Too wonderful

Tonight's dinner really made me appreciate Japanese meal-planning. What a westerner might call an "entree" is only one of several dishes; it is augmented by rice, soup, a pickle or other vegetable offering. The portions are small and create a medley of tastes and visual impressions. No platters heaped with gigantic helpings of a single food here.

Dinner made me appreciate Japanese meal-planning because, as usual, I didn't follow it. Getting one kind of food on the table taxes my coordination level enough; making a dinner involving several different things is too much effort and planning. Most of the time, I'm only cooking for me so it doesn't matter. But when you make a sinfully rich meal like duck Kaga-style, too much of a good thing can be too much (though it was also wonderful, as Mae West once noted).

I adapted this recipe from Hiroko Shimbo's The Japanese Kitchen. Well, ok, I left out the step of searing the duck breast first, but Shimbo herself says she added this step to the recipe. Omitting it was probably the right decision tonight, since I bought a whole duck at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmer's Market and carved the breast meat myself. Since my poultry-carving skills are rudimentary at best, I was pleased I didn't make more of a mess than I did.

Slice the duck breast, flour it in a blend of regular and buckwheat flour, then leave the sliced meat to sit for 20 minutes at room temperature. Meanwhile, create a broth from two cups of dashi, one cup each of sake and mirin, half a cup of shoyu and two or three tablespoons of sugar (I used three since I was using cooking sake).

When the meat is ready, add the green parts of two scallions and any extra duck skin or fat you have trimmed from the meat to the broth and bring to a boil. Once the broth is boiling, remove the scallion greens and duck skin or fat from the pot. Add the white parts of two scallions, dip the duck meat in flour again, and add it to the pot. Let it cook until done, about two minutes.

When the broth was cooking all by itself, the kitchen already smelled wonderful. By the time I was sampling the duck, it was heavenly. The rich sweet sauce was wonderful, like teriyaki sauce but even more so. It actually reminded me of the chicken teriyaki they served at Iroha, a Japanese restaurant that used to reside in midtown where Sapporo is currently located. I don't know what they did to that teriyaki sauce, but it was sweet and rich in a way I've never encountered since. Until now, that is. Hmmm.

Of course, given the duck's thick fatty skin, I could feel my arteries clogging with every bite. I'll probably need to go on a tofu diet after this. Whew. The amount of what I ate was small, but it was heavy.

Wonderful as this dish was, eating it by its lonesome was too much. It really needed to be served with a bowl of miso, some rice, a pickle or salad to cleanse the palate, and some green tea. Then it it would even be more perfect, if such a thing is possible. Then the duck's richness would be set off by simpler foods with complementary or contrasting tastes. Live and learn.

Thai yakisoba

Well, no, not really, but this recipe is similar to Japanese yakisoba. It's another dish where noodles are stir-fried in a soy sauce-based sauce, along with meat and greens. It appears as "Soy Sauce Noodles with Beef and Greens" in Quick and Easy Thai. There is another version of it in Real Thai.

The soy sauce in this dish, rather than being shoyu, is kecap manis. This is the sweet dark soy sauce found in southeast Asia; my bottle comes from Indonesia (ABC brand). Three tablespoons of it are mixed with three tablespoons of fish sauce and a half teaspoon each of salt and pepper. The noodles are fettucini-like Thai rice noodles rather than the narrow chukasoba, another difference.

The method is much the same as that used for yakisoba; season the cooking oil with garlic and onion, stir-fry the meat and greens (beef and spinach in this case) and remove from the pan. Add the noodles to the pan and cook, then push them to one side of the pan and add two beaten eggs. Let the eggs almost set, then stir to scramble and mix with the noodles. Return the meat and greens to the pan, add the soy sauce blend, toss and heat through.

This was a nice dinner indeed. The mix of kecap manis and fish sauce gave a sweet yet sharp taste to the sauce, something which none of my yakisoba sauces has had yet. The beef was perfectly done and the noodles sopped up the sauce nicely. Another tasty dish from my new cookbook.

Five cookbooks meme

My blogging friend Obachan tagged me with this meme. It’s a natural because I love books even more than I love cooking.

1. Total number of cookbooks I've owned

An easy question for someone who keeps a book database and whose cooking infatuation is recent enough that I have yet to do a book purge. 42.

2. Last cookbook I bought

Three of them: Quick and Easy Thai and Real Thai by Nancie McDermott, and Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall.

3. Last food book I read

Real Thai by Nancie McDermott.

4. Five cookbooks that mean a lot to me

(in semi-chronological order)

The Frugal Gourmet by Jeff Smith was the first cookbook I read for fun. It gave me recipes back when I was just learning how to cook for myself, and many of those recipes remain favorites.

Japanese Family-Style Recipes by Hiroko Urakami showed me that I didn’t have to depend on restaurants for good Japanese food; I could cook it myself! This basic lesson surely emboldened me to try cooking other “exotic” cuisines later on.

Asian Ingredients by Bruce Cost gave me a buyer’s guide to my local Asian supermarket, and it introduced me to many foods I never knew existed. Some of them I even came to love.

Everyday Asian by Marnie Henricksson gave me accessible recipes from a host of Asian countries, and presented them in such a simple, friendly and fail-safe fashion that successful results were almost guaranteed. This book gave me a culinary tour beyond Japan and China and encouraged me to explore further.

The Bountiful Container by Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey is a bit of a cheating pick (though it does include recipes). This book showed me that I could grow my own produce and eat it, and that the best way of getting some obscure ingredients was to plant them myself.

5. Which five people would you most like to see fill this out in their blog

This meme has already made the rounds, so finding someone who hasn’t been tagged yet is a challenge. pumpkin pie bungalow’s history of the meme was invaluable in trying to come up with a short list.

bacon press
Cuisine Capers
FoodNerd!
OsloFoodie
words to eat by

Not that I’m exactly sure how one tags someone. Leaving a random comment on someone’s blog takes a little more gumption than I usually have. Hmm. Maybe I’ll just post this now and get up the gumption for tomorrow. Besides, I have another Thai dinner to blog.

Thai fried rice

Yes, here I am again reporting on something that could be a Thai version of a Chinese classic. "Thai Fried Rice" comes from Quick and Easy Thai; there is also a version in Real Thai. Nancie McDermott comments that fried rice is what a Thai might throw together in a situation where an American might put together a sandwich; it's a simple way of making a meal out of whatever is on hand. Besides, there's usually spare rice available in a Thai household.

Spare rice, in fact, was what got me started on this recipe. After that, it was just a matter of adding some chicken thigh meat and some seasonings. As usual, I forgot about the garnishes and optional additions like sliced cucumbers and lime juice; if I really want to cook Thai, I will have to change that outlook.

The recipe in a nutshell: stir-fry some garlic and half a cup of chopped onion in oil for a minute, then add your meat of choice and stir-fry for two more minutes. Add one beaten egg, let it start setting, then stir to scramble it. Then add the rice, two tablespoons of fish sauce, a teaspoon of sugar and two chopped scallions. Heat through.

On a side note, getting more than one cookbook at once is an exercise in applied indecision. Suddenly there are all these wonderful new dishes to try. There may be new ingredients or tools to acquire. So many possibilities, so little time! At times like these, it's hard for me to sit down and just pick one of the many tempting options. To make matters worse, now I am reading my new Korean cookbook, and that is giving me more tempting ideas. I know it's popular to bemoan the glut of cookbooks and the equivalent drop in home-cooking, as cooking becomes a spectator sport. But I only get cookbooks I want to cook from and then I cook from them. I guess I thought that was how it was supposed to work.

Chicken and cashews, Thai-style

By way of celebrating a new job, I got some new cookbooks. Two were Thai cookbooks by Nancie McDermott, Quick and Easy Thai and Real Thai. Last night I cooked my first dish from Quick and Easy Thai, "Chicken with Cashews and Chilies." There is a very similar recipe in Real Thai; there is a lot of overlap between the two books, but Real Thai places the dishes in a regional context and adds some recipes that are not "quick and easy," such as those for curry pastes.

I went mild on the chiles, using one dried serrano chile. My dried serranos are pretty old by now and I think they've lost most of their punch. I overcooked the chicken pieces, but it still ended up tasting pretty good. Leftovers were even better tonight when served over a plate of hot jasmine rice. The flavorful chicken and the simple rice were perfect foils for each other.

I'm due for a couple of postdated restaurant reviews from last weekend when I was out of town.

Land Ho!

In a whirlwind trip of a few days, there isn't enough time to do an extensive restaurant tour of the Cape. Besides, there's always the desire to stay home and just eat in. That was Friday night, when my mother took a semi-random selection of leftovers and put together a delicious chicken and gravy dinner. There wasn't enough time for me to cook for my parents, either, but hopefully there will be next time. After some waffling on Saturday, we decided to eat out before I headed home the next day. We decided to have an early dinner at Land Ho! in Orleans because the food is good and the setting is casual.

Arriving early was the right idea; although the season is just starting on the Cape, Land Ho! is always a popular hangout and never more so than on a Saturday night. It has a casual bar-type atmosphere and the decor is dominated by a raft of signs and license plates hanging from the walls and ceiling. It can get loud, but the noise level wasn't too bad this time. The clientele encompasses everyone from locals out for a simple dinner to vacationers looking for a night on the town.

I had the fried shrimp, a traditional choice. You get a basket of medium-sized shrimp with a crisp fried coating and a dish of cocktail sauce. Unfortunately, the shrimp weren't local on this night, because a red tide stretching down from Maine has wiped out the local shellfishery this season. The red tide is the biggest news story on the Cape right now, as many locals have lost their livelihoods. It is the worst it has been for years. It's a sobering instance of how precarious a living fishing can be.

My mother had a roast beef sandwich au jus with extra gravy. My dad had a cheeseburger and let me sample some; it was rich and juicy, just a phenomenally good burger. I have to say I've had some great burgers lately. A hamburger can be awfully routine or worse, even bad, but when it's cooked well, you regain your faith in at least one eternal American verity.

In the lockup

A few years ago, my parents retired to Cape Cod. Before long, they started discovering a host of terrific restaurants in their new stomping grounds. This always makes it a pleasure to go visit, since there is a great variety of good food and different ambiences from which to choose.

I took a long weekend on the Cape just before starting my new job. The night I arrived, we ate at the Old Jailhouse Tavern in Orleans. The Jailhouse is a perennial favorite of ours, since it carries a range of food from burgers and sandwiches on up to some truly gourmet creations. In summer, it's nice to sit out on the porch (as we did this time) and admire the gardens.

Tonight I splashed out and ordered a swordfish special. I love swordfish, but I don't eat it very often any more. I will never forget the best swordfish I've ever had, a melt-in-your-mouth swordfish steak at Menz Restaurant in Cape May; it must have been right off the boat. The Jailhouse swordfish didn't quite attain that level of nirvana, but it was an awfully good piece of fish; firm and with good flavor. It was adorned with a wonderful lemon and white wine sauce and capers. The sauce was rich and creamy and was good enough to have on its own, but the fish stood up to the flavorful sauce. There were a lot of intriguing specials on the menu this night, but once chosen, the swordfish proved to be the right choice. I'm going to have to see if I can recreate that sauce.

Unfortunately, I forget what my mother had, but my father had a big fruit salad. That may not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but all of the fruit was beautifully ripe. There was melon, pineapple, blueberries and, most noteworthy of all, it was topped by a single slice of starfruit. That was a very nice touch.

Thai leftovers

It's hot. It's busy. I'm about to head for parts to the north. So this will be a catch-up post of sorts.

The other night, I cooked a Thai dish from From Bangkok to Bali in Thirty Minutes. I tried "Fat Noodles with Fresh Chillies and Mint Leaves." For ground meat, I used ground pork from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmer's Market. I omitted the quartered cherry tomatoes and used Tabasco sauce instead of fresh chilies. There was no noticeable spiciness to the final dish, but it was quite salty from the fish sauce. It was more than edible for dinner tonight (especially given that it was coolly refrigerated and the evening is stiflingly hot), but not quite what the recipe had intended. I bet the tomatoes would cut the saltiness.

On Saturday night, after a long day's birding trip, we visited a Texas Roadhouse in Cumberland County. My "light" dish of sirloin tips on seasoned rice knocked me back as much as the other night's stir-fry. I'm starting to wonder if beef is getting to be too much for me.

Two Thai cookbooks and one Korean cookbook are on their way to me from the electronic motherlode of things to be ordered with a click (hint: begins with "A," used to mean a woman warrior).

In the garden, the spinach has bolted and the cilantro is doing so now, but the Thai basil is starting to produce some lush leaves, the Asian greens and lettuce are hanging in there, the mitsuba is sending out new leaves all over, the pea plant is flowering (if one flower so far = flowering) and the the tomato plant that was nursed through the winter and seemed to be at death's door has three green tomatoes on it, in addition to plenty of flowers.

There, I think that covers it. Thank you for your support.

Pan-fried chicken strips

It’s been a while since I cooked this dish, which is a shame because it’s so easy, fast and tasty. It comes from The Frugal Gourmet and is one of those dishes that quickly became a standby as soon as I tried it, back when I was a culinary neophyte.

You can find a slightly adapted version of the recipe here. This time around, I used fresh lemon juice from a couple of leftover lemon slices and a bit more marsala than what is recommended. The sauce was sweet and light, just terrific. I think this was my most successful attempt at this dish to date. Using real marsala (not the salted cooking variety) undoubtedly helped. The leftovers were equally excellent when poured over some leftover jasmine rice the next day.

Although this is not an Asian recipe (the Frug’s attribution for the recipe is “Italy-China-San Francisco”), it fits comfortably into the Chinese vein of seasoning some oil, stir-frying some meat, then creating a simple sauce and heating the ingredients through.

Beef knockout stir-fry

If you’d asked what my favorite meal was when I was a kid, I would’ve told you it was a hamburger, french fries and a Coke. If you’d asked me sometime later than that (college years and up, I suppose), I would’ve cast my vote for a really good piece of prime rib, like the one I had at the Algonquin Hotel before going to see a tribute to Bill Evans at the JVC Jazz Festival years ago. (We saw Dave McKenna at the Algonquin, too, which made the evening even better.) These days, I’m inclined to smirk and say I’ll never become a vegetarian because of prime rib.

So last night I cook myself a light little beef stir-fry and am completely knocked out for the evening. This wasn’t a huge slab of meat; it was some sliced sirloin, and not even as much as I usually use. I used Gloria Bley Miller’s recipe for “Basic Stir-Fried Beef I” from The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook. It calls for a pound of vegetables; I used bamboo shoots and a mix of spinach and Asian greens from the garden (bok choy, mizuna and heaven knows what else). I poured all of it over rice, which soaked up the juices nicely. It was pretty tasty, and it seemed like a light meal, but I guess it wasn’t. Either that, or my body is finding that it needs less and less meat as it gets older.

Veggies take your marks

It's June. The weather is warming up. It's a nice time of year in New Jersey. Unfortunately, this also means that the spinach is feeling frisky.

Cold weather vegetables like spinach do something called "bolting" when the weather really starts warming up and sunlight fills more hours of every day. My spinach has started shooting up into long scraggly plants with small barbed leaves. They have also started developing something that may turn into flowers some day, that is, if I don't pull out all the unproductive spinach first and replace those plants with a warm weather substitute like amaranth.

My other cool weather vegetables (like lettuce) have yet to bolt. Not all of my spinach has bolted yet, either. At least I can plant it again later in the season for a fall crop.

Messy frittata

Given my chronic difficulties with presentation, a frittata is something I've put off trying to cook. The Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home has several interesting recipes for frittatas, but so far I've always had an excuse not to try them. Tonight, the excuses ran out and I tried the "Simple Frittata." This involves sauteeing potatoes and onions, adding garlic and an herb (rosemary was the one I chose), then adding the beaten eggs and letting them set.

It didn't come out too badly, though by the time it left the skillet, it was in pieces. I doubt it was sufficiently browned, either. It tasted fine, however, and now I'm ready to try the "Asian-Style Frittata" at some point.

Perfect Tommy and the perfect chicken sandwich

I'm starting to think that I should've named this blog "Seven Kinds of Soy Sauce and Jersey Fast Food." It's these birding trips. The actual trips are one part nature study, one part performance art, one part reality tv, one part Talmudic debate, one part kitsch appreciation... Perfect Tommy is really the one who should have a blog for all his rants, non sequiturs, Proustian reminiscences and restaurant reviews, but he prefers delivering his stream-of-consciousness ramblings to The Lurker and me. I can't possibly do justice to them.

Chick-fil-A is a southern-based fast food chain that has a bit of a presence in New Jersey. The Lurker, whose thing is fast-food chicken sandwiches, has been raving about them for some time, but every time we drove past the one on Rt. 130 in Hamilton, it was closed. Finally, the stars were aligned correctly yesterday and we were able to stop there for dinner.

Both Perfect Tommy and I had the basic sandwich, which is a fried piece of chicken breast on a buttered bun with two pickles. The chicken was pressure-cooked and moist, the breading was not too hard and not too soft. It was not excessively spicy, just nice and simple. The butter added a bit of decadence, while the pickles gave a complementary sour note (uh oh, this is sounding like a wine description). Another thing the chicken was not was greasy. All in all, it was a tasty chicken sandwich, a step up from what I expect at a fast food place. Oh, yeah, the waffle fries were generous, potatoey and also not greasy.

Judging from the "wow"s emanating from Perfect Tommy's end of the table, he was having another food religious experience. When questioned whether this was better than Krispy Kreme, he immediately said no, it wasn't. He said that the Krispy Kreme experience was transcendental, while Chick-fil-A gave a more earth-bound sense of well-being. The Lurker and I were just grateful for some sense of well-being, since Perfect Tommy's mood had gone sour ever since we had spotted a Pizza Hut Italian Bistro in south Jersey earlier that afternoon. This is apparently Pizza Hut's attempt to go upscale, complete with more subtly-colored buildings, but Perfect Tommy was incensed by the pairing of "Italian" and "bistro," since "bistro" is of course French. This whole episode linked back to a previous trip's rant about Olive Garden and real Italian food, but I'll spare you that for now. Then again, you can probably find similar rants in cyberspace anyway.

While two-thirds of the table were appreciating their chicken sandwiches, The Lurker was inhaling his chicken strips with "Polynesian sauce." "Polynesian sauce" is a takeoff on sweet-and-sour sauce, but with most of the sour removed. The result is sort of a tomato-fruit blend with what seems to be just a touch of something like cayenne. I've never been a big fan of sweet-and-sour dishes, but this sauce was more down my alley.

So that was Chick-fil-A, finally. It goes into the register as another fast-food place worth stopping at, if the opportunity arises.

Bad bad bad

This gardening thing has definitely gotten out of control. After getting out of work early due to the holiday weekend, I stopped off at the local high-end grocery on the way home. I had intended to pick up a few staples like milk and orange juice, but right there in the front were the potted herbs. Damn!

I've been meaning to get a rosemary plant, so that was a no-brainer. But there were so many other possibilities. Sweet basil. Various sages. Dill. Parsley. At least two varieties of thyme. Oregano (well, ok, I'm not a big oregano fan, so that wasn't much of a danger). Etcetera, etcetera.

In addition to the rosemary, I left with lemon thyme and a variegated sage (to replace the sage that died earlier this spring). But I'm still thinking back to the sweet basil and the parsley. And the dill. Ai yi yi.

One from the past

Back in late April, when I was drowning in busyness and malaise, I cooked a dish that I totally forgot to blog. I decided to post a quick note about it since I've been catching up lately.

I tried "Burmese-Style Red Lentil Soup" from From Bangkok to Bali in Thirty Minutes. Ever since I ate at Rangoon with friends a couple of winters ago, I've been impelled to find out more about Burmese food. The night market noodles at Rangoon were particularly excellent, but everything was tasty. Unfortunately, life has not been conducive to my goal of tossing everything else aside to concentrate on Burmese food. The best I can say is some of my pan-Asian cookbooks have scattered Burmese recipes included in them.

The soup is very simple, essentially a mix of red lentils (masoor dal in Indian food terms) with garlic, ginger and turmeric simmered in water. The end result was fine, but a little bland. On the other hand, Burmese cooking stresses garnishes, and I didn't garnish the soup with anything (the recipe recommends sesame salt and crisp-fried shallots). If I found the soup bland, it was my own fault for not garnishing it as I should have done. Maybe next time.

Chicken korma

I really feel guilty about blogging this, but I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway. Last night, I made chicken korma. Before you get all enthused, let me point out that all I did was stir-fry chicken pieces in some canola oil for a few minutes, open a jar of Patak's korma sauce, dump the sauce into the pan and simmer for 20 minutes (recipe from the jar label). When it was done, I served it over jasmine rice. I wound up with a big pile of food that will give me leftovers for the next couple of days. I can scarcely call it real cooking, though.

Despite my on-again, off-again relationship with Indian food, chicken korma is one of the dishes I like. I think I first discovered it thanks to an Ethnic Gourmet frozen dinner that was out of this world (Ethnic Gourmet was still Taj Gourmet back then).

Last night's version of chicken korma was quite good, but the sauce was a little sweeter than what I'm familiar with, almost too sweet for my taste. The interplay of the spices in the sauce was terrific, however. Today I'm annoyed with myself for forgetting that I had a jar of ghee in the fridge; it would've been much better to use that rather than the canola oil. Oh, well, maybe next time.

Jersey Freeze

By Sunday, it had all the hallmarks of a lost weekend. Sorting through graphic novels had turned, as it always seems to, into rereading them. I was restless. I wanted to do something. Rereading ElfQuest all weekend was not going to satisfy that urge. So I dropped an e-mail to The Lurker and Perfect Tommy asking them if they wanted to go birding.

The trip to Sandy Hook provided a perfect excuse to wander all over Monmouth County for an afternoon. When we were ready for dinner (actually, first we wanted to go for ice cream, then dinner got added on to the program), we started looking for likely places. When Jersey Freeze crossed our ken, Perfect Tommy started raving about it having been on tv and so forth. We turned around and decided to check it out.

Jersey Freeze is famous up and down the east coast for its soft-serve ice cream; it is even featured on Ice Cream Unwrapped on The Food Network. Dinner was a more immediate concern, however, so we went into the wing of the building that promised food.

A glance at the blackboard behind the counter showed a mixed romaine salad on offer, a good sign. The Lurker and I ordered burgers, while Perfect Tommy got a chicken cheddar sandwich. The burgers were real handmade patties, good and juicy. My bacon burger was topped with three big strips (slabs, actually) of the best-looking bacon I’ve seen in a restaurant for a long time. The buns were real. The fries weren’t greasy. Perfect Tommy, our most severe restaurant critic, said his sandwich was very good. We hadn’t expected much from the meal, to be honest, since Jersey Freeze is a humble sort of roadside place and its fame is for ice cream, not food. We were very pleasantly surprised, however.

When we sidled up to the ice cream counter for dessert, however, things took a turn. There were only four flavors of ice cream listed, black raspberry being one. Unfortunately, they were out of the black raspberry. Forced to choose between eating famous ice cream and eating black raspberry ice cream, Perfect Tommy chose the latter, so off we went on our quest. What ensued was a session of wandering all over central Jersey while trying to remember the locations of ice cream places we had eaten at in the past. We finally ended up at a Friendly’s, which is probably some kind of heresy. Perfect Tommy didn’t care, though, because he got his black raspberry. I had a pistachio cone and The Lurker opted to be good. In any case, I have a feeling that I’ll be back at Jersey Freeze in the future.

Simmered hijiki tofu

Checking the expiration date on my package of firm tofu yesterday made me realize that I had to use it up or else. Time to throw something else together. What I ended up with was the following:

Stir-fry some hydrated hijiki in oil for a couple of minutes. Then add a cup of dashi, three tablespoons shoyu, three tablespoons sugar and two tablespoons mirin. Add sliced tofu, bring to a boil, then cover and lower heat. Simmer for ten minutes.

The sauce was a bit thin; I probably should’ve cooked it down some more to make it more intense. Having said that, it was still a good sweet shoyu broth. There was a bit too much oil, but that was because I started with a little too much peanut oil in the pan. I adapted the shoyu broth from Hiroko Urakami’s broth in her recipe for braised hijiki, just substituting dashi for water. I finally have real mirin back in the house, too, thanks to a trip to Whole Foods.

Southeast Asian sauté

On Wednesday (I think, it was a long week) I cooked one of my favorite dishes for the first time since starting this blog. It’s Marnie Henricksson’s “Southeast Asian Sauté with Shrimp, Spinach, and Coconut Milk” from Everyday Asian. I’ve never cooked it with shrimp but usually use chicken; this week I used Quorn tenders. It’s pretty simple. First you stir-fry some garlic and ginger in oil for a few seconds, then you add some fish sauce and spinach and continue stir-frying. This is the moment when the pan starts splattering like a demon. Then you add the meat and finally, a mixture of half a can of coconut milk and half a cup of water. On top of this, you add some precooked noodles (Henricksson recommends udon because its consistency takes the sauce well) and heat through.

This was a red-letter meal because I harvested some spinach from the garden for it. Of course, the spinach cooked down into little green bits, so it was lost in the final reckoning. Moral: next time use more spinach. The Quorn tenders worked well in this dish; they had a little more flavor than the chicken breast meat I normally use. The overall taste of the dish is rather mild; on one hand very bland meat (or tofu) will make it boring but on the other hand something like beef is too strongly flavored. On this occasion, I got some toasty bits on the pan while stir-frying the Quorn tenders, so that added more of a reddish tint to the meal (as well as more flavor) than usual.

This sauté reminds me of Italian pasta meals with a cheese-based sauce, such as fettucini Alfredo. The coconut milk is curdled by the fish sauce, and becomes a creamy cheese-like sauce.

World Series of Birding

Twenty-four hours, one county, 99 birds, two home-cooked meals. Saturday was the annual World Series of Birding sponsored by the New Jersey Audubon Society. The idea is to see as many bird species as possible during 24 hours, all in the state of New Jersey. Participants take pledges from sponsors (so many cents per bird species seen) and contribute to NJAS or the conservation cause of their choice.

Since this is not a birding blog, I will spare you the gory details but instead focus on the food. I have learned from hard experience that a long day birding requires good food and drink. Underfueling the body leads to headaches, nausea and general debility. When I was recommended Gatorade after a near-heatstroke event, it changed my birding life. Clif Bars are also good birding food. The real clincher, though, was the day I made some chicken donburi, froze it, then brought it along for WSB. That was a couple of years ago and though it wasn’t what you might think of for breakfast, it kept me going all day without headaches or wimping out in the doldrums of the afternoon. I was sold. Freezing the food ahead of time and letting it dethaw keeps it cool and unspoiled for a long time. This is important when you’re careening all over the state, far away from reliable refrigeration.

This year’s food was a multipart event. Breakfast was chicken donburi, but made with porcini soaking water rather than dashi. It was very tasty, and the leftovers were still good earlier this evening, several days after they were originally dethawed. Maybe I’m courting salmonella, but so far I feel fine. Plus I have unused dashi ice cubes in the freezer, ready for some other dish.

The second course was a portion of beef yakisoba. Boy, that was good. Finally, we wound up for a dinner break (we must be getting old, normally we don’t stop for food on a WSB) at the Clinton Station Diner. The Lurker and Perfect Tommy had sandwich-type things (sorry for the lack of specificity, but staying awake nearly 48 hours straight really does a number on your memory), while I just ordered breakfast (at 10:00 PM!), two eggs sunnyside up and home fries. I look forward to getting back to this diner under less extreme circumstances, because everyone gave their meal high marks.

Another thing that keeps me going on long birding days (or long days at outdoor music festivals, for that matter) is grapes. A big bunch of chilled green grapes provides a perfect snack. It’s food and drink, all at once. Plus they come in manageable portions.

Sprouts

The garden has been busy in the last few days. On Friday, my remaining indoor starts started sprouting, so now I have hot pepper, bergamot and Thai basil seedlings. On Saturday, right on schedule, the Asian greens mix started sprouting as well. The spinach leaves are getting big enough to be considered "baby spinach," so I can probably start harvesting it soon (I need to thin some leaves anyway).

Sesame noodles

I have this perfect fantasy of sesame noodles. I envision a bowl of steaming golden noodles, like really good beef yakisoba, imbued with the aroma and flavor of sesame. It would be the most wonderful thing, at least it would be if I could create something like that.

In real life, I’m not much of a peanut butter fan, and sesame paste’s resemblance to peanut butter in texture and (surprisingly) flavor puts me off. My first try at sesame noodles was Marnie Henricksson’s recipe of the same name from Everyday Asian. It was fine, but the strong nutty flavor of the sesame paste and the peanut-butter consistency of the sauce was not what I expected. Why can’t sesame noodles taste more like sesame chicken? I know, maybe the radical differences in cooking technique used to reach each destination have something to do with it. (It was a rhetorical question.)

Last night, I decided to give sesame noodles another try. This time I used the Frugal Gourmet’s recipe for “Chowed Noodles with Pork and Sesame Sauce” from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines. Interestingly, his recipe for the sesame sauce (from his “Shredded Sesame Chicken”) is not too different from Henricksson’s sauce; the main difference is The Frug’s addition of Chinese red vinegar and chopped scallions to the mix of sesame paste, garlic, ginger, light soy sauce, sesame oil, pepper oil and sugar. The dishes are also assembled differently, which I discovered when I really read the directions for pan-browning the noodles. Once I realized that those noodles were not going to be given two hours to dry on an oiled broiling rack, it was clear some changes would be made. When I read further and saw how many ingredients were supposed to be cooked in the pan, taken out, then returned to the pan later, it was even clearer that I was going to take the lazy cook’s path to sesame noodles.

So I cooked some Chinese egg noodles, then pan-fried them. I extricated most of them from the skillet, then poured in a bit more oil and stir-fried the chopped garlic and salt upon a steadily browning bed of noodle fragments which had stuck to the bottom of the skillet. I added chicken pieces (I discovered at the last moment that the only pork I currently have is a lonely pork chop) and stir-fried them. Then I put the noodles back in, along with some chicken broth ice cubes. Once the broth was assimilated by the noodles, I poured everything into a bowl, added the sesame sauce (which I had made separately) and mixed well.

Given the similarities in the sauce ingredients, it wasn’t that different from the Henricksson version. Again, it was good, but did not approach my fantasy of the perfect bowl of sesame noodles. I’m starting to think my fantasy is more trouble than it’s worth.

Garden report 05.01.05

It's been quiet here lately. Life has been busy and discouraging lately. I haven't been motivated to cook anything special.

The garden continues along, though I have yet to harvest anything from it. The big success story so far is the spinach, which is growing well. The two mints are also very rambunctious. This week I moved most of my plants out onto the deck to stay, since nighttime temperatures have risen out of the 30s. The mitsuba is still inside because it seems a bit frail. I repotted it a few days ago. The lettuce is also not as far along as I had hoped it would be, but it finally seems to be doing better. Some of the red lettuces are getting the red color in their leaves.

About a week ago, I planted some snow peas, and today I planted some seeds from an Asian stir-fry mix, as well as cilantro. The stir-fry mix includes bok choy, mizuna, komatsuna, mibuna, red romaine lettuce, red kale and celtuce. Since I haven't tried most of these greens before (at least, not knowingly), I look forward to finding out which I like best.

My indoor starts have been slow, but I finally saw a seedling in one of the pots today. I neglected to mark the pots when I planted my starts (oops), so I'm not completely certain, but I think it may be a hot pepper.

Tonight I plan to make some porcini marsala fettucini. Something so easy and delicious is always a morale-booster.

Adobo

Last night I added another notch to the culinary belt by attempting another cuisine - Filipino. I used the recipe for "Filipino-style Potatoes Adobo" from From Bangkok to Bali in Thirty Minutes. Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients also has an adobo recipe which involves marinating, which the Laursens' recipe does not. After surfing the web and looking at various adobo recipes, I concluded that marination is not compulsory for adobo.

Adobo sauce blends vinegar, light soy sauce and garlic for a tangy flavor; it was originally a way of preserving food. I bought a bottle of Filipino palm vinegar for this dish at the Asian supermarket. It may be milder than some other vinegars, but still packs a decent bite.

This recipe calls for stir-frying garlic and a sliced onion in olive oil, then adding the sliced potatoes. After about five minutes, in go the sauce ingredients (vinegar, light soy and palm sugar). An interval of covering the pan and simmering follows. I never got all the potatoes to be equally tender; those that cooked in the sauce ended up as desired, while those piled on top were harder. The tart sauce was different from anything I've encountered before, and may be tinkered with somewhat, but I enjoyed it. I look forward to cooking other adobo meals in the future, using meat and marinating it.

An enjoyable musing on adobo can be found here.

The cult of Krispy Kreme

By rights, I should be blogging about last night's Thai-style sweet pork, which made a good dinner and even better brunch this morning, once the flavors melded. But no, this will be a brief foray into fast food land with my usual companions on such occasions, The Lurker and Perfect Tommy.

Our excuse for an outing today was the beluga whale that has gained notoriety by swimming up the Delaware River to the Trenton area. We did not see the whale and spent much of the day in wandering mode. To make a long story short, we ended up in the mall-verse known as Langhorne, Pennsylvania. There is a Cheeburger Cheeburger located there, and Perfect Tommy has been itching for a visit.

Passing quickly over dinner (good burgers, nice spicy fries and a generous root beer float), we continued on our way. As we tried to find our way out of the mall zone, The Lurker directed Perfect Tommy (who was driving). As we paused at an intersection, Perfect Tommy suddenly cried, "Krispy Kreme!" and executed a Dukes of Hazzard-style turn to follow the Krispy Kreme pointer. Perfect Tommy has a strong affinity (some might say fixation, but we're trying to be diplomatic here) for certain eateries and chains; Krispy Kreme is one of them.

We followed the road around the side of a building and found no Krispy Kreme. We continued, thinking that maybe it had gone out of business and the sign hadn't been updated. Then, around another turn, there it was, and the "Hot and Fresh" sign was lit up.

Perfect Tommy and The Lurker went in; I demurred because I was stuffed from dinner. They soon returned, Perfect Tommy with a box of a dozen steaming fresh doughnuts. He insisted on having one before driving away, and before long it was evident that Perfect Tommy had attained nirvana. He had never had a Krispy Kreme doughnut so fresh and hot before, and he said, "Now I understand why people go crazy about these things." That was when he wasn't saying, "Oh, my god," or similar expressions of awe. Swayed by his enthusiasm, I even had one. The doughnuts are at their lightest when they're fresh-made, after all.

After another futile try at whale-watching, we headed home, with Perfect Tommy ready to form a new cult around Krispy Kreme. Since the doughnuts are light, airy and sweet, apparently what the worshipper does is to become one with the doughnuts by ingesting them; then the lightness, airiness and sweetness becomes part of the worshipper's personality. Since Perfect Tommy had been out of sorts for most of the day, this was quite an accomplishment. When they dropped me off at my place, Perfect Tommy was trying to figure out how he could get his medical insurance to cover fresh Krispy Kremes. I always suspected they ought to be a controlled substance.

In other (non-food) cultic news, I have to note that we saw a car with a Cthulhu fish magnet on it. It's always nice to see there are other H. P. Lovecraft fans out there.

Intense baked chicken

There are a pile of recipes for roast chicken that I want to try, but since I'm usually cooking for one person, roasting a whole chicken is generally not in the cards (unless it's a Cornish game hen). Last night I compromised by baking some pieces of a cut-up kosher chicken.

I used the recipe for "Chicken Baked with Honey and Soy Sauce" from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines. It's a Chinese recipe The Frug got from a Roman prince (well, that's what the cookbook says). It's pretty simple. First you marinate the chicken in two tablespoons each of dark soy sauce, honey and sesame oil. (The hardest part of the whole exercise was getting the crystallized honey out of its squeeze bottle.) Then you bake it, starting at 350 for 15 minutes, then 325 for 20 minutes and finally 300 for a half-hour, basting periodically. I mistakenly turned the oven up to 375 rather than down (yikes!), but it seemed to not matter in the final analysis.

The chicken probably could've baked a tad longer to remove the bits of pink at the bone, but it wasn't what I'd call underdone, either. The meat was juicy and tender, thanks to the marinade. The skin was crisp, and flavored intensely with the dark soy sauce. The next time I try this, I might use regular soy sauce to lighten it up just a bit.

Homemade noodles

The brand of udon I usually buy is Shirakiku's inaka udon. "Inaka" means "rustic" or "country-style" in Japanese. If that udon is rustic, then the egg noodles I made today hailed from way out in the boonies.

I've been craving egg noodles for a while, but I'm trying not to spend too much money right now. That means the usual shopping trips where I buy lots of intriguing things are out for the moment. It dawned on me that rather than buying a bag of egg noodles at the store, I could try making my own. It would be a culinary adventure.

I used the recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook (the same cookbook that gave me my first stir-fry recipe, but that's another story). I had to add a little water to get the dough to the right consistency for effective kneading, but after that, things went fine. I divided the dough into quarters; two of them got rolled into noodles while the other two got stashed in the freezer. I used one batch of noodles for dinner tonight, and the other batch got frozen as well.

When I realized I was using two egg yolks without the egg whites, I remembered that velveting meat in the Chinese manner requires egg whites but not yolks. There was the inspiration for a stir-fry. I decided to velvet some Quorn tenders, cook them in the sauce from wrong noodle stir-fry and pour them over the homemade noodles. Of course, the velveting solution calls for one egg white, so I just doubled the proportions of the other ingredients.

The Quorn tenders velveted adequately, though doubling the velveting solution was decidedly overkill. The sauce, possibly from the added infusion of cornstarch, ended up strongly resembling the sauce from cold Sichuan chicken; clearly a case of convergent evolution despite the different ingredients of oyster sauce and Worcestershire sauce. And the noodles looked frayed and irregular around the edges; some had not wanted to be picked up off the counter, so they were a little bunchy into the bargain. Some were thicker than others. It was not a polished collection of pasta pulchritude.

It was a great moment when I bit into a test noodle steaming from the pot and discovered that it tasted like a real noodle, however. Not only that, it had the right consistency. Somehow those little pieces of floury dough had been transformed into real pasta. None of the world's great pasta empires need tremble in fear, but my world is a somewhat brighter place. I love pasta, and today I made a batch all by myself.

Chicken hijiki noodles

I froze some of my chicken stock in an ice cube tray so I could use it in future stir-fries, but that still left a generous amount of chicken stock hanging around. I ended up using it to help cobble together dinner last night.

I heated the stock in the big skillet, and added some shoyu and sugar. Then I put in some hijiki and somen noodles (somen are very thin Japanese noodles often used in soups). The combination of the straw-colored somen (ok, so at least some of the straw color came from the chicken stock, not the noodles) and the inky curls of the hijiki was reminiscent of some abstract Japanese print. I tore myself away to sit on the deck and enjoy the sunset.

When I came back, the liquid was all gone and the noodles were hydrated. The final result was a little bland, perhaps, but it was a great way to use up some random ingredients.

In other news, today I found a new sprout sticking up in one of the pots. The Chinese celery has decided to join the garden population.

Chicken stock

I get the impression that every proper cook has homemade from scratch stock of various kinds. At least, many cookbooks give that impression. You're just not a real cook if you don't make your own stock.

I've had this pile of chicken bones and giblets accumulating in the freezer for quite a while, so yesterday I finally decided that it was high time to make some stock. I used Bruce Cost's recipe from Asian Ingredients. The big attraction of that recipe was that it isn't as specific as some other stock recipes. It's all very well to call for three pounds of chicken bones, but I don't have a scale, and I'm not getting one any time soon.

I tossed the bones, necks, feet, heads and thighs into my pot and covered with water. I added some ginger slices, brought to a boil, then simmered for four hours. The aroma of the simmering stock was maddening. Somehow I managed to survive without going completely nuts.

Today I used some of the stock for chicken noodle soup (with wide Chinese noodles). For some reason, I frequently get indigestion from normal (i.e., store-bought) chicken broth. This soup, however, was fine, and gave me no digestive difficulties at all. It needed some seasonings to liven it up, perhaps, but apart from that it was fine.

One thing I wonder about is the cloudy appearance of the stock. I know that Chinese banquet-style stock is clear, and I wasn't trying for that. But the cloudiness bothers me. I suspect that means there's a problem with the broth, or maybe I'm just being paranoid. Further research is definitely needed.

In other news, yesterday I noticed some green threadlike sprouts in the spinach pot. It looks like the scallions are beginning to make themselves known.

The realm of the senses

Today's culinary experiment is to make Chinese chicken stock. It isn't done yet, but all I can say is that the wonderful aroma is already driving me crazy, and it still has over an hour to go. Humans may be visually-oriented creatures, but the other senses can cause all kinds of mayhem.

More later.

Trefoil

One of the distinctive things about mitsuba is its trefoil shape. This gives a decorative touch to dishes where mitsuba is used as a garnish.

As my mitsuba sprouted, I was pleased yet a little puzzled. The tiny leaves on the sprouts were rounded, not three-lobed, and certainly not serrated. I didn't think the seed company had made a mistake, but it seemed odd. Today, however, the mystery was solved.

When I got home from work, I checked the garden (or "the farm," as my mother called it the last time I talked to her). One of the mitsuba sprouts was showing two new leaves, and these had the expected serrated trefoil shape, in miniature. I heaved a sigh of relief. All was well with the world again (or, at least, the world in that mitsuba pot).

Pork stir-fry

I've been cooking a lot of Japanese food lately, but when I thawed out some pork for tonight's dinner, it was almost inevitable that I'd go Chinese. My original intention was to make some Sichuan spaghetti, but I decided I felt too lazy to chop up ginger tonight (it's been a long week and it's only Tuesday). I finally turned to Gloria Bley Miller's The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook and found a recipe for stir-fried pork in oyster sauce that didn't require much chopping.

Having picked a recipe, I started altering it. First, the garlic had seen better days, so I substituted shallots. Then I used porcini soaking water instead of chicken stock, without really considering the radical difference in taste between the two.

It's a simple recipe: stir-fry your onion of choice in oil, then stir-fry the pork pieces until they're slightly browned. Add a little light soy sauce, then Shao Xing rice wine, and stir-fry for another minute. Add half a cup of (in this case) porcini water and heat, then add the oyster sauce solution (cornstarch, oyster sauce, water, sugar, light soy sauce). Serve with chopped scallions as a garnish.

This was another success. The combination of porcini water and oyster sauce made a rich savory sauce that was a delight. I will have to remember this combination, since it worked so well. Ok, so chopping four scallions for the garnish was definitely overkill, but the sauce was a real treat. I'll probably reuse the leftovers with rice tomorrow for lunch.

Today's sprouts

Another set of little green sprouts is coming up, this time in the pot that contains scallions, spinach and Chinese celery. Judging from the position of the sprouts, they are incipient spinach plants, though I can't say they look much like spinach at this point.

Of the six mitsuba seedlings, two are looking particularly healthy and strong. Meanwhile, I continue to thin the lettuce patch. Most of those seedlings are long and scrawny; according to my mother this means they aren't getting enough light. It's still a little early to put them outside, though temperatures are moderating. Then again, some of the newer seedlings are less gawky, so maybe they're starting to get enough light.

Next to plant: edible-podded peas, Thai basil, bergamot and hot peppers.

Beef yakisoba

In which Friday dinner is transformed into Saturday's birding lunch and a good time is had by all.

It wasn't quite the same as Dosanko's beef yakisoba, but boy, was it good! I used some of the sliced sirloin that I like so much. I started by marinating it in a mix of two tablespoons shoyu, two tablespoons sake, a teaspoon of sesame oil and a teaspoon of cornstarch. I let it soak for about an hour. In the meantime, I chopped some napa cabbage (since this is a Japanese dish, I should probably refer to it as hakusai for the duration of this post), rinsed some leftover water chestnuts and cooked some chukasoba.

In my quest for a new bottle of good mirin I have so far come up empty. The high-end supermarket was all out, and the Asian supermarket only has aji-mirin at the moment (mirin with additives to increase the sweetness). However, my eye was caught by the so-called "kotterin mirin sweet cooking seasoning" that Kikkoman makes. "Kotterin" seems to come from the Japanese word for "thick;" this mirin is fortified with corn syrup, water, vinegar, shoyu, the ever-popular "flavorings" and a dash of sodium benzoate as a preservative. I figured I might as well give it a try and bought a small bottle. I mixed a tablespoon of this with two tablespoons of shoyu and a teaspoon of sesame oil to make the yakisoba sauce. When I tried it, it tasted great.

Yakisoba was easy to cook as usual. I stir-fried the beef in about three tablespoons of peanut oil until it was rare, and added the veggies and stir-fried for another minute or two. Then I added the noodles, stirred them and poured the leftover marinade and the sauce over everything. After heating through, I plated it.

The beef was perfectly done: right at the cusp of medium and medium-rare, with no pink in the middle but still juicy and tender. The beef juices added their signature to the sweet sauce, which lightly coated the other ingredients. It was a great way to celebrate the end of the work week.

Although I did my best to devour it all, enough was left to pack along as lunch on a birding trip with The Lurker and Perfect Tommy the next day. I happily finished it off as we ate at the Freehold WindMill (Perfect Tommy loves their hot dogs). As The Lurker had a barbecue sandwich and Perfect Tommy (of course) had a hot dog, I made side dishes out of The Lurker's lettuce and tomato for his sandwich, as well as some french fries he was willing to share.

It was a fairly quiet birding excursion, though we did see a rarity and some harbingers of spring. We finished our day at Aljon's Pizza, tucking into a wonderful large plain pie. Then it occurred to me that I needed some orange juice, so I figured a quick visit to the Asian supermarket was in order. Neither of the others had ever been there before (though Perfect Tommy often talks about having to get there someday). I did my tour guide routine and Perfect Tommy oohed about much of the food while managing to walk past it. He met his match in a jar of kimchi, however. The Lurker (not a fan of Asian food) trailed along in our wake, but his eyes lit up when he found a jar of mango powder meant to be used in drinks. He left it on the shelf, but I was impressed he found something of interest there. After some checkout confusion regarding a sale on orange juice (I ended up buying two on sale because it was just easier than explaining to the cashier that I just wanted one), we trooped off into the night.

Braised hijiki

Last night I had a light dinner of braised hijiki. Hijiki is a kind of seaweed; in its dried form it looks like little black wisps. When soaked, it expands in size, but it's still much less substantial than konbu or wakame. To give the dish a little more heft, abura-age is usually added. The drained hijiki is stir-fried in some oil, then the abura-age and the broth ingredients are added. The dish simmers for ten minutes, or until the liquid is absorbed. The broth is a sweet shoyu broth; the version I used last night includes a cup of water, three tablespoons of shoyu, two tablespoons of mirin and three tablespoons of sugar (recipe from Hiroko Urakami's Japanese Family-Style Recipes).

I had expected to need something more to eat, because this is such a light dish, but it was filling enough last night. It would be perfect in the usual Japanese context of a variety of dishes at a meal, but normally I cook one thing for a meal (too much coordination required to have soup, rice, salad and a main dish on the table for one meal).

Boring random stir-fry

Well, maybe it was boring, but it wasn't bad. I spent most of the day puttering around on various projects. I also planted spinach, scallions and Chinese (or leaf) celery. As a result, dinner was not going to be an important meal. I wanted something a little more involved than pouring some marinara on some noodles, but I didn't want a big production, either.

I started out with some "wok oil," which is oil that has been infused with onion, garlic, ginger and cilantro (House of Tsang brand). I was too lazy to chop up the seasonings tonight. The wok oil has impressed me as too harshly garlicky in the past, but it didn't bother me tonight. I stir-fried some water chestnuts and boiled bean sprouts for two and a half minutes, then added some cooked chukasoba noodles and cashews, then the sauce. The sauce proportions were two tablespoons shoyu, one tablespoon water, two tablespoons sake, a teaspoon of sesame oil and sugar to taste. I wanted a sweet stir-fry, so I added a lot of sugar. I cooked it until it seemed heated through, then sat down for dinner.

The sauce ended up being pretty bland and undistinguished, just like the food's appearance (maybe I should've added some slivered carrots for color, or a green garnish of some sort). The veggies didn't have that ideal fresh crunch you want in a really good stir-fry. But I have to admit that I didn't care tonight. It was simple, it was undemanding, it was filling. It was exactly what I wanted out of dinner tonight. Sometimes wonderful culinary pyrotechnics are just so much overkill. Some other time I can take this basic plan and tinker with it. For tonight, it was just what the doctor ordered.

Spring sleet

Leftover time. My leftovers from the mizore nabe were broth, some daikon, a few chicken pieces and some sprouts. After responding to obachan's comments this morning, I had an idea for lunch. I reheated the leftovers in my big skillet, then added some cubed firm tofu and some more sprouts. I also grated more daikon right into the skillet as it simmered on the stove. I cooked it until the tofu cubes I fished out for tasting purposes tasted good and hot, then poured it into a bowl and anointed it with ponzu.

Ponzu is a citrus-flavored shoyu-based dipping sauce; the recipe that Hiroko Shimbo gives for it calls for yuzu juice, mirin, rice vinegar, shoyu and dashi. Yuzu is a Japanese citrus fruit that is very hard to find in the US. When I first started going to the Asian supermarket, there was a little jar of yuzu juice in the Japanese section; since it was pricey, I gave it a miss. Inevitably, it vanished, and I've been kicking myself ever since because it has not reappeared. I've learned from this and other experiences that sometimes there are unusual delays in restocking at the Asian supermarket, and sometimes things never reappear at all. Maybe that's because most of their stock is imported. But I digress. Besides, it's very easy to get a bottle of premade ponzu right in that same Japanese section.

Obachan was absolutely right about the ponzu; even though the nabe broth smelled wonderful as it cooked, the ponzu added something to the dish that made it even better. I can't really describe it, except that it was similar to the way a drop or two of sesame oil can bind a sauce together. Thank you, obachan! Another good thing about the leftovers was that reheating them quickly in the skillet made it possible to concentrate on the food, rather than how long it was taking to cook. It was very tasty; I even drank off the leftover broth. Maybe I gave the mizore nabe a bum rap the other night.

For dessert, I relaxed with a cup of genmaicha (green tea with toasted rice) and listened to Wall to Wall Stephen Sondheim on WNYC. I've been a Sondheim fan since childhood (thanks, dad!), and my only regret was that I couldn't hear the whole thing (like those lucky XM Satellite Radio listeners). Even people at Symphony Space in New York were being encouraged to listen for a while and then depart so as to give another person an opportunity to hear the music. I most wanted to hear something from Pacific Overtures, my favorite Sondheim musical, but was disappointed on that score. I still got to hear lots of good stuff, though. A great way to spend an afternoon.

Double your garden, double your fun

I have another crop. Last night, after coming home from a corned beef dinner at The Deacon's, I found one tiny little seedling poking up in the mitsuba pot. This morning I could see its two tiny leaves, all ready to do service as solar panels. Not only that, another little seedling has appeared. I'm very pleased, because I understand that parsleys are much harder to grow than lettuce, and I wasn't sure if any seeds from my indoor start of mitsuba would come up. There they are, ready to go, and a little ahead of schedule, even.

Speaking of lettuce, it continues to go great guns. The seedings are around an inch tall (some more, some less), and even at this small size, some differences in structure between seedlings have appeared. There are big rounded ones and little crinkly ones, neither of which have been identified to variety yet. The official variety breakdown is 25% Deer Tongue, 18% Oakleaf, 18% Simpson Elite, 18% Tango, 10.5% Royal Red and 10.5% of a Red Oakleaf.

Since the lettuce is growing like crazy, the seedlings have gotten very crowded in some parts of the pot. So, I took a deep breath and started thinning this morning. I took out or moved about ten seedlings, and will keep at it progressively. The ones I took out became a very light breakfast snack. They're definitely lettuce, with a light delicate taste. I think I can get used to this.

Mizore nabe

I'm starting to think I should go back to cooking something I have a proven track record with. I've had a succession of new dishes that have not worked out too well. Then again, the sukiyaki wasn't new. Never mind.

Tonight I decided to try making mizore nabe, or "sleet in a claypot," as Obachan so aptly puts it. I was inspired by her post on the dish back in January. After some poking around the internet, I found a recipe for it at Yasuko-san's blog. After comparing and contrasting the two, I decided to take them as a starting point and extrapolate a little from there.

Naming a winter hotpot dish after sleet seems so poetic that I had to try cooking it. The "sleet" is really grated daikon. When I was grating the daikon, however, I realized that I had forgotten what hard work poetry can be. I have a tiny grater, and when I had grated a certain amount of daikon, it would get too slippery to continue until I cleaned the grater off. I finally figured out that more pressure on the daikon against the grater worked better, so I switched hands so that I was holding the daikon in my left hand (which is stronger than my right). It went much better after that.

While I was grating daikon, slicing scallions and selecting bean sprouts, chicken was marinating in a mixture of shoyu, sake and sugar. Mirin is recommended, but I'm currently out of it, so I substituted a tablespoon of sake mixed with two teaspoons of sugar for each tablespoon of mirin, as per Hiroko Shimbo. The marinade smelled suitably mirin-like.

Since this was a nabe dish, I figured it was a good excuse to cook with the donabe. To make a long story short, I think I won't be cooking with the donabe on weeknights any more. It just takes too long. The total cooking time for the mizore nabe wound up being an hour and a half, and I probably could've let it go longer. Getting the donabe warmed up takes a while, and then adding ingredients to it lowers the broth temperature, so I have to wait for it to warm up again. Once it reaches a good temperature, it does cook along quite well; I never raised the burner above medium heat but did manage to get a boil going at times. Then again, I don't know if the crackling sound I heard when the donabe was hottest was boiling broth or crackling clay. At least the donabe seemed undamaged afterward.

The mizore nabe tasted reasonably good. It was probably not as sweet as it would be if I had used mirin in the broth. The broth was a combination of one cup of water, a four-inch piece of konbu kelp, five tablespoons of shoyu, two and a half tablespoons of sugar, and two and a half tablespoons of "mirin substitute." That broth is more or less what I use to make donburi, and the proportions come from Hiroko Urakami's Japanese Family-Style Recipes. The daikon did look sleety while cooking, but once I added the chicken and its marinade, it turned into brown slush. I don't cook with daikon often because I'm not that fond of its flavor, but its strong taste worked well in the mizore nabe.

Bottom line: not a bad meal, and I'm eager to try Obachan's chicken meatballs and Yasuko-san's deep-fried chicken version, but I may not do that in the donabe next time. Unless it's a weekend.

Sukiyaki leftovers

Tonight I had the leftover sukiyaki from my less-than-successful attempt on Sunday morning. Since I was going birding with The Lurker and Perfect Tommy, and since we were starting late, I figured I'd have enough time to whip up a batch of sukiyaki. Unfortunately, I made a few mistakes:

1. Thin beef, when cooked too long, attains the texture of shoe leather.
2. Measuring out a cup of shoyu by pouring it over a cup of sake until you reach the two cup mark on the measuring glass means you'll probably end up with too much shoyu in your broth.

I attempted to rescue it by emptying my bottle of mirin into the brew, cooking it down and pouring it over short-grain rice. It wound up being an edible lunch for a birding trip, but not much more. When The Lurker inhaled the cooking fumes, he thought something smelled Italian, kind of like some sort of toast. I'm afraid that must have been because the rice was a bit closer to burning than I had thought.

So that was dinner tonight. The shoe-leather beef actually had a better flavor than one might expect, and the broth wasn't that bad: just less sweet and more intense than I wanted.

Busy busy busy

March is shaping up to be a busy month, so my blogging may be more irregular for a while. There's been some stuff I've been meaning to blog, but there are some other projects with actual deadlines that need to be taken care of as well.

The lettuce seedlings continue to flourish. I watered them last night and they looked very perky this morning. I'll have to thin some of them soon, as some of the seedlings are practically on top of each other. Meanwhile, still nothing from the mitsuba, but it shoudn't be sprouting yet anyway.

I hope to post later about an actual cooking session, since sukiyaki is on the menu today.

Lettuce

I got home today and was delighted to find little green lettuce seedlings poking up from the pot. They were right on schedule, since I planted the seeds on March 1st and the seeds were supposed to sprout in seven to ten days, according to the seed packet. They're a long way from any kind of salad, but it looks like the kitchen garden experiment may be a go after all.

Vegetarian kung pao stir-fry

Tonight I wanted something a little special for dinner, so I decided to make kung pao chicken. Of course, I had no chicken thawed, so I decided to use Quorn nuggets instead. Then, since I got home later than anticipated, I decided to omit the step of velveting the meat (or protein, in this case) and just make it a simple stir-fry. I used a recipe from Ken Hom's Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood. Instead of using chicken stock, I substituted vegetarian boullion. I also left out the dried chiles, instead making do with a few shakes of Tabasco sauce. I used grated palm sugar, though crushed rock sugar probably would have been more authentic.

The stir-fry went well, though ideally the vegetarian kung pao should have been served with rice. The stir-fry in its dark sauce would have benefitted from the contrast with the bland rice. Since the Quorn nuggets were not precooked by velveting, I had to cook them longer than normal; when the pan and sauce began to smoke, I deglazed the pan with some Shao Xing rice wine (the salted cooking variety, since this sauce called for salt). This probably diluted the punch of the Tabasco sauce.

Spring hath sprung

I suppose it may seem eccentric to insist that spring is well on its way, given that we had our latest winter storm yesterday. But for me, spring has been here since the beginnng of February, when the cardinals and Song Sparrows started singing, just like clockwork. The big flock of wintering Canada Geese has moved out and flocks of blackbirds are moving in. The weather may not know it's spring, but the birds do.

Just to clinch it, I planted my first seeds today. After I got home from work, I sprinkled an assortment of lettuce seeds in one pot, and planted a few mitsuba seeds in another pot. The lettuce should be sprouting in 7-10 days, while the mitsuba will probably take closer to 20 days, since it is a parsley and they are slow to germinate. At least, that's what my information tells me. Planting a garden will be one big experiment because this is the first year I've ever tried it.

Sliced sirloin in red wine sauce

I got inspired by Cuisine Capers and the recent recipe for venison tips over brown rice. However, I didn’t have four cups of fresh mushrooms (nor any venison) in the pantry. As a result, I decided to make a simple beef dinner with red wine sauce and mushrooms.

The last time I tried this kind of thing was for a vegetarian dish from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, and it came out way too watery. I also used shiitake mushrooms, and concluded that their dark earthy flavor was too intense to work well with a red wine sauce.

I went looking for a simple recipe for red wine sauce. Every recipe I found, however, was written for more meat than I wanted to use; I was just working with some sliced-up sirloin strips intended for a stir-fry. Normally, I turn up my nose at meat pre-sliced for stir-fries; I can do my slicing myself, thank you very much. What keeps me coming back to this meat is that it’s flat-out good beef that turns out very tasty when I cook it. As someone with a long history of boring overdone steaks and hamburgers behind me, I appreciate a cut of beef that can stand my lack of technique. Or maybe I’m just a better stir-fry chef than steak chef.

Finally, after scanning many recipes and a final trip over to trans Fatty’s post on finishing sauces, I decided to wing it. A basic theoretical understanding would have to be enough.

I started by melting a blend of olive oil and butter in the skillet; the butter chunks splattered quite impressively when they hit the oil. I browned the sirloin pieces in the hot oil and butter, then removed them. Then I added half a cup of red wine (Yellowtail merlot) and the soaking water from the porcini mushrooms. At some point, I added a teaspoon of cornstarch, which promptly turned into starch nuggets because I had neglected to dissolve it in fluid first. Oops! Another teaspoon of dissolved cornstarch and some mashing of starch nuggets with the spatula came to the rescue.

Once the sauce was hot and had reduced a bit, I added the porcini mushrooms. Then the sirloin pieces went in and I cooked them until they looked done, the sauce had reduced some more, and I got impatient (I’m starting to think I lack the patience to create really tasty creamy sauces). I poured it all over a plate of spinach fettucini.

It was fine for a first try without a recipe, but it needed something, as usual. Even with the cornstarch, the red wine sauce was more toward the au jus end of the spectrum rather than the gravy end of the spectrum (not that this is a bad thing, I just wanted something more like gravy). More mushrooms, less assertively-flavored mushrooms, would be a good addition. Maybe if I served it with mashed potatoes next time, the potatoes would soak up the sauce better than the pasta. Ah, well, it was better than I'm making it sound.

Panang curry rice

The index proved its worth today. I was eating my sandwich at lunch today, idly pondering what to have for dinner. I needed to use up some coconut milk, bamboo shoots and jasmine rice. A Thai curry seemed like the obvious choice, but what had I done in the past? Inspiration struck, and I searched through the SevenSoy index to find the random Panang curry entry. Before long, I was armed with a plan and ideas with which to tweak the dish. “THIS is why I wanted an index!” I thought, and, “This is SO cool!”

I mixed half a can of coconut milk with a cup of water, then heated it in the skillet. When it was hot enough, I added two heaping tablespoons of Maesri Panang curry paste, then a tablespoon of tamarind paste (inspired by an eGullet conversation on Thai cooking by mamster and Pim of chez pim). It tasted interesting but it was too soupy. I added the bamboo shoots and some shredded carrots and cooked them for a while, then added grated palm sugar to taste and two tablespoons of fish sauce. The sauce was starting to reduce by now. I added the rice (which completely soaked up the sauce), garnished it with sliced almonds, covered the skillet and simmered for five minutes. After the simmering, I added more garnishes: orange mint leaves and Maesri crunchy chili bits (nam prik klang dong). A few squirts of lime juice and it was done.

I was very pleased with the curry. It was hot, sweet and tart, all at once. The tamarind flavor was lost in the final dish, but the mint leaves added a surprisingly strong punch. I’m not sure the almonds added anything useful to the curry. In any case, it worked out very well and yes, I have leftovers.

A brief note

This business of flaking out during the week and blogging retrospectively has really got to stop. I know life has been busy, but still. There are things I'd like to blog about.

The short form of this week includes getting four different meals out of the ground pork from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmer's Market, which is a record. They were all stir-fries involving slightly different sauces and noodles, and all were great. They would've been kind of routine to blog, however ("Ok, tonight I used the new fancy wide Chinese noodles instead of udon."). I do love the new fancy Chinese wide noodles, but recooking the same dish with minor variations in ingredients is not exactly scintillating to write nor, I suspect, to read.

My tomato plant keeps putting out flowers but until it puts out two or more at the same time, they aren't going to get pollinated. Feh. In good garden news, however, I can start planting seeds in a few days. I can hardly wait.

Oh, well, I guess I'd better go decide what's for dinner tonight.

Dutch treat

Living in New Jersey means that, with a little research and persistence, you can probably find people from just about any culture in the world. The culinary benefits of this are obvious; it would be a lot more difficult to cook Asian if I were living in other places where a wealth of real Asian ingredients is hard to find.

There are plenty of other cultural groups here, though, and today I visited a different local “ethnic” market. I’ve wanted to visit the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmer’s Market in Kingston ever since I heard about it, especially since it’s not too far from home. Since they have very limited hours, this takes a little preparation or luck. I decided that since it was a sunny afternoon and I had some errands to run anyway, I’d drive by and see if they were open. At worst, I’d get to take down their hours from the sign on the door.

Luck was with me, since I arrived while their working week had about an hour to run. Many of the meat cases had been completely cleaned out, but I was able to get a pound of excellent ground pork. I needed butter, so I got a big hunk of unsalted sweet butter. Being the noodle addict I am, I bought two bags of dried egg noodles; one of wide noodles and another of more spaghetti-like dimensions. I hurried by the abundant pies and sweets in an attempt to not make the trip too unhealthy (or too expensive, for that matter). There was a decent selection of winter vegetables and I’m still regretting not getting the beautiful head of romaine I walked past. I also got some candles.

The market has different sections and a register for each section; you pay for your purchases in the department where you get them. The staff is composed of Mennonites from Pennsylvania. The fresh produce comes from farms in Pennsylvania, though packaged goods may come from farther afield; my noodles hail from Ohio. Not only can you buy a wealth of food there, you can also buy various crafts or even furniture. If you just want to stop in for a snack, they have a lunch counter, too.

Dinner was the ground pork, sautéed in the butter and mixed with shoyu, mushroom-flavored soy, mirin and sesame oil, then served over the wide egg noodles. I’ll be back to that market, I’m sure.

Sinfully decadent leftovers

Tonight I finished up the braised chicken and noodles from last night. I heated the leftovers in the skillet while boiling up some more rice flakes to sop up the sauce. The rice flakes weren't quite as sublime as last night's rice flakes, I think because last night's sat for a while before having the sauce poured over them. They probably dried out a bit and were able to soak up the sauce more effectively.

Having said that, dinner was still mind-blowingly rich and decadent, even before the glass of sherry that put it over the top. I should probably go on a bread and water diet for the next few days to recover. Whew.

Laotian (?) braised chicken with Thai noodles

Sometimes I feel guilty about blogging. "Why," I ask myself, "would anyone want to read what an anglo in central Jersey has to say about cooking Asian food, when there are so many real Asian food blogs out there?" I love Asian food, but it is hardly my birthright or heritage. So many people out there know so much more than me. Does the world really need one more well-meaning American indulging in cultural appropriation?

Take tonight's dinner. I decided I wanted to try Bruce Cost's "Laotian Braised Chicken with Shallots and Cracked Black Pepper" from Asian Ingredients. I've cooked this before, but it came out too salty; it was also one of the first dishes I ever cooked using fish sauce, so that threw me.

Once I decided on the menu, I got a little more curious about Laotian food. To say it has a low profile in the States is a vast understatement (though apparently there are a couple of restaurants in Philly that serve it). I did a Google search and found that most of the hits ran to reviews and sales links for a handful of Lao and partial-Lao cookbooks. There were a few restaurant reviews. But one phrase seemed to recur with worrying frequency: Laotian cooking doesn't use coconut milk. Since Cost's braised Laotian chicken leans heavily on coconut milk, I began to wonder whether I was cooking an Authentic recipe.

The most detailed information I found was in a review of a cookbook called Taste of Laos. The review is here, should you care to peruse it. I couldn't begin to paraphrase it, but it sounds convincing and makes me want to learn more about Laotian cooking.

Asking someone completely clueless about Laotian cooking to judge the authenticity of a dish claiming this nationality is probably too much, so I got back to the actual cooking. In spite of halving the recipe, there was still way too much food, especially sauce. I suppose I could have reduced the sauce further than I did, but I got impatient. I browned the shallots, scallions and chicken pieces in a cup of peanut oil, then poured out most of the peanut oil so I could stir-fry the chicken in the oil and coconut milk. Progressively, one adds water, shallots and fish sauce, then covers to simmer for about ten minutes. I omitted the chili peppers and settled for some Tabasco sauce, which was completely lost in the final product. I also omitted the initial step of salting the chicken pieces and letting them sit for half an hour. This time it wasn't salty at all, but probably sweeter than the recipe intended.

Once the dish is done, you are supposed to serve it over the scallions, but I decided to use Thai "rice flake" noodles instead. These were the big discovery of the evening. I got them at the Asian supermarket when attempting to find an equivalent for some wonderful wide egg noodles I had at a restaurant called Aroma in Franklin Park. The rice flakes are brittle large triangular pieces of vermicelli, for lack of a better description. When cooked, they rolled up into tubes like penne pasta. Tasting one was a rude shock, however, as it tasted like tap water. Bad tap water.

Eventually the rice flakes were done and I poured them into a big bowl. When the chicken and sauce were done, they went on top of the rice flakes. And what a change in the rice flakes! Now they had a wonderful buttery, egg noodle-like consistency, very rich and decadent. Like vermicelli, they take on the nature of the sauce or soup in which they are cooked. I will definitely be looking for more rice flakes when I go to the Asian supermarket next. Mmmmm!

So, whether or not the recipe was authentic to start with, it sure wasn't when I got through with it. But it was quite tasty.

Tofu with Chinese black bean sauce

The porcini tofu teriyaki did a good job of using up some of the tofu I needed to use, but I needed to finish the job. I was thinking about something involving Chinese black beans and found just what I was looking for in Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home. A Moosewood cookbook was a good choice to find a tofu recipe, since it's a vegetarian cookbook (though this cookbook includes some fish recipes). I chose "Mushrooms with Chinese Black Bean Sauce," although I needed to make some substitutions. I didn't have the recommended fresh mushrooms, so I decided to use bamboo shoots, which have a similar consistency. There's no molasses around here either, but I reasoned that if kecap manis' best substitute is maple syrup, then it would do as a replacement for molasses. And I completely ignored the need for a green or bell pepper.

It was a solid, decent meal, though once again an opportunity to remember that tofu is not the most thrilling ingrediment on earth. Maybe with all of tofu's other virtues (easily digestible source of protein, a mainstay of vegetarian cuisine, ability to take on the character of the ingredients around it), it doesn't need to be thrilling.

Crab cakes

The Lurker and I went to Maryland for lunch today. Well, not exactly. The Lurker eats to live, so it's unlikely he would go out of his way for any sort of culinary nirvana. He's remarkably tolerant when Perfect Tommy or I start going on about our own culinary nirvanas, but only because he finds it entertaining. So, to be more accurate, The Lurker and I went to Maryland for a rare bird, and we had lunch when we got there.

This particular bird went well with lunch because it's a gull which has staked out a dock behind a crab house in southern Maryland for several years. Inside the crab house, there are framed newspaper clippings about the scene of dozens of birders descending on the quiet hamlet of Sandgates just to see this gull. There's also a framed plaque from the American Birding Association thanking the owners of the crab house for being such excellent rare bird hosts (yes, there is such a thing as a rare bird host). Then again, when a bird brings in as much business as this one must have done over the years, it's no wonder the owners of the Sea Breeze are willing to share some of their seafood with the celebrity gull, who has been nicknamed Shrimpy.

When we pulled up at the Sea Breeze, our friends Phil and The Sherpa were waiting for us. They were in on the initial gull madness, but were quite happy to return to the scene of past glories. After a brief search, The Lurker spotted Shrimpy perched on a piling behind (heresy!) the other crab house next to the Sea Breeze. We admired Shrimpy and noted all the field marks that make this gull not exactly the same as all the other gulls hanging out on the bay, at least until Shrimpy flew out of sight. Mission accomplished, we trooped inside to render our thanks to the Sea Breeze.

This was my first opportunity to have a real Maryland crab cake right on Chesapeake Bay. I know that there are crab cake connoisseurs out there who bring almost as much rigor to it as wine mavens. Since I'm an inherent know-it-all, I wish I was a crab cake connoisseur, but I have to confess my ignorance in this case. I also have to admit that I hate passing judgement on restaurants, because when something is off, I'd just as soon give them the benefit of the doubt (unless it's something really bad).

Having said all that, the crab cake platter was an enjoyable and filling meal. Maybe the crab cake didn't have huge lumps of crabmeat in it, maybe the coating (carapace?) was much harder than expected, maybe the seasonings were mild. But it hit me right at the time and kept me satisfied for an afternoon of more birding. The fries were ordinary (but they mopped up the tartar sauce just fine), and I was too full to get to the cole slaw. Ever the landlubber, The Lurker had a basket of chicken fingers that he pronounced "edible," but then, have chicken fingers ever gotten gourmet treatment? The Sherpa raved about the crab soup she had the last time she was at the Sea Breeze, but today she found it disappointingly salty. Phil had a broiled fish that looked marvelous and was deemed “ok.” We had a great view of the water from our table, so we kept getting distracted by passing birds. I'm sure the crab house is used to patrons snatching up binoculars at odd moments by now.

At least now I can say I've had a genuine Maryland crab cake.

Porcini tofu teriyaki

Yes, it's time for another stab at fusion cooking here at SevenSoy Central. Be very afraid.

I was faced with the necessity of using up the remains of Wednesday night's teriyaki sauce, as well as using a cake of firm tofu before its expiration date in a few days. I was able to scrape out a surprising amount of chicken-infused teriyaki sauce from the skillet; it was promptly bottled and stuck in the fridge. I've found that Newman's Own salsa jars are excellent storage units for the oddments of sauces and whatnot that accumulate around my kitchen.

Tofu and teriyaki were a good Japanese combination; I thought shiitake mushrooms might be a good authentic addition, but I wasn't sure whether the strongly-flavored shiitakes and the teriyaki sauce would work together. Finally, I decided to brave the unknown and use porcini mushrooms instead. I suppose I'll burn out on them at some point but right now they're in the top ten of cooking ingredients here.

I marinated the tofu in the teriyaki sauce. Meanwhile, I hydrated the porcinis and then sauteed them in their own soaking water. Finally, I added the tofu and marinade to the pan and cooked everything until I thought it was probably done.

It was a thoroughly edible meal, but I found myself disappointed. Teriyaki and porcinis, on their own, are wonderful tastes. Brought together, each lost its particular character (teriyaki's sweet strength, the porcinis' smokiness) as it blended into an undistinguished whole. If I tried this again (and I probably will, because now it's a challenge), I would either add a carefully-crafted combination of seasonings, or vegetables to provide a variety of consistencies to the bite.

Not exactly teriyaki

In the vein of sukiyaki, sort of, last night's effort was a take-off on teriyaki. It started with some thawed chicken. After the usual bout of indecision, I asked myself why I couldn't mix together the usual components of teriyaki sauce and cook the chicken in that broth. No contrary answers being forthcoming, I went ahead and did it.

It's kind of surprising I didn't think of this long ago. I used Hiroko Shimbo's recipe for teriyaki sauce, which is one of those recipes that leaves the kitchen smelling like a Japanese restaurant. I simmered the chicken in the teriyaki sauce ingredients, rather than marinating or grilling or even baking. It smelled a little sharper than the last time I made teriyaki sauce, I think because the sake had a drier flavor than expected. I used Gekkeikan rather than the cooking sake but, interestingly, the Gekkeikan was somewhat sharper and drier in flavor than other bottles of the same brand I've bought recently. Even more confusing, the Gekkeikan seemed a little sweeter when sampled the following evening, but later went back to being drier than normal. Maybe I'm just losing my mind.

An index, at last

Finally, there is an index to this blog. I expect to refine it over time, but for now, you should see a link to it at the top of the food links on the sidebar. Enjoy.

I've wanted to blog various meals over the past few days, but haven't gotten around to it. Expect some post-dated entries soon.

A tale of two mushroom soys

I have two bottles labeled "mushroom soy" in my kitchen, but they are not the same. The Chinese mushroom soy is very dark and flavored with molasses. The Thai mushroom-flavored soy is just that. I bought it on a whim, but have not yet encountered a recipe calling for it.

As not uncommonly happens in my kitchen, a rare bird forced the issue. To make a long story short, an extreme rarity showed up in eastern Pennsylvania and I wound up chasing it with The Lurker and The Blonde Bandit. Since we left mid-morning, I was able to throw together the most random of stir-fries before driving over to The Blonde Bandit's for a rendezvous.

I used abura-age as the protein component of the dish since (as usual), there wasn't any meat thawed. I opened up the bottle of mushroom-flavored soy sauce and sampled it. As advertised, it was a mushroom-flavored soy sauce, and very tasty, too. I used it as the base for a random stir-fry. I mixed some of it up with Shao Xing rice wine and sesame oil, and stir-fried the abura-age in the sauce. As the sauce bubbled up, I added some Chinese mushroom soy to give the sauce some depth, then added more mushroom-flavored soy and rice wine. It was a matter of watching the sauce's consistency in the pan, then adding more liquid (or not) as seemed appropriate. I poured it over leftover rice from Friday night and it all worked out well. Better than the chase, in fact, since we didn't get the target bird.

After our unsuccessful chase, I went to The Cruise Director's and The Fireman's for a Super Bowl get-together. The Cruise Director provided some excellent beef stew, The Deacon brought cookies and a very decadent cake for The Fireman's and The Frog Collector's birthdays. Unfortunately, I flaked out early because of the long day, but The Cruise Director sent me home with a CARE package of stew which made a very good lunch the following day.

Successful steak sha zha jiang

And it’s about bloody time, too, is all I can say.

One of the first books I bought upon moving here was Bruce Cost’s Asian Ingredients. I figured I would need some guidance now that I was living in a place where my nearest market was an Asian one that carried foods way beyond the bounds of what I knew. Not only was Asian Ingredients very educational, it emboldened me to try things that, left to my own cautious devices, I never would have tried. One of these was Chinese barbecue sauce or sha zha jiang. It was one of the things I got because Cost raved about it so.

Cost’s top pick was Lan Chi brand, so that’s what I bought. Its ingredients are listed as “fish, chili, garlic, salt, soy bean oil, small dried shrimps, peanut powder, spice, rice bran” on the label. I can’t begin to describe the taste. It is extremely spicy and has a very strong, almost harsh flavor. This sauce goes beyond just having a bite to it; the jar might as well get up and chase you around the room, it’s so intense.

I tried cooking Cost’s recipe for “Sliced Steak with Sha Zha Jiang” twice, but both times it gave me a very upset stomach. This was unfortunate, because as I ate it (before the digestive problems set in), I got the feeling that sha zha jiang was a taste I could acquire. Maybe having it every week would be a bit much for such an aggressively-flavored dish, but it was something I wanted to keep in my repertoire. So I decided to try it again last night, with a few modifications.

Cost’s recipe calls for stir-frying the beef in a cup of peanut oil (velveting), then turning it out of the pan and starting over in a clean pan or wok by stir-frying quarter of a cup of chopped chili peppers, quarter of a cup of chopped shallots and a scallion in two tablespoons of peanut oil. To reduce the complexity of the process, I decided to turn it into a simple stir-fry, rather than velveting the meat and then cooking the rest of the ingredients. So, I stir-fried the scallion and shallots in two to three tablespoons of peanut oil, then added the beef. (I omitted the chilis to lower the heat of the dish slightly.)

I stir-fried the beef until it started to look mostly done; this was a little difficult because the beef was marinated in two teaspoons of cornstarch, a tablespoon of mushroom soy and a tablespoon of sesame oil. The dark color that the soy sauce imparted to the beef made it harder to judge the meat’s doneness. As I stir-fried, the big skillet developed a nice-looking brown tint from the meat and marinade juices.

After I had cooked the beef for what felt like an adequate time (maybe a little more than three minutes), I added the remaining sauce ingredients. This worked out to be one and a half to two tablespoons of sha zha jiang (reduced from three to four), one teaspoon of sugar and two tablespoons of Shao Xing rice wine (altered from one tablespoon of the wine and one tablespoon of chicken stock). I did not add the recommended half-teaspoon of salt. I stir-fried this for a few minutes and, as the sauce and pan juices started bubbling up nicely, I added more rice wine to create a more liquid sauce. I didn’t measure the wine, just poured what looked good into the pan. It might have been about half a cup or somewhat less. I cooked it down until the sauce reduced to a fairly thick consistency (sort of like a good oyster sauce), then served it over Chinese egg noodles.

Although my stomach muttered to itself into the evening, there were no more serious results, which was a major improvement over past history. I think I’ve found a way to have my sha zha jiang and eat it too.

Thanks, Marnie!

Tonight’s entrée was Indian Spice-Rubbed Pork Chops from Everyday Asian. The rub is a blend of paprika, turmeric, black pepper, salt and cayenne pepper. Although this is intended to be a grill dish, I baked the pork chops and they turned out excellent. The rub, as advertised, kept the pork chops moist. It was spicy but not incendiary.

I’ll take this opportunity to praise Marnie Henricksson’s Everyday Asian, one of my favorite cookbooks. Since I bought it in September 2003, I’ve cooked 17 of the recipes in it (it’s a small book) and not one has been a dud. The recipes are very well written; you are never in doubt about what to do next or how to assemble a dish. The recipes cover Asia from Japan to southeast Asia; most are fairly authentic, but there are a few fusion-type dishes (such as tonight’s pork chops). Henricksson ran a noodle shop in the Village and I have to say I’m sorry I missed it when I was in New York more often. She does like her food a little hotter than I do, and the amounts are often more than one person needs, but apart from that, I love this cookbook. The consistent high quality of the results of these recipes earns high praise from me.