Adventurous eating

Natto is a thing I'd heard about, but I'd never seen it until I went to Uwajimaya in Beaverton last weekend. I thought it sounded like a pretty strange thing, and even though I like trying all sorts of strange things, I was a little scared of it.

It came in a 3 pack in the frozen section. I think the gist of the little cartoon is that you warm it up then stir it around with your chopsticks. The cartoon was baffling until I opened up the package. I thought for sure it was a picture of a large pot, indicating that the natto should be stirred into a pile of boiled eggs. Which made no sense at all when I looked up eating instructions online. Yes, I did need to look up instructions for how to eat this. Even so, that cartoon... Once I opened the package the meaning of the drawing became apparent. The orange blob is a little dab of seasoning, and the round things that I mistook for a bunch of boiled eggs are, in fact, the fermented soybeans.

If you've never eaten natto before, I have 2 recommendations:

1. Unless you enjoy slimy goopy foods, don't.
2.Wait until you are very hungry to try it.

I realize these are very ominous provisos, but really, don't get scared off yet. I mean, I ate it, and I'm still fine. In the first place, if you don't like slippery gooey foods, there's no point in trying this stuff. There ain't nothing slipperier nor gooey-er, except maybe a mudpuppy dipped in Elmer's glue. I don't inherently dislike slimy food, so that, per se, didn't creep me out. Why wait until you are extremely hungry to try it? Because it is so profoundly unlike any other thing I have ever eaten.

Here's what you do: You microwave the little packet until it's hot through. You realize that the room now smells powerfully like stale beer. As you stir the dab of sauce into the beans, and watch the gravy turn into a filamentous mass of glue strings that are persistent enough to suspend a couple beans several inches below your chopsticks, you think better of consuming them neat, as it were. So you stir them into rice, with some hot sauce and furikake, as recommended by some people online who are either actual Asians or are mocking Asian-English syntax errors. And then you aren't sure if you like it, or you are actually horrified but ravenously hungry. The beans are just beans, they are like smaller ones of the things you find in a can of Busch's baked beans. But instead of that ketchupy red sauce, there is this stuff that acts a lot like rubber cement and smells like flat beer, and whiffy french cheese, and maybe feet, or maybe something floral and herby. It isn't sweet, it isn't very salty. Sriracha and furikake really help jazz it up. Minced green onion is tradidional too, but I was out of those. What can I say? It made quite an impression on me.

They say that it takes about 10 tries to determine if you actually like or dislike a new food, because we are designed to be slightly averse to novelty. It's an evolutionary safety feature. Novelty = increased risk, taking increased risks = (in nature) increased risk of DEATH! Having a preference for familiar foods cuts down on the likelihood of eating something that will kill you.

But come on people! We live in the 21st century! Live a little! If a slimy soybean didn't kill all those Japanese folks, it isn't going to kill you. In fact, natto is comfort food to lots of Japanese. They eat it for breakfast, but I think I need to try it at other times of day several more times before I do that.

more ballyhoo

Here's another recipe that got a lot of squawk in the food blogs a while ago. Everybody was all ooooh, you gotta make this fried rice, this is the best fried rice. It is good fried rice, but it didn't blow me away or anything. I'll probably make it again even, but not for breakfast. I'm just too damn hungry to fiddle around with it first thing in the morning.

  

The original recipe is here. It says to fry the ginger & garlic in the oil first, then fry the rice with the same oil. That probably makes a difference. There's onions in it too, but I didn't have onions. Oops, oh well. So I put in edamame for color which is actually pretty good. And soy sauce doesn't really amaze me or anything, so I used a dab of black bean sauce, which really helps.

1 cup cold rice
1 small clove garlic, minced
1 small slice ginger, minced
edamame - I used pre-cooked frozen, thawed out first.
1 egg
sesame oil and other oil for frying
salt
black bean sauce

Put about a tablespoon of cooking oil in a pan on medium high heat. When the oil is hot, dump in the rice and a pinch of salt and stir it around to break up the clumps and coat the rice with a little oil. Cover the pan and wait for there to be some brown bits on the rice. Stir it up, push it to the side of the skillet and add about another teaspoon of cooking oil plus a dash of sesame for flavor. Add the ginger & garlic bits and another pinch of salt, then fry until they're crispy.  Throw in the edamame and a little black bean sauce, stir everything up, and dump it onto a plate so you can fry an egg to go on top. Don't over fry the egg or you won't be able to stir the yolk into the rice.

What do I think? It's fried rice for chrissakes! Of course it tastes good, it's po' folks food! I guess I just feel like it was another case of the fancy chef guy who has the tv spot or whatever being able to say 'Hey look! I can make normal food too!' and everybody else going 'No way man! That's amazing! You did that on tv!'

Like I said, I'll probably make this the next time the fridge is empty, but I feel rather impatient with the fuss about it. I kinda thought well duh, you put fried garlic and eggs on anything mostly, and it'll taste pretty darn good.

Spinach & Mushroom Risotto

  

  
I know I said I don't really like rice, and it is mostly true. I think of it as a thing that you eat with more interesting stuff. Risotto is not really just rice, though. It's a dish that calls for rice as an ingredient. Don't be put off because you find risotto on restaurant menus, it isn't complicated or difficult to make, and you don't even need special rice to do it. I know everybody says to use arborio or carneroli rice, but I read some instructions from a real Italian lady, and she said it doesn't matter. So I used sushi rice, and it turned out great. Also, it cooks faster than you would think. The whole recipe took me at most 45 minutes from "Oh what the hell do I cook?" to scarfing risotto while typing this post. This is a small recipe, good for a single-gal-sized dinner with a dab of leftovers in case I wake up ravenous at 4 AM. It happens.

a generous half cup of sushi rice
a cup of sliced brown button musrooms
2 green onions, finely sliced
butter and olive oil for frying
hot water and about 1/2 teaspoon broth concentrate
pepper
a pinch of fresh herbs, I used about 1 leaf of sage an an equal amount each of rosemary & thyme
a generous handful of baby spinach leaves
about 1 ounce of freshly grated parmesan

Put a kettle of water on to heat up while you chop the veggies.

Put about 1 tablespoon each of butter and olive oil in a heavy skillet, and heat to medium. Saute the mushrooms and onions until the mushrooms loose about half their volume and start to look a little dry. Remove them from the pan.

If the mushroom goop in the pan looks pleasantly brown rather than burnt black, add another tablespoon of oil to the pan and dump in the rice. (If it is burnt, just rinse out the pan and start fresh.) Stir the rice around for one or two minutes until the grains start to get a little bit brown, then put the mushrooms back in. Pour in about 1/2 cup of hot water and stir it around quickly. Pour in another half cup when about 3/4 of the first round has disappeared. Add the broth concentrate somewhere around here. Keep stirring and adding water as the pan dries out. When the rice is about half cooked, add the herbs and pepper.

Eventually, a thick, smooth, sauce will develop around the grains and veggies. It's done when the rice is al dente. Remove the pan from the heat, stir in the cheese and serve immediately.

Pointers:

1.  Keep the pan hot. The first cup of water should sizzle pretty vigorously in the pan. There should be continuous bubbling and stirring.
2.  As you cook, don't let it dry out completely. Let the sauce build up. The finished texture should be like a very rich savory porridge.
3. Most recipes call for stock, but I went with the broth concentrate because I could just drop the concentrate in the pan and add water as needed, instead of measuring out a pot of stock and then either having too much or too little. And having to wash another dish.
4. While the soup concentrate was an acceptable shortcut for me, anything but fresh cheese was not. The cheese contributes more to the flavor of the dish, and the stuff in the green can that goes on spaghetti does not taste the same at all. Also, fresh cheese melts and adds a creamy texture to the risotto, which green-can cheese, being quite dry, will not do.

I read about a dozen risotto recipes before making this. One thing I did not have was wine, which many recipes call for. It seems to be traditional to add a splash of a dry white in with the broth. Garlic is another common addition, but I just wasn't in the mood. Everything else is pretty much up for grabs. I read recipes with chicken, with asparagus, or fava beans, or broccoli, they had different sorts of cheeses, lots of recipes had lemon, and one that really made me think huh was a version with beets and sharp cheddar. I don't know that I'd like a cheddar flavored risotto, but I started thinking that pancetta or bacon and beets with some white wine and gruyere would be pretty nice. You can even make pretty decent vegan risotto, with a good vegetable stock. Just no soy cheese, for chrissakes, that stuff is so vile. If you go vegan, add a drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of sea salt just before serving to give it the richness that real cheese would add.

  

Chicken and Majaddara

  

  
What makes something authentic, anyway? What's the cutoff point at which something stops being what it purports to be? In the case of food, who gets to decide? I got this rice mix at TJ's to see what it was like, and it's pretty generic, I think of it as being typically 'american' flavored. It's got long grain rice, wild rice, and a bunch of dehydrated vegetables in it. Looks great in the bag, plenty less so once you cook it up. By itself, it's awfully blah. It's rice for people who don't want to eat rice, but aren't adventurous enough to go out and get something with texture or flavor. This is what despairing non-cooks will slap on their oafish menfolk's plates in the hope of getting them to eat anything except white bread and a pound of bratwurst for dinner. I tried making risotto with it, which tasted ok, but I might have known it would lack the creamy texture that makes risotto worth stirring for half an hour.

Then I thought of majaddara. Nicholas' Restaurant has amazing majaddara. I looked up a bunch of recipes, and they're all just 3 things: lentils, rice, fried onions. The flavoring agents range from salt only to any combination of salt, pepper, allspice, bay leaf, cloves, cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, coriander, lemon rind, fennel seed, and nutmeg, plus maybe other things. Which brings me back to the authenticity thing. I don't actually care that much about authenticity, especially in food, but I did feel like the vague instructions in some of the recipes to use whatever I feel like to tart it up gave me the green light to use this bastardized rice for majaddara. Good thing, because otherwise I think that rice would have stayed in my cupboard until it got infested by meal moths.

Majaddara according to me:

1/2 cup rice
1/2 cup lentils
2 or 3 allspice berries
1 or 2 cloves
1 bay leaf
a couple pinches cumin
salt
olive oil
the fried onions from the previous post

yogurt, chopped mint, oregano & parsley for serving

Cook the rice & lentils separately, because they get done at different rates. I salt the water for the rice, but not the lentils. Cook the rice as you normally do, but add the spices. Cook the lentils as though you were making pasta, again with the spices in the water. I used red hulled lentils, which cook very fast. Because they are hulled, they tend to disintegrate quickly. I solved the problem by just cooking them until they were barely done, then draining them quickly and putting them back in the warm pan with a little olive oil and a dash of salt. This let them continue softening up while the rice cooked. I also pulled out the bay leaf and allspice to keep flavoring the rice. When the rice is done, throw out the cloves, leaves and berries, and mix the lentils, rice, and onions together.

The chicken that went with:

2 chicken thighs
1/4 lemon, chopped into 1/2" bits
2 green onions, chopped
salt & pepper
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon crushed coriander seeds
a pinch of cayenne
about 1/4 teaspoon  pumpkin pie spice
about 3 tablespoons olive oil

 Marinate the chicken for about 2 or 3 days with all the other ingredients. I recommend pan-frying the chicken, unless you have a grill and want to cook it that way. The benefit of the frying pan is that the marinade reduces to a zippy glaze. Throw out the lemons halfway through cooking if you do that, or the rinds will overpower the rest of the flavors. On the other hand, grilling makes most things turn out pretty well. That's what Pete does, and it's his recipe. Except for the pie spice- he uses cinnamon sticks, but I don't have any of those.

Ba Bao Fan

The name of this dessert was baffling to me when I was little. In a typically oriental piece of transliteration, dad used to call it "eight precious pudding". I thought he was saying "a precious pudding", which made more sense than ba bao fan. I mean, I got that the 'fan' part meant rice, but the rest- bobble fan?- ba bowl fan? Huh. Beat the hell out of me. I think I was in high school when I finally figured out that the name means something like '8 things in rice'. There's some kind on chinese numerology business going on here. 8 is an auspicious number, so I think the implication is that if you have eight things in the rice, that must make it fancy. If you look up recipes online, a lot of them will call it Eight Treasures Pudding. 

But never mind! It is delicious, and takes virtually no effort to make, especially if you buy the sweet bean filling in a can. Here's what you need:

3 cups sushi rice. It will say 'short grain sweet rice' if you aren't in the habit of buying it.
2 or 3 tablespoons canola oil, or lard of you're feeling particularly authentic. Duck fat would be even fancier!

1 1/2 cans sweet bean filling- there were 2 kinds at the store, and I recommend the one in the green & yellow can. The one in the blue package isn't as good, which I might have known at the outset. The sketchy outdated label design on the L&W brand made me suspect that the contents would be more authentic in much the same way that having a frightening washroom in a chinese restaurant augurs well for the quality of the food. It's a cultural thing.



toasted, unsalted cashew nuts
ginko nuts
candied orange peel or pieces of candied orange
dates- regular, or chinese red ones if you can find them.
prunes
golden raisins
maraschino cherries!

This will make enough for 13 adults and 5 children ages 4-7ish.

The only ingredients that are really critical are the rice and the sweet bean filling. The important thing is that you end up with 8 fruits, nuts, etc to decorate the rice with. Maraschino cherries had a decidedly exotic and luxurious mystique to me as a child, and they remain my favorite no matter how horrible I know they are. Other traditional things are lotus seeds, chinese red dates, dried apricots, and maybe dried pineapple or candied chinese plums. I also used a few blanched almonds, but that was because I was really leery of the ginko nuts. See note below.

Rinse the rice 3 or 4 times, until most of the excess starch has been washed off. You could skip this step, if you wanted, but the rice is much easier to handle later if it's been well rinsed. Drain the rice, put it in a rice cooker with 4 cups of water, and cook as usual. When the rice is done, gently toss the oil or fat into the rice with a fork. Let the rice cool a bit while you assemble the rest of the stuff.

You will need a large metal or glass mixing bowl for a mold. Round is traditional, but there is nothing I can think of that should stop you from using a ring mold, a loaf pan, or any other fancy shape you like. The limiting factor is the fact that you have to steam the mold for an hour or two, so whatever you use has got to fit inside another, larger, pot with a lid. I had to borrow my brother-in-law's 5 gallon pressure cooker for this one.

Oil the mold. Arrange the rest of the ingredients in fancy designs in the bowl. Cover them with a layer of rice. I scooped up handfuls and patted it into flat pieces then laid them on top of the decorations. Keep your hands wet while handling the rice, it will stick to you less. Scoop the bean filling into the middle, smooth it out, and cover it with a layer of rice. Gently press the whole thing down and cover it with foil.


I don't have 3 arms. My niece Agatha was helping me with the almonds.

If you mean to eat it more or less immediately, steam it for about an hour- all it needs is to be hot through. If you're making it ahead of time, like I did, refrigerate it until about 2 hours before you want to eat it, then steam it for about 1 1/2 -1 3/4 hours. That much mass will take a while to warm up. About 15 minutes before serving, remove it from the steamer and run a knife around the edge to loosen it up, then invert it onto a serving dish. If it doesn't immediately fall onto the plate, just go away and leave it alone for a few minutes. Presently, the steam trapped in the mold will un-stick the rice, and it will come out. Pick off any little bits of decorations that are still in the mold, and put them back on the pudding. Serve with a little honey drizzled over each person's portion.

Note: Ginko nuts (or seeds) can be found in little vacuum packs in the refrigerated produce section of Fubonn. To prepare them, mix 1/4 cup sugar with 1/4 cup water in a small sauce pan and simmer until the sugar has dissolved. Put in the seeds and simmer them for about half an hour befor using them. They are very strange. They are slightly astringent tasting, sort of like pine nuts, and once cooked in the syrup, they have a texture like gumdrops.

Ginko nuts figure largely in the early lore of my family. Some time while I was in grade school, Dad took Pete to help gather ginko nuts. If you've ever walked under a ginko tree in the fall, you will have noticed that fallen ginko fruits smell like poo. That's because, like actual excrement (and body odor, and rancid butter), ginko fruit contains butyric acid, which is known as one of the stinkiest chemicals in the world. So of course, chinese people love to eat ginko nuts. They are even slightly poisonous! Besides, why would anybody be put off by the idea of coming home smelling like a pigsty, leaving your (only) pair of sneakers and the inside of the car scented like a cesspool from the contents of a 5 gallon bucket of decaying fruit? All you have to do is wash the foul-smelling glop off the outside of the seeds... which involves plunging your arm into the bucket and sloshing them around.

No, thank you. I will buy little vacuum packs in the grocery store.

Yappy Hoo Near!

Wikipedia has an entry about Tang-Yuan that seems to pretty much line up with what I remember about them.

Last year I made some of these with mochi flour and a rather poor approximation of mung bean filling. This year, I got a bug in my ear and decided to go from scratch. And I managed to remember that when I was very small and was eating them for probably the first or second time, the ones with plum filling were my favorite. The ingredients are simple, the procedure is not complicated, but it is time consuming and labor-intensive in parts. Do not  attempt the filling recipe unless you are willing to literally stir constantly for about 40 minutes. Your arm will get tired.

Here's what you need:

2 or 3 cups sushi rice, in a large pot big enough to fit that plus about 5 cups of water.
a blender, a large colander and a piece of muslin big enough to line it with.

3/4 lb of prunes
2/3 cup cooking oil or shortening. Saturated fats will make the finished produce easier to work with.Lard is traditional, dad used duck fat when he had it.  Chicken, maybe not.
possibly a half cup of sugar, but I didn't this time, I wanted it to be a little tart.

a very heavy 2 qt cooking pot, and NOT a non-stick one.
This recipe will make enough for a whole party of squeamish people, or for a small number of afficionadoes. They are even more weird and ethnic than mochi.

Leave the rice in the water for up to a week, and at least 3 days. Unless you want to risk having it ferment, stow it in the fridge. The rice grains will absorb water to the point where they start to disintegrate. Pinch one in your fingers and you'll see. It'll crush into a coarse mush. Then line your colander with the muslin, and put the rice through the blender, using only as much water as needed to keep it liquid enough for the blender to cope with it. This will take a while. Get it as finely ground as possible, and pour it into the muslin lined colander. Tie up the cloth and let the liquid drain out (this is likely to take at least 24 hours, so put it back in the fridge), and the mass of rice paste is your dough. You should freeze it if you aren't going to use it within a couple days. I found that after draining, freezing and thawing once, it was still coarser than I wanted, so I put a glob of it back in the mini-process and ground it again, with very good results. I suspect that the freezing helps break down the grains.

For the filling, put the prunes in the heavy pan with enough water to cover them, and bring them to a boil. After about 8 or 10 minutes, they should be tender enough to put in the blender, again using as little water as possible. Return the pureed prunes to the pan and add the oil and the sugar if you want it. From now on, be prepared to stir. With the heat at medium, use a wooden spoon to methodically scrape the bottom of the pot. The correct temperature for cooking will make the puree sizzle gently but quickly as you expose the bottom of the pan when stirring. You are going to cook all the water back out of the prunes which you just put in. After about half an hour of stirring, the paste will begin to form a coherent mass, and some of the oil will begin to sweat back out of it. It's done when it is very dark and has a consistency about halfway between Jif and Play-Doh. Turn off the heat and keep stirring until the paste stops sizzling against the pan, then refrigerate it in tupperware until you want to use it.

You know, lots of fruits can be treated this way. Dad used pineapple one year, which was good, and once, there was a batch made out of dried chinese red plums. That didn't go over so well, it was full of tough, splintery fibers. It tasted good, but the texture was decidedly sinister. Very pokey. Good lord, that must have been in like, 1979 or something. Don't feed things like that to your kids, they'll never forget. Anyhoo, the thing is, after all that cooking, anything you use will have a tendency to taste similar. It's the caramelization.

What to do with it:

Take the rice dough, pinch off pieces about 2 tablespoon sized, and roll them onto balls. If the dough was drained long enough to make it too dry, just add a little water back into  it. Make little balls out of the filling, about 1 teaspoon sized. Hold one of the dough balls in your palm and poke a hole in it about down to the middle, and push one of the filling bits into the hole. Gently roll the dough in your palms to re-form it into a solid ball with no filling showing. The whole business should end up about the size of a ping-pong ball. Continue until you have as many as you want.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and drop the tang-yuan into it. Stir them once so they don't stick to the bottom. Wait for the water to boil again. Once the water boils, turn it down to a simmer. When the tang-yuan are done, they will float to the surface. As the rice starches expand, they become more buoyant. The side that is immersed in the hot water will eventually become so much less dense than the top that they will flip themselves over if you poke them gently. Don't cook them any longer than that, the dough will just disintegrate.

Traditionally, these are served in a generous amount of the cooking water. I think that just makes them watery-tasting, so I usually don't do that. However, I have to admit that cooking them from scratch makes the cooking water actually pretty appealing. The freshness of the rice flour is orders of magnitude more delicious than frozen store-bought, and the texture is both firm and tender. You would think something made out of just rice would be boring, but that doesn't have to be so. Rice should taste like rice, and things made out of it should be yummy.

Lastly, I used olive oil in my filling. It's ok, but I don't really recommend it. The oil oxidizes or something in the cooking, and even if you use the most boring kind, the taste becomes more pronounced at the end. Like I said, ok, but definitely not traditional. Use peanut or canola or corn oil if you can't bear to use lard.

Fish-sauce Tofu

Okey-Dokey. I've had enough holiday eating. I love some holiday eating, but now I want something less fancy. This is quick, light, and is primarily flavored with fermented ingredients. It's a little stinky; don't try it unless you like thai fish sauce. A lot. This takes about 10 or 15 minutes and makes exactly one serving.

1/3 block firm tofu
1/2 cup water
1 T fish sauce, more or less. It's very salty!
1 tsp minced onion
1/2 tsp grated fresh ginger. Powdered will not do. 
dash of light soy sauce
rice seasoning for garnish, bell peppers too, if you like.

Put the water, fish sauce, onion and tofu in a small sauce pan on medium heat. Braise the tofu, turning every once in a while, until the liquid is about half gone. Then put in the ginger and soy sauce, continue to cook until the liquid is reduced to a tablespoon or two. Serve over rice, decorate with such things as suit your fancy. I like peppers, I would have put on a little cilantro or green onions if I'd had any.

Tofu Quickie

I like this method of fixing tofu because it doesn't require frying. Not that I don't like fried things, lord knows I do. It's just that when the weather keeps me from opening all the windows, anything that gets fried in my open floorplan apartment hangs around in the air for days. The kitchen vent fan is just for ambience.

Also, this dish requires exactly 2 cooking implements- one spoon for scooping & stirring (and eating), one covered casserole to cook and store leftovers in, plus a microwave. Awesome.

1 lb firm tofu
1/2 bag frozen chopped spinach
assorted condiments to taste. I usually use a mix of:

black bean sauce (master or comrade brands are my faves, but dragonfly is good too.)
oyster sauce- definitely Dragonfly brand. Read the ingredients.
trader joe's pad thai sauce.
sesame oil
sriracha- just a dab usually, more if I have a cold

and sometimes I use fish sauce too.

Drain the tofu and roughly chunk it up into the casserole. Throw on some good sized scoops of your chosen seasonings. Go easy on the fishsauce if you're using that, it's basically just stinky liquid salt. Top with the spinach, cover and microwave 3 or 4 minutes at a time until the spinach is as done as you want it to be. Poke the ingredients around gently between sessions in the microwave to get the flavors well mixed. Taste as you go along. Tofu is powerfully bland. If it's not sweet enough, add a dab of oyster sauce, if it's not salty enough, add bean sauce or fish sauce. If it's too salty, oh well, you're gonna eat it on rice anyway, it'll be fine.

I wish I had a bottle of sake with this...

Yeah, so, I set the smoke alarm off...

Ever see a smoke alarm in a chinese person's kitchen? Me either. Authentic stir fry is dangerous. Not that this is all that authentic, but I wish I had pictures of the grease flash that caused the smoke alarm thing...

Beet Greens & Tofu in Spicy Oyster Sauce

1 large bunch of beet greens
1 onion
1 block firm tofu
oil for frying
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 T black bean garlic sauce
1/2 tsp crushed chili paste
1/3 c oyster sauce
a pinch or 2 of salt

I had been avoiding buying beets at market for a while because I couldn't think of what to do with the greens. I like them southern style, but that makes them up as kind of a side dish and even a small bunch of beets comes with a large mess of greens. Then they kick around in my fridge until they die. Hence, the chinkabilly stir-fry.

Wash the greens well, separate the stems from the leaves and chop each, keeping them separate.
Chop the onions & add to the pile of stems. Drain & cube the tofu. Big cubes is good. Mix the seasonings in a little bowl.

I guess a wok would be good, but I used my cast iron frying pan. Put a tablespoon or so of oil in the pan and over pretty high heat. The oil should be shimmering and smoking in the pan. Sprinkle a little bit of salt in the pan and put in the stems & onions. Fry uncovered, stirring enough to keep from burning them, for about 3-5 minutes, or until the vegetables have begun to caramelize. Pour them into a dish and reserve. Rinse the pan out, then repeat the process with the leaves, rinse again and put a slightly larger amount of oil in and get it good and hot before putting in the tofu. Wait until the bottoms of the tofu bits have developed a good crust before turning them over, brown on all sides before putting the vegetables back in the pan with the seasonings. Heat everything through, mixing well. Serve with rice. Fried noodles would be good too.

Now, here's the thing: you can use roughly this process with everything, but the 2 key steps are to get the pan hot and keep it that way, and to add a pinch of salt to the pan before the vegetables. Salting the pan draws the water out of the veggies, and the high temperature does 2 things: 1) it caramelizes any starches that come out of the vegetables really fast, so that you have both the fresh veggie taste and a hint of maillard compounds. 2) the heat causes some of the cooking oils to oxidize and polymerize which is what that magic "stir fry" taste is.

Of course, high heat also causes oil to vaporize. And throwing a bunch of wet tofu into a puddle of hot oil causes steam. Which creates a rapidly expanding cloud of tiny oil droplets mixed with the ideal ratio of oxygen packed in little water molecules to make for a very exciting wooHOO! moment when it hits a red-hot burner. As a child this was a regular, but always alarming occurrence at my house. Nowadays I just run around cursing and flapping a towel at the ceiling, I swear I'm gonna pull the battery out of that wretched thing.

I'm Asian! What D'you Want!?!

"If you want to be Chinese, you have to eat the nasty stuff."
So says Chow Yun Fat's character to the neophyte, in the movie The Corruptor. Well, in that case Mr. Chow, I got my bona-fides right here. The thing that divides the white from the yellow is not a line, it's a preserved duck egg. One of these stinky little green and brown babies and you'll have enough gosh-darned authentic chinese kung-fu to whoop the ass out of a whole reel full of John Woo villains. No hair on the chest though. Chinese guys don't do that. I guess we're more closely related to whales and manatees than everyone else.

Moving on.


Sushi rice rolls with some fishy seasoning mix I got at Fubonn, served with fresh young coconut and preserved duck egg, aka "peedan." I do wish I'd had some pickled ginger though.

Take a cup of sushi rice and rinse it well. Drain, add about 1 3/4 c. water back to the pot and cook as you would ordinary rice. When it's done, mix 2 T cider or rice vinegar with a dash of salt and a heaping teaspoon of brown sugar, then toss it gently into the rice using a fork so you don't make the rice grains just turn into mush. Let it cool enough to handle, and roll about a cup in a sheet of toasted nori. Slice the roll with a wet knife (keeps the blade from sticking) and dunk the ends of the rolls in the seasoning mix.

Here's what I used. It's crunchy, fishy, sweet and salty. I am having a hard time not eating it straight out of the can.

Thats about it. I had a hangover yesterday, so I got a young coconut at the grocery store- coconut water has lots of potassium in it. The texture of the coconut meat is kinda weird, a little fleshy or something, but it's got nothing on peedan. I think the ones I got were a bit dehydrated, the yolks should be runny.

But what do they taste like? Um...sulphur? Rubber? Like something somebody dared you to eat? They're chemically cooked in lye... And the package declares, not at all reassuringly, that they are "lead free"- Gosh, I hope so.


And one last reason to love the preserved duck egg: 110% of your daily cholesterol intake.

Um, yes. I know, it's not a John Woo movie. Stupid joke. Sigh.

Neon Food! With Minty Pea Sauce!

Yes, the real reason for this post is that the phrase "minty pea sauce" makes me snicker. And I saw a picture of these pickled eggs in the paper and had to try it. Not my most inspired moment of food styling, I have to say, but hey, it is eye-catching.

I love food that appears to have an unnatural color. Mostly, if it looks unnatural, it is. Especially if its blue. (I failed to grow any borage this year, so I have no blue food, but next year...) However: this here picture shows all 100% natural coloration. And it really is all that bright, no foolin.

Remember the beets from last week? I made beet pickles, and dropped some boiled (shelled) eggs in the extra pickle juice. It makes 'em taste like devilled eggs, but the pink part is what has the pickle-y flavor.

The recipes for the yogurt and the chutney can be found on my facebook pages and the rest goes like this:

Lazy Curry Chicken

2 or 3 chicken breast tenders
1/4 turmeric
1/2 tsp curry powder, I recommend hot
salt & pepper
olive oil

If you use frozen tenders, just throw them in a bowl and coat them with the marinade, and leave them in the fridge a couple days. Turn them once or twice to get them well coated with the seasonings, and wait'll they thaw. When you're ready to use them, put a dab of oil in a pan heated to medium. Put the tenders in with any marinade/juices and cover. Cook for 3-4 minutes, flip, turn heat off, cover, ignore until the rest of the meal is done. This method works for me because 1) I use a heavy skillet and 2) I use an electric stove which takes a minute to cool down.

Bright Yellow Pilaf

1/2 cup white rice
1/2 cup red lentils
pat of butter
broth concentrate
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp paprika


Rinse rice & lentils well, add 1 1/2 c. water and the other stuff and cook as you usually would. This method makes the lentils disintegrate, if you want them to stay whole, cook the rice about halfway then stir in the lentils.

and....dun dun DUN!

Minty Pea Sauce!

It isn't really that exciting, sorry. Microwave 1/2 cup frozen peas with 1/3 cup water just barely until they are bright green and tender. Put them in a blender or mini food processor with 4 mint leaves and grind the bajeebus outta them. Add the tiniest pinch of salt. This isn't to make it taste salty, it just makes it taste more interesting. Truly, it works. The sauce will still taste sweet and have a cooling sensation, but it won't be flat and blah. This stuff is actually great with the yogurt.

Here's the eggs again, just because they look neato. Oh and those bright orange things in the other picture are nasturtium petals... They were just..orange, ok?