One of the reasons I started The Reluctant Gourmet was because when I first started teaching myself how to cook, the cooking magazines used terms I didn’t understand. I would look up a recipe and come across words like chiffonade, panko, al dente or bard and I had no idea what they meant and had to go look them up. If I was lucky enough to find the definition, I would post it on my site under AtoZ Cooking Terms and link to it.

Over time I’ve learned a lot of new culinary terms but I’m still finding new ones every time I open a cooking magazine. A lot of these terms are from other countries because cuisines from around the world are so popular now. There are so many ingredients I’m not that familiar with especially those from Asia and South America.

For example, I was looking at a recent copy of Food & Wine and came across this recipe for Japanese-Style Trout with Dashi. Ok, let’s start with Dashi. What the heck is that? I know a “dash” is a measuring term referring to a very small amount but “dash” with an i at the end.

Turns out dashi is a type of soup or stock that is fundamental to Japanese cooking. When reading the definition for dashi, they describe it as being made with kombu. Okay, kombu, let’s look that up. Oh, that’s edible kelp and we all know kelp is a type of seaweed that grows in shallow oceans.

Another ingredient in dashi is katsuobushi or fermented bonito flakes and we all know bonito is a type of tuna and the flakes are from steamed, aged and air dried bonito fillets that are shaved into delicate flakes.

Another recipe in that same Food & Wine article is Crunch Pork-Kimchi Burgers. What is kimchi (pronounced [KIHM-chee]) you ask?

It is a very spicy, pungent condiment served with most Korean meals. Made from fermented vegetables like cabbage or turnips that have been pickled, jarred and buried in the ground until needed. The same recipe mentions panko (a Japanese bread crumb) and umani (one of the five basic tastes that refers to savoriness).

After 15 years of writing about food on The Reluctant Gourmet and I’m still learning new terminology every day. That’s what I love about my what I do. Every time I turn around there is something different to learn about. Very cool!

By the way, chiffonade is the French term for a particular knife cut where herbs and leafy greens are cut into thin strips. Panko is a Japanese style of bread crumbs. Al dente translates from Italian to mean “to the tooth” and refers to the degree of doneness for pasta or risotto where the center remains firm and not overcooked.

To bard is to wrap a lean cut of meat like filet mignon with a fat like bacon to prevent the lean cut from drying out while cooking. See, not so difficult except there are hundreds if not thousands of terms like this you might come across every time you pick up a cookbook or cooking magazine.

I’m going to start posting culinary terms over on my Facebook page as I become acquainted with them as well as post them on my AtoZ Cooking Terms page. Of course, if you have a term you would like to share here or on my Facebook page, I’d love to learn it from you. This will be a work in progress and I hope it will be fun and educational.

When I think of salsa, I think of fresh tomato salsa with chunks of red tomato and bell peppers. Salsa is Spanish for “sauce” so there are many different types of salsa to enjoy. Recently I showed you how I prepared a Chipotle salsa and now I want to teach you how to make tomatillo salsa as taught to me by my Mexican friend Paula.

What Are Tomatillos?

Sometimes called green tomatoes or husk tomatoes, tomatillos are a fruit about the size of a ping-pong ball with an inedible, paper-like husk surrounding them. When ripe, they can be yellow, purple or even red but most often you are going to find the green ones.

When buying tomatillos, look for husks that are intact and light brown. If the husk is dry and shriveled, the fruit may not be in very good condition. Make sure the tomatillo is firm and free of blemishes. If you can’t find them fresh, you may be able to find them canned in your local market but they are not the same.

Tomatillos have a tart flavor and are a staple in Mexican cooking. Paula says this tomatillo salsa is popular in Mexico because tomatillos are so available and inexpensive. She told me they were so plentiful in the town she grew up in, you could just walk down the road and find them growing wild.

Although the first domesticated tomato, the ones we are familiar with, may have first been grown by the Aztecs of Central Mexico, red tomatoes are often too expensive for many Mexicans to use for their salsas.  Therefore, tomatillos are a good substitute and very popular to use in sauces (salsas).

Don’t confuse a tomatillo with the green tomato made famous in the 1991 film, Fried Green Tomatoes. They are not the same. Although they are in the same family, nightshade, they are a different genus.

Sauce or Salsa

Yes, I know they mean the same thing but how you are going to use this sauce determines how much water you use. Paula uses tomatillo sauce like most of us would use a sauce, for additional flavor for chicken, pork and fish dishes. She may use it inside a fajita or to cook enchiladas in.

What I am saying is she pours it on, over or into whatever she is serving it with and therefore makes it very liquid. If you want to use this as a more traditional salsa to serve with chips, use half the amount of water for a thicker result.

How Hot Do You Want It?

This gets really confusing because the first time we made this, Paula used 6 jalapenos. The next time we used only 2 and it was even spicier. When asked, she said it depends on the jalapeno’s age. Older jalapeno peppers are hotter than young ones. See my post on jalapeno peppers. So for this recipe I’m going to say 2 to 6 jalapenos depending on how hot you like it and how hot the jalapenos are.

Easy to Make Jalapeno Sauce (Salsa)

Ingredients

1-pound fresh tomatillos, husks removed
2 – 6 jalapeno peppers (see above)
2 cloves garlic
1 – 2 cups of water, depending on how thick you like it
3 sprigs fresh cilantro

How to Make Jalapeno Salsa at Home

Add the tomatillos, jalapenos, garlic cloves and water to a saucepan. Bring to a boil then lower heat just a bit and continue to simmer for 30 minutes.
Transfer to a blender and puree until smooth. Add the cilantro and puree again.
That’s it. Couldn’t be easier!

I Use This Sauce On Everything

I can’t tell you how much I enjoy this sauce. I really do use it on everything, especially leftovers. I like the heat it adds to left over pasta, rice or vegetables. For breakfast, I’ll scramble up an egg; add it to a toasted corn tortilla with a piece of cheese. The eggs melts the cheese and then I top everything with a little of tomatillo sauce.  Yummm. What a great way to get any day started!

Give this a try and tell me how you might use tomatillo sauce in your cooking repertoire.

Which One Is Hotter?

My friend Paula has been teaching me some basics of Mexican cooking and one of the ingredients she loves working with are jalapeño chili peppers. In fact, as a snack, she likes to slice them up and eat them with a little salt and fresh lemon juice like they were Bonbons. I try a piece and I end up with the hiccups.

Last week we were working on a fresh tomatillo salsa that Paula has made for me in the past and is now a staple in my fridge. It is so versatile. You can put it on just about anything you want to spice up with a little flavor like roast chicken, fish, pork tenderloin. This sauce is perfect for tacos, tamales, and tortillas or as a simple dip for corn chips. I’ll post a recipe for tomatillo salsa later this week.

Just a few ingredients in Paula’s tomatillo salsa and one of them is the jalapeño pepper.  I noticed one week we added six jalapeño peppers to one pound of tomatillos and the next week just two jalapeños. I asked why and she said the two jalapeño peppers were much hotter than the six other ones.

Of course I asked her how she could tell without cutting open the peppers and tasting them. She told me she does it by looking at them. It seems that jalapeño peppers get hotter as they get older and the older they get, they change in appearance.

When young, they are smooth, uniformly green and less hot but as they get older they start to develop striations or lines in the outer skin. You’ll also start seeing little white lines and white flecks in the skin as shown in the photo above. According to Paula, these should be hotter and sure enough the version of tomatillo salsa made with these two older jalapeños was hotter than the batch we made with six.

Does that mean you can’t find really hot jalapeños with smooth skins? I don’t think so. I’m sure there are some jalapeño peppers that are perfectly smooth that are really hot but just imagine how hot they are going to be when they age some. Supposedly red jalapeño peppers are at their ripest and most hot. I stay away from them so I have no idea.

Hotter In Refrigerator?

When I asked Paula if the peppers getter hotter with age in the refrigerator, she said they do. I’m not a food scientist but I did purchase a few jalapeño peppers and watched them over the course of a couple weeks and can say yes, they do develop the white lines and striations as they age and yes, they were much hotter.

Don’t take my word for it. If you like hot, spicy foods try this experiment for yourself and see what results you get. I would love to hear about what you find out.

And when shopping, you now can pay attention to the bin full of jalapeño peppers and have a better chance of picking out the hot ones if that’s your goal.

Gluten Free Penne with Tuna and Artichokes

Last night I needed to come up with a quick meal for the family. My oldest daughter had a tennis clinic so we started a little late. We talked about going out for dinner but both girls said they had too much homework and wanted to stay in and order takeout sushi.  These girls will find any excuse to order sushi but I said no to that so now what do I prepare?

I love to keep our pantry filled with interesting food items for occasions just like this when I want to put together a quick meal but still want it to be a little different and taste great. I call these meals “quick & easy” and on the newly designed site, I’ll have a category for these recipes. I’ve been stocking up my pantry with some very cool items I’ve found on Amazon and because we are signed up as a “Prime” members, we get free 2-day shipping on all items fulfilled by Amazon.

Several of the items for this meal were ordered online from Amazon and stock my pantry. Yes, you typically have to order by the case, but often a case is just 6 items. And if you are ordering items with long shelf lives or that you use a lot, it really doesn’t matter. It’s sort of like shopping at Costco but online.

4/28/12 Added - My friend Chef Ricco DeLuca suggested adding some fresh cracked pepper, fresh Italian parsley and a sprinkle of extra virgin olive oil so I am adding these ingredients to this recipe. Ricco is one of the best cooks I know so if he says this recipe will be better with these ingredients, I trust it will.

Strozzapreti Pasta

Strozzapreti pasta or “priest choker”

I already ordered a bunch of new and interesting pastas like the strozzapreti pasta that I wanted to try out but now that I’m experimenting with a gluten free diet for a while, I decided to prepare two different pastas, one for my wife and kids and one for me. The girls have already told me they have no problem with the rice flour pasta but they were excited to try the interesting looking strozzapreti.

Strozzapreti translated is “priest choker” in Italian. Not sure how it received its unfortunate name but according to Wikipedia there are a few legends that may explain its history. One is that “gluttonous priests were so enthralled by the savory pasta that they ate too quickly and choked themselves, sometimes to death.”

There’s another legend mentioned that goes, “wives would customarily make the pasta for churchmen as partial payment for land rents in Romagna, and their husbands would be angered enough by the venal priests eating their wives’ food to wish the priests would choke as they stuffed their mouth with it.”

Neither sound that appetizing but I can assure you my girls enjoyed the pasta, went back for seconds, and didn’t choke on it.

The pasta is made from strips of pasta dough that are twisted by hand (I’m sure commercial pasta manufacturers have machines that do this), cut into 10 cm lengths, and are not uniform in size or shape. Find it at Amazon at strozzapreti pasta.

Italian Jarred Tuna

Imported Italian Tuna - the best!

For a dish like this, you want to try and find imported Italian tuna. There is simply no comparison to the everyday canned tuna we buy for making tuna fish sandwiches. Yes, it is more expensive than most tuna but the meat comes from the finest cuts of yellowfin tuna and with a $7.00 jar you can feed a family of four with leftovers for school lunches the next day.

I purchased the Tonnino Tuna Ventresca in Olive Oil at Amazon. According to Tonnino’s, this is their “créme de la créme of their product line. Imagine an extremely smooth, soft strip of tuna hand filleted from a small section of its underbelly and hand packed in its natural form.”

It is really that good!

Artichoke Hearts

So we have pasta, tuna and now for some artichoke hearts. When I first had this dish while in Rome on my honeymoon at a friend’s home, the artichokes hearts were fresh and amazing. Since this is a pantry pasta dish, I pulled out giant jar of artichoke hearts packed in water that I think I purchased at Costco. I usually have some smaller cans of artichoke hearts in the pantry but we must have run out,  You can also buy a case of these at Amazon at a really good price. Check out these artichoke hearts.

I suggest you don’t buy the marinated hearts because in my opinion the marinade doesn’t taste that good and you cannot get the flavor off the artichokes no matter how many times you rinse them off. Stick with the ones packed in water or brine and then add the flavors you want and by all means if you have the time, use fresh artichokes.

Kalamata Olives

Yes, you can purchase pitted Kalamata Olives at Amazon. I did once and they were terrific but it was a 5-pound bag of them. That’s a lot of olives! You can purchase them in small sizes but olives are easy to find these days in most supermarkets and they’re a great item to have in your refrigerator at all times for all sorts of recipes and salads.

Pine Nuts

Sometimes called Pignoli nuts, these babies are getting expensive but they are so good when toasted and added to a dish like this. My wife suggested we add them to this pasta recipe and it was a great idea. Pine nuts are the seeds that are found in the pine cones of certain species of pine trees. It’s a lot of work to gather and process pine nuts and maybe that’s why they are getting so expensive. I purchase mine at Costco but I did check and you can purchase them on Amazon and have them shipped to you. Check out Amazon pine nuts.

That’s it. Besides some hot peppercorn flakes to give it another layer of flavor, we are ready to go. Normally I would add the peppercorn flakes to the sauce but then my kids wouldn’t eat it so I leave them out for whoever wants to add them to their dish to give it some fire.

Cheese or No Cheese

I posted a similar recipe to this back in 2007 that suggested finishing with grated Parmesan cheese as optional. Since then, I have learned from my good friend Chef Ricco DeLuca that combining cheese with fish sauces is not a good idea and he went on to say “his father would roll over in his grave if he ever combined the two.”

I don’t want any mass grave rolling so this time I’m going to say - No optional cheese.

Boiling Water for 2 Pastas

Toasting pine nuts

Kalamata olives in olive oil

Add the artichokes hearts to the pot

Wheat Flour Strozzapreti Pasta and/or Gluten Free Penne Pasta with Tuna, Artichoke Hearts & Kalama Olives

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup pine nuts, toasted
• 1 pound of strozzapreti or penne pasta
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
• 12 pitted kalamata olives, roughly chopped
• 1 can (about 6) artichoke hearts packed in water but rinsed, drained and quartered
• 1 6.7 oz. jar of imported Italian tuna packed in olive oil
• 1 tablespoon freshly chopped parsley
• 1 teaspoon freshly cracked black peppercorns
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil to drizzle on top
• Hot peppercorns flakes, to taste (optional if you have kids)

How to Make at Home

Start by bringing a large pot of salted water to boil. While it’s coming to a boil, prep all your ingredients. Once the water comes to a boil, add your pasta and start making the tuna sauce.

I’m not sure if there is a particular order I should be following but I heated up a saucepan, added the olive oil and then started with the chopped olives. Let them cook for two or three minutes then add the artichoke hearts. The hearts will break up some while you heat them up especially if you are stirring often but this is fine.

Add the jar of tuna WITH the olive oil it was packed in. Stir to combine ingredients and to break up the tuna chunks. Cook until all the ingredients are heated through.

When the pasta is done (be sure to read my post on How to Cook Pasta), drain and reserve. I do not suggest you combine the sauce and the pasta but rather plate individually by spooning some pasta into each plate and then topping with sauce. Depending on how much tuna sauce you like, a pound of pasta may be too much or it may be just right. Besides one kid may like Kalamata olives and another might not.

Sprinkle some toasted pine nuts, parsley, cracked peppercorns and olive oil on top and serve with the hot pepper flakes on the side so everyone can add to taste.

This is a quick & easy recipe that you can alter to your own likes and with what you have in your own pantry. It’s a great example of why it is a good idea to keep a well-stocked pantry so on nights you don’t know what to cook, you can come up with something special and just as important….easy!

Strozzapreti Pasta with Tuna

Here's what a chipotle pepper looks like out of a can

I just recently learned this but a chipotle is a smoke-dried jalapeño pepper. It comes from the word chilpoctli which means smoked chili pepper. A very popular pepper in Mexico, jalapeños that have been left on their plants at the end of the growing season turn bright red and loose a lot of their moisture. These are then picked to be used for making chipotle.

Placed into a smoker, the ripe jalapeños are smoked for several days until they loose their moisture and get prune like. I read that it takes 10 pounds of jalapeños to make 1 pound of chipotle. The heat of the chipotle has a lot to do with the heat of the jalapeño it comes from.

Sauce or Salsa

I call this recipe a chipotle sauce but it can also be called a chipotle salsa because salsa means sauce in Spanish. I think of salsa in the more traditional American way and that is as a salsa cruda  or pico de gallo, you know, the stuff we serve with corn chips while watching sports. See my version of salsa cruda here.

I learned how to make this simple sauce(salsa) from my friend Paula who is from Mexico. She is a wonderful cook and has been teaching me the basics of Mexican cuisine and I’m not talking about anything fancy, just simple, traditional and very tasty.

What’s really great about this sauce is you combine heat with a smoky flavor and you can use it with just about anything. I’ve tried this on pan fried chicken, fish, tacos, beef, leftover rice and pasta or as a snack with corn chips. It’s easy to make at home and a lot cheaper than some of the commercial varieties.

Roasting a tomato on the stove top

Peeling a hot roasted tomato. Be careful

Chipotle peppers in a can

Puree the ingredients in a blender

Chop and add some fresh cilantro

I served my chipotle sauce over tacos

Chipotle Sauce Recipe

Ingredients

2 tomatoes
2 chipotles from a can - more if you want it hotter
1/2 cup of water
1 or 2 sprigs of fresh cilantro, chopped

Start by roasting the tomatoes. You can roast them in the oven or right on top of the stove. In the photo above you see Paula roasting one over the flame of my gas burner. Being careful not to burn yourself, you hold the tomato with a fork over the flame until the skin turns black and then peel it off over the sink. Transfer the tomatoes into a blender.

Add the chipotles to the blender and then the water. Puree this together in the blender and pour into a bowl. Stir in the chopped cilantro and you are ready to go. If the sauce is too thin for you liking, you can cook it down some in a pan but realize the sauce will get hotter the more you cook it down, so be careful.

Serving

In the photo above you see some of the Chipotle Sauce drizzled on top of some chicken tacos but that is more for show. Paula taught me to add some of the sauce to the inside of the taco by opening it up and spreading sauce inside the corn tortilla.

I have found myself using this spicy sauce to add flavor to lots of dishes but I especially enjoy using it with leftovers.  I’m not eating wheat bread at this time so when I’m hungry for a little snack, I look into the refrigerator for some leftover beef, chicken or fish and some corn tortillas, maybe a little cheese and my container of Chipotle sauce.  Hmmm Good!