Half-Fast Cooking: Wok-Free Chinese

It's not fast food. It's not slow food. It's...half-fast food! Part of an occasional, sloth-driven series.

I admit it. I'm a total snob when it comes to Chinese food.

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?

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!

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.)

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.

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  Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China 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.

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.

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 – directly above the stove. 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.

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.

WORLD’S EASIEST OYSTER SAUCE NOODLES

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.

7 ounces dried wheat noodles (in a pinch, I’ve used spaghetti)
4 tablespoons peanut or canola oil
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 medium clove of garlic, peeled
a 1-inch square piece of peeled fresh ginger
4 tablespoons oyster sauce
Optional add-ins: thinly sliced scallions, bite-size pieces of cooked meat and/or vegetables, Chinese chile oil

1. Put a large pot of water to boil for the noodles.

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.

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.

4. Add the noodles to the boiling water and cook until tender, about 10 minutes.

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.

5. Mix in any add-ins you wish and serve immediately.

Eating (Really) High on the Hog

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.”

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.

And for good reason: done right, it can be downright decadent.

Yup – pigs’ ears can be awesome.

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.

Then I saw them on a non-Chinese menu for the first time, at the unapologetically carnivore-centric Los Angeles restaurant Animal: “crispy pigs’ ears, lime, chile, fried egg.”

“How weird,” my sister said. “I wonder what THAT’S like?”

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.

“By the way, these are the pigs’ ears,” our server said. Then, leaning closer: “Trust me—they’re very good.”

They were.

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.

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.

It was time for an experiment.

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 Chichi Wang, 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.

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.

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:

“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.”

Amen. Now let’s pig out.

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CRISPY, SPICY PIGS’ EARS

Adapted from Chichi Wang, with additional inspiration from Animal restaurant, Los Angeles

1 pound pigs’ ears
1 carrot, peeled and chopped coarsely
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped coarsely
1 stick celery, chopped coarsely
1 tablespoon whole peppercorns
¼ cup cornstarch
¼ cup flour
12 cilantro leaves, washed and dried
½ lime
½ teaspoon cayenne powder (more if desired)
salt as needed
canola (or other neutral cooking oil) for deep-frying
4 fresh eggs, fried to your taste.

1. Place the pigs’ ears in a pot of boiling water. Boil for three minutes to remove any impurities, then drain and set aside.

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.

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.)

4. When the pigs’ ears are cool and dry, cut them into ¼ inch strips.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Half-Fast Cooking: Brunch for the Lazy

It’s not fast food. It’s not slow food. It’s... half-fast food! The first in an occasional, sloth-driven series.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

It made me resent the lucky slobs who got to eat brunch.

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.

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?

Hell, yes!

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.

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.

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.

CHOCADILLA

For each serving:

1 large flour tortilla, at room temperature

2 tablespoons peanut butter

1/3 large banana, sliced thinly

2 tablespoons chocolate chips

Canola or other unflavored oil for frying

powdered sugar for garnish

melted chocolate for garnish (optional)

1. Spread the peanut butter over half of the tortilla, leaving a 1-inch margin around the edges.

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.

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.

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.

5. Garnish with powdered sugar ( and melted chocolate, if desired). Serve immediately.

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.

I Want My Country Back! All-American Tacos for July 4

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.

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.

“Who here can tell me what ‘allegiance’ means?”

Whoa. This was WAY too early for a pop quiz.

“No one?”

We shook our heads.

“Here’s an easier one, then. Do you know what ‘pledge’ means? Okay, good, I see lots of hands. David?”

“It means a promise?” David said, sounding as terrified as the rest of us felt.

“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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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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.

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 Kogi taco truck 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.

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.

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.

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.?

ALL-AMERICAN KOREAN TACOS

For the meat: (adapted from Quick and Easy Korean Cooking (Gourmet Cook Book Club Selection) by Cecelia Hae-Jin Lee (no relation!))

Marinade:

½ medium onion, minced

½ bulb (about 5 large cloves) garlic, minced

¼ cup soy sauce

¼ cup sugar

½ cup pineapple juice

2 teaspoons Korean red pepper lakes

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

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)

For the cabbage slaw:

2 cups finely shredded cabbage

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon (or more to taste) Korean red pepper flakes

1 clove garlic, minced

4 tablespoons rice vinegar

For the Asian guacamole:

1 small avocado

2 tablespoons finely minced onion

juice of ¼ lime

½ teaspoon sesame oil

salt to taste

For serving:

1 dozen corn tortillas

chopped fresh cilantro

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.

2. Remove the meat from the marinade, letting the excess marinade drip off. Broil or grill until done to your taste.

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.

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.

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.

6. Wrap the tortillas in foil and heat in a 300 degree oven for about 10 minutes.

7. Bring the tortillas, meat, cabbage slaw, cilantro, and guacamole to the table and invite diners to make their own tacos. Happy Independence Day!

On The Wings of (Reflected) Glory

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.

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.

“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!”

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.

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.

“Wow, that’s great!” I said, genuinely happy for her. “Was that a life sighting for you?”

“Oh yes! I even wrote a poem about them when I got home.”

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.

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!”

The poem my newbie birder friend had written about the owls was accepted for publication by the New Yorker.

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.

“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.”

This wasn’t the first time I discovered one of my birding pals to be way, way out of my league.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*******************

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 Mark Bittman'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 Momofuku 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  Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone–– features corn and tomatoes as a rustic Mexican-themed pasta topping.

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.

SUMMER TRIBUTE PASTA WITH CORN, TOMATOES, AND BACON

Kernels from 2 ears of corn

2 medium tomatoes, cut into 1/3-inch dice

3 strips of bacon, cut into 1/2-inch dice

3 scallions, cut into fine rounds

½ cup chopped cilantro

2 teaspoons soy sauce

1 finely chopped jalapeno or other hot pepper (optional)

1/2 pound spaghetti

Salt and pepper to taste

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.

2. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil and begin cooking the spaghetti.

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.

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).

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.

Rhodes to Nowhere: A Mortifying Adventure (and a Recipe)

I could have been a contender.

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.

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!

At Stanford, they were honest enough not to deny this.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

YESS! I STILL RULE!!

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.

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.

“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.”

I unfolded the flyer: announcements for that year’s Rhodes and Marshall Scholarship competition.

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.

That someday was now on the horizon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“...And this is Professor Smith,” the chair continued.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, reaching across the table towards his outreached hand--

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.

My life was over.

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.

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.

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.

“Hey! How was the big interview?”

“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!”

I heard him gasp. “Oh...my...god....”

I waited. He took a loud breath. There was a pregnant – and I assumed, sympathetic – pause on his end of the line.

“...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...?”

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?”

They didn’t. And yet I’m still alive, many, many years later.

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.

************

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 Ian Dowding in the 1970s.

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.

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.

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.

BANOFFEE PIE

For the crust:

1 7-ounce package digestive biscuits

1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, melted

1 cup whole, roasted hazelnuts

For the dulce de leche:

1 ½ cans (21 ounces total) sweetened condensed milk

For the coffee whipped cream:

1 ½ cups whipping cream

1 1/2 teaspoons instant coffee

2 teaspoons sugar

½ envelope unflavored gelatin powder

2-3 ripe bananas, sliced

finely powdered instant coffee for garnish

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grind the digestive biscuits into fine crumbs in a food processor, then place them in a medium mixing bowl.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

10. Chill the pie for at least an hour before serving. Garnish with the ground instant coffee just before serving.

Eat Like a Bird!

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.

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. Wired  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.”

When Mammy urged Scarlett O’Hara to eat like a bird, this probably wasn’t what she had in mind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 Madhur Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking.

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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.

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 my favorite birding blogs 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.

And so is my “birdseed.” Enjoy!



****************

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.

Spiced Birder Seed

3 whole cloves

a 3/4-inch piece from a cinnamon stick

½ teaspoon black peppercorns

neutrally flavored oil (such as canola) as needed for frying

2/3 cup roasted, unsalted peanuts (or raw peanuts, deep-fried and drained)

2/3 cup roasted, unsalted cashews (or raw cashews, deep-fried and drained)

1/3 cup shelled, roasted, unsalted sunflower seeds (or raw seeds, deep-fried and drained)

1/3 cup shelled, roasted, unsalted pumpkin seeds (or raw seeds, deep-fried and drained)

4 tablespoons raisins, briefly deep-fried until puffy and drained.

3 cups puffed (NOT raw) millet

2 tablespoons canola or other neutrally flavored oil

½ tablespoon whole black mustard seeds

3 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

¼ teaspoon ground turmeric

1 teaspoon or more ground cayenne, or to taste (optional)

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

2 1/2 teaspoons sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons ground amchoor

1. Grind the cloves, cinnamon stick, and peppercorns together in a mortar and pestle until powdery; set aside.

2. Combine the nuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, millet, and raisins in a large bowl; set aside.

3. Heat a small saucepan over medium heat and add the 2 tablespoons oil. When hot, add the mustard seeds.

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.

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.

6. Cool the mixture, then store it in an airtight container.