Liquor = sauce

Sometimes, I think the best thing about alcohol is that you can cook with it. "Sauced," of course, can mean that one has had too much fruit of the vine. On the other hand, fruit of the vine (or its relatives) can also help make a phenomenal sauce.

Well, ok, so last night's sauce wasn't phenomenal. I picked up a mix of fresh "gourmet" mushrooms at the supermarket (shiitake, oyster and crimini) and decided to make a liquor-based sauce and pour it over spinach fettuccini. The sauce template I used was Mark Bittman's miso-red wine sauce; it is proving to be a very flexible base for sauce improvisation. I used up the last of my vermouth (3/4 of a cup) and added 1/4 of a cup of cooking ch'ongju to eke out the required one cup of liquor for the sauce.

I tasted the sauce as it was cooking down and thought it wasn't sweet enough. In went a tablespoon or so of sugar, and then, after another taste, a tablespoon or so of mirin. That did the trick. I poured the sauce over three thin pan-seared pork chops.

It's not that it was bad; I'm sure plenty of people would've enjoyed this extemporaneous sauce. But it didn't quite do it for me. The final result had almost as bright and aggressive a taste as some candies have; the combination of the sweet liquor blend and the deep wininess of the white miso resulted in too much going on, tastewise. The mushrooms picked up the flavors strongly; delectable, if you like that sort of thing, but too intense if you don't. I guess that the next time I try something like this, I'll go for the "less is more" approach.

Hijiki and pretzels

A while back, I blogged about chicken hijiki noodles. That dish consisted of somen noodles simmered in chicken stock and garnished with hijiki. Thursday night I took chicken, hijiki and noodles and wound up with something different.

It was hardly rocket science; I just took the traditional recipe for hijiki simmered with abura-age and substituted sliced chicken thighs for the abura-age. Once the chicken had simmered for ten minutes, I removed it from the skillet and cooked the sauce down to taste. The reduced sauce thickened just a bit without the aid of anything like cornstarch; the flavors intensified as well. The final result was rather sweet; if you want a sauce that isn't so sweet, reduce the amount of sugar you add to the shoyu broth. Adding some seasonings (such as herbs of your choice) to the broth would probably give an interesting dimension to the sauce.

I served the finished dish over wide egg noodles from the Pennsylvania Dutch famers market. The chicken pieces almost seemed glazed from the sauce (possibly due to the high sugar/mirin content) and they had a sweetness similar to the sweet chicken teriyaki I remember from Iroha. The dish had a nice contrast between the luxurious sweetness of the sauce and the earthier tones of the hijiki and the chicken thigh meat.

Most of the solid components of the meal were gobbled up Thursday night, but I was left with some sauce. That got called into play yesterday on a scouting trip for the World Series of Birding with The Lurker and Perfect Tommy. As we drove up and down Rt. 130, vainly searching for a Chik-fil-A for lunch, I finally weakened and pulled out my "bag lunch;" a plastic container of jasmine rice sopping up the remaining chicken hijiki sauce. I was just finishing the rice by the time we finally located the Chik-fil-A; I tried not to feel too smug (probably unsuccessfully).

For dessert we visited the Pennsauken Mart pretzel shop. This time we had to wait a few minutes for pretzels to come out of the oven (along with other hopefuls). When the pretzels finally arrived, the fellow who put them into the brown paper bag for me warned, "Be careful, they're hot." Boy, were they! They were fresh out of the oven and too hot to touch without a towel or other protective device. Perfect Tommy admonished us not to close up the paper bag, lest the steam get trapped inside and condense on the pretzels. When we got back out to the car, a perfect plume of steam was emanating from my pretzel bag (but it was a cold day). I held off as long as prudence indicated, but as soon as I could, I started on that first heavenly pretzel. They really are great birding food.

Cutting the heat

I know that beer is a popular beverage when one encounters hot and spicy food but I may have found an alternative. Tonight I made Sichuan spaghetti but wasn't in the mood for beer. Instead, I had a glass of apple cider from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market. It was amazing. The cider practically eliminated the burn from the Sichuan spaghetti almost immediately.

Maybe an apple a day keeps the capiscin away too? Nah, it can't be that easy.

Yakisoba out of the bottle

Cooking yakisoba these days is about the quest for the perfect sauce. I've come up with some pretty good versions (just check the index for some past attempts) but none of them quite have that beefy, just a bit greasy goodness I remember from Dosanko.

Walking down the aisles of the Asian supermarket is perilous for a sauce lover. There are bottles and bottles of all kinds of sauces, all gleaming with a come-hither luster. All of them promise wonderful meals: savory meat and noodles, lightly stir-fried veggies gleaming with just the lightest veneer of sauce to add flavor to the dish without drowning it. Who knows which bottle holds the secret? They all whisper their promises, while the cold voice of the conscience admonishes that homemade sauces without preservatives are really the best. The temptations increase in the Japanese aisle, where the sauces are not only tempting in their own right, but often come in beautifully designed little vials that would not be out of place in a well-appointed wizard's cabinet of potions.

So I thought to myself, 'Why not try a bottled yakisoba sauce? Maybe it'll hold the perfect sauce secret.' I came home with a bottle of Otafuku Yakisoba Sauce, which also advertises itself as a suitable garnish for stir-fried veggies, hamburgers, noodles and fried rice. The lengthy ingredient list includes some potentially scary stuff (high fructose corn syrup, MSG), extracts from much of the animal kingdom (oysters, chickens, pigs, fish, scallops, shrimp and yeast into the bargain) and fruits and vegetables (everything from peach to garlic).

I followed the recipe on the bottle wrapper (yes, this is a bottle that comes in a plastic wrapper). Due to a glitch in preparation, I wound up with both chicken breast and shrimp ready to be cooked that night. Mixing meats like that is more of a southeast Asian thing, but I decided to go with it. Maybe it would lead to a yakisoba as big as the Ritz. I doubled my allotment of chukasoba noodles to make sure the proportions of meat to noodles were correct.

I stir-fried the shrimp, chicken and some sliced button mushrooms and onions in a bit of vegetable oil about five minutes, then added the cooked chukasoba and heated it through. Then I added a third of a cup of the yakisoba sauce and cooked everything for about three more minutes. I served it out onto plate and tucked in.

It wasn't bad, but it left me a little disappointed. I'm starting to think that one of the components of my perfect yakisoba sauce is beef juice, so the absence of beef from this yakisoba posed a problem. The bottled sauce itself had a sort of sweet-and-sour fruity note that can be found in things such as Chik-fil-A's polynesian sauce. So there I was, eating a home-cooked meal and thinking of fast food. Not the desired impression, to put it mildly. Then again, I probably eat more fast food than I should. It wasn't bad, it made great leftovers and a "brown-bag" lunch for a couple of days, but I think I prefer my fumbling homemade attempts at the perfect yakisoba sauce. Cook and learn.

Not that that means I'll ever be immune to the siren song of the sauce bottles at the Asian supermarket.

Garden musings 1

When I started the blog, I posted regular garden updates. Somehow, all that fell by the wayside. Maybe I was too ambitious, trying too many different things in my first real year of gardening. I certainly didn't end up harvesting homegrown lettuce for salads every night, which was a disappointment. Now spring is looming, however, so that means I have to plan for this year's garden. Let's see what the verdict was on last year.

Asian greens - fodder for Cabbage White butterflies. This year I think I'll stick to buying them at the Asian supermarket.

Bergamot - did ok for a while, then was taken down by a whitefly infestation. I might try some of last year's seeds to see if any of them still have some punch.

Cilantro - did not want to play at all. This will be another supermarket item this year.

Hot peppers - another failure. (I sense a trend here)

Leaf celery - hey, it's still alive! Not only that, it's flourishing pretty well. I just need to use it more in cooking.

Lemon thyme - hit hard by the whiteflies, but I cut it back severely over the winter and it's now coming back, albeit somewhat hesitantly. I love the strong flavor of the tiny leaves, so if I can't keep this plant going, I'll probably pick up another one. I'd also like to try some other sorts of thyme, of which there are many.

Lettuce - my main lettuce pot was initially seeded too thickly and I didn't have the heart to thin the seedlings, so none of them did much. Once I planted seeds more sparsely in other pots, they grew bigger. Inconsistent watering led to sometimes bitter flavor. I'll try lettuce again this year, but I think I need to work harder to ensure its success.

Mitsuba - finally, an out-and-out success. The mitsuba has grown well and abundantly, and reseeded itself to boot. I was also able to save seeds from last year's seed heads. This year I'll test whether it really is hardy in Zone 6 by planting a pot to be left outside come the winter.

Orange mint - also badly hit by whiteflies, also severely cut back. Being a mint (unfazed by just about anything), it's recovering nicely, though I think it's just about outgrown its current pot. I also planted a runner in another pot which, after an iffy start, seems to be regrouping and thinking about world domination, as mints will do.

Peas - one wonderful sweet peapod and that was all she wrote. I want to try some more peas this season (which means I'd better hurry up and order them!).

Rosemary - a supermarket herb plant that has survived. It's hard to balance the extremes of too much and too little water, but it's started putting on new growth lately. Probably my most-used culinary herb, next to the spearmint.

Sage - hanging in there, which is more than I can say of the variegated sage (R.I.P.).

Scallions - the neighbor's cat has an unfortunate taste for scallions, so they're not going back out on the deck any time soon. Another lovely thought that will be a supermarket purchase this year. I still have scallions growing, but they're so tiny and threadlike after nearly a year, it seems rather pointless.

Spearmint - cut back, bouncing back happily, frequently used in tea. A success.

Spinach - another success. This did really well for me early last season. I want to plant even more of it this year.

Thai basil - did very well until those whiteflies showed up, and persisted pretty strongly afterward. I was able to save seeds from last year's crop, so I'll be planting it again this year. And lots of it.

Tomatoes - the plant that survived last winter gave me a few tomatoes but nothing much. I have seeds from it, but I probably should've planted them already. I'll probably just get a tomato plant at a garden center this year.

Tropical sage - I finally got around to planting some of this late last season. One tiny little seedling has poked up and not expired yet. If I'm lucky, it'll still be around in the fall, when western hummingbirds come to call in New Jersey.

A few links

Apologies for the paucity of entries here lately. It's been a combination of busyness and exhaustion, along with making oxtail stew earlier in the week. When you make oxtail stew, it tends to keep you going for most of the rest of the week. I'm finishing it off as I blog this, actually. It's a good hearty meal, very appropriate for chilly, not-yet-spring weather, as well as for stressful mundane life. This batch of oxtail stew wasn't cooked down as much as usual, so I made a pile of jasmine rice the other night to sop up the juices. That worked like a charm.

Since I've been so remiss on the content front lately, I'll offer up a couple of posts I found interesting, as well as germane to the theme of this blog. Barbara at Tigers and Strawberries posted this on soy sauce, the patron condiment of this humble little blog. If you've ever wondered why one bottle of soy sauce isn't enough, here's your answer.

While you're stocking up on soy sauces at your local Asian market (if you're lucky enough to have a local Asian market), you might want to check out the cookware aisle, especially if you're value-conscious. Barbara reports on Williams-Sonoma's upscale marketing of Asian cookware here (this time for Paper Palate. She makes some interesting points.

Five-spice game hen

Once in a while, you have to roast a chicken. It's not something I do as often as I could, especially given that it's so easy. Part of the problem is that I seem to have a similiar attitude about roasting chicken as I do about seafood: I want to cook it the same day I buy it. So I wander through the supermarket, or by the poultry counter at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market, and I see some nice bird. Then I think, "Oh, but I was going to make oxtail stew today," and that's the end of that.

The last time I was at McCaffrey's (the local high-end supermarket), I got a bitty little Cornish game hen because I'd been thinking about "Five-Spice Game Hens" from Everyday Asian. Ideally, one marinates and then grills these game hens, but I live in a condo where the management frowns on grilling. Luckily, the recipe includes instructions on roasting, so that's what I did.

First you marinate the game hen in a spice paste of three chopped shallots; two minced garlic cloves; two teaspoons of five-spice powder; half a teaspoon of cracked black pepper; three tablespoons each of fish sauce, rice wine and soy sauce; two tablespoons of palm sugar; and one tablespoon of sesame oil. Marinate the game hen overnight if you can; I put it in a freezer bag with the marinade and turned it periodically to try to make sure the marinade was fairly evenly distributed. Incidentally, the recipe is written for two game hens, but I roasted only one; I didn't attempt to reduce the marinade recipe.

Once the game hen is marinated (three hours being the minimum), bake it in a pan with a rack at 350 F for 45 minutes, then at 400 F for ten more minutes. Henricksson recommends that one split the game hens in half, but I opted to leave the game hen whole. Now that I think about it, that might be why the hen was undercooked, with the portions nearest the bone still quite pink when I removed it from the oven. The outside parts of the hen were done, however, very tasty and tender, so I just ate those. Maybe an oven thermometer is a worthy kitchen investment...

A few words on the provenance of the recipe: Henricksson says, "Poultry, five-spice powder, and a grill are a classic combination, seen time and again in Chinese and Vietnamese cooking." The inclusion of fish sauce in this recipe puts it squarely in the Vietnamese camp, but Henricksson stops short of ascribing this recipe to a particular country. I find a very similar recipe for "Shiu Ng Heung Gai (Oven Roasted Spiced Chicken)" in the Chinese section of Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cookbook; here the marinade is composed of Chinese light soy, peanut oil, rice wine, garlic, salt, ginger and five-spice powder. No analogous recipe appears in the Vietnamese section of Solomon's book.

Meanwhile, Ha Roda's A Vietnamese Kitchen has "Roasted Cornish Hens;" these hens are marinated in a combination of soy sauce, hoisin sauce, ginger, rice vinegar, fish sauce, garlic, black pepper and water. After roasting the hens for 40 minutes, Roda brushes a mix of one teaspoon honey and one tablespoon water over the hens, then returns them to the oven to broil for 20 more minutes or until golden brown.

So, I guess it's like barbecue: find your own special marinade and go with it.

Asian telephone refinement

Somehow, I thought the 200th post on my blog should be something special. But no, I'm going to waste it on a technicality.

I've concluded that, although Asian telephone is a fun game, it has ended up holding me back from cooking with my usual abandon (or what passes for it). I will keep playing the game, but I won't insist that every Asian meal follow the rules. The other night, I had all the right ingredients for Thai fried rice, but none of those ingredients were carryover ingredients from the previous Asian telephone meal. So I broke down and made Thai fried rice. I finished off the leftovers just now. Nothing extraordinary, perhaps, but a good solid meal, tastier than many meals. It's remarkable how fish sauce adds a bracing, almost astringent quality to a dish. It really seems to bring out pork's better qualities, in particular.

Sometimes, limitations provide a useful challenge and keep things interesting. But when they start getting in the way of something you enjoy, then you need to rethink things. So I'll keep playing the game, but I won't insist that every Asian meal I cook play the game.

Pretzel quest

Ever since I read this post over at words to eat by, I've had a hankering for Pennsauken Mart pretzels. I immediately forwarded a link to the post to Perfect Tommy, who promptly checked them out on one of his wandering trips. He has wandered past the location before, and suspects that the universe was trying to guide him to the pretzel mart. In any case, the pretzels earned the Perfect Tommy Seal of Approval and I became even more interested in checking them out.

A few weeks ago, we stopped at a Gaetano's in the same strip mall but the pretzel mart, alas, was closed. But on Sunday, we headed down to the southwest corner of Jersey again. The ostensible reason for this trip was a small flock of Brewer's Blackbirds that has set up shop on Supawna Rd. in Salem County, but a major subtext was pretzel desire. We lunched at a Wendy's and repaired to the pretzel mart for dessert. Lo, it was open. If there had been any doubt, the people sitting in their cars in the parking lot and eating pretzels would've removed the doubt.

I have to admit that I have not made an extensive study of fresh soft pretzels. Most of my pretzel experience comes from those brittle little sticks you find in bags at the supermarket. Given that, these pretzels really were a revelation. Hot out of the oven, meltingly soft, studded with salt like sesame seeds on the crust. God, were they good. I had one immediately and saved one for later in the afternoon. By then the crust had hardened, but the inside was almost as soft as ever. A wonderful snack for any occasion, but particularly excellent finger food for birding.

Thanks for the tip, Debbie!

Cooking with the ancients

This meal hails from last week, actually. A minor section of Charles Pellegrino's Ghosts of Vesuvius (which I'm currently reading) includes the line, "Romans living on the Bay of Naples in A.D. 79 enjoyed pizza, hamburgers, and chili dogs." That summoned up an image of a Roman predecessor of Perfect Tommy raving about the chili dogs at Iachus' stall near the baths and dragging his bemused friends off to sample them. After The Lurker wondered if the line was just a rhetorical flourish, I started thinking about ancient food and what we know about it. I found some sites with Roman chef Apicius' recipes but have yet to track down the chili dog recipe. I'm tempted to do a series of posts about researching the food alluded to by Pellegrino, but I suspect that it's old news to others. Heck, Slice touched on the ancient pizza issue not long ago, so I think this ground has already been covered by others better than I could do it.

This historical reverie led me back to The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines, which includes Roman recipes. Interestingly, the recipes he gives are not as timeless as "pizza, hamburgers, and chili dogs" might indicate; after all, garum or fish sauce was a favorite Roman condiment, and according to Apicius, it went into the so-called "hamburgers." On the other hand, the most off-putting recipes I've come across in a Frugal Gourmet cookbook are the ones from colonial America in The Frugal Gourmet Cooks American, which is much nearer to us in time (and to some of us in geography and culture) than ancient Rome. Go figure.

After all of that, I cooked an ancient Greek shrimp recipe from the Frug. "Shrimp Ananius" goes back to a poet whose work survives only in fragments. He may have invented the "satyric iambic verse called Scazon," or maybe his contemporary Hipponax did instead. In any case, I guess one of his surviving fragments is a shrimp recipe that the Frug likens to "yuppie food from the Upper East Side of Manhattan." Now there's timeless food for you.

This is one of those pathetically easy recipes. Boil a pound of shrimp in one cup each of dry white wine (or beer) and water for two minutes; the water-wine mixture should have half a teaspoon each of marjoram and salt added. I used frozen shrimp, so I boiled it a little longer. I also used Shao Xing rice wine since I had it on hand. The result was rather subtle in flavor; perhaps I would've gotten more of it if I had shelled the shrimp before boiling them instead of leaving the shells on. I would've preferred a stronger flavor from the dish, but it's hard to complain too much about a shrimp dinner, either. It might not make a bad appetizer, like shrimp cocktail.

Asian telephone: second call

If I were the sort of person who booked plane tickets on a whim, last night's dinner would've led to a trip to Singapore. For my second installment of Asian telephone, I took oyster sauce and Shao Xing rice wine as my carryover ingredients from China to Singapore. I have a feeling that I'll be doing a lot of cooking from here in the upcoming months, as Singapore is a perfect link between the cuisine of China and the more tropical regions of southeast Asia. Not only that, I have an interesting recently-acquired cookbook (Shiok! by Terry Tan and Christopher Tan) filled with tempting recipes.

Last night's dinner was "Beef Hor Fun." This is one of those substantial beef and noodle dishes that can be found in many Asian places: beef yakisoba, Korean beef noodles and soy sauce noodles with beef and greens are other examples of the genre. I think the beef hor fun may have been the tastiest of all of them, however.

Hor fun are wide rice noodles; I only had narrower rice noodles on hand, so I did the best I could with them (I probably should have used rice flakes instead). The recipe does call for the widest rice noodles you can find, and the noodles were under-represented in the final dish, so that will have to be corrected next time around. The beef is sliced sirloin and is marinated in two tablespoons each of Shao Xing rice wine, sesame oil and oyster sauce, plus one and a half tablespoons of grated ginger and a teaspoon of black pepper. Marinate between half an hour and three hours; I probably let it sit for about two and a half hours. Add two teaspoons of cornstarch to the beef and marinade just before starting to cook.

Take your rice noodles (fresh or previously cooked) and stir-fry in three tablespoons of vegetable oil and two tablespoons of dark soy sauce for two minutes (I used Chinese mushroom soy, although it better fits the Tans' definition of "thick dark soy sauce"). Brown the noodles slightly and remove from the pan; my noodles were browned more than slightly, and left a brown crust on the pan surface, but they didn't actually burn. Add one more tablespoon of vegetable oil to the pan and stir-fry the beef for two minutes (I added the marinade as well, though there are no specific instructions about this). Add 150 milliliters (2/3 of a cup minus a tablespoon) of water and the noodles to the pan and stir-fry for another minute, then add three sliced scallions and cook for 30 seconds (I omitted the scallions since the ones I have on hand are looking long in the tooth). Serve with pickled green chiles, if you have them on hand (not to worry, Shiok! has a recipe for them, too, though I didn't serve them last night).

It's hard to put my finger on it, but this was truly delicious. I stir-fried the beef a bit longer than was recommended, just to thicken the sauce some. The sauce was a wonderful beefy gravy with excellent flavor, thick but not so copious it drowned the other ingredients. The rice noodles (as befits their chameleon-like nature) soaked up the other ingredients and transformed themselves into more beefy goodness. The beef was done to medium, not medium-rare as is often the case in stir-fries like this. If you're a "meat and potatoes" kind of person, this might be a good Asian dish for you to try.

So, for our next episode of Asian telephone, potential ingredients include beef, rice noodles, ginger, sesame oil and Chinese mushroom soy. Since the carryover ingredients for this step were Shao Xing rice wine and oyster sauce, they probably should be disqualified for the next go-round. Ingredients like black pepper, cornstarch and vegetable oil (oh, and water too) seem generic enough that they should be disqualified as well. I expect the "rules" for Asian telephone will evolve as I play the game.

Fettuccini with carrots and mushrooms

Whenever I walk into a supermarket and find Italian ingredients in the "Ethnic" or "International Foods" section, it gives me a turn. I grew up in northern New Jersey and in that setting, Italian food isn't anything foreign (not like French or Mexican or Japanese food). Italian food is just normal food. Spaghetti, pizza, fettuccini, lasagna, bologna, salami, pastrami...you get the idea. Now, growing up as I did in a non-Italian family, I doubt our spaghetti was particularly authentic, but long before I got interested in cooking, I already had a lot of Italian words in my lexicon. To me, it will always be part of the normal culinary scene.

To make a long story short, I got to talking cookbooks with my mom around Christmas, and she recommended Anne Casale's Italian Family Cooking as a good basic Italian cookbook. It even has a recipe that is very close to an eggplant dish that one of our neighbors used to make; this neighbor came from a Sicilian background and shared some of her recipes with my mother, who still has them. For my first try at cooking from a dedicated Italian cookbook, I didn't tackle eggplant (never one of my favorite veggies) but made a pasta recipe for spinach fettuccini topped with carrots, mushrooms and pancetta.

The carrots are julienned and boiled until barely tender; the less said about my julienning ability, the better, so I just sliced them. One heats three tablespoons of olive oil in a pan over medium heat and adds three tablespoons of butter. Then one adds in succession: diced pancetta, sliced scallions, and the carrots, cooking each until tender, between one to two minutes apiece. Then one adds sliced mushrooms (I used regular button mushrooms) and turns up the heat to medium-high to cook for about a minute (until the mushrooms start giving up their juices). Season with salt and pepper to taste, remove from the heat, and stir in some minced parsley (I omitted the parsley). Serve over the spinach fettuccini.

This is a fairly simple dish in execution and taste. The centers of attention are the pasta and the vegetables; the butter and pancetta are there to provide flavor accents only, not to dominate the dish and turn it into something luxurious. I'm sure it could be adapted for any assortment of seasonal produce, or one could omit the pancetta and turn it into a vegetarian pasta (maybe as easily as substituting reconstituted dried porcini for the pancetta). I have to say the result didn't make me jump up and down in excitement, but it was a perfectly respectable solid dinner. It's so easy to throw a canned sauce over pasta, but it's almost as easy (and likely healthier) just to cook up a few toppings and turn them into a light sauce like this.

Asian telephone: first call

Well, we're off to discover whether this 2006 cooking challenge will be enough to hold my interest for the rest of the year. In order to make it count, henceforth every Asian meal I cook this year will follow the rules of Asian telephone, as composed on a whim for a meme post: take one ingredient (at least) from an Asian meal and use it to cook another meal from a different country or culture's cuisine.

The first entry comes from China via the Frugal Gourmet's first cookbook: "Shrimp and Fungus." The fungus in question is the tree ear, an unassuming object that resembles (in its dried form) a crumpled-up bit of burned paper. Once hydrated, it expands dramatically in volume but has no taste worth mentioning. On the other hand, it supplies a prodigious and enjoyable crunch to any dish in which it appears. The black tree ears can also add a dramatic note to the appearance of a meal.

This is a simple recipe that I've wanted to try for quite a while but have never quite gotten round to. Marinate the shrimp in a teaspoon each of Chinese light soy and Shao Xing wine (the Frug calls for sherry), along with half a teaspoon grated ginger (as usual, I chopped the ginger; I really need to get a ginger grater one of these days). Stir-fry a crushed clove of garlic in two tablespoons of peanut oil for a few moments. Then add the shrimp and stir-fry until they change color (the Frug calls for shelled shrimp but I cooked mine in shells because, well, because I guess I didn't read the recipe carefully enough!). Then add the fungus and cook for a few more minnutes, until everything is heated through. Now add two tablespoons each of chicken broth and oyster sauce, plus half a tablespoon of cornstarch mixed with half a tablespoon of water. The Frug also calls for a pinch of sugar, but I forgot about that. Cook until the sauce thickens then serve over noodles or rice.

My sauce never did thicken because I added the shrimp marinade along with the shrimp. I turned this into a fusion dish because I wanted spinach fettuccini; I also used porcini soaking water rather than chicken broth. Then there were the mistakes mentioned above. It didn't matter. The sauce was delicious yet subtle, well worth licking off the shrimp before I peeled them. It could easily be kicked up a few notches with the addition of hot sauce or chiles. The combination of pink shrimp, green fettuccini and black fungus looked great; the varied textures also were a treat.

So, for our next installment of Asian telephone, some ingredients to consider include shrimp, tree ears, garlic, Chinese light soy, Shao Xing wine and oyster sauce; any of these for an Asian dish not from China. Hmmm.

Chicken and shiro-sherry sauce

I liked Mark Bittman's miso-red wine sauce so much that I decided to retool it a bit. Rather than using red miso and red wine to make a sauce for pork, I substituted white miso (or shiro miso) and sherry to make a sauce for chicken thighs and mushrooms.

Brown a half-pound of chicken thighs in a hot skillet, then add sliced button mushrooms. Saute until chicken turns white and mostly cooks through, then add a cup of cream sherry (I used Hartley and Gibson's cream sherry) and two tablespoons of white miso (it helps if you smash up the miso some before adding it, so it will dissolve faster). Cook the sauce down by at least half, then turn out onto a plate of pasta.

This was a decadent dish. I've cooked with marsala quite a bit, but I can't remember trying a real sweet sherry sauce. This one delivered the goods, so much so that it induced a post-dinner coma. The mushrooms soaked up the sweet sauce, and were intensely flavored as a result. The dark meat of the chicken thighs stood up to the strength of the sherry flavor better than a milder cut like chicken breast would have done. When I try this again, I'll probably serve it over a flavored pasta like spinach fettuccini in order to add another taste element (this time I used wide egg noodles). If I really want to quibble, I would say that a well-chosen herb and some lemon juice would also add a bit of zing to the sauce, but even without that zing, the sauce was excellent. A keeper.

Stuff I haven't blogged lately

Now that I think about it, that title almost sounds like a meme. Anyway, here are some things I haven't blogged lately:

1. Finishing off a pot of oxtail stew on the electric range when the power went out during a storm. The power stayed off for a couple of hours, so I got to eat a not-quite-reduced-enough bowl of stew by candlelight and the ambient light from the sliding glass door. Luckily, the stew was almost done when the power cut out.

2. Making mizore nabe for The Deacon and The Frog Collector when they came over to my place a couple of weeks ago for Sunday dinner. The mizore nabe received high marks, but as usual it didn't quite turn out the way I wanted. I guess I'll keep playing with it and experimenting with it until it becomes my own.

3. Making an egg stir-fry from Ken Hom's Easy Family Recipes From a Chinese-American Childhood. Hom says dishes like it were probably the antecedents for the Chinese restaurant institution egg foo young. The final result was much like scrambled eggs with bean sprouts and sliced onions added in. It struck me as bland and unexciting, but that's really my fault because I didn't add the chopped tomatoes called for in the recipe. That would've livened things up considerably.

4. Last weekend, I made my first foray into the Philly cheesesteak universe by having a "mini" plain steak at Gaetano's Steaks in Maple Shade, NJ. Perfect Tommy has been raving about this place for a while, particularly the bread (which really was wonderfully incredible). He also gives the meat high marks, since it's actually thinly-sliced steak, not processed beef product. It really was great stuff going down, but unfortunately for me, it didn't settle well and we had to make an emergency pit stop on the way home. I'm not sure what upset the intestines, but it was a huge pile of beef, which may have been enough all by itself.

There, I think I'm caught up for now. A little later, I'll post about last night's dinner, chicken and shiro-sherry sauce.

Meme: Too much information

Well, obachan was looking for willing tag-ees for a meme, so I had to volunteer, just to help her out. So here we go, some completely irrelevant information for y'all:

1. Mountains I have climbed include Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire, Cadillac Mt. in Maine, Mt. Scott in Oregon and Utsjoki Ailigas in Finland.

2. I used to play the dulcimer a little bit.

3. H. P. Lovecraft is (was?) a distant cousin of mine.

4. My first word was "kih-kih," that is, "kitty."

5. I know how to read tarot cards.

6. I used to listen to Jean Shepherd on WOR when I was a kid.

7. I'm an off-and-on collector of model horses.

8. I was one of the hordes of people who saw a Boreal Owl in Central Park last winter.

9. One of this year's projects is to hike the Batona trail end to end with The Lurker and Perfect Tommy.

10. I was in the stands when Len Dykstra won game 3 of the 1986 National League playoffs with a homer.

And now, a word from our sponsor

Well, more a word from the Apologist-in-Charge. Although I have some drafts of posts lined up in the queue here at SevenSoy Central, I have been quite remiss in finishing them off. You see, I got a new refurbished laptop the other day and it has been quite the distraction. Transferring my e-life from my older machines to the fancy schmancy new one will take some time, but getting back into the swing of blogging is definitely a priority.

Incidentally, you can check out my weekly column, "Asian Sweet of the Week" on Mondays over at Sugar Savvy.

Meme: Five cooking challenges for 2006

Oh, goody, a meme! Crazy Gaijin of Cooking in Japan (aka Nihon no Ryori) tagged me with this one, which provided a lot of food for thought. In December 2004 (yikes, has it already been that long?!), I blogged some food-related resolutions for 2005 (intermittently kept), but this year I hadn’t really thought about it. Well, now I have.

1. Make every dinner a dish worth savoring. Every dinner, even those workaday weekday dinners: in fact, especially those dinners. It’s understandable to take the path of least resistance, especially when tired or stressed out from work (which seems to be my normal state of mind these days, alas). But opting for routine in those situations leads you down the slippery slope. At those tired or stressful times, one simple way to make yourself feel better is to fix yourself a special meal. It doesn’t have to be fancy-special or time-consuming-special; it just needs to be something that requires a little bit of thought and care, or maybe just some Zen time chopping garlic or onions without thinking. Falling into routine is a way of turning off the things that make you happy by seeking refuge in the overly familiar. Making a special meal is a way of saying yes to the things that make you happy. Saying yes to those things always makes life better, but it’s often surprisingly difficult to do.

2. Eat more vegetarian meals. Asian cuisines are well-adapted to those seeking a vegetarian diet; if you want to make a stir-fry with no meat, it’s pretty easy to do. For a carnivore, I eat vegetarian more than I would expect, without trying too hard. It would be worth it to push that envelope a little further.

3. Away from the general toward the specific: I want to learn how to make Swedish meatballs.

4. Another specific challenge: use my bamboo steamer.

5. Finally, Asian telephone. This idea struck me as I was toying with this meme, and I loved it immediately. Cook an Asian meal, any Asian meal. Then take one ingredient from that meal and cook another Asian meal, from a different country or culture’s cuisine. Continue ad lib and see where you end up. I think the seed for this one may have been planted by Hot Sour Salty Sweet, which is a great book about regional cooking in southeast Asia. The book does an excellent job of showing the similarities and differences in the cooking of the different peoples who call the Mekong River area their home. Sure, I already have recipes for pad Thai and beef pho and Chiang Mai noodles, but Hot Sour Salty Sweet gives a deeper context than many cookbooks.

Oh, gosh, now I need to tag some folks.

Obachan
Gluten-free Girl
Sweetnicks
Mahanandi
umami

Pennsylvania road food

An after-the-fact note about a couple of eateries I visited with The Lurker and Perfect Tommy on a trip to Pennsylvania in search of a rare bird (not to mention some Ikea scouting).

Yocco's Hot Dogs: Perfect Tommy is a hot dog fan, and his craving lately has been for Yocco's, a mini-chain in the Lehigh Valley area. The hot dogs are rather thin, which is why the average serving preferred by aficionados is two or three dogs. Each hot dog is dressed in chili sauce, onions and mustard. I wasn't sure how easily digestible the hot dogs and their topping would be, so I only ordered a single with a side of fries. I needn't have worried; it went down just fine. The fries were crinkle-cut and not greasy.

That evening, when we'd finished wandering around Ikea, we stumbled onto a sports bar called Champps, another chain (albeit of the bigger, glossier, less homespun sort than Yocco's). Both Perfect Tommy and I had the "Shanghai steamer," an assortment of pork, shrimp and chicken dumplings served with dipping sauce. It was pretty good, all told. I tend to avoid ordering Asian-style dishes in western restaurants (particularly chains), because who knows what their interpretation of Asian food will be like. But the dumplings were fine and the teriyaki dipping sauce was fine. The "Thai peanut slaw" that accompanied the dumplings turned out to be your basic cole slaw with just a hint of peanut flavor in the dressing. It was definitely not the assertive symphony of tastes that is a hallmark of real Thai food.

The most amusing moment of the evening (for the three of us, anyway) was when our server read off the night's specials, including a special martini, the "Flirtini." All of us ordered Cokes, since none of us are "swingers" by any stretch of the imagination. That poor waiter, little knowing he was offering a Flirtini to three of the least flirtaceous people one could find anywhere. Oh, well, that's life.

Gai lan three ways

My dislike of broccoli was crystallized in one of my earliest memories, a memory that has turned into a favorite story to tell and retell. I was in nursery school and it was lunchtime. The teacher went around to serve us our meals. When she got to me, she asked me if I wanted "a big tree or a little tree," while offering a selection of broccoli. I replied that I preferred not to have any trees at all. Unfortunately, this was not an acceptable answer. I remember that I was sent to sit in the corner for the rest of the afternoon because of my insubordination, but to be honest, that memory may refer to a punishment for a different transgression that just got matched up with the broccoli showdown. The brain can be funny that way.

In any case, I hate broccoli and have for a very long time. Both the taste and the consistency turn me off. I was a picky eater in childhood, and broccoli was only one on a long list of disliked food items. Mushrooms. Lima beans. Peas. Collard greens. Okra. I have come to reevaluate mushrooms in adulthood, but I think part of that is becoming familiar with different types of mushrooms such as shiitakes, porcinis and tree ears. Broccoli remains on the no-go list, however, along with lima beans. This summer, I had peas fresh off the vine from my garden and realized that they really were so much better than other peas, like every gardener says. Collard greens and okra are yet to be officially reevaluated, but that day will probably come soon.

Chinese cooking boasts an assortment of cabbages and bitter mustard greens. One of these is variously called Chinese broccoli, Chinese kale, gai lan or kai lan. Perfect Tommy loves the stuff, singing its praises when it's served in a simple stir-fry. After hearing him rhapsodize, I grudgingly agreed that I would try gai lan at least once. After all, it wasn't exactly the same as regular broccoli. Maybe there would be some subtle difference in its taste that would make it acceptable to this broccoli-hater.

I recently got a new cookbook called Shiok! by Terry Tan and Christopher Tan. Shiok! is a big colorful paperback dedicated to Singaporean cooking; it contains a panoply of recipes showing the cross-cultural fusion cooking that is the culinary heritage of Singapore. When I came across a recipe called "Stir-fried Beef with Kai Lan," I knew what I had to do. I bought a bunch of gai lan from the Asian supermarket, thawed some stir-fry sirloin and prepared to do battle.

The first way was to follow the cookbook. Mix the beef with two teaspoons each of cornstarch and light Chinese soy sauce, and one and a half tablespoons of Shao Xing rice wine. This is a marinade, but there are no cookbook notes on letting the beef sit in the solution, so do what you will; I mixed it up and threw the beef into the skillet. Fry some garlic and ginger in oil, then add the beef and stir-fry for a minute. Add the gai lan and stir-fry for two more minutes. Then add one and a half tablespoons of Shao Xing rice wine, two tablespoons of oyster sauce, one tablespoon of sesame oil, a teaspoon of black pepper and four tablespoons of water. Stir-fry until the sauce thickens, then serve.

It was pretty good, but the gai lan was bitter. In cooking terms, it behaved much like spinach because the expanse of leaves quickly cooked down to a fraction of the volume it had started with. The next evening I served the leftover gai lan and remaining sauce (the beef was taken care of pretty quickly) with jasmine rice. Good, again, but the gai lan was still bitter. So I finally tackled the leftover gai lan and rice with the Thai fried rice recipe from Hot Sour Salty Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (another new cookbook treat). Yes, the gai lan was bitter, again.

While driving up to The Lurker's for a weekend birding trip (more on that later), I told Perfect Tommy about my gai lan experience. He mentioned parboiling the gai lan to remove the bitterness. I guess I'll have to try that next time.

One's friends can lead one so astray. A food my parents never could have gotten me to eat in childhood becomes worthy of the benefit of the doubt because a friend (long after childhood) recommends it. I don't know if that's scary or fitting.

Be fed well

Yep, it's official. The WellFed Network is up and running. Go over there and have a look. Not only am I looking forward to blogging for it, I'm looking forward to seeing other people's great posts on the member blogs.

Korean spaghetti

This meal got its start from Sichuan spaghetti, which came from Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients. I've had some Korean soybean paste and hot pepper paste sitting in my cabinet for a while, but many of the recipes in my main Korean cookbook (Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall) are fairly intricate, with lots of ingredients. I haven't really dived into it yet. So, I decided that the thing to do was to cook a more generic stir-fry with these ingredients, just to get a feel for them.

Sichuan spaghetti turned out to be a good choice to try these new ingredients. Rather than using five tablespoons of Chinese hot bean paste, I used three of the Korean soybean paste and one of the hot pepper paste (not knowing quite how hot it was beforehand). The soybean paste clumped together in the pan, a little too sticky for this treatment (but then, would you stir-fry miso unadulterated with some thinning agent like water? No); I added some ch'ongju to deglaze the pan a bit.

The end result was very similar to Sichuan spaghetti. The main difference was that it wasn't as oily. The Sichuan spaghetti contains not only the oil used to fry the ingredients but also oil from the hot bean paste; there was no additional oil from the combination of Korean soybean paste and hot pepper paste. On the other hand, the soybean paste wasn't the right consistency to stir-fry alone, and mixing two ingredients for the sauce adds an extra step that the hot bean paste makes unnecessary. I suppose one way around the consistency problem would be to mix the soybean paste and hot pepper paste with water or some other fluid; that would improve the consistency of the sauce, in stir-frying terms.

In any case, it was an interesting experiment, and it did give me an idea of what to do with the Korean ingredients. The hot pepper paste will probably become the go-to source of heat for certain stir-fries; not as vinegary as Tabasco sauce, nor as powdery as cayenne or red pepper flakes. It has a wine-dark purplish color that led my fevered imagination to ponder combining it with red wine for a bizarre variant of traditional European sauces. The soybean paste resembles a particularly chunky, earthy version of miso; the misos you tend to find in the store are smoother, without obvious bits of bean in them.

Any meal that takes an "exotic," hitherto unknown ingredient and makes it comprehensible is a winner in my book.

Four flavors

In southeast Asian cooking, a balance of four flavors is prized: heat from chiles or pepper; sourness from tamarind, lime or vinegar; sweetness from sugar; and saltiness from fish sauce or soy sauce. A well-made dish should demonstrate a complex interplay among these tastes, reaching a level as sophisticated as anything in French haute cuisine or in India's intricate spice blends. The other night I made a Thai dish with obvious sources for all these tastes, but proved that including certain ingredients is far from executing the dish at a high level.

The dish in question was "Tangy Bean Thread Noodles with Cilantro and Lime" from Quick and Easy Thai by Nancie McDermott. After preparing the bean thread noodles by soaking them in hot water, then draining and cutting them into shorter lengths, you stir-fry two tablespoons of chopped shallots and one tablespoon of chopped garlic in vegetable oil for a minute. Then you add a quarter of a cup of chopped meat of your choice (I used pork this time), toss, and add two tablespoons of fish sauce and one teaspoon of soy sauce. Stir-fry the meat until done, then remove from the heat and mix in the noodles. Let stand until it reaches room temperature (I omitted this step, opting to eat while hot) and add two teaspoons of sugar, one teaspoon of dried red chile flakes, and two tablespoons each of lime juice, chopped scallions, and fresh cilantro or mint. Wrap in lettuce leaves, if desired, to serve.

Rather than getting an interplay of the four flavors, I wound up with a single blended taste that wasn't bad, but wasn't tangy, either. It wasn't nearly as spicy as it should've been; maybe the omission of scallions (the ones I had on hand were played out) had something to do with it, but the chile flakes didn't live up to their end of the bargain, either. The other flavors seemed more muted than enhanced by the combination, as if they were cancelling each other out. I'm sure this wasn't the intent of the recipe.

Just another example of how you can cook a meal and follow the recipe, yet end up light-years away from the way the food "should" taste.

Odds, ends and a preview

I have a couple of odds and ends to catch up on blogging, so expect them in the next couple of days. This week so far has been uneventful, with chashu Monday night and chashu over fettuccini last night. I have a feeling that tomorrow's predicted rain will lead to a session of making oxtail stew. The Lurker sent me a report from the road yesterday; he and Perfect Tommy discovered that the Langhorne Krispy Kreme is now closed, alas.

The main reason I'm blogging this aimless entry, however, is to give you the heads-up on a new project I'm getting involved in. If you travel the food blog-verse, you may have run across references to the upcoming WellFed Network. WellFed is going to be group of blogs about food; each blog tackles a different topic and has a group of bloggers contributing to it. I'm pleased to announce that I will be contributing to two of the four WellFed blogs coming online in January: Sugar Savvy and The Spirit World (follow the links for a preview).

I will be blogging a column called "Asian Sweet of the Week" for Sugar Savvy; it is what the title says it is, a review of a semi-randomly-selected candy from the well-stocked shelves of the the local Asian markets. One of the other columnists is based in Asia, so that part of the world should have excellent coverage. Of course, the rest of the world has plenty of sugary treats to offer, so I'm sure there won't be a dearth of material.

The Spirit World is dedicated to alcoholic beverages other than wine (which will have its own WellFed blog); beer and cocktails have already made appearances. My occasional contributions will be in the line of reviewing Asian liquors (hm, I sense a theme here) as well as writing about cooking with alcohol, which is what I do with it most frequently. What is the difference between using sake and michiu in a stir-fry? I hope to find out.

It is always nice to be able to look ahead to new possibilities at the New Year. I'm glad to be involved in this project; it's a way of doing something a little different with my blogging. Meanwhile, of course, Seven Kinds of Soy Sauce will keep chugging along with its recipe reviews, digressions and occasional road food mayhem.

'Tis the season

'Tis the season to find whatever good you can in a situation that may not be ideal. Rather than the day to sit down to a big family meal, today was the day to drive from Massachusetts to New Jersey (so that I can show up at work tomorrow). My parents and I did Christmas yesterday; my mom prepared a ham with mashed potatoes, gravy and various accessories. It turns out that lingonberry jam is even better with ham than cranberry sauce is.

Once I got home in one piece and unpacked the car, it was time to try and cobble together a bit more of Christmas for myself. My inspiration was last year's solo holiday and dinner didn't fall far from that tree. I sauteed some porcini mushrooms in butter until they browned, then I added half a cup each of porcini soaking water and cooking sake. I cooked the sauce down and also added a teaspoon of cornstarch dissolved in too much water. When it had started to thicken, but there was still a good amount of juice, I poured it over some spinach fettuccini. Boy, that didn't last long. It really is heartening to be able to come home and throw a meal together that tastes so good. Even on a day taken up with other things, you can still make a little space and take a little time to treat yourself well. At least, I hope I can remember that in the future, because I tend to lose sight of it easily.

Happy holidays!

Perfectionism: the enemy in the kitchen

Well, here I am in balmy Massachusetts, where upended trees are still strewn hither and yon from the nasty storm that came through a few weeks ago. My parents had at least four trees come down in the yard but luckily none of them hit the house or did major damage. They did lose power for several days.

I haven't been up here since June, and I wasn't able to visit for the holidays at all last year, so it's nice to be here. One way to treat my parents is to cook a meal for them. Last night I thought I'd try "Garlic Fried Shrimp" from Marnie Henricksson's Everyday Asian. Of course, once I arrived in the kitchen, variables were introduced. My parents' electric range cooks hotter than mine. They picked up a bunch of veggies for the stir-fry although the recipe doesn't call for them.

The idea of the recipe is the Vietnamese technique of cooking garlic and onion down into a syrup (with the help of oil, sugar, fish sauce, salt and pepper). Once this is done, then the syrup is poured off and separated from the oil. The oil stays in the pan and is used to stir-fry the shrimp. Then the sauce is returned to the pan, heated through, and the shrimp and sauce are served over jasmine rice.

It was probably a mistake for me to try this technique (a new one for me) in a new kitchen with an audience I wanted to impress. The garlic-onion-syrup mixture quickly cooked down into something that looked more burned than anything else. I hacked as much of it as possible out of the pan and set it aside in a bowl. Then I started stir-frying the veggies, adding first the asparagus spears, then the sliced mushrooms, then the shrimp, then the pea pods. Stir-frying did pick up a lot of the burned crispy stuff left over from the sauce.

Then came the time to add the sauce back in, but when I attempted to scoop it out of the bowl, it came flying out and skated across the kitchen floor in a perfect imitation of a hockey puck. The mess had congealed and crystalized, doubtlessly abetted by the sugar. My mother opined that it was rather like a kind of candy, and even thought it didn't taste bad. All I knew was that it wasn't remotely what had been supposed to happen. Argh! So I just finished up the stir-fry and dumped the shrimp and veggies over the jasmine rice (which came out fine despite boiling over).

I couldn't think of the dish as a success since the end product was so different from what the recipe intended. But my parents loved it. I grudgingly had to admit that it was a successful meal, just not the successful meal that I had set out to prepare. And that's the real joy of cooking - those surprises that come along and teach you more about cooking than the tried-and-true comfortable dishes. Take the asparagus, for example. It was the first time I'd cooked asparagus, because I'm not a big fan of it. My dad loves it, though, so it went into the stir-fry as a treat for him. It came out perfectly done, crisp on the outside and tender on the inside. Even I liked it.

Someday, I'll try that recipe again and get it "right." But last night's meal will last longer in memory for its "imperfection."

Kindred spirits

Normally when I mess around with my sidebar links, I don't notify the media. It's just routine cyber-housecleaning, nothing to get excited about. Clean out the dead links, add new interesting sites as you find them. But taquitos.net is something else.

I stumbled onto it while looking for info about Baby Star snacks. Then I saw the item about the closing of the first Massachusetts Krispy Kreme store in Medford. I e-mailed the link to Perfect Tommy and The Lurker; Perfect Tommy, of course, is a dedicated fancier of Krispy Kreme, while The Lurker is a not-so-innocent bystander sure to be amused by any of Perfect Tommy's excesses. Then Perfect Tommy e-mailed back that The Lurker should check out the fries section, with its mention of "the Chick-fil-A triad." It turns out these folks are obsessed with Chick-fil-A, too. The Lurker was happy they adore Chick-fil-A. Perfect Tommy was happy that they actually understand the batter-to-potato ratio for french fries, which he has been expounding about to an uncomprehending populace for ages. I like the Asian snack reviews (well, ok, and the Bugles review too), but on wandering through the site, I stumbled on this snippet from their explanation of how taquitos.net came to be:

"As for the name of the site, it has something to do with Jeremy's hunger for Trader Joe's taquitos (hideous things, really). The name stuck when the word found its way into a certain Simpsons episode, when one of the retirement home residents said "I want some taquitos" not once but twice in the same episode. Understanding Jeremy's logic in choosing that name for the site (not to mention understanding Jeremy's logic in general) is like getting from Point A to Point B by taking a side trip through Points C, E and F. You'll just have to trust us."

This is the perfect description of a birding trip (or heck, even just a conversation) between The Lurker, Perfect Tommy and myself. I'm not sure whether I'm heartened to find others like us on the internet, or scared.

Well, I just finished my bag of Baby Star chicken-flavored Crispy Noodle Snack. Time enough to end this post!

Sesame-ginger stir-fry

This recipe comes from one of my more recently-acquired cookbooks (Ken Hom's Hot Wok), but it reminds me of a Frugal Gourmet recipe that I've been cooking (and fiddling with) for years. That Frugal Gourmet recipe is "My Cousin David's Hot Szechwan Chicken." Oddly enough, Hom's recipe is also named after another person; it's called "Peter Ng's Sesame-Ginger Chicken." Hom’s recipe claims no Sichuan influence; instead he tells us that Peter Ng was born in Malaysia of Chinese descent.

The techniques of the two dishes are similar; first you marinate the chicken meat, then you stir-fry. In the present case, the marinade consists of two teaspoons light soy sauce, one teaspoon mushroom soy sauce, one tablespoon Shao Xing rice wine, a half teaspoon each salt and black pepper (I omitted the salt), one teaspoon sesame oil and two teaspoons cornstarch. This marinade is a bit more involved than The Frug's, which just calls for light soy sauce, sherry and cornstarch. Hom directs that the meat be marinated for 30 minutes, The Frug gives no time limit.

This stir-fry is a bit different in that it calls for a blended oil in which to stir-fry, instead of straight peanut oil or vegetable oil. The blend is one tablespoon peanut oil and two teaspoons sesame oil. This technique of blending sesame oil with regular cooking oil is used in Japanese cooking for tempura, but I haven't previously encountered it in Chinese or Chinese-influenced dishes. It doubtless is used here to help produce the sesame flavor of the dish.

Stir-fry three tablespoons of ginger (Hom calls for shredded, I just chopped mine) in the blended oil for a minute, then add the chicken and stir-fry until the chicken starts browning. Then add the following ingredients: two tablespoons mushroom soy, two teaspoons sugar, one teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon black pepper and 150 milliliters stock.*

* Digression: My copy of this cookbook is the British edition, so it includes metric fluid measurements. Two-thirds of a cup is roughly equivalent to 150 milliliters, but I just measured it out in a cup with metric amounts on one side.

After stir-frying for a minute, cover the pan and simmer for eight minutes. When the simmering is done, uncover and raise the heat to reduce the sauce. Once the sauce has reduced to several tablespoons, add two tablespoons of Shao Xing rice wine and stir-fry for about two more minutes. Garnish with scallions and serve.

The Frug’s recipe is a straight stir-fry without sauce reduction and simmering. His sauce ingredients are sherry, mushroom soy, brown sugar, sesame oil, Worcestershire sauce, water and cornstarch. Both recipes result in a flavorful thick sauce with a certain tang to it, sort of an example of culinary convergent evolution. Hom’s sauce is almost syrupy by the time it’s done, with a dark brownish-red color that brings to mind Chinese red-cooked stews. The dark color comes from the mushroom soy, of course, but sesame and ginger, as the recipe’s title indicates, are the dominant flavors. The strongly-flavored chicken from both recipes goes well with either rice or noodles as a setting.

This meal was like meeting an old friend in a new guise. I’ll definitely be making it again.

Sauce follies

Building on my last major meal, I decided to take the sauce and pour it on some spinach fettuccini for dinner. Half a cup of real sake, half a cup of chicken-turkey stock, no seasonings. I sauteed some porcini mushrooms in a bit of vegetable oil first. Once the mushrooms had absorbed most of the oil, I added the sake and stock. I subsequently added a teaspoon of cornstarch, but this didn't thicken the sauce in any significant way. I reduced the sauce for a while, then poured it on the fettuccini.

It was tasty, but not remotely what happened when I tried this the last time. It is really funny (peculiar is maybe a better word) to see how the same ingredients and techniques can lead to very different outcomes. I guess that's one reason to keep cooking; if it was completely predictable every time, would it be as much fun? Well, ok, I'm an amateur cook, not someone who wants to open a restaurant any time soon. Unpredictability adds spice to the amateur's life, while to the hopeful professional, it probably means something's gone wrong. Careers are built on consistency.

The best ingredients

There's a cooking truism to the effect that a meal's quality depends directly on the quality of the ingredients. The freshest produce and meat, unadulterated seasonings; all of these will combine for a fine meal. Reality being what it is, however, every cook without unlimited time and an unlimited bankroll (i.e., most of us) has to make certain tradeoffs. Sometimes these tradeoffs can be downright idiosyncratic. In my case, I hardly ever cook with frozen fish; I want it as fresh as I can get it, or at least bought the same day I eat it. On the other hand, I think nothing of buying beef, pork or poultry and tossing it into the freezer until I want it. Go figure.

Yesterday I tried making a variant of rosemary chicken. I started with the big skillet, which had had bacon fried in it recently (the bacon has no further part in this meal). I added a bit of vegetable oil to eke out the traces of bacon grease and the remaining crusty bits, then stir-fried quarter of a cup of sliced onion for a minute. Then I added some sliced chicken tenderloin and stir-fried until it had mostly turned color. The onions and chicken picked up the browned bacon leftovers from the skillet quite nicely, cleaning the pan up. I then added half a cup of homemade Chinese-style turkey-chicken stock, brought it to a boil, and did the same with half a cup of sake (the real stuff, not cooking sake).

I removed the chicken pieces with a slotted spoon and got to work on the sauce. A bit of salt and pepper to taste livened it up a bit, as did half a teaspoon of sliced fresh rosemary. From there, I just reduced the sauce. As it reduced, it remained close to the "au jus" end of the spectrum, so I added a teaspoon of cornstarch to thicken it up. This did the trick and soon I was pouring the chicken and the sauce over a big pile of jasmine rice.

The sauce tasted wonderful as it was bubbling away in the pan, but it was quickly lost in the pile of jasmine rice, becoming a mere shadow of a memory. This threw the spotlight squarely on the chicken which, it quickly became evident, was not quite ready for prime time. It was tender and moist, but it had an off-putting cardboard-like aftertaste. It was still edible, but clearly it had sat in the freezer a little too long.

Little details mean a lot. The sauce was perfect, but there was too much rice to absorb it. The meat was the right consistency, but just not fresh enough. On the other hand, there's reason to be hopeful. With just a few minor changes, last night's disappointment is sure to become another evening's beautiful centerpiece.

2005 Food Blog Awards

Just reminder that it's that time again: time for the 2005 Food Blog Awards! I thought voting was tough last year, but this year, there are even more great food blogs out there and I have less free time to read them. Ack. It really is hard to pick favorites when you know you will leave out many deserving contenders.

Trot over to The Accidental Hedonist and nominate your choices by December 16. Then the esteemed judges will review the contenders, come up with a slate of finalists and open them up to votes from December 21 to December 31.

If you have a food blog, good luck!

Vietnamese hash

Well, ok, so the classic form of hash seems to require potatoes. My mom's hash definitely involved potatoes. But the thing I threw together Monday night seemed so hash-like, I couldn't say it was anything else. It's just that rice took the starch place of honor, rather than potatoes.

I improvised off of Ha Roda's recipe for "Egg and Pork Stew" in her cookbook A Vietnamese Kitchen. Marinate about a pound of ground pork in two tablespoons of fish sauce, one tablespoon of light soy sauce, one tablespoon of oyster sauce, some salt and black pepper to taste, one teaspoon of sugar, two tablespoons of chopped onion and two teaspoons of bacon grease. Stir-fry the pork for a minute or two, then add leftover cooked rice (about a cup) and stir-fry for another minute.Then add the egg and stir-fry. On the second day, I threw this over some rice noodles. On the first day, it was fine by itself.

I doubt it’s really hash, and it’s definitely not authentic Vietnamese food. But it turned out to be a tasty way of using up odds and ends.

Apres-holiday

I'm one of those tiresome folks who is descended from one of the English people who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. My blog handle, in fact, is derived from one of those people. Thanksgiving is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to me it's always been a family occasion: an anniversary of an arrival in a new place, but also an occasion to honor the native people without whom the Pilgrim settlement would never have survived. Some contemporary Native Americans find that a troublesome legacy (and I don't blame them), but I think of a hard winter in a new country, when the English transplants were sick and dying, and the native people did what any decent human being would have done; they offered help to their new neighbors. That they were repaid so poorly is one of history's tragedies.

Thanksgiving found me alone again this year; partly from circumstance, partly from inclination. I turned to Mark Bittman and the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market. Bittman's recipe for "Turkey Thighs Braised in Red Wine" (from How to Cook Everything) seemed just the ticket, and the farmers market was happy to supply a turkey thigh (one thigh is plenty of meat for one person). The seasonings ranged from porcini mushrooms to juniper berries, all simmered in some Ravenswood Vintners Blend Zinfandel. This would qualify as another "hearty food" kind of dish, with the dark thigh meat standing up to the intense red wine quite well. I added a twist to Bittman's recipe by frying some bacon in the pan first, then browning the turkey thigh and simmering; just to add a little something extra to the sauce. Not your typical Thanksgiving meal, but more than adequate and suitable for a festive special occasion.

Dessert was the traditional pumpkin pie, also from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market. On Friday, I introduced The Deacon to the market; she has been seeking a good meat counter ever since her favorite butcher shop, Heinz's, closed a few years ago. During my tour, I noticed a new heap of Mennonite and Amish cookbooks in the furniture-and-tchotschkes section; that definitely spells trouble.

High-test stir-fry

The problem to be solved for last night’s dinner was what to do with half a package of abura-age before it went bad. This is what I came up with:

Take half a package of abura-age and one sliced piece of bacon; stir-fry in a tablespoon of peanut oil for about three minutes. Add two cups of bean sprouts and another tablespoon of peanut oil; stir-fry for another couple of minutes. Add cooked Chinese egg noodles and stir-fry for a minute. Add sauce composed of half a tablespoon of Chinese barbecue sauce, one tablespoon Chinese light soy, one tablespoon oyster sauce and one teaspoon of sesame oil. Blend ingredients, heat through, and serve.

The addition of the barbecue sauce was inspired by this post over at dcfüd. Although some of the other ingredients involved are hardly shrinking violets, the barbecue sauce made them all run for cover. Even though I used a minimal amount of barbecue sauce, my lips burned from the heat of the sauce. Whew. That really is virulent stuff.

Not the most refined meal ever, but a good way to use up odds and ends.

Bacon coma

I guess my recent infatuation with good ol' wholesome American cookin' may be getting a little out of hand. Yesterday on the way home from work I stopped off at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market (they have expanded hours due to the impending Thanksgiving holiday). Last week, I had eyed the bacon there but had not bought any. Over the weekend, I mentioned their bacon to The Lurker, who gave it a rave review. That sealed it; last night I bought a pound of the maple-honey bacon (among other things).

This morning's breakfast was about five slices of the bacon (big slices) and two eggs sunnyside up, fried in the bacon grease. The entrancing aroma of maple sweetness still permeates the kitchen hours later (not that I'm complaining). The bacon was every bit as wonderful as the aroma promised. But after breakfast, I had to go lie down for a while. Whew! What a knockout! Some farmhand I'd make, if I eat a stick-to-your-ribs meal like that and am impelled to take a nap, rather than go chop a cord or two of wood.

I fantasized about making some bacon gravy and searched online for advice. I found several odes to bacon grease; here and here are just two examples. My surfing emboldened me enough to pour off the remaining bacon grease from the skillet and save it. This has got to be the road to perdition that I'm starting down. I need to remember the title of this blog and start making some nice light stir-fries again.

Terra incognita: breakfast

I'm one of those people who usually thinks of breakfast as a pastry and a cup of tea, if that. Half the time I do without. Sure, I've read all those stories extolling breakfast as the most important meal of the day, but when you're in a rush to get to your job (such as it is), it's easy to toss all that out the window.

Well, recent history has made me rethink that idea. It started with the Christmas Bird Count scouting trip two weekends ago. I just fried a couple of eggs, nothing fancy. By midday, everybody else was hungry and I was still fine. This past weekend, The Lurker, Perfect Tommy and I scouted access points for the Batona Trail in the Pine Barrens. We met for breakfast at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market, where I had my new favorite, gravy over home fries. That kept me going well into the afternoon.

I think there may be something to this breakfast stuff after all.

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.

The cook's weaknesses

I've been cooking long enough to realize that I have certain weaknesses. Last night's cooking session exposed a number of them:

1. The tendency to expect a side dish to function as an entree, due to an unwillingness to cook more than one thing at once.
2. Using less of the main ingredient in a dish, but all of the sauce, leading to something swimming in sauce.
3. A tendency to let the attention wander a bit.

So that was my attempt at "Not Your Mother's Green Beans" from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home last night. Too much dressing for the green beans, pine nuts more burned than toasted, and a side dish thrust into unwanted prominence as an entree.

The dressing is composed of a quarter of a cup each of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, plus a chopped shallot and two tablespoons of fresh parsley, basil or chervil (I used Thai basil). This is poured over some boiled green beans and then toasted pine nuts are stirred in. The right main dish would make this an elegant side indeed. Another mark against my meal-planning skills. I also noticed that the balsamic vinegar and olive oil did not want to mix with each other.

This was one of those "cook and learn" meals.

List of excuses

Yes, it's been quiet here lately. It started with a weekend out of town last weekend, then a cold which has spent the subsequent week (and has yet to depart). November is also National Novel Writing Month, just for another distraction. It never ends.

Earlier this week, my intent to make southeast Asian saute hit an unexpected roadblock when I discovered my two remaining cans of coconut milk had solidified into something like coconut cream. It was disappointing because I was all set to liven the saute up with chopped tomatoes and mushrooms. I decided to regroup and turn it into a more Chinese stir-fry. After seasoning the oil with garlic and ginger, I stir-fried sliced chicken breast for a minute, then added the tomatoes, spinach and mushrooms and stir-fried for a couple more minutes. In went the udon, and then in went the sauce (two tablespoons each of Chinese light soy, Shao Xing rice wine and oyster sauce, plus an overly generous teaspoon of sesame oil and too much Tabasco sauce). It worked out ok, and was more pungently garlicky on the second day when I had the leftovers for lunch, for some reason. Not quite what I had intended, but not a bad plan b. I'm still not sure what the deal with the coconut milk was, though.

More hearty fare

Readers of food blogs probably know better, but I suspect that many Americans still consider vegetarian food to be an anemic assemblage of bean sprouts, lettuce and vegetables that you eat because they're good for you, not because they taste like something you would want to eat. Last night, I made my second try at "Pasta with Porcini Mushroom Sauce" from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, and I can report that this is vegetarian food with a heft that ought to please any meat-eater, especially one fond of red wine sauces.

The last time I tried this, I didn't cook the sauce down enough, so it ended up way too soupy. Last night, I cooked it down a little too much, because I was alternating cooking the sauce with composing an e-mail to The Lurker. Multi-tasking can be good in a kitchen, but not when it extends itself out of the kitchen entirely.

The basic method: soak some dried porcini in a cup and a half of boiling water. Meanwhile, saute a cup of chopped onion in two tablespoons of olive oil for ten minutes, then add two cups of sliced fresh mushrooms. Also add a teaspoon dried marjoram, four teaspoons fresh sage and a dash of salt. While this is going on, cook some pasta; linguini or fettuccini would be good for this but I used spaghetti last night. When the mushrooms begin to soften, add the porcini, then stir in a tablespoon of flour or cornstarch, 2/3 of a cup of red wine (I used Ravenswood Vintners Blend Zinfandel again) and a tablespoon of shoyu. Simmer until the sauce thickens, then pour over the pasta. Garnish with parmesan and/or fresh cracked black pepper, if desired.

The cookbook says, "This is an earthy, rich-tasting pasta for a hearty fall or winter meal," and that's no lie. The combination of red wine and mushrooms in sauce is classic with beef, of course. It works just as well with pasta, too.

Oxtail and beach plum

Yesterday morning I decided to go shopping at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market. I went first thing in the morning, so I was able to start the day with breakfast there. I had bacon gravy over home fries (they were out of sausage gravy, alas). The gravy was thick, creamy and a little smoky-tasting. The home fries were little wedges of fried potato seasoned with pepper and probably a few other things; I was too busy scarfing it all down to be very analytical. Definitely the kind of solid food you feed to the farm hands to fortify them for a long day's work.

Once I had fortified myself, I settled down to shopping. I couldn't resist getting another bag of peanut brittle; the one I bought last week disappeared so fast! I need not to make a habit of this, though. I bought a pile of other things and hauled them all home. There's something about a big shopping trip that makes me feel very satisfied. When I get the food home and stashed away in the cupboards and pantry, I feel like I killed a mastodon all by myself. Yes, I can provide for myself. I know this rosy picture falls apart on closer analysis (it's all about the payment of money, not real providing skills), but it's a pleasant feeling if not examined closely.

One of the things I got yesterday was a pound of sliced oxtail. The minute I saw it at the meat counter, I knew I was going to dig out a recipe for oxtail stew. The one I used was Bruce Cost's "Slow-Simmered Oxtail, White Radish, and Star Anise" from Asian Ingredients. Since I didn't have any daikon, I substituted sliced carrots. After parboiling the oxtail for two minutes, you boil eight cups of water and add the oxtail, three star anise, a quarter cup of Shao Xing wine, four smashed garlic cloves and six slices of ginger. This mix is cooked over medium heat, partially covered, for an hour. Then you add one tablespoon of mushroom soy and two tablespoons of light soy, two pieces (one inch square apiece) of rock sugar and one and a half teaspoons of salt. Cooking continues for two and a half hours. At that point, add the carrot or radish and cook for 30 more minutes. Of course, I neglected the step of cooking the stew down until the sauce was greatly reduced, so what I got was more soupy. I suppose I can cook it down tonight when I heat the leftovers for dinner.

The stew was lighter in flavor than I expected, probably because I didn't cook it down. The oxtail was falling-off-the-bone tender, very delicious. The carrots were almost but not quite as tender. I threw in some remnant egg noodles from almost-finished packages, just to confuse the issue; not enough to be a main ingredient, but enough to keep cropping up. Then I sat down to dinner while watching Colameco's Food Show and finding out how easy good roast beef can be (I liked his paean to iceberg lettuce and Russian dressing, too, though Perfect Tommy would probably be scandalized).

Today, The Lurker and I went out to Sandy Hook. We saw some birds, but the sunny breezy day was just a perfect fall day to be savored, no matter your recreation of choice. Migrating hawks flew overhead regularly while sparrows, Yellow-rumped Warblers and hordes of Dark-eyed Juncos foraged in the scrub and undergrowth. One find we made was what proved to be a beach plum bush with indigo fruits hinting at a violet tinge and what can only be described as a pruinose sheen. (I'm surprised to be able to link a botanical definition, since The Lurker and I were thinking of pruinose dragonflies when we made the comparison. Learn something new every day.) I picked one and brought it home to confirm the identification. Once it was identified, I ate it; its tart flavor and big pit may not be the sort of thing that commercial food producers go for, but it has a mystique all its own for those who love the beaches and barrier islands of the Atlantic coast. Besides, that particular beach plum may not have been ripe.

All in all, a fine weekend. I just wish it could last longer.

Rosemary chicken

This is one of those dishes that make you happy to have an herb garden. I resorted to The Frugal Gourmet for this recipe, which can also be found here. The Frug ascribes it to Italy.

Rather than using a whole chicken, I cooked this with some boneless, skinless chicken thighs from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market. For the white wine, I chose the 2004 Seyval Blanc from Unionville Vineyards up in Ringoes, not too far from here. I discovered this winery when The Deacon served the Seyval Blanc at a get-together not long ago. I'm more of a red wine fan, but the Seyval Blanc hit me just right; not too dry, not too sweet. I'll have to drive up there and get a few more bottles at some point.

In any case, this was another nice simple dinner that made an evening special and provided excellent leftovers the following day. I served the rosemary chicken over some wide noodles from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers Market, which made a good combination. I have some of the extra-concentrated tomato paste mentioned in the recipe page linked above and I used two tablespoons, but then, I'm one of those people who believes you can't have too much tomato-ness.

Off-the-cuff lo mein

I wanted to make lo mein to celebrate the discovery of the world's oldest noodles. I finally got around to it last night. After casing the library for recipes, I finally went to Gloria Bley Miller's The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook. I can't even say I used a recipe; Miller's "Miscellaneous Stir-Fried Combinations for Chow Mein or Lo Mein" is really more like a serving suggestion. Anyway, one type of meat and one type of vegetable suited me just fine, since I had celery and thawed pork on hand.

I was so lazy I used flavored wok oil rather than chopping my own garlic, onion and ginger. I stir-fried one sliced celery stalk and some sliced pork tenderloin in the oil, then added a nest of precooked Chinese egg noodles. After stirring the ingredients together, I added a sauce composed of two tablespoons of Chinese light soy, two tablespoons of Shao Xing wine and a teaspoon of sesame oil. After heating it through, I plated the whole thing. It disappeared soon afterward. If lo mein can be this easy, I think I might cook it more often.

The sophisticate's dinner

Take one thick pork chop on the bone, a bottle of Zinfandel, some red miso and the right album on the stereo, and you too can have a sophisticated dinner. The night was Saturday and I had decided to cook "Pork Cutlet with Miso-Red Wine Sauce" from Mark Bittman's The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. Bittman speaks of this recipe's taste belying the effort involved and I have to concur, although I made it more effortful than Bittman does.

The issue was searing the pork chop in a hot skillet for four or five minutes on one side, then three or four minutes on the other side. Once I did this, there was still a healthy amount of pink in the middle of the chop, and I was hearing the word "trichinosis" muttering in my brain. So I put the chop on a baking tray and stuck it in the oven so I could finish it by baking. It eventually worked.

The sauce itself is comprised of a cup of red wine and two tablespoons of red miso (or akamiso). Once the pork chop is removed from the skillet, one adds the wine and cooks it down by half. Then one turns the heat to low and adds the miso, mixing it in well. I reserved some wine to mix with the miso beforehand, so I could add a miso-wine paste to the skillet (rather than two tablespoon-sized miso lumps, which can be time-consuming to mix in). I used Ravenswood's Vintner's Blend Zinfandel, which has been one of my favorite wines of late.

It was a great pork chop smothered in a great sauce. Enough sauce was left over that I was able to serve the rest over spaghettini last night and enjoy something that really was ridiculously easy and ridiculously good. On Saturday night, I paired it with Bittman's "Green Salad with Soy Vinaigrette." The salad dressing was quite hot, even though I thought the amount of cayenne called for was minimal (not that I'm complaining).

As for the album, it was Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane. Now that is some seriously sophisticated music, the perfect garnish for a great meal.

Pad Thai

Anybody who cooks Thai food has to grapple with this classic sooner or later. There seem to be as many recipes as cooks. I used Nancie McDermott's recipe from Quick and Easy Thai, which can be found here.

I cooked it with shrimp and pork. It made a tasty assemblance of varied ingredients; the fresh lime juice added a lot to it. The chore of chopping up peanuts with a regular knife made me wonder if maybe I should cave in and get a food processor.

Vintage noodles

Very vintage. Lala forwarded a link to this BBC story about the oldest noodles ever found; archaeologists found them in China, of course. If I weren't already planning to make pad Thai later, I'd whip up some lo mein to honor the occasion. Maybe tomorrow.

Stew: the gift that keeps giving

It's October. New Jersey is currently suffering under a coastal storm that refuses to leave (we had it last weekend, and now it's drifted back to us). It's gray, cold and gloomy. And soggy. I haven't been birding with The Lurker and Perfect Tommy for way too long. Bleah. So I made a pot of beef stew earlier this week and have been eating it ever since.

I started with Marnie Henricksson's recipe for red-cooked beef stew from Everyday Asian, but I made a few changes this time. I added chopped celery and carrots, as well as a bay leaf for the seasonings. Rather than using Chinese mushroom soy, I used leftover chashu broth. The stew juice ended up lighter is color as a result, so I really can't call it red-cooked this time. The result was a stew with a mild flavor dominated by the aroma of star anise.

In a belated note for music fans, WXPN is doing its countdown of 885 best/favorite albums as voted by its listeners. I submitted a hopelessly obscure top ten list and only two of my albums have made it in so far. It's fun listening in when I can and keeping track of the results.

Now back to your regularly scheduled food blog.

Happy birthday blog

That's right, today is this blog's first birthday. This lark has proved to be a cooking inspiration, a great way to keep track of things, and a fun excuse for writing. I hope the next year is at least as much fun.

Joy of chicken

On Sunday night, I took a foray into another cuisine. When I was little, I loved Greek mythology; a practical effect of that was eating at Greek restaurants as often as I could get my parents to go along with it. At some point, the fad for both myth and food ebbed, but lately I've started thinking about it again.

This was "Roast Chicken, Greek Style" from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines. Marinate the chicken in half a cup of olive oil, the juice of two lemons, a tablespoon of oregano and salt and pepper to taste for an hour. Then roast it in a 375 F oven for an hour. About as simple as it gets.

I used a two-pound "baby chicken" from the Asian supermarket since I was just cooking for myself. It was a little bigger than their game hens, which seem larger than the game hens one finds in a typical supermarket. Anyway, the chicken cooked up very well, tender but not underdone. It was just small, maybe even a little small for one person.

Salty rice

Last week I made a Vietnamese stir-fry that required extended prep. The recipe comes from Ha Roda's A Vietnamese Kitchen and it calls for "Marinated Meat," so I marinated some sliced pork for a couple of days. The marinade combines a teaspoon each of fish sauce, light soy, oyster sauce and hoisin sauce, plus half a teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons chopped garlic, 1/8 teaspoon of black pepper and two tablespoons of chopped onion.

After I finished marinating, I threw together "Stir-Fried Green Beans." The beans are sliced in half lengthwise and stir-fried for three minutes. Then you add a mixture of two tablespoons light soy sauce, 1/8 teaspoon of salt and half a cup of water, and stir-fry for three more minutes. Turn out of the pan, and stir-fry the marinated meat in the pan until it changes color. Add the green beans back in, heat through and serve.

The first night I had this, I had it solo. It was very intense and assertive, almost smoky-tasting. The next night I had the leftovers with jasmine rice, which did a good job of soaking up the salty juices. Even with the bland rice to accompany the meat and beans, it was still a strongly-flavored dish. This would be best in an arrangement of dishes with varied tastes, rather than standing on its own.

Hedonistic seafood

If one looks at the index for this blog, one will discover an embarrassing paucity of seafood entries. My excuse, such as it is, is that seafood has been a luxury item for me for a while. Thankfully, that has changed for the moment, so tonight I cooked shrimp for the first time in what seems like forever.

I tried Mark Bittman's recipe for "Shrimp in 'Barbecue' Sauce" from The Minimalist Cooks Dinner. I know one of the most overused sentences in this blog has got to be, "This is a quick easy meal," but this really was (well, ok, other than the bit about peeling and deveining the shrimp).

Melt half a stick of butter in a pan over high heat. Add the shrimp and two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce. Cook until done, season with salt, pepper and lemon juice, and serve. This isn't brain surgery here. Bittman attributes this recipe to New Orleans.

I probably used too much butter, since my "barbecue" sauce ended up being more like drawn butter with a sweet undertone. The idea is to have a smoky, spicy flavor, which comes from the Worcestershire sauce and pepper. Of course, I forgot to add the pepper and lemon juice at the end, so I doubt my dinner was what Bittman had in mind, but damn, it was great to be cooking shrimp again. Better yet, I have enough extra shrimp stashed in the freezer for pad Thai in the not-too-distant future.

Another new used cookbook

Thursday's lunch was my first try from another recently purchased cookbook, Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cookbook. Completeness is always a dicey thing to claim, but this tome does at least include recipes from many Asian countries. The thing that caught my eye was the inclusion of countries not well covered in my library such as Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, etc. It even has a section on Indian and Pakistani recipes. The Singapore section focuses on Nonya cooking.

My first attempt was "Beef with Sesame Sauce" (Bo Xao Dau Me) from Vietnam. I picked it because the book randomly fell open to it and it looked good and simple. It was a success on both counts. Just stir-fry some garlic and beef in peanut oil, then add the sauce makings (beef broth, water blended with cornstarch, sesame paste and hot bean sauce). Cook through and serve with rice (though noodles would be equally good). Depending on what cut of beef you want to use, you might be advised to marinate first, but I used sirloin and skipped that step.

I was a little worried about the sauce consistency as I cooked the ingredients; the cornstarch, although mixed smoothly with water, started producing lumps as it was added to the broth and pan (incidentally, I used chashu broth rather than regular beef broth). As it cooked and more ingredients were added, the consistency improved, though it never became what I would call smooth. The final result was tender beef in a savory sauce. The fire from the hot bean sauce was present but understated; the same was true of the sesame paste. The whole thing reminded me of other beef dishes such as beef with oyster sauce or soy sauce noodles with beef and greens; they are also beef dishes with an assertive gravy-like sauce, food that runs toward the heavier end of the Asian food spectrum.

This was one of those auspicious-seeming first recipes that seems to get a new cookbook off on the right foot.