tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82686304966337896862024-02-19T08:54:47.991-08:00burnt-out bakerconfessions of a culinary industry burnout who can't stay out of the kitchenFeliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-8087456477852856192012-05-25T04:15:00.001-07:002012-05-28T14:18:50.317-07:00Chocolate-Orange Bread Pudding: An Epic Tale of Leftovers and Redemption<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZQ-oh2aBAQriTZD7De4g4H5wi7d8OALrrPVuwAuwdTJdxL4xt2lC8AR95vc6ak6cXFal1gazx3FE-0ncpxnD34dKewLvxzAXS1l-uisrbcefGvhBm1dXdBU2csAG5C57SNmM79DTdKZWr/s1600/bread+pudding_8768blg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZQ-oh2aBAQriTZD7De4g4H5wi7d8OALrrPVuwAuwdTJdxL4xt2lC8AR95vc6ak6cXFal1gazx3FE-0ncpxnD34dKewLvxzAXS1l-uisrbcefGvhBm1dXdBU2csAG5C57SNmM79DTdKZWr/s640/bread+pudding_8768blg.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This may look
like an ordinary square of bread pudding, but I am inordinately proud of it.
The story behind it is one of redemption and rebirth (cue the swelling
instrumental chorus…)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It began in
January, when I made <a href="http://alwayshungry-felicia.blogspot.com/2012/01/sweetness-and-luck-multicultural-cake.html">this cake</a> topped with candied oranges. Because candied fruit is impossible to find
here in my town in rural Florida after Christmas is over, I had to candy the
oranges myself. This was a surprisingly easy task that left me with a boatload
of leftovers, since only a handful of slices were needed for the cake. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">So I did what
most mortal cooking enthusiasts do – I shoved them into the back of the
refrigerator and forgot about them. (Since candying was originally developed as
a preservation technique, I figured they’d be good for a few months – or more.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The next turning
point in the epic took place about a week ago. Some dear old friends (and I
mean <i>old</i> – he saw combat in Okinawa,
she programmed IBM computers using punch cards and magnetic tape reels; both
are formidable storytellers) asked me to bake them a cake for their 48<sup>th</sup>
anniversary. Their only request was that
it be “decadent” with “rich, rich chocolate icing.” Of course, I was delighted
to oblige.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I decided to
make them a dressy variation of a Boston cream pie, with a rum-flavored custard
filling, a full covering of poured bittersweet chocolate ganache, and a
decoration of gilded chocolate wedges arranged in a pinwheel formation atop the
ganache. (Unfortunately, I did not get a photo of the cake before I gave it to
them.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The base of the cake
itself had a pretty standard recipe – eggs beaten to a fluffy mousse with sugar
and folded together with melted butter, flour, and leavening. In principle, it
would take only minutes to mix together before baking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Then the family
curse paid a visit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Every member of
my immediate family has suffered from this curse: a gluttonous disposition
combined with a genetic proclivity for high cholesterol. Because of this
familial burden, I generally keep egg substitute in the house rather than
regular eggs, and whenever a recipe calls for whole, unseparated eggs, I reach
for that yellow carton. It usually works fine for baking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">But not this
time. In recipes like this, the texture of the cake depends on the eggs being
beaten into a thick foam, which will in turn form the airy bubbles that give
volume to the cake. For this, only the oh-so-rich-and-stretchy texture of real
eggs will do. I realized this even as I poured a cup of sugar into the ersatz
eggs and turned on the mixer: <i>Oops</i>. <i>This probably won’t work.</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">My suspicions were correct. After half an hour of being whipped at high speed, the eggs still
sloshed sullenly around the mixer bowl in their original liquid form.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">This was, no
doubt, my karmic punishment for trying to pass fake eggs onto good friends who
deserved better. A quick trip to the supermarket for real eggs solved the
problem, but I still had a mixer full of fake egg-sugar mix. Throwing it out
seemed wasteful – surely, there was some palatable way to recycle the stuff: Custard
pie? Some kind of mousse? Besides, those fake eggs were stabilized,
pasteurized, and probably loaded to the hilt with preservatives, so they’d no
doubt last a while.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Into the
refrigerator they went, right behind the oranges.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Next, it was
time to make the chocolate decorations for the top of the cake. My friends had
seen my cooking-school portfolio and wanted and expected a showstopper cake,
but my piping skills had gotten seriously rusty since I stopped baking professionally.
(I’ve had precious few occasions to make buttercream roses in my subsequent teaching
and writing gigs.) So I chose to top the cake with thin chocolate wedges
flecked with edible gold powder instead. It would be eye-catching, elegant, and
most importantly, relatively hard to screw up. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Knowing the many
ways I <i>could</i> screw up, however, I
deliberately made more chocolate wedges than I needed – some would no doubt look
funny or break when installed on the cake.
Besides, the chocolate needed to be tempered before I could cut it into
those wedges, and I’ve found it’s easier to temper large quantities of
chocolate than small ones. My cautionary measure paid off: I had plenty of
good-looking, evenly shaped wedges to use for my cake. But I also had a huge
plate of leftover tempered chocolate shards.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">There is no
doubt a special circle in hell for people who throw out perfectly good
chocolate – so these went into the back of the fridge, too. Right alongside the
oranges and sweetened eggs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The final chapter
of the tale unfolded a few days ago. As a household of two, we generally find
ourselves with a good quantity of leftovers after meals, which conveniently
stretch into meals on subsequent days. But the other day, I noticed something
ominous – our Tupperware supply had dwindled to nothing. Every container in the
house was already in the refrigerator or in the freezer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Something had to
be done. It was time to make use of the stuff that was filling those containers
and starting to outstay its welcome. I focused on those oranges, the oldest
things in the fridge; the chocolate, which occupied a favored container; and
those sugared eggs, whose presence in the fridge was just plain awkward. Since I love the combination of chocolate and
oranges, I figured that they’d make a good dessert together. But whatever it
was, it would have to have a sweet, eggy base. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Glenn suggested
that the eggs would be a good base for French toast – but to use them up, we’d
need to make French toast for ten. And the sugar in the eggs, combined with
whatever toppings we’d use, would make the finished dish way too sweet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Then it occurred
to me: bread pudding is essentially sweetened French toast in casserole form.
It would be a perfect vehicle for finishing off those sweetened eggs, and the
chocolate and candied orange would be a refreshing change from the predictable
raisin-and-cinnamon treatment bread pudding usually gets. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I chopped up
some of the candied orange and chocolate, layered them in a casserole with
slices from a supermarket baguette, and topped the whole with the sugared eggs,
which I had thinned with milk and flavored with vanilla. (Bread pudding was
developed, according to popular myth, as a means for using up leftover bread
–but ironically, in this instantiation, the bread was the only major component
that <i>wasn’t</i> a leftover.) I let the
pudding sit so the bread would absorb the liquid, then topped it a few dots of
soft butter and put it in the oven.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The end product?
Wonderful – rich, eggy, and luxurious in a way that regular bread pudding isn’t.
After all, adding chocolate to almost anything will make it better. I thought
it was fine eaten on its own, but Glenn suggested an additional topping of
bourbon-flavored hard sauce, which made it even more luxurious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Recycling had
never been so glamorous.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">CHOCOLATE-ORANGE
BREAD PUDDING<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">For the pudding:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">1 baguette, cut
into ½-inch slices<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">4 eggs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">1 cup sugar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">¾ cup milk<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">1/3 vanilla bean<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">¾ cup semisweet
chocolate, chopped into fine pieces<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">¾ cup candied
orange, chopped into fine pieces<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">1-1/2
tablespoons softened butter<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Powdered sugar
for garnish (optional)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">1. Beat together
the eggs, sugar, and milk in a medium bowl. Split the vanilla bean in half
lengthwise and with the blunt side of a knife, scrape out as much of the inside
material as you can. Stir the vanilla-bean innards into the eggs mixture,
ensuring that they are evenly distributed throughout the batter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">2. Cover the
bottom of an 8” square pan with a layer of baguette slices (this should use up
half the slices). Sprinkle on half the chocolate and half the candied orange
pieces. Layer the remaining baguette slices, chocolate, and orange pieces on
top of the first layer of bread.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">3. Slowly pour
the egg mixture over the assembled pudding. Shake the pan gently to distribute
the batter evenly. Allow the pudding to sit for about 20 minutes so the bread
will absorb the egg mixture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">4. While the pudding
is resting, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Top the pudding evenly with small pats of the softened butter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">5. Put the
pudding into a larger pan (such as a roaster)
and add about ½” of water to the larger pan. Cover the pudding with foil and bake for
about 30 minutes, or until almost set.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">6. Remove the
foil, raise the temperature to 400, and continue baking until the pudding is
lightly browned, about 10 minutes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">For the bourbon
sauce:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">6 tablespoons
unsweetened butter, softened<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">¾ cup powdered
sugar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">½ teaspoon vanilla
extract<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">2-3 tablespoons
bourbon (adjust amount to your taste)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Combine all
ingredients until evenly mixed. At room temperature, the sauce will be thick
and fluffy. If you wish to thin it down, heat it gently over a water bath at
low heat. Serve with the pudding.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-74716805140261960012012-05-04T04:00:00.000-07:002012-05-28T14:24:59.126-07:00#Lets Lunch: A Life Lesson from Hummus<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih62ETZjgyG4S3ni3qF76003lJ4ybiBQNzxhynEbBmWJ5k7jHgQxGAyCqL1QKILCuWBUsoXLWUDM7TB67v1kbvdserLrklZj2_FZKC5pyC1uRTcpWJvstIIV0WANPgyTQPjOKUv2bELs51/s1600/hummus_6395blg.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5666067937014151362" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih62ETZjgyG4S3ni3qF76003lJ4ybiBQNzxhynEbBmWJ5k7jHgQxGAyCqL1QKILCuWBUsoXLWUDM7TB67v1kbvdserLrklZj2_FZKC5pyC1uRTcpWJvstIIV0WANPgyTQPjOKUv2bELs51/s1600/hummus_6395blg.jpg" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<i>This is part of the monthly Twitter-based #LetsLunch series. Every month, Lets Lunchers blog about a recipe of their choice on a common topic. This month's topic: Biculttural food! A list-in-progress of other Lets Lunch posts follows the recipe.</i><br />
<br />
I dreaded every day of graduate school. I felt awkward and insecure around my brilliant and worldly classmates, and was terrified of my even more brilliant (and all incredibly famous) professors.<br />
<br />
I shouldn’t have been. And now, after a decade of teaching in other programs, I realize my years in the doctoral program in linguistics at UCLA should have been the best in my life (okay, maybe second-best after my two years of living on wine, cheese, and <i>pain au chocolat</i> while teaching English in Paris). UCLA’s linguistics department, to put it in polite academic terms, kicked major ass – but I was too dim to realize it at the time.<br />
<br />
Some of the things I dreaded about it back then were the very things that made it such a great place to learn. One of these was the Copy Room Ambush. The Copy Room Ambush worked like this: I’d be minding my own business, photocopying a journal article, when some Famous Faculty Member would suddenly pounce from behind the recycling bins:<br />
<br />
FFM: You! You have to give a talk in the Syntax/Semantics Seminar!<br />
<br />
ME: But what am I going to talk about?? I don’t have anything ready to present!<br />
<br />
FFM: That’s your problem. You’re going to give a talk!<br />
<br />
And I almost always did. And all my presentations got ripped to shreds. The discussions invariably veered off onto long digressions, and these digressions led to arguments, and these arguments occasionally led back to my presentation. Or what was left of it, after everyone had taken their shots at it.<br />
<br />
It wasn’t just me, either. Everyone’s work got ripped to shreds. The department had a golden reputation and sufficient funding to invite prominent linguists from all over the world to come and present their latest work. We ripped that to shreds too, but not before taking the authors out to dinner.<br />
<br />
And yet, all these famous linguists kept coming back when invited. And I kept on working on new papers that I knew would be soundly trashed.<br />
<br />
Then, after presenting a paper, I’d rework it and rework it until the protests died down. What didn’t kill my projects – and those of my classmates, professors, and our visitors – made them stronger. And we all knew it.<br />
<br />
The department was an insanely busy place, with people presenting research (and getting trashed) just about every day, and a constant stream of interesting visitors from around the world coming through to teach, to collaborate, or just to share their ideas.<br />
<br />
These visitors brought non-academic benefits, too. Visitors meant receptions and receptions meant free food – an important consideration for an impecunious grad student. Fridays were a big deal in the department, for that’s when we had our weekly colloquium, usually presented by a visiting big shot. And after the colloquium was a lunch reception.<br />
<br />
For me, these receptions were yet another vexing feature of life in the department. First, there was the sheer terror of standing around with a paper plate smeared with hummus or Boursin while trying to make small talk with people who scared the crap out of me. Second was the puzzling contents of those paper plates.<br />
<br />
There was invariably something wonky about the food selection. A typical spread consisted of several kinds of cold salads, a fat wedge of Gorgonzola – and several bags of potato chips. Or the assortment would include hummus – served with slices of baguette. When wedges of pita did appear, so would several tubs of salsa or onion dip – but no hummus.<br />
<br />
Student members of the Colloquium Committee were responsible for hunting down lunch, and most of my cohorts were scary smart – except, apparently, when it came to food. Perhaps this was because many of them were international students unfamiliar with how the foods they chose were meant to be eaten. Or maybe they were too absorbed in their research on optimality theory or quantifier scope to notice what they were serving us. I really didn't care why our lunches were so weird. All I knew was that it was driving me nuts.<br />
<br />
One day, I finally had enough. We grad students were having a meeting to discuss ways to improve various things in the department, among these, the Friday reception. “You know what we need at the reception?” I said, “Matching carbohydrates. What’s the deal with the salsa and bread, and tortilla chips and Brie?”<br />
<br />
I saw a few light bulbs go off over my classmates’ heads. “Oh God, we’ve totally been doing that,” someone said.<br />
<br />
“Yeah, the chips and butter have got to go," someone else chimed in.<br />
<br />
I was too stressed out worrying about my dissertation to remember if we actually did anything about the matching carb situation. But in retrospect, that meeting should have been an “aha!” moment for me: my classmates didn’t think I was an idiot. They actually thought my ideas (about food, at least) had merit and were worthy of serious consideration.<br />
<br />
And having seen what the rest of the academic world looks like, I now find myself missing that place I spent years hating and dreading. I miss the caffeinated buzz of our seminar discussions. I miss the thrill of being among the first to hear of new research by bigwigs in the field. I miss my grubby little grad student office and the distant echo of the UCLA marching band practicing on fall afternoons. <br />
<br />
And now that I think of it, hummus on tortilla chips wasn’t half bad.<br />
<br />
********<br />
<br />
The connection between hummus and tortilla chips isn’t as farfetched as it may seem. Lebanese immigrants have a long history in Mexico, especially in the states of Puebla and Yucatán. I ate at a Yucatecan restaurant in Los Angeles once and was surprised to find <i>kibbe </i>(a Middle Eastern meatball made with ground lamb and bulgur) listed among the appetizers. A regional specialty of Puebla is<i> tacos arabes</i> – tacos served on pita bread rather than tortillas. And the Mexican standard <i>tacos al pastor</i> – tacos filled with spice-rubbed meat sliced off a vertical spit – was, by some accounts, inspired by Middle Eastern <i>shawarma</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Hummus ma lahma</i> is a hearty Lebanese treatment of hummus that tops the already rich chickpea puree with spiced ground beef. Here’s what I imagine a second- or third-generation Lebanese-Mexican in Yucatán might do with this dish: give the beef a local flavor with hot peppers, olives, raisins, and capers. The beef topping is inspired by the filling in a Yucatecan specialty, <i>queso relleno</i> (hollowed-out balls of Gouda filled with seasoned ground meat), and is inspired by Rick Bayless’ pork-based <i>queso relleno</i> filling.<br />
<br />
HUMMUS MA LAHMA WITH YUCATECAN FLAVORS<br />
<br />
FOR THE HUMMUS:<br />
<br />
1 14-ounce can chickpeas, drained<br />
<br />
3 tablespoons tahini<br />
<br />
1 small clove garlic, minced<br />
<br />
2 teaspoons lemon juice<br />
<br />
1/3 cup water (or as needed)<br />
<br />
salt to taste<br />
<br />
1. Puree all ingredients except water and salt in a food processor until smooth. With the motor running, gradually add water as needed to obtain a soft but spreadable consistency.<br />
<br />
2. Add salt to taste.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
FOR THE SPICY BEEF TOPPING:<br />
<br />
1 cup chopped onion<br />
<br />
1 large hot banana chile, chopped<br />
<br />
3 cloves garlic, chopped<br />
<br />
3 tablespoons neutral cooking oil, such as canola<br />
<br />
1 pound ground beef<br />
<br />
1/3 teaspoon ground allspice<br />
<br />
2/3 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper<br />
<br />
1/3 cup raisins<br />
<br />
1/8 cup capers<br />
<br />
1/3 cup chopped green olives<br />
<br />
1 large pinch dried (or chopped fresh) epazote (optional)<br />
<br />
2 teaspoons vinegar<br />
<br />
2 tablespoons tomato paste<br />
<br />
1. Heat oil in a large pan over medium-high heat. Add the onion, chile, and garlic and cook until tender.<br />
<br />
2. Add spices and stir several seconds until fragrant.<br />
<br />
3. Add the ground beef and cook until no longer pink.<br />
<br />
4. Stir in the remaining ingredients and simmer 20 minutes to blend the flavors. Taste and adjust seasonings if needed.<br />
<br />
PRESENTATION:<br />
<br />
Put the room-temperature hummus in a serving bowl (preferably a wide, shallow one, but any kind will do). Top with some of the hot beef mixture (you’ll have some left over; it makes a great filling for tacos, empanadas, or a ball of molten Gouda cheese). Garnish with sliced hot chiles and/or chopped cilantro. Serve with pita wedges and/or tortilla chips.<br />
<br />
Check out how the rest of the Lets Lunch bunch created their multicultural dishes!<br />
<br />
<a href="http://atigerinthekitchen.com/2012/05/goan-pork-curry-tacos-crossing-two-cultures/" target="_blank">Cheryl‘s Goan Pork Curry Tacos at A Tiger in the Kitchen</a><br />
<a href="http://eleanorhoh.com/2012/04/27/wok-picadillo/" target="_blank">Eleanor‘s Wok Picadillo at Wok Star</a><br />
<a href="http://cowgirlchef.com/2012/05/04/salty-lime-sables-margarita-cookies/" target="_blank">Ellise‘s Margarita Cookies at Cowgirl Chef</a><br />
<a href="http://kitchendreamer.blogspot.com/2012/05/may-letslunch-food-across-two-cultures.html" target="_blank">Emma‘s Kimchi Bulgogi Nachos at Dreaming of Pots And Pans</a><br />
<a href="http://xn--graces%20taiwanese%20fried%20chicken%20at%20hapamama-y636a/" target="_blank">Grace‘s Taiwanese Fried Chicken at HapaMama</a><br />
<a href="http://eatingmywords-jwl.blogspot.com/2012/05/southern-knishes-hold-mishegas.html?spref=tw" target="_blank">Jill‘s Southern Pimento-Stuffed Knishes at Eating My Words</a><br />
<a href="http://www.joeyonan.com/2012/05/lets-lunch-grilled-kimcheese-sandwich.html" target="_blank">Joe‘s Grilled KimCheese Sandwich at Joe Yonan </a><br />
<a href="http://mondaymorningcookingclub.com.au/2012/05/04/jewish-chinese-brisket/" target="_blank">Lisa‘s Sunday Night Jewish-Chinese Brisket at Monday Morning Cooking Club</a><br />
<a href="http://acookandherbooks.blogspot.com/2012/05/fusion-of-tastes.html?spref=tw" target="_blank">Lucy‘s Coconut Rice Pudding with Mango at A Cook And Her Books</a><br />
<a href="http://nanciemcdermott.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/letslunch-sandra-gutierrezs-chili-cheese-biscuits-with-avocado-butter/" target="_blank">Nancie‘s Chili-Cheese Biscuits with Avocado Butter at Nancie McDermott</a><br />
<a href="http://hotcurriesandcoldbeer.blogspot.com/2012/05/traveling-with-mangoes-across-time.html?spref=tw" target="_blank">Rashda‘s Mango Cobbler at Hot Curries & Cold Beer</a><br />
<a href="http://saucyskillet.blogspot.com/2012/04/asian-spiced-quick-pickle.html?spref=tw" target="_blank">Renee‘s Asian-Spiced Quick Pickles at My Kitchen And I</a><br />
<a href="http://kitchentrials.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/coming-home/" target="_blank">Steff‘s Chicken Fried Steak at The Kitchen Trials</a><br />
<a href="http://www.vivianpei.com/2012/05/lets-lunch-the-fusion-episode/" target="_blank">Vivian‘s Funky Fusion Linguini at Vivian Pei</a><br />
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<br />Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-2984024593632631962012-04-04T14:31:00.000-07:002012-05-04T06:21:20.788-07:00The Sandwich, (Nearly) Perfected<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwPkf9GMOBmqWjsaH8WZjkrR2RvsM4eNH1A00-Gz578M-ULAsD-6ccSpuCSBnKc8iAJKVquIvris1yamePwgvOItRNVOu8RvPuUzSgc_CEGr5hkuqTcitMOolmtnYA2Fmo2Tx2zDwb-KsK/s1600/steak+sandwich_8064blg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwPkf9GMOBmqWjsaH8WZjkrR2RvsM4eNH1A00-Gz578M-ULAsD-6ccSpuCSBnKc8iAJKVquIvris1yamePwgvOItRNVOu8RvPuUzSgc_CEGr5hkuqTcitMOolmtnYA2Fmo2Tx2zDwb-KsK/s640/steak+sandwich_8064blg.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>This is part of the monthly #LetsLunch series, a Twitter-based festival of food based on a different them every month. This month's theme is eggs! For more great posts in the series, check out the hashtag #LetsLunch on Twitter, or Karen Morley's list <a href="http://paper.li/geokaren/1318013798?utm_source=subscription&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=paper_sub" target="_blank">here</a> or Lucy Mercer's Pinterest compilation <a href="http://pinterest.com/acookandherbook/letslunch-april-2012-eggs/" target="_blank">here</a>.</i></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sandwiches are deeply
personal things, and one’s taste in sandwiches reveals much about a person’s
personality and character. Thus,
opinions about what constitutes an ideal sandwich will be as varied as humanity
itself, and any debate on the subject is bound to grow long and heated: For
one, what qualities make a perfect sandwich? For that matter, how exactly
should the term be defined – do open-faced sandwiches count? Do wraps? And if
wraps count, why not burritos, pasties, and other edible material enclosed in
bready stuff?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">My taste in sandwiches,
which my husband, Glenn, shares, tends to run to the big, brash, and exuberant,
which is puzzling since neither of us are big, brash, or exuberant by any
stretch of the imagination. Being mature adults, we’ll eat crust-less tea
sandwiches to be polite and boring gas-station
industrial-turkey-on-industrial-sliced-bread things when we’re on the road and
nothing else is available. But our favorites are hot, on substantial, crusty
bread, and loaded generously with boldly flavored fillings: crusty, gooey
Cubans, juicy hot French dips with lots of horseradish on the side, spicy,
meat-and-vegetable filled Mexican <i>tortas</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Because we have rather
strong opinions about what the platonic ideal of a sandwich can be (these can
vary slightly according to our mood), we can always think of ways to make a good
sandwich even better.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“This is really good,”
Glenn said at a local Cuban place one day, tucking into a garlicky roast-pork
sandwich on a crusty pressed Cuban roll, “but it needs to be spicier.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Of course, authentic
Cuban food is not hot and spicy, and never has been – but he had a point worth
considering.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">At another Cuban place,
we discovered another excellent sandwich, the prosaically named <i>pan con bistec</i> (“bread with steak”). It was, as its name promised, a steak
sandwich on that crusty Cuban bread crisped in a sandwich press – but what made
it special was its additional toppings: tangy grilled onions and a generous
strewing of crispy shoestring potatoes. The combination of contrasting flavors
and textures was spectacular.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“You know what would
make this even better?” Glenn said. “A fried egg on top!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> “You think fried eggs
make <i>everything</i> better,” I said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Well, they do!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">And after further
reflection, I realized this wasn’t a half-bad idea.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Since it’s always
constructive to act on good ideas, I devised a sandwich that incorporates
everything we love –the crispy, pressed bread of a good Cuban, the flavorful
grilled meat and spice of a Mexican <i>torta</i>,
and those lovely, crunchy shoestring potatoes to add a refined look and
textural interest. And, of course, the whole thing is topped with a fried egg.
Because fried eggs really do make a lot of good things even better.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Like all my favorite
sandwiches, it’s a shamelessly messy
thing to eat, more suitable to being devoured in big sloppy bites
with beer and friends than nibbled at over a business lunch. It’s built to make
a statement: “Here I am in all my shameless glory, wouldn’t the world suck without my
presence?” It’s big, brash, and exuberant, and unafraid of making a grand
impression -- or thoroughly annoying the timid and squeamish.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Totally unlike quiet,
boring, cautious old me. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I was so happy
when I put this sandwich together: It’s not an exact reflection of my character
– far from it: It’s a reflection of the person I’d love to be.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">THE PERFECT SANDWICH<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Serves 2</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 long French rolls or 6-inch lengths of Cuban bread, split<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 small steaks, such as breakfast steaks<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 eggs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Hot sauce (such as habanero or Tabasco) (optional)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½ cup shoestring potatoes (the snack variety found in the chip section)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">For the marinade:<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Juice of
1 lime<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1 large clove of garlic, minced<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">¼ cup
olive oil<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½
teaspoon salt<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½
teaspoon ground cumin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">¼
teaspoon red chile flakes (or more to taste)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<u><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">For the sautéed onions:<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">¾ medium onion, sliced<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1 jalapeno pepper, cut into slivers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1. Combine the marinade ingredients in a shallow, non-reactive pan and add
the steaks in a single layer. Allow to marinate for about 30 minutes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2. Remove the steaks from the marinade and pat dry when you’re ready to
cook them. Reserve the remaining marinade.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">3. Spoon off a couple of tablespoons of the oil from the marinade and heat
in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the steaks and cook until lightly browned and both sides and cooked through.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">4. Remove the steaks and set aside, covered. Add the onions and jalapenos
to the pan and sauté until the onions are tender. Add a few spoonsful of the
remaining marinade along with the steaks, and cook about two minutes more,
until the steaks are heated through and the marinade is slightly reduced.
Remove the pan from the heat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">5. Assemble the sandwiches: Spread
about a teaspoon of hot sauce on the inside surfaces of each roll or bread
length, then divide the steak and the onion mixture evenly between the two
sandwiches. (You may need to slice the steaks to get them to fit into the rolls.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">6. Cook the sandwiches in a sandwich press until warmed through and crisp
on the outside.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">7. When the sandwiches are nearly done, heat 1 tablespoon canola oil in a nonstick pan and
fry the eggs to your taste. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">8. Gently open the pressed sandwiches and top each with a fried egg and
half the shoestring potatoes. Close the sandwiches and enjoy immediately with
lots of napkins.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-73676017720042324552012-03-09T07:55:00.000-08:002012-05-04T06:21:50.056-07:00Let's Lunch: Even Greener Green Chorizo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC-K1d0OC280ZFLzIInS86VY3_DsYqXuEg_Tlh-ywyydlwvrpfFoFa1dgGGg5pxccw_7s6r9OmiyKhA7UVhz-XN_mXLEeO4cEYYPngdB8fqIaojAYOAOjrwOxSqK_zyVzdyAANM20mlS4n/s1600/green+chorizo_7817blg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC-K1d0OC280ZFLzIInS86VY3_DsYqXuEg_Tlh-ywyydlwvrpfFoFa1dgGGg5pxccw_7s6r9OmiyKhA7UVhz-XN_mXLEeO4cEYYPngdB8fqIaojAYOAOjrwOxSqK_zyVzdyAANM20mlS4n/s640/green+chorizo_7817blg.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sometimes
I envy normal people with normal careers. When such normal people travel to
Mexico, they get to enjoy margaritas and sunny days at the beach. Or maybe
sunny days strolling through picturesque bazaars or scenic historic ruins. And when they come back, the splash of lime
juice over a salt-rimmed glass or the
happy blare of a mariachi band is all it takes to bring them back.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lucky
them. My trips to Mexico were never truly fun – unless your idea of fun involves
enduring six-day work weeks filled with frantic note-taking while being
snickered at by locals, stalked by bribe-exacting police officers, and
practically choked to death by antimalarial prophylactics the size of marbles. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">So let
it be stated for the record that if you’re looking for a carefree good time
south of the border, researching indigenous languages in rural Mexico is <i>not
</i>the way to go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">There
were some good things about these trips, of course. First and most importantly,
they were the only opportunity of the year for me to get the data I needed for
my research back when I was still in academia. Second, they were (practically)
free – grants covered most of my costs. (Normal people who kvetch about how
hard it is to redeem frequent flyer miles have never had to write a 20-page grant
proposal every time they wanted to save themselves some money when traveling.)
Third, there was the Indiana-Jones-like cachet of traveling to places so remote
they have neither paved roads nor dependable running water. Fourth was the food
– locally grown and made from recipes and techniques dating to a time when
everyone was a locovore by necessity. The food was incredible enough to keep me
going back.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">But on
my third work trip to Mexico, I almost didn’t get to eat anything interesting.
This was because my mealtimes were obstructed by a force that never caused any trouble on my previous trips: my travel companions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Both of
them – a colleague I’ll call Joel and a graduate student I’ll call Deirdre –
were as gringo-y as gringos get – fair-skinned, cold-weather-loving
Midwesterners. Since this would be their
first trip to Mexico and we’d be traveling to a hot region in the middle of
August, I did my best to let them know what to expect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">They
responded enthusiastically to my e-mails and phone reminders to bring
sunscreen, bug spray, and extra batteries for our video equipment, so I
figured they were on top of things and ready to go. It was only when we were at
the airport about to take off did they drop a major bombshell on me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Well,
of course I’m concerned about the sanitation issues,” Joel said as we strolled
toward our terminal. “And finding enough speakers to have a statistically sound
sample. And also the language – do you speak Spanish?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Sure,”
I said. Well, duh – we were going to be in a tourist-free, predominantly Indian
region where even urban Mexicans were a rare sight – how else would we
communicate?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Good,
I’m glad to hear that – we’ll need your translation services.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Holy
cow. “Wait,” I said. “You don’t speak Spanish?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Joel
shook his head. So did Deirdre.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Do you
read it?” I asked. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">They
shook their heads again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Great.
My Spanish wasn’t all that great either – I could read it fine and spoke it
competently enough to muddle gracelessly
through whatever I needed to do, but serve as the mouthpiece for two needy, helpless
Midwesterners for three weeks? Not so much.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">They
chose to drop Bombshell Number 2 on me a short time later, when we were looking
for dinner in the airport.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Oh yes,
I think I should tell you,” Joel said, “Deirdre and I are both vegetarians –
will that be a problem down there?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Only if
you want to eat, dude</i>, I thought. Aloud, I said, “Well…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here’s
the deal: in rural Oaxaca, where we were
going to be, the diet of the sustenance farmers in the tiny village where we’d
be working was, indeed, predominantly vegetarian – beans, rice, corn tortillas,
home-grown vegetables – but the food available to visitors in the slightly
bigger market town nearby where we’d be staying and having most of our
meals? Our dinner options could be
described in three words:<i> carne asada</i> tacos.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">From my
previous trips, I knew these tacos would be wonderful – as would be everything
else in the market stalls and tiny food stalls here in town . Oaxaca may be one
of the poorest and most primitive states in Mexico, but its native cuisine is
among Mexico’s most baroque and creative – for instance, the region is justifiably proud of its seven distinct, equally complex mole sauces , each a colorful and elaborately wrought amalgam
of roasted and finely ground nuts, spices, fruits, vegetables, and/or
chocolate. Oaxaca’s dishes of pride are what one finds in most restaurants –
and while many are vegetarian, many of the best and most beloved of them
contain meat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">And this
is why my mealtimes in Oaxaca on that trip – the times of day that I looked
forward to the most – were ruined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">We ate
breakfast every morning at a tiny <i>fonda </i>– basically a little stall with no
written menu – near our hotel in the small market town where we were staying.
(Our grant allowed us the luxury of a $10/night
hotel, since I figured out – correctly – that my colleagues couldn’t
possibly last three weeks in the village, where electricity and running water
weren’t guaranteed.) Every morning, the
owner of the <i>fonda</i>, the most patient person who ever walked the earth, would
come to our table and recite the day’s offerings, which I’d translate into English.
And every morning, my colleagues said the same thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Ask if
it has any meat in it!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Does it
have any meat in it?” I’d ask as politely as I could in Spanish, wanting to fall through
the floor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Almost
none of the breakfast dishes, which mostly involved freshly made corn tortillas
enrobed in various vegetable-based sauces, did. But this
didn’t assuage my companions’ paranoia: in their minds, this alien land was just lurking with invisible critters and critter bits.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Ask if
the sauce has any meat in it!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Ask if
the vegetables were cooked in meat broth!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Even
after being assured that everything was, indeed, meat-free, Deirdre rarely
believed me (or the poor local I had been interrogating). She’d lift her plate
of beans or <i>entomatadas </i>–
tomato-sauce-covered tortillas – to her face, sniffing loudly. “It smells like
it has <i>meat </i>in it!” she’d wail, as if
betrayed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I wanted
to die.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Still,
there were some great things about that trip -- and my companions, when I wasn’t trying
to feed them. I'll always remember the pleasure of watching their eyes light up at the big Sunday market near
our hotel and showing them the amazing
18<sup>th</sup> century church in the village – which would easily
qualify for national landmark status had it been located in the U.S. or Europe.
And unlike the crew I worked with back home at the time, they laughed at my
jokes and were (mostly) easy and fun to talk to. In the end, we became friends -- although I still wanted to strangle them at mealtimes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">So in
honor of the Trip From Hell and my vegetarian buds, I’ve devised a vegetarian
version of a little-known Mexican sausage variant, green chorizo. Most people
are familiar with the bright-red, wonderfully greasy and spicy version of
chorizo, but a green version also exists – brightly flavored with cilantro and
parsley along with spices and chile.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">My green
chorizo was inspired by recipes by the two Anglophone masters of Mexican
cooking, Rick Bayiess and Diana Kennedy. Bayless’s green chorizo recipe is
minimalist – a few herbs and chiles ground, mixed into ground pork, and quickly
cooked. Kennedy’s version is a bit more complex, involving a puree of spices.
herbs, and chile mixed with meat, stuffed
into sausage casings, and aged for a short time before cooking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">My
version combines (most of) Kennedy’s flavorings with Bayless’s
weeknight-friendly technique, Using an idea from another chef I admire, Deborah
Madison, I made my chorizo vegetarian by using crumbled firm tofu instead of
ground pork. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">It’s not
authentically Oaxacan (traditional Oaxacan chorizo is red and shaped into
ping-pong-ball-sized rounds), but my version does have a lively, spicy, flavor
and pretty green color. It’s lighter and less greasy than “real” chorizo, and
appropriate for Lent, St. Patrick’s Day, and dinner with difficult friends you
really want to keep, after all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">VEGETARIAN
GREEN CHORIZO<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Inspired
by recipes from </span><a href="http://www.rickbayless.com/recipe/view?recipeID=236" target="_blank">Rick Bayless</a>
, Diana Kennedy's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307383253/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307383253">The Art of Mexican Cooking</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0307383253" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />; and
Deborah Madison's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767904192/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0767904192">This Can't Be Tofu!: 75 Recipes to Cook Something You Never Thought You Would--and Love Every Bite</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0767904192" style="border-bottom-style: none !important; border-color: initial !important; border-image: initial !important; border-left-style: none !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-width: initial !important; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1
(14-ounce) carton extra-firm tofu<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½ cup
chopped flat-leaf parsley<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½ cup
chopped cilantro<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1
poblano chile, coarsely chopped<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2
serrano chiles, coarsely chopped<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½ cup
cider vinegar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">3 cloves
of garlic, peeled and roughly chopped<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½
teaspoon dried oregano<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1 bay
leaf<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1 whole
clove<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">5 black
peppercorns<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2
teaspoons salt<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">¼
teaspoon each cumin seed and ground coriander<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">3
tablespoons neutral cooking oil (such as canola) for frying<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Corn
tortillas, crumbled cheese, shredded cabbage, salsa and/or guacamole for
serving<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1.Using
your hands, crumble the tofu finely and place in a colander set over a bowl.
Allow to drain while you prepare the remaining ingredients.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2. Put ¼
cup of the vinegar in a blender jar and add the garlic, salt, and spices. Blend
until all is finely ground.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">3.Add
the rest of the vinegar and the chiles and blend to a smooth puree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">4.Add
the parsley and cilantro and blend to a
smooth puree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">5.Put
the drained, crumbled tofu into a bowl, add the puree, and mix until thoroughly
incorporated. Mixture will be a pretty green.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">6.In a
heavy sauté pan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. When hot, add the green
chorizo and cook, stirring frequently, until the mixture is thoroughly hot and
most of the liquid has evaporated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">7. Serve
with tortillas and garnishes.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>This post is part of the monthly, Twitter-based #LetsLunch series -- every month, participants share their recipes and stories about a dish reflecting that month's theme. This month is green food month! I'll post links to fellow #LetsLunchers in a bit -- now's a great time to enjoy your veggies!</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br /></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Linda at Spicebox Travels on <a href="http://t.co/5dGlwerd" target="_blank">Kale Chips</a></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Charissa at Zest Bakery on <a href="http://t.co/FAWpNsvu" target="_blank">Pandan Tapioca with Coconut Cream</a></i></span><br />
<i>Grace at HapaMama on <a href="http://t.co/OyumjZPK" target="_blank">how to brew the perfect pot of tea</a></i><br />
<i>Ellise at Cowgirl Chef on <a href="http://t.co/ho1p4Xe8" target="_blank">Notos Pesto</a></i><br />
<i>Cathy at Showfood Chef on <a href="http://t.co/kkFv5w5b" target="_blank">Matcha Green Tea Cupcakes with Matcha Green Tea Butter Frosting</a></i><br />
<i>Lucy at A Cook and Her Books on <a href="http://t.co/rAcIhrQP" target="_blank">Green Bean Soup with Butter and Chives</a></i><br />
<i>Lisa at Monday Morning Cooking Club on <a href="http://t.co/sEBngDCR" target="_blank">Natanya's Soon-To-Be-World-Famous Avocado Dip</a></i><br />
<i>Eleanor at Wok Star on<a href="http://eleanorhoh.com/2012/03/09/ginger-honey-wok-brussel-sprouts/" target="_blank"> Ginger Honey Wok Brussel Sprouts</a></i><br />
<i>Karen at GeoFooding on <a href="http://geofooding.blogspot.com/2012/03/green-food.html" target="_blank">Asparagus with Poached Eggs</a></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-62039279053693244922012-02-13T09:21:00.001-08:002012-02-13T18:18:04.783-08:00This Is Not a Valentine’s Dessert<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCwMlmUxwybFba9yGJZYB0zVB6ZjISkwq5Mw2L4qwJrUSXR8U6AqHr3lTYPdkoEEooUPo61l_8VOKUUDuH0MIk24fjBpbEdnGe2PuSdFWnlS7w84Pbl46PLB53BWlLTpFpOO5lib-_ERy2/s1600/chocolate+cookies_7267blg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCwMlmUxwybFba9yGJZYB0zVB6ZjISkwq5Mw2L4qwJrUSXR8U6AqHr3lTYPdkoEEooUPo61l_8VOKUUDuH0MIk24fjBpbEdnGe2PuSdFWnlS7w84Pbl46PLB53BWlLTpFpOO5lib-_ERy2/s640/chocolate+cookies_7267blg.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Let it be proposed
that Valentine’s Day is the most unnecessary and overblown of holidays. A day
dedicated to the celebration of romantic love seems about as necessary to me as
a holiday honoring English-speaking communities or Protestantism – aren’t most
days already dominated by these things and their looming cultural reach? As if it didn’t suck enough to be a single
adult in America the other 364 days a year, there has to be one oh-so-special
day in the darkest part of winter when a huge swath of the human population is
reminded of what pathetic losers they are.
And those of us who are fortunate enough to be in happy, committed
relationships (such as yours truly) are badgered into believing that cheesy
jewelry and heart-shaped tchochkes are the only legitimate ways to validate our
commitment to each other.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bah, humbug.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Valentine’s Day was
a lot more fun in grade school, back when boys and girls considered each other
gross and inscrutable. My tiny grade school had a deeply egalitarian ethos;
every kid in a class exchanged a valentine with every other kid, so everyone
gave and got the same number of valentines. The highlight of the holiday, back then, was
the opportunity to eat sugar cookies with red sprinkles on them, collect those
little candy hearts to see how many different messages you could get, and of
course, eat lots of chocolate. It was also the only time of the year when the
school’s art teacher let us use pink and red together. The rest of the time,
she said they clashed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">In short, it was a
celebration of cordiality (albeit enforced cordiality – little kids do have to
be taught to be nice to each other), friendship, and food – with just enough
decadence to make it memorable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the spirit of
THAT Valentine’s Day, which I vastly prefer to the pressure-driven adult
version, I’m serving for dessert this year a simple chocolate-y treat that
makes enough to share with several good friends, along with that special
somebody in your life (should there be such a person). It’s a riff on a Valentine’s Day chocolate shortbread
recipe presented recently in the <i>New York Times</i>: while the original recipe
featured a chocolate shortbread base topped with layers of cherry jam and chocolate ganache
flavored with rum, my version switches out the jam and rum for something with
an even greater aphrodisiac (and conversation-starting) effect: a hot jelly
made from datil chiles, a Florida specialty. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Datils, grown
commercially in the U.S. only in the area around St. Augustine, Florida, have a
distinct pineapple-passionfruit-like aroma and serious chile punch that marries
well with chocolate. (Any other hot, fruity jelly would produce a similar
vibe.) The combination of chocolate and chiles is traditional in Mexico –
indeed, some of the earliest recorded versions of chocolate drinks drunk by indigenous
people there were flavored with chiles – and it’s a combination that works. And
unlike those cloying supermarket chocolates in heart-shaped boxes, this
chocolate treat actually tastes interesting – and is a suitable accompaniment
to either a steamy relationship or a heated political debate with friends.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">And this brings me
to another pet peeve about Valentine’s Day: every relationship is unique, so why
are we always pressured into commemorating these special bonds with the same
mass-market crap as everyone else? This guy I dated, before I met my husband,
used to bring me big bouquets of roses fairly frequently. “Guys get girls
flowers because we can’t think of anything else,” he told me on several
occasions. Wow, how romantic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">But once, he
actually did come through with something personal and thoughtful, and
ironically, it was the evening when we finally broke up. He was a good guy –
honest and well-intentioned – but we were wrong for each other in every
respect: different tastes, values, politics, and goals in life. We finally
realized that we liked the idea of being together more than we actually liked
each other.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The week before our
breakup, I had accidently left the lights on in my car when I parked it at
work, and when the workday ended, I found my battery was dead. A quick call to
AAA solved the problem, but my then-boyfriend was surprised that I didn’t have
a set of jumper cables in my trunk. “You could have been back on the road a lot
faster if you’d just gotten a jump from someone else in the office,” he told me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">But on our last
evening together, we stood, still shell-shocked at our decision, in the
parking lot of his condo complex. He gave me a long hug, then ran to his car. “Wait—I
have something for you,” he yelled from across the parking lot. He opened
his trunk and ran back with a set of jumper cables—the ones he always kept in
his trunk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“I want you to stay
safe – always,” he said, thrusting them into my hands. “I wish I could love you forever.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">And this is the
story of the most romantic (pre-engagement ring) gift I ever got: a set of used
jumper cables. And this is also why most Valentine’s Day propaganda makes me
want to hit someone: because I understand what the spirit of love really
is – and you can’t find it in a pre-printed card.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">TORRID CHOCOLATE
GANACHE SQUARES<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">This recipe is such
a close adaptation from the original <i>New York Times recipe </i>that I’ll just
provide <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/dining/plain-jane-cookie-dresses-up-for-valentines-day-a-good-appetite.html?scp=1&sq=chocolate%20shortbread%20ganache&st=cse" target="_blank">a link to the original</a> plus instructions for my little hack:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Bake the chocolate
shortbread base as instructed in the original recipe. Replace the cherry jam
with datil jelly (if you can find it) or other hot pepper jelly, preferably
from a fruity chile such as a habanero. Likewise, instead of mixing two
tablespoons of rum or other liquor into the finished ganache, melt two
tablespoons of the datil (or other hot pepper) jelly into the cream while you’re
heating it to make the ganache. Mix the heated cream with the chocolate as
instructed in the recipe. Pour the ganache over the baked shortbread base, then garnish and chill as directed in the original recipe. </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">(If you're sharing this with kids or hard-core V-Day traditionalists, top the ganache with red sugar instead of</span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> fleur de sel</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">.) </span></div>
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<br /></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-16120464282295050532012-02-03T10:30:00.000-08:002012-02-13T18:13:08.369-08:00Let’s Lunch: Tommy’s Chili and Rock n’ Roll Dreams<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirF8dWnQh7Nc0REYPljB7Z6lMRv8VdvdGf8KWM9UVUtoUaYizhC2LpKuhXuWOzfA0OExw-4we3xHK-hySLatdQT1Kyjb86X-uk1yi8EOoObJwTLT8nqCKzekBPvm91hC1s8_SD6gMCbpSX/s1600/chili+burger_7115blg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirF8dWnQh7Nc0REYPljB7Z6lMRv8VdvdGf8KWM9UVUtoUaYizhC2LpKuhXuWOzfA0OExw-4we3xHK-hySLatdQT1Kyjb86X-uk1yi8EOoObJwTLT8nqCKzekBPvm91hC1s8_SD6gMCbpSX/s640/chili+burger_7115blg.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">It was the dawn of the 80s, and
we were hard-rockin’ renegades, living life in the fast lane on the edges of
the Los Angeles music scene. We were young
– I was sixteen when we started – but worldly: we were L.A. girls after
all. Yes, we’d seen and heard it all,
unlike those pathetic teenage runaways on Hollywood Boulevard who came to town
corn-fed and starry-eyed and ended up strung-out, destitute, and disillusioned.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">We knew better. WE were going to
be famous!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">And we knew that becoming famous
would take a lot of work. Mark, our leader, never failed to remind us of this.
Mark was a motorcycle-riding veteran studio musician and a bit older than the
rest of us – he was already 26 – and he liked to quote from Jackson Browne’s song “The Load-Out ”: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pack it up and tear it down/ They’re the
first to come and last to leave/ working for that minimum wage…</i>”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Yeah, this is what the
industry’s all about,” he’d say as we’d collapse, hot and sweaty, after yet
another couple of hours hauling instrument cases, microphones, amplifiers,
tangles of second-hand extension cords
and piles of sheet music down the rickety set of stairs from our rehearsal room
to our van for yet another concert. “Gotta pay your dues. The music world’s
cutthroat—no one will respect you unless you can carry your own weight. And you
know what, guys? You’re doing it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">In those days, we never stopped
doing it. There were eight of us:
Suzanne played drums, Kentia, Maria, and/or Mark played guitar, Sandy
and Sue played keyboards, Judy and Michelle provided vocals, and I played bass.
Another girl, Dana, was our permanent
stage hand -- she already had both a
drivers’ license and free use of her dad’s van, both of which were essential to
our existence as a functioning band. We rehearsed for several hours every
weekday afternoon, and sometimes on weekends.
I heard our songs in my sleep and tapped their rhythms with my fingers
as I ate or studied or watched TV. I grew thick, ladybug-shaped callouses on my
fingertips from the ridged metal strings of my electric bass. I could hook that
bass up to my amp and troubleshoot said amp with my eyes closed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Performances, of course, were
what we lived for. We didn’t get too many calls for paid gigs, but when we did,
boy did it feel sweet. Never mind that they weren’t in the most prestigious of
venues – in time, we knew we’d be on regular rotation at the Troubadour or the
Roxy or some other Sunset Strip hotspot where a talent scout from a record
label would certainly discover us – but, as Mark said, we were still paying our
dues.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">So off we went to our humble
gigs. There was the charity fundraiser in the parish hall at Christ the King. And
the dinner meeting of area Catholic school principals at Notre Dame High
School, an especially tough crowd. (We
played only mellow instrumentals for them.)
But no matter who we played for, we gave them our all – that was part of
the game plan too, according to Mark. Every performance, he said, has to be
your best if you wanted to make the big time. And someday we’d be able to look
back and laugh about those evenings playing half-amplified Doobie Brothers and
Pat Benetar covers (had to be considerate of the neighbors!) for venues filled
with nuns and squealing children. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a necessary part
of our journey.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Besides, we had no choice. Yes, we were rockers at heart, destined for
stardom. But officially, we only existed for four units of fine arts credit
towards our graduation. And what serious club would listen to an audition tape
from an outfit officially called the Immaculate Heart High School Contemporary
Band?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mark’s hands were tied. His rock’
n’ roll dreams burned even more brightly than ours, but he couldn’t afford to
lose his day job as the school’s music teacher. And because we didn’t want to
lose the coolest teacher in the school, we dutifully limited ourselves to our
school-sanctioned gigs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">But after our performances, we
allowed our dreams to take full flight. Somehow, no matter where we had
performed in town, we always ended up at the same place for dinner afterwards:
Tommy’s, a beat-up hamburger joint in a seedy neighborhood close to downtown.
It was cheap, open late, famous (or infamous, depending on whom you ask) for
the distinctive, gut-busting chili that came with every burger, and best of all
from our perspective, known to attract a racy crowd of night owls, especially
musicians. In short, it was a de facto industry canteen for strivers, and we
considered ourselves card-carrying members of this club. Forget boys or horses
or whatever other stuff the other girls at school were into: nothing felt
better to my 16-year-old self than biting down into a sloppy, shamelessly
greasy Tommy’s burger late on a Saturday night, chili dripping down my arms and
bass lines still pounding in my head. It was the taste of dreams come to fruition: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I’ve just been paid to rock my heart out,
and my music paid for this burger! With five bucks left over! And Mom and Dad
said I’d never make money in music!<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I savored every savory, goopy
bite, every word of our fantastical banter about record contracts and auditions
and tours. I knew there would never be another time like this in my life, and I
was right. For a short while, Tommy’s oh-so-dangerous burgers weren’t the only
thing that rocked in our ordinary Catholic schoolgirl lives. We did, too.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tommy’s burgers have been a
favorite late-night post-party alcohol mop for Angelenos since the 1940s. The recipe for Tommy’s chili – an object of
passionate craving and even more passionate revulsion – remains a closely
guarded secret. Whatever’s in it, it
probably won’t win any Texas chili competitions: it is clearly intended to be
used as a condiment, rather than eaten as a dish by itself. It has a distinctively
thick, gravy-like texture, and while it tastes distinctively of beef and
chiles, it contains neither sizable pieces of meat nor any discernible chile
heat (at least not to me -- but some people
do go on about how spicy it is).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Those who have attempted to
back-engineer the mysterious condiment (there are many) are mostly in consensus
that it involves a roux of flour deeply browned in fat, preferably beef fat.
But some have suggested that the distinctly smooth, thick texture comes from
boiling the ground meat in the sauce base to cook it, rather than browning
it -- this will cause it to cook into a thick paste, rather than into distinct
little meaty granules. I’ve decided to split the difference and use both
techniques: a dark roux based on rendered fat from the cooked meat (there
should be a lot of it; this isn’t a diet recipe), as well as additional ground
meat simmered into submission in the dark, chili-scented sauce. Some recipes
call for dried onion flakes, garlic powder, and even industrial beef patties to
replicate that deliciously sleazy, fast-food taste. Others, however, point out
that none of these things probably existed when Tommy’s first opened, so couldn’t
have been part of the original recipe. Since I don’t keep those things around
the house, I used fresh onions and garlic, as well as freshly ground beef – but
as most recipes suggested, I used the fattiest, cheapest fresh ground beef I
could find.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I won’t pretend that my version
can pass for the original – it can’t, and I’m sure nothing can. (Tommy’s is
now a small chain in the Los Angeles area; my husband and I agree that a Tommy’s
burger only tastes truly right when eaten in a dangerous neighborhood after 10
p.m.) Instead, I think of my take on that chili the way I now think of my
girlhood covers of those Doobie Brothers songs – a competent, agreeable,
slightly more wholesome tribute to the original.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">TRIBUTE TO TOMMY’S CHILI<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1-1/2 pounds fatty ground beef<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 tablespoons neutral cooking
oil, such as canola<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">4 tablespoons flour<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½ cup minced onion<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 cloves garlic, minced<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1 tablespoon ground cumin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 teaspoons chili powder<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1 tablespoon cayenne (or to
taste)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">3 cups beef broth<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1.Divide the beef in half. Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a
large, heavy pot and add half the ground beef, breaking it up as you do so.
Cook, stirring constantly, until the meat is brown and crumbly and no pink remains. Transfer the cooked meat to a
bowl with a slotted spoon, leaving any juices and rendered fat in the pot.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2. Add the flour to the fat and
juice in the pot and cook on medium high heat, stirring constantly, until the
mixture turns a pale tan. Add the onions
and continue to cook until the mixture turns reddish-brown. Quickly stir in the
garlic and spices and cook for about a minute more, until the garlic releases
its scent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">3. Add the broth and whisk until
the flour mixture dissolves. Stir in the cooked beef, then the raw beef,
breaking it up as you go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">4. Simmer over medium heat,
stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens and reduces. When done, it
should be thick enough to coat a spoon. Taste and add salt if needed (both my
beef broth and chili powder contained salt, so I didn’t need any more -- so be sure to taste your chili before
salting it).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">5. Serve over cheeseburgers, hot
dogs, or fries, preferably late at night in a suspect neighborhood, with good
friends nearby to share the evening.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
<i>This post is part of the monthly, Twitter-based #letslunch series: on the first (or sometimes second) Friday of every month, LetsLunchers blog about a dish or their choice based on a given theme. This month's theme is music. At least I hope it is!</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i> I'll try my best to post links to other LetsLunchers' posts as they come in -- check them out:</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="http://beautifulmemorablefood.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/buena-vista-social-club-inspired-frijoles/" target="_blank">Linda at Spicebox Travels</a> on the Buena Vista Social Club, Cuban beans and mojitos, and the Chinese diaspora</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="http://cowgirlchef.com/2012/02/10/tiger-cakes/" target="_blank">Ellise at Cowgirl Chef</a> on Tiger Cakes, a tribute to her new favorite song, Valentine's day, and chocolate</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="http://www.showfoodchef.com/2012/02/chicken-and-dumplings-roxie-waller.html" target="_blank">Cathy at Slow Food Chef</a> on Southern chicken and dumplings, inspired by Roxie Waller.</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="http://hotcurriesandcoldbeer.blogspot.com/2012/02/song-memory-besame-mucho-banana-bread.html" target="_blank">Rashda at Hot Curries & Cold Beer</a> on "Besame Mucho", banana bread, and memories of her father.</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="http://www.patrickglee.com/2012/02/10/organ-sounds-and-the-munchies-a-dilemma/" target="_blank">Patrick G. Lee</a> on what (not) to eat during an organ concert.</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="http://grongar.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/jewish-vegetarian-kishke/" target="_blank">Rebecca at Grongar Blog</a> on traditional Jewish kishka and a song inspired by it.</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/monday-morning-cooking-club/lets-lunch-post-for-febby-lisafood-and-music/268533949884190" target="_blank">Lisa at Monday Morning Cooking Club</a> on Hawaiian songs and macadamia wafers</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="http://kitchentrials.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/coconutcake/" target="_blank">Steff at The Kitchen Trials</a> on Garth Brooks, pina coladas, and coconut cake</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i><a href="http://freerangecookies.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/how-the-bee-gees-inspired-a-gluten-free-thin-mints-recipe/" target="_blank">Free Range Cookies</a> on how the Bee Gees inspired the creation of gluten-free Thin Mints</i><br />
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<br /></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-37437213834213567072012-01-22T15:29:00.000-08:002012-05-25T04:12:43.968-07:00Sweetness and Luck: A Multicultural Cake for Chinese New Year<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGNGHXvnj-VJm0hIY38xDKhuqqlDCYQ7JzXZQ9GnxLiTrZ73RwwUT4sj6kirNDoUs3gA1RTLlgcT379V8VkzT8hicufTV4zE5aedV7woBUIXmjdWo-LqAR_OzICnvNhX_jtoMPJg7gm8nI/s1600/almond+cake_6966blg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGNGHXvnj-VJm0hIY38xDKhuqqlDCYQ7JzXZQ9GnxLiTrZ73RwwUT4sj6kirNDoUs3gA1RTLlgcT379V8VkzT8hicufTV4zE5aedV7woBUIXmjdWo-LqAR_OzICnvNhX_jtoMPJg7gm8nI/s640/almond+cake_6966blg.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Western
civilization does New Year’s celebrations all wrong.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Western
New Year’s celebrations are all about looking back – and Monday morning quarterbacking
is never truly satisfying. Do you really want to hear the past year’s Top 100
songs played back in ascending order of popularity, rehash every natural
disaster and political scandal of the year, and re-read the obituaries of every important
person who has passed on during the past twelve months? Worst of all, after the celebration itself –
typically a frenzied and wildly overpriced evening on the town (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">look out for those sobriety checkpoints!</i>)
– there's nothing to look forward to but taking down the Christmas tree. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">No
wonder everyone wakes up on January 1 with a hangover.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">On the
other hand, Chinese New Year celebrations – which I grew up with alongside their
champagne-fueled Western counterparts – are all about looking forward. Sure,
the past year may have been marked by screw-ups, disasters, and disappointment, but
so what? The advent of a new year is a
chance to reset the clock, get back up, and start out again from scratch – and that
in itself is genuine cause for celebration.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the
days leading up to Chinese New Year (which falls on January 23 this year), houses
are cleaned (to ensure a fresh start), new clothes are purchased (ditto), and
decorations in lucky colors – red and gold – are put up everywhere to invite
good fortune for the following year. On a trip to Singapore several years ago,
my parents loaded up on gaudy bright-red New Year decorations, the likes of
which they’d never seen anywhere else – a six-foot long red dragon, which
they’ve taken to hanging over the dining room table, and long strings of fake
red-and-gold firecrackers (including a battery-operated one that lights up and
makes obnoxious popping noises when you press a button). In the years when
they’ve hosted big Chinese New Year’s parties,
they’ve left the outdoors Christmas lights up to add to the festive look.
(Conveniently enough, Chinese New Year typically takes place in late January or
early February, which always gives us something to look forward to in those
blah days after the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i> New Year.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Like all
worthy celebrations, Chinese New Year festivities are centered around food. But
not just any food – everything eaten during this important time must contribute
to one’s good luck in the following year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">This
focus on securing one’s future good fortune begins the moment one wakes up on
New Year’s Day. While Western custom dictates waking up every January 1 to the
taste of Alka-Selzer and regret, Chinese
tradition requires that you start the new year with a taste of something sweet,
to ensure sweetness in the year ahead. (I clearly remember being fed a bit of
rock candy before breakfast one Chinese New Year morning during my childhood –
right before a dental appointment!) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">To
ensure that your friends and family have an equally sweet start to their year,
you must also have a pretty box of sweets – such as candied kumquats, melon,
and ginger – on hand when they drop by. If they come over for lunch or dinner,
traditionally lucky foods you can serve them (and yourself) include clams,
lettuce, whole chickens, and pretty much anything round or orange or gold – all
of which symbolize wealth and completeness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Besides
being auspicious, traditional Chinese New Year dishes can be delectable – fresh
clams stir-fried with savory black-bean sauce, juicy poached or roasted
chicken, and, of course, lettuce wraps – but some may be acquired tastes for
those who did not grow up with them. In particular, Chinese sweets tend to be
problematic for non-Asians – they’re generally a lot
less sweet than Western desserts, and the bouncy, toothsome texture of some of
the rice-based sweets is an unfamiliar and startling sensation for many.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Still,
festive meals call for dessert, and most Chinese-Americans have plenty of
non-Chinese friends who share in their celebrations (and also deserve any good
luck that comes along). Since sweets in general are lucky, as are round, orange
or yellow things, pretty much any sweet, round, orange or yellow thing will
serve as good insurance against misfortune – this is why tangerines, oranges,
and kumquats are popular New Year’s treats and decorations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Still, pointing your non-Asian friends towards that decorative bowl of tangerines while you enjoy your
sticky-rice new year’s cake is not very classy. Instead, I’d serve a dessert
that pleases all constituencies involved (because this is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">America</i>, doggone it!). This almond cake topped with candied orange
slices (inspired by a Mexican almond cake by <a href="http://patismexicantable.com/2011/04/episode-105-convent-food.html" target="_blank">Paty Jinich</a>) has all bases
covered: It’s round. It’s orange. It’s laden with an exceptionally lucky fruit. The cake is sweet but not too sweet, with a
moist, tender texture that will please everyone at your table. And if any of
your New Year’s guests are avoiding gluten, you’re also safe: the cake is also
flourless and gluten-free.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Back in
high school, one of my English teachers gave a fantastically depressing lecture
about New Year’s Eve. He told us that it was a profoundly sad occasion because
that’s the time when people reflect upon the failures and disappointments of
the past year and realize they’re a year older and they’ll never get that time
back. Nobody actually enjoys all those big parties and all that champagne, he
said. All they’re doing is trying to hide from the pain. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Speak
for yourself, dude.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">****************************<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">This
cake takes as its point of departure Paty Jinich’s version of a Mexican convent
sweet – a flourless almond cake topped with a marmalade glaze. To make this
simple cake prettier and more festive, I’ve replaced the original marmalade
topping with candied orange slices (based on a surprisingly easy recipe from <a href="http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/candied-orange-slices" target="_blank">Food and Wine</a>), and replaced the original port flavoring in the cake with a mixture
of orange juice and orange flower water.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">FLOURLESS
ALMOND CAKE WITH CANDIED ORANGES<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">For
the cake:<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 cups
blanched almonds<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">¾ cup
sugar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">4 eggs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½ cup (1
stick) butter, at room temperature<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1
tablespoon vanilla extract<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2
teaspoons fresh orange juice<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1
teaspoon orange flower water<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<u><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">For
the candied oranges:<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 large
navel oranges<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">3 cups
water<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1 cup
sugar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sugar for garnish (optional)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">1.Butter
an 8-inch round cake pan or springform pan, and cover the bottom with a circle
of parchment paper. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2.In a
food processor, pulse the almonds and sugar together until finely ground. Add
the eggs and pulse until all is thoroughly combined. Then add the vanilla,
orange juice, and orange flower water. Cut the butter into chunks and add to
the batter, processing until thoroughly combined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">6. Pour
the batter into the prepared pan and bake until the top of the cake is golden
brown and a knife inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, about
30 minutes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">7. Allow
the cake to cool for about 10 minutes before removing from the pan and cooling it completely on a wire rack.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">8. To
make the candied oranges: If the oranges have been waxed, dip them briefly in a
pot of boiling water, then rinse and dry them thoroughly to remove the wax. Cut
them crosswise into ¼-inch slices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">9. In a
wide, deep skillet, combine the water and sugar and bring to a boil. Add the
orange slices and cook over medium-high heat until the oranges are translucent
and the liquid forms a thin syrup, about 20 minutes. Gently stir the oranges
from time to time to ensure that they cook evenly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">10.
Reduce the heat to medium low and continue cooking until the syrup thickens and
reduces and the orange rinds are tender.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">11. Once
the oranges are cool enough to touch, arrange them decoratively over the top of
the cake, glaze with the leftover cooking syrup, and sprinkle with extra sugar, if desired.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<br /></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-2653810458917125202012-01-06T00:00:00.000-08:002012-01-05T14:12:33.284-08:00Let's Lunch: Low-Concept Vegetarian Chili<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-k7yQOxj5WFkOwf5eynwlRM8trPb76nFWpCxDXYIMHt_4CvJ5L2sz6qMUNCIPx5qvXsl8D3XGMOp2vyz6Pnw4fKs4HqFV-u2xEiETFrmZ3p4xwGA88NbMMBXfdzFVNBYMBbyS9vJQ004b/s1600/ingredients_5737blog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1ujY4XDq0p4B1noMs64fllNbLc8cDUpOSJl0-TfDCrUbReR_0RqGaSkbkk-viwz-J0tck95ejIMj25SPmA5CLXiWtvL4bJWSQhFqIa-St3CMrzjtxSAbdFcnl8f9LM75yKyaMYqPzvi7Z/s1600/chili_5755blg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1ujY4XDq0p4B1noMs64fllNbLc8cDUpOSJl0-TfDCrUbReR_0RqGaSkbkk-viwz-J0tck95ejIMj25SPmA5CLXiWtvL4bJWSQhFqIa-St3CMrzjtxSAbdFcnl8f9LM75yKyaMYqPzvi7Z/s1600/chili_5755blg.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">(This is a slightly modified repost of an earlier piece)</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Anyone
who has ever shared a meal with me knows I’m relentlessly curious about strange
food – the weirder the dish, the more I want to try it. “This looks like
something YOU would order!” has become
family shorthand for any crazy menu item featuring odd organ meats or unexpected uses of flavorings (vanilla-flavored
appetizers or cilantro-flavored desserts, anyone?) At home, my husband knows better than to
expect any dish, except for a few treasured standards, to ever taste the same
way twice. All others are subject to change and revision without notice. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Because
of my passion for culinary experimentation (a.k.a., pulling random objects from
the fridge and making stuff up as I go along), the dishes I come up with during
my cooking frenzies tend to be high-concept and, I like to believe, subversive:
<a href="http://alwayshungry-felicia.blogspot.com/2011/08/eating-really-high-on-hog.html">Crunchy pig ears!</a> <a href="http://alwayshungry-felicia.blogspot.com/2011/11/tiger-moms-daughter-makes-popcorn.html">Curried popcorn!</a> <a href="http://alwayshungry-felicia.blogspot.com/2011/07/half-fast-cooking-brunch-for-lazy.html">Sugary quesadilla-like objects!</a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Okay,
maybe “high concept” is too generous a term. “Utterly random and in need of
justification” may be more accurate. Still, some of my most random accidental
creations are the ones I think of most fondly. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">But on
really busy nights, the comfortable, immutable standards – grilled cheese sandwiches,
fried eggs on toast – come to the rescue. Alternately, I’d throw together a
pared-down, quickie version of something I’d normally do a lot, lot better. On
such nights, the only guiding concept behind my cooking is “lowered
expectations.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">A Wednesday evening in November – Thanksgiving Eve – was such a night. The strange part was that my
experiment in non-experimentation went amazingly well.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Thanksgiving
Eve (is that even a real term?) is the one day of the year when Americans are
officially excused from even trying to make dinner – apparently, it’s one of <a href="http://www.smartbrief.com/news/aaaa/industryPR-detail.jsp?id=63E36BDC-D8C3-4011-A7BC-0A0FC526E6B4">the biggest nights of the year for Domino’s Pizza</a>. For me, it was also a rush day at
work – a huge, last-minute, emergency project kept me glued to my computer
from about nine in the morning until 8:30 that night. When I hit the SEND
button for the last time that evening and finally wiped my hands of the project,
I realized I had not eaten anything since breakfast but a taro-flavored mochi ball
(don’t ask) and a pear. I was famished, and my husband even more so.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I had
previously planned to make vegetarian chili – I had all the ingredients, and it
would be a good, low-fat counterpart to all the splurge-y stuff we’d be eating
in the next few days. But I hadn’t counted on that project taking so long.
Whatever. I really felt like eating chili, so I just plowed ahead. No time for
anything experimental or fancy or original. Just basic, pared-down, fast-as-possible
chili, or something like it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In the
interest of speed, I poured a thin layer of canola oil into a heavy saucepan
and set it to heat as I prepped the veggies. (Back in cooking school, we were
taught to have our <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mise en place</i> – prepped
ingredients and equipment – fully prepared and ready to go before we even
contemplated approaching the stove, but at home I’ve found that interspersing
prep and cooking is even faster, if you plan things right.) </span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-k7yQOxj5WFkOwf5eynwlRM8trPb76nFWpCxDXYIMHt_4CvJ5L2sz6qMUNCIPx5qvXsl8D3XGMOp2vyz6Pnw4fKs4HqFV-u2xEiETFrmZ3p4xwGA88NbMMBXfdzFVNBYMBbyS9vJQ004b/s1600/ingredients_5737blog.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-k7yQOxj5WFkOwf5eynwlRM8trPb76nFWpCxDXYIMHt_4CvJ5L2sz6qMUNCIPx5qvXsl8D3XGMOp2vyz6Pnw4fKs4HqFV-u2xEiETFrmZ3p4xwGA88NbMMBXfdzFVNBYMBbyS9vJQ004b/s1600/ingredients_5737blog.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">N.B. -- these photos weren't taken Thanksgiving Eve; we were too spaced out to even think of it. And in any case, I had no idea if the recipe would work, and to be honest, didn't really care. Rather, Glenn got these shots last night when I re-created the dish and calibrated all the measurements for public consumption.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">While the oil heated,
I chopped up some onion and bell pepper, which seemed like common-sense things
to put in chili, then tossed them into the saucepan with the hot oil, a bit of
dried oregano, and some cumin seed. (I added the seeds because I couldn’t find
my bottle of ground cumin – now I’m glad it went missing; the seeds add a pop
and vibrancy that the ground stuff doesn’t.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> Then I chopped half a large tomato, a clove of
garlic, and half a large jalapeno pepper. I tossed these into the saucepan
along with my go-to secret ingredient: a chopped <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chipotle en adobo</i>, or pickled chipotle chile: these chiles add a terrific hit
of sweetness, spice, and smokiness to everything, and even better, keep well
for long periods in the refrigerator.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">All this
had taken about 15 minutes, tops. Then I opened and drained a can of red beans,
poured them into the veggie mix, lowered the heat, and let it simmer until the
tomatoes and other veggies had cooked down. While this was happening, I poured
beers for my husband and me and put together some tasty garnishes for the chili:
a cut-up avocado, some chopped onion, a bit of grated cheddar. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">My
original plan that morning had been to make cornbread to go with our dinner,
but there was no way that was going to happen now – my brain was too fried and
I was just too tired. So I got a loaf of bread from the fridge, cut a few
slices, and put them on the table with the chile garnishes. Hey, it’s not much,
but it’s better than Domino’s!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Now it
was just after 9:00. Yes! A nice pot of homemade chili for two in just half an
hour! Now THIS was a conceptual coup.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">And darn
if it didn’t taste really nice – bright, spicy, not too heavy, and quite pretty
with the colorful garnishes strewn over the top. It turned out so well I
decided I’d make it again, without any tweaks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Of course,
every experience of discovery brings with it useful lessons for the future, and
here is the lesson of my nearly-no-concept chili: Sometimes brainless,
half-assed efforts pay off big time. Thank
goodness for the universe’s small favors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">LOW-CONCEPT
VEGETARIAN CHILI</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">2
tablespoons canola or other neutral cooking oil</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">½ cup
chopped green bell pepper</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">¾ cup
chopped onion, plus extra for garnish</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">½ teaspoons
cumin seed</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">¼ teaspoon
dried oregano</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1 clove
garlic, minced</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">½ large
jalapeno pepper, minced (optional – omit if you’re heat-averse)</span></div>
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1 cup chopped tomato (fresh or canned)</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1
chopped <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chipotle en adobe</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1
(14-ounce) can red or kidney beans</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Salt to
taste</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Shredded
cheddar cheese, for garnish</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1
chopped or sliced ripe avocado, for garnish</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1. Heat oil
in a heavy saucepan over medium high heat. Add onions, bell pepper, cumin, and
oregano and cook until vegetables are wilted, about three minutes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">2. Add
garlic and jalapeno to the saucepan, cook until they soften and release their
fragrance, about 2 minutes. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">3. Add
tomatoes, chipotle, and beans to the saucepan. Lower the heat, stir, cover, and
allow to simmer, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes have dissolved and
the vegetables are soft. Taste
and add salt if needed (it probably won’t need any). Serve with garnishes.</span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">This is part of the monthly #LetsLunch series -- this month's theme is chili! Stay tuned for links to other contributions to the series; it's going to be great! </span></i></div>
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<br /></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-69173067223448960812011-12-25T09:56:00.000-08:002011-12-31T21:58:08.235-08:00New Year's Hot Pot: Party Food for Homebodies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9No-DyW9FbfG8e6VH0n-M5O_z3cgg1VSQY1poH-maBFndE3g-sUmEFfxjlym8EQz5phGxkk_Pmhy0DUXydMst_vx5XlzoBZ_l9Az132jl0UcF7wQ4djlQso2zXHsHcyfAYAalFoxeNBY/s1600/hotpot_83141293427842.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9No-DyW9FbfG8e6VH0n-M5O_z3cgg1VSQY1poH-maBFndE3g-sUmEFfxjlym8EQz5phGxkk_Pmhy0DUXydMst_vx5XlzoBZ_l9Az132jl0UcF7wQ4djlQso2zXHsHcyfAYAalFoxeNBY/s1600/hotpot_83141293427842.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<i>(A slightly different version of this piece was published last year in<a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/12/28/chinese_hotpot/" target="_blank"> Salon.com</a>.)</i><br />
<br />
If life were fair or logical at all, I should have been the queen of party girls. I grew up in the Hollywood Hills (yes, <i>those </i>Hollywood Hills), only a stone’s throw from the legendary party district where Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, and Frank Zappa started their careers. On weekends, our neighbors (never the ones my parents hung out with) held epic blowouts with valet parking and hired DJs playing the coolest new music for their glamorous friends. In recent years, my parents have taken to complaining about the noise from paparazzi helicopters hovering over Britney Spears’(embarrassingly close) house.<br />
<br />
And I spent almost every evening of my teen years among the stars... sitting in my room. Doing algebra. Or writing essays about <i>Julius Caesar</i>. Or plowing through some other wholesome and useful activity that would allegedly make me into a better person. Even New Year’s Eve – the one holiday where staying up late, wearing lots of makeup, and actually leaving the house are practically legal requirements – was spent at home with Mom and Dad. <br />
<br />
But New Year’s Eve was different. The rest of the year, Mom and Dad kept me (and to a lesser extent, my younger sisters) on a tight leash out of concerns for our safety and well-being. But on New Year’s Eve, we stayed home because of Dad’s tale of the loneliest night of his life.<br />
<br />
Dad’s annual recollection of the loneliest night of his life was, and sometimes still is, the cornerstone of my family’s New Year’s Eve celebration. It also reminded us why we always spent the most festive night of the year barricaded in the family room in sweats and slippers.<br />
<br />
Dad’s recitation could only occur if a few necessary conditions were met. First, the TV had to be tuned to the annual bacchanal in Times Square, preferably with Dick Clark chirping happy platitudes in the background. Second, Dad never volunteered the story. Just as a child obligatorily initiates the ritual retelling of the Passover story, it was up to us kids to jump-start the narrative that made our New Year’s Eve different from all others.<br />
<br />
“Daddy! Daddy!” we’d yell as the soon-to-drop Times Square glitter ball filled the TV screen, “Tell us about the loneliest night of your life!”<br />
<br />
Then he’d smile. And slowly begin his tale:<br />
<br />
“The loneliest night of my life – It was New Year’s Eve, 1957. I’d come down to New York with a couple other interns from Temple. I didn’t know a soul in New York City.<br />
<br />
“The other guys all had dates for New Year’s Eve. They offered to set me up with someone, but I didn’t have the money to treat a gal to dinner.<br />
<br />
“So they all went off, wining and dining, And I was all by myself.<br />
<br />
“I wandered around the city and ended up in Times Square. All those people, drunk and laughing. And I never felt so lonely in my whole life. Alone in the crowd.”<br />
<br />
Then he’d sit back. And there would be a pregnant and solemn silence. For about half a second. <br />
<br />
“Ooh, poor Daddy! You’re not lonely now, are you?”<br />
<br />
“Yeah, you’ve got US!” <br />
<br />
“Tchih!” Mom would mutter, rooting through the cupboards for champagne glasses.<br />
<br />
And this was why, Dad would explain, we always spent New Year’s Eve at home: holidays meant nothing without loved ones nearby, no matter how much hype and glitter you threw at them. Ergo, nothing could be more meaningful than observing the passage of another year in the place we loved best, in the company those closest to us. Even if this meant our holiday was almost indistinguishable from every other night of the year.<br />
<br />
The key word here is “almost.” The differences between New Year’s Eve and ordinary nights at our place were few, but significant. First, we kids were allowed to stay up until midnight, with no lectures about the virtues of going to bed early. Second, there was almost always caviar (and champagne for Mom and Dad), to be consumed as close to midnight as possible. The very idea of feasting on exotic delicacies at that forbidden hour seemed to me almost as decadent and glamorous as going out to celebrate. <br />
<br />
And finally, we’d always have something special for dinner before our late-night festivities. It was never anything near as elaborate as our Christmas or Thanksgiving feasts – but always something out of the ordinary. <br />
<br />
Very often, this something special was a Chinese hot pot, a brash, blinged-out version of Japanese shabu-shabu, traditionally served in the winter.<br />
<br />
Technically, the hot pot is just soup, but its execution makes it special: it starts as a big pot of plain simmering broth in the center of the dining table (it’s kept hot over a heating unit), into which diners toss thinly sliced meat, vegetables, and seafood. Diners remove these goodies as they cook and eat them with rice and dipping sauces – typically, jarred Chinese hot sauces or simple mixes of soy sauce and sesame oil. <br />
<br />
As the meal progresses and more ingredients are added and taken from the pot, the broth grows richer and more and more flavorful – and becomes a luscious and soothing final course when everything else has been eaten.<br />
<br />
Another thing makes Chinese hot pot special, too: it can’t be made, nor eaten, by just one person. Nor is it a good choice for a first-date or business meal: getting all those morsels of meat and vegetables in and out of the pot and into one’s mouth entails lots of vulgar reaching across the table and occasionally, seagull-like theft from other diners. And no matter how careful you are, broth and sauce will end up dripped all over the table.<br />
<br />
This means the only people with whom one can judiciously share a hot pot are those who you know will put up with you no matter what – which makes it scarily appropriate for an intimate celebration of family solidarity, observed at home in sweats and slippers.<br />
<br />
CHINESE HOT POT<br />
<br />
This dish is so simple and open-ended it doesn’t really require a recipe, just a few guidelines.<br />
<br />
The Broth: Allow about 2 cups of broth (Mom uses canned chicken broth) per person. By tradition, the broth is heated to boiling and kept hot in a special hot pot with a chimney, as seen above.<br />
<br />
Hot coals are traditionally tucked into the base of the pot to heat the broth. But the few times my family actually used this thing, we used canned Sterno (the same stuff used to warm chafing dishes and fondue pots). In recent years, we’ve switched to a less-evocative but more-powerful tabletop induction unit and an ordinary soup pot to hold the broth.<br />
<br />
The Rice: Prepare about 1 cup cooked (1/2 cup raw) plain white rice per person.<br />
<br />
The Good Stuff: Standard hot pot ingredients include thinly sliced beef (such as flank steak cut against the grain), thinly sliced chicken (dark meat is preferred over white by Chinese convention, and is cheaper too), cubes of tofu, fresh, shelled oysters, shelled and de-veined shrimp...pretty much any protein in bite-size pieces that cooks quickly in boiling broth. Asian markets often have packages of pre-sliced meat and chicken specifically for hot pot; these will cut your prep time even further if you have access to them. Allow about 1/3- ½ pound of mixed meats per diner. (This can vary, of course, depending on the appetites of the individuals you’re serving.) <br />
<br />
Good vegetables to include in a hot pot are dark leafy things that cook quickly: spinach, or even better, water spinach or garland chrysanthemum leaves (available in Asian markets and every bit as fragrant and wonderful as their name suggests—and a perfect foil for rich broth and meats). Allow several big handfuls of these per diner, bearing in mind that these vegetables will wilt and shrink when cooked, so you’ll probably need more than you think.<br />
<br />
The Sauces and Setup: Put the hot pot full of heated broth in the middle of your kitchen table. Don’t bother using your best tablecloth, or any tablecloth at all, for that matter. Turn on whatever heating unit you choose to use, and try to keep the broth at an active simmer. Set out a bowl, a pair of chopsticks or a fork, and a soup spoon for each diner. <br />
<br />
If you can find them, also provide each diner with a hot pot basket (a small wire basket on a long handle, as seen in the photo above): the baskets are used to recover cooked ingredients from the pot. If you can’t find these baskets, have a couple of serving spoons available for diners to use.<br />
<br />
Next, set out the rice and raw hot pot ingredients, as well as small dishes of Asian hot sauce (such as sriracha sauce or sambal oelek) and soy sauce mixed with a few drops of sesame oil. Then make sure you have lots of napkins.<br />
<br />
To serve: Place some of the meats and/or seafood into the hot broth, then some of the vegetables. Instruct diners to hold their freaking horses and try to behave themselves until the meats are cooked (this should take no more than five minutes). Then allow them to extract whatever they want from the pot (<i>Hey! No pushing! There’s plenty to go around!</i>), to be eaten with rice and dipping sauces. <br />
<br />
Replenish the broth with meat and vegetables as needed. When you’re out of meat and vegetables (or when everyone is too full to eat any more) spoon the broth into bowls to enjoy as a final course. By this time, it will have absorbed the savor of meat, vegetables, and good conversation, and will be a perfect cap to a New Year’s feast.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-18975624242156537612011-12-19T10:43:00.001-08:002011-12-19T11:05:56.007-08:00A Plumber Makes Pasta for Poets<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzYHhKQXBZobNs8e5YJVd9RJudX-bbv0LrI1rbpwTUxiqlvvgiFjW7bMxuBk-r_yta0Rl_NTH-C_W-XvVY3ydyKkC7B9ccJKp7TwL2wihyYo7hhvPuVRbuFCwoXiLqtzw-JKCNv3BQJNm2/s1600/cold_noodle_salad_5843blg1323294477.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzYHhKQXBZobNs8e5YJVd9RJudX-bbv0LrI1rbpwTUxiqlvvgiFjW7bMxuBk-r_yta0Rl_NTH-C_W-XvVY3ydyKkC7B9ccJKp7TwL2wihyYo7hhvPuVRbuFCwoXiLqtzw-JKCNv3BQJNm2/s640/cold_noodle_salad_5843blg1323294477.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"><i>(A slightly different version of this piece appeared in my <a href="http://open.salon.com/blog/rellowrump/2011/12/07/funeral_for_a_friend_the_last_days_of_books_inc" target="_blank">Open Salon blog</a>.)</i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I was raised to
believe that it was the height of rudeness to read at the dinner table. It was
not only inconsiderate to other diners, but would cause the unfortunate book
brought to the table to be covered with gravy or grease stains. Both of these
were unforgivable sins.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Then I discovered
the lovely, subversive institution known as the college-town bookstore. Not the
big, school-sponsored one on campus, with its endless supply of computer
equipment, shrink-wrapped textbooks, and tchotchkes bearing the school’s
mascot. Nor the smaller, parasitic bookstore just off campus, where the same
textbooks, barely used, can be bought and sold for half price the following
semester. The best and most interesting bookstore in any college town is always
a funky place selling secondhand books and distinguished by the presence of (a)
the owner’s cat, (b) beat-up second-hand furniture of suspect provenance,
and/or (c) organic coffee and really thick vegetarian soups.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">These stores tend
to have a countercultural bent and thus allow one to violate a lot of the rules
observed by Nice People. Like the dictum against dawdling too long in a retail
establishment without buying anything. And the rule against reading at the
table during meals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In my current
hometown of Gainesville, Florida (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">home of
the Florida Gators – if you’re not a Gator, you’re Gator bait!</i>) Books, Inc.
fills this crucial role in the cultural ecosystem. It fills a sprawling old
house near the university, is furnished with the obligatory frayed armchairs
and beat-up side tables from who-knows-where, and boasts a tiny vegetarian eatery
(The Book Lover’s Café) that serves sturdy earthenware mugs of soup and organic
coffee to a loyal population of students, aging hippies, writing groups, and
Dungeons and Dragons players. No cat, though – the place has enough interesting
characters on hand that it doesn’t need one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I’m not a hippie
type. Nor am I a vegetarian. But the first time I stepped into Books, Inc.,
something about the scruffy, casual vibe of the place just felt good and right.
And over the past few years, it has come to epitomize the best of Gainesville
for me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The cashier’s desk
– a retail establishment’s place of honor – features not bestsellers and
bookmarks, but an ever-changing jumble of works by local and regional writers –
everything from paperbacks by nationally known locals to collections by
critically acclaimed poets to self-published zines and charity cookbooks, along
with books about local flora, fauna, and history. (This brings up another thing
I love about this place: While a lot of
big-box outlets around here try to cop a “local” vibe by painting “GO GATORS!”
in the front window and hanging a few posters of Tim Tebow, the commitment to
local culture at Books, Inc. is deep and genuine – and miraculously, expressed
without a hint UF orange and blue). Local writers who manage to get published also
know that Books, Inc. is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> place to
host book-signing parties.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The store’s biggest
fans, however, are the scores of would-be creative luminaries who are also
nurtured and fed (both intellectually and literally) at its dozen or so
mismatched tables. One of my two writing groups – the one whose members
compensate for their chronic flakiness with peerless conversational skills and
brilliantly incisive critiques (on the rare occasions they actually get around
to reading each others' submissions) has held its weekly meetings there for the
past two years, and is only one of several writing groups that regularly jockey
for table space in the busy store. And all of us ate and drank, wholesomely and
well, while tapping at our laptops or flipping through our manuscripts or even
yet-to-be purchased volumes from the store’s shelves.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-ASfmK2BSD7fpwv61AXRXyH1VbxRpflgJqYhqqz_7wKHQgkxIOnZqcrhdwLH4uF4ysIzYiGQX1gPqj8aP9CrsH6fSnfEyi-pYoqE1coHOP2ciJqB1eMmcvpNtDNWWN-RymDLU1XJOD4EQ/s1600/glenn+price_books+inc+show.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="428" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-ASfmK2BSD7fpwv61AXRXyH1VbxRpflgJqYhqqz_7wKHQgkxIOnZqcrhdwLH4uF4ysIzYiGQX1gPqj8aP9CrsH6fSnfEyi-pYoqE1coHOP2ciJqB1eMmcvpNtDNWWN-RymDLU1XJOD4EQ/s640/glenn+price_books+inc+show.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> My husband had his first-ever photography
exhibition in their tiny art gallery – and every time I came in during the time the exhibit
was up, Anne, the owner, made a point of
coming up to me and telling me excitedly about how some customer or another had
loved his photos. When we hosted an opening night reception in the little
gallery, she mixed up a huge bowl of punch, put out hummus and chips and
cookies to supplement our supply of wine and cheese, helped us set everything
up, and waited along with us, as eager for Glenn’s success as we were. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">At the end of the month-long
exhibition, Anne told us that Glenn’s exhibition had been their most profitable
in years. He eagerly agreed to do
another show in the following year. Now we were both established members of
Books, Inc.’s creative community, and I envisioned Books, Inc. becoming for us
what Shakespeare and Company was to Gertrude Stein and Hemingway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Then last month,
Glenn got a call from Anne. His next show
was cancelled: She and her husband were
retiring and closing the store in early 2012.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">There had been a
big “For Sale” sign outside Books, Inc. since forever, so I shouldn’t have been
surprised. But business inside the store
seemed to go on as usual, so it was easy to not to think the unthinkable. On a
couple of occasions, members of my writing group speculated about it, but we
did our best to stay in a state of denial.
Surely, they couldn’t be serious about selling the place. Maybe just the property was being sold, and
the store was only renting it. Books, Inc. is so well established in the community,
someone would come forward to buy it – wouldn’t they?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">My writing group,
to my annoyance, has recently moved our meetings to a thoroughly mediocre
restaurant down the street at the request of a member who declared he didn’t
like eating “rabbit food.” (This member quit soon after for unrelated reasons.)
But I’m going to petition to move our next few meetings back to Books, Inc.,
for old times’ sake. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Some of my fondest
memories of life in Gainesville will always be those writing-group meetings
there – evenings of wandering conversations that typically veer from vampires
to Watergate to space travel to food, Florida history, and gun control, and then
back again, all fueled by tempeh Reuben sandwiches, creamy-but-cream-free
soups, and a mysterious house-made fresh ginger brew that none of us have been
able to replicate. On a typical evening, Lina would struggle to get her laptop
connected to the store’s touch-and-go wireless network, Wes would meander
about during breaks, looking for books on European history, and I would drink
in the place’s signature scent of coffee, cumin, and old paper while
eavesdropping on other groups of readers, writers, and diners, all having
conversations just as pointless and random as ours. And yes,we read and ate and wrote and talked all at the same time. Who ever knew that quietly breaking a few rules of etiquette could be so much fun?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I
need to cement as many of these memories into my brain as I can, and soon –
because in a few months, that’s all I’ll have left of one of my favorite
places.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">One item on the
Book Lover’s Café menu that I haven’t
yet gotten around to ordering was called “Our Plumber’s Pasta.” It seemed to be a typical college-town
hippy-ish mixture of pasta, vegetables, and almonds in a sort-of-Asian-style
sauce. But only after buying the Book Lovers’ Café cookbook as a souvenir
recently (it was, of course, right on the cashier’s table, along with all the
other local works) did I realize how true my characterization was: the base of the dish, and the source of
flavoring in the original formulation of the recipe, was a notorious student
standby: instant ramen noodles and flavoring packets! But the truly novel and
creative part of the recipe is that it requires no cooking whatsoever –
instead, the “instant” noodles soak overnight in a soy-and-vinegar-based
marinade until tender. (And according to the cookbook, the popular dish was
indeed the invention of the original chef’s plumber.) Of course, I had to try
my own version of it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The book didn’t say
who this plumber was. But I picture him as a bright, free-thinking UF dropout
who decided he’d rather do real work with his hands than spend his life pushing
paper around. More than any of the other, more conventionally wholesome dishes
on the café’s menu, with their locally sourced organic ingredients, this
plumber’s creation speaks loudly and clearly to a distinct sense of place:
Where else could such a dish have evolved and flourished except in a community
dominated by starving students and aspiring artists with dreams of far-away
places and bigger things?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">OUR PLUMBER’S PASTA</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">(Adapted from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Book Lover’s Café Cookbook</i>, by Ian
Schliefer)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Notes: The original
recipe called for balsamic vinegar, but I substituted Chinese sweetened black
vinegar, which has similar tangy, caramel notes and is a LOT cheaper.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">For the pasta
and vegetables:</span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">3 (3.5 ounce)
packages instant ramen package (according to the original recipe, all the
ingredients in “Oriental”- flavored ramen are vegetarian, but check the
ingredient list if this is a concern. If not, any basic flavor will work.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1 large green bell
pepper, diced</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">½ medium red onion,
diced</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">½ cup red cabbage,
diced</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1/3 cup sliced or
slivered almonds</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">For the
marinade:</span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">¼ cup canola oil</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">¾ sweetened black
vinegar </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1/3 cup soy sauce</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1 seasoning packet
from an instant ramen </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">I teaspoon finely
grated garlic (about 1 medium clove)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1 teaspoon finely
grated fresh ginger</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">1 cup water</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Combine the
marinade ingredients in a medium bowl; set aside.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Break up the cakes
of ramen noodles into small pieces (about ½ inch across), and put them in a
large bowl. Toss thoroughly with vegetables and marinade. (Discard remaining
two flavoring packets or reserve for another use.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Cover the bowl with
plastic wrap and allow to rest, overnight, in the refrigerator. (Instant ramen
noodles are already cooked; soaking them in the marinade will rehydrate them
into their more familiar “cooked” form.)
Serve cold or at room temperature.</span></div>
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<br /></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-55198993328516050502011-12-08T14:21:00.001-08:002012-01-20T08:35:31.700-08:00Eating Butterflies: Festive Treats for Ordinary Days<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">It used
to crack me up how people on TV and in magazines portrayed “four-course
banquets” as the very height of festivity and luxury. I was just a boring
little kid who never got to go anywhere interesting, and I’d been to more TEN-course
banquets than I could count. And as Dad constantly reminded me and my sisters,
we were even more fortunate than other people and their trivial roast-beef
feasts, for our banquets featured the classic dishes of ancient China, and the
culinary traditions of China are even older and more sophisticated and refined
than those of France and Italy: Did you know, he liked to tell us, that the
Chinese invented pasta, and it only got to Italy because of Marco Polo?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Banquet
season for our family was whenever Grandma Lee came to visit us in Los Angeles.
She was an expert and prodigious
networker decades before the term was even invented, and her week-long visits
involved nightly ten-course feasts, each serving seemingly
hundreds of friends, relatives, and business associates in the Chinese-American
community whom she just had to see. I have no idea who paid for or planned
these events, but I was sure Dad was right about the proper place of Chinese
cuisine in the culinary pantheon -- the food was luscious: whole, steamed fish
topped with scallions and ginger, burnished marinated and roasted chicken or
squab surrounded by a ring of crunchy shrimp chips that looked like disks of
candy-colored Styrofoam, and tender morsels of quickly stir-fried steak in a
peppery sauce, along with seven other, equally appetizing courses. It made the
inevitable series of lengthy Cantonese
speeches before each meal (which even my parents said were boring and
formulaic) worth it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Only one
course was inevitably disappointing at these celebratory events: dessert. No
matter what exotic luxuries had come before, dessert almost always seemed to be
an afterthought in Cantonese banquets. There were usually orange slices and
maybe some almond or fortune cookies, and very occasionally, some vaguely sweet soup
that, like a postprandial bowl of Raisin Bran, really didn’t seem sweet or decadent enough to count as dessert. The only time when
Grandma’s banquets didn’t end
anticlimactically was when the extended family met in San Francisco.
This was because younger members of the local clan usually procured a rum-drenched,
cream-puff-topped layer cake from Little Italy to end our otherwise
authentically Chinese meals. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Those
cakes made me wish I were Italian.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Chinese
food is healthy,” Dad said when I asked him why we didn’t have good desserts
like other cultures. “We’ve known for a long time that people aren’t supposed
to eat a lot of sweets. Americans are just figuring that out now!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I
learned later that Western-style dessert didn’t exist as its own course in
Chinese tradition, and that the few sweets that did exist were more likely to
be served as snacks than with meals. (Some of these traditional snacks, such as
those mildly sweet soups, got co-opted into playing the dessert role at the
banquets I had attended.) I also learned, contrary to Dad's lectures,
that there do exist sweet and shamelessly unhealthful Chinese treats worth
pursuing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">One of
these was an occasional treat we’d use to get from Chinatown bakeries, called a
butterfly cookie. It only bore the vaguest resemblance to a butterfly, and
wasn’t really a cookie – rather, it was a twisted, crunchy deep-fried
confection drenched in thick, sticky sugar syrup. It was also larger than a
normal cookie – about six inches long, the perfect size for getting a grade
schooler’s hands completely sticky. Consistent with Chinese tradition, we never
had these at the end of meals, but only as snacks – the usual routine was to
buy about half a dozen of them after a weekend dim sum lunch in Chinatown, take
them home in the standard-for-Chinatown pink cardboard box tied with red
string, and munch on them while watching badly dubbed 1950s-era Japanese
monster movies on some local independent TV station. Butterfly cookies weren’t
officially special-occasion food, but like ice cream cones, they made ordinary
days feel a little bit special.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The
recipes for homemade butterfly cookies I’ve found differ in a couple of
respects from the ones I remember seeing in Chinatown. For one, they’re much
smaller (they’re generally made with fried wonton skins, which are only about 4
inches square), and almost always call for a simpler finish of powdered sugar
rather than syrup. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">But for
me, that sticky syrup is what made the butterfly cookies of my childhood so
much fun to eat – both for the decadent sweetness it contributes, and the
distinctive stickiness. The great thing about eating a properly made butterfly
is that while it’s crispy and brittle, it generates very few crumbs when you
break off a piece or bite into it. This is because the syrup coating will form
long, almost tensile strings that will keep the shattered crunchy shards
securely attached to the rest of the pastry, so none will be lost or wasted.
The only mess will be from gobs of syrup on your fingers, but you can alleviate
this problem by holding the butterfly with the wax-paper square on which it is typically
sold.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Most
likely, modern home cooks adapted the powdered sugar route because it’s
easier and (arguably) prettier. But the end result will be a lot messier to eat
(crumbs and powdered sugar everywhere!) and nowhere near as much fun.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">When
preparing this post and formulating my recipe, my South-African-born husband
mentioned that butterfly cookies drenched in syrup were the standard
end-of-meal treat in Chinese restaurants when he was growing up. (He remembers
them being called “bow ties” rather than butterflies, but he was definitely
referring to the same confection.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">So it turns out that
somewhere in the world, there are Chinese restaurants that end meals with
memorable sweets. As always, there is wisdom to be gleaned from the customs of
others.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">CHINESE
BUTTERFLY COOKIES</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">24
wonton skins</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Canola
or other neutrally flavored oil for deep frying</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 cups
sugar</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">½ cup
water</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">2 teaspoons lemon juice </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Shape
the butterflies. Stack two wonton skins on top of each other (keep the
remaining skins covered to keep them soft and pliable) and cut the stack in
half lengthwise. Each half of the stack will form a single pastry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cut a 2
½-inch long slit down the center of each stack.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Pick up
one of the stacks. Fold one end of the stack towards you, push it through the front
side of the slit, then pull it up through the back side of the slit. This will
form two twists along the sides of the cookie.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Repeat
the cutting and folding until all the butterflies are formed. Keep the
already-shaped butterflies covered with a towel to keep the wonton skins soft.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Meanwhile,
heat about 2 inches of oil over medium heat in a heavy saucepan. When it is
hot, drop in a test butterfly: if the oil is at the right temperature, the butterfly will immediately rise to the top and start puffing up.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">When the oil is the right temperature, add as many pastries as will fit easily without touching (there should be some room around them) and fry, turning once or twice, until golden brown. Remove and drain on paper towels.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Make the syrup: Combine the water, lemon juice, and sugar in a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. (The lemon juice doesn't add much flavor; it prevents the syrup from getting crystalized.) Cook until the syrup thickens. Test the syrup by placing a small drop of it into a bowl of ice water: the syrup is ready when the drop forms a pliable, sticky ball that can be pressed flat between your fingers. When the syrup is ready, plunge the bottom of the pot into a large bowl of cold water to stop the cooking.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dip the pastries: Using tongs, take each butterfly and dip it into the syrup, ensuring that it is completely covered. Place the dipped pastries on a baking sheet lined with waxed paper or baking parchment (do NOT put them on paper towels or they'll stick).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">The butterflies can be eaten immediately, or stored in an airtight container, with layers of pastries separated by waxed paper. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>This post is part of the monthly #LetsLunch series -- this month's theme is festive sides from your family heritage. Okay, I heard it wrong and just did a random festive dish. My bad.</i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Here are the fine bloggers also doing lunch today: The list will be updated throughout the day as more terrific posts come in, so stay tuned!</i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><a href="http://acookandherbooks.blogspot.com/2010/12/not-my-mamas-black-eyed-peas-greens.html">A Cook and Her Books </a></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>on festive black-eyed peas and greens -- lucky food for Southerners! </i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><a href="http://www.patrickglee.com/recipes-2/baby-pecan-pies/">Patrick G. Lee</a> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>(no relation, but he sounds like a fun guy!) on baby pecan pis.</i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><a href="http://hapamama.com/2011/12/of-loaves-and-fruitcakes/">HapaMama</a> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>on fruitcake and generosity, two essential components of Christmas.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><a href="http://beautifulmemorablefood.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/trinidadian-baked-pastelles/">Spicebox Travels</a> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>on Trinidadan pastelles - Caribbean Christmas tamales -- and an easy way to make them.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i> <a href="http://freerangecookies.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/bake-me-a-salad/">Free Range Cookies</a></i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>on crunchy, crunchy salads -- made of baked veggie chips! </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><a href="http://atigerinthekitchen.com/2011/12/auntie-janes-potato-gratin-a-singaporean-christmas-casserole">A Tiger in the Kitchen</a> </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>on a Singaporean potato-and-sausage casserole, traditional at Christmas. UPDATE: This post also contains the complete, updated list of this month's #LetsLunch participants -- check it out!</i></span><br />
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<br /></div>Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-3184904511957815792011-11-22T10:48:00.000-08:002011-11-22T11:11:34.567-08:00An (Almost) All-American Thanksgiving (or, What to Eat the Morning After)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYZH0MSxtzswbbL5XjCedhzoUKxey3e1liLqCI-roPbTfafNGZc1mRWVme0EGEbqwdOF59CpLLaPp9JZRBxfC41MnlR9gyBWnp-G8yLa9dFBqYueL0Nn59nLZjM3XorV5TYcAUzqFWG89z/s1600/jook_7583blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYZH0MSxtzswbbL5XjCedhzoUKxey3e1liLqCI-roPbTfafNGZc1mRWVme0EGEbqwdOF59CpLLaPp9JZRBxfC41MnlR9gyBWnp-G8yLa9dFBqYueL0Nn59nLZjM3XorV5TYcAUzqFWG89z/s400/jook_7583blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5666070370969822930" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(This post originally appeared on my <a href="http://open.salon.com/blog/rellowrump">Open Salon</a> blog last year. A slightly different version was published on <a href="http://www.salon.com/2010/11/23/chinese_american_thanksgiving_open2010/">Salon.com</a>.)</span><br /><br />Ungrateful whining is an American child’s birthright. But if you grow up in an immigrant family, you have a whole battery of things to whine about that other kids don’t.<br /><br />For one, your parents and their friends will insist on infesting every event with dorky, embarrassing stuff from the old country. Back in my whiny years, all my cool friends from school got to have buttery mashed potatoes and flaky little Parker House rolls at their Thanksgiving tables. And I was stuck with... plain boiled rice.<br /><br />“MOOOM! Why do we have to have RICE? I want potatoes!”<br /><br />“Rice is good.” Mom would say. “And Dad wants rice.”<br /><br />End of discussion. (This was another thing Chinese-American kids get to whine about: We never get to have the last word. Ever.)<br /><br />Thanksgiving, according to my grade-school teachers, was the most American of holidays, a time to celebrate our common heritage by bonding around indigenous American foodstuffs. So I decided it was up to me, as a patriotic native-born American, to protect the sanctity of the holiday from creeping Sinofication.<br /><br />“You know what Auntie Pat puts in her turkey?” Mom said one night a week before Thanksgiving, “Naw mai and lop cheung.”<br /><br />Dad’s eyebrows raised from behind the Wall Street Journal. “Mmm, “ he said.<br /><br />“MOOOM! NO!” my sisters and I yelled in unison. Not that there was anything wrong with naw mai (sticky rice) and lop cheung (dried Chinese sausage), but these weren’t Thanksgiving food. They were everyday boring food. The kind of stuff we ate while relatives interrogated us about our grades and asked us why Mom didn’t have any sons (as if we could possibly formulate an intelligent answer to this question).<br /><br />Year after year, we successfully fought off rice-stuffed turkeys and stir-fried side dishes. We also managed to increase, ever so gradually, the proportion of toasted marshmallows on top of our absolutely mandatory sweet potato casserole. And as my sisters and I assumed more and more responsibility and control in the kitchen, our Thanksgiving spreads became less Norman Rockwell and more Martha Stewart: pumpkin flans and souffles are more our thing than pumpkin pies.<br /><br />These days, we count our victory over immigrant dorkitude nearly complete. But the purity of our red-blooded Yuppie American Thanksgiving feast lasts only until the dishes are cleared. That’s when our Martha Stewart idyll ends, and Mom’s annual turkey jook production begins. (Jook is often described, unappetizingly, as rice porridge or gruel, but it deserves to be re-branded as a savory and soothing cream of rice soup.)<br /><br />While the dishes are still in the sink, Mom puts the turkey carcass (denuded of stuffing and any pieces of meat large enough to save for sandwiches) in a slow cooker and covers it with water. She tosses in a cut-up carrot and a stalk or two of celery. (Neither of these are traditional Chinese soup ingredients, but that’s how she rolls.) Then she turns the cooker on and lets it do its thing while we do the dishes and attempt to foist foil-wrapped packets of leftovers onto our guests.<br /><br />The cooker stays on all night, and early on Black Friday morning, Mom removes and dumps the carcass, and adds several handfuls of leftover rice from the night before. (Yes, we still have plain boiled rice every Thanksgiving. Since almost no one touches it except Dad, we can always count on leftovers for jook-making.) Within an hour, the rice will have dissolved, turning the rich turkey broth into a silky ivory cream – just in time for a comforting, very traditional Chinese breakfast for late risers.<br /><br />In the end, that pointless bowl of Thanksgiving rice always manages to redeem itself. And we always end up with a real Chinese dish for Thanksgiving – albeit one with an All-American backbone. And none of us have ever complained about it.<br /><br />As always, Mom and Dad get the last word.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Jook is traditionally served at breakfast or as a late-night snack. It can be made with fish, meat, or poultry broth, and usually contains pieces of the corresponding meat. (I’ve heard of jook based on plain water, but this would be unthinkable in my family.)<br /><br />True confession time: I’ve never hosted a full-on Thanksgiving dinner, so I’ve have never had unfettered access to a turkey carcass. (Yes, I know – I’ve missed a crucial milestone of American womanhood and should probably just go and join the Taliban right now.) But I have made jook many times, and it’s dead easy. The recipe below produces a more modest portion than Mom’s – a good starter size for newbies and doubters. It calls for raw rice, since I assume most non-Chinese don’t typically have cold cooked rice lying around. But you can use a larger portion of cooked rice and cook the soup for a shorter amount of time.<br /><br /> <br /><br />TURKEY (OR CHICKEN) JOOK (CREAMY RICE SOUP)<br /><br /> 4 cups turkey or chicken broth<br /><br />2 ¼-inch thick slices of fresh ginger<br /><br />1/3 cup raw white rice, rinsed (or 1 cup cooked white rice rice)<br /><br />salt and white pepper to taste<br /><br />1 cup cooked turkey or chicken, shredded into bite-size pieces<br /><br />For garnishes:<br /><br />2 scallions, thinly sliced<br /><br />sesame oil<br /><br />chile oil<br /><br /> 1. Bring the broth and ginger to a boil in a heavy saucepan.<br /><br /> 2. Add the rice. Cook at medium heat, stirring regularly, until the rice has fully cooked and broken down (about an hour). The mixture should have the consistency of a thick bean soup (it won’t be completely smooth; little nubs of rice will still be evident). If it’s too thick for your taste, add more broth. If it’s too thin, raise the heat and cook until the mixture has thickened to your desired consistency.<br /><br /> 3. Add the shredded chicken or turkey and season to taste with salt and white pepper. Cook until the meat is heated through.<br /><br /> 4. Garnish with sliced scallions. Serve with sesame oil, chile oil, and extra white pepper for diners to add at will.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-39957615641212119362011-11-21T11:26:00.000-08:002011-11-28T14:37:44.858-08:00A Tiger Mom’s Daughter Makes Popcorn<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIkwxwenxnznLRy8fgkMi7fknFaIaYR2n_JeJr4hOGxbO5BuNxyyfQOK5oagd2qNfGBIhHA92JWrQ-YXhWLXWNonNYRbMH1YFdVgEKeTApQAXX6Amm2lQzwk3jnp-K-qDrozIyO38TANFY/s1600/spicy+popcorn_5609blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIkwxwenxnznLRy8fgkMi7fknFaIaYR2n_JeJr4hOGxbO5BuNxyyfQOK5oagd2qNfGBIhHA92JWrQ-YXhWLXWNonNYRbMH1YFdVgEKeTApQAXX6Amm2lQzwk3jnp-K-qDrozIyO38TANFY/s400/spicy+popcorn_5609blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5677534337829268322" /></a><br /><br />I’ve had this brilliant idea bouncing around for a while: flavored popcorn. But not just plain old cheese-flavored popcorn or kettle corn – truly epic, sweet, salty, tangy, and spicy popcorn with crazy Indian flavors that would subvert the whole notion of what popcorn is supposed to taste like. <br /><br />And it would be a cinch to make, too. I knew exactly what flavors I wanted and how to get them (basically, I’d use the spice combination in Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe for Indian snack mix, which I’ve used successfully before in <a href=”http://alwayshungry-felicia.blogspot.com/2011/05/eat-like-bird.html”>other experiments</a>). I knew how to get the flavors and the popcorn together – I’d cook the spices along with the popcorn, a technique I had learned from a spiced popcorn recipe in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688131778/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0688131778">City Cuisine</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0688131778&camp=217145&creative=399369" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />, a cookbook featuring dishes from a wonderfully original (and sadly defunct) Los Angeles restaurant.<br /><br />How could I go wrong?<br /><br />Let me count the ways.<br /><br />First, I haven’t laid eyes on that cookbook for years. If I still have it, it’s somewhere in storage at my parents’ place, three time zones away. I haven’t made the spiced popcorn recipe from that book in years, and the exact details of the technique involved were fuzzy. I’d have to wing it, but I’m good at winging it. Usually.<br /><br />I assembled and mixed my spices, per Jaffrey’s recipe: salt, sugar, cinnamon, turmeric, black mustard seeds, cayenne (I like to use a LOT), cloves, black pepper, and the secret ingredient, <span style="font-style:italic;">amchoor</span>, or dried green mango powder.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdeO2-G-TmOLv7d1ufhx9PdHO6pDXNzf153dMZhyao9pc8sarJ7XH7I9iTo6PwPwS3YNft63rTAWRO9jOcCncSJFbZZ4GNoHX3Ps2hpsRIkAa8mJkxP3dnQRq98JEVa5JW6ND9jzWyM0XD/s1600/spices_5529blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdeO2-G-TmOLv7d1ufhx9PdHO6pDXNzf153dMZhyao9pc8sarJ7XH7I9iTo6PwPwS3YNft63rTAWRO9jOcCncSJFbZZ4GNoHX3Ps2hpsRIkAa8mJkxP3dnQRq98JEVa5JW6ND9jzWyM0XD/s400/spices_5529blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5677534457659013122" /></a><br /><br />Then I heated up some oil in a big pot to pop the corn. When it was sufficiently hot, I dumped in the popcorn kernels, let a few of them pop, then dumped in the spices. I could heat the happy thumps of popping kernels hitting the bottom of the pot’s lid, and smell the spices. And something burning.<br /><br />I lifted the lid about an inch. Several kernels of corn shot across the kitchen through a puff of smoke and skidded under the refrigerator. If you make popcorn on the stove you can expect a bit of steam when you crack open the lid but this wasn’t steam. It was the whole darned project going up in smoke.<br /><br />I realized immediately what had happened. The City Cuisine recipe (if I recalled correctly) involved only dried spices and salt. My recipe involved sugar and <span style="font-style:italic;">amchoor</span>, which was essentially powdered dried fruit. Dumped into a pan with a layer of hot oil on the bottom, it cooked into a jam-like gunk, then scorched. <br /><br />Duh. What did I <span style="font-style:italic;">think</span> would happen? Here, I can hear my parents’ Pavlovian response to such mishaps by their offspring. “The problem was, you <span style="font-style:italic;">weren’t</span> thinking!”<br /><br />Well, I was thinking now. Failure is a memorable teacher, if nothing else. And one lesson I’ve absorbed from a Chinese-American childhood (other than to never put sugar in your tea at a dim sum place) is that adversity is good for you. Spending hours upon hours doing stuff you hate (Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, anyone?) makes you a better person – and really good at doing stuff you hate, a regrettably important skill for adults. <br /><br />Fortunately, this training also made me better at doing stuff I like, especially when it goes bad – like now. Thankfully, I had plenty of all the ingredients I needed, and the burnt gunk on the bottom of the pan washed off fairly easily. Time for take two. This time, I’d keep the <span style="font-style:italic;">amchoor</span> and sugar separate from the other spices and add them only at the end, after the popcorn had finished popping. <br /><br />The oil was heated and the kernels were just starting to thump against the inside of the lid. I lifted it quickly and dumped in the spices, leaving the <span style="font-style:italic;">amchoor</span> and sugar off to the side. I shook the pan to distribute the spices as the kernels popped, thinking of how pretty the finished popcorn would look – sunny yellow from the turmeric and flecked with bits of spice.<br /><br />The popping slowed, then stopped. I lifted the lid: a few sunny yellow buds of popcorn, but the rest were flecked with black. The spices had burned again.<br /><br />A lesser warrior would have given up. But not me. I wasn’t raised to be a quitter. Nietzsche said that what doesn’t kill you will make you grow stronger, and being stronger is always a good thing. This was a teachable moment, and I was going to learn from it, dammit!<br /><br />Take three. It was obvious that cooking the spices with the popcorn was a no-go. (Was that really how they did it in the City Cuisine recipe? Now I was beginning to doubt my memory, which is normally pretty good.) Just dumping the spices onto the popcorn after it was popped wouldn’t work either; I’d tried that before and the spices never stuck to the popcorn – they just sank uselessly to the bottom of whatever container the popcorn was in. So I opted for the method Madhur Jaffrey used to incorporate the spices into her snack mix: I heated the mustard seeds in oil until they popped, removed the hot oil from the heat, and stirred in all the spices except the <span style="font-style:italic;">amchoor</span>, salt, and sugar. Then I poured the mixture over the popcorn and stirred. Once everything was combined, I sprinkled on the <i>amchoor</i>, salt, and sugar and stirred again.<br /><br />Close, but still not perfect. It was certainly edible, but not quite what I wanted. Some pieces of popcorn were covered with gobs of the spicy mix, while others were nearly white. Also, the mix was almost too saturated with flavor –as if there was too much spice for the amount of popcorn used. I knew exactly what I needed to do: slightly increase both the amount of popcorn and the amount of oil used to heat the spices. The problem with this batch was that the oil-and-spice mixture was thick and pasty, not the melted-butter consistency that would even cover the popcorn. These two adjustments would both improve the flavor balance and the distribution of spices over the popped kernels.<br /><br />Now I was feeling both like a very proud cub of a good Tiger Mom and like a particularly masochistic minion of <a href=”http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2003/10/sexy_food_nerds.html”>Christopher Kimball</a>. The end was in sight. But my kitchen was a hot mess (literally) and it was getting close to dinnertime. The (hopefully) final denouement of my project would have to wait.<br /><br />Flash forward about 20 hours. This whole experiment was beginning to feel like <a href=”http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107048/”>Groundhog Day</a>. I assembled my spices (again), measured out a slightly larger quantity of popcorn, and popped it as usual -- again. Then I dumped it into a big bowl, wiped out the pot, and added the oil and mustard seeds. When the mustard seeds had all popped, I added the spices, just as before. This time, there was enough oil to dissolve, or at least, evenly disperse them. I poured the now- bright-orange liquid over the popcorn and stirred vigorously until the popcorn was the sunny, nearly uniform yellow I had hoped for. Then I poured over the <i>amchoor</i>/salt/sugar mixture and stirred again.<br /><br />I tasted it. Success! About freaking time, too. Sweet, salty, spicy, tangy, and despite the seemingly copious amount of oil involved, not discernibly greasy. A perfect snack for Bollywood movie nights and beyond. Forget the Tiger Cub – now I felt like one of Malcolm Gladwell’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316017930/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0316017930">Outliers</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0316017930&camp=217145&creative=399369" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />: my 10,000 hours of popcorn-making practice (well, that’s what it felt like) had finally resulted in transcendence. It felt amazing and made me wonder why I didn’t do experiments like this more often. <br /><br />Then I realized it was close to dinnertime again and it was time to wash and put away all that stuff in the sink before getting started on yet another group of recipes. And I was now running low on black peppercorns, one of my husband’s favorite flavorings, too. And cooking oil. Oops. Maybe that’s why.<br /><br />But no regrets. The ride was totally worth it.<br /><br />BOLLYWOOD POPCORN<br /><br />(inspired by recipes from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394748670/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0394748670">Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0394748670&camp=217145&creative=399369" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0688131778/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0688131778">City Cuisine</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0688131778&camp=217145&creative=399369" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;"/>,by Mary Milliken and Susan Feniger)<br /><br />This recipe actually is really easy to make, believe it or not. It would make a fun and different cocktail nibble for a holiday open house. <span style="font-style:italic;">Amchoor</span> (which contributes a tangy, fruity note) and black mustard seeds are available at Indian markets.<br /><br />¾” piece cinnamon stick<br />3 whole cloves<br />½ teaspoon black peppercorns<br />¼ teaspoon ground turmeric<br />1 teaspoon cayenne (or to taste—this amount makes the mix quite spicy!)<br />1-1/4 teaspoon salt<br />2-1/2 teaspoons sugar<br />1-1/2 teaspoons <span style="font-style:italic;">amchoor</span> (dried green mango powder)<br />1/3 cup popcorn kernels<br />½ tablespoon black mustard seeds<br />4 tablespoons neutral cooking oil, such as canola (or more if you need it to pop your corn)<br /><br />1. In a spice grinder or mortar, grind the cinnamon stick, cloves, and peppercorns until they are powdery. Combine with the turmeric and cayenne in a small cup and set aside.<br /><br />2. In a separate cup, combine the sugar, salt, and amchoor; set aside.<br /><br />3. Pop the corn. If you don’t have a popcorn popper, you can do it the old-school way, on the stovetop: put 2 tablespoons of canola or other neutral oil in a large, heavy pot with a lid and drop in a test kernel. Cover the pot and cook over medium heat until the kernel pops. Then add the remaining kernels. Keep the pot covered, but shake it around occasionally to distribute the kernels evenly. When the popping stops, remove the pot from the heat and pour the popped corn into a large bowl.<br /><br />4. Wipe out the pot (if you’ve used one) or use a small, heavy skillet to make the seasoned oil. Put the 4 tablespoons of oil into the pot or skillet and bring the heat to medium. Add the mustard seeds and cook until all the seeds have popped. Remove the skillet or pot from the heat and stir in the ground spices. <br /><br />5. Pour the spice mixture over the popped corn and stir vigorously with a large spoon (or even your hands) until the popcorn is evenly coated. Sprinkle on the salt/sugar/<span style="font-style:italic;">amchoor</span> mixture and stir again.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-42301894601558930752011-11-15T09:39:00.000-08:002011-11-15T09:50:23.101-08:00The Pleasures of PBS (and a Defense of Monkey Gland Steak)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCxX8KXSeNJpOSJL2qV0MIQkWAPgHUvkqd1yWzGmRjkzx8t2X6GchEBbOLQGWf5WPDGmUwOMuYGUJphDcLN1MXwUvdDD-_XaeXj_PPcad82hlzeb8fMshg4E-7Iqvfza7zYrRS_xALYvuD/s1600/monkey+gland+steak_5503blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCxX8KXSeNJpOSJL2qV0MIQkWAPgHUvkqd1yWzGmRjkzx8t2X6GchEBbOLQGWf5WPDGmUwOMuYGUJphDcLN1MXwUvdDD-_XaeXj_PPcad82hlzeb8fMshg4E-7Iqvfza7zYrRS_xALYvuD/s400/monkey+gland+steak_5503blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5675278815609592162" /></a><br /><br />Not having cable is liberating. It gives me a perfect excuse not to keep up with the Kardashians or any of the other irritating presences hogging up the cultural universe: Sorry, I didn’t see that – I don’t have cable!<br /> <br />Another good thing about not having cable is that when I do feel like zonking out in front of the TV, I am forced to watch PBS, the only over-the-air station in my area that has decent reception and isn’t constantly running pawn-shop ads. It’s kind of like not keeping junk food in the house: if you feel like snacking, you have no choice but to go for the carrot sticks.<br /> <br />But after many hours of virtuous sloth (spacing out in front of a Ken Burns documentary somehow feels righteous and wholesome), I realized with delight that PBS isn’t all carrot sticks. Sometimes, like ripe mangoes or perfect strawberries, it’s so enchanting you forget it’s good for you. Seriously, any American who doesn’t love Big Bird or get into geeking out with the <a href=” http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/”>History Detectives</a> really does’t deserve to be alive. <br /> <br />Even more fun than Big Bird’s adventures or the origins of that thing that may or may not have belonged to Benedict Arnold are PBS’s cooking shows. Unlike the glitz-filled drivel on the Food Network, the cooks who have shows on PBS – Ming Tsai, Jacques Pepin, and Lidia Bastianich, among others – actually know how to cook and are passionately curious about the history, origins, and uses of their ingredients. Watching those guys (and girls) at work can give you both a raging appetite and a genuinely improved knowledge of some crucial technique or regional cuisine: Did you know you can avoid getting shell bits in your eggs by cracking the shells against a flat surface such as a counter rather than against the rim of a bowl? Merci, chef Pepin. Try getting useful stuff like THAT from a gaggle of feuding sorority girls on Cupcake Wars. <br /> <br />Best of all for me and my husband Glenn, several of these shows happen to come on just before we normally eat dinner – perfect eye candy to relax to while stirring up a sauce or waiting for something to come out of the oven. <br /><br />Like every other human institution, however, PBS sometimes screws up. Some of their B-string cooking shows look as though they were lifted from some public-access channel in the middle of nowhere. And even the true culinary stars in their lineup occasionally get things wrong.<br /> <br />A couple of weeks ago, Todd English’s travel and cooking show came on just before dinner and to Glenn’s delight, was to feature the foods of South Africa, where he was born and raised. And Glenn and I couldn’t wait to see the traditional foods he grew up with showcased by a master chef: What would English taste and cook as he explored Glenn’s homeland? The sweet, twisted fritters called koeksisters? Sosaties, skewers of curry-drenched lamb cooked over an open flame? The traditional meat-filled grill called a braai?<br /> <br />The final answer was...none of the above. Todd English’s vision of South African cuisine and Glenn’s couldn’t have been more different. The Zulu goat sacrifice and resulting goat stew that English watched being made were authentically African, but not part of Glenn’s experience as a non-African from Johannesburg. And English’s segment on safari cooking featured a butternut squash and mascarpone cheese casserole -- something Glenn never recalled having on any safari that he’d ever been on.<br /><br />To be fair, it would have been impossible for English to do justice to the culinary traditions of a country as culturally complex as South Africa in a half-hour show. But the contributions of South Africa’s centuries-old Indian and European populations to its cooking – which include a full battery of eclectic dishes not found anywhere else – seemed conspicuous by their absence.<br /><br />Why? Maybe English tried some of traditional Euro-Indo-South African dishes and didn’t like them. Or maybe his producers thought scenes filmed in the bush would look better on TV than those filmed in a typical middle-class urban kitchen. Or perhaps typical urban South African fare is neither exotic nor fancy enough to suit the vibe of his show. <br /><br />However, I have another, less obvious theory. Some of these typical dishes – tasty as they are – have weird names that American audiences might find off-putting. And English and his team probably realized this wouldn’t go over very well during PBS pledge week: Stay tuned! After a few words from our general manager about our latest matching challenge from Gatorland Chevrolet, we’ll return to Todd English as he shows you how to make a traditional South African favorite – Monkey Gland Steak!<br /><br />If this is the case, maybe I see why English and his handlers made the choices they did. Still, somebody has to explain the wonders of Monkey Gland Steak to the wider world – and it might as well be me. Fear not, this dish is, and always has been, completely monkey- and gland-free.<br /><br />************<br /><br />It’s unclear how Monkey Gland Steak – beef topped with a tangy sauce enlivened with chutney, onions, and tomatoes – got its name. One legend has it that the dish was invented as a joke by a group of French-trained chefs at a snooty Johannesburg restaurant: Bitter that their wealthy but unschooled Afrikaaner and rural English clientele failed to appreciate the subtlety of their classic French sauces, they threw together the dumbest, most un-French mixture of bottled condiments possible and gave it the most ridiculous name they could think of. To their surprise (and perhaps, disappointment), the philistines loved it. Another story claims that an English chef created this dish early in the last century, and it became a favorite of a prominent doctor known for grafting tissues from monkey testicles into human testicles to restore virility. The chef later moved to South Africa and brought the recipe with him – and it soon became a local favorite.<br /><br />In South African, the sauce is either cooked along with the meat or offered as an optional topping for steaks (it appears on menus at steakhouses alongside Béarnaise sauce and other classic steak accompaniments). To my taste, the brash, tangy flavors of Monkey Gland sauce (it’s a bit like a South African analogue to barbecue sauce) seem wrong for a delicate filet mignon or other special-treat cut. Rather, it seems better suited for the preparation Glenn remembers from his youth: baked slowly with a cheaper, sturdier cut of beef for a hearty family dinner – it’s great served with mashed potatoes.<br /><br />MONKEY GLAND STEAK<br /><br />(<span style="font-style:italic;">Adapted from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805941878/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0805941878">South African Gourmet Food and Wine: Traditional South African Food and More</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0805941878&camp=217145&creative=399369" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />by Myrna Rosen and Leslie Loon)<br /></span><br />4 rump, strip, or sirloin steaks<br />4 tablespoons prepared mustard (or more if needed)<br />2 tablespoons neutral cooking oil, such as canola<br />1 medium onion, chopped<br />1 pound sliced or roughly chopped fresh mushrooms<br />½ cup tomato ketchup<br />½ cup Major Grey chutney (or other sweet mango chutney)<br />2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce<br />1 teaspoon (or more) hot sauce, or to taste (optional)<br />salt and pepper to taste<br /><br />1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Spread mustard thinly on both sides of each steak. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium high heat, and brown the steaks briefly on both sides. Remove the browned steaks from the skillet (you may need to brown them in two batches) and place in a heatproof baking dish.<br /><br />2. Add the chopped onion and the mushrooms to the hot skillet and cook until wilted and slightly browned.<br /><br />3. Meanwhile, combine the ketchup, chutney, Worcestershire sauce, and hot sauce and add to the skillet. Cook, stirring, until the sauce comes to a boil.<br /><br />4. Pour the sauce over the steaks in the baking dish. Cover the dish with foil and bake at 375 degrees until the steaks are tender, about 40 minutesFeliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-73474048988997449832011-10-30T14:12:00.000-07:002011-12-01T19:18:01.710-08:00Half-Fast Cooking: Wok-Free Chinese<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicvN6Nf8En4M8EfnemR6EK05BQemSzbd2k08LTipi1VEnmh8c1lYFQdU4aTx1csZPgPhTgZ-qFPeSOhXH0fR4YJStbEKs3XMriPE4iFdvT0RykbhsZV8VBEROCreMxPI0iBf1x0wlEhBTx/s1600/noodles_4747blg.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669396687991618002" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicvN6Nf8En4M8EfnemR6EK05BQemSzbd2k08LTipi1VEnmh8c1lYFQdU4aTx1csZPgPhTgZ-qFPeSOhXH0fR4YJStbEKs3XMriPE4iFdvT0RykbhsZV8VBEROCreMxPI0iBf1x0wlEhBTx/s400/noodles_4747blg.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 267px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">It's not fast food. It's not slow food. It's...half-fast food! Part of an occasional, sloth-driven series.</span><br />
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I admit it. I'm a total snob when it comes to Chinese food.<br />
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Growing up in proud Chinese-American family, I used to be both puzzled and annoyed by the weird ideas non-Chinese had about Chinese food. Some of these strange ideas continue to baffle and annoy me to this day: Why do non-Chinese eat Chinese take-out directly out of the box, instead of transferring it to a plate first, like we did? Why do they think it’s appropriate to pour soy sauce over everything on their plates? Why do they obsess about MSG in Chinese food but not worry a jot about the copious amounts of the stuff in Big Macs and Doritos? And what’s the deal with those crunchy noodles that come in a can? What, exactly, are they for?<br />
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More recently, I’ve noticed a more insidious and potentially harmful misconception that could wrongly turn good people away from Chinese food: the myth of the quick ‘n’ easy stir-fry. Every serious home cook has probably heard this: Stir-fries are great everyday dishes because they’re so easy! They have tons of nutritious veggies! And they cook in only seconds!<br />
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I’ve learned the hard way, however, that making a stir-fry when you’re tired and busy is almost always a bad idea, unless you REALLY know what you’re doing. (Which I don’t.)<br />
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Yes, stir-fries cook up quickly. But there’s a huge difference between “quick” and “easy.” Cooking a proper stir-fry is a lot like pulling off a successful assassination: the act itself may require only seconds, but you need serious planning, preparation, and skills to make it work.<br />
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In a proper stir–fry, everything must be cut perfectly: the shape of a cut must not only be compatible with the ingredient you’re cutting, but the other stuff in the dish as well. Every piece of a given ingredient must be exactly the same size, otherwise it won’t all cook through evenly. (Fuschia Dunlop's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393332888/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0393332888">Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China</a><img alt="" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0393332888&camp=217145&creative=399369" style="border-color: initial !important; border-style: none !important; border-width: initial !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /> has a terrific description of the theory and practice of of classic Chinese knife techniques.)Then, everything must be cooked in the proper order: things that require more cooking go in first, those that require the least go in last. Get the timing wrong and you’ll end up with a noxious mélange of overcooked and half-raw ingredients. And because stir-fries cook so quickly, there is very little room for fudging in this area.<br />
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Also, the wok used for frying must be the right temperature: hot. As in REALLY hot, for most preparations. If the oil in the wok doesn’t sputter violently, spewing incendiary droplets onto your face and arms as you throw in your ingredients, it’s not hot enough. If it doesn’t send up a noisy, fragrant cloud of smoke that makes you think “great, now I’m going to have to shampoo every carpet in the house tomorrow,” then it’s not hot enough. In Cantonese, there is a special term for the distinct aroma of a properly executed stir-fry: wok hei, sometimes translated as “breathe of the wok.” It’s the elusive smell of sear just before it becomes char – hot and smoky and flame-kissed, like the edges of a good grilled steak. It’s special and short lived; it dissipates almost as soon as a platter of hot stir-fry hits the table.<br />
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I love setting stuff on fire as much as the next person, but I can’t even try to make a proper stir-fry at my place: my downstairs smoke alarm is – wait for it – <span style="font-style: italic;">directly above the stove</span>. Call it the curse of college-town housing: the unspoken assumption around here is that anyone who cooks anything more ambitious than Top Ramen will probably burn the place down.<br />
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Thankfully, there are other options when I get a jones for real Chinese home cooking but don’t want to invoke the wrath of the local fire department. Thinking of real Chinese food always makes me think of home and family, and a homey, dead-simple dish Mom makes frequently – particularly for quick weekend lunches – is a tasty and quick preparation of noodles tossed with oyster sauce and hot oil flavored with garlic and ginger. Growing up, I’d never seen it served anywhere except chez Mom and Dad – if it did show up on restaurant menus, we never bothered ordering it. It was one of those low-key staples I always took for granted, But now, living far from my family in a place where people think brown-rice sushi is an obligatory item on “Chinese” menus, I find it irresistible. Best of all, it takes all of 15 almost completely brainless minutes to make – tops.<br />
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WORLD’S EASIEST OYSTER SAUCE NOODLES<br />
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Chinese oyster sauce doesn’t look or smell anything like you’d expect from something made from oysters—it’s a dark, salty condiment, about the consistency and color of bottled steak sauce, that can be found easily in glass bottles in Asian markets. (It’s the dominant seasoning in that Chinese-American favorite, beef with broccoli.) Oyster sauce is not especially fishy, but since it’s intensely salty, a little goes a long way. it keeps for several months in the refrigerator.<br />
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7 ounces dried wheat noodles (in a pinch, I’ve used spaghetti)<br />
4 tablespoons peanut or canola oil<br />
1 tablespoon sesame oil<br />
1 medium clove of garlic, peeled<br />
a 1-inch square piece of peeled fresh ginger<br />
4 tablespoons oyster sauce<br />
Optional add-ins: thinly sliced scallions, bite-size pieces of cooked meat and/or vegetables, Chinese chile oil<br />
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1. Put a large pot of water to boil for the noodles.<br />
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2. While the water is heating, heat the peanut or canola oil in a pot large enough to hold the noodles, and finely chop the garlic and ginger.<br />
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3. Add the garlic and ginger to the heated oil and cook, stirring for about 2 minutes or until they wilt and start to release their aromas. Stir in the sesame oil and remove from heat.<br />
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4. Add the noodles to the boiling water and cook until tender, about 10 minutes.<br />
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5. Using tongs, transfer the noodles to the pot with the seasoned oil and toss thoroughly. Add oyster sauce and toss again until all is well combined.<br />
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5. Mix in any add-ins you wish and serve immediately.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-70510703698416507952011-08-21T17:40:00.001-07:002011-11-30T15:20:17.177-08:00Eating (Really) High on the Hog<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimk_O2-TYnGJ3BY49Ag7ojVKE6I4ckK0ZdxaV1eueBeINYKc82OVFVqgJkhvMLRo4A0PD_geLn0bFRN5GIYsTfk-F2wqTwmqp183oW51Ce4TaqOubEP-CSWXiZsBKEROZwqB1HxMWUtevD/s1600/fried+pigs+ears_3358blg.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5643473965554976562" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimk_O2-TYnGJ3BY49Ag7ojVKE6I4ckK0ZdxaV1eueBeINYKc82OVFVqgJkhvMLRo4A0PD_geLn0bFRN5GIYsTfk-F2wqTwmqp183oW51Ce4TaqOubEP-CSWXiZsBKEROZwqB1HxMWUtevD/s400/fried+pigs+ears_3358blg.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 267px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 400px;" /></a>
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The expression “high on the hog” is said to originate from the general belief that the choicest cuts of pork came from high on the animal’s anatomy – the back and upper legs. Thus, these cuts were more expensive, and those lucky enough afford them were said to be living (or eating) “high on the hog.”
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Ironically, the highest topological point on the hog, the pinnacle of piggy anatomy, is one of the cheapest and least prestigious cuts. It has been quietly prepared and relished for centuries by African-Americans, Chinese, and others whose cultural mores or pocketbooks eschewed waste of any kind. For these reasons, it has also been embraced by ethics-driven omnivores and recession-strapped foodies.
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And for good reason: done right, it can be downright decadent.
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Yup – pigs’ ears can be awesome.
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I used to be a skeptic, too. While I grew up seeing pigs’ ears in Chinese butcher shops (they look exactly the way you think they would, only bigger), I never had much desire to try them – they were always pink, pointy, and floppy, and it was impossible to look at them and not imagine poor Porky Pig going “Ow! M-m-m-my ear!” In an Asian deli several years ago, I saw small packages of Taiwanese-style stewed, sliced pigs’ ears – meant to be served as appetizers or bar snacks – and I made a mental note to try them sometime. But that sometime never came.
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Then I saw them on a non-Chinese menu for the first time, at the unapologetically carnivore-centric Los Angeles restaurant <a href="http://www.animalrestaurant.com/">Animal</a>: “crispy pigs’ ears, lime, chile, fried egg.”
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“How weird,” my sister said. “I wonder what THAT’S like?”
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Our server must have overheard her question, because when he passed our table a short time later he stopped to show us a plate he was delivering to another table: a pretty pile of crunchy browned shreds, smelling vaguely of fresh cracklings, topped with a sunny-side up fried egg. It reminded me of bacon and eggs, but with an obscenely generous proportion of bacon.
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“By the way, these are the pigs’ ears,” our server said. Then, leaning closer: “Trust me—they’re very good.”
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They were.
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Flash forward about two years, to the present day: I had moved from the Los Angeles area to Middle Of Nowhere, Florida – a sleepy rural college town distinguished from the surrounding sleepy rural towns by the presence of a humongous research hospital and an equally humongous football stadium. But one nice thing about being in the middle of nowhere is that old rural folkways are still observed – it’s easier to find old-school cooking paraphernalia such as canning jars here than in Los Angeles, for instance.
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The same goes for food. Unfashionable cuts of meat that would never grace the shelves of Whole Foods – turkey necks, pigs’ feet, chitlins – are easy to find, and dirt cheap to boot. Last week at my favorite grocery store, I saw that they had pigs’ ears – good-sized trays of them – for about two bucks each.
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It was time for an experiment.
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After a quick bit of internet research, I had a plan. The pigs’ ears, as I suspected, wouldn’t be difficult to prepare, but they’d require a bit of cooking – cartilage-filled cuts of meat always do. Following the basic guidelines of a recipe (and entertaining related essay) by
<a href="http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2009/10/crisp-fried-pigs-ears-salad-recipe.html">Chichi Wang</a>, I simmered the ears in water and aromatics until they were soft. Then I drained and cooled them, sliced them into thin strips, and dredged them in flour and cornstarch before deep-frying them until they were browned and crispy.
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To finish them off, I shamelessly plagiarized Animal’s preparation by tossing the crispy strips with salt, cayenne, and a squirt of lime, then topping the whole thing with fried eggs, one per diner. My only original contribution to the recipe was inspired by the presence of that big pot of hot oil left after the ears were fried: not wanting it to go to waste, I threw in a handful of cilantro leaves, which brightened and crisped to make a pretty garnish.
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For those still grossed out by the whole notion of eating pigs’ ears (vegetarians are excused from the sermon), please consider this wise observation from M.F.K. Fisher:
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“Why is it worse, in the end, to see an animal’s head cooked and prepared for our pleasure than a thigh or a tail or a rib? If was are going to live on other inhabitants of this world we must not bind ourselves with illogical prejudices, but savor to the fullest the beasts we have killed.”
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Amen. Now let’s pig out.
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CRISPY, SPICY PIGS’ EARS
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Adapted from Chichi Wang, with additional inspiration from Animal restaurant, Los Angeles
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1 pound pigs’ ears
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1 carrot, peeled and chopped coarsely
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1 medium onion, peeled and chopped coarsely
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1 stick celery, chopped coarsely
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1 tablespoon whole peppercorns
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¼ cup cornstarch
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¼ cup flour
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12 cilantro leaves, washed and dried
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½ lime
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½ teaspoon cayenne powder (more if desired)
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salt as needed
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canola (or other neutral cooking oil) for deep-frying
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4 fresh eggs, fried to your taste.
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1. Place the pigs’ ears in a pot of boiling water. Boil for three minutes to remove any impurities, then drain and set aside.
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2. Arrange the carrot, onion, celery, peppercorns, and pigs’ ears in a large pot and add enough water to cover. Add about a tablespoon of salt. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer and allow the ears to cook, uncovered, until tender enough to pierce easily with a fork, about 2 hours.
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3. Remove the pigs’ ears from the water, drain them, and allow them to cool. (Save the broth—it’ll make a great soup base.)
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4. When the pigs’ ears are cool and dry, cut them into ¼ inch strips.
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5. In a medium bowl, thoroughly combine the cornstarch and flour. Meanwhile, put about 2 inches of canola oil into a deep pot and heat to 350 degrees.
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6. Toss the sliced pigs’ ears in the flour-cornstarch mixture. When the oil is hot, add the floured slices to the hot oil in batches, shaking off extra flour first.
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7. Cook the strips until they are crisp and browned. Remove and drain on paper towels. Keep finished strips in a warm oven until all are done.
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8. When all the strips are cooked, toss the cilantro leaves into the hot oil. They will sizzle and crisp up within 15 seconds or so. Remove them with a slotted spoon and drain them on a plate lined with paper towels.
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9. To complete the dish, toss the pigs’ ear strips with cayenne and add salt to taste. Squirt with lime juice (exact amount is up to you) and toss again. Divide the mixture among four plates, and top each with a fried egg and some of the cilantro leaves.
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<br />Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-72764940274894733122011-07-17T15:11:00.000-07:002011-10-29T13:35:55.647-07:00Half-Fast Cooking: Brunch for the Lazy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigXwcneCezzUwCg_m3hAX4WFNsY0bugT_6RyKKCqE_wF6IGIlksn02dof7y_1V2ef9EJrvNOvWPoSmWZlNTNirT3SQA46-624HP8Vtidd6GK7J43MRGm893H5jmpm4DbhQ3zpoK8ONaYmL/s1600/chocadilla_2587blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigXwcneCezzUwCg_m3hAX4WFNsY0bugT_6RyKKCqE_wF6IGIlksn02dof7y_1V2ef9EJrvNOvWPoSmWZlNTNirT3SQA46-624HP8Vtidd6GK7J43MRGm893H5jmpm4DbhQ3zpoK8ONaYmL/s400/chocadilla_2587blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669015573787113458" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">It’s not fast food. It’s not slow food. It’s... half-fast food! The first in an occasional, sloth-driven series.</span><br /><br />Back when I worked in the pastry kitchen of a swank beach resort, I dreaded Sunday brunch. The resort’s brunch was a $75-per-person affair (this was the price six years ago) featuring a dizzying spread of dishes and bottomless servings of domestic sparkling wine. There were carving stations, seafood stations, and separate omelet and pancake stations, along with a stir-fry station and a humongous salad bar. Big silver chafing dishes held constantly replenished supplies of eggs Benedict, sausages, bacon, and assorted potato dishes. Across the dining room were tables holding a towering assortment of breads along with half a dozen imported cheeses, butter rolled into pretty little balls, and cream cheese and smoked fish to go with the bagels. Piles of croissants and filled danishes covered a nearby table. Then there was the kids’ table, a rug rat paradise of macaroni and cheese, tiny peanut-butter sandwiches, chicken fingers, miniature chocolate chip cookies, and plastic Sponge Bob plates instead of the resort’s standard white stoneware.<br /><br />Finally, dominating one end of the dining room’s back wall was the dessert station, fully loaded with dozens of different types of petit fours, cookies, cakes, and tarts, along with a sundae bar and a make-to-order crepe station. This where I stood guard on most of my Sundays, wearing a ridiculous paper toque, a starched white jacket, and the fakest grin this side of a Meet the Press interview.<br /><br />The truth was I didn’t dread everything about Sunday brunch. It was the only time of the week when I got to meet the people who ate the things my colleagues and I had spent the rest of the week making. Watching them coo over a cake I had decorated an hour before – then come back for seconds – was exhilarating. Nobody ever got that excited about my lectures back when I taught linguistics.<br /><br />Sundays also provided unparalleled people-watching opportunities. I came to think of crepe station duty as an exercise in anthropological field work, and the natives – hedge-fund managers, B-list celebrities (David Hasselhoff and Ron Jeremy were regulars), along with their kids, mistresses, and various hangers-on– were fascinating. They showed up in everything from Chanel to flip-flops and board shorts, but the dominant look was one of ruined decadence. The preponderance of multiple gold chains nestled in thickets of graying chest hair and sequined halter tops revealing obvious boob jobs (at 10 a.m., no less) was a sight to behold, as foreign to my sensibilities as loin cloths and animal worship. And every Sunday brought another opportunity to study this exotic tribe: There must be a deep, culturally rooted reason they choose to look like that – if I observe them for a while more, maybe I’ll figure out what it is!<br /><br />So technically, I didn’t dread Sunday brunch. What I really dreaded was the Saturday before, when my colleagues and I had to make all those hundreds of cakes, petit fours, and crepe fillings– while simultaneously preparing restaurant and banquet desserts, snacks, room service orders, catered beach picnics, and breakfast pastries for the hundreds of guests and day visitors expected on any given weekend. Forget the Keebler elves. On Saturdays, we looked more like a Special Forces team about to rush a fortified Al-Qaida safe house as we worked elbow-to-elbow in the kitchen or sprinted madly from one of the resort’s food outlets to another, putting out one fire after another while frantically baking, assembling, cutting, and plating stuff for Sunday’s debauchery.<br /><br />It made me resent the lucky slobs who got to eat brunch.<br /><br />Now, thank goodness, I’m one of them again—at least in theory. I no longer have to clock in on Sundays, but still I don’t eat or cook brunch much anymore. Even though I’m an unapologetic morning person (blame my bird-watching hobby – birds get up with the sun, and so do we dorks who watch them), there’s no way I’m going to start a weekend morning making several dozen dishes This would mean missing one of my weekend bird-watching walks, which would be unthinkable.<br /><br />Just as a thought experiment, I wondered if I could have both my birds and my brunch too. I’d get up super-early as usual, head out and look for early fall migrants (yup, they’re starting to come back already), then get home about 9 in time to shower, change, and throw something festive and brunch-worthy together by 10. Is this even possible?<br /><br />Hell, yes!<br /><br />I normally lean towards the savory offerings at brunch, but since I love to mess with expectations – especially my own – I played with the idea of taking something that’s normally savory and turning it into something sweet. Rich and spicy Mexican breakfasts and brunches –huevos Rancheros, breakfast burritos, eggs scrambled with chiles or braised meats and served with stacks of tortillas – have always been special favorites of mine. So I turned a staple of the Mexican savory repertoire – the flour tortilla – into a crispy wrapping for a gooey, sweet, yet wholesome morning treat, filled with creamy warm bananas, peanut butter, and just enough chocolate to make it company-worthy.<br /><br />My little invention is tasty and elegant enough to qualify as treat food, but its starring virtue is that it takes all of five minutes to make. So in less than an hour, even an inexperienced cook can make a batch of these, stick some good sausages in the oven, put on a pot of coffee, and call up a friend to ask him or her to pick up a fruit tray at Publix on the way over. An experienced cook will be able to handle the fruit solo and maybe cook up some bacon for extra decadence. If you work things right, you may even have time to enter all your morning’s birding numbers into eBird before your guests arrive.<br /><br />I was going to dub my invention a sweet breakfast quesadilla, but my husband pointed out – rightly –that “quesadilla” implies the presence of cheese. So I’m going to follow his suggestion and call it a “chocadilla.” Yes, this makes it sound more like a kind of reptile than a brunch dish—but for some, this may even add to its appeal.<br /><br /> CHOCADILLA<br /><br />For each serving:<br /><br />1 large flour tortilla, at room temperature<br /><br />2 tablespoons peanut butter<br /><br />1/3 large banana, sliced thinly<br /><br />2 tablespoons chocolate chips<br /><br />Canola or other unflavored oil for frying<br /><br />powdered sugar for garnish<br /><br />melted chocolate for garnish (optional)<br /><br /> 1. Spread the peanut butter over half of the tortilla, leaving a 1-inch margin around the edges.<br /><br />2. Top the peanut butter with banana slices, then sprinkle the chocolate chips on top. Fold the uncovered half of the tortilla over the filling to cover completely. Press down on the folded tortilla to eliminate any air pockets.<br /><br />3. Heat a thin layer of oil in a large skillet (at least as wide as the tortillas you’re using) over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, add the folded chocadilla. As it cooks, press down on the edges of the tortilla to keep them sealed. When the bottom is golden brown, turn it over and cook until the second side is also golden brown. (If your skillet is large enough, you can fry two at a time.<br /><br />4. Drain cooked chocadillas on paper towels, then keep them warm in an oven set on low heat, on a metal rack placed on a sheet pan.<br /><br />5. Garnish with powdered sugar ( and melted chocolate, if desired). Serve immediately.<br /><br />Variations: Instead of peanut butter and chocolate, substitute a chocolate-hazelnut spread such as Nutella. You can also add a scant handful of miniature marshmallows or chopped-up regular ones.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-25653207862264314972011-06-11T15:07:00.000-07:002011-10-29T13:58:17.594-07:00I Want My Country Back! All-American Tacos for July 4<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_osyB2wXGpO-wAC3N_Q2EwZdPdzrD1MxKFO1G-Xr_ZdfAH3eTLq5FSA5jjo1f9A5NTU4a4NxaLASN9qaHs3X2ppGOFcPEa6zvH4ATUpktx93ZZbNHIbgc9CoRaic6BVCEEq0ZmhF9lGsb/s1600/korean+tacos_2331blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_osyB2wXGpO-wAC3N_Q2EwZdPdzrD1MxKFO1G-Xr_ZdfAH3eTLq5FSA5jjo1f9A5NTU4a4NxaLASN9qaHs3X2ppGOFcPEa6zvH4ATUpktx93ZZbNHIbgc9CoRaic6BVCEEq0ZmhF9lGsb/s400/korean+tacos_2331blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669015355138129106" /></a><br /><br />In grade school, I learned to be a patriotic American. At the front of every classroom was an American flag, and every morning for nine years (the school went from first through ninth grades), my classmates and I stood facing it, right hands over our hearts, and solemnly recited the Pledge of Allegiance.<br /><br />One morning in third grade, our regular teacher was out sick. So the principal took over, as was the policy at our tiny school. As usual, we droned our dutiful way through the pledge. Then the principal spoke.<br /><br />“Who here can tell me what ‘allegiance’ means?”<br /><br />Whoa. This was WAY too early for a pop quiz.<br /><br />“No one?”<br /><br />We shook our heads.<br /><br />“Here’s an easier one, then. Do you know what ‘pledge’ means? Okay, good, I see lots of hands. David?”<br /><br />“It means a promise?” David said, sounding as terrified as the rest of us felt.<br /><br />“That’s right, David. A pledge is a promise. A public promise. Now I have another question for you: None of you knew what ‘allegiance’ meant. But you all made a pledge – a promise – of allegiance. How could you make a promise if you don’t know what you’re promising?”<br /><br />Our principal was one intense dude. But he was no Commie. Our deafening silence after his question was followed by a long discourse on the definition of ‘allegiance,’ the wisdom and courage of the founding fathers, and our responsibility, as citizens and future leaders of the greatest country on Earth, to understand and participate in the civic life of our community.<br /><br />Grade school is where many kids first learn about the world outside home and family, and the America I learned about in grade school – and that I saw reflected in the values and lives of my classmates and teachers – was a wondrous place. From a vast land filled with nothing (okay, there were the Indians, who we treated pretty badly –we learned about that in seventh grade), we created a country so wonderful that people from all over the world want to live here. Like most of our grandparents and great-grandparents. And all of us, no matter what our backgrounds, could grow up to be anything we wanted! Our boundaries were only limited by how hard we were willing to work.<br /><br />Nothing in the lives of my classmates contradicted any of this. We learned about horrific things that people had done to each other – like the Holocaust in Europe and slavery in the U.S.—but all those things, our teachers said, happened a long, long time ago and would never happen again, because now people knew better. A majority of my classmates were Jewish and had parents or grandparents who had witnessed the Holocaust – and they all had happy, affluent lives now in nice parts of Los Angeles. The few black kids at the school were the children of doctors, engineers, and judges. And even though I could count the number of other Asian kids there besides me and my sisters on the fingers of one hand, I never felt any less a part of the school community because of it. Life was fair.<br /><br />Life was good, even. Nowhere did it feel better than on the festive days when our classes had potlucks. Sometimes these happened in conjunction with a particular class – such as a social studies class on immigration, in which each of us was supposed to bring in something representing the country our ancestors came from. But sometimes they took place to celebrate a transition in the year, such as the last day before winter break or summer vacation.<br /><br />Of course, we kids did little or none of the preparation ourselves (although I took to making my own cookies around eighth grade or so). It was up to our mothers (and back then, it was ALWAYS the mothers) to bring hot dishes covered with foil to the classroom right before lunch. Through these moms, I learned that quiche Lorraine was from France (and truly rocked), and that the Japanese ate octopus, which tasted mild and bouncy. I also discovered latkes and matzos and enchiladas. Oddly, the enchiladas were usually brought by the same moms who brought the matzos and latkes, which taught me another lesson: you don’t have to be born into a culture to celebrate it.<br /><br />I absorbed the values and ideals of this perfect America through my brain and my stomach. I learned that it’s not only okay to have friends and food from far-flung corners of the world at the same meal, but darned wonderful. I learned from hundreds of teachable moments at that school – like the principal’s Pledge of Allegiance lesson – that it’s right and responsible to question authority, but it’s best to do it politely. In each of these illuminating (and sometimes gluttonous) moments, I felt as though I truly understood what it felt like to be American.<br /><br />The ugly, hard truth about the American Dream – that hype and luck can get you further than hard work, and the word “patriotism” is all too often co-opted by those who hate most of their compatriots – was not theirs to teach us. These things, like calculus and James Joyce’s novels, were for a later part of our educational journey. The day when we’d have to tackle them would come soon enough.<br /><br />At times I still hold on to that early vision I had of America—a safe and fair place when people with roots and backgrounds from all over treated each other with respect and dignity. A place where people asked tough questions gently and use reason instead of personal invective to solve problems and work out differences. Right now, the real America seems to be moving further away from this ideal than at any time I could remember.<br /><br />But I like to think the America I grew up with is somehow real, and maybe we can get there someday. It’ll no doubt be quite different from what I envisioned as a child, but I do know this: the food will rock your world..<br /><br />*********************<br /><br />As the child and grandchild of immigrants, I always like to throw something “ethnic” into my Independence Day feasts, to honor those who’ve come from far away to reinvent their lives here. Whatever that something is, throwing it on the grill is obligatory.<br /><br />This year, I’d like to re-create a famous (or infamous) Los Angeles specialty of recent vintage: the Korean taco, first made famous by the <a href="http://kogibbq.com/">Kogi taco truck</a> mini-empire. The tacos – grilled meat in a Korean-style sweet and garlicky marinade, served up on warm corn tortillas and topped with kimchee (Korean pickled cabbage) – are said to have been invented and independently re-invented hundreds of times by hungry Angelenos years before Kogi hit the scene, however. Tacos, after all, are nothing more than a tasty and convenient way of conveying small bits of meat into one’s mouth, and tortillas are easier to find than paper plates in parts of Los Angeles. Perhaps Korean tacos were invented by Mexican-American cooks working in L.A.’s many Korean restaurants. Or by Mexican workers sampling leftovers from Korean colleagues’ lunches. In any case, people were quietly eating them long before they became trendy.<br /><br />Much as I enjoy kimchee, I enjoy the all-American custom of crunchy greenery on top of tacos even better, so I’ve replaced the kimchee with a fresh cabbage slaw for extra textural contrast. I’ve also added an Asian-tinged guacamole, just because I love guacamole.<br /><br />I’ve borrowed another Korean-American tradition too: grilling the meat outdoors, picnic-style, rather than inside on a tabletop brazier. When Mark Bittman proposed a Korean-style outdoors barbeque in a recent column, several readers gently informed him that this very thing had been done for years by Korean-American church groups and hungry families.<br /><br />Before anyone gets on my case for being a treasonous bastard – Paul Revere NEVER would have put kimchee on his tacos! Why do you hate America so much?? – consider this: could the Korean taco possibly have been invented anywhere BUT in the U.S.A.?<br /><br />ALL-AMERICAN KOREAN TACOS<br /><br />For the meat: (adapted from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811861465/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0811861465">Quick and Easy Korean Cooking (Gourmet Cook Book Club Selection)</a><img style="border-width: initial !important; border-color: initial !important; border-style: none !important; margin: 0px !important" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0811861465&camp=217145&creative=399373" alt="" width="1" height="1" /> by Cecelia Hae-Jin Lee (no relation!))<br /><br />Marinade:<br /><br />½ medium onion, minced<br /><br />½ bulb (about 5 large cloves) garlic, minced<br /><br />¼ cup soy sauce<br /><br />¼ cup sugar<br /><br />½ cup pineapple juice<br /><br />2 teaspoons Korean red pepper lakes<br /><br />1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper<br /><br />1 ½ pounds flank steak or skirt steak (don’t screw up like I did this time and try to economize by using round steak—it’s edible but not as tender as it could be)<br /><br />For the cabbage slaw:<br /><br />2 cups finely shredded cabbage<br /><br />2 teaspoons salt<br /><br />1 teaspoon (or more to taste) Korean red pepper flakes<br /><br />1 clove garlic, minced<br /><br />4 tablespoons rice vinegar<br /><br />For the Asian guacamole:<br /><br />1 small avocado<br /><br />2 tablespoons finely minced onion<br /><br />juice of ¼ lime<br /><br />½ teaspoon sesame oil<br /><br />salt to taste<br /><br />For serving:<br /><br />1 dozen corn tortillas<br /><br /> chopped fresh cilantro<br /><br />1. Combine the meat marinade ingredients in a large baking pan, add the meat, spooning marinade over the top. Cover and refrigerate overnight, turning occasionally.<br /><br />2. Remove the meat from the marinade, letting the excess marinade drip off. Broil or grill until done to your taste.<br /><br />3. Allow the meat to rest for about 15 minutes after it has finished cooking, then cut it into thin slices. Cut the slices into bite-size pieces, cover and set aside in a warm place.<br /><br />4. At least half an hour before serving, combine the cabbage slaw ingredients. If any liquid accumulates after the cabbage has sat for a while, carefully drain it off. Cover and set aside.<br /><br />5. Mash the avocado with the remaining guacamole ingredients. Press a sheet of plastic wrap snugly over the surface of the guacamole to prevent browning, then set it aside.<br /><br />6. Wrap the tortillas in foil and heat in a 300 degree oven for about 10 minutes.<br /><br />7. Bring the tortillas, meat, cabbage slaw, cilantro, and guacamole to the table and invite diners to make their own tacos. Happy Independence Day!Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-35884113740812932112011-05-22T15:04:00.000-07:002011-10-29T14:07:43.965-07:00On The Wings of (Reflected) Glory<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK34tv4W_JNpIiQGK5lmjHECRs7fgA9ogm9wnSWzLkaiD_kHVpzIn8dMYV8-hVkKF88dm2qCuydzzoNubwHC77T9J0461l4HAdIBLaQxgi0gsuMiXagK3B8YvjqUstJ4IAc_e1cfu_ufyB/s1600/summer+pasta_2177blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK34tv4W_JNpIiQGK5lmjHECRs7fgA9ogm9wnSWzLkaiD_kHVpzIn8dMYV8-hVkKF88dm2qCuydzzoNubwHC77T9J0461l4HAdIBLaQxgi0gsuMiXagK3B8YvjqUstJ4IAc_e1cfu_ufyB/s400/summer+pasta_2177blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669015169701161842" /></a><br /><br />A beginning birder started showing up at my Audubon chapter’s field trips last year. She was friendly, smart, and ferociously curious; and despite starting out barely able to tell a penguin and an ostrich apart, a fantastically good sport in a group dominated by experts. She asked tons of (very intelligent) questions, and her eyes lit up at the sight of just about anything with feathers, for every species was new and wondrous to her. Birding with her was a joy – I felt the same vicarious pride in her discoveries that I did in watching my nephews learn to crawl and walk.<br /><br />One day a few months back, I caught up with her after having missed a few field trips. She recounted her adventures on the last trip with her usual enthusiasm.<br /><br />“Oh! And after the trip, a bunch of us went to Gilchrist County to look for Burrowing Owls and we found some right by the side of the road!”<br /><br />Burrowing Owls –there’s no other way to put it – are freakishly adorable. They’re tiny for owls, with improbably long legs, fuzzy egg-shaped bodies, and standard-issue-for-owls enormous yellow eyes. As their name suggests, they live, Hobbit-like, in cozy burrows.<br /><br />If they didn’t exist in nature, Steven Spielberg and Jim Henson would have probably gotten together, invented them, and put them into a movie as sidekicks to some cute misunderstood kid.<br /><br />“Wow, that’s great!” I said, genuinely happy for her. “Was that a life sighting for you?”<br /><br />“Oh yes! I even wrote a poem about them when I got home.”<br /><br />Oh, that’s nice. I thought. I’m not an expert on poetry, but I met enough well-meaning birders and would-be poets to know that most bird poetry is awful: Why do so many otherwise intelligent people think they’re the first ever to put “fly,” “high,” and “sky” into rhyme? And I had a hard time imagining any poem about Burrowing Owls that wouldn’t be a treacle-drenched train wreck.<br /><br />Summer came, and we both got busy and stopped running into each other. Then I got my weekly e-mail update from one of the Audubon ringleaders. The subject line of the message: “Local owl hits big time!”<br /><br />The poem my newbie birder friend had written about the owls was accepted for publication by the New Yorker.<br /><br />Wow. This was truly amazing and very cool indeed, so I immediately e-mailed her with my congratulations. She e-mailed me back almost immediately.<br /><br />“Thanks! I’ve actually had several poems published in the New Yorker before, but this is the first in a few years, so it’s kind of exciting.”<br /><br />This wasn’t the first time I discovered one of my birding pals to be way, way out of my league.<br /><br />A few years back, when we lived in California, my husband and I started running into the same couple, several years older than us, at all the birding hotspots. He told us that they had just moved to the area for his new job on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine. Like my poet friend, both were friendly and down-to-earth. Unlike her, though, both were expert birders, but they never showed the slightest hint of impatience with our relative cluelessness.<br /><br />A while later, I Googled him (I had misplaced his e-mail address – and yes, I was being nosy) and found that in his usual humble way, he had radically understated his reason for moving to California. He didn’t just have a teaching post at UCI. He had a freaking endowed chair there.<br /><br />This shouldn't have surprised me. It was just the latest in a string of several similar revelations I’ve had about friends over the years.<br /><br />What did astound me, though, was what didn't happen. I realized I didn’t have even the tiniest urge to throttle him. Only few years earlier, such greatness in my midst would have been triggered a week-long pity party. Why can’t I be fabulously talented and famous too?? Why do the fates hate me so much?? The idea of simply taking pride in the company I keep would have been downright insulting.<br /><br />Something big must have changed between that earlier stage of my life and now – but whatever it was, it happened so gradually I didn’t notice it. And now I can only guess at what it might have been. Maybe this is just a natural developmental stage – midlife is all about navigating the shoals of one’s limitations, and perhaps, just by surviving so far with my dignity more-or-less intact, I’ve successfully maneuvered past that obstacle.<br /><br />But I like to think this is because of birding. Through birding, I’ve acquired not only interesting and inspirational friends, but perhaps some of the values of the birds I spend way too much time chasing: real winners are those who find the best food and get through the day in one piece, with family and flock mates nearby.<br /><br /> *******************<br /><br />This modest and easy dish is a tribute to several cooks who are way smarter than me. Fresh corn and tomatoes are in season now, and in looking for fun things to do with them, I found numerous simple, summery, yet slightly surprising recipes from chefs and writers I admire: One of <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/diningandwine/columns/the_minimalist/index.html">Mark Bittman</a>'s recipes from his Minimalist column was a salad of corn and tomatoes flavored with soy sauce for yet more umami punch. In the insanely interesting and creative <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030745195X/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=030745195X">Momofuku</a><img style="border-width: initial !important; border-color: initial !important; border-style: none !important; margin: 0px !important" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=030745195X&camp=217145&creative=399369" alt="" width="1" height="1" /> cookbook, bad-boy fusion perfectionist David Chang proposes corn flash-sauteed with bacon and scallions. (Like Bittman, he also adds an Asian touch: miso and his custom ramen broth.) A recent rerun of one of Ming Tsai’s cooking shows featured dishes highlighting both cilantro and bacon, two things I love but never thought to combine. Finally, one of my go-to everyday cookbooks – Deborah Madison's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767927478/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0767927478">Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone</a><img style="border-width: initial !important; border-color: initial !important; border-style: none !important; margin: 0px !important" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0767927478&camp=217145&creative=399369" alt="" width="1" height="1" />–– features corn and tomatoes as a rustic Mexican-themed pasta topping.<br /><br />My tribute to these fine cooks (I no longer stew over why I can’t be them, but I still strive to be more LIKE them) is a quick and summery pasta topping with fresh corn and tomatoes, flavored with bacon, cilantro, and a dash of soy.<br /><br />SUMMER TRIBUTE PASTA WITH CORN, TOMATOES, AND BACON<br /><br />Kernels from 2 ears of corn<br /><br />2 medium tomatoes, cut into 1/3-inch dice<br /><br />3 strips of bacon, cut into 1/2-inch dice<br /><br />3 scallions, cut into fine rounds<br /><br />½ cup chopped cilantro<br /><br />2 teaspoons soy sauce<br /><br />1 finely chopped jalapeno or other hot pepper (optional)<br /><br />1/2 pound spaghetti<br /><br />Salt and pepper to taste<br /><br />1. Saute the bacon in a wide skillet until crisp. Remove and drain the bacon, remove the skillet from heat, and reserve it and the bacon fat left behind.<br /><br />2. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil and begin cooking the spaghetti.<br /><br />3. Return the saute pan with the bacon grease to the stove and bring it to high heat. Add the corn and cook, stirring constantly, until it is lightly seared.<br /><br />4. Add the soy sauce, tomatoes, scallions, and hot pepper (if using) and cook, stirring, for about a minute, until the scallions have wilted slightly and the tomatoes start to look cooked on the outside (They should still be firm enough to hold their shape).<br /><br />5. When the pasta is done, drain it and toss with the corn and tomato mixture. Toss in the cilantro and cooked bacon and serve immediately.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-52360978877931857822011-05-22T14:58:00.000-07:002011-10-29T14:17:32.101-07:00Rhodes to Nowhere: A Mortifying Adventure (and a Recipe)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhag4TIGCTVi1wjsxx2fXsHyW_XfxBaQYGnyfQLOAkHp02X8M7Ssb1jCoXGG9WHDLjlp-fVeinqU4zdCetSyxlQIRfyaLxKfeL7t0Jjve8HrxxwvTxvF4DxD5y7EEqzH6Belhwja2UbKiy6/s1600/banoffee+pie_1207blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhag4TIGCTVi1wjsxx2fXsHyW_XfxBaQYGnyfQLOAkHp02X8M7Ssb1jCoXGG9WHDLjlp-fVeinqU4zdCetSyxlQIRfyaLxKfeL7t0Jjve8HrxxwvTxvF4DxD5y7EEqzH6Belhwja2UbKiy6/s400/banoffee+pie_1207blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669014939724950114" /></a><br /><br />I could have been a contender.<br /><br />I was SUPPOSED to be a contender. I breezed effortlessly through grade school and high school, earning A’s on almost everything I touched. I boasted an impressive array of extracurricular activities, from multiple honors societies to volunteering at a local hospital to playing electric bass in my high school’s jazz band.<br /><br />Just as I was supposed to, I got admitted to Stanford (there are advantages to being both a baby-bust kid and a legacy). There, the kindly teachers at my small Catholic high school warned, my golden years as a big fish in a small pond would end. Colleges, they warned, can be cruel and merciless places. You’ll be an anonymous face in a lecture hall of hundreds, graded on a curve against kids just as smart as you – and yes, there are a lot of them out there. No one will be there to pick you up when you fall. Or to warn you against making potentially dangerous mistakes. Danger! Danger!<br /><br />At Stanford, they were honest enough not to deny this.<br /><br />“Almost all of you came in here with straight A’s,” the admissions director (a hero to us incoming freshmen) told us during an obligatory orientation assembly, “But almost none of you will leave here that way.”<br /><br />The class work at Stanford was – just as promised – more difficult and demanding by multitudes than it was in high school. I read more in a typical week than I did in a whole semester back home. Then the day came when I was to get back the first major graded assignment of my college career: a research paper in my Western Cultures class.<br /><br />“I know most of you are used to getting A’s from high school,” the fatherly British professor leading my discussion section said, “But you’re not in high school anymore. This is Stanford, and you are being held to a higher standard. Do not take my grade to you as a personal affront. Read my comments and learn from them – that’s what you’re here for.”<br /><br />I took my paper, trying to control the tremble of my hands as I flipped through it, skimming past the underlined passages and handwritten comments in the margins. Finally, I got to the last page, and there it was at the bottom: A -minus.<br /><br />YESS! I STILL RULE!!<br /><br />I got through my first quarter at Stanford with two A’s and one A-minus (in Western Cultures). Most of my subsequent quarters were an honorable mix of A’s, A-minuses, and the occasional B+. Meanwhile, I threw myself into extracurriculars – at some point or another, I ended up editing or writing for most of the major student publication on campus. I was an English major and I qualified for the department’s senior honors program. My CV was looking pretty darn good, if I did say so myself.<br /><br />I wasn’t the only one who thought so. At Stanford, almost all the undergraduate dorms had a live-in faculty member – the resident fellow –who was supposed to help organize the dorm’s cultural and social events and be a positive role model for us. He or she was also supposed to act as an informal academic advisor. The resident fellow in my dorm thought I was just the bees’ knees.<br /><br />“You should consider this for next year,” he said, handing me a folded flyer one day during my junior year. “With your grades and extracurriculars, you should be a very strong candidate.”<br /><br />I unfolded the flyer: announcements for that year’s Rhodes and Marshall Scholarship competition.<br /><br />Wow. I was still pretty clueless then, but even I knew what these were. Dad had told me about the Rhodes Scholarship, way back in grade school: how the foundation chose two exceptional college students from each state every year, and gave each a two-year scholarship to Oxford, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities. Rhodes Scholars became presidents, senators, and captains of industry. Maybe, Dad said smiling, you will get one of those scholarships someday, if you work hard enough.<br /><br />That someday was now on the horizon.<br /><br />When the same flyer (with the dates changed) re-appeared the following year, I made note of it. At the obligatory orientation meeting for potential applicants –there weren’t as many as I had expected – we were told that the process involved several interviews. The first of these was the only one we’d all do: it was with the campus-internal Rhodes selection committee, which would recommend candidates to be sent on to the next round of competition.<br /><br />Okay, this was do-able. The written application would be a boatload of work but well within my capacities. It involved several essays, and I was good at essays. And most of the other applicants – at least the ones I recognized – didn’t seem any more impressive than I was, at least from what I knew of them.<br /><br />The day of my interview arrived. Suddenly, I was nervous to the point of catatonia. What were they going to ask? What if I didn’t know the answer? This was my moment of reckoning, and I was so tense and numb I could barely breathe, let alone speak insightfully about my grand plans for Oxford and the rest of my life.<br /><br />I found myself in a narrow meeting room dominated by a heavy wooden conference table. Around the table were about half a dozen grey-haired figures, each of whom had a copy of my application and a yellow legal pad in front of him. A large glass pitcher of ice water was about to drip beads of sweat onto the table, and so was I.<br /><br />“Miss Lee, welcome!” one of the grey-haired figures said, standing. He introduced himself as the chair of the committee. “Please let me introduce you to the other members. We’re looking forward chatting with you about your application.”<br /><br />As he introduced each member – I no longer remember their names, if I even registered them in the first place – the member extended his hand and I reached out to give it an appropriately firm-but-not-too-firm handshake.<br /><br />“...And this is Professor Smith,” the chair continued.<br /><br />“Nice to meet you,” I said, reaching across the table towards his outreached hand--<br /><br />I never reached it. Instead, something hard bumped my elbow and crashed against the table. Professor Smith leapt to his feet, water and crushed ice rolling off his crotch. The water pitcher was on its side.<br /><br />My life was over.<br /><br />Trauma victims often report having no memory of the very worse parts of their traumatic experiences. For that, a friend of mine told me, she is grateful: it's as if her subconscious deliberately deleted those terrifying and degrading images so she'd never have to relive them again. <br /><br />That's probably why I can't remember how the rest of my interview went. But I do remember the sinking realization that my star had fallen – hard. With one stupid strike of my elbow, I had gone from Promising Young Thing to washed-up has-been.<br /><br />Back at the dorm, I locked myself in my room and dialed the one person who could make this all better—my buddy Jeff. Jeff was one of the campus’ golden boys (I was surprised that he wasn’t in the running for a Rhodes himself), a perpetual optimist, and a strong brotherly shoulder to cry on. He answered on the first ring.<br /><br />“Hey! How was the big interview?”<br /><br />“Awful! I was being introduced to the selection committee, I tried to shake hands with one of them and guess what? I knocked a pitcher of water over into his lap!”<br /><br />I heard him gasp. “Oh...my...god....”<br /><br /> I waited. He took a loud breath. There was a pregnant – and I assumed, sympathetic – pause on his end of the line.<br /><br /> “...THAT’S SOOO FUNNY!” I heard Jeff’s footsteps pounding away from the phone, then his voice somewhere off in the distance. “HEY GUYS! CHECK THIS OUT, IT’S HILARIOUS! Felicia had her Rhodes interview just now and guess what...?”<br /><br />He was still laughing when he picked up the receiver again. “Seriously, they HAVE to send you on to the next round now! You know that, don’t you?”<br /><br />They didn’t. And yet I’m still alive, many, many years later.<br /><br />Like every other stressful, difficult thing that happened to me at Stanford, this taught me a lesson, even though I didn’t realize it at the time: Laugh and the world laughs with you. But it still won’t give you that free ride to Oxford.<br /><br />************<br /><br />In honor of my Oxford idyll that never was, I present an atypically luscious English dessert: banoffee pie, a toothsome combination of caramel, bananas, and coffee-flavored whipped cream. It was invented by chef <a href="http://www.iandowding.co.uk/thebanoffipiequestion/thebanoffipiequestion.html">Ian Dowding</a> in the 1970s.<br /><br />Appropriately enough, it was invented in an attempt to replicate a recipe for a toffee-coffee pie that almost always failed. Dowding discovered that the temperamental toffee recipe in the original pie could be replaced, and improved upon, with dulce de leche (though he doesn’t call it that) – caramelized sweetened condensed milk. He added bananas to the mix, and his new invention soon spread all over England. The pie is a flavorful and comforting reminder of the redemptive potential of embarrassing mistakes.<br /><br />Banoffee pie, like a good melody, is subject to riffing and variation, and numerous versions exist. Some use pastry crust (as does Dowding’s original recipe) while others use crumb crusts. Pace Dowding, I think the relentless mush and creaminess of bananas, caramel, and whipped cream cry out for a dramatic textural contrast, so I’ve used a nubby crumb crust made with whole-wheat digestive biscuits (borrowing an idea from a recipe in Saveur) combined with finely chopped hazelnuts for extra crunch and flavor. Sadly, most banoffee pie variations use plain sweetened whipped cream rather than Dowding’s coffee whipped cream. To me, the coffee flavoring is non-negotiable: it really makes the pie special.<br /><br />Besides the nuts in the crust, my other twist on the dish involves a trick I learned in cooking school: Whipped cream, if left to sit for more than a few hours, tends to separate and lose its volume and shape. Dissolving a little unflavored gelatin in cream before whipping it helps it keep its texture and shape for several days, so I’ve added a bit of it to the pie topping. The gelatin does not affect the flavor of the cream or make it even remotely bouncy, but makes the pie slice more cleanly. I deliberately kept the sugar level down in the coffee-flavored cream because the caramel and bananas provide sweetness enough.<br /><br />BANOFFEE PIE<br /><br />For the crust:<br /><br />1 7-ounce package digestive biscuits<br /><br />1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, melted<br /><br />1 cup whole, roasted hazelnuts<br /><br />For the dulce de leche:<br /><br />1 ½ cans (21 ounces total) sweetened condensed milk<br /><br />For the coffee whipped cream:<br /><br />1 ½ cups whipping cream<br /><br />1 1/2 teaspoons instant coffee <br /><br />2 teaspoons sugar<br /><br />½ envelope unflavored gelatin powder<br /><br />2-3 ripe bananas, sliced<br /><br />finely powdered instant coffee for garnish <br /><br /> 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.<br /><br />2. Grind the digestive biscuits into fine crumbs in a food processor, then place them in a medium mixing bowl.<br /><br />3. Put the hazelnuts in the food processor and pulse them until they are finely chopped but not powdery. Add them to the bowl with the crumbs, along with the melted butter.<br /><br />4. Combine the melted butter thoroughly with the crumbs and butter, then press the mixture firmly along the sides and bottom of a 9-inch pie pan. Press firmly with your hands or the back of a spoon so the mixture will cohere and form a layer of even thickness.<br /><br />5. Bake the crust for about 15 minutes, or until nicely browned and fragrant. Remove the crust from the oven and set it aside to cool.<br /><br />6. Meanwhile, make the dulce de leche: cook the sweetened condensed milk in the top of a double boiler over simmering water, stirring occasionally, until the milk has caramelized and turned golden. This will take about an hour and a half.<br /><br />7. While the dulce de leche cools, make the whipped cream: Heat ½ cup of the cream, along with the instant coffee and sugar, just until it feels hot to the touch. Stir to dissolve the coffee completely.<br /><br />8. Remove the cream from the heat and sprinkle the gelatin evenly over the surface of the cream. When the gelatin has softened, stir it into the cream until it is fully dissolved. Set the cream aside to cool to room temperature.<br /><br />9. When the coffee-flavored cream has cooled, add it and the remaining cup of cream to a mixer fitted with a balloon whip. Whip the cream at high speed until stiff peaks form.<br /><br />10. Spread the dulce de leche evenly over the bottom of the baked and cooled pie crust. Top it with an layer of banana slices (they should cover the dulce de leche completely). Then top the bananas with the coffee-flavored whipped cream – use a piping bag and star tip to apply it in decorative rosettes, if desired.<br /><br />10. Chill the pie for at least an hour before serving. Garnish with the ground instant coffee just before serving.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-14547256764101686642011-05-01T14:57:00.000-07:002011-10-29T14:23:44.870-07:00Eat Like a Bird!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRqSWyPm2jActflC4n3edzEHgMVIB9peKneMQQg3_GrpCSF32QLqY74UFHH8Hsbc_rmUEl3iMNieY9nSq1MKxADbx8aYpxbMG2gc9xLclASkdyJKJbB_hJUfxb-J0kF9mw6e8eybAI1NL/s1600/northern+parula_may+2011-7d_7241blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRRqSWyPm2jActflC4n3edzEHgMVIB9peKneMQQg3_GrpCSF32QLqY74UFHH8Hsbc_rmUEl3iMNieY9nSq1MKxADbx8aYpxbMG2gc9xLclASkdyJKJbB_hJUfxb-J0kF9mw6e8eybAI1NL/s400/northern+parula_may+2011-7d_7241blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669014507134218258" /></a><br /><br />This Northern Parula flew 1,000 miles or more across the Gulf of Mexico – without stopping, eating, or sleeping – before landing in Florida during spring migration. This grueling flight took the tiny bird-- just over 3 1/2 inches long -- somewhere between 18 and 25 hours.<br /><br />Before setting off on this flight, he spent some serious time fueling up. In the days leading up to his trip, he piled on the calories, ballooning from a lithe 1 ounce or less to a staggeringly obese 2 ounces – virtually doubling in weight. <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/migrationmorphing/">Wired</a><span> </span> graphically described this phenomenon of avian gluttony as “the equivalent of having a hamburger for lunch on Monday, and 100 hamburgers for lunch on Friday.”<br /><br />When Mammy urged Scarlett O’Hara to eat like a bird, this probably wasn’t what she had in mind.<br /><br />Those of us who enjoy watching birds also pick up strange eating habits during migration. These usually involve consuming large quantities of coffee before sunrise, feeding from ziplock bags filled with trail mix, and toting energy bars bent and flattened from hours in our back packets. Like our avian quarry, birders focus on high-protein, high-energy natural food sources when on the road. Birder snacks of choice usually involve nuts, seeds, whole grains, and/or fruit, often scented with hints of bug spray, sunscreen, and car exhaust. On the other hand, migrating songbirds – even some that typically eat seed – favor the high-calorie goodness of insects and their larvae, food sources most birders tend to avoid.<br /><br />Still, our eating habits can be frighteningly similar. When shopping for bird seed for my backyard feeders recently, I saw a shiny little bowl filled with freshly shelled Brazil nuts, peanuts, sunflower seeds and unusually fat raisins. I was about to help myself to few bites when I realized it was sample of one of the store’s specialty birdseed mixes.<br /><br />And it looked better by magnitudes than most of the cheap-ass trail mix I’ve lugged around on birding trips. The woodpeckers around here eat better than I do.<br /><br />My husband and I joke that someday, we’ll have to buy a bag of that super-fancy fruit-and-nut mix, pour some into a pretty bowl, and feed it to our birder buddies. My prediction is that they’ll think it looks familiar, but assume it’s that pricey brand of organic snack mix they never quite felt like splurging on.<br /><br />And since it’s near the end of another spring migration season and my Audubon chapter is holding its annual end-of-the-birding-year potluck soon, the occasion for our little experiment is now upon us! MWAA HA HA!<br /><br />Seriously...I’m not going to do it. But I will do something very much like it. As a tribute to those hard-working birds and my friends who love them, I devised a munchable treat with the same base ingredients as that fancy bird mix – peanuts, raisins, sunflower seeds, and bigger, blingier nuts of some kind. And millet, because almost all birdseed mixes contain copious amounts of it. But being a good citizen, I resisted the urge to take these from a 25-pound bag with NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION printed on it.<br /><br />Because just plain old nuts and raisins mixed together seem kind of abstemious, particularly for a festive occasion, I spiced them them up and converted them into a sweet-salty-tangy-spicy cocktail nibble. I’ve always been addicted to Indian snack mixes – exhuberently spicy blends of fried grains, nuts, dried fruit, and spices – and I’ve modeled the seasoning in my mix after these. The recipe on which I base my spice mix comes from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394748670/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399353&creativeASIN=0394748670">Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking</a><img style="border-width: initial !important; border-color: initial !important; border-style: none !important; margin: 0px !important" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0394748670&camp=217145&creative=399349" alt="" width="1" height="1" />.</p> .<br /><br />The optional cayenne chile in my souped-up birdseed mix not only makes me happy (since I love hot stuff) but evokes two rituals familiar to birders. Serious backyard birders know that an effective technique for keeping squirrels off suet and other bird feeder food is to spike it with hot pepper, since squirrels can’t tolerate the taste of it. Birds, on the other hand, can’t taste chiles at all. This evolutionary adaptation both allows the birds an additional food source and enables them to propagate chile plants, whose seeds pass undamaged through their digestive systems: a win-win for both the eater and the eaten.<br /><br />Spicy, salty, snacky food, of course, also goes beautifully with beer. And for some sociological reason I’m still trying to figure out, serious birders are very often passionate hopheads as well. On the last fall migration count I did, two of the guys on my team brought a nice assortment of microbrews to go with their sack lunches. One of <a href="http://thedrinkingbirdblog.com/2011/05/06/brewing-birds-black-hawk-stout/">my favorite birding blogs</a> occasionally features knowledgeably written reviews of beers that happen to have birds on their labels. The birds, I suspect, are just a happy excuse to enjoy another beer.<br /><br />And so is my “birdseed.” Enjoy!<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg-vBJlC2FdlaOo1lbGcri9Fwi9Kl2Owla4zenzmFqG1jH7rtvytjRHmf1G2PYxD8nRJX346WgxxB4i6E5fJrDQkRucGaCbtrbsD_jdl2flWTiZPLK6oP_AIqfH6JoHGiJ6MQ4hnEw6b88/s1600/chewra_1071blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg-vBJlC2FdlaOo1lbGcri9Fwi9Kl2Owla4zenzmFqG1jH7rtvytjRHmf1G2PYxD8nRJX346WgxxB4i6E5fJrDQkRucGaCbtrbsD_jdl2flWTiZPLK6oP_AIqfH6JoHGiJ6MQ4hnEw6b88/s400/chewra_1071blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669014210683255618" /></a><br /> <br />****************<br /><br />Notes: Jaffrey’s recipe – which uses a different assortment of grains and nuts than I chose to use – calls for raw nuts and grains, all to be separately deep-fried and carefully drained. She assures readers the end result will not be greasy and she’s probably right (she usually is where Indian cooking is concerned). But if you don’t need to double in weight for an upcoming trip or don't want to mess up your kitchen, oven-roasting the nuts or using already-roasted ones will work just fine, at least for the choice of nuts and grains I have used.<br /><br />Spiced Birder Seed<br /><br />3 whole cloves<br /><br />a 3/4-inch piece from a cinnamon stick<br /><br />½ teaspoon black peppercorns<br /><br />neutrally flavored oil (such as canola) as needed for frying<br /><br />2/3 cup roasted, unsalted peanuts (or raw peanuts, deep-fried and drained)<br /><br />2/3 cup roasted, unsalted cashews (or raw cashews, deep-fried and drained)<br /><br />1/3 cup shelled, roasted, unsalted sunflower seeds (or raw seeds, deep-fried and drained)<br /><br />1/3 cup shelled, roasted, unsalted pumpkin seeds (or raw seeds, deep-fried and drained)<br /><br />4 tablespoons raisins, briefly deep-fried until puffy and drained.<br /><br />3 cups puffed (NOT raw) millet<br /><br />2 tablespoons canola or other neutrally flavored oil<br /><br />½ tablespoon whole black mustard seeds<br /><br />3 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds<br /><br />¼ teaspoon ground turmeric<br /><br />1 teaspoon or more ground cayenne, or to taste (optional)<br /><br />1 1/4 teaspoons salt<br /><br />2 1/2 teaspoons sugar<br /><br />1 1/2 teaspoons ground amchoor<br /><br />1. Grind the cloves, cinnamon stick, and peppercorns together in a mortar and pestle until powdery; set aside.<br /><br />2. Combine the nuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, millet, and raisins in a large bowl; set aside.<br /><br />3. Heat a small saucepan over medium heat and add the 2 tablespoons oil. When hot, add the mustard seeds.<br /><br />4. When the mustard seeds have stopped sizzling and popping, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the sesame seeds, turmeric, and cayenne.<br /><br /> 5. Pour the fried seeds, spices and oil over the millet, nut, and raisin mixture. Add the remaining ingredients and stir until the seasonings are evenly distributed.<br /><br />6. Cool the mixture, then store it in an airtight container.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-52998838458967096082011-04-25T14:52:00.000-07:002011-10-29T14:34:42.905-07:00Bake It Forward: A Few of My Favorite Things<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1CvTDHZeiDWTG_NCGIhjElozPZB7XrEEj9Zh4XXXd_tpt6Aap9GGVzUIURj2Og8Au57ktEBaq9Df5o9VelwcwzhrbTJLfxEoPck2hVSStr5Dwz7WoaemyiSYjVKEnWqWkTdNK_i5pjq1F/s1600/bake+it+forward_0772blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1CvTDHZeiDWTG_NCGIhjElozPZB7XrEEj9Zh4XXXd_tpt6Aap9GGVzUIURj2Og8Au57ktEBaq9Df5o9VelwcwzhrbTJLfxEoPck2hVSStr5Dwz7WoaemyiSYjVKEnWqWkTdNK_i5pjq1F/s400/bake+it+forward_0772blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669012568964144482" /></a><br /><br />Last fall, <a href="/blog/pbj">Lucy Mercer</a> initiated a project to bring Open Salon food writers – and the products of our kitchens – together in meatspace. As part of Imperial Sugar Company’s <a href="http://www.imperialsugar.com/sweet-community/bake-it-forward">Bake It Forward</a> program, we’d each have a turn to receive a box of home-baked treats from the kitchen of another Open Salon writer, who would then blog about the goodies she made. (“She” is the right pronoun here; unfortunately, no boys have chosen to play with us yet.) Next it would be the recipient’s turn to fill the box, send it to another writer, and blog about it. Would I be interested in joining in? Lucy asked.<br /><br />At the time, Thanksgiving and Christmas were looming and I was overwhelmed with work-related matters, so I declined. Then the first few Bake It Forward posts appeared and I felt like a shmuck. (<span style="font-style:italic;">Linda’s cookies look amazing! And I could be eating them right now, if I weren’t such a lazy-ass slacker!</span>) <br /><br />But a few months later, I had my shot at redemption. <a href="/blog/atlbch">Gabby Abby</a> sent me an e-mail: would I be interested in taking her sour-cream pound cake and stewardship of that box? This time, I couldn’t say no.<br /><br />Inside that box was not only some extraordinary pound cake, but a delightfully unexpected treat: a packet with about six envelopes inside, each containing a handwritten card from one of the bakers to the recipient of her treats. I was the last link in the chain:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Qq7zKil1yhvZIeSDzX_kW0f4aM9D8RRBj-ZTjAaS7yDd8Zih82rBeQUAb_ZgIFA91SkE63XFTaTiF00buavFr3x6W4KpT7pHecYAnqJqwZNaIghvsuKCvW9G5W8tUjD5N9J61YWpjBC3/s1600/bake+it+forward_0791blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8Qq7zKil1yhvZIeSDzX_kW0f4aM9D8RRBj-ZTjAaS7yDd8Zih82rBeQUAb_ZgIFA91SkE63XFTaTiF00buavFr3x6W4KpT7pHecYAnqJqwZNaIghvsuKCvW9G5W8tUjD5N9J61YWpjBC3/s400/bake+it+forward_0791blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669012663868123058" /></a><br /> <br />I could never relate to people who consider online communities their lifelines and fellow bloggers or forum members their only friends. Don’t they realize most online personas are the same dude posting under multiple pseudonyms and most online groups, even the most potentially useful, are peopled with spammers and frauds? But opening and reading all these cards made me realize that there are real, warm, and decent people behind those avatars – people I’d love to meet in person, should the occasion arise.<br /><br />If they are all the same dude posting under multiple pseudonyms, he makes a mean pound cake. And has a real talent for feminine penmanship. <br /><br />Scarfing down Abby’s pound cake was easy. Now I had two things to figure out: who should get the box next and what to put in it.<br /><br />The first question had an easy answer: the box would go to <a href="/blog/cmgeery">Christine Geery</a>, who blogs prolifically about food and everything else and would no doubt enjoy thinking of a fun way to refill that box. But first, I had to think of something to send Christine.<br /><br />I have no shortage of recipes for baked treats. But I’m always a bit self-conscious about cooking for people I don’t know well. I’m aware that I cook with roughly three times as many chiles and twice as much garlic as most normal people—when I give out recipes, I always dial down the quantities of these for decency’s sake. I love things that a lot of people hate, like fish sauce and coconut. And now I was baking for someone I’ve never met in real life. It’s always easier to please unfamiliar palates with sweets than savories, but still.<br /><br />Then there was the issue of portability. Whatever I made had to be something that could endure whatever abuse the postal service dished out and something that could travel halfway across the country though goodness-knows what kind of temperature fluctuations and come out unscathed. So, alas, nothing with chocolate glaze or cream filling or anything that could melt or get soggy.<br /><br />I decided on two of my favorite things. The first is my favorite scone recipe, Hollyce’s Oatmeal Scones from the Stars Desserts cookbook. (Stars being a now-defunct restaurant in San Francisco.) The name of the recipe really doesn’t do it justice. Yes, there are oats in there—lots of them, contributing a wonderful toasty, nutty flavor. But there is also a serious hit of orange zest, lots of butter, and chewiness and sweetness from raisins. (The recipe officially calls for currants, which would be smaller and prettier by far, but I couldn’t find any in my local supermarket.) The scones travel and freeze well, and are among the few scones I’ve had that taste good cold as well as warm.<br /><br />The second recipe is a sentimental favorite of mine: a lemon-square recipe from a 1970s charity cookbook. I’ve re-christened the recipe Led Zeppelin Lemon Squares for reasons soon to be made clear, and I’ve been making them since I was about ten. This recipe has never let me down. It has gotten me invited to sleepovers (so I could teach my friends how to make it), helped me kiss up to my teachers in high school, kept several boyfriends (temporarily) loyal, and even placated <a href="/blog/rellowrump/2010/08/13/my_worst_job_and_best_pork_chops_ever">the dysfunctional French family</a> for whom I worked as an au pair.<br /><br />And in one of the most awkward stages of my life, these lemon squares made me feel powerful. Back in high school, I was nerdy and shy and spent almost all my Friday and Saturday nights at home. I couldn’t be the party animal I wanted to be, but I could stay up dangerously late, listening to KMET (then Los Angeles’ premier heavy-metal station) while baking up batches of cookies, getting a serious sugar buzz, and wondering how long it took Jimmy Page to learn to play like that. I may have been a social wipeout, but even the popular kids loved my cookies. No matter what, I knew I could rock that cookie jar. On most Saturday nights, that was good enough for me.<br /><br /> LED ZEPPELIN LEMON SQUARES <br /><br /> (adapted from The Three Rivers Cookbook)<br /><br /> For the base:<br /><br /> 1 cup all-purpose flour<br /><br />¼ cup powdered sugar<br /><br />½ cup (1 stick) butter<br /><br />For the top layer:<br /><br /> 2 eggs<br /><br />1 cup granulated sugar<br /><br />2 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice<br /><br />finely grated zest of 1 lemon<br /><br />2 tablespoons all-purpose flour<br /><br />½ teaspoon baking powder.<br /><br /> 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.<br /><br /> 2. Combine the base ingredients; they will form a crumbly dough. Press the dough evenly over the bottom of an 8-inch square baking pan.<br /><br /> 3. Bake the base for about 15 minutes, until it starts to brown at the edges.<br /><br /> 4. While the base is baking, thoroughly combine the remaining ingredients in a mixing bowl. If you leave the mixture alone, the flour and baking powder will separate and form a layer on top of the lemon goop. Do not be concerned; this is part of the plan.<br /><br /> 5. When the base is done, remove it from the oven and allow it to cool slightly. Then pour the remaining ingredients over the base and return the pan to the oven.<br /><br /> 6. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until the surface of the lemon squares is evenly golden brown. (The flour and baking powder will have risen to form a thin, flaky crust over a creamy lemon filling.)<br /><br /> 7. Allow the confection to cool completely before you cut it into 16 squares. Top with sifted powdered sugar if desired.<br /><br /> <br /><br />HOLLYCE’S OATMEAL SCONES<br /><br />(adapted from Stars Desserts, by Emily Luchetti)<br /><br /> 3 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour<br /><br />½ cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar<br /><br />11/4 teaspoons salt<br /><br />11/4 teaspoons baking soda<br /><br />21/4 teaspoons baking powder<br /><br />10 ounces (2 ½ sticks) cold, unsalted butter<br /><br />2 cups rolled oats<br /><br />1 cup currants or raisins<br /><br />2 tablespoons finely chopped orange zest<br /><br />¾ cup buttermilk<br /><br /> 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.<br /><br /> 2. Combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and butter in the bowl of an electric mixer. Using the paddle attachment, mix at low speed until the butter is the size of small peas.<br /><br /> 3. Add the oats, currants or raisins, and orange zest. Continue to mix, slowly pouring in the buttermilk, just until the dough comes together. It may be a bit sticky.<br /><br /> 4. Put the dough on a lightly floured board and roll it out into a ¾ -inch-thick circle. Cut the dough into 10 circles, each 3½ inches in diameter. (If you have extra dough fragments after cutting the circles, gently press them together, roll to ¾-inch thickness, and try to cut out extra scones if you can.)<br /><br /> 5. Put the scones on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for about 20 minutes, or until golden brown.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-35494376898305377592011-04-03T14:45:00.000-07:002011-10-29T13:23:26.268-07:00You Really Shouldn't Be Eating This<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT7NOFOgemplMbKg2g5o5lVXPYD4UtoysdRjkcYevNO1X0eCi2Vbz0vl8Nad7FJF7C6UCVGselKAYDN2H_OUsvAWJxjQKcHixD0V98E9ccoZm6ikp0wnxTFy_UBCLI7X28_J-MKKma1hab/s1600/egg+sweets_0373blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT7NOFOgemplMbKg2g5o5lVXPYD4UtoysdRjkcYevNO1X0eCi2Vbz0vl8Nad7FJF7C6UCVGselKAYDN2H_OUsvAWJxjQKcHixD0V98E9ccoZm6ikp0wnxTFy_UBCLI7X28_J-MKKma1hab/s400/egg+sweets_0373blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669012363389192962" /></a><br /><br />In my family, cholesterol is the source of all the world’s trouble. Boatloads of the fatty stuff course through our collective veins with varying speeds of efficiency. My parents regularly interrogate my sisters and me about our cholesterol levels and warn of the horrors that will befall us if we don’t keep them under control. Everything from acne to anxiety attacks has been attributed by my parents, at some point or another, to dietary fat. I’m sure they’ve considered bacon as a possible root cause of terrorism and the ascendancy of the Tea Party.<br /><br />None of this, however, stops us from sitting around the table at lunch talking about what we’re going to eat for dinner. My brothers-in-law make mean homemade sausage and barbeque marinades, and both my parents boast professional cooks among their parents or grandparents.<br /><br />Cholesterol in the Lee clan has always been – as Homer Simpson famously said of alcohol – the cause of, and the solution to, all of life’s problems.<br /><br />“You really shouldn’t eat so much fat,” Mom lectured one morning when I was visiting over Christmas. “That’s why your blood pressure so high.”<br /><br />She was telling me this as I was pouring myself a bowl of granola and she was preparing breakfast for Dad: fried eggs and Spam.<br /><br />We all know, of course, that food doesn’t have to be fattening to be wonderful. We love the custardy, string-free mangos that sometime pop up, for a mere 50 cents apiece, in Chinatown. We always look forward to the peppery salads made with the greens Mom grows in big pots on the back patio.<br /><br />Still, some of the things nearest and dearest to our hearts and stomachs are not to be spoken of in the presence of respectable people – and the element of danger only increases their appeal. You’ll have to pry our pork belly sliders from our cold, dead (no doubt from congestive heart failure) hands.<br /><br />Even Mom, the most vocal worrywart in the family, is not immune to the allure of fatty treats. Every so often over the years, she’d wax rhapsodic about the baroque, egg-laden Portuguese sweets she grew up with in Macau, which was at that time a Portuguese protectorate. I was intrigued by her descriptions of them and by the fact that none of these treats seemed to have a name, at least not that she could remember. One of these, she said, consisted of “tiny strands of egg yolk cooked in sugar, like a little birds’ nest”; another was “a ball of egg yolk that has crunchy sugar on the outside but is creamy when you bite into it”). How could these mysterious wonders not have names?<br /><br />Later, my intrigue grew with the realization that I’d never seen anything resembling those confections anywhere – and I’ve been fortunate enough to live in places where one can track down just about any ethnic cuisine imaginable. Another reason for my fascination with those treats is that they are made almost entirely of egg yolks. Eggs in themselves, Mom liked to warn, should be eaten only in moderation. But the mystery sweets of her youth not only contained eggs, but only the bad, dangerous, cholesterol-bearing part of the egg, in lethal concentrations. And yet Mom liked to reminisce about those eggy sweets, and would no doubt eat one in a heartbeat if we somehow managed to conjure them up.<br /><br />Then, last week she called me, excited by a recent discovery. While browsing an online store featuring Spanish imports, she came across something that looked strikingly familiar – tiny, round convent sweets made of egg yolks, an artisanal specialty made for hundreds of years by an order of Spanish nuns in the walled medieval town of Avila. The description said they were crunchy with sugar on the outside with insides that dissolved on the tongue “without any pressure.”<br /><br />Bingo. Or as close to “bingo” as we could hope to get: Spain and Portugal are neighboring countries with many shared food traditions, including an obsession with cramming as many egg yolks as possible into the dessert course. (There is a practical historical reason for this: wine-makers in both countries required large quantities of egg whites to clarify wine, and the nuns used egg whites to starch their habits – hence, a steady supply of egg yolks was ready and waiting to be made into convent sweets.) The resulting cholesterol bombs became so beloved they spread around the world with the Spanish and Portuguese diaspora, evolving as they traveled. Local variants of Iberian egg sweets can be found in locales as far flung as the Philippines, Brazil – and Macau.<br /><br />And Mom swore those pricey Spanish sweets from that online catalogue looked and sounded exactly like the ones she remembered from Macau. But no way was she going to pay to have those things airlifted in an insulated box from Spain to Los Angeles.<br /><br />But, she said hopefully, there were recipes for it online, and they sounded pretty simple. Hmm.<br /><br />I had myself a project. Fate nudged me along in the form of a promotional coupon from Target for a free carton of a dozen eggs. I normally keep only Egg Beaters in the house in deference to my arteries, but hey, the eggs were free! This was almost as good as getting a bucket of free, fresh yolks from the local wine-maker. Now I really had no excuse not to go through with this.<br /><br />The recipes I found for this confection, officially called yemas de Santa Teresa (literally “Saint Teresa’s egg yolks,” a.k.a. “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”) all take the same basic form: make a sugar syrup, mix it with an appalling number of egg yolks, cool the resulting mixture, form it into little balls, then roll the balls in sugar. Some recipes boast only three ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, and water. Others enhance the syrup with lemon zest and/or cinnamon. I like the idea of a hit of spice and citrus to offset all that sweetness and richness; it adds to the mysterious medieval vibe of the confections and makes them feel both more and less pointlessly decadent.<br /><br />I’ve always hated the term “sinful” when applied to food. It seems to reflect the worst aspects of Puritanism (free will and the Puritan work ethic I can get behind; the idea that life must be miserable to be virtuous, not so much). Besides, how could these little treats be sinful? They were invented by NUNS. And sold by nuns to support their work. Ergo, those who eat them are doing God’s work.<br /><br />Given these truths, how could they possibly be bad for you?<br /><br />**********<br /><br />The following recipe is a combination of several nearly identical recipes I found online from different sources. Almost all of the credible-looking recipes came from web sites based in Spain, which made me glad to have functional Spanish reading skills and a digital scale that allows metric measurements. I’ve converted the measurements to standard American measures.<br /><br />YEMAS DE SANTA TERESA<br /><br />8 egg yolks<br /><br />½ cup sugar<br /><br />1/3 cup plus 2 teaspoons water<br /><br />½ stick cinnamon<br /><br />zest of 2/3 lemon<br /><br />Additional sugar for coating<br /><br />1. Beat the egg yolks, then pass them through a fine-meshed strainer into a heatproof bowl.<br /><br />2. Combine the remaining ingredients in a small, heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat and cook until the syrup reaches the soft-ball stage (There are two easy ways to tell: If you use a candy thermometer, this stage is between 235 and 240 degrees F. The low-tech way to test for readiness is to drop a small amount of the syrup into a bowl of ice water. If the syrup is ready, it will form a soft little ball that you can easily pick up and press flat between your fingers; if it's not ready yet, it will dissolve in the water).<br /><br />3. Remove the cinnamon stick and lemon zest from the syrup, then gradually whisk the syrup into the egg yolks.<br /><br />4. Return the syrup and egg mixture to the saucepan. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture thickens and starts to pull away from the sides of the pan.<br /><br />5. Put the mixture in a clean container and refrigerate until firm.<br /><br />6. Roll the cooled mixture into walnut-sized balls and roll the balls in sugar.<br /><br />7. If you want to be fancy, put the balls in frilly little paper cups for serving.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-67983349578234417892011-03-20T14:42:00.000-07:002011-10-29T14:46:47.902-07:00Where Are You From? It's Complicated (But the Food Is Great)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFpzUL6AidrPBx9cWpRQbHxgdoVvzcJpvY9UpcyJYC0UR_reFCq4IMEG5VtFt2zdWc1_xRblCmdCgs8e3NGWKfR8nQAFQcKxXPt0Q5PIPjo2QhRWQm-lflxihoEPbTZfSSRG_EcA1_qS0i/s1600/minchee_0016blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFpzUL6AidrPBx9cWpRQbHxgdoVvzcJpvY9UpcyJYC0UR_reFCq4IMEG5VtFt2zdWc1_xRblCmdCgs8e3NGWKfR8nQAFQcKxXPt0Q5PIPjo2QhRWQm-lflxihoEPbTZfSSRG_EcA1_qS0i/s400/minchee_0016blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669012146303761202" /></a><br /> <br />Every Asian-American has to deal with The Question:<br /><br />“So...where are you from?”<br /><br />It wasn’t until I was in high school that I finally realized why everyone was so baffled by my perfectly truthful one-word answer (“Pittsburgh!”) I’ve grown to dread the time-sucking ritual of The Question. It’s like answering “so, how are you?” when you’re in a really rotten mood: you can either tell people what they expect to hear and waste a few seconds or tell the truth and drive people insane while wasting epic amounts of time.<br /><br />Sometimes, the temptation towards the latter is too great to avoid.<br /><br />“No, where are you REALLY from?”<br /><br />“Well, I was REALLY born in a community called Squirrel Hill. But I think it’s technically still part of Pittsburgh.”<br /><br />This helpful clarification invariably leads to the question of where my parents are from. And this sucks me into yet another lengthy digression:<br /><br />“Your mom is from WHERE?”<br /><br />“Macau.”<br /><br />“Where’s THAT?”<br /><br />I could just say Mom is from Hong Kong – it’s not as if anyone actually cares. But part of me believes that even truly tedious people deserve to know about Macau – a former Portuguese territory on the south coast of China, just west of Hong Kong – for it’s a genuinely wondrous place. Wondrous enough to make me want to stand around explaining my ancestry to total strangers.<br /><br />How could any place possibly be this awesome? First, there's the architecture -- picture a medieval Mediterranean seaside village, complete with the ruins of its own seventeenth-century cathedral, plunked down only an hour from Hong Kong. Then there's the area's history, as intriguing to explore as its architecture. But most importantly, there's gambling, sex, drugs, and sixteen-century Asian fusion cuisine. What's not to love? <br /><br />A few anecdotes from my family history will illustrate some of these defining cultural features in action.<br /><br />1. Gambling! On my first visit to Macau – and Mom’s first visit home in years – we made the obligatory stop at Casino Lisboa, the best-known, and at the time, biggest and grandest of Macau’s apparently not-so-famous casinos. (Growing up, I thought EVERYONE knew that Macau was the Monte Carlo of the Far East, the place favored by high rollers from Hong Kong or Tokyo looking for a weekend of decadent debauchery.)<br /><br />My Aunt Susie led my barely college-age sisters and me across the floor, past the baccarat tables, roulette wheels, and trilingual (Chinese/Portuguese/English) NO PERSONS UNDER 21 ALLOWED signs to the slots. Then she handed us each a Hong Kong dollar coin.<br /><br />Then we noticed a stern-faced security guard closing in on my baby sister Sondra, who was then about eighteen but looked closer to fifteen.<br /><br />“Now we’re in trouble,” one of my other sisters muttered.<br /><br />Within seconds, the guard was at Sondra’s side. He said something in Cantonese, plucked the coin from her hand -- then stuck it into the slot machine in front of her and motioned for her to pull the handle. Then he handed her another coin.<br /><br />What happens in Macau, stays in Macau.<br /><br />2. Sex! One of my proudest moments in elementary school was the day my classmates and I got to present our family trees, which we'd spent the previous week researching and designing. Everyone else’s trees showed polite, symmetric pairings of circles and triangles: Grandpa met Grandma in Belarus, they immigrated to New York. Boring.<br /><br />My tree – at least on Mom’s side of the family – was a proud tangle of depravity. There was Grandpa and Grandma, and underneath them, my mom, two aunts and one uncle. But directly next to Grandma were Grandpa’s three other wives/concubines (their exact legal status was never clear to me) and underneath them, their own children – Mom’s half-siblings. Grandpa supported each of my “grandmas” in a separate house and circulated among them regularly. One of my aunts later told me that he tended to drop by their place during the mid-afternoon. He spent most of their visits, she said, sequestered with Grandma in her bedroom. Ahem.<br /><br />3. Drugs! I never met my maternal grandfather – he never traveled to the U.S. as far as I know, and I never had the chance to visit Macau until years after he died. But even when he was alive, he was a shadowy figure to me. I knew he was well off - he had to be to maintain four separate households simultaneously, and Mom sometimes reminisced dreamily about her childhood in a three-story house with marble bathrooms and several servants.<br /><br />But when I was growing up, no one would give me a straight answer about exactly what he did for a living. Sometimes they said he was in business. What kind of business? Medicine. Was he a doctor, like Dad? Or a pharmacist, like all my older cousins? No, it was different kind of medicine. They don’t make it anymore.<br /><br />Well, it turns out they do. I found out much, much later that he dealt in opium. But saying Grandpa dealt in opium is a bit like saying Bill Gates works in software. Grandpa held Macau’s sole opium franchise—essentially, he was a one-man cartel. Until the mid-1940s, this was fully legal in Macau, not to mention obscenely profitable. And like most successful drug kingpins, Grandpa never touched the stuff himself.<br /><br />And to think I used to envy “normal” kids with cuddly grandfathers who’d sit in rocking chairs and whittle stuff for them out of willow twigs.<br /><br />4. Sixteenth-century Asian fusion cuisine! I’ve saved the best of Macau’s many decadent sensual delights for last: the food. God, the food.<br /><br />The wonders of Macanese cooking are a reflection of Macau’s long and lively colonial history. Unlike the British in neighboring Hong Kong, who kept a strict social distance from their Chinese subjects, the Portuguese in Macau were happy to embrace the locals – literally. Intermarriage was common, as was the mixing of languages and cultures. During my childhood, I was once surprised by a blonde, green-eyed woman running towards us in Chinatown, calling joyfully to Mom in fluent Cantonese. It was an old friend from Macau. When we visited Macau, we met another family friend, a Portuguese-Chinese woman everyone knew as “21”: her Portuguese father had adopted the local habit of taking multiple wives, and she was his twenty-first child.<br /><br />The food is yet another result of this raucous mix. Our meals in Macau reflected the best of East and West, joyfully combined: meals came with rice AND crusty bread, chopsticks AND forks, tea AND Portuguese vinho verde – all in copious quantities. The cooking showed a mix of European techniques – lots of grilled seafood, braises, and casseroles – and Chinese flavors, augmented by African and Indian influences, a reflection of Macau’s former prominence as a stopping point on eastern shipping routes. Bay leaves and soy sauce can appear seamlessly in the same dish. Curried crabs, grilled sardines brushed with olive oil, and African chicken (a blackish spice-rubbed chicken dish not found anywhere in Africa) can all be found on the same table at the same time, if one is lucky enough.<br /><br />Francis Lam recently noted that there is <a href="http://www.salon.com/food/eyewitness_cook/index.html?story=/food/francis_lam/2010/12/10/ginger_milk_pudding">no one perfect cuisine in the world</a>: Chinese cuisine, for all its wonders, is weak in desserts, for instance. But Macanese cuisine comes pretty close to being the total package: it boasts the vibrancy of eastern and tropical spices combined with European rib-sticking heartiness overlaid with distinctive Chinese flavorings – topped off with local versions of egg- and butter-rich Portuguese-influenced sweets for dessert.<br /><br />In short, Macanese cooks invented Euro-Asian fusion cuisine almost half a millennium ago.<br /><br />A quick and easy dish that exemplifies the hearty, homely East-West mix that is Macanese home cooking in minchee – a simple, savory meat-and-potato hash seasoned with soy sauce and spices. Minchee, like so much else in Macau, reflects a cross-cultural mix, which in this instance includes an English influence from nearby Hong Kong: the word minchee is a Cantonese corruption of the English word “mince,” and this version contains a very English ingredient, Worchester sauce. Like much Macanese cuisine, it’s a family dish, designed to satisfy and comfort, rather than to surprise or impress.<br /><br />After all, if you want to be surprised or impressed in Macau, all you have to do is put down your fork or chopsticks and step outside.<br /><br />*******<br /><br />I wish I could say this recipe came to me handwritten on a scrap of parchment in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macanese_language">Macau Creole</a> by my great-great-great grandma, but because Mom was raised in a household where hired guns did all the cooking, she never learned any local recipes growing up. The recipe that follows is adapted from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0781810221/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0781810221">Taste of Macau: Portuguese Cuisine on the China Coast</a><img style="border-width: initial !important; border-color: initial !important; border-style: none !important; margin: 0px !important" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0781810221" alt="" width="1" height="1" /> by Annabel Jackson, and seems to be close to the one Mom described from her youth.<br /><br />MINCHEE (Macanese meat and potato hash)<br /><br />1 pound ground beef<br /><br />2 small baking potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes (about 2-1/2 cups of cubes)<br /><br />olive oil for cooking<br /><br />1 medium onion, finely chopped<br /><br />1 bay leaf<br /><br />3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed<br /><br />3 tablespoons light soy sauce<br /><br />I teaspoon sugar<br /><br />1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce<br /><br />salt and pepper to taste<br /><br />Cooked rice for serving<br /><br />Fried eggs (optional) for serving -- allow 1 per diner, if using <br /><br />1. Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add the diced potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are golden brown. Remove the potatoes from the skillet and set aside.<br /><br />2. Add 2 more tablespoon olive oil to the skillet and return the skillet to the stove. When the skillet has reheated, add the the onion and bay leaf and saute until the onion is golden. Remove the onion and bay leaf from the skillet and set aside.<br /><br />3. Add 1 tablespoon olive oil to the skillet along with the garlic. Saute the garlic, pressing on it to release its aroma. Remove and discard the garlic when it has browned on all sides.<br /><br />4. Increase the heat to high and add the ground beef to the skillet. Cook, stirring and breaking the meat apart until it crumbles. Continue cooking and stirring for 2-3 minutes.<br /><br />5. Add the reserved onion and bay leaf to the skillet with the meat. Continue cooking for 2 minutes<br /><br />6. In a small cup, combine the soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and sugar and pour this mixture into the skillet. Continue cooking and stirring for another 3-5 minutes until the meat is fully cooked and the liquid has mostly evaporated. Taste and season with salt and pepper as desired.<br /><br /> 7. Add the potatoes, mix well, and stir just until the potatoes are heated through. Remove from heat when done.<br /><br />8. If serving with fried eggs, fry the eggs to your liking now; it's almost time to eat.<br /><br />9. Serve with plenty of rice. Top with the optional fried eggs if desired.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8268630496633789686.post-49720380073894549942011-02-27T14:40:00.000-08:002011-10-29T14:57:01.536-07:00What to Cook When Your Spouse Turns on You<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkYOWXhaJMXZNMt6ca8ZlTxDuX5cHHwgi384Q5X2Xe6v-qr2qrDGuxM123JWmHQlr2GtuIUhSHON-oK_U-9yyaWRqBwpzaK9JFBVK6v6xcvYoGeMkSZVYVW4bOPWySAKH5BbEOdwl5o_Tc/s1600/vegan+lasagna_9470blg.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkYOWXhaJMXZNMt6ca8ZlTxDuX5cHHwgi384Q5X2Xe6v-qr2qrDGuxM123JWmHQlr2GtuIUhSHON-oK_U-9yyaWRqBwpzaK9JFBVK6v6xcvYoGeMkSZVYVW4bOPWySAKH5BbEOdwl5o_Tc/s400/vegan+lasagna_9470blg.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5669011914859507522" /></a><br /><br />What do you do when the person you thought you knew better than anyone else suddenly turns into something entirely different? What happens when you discover your most fundamental beliefs about the dearest person in your life turn out to be wrong? And most importantly, what the hell do you feed this person once this happens?<br /><br />My story began one afternoon about six years ago with a series of increasingly desperate voicemails from my husband. When I finally caught up with him, he told me his internist, who had just seen the results of a routine blood test, had called him at work and ordered him to reduce his cholesterol level radically within a few months or else.<br /><br />What the doctor said must have been far, far worse than that, because my husband declared that from that day forward, he’d be quitting cholesterol cold turkey. Starting now, we would have no animal fats in the house. Period.<br /><br /> “It’s the only way to get things better quickly," he said."We have to go vegan.”<br /><br /> ‘We’ ?? What did he mean, ‘we’?<br /><br />My husband. A vegan. This coming from a guy who treasured rare filet mignons and hunks of Gorgonzola above all other foodstuffs. A guy who thought buttering hot dog buns was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. A man who believed that no foodstuff couldn’t be improved by a melted cheese or a fried egg topping (or if sweet, a scoop of vanilla ice cream). You know those soap-opera turning points when a woman comes home to find her husband wearing her underwear and lipstick? It was kind of like that.<br /><br />But I soon discovered that keeping vegan at home wasn’t as hard as I thought. This was in large part because I got to cheat with impunity: at the time, I was working as a pastry cook in a fancy beach resort, and the pastry chefs generously allowed us peons to snack on pretty much anything we wanted in the kitchen. So by time I got home every night, my hair smelled of chocolate and butter and I was thoroughly bloated on brownies, chocolate-chip cookies, and those endless rows of mini lemon tarts that I squirted with meringue and browned with a welding torch. And when I was home, I was happy and relieved to cook things that didn’t require separating dozens of eggs or whipping up gallons of cream. I enjoy veggies and beans in any case, so our vegan meals at home felt tonic and refreshing.<br /><br />There were a few things that were truly agonizing to give up, though. The biggest one was cheese. My hubby and I LOVE cheese. Soy cheeses sort-of simulate the plastickly meltiness of cheap processed stuff, and brewers’ yeast is a wholesome near-doppelganger for that orange powder in boxed mac and cheese, but nothing in the vegetable world can approximate the nutty, funky, winy notes of a good Brie or Manchego. Or so I thought.<br /><br />On one of my days off from the hotel, I was eating lunch at a Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant not far from home. As to be expected in a Vietmanese eatery, my table held a tantalizing assortment of condiments in small glass jars and bottles: dried chile flakes, bottled chile sauce, pickled chile slices, some vegan approximation of fish sauce, and a jar of soft beige cubes with a familiar smell: I recognized it as fermented bean curd, also used in Chinese cooking.<br /><br />I’d never seen this used in Vietnamese cookery before. Nor had I seen it used as a table condiment. My curiosity was piqued and I smeared a bit of it on an egg roll. (I had no idea if it was intended to be used this way.) Yes, it was the same stuff Mom used to mix into stir-fried greens. But something else about it, in this context, tasted strikingly familiar—but not in a way I expected.<br /><br />Honest to God, it tasted like cheese. Real cheese. It was winy, nutty, milky, and funky like a really good Gruyere. It had a pungent sharpness reminiscent of blue cheese. The texture was different from Gruyere or blue (soft and creamy rather than bouncy or crumbly) and the flavor was a lot more intense than either—it was more like a vegan cheese concentrate.<br /><br />Then it struck me: I had discovered an almost perfect cholesterol-free cheese substitute – courtesy of two cultures whose traditionalists would no sooner eat cheese than eat their own children.<br /><br />In the following weeks, I experimented with the cheese-substitute possibilities of fermented bean curd. I found it worked well melted into a soy-milk-based cream sauce to make a faux cheese sauce (albeit one that tasted more of Swiss-type cheese than cheddar). I tried adding kirsch to the sauce to make a faux cheese fondue, but without that stretchy stringy factor, it just wasn’t the same.<br /><br />But as a sauce, it worked great. I later decided to try it as a base for a white lasagna filling with chard and sundried tomatoes – it turned out great: creamy, flavorful, and most importantly, gently cheesy. It was also super-healthful: Dark leafy greens! Soy milk! And absolutely no cholesterol or trans fats! I even made a pan of it to bring to my (non-vegan) foodie sister after she had a baby, and she ate it up.<br /><br />And this was its biggest plus: it’s tasty enough to please food lovers who have no dietary restrictions. We’ve gone off our strict vegan regime (we’re still mostly vegetarian and prudent about our consumption of butter and red meat), but I still think this recipe is a keeper.<br /><br /> I was feeling quite pleased with myself and my amazingly original contribution to vegan cookery when I purchased <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1580082076?ie=UTF8&tag=ocwa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1580082076">The Artful Vegan: Fresh Flavors from the Millennium Restaurant</a><img style="border-width: initial !important; border-color: initial !important; border-style: none !important; margin: 0px !important" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ocwa-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1580082076" alt="" width="1" height="1" />, authored by the chefs of a high-end vegan restaurant in San Francisco. The recipes and photos looked spectacular—their use of sauces, textures, and flavors was utterly unlike the rustic hippie fare in most vegan cookbooks. I was flipping through the book, awestruck by their genius, when I saw something familiar: they, too, used Chinese fermented bean curd to evoke a cheesy flavor in one of their recipes.<br /><br /> Rats. So I’m not a total creative genius after all.<br /><br /> Yes, I came up with the idea independently. But they came up with it first – years before my husband and I ever dreamed of foregoing real Brie and Gorgonzola. And by the conventions of academic research, whoever gets an idea published first in credible form gets full credit for it. So props to them, they deserve it.<br /><br />And remember, great minds think alike.<br /><br />VEGAN WHITE LASAGNA WITH CHARD<br /><br />Note: Fermented bean curd comes in re-sealable glass jars and can be found alongside other jarred condiments in Asian markets. Most well-stocked markets will offer two varieties: plain (bean curd cubes in a clear, flavored brine) and red (bean curd cubes in a red brine flavored with red yeast rice and chiles). Use the plain kind in this recipe.<br /><br />Don't be put off by the strong smell or taste; it's meant to be used in small quantities as a flavoring. Like any other powerful tool in your arsenal, it works wonders if you respect its power and use it as intended.<br /><br />For the chard filling:<br /><br />1 bunch chard, washed and chopped into ½” pieces (stems included)<br /><br />½ medium onion, chopped<br /><br />3 tablespoons olive oil<br /><br />3 oil-soaked sun-dried tomatoes, finely diced<br /><br />salt and pepper to taste<br /><br />1. Heat a large saute pan over medium-high heat and add the olive oil. Add the onions and cook them, stirring occasionally, until translucent and just starting to turn golden.<br /><br />2. Add the chard to the pan. Cook, stirring, until the chard and onions are evenly combined and the chard has wilted.<br /><br />3. Lower the heat to medium-low and continue to cook, stiriing occasionally, until the chard stems are fully tender. Stir in the sun-dried tomatoes.<br /><br />4. Add about 1 cup of white sauce and stir to combine. Set filling aside.<br /><br />For the white sauce:<br /><br />2½ cups unsweetened soy milk<br /><br />2 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced<br /><br />A ½” –thick slice onion, separated into rings<br /><br />2 tablespoons unflavored oil, such as canola<br /><br />3 tablespoons all-purpose flour<br /><br />½ teaspoon crushed fermented bean curd<br /><br />3 tablespoons white wine<br /><br />salt and white pepper to taste<br /><br />1. Heat the soy milk, garlic, and onion together in a saucepan over medium low heat for about 10 minutes, until the milk is hot and the onions and garlic are soft and have given off their aromas.<br /><br />2. In a separate pot, heat the oil over medium heat and add the flour. Whisk vigorously to ensure the flour-oil mixture does not get lumpy. Cook, whisking constantly, for about 2 minutes. The flour should be cooked, but not browned.<br /><br />3. Strain the milk mixture and pour the hot milk into the pot with the flour mixture. Whisk the sauce base over medium heat to eliminate lumps, and continue to whisk until the sauce thickens, about 3 minutes.<br /><br />4. Whisk the wine and fermented bean curd into the sauce. Taste and season with salt (start with about ¾ teaspoon) and white pepper to taste.<br /><br />For the lasagna (adapted from the fresh pasta recipe in The Artful Vegan):<br /><br />1 cup semolina flour<br /><br />1/4 teaspoon salt <br /><br />1/4 cup lukewarm water (or more if needed) <br /><br />1. Combine the flour, salt, and water. The mixture should be stiff but pliable enough to knead. Add additional water if necessary.<br /><br />2. Knead the dough on a clean surface until the pasta dough is smooth. Wrap in plastic and allow to rest for at least 30 minutes.<br /><br />3. Divide the dough into four pieces. Run the pieces, one at a time, though a pasta machine at the second-thinnest setting. (Mine is a hand-cranked model with seven settings; I roll my lasagna at 6.)<br /><br />4. Dip each rolled-out sheet into boiling water for about a minute to cook -- it doesn't take long.<br /><br />5. Keep the cooked pasta on a sheet pan lined with a linen towel or napkin while you assemble the lasagna. Do not allow the pasta sheets to touch each other. <br /><br />Assembly:<br /><br />1. Smear a layer of sauce on the bottem of a 8 x 8” baking pan. Cover the bottom of the pan with a layer of lasagna. Top this layer with half the chard filling.<br /><br />2. Top the chard filling with another layer of lasagna, then the rest of the chard filling.<br /><br />3. Top the second layer of chard filling with the rest of the lasagna noodles, then cover the noodles evenly with the remainder of the sauce.<br /><br />4. Bake the lasagna, covered, for 20 minutes in a 400 degree oven. Uncover the lasagna, raise the heat to 425 degrees, and continue baking until top of the lasagna is lightly browned on top.Feliciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15364571181978955929noreply@blogger.com0