Lemongrass Sausage in lettuce cups

I am always looking for an easy dinner that I can throw together quickly (I mean really...who isn't) and took a pic of this one out of my friend's famous monthly cooking magazine. 

This recipe is a fantastic two-fer, because although I think it was intended to be an appetizer (which I have yet to do), I have made it for dinner several times. As an appetizer, I can guarantee that you will be the toast of the party if you bring these babies as your hors d' to share. 

Often big chain supermarkets (and of course, Asian grocery stores) carry stalks of fresh lemongrass, which is essential this dish. I use about three stalks stripped to the soft inner core to equal 1/2 cup. 

I usually double the recipe and freeze the patties, then tightly wrap in plastic wrap and store in a zip-top bag for an even quicker lunch or dinner. Just thaw for 20 minutes and proceed with cooking.

LEMONGRASS SAUSAGE LETTUCE CUPS

1/3 cup coarsely chopped scallions


1/4 cup finely chopped fresh lemongrass

1 tablespoon kosher salt

1 teaspoon granulated sugar (I use agave liquid, either is fine)

1 teaspoon lime zest

2 medium garlic cloves, crushed

2 tsp fresh ginger, grated  (optional, but delicious)

1/2 pound ground pork

1/2 pound ground chicken thighs

1 tablespoon neutral oil

12 butter lettuce leaves (from 1 head)

1 cup matchstick-cut carrots

Fresh mint and cilantro leaves

Nuoc Cham (Vietnamese fish sauce) 

Toss together scallions, lemongrass, ginger, salt, sugar/agave, lime zest, and garlic in a bowl. Mix in ground pork and chicken

Shape ground pork mixture into 12 (2-inch) patties. Heat oil in a large skillet over medium. Working in batches, cook patties until well browned and no longer pink in center, about 3 minutes per side. Remove from skillet; let rest 5 minutes.

Stack 2 lettuce leaves to form a cup; repeat with remaining leaves. Place 2 patties in each lettuce cup with matchstick carrots, mint, cilantro, and nuoc cham.

Ground Chicken/Turkey Thai Larb Salad

I really should have posted this recipe years ago, because I make it often and often lose the recipe. 

Right now, it's living on my phone as a blurry photo, and so I decided to type it out and post it for-real so that I could find it in a hurry. 

We are fans of anything you can put on a salad and call dinner, and this is a good one. Served with steamed rice, quick-pickled onions, lettuce and a handful of chopped herbs, and you have a 30-minute dinner, and makes perfect leftovers for a salad lunch tomorrow. 

CHICKEN/TURKEY THAI LARB SALAD

1 lb of ground chicken or turkey - I usually double this recipe for leftovers!

1/2 red onion, sliced for pickled onion

4 cloves minced garlic

3 sliced green onions/scallions

some fresh jalapeño slices of you like a kick

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp Vietnamese fish sauce

Lettuce of your choice: butter, red leaf, romaine, spinach, whatever

Chopped/torn herbs, to taste: cilantro, basil, and mint

Dressing

2 tbsp fresh lime juice

2 tablespoons Vietnamese fish sauce

1 tbsp sugar/agave syrup

1 tbsp water

shake of red chili flakes 

Chopped roasted peanuts or sliced almonds for garnish

If you like pickled onions: thinly slice half a red onion and place in a small bowl with a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, a shake of sugar and two pinches of salt. Let it rest in the fridge until you're ready to eat. 

Next, steam some white rice. Or be lazy like me and open a bag of TJ's frozen brown rice and empty it into a covered dish, microwave 3 minutes.

Heat some vegetable oil in a skillet over medium heat until shimmering. 

Add ground turkey/chicken, minced garlic cloves, three thinly sliced scallions (whites and greens), and a couple of slices of jalapeño. 

Season with a black pepper and cook until chicken is cooked through and browned. 

Stir in soy sauce, fish sauce, a small spoonful of sambal oelek or  sriracha, cooking until the liquid is almost completely reduced.

Toss dressing over warm meat and serve with rice, Bibb or butter lettuce leaves, lime wedges, quick-pickled onions, more hot sauce if desired, and chopped/torn herbs.

Basil Chicken, Thai style

I am always trying to replicate—or make better—dishes that I eat at restaurants, especially dishes that seem so simple it's more work to put on shoes and go out to eat them. 

I also hate eating out, because I hate to wait (an hour +) to be seated, hate to be rushed by the waitstaff (and anxious wait-ers, sending side-eye to your table with silent thoughts of GTFO), and wanting  desperately to drink my own wine with my meal, and not some crappy 2-buck sauv blanc. 

SO, this tastes just like the take-out version, is super easy to make, and pairs nicely with your slightly better than crappy sauv blanc. 

One last note: Dishes like these are only "good" if they taste like YOU want them to taste. 

I mean, the taste that you are used to from your favorite take-out place. So if it doesn't taste good to you, by all means, experiment with the fish sauce, soy, sauce, oyster sauce, etc. until it matches your favorite take-out place. Then, you know you have a successful dish in front of you! PS write down your personal proportions so you can replicate it. 

BASIL CHICKEN, THAI STYLE

2 cups minced chicken breast

1/2 cup roasted cashew nuts

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1/4 cup white onion

1 cup Thai basil (if unavailable, use normal basil)

3 tablespoons oil 

11/2 tablespoon fish sauce

11/2 tablespoon oyster sauce

2 tablespoons soy sauce (I use low sodium)

1 teaspoon sugar (I use agave syrup, sold at Trader Joe's in baking section)

1 splash water (optional)

Mix the soy sauce in a cup with the agave, and stir to dissolve.

Heat a wok or frying pan on medium to high flame for 20 seconds. Add 3 tablespoons oil and swirl the wok/frying pan so that the oil is evenly distributed.

Add minced garlic and fry for 10 seconds. Quickly add minced chicken and continue frying until chicken turns white.

Pour the sauces into the chicken and mix well. Add the basil and fry for another 30 seconds. If the chicken looks dry, add a splash of water. Throw in the cashew nuts and turn the flame off. Stir the cashew nuts into the chicken.

This dish goes well with rice, over cooked soba noodles or on top of a salad of lettuce and mixed herbs like cilantro, basil and mint. 

(celebrating annual) Hot Crab Dip (Day)

I'm done searching my computer for this damn recipe - I only make it once a year, on Super Bowl Sunday, with any leftover crab I froze from our Annual Christmas Eve Crab-fest. We are fortunate that Dungeness crab season runs November to March in our area, so I'm not sure why I only make this once a year?* (see next paragraph) I think it would make a great crab enchilada filling with a green chile sauce. 

*Don't be frightened by the recipe - this is dip is ridiculously rich, so make sure you are prepared for the fat-bomb that follows. 
Boom.

HOT CRAB DIP

This recipe can be scaled to make an infinite amount, which is good news because that's how much you will want to eat.  

4 ounces cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup Hellmann's® or Best Foods® Real Mayonnaise

1/4 cup finely chopped onion

1 tbsp. lemon juice

1/2 tsp. hot pepper sauce, I prefer Frank's

1/2 tsp. seafood seasoning or seasoned salt

6 ounces fresh lump crab, drained

Preheat oven to 350°.

In medium bowl, combine all ingredients except crab and beat with a stand mixer or by hand until smooth. Gently stir in crab., and sprinkle with some homemade Emeril's seasoning (you can Google that). Spread gently into a greased shallow baking dish. I like a thin layer of dip so there is lots of crusty top for everyone. 

Bake 30 minutes or until heated through and bubbly, and hopefully a little toasty on top. 

Serve with your favorite dippers. Ours include regular flavor Doritos. 

Crumb topping (a gift to you)

Been invited to a birthday party this weekend and the invite says "no gifts."

I am a bit relieved just because we all have so much stuff, it's hard to come up with a little something special that most can't acquire themselves - so I've taken to bringing a breakfast baked-good from my baking-company days as a thank you/hostess /birthday/whatever gift. 

Nothing says I care about you like breakfast the next day after I've drunk all your wine and danced on your kitchen island, am I right??

Here's a crumb topping recipe that I keep in a zip-top bag in the freezer for all sorts of occasions. I use it to top unbaked cranberry or raspberry coffee cakes, any sort of fruit pie, and today, on a fool-proof, insanely easy apple bread recipe that I (think I?) I cut out of the WSJ food section last year about this time...?

Make a bag and then know you have a secret gift in your freezer at all times. 

Cinnamon Crumb Topping (photo on my Instagram - too lazy to link right now)

1 1/2 sticks unsalted (or salted) butter - room temp to slightly soft

1 1/2 cups flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar
1/4 tsp salt (omit if you only had salted butter)
1/2 tsp cinnamon
few shakes of ground nutmeg

Mix the dry ingredients in a medium to large bowl (I use large because I am, after all, a hot mess). 

With your hands, rub the soft butter into the dry ingredients until fully incorporated and you have a range of clump sizes, a little powder all the way up to biggish clumps. 

For optimum clump size, freeze it all on a metal tray for about 20 minutes, then move to zip top bag; or just put topping straight into the bag and into the freeze, relatively flat so your clumps don't turn into one giant frozen clump. That's a bummer, you have to wait for it to defrost a bit before showering your baked-good with crumby goodness before it goes into the oven. 

Whatever you top, bake generally as instructed. 

And the recipient will thank you. 

Easy Chicken (Coconut) Curry

I recently read a book about minimizing the chances of Alzheimer's and dementia through diet that threw alot of data at me. Great, fine, I love data and I am sure no one wants brain deterioration, but I don't know how many people are willing to make (extreme) dietary changes (ie sacrifices) at present? 

Something certainly NOT a sacrifice is eating curry. One of the chapters mentions Turmeric as a spice in the curry blend (the yellow one) that (according to DATA) can help ward off brain disease. Well that's easy, I love curry! 

Here is a recipe that I found on a very random curry powder jar years and years ago. We liked the recipe so I have kept that darn empty curry jar in my spice cabinet for nearly 20 years, just so I wouldn't lose the recipe. Now I will finally write it down. 

I started out making it according to the jar directions, using whipping cream, but now that I have learned about the super healing power of coconut (as told to me in the book and also backed by DATA) I've been doing it with coconut cream. (Thanks to TJ's!) 

Canned coconut cream is alot thicker and richer than the canned coconut milk I had been using for curries. Trying to recreate Thai curries at home just never worked because they were too runny and not rich like restaurant versions. Well I think the key is using coconut cream. But NOT the sweetened Cream of Coconut in the mixer section of the grocery store. Save that for your Piña Coladas! 

Easy Chicken (Coconut) Curry 
serves 2-4 depending on how much your people eat

1 1/2 tbsp olive oil (I use coconut oil because it's so healing!)
1 small yellow onion, chopped or sliced thin, depending on how much onion you want present in your finished dish (chopped will disappear more)
2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 cup plain greek yogurt (full fat if you want to be super brain-healthy) **OPTIONAL for coconut version
1 cup heavy cream --OR-- 1 - 14 oz can of coconut cream
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
(I use more because I like my curry with heavy salt & pepper)
2 chicken breasts (organic and pastured, of course) sliced really thin into bite size pieces
Cilantro for garnish

Steamed rice to serve

In a medium/large saucepan, heat the olive or coconut oil over medium/low heat and cook onions until soft, trying not to brown them, about 5-8 minutes. I am lame and usually somehow let them brown, it's not a crisis. ADjust the heat to medium and add the curry powder. Stir so it doesn't burn. 

Add the chicken and cook in batches, if necessary, until it just turns white, not really cooked through. Add the whipping cream or coconut cream and yogurt, and simmer 3-5 minutes until chicken is just cooked through but still tender. Season with the salt and pepper to taste. 

Serve over rice with a side of sautéed or roasted vegetables, kale, whatever you like!

I call this my dinner-party curry because you can make a vat of it and it's a crowd pleaser. Plus, now it know it's good for us. 

Doesn't your brain feel younger already?

Quick/easy Steak Marinade

I am sure (well, I hope) everyone has some hand-me-down trashy comfort food recipes from their childhoods that they bust out now and then - mine is my Mom's Beef Stroganoff with a base of Campbell's Tomato Soup. Maybe I will post it sometime, if you promise not to judge. It's pretty tasty. 

My friend's secret is the package of Lawry's powdered meat marinade. Who knows what evil lurks in that little envelope, but toss some grass-fed rib eye steaks in it and in 20 minutes you have some tasty meat to grill. 

Panic ensued last night when I checked the pantry for a magic little envelope and I was all out - friends were coming in an hour and I didn't have time to get to a store that actually carries it (ie trashy grocery, not Whole Foods) so I tracked this marinade down. Easy because all the ingredients are pantry items, and quick because you just toss it all in the blender.

Delicious – and bet a lot healthier than the packet of Lawry’s marinade, with just a little more work!

Quick/easy Steak Marinade

1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup soy sauce
4 scallions, washed and rough chopped
2 large cloves garlic
1/4 cup lime juice
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
3 tablespoons honey or brown sugar
2 pounds inside skirt steak, cut into 3-4 equal pieces - I am sure you can use any cut you like tho

In a blender, put in oil, soy sauce, scallions, garlic, lime juice, red pepper, cumin, and sugar and puree. 

In a large heavy duty, zip top bag, put pieces of skirt steak and pour in marinade. Seal bag, removing as much air as possible. Allow steak to marinate for 1-1.5 hours in refrigerator.

Remove steak from bag and grill until done. Don't overcook! When finished cooking, cover with foil and allow to rest for 15 minutes.

Remove meat from foil, reserving foil and juices. Slice thinly across the grain of the meat. Return to foil pouch and toss with juice.