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.