Night(s) of the living noodles

Even I never thought I could get a bowl of leftovers through the better part of one week, but I reckoned without Chiang Mai curry noodles. This dish hails from the northern part of Thailand and finds its roots in Burmese cooking, according to Real Thai, but Thais have adopted it for their own and have worked some changes on it. The recipe I used came from Quick and Easy Thai, and can be found here.

I followed the recipe the first night (apart from not making the deep-fried noodle nest intended to garnish the dish). The next night, I decided it needed some more noodles, so I cooked some rice flakes and tossed them into the curry. Also not bad, though a curry with two different kinds of noodles was probably overkill. The following night, I thought the remaining curry needed another infusion of starch to make up for the noodles that had been eaten, so this time I made jasmine rice and stirred it in. I froze a portion of that version, and that was what went to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival with me. The meat I used was chicken thigh meat.

This made a good solid meal (well, ok, several good solid meals). It was a relatively mild curry in terms of heat. The chicken thigh meat complemented the sweet coconut milk-based curry nicely. Another winner from my latest favorite cookbook.

Festival food

Last weekend I went to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival with some friends including The Lurker and The Dancer. It has become a tradition for us. We camp on the farm where the festival is held, which makes it very convenient to catch all the music one could want. Since we camp, we bring some food with us; the rest we buy on the midway.

Stuff I brought this year included:

*Gatorade - essential for long days outdoors, especially in summer.
*seedless green grapes - quick doses of food and fluid in an easily managed package. Unfortunately, the sun, heat, and trips in and out of the cooler are hard on them, and some always go to waste.
*Stella D'oro Marguerite breakfast cookies.
*an assortment of tea bags - I only drank the Ten Ren ginger tea and Good Earth Original tea this time.
*two small bottles of Caravelle Thai tea - delicious!
*arare - Japanese rice crackers labeled "Friendly Pack" in a blue and white bag.
*butter cookies from the bakery at the Asian supermarket - tasty but on the dry side.
*Goya Maria cookies - not eaten during the festival, so I'm been snacking on them this week.
*Chiang Mai noodles that would not die – lunch on Friday, but more about them in the next post.

One of my favorite things about FRFF is Myron's Number 1 Yakitori. I discovered Myron's sauces in the supermarket and was quite happy to buy them off the shelf (my favorite is the tsukeyaki). Then I was strolling the FRFF midway in 1997 (my first visit to the festival) when I spotted a red stand selling yakitori. It was Myron himself. Boy, did that make me happy.

Myron’s stand sells an assortment of food. You can get beef teriyaki or chicken yakitori on rice, chilled noodles in spicy peanut sauce, pork or vegetarian shumai, and iced jasmine tea. The shumai in particular are highly addictive. If you want to doctor your food, a full assortment of Myron’s sauces is available, along with sriracha sauce. More than one musician playing the festival has lauded Myron’s food from the stage; I remember the Waybacks waxing eloquent about the shumai when they played Winterhawk (FRFF’s currently inactive sister festival) a few years back. If you want a souvenir, Myron will be happy to sell you bottles of sauce to take home.

This year I had the chicken yakitori; it was tender on the inside with not too much char on the outside, skewered with green pepper and onion and served on white rice. I also had the delectable pork and leek shumai and a teriyaki sirloin special without rice (a little on the rare side but not enough to cause trouble).

One quibble about Myron’s is the smallish portion sizes, but that is not uncommon on the midway (and besides, it makes portions easier to carry around). A number of stands bucked the trend this year by serving up big platters of food (then again, Sunflower Pizza has always offered huge slabs of pizza). Since the festival audience is a captive one, prices tend to be on the high side (at $8 for a pulled pork sandwich from the barbecue stand, The Lurker regretfully said no). Vegetarian food has always been well-represented at the festival, but those of us who require meat to get through a long camping weekend have been left wanting more. Not this year. There was barbecue, there were chicken fingers, there was a new Cajun stand.

Since I wasn’t there for the whole festival, I missed some places I normally visit. With all the Gatorade, I never needed a smoothie for emergency rehydration. I never had a morning blast of cappuccino. I missed Sunflower Pizza and never got around to sampling the ginger ice cream at the 4-H stand. I did get catfish cakes at the Cajun stand. The cakes were small, mild and of falling-apart consistency; the accompanying remoulade was also mild but tasty and a good complement. The “Cajun slaw” served on the side was a mix of sliced peppers, onions and radishes in a vinegary sauce – not bad, but not quite what I was in the mood for. I wanted to go back and try some of the other Cajun food, but that didn’t happen either.

Finally, in an indication that I may be doing something right in the diet and exercise department, I was able to hike up the steep hill without huffing and puffing for the first time ever. We camp on the hill and the stages are at the bottom of the hill, so the trek back up to the campsite is never a welcome prospect. Even though there are shuttle buses, one always ends up climbing the hill more often than expected.

Chicken and Thai basil

Last night I made another recipe from Quick and Easy Thai. It really was quick and easy, not to mention delicious. It was "Chicken with Fresh Basil." There is also a version of this recipe in Real Thai. You can find the recipe here.

Although the recipe calls for holy basil, I used Thai basil from the garden. It added terrific flavor to the chicken and sauce. I only used one chile, and could've gone higher on the heat with no ill effects; on the other hand, my last bite of the meal involved one of the chile pieces and boy, was it hot! It was good, though. The sauce was dark and rich, but not overbearingly so. Yet another winner from this cookbook, which has been a real pleasure to cook through so far.

Return to the blog

Well, no, I hadn't deserted it. It's just that when life gets a little busy, the blog is often put on the back burner (as it were). I've been cooking, and have a few new things to blog, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. More stuff soon, I promise.

Return to Soonja's

This post actually belongs earlier in the week, on Tuesday night, but the mood has been up and down, mainly thanks to my aging car. But I try to keep my non-cooking woes out of this blog as much as possible, so on to Soonja's.

It's been a while since I've really eaten out for any reason other than a birding trip. On Tuesday, though, I decided to celebrate my hopefully solvent future. I also wanted to thank The Deacon for her various forms of support, so I treated her to dinner at Soonja's Restaurant in Princeton.

Soonja's is a small pan-Asian style restaurant much favored by the local populace. We got there early on a Tuesday in July, however, so we practically had the place to ourselves. Later in the evening, and at times when the university is in session, that would be a neat trick indeed. Soonja's features dishes from Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai cuisines. They have an extensive sushi menu. They also have a "create your own noodle dish" option, which is what The Deacon had on this visit (she chose soba noodles, chicken, and ginger scallion sauce). Although The Deacon doesn't do raw fish, she had the oshinko maki (Japanese pickle) roll for a first course.

In keeping with my recent reading on Korean food, I had beef bulgogi. This was the first time I'd had bulgogi and I was impressed with the rich smoky flavor. The bulgogi was served with rice, vinegared bean sprouts and slivered carrots with a touch of sesame oil, and miso soup. I had a tempura appetizer as well. It was very generous (8-10 pieces), mostly vegetables with two shrimp. Unfortunately, this tempura didn't come up to the quality of past favorites such as the tempura from the Fuji in NYC or from Sukeroku in Little Falls. The batter on the shrimp was not light and fluffy, but more of the consistency one would expect from conventional fried shrimp. The batter on the veggies was much better.

As for beverages, The Deacon had a pot of oolong tea, while I indulged in a sweet Thai iced tea. We were too full for dessert, alas. Maybe next time, because there certainly will be a next time (and next times after that). Soonja's provides an assortment of good Asian food from several different countries. The atmosphere is casual and enjoyable (one quibble: the lighting is on the dim side). It's definitely one of my favorite local restaurants.

First tomato of the season

Late last season, I planted some seeds from my patio tomato plant. I kept it growing through the winter. There were several diebacks, times when it seemed done for, but new green growth always kept coming up from some part of the plant. Come spring, I put it out on the deck and watched it flower (as well as drop some flowers). The payoff finally came today when I picked a small, cracked but ruby red tomato off the plant. I sliced it up with some homegrown lettuce and had a homegrown salad. It may have been a small tomato (bigger than a cherry tomato, smaller than a plum tomato) but it had the rich ripe flavor that homegrown tomatoes are known for.

Best of all, there are more tomatoes coming on. I guess I'll have to save some of these seeds too.

Shopping spree

It was inevitable. As I read through Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen, I kept encountering new and unfamiliar ingredients. The Korean aisle in the Asian supermarket started exerting a gravitational pull. I made a list. But wouldn't you know it, yesterday's supermarket trip was made on the spur of the moment, and who knows where the list is.

Korean stuff I bought: pine nuts, hot red pepper paste, cooking wine, napa cabbage and boiled oyster mushrooms. Only a start, involving items that I knew were featured frequently in the cookbook and which I remembered clearly enough that I felt comfortable buying them. The dried bellflower root and boiled fernbracken got put back due to a need for further research. I wasn't sure if the soybean paste was really fermented soybean paste (toenjang), so I left it, too.

I also learned a lesson regarding the usefulness of reference sources when shopping at the Asian supermarket. Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen describes a host of ingredients, but in generic terms (no brand names, in other words) and the Korean names are given as English transliterations, not in Korean characters. Asian Ingredients often does give brand names and even descriptions for the items it recommends, but it is weaker on Korean ingredients than on Chinese or Japanese. As a result, I was left trying to puzzle out English names on bottles and boxes, knowing full well that an English description on an Asian container may fall woefully short of a useful title. I may have to teach myself the Korean alphabet. This is the sort of thing that makes me think that a "cheat sheet" of Asian characters frequently used in food labels (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, etc., etc.) would be a really helpful item.

While at the Asian supermarket, I also got more usual items such as ginger, firm tofu, abura-age, Chinese broad noodles, Thai chiles and green tea ice cream. I was also able to confirm that the ducks at the Asian supermarket are half the price of the ones at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmer's Market, but I had suspected as much anyway. The cutest incident I witnessed was when a dad picked up a big angled luffa and pretended it was a snake. His kids gleefully pretended they were terrified of the "snake." Just in general, there were piles of gorgeous-looking produce; it was very difficult to walk past all of it.

Mussamun curry

Another week, another Thai dish. This time it was "Mussamun Curry Beef with Potatoes and Peanuts" from Quick and Easy Thai. Real Thai has another version of this which is much more labor-intensive (plus the book includes a recipe for homemade mussamun curry paste, rather than recommending the store-bought variety). You can find lots of recipes for mussamun or massaman curries on the web.

The mussamun curry paste is more like an Indian curry, with its complex interplay of spices and a fairly restrained chile bite. I substituted duck stock for the suggested chicken or beef stock. The beef wound up being overcooked, with an almost fishy flavor (I guess from the seasonings). That said, it wound up tasting pretty good; the curry sauce was smooth, sweet and flavorful. Last night I had the curry straight (it was almost soup-like), but today I poured it over rice. I may have to stop using my big Pyrex bowl for such meals, however. It conducts heat so well that it's impossible to pick up the bowl when it's full of steaming hot food. If one has a dining room table, it may not be such a big deal, but since I usually eat my dinners curled up in an armchair (aka "the comfy chair"), it presents a problem.

More than wonderful

When faced with the challenge of throwing together lunch for a trip with The Lurker and Perfect Tommy yesterday, I decided to go the Thai route. I had spare rice, I had leftover Kaga-style duck. It was time for fried rice. I followed my last version of Thai fried rice; the only changes were that I used the leftover duck, I added spinach, and I threw in an extra splash of fish sauce at the end to get more of the flavor bits off the skillet.

This fried rice turned out so well I might have to make duck Kaga-style in the future just so it's available to make fried rice. The flavorful bits of meat added the right accent to the rice; the duck wasn't overpowering this time, it was part of a complete balanced dish. The rice was great, partly because the delicious teriyaki-type sauce on the duck made its way into the rest of the dish. This was a real winner.

Too wonderful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thai yakisoba

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

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

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

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

Five cookbooks meme

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

1. Total number of cookbooks I've owned

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

2. Last cookbook I bought

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

3. Last food book I read

Real Thai by Nancie McDermott.

4. Five cookbooks that mean a lot to me

(in semi-chronological order)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bacon press
Cuisine Capers
FoodNerd!
OsloFoodie
words to eat by

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

Thai fried rice

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

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

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

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

Chicken and cashews, Thai-style

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

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

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

Land Ho!

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

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

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

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

In the lockup

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

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

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

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

Thai leftovers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pan-fried chicken strips

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

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

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

Beef knockout stir-fry

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

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

Veggies take your marks

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

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

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