Courtesy of Everyday Food Magazine. The chicken salad I modeled my recipe after!

This one is dedicated to my cousin Rudy. She ordered the roasted chicken salad at Founding Farmers recently, and I was absolutely inspired by its sweet, tangy and peppery flavors.

I decided to recreate it on a whim after stumbling across a similar recipe in Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food magazine. Instead of using dried blueberries and golden beets, I replaced the sweetness with dried apricots. But there’s also a nice, nutty crunch from the toasted almonds and a verdant aroma from the fresh basil.

Like the Founding Farmers’ dish, I assembled the plate just the same: I laid out a bunch of leaves (spinach in my case, but you can use spicy arugula or buttery lettuce), topped it with a giant heaping portion of chicken salad and gently rested a crispy wedge of French bread against it. It was a beautiful sight to behold, and I didn’t want to break into it — but it was too good to resist.

Recipe:

1 heaping spoon of mayonnaise
1/2 c greek yogurt
1 tbs vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced
salt
pepper
3 chicken thighs, seared, roasted and then shredded
1 stalk of celery, minced
1/2 small red onion, minced
1/3 c slivered almonds, toasted (you don’t have to do this if you don’t want)
about 10 dried apricots, minced
8 basil leaves, minced
2 green onions, minced

Mix the first four ingredients together and season with salt and pepper. Add the rest of the stuff in and season again to taste. It should be tangy, sweet and tart!

(c) Felisha Eugenio, Wish You Were Here*

My cousin Felisha is a pre-med student at Cal State Long Beach in sunny Southern California. She still lives at home, but thanks to a car and an adventurous spirit, she’s able to get away and drive to cute little cafes, boutiques and restaurants in the area when she’s not studying.

She just started a blog, Wish You Were Here*, which captures all her eating, traveling and shopping escapades in the Los Angeles, Orange County and the SoCal region. She’s a fantastic photographer, so if her vibrant photos of the L.A. skyline, plates of Mexican food and ocean views don’t beckon you to the Golden State, I don’t know what will.

I still don’t know how to navigate through Tumblr for the life of me, but hopefully you’ll be better at figuring that out.

(c) Claire O'Neill

For our Memorial Day weekend barbecue, my friends and I decided to throw a surprisingly organized hot dog topping contest. It was incredibly democratic; everyone cooked in batches, making enough samples for each voter to try. Each contestant took the contest very seriously, some planning and prepping for days in advance, others reaching a stroke of genius seconds before presenting their dish (Barrett!).

We ate a lot of dogs. Claire made a beautiful Welsh rarebit-inspired hot dog, which had a lovely, bitter beer-cheese sauce and a garnish of caramelized onions and potato chips; Lori roasted corn for a sweet, buttery accoutrement along with scallions and sour cream; Becky topped her hot dog with a Spanish creation she learned from a recent trip; Darren got back to his roots and fried up some pickled okra and stirred together a spicy remoulade for his dog; and Andy somehow got away with topping his hot dog with bacon, peanut butter, Nutella and bananas.

Banh-mi inspired hot dog. (c) Claire O'Neill

I made a banh mi-inspired hot dog (pictured above). It was fairly easy to transition the Vietnamese po’ boy sandwich to hot dogs, since the basic flavor profiles (spiced meat and bread) were already there. Since a lot of the ingredients were just veggies and stuff, I made sure that the homemade elements — carrot pickles and sweet and sour sauce — were top notch. Other than that, it’s really a matter of assembly.

Recipe:

4 grilled hot dogs
4 grilled buns
1/4 red onion, sliced very thinly
4 sprigs fresh cilantro
mayonnaise
4 scallions, chopped finely
sliced cucumbers
bean sprouts
carrot pickles (see recipe below)
sweet and sour sauce (see recipe below)

Pickles:

1 large carrot, chopped into matchsticks (tedious, I know — but don’t cheat and use shredded carrot. Not the same!)
rice wine vinegar
white vinegar
2 tbs sugar
salt
lukewarm water

In a bowl, sprinkle a generous amount of salt and sugar onto the carrots and knead gently with your hands until you’ve wrung out a bit of the liquid, about three minutes. The carrots should be flexible enough not to break in half by the time you’ve been through with it. Rinse off with water and pat dry; place into a bowl. Pour in equal parts rice wine vinegar, white vinegar and water over the carrots until it covers them. Add in a sprinkling of salt and sugar, give it a stir, and store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to four days.

Sweet and Sour Sauce:

2 tsp soy sauce
2 tsp fish sauce
2 tsp lime juice
1/2 tsp minced Thai chili pepper
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tbs Thai sweet chili sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp sesame oil
1/2 tsp chili oil

OK, I know it’s a lot of shit, but trust that it tastes good. You could really come up with your own concoction of this, just as long as it’s sweet and sour, and somehow combines fish sauce and chili. Stir this together and store in an airtight container.

TO ASSEMBLE:

Slather mayonnaise on one side of the bun and the sweet chili sauce on the other. Layer on the cucumbers and bean sprouts neatly next to the dogs. Top with drained carrot pickles, cilantro and scallions.

Cover of the newest issue

The new issue of The Runcible Spoon is now available online. We’ve jam-packed our Spring/Summer zine with all the stories fit to print. Kalee tells us how to make our own hot sauce. Jason lets us in on a little secret called cheese spread. Andrew gets the dirt on the beer expert from the ChurchKey…and WAY more other stuffs (trust us, we used a size 7 font).

This weekend, the team and I will be distributing 400 issues to the following neighborhoods:

Dupont Circle
Adams Morgan
U Street
Eastern Market
Georgetown
Woodley Park restau
Columbia Heights
Logan Circle

And we’ve also succumbed to the Devil. We’ve started a Facebook page. Sorry, gods of Print.

Ug. So cute.

It’s frustrating when you see other people making tiny foods out of polymer clay that look way better than my cell phone charms. But I’ll try not to be too much of a hater and say some nice words about Barcelona-based artist Geraldine Klein’s food-related jewelry and other stuffs (like this lovely macaron thumb drive pictured above). Here are my kind words: SO CUTE!

As a freelance illustrator (of sorts), I regularly troll the Web for new ideas for drawings and what not, and I’ve discovered that there are a lot of great food illustrations out there. Here are some of my favorites that I’ve found:

Omnivore's Delight

“Omnivore’s Delight” by illustrator/typographer Chris Ward.

Watercolor illustration for Marks and Spencer's

Emily Robertson’s watercolor drawing of pasta ingredients. She’s part of a UK-based illustrator’s collective, Plats.

Ice Cream Truck

Brooklyn-based illustrator Kevin Cyr’s artwork is too cool for school.

Tinga, shredded chicken in a spicy tomato sauce. Photo courtesy of Papiroz.net.

If you’ve been reading this blog, I’m sure you’ve become very familiar with Daniel Solis, my mother’s boyfriend. He is from Mexico and is the most wonderful home cook — and I thought, with Cinco de Mayo just around the corner, it would be the perfect time to showcase a couple of his recipes.

The first one I’ll share is Pollo a la Talla, fried chicken that has been marinated in a spicy chili paste and served over white rice:

POLLO A LA TALLA RECIPE:

3 or 4 ancho chilis
4 chicken breasts without skin
olive oil
1/2 c water
2 garlic cloves
1 medium onion
1/4 tsp peppercorn
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
salt to taste

Slice chilies in half and remove seeds. Rinse and dry with a towel. Saute lightly in extra virgin olive oil for a minute or so.

In a blender, add the chilies, water, garlic, onion, peppercorn, balsamic vinegar and salt to taste. Blend until smooth. Push the ingredients through a sieve and stir to make a paste.

Mix the paste with the chicken breasts and marinate for an hour. Pour some oil in a large saute pan until it’s hot, then place the chicken breasts in the pan. Cover and cook for 10 minutes, and then turn it over to cook the other side. Add more marinade if it gets too dry.

Serve over white rice.

This dish can also be used to cook fish or beef.

More after the jump

The next recipe he gave me is Tinga, which you can see in the picture above. It’s shredded chicken in a spicy chili and tomato sauce and is traditionally served on top of a tostada, a hard shell tortilla. I really want to try this one but I want to serve it with cotija cheese, and I haven’t stumbled across that yet in D.C.

TINGA RECIPE:

3 chicken breasts
1/2 white onion, whole
1/2 white onion, sliced thinly
2 chicken stock bouillon cubes
2 large tomatoes
2 garlic cloves
2 chipotle chilis
3 tbs butter
tostadas to serve (For the love of God, do not buy a hard shell taco. Buy a corn tortilla and fry it up yourself).

Boil the chicken, whole piece of onion and bouillon cubes together. Once the chicken is cooked, shred it to 1 1/2 to 2 inch pieces. Set aside.

In a separate pot, boil the tomatoes. Put them into a blender and add the garlic and chilies. Blend.

Get a large saute pan and heat up the butter and gently fry the onions. Add the tomato sauce, 2 cups of broth and chicken, and simmer for five minutes. Season to taste.

Serve over tostadas and garnish with cotija cheese, cilantro and raw onion.

HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO!