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.

Manly Mittens

 

 
I got a great big sack of yarn at goodwill. David needed some new mittens. He always pokes the fingers out of those cheap gloves he uses anyway, so I didn't put any fingers on his mitts. This used up one whole ball of very thick yarn, and a little bit of something else.

The blue yarn worked up to about 4 st/inch, the gray, about 5 st/inch. Fiber content unknown. They look like dryer lint. After my epic scarf project, I needed some instant gratification, these took only a few days of knitting on the bus during my commute.

I was really trying to not acquire even more stuff, but it's so rare to see any yarn at goodwill that isn't 100% acrylic Vanna's Choice or Red Heart or novelty Fun Fur yarn that no adult would want to wear that I snatched it up. There are a bunch of nice wools and a pair of lovely balls of lace weight yarn that might be alpaca. And about 8 balls of Fun Fur, but I'm going to knit Jej a vest out of those. She will never wear it, but her kids might.

David said something like "I want you to knit me a pair of underwear out of dryer lint" and I said really? and he said "No, I meant gloves." So there you have it.

Garlicky Cheezy Taters

 

 
I actually looked at my blog the other day and I thought jeezus do I ever eat anything except tofu, broccoli, and noodles?

Yes, sometimes I eat cheese. Melty cheese is the best, and if you put it on potatoes, it is even better.

2 medium russet potatoes

2 T butter
2 T flour
1 clove crushed garlic

1 1/3 cup milk
1/2 lb grated cheese, maybe a little more
tsp Dijon mustard
dash of nutmeg
a pinch of lavender
pepper & salt

Pre heat your oven to 375.

Cut the potatoes into 1/8" slices. Butter a heavy, oven safe skillet and arrange the potato slices evenly in it. Set them on a medium low burner, and once you can hear them start to sizzle add 1/3 cup water, cover, and let them continue to cook while you make the sauce. No stirring.

In a smallish saucepan using medium heat, saute the garlic in butter until it is just barely starting to brown, then remove from heat. Mix the flour into the butter, wait a few seconds for the oil to soak into the flour, then add the milk. Put it back on the burner, and start stirring. When it starts to thicken, add the cheese. Stir until the cheese is completely melted, remove from heat, and season to taste.

Pour the cheese over the potatoes in the skillet. Top with additional cheese if you feel like it, and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until it's as brown as you want it.

Notes-

1. Yep, it's exactly like making mac and cheese. Plus garlic.
2. I used cheddar mainly, but I always think it tastes better with more than one kind of cheese. Be aware that cheap Swiss will be kinda stringy though.
3. This is very fatty. I like to put it on top of some arugula to eat it. It's like salad dressing.
4. Roux. I think the reason you melt the butter and then mix in the flour is to coat the flour particles with oil, which prevents them from clumping together when you add milk. Instead, the flour is distributed evenly throughout the liquid so that as the temperature rises you get a smooth sauce.
5. Remember not to toast the flour in the butter. If you do, the starches will have a reduced capacity to thicken the liquid, and the sauce may break, or separate into a bunch of little particles in a thin liquid. Tastes just as good, but it doesn't look very appealing.

Rush job

  

  
Lately, dinner has been an un-photogenic, ad hoc sort of affair. There have been a lot of nachos. There was a pretty tasty chicken and chick pea pottage, but pottage does not look as good as it tastes. Lots of fried tofu. One time we ate grilled cheese and carrot sticks. It was delicious.

But! I did make a noodle salad the other night which I got a photo of before we ate it.

1 lb tofu
1 T dark soy sauce
1 T fish sauce
dash of sesame oil

1/2 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup light soy sauce
1/3 cup rice vinegar
1T sesame oil
1T sesame paste
dash of cayenne

chinese noodles
2 cups broccoli florets
salt

sesame seeds
cilantro
yellow bell pepper slices

Cut the tofu into 1" cubes and press it firmly to squeeze as much water out as possible.  Toss the tofu in a bowl with the next 3 ingredients and let it sit.

Combine the next 6 ingredients. This is the dressing. Mix well.

Boil the noodles in salted water. When they are about 30 seconds from being done, toss the broccoli florets into the pot with them to blanch. When the water comes back to a boil, drain the noodles and broccoli together. Run cold water over them to stop the cooking and remove extra starch from the noodles.

Toss the nooles, broccoli and tofu together with the dressing, then decorate each serving with sesame seeds, pepper slices, and cilantro if you like it. I like it a lot.

"It works perfectly!" he said.

So, what the heck have I been doing all this time? I made a scarf. An epic scarf. 2 months and 55,000 stitches of knitted scarf for my brother's 40th birthday. After I dropped it off, I thought maybe I should have gotten a picture of it, but I was basically sick of looking at it.

He sent me this picture of himself modeling it. Pete's One Scarf rules them All.

Tamales!

  

  
I have a powerful love for Trader Joe's green chili tamales. I love the fatty, puddingy, cheesey texture. I love how pillowy the dumpling part is. They're rich and fatty, and they aren't chewy at all, unless you microwave them until the cheese oozes out and gets stuck to the plate, but I like those parts too, so it's all good. But they cost 3 bucks for 2 tamales, so they aren't actually cheap.

I finally made some of my own. They aren't identical to TJ's, but the key factor, the fluffiness of the dough, is very close. Pete & Cynthia were out of town, so I went over to their house and borrowed their Kitchenaid mixer. It was awesome. I am so geeked. This  recipe made 19 tamales for me.

a bag of corn husks

Fill them like this

1 lb masa for tamales
2 1/2 cups hot water

1 1/4 cup shortening or lard or butter
2 cups broth or stock, cold or at room temperature

1/2 lb cheese, cut into matchsticks
roasted green chilis

Put at least 24 corn husks in a large pot of hot water to soak over night. They float, so you'll need to put a heavy bowl or something on them to keep them submerged.

Mix the masa with the hot water until it forms a thick paste. Cover it and set it aside for at least 30 minutes. I left mine over night.

When you're ready to make tamales, put the shortening in the bowl of the mixer, and beat it at high speed using the wire whisk attachment until it gets light and fluffy. Begin to drop 1" bits of the masa mix into the fat, allowing each piece to get somewhat broken up before adding more. Once half the masa is in the bowl, start alternating masa and broth or stock. When all the ingredients have been added, mix for a few more minutes to make sure there are no lumps.

At this point, the masa should look and feel like a rather light but stiff cake batter. Check to see if it's done by dropping a small dab of it into a cup of cold water. If it floats, it's got enough air beaten into it. If not, keep mixing. If it's too stiff, it won't hold air bubbles, so add a few spoons more water or broth.

They are a little messy

Drain the corn husks. Spread about 1/3 cup of masa on a husk, add a stick of cheese and a couple chilis, then roll the husk up. Fold the tail end of the husk up to keep the filling in, and tie a string around it. If you're freezing them, set them on a tray in a single layer until they get hard or the filling will ooze out. If you're going to steam them right away, make sure they sit upright in the steamer the whole time or again, the filling will ooze out. Fresh, they take about 25 minutes to steam.

Notes:

1. I would never even try this without a mixer. The ability to get the dough full of tiny air bubbles is all-important to get the fluffy texture.
2. Whatever kind of fat you use, it should be solid at room temperature, or it won't be able to keep air trapped in the dough. I used Crisco, because I was scared of the packages of lard sitting on the shelf. Not rational, but there you go.
3. Don't worry about rolling them up tightly. As they cook, the masa expands a lot. A bit loose is better than a bit tight, because you don't want the husks exploding.
4. The recipe calls for 1 1/4 cups shortening, but I think just one cup would be enough. I'm going to try the smaller amount next time. I think a slightly stiffer dough would keep its shape better during cooking.
5. The tamales will taste like whatever broth you use, so make sure it is a kind you like. I used concentrated chicken bouillon, which is fine, but next time I may use plain stock.

These are most satisfying. I'm not sure they're good for you, but I don't care. I even cooked a few in the microwave, which was a little sloppy, but it still worked. And it made those crunchy chewy cheese gloops on the plate. I admit that one of the things I like best about the TJ's tamales is the convenience of being able to throw one in the microwave at the end of the day like the lazy-ass I am. Eat them with salsa. You need something to balance out the grease. Unless you take them with you on a 7 mile hike, in which case just eat them like a barbarian with your fingers and lick the husks when you're done. And don't throw the corn husks into the gorge, that's crass.

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!

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.

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.

The Yarnlings

Most of these were made last year, but this week I made several changes to the formula which is the mini alien pattern found here. If  you click over to my flickr photostream, you can see individual pictures of all of them, I think they're quite appealing. I gave them all names according to their personalities.

This really is a very excellent pattern, and all but the last two I made followed it exactly. I knitted them in the round on size 2 double pointed needles for the most part. Peeve and Bigfoot are the only ones I made on different needles, Peeve was made of sock yarn and requires a set of size 1's, and Bigfoot was made with a rather different beginning that required a circular #3.

This is Six

Six was my first attempt to alter the construction. I followed the instructions for the circular cast-on exactly, up to the point where you make bobble arms. After the first set of bobbles are made, knit 4 rows plain, then repeat the bobble row, and finish as directed in the pattern.

After Six, the notion I  had of making an alien with more pronounced lower limbs took hold of me, and I made Bigfoot. Bigfoot requires a circular needle, because I used my favorite start-in-the-middle cast on, found in this handy video. 

Bigfoot.

To make your own bigfoot, cast on 20 stitches according to the video. That's 10 on the top needle, and 10 on the bottom. On round 1, start by making a bobble, knit 8, make a bobble, knit 10. Knit rounds 2-7 according to pattern. Knit an extra round, maybe two, depending on how squatty you want the body to be ( I think I knitted 2 extra, because I wanted him taller). Continue following instructions from round 8 to the end of the pattern. Run a long tail of yarn through the remaining 6 stitches, and stuff the alien through the hole on the top. Pull the yarn tight,tie off, and decorate as you like.

None of these guys is very big. Bigfoot and Six are only about 3 inches tall, and Peeve barely tops an inch. Maybe that's why he's so irritable.

Dubious

  

  
In honor of national pie day, I made a coconut pudding pie. It isn't as strange as the basil seed thing, but it's not what I thought it would be either. I was thinking of a sort of egg custard pie, but with a coconutty aspect to it. But I distrust egg custard pies; I have it in my head that they are difficult and finicky things. There's no reason for me to think this. I've never tried to make one. But I decided to go for a pudding pie recipe instead, where you cook the crust and the filling separately. Irrespective of my fear of egg custard pies, the big reason I chose the pudding route was that I bought a disappointing coconut substance at Fubonn the last time I went.

You can get several brands of powdered coconut milk there. I have no idea what you're supposed to do with it for, but I put it in coffee as creamer, I use it as a topping for oatmeal, and I make rice pudding with it. Out of curiosity I tried a new brand, and it turned out to be slightly loathsome for any of my usual purposes. Unlike my preferred brand, this one has a large percentage of starch added. It also has a bunch of salt. The starch makes clumps in my coffee, and tastes chalky in my oatmeal. The salt is gross for both applications, so I didn't even try a rice pudding. So, pie.

One 9" pie crust of your preferred type. I made a slightly sweet pastry crust. 

Should have read the ingredients.

1 pack of this coconut powder
2 eggs
2 cups water
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup sweetened condensed milk
a pinch of nutmeg
toasted coconut flakes for the top

Pre-bake the crust until it is slightly browned and then let it cool completely.

Put everything else except the coconut flakes in a blender for about a minute, then pour the mix into a small saucepan over medium heat. Using a whisk, stir constantly until the filling is as thick as jello pudding. Pour the filling into the crust and refrigerate for at least a couple hours, until it is quite chilled. Top with toasty coconut just before serving.

This is super easy, but there are a few things that are worth explaining.

1. For the first 8 minutes the filling is on the stove, absolutely nothing will happen. Then it will thicken rapidly.
2. So why stir for all that time? To prevent lumps. The bottom of the pan will be hot enough to cook the filling solid down there before the rest of it is done unless you keep stirring.
3. A moderately slow and lackadaisical stirring motion is sufficient until it starts to gel up. Then you want to stir fast and methodically or again, lumps.
4. The toasty flakes add crunch, which is important because otherwise this would really be boring.
5. Remember the salt complaint? That's what the sweetened condensed milk is for. The salt is still in there, but the sugar balances it out. Also improves the mouth feel.
6. What if you don't have a blender? Make sure you whip it to within an inch of its life or else, Lumps!

My pie research led me to believe that the starch in the coconut powder would lend itself to a pudding-style filling, and I was right. If you like coconut pudding pie, there is no reason to go looking for this particular off-brand of coconut powder either, you can just use 2 cups of coconut milk and 1/4 cup of cornstarch instead. Make sure you get the full-fat kind of coconut milk too, no sense in doing things by halves.

Well of course I had pie for breakfast. And a boogerty egg and coffee. That's what you do on Pie Day.