photo shoots, price fixe, peachy tea

I confronted two issues this morning:

1. This week is restaurant week.
2. I needed to get the HELL out of my house.

I sent my friend Lorraine a text message. “Lunch in DC today? It’s restaurant week!”

Praise be, she said YES.

I bummed a ride in with her and we ended up in Chinatown, where we meandered for a bit, stopping to have a ridic photoshoot in the fitting room.

Can we say Posh Spice?

Yeah, photoshoots don’t work when you are looking in the camera screen. Lesson learned.

Also, Victoria would not be caught dead in flip flops.

Our ultimate destination, however, was Jaleo, the original in Jose Andres’ tapas empire of deliciousness. It is so friggin’ good. Lorraine was already obsessed, and then had studied abroad in Spain and goes there at any possible opportunity to get her tapas fix.

Butttttt this week is not like any other week!

RESTAURANT WEEK! Restaurant week is my favorite holiday. I made that my Facebook status and then my friend (who is living in Oklahoma, poor dear) said “What is restaurant week?”. I explained the idea (I.e. that in August everyone hates being in DC cause it's miserable buttttt the shnazzy restaurants have special money-saving deals for a week). And then my friend Edward summed it up nicely and said “It's a week where you bike to work.”

Anyway, you can peruse the menu here. Any locals, I highly recommend. Great selection, great quantity of food.

Like most restaurant week participants, they do a price fixe menu for $20.10 at lunch, but at Jaleo you actually get three courses PLUS a dessert (most places do three total).

We begin, naturally, with pan.

I was regretfully in the bathroom for the dramatic pouring of the olive oil over the rosemary and garlic. The bread was awesome- crust-licious.

First course:

Ajo blanco malagueno con uvas: white almond gazpacho served with grapes.

I could not stop photographing this. I mean, first of all because it is bloody difficult to take a good photo of a beige soup in a white bowl. But also because I am now OBSESSED WITH THIS.

I mean, garlic and almond soup sounds a little crazy, right?!

  

But ohhh myyyyyy godddddd the soup was so velvety rich! The almonds perfectly counterbalanced the garlic (although the garlic was hefty- this is not one to order on a first date!). There was also a tang of vinegar to keep things interesting on the palate.

I was alas too slow with my camera to miss the dramatic pour, but this actually began as a dish of the soup accompaniments and the almond-garlic mix came beautifully flowingly out of a tall container.

It meant that as you ate the soup, you kept bringing up little jewels of deliciousness with your spoon. There were sweet plump raisins…

 

And the promised grapes.

But wait, wait. That little blob in the center of the bowl? FRESH CRAB. Ohhhhhhhhh Goddddddddddddddddd.

It was really. Really. Good.

Lorrainey got this and insisted it was too beautiful not to photograph.

Ensalada campera: salad of conserved tuna, fingerling potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, and hard boiled eggs.

Next course:

We had passed through Cowgirl Creamery on our way to the restaurant and I was craving cheese in a bad way. Luckily for me, on the menu was something to fit the bill quite nicely.

Manzanas con hinojo y queso Manchego: sliced apple and fennel salad with Manchego cheese, walnuts, and Sherry dressing

Big chunks of cheese? Check!

This picture doesn’t convey the massiveness of the salad. I was STUFFED. You get more, MORE than your money’s worth at Jaleo for restaurant week.

Apples and fennel are just a match made in heaven. And the walnuts were roasted and so wonderfully flavorful and imparted their wonderful taste and texture. And the cheese! Lorraine (who is CRAZY) actually typically doesn’t LIKE cheese (can you imagine?!) but she was inhaling my manchego. It is good, good stuff.

Your final savory course was some of the “meatier” stuff. Fortunately, I had gone for a smaller portion, as I was already quite packed full of goodness at this point.

Vieiras con calabaza y naranjas: seared scallops with butternut squash puree, orange segments, and pumpkin seeds

Tasted as beautiful as it looked.

My thing when I go out to eat is that I don’t want to pay good money to eat something I wouldn’t eat at home. To that end, I order dishes with unusual flavor combinations skillfully blended by a good chef (garlic and almonds anyone?), dishes with hard-to-find ingredients (Manchego!), and dishes with techniques that I lack the equipment and skill to replicate at home (perfectly seared scallops please!)

So so so happy.

And then there was DESSERT!

You had a choice of a flan, a chocolate torte, or the ice cream/sorbet of the day.

Lorrainey finished with a bang and got the chocolate hazelnut torte:

This was so rich it was ridiculous. And the hazelnuts were like crack.

I, already gestating a food baby, went for a palate cleansing option. They said the sorbet of the day was orange, and I went “Spain! Oranges! Valencias! Yum!”

And this beauty arrived:

Best sorbet I have ever tasted. A perfectly acid-sweet balanced orange flavor. So tasty. It was also so light and fluffy it was like it hadn’t been frozen. I don’t know how they did it. I want to steal their ice cream freezer! As for the little cookie sticking out of it, I don’t know what was in it except that it was nutty, not-too-sweet, and extraordinarily good.

But wait! The fun doesn’t stop there!

I got an impromptu text from Maya yesterday asking me if I was interested in a DC blogger meetup. Once I was already in town and didn’t have to figure out transportation, I happily RSVP’d!

I was thrilled to have an opportunity to do some SERIOUS digestion- I scampered across town from 7th and E (Jaleo) to 23rd and I (the Foggy Bottom metro).

Maya, Sophia and I met up there to go to, according to many, the REAL best cupcakery in Georgetown:

Baked and Wired!

I admired their very large and very distinctively wrapped cupcakes…

And wished my appetite could do justice to this amusingly-named and delicious-sounding thing:

I toyed with the idea of getting a lemon bar, despite having eaten so massively so recently, but I asked them if they were sweet or sour and they said sweet. I like my lemon bars SOUR!

So I decided to just stick with a drinksie.

They have very silly coffee names:

But ultimately I just wanted to get myself hydrated and wanted some cool, refreshing iced tea. They had an impressive selection:

I had a difficult time making up my mind and the punk-ly haired girl working behind the counter gave me an incredibly impressive and thorough description of their flavors, astringency levels, and abilities to refresh. Kudos, Baked and Wired, for treating iced tea with the seriousness it deserves!

I went with the Persian nectar, a classic black iced tea with a lovely warm hint of peach flavor.

And I rejoined the girls, and as ever thoroughly enjoyed photographing a food blogger photoshoot.

Sophia in action:

(that girl in the background was reading Let the Great World Spin. I really wanted to go up to her and go “That was my favorite thing I read this summer!”, but decided that’d be intrusive)

Anyway, Sophia and Maya split these two beauties, on the recommendation of the servers:

I had a taste of the strawberry and it was like someone’s grandma’s delicious strawberry jam and perfect moist yellow cake had had a delicious baby.

With all the tastiness today, there was also a lot of activeness: I did the math and with all the walking I did in DC I ended up going… 4 and a half miles.

Plus, then I was carless so I metro’d to my mom office and got a free pass to the gym near there and worked out while she finished working!

Then we went out to dinner :D

a tale of two shrimpies

I MADE THIS:

No, I did not get it at a restaurant where chefs are paid to make things taste and look fabulous. I MADE THAT. Omg omg omg.

Not only that, I made TWO THINGS. Here’s how it happened…

We had a lot of shrimp :D

We had a lot of shell-on shrimp, ugh. Instinctively, an ugh. Shelling and deveining is a pain. BUT. Whilst perusing recipes, I found some that involved making shrimp stock with the shells.

Which means, obviously, that from now on I will be, when in the possession of shell-on shrimp, unable to throw the shells away like a normal person now that I know they are USABLE.

I knew I wanted to make tapas-style shrimp. With the possibility of stock, I also got it in my head to make *shrimp bisque*

So I peeled and deveined.

Since we’d relied on the “Yeah, that looks about right” weighing method at H Mart, where we bought the shrimp, I had about 18 ounces of shrimp.

So okay cooking math (the best kind of math :D): the tapas cookbook recipe called for a pound of shrimp to serve 3-4. I 2/3’d that to serve 2, so that was about 11 ounces. That left me 7 for chowdah.

I prepped my aromatics:

 

For the chowdah on the left (onions, celery, n garlic) and for the tapas on the right (onions, garlic, and parsley).

Got my stock on:

Into my pot went the shells, big hunks o’ onion and celery, and a bay leaf. Then I covered with water, brought to a boil, and let simmer maybe an hour and fifteen minutes or so? Longer equals more flavah, obviously.

In the end I ended up with a gorgey golden stock:

I drained that, cleaned out the pan, and threw in buttah and olive oil (buttah cause cmon this is bisque. Olive oil because it lowers the risk of  burning and is heart healthy).

Then I added my tinily diced celery and onion, and cooked gently on medium low. Then I added some flour.

Then went in my homemade stock and a splash of sherry. I brought everything up to a simmer and tossed in the shrimp. When the shrimp had just cooked through (and were pleasingly pink) I threw the mix in my adorably ancient blender, along with salt and pepper and a splash of hot sauce:

And blendy blendy!

 

Saving these for another day. Will report! But I had a wee taste and it’s goooooood.

Now, tapas time.

Guys, this technique was QUALITY. I have fun throwing together my little recipes, but having a recipe written by a professional chef who knows the science is a whole different cuppa tea.

This is from Mediterranean Cooking by Paula Wolfert. It is a GOOD COOKBOOK!

You begin by adding, all at the same time, olive oil, minced onion, and water.

  

Then you let it cook until the water evaporates, which takes about fifteen minutes. This is BRILLIANT. The onion cooks til it is meltingly golden and delicious, and it cannot burn!

It ends up looking like this:

  

At that point, you put in garlic and parsley:

And then, your stars, the shrimpies, on BRISK heat. You cook them verrrrrrrry quickly; just two minutes (stirring CONSTANTLY) and then you deglaze the pan with wine and cook one minute more.

The final result, topped with a bit more parsley?

TRANSCENDENT. I love Spanish food so hard. And when you think about it, the concept of this is a lot like scampi, but it’s made with heart-healthy olive oil and it’s light and fresh, instead of greeeeeeeeasy like, in my opinion, scampi too often is.

And the onions achieved this subliiiiiiiiiiime jamlike consistency. Sweet and rich and heavenly!

This being Spanish food, on the side I had some patatas

Roasted with olive oil, pepper, and garlic salt.

And a nice simple salad:

Just greens n shrooms, with homemade vinaigrette:

Dijon, more parsley <3, white wine vin, and olive oil.

And that’s what I did with all that shrimp!

tapas are perfect

Tonight we had gorgeous fresh shrimp from H Mart to use, so I grabbed Penelope Casas’ cookbook, just titled “Tapas” (that link is the new edition, ours is older, but the recipe is a classic so I’d be surprised if she took it out), and got the recipe for shrimp in a spicy tomato sauce.

HELLO, BEAUTIFUL!

Seriously, this might be the best shrimp I’ve ever made. The sauce was UNREAL- full of onions, garlic, herbs, olive oil, tomato, wine… so flavorful and complex, even though it only cooks for twenty minutes or so. And the technique was spot on: the shrimp was cooked really well (you sear it really quickly in a super hot pan, then let it finish gently cooking in the sauce so it soaks up the flavors).

It really tasted like the tapas I’ve had at restaurants! I love the whole idea of tapas- take a few really quality, fresh, ingredients, prepare them in a way that highlights their integrity, and eat, in a fun, social, relaxed, sharing manner. And I would so rather nibble on lots of fun little things than have some big plate of meat and potatoes!

To accompany, my mom made a seriously gorgeous salad with awesome Spanish/Mediterranean flavors:

This is Spring Mix greens, oranges, kalamata olives, the last of my cheese, and a beautiful parsley shallot vinaigrette. It was SO GOOD. I seriously could not stop eating it.

Here’s everyone all together:

I was already planning this recipe this afternoon, and I thought, hey, what better to soak up the flavors than GORGEOUS HOMEMADE CRUSTY BREAD! This was a GOOD ONE, and can be found here, for other bakers (I used all whole wheat flour, halved it –the halved recipe still made two small loaves-- and added 1 tbsp flax for healthy fat).

And yeah, just in case the sauce wasn’t good enough on the shrimp, wiped up with yeasty wheaty crispy crusty homemade bread? HEAVEN!

I had another yummy breakfast featuring more H Mart fabulousness:

Oats and CHERRIES!

The oats were nice and banana-y this morning, because I was hunting through the freezer and wanting to make a double batch (for me and my mom) and I found one half banana and one 3/4 of a banana. So we got a lil extra! And I topped it with walnuts, cause I’d been craving them.

But let’s talk about these:

THESE CHERRIES ARE UNREAL! Soooooooo tasty and perfect and ripe and delicious! I actually don’t know what variety they are: as you can tell by the color, they aren’t Bing, because at this color they are PERFECTLY RIPE.

I ate them basically all morning. This was just part one.

Lunch was hers and hers salads, which I made for my mom and me. Both featured mixed greens leftover from last night’s sashimi platter, steamed green beans, carrots, and parsley dressing. I topped each of ours with stuff that had to be used up in the fridge

Mine with tuna:

Mom’s with chicken (only a wee bit left) and shrooms:

Hahaha, I love that the sun went behind a cloud when I took mine. You can totally tell!

Finally, fabbity fab home brewed iced tea: