Cooking with Oat Meal & Wine Cork

One of my favorite restaurants in NY is Babbo. The food & service is always consistently good & has, in my opinion, one of the best sommeliers in town. Their signature dish, beef cheek ravioli is to die for.

The company I had worked for used to organise forums for their staff inviting celebrities & guests speakers. On one occasion, it was Mario Batali. He came across as being personable and I was fortunate enough to meet him, chatted a little & even got a signed copy of his cookbook, simply titled Babbo.

I've had the cookbook a while now but never had a chance to try any of the recipes although out of nostalgia, I would flip to the page for beef cheek ravioli & just ravished at the sight of that dish. For FND this week, I wanted to cook 2 dishes from there & since I'm tired of duck or any sort of meat, it's going to be all seafood.

So what has that got to do with oat meal & wine cork, you ask. Well I will be using cockles & the internet says that I need to scrub them thoroughly then place them in salted water with a little oat meal for half an hour - they will feed on the oatmeal & excrete any dirt & sand. So I obediently fed my cockles oat meal.

Next on the menu is baby octopus. I didn't manage to find any so I bought 2 medium octopuses instead. Mario says I need to boil them for an hour with red wine vinegar & a wine cork. Apparently there is some chemical reaction from the wine cork that will make the octopus tender. So I boiled my octupuses with wine cork.

The starter is Steamed Shrimp & Cockles in a green chilli-basil brodetto. The verdict is unananimous. We both loved it & gulped down whatever broth there was. The original recipe calls for Mahogany clams but I used cockles instead.

Next linguine with baby octopus, green chillis & mint. The photo doesn't do it justice. I'm still having difficulty photographing food at nights. The sauce is delicious. X didn't like the mint in the sauce but I loved it. I, on the other hand, wasn't too keen on the octopus. I think I'm going to hunt me down some baby octopuses to do this again.

For dessert, home made strawberry swirl ice cream.

Steamed Shrimp and Mahogany Clams in a green chili-basil brodetto
taken from Babbo
serves 4

9 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 green chili, seeded & finely chopped
20 mahogany clams or cockles
12 shrimps, peeled & deveined (keeping the head & tail)
1 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup finely chopped parsley
10 basil leaves, finely shredded

To prepare the cockles : Scrub them thoroughly to remove any grit. Then leave them in a sink / pail of salted water with a handful of oatmeal for at least half an hour.

1. Heat 3 tbsp of olive oil until almost smoking. Add garlic & saute over high heat until lightly browned, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the green chillis, clams, shrimp & white wine & cover. Lower the heat to medium & cook for 3 mins. The clams should open & the shrimps should be pink. Discard any unopened clams.

2. Add the parsley, toss gently over low heat for 1 minute, and remove from the heat. Add he remaining 6 tbsp of olive oil & stir through. Divide evenly among 4 warmed dinner bowls, sprinkle with the basil & serve immediately.

Note : Although you can't see from the picture, I'd kept the prawn heads intact. It gives more flavor to the broth. Just remove the shell & devein keeping the head & tail.


Linguine with Baby Octopus, Green Chili & Mint
taken from Babbo
serves 4

1 kg baby octopus
3 Tbsp red wine vinegar
1 wine cork
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1/4 cup Jalapeno pesto (green chilli pesto)
1 cup basic tomato sauce (I used home made tomato coulis)
linguine
12 fresh mint leaves
black pepper, to taste

1. In a medium saucepan, combine the baby octopuses, vinegar, cork & water to cover. Bring to a boil & cook uncovered for 15 mins. Drain & allow to cool (If using one large octopus, cook it whole for up to an hour or until it's tender & then cut into pieces before tossing into the pan).

2. Boil a pot of salted water

3. Heat the olive oil over high heat until hot but not smoking. Add the garlic cloves & cook until light golden brown, about 3 mins. Add the jalapeno pesto, tomato sauce & octopuses and cook over high heat for 5 mins.

4. Meanwhile cook the linguine in the boiling water as per instructions al dente. Drain the pasta and add to the panwith the sauce. Add the mint leaves and toss over high heat for 1 minutes, season with salt & pepper and serve immediately.

Jalapeno pesto
makes 1 cup
I really like this. This can be kept up to 1 week, refrigerated, in an airtight container.

6 jalapeno peppers (green chillis) stems removed, seeds intact
1/4 cup blanched and sliced almonds
1/2 red onion, diced
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Combine the peppers, almonds & onion in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until pureed, then slowly drizzle in the oil until emulsified.

Cooking with Children

Don't know about you but I really enjoy cooking with the Girl. Whenever I'm cooking or baking, she would pull up her little chair to stand next to the countertop to see what's going on.

If possible, I'll assign little tasks for her to do like arranging the sliced potatoes when I make gratin dauphinois or soak the spring roll skins in water. She's quite the little helper - even knows how to remove garlic skins.

But she has the most fun when I'm baking - whisking & mixing, cutting the cookies into various shapes, decorating the cookies or sometimes just playing with a small piece of dough. Of course, she will make a mess - esp when fluor is involved but she really enjoys it so I just let her be.

So I'm thinking that this mini baking set from sur la table would be perfect. Should I wait for her birthday to get this for her ?

And while writing this post, I also came across these felt fruits from umecrafts @ etsy. How cute are they !

Breast milk cheese

Believe it or not. Apparently there is a farm in France that specialises in cheese made from human breast milk. Well I've certainly not heard of them & I'm going to ask around if anybody else has. But they have a website (it's all in French tho') & you can even order online.

Then I came across this post at Indirani (an Indonesian couple living in Singapore) wherein the wife Rani tried making cheese from her own left over breast milk & concluded that it can't be done because breast milk doesn't curdle due to the low protein content.

So I'm really curious as to the validity of this farm in France. Is it a hoax ? If it really exists, what I'd like to know is where they get such massive quantities of breast milk & how they select their candidates. I'm all for breastfeeding & the benefits of breast milk (I did breastfeed the Girl till she was 20 months) but I'm not sure I will eat cheese from breastmilk. Would you ?

A horse handler in the making

Remember the horse show we went to last weekend.

Well it inspired the following.

Her idea of how it should be done on her wooden rocking horse.

The Great Tortilla Conspiracy

The People's Gallery
Originally uploaded by El Rio

Jos Sances, father & son Rene & Rio Yanez are the artists behind The Great Tortilla Conspiracy. It uses tortilla as a canvas & as a medium to raise awareness on issues. They also invite the public to draw or submit an image to be hot pressed into a tortilla.

What a cool concept. You never knew you could have so much fun with food, did you ? Go here to check out more of the images.

What to do with left over duck ? Part 2

Even after I made the Thai Red Duck Curry, I still had a lot of duck left.

So I decided to serve it with noodles. I cut up the magret de canard into slices & fried them a little cos they were still pink on the inside (which is how we like the magret done but definitely not for noodles). Then I just shredded them, cook some egg noodles & serve it with stir fried vegetables.

As you can see from the picture, there's a bottle of Guilin Chilli Sauce next to the noodles. I put this on all my Chinese noodles - dry or soup. It reminds me of the noodle stalls in HK - the white tiles, the round tables & stools, the small barrels of chopsticks in the centre of the tables & the containers of Guilin chilli sauce.

The Girl, being my child, likes it too. She polished off all her noodles & duck with of course, a little bit of the chilli sauce.

What to do with left over duck ? Part 1

After our lunch yesterday, I realised that we have 2 and a half fillets of magret de canard left. Not that nobody ate theirs, in fact everybody finished their food, but rather X prepared too much. He is a chef, he should know better.

So now I'm left with a lot duck & wondering what to do with them. Then a light bulb moment came when I remembered reading Lotus' post on Thai red curry with magret de canard sometime back. (Eunice, I know, I'm cooking Thai again)

What a great way to use up the left over duck !......and vegetables. I just used whatever I had in the fridge. I also added several pieces of pineapple (you know how much I love having them in food now) & it really goes well with the curry.

Thai Red Duck Curry

Roast Duck, sliced
4 Tbsp red curry paste
1 can coconut milk
choice of vegetables, diced (I used tomatoes, bamboo shoots, aubergines & green beans)
7-8 bite size pieces of pineapple
fish sauce
sugar


1. Fry the red curry paste in a little bit of oil until the flavours are released. Then add 1/4 can of coconut milk. Stirring to dissolve the curry paste.

2. Then add the vegetables & the rest of the coconut milk. Bring to a boil & then simmer until the vegetables are soft. Add fish sauce & sugar to taste.

3. Add roast duck & pineapple at the end.