Everybody Loves Ramen!

We've had some cold weather around these parts, and a freezer full of turkey meat and turkey stock. So to kill two birds with one stone and use up our turkey, and warm our bellies, we decided to try our hand at making our own ramen.  We transformed this American fall classic into a Japanese-influenced cold weather delight.

To our basic stock, we added some mirin, garlic, soy sauce, and some white pepper.  Since our stock was pretty thick, we also added some water to give it the right consistency.  Let it simmer and reduce to about half.  We also threw in some of the shredded turkey we had on hand.

Once your broth has reduced, throw in your noodles.

Once they started to soften, we added in our chopped baby bok choy and some sliced scallions.  We wanted to keep some crunch to the bok choy, so we added them at the end.  If you want them to soften more, you can add them earlier.

Once the noodles are al dente, you're ready to serve!  We topped our ramen with some strips of nori for some added umami punch.

It was a nice and hearty bowl of soup, perfect for a cold winter's day!  It was a great change of pace from other turkey leftovers, and the flavor was comparable to the real thing.  Look for us to try a more traditional tonkotsu ramen in the future.

Sear-iously Good Tuna

The items in this week's share really inspired this quick and easy dinner of sesame crusted seared tuna over bok choy and daikon.  It didn't hurt that tuna was on sale at the grocery store either.

Start by mixing up a marinade for your tuna.  We used soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, and some fresh ginger. Toss everything together, add your tuna, and let it sit while you prep everything else.

For the salad, we just chopped up some baby bok choy, sugar snap peas, and daikon.  If you have a mandoline, that would be ideal for slicing the daikon.  But if you're like us and don't have one, just try to slice the daikon as thin as possible.

For the dressing, we threw together some sesame oil, Chinese cooking wine, black vinegar, and a touch of honey.  You could also use rice wine vinegar in place of the Chinese cooking wine and black vinegar, we just didn't have any on hand.  So we improvised.

Now, back to the tuna.  Once marinated, we seasoned it with some wasabi salt & pepper that we'd picked up from the Asian market, to add a little spice.  But if you don't have any, you can season with salt and pepper.  Then just roll it in your sesame seeds.  We used a combo of black and regular.  Place your tuna in a hot pan and sear it for a couple minutes on each side.  We like it raw in the middle, so we didn't leave our tuna in the pan very long.

Then just slice up your tuna and arrange it on top of your salad.  We topped ours with some freshly sliced scallions.  It paired nicely with the Flying Dog green tea imperial stout that I happened to find at the grocery store that morning.  Restaurant quality food in a matter of minutes.  What more could you ask for?

Welcome to the Jungle [Curry]

I'm pretty sure I won Justin over on just our 2nd date when we ended up at Little Serow for dinner.  If you're not familiar, it's a tiny, hole-in-the-wall place, behind an unmarked door, that was named one of Bon Appetit's 50 best new restaurants last year.  If you're lucky enough to get a seat, you're in for 5-7 courses of delicious northern and northeastern Thai food.  This isn't your typical coconut curry and pad Thai that you get in most Thai restaurants.  Instead, the flavors are tangy, and progress in heat.  The ingredient I was most surprised to find was dill.

It was only a matter of time before we attempted to recreate this cuisine at home.  We decided to make a jungle curry, native to northeastern Thailand.  Coconuts don't grow in that region, so this curry ends up looking more like a broth.

We started by prepping our veggies; some magda squash, globe squash, baby bok choy, and snap peas, green onion, all fresh from the share, along with some white onion, dill and cilantro.

 Then we fried up some shallots that would be used as a garnish.  Just slice them then, and drop them into some hot oil.  You don't have to bread them or anything.  Keep your eye on them though.  They fry up quick.

We heated our wok with some vegetable oil and tossed in a couple cloves of chopped garlic, a healthy squeeze of sriracha, and a couple chopped dried chiles.  Once they became fragrant, we tossed in the bok choy, and started to build the broth.  I didn't have any curry paste on hand, but I did have some amok curry powder from a past trip to Cambodia, so we tossed that in instead.  We also added a bit of brown sugar, some oyster sauce, and a bit of fish sauce.  Now, the smell of fish sauce is not appealing at all, but it adds a nice salty and tangy flavor to a lot of southeast Asian dishes.

From here, we started adding in the squashes, onions, snap peas, and some chicken broth to round out the broth.  As everything continued to simmer together, we added in our cubed chicken.  Within minutes, the We plated up the curry, garnished with the cilantro, dill, and fried shallots.

It was really, really good, and very different from typical Thai food such as peanut satay.  The squashes were especially yummy as they soaked up all the complex flavor from the curry, while the heat didn't overwhelm their nutty taste.  I have to say...it was a pretty close rendition to a dish we enjoyed at Little Serow last summer, and much quicker than waiting in line for a table.