Older Bolder Life

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friday feast

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast: Carrot and Peanut Salad

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I’ve shared in a number of posts over the years that my family has fairly deep roots in the South, mostly Texas, and my wife and I have been profoundly influenced by the fascinating amalgam that is the ever-evolving Texas food scene these days.

That said, we still both have family recipes we remember from our childhoods, recipes passed down through several generations, and that have stood the test of time and continue to grace the table now and again.

One of those very recipes is this venerable Carrot and Peanut Salad, an almost absurdly simple combination of textures and flavors that just work together, and it’s simple enough a child can put this one together in under ten minutes without a recipe.

As always, the quality of your ingredients make the dish; you’ll want fresh, crispy, organic carrots for this dish, along with roasted peanuts (watch those roasting oils), and a fresh batch of avocado oil mayo. Now and then I’ll use half avocado oil mayo and half sour cream or Greek yogurt just to mix things up a bit (they both add a bit of tartness to the salad as you’d expect).

After washing and prepping the carrots all you need to do is grab your trusty box grater and grate away (high brow folks from the Northeast may call that shredding) until you have enough for your meal – I usually prep 4-5 large carrots for a recipe.

Start with a generous half cup of peanuts (you can always add more) and mix in your avocado oil mayo (or sour cream or yogurt) to your desired level and you’re ready to head to the table.

As with all recipes consider this the most basic framework to start from; this recipe is delicious (and visually interesting) with multicolored carrots, finely chopped jalapeños or other peppers, and with a variety of other nuts – our favorite “other nut” for this one is toasted pepitas…

Enjoy, and never let anyone argue otherwise – complex recipes aren’t always better.

Cheers.

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast: Grilled Rosemary Lamb Chops

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Like many of you, when thinking about the Easter table we often think of lamb or ham as the centerpiece protein; this year my lovely wife called for a Greek inspired meal featuring a perennial favorite – Grilled Rosemary Lamb Chops.

Last Easter’s Merguez Sausages were damned tasty, and I personally think this Ancho Leg of Lamb hung the moon, but lamb chops won the day this year.

Lamb chops are easy to source, quick to grill, and as always provide incredibly flavorful meat right off the bone. My only real complaint about them over the years has been that given that most lamb chops are cut fairly thick, sometimes there’s a bit more char outside after grilling given the time needed to make sure the deepest meat is a perfect medium rare.

This year I decided to sous vide the chops (130, 90 minutes) after rubbing with a bit of olive oil and a fresh cut garlic clove, with the chops then loaded into BPA-free bags with several sprigs of fresh rosemary.

A Quick Sidebar on Sous Vide and Texture…

As an aside, while we still use the sous vide method around our camp with some regularity, I am as I’m sure you are aware of a growing backlash against sous vide (nothing to do with the somewhat tired BPA discussion), but instead focusing on texture.

There are a number of talented chefs and home cooks who continue to report that they find proteins that spend time in a sous vide bath, while often cooked to perfection from a temperature / doneness perspective have a different texture than say thick-cut, bone-in ribeye cooked using a reverse sear technique. (Interesting my son Jake and I have had a very similar discussion a couple of different times this winter, and both find we’re leaning to the texture of the reverse sear method).

The other texture issue with sous vide has to do with pre-salting proteins before they’re placed in the water bath; some folks feel that doing so can make some proteins taste “rubbery and hammy”; there’s been a fair amount written on the subject, and we don’t salt red meats pre-sous vide, particularly if they’re going to be held for hours or a day or two before grilling, but still lightly salt chicken breasts for cold chicken salad (for example) before their time in the bath.

You make the call…

Back to Our Grilled Rosemary Lamb Chops

All the chops needed then was a quick turn on the grill to caramelize the surfaces and we were good to go, with this delightful Greek Salad, a recipe of homemade tzatziki, and crumbled feta on board.

These chops are delicious cold as well or heated gently prior to serving; cook a big batch when these come up in rotation.

Enjoy.

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast: Quick Kung Pao Shrimp

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For the past several weeks we’ve been on somewhat of a stir fry kick; like many of you now and again we get stuck on a particular cuisine or preparation method and ride that horse for a few weeks just to change up the routine and menu.

My wife in particular has been craving some of the traditional Americanized Chinese food that we’ve eaten over the years; recently she’s been pestering me to craft a dish akin to a wonderful Kung Pao Shrimp we used to eat at a now defunct eatery in Salt Lake City back in the day.

It was spicy but not too hot, incredibly well balanced with the classic Chinkiang vinegar flavor followed by a just a hint of sweetness, and packed with tasty cashews and tender shrimp.

After a bit of trial and error, and digging around a bit, we’ve settled on this recipe using an incredibly easy homemade Kung Pao sauce (you can as always control the quality of your ingredients and cut back on the typical sugar/sweetener load), though a commercially prepared sauce could work in a pinch (read those ingredients!). By the way, I’ll post the recipe for the Kung Pao sauce down the road a few weeks from now…

With a minimum of prep, you can have this dish ready for the table in about twenty minutes, along with a big pile of steamed broccoli florets just like you’d receive in a classic restaurant setting.

As tempting as it is to throw in several handfuls of other vegetables, every time I’ve done that we (my wife especially) feel that the overall flavor impact of the dish is diminished by too many competing flavors. And it’s great over a spoonful of garlic cauliflower rice….

1 pound shrimp, prepped (peeled and deveined)
1 T Shaoxing wine
1 T cornstarch
1 tsp avocado oil
¼ t good salt

1 T avocado oil
6 green onions, white and green parts, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 bell pepper, ¾-inch dice
1/3 cup (perhaps a T or two more) homemade Kung Pao sauce
1/3 cup roasted cashews or peanuts

Combine the prepped shrimp, Shaoxing wine, cornstarch, and the salt; set aside for 10 minutes. Prep the vegetables and set aside.

Heat the oil in a large flat skillet until just smoking; add the shrimp in a single layer and cook for thirty seconds undisturbed, then stir occasionally for the next three minutes or so until the shrimp are just opaque.

Add the green onions and bell pepper, stirring to combine and heat the vegetables thoroughly. Now add the Kung Pao sauce, stirring to coat everything in the pan evenly.

Add the cashews (or peanuts), stir to distribute evenly, the remove from the heat and serve immediately.

Enjoy.

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast: The Versatile Okra Crisp

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A little over a year and half ago I shared that I spent several months helping a group of compadres open a little Cajun restaurant nearby; it was an eye-opening experience for me to work in the kitchen “behind the restaurant curtain”.

Of course this was back in the pre-COVID days, which for restaurants seems an eternity ago (as it does for all of us), and clearly life in the restaurant biz was very very different then.

One of my responsibilities back in the day was preparation of huge batches of gumbo, up to forty (yep, I said 40!) gallons at a time in a huge floor-mounted steam kettle. The restaurant then was being directed by a very talented, Louisiana born and bred, young chef who had adapted recipes from his family back home to production in a commercial kitchen setting.

I have to admit his gumbo recipe is one of the very best I’ve ever tasted (sorry Mama – pronounced maw-maw, his really is better…), and it’s become one of our absolute favorite cold-weather soups (or stews if you want to argue that point) in our rotation.

One of the tricks that this particular chef taught me was that precooking okra before adding to the gumbo effectively de-slimed it and enhanced it’s earthy, vegetal flavors. We did it in the restaurant by flash frying for no more than 4 minutes in a commercial fryer; yes it was done in terrible oils (canola or soybean pending what was available, it’s just part of the restaurant game and begs another discussion on a different day). Nonetheless, it was so tasty I’d have to stand over the 20 pounds or so we’d do in a batch to keep my kitchen mates from grabbing handfuls to snack from.

The prep was easy – just head the okra, trimming off the stem end, and slice into 1/3 to 1/2-inch pieces and go to it.

Chatting up the recipe one day with my friend Chef Libby in Austin, she recommended a trial of baking the sliced okra at home in a medium oven after adding a splash of a healthy neutral oil (we think avocado works best here, olive oil can impart more flavor that you’d think) and a grind of good salt and pepper.

We’d actually already started doing that before Libby and I talked about it; it’s a piece of cake to spread the prepped okra pieces out on a piece of parchment, and then throw in the over for 45-50 minutes (with a turn somewhere in the middle).

The okra comes out perfect for topping gumbo, though my lovely wife likes this prep so much we do it as a side dish now and again, top salads with it, and even as a healthy snack out of hand.

Enjoy.

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast: Carrot and Pepita Salad with Ginger Dressing

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Today’s Friday Feast recipe is going to be one that’s very much like the style of cooking I’m trying to do these days – damned tasty, colorful, a bit out of the ordinary, and a quick, straightforward prep.

My lovely wife has been clamoring for carrots as we’ve jumped from record cold to the sunny 70s here in North Texas in less than two weeks; she’s a big hummus fan and enjoys it immensely with crudite (carrots are pretty much always on the crudite platter around our camp).

That said, I’ve been digging around for new spins on carrots as the star of salads and fresh, uncooked side dishes of late, and this Carrot and Pepita Salad with an easy, Asian-inspired Ginger Dressing is a nifty one and probably the pick of the litter so to speak of all that we’ve tried lately.

I pulled this one together after reading several similar recipes, the one that looked the best on paper called for 5 to 6 ounces of fresh pea shoots along with the carrots, which for the life of me I’ve been unable to source (the pea shoots) this time of year and post the freeze of the century in Texas.

Digging around a bit for likely subs for pea shoots, which appear to be damned easy to grow at home by the way, the most commonly recommended were baby arugula, baby boc choy, or even baby spinach. We happened to have some baby arugula in the fridge, so that’s what you’ll see in the images today, though I’ll bet this is great with the pea shoots as well.

The recipe is ridiculously easy overall, and calls for a somewhat unusual step of dry toasting your pepitas in a skillet, removing from the heat, and then adding 4 tablespoons of tamari or soy to the hot pepitas and letting them soak as they cool.

Give this one a spin as spring rolls into your neighborhood, it’s a keeper.

1/4 cup pepitas
6 T tamari or soy sauce
4-5 medium carrots in matchsticks
5-6 ounces pea shoots, baby arugula, baby spinach, or baby boc choy
3-4 green onions, trimmed, sliced on an angle

Dressing
3/4-1” piece of fresh ginger, peeled, grated
2 T mirin
2 T toasted sesame oil
1 T rice vinegar
Good salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Dry fry the pepitas until they begin to color (keep them moving so they don’t burn); remove from the heat, add 1/4 cup soy/tamari and set aside to cool.

Combine the dressing ingredients, whisking or shaking in a jar until well combined; hold in the fridge until you’re ready to dress the salad.

Combine the prepped carrots, pea shoots or sub of your choice, and the green onions in a small bowl, stir in the dressing, and top with the toasted pepitas.

Enjoy.

The Older Bolder Life Friday Feast: A Nifty Tip When Tempering Chocolate

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Like many of you I reached for an old favorite when Valentine’s Day rolled around a few weeks back – Chocolate Covered Strawberries.

What a delicious gift; they’re damned tasty, beautiful to look at, easy (in the big scheme of things) to do, and ridiculously more affordable – and fresher – than buying them commercially around the holiday. And though some might argue, you’ll get far better, more consistent results by tempering your chocolate before dipping every time.

After a bit of trial and error (more error initially), online research, and pestering my chef friends (thanks again Libby!), we’ve evolved to the following routine for a quick, easy temper of good chocolate for dipping, using a combination of the classic techniques and one newer trick at the end.

While some might suggest that you need to chop your chocolate down into tiny pieces, I’ve found that a fairly rough chop is all that is needed to get thing started. Most experts suggest that you need a critical mass of chocolate to really get a good temper, you’ll often see amounts mentioned anywhere from 12 ounces to a pound and half at minimum.

I started this batch using a pound and half total, with roughly 2/3’s of that dropped into a stainless bowl to place over simmering water on the stove. With your chocolate chopped fairly small, this first melt happens reasonably quickly. It’s important to note that you don’t want your chocolate to reach a temperature warmer than 125 F, some even suggest 115 is enough to consider the mass fully melted and ready for the next step in tempering.

As pictured above, the next step involves removing the molten chocolate form the heat, stirring in the remaining chopped (and unmelted) chocolate until fully melted, and letting your chocolate cool to 81 F. This process of adding unmelted chocolate serves to both cool the heated mass and “seed” the formation of well-aligned chocolate crystals that give solid chocolate its stability and sheen.

Once the seed chocolate you’ve added has fully melted and the molten chocolate has cooled to 81 F, it’s time to reheat the chocolate back to 90 F to complete the tempering process.

We’ve taken to using a water bath and immersion circulator to do that now, for three reasons. One, it’s damned precise – I can set the water bath up ahead of time and have it ready and spot on the mark temp-wise when it’s time to reheat the chocolate.

Second, this is easier than going back to the double boiler, and third, and probably most importantly, using the water bath makes it super-easy to take your time dipping or coating your fruit, as you can hold the chocolate at 90F (in theory) indefinitely so you don’t have to rush to dip / coat fruit (or whatever) before your chocolate cools and sets up.

As always, the tempering process produced silky smooth, beautiful dipped strawberries this time around. Tuck this one away for the next time you need tempered chocolate for a special occasion.

Enjoy.

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast: Loaded Huevos Rancheros

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Over the past couple of weeks we’ve posted a couple of great standalone recipes: this Tex Mex Chorizo (or our Chorizo No. 2) and this Ranchero Tomato Salsa (or sauce, pending what your intentions are).

Both recipes are packed from top to bottom with plenty of spice and deep flavor, are accessible to we mere mortals cooking at home from the standpoint of both ingredient list and skills required, and just taste damned good.

Several weeks ago I’d have been lying big time if I denied intending to at some point in the near future post a Friday Feast featuring what we’ve come to call Loaded Huevos Rancheros.

Both my lovely wife and grew up under the bright skies of the Lone Star state, and spent a fair amount of our youth and young adulthood wandering around other parts of the Southwest, mostly New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, with a bit of Arizona thrown in for good measure.

While there are profound differences among these regions in terms of food culture (and lots of other things), one commonality you’d find almost everywhere was some form of huevos rancheros on the breakfast menu, if not available all day in the “better” eateries.

Nodding to more recent history, in the Ranchero Tomato Sauce/Salsa post last week I shared a bit about events that prompted the ultimate version of the recipe I shared –

… Two summers ago a friend came to me and asked me to help with menu planning an event he was hosting for his extended family around Father’s Day; as is typical for our North Texas neighborhood he was planning a big brisket and fixin’s barbecue one evening, but he also wanted to serve a brunch built around some of his Tex Mex favorites, including huevos rancheros.

My buddy was not only hell bent on serving a classic huevos rancheros, but he wanted it to match a particular dish he’d enjoyed on a hunting trip down in the Texas Rio Grande Valley in the months prior. He waxed poetically about a thick, tomatoey ranchero sauce, deeply flavored with dried peppers, and punctuated with a smokey, lingering heat that just had to be from chipotles.

My best advice was to call the little eatery he’d placed on this culinary pedestal to see if they’d share a recipe; he did, and lo and behold he reported the grandmother running the kitchen ran off a list from memory, though without the specific amounts of each ingredient, and she apparently said to use “some good spices” as well…

The “loaded” huevos concept isn’t mine; I think we first saw it on a menu in a little Tex Mex eatery outside of Port Isabel (on the way to South Padre from Harlingen), though you can find similar offerings just about anywhere these days.

The principle is simple: load your basic huevos rancheros recipe up with some tasty protein like chorizo (though well-spiced ground beef works here as well), mushrooms, peppers you have on hand (we prefer diced poblanos), a bit of diced onion, and whatever else floats your boat that day, and layer it atop your tortillas (gluten free if you prefer, we still reach for Siete’s products first), a bed of lettuce, or even a pile of sautéed, crispy sweet potatoes.

If I remember right, the version we had down in far South Texas featured crispy potatoes pieces as well, with eggs cooked enough to almost set the yolk so it runs down and bathes everything nearby when you take that first bite.

My wife typically won’t eat these unless there’s a pile of freshly sliced avocado or a big scoop of guacamole on the plate, along with some grated or crumbed cheese, and a dusting of finely chopped cilantro.

It’s time to get creative and crank these out for breakfast, brunch, or dinner this weekend…

the Older Bolder Life Friday Feast: Ranchero Tomato Sauce (or Salsa) No. 1

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Today’s recipe came about in sort’ve a roundabout way and with input from a number of damned talented folks messing around in kitchens.

Two summers ago a friend came to me and asked me to help with menu planning an event he was hosting for his extended family around Father’s Day; as is typical for our North Texas neighborhood he was planning a big brisket and fixin’s barbecue one evening, but he also wanted to serve a brunch built around some of his Tex Mex favorites, including huevos rancheros.

My buddy was not only hell bent on serving a classic huevos rancheros, but he wanted it to match a particular dish he’d enjoyed on a hunting trip down in the Texas Rio Grande Valley in the months prior. He waxed poetically about a thick, tomatoey ranchero sauce, deeply flavored with dried peppers, and punctuated with a smokey, lingering heat that just had to be from chipotles.

My best advice was to call the little eatery he’d placed on this culinary pedestal to see if they’d share a recipe; he did, and lo and behold he reported the grandmother running the kitchen ran off a list from memory, though without the specific amounts of each ingredient, and she apparently said to use “some good spices” as well.

It pays to have a chef friend in the fold who likes to chat about recipes, so I called Chef Libby in Austin and worked backwards to construct a recipe that we both refined further over a few weeks. Libby was actually using something similar she’d sourced somewhere online (she couldn’t recall at the time) and we tried to incorporate both fresh, dried chiles and reached for saucy chipotles in adobo given how rich and flavorful that canned adobo sauce is.

The spice profile is pretty typical for ranchero-style sauces, though we’ve added a bit of paprika and a splash of tamari/coconut aminos/soy to deepen the umami notes.

The result is a thick, rich, deeply flavored sauce (some might argue this could even be called a salsa) that makes for the best huevos rancheros (next week’s recipe) that I’ve ever tasted, and plays very well with roasted meats – chicken and pork especially – and could very likely work even as an enchilada sauce, though to be honest we haven’t gone there. If I’m not careful, my wife will pull out her tortilla chips and eat through half a recipe anytime this is on the stove…

Note the recipe as written makes enough for 2 meals of huevos; halve the recipe if you want, though I’ve been making it up as written and freezing half for later.

1 medium onion, thinly sliced
6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 large dried ancho chiles, seeded, thinly cut into strips (use scissors)
2 guajillo (or New Mexico) chiles, seeded, thinly cut into strips
1-2 tbsp avocado or olive oil
1 and 1/2 tsp dried Mexican oregano
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp paprika
2 cans (14-oz) fire roasted tomatoes
4-5 chipotle chiles in adobo
4-5 tbsp adobo sauce from chile can
1/2 cup fresh cilantro and tender stems, finely chopped
2 tbsp tamari, coconut aminos, or soy sauce
2 tbsp fresh lime juice
Good salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

Stem and seed the peppers, then cut into thin strips using scissors.

Heat a medium saucepan over medium-high heat without oil, then toast the chile strips until fragrant, watch carefully, given their small size it won’t take long. Remove and set aside.

Now add the oil, onion and garlic slices and sauté until softened and just starting to brown, then add the chile strips, oregano, cumin, and paprika. Stir and cook another 20-30 seconds, then add the tomatoes, chipotles, and adobo sauce. Bring to a simmer, then reduce the heat and keep it simmering gently for 15 minutes or so.

Now puree (coarsely) using an immersion blender (or standup blender if you prefer – remember hot liquids expand in the blender), then add the prepped cilantro, tamari/aminos/soy sauce, and lime juice. Stir the mixture well and add salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.

The sauce is ready for huevos rancheros or any other recipe you want to use it for, and keeps well sealed in the fridge for 7-10 days.

Enjoy.