Bombay Sliders

Can you tell I've been fascinated with east Asian flavors lately? I had difficulty coming up with a name that didn't involve the word "curry!"

I started off with a pound and a half of ground beef. It wasn't terribly lean just your average 80%. I've got a lot to feed!

Add a little salt.

Add some nice green curry paste! You can use my recipe or you can buy a can of it at your local Asian grocery.

Mix it in well! I used my hands. They're so good at mixing heavy things.

Make up some little patties! I was doing this earlier in the afternoon so after I made the patties I let them sit in the refrigerator for awhile. If you were working with something like ground turkey I'd think this step would be absolutely necessary.

Now for a sauce! Get yourself some GOOD plain yogurt. This type has a layer of hardened cream at the top. Mmm! Stir the cream back into the yogurt where it belongs.

We'll need about a cup of it.

Now give it a taste. Its so good I could faint. You can even paint it on your face for an at home acid exfoliation. My skin loves it. I had big plans for this yogurt. A lot of plain yogurts are gelatinous and have no flavor other than sour milkiness. Those yogurts need lots of "help" to form a good sauce. They need grated cucumber, salt, garlic etc. to give them flavor. This stuff, really needs nothing!

I want some mint. At this time of year this is the only mint I have around the house.

A little dried mint in the yogurt is all that's needed. It'll give the yogurt an extra hint of brightness. A little POW.

I'm heating up my griddle! My sliders are too tiny for the grill. They'd fall through! If I had to I guess I could try putting them on skewers.

Throw them on the griddle!

Flip! They're shrinking because I have the heat up a little high. But heck how would the family know to come to dinner if I didn't set the smoke alarms off? They're my own personal dinner bell!

The necessary accompaniments! A little raw purple onion would be delicious too. If your curry paste didn't have enough onion in it. It'd be tasty in the yogurt sauce.

My hubby doesn't like raw onion though . . . It's a flaw . . . I couldn't handle it if he was perfect though. There's only room for one perfect person in this house!

That would be the cat.

We added these to our sandwiches too! They're salty, spicy, rich, and have a texture not unlike a beautiful oil cured olive. It'll wake up your taste buds!

Slip it all in a pita pocket and sing!

This is darn close to the perfect sandwich! The meat is hot, tender, juicy, and full of herbs and garlic. The vegetables are cold and sweet. The sauce is creamy with an acidic bite that compliments the rich ground meat. The mango pickle adds a salty, spicy kick that surprises. The pita contains it all!

If you're not "into" messy sandwiches then slice everything up, including the pita, and make it a salad. Then you can be clean and lady like while you stuff your face with abandon.

Bombay Sliders

for the sliders
1.5 lbs of ground meat
1/2 cup green curry paste
1/2 teaspoon salt

for the sauce
1 cup plain yogurt
1 teaspoon dried mint

for the sandwich
6 whole pita pockets, sliced in half
tomatoes, sliced
cilantro leaves
cucumber, sliced
mango pickle or other spicy pickle of your choice

Mix ground meat, curry paste, and salt together throughly. Form into pattie and allow to rest in refrigerator. Mix yogurt and mint together and adjust seasoning with salt as necessary. Refridgerate yogurt mixture.  Fry patties in a hot nonstick skillet about 3 minutes per side. Warm pitas and serve!

The Golden Grill

It's time! Look at it! A thing of beauty if there ever was one! 26.5 inches of pure glory!

It's been so hard looking at you all boxed up in the garage! I've been waiting for weeks to put you together . . .

Egads! It's a little too reflective!

It looks so complicated and scientific . . . I like that in cooking equipment!

Seriously, you are so pretty! Almost too pretty to dirty with charcoal and drippings . . . I couldn't hold you back from your purpose in life though! It would be wrong!

There's 2,165 square inches of beautiful surface area to cook for a family of six!

What should I grill first? A brisket? A chicken? A steak? A pizza?

The possibilities are endless!

Do you have grilling issues? Are there certain cuts you'd like to cook but have little success at? Are you interested in making the entire meal outside?

Lead me and I'll follow!

Unless you want liver . . . I don't do liver . . . blech

Chicken on a Stick

My children love eating things on a stick. I think it appeals to their sense of danger. They haven't realized yet we keep them separated at table so they can't spear each other with dangerous pointy objects. They still think it's so we can make sure vegetables get on their plate! Ah, the innocence of youth.

We had these for dinner the other evening but if you use a smaller skewer and smaller chunks of meat you can serve these as an appetizer!

Now if you happen to live next to an Asian Grocery go get this stuff! If you read the label you'll see it's a Product of Indonesia. Which is appropriate since an Indonesian man I worked with introduced me to it!
It's like molasses and soy sauce all mixed together in some sort of twisted, salty, sweet, odd couple.

If you do happen to travel to the Asian grocery store check out everything there. Evidently there's plenty of call for prepackaged foods in the Asian immigrant community! It's a bond we share. I'm sure there's very little melamine in them too . . .

If you do purchase this just add a ton of garlic to it and you've got marinade! A suitable marinade for chicken, pork, beef, or salmon even. Unfortunately, I have to travel over to . . . gasp . . . KANSAS . . . to get it. Doesn't it seem a little weird that I have to travel to Kansas for exotic Asian ingredients?

Now for those of you not near an Asian store or who want to work with what you've got at home let's get started.

Grab some soy sauce and some molasses! I get the mega size at the Asian grocery for cheap! The molasses are leftover from molasses cookies at Christmas time.

I had to break out a new bottle of molasses! It's thick and sweet and has a licorice flavor to it. Can you believe this is the "light" variety? It's flavor is so strong I can't imagine what the full strength versions are like!

An equal part of soy sauce.

Give them a little stir.

Now for some garlic! Mince it in the manner you desire and stir it in too.

Take some beautiful ginger and peel it and minced it up into tiny pieces too. It joins the soy party!

I wanted more acid and citrus notes so I added an equal part of orange juice. This is fresh squeezed!

It's fresh squeezed because I have clementines that my kids won't eat because they're not "pretty" looking anymore. Frankly, they're also at the stage where they're losing some sweetness too. So I'm now adding orange juice to everything I possibly can sneak it into to.

Now I'm going to add a little heat to the party! You could add hot sauce too if you wanted to. Asian groceries have the BEST hot sauces.

I'm going to add a little of this too. I was reading the label and mine has SEVEN spices in it! Where's the authorities on this? Where is the FDA? Anyway it generally has things like cinnamon, ginger, cloves, pepper, anise, fennel, and licorice root in it. So you could throw in a pinch of any of those if you liked.

I sliced up some chicken breast and put them on skewers.

Put the marinade on them and flip them around in this until they have a nice coating.

Now I was prepping this dinner so that I could do most of the work ahead of time and just throw things  under the broiler at the last minute. Most of the time I marinade the chicken and then put it on the skewers right before I cook it. It's much easier to marinade in a bowl or bag! It's a flexible thing.

I only marinated them about 45 minutes. Since they were in a flat pan I had to flip them over half way to make sure the other side was getting the goodness too.

I had to put them on a rack so that I could broil them. We had an unexpected cold snap you see. I've been waiting a week now for it to end. I am so ready to grill!

I like to throw on some sesame seeds. Distracts the eye from the irregularities of sliced chicken breast.

I broiled the first side 5 minutes and then I flipped them over to finish the other side for another couple of minutes.

There it is! Dinner is ready and the kiddos are right there to be handed pointy sticks!

The molasses caramelizes under the broiler beautifully. The chicken has a lovely salty sweet flavor with hints of ginger and garlic goodness.

The longer you leave the chicken in the marinade the better it is. Could you just stick whole chicken breasts in this marinade and grill them later? Yes you could!

Sweet Soy Chicken

2 lbs chicken breast, cut into strips
1-2 Tbsp sesame seeds
12-16 skewers

for the marinade
1/3 cup molasses
1/3 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup orange juice
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
1/4 tsp Chinese 5 Spice powder,


Mix marinade ingredients and pour over chicken. Marinade at least 1 hour. Two or three hours is ideal. Skewer chicken and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Grill or broil 8-10 minutes, turning once while cooking.

A Season For Every Pan Under the Sun

I love my cast iron griddle. You see the television chefs using them all the time!

What's that? Mine doesn't look quite like theirs? Sigh. I know. This used to be a beautifully seasoned Emeril Cast Iron Grill/Griddle.

Now it's just a griddle that has lost it's natural non-stick coating. How does this happen? Cast iron and water are not friends you see. Cast iron doesn't like to be immersed in water. It's the Wicked Witch of the West of cookware.

My kitchen staff likes water . . . they like soap. They like copious amounts of soap and water and scrubbing. This is excellent in the staff's day job which involves surgery. It's not so excellent for my cast iron and Teflon coated pans.

Why don't I wash my own darn pans? Well the impressionable male children need to see the staff helping mommy you see.  Shared workload in the household blah, blah, blah, blah . . .

But no worries! We can fix it!

Turn up the heat! You're going to want to make sure you have some good ventilation for this process.

There's smoke involved. Lots and lots of smoke! Most of my cooking involves smoke. I have a love/hate relationship with my smoke detectors. I lean heavily towards hate.

If you have birdies in the house or anyone who's sensitive to smoke may I recommend you do this on a grill outside? If you have one of those glass top electric stoves, I don't think it would like this process much either. Stick with your outdoor grill--gas or charcoal will do. We need to bake a new coating onto this pan. 

Add a little vegetable oil to your pan. I'm using a lovely soybean oil. Any bland, flavorless oil will do.  This is not the time to use olive oil!

Use a nice clean paper towel to spread the oil all over your pan.  It's safer to use tongs.

Heck, what do I need fingers for?

Can you see the oil start to smoke? That's what we're looking for. When the smoking starts to diminish . . .

Add some more oil! Notice that pan is so hot I'm using tongs to hold the paper towel now. It's really the best bet.

Even more smoke! Let the oil burn off and the smoke dissipate and do it again!

What we're looking for is the pan to turn black! The way it looked originally!

After about 20-30 minutes I thought that maybe, just maybe I had accomplished it. So let's test it. Add a little cooking oil . . .

. . . and an egg. Who doesn't like a nice fried egg? I don't like broken fried eggs! Hmm . . .

Not exactly like Teflon, but it's NOT STICKING!

But will I be able to get it back off of there?

YEAH! No leaking. My work here is done! Well it's almost done.

A cast iron pan likes to be cleaned with a little oil rub down. See the browned stuff that is wiping up? Let your pan cool with a little oil on it. Wipe all the excess oil up and put it away.

If you happen across an old rusty cast iron pan at a garage sale or flea market give it a good scrubbing with steel wool and then try this process with it. Most of them will come right back to life.