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| Break those yolks over rice or pasta -- and go to town. |
If you listen carefully enough, you'll hear some of the foods in your refrigerator and cupboard pleading with you to eat them together and elevate every day into the sublime.
Here are some terrific flavor combinations:
- An Italian-Korean salad of small, soft balls of marinated mozzarella cheese from Costco Wholesale and spicy, crunchy Arirang-brand cabbage kimchi from Gaboh Inc. in Englewood.
- Peanut butter, preserves and sliced, skin-on cucumber for crunch -- laid on thick on 100% whole grain toast from Costco.
- A yolk -- from an egg fried sunny side up or softly boiled in a Korean tofu stew -- eaten over steamed rice.
- A variation: Two eggs fried sunny side up and eaten over any kind of pasta or kimchi friend rice.
- The bland Jamaican fruit called ackee with salted cod or pollock, and sweet and hot peppers -- considered the Caribbean island's national dish.
- Boiled potatoes, mixed vegetables and hard-boiled eggs, bound together by mayonnaise -- Jamaican potato salad.
- White pizza, made with ricotta cheese, then layered with arugula and prosciutto. If you don't eat meat, any pizza topped with large quantities of fresh, wilted spinach.
- Bibimbap, a one-dish wonder, is a Korean entree in a hot stone bowl with steamed rice, several marinated raw vegetables and greens, a little ground beef, a raw or cooked egg on top, and spicy red-pepper paste. It's just as good without meat. You stir everything up and eat it with a spoon.
- Wild salmon baked or grilled with fresh herbs and ripe mango or peach slices.
- Fried eggs, fish or hummus sprinkled with mildly spicy Aleppo red pepper.
- Anything eaten in fresh Syrian pocket bread, such as the soupy fava-bean stew and salad I enjoyed today at Aleppo Restaurant in Paterson.
- Please fill in your favorite food pairings.
Chasing sardines
The 99-cent cans of sardines from Morocco have been hard to find recently.
Last week, I dropped into Sahara Fine Foods on South Summit Avenue in Hackensack, only to find Al Shark-brand skinless-and-boneless sardines, at $1.49 a can. The merchant said he couldn't get the cheaper ones in spicy or regular oil.
At Fattal's Syrian Bakery on Main Street in Paterson today, there was a large empty space on the canned-fish shelf, and the cashier said the distributor promised the 99-cents sardines would return in a couple of weeks.
At Brothers Produce on East Railway Avenue in the Paterson Farmers' Market, I finally found another brand of Moroccan sardines, Sultan, in vegetable oil with chili pepper for 99 cents a can or with spicy olive oil for $1.29.
I bought 10 cans of the former, and I'm looking forward to pasta with sardines in red sauce or eating these mighty little fish over a salad.
