Char siu

Char siu is Chinese marinated and roasted pork. It's traditionally considered to be something that you buy rather than making at home, because few people in China had ovens. When I'm in the corner of the Asian supermarket that is near the lunch counter, the tempting aroma of char siu is overwhelming.

Marnie Henricksson has a recipe she calls "Chinese Roast Pork Tenderloin" in Everyday Asian. The last time I read through the cookbook, it caught my eye.

The dish starts with a marinade. The ingredients are a third of a cup each of hoisin sauce, rice wine and soy sauce; a tablespoon of ketchup; two minced garlic cloves; and two tablespoons of light brown sugar (I used palm sugar). Henricksson recommends marinating the pork for one to three hours, but I let it go overnight.

In a 400 F oven, bake the tenderloin for 20 minutes, while boiling and slightly reducing the marinade on the stovetop. Remove the meat from the oven, baste, then return it to the oven for 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the thickness of the meat. Since I was using a relatively small hunk of boneless country ribs, I let it go for 10 minutes. The key is to let it go until it has a deep red color and some toasty browned bits. Simmer the remaining sauce for three minutes and let the meat rest for five minnutes before slicing.

Since my boneless country ribs were presliced, the meat dried out more than it would had the meat been in one unsliced chunk. That was a bit disappointing. However, the sauce was a terrific smoky barbecue type sauce, the kind of thing I'd happily slather on grilled meat (assuming I lived in a place where I was allowed to grill). The sauce was rather garlicky, too; the bits of minced garlic clung to the sides of the meat and imparted their toasted flavor to the dish. Not at all bad, but a little bit goes a long way. No wonder this meat is used to pep up flavors in Chinese cooking.

Going Italian

Ah, Italian food. Whenever I get a little tired of fish sauce or soy sauce, I can just readjust my attention to tomatoes, basil and garlic. Rather than noodles, I can have pasta. Olive oil goes into the pan, not peanut oil, and one sautes rather than stir-frying. Well, ok, maybe the differences between some of these things are judgement calls, but Italian food is a good way of satisfying myself when I want "normal" food.

The first recipe I cooked from Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner was fettuccini carbonara. I thought it worked out well, but there were a couple of things I wanted to tweak. I got my chance to do that recently when I used Bittman's recipe for "Pasta alla Gricia," which is the base recipe from which the carbonara recipe "deviates." The interesting thing was that my tweaking didn't make any difference. I substituted regular olive oil for extra virgin olive oil because I thought the extra virgin olive burned and gave the carbonara a bitter undertone. Apparently the oil was not the culprit, because the pasta alla gricia had the same taste. Perhaps I cooked the pancetta too hard and too long? Pasta alla gricia is a simple dish (which is what attracted me to it on the night in question); cook the pancetta and pasta, combine them, then serve after stirring in some Pecorino Romano cheese. This was the first time I'd cooked with Pecorino Romano cheese and that, too, seemed somewhat bitter to me (though I'm the first to admit I'm not the world's biggest cheese fan).

The other night, I was looking for another simple pasta recipe. This time I used Anne Casale's Italian Family Cooking. I settled upon "Bucatini with Plain Tomato Sauce," although I used spinach fettuccini for it as well (it was the pasta I had in the house). For the sauce, one slowly sautes half a cup of chopped onion in a blend of two tablespoons each of olive oil and butter until soft but not brown. Add two large garlic cloves, halved, and again saute until soft but not brown. Add a 28 ounce can of crushed concentrated tomatoes, one and a half tablespoons of minced fresh basil, half a teaspoon of sugar and one teaspoon each of salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then turn heat down to low and let simmer, partially covered, for about 25 minutes. Casale recommends lots of stirring during these stages of sauce creation, but I stirred only occasionally and it didn't seem to hurt the end result. After the 25 minutes are up, let the sauce rest for an hour before cooking the pasta. I just cooked the pasta and dumped the sauce on top of it, although Casale gives slightly more involved directions for how to combine pasta and sauce.

This was very tasty. The sauce was mild and tomatoey (just what you want this time of year) and was very easy to make. The onions give it a bit more depth, but still make it sweet rather than spicy. This would be easy to tweak in various directions, as well. There was plenty for leftovers the next day. With results like this, I'm definitely emboldened to try Italian cooking on a more consistent basis in the future.

Asian telephone: third call

Time for another round of my neglected game of Asian telephone. This time, the carryover ingredient from round two was sesame oil, and I went from Singapore to China. Thanks to Ken Hom's Hot Wok, I threw together a hot stir-fry he calls "Stir-Fried Garlic Pork."

Want heat? You've got garlic, you've got hot bean sauce, you've got scallions. Together, they ramped the dish up to the point that I had flashbacks to the last time I had steak sha zha jiang. The heat was raw and garlicky, like Chinese barbecue sauce. Whew.

First you slice up some pork and marinate it in a combination of one tablespoon Shao Xing rice wine, two teaspoons sesame oil and one teaspoon cornstarch. The recommended soaking time is 20 minutes, but I ended up letting it go overnight. Hom's original recipe has a step where the pork is stir-fried before the other ingredients and removed from the wok, but I omitted that. I just stir-fried three cloves of garlic, three chopped scallions and two teaspoons hot bean sauce in peanut oil for about 30 seconds. Then I added the pork and marinade, one tablespoon each of light soy, water and sesame oil; and one teaspoon each of Shao Xing wine and sugar. This I cooked for five or so minutes, then I poured it onto some leftover jasmine rice. Whew. Hot hot hot hot hot. But not in a bad way.

So, the potential ingredients for the next Asian telephone call are garlic, Chinese hot bean sauce, scallions, pork, Shao Xing rice wine and Chinese light soy sauce.