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!

Green Papaya Salad

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

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

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

The Grid by SiliconeZone

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.