ForkAndPen

100 Centre Street

This weeks theme is a bit lazy. Still enjoyable of course.

I have jury duty this week in the Supreme Court of New York building, 100 Centre Street in lower Manhatten. Unbenounced to me the court building was steps away from Bayard street and in turn - Shanghai Cuisine. So there is the theme - eating by the court house. Every day this week I will try to have at least one meal by the court house. Today it looks like a Thai place.

Jury Duty Lunch #1 - Shanghai Cuisine

Hot and Sour soup

Crab and Pork tiny buns

Baby Shrimp Fried Rice

Hoomus Chicken Salad

Here is a leftover from chickpea week that I made. My problem with chicken salad has always been mayonnaise. I just don't enjoy the stuff ( as any good food writter will tell you - we must learn to eat the things we despise and one of these weeks mayonnaise will be the theme). I never have liked it. But I craved chicken salad. So I used Hoomus as the binding agent.

Eureka!! It was good. Below I will tell you what I did and soon I will write up an actual recipe with some pictures.

1. Make a good amount of hoomus (olive oil, tahini, 2 cans of chickpeas, 5 gloves of garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, a little lemon juice).

2. Marinate three chicken breasts in lemon juice, cumin, seasoning salt, peper, and olive oil.

3. Brown chicken in a pan and cook all the way through. Reduce leftover liquid with water or more lemon juice and save.

4. Put chicken in food processor and reduce it to tiny shredded pieces. Add the reserve liquid and a bit more peper to the chicken and run food processor once more.

5. Cut up scallions and add to the chicken. Add hoomus back to the mixture and run once more in the food processor to mix.

6. Salt and pepper if needed.

And there you have it. Does it taste like chicken salad? Well, somewhat. The garlicky taste of hoomus is strong but mixed with the chicken things balance out. I toasted wheat bread and served the chicken salad on it topped with cucumber, lettuce, and a few strips of bacon.

Chickpeas with garlic

I recently bought Claudia Roden's The Food of Italy - a simple and touching book that goes region by region through Italy with recipes so short and simple that you wonder if something is wrong - "thats all i need to do?" you ask staring at 4 ingredients and one line of instruction.

So for chickpea week I took her recipe for Ceci all'aglio (chickpeas with garlic) and added pasta. A filling dinner for six is created!

Eat the theme

Lately I have been trying to come up with some ways to make my daily eating more interesting. I try to cook as much as I can but of course get lazy. And when choosing places to eat in this great city of New York, the tendency is to try something new, but sometimes you need a little push.

Hence the idea of "Eat the theme". Each week (or whenever I want to do it) I am going to pick an ingredient or a dish or even a culture. Then through the week I will cook, eat, and learn that theme. You can think of it as "Iron Chef" extended over a week and with only one contestant.

The first installment........

Chickpeas

What is the chickpea ?

Some chickpea recipes