Food Network Star Episode 1 Dish: Miso Skewer en Papillote (aka 2-in-1 Surprise Skewer)

Okay, so you’ve been dropped onto a fake beach in the middle of an amusement park. What now? You cook, of course! 

I've watched enough seasons of Food Network Star to know that the first challenge usually involves your signature dish. But here was this season's twist: it had to park-friendly. Explicitly, that meant no utensils, and it had to be plated on servingware normally found in an amusement park. Implicitly, that meant a world of intangible things that you might expect from park food. 

my signature dish in its normal form

What are those intangibles? Here were the musts I considered: 

• Fun -- think churros and Groot bread 

• Light -- this was a water park after all and I didn’t want to serve anything too heavy or hot 

• Easy and relatively unchallenging -- no one comes to an amusement park to take culinary risks 

When you're not good at hiding your discomfort ...

... and panic.

So I decided to convert my miso-glazed halibut with turmeric tiles into a skewer, cooked en papillote. The parchment papillote would keep the dish neat, ensure everything inside was warm and tender, and provide a little mystery. 

on the show

at home

In my presentation, I ended up calling this a “Two-in-One Surprise Skewer”. After our cook, I had looked around and seen people had beautiful dishes -- all visually exciting colors and textures. I had… a brown paper pouch and a piece of brown bread. Blech. 

"Everyone likes their own personal packet. And it tastes good." 

So I tried to spin the negative into a positive. Can’t see what you’re eating? It’s a surprise! Don’t know what’s inside? It’s actually two things, a skewer and brothy veggies to sop up with the bread. 

Sadly, neither the park guest, Giada, nor Bobby commented on my expert re-branding. But it didn’t hurt me either :P. 

RECIPE

2-in-1 Surprise Skewer (aka Miso-Glazed Turbot and Zucchini Skewers with Turmeric Veggies and Garlic Sesame Naan) 

I changed this recipe a bit from what I cooked on the show. My original signature dish used yellow squash, and that’s what I used here. On the show, I couldn’t find/they didn’t have any yellow squash, so I ended up using bell peppers. 

I also used turbot here because my local Whole Foods was out of halibut. Feel free to use any firm, thick white fish like halibut, turbot, or cod. 

Poached Vegetables
4 cups water
1-inch knob of ginger
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons turmeric
1 teaspoons whole black peppercorns
½ head Napa cabbage
3 yellow zucchini 

Skewers
2-inch knob of ginger
6 cloves of garlic
¼ cup white miso
2 ½ tablespoons mirin
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 ½ tablespoons soy sauce
1 lb firm white fish like halibut, turbot, or cod 

Naan
1 ½ tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic
Pinch of salt
Splash of sesame oil
Black sesame seeds
1 naan 

Preheat oven to 400°F. Peel and dice ginger. Slice Napa cabbage into ¼ inch strips. Slice zucchini into ¾” half moons. Add water, ginger, salt, turmeric and peppercorns to a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Add the Napa cabbage and zucchini and lower to a simmer for 3-5 minutes, until the cabbage has wilted and the zucchini is fork-tender, but still firm. 

Puree all the skewer ingredients (except for the fish :P)  in the blender. Cut fish into 1” cubes and mix with the miso marinade. 

Use pre-cut parchment paper squares, or cut them yourself. Lay out skewers diagonally on the paper. There should be at least one inch of room on each side of the skewer. If not, trim your skewer. 

Lay out one square. Spread a bed of cabbage along the diagonal of the square, where the skewer will be. Build the skewer, alternating zucchini and fish. When done, place the skewer on the parchment paper. Trim the corners of the parchment paper “wings”. This will reduce excess paper. Crimp the edges of the parchment paper by rolling and pinching, sealing the skewer.

Place on a sheet tray and bake/steam in the oven for 13 minutes. 

As the fish cooks, make the garlic sesame naan. Add olive oil and garlic to a small frying pan. Slowly bring to a simmer, until garlic is lightly golden. Add sesame oil. Brush oil on naan with a pastry brush. Toast in the oven or on a grill. Sprinkle with sesame seeds. 

Serve hot so your guests can open the pockets and enjoy the aromatic steam. 
 

Book Club Bites: Salade Nicoise

There’s an important scene in Food Whore where Tia is feeling lost. Her personal life and secret life with Michael Saltz are starting to clash and she’s not sure how she'll sort it out.

Her friend asks her to grab a bite and they go to a nice-ish deli near Washington Square Park. You know, one of the ones with a decent salad bar. As she’s thinking, she absent-mindedly adds items to her container: arugula, tuna, mustard, olives… until she makes an accidental Salade Niçoise.

“I mixed and tasted and went back for other ingredients until the tuna salad was near perfect. It was filling and bracing and pickled. It didn’t taste like bodega food at all. The simple act of cooking and tasting calmed me like nothing else.”

Surprise, surprise, I also love Salade Niçoise. The appeal is its remarkable harmony. Every player is assertive: fragrant tuna, briny olives, meaty haricot verts, plush hard-boiled eggs, spicy arugula. And yet together, they harmonize. The salad surely doesn’t need cheese or bacon, both auto-tune for salad, ways to increase tastiness by masking the ingredients. This is hearty and flavorful, with each component keeping its integrity. 

In my mind, the defining characteristics of a Salade Niçoise are: boiled potatoes, blanched haricot verts, Niçoise olives, hard-boiled eggs, and high-quality tuna. Other people may want to put anchovy in there, but to me, olives and tuna add enough saltiness. Once you have those ingredients, you can really play around with the rest. The recipe below doesn’t have precise proportions -- just mix and match, salad-bar-bodega style.

RECIPE:

Dressing: Using a mortar and pestle, grind three cloves of garlic with one tablespoon of salt until pasty. Add to a bowl along with ⅓ cup of olive oil, 1 minced shallot, the juice of 2 lemons, 1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard, and black pepper to taste. Whisk and set aside.

Boiled Components: If you have the time, you might as well cook everything in the same pot of boiling water (as opposed to having three pots at once, which is somewhat wasteful and adds a lot of unnecessary heat to your kitchen -- critical if you’re making this in the summer).

Add water to a large saucepan and heavily salt. Bring to a boil. Add purple potatoes and four eggs. After 7-10 minutes (depending on how you like your eggs), remove the eggs and cool them off in a bowl of ice water. Add trimmed haricot verts and cook for 2 minutes. Remove and add to another bowl of ice water. Check potatoes with a fork -- the cooking time depends on the size. Remove when a fork easily slips in, with no “crunch” sound.

Before you assemble, cut the eggs in halves or quarters. Cut the potatoes into bite-sized pieces.

Classic Components:
Tomatoes - I like Kumato because they’re sweet and not too tart. But any tomato will do. Cut into wedges.
Radishes 
Cucumber - English or mini. You want a compact cucumber that isn’t too watery.
Olives - I used oil-cured black olives because they are one of my favs. But Niçoise olives are the classic.
Herbs - scallions, basil, chervil

Wildcard Components:
Beets
Fiddlehead ferns
Microgreens - here, I used mustard micro greens
Pickled Cipollini Onions

Assembly:
On a large plate, arrange a bed of arugula. Add your other ingredients. Top with high-quality olive oil-packed tuna. My favorite is this yellowfin tuna from Ortiz. You can buy it at Whole Foods or Zingermans. (True, you can’t find imported Spanish tuna at a bodega salad bar. But just go with it.)

Drizzle with dressing and serve.

Flax Fish Sticks with Special Sauce

It started with a baseball game -- hot dogs, popcorn, soft serve, peanuts, fries. The whole works.

This time I had a taste of tater tots. The last time I had tater tots was in elementary school, when fried potatoes were still considered your daily vegetable.

They weren't really tasty. Or well-executed. They were definitely from a an institutional food services company. And yet they were so good. Perfect, really. A perfect snapshot of me 20+ years ago, buying a $1 red-and-white paper boat of tater tots with money I saved up just for the occasion.

And so this dish came from another long-ago memory. The Big Mac and its Special Sauce. Special sauce is probably a model recipe, a perfect representation of the salty-fatty-sweet trifecta. Even if I never eat a Big Mac again, I'm sure it's engineered to stay in my memory until I die.

My sauce breaks down the McDonald's recipe and translates the ingredients into something cleaner. The fish sticks are covered in flax seed meal, which give it a texture and nuttiness not unlike fried breading

Would you ever eat Flax Fish Sticks with "Special Sauce" at a baseball stadium or fast food restaurant? Never. But for a moment, you can be transported there, guilt trip not included.

RECIPE: 

Cut one salmon filet into dunkable pieces. Air dry on a plate, so the surface will toast rather than steam. Preheat toaster oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Meanwhile, in a blender mix 1 cup cottage cheese, 2 tablespoons ketchup, 1 teaspoon paprika, 1 slug of vinegar, and a pinch of onion powder. Add salt to taste. Remove the sauce from the blender and add 1 heaping tablespoon of sweet relish. Set aside.

Sprinkle flax seed meal on the fish plate and coat pieces thoroughly. Cook in toaster oven. Your time will depend on the thickness of your fish. I made them thin and cooked them for about 7 minutes.

Chorizo Scallop Cabbage Pouches

Anything that requires wrapping is not an everyday food. Growing up, we only made "shambosh", a curry-beef samosa, on holidays. Grandma's yearly zongzi-making is reason enough to visit. From dumplings to spring rolls, tamales to tortellini, wrapped things are the stuff of special occasions.

But wrapped foods are a warm, loving gesture. Dim sum, after all, means "touches the heart." But with the right recipe, you can get the same effect ...without taking an entire day to get there.

This dish is simple, savory, and clean. Stuffed cabbage is another homey Grandma thing, but here the inside is simplified and purified.

I think in some cases, it's noble and grand to sacrifice your time and labor to feed someone. And in other cases, I think it's better to take it easy on the cooking so you can spend that time with that someone.

RECIPE: Separate 10 leaves from a small cabbage. The cabbage must be small because the leaves are more supple and the leaves fit the scallops better. Simmer them in a pot with 1/2 cup of chicken broth. Cook until they're translucent and pliant, like a swath of thick cloth.

Chop chorizo and add to one cabbage leaf, along with scallop. Fold the sides first, then the top, then bottom part, where the leaf met the base. Lay into a pan. When you've wrapped all your scallops, add the broth you used for the scallops. Cover and simmer for 5-8 minutes.

Season with sea salt and paprika.