Growing Sideways » zucchini

Milos

Varun — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:24:31 +0000

Went to Milo’s last night and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Fish market below

One of the appetizers. It is called the Milos Special, and it is made of fried zucchini and eggplant chips (not soft inside like tempura, but very crispy) stacked in a tower with a cavity in the center, which is filled with a sour greek yogurt dipping sauce. And on the side are pieces of fried Greek saganaki cheese.

Tuna crudo appetizer. Again, amazing.

Zucchini Lasagna

Varun — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:15:46 +0000

The problem with delaying a post is that you forget how you prepared a dish…even if you have pictures of the process :-/ I suppose that’s a jab at my memory! In any case, I have a good “excuse” — I had ACL surgery in early March, so most of my mind was occupied with that. Today (3/20/2010), I was finally “recovered” enough to take a trip to Whole Foods and cook up some damn fine grub. But this post isn’t about that. This post is about a different fine meal that I prepared at home on Jan 30, 2010 (Yes…almost 2 months ago!!! ). Btw, I also finally set up my own website =D –> www.varundube.com, which seems to be off to a good start. We’ll see how it goes.

And finally on to the food! I was watching some fine knife-carving by Japanese chefs and was inspired to use a big-ass knife to make thin sheets of zucchini and make manicotti with it. Two things foiled my plan: I was not skilled enough and I did not have a big-ass-enough knife. So I ended up cutting thin strips and reverting to looking for a zucchini lasagna recipe. Giada had a recipe that looked fantastic, but I ended up modifying it to suit my inner desire for a comfort food. It turned out great! The zucchini was cooked through and left no taste, it was light but satisfying, it was crispy and cheesy enough for everyone, and adding red pepper flakes and pasta sauce gave it two kicks in the right direction.

Some notable things we did to ensure bliss:

after arranging each layer, we decided to broil it in the oven so that the breadcrumbs and cheese would loose a little moisture and crunch up
adding sauce was an afterthought as we found a small lack of depth with just the cheese and zucchini
we used ricotta, parmesan andÂ mozzarellaÂ cheeses mixed with some dried herbs, a lot of black pepper and a little salt
used panko bread crumbs on top of cheese for extra crispy crunch

Oh Lazy Me

Varun — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:03:48 +0000

I’ve been pretty lazy about writing the past 2 weeks, but I’ve been cooking even more, so when I get around to it (I have at least 2 posts to be written), it will be worth the wait…hopefully. I think we had 3 dinner parties and 1 ‘nice’ dinner since I last wrote. Let’s see if I can remember what was made:

Dinner Party 1:
zucchini lasagna (post worthy), chocolate ?foam? muffins (semi post-worthy…although I don’t have pictures of the final thing since we ate them all), spicy chicken with american raita

‘Nice’ Dinner (2/4):
mom made thai noodles with chicken and shrimp, I made manchego mashed potatoes and spinach artichoke dip

Dinner Party 2 (2/5):
senegalese chicken peanut soup, chocolate mousse part 1, chole, thai rice veggie wraps

Dinner Party 3 (2/6):
cheese dip, chocolate mousse part 2, chicken salad