I'm Not Julia Child

Okonomiyaki

2011-10-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

Ah...just looking at this picture makes me want to whip up another batch of okonomiyaki. What is okonomiyaki? It's a big, fat savory pancake filled with vegetables and meat. In Japan, you can go to restaurants that specialize in okonomiyaki. Each table will have a large flat grill and the pancake is made right in front of you. Lots of fun. But you can also make okonomiyaki at home. It's pretty easy—in fact, learning to say okonomiyaki is the hardest part of the dish.

Recipes will vary greatly because you can add pretty much any ingredient to the basic flour batter. But I have found that one ingredient is pretty important: nagaimo (a.k.a mountain yam). The yam won't add any flavor at all, but it will make the pancake light and almost cake-like. I have to warn you that nagaimo takes a little getting used to. The raw vegetable is pretty darn slimy and trying to peel it (which you must) can be a bit tricky. The Japanese really enjoy slimy vegetables (okra is another favorite) and believe their mucilaginous properties are very good for your stomach. I don't mind slimy. And all the slime will have disappeared by the time you've cooked the pancake. Another odd property of nagaimo is that when you grate it, the yam instantly turns into a snot-like gel! Just bear with it and continue to grate in a very gentle manner (I find a Microplane is great for this). Interestingly, if you just slice it into large chunks and braise it in a stew, the nagaimo has the same texture as a potato.

As a guide, click here for a very dependable recipe from Harumi Kurihara, a popular cookery writer in Japan (she's known as the Martha Stewart of Japan). Warning! The recipe calls for "taro". This is a translation mistake. What they really mean is nagaimo. You will not get the same effect using taro!

Going out to eat okonomiyaki is such a popular thing to do in Japan, many TV shows feature it in a scene or two. My favorite depiction of okonomiyaki feasting is in Kekkon Dekinai Otoko (The Man Who Wouldn't Marry). In the following clip, Abe Hiroshi demonstrates the perfect way to cook okonomiyaki.

KekkonDekinai06.2 2/4

Vivian | Myspace Video

Yotam Ottolenghi's Butternut Squash and Tahini Spread

2011-10-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you read a recipe and you know instantly that it's going to be good. Like Yotam Ottolenghi's recipe for butternut squash and tahini spread. The title of the recipe says it all—the heart of the recipe is just squash, tahini and yogurt. I tried out the recipe today and the dish was fantastic, probably because I was able to get an incredibly sweet and aromatic butternut squash. That's the trick to recipes like this: very good, fresh products. Hope you try it.

For the full recipe, go to The Guardian's webpage.

Soy Sauce

2011-08-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

I grew up using Kikkoman soy sauce and never really thought very seriously about soy sauce at all. Kikkoman seemed like a good all-purpose sauce and I used it whenever a recipe called for soy sauce regardless of what cuisine it was. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about soy sauce. Initially, I was mostly concerned with finding a sauce that didn't have sodium benzoate, a nasty preservative that's in practically everything, including liquid vitamins. But now, I'm concerned about taste. I had no idea how different soy sauces can be, from Kikkoman to Yama to Marukin.

Marukin is the one I've been using most. According to the label, it has no preservatives at all and must be kept in the fridge. It's much more salty and intense than Kikkoman so a little goes a long way.

The second soy sauce I now have is a brand called 수복표 국간장. Yup, the name of the brand is only in Korean. Strange for a soy sauce made in Los Angeles. In English, the brand name is Soo Bok. Like Marukin, there are no preservatives (again, I have to trust the label). But unlike Marukin, there's no wheat. That's really the difference between Japanese and Korean soy sauces, Japanese being a combo of soy beans and wheat, Korean being pure soy beans. 수복표 국간장 is absolutely lovely. The sauce is light and clear with a delicate, though very salty, taste. Really recommend it for all Korean food.

Of course, if you're cooking Chinese food, you really should use a Chinese soy sauce, but I haven't found a really good brand yet. Pearl River Bridge is the brand most available in the U.S., but I've never been terribly impressed by Pearl. Any recommendations out there?

What I Did For Pho

2011-06-11T10:22:00.001-07:00

My short story "What I Did For Pho" is going to be included in an upcoming anthology. For the accompanying bio, the editor suggested I include a personal recipe for pho. Pho is the iconic noodle soup dish of Vietnam. It's true that I make pho at home, but my recipe is far from authentic and I hesitated. But what is really authentic? I've had so many phos at so many different restaurants (although sadly, never in Vietnam) and they've all tasted different. Why not include my own version?

Simple Homemade Pho

1 large beef shank (preferably from a grass-fed cow who's been treated in a humane way)

1 large stick of lemongrass

1/2 onion or three shallots

clove of garlic

a good chunk of ginger or galangal

1 lime

salt

fish sauce

Thai basil (optional)

cilantro (optional)

mint (optional)

bean sprouts (optional)

hoisin (optional)

chili sauce (optional)

Vietnamese or Thai rice noodles (often labeled as "rice stick")

Put the beef shank in a large bowl of cold water. Let it soak for about one to two hours. This gets some of the impurities out.

Transfer the shank into a large pot and fill with fresh cold water. The water should completely cover the shank by at least an inch. Bring the water to a boil. As soon as the water boils, turn it down to a good simmer. In about five minutes scum should start floating to the top. Remove as much as you can with a skimmer or a spoon. To the cooking liquid add lemongrass (if using), garlic, onion (or shallots), and ginger. Turn the heat down to a slow, gentle simmer and cook the broth for some four hours. Keep checking every half hour or so to make sure there's still a nice level of water in the pot. If you need to, add more water.

After four hours, the meat should be falling off the bone. Which is what you want. Take the shank out of the broth and let it cool until you can touch it without burning yourself. At this point, remove everything else, like the lemongrass, and discard. When the beef has cooled, remove the bone and slice the beef into thin pieces.

Meanwhile, season the broth with salt. How much salt you'll need will depend on how much broth you have. Start with a small amount. Taste. Add more if needed. You don't want it to be too salty because you'll be adding fish sauce next, about a teaspoon. Keep tasting and adjusting the salt and fish sauce until the broth is the way you like it.

Now for the noodles. Rice noodles can come fully dried or partially dried. The fully dried ones need to be soaked in water for about half an hour and then put into boiling water for about five minutes. Cooking times for noodles vary greatly. What I do is check the noodles every few minutes to see if they're done, usually by dipping a noodle in cold water and eating it. The partially dried noodles need no soaking time. A gentle dip in boiling water should do the trick. But again, you must test the noodles as frequently as possible or you will get a mush.

To assemble, put the noodles in a warmed bowl. Garnish with beef and any combination of bean sprouts, cilantro, Thai basil, mint, etc. Slice the lime and squeeze lime juice into the bowl. Add piping hot broth. Flavor with hoisin sauce or chili sauce or both. That's the beauty of pho—you decide how it should taste.

Mangoes

2011-05-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Costco had a great bargain on mangoes so I bought a pack of six. That's a lot of mangoes for our household and I was a little worried about what I'd do with them all. Instead of worrying, I decided just to plunge in, head first.

First up was a mango and banana lassi. Lassis are Indian yogurt milkshakes—great to drink with a very spicy meal. And like most milkshakes, they're very easy to make. Of course, lassis aren't really milkshakes as they're yogurt based. You can also make salty lassis as well as sweet. For the salty, just combine a cup of yogurt, salt and enough iced water to thin (this is for one person). For sweet, add about two to three tablespoons of condensed milk. For fruity, add a nice, ripe tropical fruit of two.

Next, a mango salad. I thought a simple sweet-and-sour dressing of rice vinegar, sugar and oil would be best for the fruit. Then I chopped some green onions and mangoes and added it to the mixture. For greens I used shredded red leaf lettuce and mizuna (a Japanese mustard green).

For the last of my mangoes, I made Thai sticky rice. This too was pretty simple. Just get a package of "sweet" rice (also known as glutinous rice), wash, soak for 24 hours, and steam until done. Make a sauce by combining and heating canned coconut milk (about a cup), sugar (about a third of a cup) and salt (a quarter teaspoon)—heat just until the sugar is melted. Reserve about a quarter of a cup. Put the sauce in with the rice and mix well. Then cut up mangoes, throw on top of rice, decorate with reserved sauce and voila!

Mini Food Short-story Collection

2011-05-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

My mini collection of short stories is now available as an ebook. For only .99! It's for people who live and breathe food. Please check out a free sample at Smashwords. Or at Amazon.

Japanese Curry

2011-05-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

Yes, the Japanese eat curry, but it's not like any curry you'll ever get in India or England. It's sweeter and usually thicker, more like a stew. My mom used to make Japanese curry all the time, so I never thought much about it. But lately, I've been learning a lot about Japanese curry and it's really very fascinating.

As I suspected, Japanese curry is a version of English curry. The truth is, there's no such thing as Indian curry. Curry, as most people know it, is an Anglo-Indian invention. It came to Japan around the early 1900s when Japan started modernizing. Of course, the reason they wanted to modernize was to be able to defend themselves against the European and American bullies. And they weren't going to be able to do that until they got a competitive military. And part of being competitive was beefing up its military men. Literally. They began feeding their men beef. But the men didn't like it. They'd been brought up eating fish, if they were lucky, and soy. Beef tasted foul. Smelled foul too. So how does one make beef more appetizing? The Japanese military looked towards the British navy. They fed their guys curry. What a great way to hide the stink of beef! (I have to add that I've read other versions but I think this is the right one.)

Beef, curry, and Western food soon began to spread to the populace at large. There were even restaurants dedicated to the stuff. But like the Japanese curry, all the dishes were catered specifically to Japanese palates. That's why you get the ketchup omelet rice dishes. And why Italian pasta dishes will be garnished with nori (Japanese dried seaweed). Curry, though, seems to have really won the heart of the average Japanese. I've heard that a Japanese housewife will serve curry at least once a week to her family. One of the reasons is that children really love it. I suppose it's a lot like how Italian spaghetti became so popular with American housewives.

Any Japanese housewife worth her weight in salt has her own special recipe. The basic recipe starts off with a stew made of beef, potatoes, carrots, and onions. To this a curry roux is added. Then the special secret ingredient, which can be any combination of Worcestershire sauce, pineapple juice, grated apple, cream, yogurt, etc.

The curry is served with Japanese rice and a side of Japanese pickles. The Japanese pickles really add fun. Oh—don't forget to bring the spoons in glasses of ice water. The icy spoon is supposed to make the curry less spicy.

Most housewives do not make their own roux. You can get store-bought like the S&B Golden Curry Sauce Mix (I've seen this brand in places like Safeway's and Ralph's). Using prepared roux is such a given, it'd never even occured to me to make my own. But then I found a curry roux recipe at Harris Salat's website and thought, why not?

If you're at all familiar with making roux, the recipe is very easy. You just add the curry powder to the roux with some stock. But let's face it: it's so much easier just to break off a cube of S&B and stir. I'll probably continue using S&B. The taste difference between homemade and store-bought wasn't that profound. Homemade roux resulted in a much more buttery dish, but you can always add butter. Of course, S&B contains palm oil, sugar, caramel, MSG, disodium guanylate...

Spritz Cookies

2011-05-07T17:36:00.000-07:00

I love a good butter cookie. So pure, so delicate, so delicious. And so pretty if they're spritz cookies. I decided to make a batch late last night, and for the first time, used Rose Levy Beranbaum's recipe. Hers is very interesting because you add toasted ground almonds. This, says Rose, gives the cookies a very tender texture. And you don't have to use as much sugar. Having let my butter warm up for two hours (which I almost never do), the batter was really easy to whip up. And the cookies were not just more delicate, but had more flavor because of that toasted almond goodness. If you'd like to try her recipe out, just click here and I'll direct you to the LA Times website where they've archived it.

BTW, my recipe came from Rose's Christmas Cookies. For some reason, I have an autographed copy and was delighted to find out that she'd lovingly signed her name in both red and green colors!

Chong's Sesame Oil

2011-04-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

My discovery of the year is Chong's Sesame Oil. Made fresh in a tiny little storefront in L.A.'s Koreatown, the oil is absolutely fantastic! I had no idea fresh sesame oil could taste so alive. No hint of rancidity at all. Available in a variety of sizes, Chong's comes in both light and dark. The small 16 ounce bottle of light is $10, which is a bargain.

I've heard that you can get Chong's to mail the oils to you, but I haven't tried it. If you're in L.A., just go to their store in Koreatown, although finding the store is a bit tricky because the store is on the phantom 8th street. Phantom 8th street, you ask? Yes. Because, it turns out that there are two 8th streets: the main 8th street and a tiny side street that parallels it for about a hundred feet which is also called 8th street. Chong's is on that parallel side street.

Chong's Grocery
3560 W 8th Street
LA 90005
213 387 0651

BTW, according to the Korean spelling, the store should really be called Jeong's Grocery. Just saying.

Goguma (Korean Sweet Potato) Cake

2011-04-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

Goguma cake is something you often see at Korean cafes but I've never seen a recipe for it. (Of course, I've only been searching English language sites—there must be some very good ones on the Korean language ones.) Undeterred, I decided to MacGyver up a recipe. I mean, how hard could it be? After all, gogumas, or Korean sweet potatoes, aren't too far off from bananas, so wouldn't a banana cake recipe work just as well? After some research, I had a hunch that the most workable banana cake recipe would be Martha Adams's version in Cooking From Quilt Country. It uses cake flour and turns out a very light, wonderful cake.

Of course, I ended up having to substitute more than just the bananas—I didn't have buttermilk. But lack of buttermilk is never a deal-breaker. I've always found that a combo of yogurt and half-and-half does a pretty good job as a buttermilk sub, and those two things were luckily in the fridge. Now the only difficulty in making this cake is that you have to have precooked gogumas. I had some leftover from a couple of days before, and really, it was trying to figure out what to do with it that led me to making this cake.

In case you've never eaten a Korean (or Japanese) sweet potato, let me warn you that it is very different from American red sweet potatoes (sometimes called yams). A goguma's flesh is light golden and its sweetness is more delicate, less in-your-face. And there's a natural buttery richness so that if you simply roast one, you can eat it plain. Fantastic as part of a tempura platter too.

Another warning: this cake recipe is a bit more involved than a banana cake recipe because you need to put the cooked goguma through a sieve (chinoise) otherwise you just end up with too much fiber in the cake.

So, here we go!

Adapted from Cooking From Quilt Country by Marcia Adams

Goguma Cake

2/3 cup of butter
1 cup sugar
3 eggs at room temperature
2 1/4 cups of sifted cake flour
1 1/4 teaspoons of baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoons of baking soda
1 1/4 teaspoons of salt
2/3 cup of buttermilk at room temperature (or a combination of plain yogurt and milk or half-and-half)
1 1/4 cups goguma, cooked, mashed, and sieved
2/3 cup of chopped walnuts

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Cream the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well. Sift the dry ingredients together. Add a third to the butter mixture and beat. Then add a third of the buttermilk (or sub) and beat. Then a third of the dry, then a third of the wet, etc. Add walnuts, mix, put in a pan (I used a brownie pan but you can use two cake pans) and bake.

In a brownie pan, the cake should take about thirty minutes, depending on your oven. You want to keep the cake pretty light and tender, so check after twenty. I always use a cake tester. Of course, you are perfectly free to frost the cake if you wish (any type of frosting will do), but I like mine with just a dusting of powdered sugar.

Celery

2011-03-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

Celery is one of those vegetables that doesn't really get my imagination going. It's a nice vegetable and pretty critical as part of a mirepoix, but on its own? I suppose this is why there are so few recipes where celery takes center stage. Italians braise it in stock for a long time and that's really good. And I have a dish I make that's beef and celery stewed together for about half an hour (I got that recipe from the back of a Campbell's soup can because what makes the dish is cream of mushroom soup). And, of course, sliced celery is very nice in creamy salads. But what else? I was wondering that when I was browsing a Gary Rhodes' cookbook and I found a very interesting cooked celery dish. It's kind of a warm Waldorf salad because it uses the classic combo of celery, apples, and walnuts. But there's no mayonnaise, just a little bit of butter for enrichment. All you have to do is wash and peel the celery (to get rid of the strings which can be hard to eat), blanch it in boiling water for three minutes, fry some cut-up apples in oil until browned, throw in the blanched and drained celery, and add the butter and walnuts. Some salt and pepper too. It's a nice, light dish. I made it a little bit more savory by garnishing the dish with some thinly sliced Pecorino cheese (best done with a vegetable peeler).

How did it taste? I'd give it a solid B.

Carrot And Ginger Soup

2011-03-23T12:22:00.000-07:00

When we were living in New York, we'd sometimes go to E.A.T. for lunch. I always found the restaurant too expensive for what you got, but I did love their carrot soup, which was just so amazingly fresh and concentrated. Now whenever I make carrot soup, I try to emulate E.A.T.'s version. The key, I've found, is to use water, not stock. Stock just muddies the taste. By using water, you get this amazingly fresh carrot flavor. This is a super easy recipe.

About a dozen carrots, peeled and cut into smallish pieces
A tiny clove of garlic, peeled and smashed (use side of knife or bottom of glass)
A chunk of ginger about an inch long, peeled, cut up and smashed (smash same way as garlic)
Water
Pinch of ground cumin (optional, but nice to add because cumin has an incredible affinity for carrots)
Salt and pepper

Put the carrots, garlic and ginger in a pot. Add water--but only enough to just cover the carrots. What you want is a very thick, concentrated, bright orange soup. Cook until the carrots are tender (10-15 minutes). Add ground cumin (if using). Then blend using an immersion blender. If the soup is too thick for you, feel free to add more water. Now adjust the taste with salt and pepper.

My Dilemma With Trader Joe's

2011-03-22T19:39:00.000-07:00

This is pretty simple. I'm just mystified that some of Trader Joe's products are so good and some are so bad. Like their avocados—always ripen to a lovely creamy consistency. Or their frozen chocolate croissants which you bake at home—turns your home into a bakery. So why are their cheese so bad? Their "Parmesan" is horrendous. Their Monterey Jack doesn't even melt. And their frozen ethnic foods, like the gyozas, have the consistency of wet cardboard. But great apple juice.

My Dilemma With Whole Foods

2011-03-20T22:10:00.000-07:00

My dilemma with Whole Foods? They're just weird. Like they've got stuff I really like to buy, but the shopping experience is just so confusing. Like sometimes the meat you get at the counter is really fresh and sometimes it's really not fresh. Like I'm at the produce section and they've got all this stuff with scanner codes but no prices. So finally, I ask a staff guy what's with the veggies with no prices? I'm assuming since they have scanner codes, there must be a scanner somewhere? Like where is it? So the guy says, "Well what do you need the price of?" And I'm like, no—week after week this happens—where's the scanner? Do you guys even have one? So the guy finally gets it and says, "Yeah. I'll show you." And then he take me to the tiniest computer behind some mushrooms and I say, "Uh—don't you think you guys should have a big sign so we can find this scanner?" And he looks at me like, "Why?" Shopping rage. I'm getting a headache just retelling this story.

Coming next, my dilemma with Trader Joe's.

Kitchen Shears

2011-02-22T20:06:00.000-08:00

Kitchen shears. Not a very romantic topic, but what in the kitchen is? Kitchen shears are pretty important though. I find it impossible to operate in the kitchen without them, especially in the age of over-packaging. A good pair of kitchen shears will cut through any plastic, no matter how tough, break cleanly through chicken bones, chop up herbs, cut raw bacon better than a knife, etc. On the other hand, a bad pair of kitchen shears will only enhance wrap rage. I had a bad pair; I used them for over ten years. When they finally came apart, I decided I wouldn't buy another pair until I'd done tons of research. Which is how I found my way to Shun Kitchen Shears. As sharp as any pair of shears I've ever had, and built to last, I now cannot live without them. It even comes with screwdriver blades, which I thought I would never use, but I actually did yesterday, tightening the screw on my cheap Ikea pot lid.

Nongshim Hearty Rice Noodle Soup

2010-11-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

Nongshim runs some great ads. They always get me to buy their new instant noodle products. My latest try was their "hearty rice noodle soup" or duk bae kee noodle soup. Nongshim tends to be hit-or-miss and this noodle was a bad miss. The rice noodles take forever to cook, and if you follow their directions, the soup is just a gross mess. But the ad is still great!

Basturma

2010-10-30T15:03:00.000-07:00

By RosarioVanTulpe [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

Today, for lunch, I finally tried a basturma sandwich. Basturma is an Armenian cured meat that reminded me a lot of Spanish cured hams, except that it's intensely flavored with spices like paprika, garlic, salt, and fenugreek. Doing some research, I found out that basturma is found all over what used to be the Ottoman Empire and can also be called pastirma. Apparently pastirma has the same etymological roots as pastrami but the two meats are worlds apart, since pastirmas are not cooked. Armenians make basturmas out of beef or lamb, but it can also be made from goat or camel. I liked it, but a little goes a long way.

There's a great article about the basturma and what it means to Armenians by Nigol Bezjian. Just click here.

The Story Of Three Peppers

2010-10-06T20:57:00.000-07:00

Every time a recipe calls for green bell peppers, I groan. Because, these days, cultivated green bell peppers are pretty horrible: rubbery, tasteless, old, and expensive. Almost $3 a pound? You've got to be kidding. Most of the time, I just leave the peppers out. But there are some recipes you really need a pepper for, like sloppy Joes. So, what does a girl do? How about replacing bell peppers with Anaheims or pasillas, my brain suggested as I browsed the produce section of an upscale chain supermarket with half-rotten vegetables.

The thing is, Anaheims and pasillas are almost half the price. And they give really good flavor. My only caveat is that if you use pasillas, make sure you fry them for at least ten minutes on low heat, because they're a bit tough. Pasillas, which are actually poblanos, are usually roasted, so they need a bit more extra care if you're going to use them like bell peppers (apparently, US stores always mislabel fresh poblanos as pasillas).

Corn Pancakes á la Bindae Duk

2010-10-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things to eat is a type of pancake made with mung beans called bindae duk. But the problem with making this at home is that you need mung beans, which you have to soak for several hours and then grind. So I don't make it very often. But then one day, I was at a Korean restaurant in London and they served a kind of pancake made with cornmeal that was very much like bindae duk. I thought that was brilliant: a quick, easy way to make bindae duk using a very common ingredient. In addition, they'd added baking powder which made the pancakes fluffy and light. I really liked that. Of course, pancakes made with corn aren't the same as pancakes made with mung beans, but when you have a craving, they're awfully close, and so wonderfully hearty and delicious. Here's my version of it.

Corn Pancakes á la Bindae Duk

About a cup of very roughly ground cornmeal
About a 1/4 cup of flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 egg

Add water to the cornmeal, just enough to barely cover. Let soak for two to three hours. Add flour, salt, baking powder and egg. The batter should be fairly thick, but still runny, so if it's too thick, add more water. If too thin, add more flour.

Heat a skillet. Add oil. Wait until the skillet is fairly hot. Then fry up pancakes — the size is up to you.

There's also a dipping sauce, but it's fairly simple: soy sauce and vinegar, the proportion up to you.

Eating these pancakes with just the dipping sauce is pretty satisfying, but it's so much more fun if you add things like kimchee, green onions, bacon, etc to the pancakes. Just remember that you're going to have to fry up these ingredients beforehand, especially bacon. That's fairly easy. Just fry the ingredients in the skillet until they're mostly cooked and then scoop some batter right on top. Just be careful when you flip the pancakes over.

Swiss Beer Fondue Macaroni and Cheese

2010-06-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

Today I really had a craving for macaroni and cheese. Usually I do the whole thing myself, make the béchamel sauce, grate the cheese, etc. But today, we didn't have any Cheddar cheese. Or milk. But in the back of the fridge, I had my emergency package of Trader Joe's Swiss Beer Fondue (this thing has an obscenely long shelf life so you can keep it in the fridge for months). Um, I'm not sure why TJ decided to do a fondue with Swiss beer — fondue is usually done with wine and kirsch — in addition, when was the last time you heard of Swiss beer? Swiss beer is hard to find even in Switzerland, so all in all, it's kinda weird. Well, the idea, that is — the Swiss Beer Fondue is actually pretty good.

To make the macaroni and cheese, I just smeared the thick goodness all over cooked conchiglie shells (the small ones) and put it in the oven. So how did it turn out? Pretty good. Nice boozy smell all over the house. Nice oozy cheese. Took care of my craving!

BLD Tweet A Dish

2010-06-19T15:12:00.000-07:00

When I found out that one of my favorite restaurants, BLD, has an on-going Twitter contest for free food, I knew I had to enter. I really like BLD. It's just one of those great neighborhood places where you can go for good food and good wine, where the staff is knowledgeable and friendly, the atmosphere both fashionable and relaxed, where you're perfectly free to dress up or dress down — you can even bring your kids. Unfortunately, it's not the sort of place I can go to too often because most of the entrees are in the $15-$27 range, and when you're pinching pennies, even a $6 hamburger can seem formidable.

So how does the contest work? You go on Twitter and suggest a dish that BLD might want to make for its Thursday night special. Past winning dishes have included chicken and dumplings and Moroccan tajine. I suggested that yummy Portuguese dish of pork and clams. Well, much to my surprise, I actually won. I mean, I never win anything, and I'm one of those poor suckers who enters everything. I can't tell you how many stupid hoops I've jumped through, from writing slogans for lawn mowers (we really needed one) to designing t-shirts with eco themes for a hopeless chance at a Smart car. Well, finally! Who knew all those hours of reading cookbooks would pay off!

The prize for Tweet A Dish is a complimentary 3-course meal for two! And that includes wine! I was in heaven...! Originally, I thought part of the deal was that you had to have the special you suggested, but, no, the staff said we could both order anything we wanted! BLD is just so generous. Absolutely no fine print involved. As our waiter Peter said, "We just want you and your guest to have a good time." And boy did we. The featured wine for the night was this incredibly fun, delicious white from Slovenia called "Jarenincan" (Crnko winery), an interesting blend of riesling, sauvignon blanc, and chardonnay which made for a slightly sweet flavor with the most floral, fruity aftertaste — starting off with that how can anything go wrong?

Of course I couldn't wait to try my special. I'd noticed that on the menu, the dish had become "Portuguese sausage and clams". I hadn't realized that there were two similar Portuguese dishes, one with pork and clams done in an Alentejo style, and another with sausage and clams called cataplana, which is a specialty of the Argave region and is more like a bouillabaisse with lots of seafood. BLD did the cataplana version, only with their own spin, making it more like a risotto, or, paella, I suppose. The dish was very delicious, full of flavor from the shrimp stock, and with plenty of nice heat.

It was such a wonderful evening, with all my thanks going to BLD. They really go all out to make the Tweet A Dish winner feel special, and it's that kind of graciousness which makes L.A. a fantastic town.

Iced Peach Tea

2010-06-15T15:51:00.000-07:00

(These are peach blossoms.)

While shopping at Whole Foods, I was caught by that wonderful floral smell of ripening peaches and ended up buying three. I'm always wary of buying peaches at supermarkets as they never ripen, or if they do, they just become mealy and tasteless. (Avocados too.) And sure enough, while these peaches continued to produce an amazing amount of fragrance, they never properly ripened, wizening and drying out instead of softening. I tried tasting one, but the tannins nearly bit all my taste buds out. So what to do? I couldn't throw them out. In desperation, I peeled and cut them up and threw them in a pot with water and tons of sugar. The stewed peaches were OK, but the resulting sugar syrup was phenomenal. I knew instantly what to do with the syrup — make iced tea! Using my favorite jasmine green tea, of course. If life gives you hard peaches, make iced tea! :)

BTW, I'm really not liking how these large fruit producers are now breeding fruit just for smell. A pretty nasty way of tricking us shoppers. Why I'm buying most of my fruit at farmer's markets. Although, I have to say, I've been very impressed by the fruit that's on sale at Trader Joe's. Their small watermelons have been real winners, nice and sweet with good texture, and I was very happy with the avocados that were on sale in May.

Hamburger Buns

2010-06-13T15:08:00.000-07:00

Today, I really wanted to make hamburgers for lunch. Unfortunately, we didn't have any buns. I thought about making a quick trip to the store to buy some, but then the thought of those horrible tasting store buns made me think twice. I had several bun recipes but those recipes take four-five hours with all the rising and stuff. And then I began to wonder about Ken Hom's baos (see post below for recipe). They only take about 30 minutes. Would they make good hamburger buns? The answer was a decisive yes. They made fantastic hamburger buns, flavorful, tender yet sturdy enough to stand up to all the juices of a good burger. I only made two small changes. I added about 1/4 teaspoon of salt to the dough, and, instead of steaming them, put them into a 375 degree oven for 25 minutes. This is now my go-to recipe for any kind of bun: hamburger, sandwich, hot dog.

BTW, I made the hamburger patty from some tri-tip I got at Costco. $4.99 a pound and packed with flavor — not like supermarket meat at all!

Chinese Steamed Buns

2010-06-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

Our family is crazy about Chinese stuffed buns, the ones called baos. Usually, we'll make a special trip to a restaurant to get some, but every once in awhile, I actually feel like making them at home. And they're not as hard as you'd think they'd be to make. For the bun part, I like to use a recipe by Ken Hom which is extremely easy. For the stuffing part, I just put in whatever is around. Like ground pork, garlic, ginger, frozen peas, cellophane noodles, carrots, etc. The only trick, if you're using nonfatty pork loin, is to add some cold water or else the stuffing could get very dry.

Baos can be baked or fried, but mostly, they're steamed. The ones I cook at home are the steamed version.

Recipe for the Chinese steamed buns
(adapted from Ken Hom's Illustrated Chinese Cookery):

6 fl oz warm water
1 packet of yeast
1 tablespoon of sugar
2 tablespoons of oil (something without much flavor like peanut)
13 oz plain flour

Mix the water, yeast and sugar in a large bowl. Leave for about 10 minutes, at which point the mixture should be foaming. (If it isn't, you've got dead yeast and will have to go and get some live ones.) Add the flour and mix until you have a nice, smooth dough (if it's too sticky, add more flour). At this point, you can just make steamed buns. Just roll out the dough into a large snake and evenly divide the snake into as many pieces as you'd like. Put a little piece of parchment paper on the bottom of each piece and let rise for 30 minutes. The parchment paper keeps the buns from sticking to whatever tray you've put them on. And then steam for about 10. (Uh — you should know to use a steamer of some kind, right? I have a two-tiered one I got at a Korean store.)

Recipe for stuffing

About 3 - 4 pork loin cutlets, ground
half a carrot, chopped into tiny squares
garlic, minced
a teaspoon of minced ginger
1/4 cup of defrosted frozen peas
3 tablespoons of cold water
1/2 teaspoon of salt
lots of pepper
cooked cellophane noodles, finely chopped

Now the secret here is to make sure the pork loins are ground to a paste. I do it in a small food processor. Add all the ingredients and mix extremely well with your hands. You MUST use your hands. It will be gooey, but that's what you need to have a moist stuffing.

Now to assemble the baos, take a small chunk of dough and swirl it around both palms until you have a rough ball. And then flatten it, again with your palms. Unto the little pancakes, add enough stuffing to fill about 85% of the pancake. Now, very gently, pull the dough up and around the stuffing, going around and around. You should get little rough points meeting up at the center. Pinch together the points and twist. Now you have a bao!

Grease the bottom of your steamer (I find Pan pretty good). Fill the steamer with the baos, not crowding them too much, as the baos will rise. Let rise for about 20 minutes. And then steam for about 10 minutes.

Rosemary Helps Reduce Toxins in Grilled Meat

2010-06-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

I always get nervous about grilling meat because of all the cancer concerns. Cooking meat at high temperatures produce something called heterocyclic amines and supposedly, these things are linked to cancer. Even though I have a family history of stomach cancer, I try not to remember this because who can resist charred meat? Come on — it's primeval. Just the smell of the grill significantly raises my happiness index. So I was really interested in reading a recent NYT article about rosemary and how chemicals in rosemary counteract the nasty heterocyclic amines. Unfortunately, I find rosemary overwhelming and don't use it very much. Luckily, other marvelous ingredients like lemons, onions and garlic do the same thing!

I wonder if people instinctively knew this because all these ingredients are classic parts of marinades. In Greece, it's olive oil, garlic, and rosemary. In Asia, onions, garlic, and sometimes lemons or limes. Seems like too much of a coincidence...

My Favorite Cooking Show

2010-05-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

I have a favorite cooking show. But I don't know what it's called, I don't know who the host is, and I can't understand a word (except hao, which means good). That's because my cooking show is on ZWTV, which seems to be a local Chinese station. I can't get any info because the only thing ZWTV translates into English is the ads, and only the addresses. Even the website is in Chinese and, apparently, untranslatable (I tried plugging in the URL at the Google translation site: nada).

Even without understanding the Chinese, I still find it riveting. Mainly because of the host, who is an absolute riot. The first half hour of the show is when she has guests — she really shines here, laughing, buffooning, teasing. On one recent show, she actually cried. At first I thought she was joking, but no, she was crying. The guest chef had made a chicken in a pressure cooker. At the bottom of the pot was an intense liquor of chicken broth. The host drank it, and almost instantly, started tearing up. I'm sure she was reminiscing about her childhood, about her mother or grandmother taking all day to prepare this dish, how the aroma and taste reminded her of all that love. She cried for a good five minutes. I couldn't imagine Martha Stewart or Julia Child doing that.

I think ZWTV is Taiwanese. And I've noticed that Taiwanese shows are really cartoony, very heavy with graphics and physical humor. Even this cooking show will often have cartoon bubbles sprouting out of the guest's head. It's such a fun show. And with food shows, I notice you really don't need to understand the language. So check it out if you get ZWTV. In LA it's 57.9 and the show appears at 9 in the morning on weekends.

Shish Barak

2010-04-30T18:48:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite cookery writers is Claudia Roden, and one of my favorite cooking books, Roden's Arabesque. The book is a wonderful collection of easy recipes from Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon. Yum! I can't tell you how much I love food from Turkey and Lebanon.

Shish baraks are from Lebanon and they're hard to explain. Stuffed with meat, they're vaguely like tortellinis, but the taste and texture is very different, mostly because the wrapping isn't pasta but filo dough. Shish baraks are exquisite, in large part because of the sauce, which is simply yogurt! But on top of the shish barak, it doesn't taste like yogurt at all — more like a savory, creamy, rich gravy. Talk about heavenly chemistry!

Of course, not having all the ingredients, I had to modify Roden's recipe. For instance, I didn't have pomegranate molasses, so used a combination of honey and tomato paste — what you want is a sweet and sour taste and this combo works. I also halved the recipe. So here goes.

Shish Barak adapted from Claudia Roden's Arabesque

For the filling:

1 onion, chopped
1/2 pound ground lamb or beef
11/2 tablespoons sunflower oil (I just used peanut)
About an ounce of pine nuts (I didn't have pine nuts so used slivered almonds)
salt & pepper
1 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses (I used a tablespoon each of honey and tomato paste)

For the pastry:

3 sheets of filo
4 tablespoons of butter, melted

For the sauce:

1 small container of yogurt at room temp
sprinkle of salt
1 small clove of garlic, minced
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
some dried mint

To make the filling, fry the onions in the oil until they're nice and golden. Add the ground meat, salt, pepper and spices. The trick here is to make sure everything is extra spiced because it's going to have to support the blander yogurt. Stir and make sure the meat is fully cooked. Then add the pomegranate molasses (or honey and tomato paste mixture). Turn the heat off. In another pan, put in a drop of oil and cook the nuts until they're golden. Add to the meat mixture. Give everything a good stir.

Now you have to deal with the filo dough. Usually they come in large rectangles. Just cut them up until you have rough rectangles of 6 inches by 4 (I think I just halved the large rectangles and then halved the smaller pieces). Brush a sheet with melted butter. Make sure the longer edges of the rectangle is facing you. Then put a thin row of meat filling along that long edge. Then roll the filo like you would sushi. When you have a long snake, begin to shape the roll into a tight coil. The trick here is to crush the roll a little while coiling, otherwise, the filo tends to break. Put the little coil on a large baking tray (which should be greased). Repeat with the rest of the filo and filling. Right before you put it all in the oven, brush all the coils with melted butter.

Make sure the oven has been pre-heated to 400 degrees F and bake for about 30 minutes. When ready, the little coils should be nice and golden, with the intense aroma making you salivate.

For the sauce, beat the yogurt with the salt and minced garlic. You can heat the yogurt or serve at room temperature (I like it slightly heated, but be careful that you don't curdle the yogurt by heating it at too high a temp).

Serve the coils with a little bit of sauce and garnish with the dried mint (I used oregano).

The Gratitude of Bones

2010-04-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

Kartika Review just came out with their fabulous Home issue. OK, I am a little biased as my short story "The Gratitude of Bones" is included. But it is a pretty cool issue with tons of wonderful things to read, including essays by Asian American artists on what home means to them. To download the full issue, just click here! And please read my story and say something nice in the comments because I'm a pretty sad charity case and am not too proud to beg. ;)

Instant Ramen Channel

2010-04-06T19:13:00.000-07:00

Toshio Yamamoto eats instant ramen five times a week for breakfast. I found out about him through Lisa Katayama's post on Boing Boing. Yes, he has a blog in which he rates his ramen experiences (i-ramen.net), but more interestingly, he has his own YouTube channel called Ton Tan Tin's Channel in which he has videos dedicated to each packaged noodle. The videos are so well done, you feel like you made the ramens yourself. Unfortunately, there are no English subtitles, but you don't really need them. Here's a sample:

Plum Salad Dressing

2010-03-21T20:56:00.000-07:00

The nice thing about spring is all the abundance of fruits that are coming to market. I know — you can get fruits year round, but I hate buying fruits in winter because they're usually pretty tasteless. You also find a lot of good bargains in spring, like the plums I found — a package of six for about $2.00. The plums were the really sweet kind, with almost no acidity. Problem with packages, though, is there are always two or three that are too ripe and mealy. Most people would just pitch them, but I can't stand waste. So I decided to make salad dressing with the mealy ones — the flavor was still fantastic, and the mealiness actually is better for a salad because the plums will disintegrate nicer into the liquids.

Since the plums were so sweet, I decided to go a little Japanese with the flavors. Unfortunately, when I make dressing, I never measure, so the following are estimates and suggestions.

1 mealy plum, peeled and chopped
1/8 cup of light soy sauce
1/4 cup of rice vinegar
1/2 teaspoon of Japanese mustard (the kind in the tube)
1 tablespoon of honey
1 small clove of garlic, peeled
1 tiny chunk of ginger, peeled
1/4 cup of light vegetable oil (I used peanut)

If you have a small food processor, throw everything in and whiz. It's by far the easiest way. Of course, adjust for seasonings.

Fuchsia Dunlop's Chicken With Tea Leaves

2010-02-19T16:32:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite cookery writers is Fuchsia Dunlop. An English woman, she trained as a Chinese chef at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Her recipes are rarely too difficult and are always interesting. Like Junshan Chicken with Silver-Needle Tea (from Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province). She says the dish is a banquet delicacy in Junshan, and it incorporates the area's famous "yellow tea". I'd never seen a recipe with tea leaves in it so I thought I'd give it a try. The resulting dish was flavorful and delicate, which surprised me because, unlike so many Chinese dishes, there was no garlic or green onions. The dish is simply sliced chicken breasts that have been marinaded in a simple solution of salt, Shaoxing wine, potato starch and egg white. The breasts are quickly fried and then boiled in a tea infusion, leaves included. The key, of course, is having really high-grade tea leaves which are infused at a very low temperature beforehand (I didn't have Junshan tea so I used a silver-needle white tea). Even so, I still found it remarkable that you can achieve such wonderful, complex flavors with so little. Chicken and tea leaves — who would have thought?

Ginkgo Nuts

2010-02-15T11:55:00.000-08:00

Whenever I'd go into an Asian grocery store, I'd look for ginkgo nuts. I absolutely love ginkgo nuts — they have this unique, indescribable flavor, fragrant, slightly bitter, with an amazing translucent jade color. It's like finding treasure anytime I see them in a dish. Unfortunately, the only ginkgo nuts I ever saw in stores were processed versions in the frozen cases. (I don't know what they do to those poor nuts, but frozen, packaged ginkgo nuts are pretty horrible.) My mother couldn't understand. She says you see them fresh all the time. Really? Where?

Well, apparently, everywhere. I just didn't know what I was looking for. In fact, Asian grocery stores have piles and piles of them. Which they label as "white nuts". Having never seen fresh ginkgo nuts, I had no idea these "white nuts" were ginkgo nuts!

Thrilled with the discovery, I brought a small bag home. Wow. Ginkgo nuts are hard to shell. They were too small for my nut crackers so I had to use the back end of a knife. It takes two smacks. The first smack at the large end goes pretty well. The second smack never does, the knife smashing into the little end so that I rarely got a nice whole nut.

Now what to do with all these nuts? Most recipes only call for a small handful. Doing some research on the Internet, I found this advice from Lisa Katayama at Boing Boing. She likes to eat them fried and salted. There is something really wonderful about frying ginkgo nuts — something about the light covering of oil really brings out the nuttiness. A really interesting part of Lisa's post was the warning from her aunt: don't eat more than ten or you'll get indigestion and nose bleeds. I'd never heard that before! Upon further research, I turned up more warnings about the possible toxicity of ginkgo nuts. Quite a few people advise that you remove the "xin" inside the nut (a little strip which you can find by halving the nut — you can sort of see it in this picture).

And Wikipedia says:

When eaten by children, in large quantities (over 5 seeds a day), or over a long period, the raw gametophyte (meat) of the seed can cause poisoning by MPN (4-methoxypyridoxine). Studies have demonstrated that convulsions caused by MPN can be prevented or terminated with pyridoxine.

No idea what a gametophyte is (even after looking up the word), but I think the end advice is not to eat too many ginkgo nuts!

Green Papaya Salad

2010-01-14T11:38:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite salads is a green mango or green papaya salad (although I have to give green mangoes the edge). You usually see the dish on Vietnamese or Thai menus. I'd never really thought of making it at home until I saw a pile of green papayas at the store the other day. Well, why not?

Plenty of reasons, as it turned out. Green papayas are big. Like the size of butternut squash. And they get sort of wet and slimy. Peeling one is not an easy task. And trying to cut a large papaya into long strips, as required for a salad, is hard. Green papayas can't be easily managed with a knife. I ended up using my Japanese slicer, getting the papayas into the thinnest slices possible before hand cutting the strips. It took more than half an hour.

An easier way, if you're a master, is to chop it up with a knife while holding it in one hand. I posted a video of that technique below. Really an amazing thing to behold.

I didn't use the recipe posted on the video; I used a really delicious recipe I found at The Passionate Eater.

So what does green papayas taste like? When a friend asked me this, I wasn't sure what to say. Green papayas are basically unripened papayas, so they only have the vaguest papaya taste and are much more chewier. I wouldn't eat it plain, but somehow in a salad with a very fragrant and pungent dressing, they became addictive. The Passionate Eater describes the salad as a kind of slaw, and it definitely is a dish in which the sum transcends the parts.

Thai Eggplant

2010-01-07T14:57:00.000-08:00

I really love Thai eggplants. They're small, sweet and perfect for curries. The problem is that you often have to get a package of two dozen or more. That's a lot of eggplants. So what do you do with them all? I decided to deep-fry half a dozen. In a nice light batter I adapt from Marcella Hazan*: flour, salt and water — enough water to make the dough pour like sour cream. I cut up the eggplants into quarters, dipped them lightly in batter and deep-fried for about five minutes in pretty hot temperature. To keep the deep-fried eggplants hot, I parked them in a 350 degree oven, which made them even nicer. Sorta like french fries. I'd definitely give this dish a solid A. But how can you go wrong with deep-frying?

*BTW, USA Today once took Marcella Hazan to Olive Garden for her take on the chain's "Italian" cooking efforts. It's a pretty funny article.

Green Papaya Shredder

2010-01-06T21:25:00.000-08:00

Wow! This woman shreds green papayas in her hand with just a knife!

The Grid by SiliconeZone

2010-01-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

This is a picture of my new love.

It's called The Grid and it's a potholder, trivet and jar opener. Made from InSILate, this potholder is safe to 675 degrees.

Now, I've been searching for a good potholder for years. I really don't like the traditional cloth ones because they're too clumsy and get really grungy (The Grid is dishwasher safe). So when the first silicone mitts and holders came into the market, I was really excited. But, unfortunately, they didn't live up to the hype. While they were wonderfully flexible and had a fantastic grip, they didn't give you much heat protection. With the one I have, after three seconds of holding onto something really hot, I get burned. Why can't they make one that's doubly thick, I've always complained. Well, The Grid is more than a quarter of an inch thick. Great heat protection with fantastic flexibility. And it comes in lots of different colors. Of course, it's not cheap — around $8, but hopefully it'll last me for years and years. There's also a mitt but it's half the width so I'm not really sure how well it protects you. Unfortunately, sometimes you do really need a mitt so I think I'll go and buy one.

Healthier German Apple Pancakes

2009-12-27T11:22:00.000-08:00

Last night I did some bad tossing and turning so I woke up like a bear out of a cave (in other words, I needed some serious grub). Pancakes, bacon and scrambled eggs smothered in maple syrup? Sounded awfully good. So I got to work (did I ever tell you about my butler fantasies?)

My go-to German apple pancake recipe comes from Marcia Adams's Cooking From Quilt Country. Now Marcia's recipes feed armies so I tend to halve them. When I opened the page for the pancake recipe, lo and behold, I found a piece of paper with old notes I'd scribbled for halving the recipe! Great! So I put on my apron and got to work. A quarter cup of flour, a quarter cup of whole wheat flour (apparently, the last time I did this, I wanted a healthy version, thus the whole wheat — well, I didn't have whole wheat but I did have oat bran, so I used that), 1 tablespoon of sugar, 3/4 teaspoon of baking powder (yeah! get to use the homemade one), 3/4 teaspoon of baking soda, 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 1 egg, and — this is when I realized something was wrong. Where's the milk? You need milk for pancakes. So I compared the original recipe to my notes. Hmmm. Some serious discrepancies. Like the original didn't call for baking powder or baking soda. And it had all sorts of goodies like nutmeg and vanilla. And apples. Whoops. Wrong notes.

Well, by this time I had pretty much everything all nicely mixed up in my reliable quart-sized Pyrex measuring cup. So I just threw in the milk and spices. I figured it was all good. And it was. I especially liked the addition of the oat bran. It made the batter much more flavorful and gave the pancakes a beautiful brown color.

Making the pancakes is really easy. So much preferable than doing little ones on the skillet. I don't follow Marcia's directions completely. Instead of precooking the apples, I just do it all in the oven like this. Preheat the oven to 470 degrees. Get a really good skillet (cast iron is best but I have an ancient Cuisinart that has stainless steel sandwiched in the aluminum). Put about a tablespoon of butter in it. Cut up a smallish apple very thinly. Put it in the skillet with the butter. Put the skillet in the oven, letting the apples cook while the oven is preheating. About five minutes into it, stir the apples around so each piece gets a nice coating of melted butter.

Meanwhile, mix everything for the batter. When the oven finally preheats, the skillet should be pretty darn hot. Pour the batter over the apples. Put the skillet into the oven. Now, at this point, you can follow Marcia and turn the oven down to 350 degrees. Today, I was too busy with the scrambled eggs and bacon so I forgot. But in ten minutes, I got the crispiest, nicest pancake! I'd definitely give this dish an A.

BTW, if you live in LA, go to Huntington Meats at the Farmer's Market for your bacon. They have the best apple-smoked bacon, thick, meaty slices that are so much better than Niman Ranch. Try to get the older gentlemen to help you. The younger ones so aren't into service. And they don't really know that much. Huntington also sells Moffat's chicken pot pies. Seriously good.

Too Scared To Shop

2009-11-27T12:16:00.000-08:00

I had these two experiences shopping in the last month:

1. At Bristol Farms in South Pasadena, one of the employees climbs on top of the cheese display so she can rearrange the shelf above. Her dirty shoes were gripping the rim of the display.

2. At Whole Foods on Arroyo, an employee picks up some red kale that had fallen on the floor and puts it back in the produce display. This was kale that had been kicked around and run over by a shopping cart.

This is why I'm too scared to shop and too scared to eat.

Japanese Style Korean BBQ

2009-11-08T10:46:00.000-08:00

In Japan, Korean BBQ is called yakiniku. The meat is flavored for Japanese tastes, but the experience is pretty much the same: large platters of beef or pork grilled at the table. But I think things are changing. I just caught the end of a program that showed one Japanese restaurant serving individual portions of meat. Usually, at a Korean restaurant, you order a platter of a specific cut or part (marinated/unmarinated steak, ribs, tribe, etc.). So, unless you're with a large group, you only order one or two platters. But in Japan, people wanted to be able to order a piece at a time, like at a sushi restaurant, so they could eat a variety of meat. I've often wished that myself! This is such a great idea and hope Korean BBQ restaurants here in the US follow suit.

Deep-frying Disaster

2009-11-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Okay. Not going to deep-fry duk (Korean rice cakes) again! One exploded quite spectacularly about five inches from my face. Unfortunate because the deep-fried duk was really delicious -- like golden noorunji (the crisped up rice at the bottom of a cooking pot). I ate them with sugar.

DIY Baking Powder

2009-11-01T08:45:00.000-08:00

When I found out you can make your own baking powder, I thought this is something I must try. Well, it took me several years, but I finally did it this morning. Wow. What a difference. I put some in my oatmeal pancake batter and the whole thing bubbled up like a witch's cauldron!

It's so easy. You just need cream of tartar and baking soda. It takes about five minutes. That's it.

The recipe I used comes from Scott Peacock's The Gift of Southern Cooking, a most excellent book. Much of the recipes from the book is from his mentor, Edna Lewis, as is the baking powder recipe. Scott writes that Miss Lewis was so "distressed by the chemical additives and aftertaste of commercial 'double-acting' powders" that she started making her own: 1/4 cup of cream of tarter with 2 tablespoons of baking soda, sifted together three times and stored in a tight-sealing jar (I use a tiny Lock 'n Lock). The powder lasts 6 weeks, but store at room temperature and away from sunlight.

Scott writes that when he first started using the DIY powder, he didn't taste any difference, but that when he tried using the commercial powders again, he could definitely feel the metallic tingle on his tongue. I thought my oatmeal pancake batter fried up crisper too.

Baked Asian pears

2009-10-20T09:50:00.000-07:00

Recently, while shopping at Costco (one of my least favorite things to do), I noticed a box of fruit labeled "Apple Pears". I, naturally, thought it was one of those weird hybrid fruits, borne out of some mad marketing scheme. But no, the "Apple Pears" were just Asian pears. Go figure. Anyway, the price was right, so I bought a box, and after eating two or three, decided to make some baked pears for a little variety.

The inspiration came from a show I saw about steamed Asian pears. This woman had cut in half this massively big pear (the size of a small watermelon), scooped out the seeds, and filled the cavity with honey, jujubes, ginkgo nuts and all sorts of goodies. I didn't have any of these things, nor did I have a steamer. So I put my halved pears into a baking dish, filled their tiny cavities with maple syrup, filled the baking dish with a little water, sprinkled some cinnamon and baked it in a 325 oven.

After about an hour and a half, I opened the oven to take the pears out and this strange thing happened to me: the warm smell of baking fruit, the steam from the oven, lifting the ceramic baking dish — I suddenly thought about baked apples, how I used to make baked apples all the time — why had I completely forgotten about baked apples — why did making baked pears seem so completely novel?

Why had I stopped making baked apples? Baked apples are fantastic. Why was no one else making baked apples? I can't remember the last time I'd read a recipe featuring baked apples. Caramel and candied apples are all over the place, but the equally good baked apples have disappeared from our collective memory (aka the media). Very strange.

The interesting thing about baked pears is how boozy the result was. I'd only added maple syrup and cinnamon, and yet, it tasted like I'd added a good quarter cup of eau de vie. Since I like boozy, the result was heaven. Or at least a little bit of heaven.

I'd give this dish a solid A.

Welsh Rarebit

2009-10-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

On a cold fall day, nothing is better as an afternoon snack than Welsh rarebit. Not the strange runny cheese sauce on toast you often get in the US, but the substantial crusty pizza-like thing you get in the UK. One of my favorite recipes comes from the Two Fat Ladies, Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright. According to them, the original Welsh rarebit was just a thick slice of cheese toasted in the oven. Their version is like a souffle, the melted cheese puffed up with eggs. And fairly easy to make. If you're making it as a snack for you and a buddy, shred about 4 ounces of cheddar cheese and add some mustard (they recommend dry English, but I used Sierra Nevada Pale Ale mustard), Worcestershire sauce (I add a huge amount), Tabasco, salt and pepper. Now take two eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. Add the yolks to the cheese mixture and stir until things look pretty uniform. Then whip up the whites until there are some nice stiff peaks (mine were just soft, but hey, it all eats the same). Fold the whites into the cheese mixture. Finally, put the mass on top of toasted bread and bake in a preheated 450 degree oven (hopefully, you've put the bread and cheese into a baking pan). In ten minutes, the tops should be golden.

Snacking on Welsh rarebit isn't a bad way at all of spending the time while waiting for the Muse to come back. And, Dear Muse, come back soon. I really don't think it's fair of you to get me all excited about this thing and leave me hanging with barely 40 words. After all, I've been so good. Ever since that time you punished me and left me with a 11,000-word story when I was hoping for a good, chunky novel, I've been your devoted slave. I'm not even hoping for a novel this time.

What I Just Cooked: Japanese-style Braised Pork

2009-10-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

I wanted to make a pork stew, but with a Japanese twist, so I went to one of my favorite books, Japanese Cooking A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji. There aren't a lot of pork recipes in the book, but I did find something called Nagasaki-style Braised Pork. The recipe called for all sorts of things like bean curd lees and bacon and required two days of cooking. Not going to happen. So I just simplified it by using the basic simmering stock and throwing in whatever vegetables I had.

Braised Pork

About a pound of cut up chunks of pork shoulder (or butt as it's sometimes called)
About 4 small red potatoes cut into chunks
2-3 carrots peeled and cut into chunks
24 pearl onions, peeled

simmering liquid

3 1/2 cups dashi (I just put half a small packet of powdered dashi with 3 1/2 cups of water)
1 cup sake (I used the mei kuei lu chiew because I didn't have sake)
2 tablespoons of mirin (can be skipped)
6 tablespoons of soy sauce
5 tablespoons of sugar

Put the pork into a casserole pot and add the simmering liquid. Let it come to a boil. Skim impurities. Then add the rest of the ingredients and simmer for about 45 minutes.

Recipe adapted from Japanese Cooking A Simple Art.

California Que BBQ Sauce

2009-09-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

I was in Whole Foods recently and there was this really friendly gentleman offering samples of his BBQ sauce. I always like to taste samples but I almost never buy anything. Not this time. The BBQ sauce was from The California Que and I've never tasted anything like it. Usually, you can summarize BBQ sauces with "sour", "sweet", "vinegary", "inedible". But not this one. There was such a rich, fruity taste to it, you could just eat it as a dip. But it does make a fantastic BBQ sauce, as I found out when I marinated some chicken legs.

California Que is pure sauce — no additives at all. You have to love the simple ingredients list: ketchup, brown sugar, mustard, vinegar, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, pepper sauce, honey, molasses, herbs and spices. The gentleman said it took him years to refine the recipe, and you can taste it. He offers three degrees of hotness — I found the medium plenty hot.

What I Just Cooked: Soy Poached Chicken

2009-09-24T19:27:00.000-07:00

About nine years ago, I came across a recipe in The New York Times which was so intriguing, I've never been able to forget it. It was a Mark Bittman recipe and it was for soy poached roast chicken. Now, I've made plenty of soy sauce chicken in my lifetime, mostly because it's pretty easy. You just surround some chicken with soy sauce, a little sugar, chili pepper, green onion and let it simmer for about an hour. But his recipe was really from Roy Ip and Roy liked to poach his chicken with a Chinese cooking alcohol called mei kuei lu chiew, which is made with rose essence! So for nine years, I kept an eye out for mei kuei lu chiew with no luck. Finally, in the SGV, at Hawaii Marketplace, I found a bottle! Actually several different bottles ranging from cheap to really expensive.

Without hesitation, I bought the one for around $6 dollars, bought a chicken and poached away. Wow. The dish was phenomenal. Make it now.

Soy Poached Chicken

3 cups mushroom soy sauce
3 cups mei kuei lu chiew
2 cups water
2 star a nise
1 14-ounce box yellow rock sugar, crushed or 1 cup of unrefined sugar
3 ounces of ginger cut into slices
10 scallions
1 chicken, 2 - 3 pounds

1. In a stockpot, combine the soy sauce, wine, 2 cups of water, star anise, sugar and ginger. Bring to a full boil. Add 6 scallions. Add chicken, breast side down. In the original recipe, you're supposed to bring the liquid back to the boil and cook for 10 minutes. And then you're supposed to turn off the heat and turn the chicken over and you let it sit in the liquid for 15 minutes. Didn't work for me. The chicken just wasn't cooked after 15 minutes. I find that if you're going to go this route, you really need to let the chicken sit for at least an hour, or increase the simmer time to twenty minutes or so.

4. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees. When the chicken is done, put the chicken into a roasting pan (without the liquid!) and roast it in the oven until it's brown (about 5 minutes).

5. Now is the time to make a nice sauce, which is just the poaching liquid — about a cup — with the remaining scallions nicely minced. Carve the chicken and pass the sauce.

Adapted from The New York Times.

Sichuan Peppercorns

2009-08-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

Confession time: I was never a fan of Sichuan peppercorns. I just couldn't figure out what the fuss was and why book after book always insisted on adding the difficult little things to so many recipes. I was told to buy them whole and pan toast them and grind them — and for what? A metallic burn that gave food an off flavor?

Well, I've finally seen the light. I am now a huge fan of Sichuan peppercorns. This is what happened: last week my husband took me to Xiang Wei Lou, a Hunan restaurant in San Gabriel (CA). We order their famous steamed spicy fish. It's covered in the most amazing sauce, so complex, so balanced, so floral, and I'm thinking, where's that coming from? That floral back note that's making my little taste buds ohhhh and ahhhh? And it comes to me: OMG, it's Sichuan peppercorns. Sichuan peppercorns!

So now I realize that I've only been using crap Sichuan peppercorns. And so do most Chinese restaurants. If you get the really good kind, the fresh stuff you get in China, Sichuan peppercorns are like little taste fairies that will turn even humble ma po tofu into a delicacy.

So where do I get fresh, top-grade Sichuan peppercorns? HELP!

Bulgur and Walnut Kibbeh

2009-07-22T14:42:00.001-07:00

I'm really becoming a fan of Martha Rose Shulman's health columns in the NYT. In the last week, I've made two of her recipes, one for Lebanese tabbouleh and one for bulgur and walnut kibbeh. Both were so delicious and amazingly easy to make (if you use a food processor). And in the middle of a heat wave, just what the cook ordered, as there's no heat involved, except to boil water.

This is the first time I've ever used bulgur wheat. Unlike other grains and pulses, all you need to do is soak it in some water and it's ready to go. Once soaked, there's something so enjoyable about working with bulgur, the feeling of the grain so smooth and spongy — I'm tempted to add some cucumber juice and stick it all over my face. What a great facial!

Back to the kibbeh. Wow. You'd never know there wasn't meat in the recipe. Something about the combination of walnuts and bulgur; so rich and hearty, it kept me full for hours. I think I like it better than traditional kibbeh, which is usually made from ground raw lamb. The ingredients are very similar for both the tabbouleh and the kibbeh (the kibbeh has walnuts, the tabbouleh tomatoes and scallions), so if you decide to make one, make the other the next day.

Feta Sushi Roll

2009-07-17T15:15:00.000-07:00

Well, they do say necessity is the mother of invention. And a lot of barmy concoctions in the kitchen, I'll bet. Like today. I'm making sushi rolls and I go to get eggs for the tamago and there's only one egg and the egg is cracked. Now, I don't want to risk food poisoning, but, looking in the refrigerator, there really isn't anything I can replace the egg with except feta cheese. And I think, okay. Feta cheese rolls.

Not as bad as it sounds, I'm glad to report. After all, cheese and rice is a basic in many European countries. So I make the sushi rice. And I cut up the feta cheese into nice thin slabs. I then moisten the feta cheese with the soy sauce-dashi mixture I was going to use for the tamago. And I add finely sliced mint, with a smear of wasabi. And voila. Feta cheese sushi rolls. Why not? About time there was a Japanese-Greek fusion dish!

How did it turn out? I'd give it a solid B.

Japanese Turnips

2009-05-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

I was shopping at Marukai this weekend when I saw the most delectable looking turnips I'd ever seen. Plump, round bulbs with lovely green leaves and sturdy stalks. I had no idea what to do with them but decided I couldn't pass up anything that looked so fresh and good.

Back at home, I pondered and pondered. You can always pickle turnips. Or eat them raw. Or make soup. I decided to pickle one turnip and make soup out of the rest.

But before making anything, I decided to eat a piece raw. I was expecting something crunchy, something with a bit of bite. But not this turnip. It was creamy! Like turnip ice cream. I could have eaten all four bulbs right there on the spot.

What I did to make the soup was pretty easy. I sliced up the turnips (unpeeled because they were so tender) and added it to chicken stock (made simply with chicken, garlic and ginger, salt and pepper). I also added the chopped up greens. Again, the turnips defied expectation because I was thinking the greens were going to take some time. Nope. Within five minutes they were ready to eat. And the soup was incredible! Definitely an A.

For the pickles, I left the bulb and greens whole. First I salted them for twenty minutes. And then I added them to well-salted water, with green onions, a slice of ginger, and two sliced cloves of garlic. Now the turnip is resting in the refrigerator, but the pickling liquid tastes great already!

What I Just Cooked: Banana Muffins

2009-04-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

Today, I noticed I had two very ripe bananas. They were so ripe, they were actually beginning to ferment. Well, there's only two things you can do with black, fermenting bananas: you can throw them away or you can make banana bread. I have countless recipes for banana breads and cakes, but I particularly like the one I MacGyver from a basic muffins recipe I got from epicurious.com years ago: it's easy and the texture is something between a bread and a cake.

As usual, today I tried to clean out as much from the refrigerator and pantry as I could. In addition to the bananas, I had half-and-half that was almost off, a piece of cream cheese with a bit of mold on top, and a jar of pumpkin spice that probably should have been thrown away last month (they say you shouldn't keep spices for more than a year). Well, what's the harm of slightly-off food since it's all going to be mixed and baked? The cream cheese is fine—I just took a quarter of an inch off the moldy part and threw the non-moldy part in with the half-and-half, egg, and bananas. Hey, it's all good. So here's the recipe.

Banana Muffins

2 cups of white flour (I added about two tablespoons more to compensate for the cream cheese)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup of half-and-half or milk
1/4 cup melted butter
1/4 cup cream cheese (optional)
2 black bananas (optional)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Either butter muffin pans or stick paper muffin cups inside. Or, if you're feeling very lazy like I was, just get out a 8-inch square baking pan and grease it (I was so lazy, I used the baking pan as my mixing pan too — hey, one less dish to clean up). In a bowl, put in bananas, half-and-half, melted butter, and cream cheese. Mix with a hand-held blender or just use a food processor. In another bowl (or in the mixing pan), put in all the dry ingredients and mix. Add the liquid mixture to the dry mixture and combine together until the dry ingredients are just wet (don't over mix). Put the mixture in the muffin tin or baking pan, and place in the oven. If you're making muffins, this should take about 20-25 minutes. If you're using the pan, you're basically making banana cake/bread, so check after 40 minutes. If the middle of the bread is still wet, bake for another 10.

The nice thing about this recipe is that you can turn it into almost any kind of muffin, blueberry, date, cheese, corn, etc. Just be sure to adjust the sugar depending on whether you make a sweet or savory muffin (if savory, only put in about 2 tablespoons).

So how'd it turn out? I'd give it a solid B.

An interesting aside, I'd printed out the recipe in 2001, and on the sidebar, there's an ad for a Cuisinart mini prep food processor. They wanted $40. Today, you can get one for around $36, so I guess the price's gone down — way down if you calculate in inflation. There must be a mental price barrier for things like food processors. BTW, the KitchenAid mini is really good.

What I Just Cooked: Tofu Croquettes

2009-03-19T15:04:00.000-07:00

Tofu Croquettes (or burgers, depending on how fancy you want to go)

Sometimes I get sick of doing the usual pan-fry with tofu, or the salad, or the soup, so I make tofu burgers. Before I got my little mini KitchenAid food processor, I had to be fairly energetic to make them though, because the tofu has to get pretty well crumbled up, which is a chore to do with a fork or knife. But now, I just get rid of the excess moisture in the tofu (usually by squeezing the water out with my hands — wrapping the tofu in a towel helps), roughly crumble it up in the bowl of the food processor and whiz away. I can't tell you how much I love my little mini KitchenAid. The motor is pretty darn powerful — creams butter like a dream. And what it does for tofu! Like whipped heaven! (This is sounding a little too much like a Good Housekeeping ad from the 60s...)

I found out that by whipping up the tofu, I didn't need any eggs as a binder. Which is great because sometimes you don't have eggs in the house. Today, I made a pretty simple burger. Just a regular package of tofu, about a half teaspoon of salt, some pepper, a grated carrot, ginger, garlic and about a cup of panko break crumbs to absorb moisture. Now, I call the burgers croquettes sometimes because, after forming the tofu mixture into patties, I pat them in a pile of panko before frying them up. The great thing about this burger/croquette is that you can add almost anything, like diced ham or peas or cheese or chicken or shredded cabbage. If you've added too much dry ingredients and the mixture isn't forming, add an egg to bind it all up.

Now if you haven't fried with panko before, I should say that you need a very hot pan and a good deal of oil. The oil should come to about a quarter of an inch up the sides of the frying pan. Keep the oil fairly hot, but watch it or the bread crumb will burn! I know I'm keeping the oil at a good temperature when I see gentle bubbles of oil dancing against the food.

Since I've taken care of the croquettes, I'll talk about the tofu and my latest discovery. Last year, at a branch of Whole Foods, I noticed a brand of tofu I'd never seen before, Wildwood. And a kind of tofu I'd never seen before, organic tofu made from sprouted soy beans. The package explained that the sprouted soy beans meant your body would digest the tofu better. I'm always up for better digestion, so I decided to try it, thinking it would taste like the typical American tofu, rubbery and kind of gross. But, boy, was I wrong. The Wildwood firm and soft tofu is some of the best tofu I've ever tasted. Great texture, great flavor. Absolutely nothing off. All I could think was "how in the world could an American company get tofu so right"?

Well, today, I did some checking on Wildwood. It's owned by Pulmuone, a Korean food manufacturer, one I know very well! In fact, most of the Korean food products I buy now are made by Pulmuone. And then, I recalled that about a year ago, I was watching a Korean news program that talked about how a big Korean manufacturer had bought an American tofu maker and was trying to teach them how to make tofu better. Well it figures that I'd end up buying and loving it! I just wish all the branches of Whole Foods carried it. In LA, I've only found it at the Pasadena and the Studio City branches. At least the sprouted soybean tofu. All the branches seem to carry the Wildwood tofu burgers, so why not the regular tofu? It's a good price and much better, I think, than even the Asian brand that they carry. One word of advice, the Wildwood extra firm has very little water and rubs against the teeth like chalk. Definitely not something to be eaten plain.

If only the Pulmuone naeng myun was as good! But that's another story.

Citrus Kimchee

2009-03-12T21:19:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, I was watching a Korean cooking show called Best Cooking Secrets and this kimchee master came on and said, "Today I am going to make citrus kimchee" and I thought, "What! I have to try that!" While I've eaten a lot of different kinds of kimchee, I'd never even heard of one with citrus fruits in it (and I've heard of some weird ingredients, like 7-up). This recipe calls for tangerines, which gives the kimchee a nice tangy sweetness.

For most people, kimchee is just the very spicy fermented cabbage side dish you usually get at Korean restaurants. Even many Koreans don't realize that there are over 180 different kinds of kimchee — there's even a kimchee museum in Seoul dedicated to its glories. Kimchee isn't really one dish, but a term for a kind of fermented food, just like pickles used to be. At one time, you'd never say just "pickles". You'd say "cucumber pickles" or "beet pickles" or "pickled watermelon rinds" or "pickled pig's feet". That's the same with kimchee.

Kimchee, pickles, sauerkraut — it's all one and the same thing, foods that have been preserved in salt. In fact, when Kimchee was first being made (about 8,000 years ago), the only difference between kimchee and sauerkraut was the variety of cabbage or vegetable. It was only later that Koreans started adding spices like garlic and ginger. The red, chili infused versions are late-comers, as chili peppers weren't introduced to Korea until the 16th century. The popular cabbage kimchee you usually see is called mak kimchee. At the better Korean restaurants, you'll also see mul kimchee, which is a white kimchee served in a broth of its own fermented liquid ("mul" means water in Korean). Citrus kimchee is in that category. [For examples of different kimchees, with pics, click here.]

Mul kimchees tend to be one of the easier kinds of kimchees to make since you can make it with chunks of ginger and whole cloves of garlic — with kimchees like mak kimchee, you have to spend quite a lot of time mincing all the garlic, ginger, scallions, etc. Having said that, this particular recipe does require some diligent work in the peeling of all the tangerines. Extra flavor has a price!

Citrus Kimchee

2 cups of Chinese cabbage, washed and cut into small one to two inch squares
1 small Korean radish, cleaned and cut up into small, flat rectangles (about a cup or so)
6 Tangerines, just the pulp*
1/4 cup of Minari (Korean watercress), cut into 4 half-inch pieces
2 cloves of Garlic, sliced into strips
1 teaspoon of Ginger juice — to get ginger juice, grate a hunk of ginger in a Microplaner (the one with the smallest holes)
2 tablespoons of Korean dried chili or 2 sliced red chili pepper
Kosher salt

Put the cut-up cabbage in a big bowl (you want the cabbage to have lots of room and be happy). Sprinkle the cabbage with enough salt to coat the cabbage with a light layer. Shake up the cabbage a little (you want to make sure every bit of the cabbage gets a little salt). Let the cabbage stand for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, clean the radish. First wash and then trim all the hairy parts with a small knife. Cut into small, flat rectangles.

After 30 minutes, the salt will have extracted some liquid from the cabbage. You want to keep that. Add the cut-up radishes along with the minari, garlic, ginger juice, and Korean dried chili. Mix thoroughly with your hands. Add half the tangerine pulp*. Mix again with your hands. Put the mixture into a container, like a pickling jar or even a plastic box — just make sure whatever you are using has a tight lid. Put some water into the bowl that had the cabbage in it — about a cup. Add the other half of the tangerine pulp to the water. Clean your hands in the water. While you're at it, clean the bowl, swishing the water gently around and around. I know this sounds odd, but there's a method to this madness: by cleaning the bowl with your hands, you'll extract every bit of flavor left in the bowl and on your hands. There's also a theory that using your hands while cooking transfers your energy into the food, so it's crucial that you're in a happy mood when you cook. Now add that liquid into the container. Put the container in the refrigerator. In about three days, the kimchee should be ready to eat.

*To get the tangerine pulp, use this technique. Take a sharp, small knife and cut off the top and bottom of a tangerine. Place the tangerine firmly on a cut end. With the knife, cut away the skin and inner membrane, going from top to bottom, easing the knife around the curve of the tangerine. With the membrane gone, it should be easy to remove the pulp, either with a knife or with your fingers.

Here's a picture of a display from the Kimchee Field Museum. All the dishes are examples of ancient kimchee.

credit: Wikimedia Commons

Biscuits With Cream Cheese Hearts

2009-03-04T17:37:00.001-08:00

I love breakfasts at B&Bs. Unlike at hotels, the food is usually much better, and more likely than not, served from the heart. One memorable B&B breakfast I had was from a small B&B in Ulster county, New York, years and years ago. The highlight was this incredible sweet roll filled with warm cream cheese. I guess the owner of the B&B couldn't help but notice how much I liked them, because as we were leaving, she slipped me the recipe. I've been meaning to make them, but only now had the chance! I have to say, they're better than I remembered.

Biscuits With Cream Cheese Hearts

From Sunset cookbook, tasted at Orchard House, and slightly revised by me

1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon of pumpkin spice mix (the original recipe called for straight ground cinnamon)
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract (the original recipe called for almond extract, but I didn't have any so I substituted)
3 tablespoons of melted butter or margarine
1 3 ounce package of cream cheese, cut into 10 equal portions
1/4 cup of chopped walnuts (the original recipe called for almonds to go with the almond extract)
1 package (10 pieces) or refrigerated biscuits like the Pillsbury kind

In a small bowl, combine sugar and pumpkin spice mix. In another small bowl, combine vanilla extract and butter. Dip each piece of cheese in butter, then roll in the cinnamon/sugar mixture. Lay the pieces side by side on waxed paper. Mix walnuts with the remaining cinnamon/sugar mixture.

Separate the biscuits and pat each into roughly 3 inch rounds. Place a piece of cheese in the center and pinch the dough edges to seal. Dip the filled biscuits in butter and then roll in the cinnamon/nut/sugar mixture.

Place each biscuit, seam side down, in an ungreased 2 1/2 inch muffin cup tray (I just put them on a baking tray, but the muffin tray will help the biscuits from popping open). Bake in a 375 degree oven until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Remove from the muffin tray immediately and let cool for ten minutes. Serve warm. (You can cover and chill any leftovers, just reheat in a 350 degree oven until warm, about 20 minutes.)

What I Just Cooked: Short Rib Sandwiches

2009-02-25T15:13:00.000-08:00

I was watching some show on TV (I think it was Diners, Drive-ins and Dives) and I see this incredible short rib sandwich being featured. It had red onions and gruyere cheese dripping all over it. Now, I love short ribs and I love short rib sandwiches. I particularly loved the sound of the red onions and gruyere, so I couldn't wait to make my own version of it.

First, I stewed the short ribs with the only things left in the refrigerator: celery, half an onion, a clove of garlic and an old bottle of Paulaner beer. To add flavor, I first browned the ribs until they were pretty crusty. To add even more flavor, I sauteed all the vegetables in olive oil until I could smell the sugar in the air. At the very end, I added about a tablespoon of tomato paste and let it toast a bit. I then put all the ingredients together in my trusty Creuset stewing pot and let the lot simmer for about four hours. With some salt and pepper, of course.

As it turned out, Paulaner made a fantastic braising liquid. Better than beef broth or consumme. I could have used the Paulaner broth as is, but I wanted a really rich, thick gravy so I strained the broth, degreased it, boiled it down by a third and added beurre blanc. The end result was restaurant perfect. Tasted like I'd used glace de veau, without the heavy, MSG salty flavor you often get at restaurants.

So, to assemble the sandwich! On toasted hamburger buns I put down a layer of thinly sliced red onions, a layer of shredded short ribs, a layer of gravy and a layer of cheese. BTW, I wasn't in the mood to buy a big chunk of gruyere at $9 a pop, so I just mixed together leftover Monterey Jack (for the melting factor), leftover Parmesan and leftover Pecorino.

How did it turn out? A+ But then, how can you go wrong with short rib sandwiches?

Kumquats

2009-02-16T14:09:00.000-08:00

I've decided kumquats are the S&M specialists of the fruit world. You take a bite and the tiny little devils are so sour you think you're going to scream. And then just as you're about to spit it all out, the incredible, delicious sweetness of the rind kicks in and it's heaven and you immediately want another...

So what exactly are kumquats? They're little, tiny citrus fruits that look like toy oranges. They even come with wee seeds. The inside is SOUR and the rind is so sweet that it almost tastes like the kumquats come naturally sugar coated. There's also that flavor orange rinds have, that complicated perfume which is so concentrated in the peel's oil. You can eat kumquats whole, peel and all, or just eat the peel. Kumquats also come candied.

I'd tried kumquats before, but having bought them at supermarkets, had been very disappointed. This time, I tried some organic ones at the local farmer's market — I just could not believe the difference. Like biting bits of sunshine.

Here's a recipe suggestion: slice some and put them in chicken salads. Or sandwiches. For lunch today, I made a sandwich of leftover chicken, kumquats, celery, and lettuce. I gave it a Middle Eastern twist by making a dressing of yogurt, tahini, garlic, salt, soy sauce (just a drop or two), pickled chili peppers, and chopped parsley. Or course, I wrapped a pita around the entire concoction. Filling and healthy and cheap and oh, so good... I think Julia would have approved!

What I Just Cooked: Apple Empanadas

2009-02-09T15:47:00.000-08:00

Last night I made mandu and had about half a dozen wrappers left over. Not really enough to save but too much to throw away. So today, I decided to make dessert with the leftover wrappers. Actually, the whole dish was a leftover treat. I had apples and cream cheese, so I shredded one apple, sugared it, threw some pumpkin spice in and added a big spoonful of cream cheese. After a good mix, I stuffed the mixture into the leftover wrappers and deep fried the parcels. The result was a kind of dessert empanada.

How did it turn out? I'd give the apple empanadas a solid A.

Itadakimasu

2009-01-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

Itadakimasu is the Japanese way of saying grace before a meal. A way of thanking everyone who contributed in the preparation of that food, from the people who grew the food to the people who made the meal. I've long thought before every meal we should take the time to remember and acknowledge where and how our food comes to us. To thank the plants and animals for giving their life to sustain ours. It seems to me in thanking just a god, you lose our immediate connection to the physical world around us. In a world of cubicles and boxes, where physical contact is more accidental and brutal than kind or purposeful, it seems more important than ever to remember our interdependence, that it can be a beautiful thing. Itadakimasu is a nice, simple way of saying all that.

Cooking Without Money

2009-01-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

I was delighted to find out that there's an Italian dish called "potatoes with escaped lamb" (patati con agnello scappato). The dish contains no lamb, thus the "escaped lamb"! I got all this in Amanda Hesser's NYT article "1971: Mrs. Sebastiani's Malfatti". "Mrs. Sebastiani's" features an Italian peasant dish made with bread, spinach and Parmesan. Hesser explains, "It’s a more direct descendent of the cucina povera from which the dish originates, when cooks would make a meal of bread and what few ingredients they had."

Hesser's article reminded me that I wanted to blog about cooking on the cheap. At the moment, there's a real worry about "recession obesity", the fear that with less money available for fresh fruits and vegetables, people will eat a diet of Spam and empty carbs, thus becoming even more obese than they already are. The thing is, in many parts of the world, the poor eat nutritionally, and oftentimes, well. It's just that in the US and Britain, people have forgotten how to cook well on a budget (they also don't know how to cook). And they've forgotten about cheap vegetables like kale, cheap cuts of meat like pork legs, and complex carbs like beans. I frequently advise people to buy a good Italian cook book because so many of Italy's great dishes are based on cucina povera. I don't know of any cuisine that makes beans taste so good. And the recipes are so simple that you don't really need to know anything more than how to boil water. And if you can't get filled up on pasta e fagioli (pasta and bean soup), you need to see a doctor.

For a simple pasta e fagioli recipe, click here. The recipe is from Epicurious and directed at Americans so all the ingredients are easy to find.

One last thing, most Italian recipes will call for expensive Parmesan (and don't use the thing in the can because that is not Parmesan). I can't afford Parmesan. So I'll buy a small piece of Pecorino or Piave. Also, for cooking, most Italians use the cheaper Grana Padano, saving Parmesan for grating on top of dishes right before serving. I've heard that Grana is creamier and that's why it's preferred for cooking.

Squirrel Cuisine

2009-01-07T11:27:00.000-08:00

We have a lot of nasty tempered squirrels around the house and I'm always kidding my husband by saying that he should go out and shoot a bunch for dinner.* Well, I guess I wasn't the only one thinking this because now there's a whole industry in Britain revolving around wild squirrel meat. Yes, nouveau squirrel cuisine has arrived.

I think I should begin with a little history lesson. This one is called The Battle of the Red and the Grey. Once upon a time in Merry Old England, the cute little Red Squirrels lived very happily in the cozy countryside, nibbling nuts and playing alongside the Hobbits and the elves. And then one dark day, an evil armada of North American Grey Squirrels arrived, devastating the landscape. The invading squirrels were big and nasty; the invasion was swift. Poor little Red Squirrels.

But all was not lost. Hearing the cries of the little Red Squirrels, the Gamekeepers of the Nation rose and began shooting the hell out of the nasty Grey Squirrels. Now, Gamekeepers are a thrifty lot. They don't like anything to go to waste. So what did they do with the piles of dead Grey Squirrels? Why sold them to pubs for the public to eat, of course! Well, imagine their surprise when fancy chefs (and even TV chefs) started buying the squirrels by the wheelbarrel full. And they're getting creative. One hotel restaurant is turning the nasties into mock Peking duck.

So how do nasty Grey Squirrels taste? According to an article in today's NYT's Dining & Wine section, it all depends on what the nasties have been eating. If you order squirrel pie, hope your dead squirrel lived on nummy nuts. Apparently, the NYT couldn't get enough of the story, going into a depth rarely explored in that publication.

If you'd like to cook a squirrel, the Guardian website has a squirrel pastie recipe (pasties are basically Welsh empanadas).

*For details, click here.

What I Just Cooked: Beans and Swiss Chard

2009-01-05T20:45:00.000-08:00

I saw this basic beans and Swiss chard recipe on a Lidia Bastianich show. All I needed to do was blanch some chard in unsalted water, which I did. Then I drained the chard and chopped it up after letting it cool. The rest was even easier. In a large frying pan, I threw in sliced red onions, garlic, tomato paste, cooked white beans, and crushed canned tomatoes and sauteed the whole lot in some hot olive oil.* What I found really interesting was that you fried the tomato paste before adding the canned tomatoes. As the beans started to coat in the paste, I got the idea to throw in a small amount of dark brown sugar — something about the coating beans made me think of Boston baked beans. I really regretted not having any bacon to throw in. At last, the Swiss chard was added and the dish was finished. Lidia suggested using this as a side dish to meat but I just ate it as the main.

So how did it turn out? I think I'll give this concoction a B.

*In Lidia's version, she added red peppers instead of the red onions.

What I Just Cooked: Leek And Potato Soup

2008-12-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

Leek and potato soup. This is such a simple soup to make. All you really need is water, a potato, and 1 - 3 leeks, depending on the size of the leeks. To make it richer, you can add the optional ingredients of milk or half-and-half or cream (depending on how rich you want to make it) and maybe some nice cheese (I like provolone but pecorino is nice too). To make the soup, you just need to peel and wash the potato, cut it into smallish cubes and put it into a medium pot. Add water just to cover. Bring water to boil, then reduce the heat to simmer. Add about a tablespoon of salt (or less to suit your taste or dietary requirements) and a sprinkling of pepper. Cook for about fifteen minutes. In the meanwhile clean the leeks. This is the only really tough part because leeks are a pain.

The way I clean leeks is this: first trim the leeks and get rid of all the tough green parts (the yellow and yellow-ish green parts are still good for soup); after trimming, take a large knife and cut the leek in half, beginning from just below the root (you want to keep the root attached because this will make it easier to clean); now clean the leek under running water, making sure to check between all the layers of the leek. But another way of cleaning leeks is this: cut off the root end; cut the leek in half; slice the leek the way you would slice an onion; put the cut-up leeks into a bowl; put water into the bowl; swish around and get the leeks clean; drain the leeks into a colander; rinse again with water; let drain.

If you cleaned the leeks my way, slice up the leeks. If you cleaned the leeks the other way, you're ahead of the game. By this time, the potatoes which have been simmering should be ready. Add the leeks and cook for another five minutes. Then, using either a blender or a food processor, blend the soup until it's nice and smooth. At this point, you can add the optional ingredients, the milk or the cheese or both. And serve.

Today I served the soup with little rectangles of toasted sour dough bread.

How did it turn out? I'd give it an A. It's a very filling soup. I used cream and cheese, with a garnish of sour cream. For a really cold day like today, boy, did I need the cream!

Cooking Korean Food with Maangchi

2008-12-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

My husband found Maangchi's Korean cooking videos on YouTube. I liked them so much I went to her site and found a wealth of no-nonsense information on home-style Korean cooking. Even if you've never tasted Korean food, her recipes and instructions will have you making Korean food like an old Korean grannie. The fun and instructive videos are what really makes the site special. And what makes the videos special is Maangchi's sweet and out-going personality.

Here's Maangchi making tang su yuk, which is sweet and sour pork remastered to suit Korean palates. It's basically a Chinese dish which you'll usually find in Chinese restaurants catering specifically to Koreans, as well as in some Korean restaurants. I'm classifying it as sweet and sour pork but tang su yuk is usually made with beef, although more and more restaurants are now letting you choose either beef or pork. Personally, it's not a dish I like making at home. It's a lot of work and you have to really love deep-frying. And I don't. I've had most of my worst accidents deep-frying*. It's also one of those dishes that will almost always taste better at a good restaurant. There's something to be said about cooking a dish over and over again, night after night. Like practicing the scales on the piano.

*If you cook on a regular basis, you will not be able to avoid burning yourself. That's why I always have a tube of organic aloe vera handy, one with a very high concentrate of pure aloe vera. I've had extremely severe burns heal before my eyes using aloe vera. The trick is to slather it on thick and often. The gel becomes like a second skin, healing and protecting.

What I Just Cooked: Schweinshaxen

2008-12-25T22:31:00.000-08:00

Schweinshaxen. I bought a small piece of pork leg, mainly because it was so cheap. Usually I steam-roast it, smearing it in fresh ginger and garlic. But I decided to go German this time. In a roasting pan (which at the moment is my old Cuisinart skillet), I made a bed of leeks, mainly using the tough green parts that aren't good for anything but flavoring soups. There, on the bed of verdant green, I gently rested my pork leg. This one had a nice layer of skin. In order for the flavors to seep in, I slashed the skin in several places. Then I gave the pork a rub down of coarse salt and pepper and garlic. It was now ready to go into the oven, which I turned up to 450 degrees. I also put a layer of foil over the roast to let it steam a little. After fifteen minutes, I turned the oven down to 300 degrees and removed the foil. I also poured some Paulaner Salvator beer over the top. From then on, every thirty minutes, I continued to shower the pork with Salvator. This is why I'm calling this Schweinshaxen. The overall cooking time was about five hours.

How did it turn out? I'd give my faux Schweinshaxen an A. Because the next day, the leftover pork had the most amazing aroma of beer. I love boozy meat. Absolutely amazing to eat cold!

What I Just Cooked: Twice-baked Potatoes

2008-12-21T20:21:00.000-08:00

Twice-baked potatoes. It turned out to be an all-day project. I had two massive russet potatoes that took almost two hours to bake in a 375 degree oven. When the potatoes were nice and fluffy inside, I scooped out the flesh and mashed it with half a stick of butter, half a cup of sour cream and half a cup of half-and-half. Salt and pepper, of course. I also gave it an extra whipping with my hand-held blender before piling the creamy concoction back into their skins. I wanted to pipe the filling to give it a nice look, but I had a mild fever, which gave me a headache, so in the end, I just made some swirls with a fork. When I was ready for dinner, I popped it back into a 375 degree oven and cooked it for about forty minutes. Oh! Before popping it back, I topped the potatoes with a snow of pecorino cheese, hoping for a nice gratineed effect.

I wish restaurants had twice-baked potatoes on the menu. Potatoes, in general, seem to be on the decline. Yes, you will find plenty of french fries and the occasional mashed, but remember the glory days of baked potatoes with every main dish? When the potatoes would come with a silver carousel filled with wonderful topping options like sour cream, whipped butter, green onions? And what happened to potato skins served a hundred different ways? Looking back, I guess the late 80s were the golden days of the spud. At least, when you're looking at it from a restaurant point of view. When looking at it from the supply perspective, things have never been better. Even Ralphs has at least four different kinds of potatoes, from lovely yellow ones like Yukons to dark purple delights. I even found one called White Rose which I'm dying to try.

How did it turn out? I couldn't resist garnishing the final golden spud with very finely minced green onions. You have to cut the fat somehow. Since I considered the potatoes as the main dish, I served Italian-style sausages on the side, more as something to dip into the mashed potatoes than anything else! I'll give my try at twice-baked potatoes a solid B. It's been a few years and I'm out of practice. :(

Secrets to Cookies

2008-12-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

I love butter cookies but whenever I try making a batch, something generally goes wrong. Usually I've somehow put in too much flour or too much butter or too much something so that the poor cookies come out dry and tasteless. And the kitchen is usually a mess, too, with flour just about everywhere. And flour is pretty darn hard to clean up. All that work and sweat for hockey-puck cookies. :(

Of course, I always blame it on the recipe, which doesn't make much sense because I can use the same recipe twelve times and end up with twelve entirely different textured cookies. So I was really happy to find "Butter Holds the Secret to Cookies That Sing", a NYT article by Julia Moskin. According to the article

“Butter has that razor melting point,” said Shirley O. Corriher, a food scientist and author of the recently published “BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking” (Scribner).

For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68 degrees, it begins to melt.

Not only that, but you can't rechill the butter. At least not for baking purposes:

“Once butter is melted, it’s gone,” said Jennifer McLagan, author of the new book “Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes” (Ten Speed Press).

Warm butter can be rechilled and refrozen, but once the butterfat gets warm, the emulsion breaks, never to return.

I think this is an article Julia Child would have been very happy with and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know why their butter cookies stink. As for me, having read the article, I am so exhausted, I think I'll just go to my local Italian deli the next time I want a nice butter cookie. They've got those great ones that are half dipped in chocolate.

What I Just Cooked: Chicken Faux Crepes

2008-12-19T20:20:00.000-08:00

Chicken Faux Crepes

I had a bunch of scraps in the refrigerator so I thought I'd make chicken crepes for dinner. But come dinner time, I just felt too shitty to make crepes from scratch. So I decided to use Whole Food's homemade flour tortillas instead of making crepes.* For the filling I sauteed diced white onions, left-over chicken, squash, and mushrooms. I added a cube of homemade chicken stock (I always keep some in the freezer), about a half cup of water, and about a quarter cup of cream. After reducing the liquid a bit, I added about a cup of sharp cheddar. Meanwhile, I was warming the tortillas in a 300 degree oven. When the filling was ready, I put the two things together and voila.

How did things turn out? I'd give the dish a C+. But dishes don't tend to taste very good when the cook is feeling out of it.

*Whole Foods makes their own flour tortillas in-store, but only at a very few locations. We have to go all the way to Pasadena, where they have a super store in the middle of downtown. Who knew you can get Eco bras at Whole Foods? The super store has everything, unless you actually need it, and then they're out. Murphy's Law.

BTW, Julia Child grew up in Pasadena.

Hollandaise Sauce

2008-12-19T16:41:00.000-08:00

I love hollandaise sauce but I'm not too crazy about making it. Worrying about the butter, the eggs, all that stirring — ahhhhhh! I just get scrambled eggs in the end, anyway (if you do, just put the sauce through a sieve). And frankly, anything requiring a double boiler turns me off. That's why I was so ecstatic at finding this recipe on the BBC Food site. The eggs never go near the stove. Absolute genius. The recipe is by Holly Jones and requires a food processor. At the moment, I am without one :( so I used an ancient Braun hand held blender and it worked out fine. I cannot begin to tell you how easy this recipe is. Good bye, Julia Child.

Ingredients
3 tbsp white wine vinegar
6 peppercorns
1 dried bay leaf
2 eggs, yolks only
125g/4oz butter
lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste

Method

1. Put the vinegar in a small pan with the peppercorns and bay leaf. Reduce the vinegar over a high heat until there is only 1 tbsp left. Strain the peppercorns and the bay leaf from this reduction.
2. Put the egg yolks in a food processor with the vinegar reduction.
3. Gently melt the butter so that the butter solids fall to the bottom of the saucepan.
4. Turn the food processor on and slowly pour the butter on to the egg yolks with the motor still running. The sauce will start to thicken. When only the butter solids are left, stop.
5. If the sauce is too thick, add a little hot water.
6. Season to taste with salt and pepper and a little lemon juice.

If you want to link directly to the BBC site, click here. The BBC food site is pretty good. I love their print option because there isn't the advertising junk you get with epicurious.com or NYT so the recipe prints out with a very clean look (and you use less paper), but you do get a picture. I always think it's nice to have a picture with the recipe.