An Ali Baba sandwich and thoughts of Paris

My thoughts have been drifting over to Paris quite a bit lately. I think it’s the travel bug that’s been itching in me all winter. This year also marks five years since I studied there. I spent a good part of this afternoon following Google street view around my old Paris haunts, amazed at how much is still the same (assuming Google’s photos are up to date).

The five months I spent in Paris were fabulous, and every once in a while I wish I could be transported back to that time. I learned so much there, a lot of it about food. If I were to go back in time, knowing what I know now, I would surely choose to eat a lot better. As a student, I was on a tight budget. I also knew much less about food than I do now. I cooked a lot of weird meals for myself and ate at a lot of weird places (usually only once).

But one place I know I would go back to is a little sandwich shop that was around the corner from my school. Pictured above, Le Ventilo is just a little lunch window on a quiet street. If you went inside, it like someone’s homey kitchen. There was a small seating area for maybe 3 people. You would sit behind whoever was making sandwiches that day and watch through the window as other people got their lunches. It was a lovely place, but there must have been many more remarkable sandwicheries across the city.

The menu at the time had cutely named sandwiches. I think there was one called “Le Austin Powers,” and of course, they sold the requisite Nutella panini. My favorite one, which I must have ordered a dozen times while I was there, was the “Ali Baba.” It wasn’t always available, but I remember treating myself to one whenever it was. It was 3.20 euros, I think. It was the simplest sandwich – a soft baguette pressed with moist ground beef and chopped cooked tomatoes. Simple, but somehow perfect. I would wait a few minutes for it to cool down and then nibble it for as long as I could while the meaty juices soaked into the meat and occasionally dripped down my fingers.

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Get Cooking’s take on Mabo Dofu, a classic tofu and meat dish

This post was a guest post on a blog that I love, Just Bento, in October 2009. I’ve posted it here for continuity and posterity. I encourage you to check out the other posts on Just Bento (and Just Hungry) as Maki has some of the clearest Japanese recipes you will find on the web (and some non-Japanese as well), and is currently one of my favorite food bloggers.

I know this might be looking a bit too decadent to any lover of authentic Mabo Dofu, but, well, no Japanese dish stays very authentic in my hands for too long. Mabo Dofu, an originally Chinese dish popular in Japan, is beef and tofu simmered in a red miso-ginger-garlic-chili sauce. Over the years, it has become a staple in my household. Like everything else I make regularly, the recipe changes slightly each time depending on what ingredients and condiments we have around.

The more I make and eat mabo dofu, the more I love it. I used to use sauce packets that you can find in many Asian groceries, but then I realized how much more easy, cheap, and tasty it was to make the sauce myself. While the list of ingredients looks long, it’s a very simple dish to prepare. After you have it once, you may even start adding some of the main ingredients to your fridge and pantry staples. Before this dish entered my life, I had an aversion to tofu. Having tofu in a dish where it is not meant as a substitute for something else changed my perspective on the protein completely. This is my favorite use for tofu.

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Gyros, Revisited: Beef

Between visits from family and petsitting, it’s been difficult for Jen and I to settle into any sort of routine here at the new place. There has not been much time to document cooking and the cooking we’ve been doing has been of the classic sort. We’ve been making some old simple favorites over and over to get us through the work-week.

But of course, my creative mind can’t ever leave well enough alone when cooking up tried-and-true favorites. I always find the need to tweak here and there, or in this case, substitute ingredients entirely. Last night, the craving for gyros hit again (as happens often to an old salt-hound like myself). I could have followed recipe for Chicken Gyros that I recently shared. For once, I had all of the correct ingredients; even fresh yogurt for tzatziki.

But I was lazy and hungry. I opted to use ground beef instead taking the time to finely chop chicken.

For beef gyros, follow the recipe for chicken gyros, just add a pinch more of each spice and don’t use any cooking oil. If possible, use leaner ground beef (sirloin or round) as you would ideally use for hamburgers. Twenty-percent or less fat should be more than enough to fry the gyros in and soak up the flavors of the spices during marination, the less fat the better here.

Last night, instead of broth, I used the briny liquid at the end of a jar of heart of palm I had finished the day before.

How do you make your gyros? What are your favorite meats, spices or techniques?

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Tex-Mex Casserole Pie

We came up with this one a while back, and since our first try this has always come out a flavorful yet simple dish, capable of satisfying a large or small appetite. We always end up making it as a way to clean out our fridge and pantry, as the ingredients can be thrown together as carefully or as haphazardly as you like.  One shortcoming of this dish is that it should be eaten within two days or everything becomes too soggy to be properly enjoyed, though that’s never really been a problem for us as it usually gets scarfed down on the first night.

These measurements fit our casserole dish which is 8 inches in diameter and 4 inches deep. A pie plate works well too if used with large flour tortillas. Adjust the fillings or layers in this  recipe to fit whatever dish you have.

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Cheesy Macaroni with Baked Acorn Squash and Tomato Sauce

Tonight we revisited a successful dish we had found on the Food Network’s website once when we had an abundance of acorn squash. Basically, you fill baked acorn squash with pasta, sausage, tomato sauce, red onions, cheese, and re-bake. We followed the recipe pretty closely the last time we made it (using ditalini shaped pasta instead of rigatoni and halving the recipe). I really liked this dish, except that I found that there ended up being a bit too much squash per serving for my tastes. The squash tasted best to me when it had come into contact with the pasta and sauce, so the deeper areas of squash flesh were left a bit too “squashy” for me. We remedied that issue this time.

The adjustments we made to the recipe were to make it like a big casserole. We followed most of the instructions (except we were low on sausage so we supplemented with some meatballs, and we halved the recipe again). After the squash baked, I scooped it out of its skin into the big pot where we had combined all of the other ingredients. Instead of having the beautiful little servings of pasta inside the squash, the squash flesh is now a part of the sauce. Less adorable, but far more tasty and practical. We thought about baking the entire pot of everything but it was still very warm and we were hungry, so we dug in right away. We also have a ton of very portable leftovers from this dish to take for lunch tomorrow.

I’m quite glad we returned to this dish after 2 years. It doesn’t look like much but its packed with flavor, and thanks to the squash, more varied nutrients than any regular bowl of pasta in tomato sauce.

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Beef and Lamb Chili

On Monday night last week, we made a big vat of chili. I ate chili that night, on Tuesday for lunch, on Wednesday for lunch and on Thursday I was sad that I didn’t have any more chili for lunch. It was so hearty and satisfying each time that I didn’t need any afternoon snack. I thought I’d be sick of it, but this chili seemed to get better each day that it aged in the fridge.

And except for one new ingredient (for us), we didn’t do anything special. That’s why chili rocks – a decent chili can be made with a wide assortment of ingredients. This is a chili we made up, and I’m sure we’ll never make it exactly the same way again but I’ll probably come back to this recipe as a good base since this particular conglomeration was such a success. We weren’t sure about the beans and corn, but they really helped stretch the flavors in this much farther, not to mention help us squeeze a few more servings out of the vat than we could have done without them.

Note: I’m sure we broke dozens of chili “rules.” For one, we didn’t use any chili peppers (or any other hot peppers). You can definitely rectify that if you so choose. If we had had any habanero peppers (the store was out and we were lazy), I definitely would have used them since I love heat.

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