The Perennial Plate

Chopped Roti (Kothu Roti) was one of our favorite dishes in Sri Lanka. Its a stir fry of day old roti, and its delicious. Usually served with fish or chicken curry, we made it with Dal (for Mirra).

Homemade tofu is a million times better than anything you can buy at the supermarket. Try it out, its easy, and delicious.

One of our favorite stops on our trip around Japan was to a restaurant where the owner grew his own wheat to make udon. So, for my first recipe from the road, I wanted to do a non traditional take on the dish. I don’t make it exactly like they do in Japan (since we aren’t using actual udon flour, which is very high in gluton). And on top of the noodles being non traditional — so is the sauce. Udon is served cold in the summer and hot in the winter. Usually it is served with dashi, mirin and soy sauce. Udon noodles are actually quite difficult to make. The man we visited had been perfecting his craft for 45 years. I have only been working on my technique for a few weeks. I knew I couldn’t perfectly replicate Udon, so I decided make it my own. So here is a Japanese twist on an American Classic: Udon Miso n’ Cheese. I think it turned out pretty good.

One of our favorite dishes in India (with a Minnesota twist) is also one of the freshest. This dish can be made with all prepared goods, or you can make it all from scratch… we recommend the latter. This is also the first recipe from our cooking video series with Tastemade.com Enjoy!

I did a dinner for Eat for Equity the other night. It was a three course vegetarian dinner and I made a salad based off of a salmon ceviche dish I made a while back. It uses a cool tapioca technique that I learned from the dinner we did at Governor in Brooklyn. Enjoy!

When we had our NYC event last year at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton said I had a “style” of cooking, appartently it involved lime juice and herbs. Its true, and maybe some fish sauce. That’s Vietnamese cooking I guess. Anyways, here’s another example of such a style, and of using what is available. I happened to have eggplant and cabbage… what do you make with that? Salad of course. Roasted eggplant is amazing at room temperature, tossed with some sort of dressing, it maintains its texture while soaking up the sauce. Also, just having a bunch of condiments at your house, makes it a lot easier to make a tasty dinner in a pinch. These are all Asian condiments, some of which contain corn syrup and msg, but they taste good.

I got invited to Alaska by the Copper River Salmon folks. It was amazing. Seriously, if you ever have the chance to go to Alaska, do it! Maybe the most beautiful place on earth. Anyways, their fishery is really impressive, and obviously the salmon is delicious. I came home with a box full of it. While we were up there, we had a dinner where everyone prepared a different salmon. I took the extra skin and made crackers out of it, and then made a tartare/ceviche. It was good. So, next time you find yourself with a bunch of salmon skin, make these chips. So good!

Mirra really loves white foods. In fact, for a vegetarian, she’s shockingly against anything green. So last night, when I asked her what she wanted for dinner, she said mashed potatoes (no surprise there). But you can’t just have mashed potatoes for dinner (she would say otherwise).The simple salad that I came up with, turned out really well, so I thought I’d write it up for y’all. There’s no mashed potato recipe here, you know how to make them. Boil potatoes, mash, add whatever quantity of delicious/fattening products that suit your fancy. Yogurt is a cool alternative to cream FYI. Oh and as you can see, I used fancy potatoes, these were Red Marias (a gift from a friend’s overloaded CSA)

In an effort to share more recipes, I’m just going to try to take pictures of what I eat at home, and share it with you guys. So this was lunch, I happened to have received some lovely lobster mushrooms from my friend Austin – and they are a lovely orange color. I also had peaches. So I went with an orange theme. It was all beginning to sound very Noma-esque, so I threw some flowers in there too. Try it out, or just enjoy the pretty picture.

This is something I made for lunch the other day, that combined miso and corn. Because I took a pretty picture of it, and it was delicious, I thought I would share

Its the week of thanksgiving, a time of year when the only food related stuff people want to hear about is turkey and stuffing. So here are a few takes on thanksgiving ingredients. Enjoy.

Beets are popular these days and I think its because we’ve figured out how to cook them. They used to be just boiled or pickled and that created a legion of beet haters (my girlfriend included). But when you roast them with a little added flavor, their sweetness comes out in a more savory way. The one drawback is that they take some time to cook. So when you are thinking about dinner and beets are included, make sure to get them going right away. Here is a recipe for roasted beets paired with duck hearts. At The Publican last month, this was the garnish for a sardine, but I think it makes for a great appetizer.

The Geoduck! what a clam. really easy to cook, not easy to dig, this is the recipe from our Facebook and coastal adventures on the West Coast.

This dish is about as easy and summer-like as it gets. Samin and I made this dish as a vegetarian option at the dinner we did at Tartine Bakery last month. Despite its simplicity, it’s as good as anything.

The carrots at the farmers market are beautiful with their bright green tops. Those often discarded tops happen to be quite nutritious, but not lauded by many as extremely tasty. I’ve been messing around with them lately. I made a great sauce the other day where I blanched them and then pureed them with a little yogurt. But at the dinner we did last week at Tartine I made a pesto with the carrot tops to garnish a slice of hard boiled egg – a simple and elegant appetizer if you ask me. Here’s the recipe – pretty similar to most pesto recipes, except less green and more of everything else.