Recipe: Lemony Asparagus with Orzo

Posted on April 1, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
Lemony Asparagus Orzo

Lemony Asparagus with Orzo.

Lemony Asparagus with Orzo is a pleasant way to enjoy early season asparagus and the lemon makes it feel like summer is already here. We were lucky enough to have some sweet Meyer lemons brought back from CA plus some Frog Hollow Meyer Lemon Olive Oil, but regular lemons and oil would work fine. This is a fine dish to bring to a potluck because it’s good hot, cold or at room temperature. Simplified from this NYTCooking recipe. Makes 6-8 side dish or 4 main dish servings.

Ingredients:
1 c orzo
1 lb tender young asparagus
1 T or more lemon zest
3 T lemon juice
3 T good olive oil
Salt and black pepper to taste
2 minced garlic cloves, diced
½ c panko or bread crumbs
¼ c parmesan, grated
Chopped parsley for garnish, optional

Method: break off woody ends from asparagus stalks and cut on the bias into bite-size pieces (3/4 inch long so so). Cook the orzo in a generous amount of boiling water until 2 minutes short of package recommendations for al dente. Add asparagus, return to the boil and cook those last two minutes. Drain.

Add 1 T oil to a saucepan (you can wipe out the orzo pot and re-use it) and sauté garlic until fragrant. Lower heat and add panko/bread crumbs. Toast until lightly browned, stirring constantly.

Transfer orzo mixture to a serving bowl with lemon zest, lemon juice and 2 T olive oil and toss to mix. Taste for seasoning; we think it needs just a pinch each of salt and pepper. Fold in toasted bread crumbs and parmesan. Garnish with some chopped green herbs if you like. Serve hot, cold or at room temperature.

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Recipe: Creamy Caesar Dressing

Posted on March 25, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
Creamy Caesar Dressing

Creamy Caesar Dressing atop some spring greens.

A classic Caesar is fine, but sometimes you want a creamy Caesar dressing. Especially if you have a bagful of “Spring Greens” vs rugged romaine. This recipe works because it contains all the essentials including eggs in a food safe payload (mayo) for those who are squeamish about eating them raw. Makes about 1 ½ c dressing, enough for 3 big salads.

Ingredients:

2-3 garlic cloves, peeled
2 anchovy filets in oil or 1 t anchovy paste
2 T lemon juice
1 t Worcestershire sauce
1 t Dijon mustard
½ c grated Parmesan
Generous pinch Kosher salt
Generous pinch ground black pepper
Generous pinch MSG (optional)*

Method: add all ingredients to a mini-chop and pulverize into a smooth creamy emulsion. Spoon over greens and mix thoroughly before serving. Don’t be overly generous with the dressing; a little goes a long way. Unused dressing will keep a couple weeks in a refrigerated container.

*You wouldn’t expect to see a table side waiter sprinkling on MSG in a fancy Tiajuana restaurant, but it seemed to fit here. We were inspired by its use (but not always!) in Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing and our copycat Mystery Creek Ranch Dressing.

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Recipe: Panda Orange Sauce

Posted on March 16, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
Panda Style Orange Sauce

Panda Orange Sauce atop a chicken nugget from the clown,

The ubiquitous orange-sauced chicken in food court Chinese places evolved from a more refined version served at Panda Inn, a sit down restaurant in Pasadena that spawned the Panda Express chain and made the Cherng family very wealthy. NYT Cooking recreated that original chicken, which is light years better than mall food. Try Panda Orange Sauce on anything crispy, like tonkatsu or even a lowly chicken nugget.

Ingredients:
1 c fresh orange juice
1/3 c brown sugar
2 T rice vinegar (unseasoned)
1 T soy sauce
2 T neutral oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 T minced ginger
1 t crushed red pepper
2 t orange zest (or 1 t Penzey’s dried Orange Peel, which we happened to have on hand), finely chopped

Method: mix orange juice, brown sugar, rice vinegar and soy sauce and stir until sugar is dissolved. In a saucepan, sauté ginger and garlic until aromatic, 3 minutes or so. Add red pepper, sauté briefly till it absorbs some oil, then pour in orange juice. Cook over low heat 5 minutes or so till the mixture reduces to the thickness of pancake syrup. Add zest (if using the dried zest, add it along with the orange juice mixture prior to thickening) and serve over fried food piping hot.

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Recipe: Easy Sub Rolls

Posted on March 10, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
Easy Sub Rolls

Easy Sub Rolls. Our first batch had some extra creases but our taste buds didn’t complain.

We had been having good luck with our Fast Focaccia, so why not try the same technique for making sub rolls? We increased the flour while keeping all other ingredients the same and walla, easy sub rolls in under 2 hours. One issue, the high olive oil content makes it harder to shape the rolls because it keeps the edges of dough from making a seal. If this bothers you, consider reducing olive oil from 3 T to 2 T. Makes 4 10-12 inch sub rolls.

Ingredients
1 ½ c lukewarm water (355 g)
1 t sugar
2 t yeast
3 T good olive oil (or less; see above)
4 c all purpose flour (520 g)
2 t Kosher salt

Method: add sugar and yeast to lukewarm water in the bowl of a rotary mixer; stir to dissolve sugar. Rest for 5 minutes or so until yeast blooms; add olive oil then flour and 2 t Kosher salt in that order. Mix at first speed until ingredients are combined then second speed for 5 minutes, until the dough shows good strength from gluten development.

Remove dough hook and add a little olive oil to the mixing bowl; turn the dough so all sides are coated. Cover and rise in a warm place* for 1 hour, or until doubled. Remove the dough to a work surface and divide into 4 pieces of equal weight. Shape each into a ball with a smooth outer surface and edges tucked underneath. Rest 15 minutes then flip each dough ball over and flatten into a vertical rectangle.

Swiss Steak Chicago Italian

Easy sub rolls with Chicago-tsyle beef and giardiniera.

Fold into thirds like a business letter and pinch the ends and edges to seal them. Roll out the dough into sub roll shapes: start with both palms down in the center of the dough, then roll back and forth so the dough extends to the sides. Move your palms outward as the dough extends, trying to maintain an even cylinder. (This takes practice.) When the sub roll is your desired width of 10-12 inches, transfer to a half sheet pan on top of a silicone pad or parchment paper. Repeat with other balls of dough.

When all four sub rolls are shaped, cover with a kitchen towel and preheat oven to 425 degrees. Allow to rise til the rolls have expanded somewhat and a depression made with your fingertip in the dough springs back slowly. Bake 25-35 minutes or until evenly browned. Cool easy sub rolls before using for submarines, hoagies, grinders or heroes.

*NYT offers a great trick for turning your microwave into a proofing box: put in a large cup of just-boiled water along with the bowl of dough.

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Fancy Trail Mix and Granola from Frog Hollow Farm

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
Frog Hollow Trail Mix

Upscale trail mix from Frog Hollow Farm.

I would not have taken Frog Hollow Farm Trail Mix on the road with me during my backpacking days. I was a penny pincher then as now and my preferred energy snack was a mixture of equal parts roasted peanuts, raisins and M&MS called “gorp” which I understand is an acronym for “good ol’ raisins and peanuts” (the M&Ms are silent.) A benefit of this mix, in addition to its cost, is the availability of the three ingredients at virtually any store selling food, even a general store high in the mountains.

Frog Hollow Trail Mix is at the other end of the cheapness/availability spectrum: you have to mail-order, and like the fresh fruit we tried a while back it answers the questions “what if you set out to create the best possible product regardless of cost” and “what is the best choice for the discerning person (maybe you) who has everything?”

This trail mix features intense chunks of dried fruit (it varies with the season; my batch was mostly peaches) and equally intense bittersweet chocolate mini-drops. These items are interspersed with a shower of pumpkin seeds, almonds and sunflower seeds so you get something crunchy, something chewy, something sweet and something bitter in every bite. I don’t know how the chocolate bits would hold up in hot weather (only a memory right now in the frozen north) but the bits are small enough they would not make a mess if melted.

Frog Hollow Granola

Frog Hollow Farm granola.

While on the subject of best possible products, I also tried Frog Hollow Farms Granola. The flavor of this is easy to define: toasty! The oats are roasted almost to the point of being burnt but safely short of it. The top ingredient is honey but it’s absorbed by oats and whole wheat flour. Raisins, almonds and seeds give it a nice chew.

Maybe you want to reverse-engineer the recipes, something we often do at Burnt My Fingers. Maybe you just want to give yourself (or that jaded someone) a treat. Your next step is to check out the Frog Hollow Farm website.

Disclosure: I was provided free product to munch on while preparing this review.

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Exploding pyrex

Posted on February 21, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
Exploding Pyrex

Exploding (actually exploded) Pyrex.

The other day I pulled a carton of eggs out of my poorly designed and overstuffed top-freezer fridge. It snagged a 1L Pyrex measuring bowl filled with congealed stock. The bowl tumbled onto the floor, a distance of 34 inches, and shattered into dozens of sharp edged fragments. Not what I expected from a glass container I count on to hold up to tough treatment. We are not talking about extreme temperature changes which are sometimes cited as a Pyrex hazard; the chilled container and contents had zero time to adjust to the ambient kitchen temp.

According to this allrecipes explainer, there are currently two types of Pyrex, neither manufactured by Corning Glass which originated the product. pyrex (lower case) is made of tempered soda-lime glass and is sold in the US, South America and Asia; PYREX (upper case) is made of borosilicate glass and is sold primarily in Europe and the Middle East. Borosilicate is more shatter resistant but is toxic and expensive to dispose of. When I think of tempered glass, I think of the shower of glass pellets you get when some thug breaks your car window; infuriating but unlikely to hurt you. But in my case, the exploding pyrex left jagged shards all over the kitchen floor.

This thread in the r/Baking reddit has multiple tales of exploding lower-case pyrex, including a photo of a bake pan which self destructed on the stove top. Most of these are temperature-differential incidents in which the exploded fragments embedded themselves in walls and cabinets, often with bits of the baked product to leave a sticky mess. So I got off lucky, I guess.

The final word can be found in a very detailed (complete with footnotes) Wirecutter article on nytimes.com, misleadingly titled “Why We’re Not Worried About Pyrex Bakeware ‘Exploding’”.  A researcher points out that irregular shapes and thicknesses as well as manufacturing defects can make a tempered glass object more vulnerable to breakage; a measuring cup with its handle certainly has more variation than a baking dish. Another researcher posits that a tempered glass item might not break if you drop it on the floor but could have invisible damage that causes it to self destruct in the future. Bwahaha….

Wirecutter touts a few premium baking products that are made with borosilicate, including PYREX (uppercase) from France. But they don’t deliver to the United States, alas. Amazon tells me I ordered a 3-piece nesting set including the exploding 1L twice… once in 2014 and again in 2017. The website currently shows lower case pyrex products but the remaining two in my possession are PYREX. I was managing a rental property at that time and it’s possible I left a set there and needed a replacement. In any case the product switch appears to have happened in that 3 year interval and I guess I am lucky to have kept 2 out of 3.

Who else has a tale of exploding pyrex? (or PYREX?)

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Recipe: Donnelly Swiss Steak

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
Donnelly Swiss Steak

Donnelly Swiss Steak over buttered noodles.

I snagged this Swiss Steak recipe from neighbor and Facebook friend Jackie Donnelly. She spends much of her time studying microflora in the nearby forests, so I suspected that anything which would lure her indoors had to be pretty exceptional. Serves 4 with lots of gravy to be mopped up. (Note: because the meat will cook fall-apart tender, you won’t end up with discrete flats of steak as in the traditional recipe using tenderized beef.)

Ingredients:
1 ½ lb or more beef chuck steak, with most fat trimmed
½ c all purpose flour
1 t Kosher salt
1 t granulated garlic or garlic powder
½ t ground black pepper
2 T olive oil
½ c red wine
1 can Campbell’s French Onion Soup
1 can Ro-Tel stewed tomatoes with chiles (original version preferred)
5-6 cloves of garlic, sliced thin

Method: season flour with salt, garlic powder and pepper and mix. Dredge steak in this flour to coat all sides. Heat oil in a pot (like the inner pot of an Instant Pot on Sauté setting) and brown meat on all sides. Pour over wine and simmer briefly. Add soup (undiluted) and tomatoes, mix in, bring to a boil then reduce heat to a simmer. Scatter garlic slices on top and cover; reduce heat to a low simmer and cook until meat is fall-apart tender (3-4 hours OR 45 minutes in Instant Pot with natural release).

Swiss Steak Chicago Italian

The flavor reminded me of Chicago Beef, so I couldn’t resist

Thicken the gravy: remove meat to a separate bowl with a slotted spoon; reserve. Add seasoned flour to the liquid in the pan in sprinkles, stirring constantly. Continue to add flour and stir until the liquid becomes viscous with fat bubbles. Return meat to the pan and stir to combine with gravy. Serve over mashed potatoes or noodles.

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Recipe: 1905 Salad

Posted on February 11, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
1905 Salad

1905 Salad.

Local bon vivant and restauranteur Vic Christopher said on Facebook that the 1905 Salad is his all-time favorite, so we had to check it out. It comes from Columbia Restaurant, a “Spanish-Cuban” chain in Florida. What makes 1905 Salad work is the funkiness of long-marinated garlic and dried oregano mixed at the table with parm, lemon juice and a generous dollop of Worcestershire. The salad ingredients themselves can be adapted to your taste; next time we’d definitely use romaine vs iceberg lettuce. Makes 1 main or 2 side salads.

Ingredients:

½ c good olive oil
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 t dried oregano
2 T white wine vinegar

2 c iceberg lettuce, torn into bite size pieces
¼ c cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
¼ c provolone or swiss cheese, julienne
¼ c baked ham, julienne
¼ c green Spanish olives
2 T grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
1 T Worcestershire sauce
1 ½ t lemon juice

Method: combine first 4 ingredients to make “1905” dressing. Macerate at least overnight and ideally longer. At serving time, mix lettuce with half the dressing (reserve the rest for a future batch) plus lemon juice and Worcestershire. Add toppings and lightly toss before serving.

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Recipe: Thanh Long Garlic Noodles

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers
Thanh Long Garlic Noodles

Thanh Long Garlic Noodles with a sprinkling of lumpfish red caviar.

Thanh Long is an upscale Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco, famous for its garlic noodles. That dish is currently $15 at the restaurant ($43 if you add four grilled giant tiger prawns) but we can make it at home for a buck or two. Thanks to Kenji and the folks he credits for sussing out the formula, a happy marriage of garlic+butter+umami. Serves 4 as a side dish or 2 entrée portions.

Ingredients:
1/2 lb dry spaghetti
20 garlic cloves, minced (about 1/3 c)
4 T unsalted butter
2 t oyster sauce
1 t light soy sauce
1 t fish sauce
2 heaping T grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese
Sliced green onions for garnish (optional)
Seafood add-ins such as fish roe, grilled shrimp, lox (optional)

Method: sauté garlic in butter in a large skillet until it is fragrant but not browned. Mix in the sauces. Meanwhile, cook spaghetti in a second skillet with just enough water to cover. Cook until it is barely al dente.

Garlic Noodles with Lox

Garlic Noodles go great with seafood, like some lox trim.

Transfer the cooked spaghetti to the pan with garlic butter mixture, with tongs or drained but reserving pasta cooking water. Add cheese and toss over high heat until cheese is melted; add a little of the reserved pasta water to make a thick sauce. Garnish with sliced green onions and seafood as desired. Serve immediately.

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Topping focaccia flatbread

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Burnt My Fingers

Topping focaccia or flatbread with artichoke at Night Work Bread.

My excellent local bakery, Night Work Bread, offers a rotating menu of imaginative focaccia aka flatbread topping ideas. The base is a long fermented sourdough juiced up with a little yeast so it is light and fluffy but with a bit of a tang. My favorite topping is artichoke hearts, quartered and covering most of the surface; they’ve also featured tomato and thin sliced yellow summer squash among other things.

My Tomato Artichoke Focaccia

We placed tomato slices and artichokes on top before final rise; they stayed on top rather than becoming embedded.

I set out to recreate this focaccia topping using our Fast Focaccia recipe while also solving a problem. Night Works applies their flatbread topping halfway through the cooking process (that’s my theory anyway) which means the bread in exposed areas is pasty (see the center area in above photo) and some of the topping falls off before you can get it in your mouth. I tried putting the topping on before the second rise, with the dough in the baking pan, but the ingredients just sit on top as the bread rises.

My Tomato Garlic Focaccia

We used the “dimpling” method to press thin tomato slices into the dough before baking. Better! Thin sliced tomato, caramelized onion and garlic.

For the next bake I added topping after the final rise, just before the focaccia dough goes in the oven, and pressed it down into the dough with the “dimpling” action typically used to poke holes in focaccia dough before baking. This turns out to be the solution. The topping is embedded in the flatbread so it doesn’t fall off, and as a bonus the ingredients add flavor to the surrounding dough instead of just sitting on top.

I am happy that Trader Joe’s frozen Artichoke Hearts are back in stock because they are not overly moist so can easily crisp up during the bake. Moist ingredients, like the canned artichokes I used in a pinch when the Trader Joe product was out of stock, do not crisp up and can make the dough soggy. Going to make a batch tonight, possibly combined with some roasted fennel and a bit of red onion.

Cinnamon Sugar Focaccia

Today’s food porn: cinnamon sugar focaccia from Night Work Bread.

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