packet of corn muffin mix in the cupboard. I could not resist trying it out for brekkie. Never had a corn muffin before. And the packaging looked so quintessentially American (didn't take a photo, now wish I had). Made the muffins too small, had the oven too hot, so they turned out a little more like rock buns than the maker intended. Oh well. Next time will be better.

smash-it-yourself guacamole

In a lazy mood today. Had an avocado and lots of cherry tomatoes that needed to be used before the sure sudden descent into over-ripeness that always takes place when you look at them, say "oh that will last another day", and end up binning in guilt the next day. Hence the so-chunky-it's-not-guacamole above, and the old-standby-cherry-tom-pasta below.

meatballs

on top of plain rice
all covered with spice
i lost my poor meatball
when somebody sneezed

it rolled off the table
and into my mouth
and then my poor meatball
i saw it no more

mochi and tea

I like mochi. And now that P has had some real mochi, he loves mochi too. Yay!

We bought an assortment, some of which were completely new to me. I think my favourite was an inside-out mochi, which had a covering of smooth chestnut paste (a bit like marron glace paste, but paler in colour) with a small ball of mochi buried within. It was even shaped a bit like a chestnut. One to go back for...

Mochi from Mikawaya in Little Tokyo.

taiyaki

Finally ventured to Little Tokyo in Downtown LA. Was very happy to find that they have fresh taiyaki, only these aren't the regular fish shape. I lurved taiyaki as a kid, and was looking forward to biting through the crispy dough into piping hot red bean paste. This taiyaki didn't quite live up to my childhood memories, but perhaps those weren't authentic, being mainly bought in the basement supermarkets of Japanese department stores in S'pore. The dough was quite thick and chewy, which would have been fine if the outer skin was crispier. I liked the red bean paste though; it was just the right side of chunky for me.

reuben burger

Don't know why it's called a Reuben burger, but sauerkraut works well with burgers.

@ Jerry's Deli in Westwood, inbetween some late-night experiments.