Packing an Italian lunch

Sometimes (especially when I feel particularly cheap), I like to make my own lunch to bring along on birding trips. The best method of doing this is to cook dinner the night before and make sure plenty of leftovers are available. Not only does this mean there's one less thing to deal with in the morning when I'm trying to get myself on the road, it also means that if dinner disagrees with my stomach, I can put together Plan B for the trip. Intestinal issues are bad enough when you're at home; when you're on a birding trip and may be miles away from a pit stop, they can be catastrophic.

My birding pal The Lurker, like many, just packs a sandwich or two when he feels the need to brown-bag it. You might ask why I don't bring a sandwich. For some reason, I just don't make them for myself any more. I used to pack them frequently when I worked in New York City. Of course, these were the most boring sandwiches you could imagine: two slices of generic bread and some lunch meat completed the picture. Sandwiches just don't excite me, I guess. Besides, something like Thai fried rice seems to do a better job of keeping me going during the day.

Yesterday we went off to Delaware in search of shorebirds at Bombay Hook and the avian celebrity of the moment, a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. I knew I wanted to pack a lunch, so I picked out a simple pasta recipe from Anne Casale's Italian Family Cooking, "Linguine with Shrimp." However, I didn't get to cook it until yesterday morning.

I didn't follow her ingredient proportions exactly because I was just cooking lunch and not wanting leftovers for a change. I sauteed three sliced scallions in a blend of a quarter-cup each of olive oil and butter for two minutes, then did the same with some garlic for a minute and a half. Then, in went the peeled shrimp, which I cooked over high heat until they turned pink. Then I turned the heat to low and added a few spritzes of lemon juice and a teaspoon of torn basil leaves; once this was heated through, I added half a teaspoon each of white pepper and salt, stirred a few times, then poured it over spinach fettuccini. By the end, the scallion bits were fairly brown and the sauce was rather oily, so I minimized the proportions of those ingredients when I dished it into my lunch container. I did add more sauce than I would normally, just to keep the pasta moist while it traveled around in the morning. The kitchen smelled wonderful, but it was time to run out the door.

Lunch found us at a Wendy's in Smyrna (along with everyone else in the county, it seemed). While my accomplices in crime waited on line to get their fast food, I started sampling my lunch. It was quite good; one unexpected thing I enjoyed was that the shrimp had cooked long enough to get a few little crispy brown bits on their edges. That made them extra tasty. When Perfect Tommy finally arrived at the table, carrying his Wendy's salad, he was able to guess the ingredients in short order. Later on, he suggested adding grated parmesan to top the dish, which sounds like a nice addition in the future. By the time The Lurker got to the table, my lunch was all gone, which meant that I wasn't the last one finishing my meal for a change.

Singapore fried rice

It was time for yet another variation on fried rice. Singapore got the nod this time, thanks to a recipe for "Shrimp Fried Rice" from Terry and Christopher Tan's Shiok!. Stir-fry some chopped garlic in vegetable oil; then add two eggs, let nearly set and chop them with the edge of the spatula. Toss in the shrimp (shelled) and stir-fry for two minutes, then add the cooked rice, one tablespoon of Chinese light soy and half a teaspoon each of black pepper and salt. Stir-fry about three more minutes until everything is cooked through. Pickled chilis are the suggested side dish.

This ended up much like Thai fried rice, even though the Singapore recipe adds the eggs sooner and doesn't beat them ahead of time. The one problem with the final dish was that the chopped garlic burned, so I'll have to be more careful next time. I also added more pepper than necessary, which didn't help.

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.

Salt mine

I hate to say it, but sometimes cooking Asian food seems downright routine. I know that there are all kinds of nooks and crannies of Asian cuisine that I have yet to explore (most deep-fried dishes, cooking with Chinese preserved vegetable, making kimchi, making dumplings, steaming most things, to name but a few) but I guess I've fallen into a rut. I love to stir-fry. It's so quick and simple. But I guess that humanity does not live by stir-frying alone. I love to learn new things, so I guess it's time to start pushing the boundaries and giving myself challenges more often.

In the meantime, I've recently cooked a couple of dishes that fell well within the boundaries of things I've tried before. Both were more chili-laden than normal, but that wasn't a problem.

First up was "Shrimp with Roasted Chili Paste and Fresh Basil" from Nancie McDermott's Quick and Easy Thai. This is practically Thai convenience food, even in Thailand. All you have to do is stir-fry some chopped garlic in oil, then add the peeled shrimp and cook until they turn pink. Add three tablespoons of roasted chili paste or nahm prik pao (I used Maesri's), two tablespoons of fish sauce, a quarter of a cup of water or chicken broth (I used the broth) and a teaspoon of sugar. Continue cooking for another minute or two, then add a cup of fresh basil leaves. Toss, garnish with sliced red chilis and serve.

There really is nothing more to this dish than whipping up a fast sauce for some spaghetti. I'm sure you can make your own nahm prik pao, but using it out of the jar creates an experience more like heating some store-bought pasta sauce and doctoring it with a few extra ingredients. My Thai basil plants are not yet ready to supply copious amounts of leaves, so I used Spicy Globe basil from the garden instead. The end result was a thick and flavorful sauce. Like most things involving shrimp, this meal had its finger food moments as well.

The saltier dish from the salt mine will be considered in the next post.

Nasi goreng

The Asian fried rice tour of 2006 continues here at SevenSoy Central. A few nights ago, I turned my hand to Indonesian fried rice, or nasi goreng. Parenthetical note: I'm typing this post in MS Word before posting it on Blogger, and MS Word insists on automatically changing "goreng" to "goring." Me, I like to type words and have them stay the way I typed them. I guess it's a control thing.

Anyway, back to nasi goreng. Nasi goreng is the Indonesian method of using leftover rice to create a meal. It seems as though all Asian countries have their own versions of fried rice, i.e., a meal reusing previously-cooked rice. Thai fried rice has really captured my affection because the use of fish sauce adds a bracing quality to the dish. It ends up being very clean and simple, and puts the emphasis on the ingredients. On the other hand, if there's a Japanese version of fried rice, please enlighten me! I can't remember coming across such a recipe during my Japanese cooking excursions. The closest thing I can think of is salmon tea rice, which is not the same thing at all.

There's a recipe for nasi goreng here at Indochef, but I used a recipe from Ken Hom's Hot Wok. This presented the interesting proposition of an Indonesian dish being adapted by a Chinese-American chef for his book (UK edition), then being further adapted by a Swedish-Scottish-German-English-American who had some Indonesian ingredients on hand. Hom recommends hot bean paste to supply the spicy heat for this dish; Indochef goes for fresh chilis or sambal. The soy sauce component of the meal is Indonesia's ketjap manis, a thick sweet soy sauce; Hom substitutes a tablespoon of oyster sauce and two teaspoons of Chinese mushroom soy sauce. I just used one tablespoon plus two teaspoons of ketjap manis.

The meat for this version was a combination of chopped chicken thigh meat and shrimp; one thing I like about Hot Wok is its tendency to use chicken thigh meat in stir-fries, rather than breast meat. Breast meat is an obvious choice that I've opted for many times, but thigh meat adds more flavor to the dish. My default chicken stir-fry meat has changed from supermarket breast meat (well, ok, I am a Bell and Evans partisan) to chicken thigh meat fresh from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market.

Enough backstory; the recipe is roughly as follows. In some peanut oil, stir-fry some chopped garlic and ginger, a chopped small onion, chopped shrimp, a tablespoon of shrimp paste, and salt and pepper to taste. After two minutes, add the chopped chicken and stir-fry for another two minutes. Add the rice and cook for three more minutes. Add the ketjap manis and a tablespoon of hot bean sauce and stir-fry for two more minutes. Finally, add two beaten eggs mixed with two teaspoons of sesame oil. Stir-fry for a minute, plate and garnish with scallions and fresh cilantro.

The consistency of this version of fried rice was thicker than Thai fried rice; you could almost shape it into patties by the time it was done. The hot bean paste got lost in the final dish; the chopped ginger was more successful at spreading some heat throughout the food. Since the shrimp was one of the first ingredients added to the pan, it was leaning toward being overcooked by the time the meal was ready for eating. As expected, it was even better as leftovers for lunch (and dinner) for the following day. I finally got to use some cilantro out of the garden, too, which was nice.

Speaking of the garden, I planted some Black-seeded Blue Lake green beans (courtesy of mom) about a week ago. They popped out of the dirt Thursday and since then have seemed intent on world domination.

Citrus shrimp

With the current holidays, I was looking for some excuses to cook a few special meals. I've been looking for something a little different, not just another variant of fried rice (though that has served me quite well lately, and I have more leftover jasmine rice waiting for its shot at the fried rice big time). Thursday night I decided to go to southeast Asia via Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. The recipe in question was "Shrimp Cooked in Lime Juice."

This is a quick stir-fry. After stir-frying a teaspoon of chopped garlic and red pepper flakes (to taste) in the cooking oil, you add a mixture of half a cup fresh lime juice, a quarter of a cup sugar and a tablespoon of fish sauce. This should be blended beforehand and added to the pan as a unit. Once the sauce reduces by at least half and has become syrupy, you add the peeled shrimp. Cook until the shrimp are pink, adjust the seasoning, and serve with cilantro for a garnish.

I quickly ran into trouble when my fresh limes turned out not to be terribly juicy. I managed to get a quarter of a cup of juice out of four limes (I guess they just weren't ripe enough) and added water to get the desired half a cup of liquid. As a result, the sauce was not as sour as it should have been; it had a light, sweet citrusy flavor instead (almost like candy).The red pepper flakes quickly scorched in the cooking oil and added none of their heat to the final meal; perhaps real fresh or dried chilis would be better than powder in this sort of recipe.

That said, the shrimp were tasty and there was enough sauce to flavor the jasmine rice, but not so much that it turned soupy. If I try this again, I'll make sure I have the requisite amount of lime juice on hand, and I might play with the seasonings to make the flavor more complex. I think a bit of tamarind would be an excellent addition, for example.

Shrimp and mint

I've accumulated some shrimp recipes that I want to work through, and this week I decided to try Mark Bittman's "Shrimp, Roman Style" from The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. I used the variant of shrimp over pasta. Bittman says this recipe is normally used for tripe, which takes a long time to cook, but using shrimp requires much less time.

Season some olive oil by browning a tablespoon of chopped garlic over medium heat. Bittman adds 6 dried red chiles to this step as well, but I used some Korean red pepper powder and added it later, while the tomatoes were cooking. After browning the garlic, turn off the heat for a minute, then add chopped tomatoes to the pan. I used some plum tomatoes, less than the four cups Bittman calls for. They were also less juicy than regular tomatoes, of course, which affected the sauce's consistency. In any case, bring the sauce to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer. Stir occasionally and season with salt and pepper if desired. By the time I was ready to add the shrimp, the tomatoes were starting to soften.

Cook the shrimp for about about five to ten minutes, until they're pink. Adjust the sauce seasonings if necessary, then stir in a cup of chopped fresh mint leaves. Dump over pasta and serve.

Bittman says the sauce should have the consistency of "a moist, almost soupy stew," but because my tomatoes weren't that juicy, I wound up with chunks of tomato instead, sort of a sauce in parts. I can't say it mattered to me, however, because it tasted just fine. The mint gave an almost electric zing to what would otherwise have been an ordinary Italian-style tomato sauce. It was a good change on Italian food as usual, as well as another dish whose taste outstrips the effort involved in puttting it together.