Yardlong Beans

 

 
I went to Fubonn on Memorial Day in spite of the weather. It makes a very nice bicycle adventure in good weather, and a slightly chancy but still enjoyable one in less nice weather. I got some of the usual stuff, but I also got a jar of powdered ginger drink, a box of dashi sachets, a very ordinary orange soda pop with the most remarkable Japanese packaging, a box of preserved plums that are too icky to eat, and because I am trying to branch out from the tofu and broccoli rut, I got a can of braised gluten and a pack of yardlong beans.

I was skeptical about the beans being actual beans. Once I cooked them and the beans popped out of the pods it became apparent that they really are just that, albeit a tad spooky looking. I like green beans in any case, but these are somehow particularly good. They are more tender than any western style of green bean I've eaten so far, and they have a more subtle bean flavor.

a handful of yardlong beans
half an onion, sliced quite thin
teaspoon minced fresh ginger
sesame oil
salt

can of gluten tidbits

oil for cooking

Remove any little stems left in the beans, then cut the beans into manageable lengths. Put a skillet on medium hot with some oil and a pinch of salt. When the oil starts shimmying in the pan, throw in the beans and stir them around to coat them with oil and get them good and hot. Add about 1/4 cup of water to the pan and cover it to trap the steam. When the water is evaporated, add the onions and ginger, and a little more oil if needed. Stir until the onions are brown, then add the tidbits. Stir until heated through, serve with rice, and hot sauce if you like it.

Nothing special going on here as far as technique, but the ingredients are a change of pace for me. The beans are one thing, the gluten thingummies are another. Dad used to call them vegetarian abalone, and they are also called seitan. Whatever you call them, I called them disgusting when I was a kid. I'm not sure about them now. They are squishy and chewy, and I don't know if they actually have a taste of their own, because if you buy them in a can they are packed in broth and oil.They aren't precisely fibrous, or sticky, and they are a little spongy, hence their ability to absorb flavoring agents. But they do go very well with yardlong beans, so there's that.

Lo Mien

  

  
Like chow mien, lo mien in its original form doesn't look much like what you're likely to get at a restaurant. If you order lo mien, you'll probably get a messy stir fry with boiled noodles mixed in. Depending on the particular formula, it can be pretty good, in a comfort-food kinda way. It is another one of those things that dad made reasonably often, but that it took me years and years to figure out that when you ordered lo mien for carry out, once upon a time, somebody was trying to make what dad just called 'fried noodles'. That's what lo mien actually means, anyway.

It's all about the fried noodle cake. Once you have that, you can throw pretty much any stir-fry on top. I put broccoli and tofu on it here. Honestly, I don't remember if there was a typical thing dad put on his. I was probably too fixated on the fried noodles to care in any case.

about 8 oz noodles
salted water
oil

Noodle cake!

Boil the noodles in salty water until they're al dente. Drain them and oil them pretty heavily, then put them in a heavy skillet on medium-high heat. Don't stir, just let them sit in the covered pan for about 6 or 7 minutes, or until the noodles in the bottom have fused into a nice brown crust. Flip the noodle cake over and fry uncovered until the other side has formed a crust, then slide the cake out onto a serving plate. Top with stir fry.

If you want to have what is in the picture, you need

1 lb extra firm tofu
2 bunches green onion, chopped
a teaspoon chopped fresh ginger
2 cups broccoli tops, cut small

half a cup water, maybe a little more
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
a splash of soy sauce
a splash of sesame oil
about half a teaspoon cornstarch
pepper

oil for frying

Cube and drain the tofu, and brown the cubes on medium heat until you are happy with how they look. Add a dab of oil to the pan if needed, then put in the onions and ginger. Stir until the onions are looking a little brown, then add the broccoli. Stir until everything is hot through. Mix all the rest of the ingredients in a small bowl until the cornstarch isn't lumpy any more, then dump it in the pan. Stir until the sauce is thickened and translucent.

Notes-

1. I've been over the stir-fry territory a few times already, so instead of boring on about it again I'll direct you here, for techniques.

2. The noodles can be any kind you like. Chinese, Japanese, white, buckwheat, fetuccini, angel hair spaghetti. It's all good. For visual interest, use a 50/50 mix of white and buckwheat soba. It'll be neato.

3. Keep an eye on the temperature during frying. Too low, and the noodles will never brown, too high and they'll burn before they fuse into a crust. You can keep it at medium heat for about 5 minutes, and if the noodles look like they're fused but pale, crank the heat just long enough to add color. Conversely, if they're browning fast, turn the heat down and just let it coast.

4. "Flip the noodles over" you say. The hell you say. Actually, it's not difficult. First, make sure the noodles aren't stuck to the pan anywhere. Work a spatula under them and all around the edges of the pan. Then hold the lid firmly closed and quickly invert the pan. The noodles will fall into the lid, and then you can scoot them back into the pan. Ta da!

Chinese Eggplant

  

  
If I'd known this would be worth writing down, I'd have taken a picture of the eggplants I used before I cooked them. The thing is, I am not a photographer any more than I am a chef. The eggplants didn't look special, except in hindsight, and before I cooked them I wasn't sure what was going to happen, so I didn't know that a visual aid might be useful later. At any rate, here is this eggplant dish.

about 1 1/2 pounds chinese eggplant- the long skinny kind

1/2 cup of the chinese noodle sauce from this post
6 or 8 green onions
2 or 3 slices fresh ginger
some hot pepper flakes, to taste
cooking oil
salt

a tablespoon of cornstarch

Mix the cornstarch with 2 cups of water and set it aside.

Cut the eggplant into 1/2 inch slices. I cut mine diagonally because it looks more interesting. Cut the green onions into 2 inch pieces.

Heat a skillet with a couple tablespoons of oil on medium-high until the oil just starts to smoke. Sprinkle a pinch of salt in the pan and put in half the eggplant. Stir the slices to get a thin coating of oil on them, then poke them down onto the pan to sear. Periodically turn the slices so that each piece gets evenly browned. When the first batch is done, dump them in a dish and repeat with the second batch.

Put a little more oil in the pan along with the onion, ginger and red pepper flakes. Stir until the onions have gotten moderately brown, then put the all eggplant back in the pan to heat it through. Add the noodle sauce and the cornstarch and water. Cook until the sauce thickens and turns translucent.

Notes:

1. Warning!!! This dish requires powerful ventilation! In the first place because you have to sear the eggplant, which creates smoke to set off your alarms, and secondly because of the part toward the end where you throw red pepper flakes in the pan. Capsaisin must volatilize easily; frying peppers makes it very hard to breathe. Leave your doors and windows open!

2. The eggplant should be slightly charred in places.

3. Even if your pan is large enough to cook all the eggplant at once, I recommend against it. Having it all in the pan together will trap steam around the pieces and will make them soggy. Cook in 2 batches and the water evaporates of easily.

4. Take your time and pay attention to the searing eggplant, but move fast and slosh everything together once you add the liquid. Once the sauce thickens, remove it from heat immediately or it will burn.
  


This is a version of the stuff you can get in chinese restaurants. It gets called a bunch of different things- eggplant in tangy sauce, Hunan eggplant, eggplant in garlic sauce, eggplant in bean sauce. Usually they make it too sweet and too goopy. They almost never sear the eggplant, which is a pity, because in a restaurant it's much easier to do. You can crank the gas jets up under a giant wok and flail around with a spatula the size of a shovel and whatever you want to cook is seared in moments. A home stove doesn't put out as much heat as a commercial stove. Instead, you have to compensate by making sure that you have a very heavy skillet and get it well heated before putting in the eggplant. Even so, it takes longer.

I don't remember that dad ever cooked this dish. In fact, other than eggplant sandwiches, I don't remember him ever cooking eggplant except one time: we were in China together my sophomore year in college, hanging around in some dodgy qi gong school. They provided all of our meals, and mostly the food was passable, sometimes it was a bit horrid. Eventually, dad got fed up with it, and the thing that put him over the edge was a dish of eggplant. It was a generic mess of goopy brown and purple, and he said that it bore no resemblance to what it was 'supposed to' be. So the next day, we went to the market for eggplant, which I think was something that perturbed our hosts, because going shopping is chores, and guests aren't supposed to need do any work, right? The actual cooking part was fine, because once dad got into the kitchen and shooed the disappoving cook out into the back yard, he could do his showmanship thing. I didn't look. That kitchen was spooky even before dad started making things ignite in great alarming whooshes. I was more or less expecting the whooshes, but the cook and our hosts were not. There was some gesticulating, and some loud commentary, generally admiring, and the cook shook his head a lot, but not so admiringly. Now I wish I had seen what dad did, because the dish turned out basically like shreds of eggplant jerky. It was chewy, and crunchy in parts, and had a few places where the flesh of the eggplant hadn't been dried or seared out, but remained slightly tender and almost custardy. I asked day what it was seasoned with, and he said just salt, pepper. No soysauce? Just a little "for color" he said.

The dish I made today does not resemble the dry fried eggplant dad made, but eggplant always makes me think of that.