My Favorite Cooking Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!