This is a repeat post of a mustard-soy glazed salmon that I love to make. I already posted the link to this recipe for my blog, but the picture I had to go along with it was pre-Lowel EGO lights and very amateur photography skills. It looks awful.

See?

Considering this recipe is still a staple for me despite my ever-growing cook book collection it deserves a second mention. Try it out.

Mustard-Soy Glazed Salmon with Brown Sugar and Ginger (from Not Your Mother’s Weeknight Cooking
)

4 3/4 to 1-inch thick center-cut salmon fillets (6 ounces each), skin on
4 teaspoons Dijon mustard
4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
4 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
3 to 4 cloves garlic, crushed
4 teaspoons light brown sugar
2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 350F
2. Cover a shallow rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil. Place fish skin side down and spread a thin layer of mustard on it.
3. In a small bowl, combine the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, ginger and garlic. Drizzle over the fillets. Sprinkle each fillet with a teaspoon of brown sugar and dot with little bits of butter. Bake in the center of the oven for 12 to 15 minutes until firm and opaque. Remove from oven and let stand for 5 minutes. Serve immediately.

With a leftover baguette from dinner the night before, I decided to make a skillet strata.

A strata is a layered casserole of day-old bread, eggs, cheese and milk. It’s similar to a fritata or quiche. This is from More Best Recipes by Cook’s Illustrated. Instead of a usual strata where you leave everything mixed up for a few hours up to overnight before baking, you can bake this immediately after putting everything together. This recipe reminds me of a quiche that is light and fluffy. R says that this is meal you could make when you invite people over for brunch.

If you don’t have day-old bread, you can just toast the bread in a pan for a little bit.

Skillet Strata with Cheddar and Thyme for 2 (adapted from Cook’s Illustrated)

Ingredients

3 eggs
3/4 milk
1/2 teaspoon thyme
2 ounces of grated cheddar cheese
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 small onion
day-old baguette or any white bread cut into 1″ cubes*
salt and pepper
*Note: cut as many as will fit nicely on the bottom of the pan

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 425F. Whisk eggs, milk, thyme, salt and pepper.
2. Melt butter in an 8″ oven-proof skillet over medium-high heat. Add onion and cook until softened and lightly browned.
3. Add bread and mix until the bread is nicely toasted and is evenly coated in the mixture.
4. Take the pan off the heat and add the egg mixture. Make sure you press on the bread cubes so it absorbs the mixture.
5. Pop it into the oven and bake for 12 minutes. It should puff up and the edges will have pulled away slightly when it’s done.
6. Let it rest for 5 minutes. This is so the eggs cook perfectly from the residual heat. If you don’t let it rest, you run the risk of runny eggs.

I’d like to thank Donna Hay for creating a simple, easy cake that tastes fantastic.

Last weekend there were a couple of birthday celebrations (including a belated one for me). I love making cakes (although to be honest, I may be getting tired of cakes…I’ve made 3 in a week) and I was drawn to the cake that’s on the cover of Donna Hay’s 50th issue.

No mixer is required to make the cake (just the frosting) and it was put together in no time. I did add extra icing sugar to the frosting as the kiddies would be having a piece and I felt it would be too tangy (a.k.a. sour) for them.

Recipe here (printable).

I’m working on my spice tolerance and this is one of those dishes that helps me with it. If I make it too spicy, I’ll chug a beer down with it, but that won’t stop me from continuing to eat it. It’s that good.

This recipe comes from Cook’s Illustrated. They say that they’ve kept this version relatively mild, but I find it too spicy to use all the chiles. I should also mention that I find some types of gum too spicy to handle so take that into consideration when making this dish.

Ingredients

2 cups fresh basil leaves, tightly packed
3 medium garlic cloves, peeled
6 green or red Thai chiles , stemmed
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breast , cut into 2-inch pieces
3 medium shallots, peeled and thinly sliced (about 3/4 cup)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Directions

1. Process 1 cup basil leaves, garlic, and chiles in food processor until finely chopped, 6 to 10 one-second pulses, scraping down bowl with rubber spatula once during processing. Transfer 1 tablespoon basil mixture to small bowl and stir in 1 tablespoon fish sauce, oyster sauce, vinegar, and sugar; set aside. Transfer remaining basil mixture to 12-inch heavy-bottomed nonstick skillet. Do not wash food processor bowl.

2. Pulse chicken and 1 tablespoon fish sauce in food processor until meat is chopped into -approximate 1/4-inch pieces, six to eight 1-second pulses. Transfer to medium bowl and refrigerate 15 minutes.

3. Stir shallots and oil into basil mixture in skillet. Heat over medium-low heat (mixture should start to sizzle after about 11/2 minutes; if it doesn’t, adjust heat accordingly), stirring constantly, until garlic and shallots are golden brown, 5 to 8 minutes.

4. Add chicken, increase heat to medium, and cook, stirring and breaking up chicken with potato masher or rubber spatula, until only traces of pink remain, 2 to 4 minutes. Add reserved basil-fish sauce mixture and continue to cook, stirring constantly until chicken is no longer pink, about 1 minute. Stir in remaining cup basil leaves and cook, stirring constantly, until basil is wilted, 30 to 60 seconds.

This recipe comes from…Coolio. Yes, the rapper of hits like Gangster’s Paradise and Fantastic Voyage. I wasn’t expecting a lot from this cookbook, but these muffins are really good and fall into my repeat worthy list.

You can see the full run down of what I thought over at sweethome as I’m now a contributer over there. In the test kitchen I’ll try out a recipe, photograph the results and review it. Recipes will also be posted there so you can try your hand at it too.

Check it out.

I love brunches. On the weekends we roll out of bed late and usually R will make a big breakfast. I’ll make the occasional breakfast if I want something other than the traditional weekend eggs. The blueberry pancakes from Stonewall Kitchen Breakfast has been in my head for so long I had to make them.

These pancakes are labelled “good for you” because of the whole wheat flour in them. Usually whole wheat pancakes turn out heavy unless the egg whites are whipped separately. This recipe uses a mix of whole wheat and all-purpose to make them fluffy.

Confession: I have a hard time making pancakes. Not the actual mixing of it, but any recipe that involves the slightest co-ordination will usually be a big fail for me. I tried to flip the first two pancakes and accidentally flipped one onto the other. After that I was banned from any pancake flipping.

Even though these have whole wheat in them, they don’t have that “healthy” taste to it and the pancakes weren’t leaden, but fluffy and light. I always have whole wheat flour in the house so these are sure to be a brunch staple for us.

Good-For-You Whole-Grain Blueberry Pancakes (from Stonewall Kitchen Breakfast)

Ingredients

1 cup whole-wheat flour
1 cup unbleaced white flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups buttermilk*
2 large eggs, lightly whisked
2 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter melted
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 1/2 cups of blueberries or other fruit

*substitution: 2 tablespoons of white vinegar or lemon juice with 2 cups milk. Let it sit for 5 mins

1. Set aside the fruit. In a large bowl, whisk together together the dry ingredients. Whisk the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until just blended. If you go too crazy with the mixing you will have hockey pucks instead of pancakes.

2. Heat a griddle or skillet over medium heat. Add a bit of butter to lightly grease the griddle (you can also throw in a bit of oil so the butter doesn’t burn so quickly). Pour about 1/4 cup of batter into the skillet and sprinkle the blueberries on top.

3. Cook for about 2 1/2 – 3 minutes on each side or until lightly golden brown and cooked through.

4. Serve immediately or keep it warm in a 300 degree oven.

It’s boiling hot outside. All I want is ice cream and I want to make it. This involves turning on my oven and standing over a hot stove. I’ve been wanting to make the Gianduja gelato from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz as this is my go to flavour whenever I order gelato.

There are several steps involved to make this: toast the hazelnuts, try to rub the papery skins off as much as possible (a tea towel helps with this), make the infused hazelnut milk mixture, make the custard, combine the two, refrigerate, and then make ice cream. None too difficult, but I found getting the papery skins off of the hazelnuts to be the most time consuming.

The result was dense and heavenly. Definitely a repeat before this summer ends. Was it worth being in a sweltering kitchen? Yes!

I find homemade ice creams to be much more rich and dense so a small scoop goes a long way.

Recipe here. Note: This recipe calls for milk chocolate, but I think a dark chocolate would also work nicely as well.

P.S. After having this blog for 2.5 years I thought it was time to commit and buy the domain name nervouschef.com. Please change your bookmarks/rss feeders to this one. Thanks!

I’ve resisted buying the adorable pie molds from Williams-Sonoma. Star shapes are cute, but don’t the edges burn faster?

Once I saw the Lattice Pocket Pie Mold, I had to buy it. The shape is generic enough that you could make mini calzones, empanadas, or a homemade pop tart version with just the bottom cutter.

I made mini blueberry pies, but decided to just use the bottoms because the filling was a bit runny. The picture at the top was only for show.

I planned on making a bunch to take to work however I ran into a little problem…

Half of them oozed out their filling. I’m not going to write off this pie mold just yet, it just needs a little practice.

Here’s what I learned so far:

- Do not roll out the dough too thin. In the recipe it says 1/16 – 1/8 inch thick but I found once I crimped it, the edges were much too thin.

- The dough needs to be stretched out a bit after it has been cut. Because the size is the same for top and bottom, once you add the filling, there won’t be enough dough to give it a proper seal.

- You can use more filling. The recipe says 2 tablespoons, but you can use 3 tablespoons…probably even more than that.

- Crimped edges means a happy non-oozy pie. Sometimes crimping by hand was necessary. Maybe if I had stretched the dough out more and didn’t roll it as thin, my crimping may have held better.

Cereal, half a bag of popcorn…these have been my dinners lately. When it’s just me dining I’m not particularly motivated to cook. However, when I came across this shaved asparagus pizza from Smitten Kitchen, my motivation to cook increased rapidly.

I’d like to thank Smitten Kitchen for introducing me to shaved asparagus. I’m a big fan of this stalky green and didn’t realize how delicious shaved raw asparagus could taste. I plan on incorporating this into more dishes.

I’d also like to thank Smitten Kitchen for introducing me to this pizza. I may have used an expletive describing how good this pizza was. It’s crazy delicious and I highly recommend that you make it right now.

I substituted Monterey Jack for the Mozarella as that’s all I had in the fridge. I also used one of my favourite pizza doughs for the crust. The suggestion of drizzling truffle oil after the pizza was done turned it into a fancy shmancy experience. Add a glass of bubbly and dinner couldn’t have gotten better.

Recipe here.

This was a special request from R. I don’t usually think of a heavy comforting meal such as mac and cheese as a hot weather meal.

I went to Alex Farm Products in Yorkville and I mentioned I needed a sharp cheddar for this recipe. He told me that the recipe sounded “suspicious” and steered me away from it. Why not a sharp cheese? Because of its age it won’t melt as nicely and will be grainy. The taste will also be very strong and smelly (I didn’t mind that part so much — I love a stinky cheese). So I bought a medium white cheddar that he recommended.

This is a Cook’s Illustrated recipe that is simple to make. Just remember to keep an eye on it when you’re using the broiler because the breadcrumbs burnt while I was looking for something. Oops.

I wasn’t too thrilled with this recipe, it felt like it was missing something and didn’t have the “cheese” flavour I wanted. Maybe because I used a medium cheddar?