Category Archives: corn

Dinner Party: Corn Soufflé for Two

Posted on by

My aunt Barbara is a cool lady. In reality, she’s my dad’s aunt, but she says she’s never aged a day beyond 27, and I believe her. Since I moved to New York, Barbara has been my closest relative, and I’ve had the pleasure of getting to spend weekends away from the city in her East Hampton home, where she’s lived the past 45 years. At the end of last summer, however, she sold that house and bought another, smaller place. Renovations were a disaster, leaving her stranded amongst friends throughout the construction and me without my peaceful summer getaway. Finally, she was able to move in, and I joined her for the first time in her new, almost-finished home. She’s no foodie, but she indulges me, and we always have a blast seeking out new places to “lunch” (her favorite past-time) and cooking up a storm in her kitchen with local ingredients. Since corn’s in season, we bought several ears and made a lovely little dinner for two to celebrate being together.

Corn Soufflé

  • 1/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
  • 
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced 
  • 
Fresh corn kernels, cut from 2 ears
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 
2 1/2  tbsp. Wondra flour
  • 
3/4 cup warm milk

  • 3 eggs, separated, at room temperature

Preheat oven to 450°. Butter two small soufflé dishes (6 1/2” diameter, 2 1/2” deep) and sprinkle with cheese.

Melt 2 tbsp. butter in a small skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute, then add corn and cook, stirring occasionally, until corn begins to soften, 2–4 minutes. Remove from heat, season with salt and pepper, and set aside to cool.

Melt 2 tbsp. butter in a heavy-bottomed small saucepan over medium heat. Add Wondra and cook, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, for about 2 minutes (do not brown) until a paste is formed. Turn off the heat. Simultaneously, warm the milk over low heat. Whisk half of the milk into the flour mixture. Return to heat and stir in remaining milk. Cook, stirring, until very thick, about 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, transfer to a large bowl, and whisk in egg yolks one at a time.

Beat egg whites in a separate bowl until stiff peaks form. Add a third of egg whites to egg yolk mixture and gently fold together. Add the corn, then gently fold in the rest of the egg whites. Do not overmix. Spoon the mixture into soufflé dish, and bake until soufflé is browned, 18–22 minutes. Serve immediately.

Adapted from SAVEUR.

Quick and Easy: Caprese and Pesto

Posted on by

One of the things I miss most about not living at home anymore is that I can’t go out into my mom’s garden and snap off a sprig of rosemary whenever a recipe calls for it. I especially hate this during the summer when I have to buy huge bunches of basil that I can’t entirely use before the leaves begin to wilt. However, I had my heart set on a caprese salad; since I had some leftover chicken in the fridge, I thought a pesto pasta main course would be an agreeable way to use up the rest of the basil.

 Insalata caprese

One of my co-workers has been on the hunt for the perfect burrata this summer and recommended I try Bel Gioioso’s version. On my way home from work, I grabbed it, along with some Roma tomatoes, an ear of corn, and pine nuts. Once I washed the basil leaves and set a few leaves out for the caprese, I put the rest into a food processor and began to add a little bit of pine nuts, parmigiano, black pepper, and olive oil quanto basta, tasting as I went along until the flavor was just right.

Pesto pasta with corn and chicken
 

In the meantime, I set some balsamic vinegar over low heat to reduce and put a pot of salted water on to boil. I threw in the pasta and, at the very end, the freshly-shucked ear of corn. Once I drained the water (reserving some in a separate pot to add to the pesto sauce if needed), I heated up my leftover  chicken breast with the pesto and corn off the cob before tossing it all together for a delicious Italian-American feast.

Dinner Party: Middle Eastern Feast

Posted on by

Stevie, Alexxa, and I are attempting a bi-coastal book club. While we haven’t actually talked about anything yet, I read the first book on the list: Annia Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey. It’s an American woman’s memoir of her time in Iraq and Lebanon during the conflicts of the past decade, told from the perspective of the people she met and the food she ate amidst the bombs, checkpoints, and other dehumanizing aspects of war. I loved the book and found it so inspiring and challenging. Especially when it came to my palate.

I have very little experience eating Middle Eastern food–outside of the occasional shawarma and falafel–and even less cooking it. So, why not cook a feast dedicated to the subject for ten people? That seemed like the most logical way to me to understand more about this cuisine. I spent one entire weekend sourcing ingredients (thank you Sahadi’s); soaking lentils, beans, and bulgur; cooking onions so long that they puffed up like Rice Krispies; and creating some of the most interesting, at least texturally speaking, dishes of my life. Who knows how authentic everything was, but in the end, it was all delicious.

My Middle Eastern Feast Menu
Mezes:
Homemade Hummus, Babaganoush, Labne Cheese served with Croatian Olive Oil, Stuffed Grape Leaves, Leftover Caponata (I threw this in there, since I had it in my fridge and Sicilian cuisine is heavily influenced by Arabic culture)

 The bulgur and greens dish shown here was one of my favorites, perhaps because the texture was one more familiar to me… it reminded me of cous cous.

Main (served family-style):
Lebanese Wheat Berry and Dried Corn Soup with Yogurt
Bulgur and Greens with Pistachios and Yogurt
Slow-Roasted Tomatoes with Rosewater and Sesame Seeds
Mjadara (Red Lentil Stew)

 These roasted for 4 hours in a 250-degree oven, dressed with a mixture of turbinado sugar, coarse salt, and cinnamon, then were topped with toasted sesame seeds and rosewater.

Dessert:
Greek Semolina and Yogurt Cake
Rice Pudding

 
The semolina cake was delicious and moist, topped with a lemon sugar syrup. 

Wines:
I’ve been doing some research on Lebanese wines, so we tasted a few bottles from the portfolios of Massaya, Chateau Kefraya, and Chateau Musar.

We washed the meal down with a series of Lebanese wines,
including the 2003 Hochar Pere et Fils featured here.

Many recipes inspired by and adapted from Paula Wolfert‘s Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking and Ciezadlo’s recipes in Day of Honey. Photos by Anique Halliday.

Celebrations: Vegetarian Birthday Dinner at Dirt Candy

Posted on by
Yesterday was my friend Noa’s birthday, so I decided I wanted to take her to dinner. In the four years we’ve known each other, I have set a precedent of thinking way too hard about how to feed her, either at restaurants or at home. Noa keeps kosher, so she tends to eat like a vegetarian in the restaurants that us laymen frequent. Although she is perfectly capable of taking care of her own food intake, I like to mother-hen her (perhaps a bit too much) by always making sure there’s something on the menu that she can eat.

Enter Dirt Candy. This vegetarian restaurant opened in the East Village in 2008, and I’d been wanting to try it for awhile – then repeatedly forgetting about it. While racking my brain for fun places to take Noa, the memory lightbulb went off. Take her to Dirt Candy! She can eat everything on the menu! 

The premise of the tiny 12-seater on 9th street is simple: vegetables are delicious nuggets that come from the earth. They are “dirt candy.” Chef and owner Amanda Cohen is right there to greet you when you walk in; she seated us herself when we arrived. And apparently we were lucky – they don’t usually have room for walk-ins.


The menu is small and quirky. There was one “snack,” four starters, and four entrees to choose from. All seasonal produce, and every item was named for its key ingredient.

Noa and I ordered the Jalapeno Hush Puppies to start – the soft, fried cornmeal was served with maple butter, which melted right off and onto our fingers. My only complaint is that there were five of them for two of us. Then we decided to split two entrees. Noa wanted the Corn and the Eggplant, so that’s what we ordered. And we were delighted with her choices.

There is a definite southern flair to the menu. The Corn dish was essentially gussied up grits (not that I am complaining, I adore grits,especially with cheese). These were stone ground and tasted like they’d been cooking up all day. They were speckled with full corn kernels from the corn cream, microgreens, pickled shiitakes, and huitlacoche, which is a fungus that grows on corn also known as the “corn truffle.” Served on top was a tempura poached egg, cooked to perfection. 

As delicious as these dishes were, I preferred the Eggplant. The presentation is not as beautiful as that of the Corn – there is no vibrant yellow and green to perk the eye. However, if there were to be a single dish to embody the notion of “dirt candy,” I think this would be it. Eggplant – sliced, pickled, breaded, and fried – was served a top black olive fettuccine, tossed with fresh ricotta, and served within a pool of basil broth. Eggplant jam was used as a garnish. 

If this sounds like a dark, monochromatic plate of food, it’s because it was. The dirt-colored food was even further underscored by the indigo plate it was served upon. But oh my, what amazing flavor combinations. I loved that the eggplant was pickled before it was fried, because it added an element of depth and saltiness that fried eggplant tends to lack. And the basil broth mixed with the eggplant jam was to die for. 

Though stuffed, it was Noa’s birthday after all, so we visited the dessert menu. We immediately nixed the popcorn pudding since we’d just consumed several heads of corn. Instead, we concentrated on the sweet potato puffs – served with sweet potato sorbet, brown sugar ice cream, and sour cream ice cream – and the ice cream nanaimo bar – sweet pea and mint ice cream and cream served between layers of chocolate. We mentioned both to the waitress and her reaction was immediate. The Nanaimo Bar. Hands down.

She brought it out with a candle on top – she’d caught onto the fact that this was a birthday date. I snapped this shot, the only one of the night, before we dug in (unfortunately, she’d already blown out the candle before I got to it).

The sweet pea and mint ice cream was delicate and refreshing, but I wish there had been more of it. The cream was reminiscent of the kind put in ice cream cakes from Baskin Robbins (not that this stopped me from eating my share), and the chocolate cookie at the bottom was a bit mealy. We cleared the plate, however, and ended the night with a bang – sweeping hand gestures left a bit of wine on the floor, and on me. Mazel Tov!

Fresh, Healthy Dinner, with a peppery kick

Posted on by

Dinner last night was a late affair—I got home around 9 after a book reading at McNally Jackson. And by book reading I should say cheese tasting. Liz Thorpe from Murray’s Cheese Shop in NYC has recently published a book on cheese, and to elucidate her findings, she brought snacks. Brilliant. But more on that another time.

Because it was late, I wanted to throw something light and healthy together, without taking too long. Looking in my fridge, I came across egg whites left over from a custard I had made for ice cream a few days before, corn which I had steamed and cut off the cob a few days before, cherry tomatoes that were beginning to turn, and very (almost too) soft avocados. Knowing that fresh produce stays fresh for, oh, a day, I realized I had let one too many days pass. I had to act fast.

I began by whisking up the egg whites and letting them heat slowly over a low flame. Meanwhile, I got to chopping. I halved and scored the avocado and set aside. Then, I plopped the corn into a large bowl and sliced my way through the tomatoes, some jalapenos, a handful of cilantro, and a red onion. I tossed them in a bowl and added some fresh ground salt and pepper. At precisely that moment, my eggs looked about cooked through, so I added the avocado pieces to the pan and took them off the heat.

Somehow, I had managed to salvage the goods, with enough of everything to go around for five (friends had come over post cheese tasting). A splash of peppery Domaine des Corbillières Touraine Rosé went perfectly with this simple, fresh meal with a kick – don’t forget, I’d thrown in a jalapeno or two. Score one for summer produce.