Tomato sauce recipe:

Take a good 8-10 good sized tomatoes. Blanch quickly in boiling salted water to make the skins easy to peel off. Squeeze the tomatoes to get rid of a good amount of juice and seeds, then place into hot pot already seasoned with olive oil. Break up the tomatoes with a potato masher.

In another pot, 1 cup of olive oil, some crushed red pepper, and about 10 cloves of garlic, and a lot of fresh basil – heat up over very low heat. You’re making infused olive oil here.

After about 30 minutes of the tomatoes reducing, strain the olive oil infusion into the sauce, keep stirring and keep on simmer. If the tomato sauce becomes dry, strain some of the juice from the earlier squeezing into the pot.

Cook off about 3 ounces of pasta per person in heavily salted water. In a heavy bottomed saute pan, first grill sausages, then after slicing the sausage, add the tomato mixture in, then the dripping wet pasta. Include a couple of tablespoons of the starchy pasta water. Mix. Combine. Serve with fresh basil and fresh Parmesan.

So I made some. For the recipe see their website. I stole it from them anyways. I don’t have any profound insights, but it tastes really good on some homemade bicuits (not pictured here)

I’ve cooked a lot of Italian and Chinese and some Spanish food before, but never had I cooked Thai, despite the fact that I own a Thai cookbook.

So when I had a friend come over for dinner last Sunday, I decided to avail myself of the pretty good selection of Thai sauces and ingredients (including the Thai holy trinity of galangal, keffir lime leaf and lemongrass). Unfortunately, I got into cooking so much, I didn’t take photos of my other two dishes that I made. But my menu was this:

Thai Roast Duck Salad with Mango dressing
Pad Thai (yeah, I know it it’s a cliche dish, but it is both tasty and easily made)
Yellow Curry Chicken
(unserved because we were too full) Sticky Rice with Bananas Poached in Coconut Cream

here’s the duck being prepared. (or pre-butchering) – my recipe was really to marinate it with dark soy sauce and stuff it with a mixture of lemongrass, galangal (thai ginger), sesame oil, dark soy and hoisin and roast at 190C for 10 minutes, then turn the heat down to 150C for an hour.

I’m not big on trumpeting my own accomplishments, but it was pretty delicious. In fact, I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever made. Here’s the duck before we chopped it up and ate it.

I also made Yellow Curry Chicken – I’m beginning to think that curry, much like soups, chilis and stews, tastes better the second or third day. This was ok when we ate it – but it was excellent the next morning when paired with pita bread at work. The recipe is fairly simple because – shockingly – I did not prepare my own curry paste, but instead bought pre-made. Some mixing with coconut milk, some Thai chilis, chicken and potatoes over a hot stove and you get this:

And then as served:

All three of these cookbooks talk about roasting a chicken – further to that, Bourdain maintains that if you cannot roast a chicken, you really shouldn’t call yourself a cook. Well, I’d never roasted a chicken before, but at my local Lianhua, whole chickens are only about 20 rmb, so I bought one and grabbed my Keller and Bourdain.

While both of them highlight roast chicken, they completely disagree on the methods. Keller views crispy skin as the most important part of a roast chicken and emphasizes that you should keep your chicken absolutely dry – no brine, no butter – just put it in the oven. I like my chicken meat with a little bit of moistness, so I opted to use a combination of Oliver and Bourdain’s recipes – and came out with this

Even without trussing and a butchering mishap (as you can see, I lost the lower part of the drumsticks chopping off the chicken feet) – I was able to turn out a tasty and reasonably moist chicken from my tiny counter top oven the very first time. With the heating elements so close to the tray, I need to be careful as the chicken caramelizes so very fast, so next time I’ll cover loosely with aluminum foil to keep from crisping so fast.

but the main inspiration was to go to the somewhat-local lianhua supermarket and buy my duck legs. my local lianhua is terrible and cityshop is expensive AND doesn’t carry poultry beyond chicken. but at the larger, somewhat more foreigner friendly one down the road – lots of poultry to be had.

following on a combination of the beijing hao chi recipe linked above and the recipe culled from anthony bourdain’s les halles cookbook that i won’t bother replicating here – but let’s just say it involved duck, various types of citrus, some leftover red wine from the last time galbraith was here to watch “fargo”, various herbs and some oven time.

photos after the jump

here’s the duck legs post pan-searing

here’s the sauce preparation. red wine. orange slices. rosemary. shiitake mushrooms.

in the oven

and here served with homemade parmesan mushroom risotto.

here’s the best part – duck legs at lianhua? 7.5 rmb for two!

this would be my first time making this dish – and as my cousin has found out, it’s not quite as easy as stirring some stuff together.

here’s my mise-en-place consisting of grahem crackers, kraft philadelphia cream cheese, knox gelatin, jell-o brand lime gelatin dessert, vanilla, sugar and butter.

here’s my graham cracker crust – i still don’t think i’m doing this right. i think i need to crush the crackers more.

using the hand mixer. here this is 1 packet of knox gelatin, half a cup of sugar, 1 cup boiling water and 16 ounces of kraft philadelpha cream cheese.

here is the cheesecake mix poured into the graham cracker crust. the whole thing then goes into the fridge to set.

in the meantime, i start whipping up some lime jell-o. accept no substitutes! here in shanghai there’s all these euro-gelatins with german written on the package – but only the pure processed goodness of the kraft foods company will do for this cheesecake, yessir!

the making of lime jell-o consists of 1 cup boiling water, 1 box jell-o mix and 3/4 cup of cold water

ok, confession time. the first time i tried this i didn’t wait long enough for the cheesecake to set and i ended up with a slimey, cheesecake lake mess – it still tasted great, but it looked horrible. this below is my second attempt – and i STILL messed it up a little, hence the lake of cheesecake floating in the middle of my jell-o.

but the end result is pretty dang good, if i don’t say so myself. cooking with pre-packaged foods. yum yum yum.

UPDATE: i took the cheesecake to work – and even with 50% of the office gone for business travel or chinese new year it disappeared in a matter of 2-3 hour .. . some people even went back for seconds. it was right tasty. i’ll figure out how to keep the cheesecake lake from appearing next time.

this is a super tasty roasted thyme chicken dish with hollandaise sauce (yes! i even held the egg yolk over a double boiler and kept it at temperature!)

i really need to learn how to make a dish presentable.

after watching battle cheese, i figured homemade ravioli would be an easy choice – especially since the “making your own wrappers” can be short-cut-ed by using pre-made jiaozi wrappers. (i’ve made my own pasta before – it is a LOT of work and very time consuming. buying a pack of wrappers is a huge time saver)

i didn’t have a solid idea of what i wanted to use for the filling, but walking around city shop, i chose lardon (french streaky bacon), ricotta cheese and peas.

i was going to roast my own chicken, but the city shop in the basement of times square was selling fresh whole chickens for over 70 rmb per, while selling whole already roasted rotisserie chickens for 30rmb. i figured discretion was the better part of valor – obviously buying fresh meat in china, one would do a lot better to go to the local wet market, but i was pressed for time and will leave that for next time.

to start the meal off, i made a simple salad with rosemary roasted tomatoes topped with warmed goat cheese and a honey balsamic chili vinaigrette dressing.

i served the ravioli with a thyme brown butter sauce (don’t look up how it’s made. it will scare your cardiologist), topped with creme freche and lemon zest (i bought a new microplane when i was home. i want to go around zesting every citrus fruit i see now)

the verdict? well, the jiaozi wrappers worked pretty well. i would’ve added another dish – it really didn’t turn into a substantial dinner. it did, however, engender the most conversation on my facebook feed for a while.