A while back, I made a liver and onions picatta dish, and it got me craving more calves liver. Which is hilarious because I love calves liver already. When I made that picatta dish, I went with lighter flavors, using a lot of acid, capers, and caramelized onions for a more dainty feel/contrast. So I…
Category: Plated dishes
I do cook savory food, and I love to plate these kinds of dishes with all of the same focus and finesse as I would a dessert.
Pork and Mushroom Chowder
This is the perfect dish to embrace two of my favorite savory ingredients in pork belly and mushrooms. Even before I lived in Boston, I always liked chowder for some reason. The idea of a warm, creamy soup with fun, random ingredients running through it was just reminded me of congee, but super Westernized. That…
Fig-Prosciutto Flatbread
Whenever I think of figs in a savory dish, prosciutto and cheese immediately come to mind. I’m not one to shy away from a charcuterie board – honestly, one of my favorite combinations is a punchy cheese, a cold cut, and the fig jam. So in a lot of ways, this flatbread pays homage to…
Meat and Potatoes: a plated dish
Whenever I think of meat and potatoes, steak and mashed potatoes come to mind right away. I almost immediately picture this quintessential dish of a giant slab of red meat with a pile of home fries. I wanted to slightly change that up, by doing potatoes two ways, and trim down the portion to be…
Kale Crespelles with Mushrooms and Hazeluts
This dish has been on my to-make list for ages. I always loved the combination of hazelnut, brown butter, and thyme, mostly because it is woodsy and earthy. While I usually make desserts with that flavor combination, it made just as much sense to do something savory with it as well(since it is an inherently…
Pork Loin and Fennel Salad
This dish is a loose homage to a vitello tonnato. Vitello tonnato is an Italian dish consisting of thinly sliced chilled veal loin with a creamy tuna mayonnaise sauce, usually served with capers, lemon, and parsley. It’s basically a meat salad. I wanted to do something similar to that, but in this case, with pork…
Grilled Pork Loin with Apple Nuoc Cham
This dish came about after I realized I still had 2 whole heads of romaine lettuce, and I was sick of eating a chopped salad. When it comes to lettuce, I had some semi-traumatic experiences as a child since my mom would serve us boiled lettuce. What you don’t think about when it comes to…
Everything Goes On: a plated dessert
This dessert was loosely inspired by my most recent trip to the Big Island, where my friends and I hiked through a dormant volcanic crater in Kilauea. At the bottom of the large crater, there was a surprising amount of plant life that was sprouting out of the black volcanic rock, and the visual contrast…
Liver and Onion Piccata
I am one of those weirdos that likes liver and onions, okay? Back in college, when I was learning Montenegrin food, I noticed liver was a commonly used protein in that cuisine. I still remember when I was auditioning for Masterchef season 10, since I mentioned being a heavy baker more than a savory cook,…
Chorizo Chicken Thighs with Cavatelli
A while ago, I was trying to make a dish with chorizo, but accidentally grabbed Mexican chorizo instead of Spanish chorizo. To confirm the differences here, Mexican chorizo is more like a mince or sausage meat, meant to be cooked to be crumbly. Spanish chorizo is dried and is more like a cured meat product…
Eggs, Bacon, and Toast Gnocchi
When I think of Americana, I just randomly think of that scene in Parks and Rec where the Gergich family is singing about eggs, bacon, and toast. So I figured, why not take that inspiration, and making a gnocchi dish? Originally, when I was conceptualizing this dish, it was going to be a pasta dish…
Roast Duck with Purple Yam and Radicchio
When I was thinking of a main course to serve my mom, the tricky part was the protein. Half the menu was fruit/vegetable-focused, while I also had a soup course that used poultry in the form of black chicken. I knew in terms of proteins, my mom would either want a fish, duck, or lamb,…
Heirloom Tomato Salad with Meiji Tofu and Shiso-Pistachio Pesto
This salad is a celebration of summery produce, featuring tomatoes and tofu in a very light, refreshing salad. In a lot of ways, it is like a caprese salad, but if you subbed out the basil with shiso and the mozzarella with tofu. This was one of the four courses I made for my mom…
Pork and Collard Chou Farci
Chou farci is a French dish that translates to “stuffed cabbage”. I love doing renditions on stuffed cabbage or cabbage rolls because it is fun to bite into something that looks like a vegetable, only for there to be this unctuous, savory filling instead! In the case of my recipe, I wanted to pair the…
Hamburg Steak Dinner
This recipe is my slightly bougie-r take on a a meatloaf and mashed potato dinner. I had some ground beef I needed to use up, and I figured why not make a hamburg steak? Hamburg steak is a Japanese yoshoku-style dish that is basically a beefed up(pun semi-intended here) hamburger patty that is seared and…
Lamb-Chickpea-Kataifi Fritters
These fritters were partially inspired by the mala cream shrimp dim sum from the Netflix show, Culinary Class Wars. The dish itself was a mixture of ground shrimp and pork, rolled in julienned spring roll wrappers and deep fried, so that there were these thin strands of crispy-fried dough for extra texture and crunchiness around…
Sweetbreads with Bacon-Caper Brown Butter
This recipe was heavily inspired by the sweetbreads with bacon, capers ,and brown butter from the now-closed Prune restaurant in New York City. Prune was a restaurant owned by chef Gabrielle Hamilton, and it featured food from her French-Italian upbringing. A lot of the dishes they served had this sense of resourcefulness, pulling techniques and…
Pate Choux Swans
Whenever I think of retro, classic-but-not-trendy desserts, the first two desserts that come to mind are an ice cream sundae, and pate choux swans. I just remember seeing them on every cruise ship dessert menu. Two little cream puff swans with a chocolate sauce underneath to visually represent a lake. Even though I try not…
“A Heart as Pure as Snow”: a plated dessert
When I was thinking of Valentine’s Day desserts, I realized that I somehow have not made a raspberry dessert in over two years. Which means that it was long overdue. So right away, I knew I was going to use raspberries, I wanted this white and red aesthetic, and I wanted it to be a…
“Tea and Mooncake”: a plated dish
I’ve been trying on and off to make this recipe for years now, but until recently, I had zero clue to where to buy quail. That is until I finally came across a meat market that sold almost every conceivable protein imaginable, including quail, and I could finally revisit this concept! The idea was to…
Freddy's Harajuku 