California Que BBQ Sauce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.