chawan mushi

I tried something new today. Ever since I saw my chef-crush Paul Qui make it on Top Chef I have wanted to try making chawan mushi. This weekend I finally had time for some kitchen play, so I gave it a shot.

First I had to make the dashi. This is the amazingly savory stock that goes into miso soup and lots of other Japanese food. It’s made with water, dried seaweed, and dried tuna.

First you simmer the seaweed (kombu) in some water:

Then you remove the seaweed and put in the dried bonito flakes:

After a few minutes of simmering the fish sinks to the bottom — like bizarro reverse dumplings. Then it’s time to strain it through cheesecloth, and that’s it. Dashi.

To make the chawan mushi (recipe here), the dashi gets beaten in with eggs, rice wine, soy sauce, scallions, ginger, sugar, and salt.

This mixture gets poured over cooked shrimp (recipe calls for crab but sadly, that ain’t happening here) in custard cups, then steamed.

It’s supposed to steam for 8-10 minutes but it took me nearly half an hour; I assume I had the heat too low. The finished product:

 

comfort food

homemade bread with bunny chow, avocado, and cilantro pesto

IUI #2 was this morning.

The sperm numbers were good — 18 million post-wash with 31% motility.  That’s by far the best motility number we’ve ever gotten.  I had 2 follicles each measuring 19 or 19.1 when I was monitored on Friday, so this is the best chance we have ever had.  Let me say that again.  This is the best chance we have ever had.

So why do I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck?  I’m not hopeful.  I’m not joyous.  Instead I find myself perversely in need of comfort, and as always that means heading into the kitchen.*

My wonderful husband made the bread (I don’t bake at all but he is fantastic), and I did the rest.  The bunny chow recipe is one I’ve already shared, though this time we sliced the bread instead of scooping out the insides and filling it up.  The cilantro pesto is just regular old pesto with cilantro instead of basil — just olive oil, parmesan, and the cilantro all mashed together in the food processor.

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* And that, dear friends, is why I am no longer and will never again be a size 6.  Or 8.  Or 10. 

 

fancy ramen

This started as a way to use up whatever vegetables were left in the fridge at the end of the week, but it has evolved into a more-or-less static set of ingredients.

Fancy Ramen

• 2-3 c chicken broth (homemade is best, but canned will do in a pinch)
• a hunk of fresh ginger, very thinly sliced
• 2 or 3 mushrooms
• 2 eggs if you’re sharing, 1 if you’re not
• a big handful of some kind of leafy greens (baby pak choi is my favorite but I can’t get it here so I use spinach)
• 1 package of ramen noodles
• fresh hot peppers (I use Thai chillies when I can get them, but here I substitute serranos)
• 1 scallion
• half a tomato
• soy sauce
• lime wedges

Put the broth on to boil with the ginger.  While it is heating, slice the mushrooms.  Chop the hot peppers, slice the scallion very thin, and cut the tomato into thin wedges.  If you don’t always have lime wedges in your fridge like I do, cut some.

When the broth is boiling, add the mushrooms, noodles, and greens.  Stir as needed to get the noodles totally immersed.  (Throw away the nasty seasoning packet.)

Crack the egg and gently slip it into the soup to poach; reduce the heat and cook according to noodle package directions.

Ladle each serving into a bowl and top with tomato wedges, scallions, hot peppers, and a dash of soy sauce.  Squeeze a lime on top and eat immediately (while the egg yolk is still soft).

potato salad with kalamata olives and feta

Apparently I am now writing a food blog…

This is what I made today.  It is a VAST quantity, as it’s meant to be lunch for both me and my husband for an entire week (with probably some left over).

Potato Salad with Kalamata Olives and Feta

• 10 medium potatoes, peeled and quartered
• 10 hard-boiled eggs, peeled
• 6-8 oz kalamata olives, pitted and coarsely chopped
• 4 oz feta cheese crumbles
• 2 14.5-oz cans chickpeas, rinsed and drained
• 1/2 c extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 c red wine vinegar
• 1 t oregano
• salt to taste
• crushed red pepper to tasted (I think I put in about a teaspoon)

Boil the potatoes in salted water.  Drain and cool, then dice.  Roughly chop the hard-boiled eggs.  Whisk the last 5 ingredients together, then toss everything in a very large bowl.

When I was thinking about quantities, I was thinking 1 potato + 1 egg per person per day, but it’s such a very big quantity that I may have overdone things a little…

I make a big bowl of something every Sunday that we can just scoop into containers and take with us to work each morning, and this one turned out particularly well so I thought I would share.

eggplant

Since some folks have asked, and since I was pretty pleased with myself, and since  2 weeks is a long, long time, here is what I made on Saturday (to go with rice and tofu curry).  It’s Vaguely Asian, which is the cooking style I do best.

• 1 large eggplant, quartered; each quarter sliced lengthwise into 1/2 in. slices
• salt
• a thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and cut into matchsticks
• 2 cloves of garlic, sliced very thin
• equal parts sesame oil and canola oil (maybe 2-3 T each?  I just sort of eyeballed it)
• a generous dash of lemon juice
• 1/4 cup (or more) light soy sauce
• 4 scallions, thinly sliced

Heat the oven to 375.

Salt the eggplant and set aside on paper towels for 10-15 min. to bring out some of the bitterness.

Arrange the eggplant in a single layer on a large baking dish or cookie sheet (not the totally flat kind of cookie sheet).  Mix the ginger, garlic, sesame and canola oil, lemon juice, and about half of the soy sauce together and pour over the eggplant.  The pan should be wet — if it’s not, or if not all of the eggplant has been coated, make more dressing and repeat.

Bake for 20-25 min., turning once, and adding more soy sauce if the pan dries out.  (Or cover the pan to preserve the liquid.)

Sprinkle the scallions over the eggplant and bake 5-10 more minutes.  Serve.

 

 

banana flower salad and panang tofu

One of the best things about where we’re living now is that we can drive up to see my family.  We don’t have to fly, we can be there in under 4 hours if we want to, and they can come see us too.

Even better, when we go up there we can stock up at the Asian grocery store.

Thai eggplant, pak choi, long beans, banana flower, shallots, chillies, wonton wrappers, egg tofu, fish sauce, coconut milk, curry paste, and spices.

Praise the lord and pass the ammunition!

Where I’m living now, I can’t get any of this stuff.  That shopping trip was like Christmas.  So I put it all in the car with a couple of ice packs, brought it back here, and today I got down to business.

I made panang curry with egg tofu (easy because the curry paste came out of a can) and banana flower salad.  Here’s how I did it:

Banana Flower Salad

This is something I ate in Burma but had no idea how it was prepared.  When I saw the banana flowers at the store I had to get one.  Thanks to the power of the internet I found this great recipe from Delhi Belle, which is Thai rather than Burmese.  It turned out just great!

banana flower salad

The banana flower is the great big red teardrop-shaped thing in the groceries picture above.  You eat the tender petals in the center and not the tough outer red petals, so there is a lot of peeling to be done.

banana flower with one petal removed. you remove those little blossoms too.

the edible part, chopped up and soaking in lemon water.

Never one to follow a recipe, I didn’t have any chilli paste so I pounded a few chillies in my mortar and pestle.  I ended up serving the salad in the mortar (it’s really big).  The rest of the dressing is lime juice, soy sauce, coconut milk, and sugar.

I cut up half a tomato and a scallion, then fried up some shallots.

This all got tossed together with the dressing and served!

 Panang with Egg Tofu

panang with egg tofu*

Egg tofu is … um … tofu made with egg.  And it tastes … um … different from ordinary tofu.  This completely unhelpful explanation has been brought to you by ginger and lime.

Along with the tofu (which is the stuff in the tubes), I used curry paste and coconut milk from cans, hot peppers, kaffir lime leaves, Thai eggplant, and basil.

curry ingredients

This is pretty easy to make since I don’t make the curry paste myself.

You stir fry the curry paste in a little bit of oil, then add the coconut milk and stir till it’s well blended.  When it’s boiling, toss in the eggplant, cut into wedges.

Cover this and let it simmer.  In the meantime, slice the egg tofu into discs and pan fry it on both sides.

Roll the kaffir lime leaves up into a cylinder, then slice very thin.  Slice the chillies on the diagonal.  Add both to the curry and simmer a few more minutes.

Here’s what my kitchen looked like at this point:

note the glass of wine: cook's prerogative.

Add the basil and the fried tofu and heat until the basil is wilted; serve with rice.

curry, salad, and rice

 

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* Yeah, baby.

only a few hours till dinner!

I’m in Thailand for a week and a half for a music festival. Luckily, before I have to get to work I have a few days to adjust to the time difference and do a little sightseeing.  I love Southeast Asia, and I’m so happy to be back!  I just wish my husband had been able to come with me.

As I always do when I travel, I am spending my time taking pictures of food, then eating it.  Here’s breakfast and lunch:

what i did on my summer vacation

Yesterday I had a day off.  Like, a real one.  Today it’s back to the grind, but yesterday I stayed home and blew everybody off.  I didn’t check my email, I didn’t return work-related calls, I didn’t prepare for my rehearsals and concerts that are coming up.

It was amazing.

I started catching up on posts — oh, there is so much going on with so many of you ladies and I am sorry to have missed so much.  I am trying to get over to everyone’s spaces and reconnect.

Then I sat outside on my porch and drank coffee.  Heaven.

Then I cleaned my kitchen.

Then I started cooking.  Yesterday I made:

• A fresh batch of chicken stock.  I always try to keep some in the house but haven’t had time to make it for a while.
• Vegetarian chili.  An old favorite recipe that will be good for dinner for a few nights this week.
• Vaguely Korean chicken (with the serving pieces of the same chicken — I make the stock out of the back, the neck, and the skin) with hot pepper paste, scallions, and sesame oil.
• I tried a new recipe for homemade spicy ginger soda.  You make simple syrup (1 cup sugar, 2 cups water) with lots of ginger, lots of red pepper flakes, and a little salt.  You simmer it, strain and chill, then mix with soda water and squeeze a lime over it.  This was not super successful, but we figured out that if we added enough gin it tasted pretty good.

So now my refrigerator is full of good things to get us through the week, and more importantly I spent the whole day at home.  Did I mention I blew off email?

My anxiety is already mounting for what I’m going to have to deal with today and (especially) tomorrow, but I so, so needed that one day.

Thanks for your thoughts on yesterday’s post.  There is a lot going on below the surface right now and I am taking to heart St. Elsewhere’s words — it is a lot easier not to say than it is to unsay.

malay bee hoon (sort of)

I’m very much a make-do cook.  I substitute with reckless abandon, and sometimes it works great.  This is what I made today, the first new recipe of 2011.

Malay bee hoon is a noodle dish that’s supposed to be made with rice vermicelli.  I didn’t have any rice vermicelli, so I used plain old egg noodles.  Still tasty, but I’m not really sure what to call it because bee hoon it ain’t.  Here’s what I did:*

2 T oil

1 carrot, cut into matchsticks

1/2 lb fresh shrimp, peeled

1/2 c shrimp stock (made from the shrimp shells, salt, and peppercorns simmered for about 15 minutes)

3 T soy sauce

a large handful of bean sprouts

a small bok choy, shredded

8 oz noodles, cooked.

Fresh cilantro

Rempah (spice paste):

about 1 t red pepper flakes

4 garlic cloves

1 enormous shallot**

1 oz fresh ginger

1 t ground turmeric

Grind the rempah ingredients to a paste with a mortar and pestle.

Heat the oil in a stir fry pan, then fry the rempah until it becomes fragrant (about 1 minute).  Add the carrots and cook 1 minute.  Add the prawns, then the stock and soy sauce and cook 1 minute.  Add the beansprouts and bok choy, then the noodles.  Stir fry until the vegetables are cooked.  Garnish with cilantro and serve.

*Bastardized from the excellent Malay bee hoon recipe in this cookbook.  My apologies to the authors, whose careful instructions I regularly disregard.

**Seriously, this thing was freakish…it’s supposed to be 4 shallots.

red potato and leek salad

I went to the farmer’s market on Saturday and got some lovely red potatoes and leeks, among other things.  I decided that, it being the Fourth of July weekend and all, the best thing I could do with these goodies would be a potato salad.  I have a deep and unshakable love of the potato in all its forms, but I have always hated mayonnaisey gooey potato salad.  This is my version.

The cast of characters:

Top billing: red potatoes.

Costar: Chinese celery

This looks like cilantro but it’s not.  I should have stuck my thumb into the picture for scale.  Chinese celery has thinner stalks than the grocery store kind and lots of lovely leaves.  It all gets chopped up!

The leaves are the best part.

Costar: leeks

I always slice leeks before rinsing them; it’s the easiest way to get all the grit out.  I cooked the living snot out of them over medium heat with some canola oil and water so that the green parts would be tender in the salad.

Medium heat, stirring occasionally, while the potatoes boiled.

Yummy leeks.  It was all I could do not to throw in some white wine and just toss them over pasta.  But then where would my red potatoes be?  Lonely and leekless, that’s where!

Costar: hard-boiled eggs

For the dressing, I whisked four ingredients (lemon juice, canola oil, sesame oil, and soy sauce) together.  It actually came out to VERY ROUGHLY equal proportions of each, since you generally want about twice as much oil as acid.  I ended up scanting on the oil a little and then adding even more lemon juice to give it more bite, but you won’t go far wrong with a quarter cup of each of those four things.  Sesame oil, my best friend, is there anything you can’t do?

Supporting cast: canola oil, lemon juice, sesame oil, and soy sauce

Once that was all done,  all that was left was to toss the ingredients together.

Let's take a moment to get to know each other, shall we?

A great big bowl of tasty.

Yum!  Not much of a recipe, really, but it was a good seat-of-the-pants way to use some of this week’s farmer’s market haul.  I think next time I will try for more bite with a Thai-style dressing (lime juice, chillies, and fish sauce).

And this was really fun; it was my first attempt at a “real” food post.  I think I will do some more in the future!