Falcon Ridge food 2006

Last weekend I attended the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. Last year, I critiqued some of the food (both bought on the midway and brought from home) in this post. This year, things were much the same, with a few alterations.

Most noteworthy was the absence of Myron's Number 1 Yakitori, my favorite food vendor at the festival. I was counting on his iced jasmine tea, pork dumplings and yakitori to get me through the long weekend. Darn! However, in a sort of "bad news, good news" scenario, Asian food was represented at the festival this year by a Thai stand called Thai Jasmine selling satay, noodles and rice. The satay was large pieces of chicken on long skewers, bigger than Myron's typical chicken skewers. The satay sauce was very mild, but there was an assortment of condiments available to doctor one's food; I went for the sri racha sauce. Mmmm. I also tried their pad Thai noodles, which were very tamarind-y but otherwise unassuming in flavor. Again, there was a generous portion by traditional Falcon Ridge midway standards; portion sizes seem to be increasing.

Other stands I visited included Sunflower Farm (slab of pizza), Angelo's (shrimp in an basket with cocktail sauce) and the Berkshire County 4-H Fair Association (ice cream). The 4-H stand was loaded with fascinating-sounding ice cream flavors, but the only one I got to was the ginger ice cream, which I have been longing for since last year (really) because I didn't get a chance to try it then. It was rich and mild, creamy with little bits of ginger scattered through it.

I streamlined my selection of food brought from home because of the things that didn't get eaten last year. I expanded the rice cracker selection with arare wrapped in nori seaweed; for some reason, the nori gives me a little pick-me-up on hot days out in the field. In the ultimate salty snack category, I brought some Bugles. I brought an assortment of teabags, as usual; the sencha was what I ended up drinking, which is probably no surprise. I also packed lunch for Thursday (the first day of the festival); that was leftover Sichuan spaghetti.

Food-wise, I survived the festival pretty well. There were no major headaches or dehydration (thank you, Gatorade). The weather helped some too, as a slow-moving cold front took its time going through the area. This led to clammy, misty conditions and occasional rain showers, but the advantage was that we didn't spend the entire four days baking in the sun. So it turned out pretty well (though I wouldn't have said as much during the Saturday afternoon downpour, when I was drenched, sleep-deprived and seriously annoyed).

Can't wait until next year!

Soy sauce and fish sauce

Soy sauce and fish sauce are not often found in combination. I've seen the occasional comment recommending a substitution of soy sauce for fish sauce, but it seems to me that if you want to cook Thai (say) and can't find fish sauce, you should pick another cuisine to cook. Both sauces add salt to a meal, but their other aspects are so different that they are not interchangeable.

I recently got some of Lonely Planet's World Food guides. (My series overview for Food, Bound can be found here.) Though these books are mainly travel guides, they do include recipes. I was reading the World Food guide to Thailand when I stumbled across a recipe for "Kung Phat Khing" or "Prawns Stir-fried in Ginger." It looked tasty and simple, and it called for a combination of soy sauce and fish sauce. According to the guide, it's a Chinese-style dish adapted to Thai-style cooking. Because it looked so delicious and simple, I grabbed the book and took it into the kitchen for a really off-the-cuff brunch.

Stir-fry some chopped garlic and ginger in vegetable oil until golden. Then add three tablespoons chicken stock, one and a half tablespoons fish sauce, one tablespoon soy sauce and half a teaspoon sugar. Cook until bubbling, then add eight large shrimp (shelled), eight straw mushrooms and two scallions (sliced into two and a half inch lengths). Add a sliced hot chili at this stage for more heat, if you like. Stir-fry until the shrimp are opaque, then serve.

I made minor substitutions of porcini soaking water for the chicken stock and sliced button mushrooms for straw mushrooms. The final result was very tasty. The combination of the fish sauce, soy sauce and porcini water gave the sauce an extra savor of a quality that I usually find in beef stir-fries.

Creaky chicken

Last night I had dinner with LaLa at Ya Ya Noodles. Perfect Tommy has been raving about Ya Ya's "creaky chicken" lately; it seems to have become one of his favorite treats for dinner. Thus it was that both LaLa and I were eager to try it. We decided to share two entrees between us; LaLa's choice was "soft tofu with winter mushrooms."

The creaky chicken has a hot and spicy asterisk next to it in the menu, but despite the occasional tinge of chili heat, it was not that spicy. LaLa was somewhat puzzled because she said it was the same as the chicken and ginger she'd ordered from Ya Ya the last time she'd eaten there. Despite those quibbles, we found that that it was, indeed, quite delicious. The thin slices of ginger added some bite to the rich savory sauce. The chicken morsels were perfectly done, moist and tender.

The soft tofu with winter mushrooms was also excellent. This dish had the classic "wok hay" smokiness; the tofu chunks were velvety soft and melted in one's mouth, while the mushrooms were juicy. They were dressed in a light brown sauce, thinner and milder than the creaky chicken sauce.

It was a great dinner out. It's probably just as well I don't live closer to Ya Ya Noodles, because then it would become a serious temptation.

Khmer-ical food

Another meal, another country. To an untraveled American of a certain vintage, the word Cambodia summons up horrible images of southeast Asian wars. But Cambodia is a place that people call home and cook in. My current source for Cambodian recipes is Alford and Duguid's Hot Sour Salty Sweet, an excellent cookbook for those who seek regional trends in cuisines. The Mekong River is the book's backbone as it curves from China past Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The book is full of travelers' stories, gorgeous photos and excellent recipes. I'm not a fan of the big coffee-table genre of cookbook, but this is an exception to that rule. I hope I don't wind up spilling fish sauce on the pages someday, but I suspect that the authors would be delighted if that happened. As pretty as the book is, it's grounded in real travels and real cooking. This is not one of those cookbooks that are all glitz and no substance.

So, as a way of expanding my culinary horizons, I decided to cook the recipe for "Khmer Stir-Fried Ginger and Beef." It's recommended as part of a rice meal due to the beef gravy that is a collateral result of the cooking process. The ingredients are minimal: half a pound each of sliced lean beef and julienned young ginger, three tablespoons of peanut or vegetable oil, three to four smashed garlic cloves, two tablespoons fish sauce and two teaspoons sugar. Stir-fry the garlic in the oil until golden, then add the meat and stir-fry until most of it changes color. Add the remaining ingredients and stir-fry "until just tender."

This meal was an object lesson for those who unplug the phone while they're cooking. The Lurker called while I was in mid-stir-fry mode. Normally, I'd call him back, but something in me wanted to live dangerously, and besides, we were cobbling together Plans for the following day. Since Plans are a rare and fragile commodity among our lackadaisical crowd, one really needs to seize the moment when the mirage of planning appears on the horizon. So I did the "shoulder holding the phone up to the ear" trick and continued stir-frying. I thought I carried it off pretty well, until I got off the phone, decanted the stir-fry onto the jasmine rice and realized that I had forgotten to add the ginger to the pan!

There was only one thing to do. I turned the burner back on, called the skillet back to active duty and stir-fried the julienned ginger in the leftover juices for a couple of minutes. Not the desired method, perhaps, but it did the job.

It really is essential to use young ginger for this dish. Its relatively mild taste means that you can use half a pound of it and not be overwhelmed by spiciness. Other than that, what you get is ginger and beef. It's a minimalist dish, where the quality of the ingredients makes a difference. I'm tempted to play with a few tasteful embelishments, but even without those, it made a pile of tasty simple food. You can't argue with that.