Mangoes

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

 

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Japanese Curry

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

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

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

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

 

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.