Weekend Menu

Two meals. Recipes to follow.

---

Soufflé with snails, tomato sauce & chinese chives

---

Japanese meal

Fresh bamboo-shoot rice w/ sanshō
Okra ohitashi
Scallop sashimi
Miso soup
Pickles (lotus-root amazuke, carrot shiozuke)

---

Weekend Menu

Three meals. Recipes to follow.

---

"Shirred" eggs with snails, persillade & tomato paste

♦

Filipino Meal 

Kinilaw "Guisado" with bamboo shoots, dried shrimp & kale Umami rice
Salt pickles

---

 

Sautéed pea-shoots with garlic & soy sauce Lobster ravioli in vanilla butter sauce

---

Stracci con Ragú di Pesce

This recipe is serious work so it's not for everyone.

This recipe requires access to the freshest seafood and that means a local fisherman not a supermarket!

This recipe isn't here to feed your pathetic little palate. It's here to ensure the perfection of your soul.

It only works in summer when you have access to fresh seafood, fresh tomatoes and basil but what a recipe!

If you don't understand why tomatoes, you should read this.

The CC is also assuming that you have made the tomato sauce ahead of time. It's always there in the CC's kitchen in summer but if not you will need to make that as well.

So get cranking!


Stracci con ragú di pesce

(serves 2)

Note: This is the rare recipe that pairs fresh pasta with seafood and tomatoes. It's the exception that proves the rule. The idea is that both the tomatoes act as an accent. They are definitely not the main show here. The fresh seafood is.

Ingredients

Fresh Pasta

1 cup 00 flour (substitute by sieved all-purpose)
1 egg
salt

Ragú di pesce

6 scallops
2 squid
12 clams

8 cloves garlic
1 dried red chili
16 cherry tomatoes (half yellow, half red — cut in half)

1/3 cup white wine
1/2 cup tomato sauce

2 sprigs basil

pinch of saffron

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

few basil leaves (cut into thin ribbons with scissors)
basil (ripped by hand into rough shreds)

Recipe

First, make the fresh pasta. (If you don't know how, you're probably going to need something a little more precise than the instructions below. Ironically, it's one of those things that's trivial to demonstrate and hard to write about.)

Dump the flour in a bowl. Make a well. Crack an egg into it. Add some salt. With a fork whip the egg, incorporating the flour as it goes by. Do NOT add water. Use your hands when it looks mixed in. Knead the dough to a silky mass adding only the tiniest amount of flour to make your hands not stick.

Set aside for at least 20 minutes.

Using a pasta maker, crank the dough repeatedly through all settings down to 5.

(Pasta machines have a scale from 1-8. One is coarsest and eight is finest. The reason to not crank it down to 5 straight away is that each pass through "kneads" the dough correctly to make it smooth and uniform. So you need to go through 1-2-3-4-5. Experienced chefs even repeat the 1 and 2 folding the dough into "threes" if they want a particularly refined pasta.)

Do not make it too thin. Cut into long thick ribbons and lay out on a tray to dry for at least an hour or even more in summer if it is humid. Two to three hours is preferable. The dough must dry out substantially otherwise it will fall apart.

(Yes, the CC knows that this is not stracci which refers to "rags" — irregularly cut pasta. You can cut the thick ribbons into irregular pieces. To make a true stracci, you'd have to hand-roll the pasta. If your spirit is willing and your flesh not weak, go for it!)

Then make the fresh seafood ragú.

Put the clams in a pot with half a cup of water. Heat them at high heat till they open. Fish out each one as it opens. Shuck them making sure to retain the liquid. Pass the liquid from the clams as well as the liquid from the pot through a paper towel (to eliminate the sand) and retain the liquid.

(The reason to shuck the clams is so that the shell doesn't tear the delicate pasta. With dried pasta, the clams are tossed with the shell to good effect but here we're working with fresh pasta and the clam shells would tear the pasta into shreds which we don't want.)

Heat up some olive oil in a pan. Add the garlic and red chili and let it fry for about 6 minutes at low heat. Make sure the garlic doesn't burn. Add the white wine and the clam juice from above and let it reduce a bit.

Toss in the cherry tomatoes and let cook for 5 minutes. Add the tomato sauce and basil strips and let cook till it is reduced somewhat.

Now make the pasta. When the water is boiling, add the pasta and let it cook. 3 minutes no more.

While the pasta is cooking, add the raw seafood, cooked clams and the saffron to the hot ragú. Do not overcook. You can even turn off the heat if the sauce is hot enough.

Drain the pasta and toss everything together. Add the torn basil and black pepper. Serve at once.

Japanese Meal

For the celebration of a special friend's birthday dinner.

Bottom left:

Sautéeed scallops in miso-glaze reduction.

Left placement:

Miso Soup.
Asari Gohan (あさりご飯).

Down the center plate:

Fresh wasabi (わさび).
Pickled cucumber.
Pickled jellyfish with hijiki, ginger & cucumber.
Pickled burdock (ごぼ).
Fresh seaweed salad.

Bottom right:

Scallop Sashimi.

Right placement:

Symmetric placement of left.

Julia was Right!

Turns out that butter is just better!

Particularly for sautéeing scallops.

And most of the fat just stays behind in the pan anyway, and you can drain them. They are rendered sweet and juicy just the way they were meant to be.

Of course, it matters that you get fresh scallops not frozen ones.

Poached Scallops over Spinach Couscous

This is the ultimate weekday dish. You should be able to manage this even with your "busy schedules" and "heatwaves".

If you can't manage this, the CC suggests you keep all the local takeouts and deliveries on speed dial. Oh, and you are not fit material for this blog.

Heat some tomato broth in a pan. When it comes to a simmer, turn the heat down. Add salt, pepper, herbs of your choice -- the CC added rosemary and/or thyme -- pop in the scallops and poach gently until they are barely set.

In parallel, the CC heated some water. Use the nuker. Drop in a bouillon cube (go on! don't be so uppity.) Pour it over the couscous. Cover. Let the couscous do its thing.

Remove the scallops from the pan using a slotted spoon. Turn the heat for the sauce on high, and reduce.

Plate as below. Not exactly rocket surgery but a perfectly balanced delicious meal.


This is a fairly general idea. You can poach squid, or shrimp, or even a fish fillet (for which you will need a larger amount of broth.)

You could even poach an egg.

You can use whatever herbs you have at hand. Sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano. You can bung in a chilli pepper or two for some heat. Or an anchovy for some umami.

The variations are endless. This is a meta-recipe.

As the CC said, it's the ultimate weekday dish.

Mizuna Salad with Sauteed Scallops, Radishes, Carrots, Beluga Lentils in an Almond-Lemon Vinaigrette