Soy sauce and fish sauce

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

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

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

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

Creaky chicken

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

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

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

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

Nifty teabags

The last time I wandered through the Asian supermarket, I sauntered down the tea aisle. One thing that caught my eye was an assortment of teas from Shirakata Denshiro Shoten in Japan. I passed on the genmaicha (green tea with rice, a wonderful blend), since I'm still working through a batch I bought in Rockefeller Center, oh, too long ago. I ended up picking the "houjicha" (roasted green tea). The box was almost a cube (in contrast to the oblong tea boxes that are the rule in these parts). It was a little pricey. But it was worth it.

Well, yes, the tea itself was quite good. But the teabag design was what I found fascinating about this tea. The teabag has what is called a pyramid design; rather than having the top and bottom edges of the teabag being aligned, they are turned at 45 degree angles to each other, so that from the side, the teabag looks like a triangle (or pyramid, if you prefer) (look at the website above for a photo).

But it gets better. There's a notch in the paper tag attached to the teabag. Now, this might seem insignificant to you, but I'm one of those people who is always trying to fish the teabag tag out of the boiling hot tea (and burning fingers as a result). Maybe it's something about my pouring style, who knows. In any case, when I saw that these teabags had a notch so that you can attach them easily to the rim of your teacup, I was sold. And it even works in real life, too! At last, the tea-drinking experience need not be tainted by burned fingers. I hope this innovation catches on, and soon.

Soy-simmered fish

Yesterday I decided to try a recipe I've had my eye on for a while, Mark Bittman's "Fish Simmered in Spicy Soy Sauce" (from The Minimalist Cooks Dinner). The simmering solution I came up with was one-third of a cup of Chinese light soy sauce, two-thirds of a cup of water, seven scallions sliced into two-inch lengths, one dried chili and two teaspoons of sugar. Bittman advises the cook to vary the proportions of soy sauce and water based on how salty the soy sauce is. Since Chinese light soy is very salty, I added more water.

Once the solution was boiling, I added a flounder fillet that had not completely thawed out from its sojourn in the freezer. It was a little long for the big skillet, and rigid while it remained partly frozen. As a result, turning the fish over to cook both sides was an adventure; I have to say that it was a miracle more of the simmering liquid didn't end up all over the stovetop and the floor. I cooked the fish until it was done, and flaked beautifully when a fork was applied.

In a theme that has been evident in my recent cooking attempts, the fish was tasty but too salty for my taste. The next time I try this, I'll use a different type of soy sauce and probably taste the simmering solution just to make sure. The dried chili did not add any detectable heat to the sauce, so next time I'll probably add some hot bean paste or hot chili paste to the sauce. The scallions turned out bitter, for the most part, so I think I'll substitute shallots next time. Finally, some chopped ginger would be a great addition to this dish.

Salt mine 2

As noted in the previous post, what was once challenging cooking has now become somewhat routine. Simply recording the results of recipes has also become somewhat routine, in terms of this blog. I continue to ponder how to shake things up a bit, but in the meantime, I'll blog a few more dishes in an effort to catch up.

The next "salt mine" dish was "Lemon Grass Chicken with Chilli" from Ken Hom's Hot Wok. This called for marinating some chicken thigh meat in a combination of two stalks of lemongrass (crushed and chopped), two tablespoons chopped garlic, half a teaspoon black pepper, two tablespoons fish sauce and two teaspoons sugar. Once this has marinated for 40 minutes or so, stir-fry the chicken and marinade ingredients in a tablespoon of peanut oil until the chicken is golden. Empty and drain the pan and reheat it without wiping it out completely. Once it's hot, return the chicken to the pan, along with two teaspoons fish sauce, one teaspoon sugar and one teaspoon chili powder. Stir-fry for three minutes more, then serve.

This came out quite salty, possibly because of the extra fish sauce content. There was nothing wrong with it, but it didn't thrill me, either. It's sort of a generic southeast Asian stir-fry, simple and relatively quick (apart from the marination). I suspect that I've cooked enough other meals using many of these ingredients that this one didn't quite step out from the crowd. Maybe a little tinkering and/or some other ingredients could give it more of its own personality.

Salt mine

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

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

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

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

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

Index changes

I've been pondering making some changes to the index for Seven Kinds of Soy Sauce. I think the ingredients categories have gotten so big as to be unworkable, although I do want to keep the vegetarian category. I'll also keep the categories for countries and cookbooks. One problem is that I can no longer change time and date of a post in Safari, which means I can't ensure that countries or cookbooks sort alphabetically. I did look at the interface in MS Internet Explorer, however, and that does still give the ability to edit post times and dates. I guess it's some sort of Safari-Blogger glitch.

So look for changes in the index soon.

Chicken broth and button mushrooms

Two meals, both involving homemade chicken broth and sliced button mushrooms. One turned out uninteresting, the other flavorful. It's amazing how you can cook with the same ingredients and arrive at totally different outcomes: it's sort of the antithesis of convergent evolution.

First, the unassuming meal. I made jasmine rice according to the instructions on the package, just substituting chicken broth for water. In addition, I scattered sliced button mushrooms on top of the rice, along with fresh rosemary and sage. I hoped this would lead to a flavorful rice along the lines of pilaf. What I got was bland rice (apart from the moments when I bit down on rosemary or sage). The chicken broth and the aroma of jasmine rice cancelled each other out. Forgetting the lesson I had previously learned from a bland pilaf, I didn't add salt as a pick-me-up. On the other hand, button mushrooms are considered a bland-flavored mushroom. What does it say about this dish if the button mushrooms were one of the most strongly-flavored components? They were steamed on top of the rice, and the steaming brought out every nuance of flavor.

Another night, another dinner. This time, I decided to have a pork chop with miso sauce and pasta on the side. Mark Bittman's "Pork Cutlet with Miso-Red Wine Sauce" recipe (from The Minimalist Cooks Dinner) has become a go-to recipe for me. The recipe is simple, which means that it's easily adapted to different ingredients. I've cooked it with pork and chicken, different varietals of red wine, red and white miso, sherry and, now, chicken broth.

Fresh from the chicken-broth rice debacle, I worried that the sauce for the pork chop would be uninteresting. Luckily, I was wrong. Perhaps the process of cooking down the sauce by half before adding the miso helped. Even before the miso was added, the sauce tasted deep and savory, almost like a beef broth. The miso added (as is its wont) a further layer of winy complexity to the sauce. The mushrooms took on the flavors of the sauce, then concentrated them further. My only knock against this incarnation of the miso sauce is that it was a little too salty, probably because I seasoned the pork chop with salt and pepper before searing it in the skillet. That's easily corrected. Once the sauce was done, I poured it over the pork chop and a pile of spinach fettuccini on the side. It vanished shortly after it hit the plate.

Thank you, Mr. Bittman. The next time I visit my parents, I know your recipe will provide a template for at least one home-cooked, delicious meal.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Once upon a time, there were two little pea plants. They lived in a clay pot with an errant maple seedling and some cilantro. It was an old and venerable clay pot that had been enjoyed by many previous plant inhabitants.

As spring wore on and slanted toward summer, the pea plants got bigger. They seized upon splinters from the deck railing to shore themselves up and steadfastly ignored the bamboo pole that had been put into the clay pot expressly for their use. They put out more and more tendrils. They climbed over the errant maple seedling. Finally, two little blossoms (one on each plant) made their appearance. There was much rejoicing.

The night the blossoms began to show, there was a furious thunderstorm. Other plants had to be rescued from the pounding rain and winds, but the pea plants stood fast. The morning after, they were still there, unbloodied and unbowed. All seemed well.

Then, after a trip to the Asian supermarket, the gardener looked onto the deck and gave a cry of rage. Something had dug up the dirt in the venerable clay pot! The gardener rushed outside to confirm the sad news. Yes, some evil creature had dug deep into the dirt filling the clay pot and totally uprooted one pea plant. The other still seemed rooted, but both pea plants were sadly wilting, their hopeful little blossoms now seeming like a cruel joke.

There were no muddy pawprints to point toward a culprit. Was it the neighbor's cat? Was it a wandering squirrel? Was it a Barn Swallow digging up mud for its nest? It wasn't a rabbit or deer, because they're not inclined to climb up to a deck. But what was it?

All I can say it that it's a good thing I don't own a gun. Hell hath no fury like a gardener whose garden has been tampered with. Thank you for allowing me to vent like this. Now back to our regularly scheduled food blog.

Nasi goreng

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garden update 05.19.06

The lemon thyme has died, but there are two seedlings in the pot. Time (sorry) will tell what they are. The sage looks a bit peaked, but new green leaves are sprouting along the stems and from the roots. A cluster of new mitsuba seedlings has popped up in a pot where I planted seeds from last year's mitsuba plant (which is still going strong). There's also a mysterious something else in the mitsuba pot. Last year's lettuce seeds have less germination power this year (no surprise) but a few seedlings are growing. Last year's spinach seeds seem to have more oomph, with no fewer than four seedlings putting out small spinach leaves. Two pea plants are quite feisty, looking for a foothold on anything available. The supermarket cilantro is starting to bolt, but it still hanging on; I planted some more cilantro seeds from last year in that pot in an attempt to keep cilantro coming on. I planted the green bean seeds in an indoor pot today; they'll go outside in a week or so. I also planted some shiso and holy basil in indoor pots today.

In other news, last weekend's World Series of Birding taught me that whenever I was getting tired (I was awake for close to 48 hours straight this year), a hit of chicken fried rice or donburi did the trick of rebalancing the blood sugar levels and waking me up.

Homemade ramen

Ah, ramen. It's the epitome of a fast, cheap meal. Like every other impoverished student, I ate plenty of it during my college years; I've eaten plenty of it in the years since, as well. These days, I tend to prefer the Westbrae flavors that can be found at health food stores, but sometimes you can't say no to Nissin's version; it's right there in the supermarket. Of course, the Asian supermarket has a whole aisle of ramen and ramen-like products; the variety is so staggering that I've never truly explored that section of the store (although once I bought a Vietnamese instant pho bowl that tasted great but gave me major indigestion).

The funny thing is that ramen is a quick, convenient meal even if you don't resort to a prepackaged version; just take some chukasoba noodles, broth of some sort and some toppings, and you're set. You can even make the broth from scratch if you're really into it; I've got a recipe for that but haven't tried it yet because it requires hacking up meat bones, something for which I lack the equipment.

Yesterday I was perusing one of my cookbooks. I'm tempted to call it new, but I bought it a few months ago; I just hadn't cooked from it yet. It's called Masterclass in Japanese Cooking and was written by Emi Kazuko. Masterclass is essentially an anthology of recipes from different chefs (most but not all Japanese) which ranges from traditional dishes to cutting-edge gourmet fare. Some dishes have photos showing the cooking process step by step; these are the so-called "masterclass" recipes. There is also a long introductory section which introduces Japanese cooking, describes Japan's regional culinary specialties and defines commonly-used ingredients. It's a big coffee-table sort of book illustrated with lovely photographs of appetizing food. I find it intriguing because of the variety of dishes included in the book.

I decided to make "Ramen with Mushrooms" or Kinoko Ramen for this cookbook's maiden voyage in my kitchen. First off was soaking some dried mushrooms for an hour to reconsistute them; I used shiitake and oyster mushrooms soaked in two cups of water each. Towards the end of the soaking time, I also soaked some dried wakame seaweed. Then it was time to cook the chukasoba noodles, drain them and run cold water over them to stop the cooking process.

Stage two was making the ramen broth. This required putting the mushroom soaking liquid in the big skillet along with two cloves of peeled and crushed garlic and a 3/4 inch piece of peeled ginger, which I quartered rather than crushing. These ingredients were simmered for five minutes; then the aromatics were removed and six tablespoons of shoyu were added to the pan. I stirred a bit to combine the ingredients, then added the noodles and cooked them through. When it was hot, I removed broth and noodles to a serving bowl.

After cleaning out the pan, it was time to stir-fry the mushrooms (shiitake, oyster and fresh button mushrooms, all sliced) in a bit of peanut oil for a couple of minutes. Once they were done, I added them and the wakame to the bowl of ramen. Lunch was served.

I made a few minor alterations to the recipe (four cups of soaking liquid rather than five, a different assortment of mushroom types, did not season with salt and pepper at any point). The result was a substantial bowl of food which happened to be vegetarian and also used ingredients I had on hand. I have no doubt it was healthier than buying prepackaged ramen with who knows what additives included. It tasted better, too.

If you're hungry for more ramen content, check out The Official Ramen Homepage and WorldRamen.net

Not a mint julep

I'm not as involved with horse sports as I used to be (maybe I should make that "obsessed by") but I do at least try to make room for Kentucky Derby Day. This is a challenge because Derby Day is generally a week or two before the World Series of Birding, when birds are starting to arrive in earnest and scouting time is at an ever-increasing premium. This year, however, I managed to do my scouting in the morning and headed home afterward for the race and a good meal. Both race and meal turned out better than I could have hoped.

The meal was "Roasted Cornish Hens" (or hen in this case) from Ha Roda's A Vietnamese Kitchen (see my book review for Food, Bound) here. This was a simple marinate-and-roast recipe; the main quirk was covering the hen with foil during the roasting process in order to keep it moist and to contain the marinade flavor.

I took a small roasting pan, lined it with foil and put the thawed hen inside. The hen was marinated in the pan for three hours, with a turn of the fowl every hour. The marinade was composed of three tablespoons Chinese light soy sauce, two tablespoons hoisin sauce, a tablespoon of chopped ginger, two tablespoons Japanese rice vinegar, a tablespoon of Vietnamese fish sauce, a teaspoon of chopped garlic, quarter of a cup of water and a sprinkling of cracked black pepper.

After the marination was done, I pulled the hen out of the fridge to sit at room temperature for half an hour. Then it was time to set the oven to 350 degrees F, add the hen and roast for 40 minutes. After baking for 40 minutes, I pulled the hen out, brushed it with a solution of one teaspoon honey and one tablespoon water, turned the oven to broil and returned the hen to the oven for 20 minutes, uncovered.

I've roasted Cornish game hens before, but this was by far the best result (not that the others were chopped liver, either). Maybe it was because the hen was covered with foil for the roasting part of the program. The meat was moist but not underdone; the skin was brown but not too crisp. The extra marinade pooled around the hen but did not burn during the baking process; I poured it off and saved it. This was very tasty and I'm sure I'll be making it again. Actually, I think "delectable" is really the word. It was one of those meals that works out so well it earns a place in the gallery of red-letter meals.

Enhancing my enjoyment of the meal was the result of the race. As I said above, I haven't been paying as much attention to horse sports in recent years. As a result, I hadn't realized that Michael Matz was now training racehorses. I remember Michael Matz as an Olympic show jumper and member of the U. S. Equestrian Team. He was a favorite, partly because he started riding relatively late and did not come from the stereotypical horsey family with tons of money. He gained further note by his actions in the wake of a plane crash in 1989, when he helped three unaccompanied children from the plane, then went back in to pull out a baby. Most of the country didn't know who he was before the crash, but it was nice to learn that he was a good human being, as well as being a good rider. You can read more about Matz's history in this article from The Blood-Horse.

Life went on and I became a birder (albeit a birder who casts lingering looks at any horses we may pass while on birding trips). I hadn't thought about Michael Matz recently, but that changed when I turned on the Derby broadcast and discovered that he was Barbaro's trainer. Normally, I wait for the post parade to pick a favorite. Not this time. If Michael Matz had a horse in the race, his horse was my rooting interest.

Barbaro went on to win the race in decisive and downright elegant fashion. The field was widely considered to be very strong, so that made his victory even sweeter. In the wake of that, probably the skimpiest TV dinner would've tasted like dinner at a gourmet restaurant. Luckily enough, I had a meal that was far better than that.

I love it when life comes together that way, even if for a brief shining moment only.

A stir-frying series to watch

I haven't blogged this week yet because I haven 't done much cooking worthy of note. Money is going to be tight again, so I'm half-seriously contemplating a series on "Cooking Asian on a Budget." And no, that doesn't mean stocking up on ramen.

But I didn't post to complain about my life, I posted to draw your attention to the second installment in a series worth watching on another blog. Barbara Fisher's blog Tigers and Strawberries is always worth reading for her knowledgeable and often opinionated posts on food and related topics. Barbara has just posted the second in her series on stir-frying technique, a post on stir-frying chicken in a wok. The first post, a more general overview of stir-frying in a wok, can be found here. When I read this sort of post, I feel like I should be doing more with my blog than just chronicling what I cook and what's growing in the garden, but it's hard to imagine outdoing quality work like this. I guess all bloggers have their own niches and that's what gives the blogosphere (even a focused section of the blogosphere like the food blog universe) its variety and interest. But it still makes me want to do more with this blog. Oh well, I suppose I'll add that to the list of things to ponder.

Rejiggered Sichuan spaghetti

Sometimes laziness has a payoff. I've been cooking Sichuan spaghetti for a while, and pretty much sticking to the original recipe from Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients. But the other night, when I cooked dinner later than normal, I left a few of the extras out and wound up liking it even better.

All I did was stir-fry some ground pork in peanut oil until it changed color, then added four tablespoons of Lan Chi's Soy Bean Sauce with Chili and stir-fried some more. When done, I dumped it over some Chinese egg noodles. No extra chopped ginger or scallions, no sugar added to cut the hot sauce, no sesame oil tossed with the noodles, nothing.

This minimalist presentation threw the spotlight onto the meat and the hot bean sauce, and both were up to the challenge. In particular, this meal provided an opportunity to enjoy the complexity and depth of the sauce. The earthy flavor had a sort of wininess to it; the fermented beans were oddly reminiscent of not-too-sweet chocolate. Of course, it was lip-tingling hot as well. It was a rich savory meal that prospered, rather than wilted, from cutting out some of the extra ingredients. It was even better the next day after sitting in the fridge.

Mushroom noodles

It seems like I've been living high off the hog lately (or at least been eating too much beef), so last night I went vegetarian. I topped some egg noodles with mushrooms and sauce. I sauteed some sliced button mushrooms in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil until they were cooked through, then added half a cup of water, and shoyu and mirin to taste. This cooked down into a sweet sauce not unlike that in simmered hijiki with abura-age, a similarly light vegetarian dish. There was no recipe involved; it was just a matter of taking available ingredients and doing something simple with them.

I should insert the usual comments about tinkering with the seasonings because the sauce was a little on the sweet side, but I did find it tasty, and it served its mission of being a light yet satisfying dinner.

More herbs

The season of danger has arrived; the potted herb plants have arrived at the supermarket. After agonizing over the candidates yesterday, I succumbed to temptation and brought two plants home. One is a Spicy Globe basil, with a nice lemon fragrance. The other is cilantro, which will require careful repotting. Of course, once I brought the cilantro home, I realized that its foliage resembled a tiny seedling that has mysteriously appeared in the big clay pot. I guess I planted some cilantro seeds in there on a whim and forgot all about it. Oops. Some gardener I am. Then again, given my total lack of success with cilantro last year, I'm not expecting much.

Turkey cutlet and purple mushrooms

No, they weren't some crazy controlled substance. It's just that sliced button mushrooms turn purple if you cook them in a red wine sauce.

Easter isn't one of the big holidays in my house, but it does provide an excuse to cook a nice meal. I pulled a turkey cutlet out of the freezer, thawed it and cobbled dinner together. I drew on Mark Bittman's recipe for "Sauteed Chicken Cutlets with Quick Sauce" for inspiration (the recipe can be found in How to Cook Everything). The main impulse for the meal, however, was my idea of what might work; the recipe served as a useful sounding board for my ideas rather than the blueprint for the dish.

I began by melting some butter in the big skillet. Then I seared the cutlet on both sides over higher heat. I lowered the heat and sauteed the meat until it had cooked through but still had a bit of pink in the middle. I then set the oven to 200 degrees F and put the cutlet inside on a baking sheet to keep it warm while I made the sauce. Better underdone than overdone at this stage, according to Bittman.

Some more butter went into the skillet and then I sauteed the mushrooms until they had darkened. Then the wine (Bogle Cabernet Sauvignon) went into the skillet along with some chicken stock (half a cup each). I added salt and pepper to taste, as well as about a teaspoon of crushed fresh rosemary. In the initial stages, the sauce tasted somewhat thin, but as it cooked down, it got more intense in flavor.

In the meantime, I had cooked some spinach fettuccini. As the sauce reduced, I pulled the cutlet out of the oven and put it on the plate along with the fettuccini; it had produced some juice while sitting in the oven, so I added the juice to the skillet. That did the trick of adding a little something extra to the sauce's flavor. I let the sauce reduce a bit more, then poured it over the cutlet and the pasta.

The most startling thing about the result was the intense purple color of the mushrooms. It was the sort of tint you'd expect from a bottle of food coloring. Then again, anyone who's ever tried to get a red wine stain out of fabric might be forgiven for thinking that that's precisely what red wine is. Despite the brightness of the color, the flavor was less intense than a previous red wine sauce I've made using Zinfandel; no surprise there, I suppose. Next time I try something like this, I might add some balsamic vinegar or lemon juice for a more complex flavor.

The cutlet itself had a nice crisp browned coating but was tender and just slightly moist inside; just the right consistency. Its plain flavor made a good foil for the sauce and pasta. It made a fine meal for a special occasion, and wasn't half bad as a dish cooked mostly off the cuff.

Garden update 04.18.06

First off comes the news that my part of New Jersey has moved from USDA Hardiness Zone 6 to Arbor Day Foundation Hardiness Zone 7 (a warmer zone). See the Arbor Day Foundation's map of Hardiness Zone changes between 1990-2006 for more details.

The weather has warmed up around here enough that most of the plants have been put out onto the deck. My tender tropical sage seedling is still inside, as is the rosemary plant. Meanwhile, a couple of lettuce seedlings are poking up. No spinach has been heard from yet, so I planted more. One mitsuba seedling is growing. Oddest of all is the seedling in one of last year's Thai basil pots, which looks suspiciously like Thai basil. Since this pot sat out on the deck all winter, a tropical seedling from an herb such as Thai basil should not be growing in the pot, but there it is.

Meanwhile, some of this year's new plants have arrived, if only in seed form. I ordered seeds of green shiso, upland cress and holy basil from Nichols Garden Nurseries. In addition, they sent me a free packet of carrot seeds (Scarlet Nantes variety) for the Garden Writers Association Plant a Row for the Hungry initiative. Given my novice gardening skills, I'm not sure how many carrots I'll really be able to contribute to the neighborhood soup kitchen, but I'll give it a go.

When I was on Cape Cod for the holidays, my mother gave me some Black-seeded Blue Lake bean seeds. I need to set up some sort of framework before I plant them, but my mother says they're a good variety that's very easy to grow. I hope so, since I haven't done the bean thing before. I've also planted some peas from last year, so we'll see if they produce anything.

Citrus shrimp

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

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

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

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

East meets west

Last night I continued my ongoing series of Thai fried rice meals by trying what can only be described as a fusion dish: Canadian bacon fried rice. Although Canadian bacon (or what we USA-ites call Canadian bacon) is not the first thing you think of when you think of Asian food, using it for flavoring in fried rice fits well with this dish's basic philosophy. After all, the meat is intended to give some extra flavor to the rice, not to be the meal's focal point. Some sliced Canadian bacon (or any part of the bacon-ham family) works well in this role.

The only problem is that I had intended to save some for lunch before today's planned hiking trip. Alas, it was so tasty I ate it all last night.

Another day, another blog

Before I got into cooking, I already had a long history with the first great love of my life: books. I started reading early, and have never stopped. I usually have multiple books going at once; some of the current entries include Through Asia by Sven Hedin, Prints and People by A. Hyatt Mayor, My Famous Evening by Howard Norman and Some of the Dharma by Jack Kerouac. Writing stories, telling stories and reading stories have been abiding joys in my life, even when other things weren't going so well.

When I got into cooking, I discovered a whole new category of books to read, and to make it even better, many cookbooks rise beyond the purely utilitarian into the realm of good wordsmithy, or even literature. Well, now there's a blog devoted to food and books about food. It's called Food, Bound and it's part of the WellFed family. Better yet, I will be blogging for Food, Bound; I'll be reviewing cookbooks and cooking test recipes from them, which isn't that different from what I do here at Seven Kinds of Soy Sauce.

Smug about stew

The other day, when I was making oxtail stew, it was a warm sunny spring day. It was the sort of day when one questions whether stew is necessary at all. After all, stew and warm weather are not known as one of the great "perfect together" combinations.

Today started sunny but cool, clouded up, and now is raw, rainy and brisk. Now I can reheat my stew leftovers and feel downright smug. Ah, spring.

Pasta sauce comes from a jar

Well, that's my attitude. I can buy Newman's Own marinara or vodka sauce and have a lovely meal. But I'm trying to change my ways. It really doesn't take any longer to cobble together a homemade sauce than it does to open a jar...at least, if you pick the right homemade sauce.

Last night's pasta of choice (as it often is) was wide egg noodles from the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers market. The brand is Mrs. Miller's Homemade Noodles. They're very addictive, even though I know I can make my own. I was out of bottled pasta sauce, so I figured, why not throw together some of my own?

I sauteed some porcini mushrooms and sliced chicken breast in olive oil. When the pan started getting dry, I added the porcini soaking water and some crushed fresh rosemary. When the chicken seemed done, I fished the solids out of the skillet, then cooked the remaining sauce down some. To add a little sweetness to the juice, I also added about a tablespoon of mirin. The result still tasted much more of porcini than of mirin. All in all, rather tasty but not too rich. The chicken breast was bland, as is its wont (that's why I've been using chicken thigh meat more lately). Fit Fare had a good post about livening up chicken breast recently. Maybe the next time I try this sauce, I'll add some marination to the recipe. In the meantime, I'll just inhale the aroma of simmering oxtail stew drifting from the kitchen to perfume the entire condo. Mmmmm.

Asian telephone: third call

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

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

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

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

Khmer-ical food

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

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

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

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

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

Signs of the season

Late this afternoon, I planted the first new things in this year's container garden. I planted some lettuce, some spinach and some mitsuba. We have a bit of a warming trend forecast for the next few days, so I decided to go for it. I would've planted the lettuce sooner, but the nights have been quite cold for the last week or so. As I rearranged dirt in the pots on my deck, I heard the Wood Frogs sounding off in the creek, another sure sign of spring. Wood Frogs, along with Spring Peepers, are the first frogs that start calling in the spring hereabouts.

Yesterday I made Thai fried rice with chicken thighs. I've been using Nancie McDermott's recipe from Quick and Easy Thai, which really is quick and easy. I love the clean taste of the fried rice; there are few ingredients apart from chopped onion and garlic, meat, fish sauce, beaten egg, sugar and jasmine rice (of course). Last night I didn't even use the chopped scallions. As the meat stir-fries in the pan, it leaves some fond (the brown stuff on the bottom of the pan), but the rice sops it up so that it adds more flavor to the finished dish. The chicken thighs were by far the most assertive part of the dish, almost in an unbalanced way, but when I had the leftovers for brunch this morning, it all tasted good. Thai fried rice really is an excellent way of dressing up leftovers without a lot of effort, and winding up with a tasty meal. It's also an excellent lesson in the "less is more" style of cooking.

Liquor = sauce

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

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

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

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

Hijiki and pretzels

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

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

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

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

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

Cutting the heat

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

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

Yakisoba out of the bottle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garden musings 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few links

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

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

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

Five-spice game hen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asian telephone refinement

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

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

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

Pretzel quest

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

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

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

Thanks for the tip, Debbie!

Cooking with the ancients

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

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

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

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

Asian telephone: second call

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fettuccini with carrots and mushrooms

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

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

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

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

Asian telephone: first call

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

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

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

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

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

Chicken and shiro-sherry sauce

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

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

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

Stuff I haven't blogged lately

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meme: Too much information

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

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

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

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

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

5. I know how to read tarot cards.

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

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

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

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

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

And now, a word from our sponsor

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

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

Meme: Five cooking challenges for 2006

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

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

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

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

4. Another specific challenge: use my bamboo steamer.

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

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

Obachan
Gluten-free Girl
Sweetnicks
Mahanandi
umami

Pennsylvania road food

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

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

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

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

Gai lan three ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be fed well

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

Korean spaghetti

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

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

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

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

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