Culinary Adventures in the Chinese House

Adventures in Fruit

2010-09-18T02:26:00.000-07:00

Have there been no adventures of late? I think not. I think if there is ever a lack in adventures being reported it cannot mean an actual lack of adventure, but merely a lack of man's ability to report adventures and still do all the educational research that is due and that doesn't, frustratingly, write itself.

One of the many adventures in which our brave explorers have been engaged of late is the adventure, that great sweet adventure, the adventure of Fruit.

The world is full of much delicious fruit. It is all rather good for you, and even the mediocre among the fruits are able to make one happy. However, some fruits are particularly sweet and delectable and have the added advantages of being among the weirdest freaky things that grow on this planet. Here is a quick tour:

The Sugar Apple

First of all, I think the sugar apple needs a new name. Wikipedia says I can also call it a sweetsop, which I think I will, because this is nothing like an apple and I want to support people who show creativity in their naming of fruits.

The Sweetsop

The sweetsop does not look appetizing. It looks, in fact, rather like the egg sac of a particularly large and creepy insect.

But if you are socially pressured enough to try one, you shall not be disappointed. So suck it up, smile, and put one in your bowl! If it's sufficiently ripe, upon landing in the bowl it will fall open into a pile of white flesh. This may also disconcert you, but just keep eating. You'll be just fine. The taste is magnificent - very very sweet and almost floral. It almost tastes like jasmine flowers. You eat the little sections one at a time - sucking off everything but the skin and the seeds. Like a durian, it's actually a little too sweet to eat a large amount at once. One whole fruit is pushing it. But it is a lovely experience.

¡Aye Carambola!

A carambola is better known as a star fruit. I have no idea why.

This one was particularly lovely while I was slicing it up for my breakfast, but unfortunately not very sweet. The texture is very fun to eat, and occasionally if you get a sweet one it is quite tasty.

Maybe the star fruit isn't exotic enough to be very interesting, but sometimes if you're lucky enough to have a red cutting board it can at least be a fun little political exercise.

Fruit Buffet

I accidentally ate at a steak restaurant the other day. I say accidentally because I was standing outside trying to read the menu and I happen to be very very slow at reading and I was standing there long enough and the waitress looking at me long enough that I started to feel awkward and would have felt like a jerk if I then walked away. Having odd social compunctions can really cost a lot of money sometimes.

The steak was expensive by Taiwan terms - I think I spent about $9 on my dinner, which is astronomical here. But it was from a real American cow. I know this because the icon on the menu was a little cartoon cow with an American flag on its butt. So I ordered it in the hopes that maybe it grew up on my sister's ranch in Lewistown. It probably did. Thanks, guys! It was tasty!

But the best part of the steak restaurant was the all-you-can-eat salad bar, fruit and ice cream. The salad was DANG good, which doesn't happen often here, and the fruit... well, it was just an assortment of everything that's in season now which is, you know. Dragonfruit, passion fruit, star fruit and pomelo. Let me tell you about passion fruit - it's that little cup of yellow jewels in the photo. It's fragrant - you can smell it across the room. And then you eat it and BAM! It's sour and aromatic and smacks you between the eyes. And the black seeds are crunchy and it's just all-around pleasant to eat. Plus, the inside of the shell was holding on to the seeds with these little fleshy stems and I'm just totally sure this is an alien lifeform that accidentally got dropped on earth. Too bad suckers! We totally stole your extraterrestrial fruit and we're gonna eat it all, thank you very much.

Pomelo

And now we're to the pomelo. (I like how all of these things have English names as if any native speaker would have the foggiest idea what you're talking about.)

This is a specialty at Mid-Autumn Festival, and this is how you eat it:

First, you pick one whose skin is starting to get old and dry and saggy. Because older means sweeter and more satisfying. This is also true for cute 29-year-old girls you pick to take out on dates. The smooth green ones are always distracting but don't fall for it!

Then you decapitate them. (Um, the cute girl analogy ended at the last picture) I messed up and cut through some flesh. I don't know how you can tell where the flesh starts and where is just thick white peel.

Then, you make a series of vertical cuts around the side from which you peel.

You have to peel it in one piece. To prove your man/womanhood and dexterity.

Why do you need to remove it in one piece? So you can put it on your head of course. I'm not kidding! I'm being a dang cultural anthropologist here! This is what actual Chinese people do at the mid-autumn festival. They wear fruit peels on their heads.

See?

And even better than the pomelo hat (though you must admit, it's hard to get better than the pomelo hat) is the fruit that you get to eat. It's like grapefruit's older, more responsible sister. Sweet, drier and firm, without the juice everywhere. (Um, I don't know whether that analogy is actually going anywhere. Just eat the fruit and pretend I didn't say anything.)

Another successful culinary adventure!

Culinary Adventures in Hong Kong, Part 3

2010-06-29T23:29:00.000-07:00

Monday morning, the sun shone in Hong Kong for at least six and a half minutes. I have photographic evidence:

It was glorious. But then we were back to the monsoons. I realize now, however, that mysterious powers were at work. Powers that would combine to bring us the best culinary adventure we had ever been privy to. And the rain was all part of the magic.

Among food bloggers, I am quite the scallawag. I am too snobbish to be a snob, I think continental cuisine is mostly pretentious, and I don't even own my own lemon zester. Neither did I think I'd ever be reporting on my adventures in a restaurant given a star by the Michelin Guide. Those sorts of adventures are a little too lofty for me.

And it was pure winds of fortune that blew us to Tim Ho Wan. I didn't want to leave Hong Kong without eating real dim sum, and so I'd been searching online for something that was legitimate without emptying the coffers, if you know what I mean. These coffers are rather modest. I had asked the concierge at our hotel if he had a list of dim sum restaurants. "3rd floor," he said. "No, I mean, famous in Hong Kong." "Oh," he chirped, while scribbling on my map. "Across the street, at the food court in the mall."

Nevermind. Thank you. So I read all I could online and I heard about Tim Ho Wan, which is apparently the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant in the world. Cheap snobby restaurant? Verily? However, they also say that you can expect to wait three hours to get in. Well, that doesn't quite work for two buccaneers whose ship leaves port this evening. Sad... what a great opportunity it would have been.

This is where the typhoon rains intervene in our favor. Who wants to wait in line for fancy dim sum on a Monday morning? Well, a couple hundred people. How about a Monday morning dumping buckets of rain? That's right. Only the hardy few. And after 20 minutes of persistence, we managed to work our way in to the tiny little galley.

This is about the width of the entire restaurant.

But pretty soon, the bounty starts coming. Buns with barbecued pork, and glutinous rice steamed in a banana leaf. I was hesitant, because the Dragon Boat Festival wasn't that long ago and my stomach is still reeling from far too many zongzi, but this thing was delicious. It had some sort of meat that I could swear was turkey, but could have been just a very smoky chicken creation. But we managed to finish the whole thing, which was good because the rest of the restaurant was on its way to our table.

Shrimp dumplings and a light steamed cake... never quite caught what was in the cake.

These steamed vegetable and beef dumplings were THE most delicious thing. I. have. ever. put in my mouth. I know I say that about something new every three days or so, but this time I am in earnest.

These little dumplings are made with a glutinous rice flour (mochiko) and filled with barbecued pork, then quickly deep fried. I'm more a fan of the more savory creations, but these were still delightful. And I'm glad we ordered the "braised vegetable" which ended up just being lettuce. But who knew lettuce could be cooked to deliciousness? Michelin, I suppose. He knew.

These rice skins were filled with beef. Tim Ho Wan's specialty are the ones filled with pork liver, but we averted that quickly before we ordered. We're not quite that fearless. These were nice, though - the flavor was very subtle.

What I didn't manage to get a picture of were the beef meatballs with tofu skin (inari - sorry, the only real names I know for these things are their Japanese names). They were absolutely sublime. Neither I nor my digestive tract are big fans of beef, but these were just lovely. They had some sort of flavor - I swear it might have been mint leaves - that sends you right off the starboard bow.

It was a little embarrassing how much we ordered - we had to keep stacking it up. But it was curiosity! I mean, the spirit of adventure! I mean, we were pillaging. Arrrgh!

I bet real pillagers never ate this well. This dessert was a dainty agar gelatin with some sort of herbs and flowers. Like Spring Meadow Jell-o. Jell-o never made Spring Meadow a flavor, which is probably because they didn't want it bad enough.

And we finished off with the most expensive item on the menu, at 32 Hong Kong dollars (about $4 US), which is a little unbelievably cheap for a Michelin starred restaurant. Black truffle pudding. I think it was also coconut flavored? I don't know. The flavors all hit you at once like a plank across the forehead. And they leave you lying in a blissful stupor on the deck. It was no trouble at all to stagger out into the pouring rain and slowly make our way back to the airport. And definitely an adventure in the South Seas worth the toil.

Culinary Adventures in Hong Kong, Part 2

2010-06-29T23:14:00.001-07:00

We next set out to plunder the local markets. The foodstuffs were plentiful, and not just barrels full of hardtack!

After an afternoon of bargaining for necessary plunder (scabbards, anchors, peglegs and the like) in the rain, we sought refuge in another local tavern.

The fair lass contemplates her plunder

We ended up commandeering a novel creation that shivered my timbers something fierce. It's called a 綿綿冰, and is something akin to a giant block of frozen milk shaved into a shivering tower, drizzled with a sauce of your choice and garnished with star-shaped jellies and fruit-filled "pearls" of exploding flavor.

Coconut flavor, with sweetened condensed milk, mango and lychee jellies and orange and pineapple pearls. You think I'm pulling your chain here, me hearties, but I tell ye the truth.

The fair lass ordered taro flavor. Ah, I told ye these south seas were full of worthy plunder.

The next day being Sunday, I stopped at a local canteen to stock up on some food to eat. I'm afraid to say my adventurous spirit had flagged a bit and I wasn't feeling quite up to experimenting with Chinese food preparation in a hotel. But I found a British grocery store that had quite the booty - crusty bread, smoked cheese, and vegetables with hummus dip. Aye, hummus has come to the Far East. The culinary balance of the cosmos may be nearing perfection.

Cold, wet and bedraggled, we holed up in the hull to wait out the rest of the storm . . .

Culinary Adventures in Hong Kong, Part 1

2010-06-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

Culinary adventures have been few and far between of late. Not because life is any less adventurous, but because life is a lot busier and cameras less handy. Also, there are only so many times your friends will let you sing the praises of cong you bing before they run you out of town.

But do not despair, for I am pleased to bring you some new adventures. This weekend the fair lass Josephine and I went on a pillaging raid upon the high seas. In our sights? The opulent port city of Hong Kong.

Those scurvy British dogs sat pretty on this dainty little Pacific jewel for a hundred years, but now it is in our sights. The succulent booty is ours for the taking.

We got there on a rainy day, and carried all of our earthly goods in rucksacks slung across our weary shoulders. Climbing up the riggin' and riding trains and buses and all sorts of laborious efforts. We arrived at the hotel too early to check in, so we sought shelter in a humble tavern off the port bow. It was a Shanghai-style restaurant in the food court at the mall.

It had exceedingly cute fat Chinese babies painted all over the walls. Awww... I mean... avast!

I ordered the one thing on the menu I could find that had vegetables. I wasn't in a greasy meat mood and I also didn't want to spend a bajillionty dollars. Not spending a bajillionty dollars turned out to be one of the hardest feats to accomplish in Hong Kong. Aye, they love their gold, the scallawags. Well, the "noodles with vegetables" turned out to be a very bland soup. I remembered that Shanghai cuisine was supposed to be "light and fresh." Maybe it wasn't bland, maybe it was light and fresh.

So I ordered the guotier (potstickers). Because this is Hong Kong, birthplace of dim sum, land where wee babes suck on potstickers for pacifiers. They had to be good.

Instead, I got the worst potstickers man has ever known. I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just reporting the facts. These are the worst potstickers man has ever known. Look how thick the skin is - the skin is not supposed to be that thick. It was like bread. And on the bottom, where they had touched the pan, it was like a thick bread crust. And the inside was bland. I cursed the scurvy cur who gave it to me. Actually, I didn't, I just asked for some white rice.

The fair lass Josephine fared better. She ordered the fish, not realizing she was ordering The Fish. As in, THE fish. It was steamed, with a lightly pickled green vegetable diced on top, sliced fragrant mushrooms (which are very nice to taste, as compared to the dried ones which are still hard for me to eat while smiling politely) and some sort of ham. I helped her convey the poor fishy soul to its demise, and we were surprised how much of it we ate. Normally I'm used to having all sorts of fish scraps, but this whole fish was so soft it just kind of melted into little chopstick-fulls and pretty soon all that was left was a lonely little skeleton and a lonely little head. Sorry, ye pitiful little picaroon. I'll convey ye respects to the little Fish Missus and sprats you left at the bottom of the harbor.

Going out to lunch... ON JAPANESE TV!

2010-06-06T05:43:00.000-07:00

Demi took Hui Lian and I out to lunch a few days ago. It was a restaurant owned by one of our student's parents so she worked the connections to get us a discount. Because that's what you do when you're Chinese - you work your connections. It was amazing.

But let's not go for everyday run-of-the-mill amazing food narration. That gets old. Let's instead describe this meal like we would on JAPANESE TV!

(Imagine, if you will, a 10-second clip of a very grand European orchestral theme. Ride of the Valkyries, perhaps. Yes, that will do nicely. Now, play that intermittently throughout the narration - always the same 10 second clip. Ah, yes, that will set the mood. Thanks for your help - remember... I can only be so multimedia here.)

Now let's start out with our introduction:

TRADITIONAL TAIWANESE FOOD. IS IT DELICIOUS?

(Audience: collective gasp)

We're here at a beef noodles restaurant in Xinfeng, wondering if the Taiwanese food they sell is delicious.

(Ride of the Valkyries) IS IT DELICIOUS?

These are the little cold vegetable appetizers. Pickled papaya, wild greens salad with mayonnaise and peanut powder, pickled cucumbers and pao cai - pickled cabbage.

What do we think, hosts? Are they delicious? They're looking pretty delicious!

And this: this is a very special Taiwan specialty. (Because you know how Asians love our regional specialties!) This is what they call 「豆花」. It's a tofu custard in a sweet ginger broth. What do you think. DO YOU THINK IT WILL BE DELICIOUS?

(Ride of the Valkyries)

Female host: It looks pretty delicious.

Male host: I don't know. It might be OK, but I'm not quite sure it will be delicious. Sometimes you find things that look delicious but aren't.

Audience: EEEEEEeeeee?

Female host: Well, there's only one way to find out. (Tastes it. Her eyes get huge) DELICIOUS!

Male host: (Tastes) Pretty delicious

American guest eaters: TOTALLY DELICIOUS!

Demi and I give the douhua a try. Bright red letters flash on the screen: RISKY! RISKY! (Ride of the Valkyries)

But we're saved by the cute tofu icons that pop on screen with a charming little sound effect: "Boing!"

And guess what? IT'S DELICIOUS!

The last dish is the pièce de résistance. Mung bean (綠豆) noodles with beef. Cooked with some tender greens, bean sprouts and scallions. I'm not even exaggerating when I say it was....

DELICIOUS!

Green Onion Pancakes: a love story

2010-05-24T05:24:00.000-07:00

Divided by fate and longitude, these two lovers grew up in different worlds. She, a wild, independent spirit from the untamed American West; he, a silent, strong but tender warrior from the rugged shores of Formosa. But fate could not long separate two souls whose heartflames had been kindled in the same primordial love furnace.

And so it was that Montana Rose crossed an ocean, embarking on a new life for herself and destiny threw her in the path of Cong Zhua Bing, the passionate mute warrior of the Far East.

He met her that first fateful day, unknowing, untrusting. His two cups of flour, pinch of sea salt and a cup of warm water were about to be transformed into nothing he had ever dared believe in; all with the touch of her tender hands. And some sesame oil.

Kneaded into a tender dough and slathered in oil...

um... you know what? The trashy romance novel* narrative was really funny for about 30 seconds but I think I'm gonna just stop right there.

On that note, let's dice some green onions.

These aren't quite green onions; they're one of the other green onion cousins that hang out here in Asia but you know what? I think they're just dandy. Also, for this recipe there are too many of them. Even if they are your rugged soulmate you really only need so many.

This is my tiny little kitchen that I love.

I rolled the dough out into a 10" log

And sliced it into six pieces

Then roll each slice into a rectangle and brush it with sesame oil (not too much!) and sprinkle it with 1/6 of your green onions. Loverboy.

Roll it all up as tight as you can,

And then roll the whole tube into a spiral. Then you roll this out as flat as you can get it. If you have some measure of skill you won't bust open all the dough and get the green onions spilling out and the excess oil squirting all over your rolling surface and generally making your life hard. I, of course, have all sorts of measures of skill. No doubt.

I stacked them on plastic wrap to freeze four of them because I could only eat two for breakfast that day.

Fry them up in a little vegetable oil until they're lovely, tan and ready to do whatever you ask of them. At this point it's also quite lovely to fry an egg on top.

Drizzle them with some soy sauce paste (it's like soy sauce, but he means it.)

And all those years of waiting, yearning for your one true love will have been worth it as he takes you in his muscular arms and . . . shoves a piece of green onion pancake in your mouth.

* I do NOT read trashy romance novels. However, I had a friend in high school who did and I perfected the art of stealing them off her desk and reading the synopsis off the back in a very dramatic voice. There's quite the formula to success: name your heroine after a flower or a semi-precious gemstone, make her live somewhere exotic and forbidding (the Mojave desert, the wind-whipped Scottish highlands, the murky rivers of Abyssinia, Queens) and give her a wild independent temperament, never to be tamed. Also, her eyes should be the color of a semi-precious gemstone NOT the same as her first name. The guy has to be stoic and silent, unwilling to settle down until he is tamed by that one wild heart with the tender hands and topaz eyes of fire. Also, use the word rogue at least once. Magic! Heart-pounding literary magic!

Taiwan Birthday

2010-05-24T04:20:00.001-07:00

There are different love languages. Maybe you've heard of these - you know. Some people show their love with words of affirmation, some with quality time, some with physical affection. Some people show their love with giant mountains of food.

Taiwanese people and I speak the same language.

Clark and Claudie and I put together a birthday party for me this weekend. By "put together" I mean that they took me to Costco and refused to let me pay for things and then when I had cooked a giant mountain of food they went out and bought some more.

One of the tastiest mountains of food were the sweet potato fries. I used these Taiwanese di gua, sliced them into thin wedges, and did the fry twice trick. They came out amazing. Soft in the middle - crispy and even puffy on the outside - the outer layer puffed into a little skin. All it was was sweet potatoes, oil and a little salt.

Here's the beginnings of the food, including the fruits of Costco. In the distance you might notice little squares of wheat toast with chevre cheese. For the record, Asians are not particularly fond of chevre. And I now own like a kilogram of it.

Peking duck! Not even kidding (that's those two plates in the upper right). The sliced meat you roll up in the little flour skins with a spring of green onion - the rest of the duck is all diced up for you to eat.

Clark and Claudie had watched me dice the kinpira gobo and were just sure I was going to cut my fingers off. "Don't they sell it already sliced?" Probably somewhere. But then I would lose my street cred.

Here we are with the gloves that come with the karaage chicken. OK, it's not karaage, that's a Japanese thing, but whatever they called it sounded exactly like that and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I asked my boss the specifics today and she said it's also called Shui Tong Chicken. Shui Tong means "bucket." Because you . . . cook it in a bucket? The specifics are evading me here. But you pull it apart and eat it with your hands and dip it in a sauce with some spices. I think it was five spice. The smell of five spice might be one of the most magical things in the world.

Here we are, after not having been able to eat everything.

Jessica came later and brought me a cake with a mercifully ambiguous candle atop.

Lovely, fine people who speak my language fluently.

Banana-Cacao Heavy Mushipan Torte with Okinawan Black Sugar Glaze

2010-05-16T04:52:00.001-07:00

Doesn't it sound totally exquisite when I call it that? Actually what it was was something I made up because I bought too many bananas and they were ripening faster than I could use them. The title is just to be pretentious.

Friday morning I made crêpes for Clark and Claudie (with chopsticks! They don't have a whisk so I used chopsticks! I'm rather proud of myself) and brought some to school for Demi to repay all three of them for various kindnesses. Demi had taken me shopping the night before to buy the stuff and we were in downtown Zhubei where there is a giant Carrefour grocery store. Imagine a huge, extravagant grocery store, as big or bigger as any you'll find in America, but this one is full of Asian food. I know. Be still my soul, right? Anyway - the problem with the Carrefour is that they had all kinds of delicious fresh Taiwanese fruit, but it was all in very large quantities. But I bought the bananas thinking "I can eat a lot of bananas, right?" Well, I can, but they were sneaky and had progeny overnight when I wasn't looking.

I also bought three Ghana chocolate bars.

The Japanese don't mess around with their candy. It's not just dark chocolate, it's black chocolate. This makes me exceedingly happy. Finding Japanese chocolate in Taiwan also makes me exceedingly happy. So far, I haven't seen as much Taiwanese candy as I have imported stuff from Japan, but I see no reason to complain about this.

Anyway, this side note is getting way too long. Suffice it to say that I ended up with leftover melted chocolate in a double boiler I had cobbled together and knew I had to wash before Clark and Claudie got home from Gaoxiong this evening, and that and the three remaining bananas were pricking at my heart.

"Use me! Be frugal! Don't be a food waster! Where are your principles?" I hate it when your food talks to you.

So, the leftover chocolate was probably one bar's worth, and I had one remaining bar in the fridge, so two bars of chocolate. How big are those bars? 75 grams? OK, you do the math. So I melted them again and added the three bananas, mashed up but still with some big chunks. I then stirred in two eggs.

Then, remember how we don't have ovens here? So I decided to make a mushipan. Mushipan means "steamed bread," but it sounds really pretentious if I don't translate it. You can cook cakes with steam too. They're lovely and moist. This was going to be a lovely moist steamed cake. Except remember how no one bakes here? So I scoured the kitchen and didn't find a trace of baking powder or baking soda. (Do you know the difference between baking powder and baking soda? Baking powder is 25% baking soda, 25% cream of tartar and 50% corn starch. The Baking soda is a base and the cream of tartar is an acid and the corn starch is to keep them from reacting with each other until they get wet. If you use baking soda, then you should add something acidic. The fruit would have probably been sufficient. OK, that's your kitchen lesson for the day.) So that's why this became a heavy mushipan torte - because I didn't have any leavening, so I pretended the denseness was on purpose. Like a cooked custard, sort of. See how being gourmet works? You just make up titles for your failures.

Anyway, I used this little bowl - hopefully you can tell the scale by looking at this dainty little stick of New Zealand butter next to it.

I then added some flour but I forgot to take a picture of how much. Maybe... 2 cups? At the most. Somewhere between 1 and 2 cups. Until it's this consistency:

(I had buttered the little bowl but it turned out to be a little hard to get out, so if I were doing it again I would butter and flour it.) Then I put it on this rack in the wok with water up to right below the rack. Then I turned it on to as low as the stoves here go, which isn't very low. I put the lid on it and let it boil its little heart out.

I added some more water a couple times and I cooked it for probably 20 minutes total - until I stuck a fork in its firm little belly and it came out clean.

This is what the finished cake looked like:

I was actually surprised at how pretty it looked when I took it out.

The chocolate and bananas were all the sweetening I added, and it was the subtle sweet that Asians (and I) love, but I decided it could use just a tad more sweetness. Which is where I thought of the Okinawan Black Sugar glaze.

I can't figure out what's the difference between black sugar and our brown sugar except that black sugar is probably more molassesy - more raw. I wonder if you can get anything like it in the States. It's exquisite.

So I just took this much black sugar and quickly melted it in the bottom of a saucepan:

I added a little pat of butter and a splash of milk, but you gotta work really fast, just until the sugar is dissolved. It actually made a little crunchy hunk of candy on the back of the spoon.

It was just enough to pour on the top of the little cake. Lovely! And then Demi came and picked me up and took me to Zhang Jiemei's house where she cooked unearthly Chinese food for dinner and the three of us sat around and chatted while their little boys played in the living room. The two of them told me stories of boyfriends and marriage and both told me how to decide who to marry but they disagreed with each other. And at the end we ate a little slice of Banana-Cacao Heavy Mushipan Torte with Okinawan Black Sugar Glaze and they really liked it. A lovely end to a lovely Sabbath day.

Adventures in Processed Food

2010-05-12T04:51:00.001-07:00

I'm a very healthy eater. Right? Yes. I'm very 養身, which is a word that Clark and Claudie taught me on the way to school yesterday when I was asking them about whether or not Taiwanese people eat whole wheat bread. They told me that 養身 people do, and then explained what that meant, and then asked how we say that in English and the closest I could come up with was "health nut." I told them that I like to be pretty 養身 myself. And then I went shopping when I got home that afternoon and decided that it was time to try all of the weird processed food I could find.

(How do you say "hypocrite" in Chinese?)

Here are the fruits of my discovery so far:

"Seaweed sushi" flavored Lay's. Yes!

I bought these because I really had to. "Lonely God potato twists." I mean, I at least wanted to know how lonely gods eat. I guess they graduated from angel food cake.

Let me tell you, though, if I'm ever a god I hope I have lots of friends because being a lonely god is disgusting!

I bought these not because they were extremely novel, but because their name was so awesome. "Qi duo-" sounds like "Cheeto," but it also means "really weird." I actually like how they taste, though; they're like American Cheetos with half the flavor.

I bought these next to the coughdrops. They're gummies, covered in crystally sugar, but they taste kind of minty... not like mint, more like ginseng, but with something that makes your mouth cold like mint. Would you like to know why mint makes your mouth feel cold? I thought so.

And some chewy fruit candies (yay for Asia and chewy fruit candies!) that are so sour they make your face cute.

Now this, my friends, is what we call "Don't go shopping if you're illiterate." Or at least hold out for items whose contents are clearly illustrated on the label. Because you think since you're in the candy section you're buying milk candy (huzzah for milk candy!) but instead you come home with calcium tablets. Oh well. I could probably use the calcium anyway. Sometimes I suck on them to remind myself of the ability of my mouth detect really weird tastes.

Truth in labeling... what do we think of this entry? If it contained actual offal, I actually wouldn't be all that surprised. (Let's just say one thing about Taiwanesse cuisine: It's a good thing I have 13 year olds who teach me the meaning of words like 大腸 before I go out to get lunch at the side of the road.) Turns out it only contains too-sweet chocolate, something crispy and the ubiquitous peanut cream.

OK, I'm sorry for ruining the nice Whole Foods Karma you had swirling around you. Let's take you back to some nice, wholesome whole foods to re-center your qi.

"We use everything but the cluck!"

And we'll cap things off with my dinner tonight, which was created from things I had in the fridge. Things I had in the fridge included day-old rice, green onions, eggs and Hokkaido Cream Stew roux. (I rejoice in Japanese things and I buy them out of sheer nostalgia)

I scrambled the egg, added a little salt and fried it in the bottom of the wok, and when it was done and in big pieces (I'm not so into eating the mealy or wet eggs that some people enjoy) I threw in the big-chopped green onions. When they had cooked a little, I added the rice and then some water and a cube of the cream stew roux. It turned out fantastic!

I accompanied it with a warm mug of bee pollen, which will either kill me or cure me (more on that another time), and a weird fruit that is best described as a very small honeydew melon. Except not sweet enough. But it's OK, baby, you're sweet enough.

Zai jiggity jian!

Sunday Night Outing and a Dangerous New Degree of Freedom

2010-05-05T04:33:00.000-07:00

I'm starting to get a little better at figuring out what's going on around me. And I feel like my communication skills are getting better all the time. I haven't, for instance, accidentally used the word wife when I meant to say grandmother in at least 48 hours.

My host family, Clark and Claudie, are kind of fantastic. They teach me all sorts of handy vocabulary, like the name for the hussies who sell addictive palm nuts out by the highway. They also keep buying me food, which I'm trying to put a stop to. They can't let me live in their house for free for four months and also buy me food all the time. Even if it is in a particularly delicious effort to feed me the weirdest creature in the sea.

Sunday night I was relaxing at home when Claudie asked me if I'd like to go walk around. Here, let me simulate what a conversation sounds like to me in Chinese:

"Hey Anneke, we 要情班份過含walk around內焰狗椒mountain beautiful偶氣象比來you think?"

So I say "Sure! OK!" and we get in the car and we drive somewhere and I know there will be some degree of walking around at some point.

Well, this time where they drove me was out to Neiwan, which is indeed beautiful and does allow ample opportunity for one to walk around.

Here are Clark and Claudie, being their adorable selves.

And here, for size comparisons, is Claudie next to a giant American. (drawn to scale)

Well, it turns out that this place we were walking around was indeed very mountain beautiful but wasn't so much a stroll through the woods as it was a giant market for tourists. I was feeling kind of self-conscious since it was a Sunday and I was trying to figure out how to keep the Sabbath and not offend my hosts at the same time.

It was all of about 30 seconds before Claudie bought me something to eat.

I thanked her graciously and rehearsed ways to fend off the next purchase. We saw a stand with steamed buns for sale. "Anneke! You want to eat a steamed bun?"

"Actually," I said to her, trying to be discreet and speak the right language all at the same time, "I don't like to buy things on Sundays."

"Why?!"

"It's what my church believes. We don't go shopping on Sundays, because we don't want to make people work."

"Interesting," she said, thrusting a steamed bun in my hand. She spent the next 20 minutes coming up with novel ways to overcome this inconvenience.

"Hey Anneke! I know! See, these people who work here are Taiwanese, and they would have been here anyway. So you're not making them work."

"Yeah..." how on earth do you say "it's the principle of the thing" in Chinese?

"Hey Anneke! I know! See, I'm Taiwanese, and so if I buy the things instead of you, no problem!"

She is such a sweetheart. I tried to formulate some more sentences but I don't know if any of them worked. I had to watch myself from then on out. I saw a takoyaki stand - those beloved octopus pastries from Japan and expressed my delight at seeing something familiar. "You want me to buy it?" Claudie whispered surreptitiously.

Naiwan was totally beautiful. The hillsides here look like one giant, green, lush allergy attack just waiting to storm through my sinuses. Good luck so far, though...

Which brings us to our next culinary adventure, which we entitle: Uh Oh! We Know How to Walk to the Grocery Store!

After work yesterday we decided that Hui Lian (who is staying with a family in Xi Feng) should come play at my house. So we got our moms to sign permission notes and cleared it with the bus driver and she rode home on my bus after school. It was so liberating that I forgot that I am a fully functional adult.

We ventured out of my house down toward the area where I thought that one grocery store we saw might be and eventually we found it! Which lays the foundation for me cooking a lot more of my own things and gradually overcoming the problem of constantly having food bought for me. Plus, if I went to the grocery store surreptitiously on foot, without asking anyone to drive me, there wouldn't be anyone to demand that they pay for my groceries. Mua ha ha!

So Hui Lian and I began our Grand Adventure.

Of course they sell Ke Kou Ke Le here - this is civilized society.

Everyone says good good eat! The funny thing is, this makes perfect sense in Chinese.

We got some rice (which is harder to pick out than I anticipated) and a lot of vegetables and a few too many items that I got all excited about because they have them in Japan. Like chewy milk candy. Be still my soul!

We went home and made some Japanese curry. And I made Hui Lian eat some of the durian. Oh! I forgot to report on the durian! Wish I had some photos. Bottom line is: not too bad. I don't love it and I don't hate it, but I maybe actually like it. We bought it as already in the little internal segments, each wrapped in their own stink-proof plastic liner, and Claudie just threw it all in the freezer when we got home and then sat me down and fed it to me one night promising it was "just like ice cream." It kind of was. I don't know that I'd enjoy the texture unfrozen - I can't imagine what it would be like. The smell was actually kind of fun - it smelled like an Asian grocery store - and the taste was very sweet and strong but no more offensive than an overripe banana. It had a little of that alcoholy tang that an overripe banana has too - maybe that's just the taste of strong fruit. Anyway, nothing too drastic. Hui Lian agreed, though she was a little more dubious about it than I was.

But we fed her Japanese curry to cover up the durian aftertaste and I have a gigantic pot of leftover Japanese curry and this is the country, remember, where no one eats cold food or leftovers and so they don't even have microwaves (I think there's a custom official somewhere saying "we don't need to stinkin' microwaves") so I enjoyed the experience of cold leftovers for lunch today which really, honestly, wasn't too bad. And that last sentence was way longer than it needed to be so I think it's time for me to go to bed. Until next time, brave friends. And remind me to tell you about my student named Egg.

If you're gonna be friends with me, you're gonna get fat

2010-05-01T01:56:00.001-07:00

I started out this morning without any plans but I ended up with a new friend and a stomach filled to bursting. My host family had to go to work this morning (we have school on Saturday mornings too?) and I was planning to just hang out until they got back and just play it by ear. I ate my leftover salty fish and vegetables for breakfast and I had started some rice before I found out I'd be eating alone so I had to eat it all because I didn't know the protocol on leaving leftover rice. But it's OK to overeat a little for breakfast, right? Because I have the rest of the day to work it off and I just won't eat very much else.

This is when my new friend called. Her English name is Demi, and she teaches at the same school I'll be at and is also a church member. Today her kids were visiting their grandparents and so she had the whole day to take me out and do things. When I got in the car she warned, "Are you hungry? If you're gonna be friends with me, you're gonna get fat." I had no idea.

Our first stop was the local weekly market. It was right next to this Buddhist temple and she showed me around inside - very beautiful, very ornate. Very interesting mix of old painted art and flashing lightbulb art, all combined to pay tribute to a host of local gods.

The market was packed with people, all very friendly, all making comments on how white I am. Almost everyone gives out samples, which makes it kind of like when you go have Saturday lunch at Costco because you're a poor college student.

I wanted to get more pictures but most of the time it was just too crowded. These concoctions are all vegetarian things and pickled and preserved foods sold by a friendly Buddhist guy. I have this soft spot in my heart for religious vegetarians.

Among the other things we ate were a steamed bun thing with mochi on the outside and a glass of fresh sugar cane juice that Demi bought me - so much for my no sugar policy. If my no-sugar policy doesn't include fruit, though, where does sugar cane juice fall? I'll have to think that one over a little more.

I bought some absolutely delicious pineapple and that's one of the words I learned today - feng li. I also bought a whole kilogram of a weird fruit I'd never known existed. It's lovely - kind of like a pear and a watermelon had a baby. Let's see if Wikipedia can help me out - ah. Here it is. I didn't mean to buy a whole kilogram though. Guess I'll be eating fruit for the next few days.

Then we went into Xin Zhu, the "big town," which is known as the "Windy City." Sure enough, everyone was flying kites, and they were selling them at a little booth.

The main attraction, though, was the big fish market, which was the freshest fish market I've ever been to. Most everything was still alive. The shrimp spit at you every once in a while when you try to take their picture.

These fish heads were enormous - I tried to get the scale of them in there. Each one is about the size of a basketball.

On our way out, Demi bought me a weird dessert from a little cart. From what I could deduce from the sign, this is the lucky swastika peanut and orchid cart. Mmm.

You know what, though? It was absolutely amazing. First, you get two scoops of ice cream - you can choose from passion fruit, strawberry and taro. Then they shave this giant block of peanut brittle onto it. Then they add in a sprig of fresh cilantro. Then they wrap it in some sort of a rice flour skin. Umm.... yum. "Aren't Chinese people great?" Demi asked. "We think of putting the weirdest things together." Yes. Yes, and this is why I love you.

Luckily, we went hiking next, which was just lovely. They call it "climbing a mountain," but mostly it's winding your way up a gently sloping trail with carefully manicured flowers and a couch made out of plants.

Afterwards, Demi asked, "Are you hungy?"

"No, not really."

"Ok, I'll take you to my aunt's restaurant."

She is right. We're going to be friends. And I'm gonna get fat.

Culinary adventures in an ACTUAL Chinese house

2010-04-30T01:11:00.000-07:00

This blog is taking a new adventure, along with me, as I spend the summer in the Republic of China. I've got an internship teaching English at Zhong Xin High School and I'm ready and willing to tackle whatever that involves. Especially if that involves crazy Chinese food.

OK, where to begin? Um....

Just kidding. That was the computer down in the common room of the apartment building - I tried it but it was exceedingly slow. The keyboard isn't actually all that weird if you know how to set it up to type in English. Luckily, though, I found a rogue wifi signal in my bedroom and I'm blogging in style on my laptop. Ok, so, from the top:

I spent yesterday and/or the day before flying on big machines through time zones and I can say I've never been more glad to get out of an airplane in my life.

We got in at 9:00 at night local time and met our boss and our host families, who had been waiting for us for about an hour and a half. It was so nice to see them, though, and they were so exceedingly hospitable. I'm staying with a couple who teach math at the same school I'll be teaching in and they brought me home last night after a quick stop at the grocery store.

Let me just say quickly: any anticipation I might have had about Taiwan was relieved as soon as I realized that their grocery stores are every bit as magical as grocery stores in Japan. I don't know what it is about grocery stores that soothes my soul, or why it should be this way, or whether I should be looking into getting some professional help, but once I realized that I was going to be able to buy wonderful foods that made me happy, I was just fine.

We bought just a couple things to tide me over until the weekend. They asked me what I liked and I said fruits and vegetables so that's what we got. The most exciting thing, though, is that we bought some durian - something I've always wanted to try just because it's weird. The husband doesn't like it but the wife does and she asked if I was brave enough to try it and I said "you cannot scare me with food." (Actually, I don't know what I said. It was late and I was tired and I was supposedly speaking Chinese.) So the durian awaits in the freezer and I shall report on it when I get the chance.

They showed me around the 7th floor apartment where I'm staying and explained several times how to work everything, double checking for understanding where needed. I was happy to find that I was understanding most of what was going on, but I am still kind of vastly unable to communicate, leading to some rather funny interchanges.

"You brought your own ricemaker?"

"Oh, wait, no," I corrected sleepily. "But I have used one before and I know how to use it."

This is the view from my 7th-floor balcony. I like the gardeny terrace stuff going on in our building's courtyard.

This morning I woke up at 6am, as is my body's impeccable talent to do, and tried to fall back asleep but succeeded mostly in just resting until about 8. The family was gone to work by then and I had the morning to explore. I went running on the apartment building's treadmill (yessss!) and then took my sweet little time getting ready and dressed and heading out to find my way around the neighborhood.

When we drove through town last night I had been thinking "Wow, this is just like Japan!"

The omnipresent 7-11s and even a Family Mart seemed to confirm it for me...

However, upon venturing out this morning I noticed one significant difference: Japan has sidewalks.

It's kind of nice. In spots. When you can fit between the parked cars and oncoming traffic.

Our apartment building is rather nice and has this commons room downstairs with a couple of computers, a whole shelf full of books I can't read, a giant movie screen and, best of all, it's festively decked out for Christmas!

The wastebasket is very glad.

The neighbors probably wasted no time in deciding that I'm totally nuts. I was trying to be discreet but the minute I go to take a picture of the wastebasket someone's out for a smoke break and stares straight at me.

I like this statue in our building's courtyard. I like to call it "The Joy of Childhood: or, Scared By a Dog."

It's a very nice place, actually, and I don't mind spending most of the day today inside. First thing when I got back I had to try the fruits of my trip to 7-11

"They have Calpis Water! Just like Japan! Oh joy and rapture, it's just like Japan!"

I tasted it to discover it is not, in fact, just like Japan. It's like Japan with a sour yogurt taste. I'm just going to go ahead and assume that was intentional.

And this wouldn't be a blog of culinary adventures if I didn't include my first culinary adventure - I made myself a stir fry and some fish. Maybe the fish here comes pre-salted like it does in Japan? Or maybe I was out of it and added way more salt than it needed. Anyway - salty fish. Oh, well. It wouldn't be an adventure without the occasional salty fish.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it....

2010-04-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

Agent 1275, we have disturbing reports coming in from our operatives. We need a good man to go in and confirm for us. We're hearing that . . . and these are just allegations, mind you, but we are hearing that the best Chinese food in the world might actually be found at a location in Sandy, Utah, in the United States. While this threatens the cultural supremacy of the most serene People's Republic of China, we can take comfort in the fact that it may just be more capitalist lies.

But we do need you to get in and on the ground and see what you can find.

Location: Szechuan Gardens, Sandy, Utah
Allegations: producing food better than that in the homeland
Recommendations: see if you can't get them to start serving crab rangoon. If worse comes to worse, see if you can't get them to sell the location to the P.F. Chang's franchise.

Looks like we've got some cow guts here. Affirmative. Digestive tract tissue of a ruminant, served in the classic Sichuan style. So spicy it'll fuse to your own digestive tract, but unnervingly delicious in spite of everything you know.

Well, we can take some comfort in the fact that they're serving that American staple, Wonton Soup. However, it still manages to be tasty in a way that threatens to undermine everything we hold sacred.

Oh no - they didn't break out the eggplant? They did. We've been trying to keep the Americans from discovering that eggplant are actually delicious. We've been succeeding on most fronts; keeping the vegetable offerings in most American restaurants to a minimum. We wouldn't want them to realize the true power of this cuisine, not with the instability of our plutonium supply. We just don't have than many secret weapons left.

What is that unearthly glow? It's, like, a ring of beneficent light emanating from that dish of fish fillet with pickles. Fortunately, Americans might still be dissuaded by the name - they might hesitate to order something that sounds like it's at all related to the horrors of the North countries. Let's keep them in the dark as long as we can - we must not under any circumstances let them know that Suan Cai Yu Pian is actually the current holder of the Mandate of Heaven.

Walnut shrimp . . . quick! Convince them it's a Utah salad creation! Stick it next to a jar of Miracle Whip. Perhaps they'll look the other way.

Duck? Oh no. They have our duck- looks like we've got the visuals to confirm it.

Look at what they've done - they're definitely using this in an unauthorized manner. They're consuming it all. We've got to get our troops in there somehow, to stop the carnage.

Not the . . . no! Not the cellophane noodles! Whatever you do?

How did they get their hands on these state secrets?

They've been reduced to absurdity. They're just reveling, aren't they? They laugh at their triumph!

This calls for some serious counterintelligence. I'm not sure what we can do, Agent 1275, but we need a plan. We've got to get this out of the hands of the Americans. Next thing we know they'll be training their troops on this stuff. Get in there, and get in there fast.

Chinese Dinner for 1.3 Billion

2010-04-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

Back when I lived in the French house, I had a calling. It was a very special calling. I was the ward dinner chairman. I moved out after a couple months because they didn't have a spot for me in the fall and while I missed everyone dearly I had a little spot in my heart that was rejoicing because: ward dinner chairman is the hardest calling ever.

Once a month, you get to coordinate a meal for 150 people. Now, I like meals, and I like people, and I probably even like all 150 of these people but seriously. I had to sleep for 3 days straight just to recover every time.

Now that I live in the Chinese house I am on the beneficiary end of ward dinner - I show up to eat and someone else has done all the hard work.

This month, though, we had a very special ward dinner. The best ward dinner of all: Chinese ward dinner. And I volunteered to be the Chinese food consultant. (Do you think I could be a professional Chinese food consultant? If so, actually, I'm dropping out of college right now.) And so the planning and the coordination of the shopping and the coordination of the cooking was under my supervision. That's right: plan Chinese dinner for 1.3 billion people.

So here we go!

First fact: Chinese people don't use recipes. You just buy food and you cook it. I think you all really need to try cooking like this. It may freak you out a little bit; you may feel like in that first week of advanced figure drawing when they had you a 16 x 20 sheet of paper and a black permanent marker and say: Here! Make art! But at the end of the semester, how do you feel? Like the master of the marks-a-lot, that's how you feel. So if you want to be a Chinese cook, you need to stop asking for recipes. Sooner rather than later.

Second fact: This involves being able to estimate quantities. The upside, though, is that you go to the store, see what's on sale, and buy it. And then you just cook it. And life is totally fine. When you're cooking for 1.3 billion people this is a little tougher but you manage. You go to Macey's and you tell your shopping mates: "Ok, we usually get about 3 pounds of chicken for 10 people so... um... go get 45 pounds of chicken." and "Hey, will you go grab 15 dozen eggs and meet me back here?" and "Well, is that all the green onions they have? Ok, put them all in bags." It's actually pretty exciting.

Third fact: Chinese people have two things they eat: fan and cai. Fan is rice, or in some regions noodles or sometimes steamed bread. Cai means "vegetables" but it also means "dishes." Chinese people eat more vegetables in one sitting than the average American 8-year-old has had in his entire life. This is why Chinese people live until they're 120. Meat dishes are also "cai" but it takes a back seat. When you're planning a meal, you don't have a main dish and a side dish and a salad; you have fan and cai. How many cai? Well, usually 2 or 3. Or like 10 if you're being hospitable. But the nice thing is you just cook a lot of cai and you serve it family style and you don't have to worry about portions and sizes and setting the table. It's a beautiful way to eat. Hey - 1.3 billion people can't be wrong.

So here we go - we planned 3 dishes, and ate tangerines for dessert. We split our cooking teams up into three groups, one of which I supervised. I wish I had more photos, but really, it was all I could do to keep my hands attached to my body.

First dish: Gong Bao Ji

Gong Bao Ji is Kung Pao Chicken, but doesn't it sound cooler when you call it Gong Bao Ji? It was named after a government official from the Qing dynasty who really liked it or something, but that made it dangerous to talk about during the Cultural Revolution and it was outlawed in mainland China until the 1980's. For real. This is how you live on the edge, friends, you eat politically scandalous chicken.

This is my chicken chopping crew. We chopped chicken and garlic and ginger and green onions for two and a half hours. No, really. 1.3 billion people take a long time to chop for. These guys were such good sports.

Some of the chopping chaos. Life was complicated by the fact that we were working with communist knives.

This was 1/4 of the peanuts we used. I soaked them in water the night before - they were just raw peanuts because that's what was cost effective. I think I bought 8 bags of raw peanuts. I think roasted would have been tastier

Here's how you make the Gong Bao Ji: Stir fry chopped garlic, fresh ginger, green onions and red chiles (I just got the big dried bags from the Mexican aisle). Add chicken and peanuts. Add soy sauce and/or salt and sugar until you like it. Throw some sesame oil in at the very end. It can range from kind of spicy to really dang spicy depending on how well you divide up huge bags of Mexican chiles between 8 woks.

Second dish: Chao Cai

I put my roommate Piao Liang in charge of the Chao Cai. Chao Cai means stir fried vegetables. It is the ultimate in not using a recipe. You know what you do? You buy some vegetables, you chop them well, and you stir fry them. I bought red peppers, purple cabbage and bok choy because they were pretty and on sale. She seasoned them with ginger, rice vinegar and salt and sugar. They came out... dang amazing.

Third dish: Jidan Chao Fanqie

Don't the names of these dishes sound awesome? Just say it, and the room fills with mystique. Unless, of course, you speak Chinese and you know that the name of this dish means "eggs fried with tomatoes."

Someone waiting in line at dinner asked "is this even Chinese?" The funny thing is, this was the most authentic dish there. Every Chinese person I've ever known has, at one point, cooked me eggs fried with tomatoes. Sounds really boring - it's actually overwhelmingly delicious.

What do you do? You whip up eggs (15 dozen eggs in this case - usually I do 10 eggs to 5 tomatoes to 1 bunch of green onions), stir in some salt, and stir fry them in oil like scrambled eggs. Set them aside, and stir fry some chopped tomatoes. Add sugar and salt to the tomatoes and maybe some sesame oil at the very end. Throw in the eggs, the chopped green onions and fry it together just for like 30 seconds. Then, you enjoy the beauty of it.

So here we are - dinner for 1.3 billion people (this is only one half of the serving tables). It actually went of very smoothly - for once we actually had dinner ready when it was supposed to start and apart from having not quite enough rice (we had bought one 20-pound bag, which said it was 201 servings but we could have eaten more) everything was exactly enough.

Here's a lovely plate

And my lovely co-chief Piao Liang. And my post traumatic hair disorder:

And some of the guys enjoying themselves. They have the most important job, which is eating everything.

I was so glad it went well - I appreciated my hard-working ~~slaves~~ comrades. We did it! We fed the masses!

Koko Chan's First Artichoke

2010-04-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

My little friend Yoyo is one of those people you'll never forget. You know how Japanese women are just sweet, timid, blushing little flowers who never utter a disharmonious note? Yes. Yoyo is absolutely none of the above.

She and I were mission companions. We shared all sorts of tender moments. We'd be walking down the street in a little town in Shizuoka Ken and the public announce system would start informing us that a little old lady had gone missing. Yoyo would pause, grab my arm dramatically and start humming the theme to X-Files. Or there was the time that she was rather upset at a decision our zone leader had made, incensed that such a young American boy thought he knew best. She called him and when he answered, she said in very dramatic accented English: "When you were 12, I LIVED BY MYSELF." And then promptly hung up.

She is probably one of my favorite people in the world. And last fall, she made the world that much better: she brought Koko Chan into it. Koko Chan is the fattest little half Japanese baby I've ever seen, and utterly adorable. I don't get to see them nearly often enough so I invited them over to dinner a couple weeks ago.

Koko Chan surveys my kitchen table, not sure if this is worth her time or not

Usually when I see them we eat Asian food of some sort. Yoyo actually taught me how to cook like a Japanese grandmother, for which I will be eternally grateful, but this time I felt like mixing it up and cooking something a little more "exotic." So let's go with France.

I got some frozen tilapia fillets - tilapia is the poor pescavore's friend. I thawed them out, patted them dry, and battered them in a flour, egg & salt mixture. I then did what France would have me do - sautéed them gently in butter and garlic. I'm pretty sure my soul was sautéed in butter and garlic at one point. If not, I'll have to figure out how to get that done.

I also boiled some red potatoes and made a simple white sauce to which I added Brie cheese. Brie cheese! It covereth a multitude of sins.

Finally, I got a couple lovely artichokes at Sunflower Market and steamed them. I don't even have a proper steaming pot, but I just used a big pot with a few inches of water in the bottom and boiled them for about 40 minutes. Turned out perfect.

"I don't know what you guys like on your artichokes," I said to Yoyo's husband Timmy. "My mom always liked to make a mustard sauce but sometimes I just eat them in butter."

"On our what?"

"Artichokes. How do you like them?"

"How do you even eat them?"

I had realized that maybe this was Koko Chan's first artichoke - I wasn't too surprised to find out that it was Yoyo's as well. Made sense... I don't think I'd ever seen an artichoke in Japan, come to think of it. But Timmy? Are there Americans who don't eat artichokes? Apparently there are. Well, I was glad to oblige the entire family.

Yoyo took a bit to warm up to the idea that it was an edible object. I showed her with the outermost leaves how you scrape the meat off the very base with your teeth.

"There's almost nothing there."

"It gets better."

"Do you ever get full? Or is this just a way to make you feel like you're eating. Maybe a very good diet."

"You're dipping it in butter. Pretty sure it's not going to be a very good diet."

"American diet!"

As they got closer and closer to the heart they got more and more excited. Koko Chan even perked up a little bit. She found that gnawing on the leaves was a wonderful way to pass the time, and Yoyo agreed. "Can we take these home? She can just chew on them all day and keep herself entertained."

There was much rejoicing when we finally got to the hearts. "It's full of hair!" Yoyo cried incredulously.

"It looks like Koko's hair," said Timmy, smoothing his daughter's wild locks. Koko almost has Japanese baby hair - the kind that grows straight up - but its American tips weigh it down slightly at the ends, creating a lovely wave-like crest that adorns the top of her head.

We finally got to the hearts and ate them triumphantly, covered in butter - "American diet!" and enjoyed ourselves all around.

Yoyo, with her impeccable Japanese demeanor, posed demurely for a family photo:

Koko Chan's first artichoke, 2010

Emotional Validation Through Pie

2010-03-24T21:19:00.000-07:00

He Never Called Back Pie

I've never participated in Pi Day festivities before, but it was social pressure to cook something delicious so of course my pride made me participate. Unfortunately, my pride forgot to go shopping on Saturday so there we were, Sunday afternoon, staring at a frozen pâte brisée with looks of consternation on our faces.

"I have all of the ingredients we would need for a pecan pie except for the pecans," I told Hui Lian.

"Well, we'll just add something else," she suggested.

"What are our assets?"

"I have oatmeal and apples."

"Deal."

I fished out my famous family pecan pie recipe and got to work.

This is the point in the narrative where the protagonist's fatal flaw leads to a train of events that will eventually end in catastrophe. What is my fatal flaw? We talked about this already - pride. Pride is my weakness. And your faith in your friends is yours!

So, right at the point in the pie where I was supposed to add a cup of corn syrup, I got all prideful and decided "High fructose corn syrup is the devil. Natural things that come from the earth are wonderful. Therefore, I shall replace half of this corn syrup with something benevolent. Like molasses."

Let's just cut to the chase and deliver the moral of the story: never add a half cup of molasses to a pie.

It was pretty, though! Also, there were enough people at the party that none of them knew who brought the nasty apple pie. Mwa ha ha ha ha!

The success in this story, however, lies, in the veracity which we unwittingly bestowed on the pie's title. We had given the pie a title, see, in honor of Hui Lian's recent life events. (I have plenty of anecdotes my own as well, of course, to lend credence to the phenomenon.) We had named it "He Never Called Back Pie." And oh, how satisfying! You cut yourself a beautiful, appetizing piece of "He Never Called Back Pie," with its lovely, fluted flaky crust and you settle down to eat it when you realize - "Bitter. Dark. It's bitter and dark. It got my hopes up and then it didn't follow through." And then you cry into your pillow.

You know who you are.

Keep Talkin' That Mess, That's Fine, But Could You Walk and Talk at the Same Time Pie

I repented for He Never Called Back Pie, and so it was with full confidence a week later that I tackled a simple tarte au chocolat in the French tradition. And I am happy to inform you that this story will have a much happier ending than the last one.

The recipe I found called for a pre-baked crust (bake it for 15 minutes with dry beans in the bottom to keep it from bubbling. And to lend a pleasant Chinese Checkers look to the bottom of your crust. And then take out the beans and bake it for five minutes more and take it out.), a cup and a quarter of heavy whipping cream, two eggs, some vanilla, and eight ounces of dark chocolate.

I only had half of a Newman's Own organic chocolate bar because I accidentally ate the rest, and it was nowhere near eight ounces, so I made up for it with a lot of cocoa and a little bit of brown sugar and it came out just fine.

Heat the cream until it begins to bubble, and mix in the chocolate/cocoa/brown sugar and vanilla. In a separate bowl whip the eggs, and add just a little of the hot cream to temper them. Then whisk it all together, pour it in the crust, and bake it at 350 for 18 minutes or a few more until it's solid in the middle.

And it's really dang beautiful, and everyone eats it and there is a general feeling of love all around. Because those scoundrels who treated you bad? You kicked them to the curb.

Dancing, Flapping and Indian Mystique

2010-03-21T23:09:00.000-07:00

You know what I love and hate about Provo? Endlessly tempting social events. On the one hand, you're totally broke and you have way more homework to do than time to do it. On the other hand, they're putting on a ladies' choice dance and the theme is THE GREAT GATSBY and they're going to have a LIVE SWING BAND. What are you even supposed to do? Protest? Pretend like it's even a choice?

Sigh. No, the only choice is to get out all those Indian spices you bought at Many Lands and call up the most talented dancers you know before the other girls ask them because if you're the one responsible for once for making the casual date night into an Epic Night to Remember, the reputation of the entire female gender is on the line and you're gonna do it right.

The night was kind of a frantic hustle to get everything done; a frantic hustle that also involved me having to put eyeliner places I think no eyeliner has boldly gone before, so I didn't get a lot of pictures taken during the fracas. So here's a quick tour through the endeavor.

I almost hate to admit this but it will be evident soon enough. I . . . um, don't know how to make Indian food. I know, I know, the entire female gender's reputation is on the line; this is my one chance; I'm inviting boys I don't even know so I should probably stick with something surefire so I don't send them running out the door. But it was my pride, friends, my pride.

My poor, dead little pride.

First off: chana masala. Lovely, wonderful. Delicious - rave reviews. You know why? Because I followed a recipe.

Secondly: my efforts at re-inventing Tandoori Chicken. Things I learned: yes, bamboo skewers and bread pans are an acceptable way to roast meat. Also: no, you cannot just cover chicken in a bunch of spices and roast it. There is such a thing as sending your date and your roommates' dates home with gastric ulcers and they're gonna be too dang polite to say anything about it.

The chappati were pretty good. I had even made my own ghee, which ended up being the gift that keeps on giving (see upcoming episodes). The secret is chappati flour - it makes everything better. Even cookies when you run out of white flour. Don't tell anyone!

Yeah... you know what? I don't actually know how to make Indian food.

But it's ok because we look fabulous! And our dates were still alive an hour or two after we ate, which is a good sign, and they even managed to dance, which is even better, and it ended up being a lovely evening despite the fact that I tried to ply everyone with exotic food that I don't actually know anything about. So, um, so much for the Indian Mystique but hooray for costume dances!

Ash Wednesday

2010-03-13T17:19:00.000-08:00

I realize that Ash Wednesday was... at a point in the past. But it's the sort of holiday that lasts all year through, right? The Ash Wednesday spirit can be with us even when the store displays are gone, the lights are down, and we've been frantically working on school and life instead of blogging and wishing each other Ash Wednesday cheer. So in that spirit, I present to you: Ash Wednesday, or, Jimmy Rings in Lent with Baked Ziti.

First of all, I would like to share the observation that major Mormon universities could stand a little Religious Diversity Sensitivity Training. Jimmy is our friendly neighborhood Protestant who attended Ash Wednesday services and came back with ashes on his forehead. He was then interrogated by every single person he met on campus throughout the day.

"Whoa! Did you hit your head?"

"You, um, got something on your head there."

"Heh. Did you, uh, forget to wash your face this morning?"

He was quite exasperated getting these remarks from the Mormons all day and then the frosting on the cake was when we sat down to dinner and his friendly atheist Chinese roommate greeted him with "Dude - what's all over your face?"

"I just can't win, can I?"

Poor Jimmy. But the meal he created for us was fantastic. He had a recipe for baked ziti - and we improvised a second one with spinach to have a little more variety.

Sautéeing three packages of frozen spinach with one large onion, diced. In butter, of course. What else would you sautée things in?

A basic white sauce with cheese. Jimmy had a recipe for the tomato-meat baked ziti but left this one up to me. I promised him it would be good but had my doubts halfway through the white sauce. White sauces always do that to me - there's that moment you fall into this pit of brown flour despair, but they have a way of resurrecting themselves. This one was a butter-flour roux, milk, salt, parsley and then shredded mozzarella cheese.

The spinach version before it went in the oven

They actually turned out pretty tasty! We only got one complaint from the impossible-to-placate gentleman who likes to complain when things don't have meat. Only one of these had meat so he razzed me about it. I told him is was the first day of Lent so he should get used to it, stick a sock in it, and go attend the upcoming Religious Diversity Sensitivity Training. Actually, I didn't because I can't say any of that in Chinese. Sigh. The limits of language on the ability to be a brat.

You go Jimmy! Show them Mormons how it's done!

Chipper

2010-02-11T20:51:00.000-08:00

I'm afraid to admit that I seem like a fun international gourmet only because I know a few tired tricks. I don't actually have any deep underlying expertise. Usually I don't need it because you can eat Mexican, Chinese, French and Japanese food and then start over and the world keeps revolving just fine. But throw a curve ball at me and I'm going to have to do something drastic. Something like... wildly and irresponsibly making stuff up!

Whose idea was it anyway to make Fish & Chips for dinner? I think it must have been my roommate Julia Child. She's cosmopolitan as all get out. But she's classy cosmopolitan, like the British Empire. Maybe that's because she studied in England and then served a mission in Hong Kong. The sun never sets on Julia Child's travel experience. Anyway. She was my inspiration, and the sheer empirical beauty of hot oil and corn batter was my impetus.

Feeling Chipper - an English Pub Simulation at the Chinese House

First of all is the pronunciation. I was constantly entreated by my Australian mission companion to come visit her down under and we would dine on fish and chips wrapped in newspaper as we sat on the beach and tried not to get stung by something lethally venomous. I agreed with this dream and would often repeat it back to her (usually over a breakfast of vegemite and marg on toast in our little kitchen in Yokohama), but I always messed up the pronunciation.

"So, when you eat FISH and CHIPS in Australia...."

"No, no, no, Anarchy," Anarchy being her endearing nickname for me, "it's not FISH and CHIPS. It's FISHandchips."

"FISH and CHIPS."

"FISHandchips."

"Whatever. Stop whinging and pass me the marg."

I had to look up chip recipes online - I was going to try to bake and boil and otherwise adulterate but I was informed that no, they needed to be fried. And I found some rather good advice.

First - cut them into wedges... as thick as your index finger. Soak them in water to remove excess starch.

Then is the trick. This is easy if you have an electric wok with a temperature dial. (Do our assets include an electric wok with a temperature dial? Affirmative! But the lid is lost in the boys' apartment somewhere. And you just poured all the oil in the other pan. Fine. FINE!)

If not, you have to figure out how hot your oil is and get it to about 350. If a cut up 1" cube of leftover biscuit from the back of your refrigerator turns brown in one minute, your oil is about 365 degrees. Isn't that the most arbitrary measurement ever? This is how wacky and ridiculous things like the United States Customary System get entrenched.

Anyway, the secret secret that produces absolutely delicious chips is thus: fry them in low-temp oil (350 degrees) for about 3 minutes. Take them out and drain them well. (We didn't have any sort of a basket so I fished them out with tongs and put them in a metal colander on top of paper towels) Then, crank up the oil to 400 degrees (medium high to high on a gas range) and cook them again, until they start to turn a lovely golden brown. Take them out and drain them well again, and sprinkle them with salt and... are you ready for this, mates? Rosemary. They're surprisingly non fatty and unbelievably delicious and disappear too fast to get a final photo of them. (It is rumored that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle captured a photo of these chips once during a séance, but modern daguerreotype experts mostly agree it is a rather shotty hoax.)

Next comes the fish! Now, if this was actual authentic Fried Fish of the Realm, it would probably be cod and it would be coated in a light flour and water batter with a little bit of baking soda. Did I think to check vital information on this in wikipedia before I started? No! Did I assume in all my American arrogance that since tilapia was cheap tilapia was a good idea and we should just fry it up in corn batter like my dear old Southern ancestors would have advised? Of course! My sous-chef Jimmy is a Southern boy himself so he had no objections to this and we charged on ahead in our rugged colonial fervor!

Corn batter is beautiful no matter how you do it, but so far my most successful has been about half and half corn meal and white flour. And then salt. Sugar if you want to. This much flour took about 4 eggs, and then milk until it was a good thick soup consistency.

Jimmy is my fish fry man - and not afraid to get dirty!

Beautiful, beautiful fish. I wrote a little ballad to the fish as it was frying. I would recount it for you again here but it would only make me cry. (5 minutes or so in 375 degree oil makes the song particularly poignant)

The meal isn't totally nutritionally bankrupt - don't worry. We have mushy peas. What are mushy peas? I don't know. The British have such darn complicated, obscure ways of naming things!

I used three bags of split peas (kind of way too many) and boiled them in my rice cooker on the brown rice setting. There was kind of way too much water, my rice cooker overflowed and there's still a weird burnt smell emanating from the electric heating element. This may or may not be an advisable way to go about cooking dried peas.

When they're done, though, they're most pleasant and loveable. Add a little sugar, a stick of butter, some milk and salt to taste and mash like mash potatoes.

I must report that the most satisfying result of mushy peas is getting to serve them like a lunchlady. Practice, if you need to. Get the most enormous ladle you have and make all your guy friends stand in line with their plates held out in front. (Don't forget your hair net!) There is seriously an art to the scoop and splat, but I know you have it in you. It's maybe one of the most liberating modes of self expression I've found.

Serve the FISHandchips with vinegar (because that's what that camp song said that you eat with fish and chips) or worcestershire sauce or whatever else you have in the door of your fridge. Some of the guys might insist on defiling your lovely rosemary chips with ketchup but forgive them - they only err because of the wicked traditions of their fathers.

I'm not sure if Yao Ming liked the fish, but he spent the entire meal moaning "Wooooo. WOOOOOOOOO. Woooooooo," and occasionally displaying the tastiest morsels for me to see. At least none of us are cultured enough to know that my authentic English pub food was actually a fictional sham.

Une Soirée Française

2010-02-09T20:06:00.000-08:00

I imagine there are some days you wake up and say to yourself, "I'm feeling a little... je ne sais quoi. It's just a lack of Gallic adventure in my life. What could I do to make myself feel just a little more French?"

Well, since we all have those days, it would sure be helpful if we all knew how to make crêpes. (And yes, I'm going to be an annoying little pedant and keep using the diacritical marks throughout this entry. Because I'm on a Mac, you see, and it's too easy!)

French night!

We're going to make one giant batch of savory crêpes and one giant batch of sweet crêpes and even if there's no possibility of ever cooking them all prior to the dinner it's entirely worth it. And they're tastier when they come right off the poêle anyway.

Crêpes Bretonnes - basic recipe
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup sifted flour (if you don't sift it, Hitler invades your country)
• 1/4 cup sugar (I like to use brown sugar just to be a brat. That's not authentic though)
• splash of vanilla
• 2 tablespoons butter

Whisk the eggs and milk together, and sift in the flour. Whisk, whisk, whisk. This is why French women don't get fat, actually - because whisking things burns like 50,000 calories.

Add the sugar and vanilla. In your pan (hopefully an 8 or 10 inch shallow frying pan - you don't actually need a special poêle. Don't tell the Williams & Sonoma ladies I told you that.) melt the butter and then whisk it into your batter. This makes your first crêpe ugly because it's over-buttered, but that gives you the excuse to shove it in your mouth with your greasy fingertips anyway.

Pour the batter 1/3 cup (slightly less than a full 1/3 cup is what works for my pan, actually) at a time into your hot (medium high) pan. With your magical wrist action, twirl it out into a thin, even circle. Try not to let your edges get too thin or too jagged. This actually isn't too hard; or rather, it gets easy with practice.

It should be ready to flip as soon as the edges get firm, right as they start to get opaque; before they're too brown. You can try to flip it with a spatula, but chances are you will tear a hole in it. The easiest way, and I'm not even lying here, is to pull the edge up just a little with a fork, grab it with your fingers, and peel the crêpe up and flip it over. It sounds terrifying, but it's ultimately a good idea. Like asking a cute girl on a date. In both cases, you'll be very happy you went for it.

Those are the dessert crêpes. What if you want to pretend like you're healthy? Why, then, you make savory crêpes and drench them in cheese. (Cheese is HEALTHY.)

Crêpes Salées - basic recipe
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup sifted white flour
• 1/2 cup sifted whole wheat or buckwheat flour. (Buckwheat is the authentic peasant way to do it... they have a hard time sticking together, though)
• Mashed onion or garlic or onion or garlic powder, or dried parsley or fresh chopped parsley or basil or... whatever innocent herb you can find cowering in a corner somewhere. Show no mercy!
• 2 tablespoons butter

Make them the same way as the sweet crêpes, but do note that any sort of adulteration off of the standard sticky white flour recipe makes it a little harder to keep the dough together - buckwheat, herbs, any sort of wet chunks - they are all sneaky little saboteurs. But you are le roi! Show those unwashed masses who wears the puffy purple king pants!

I didn't take any pictures of what we made for the inside of the crêpes, but that's because, quite frankly, it was terrifyingly rapid-fire and we were just trying to get them on the table in time. But you can use just about anything. I had strips of ham that I fried just in an ungreased pan, plus spinach, plus a white sauce with cheese melted into it. (White sauce, twitter version: Melt butter, whisk in flour til pasty balls form-sautee-add milk, whisk til thick) I used half swiss cheese and half monterey jack, but only because I was on a communist Chinese budget and couldn't afford something lovely like Brie. What if you were irresponsibly rich and you could afford a big block of Raclette and you just melted it strait onto your ham crêpes? Your neighborhood would start displaying unexpected seismic activity, that's what.

The inside of the sweet crêpes was a little bit of an échec épique, I'm sorry to say. (That's French for EPIC FAIL). See, usually it's OK to just chop up apples and sautée them in a tiny bit of water with some cinnamon and cook them soft. And pears and apples are cousins, right? Well. This cousin was a little unfit for the throne. If we had had some hand-whipped cream (50,000 calories!) perhaps things would have been OK, or at least some dark chocolate to melt in a double boiler and whisk in a little bit of water and make a disturbingly poignant chocolate sauce that dredges up memories of your childhood in Darkest Peru, that might have helped the poor naked little pears. But as they were, it was kind of like a nice fruity crêpe sprinkled with sand.

"Hey, everyone smile!" --- 40% effective.

Try your hand at it! One recipe usually makes enough crêpes for 2-4 people. This dinner was, like, 6 recipes (three of each). Quantity. We tried for quality, but at least we got quantity. And a little amour baked into every single one.

Veggin' Out

2010-02-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

I used to live in Tree-Hugging Hippietown, Montana. Then I moved to Utah. While some things haven't changed, like the legal currency and the native language and the prevalent species of coniferous trees, some things are indeed quite different. The most recent shocking realization that I have come to is this: there are no decent veggie burgers in this county. Things that do not count as a decent veggie burger include: 1) The "Meatless Wonder" at Chadder's. It's a white bun with shredded iceberg lettuce, onions and a vaguely orange sauce that calls itself "special" because it's actually salad dressing. It's identical to their hamburger except they took the meat off. 2) That freezer-burned box of Boca Burgers buried in the back of the freezer aisle at the BYU Creamery on 9th behind two Hungry Man Dinners. 3) A hamburger with extra pickles. (Though extra pickles are always a good idea, this one loses on a technicality.)

I admire these folks for trying. I don't even think they know what they've done wrong - they're just trying to be diverse and inclusive, right? They have merely fallen victim to the myths surrounding vegetarian food that plague so many in our nation. There's this mistaken idea that eating food without any meat in it is an ascetic penance that you inflict upon yourself in some sort of attempt to punish your weak mortal flesh. This is untrue! I am now going to take it upon myself to dispel three common myths about vegetarian food.

MYTH 1 - You have to be a vegetarian to eat vegetarian food

Non-vegetarians can eat grilled cheese sandwiches, can't they? Even as a main dish! And no one thinks the less of them! You will not be jeopardizing your loyalty to any political party if you eat a meal or two with no meat. There is no inherent link between diet and political leanings. I know this because I lived in Tree-Hugging Hippietown, where I drank the water and ate at their restaurants and I still have never as of yet voted for Ralph Nader. In fact, I can attest: tree-hugging hippies eat amazingly well, and I'm still listening to Donny Osmond.

MYTH 2 - Making vegetarian food is like making regular American food but taking out the meat

You can do this, of course. If you happen to like white buns with shredded iceberg lettuce and ~~thousand island~~ special sauce, then by all means please eat them. But the truth of the matter is: the world is full of delicious, delicious foods. Just because they don't fit on a bun doesn't mean you have to give up and just eat the fries. You could eat a bowl of broccoli instead and no one would be the worse for it! Can you imagine? Broccoli! What if you roasted the broccoli with olive oil and drizzled it with balsamic vinegar and sea salt and fresh rosemary? Whoa - crazy talk.

MYTH 3 - The next best thing to meat is isolated soy proteins

Are you kidding? That's like saying "since we don't have any cake, here - here's a box of rusty nails."

It is now my self-adopted quest to explore the possibilities of creating a veggie burger without resorting to isolated soy proteins. Because really, friends. Life's too short.

Attempt Number One - the Black Bean Burger

This one is an attempt to replicate the veggie burger at Tree-Hugging Hippietown's lovely Hob Nob Café. They still do it more deliciously, but I don't live there anymore and this wasn't half bad.

Cilantro, onions and tomatoes to make it sassy

Seasoned with cumin and chili powder, and I added cornmeal to make it... mealy. I ended up having to add a lot to counteract the wetness of the vegetables. And it still wasn't holding together well so I added two eggs.

And here we see the lovely paste. All -burgers of any sort are mostly just efforts to cook ugly pastes to make them more palatable, aren't they?

I fried it in shallow oil, trying to keep the heat low so the middle would cook before the outside did, but once I ate it I realized it should have been lower and longer. The middles were still mealy, and the cornmeal wasn't cooking thoroughly. I had to microwave the patties to get them a little more done inside. They did hold together remarkably well, though. Not as well as isolated soy proteins but who wants to eat isolated soy proteins?

This attempt does win the attempt for the most hamburger-like appearance. So if you're, you know, still trying to protect your street cred, I'd go the black bean route.

Pretty dang tasty! But again, needed longer cooking and something fattier (maybe adding some oil) to make the cornmeal a little less grainy. B+

Attempt Number Two - the Garbanzo Avocado Burger

With that thought of needing more fat inside the patty, this one had a avocado mashed in. I used two cans of drained garbanzos, one avocado, half an onion diced and then spices, cornmeal and eggs. I didn't add quite so much cornmeal this time.

Since I like to live simply so others may simply live, and also since I can't afford a food processor, I do this all with a pastry blender. I bought the pastry blender specifically to make pâtes brisées but it, like cumin, works just fine in everything I ever make.

These had a better consistency than the black bean patties, probably because they didn't have so many wet vegetables. But then again, they didn't have the deliciousness of wet vegetables either so, you know. It's an ethical judgment that I'll leave to you.

The most enjoyable part of these patties is that they're sort of green. They reduced my fossil fuel consumption by 80% this fiscal year alone! Sweet! This is like the carbon-footprint-antidote burger!

It was most delicious on a whole wheat bun with sprouts and colby jack cheese, but did need a whole mess of dill pickles to make it tasty enough to satisfy my persnickety tastes. If you're a saucy person, I'm sure you could have sauced it up to your heart's delight. Maybe with A1 sauce? Me, I'm saucy enough already.

Attempt Number Three - the Portobello Onion Burger

Also known as the most delicious creature on the planet.

No, really. The most delicious creature on the planet. It has its own t shirts.

Two portobello mushroom caps, marinated in Worcestershire Sauce. What is Worcestershire Sauce for anyway? Who cares anymore. It's for marinating oversized fungus now.

After we're done, we top them with a slice of onion. What if you had a giant onion that was even bigger than this one and it was the same size as the mushroom? I bet angels would start singing.

Holding them together the best you can, coat them in corn batter. Corn batter is just cornmeal and flour (half and half) with salt and milk and eggs until it's thick but spoonable.

And then... you light the holy fires and bathe them in the holy deep fat frying oil.

And LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE CREATED!

Whole wheat bun, sprouts, provolone. You don't even need pickles or sauce - inside the little fried bundle of love is a moist, saucy little oasis.

Look. Learn. Go forth and create.

I was very satisfied with all of these - the quantities made enough that I was freezing patties and taking them to my office hour to eat for lunch every day. All of my colleagues think I'm exceedingly eccentric, which, you know, they would have eventually figured out anyway.

I hope I've made a unique contribution to the literature. It was a labor of love. And now Utah County no longer needs to hang its head in veggie burgerless shame.

The Great Eggsperiment; or, one hundred million Mexicans can't be wrong

2010-01-31T23:33:00.000-08:00

This was an experiment that began over Christmas break, but I've been dragging out the stages and trials because it was so darn interesting. And because I wanted to take more cool pictures.

How this experiment began was with five dozen eggs in December. Two of our roommates were heading out of town for Christmas break and they left the two of us, Julia Child and I, to care for/dispose of all of the leftover eggs. Why are we all buying separate eggs anyway? I'm not sure. We love eggs. And with the number of breakfasts I like to have with scrambled eggs and the frequency of fried rice days, it's never been a problem before. But when it's two of you and an empty apartment and five dozen leftover eggs, you have to get to work.

Julia Child ponders the existential properties of the egg.

So here, in no particular order, is a rapid fire spate of results of the Great Eggsperiment.

Poaching the Egg

We watched Julie & Julia, the two of us, back when it was in theaters, and then again the day it came out on DVD, and then about 43 times since then. We even made Yao Ming and the other Chinese boys watch it with us once. They thought it was a cinematic masterpiece and have been thanking us for the culturally enlightening experience ever since.

I personally thought Julia was a little more endearing than Julie but that's because we looked up the real Julie's blog and it was full of profanity and nice girls who write cooking blogs can't cuss like sailors. Sorry, it just ruins your cute factor, even if Amy Adams plays you on the big screen.

Anyway, one of Julie's feats is poaching an egg. We realized that we'd never poached an egg either, so we set to work. Everything we found online made it sound really daunting but it turned out to be just fine. All it takes is water with a little vinegar splashed in - brought to a boil and then turned down to just below boiling. Swirl the water so there's a little whirlpool in the middle and then carefully drop the raw egg into the whirlpool.

We got lucky and got it right on the first try. A lovely little white jewel.

Problem is, with a poached egg, is once you've cooked it then someone has to eat it. And it's so pristine - you didn't even get to adulterate it with some salt. And who wants to eat an unadulterated egg?

Jungle Breakfast

I'll state right out my inherent bias: eggs were meant to be scrambled. This is a scientific fact, friends; no matter how you cook them, the yolk and white were meant to be one harmonious whole. Were this not true, the yolk would not taste like sulfur sludge when you ate it on its own.

I'm also a firm believer in adulterating the uncooked egg, usually with salt. I'm also a firm believer in cooking everything in butter. Thus is born my default egg setting: a variation on scrambled eggs that I like to call huevos anequítos. You whip up scrambled eggs, add some salt, and fry them in butter. Life is good.

Life is even better if you have some plátanos or burro bananas sitting around (you know, like you do sometimes) and you fry those in butter too and lightly salt them. Life is downright amazing if you also have an avocado to slice up. And some Herdez salsa.

And thus was born Jungle Breakfast (doodle oot doodle oot)... Jungle Breakfast (get it on!)

Sweet Rolled Japanese Omelette

I tried these again on Japanese New Year, and they came out better that time, so read those directions if you want to try it out. This first time we tried it they came out super ugly. But we ate it on an artsy white plate, so we salvaged our dignity.

They were good drizzled in okonomiyaki sauce. Only problem is, now Julia Child is addicted to the stuff, which she insists on calling okonomiyummy. And she eats it all sorts of inappropriate ways, like on fried rice.

the ugliest Sweet Rolled Japanese Omelettes in town

Chinese Tea Eggs

I made these on Christmas Eve. I was planning to spend Christmas Eve watching a Bollywood movie with my South African German friend upstairs, so in anticipation of the evening I cooked all afternoon - I made Inarizushi and Chinese Tea Eggs. What? How do you spend Christmas Eve?

This was a recipe from a beautiful book I have called The Food of China. (I read it for the pictures.) Problem is, it calls for black tea and we're sort of Mormony here. So I may or may not have sort of fudged the line and used decaffeinated green tea. This is not officially sanctioned. I never told you this, actually. At all.

Hard-boil 10 eggs. Lighty tap and roll them on a hard surface to make cool-looking cracks all over them.

Boil 4 cups of water
5 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons rice wine (I used alcohol free sweet Japanese honteri)
anise
1 tablespoon sugar
cinnamon
ginger
3 tablespoons tea leaves

Simmer for 20 minutes, then add the eggs and simmer for another 45 minutes. Turn the eggs over occasionally to get the color even. Turn off the heat and let the eggs sit until cool enough to handle. Remove the shells and serve whole or sliced, with the sauce spooned over the top.

Pretty! Turns out my South African German friend doesn't like sushi or Chinese Tea Eggs. I tried leaving them out for Santa but he wouldn't eat them either.

Migas

My family is from Texas. I'm not typically very proud of this fact, but then I eat migas and I remember why I should be.

This isn't the ideal migas - we would need fresh cilantro and tomatoes and cheese and black beans to make it fully awesome, but it's still pretty darn good.

The secret to the deliciousness of migas is corn tortillas. All you do is act like you're going to make plain old huevos anequítos but first you cut or tear up some corn tortillas and fry them in butter until they start getting crisp. Then add in your eggs and scramble.

These ones here are just served with some bottled red peppers and salsa verde, but can you even imagine how beautiful the world would be if you had onions, cilantro, tomatoes, and maybe some black or refried beans, and maybe some melted Mexican cheese on top? Oaxaca cheese. Don't try to imagine too hard, though, friends, because you might never be content with your lonely little life and the real world again.

Or rather, imagine, but follow it up quickly with some real-life migas action.

One Hundred Million Mexicans Can't Be Wrong

This last dish is one that I made up, but it's related to the migas and the jungle breakfast. It sprang fully-formed from my forehead one morning but I'd been cogitating for quite a while on the idea that Mexican eggs tend to be more joyous in your mouth than any other eggs from anywhere else in the world.

I think it's time for a random pointless anecdote. One time I was in Oaxaca and we were eating breakfast at the hotel - Las Golondrinas - at the little table down in the little courtyard where the lady takes your order. We were at the long table, 10 art students and two of our professors, chatting in English while the poor lady tried to make sense of our breakfast orders. I don't really actually speak Spanish at any respectable level, but no one else in my group spoke it at all so I was the default translator. One of the girls at the other end of the table was giving her order to the abuelita and shouted down for me for clarification. "How do you say Friday?"

"Viernes," I hollered back.

I thought nothing more of it until our food came 10 minutes later. The girl got her plate of huevos served with beans, salsa, tortillas and other lovely things and started protesting loudly. "This is NOT what I ordered."

It took a while to sort out the confusion, but it turns out the poor abuelita had had no idea what the girl had wanted so brought her what everyone else was having.

"I ordered a fried egg," the girl whined to me.

"Oh," I realized. "No, actually you didn't. You ordered a Friday. Sorry - I must not have heard you right."

This dish isn't made of fried eggs - huevos estrellados, we later found out - but it is good to eat on Fridays.

What is it? It's just scrambled eggs, but you also scramble them with a can of hominy. And you season them with salt, cumin and chile powder.

Then, when you're halfway through the delectable mélange, you exclaim to yourself, "My lands! She was right! And they were all right! Those hundred million Mexicans! How could I have thought they were wrong all these years?"

So, the conclusion of the Great Eggsperiment is this: one hundred million Mexicans can't be wrong. Life is beautiful, and that beauty comes from the fusion of corn, eggs and beans. Back together, like the Universe intended them to be.

So much time, so little to do...

2010-01-31T19:15:00.000-08:00

Wait... strike that; reverse it.

We've been having more culinary adventures than we can handle of late. I'm working on two big posts for you, but meanwhile here is a handful of snapshots from recent moments of awesomeness.

The night French House Friend and I talked about what they do in France with pears in chocolate and made mischief of one kind and another:

that's the extra pâte brisée I had in the freezer with a little flour and sugar in the bottom, pears dusted in nutmeg, and chocolate ganache poured on top. Chocolate ganache made with 60% cocoa chips, that is, because this was dark and dangerous business.

The leftover chicken stock from Jimmy's white chicken chili became, with the help of carrots, celery, garlic and some homemade noodles, a pot of magic for what ails you:

Homemade noodles are SO MUCH EASIER than anyone would have you believe. Flour, a little salt, and eggs. Seriously, that's all. Then you knead it, roll it out as thin as you can and slice it as thin as you can. You can fold/roll the dough before you slice it for really long noodles.

Those were days never to be forgotten; the days when the Chinese roommate cooks:

Tofu with black bean sauce

Eggs and tomatoes. Who would have known that Chinese people could create such wonderful poetry with eggs, tomatoes and a little salt?

Small green onions mixed with tofu. That's the name of this dish. Sesame oil and salt and you're set for life.

The lovely chef poses for a publicity shot

Party on a plate!

The happy populace.

Zhu Nimen de Sheng Ri Kuai Le, or, how you say, in your country? Happy birthday Hui Lian and Yao Ming! We wish you plenty of happiness, health, money and chocolate ganache in the coming year.

Rock the Casbah

2010-01-20T11:16:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to be born into a family that ate weird food. My family was unlucky enough to get a child who was the pickiest eater in the world. I wouldn't eat onions, I wouldn't eat mushrooms, I wouldn't eat peppers, okra was the most terrifying creature on the planet, I wouldn't eat ketchup or mayonnaise or mustard, I wouldn't eat peanut butter, I wouldn't eat anything spicy, I wouldn't eat fish, I wouldn't eat any sort of dressing or sauce - I made my mother wash the gravy off the meat.

One day she sat me down and told me "When you're an adult, you're going to like all of this. You're going to like spicy food, you're going to like fish. You're even going to like onions." I told her she was crazy. My mother, however, ends up being right about everything.

When I say my family ate weird food, I refer to the fact that we are fundamentally Texas/Cajun people via Algeria and Switzerland. We had staple dishes like red beans and rice, green chili, gumbo, fondue and couscous with chorba. You know. Like grandma used to make. It took me until my adult years to realize how thoroughly awesome this was. I had to call my mom from college once to ask her how to make chorba.

"Are you sure? It's slimy. It has lamb in it and lamb is icky."

"I can handle it, Mom. I'm realizing the wisdom of your ways after all these years."

"What was that you said? I didn't quite hear."

"I said I was wrong and you were right."

"That's what I thought. OK, first you're gonna need some cumin..."

So today at the Chinese house we are rocking the Casbah with lamb chorba over couscous. I'm not sure how close to authentic it is - as far as I know, the Algerian version is very similar to Moroccan, but I've seen some of the more original Algerian recipes (once I found an old typed-with-a-typewriter cookbook of my grandmother's that had a collection of recipes from American expatriates living with them in Algeria) use sweeter ingredients as well as the savory - raisins, dates, little silver dragées. Why would you put little silver dragées on a stew? I don't know, but it sounds absolutely exotic and lovely, doesn't it? See - there are things in this globalized world that can still shock our Western sensibilities.

I learned something monumental after I cooked this meal. My mom called me and said she had been reading my blog and said my problem was that I was putting the cumin in too early. Apparently, cumin's flavor disappears. (Loses its savor, as it were. Cumin, you sinner.) So you have to add it at the very end, and if you do this, you don't have to use so much. Geez, Mom. You do it again. The secret to this dish, though, is cumin and coriander - those are the two that will make it taste Algerian. You could throw in some cinnamon if you want. But these are your magic spices, and now we know that the secret is that we add them at the end.

You can use whatever vegetables you like for this stew. I like things that grow underground plus some zucchini for color. You can use eggplants, turnips, all kinds of lovely things. Today I used onions, carrots, parsnips and zucchini. I started by sautéeing everything but zucchini in olive oil and then adding the lamb stew meat. You can also use chicken if you like, or you can make a vegetarian version. I made a vegetarian version in another pot.

You then add enough broth to make a nice stew - either actual broth or bouillon. I have a lovely vegetable bouillon I get in bulk from the health food store. Now add the softer vegetables - the zucchini and the garbanzo beans (magic!) and let it simmer. It'll be done in 20 to 30 minutes but you can leave it simmering all day if you need to.

I'm not sure what the purpose of turmeric is other than to turn things yellow, but I really enjoy turning curries and middle eastern food yellow, and having an excuse to do so. Also, I own this giant jar of turmeric. So here you go. Yellow chorba!

You know what else is lovely? Fruit for dessert. What if you had dates? Ooo. What if you had dates and almonds and mint tea? Your Casbah would be utterly rocked. I had a limited budget, so here are some lovely little clementines.

Couscous is extremely easy to cook - just follow the directions, but it's nice to add some olive oil or butter and bouillon or broth. Some places have whole wheat couscous. Then your Casbah would be responsibly and healthily rocked.

The group liked it overall - MK says it's the most delicious thing she's ever eaten and eats it for three days, but I also pay her to say that. People had issues with the fact that the lamb stew meat had bones. It wasn't meaty enough for them, I suppose, but I like to maintain that the world isn't supposed to be ridiculously meaty. Also I told them it was more authentic this way. And I promised them next time to roast the lamb over a spit so they could have all the meat they wanted.

A Quick Recipe for Glory

2010-01-09T16:12:00.001-08:00

今年もよろしくお願いいたします！

2010-01-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

In Japan, the biggest holiday of the year is New Year's, or oshogatsu. It's the time of year when your family gathers home from all corners of the country (or the world... Hi Yuko! How are your parents?) and spends a week together. It's about tradition, it's about family, it's about love. It's about cold, slimy, sweet foods. And in that holiday spirit, this year I decided to make my own おせち料理 - the ancient Japanese sweet, slimy, cold tradition.

せち料理 (osechi ryōri) involves a lot of foods that we eat because they're puns. I only understood a couple of them, and I still haven't been able to figure out which characters they refer to, but it's okay because neither was the Japanese friend who came over. So even though we don't know why, we know that we eat black beans (kuromame) because mame also means "health" and kuro... I don't know. An old Japanese lady explained it to me once but I forgot. And we eat chestnuts (kuri) because kuri means "success" and we eat kelp (konbu) because konbu means "joy." And also because it's tradition, and a little bit of marketing.

I adapted all of these recipes from a particularly good collection at about.com - I substituted a bit, though - mostly using the non-alcoholic honteri in the place of mirin and sake.

Kuromame - black beans

I started these the night before. While I was getting ready to soak the black beans, I found a ninja hiding in the bag.

He almost managed to sabotage the entire pot of beans, but I didn't let him!

Ingredients:

1 cup black soy beans
4 cups water
1 cup sugar
2 tsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda

Preparation:

Wash black beans. Put water, sugar, salt, soysauce, and baking soda in large deep pot or iron pot. Bring to a boil. Stop the heat and add black beans. Leave it over night, or about 8 hours.
Put the pot on high heat and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to low. Skim off any foam that rise to the surface. Cover the pot and simmer the beans on low heat for 5-7 hours, or until beans are softened. When the liquid decreases, add some water. Stop the heat and let it sit until cool.

Mmm! Sweet beans! (cultural experience, friends. Cultural experience.)

Kurikinton - mashed sweet potatoes with chestnuts

The next dish involves my beloved satsumaimo and chestnuts. These are cooked into a beautiful concoction that is yellow to encourage the proliferation of gold in the coming year :) It's supposed to be sweet, but the recipe asked for an awful lot of sugar.... I cut the sugar in the original recipe in half. But you know what? It was still too dang sweet.

Ingredients:

1 lb. satsumaimo (sweet potatoes), peeled and cut into 1 inch thick slices
1 jar of simmered sweet chestnuts in syrup (8-12 pieces of chestnuts)
3/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp honteri

Preparation:

Soak satsumaimo slices in water for about 15 minutes and drain. Cover in water in a deep pot and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to medium and simmer until satsumaimo is softened. Mash them and add sugar and honteri and mix well. Stir well on low heat until smooth. Add chestnuts and simmer for a few minutes.

Kinpira Gobo - stir fried burdock and carrot

The next dish is the most beautiful thing in the world, excluding my lovely face, of course. But if my face were a dish, my face would be kinpira gobo.

First, you find gobo at an asian market or a savvy white people market. Then, you chop it into tiny little strips, which takes three hours and gives you a blister. Why do you do this?

We don't know. Probably something to do with pride.

Ingredients:

1/2 lb gobo (burdock root)
1/4 lb carrot
1 tbsp soysauce
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp honteri
1 tsp sesame seeds
2 tsps vegetable oil

Preparation:

Lightly shave the gobo skin and shred gobo into very thin strips. Soak the gobo strips in water for a while and drain well. Peel the carrot and cut it into short and thin strips. Heat vegetable oil in a frying pan, and fry gobo strips for a couple minutes. Add carrot strips in the pan and stir-fry them. Add all seasonings in the pan and stir-fry well. Turn off the heat. Sprinkle sesame seeds.

Nimono - stew

At this point in the afternoon, I had a couple dishes left I could cook, but I decided to go with the one that would cook on its own while I attended to everything else. Nimono is a generic term for stew, and the basic broth is made with dashi. This is a slightly oceany broth that makes your house smell like the pots of oden that bubble on the countertops of 7-11s in Japan. And then you get all nostalgic.

I made my own recipe here - dashi broth with soy sauce and sugar (I was getting rather sick of sugar at this point, but I did it to be authentic.) And then I just threw in the things I had extra laying around. Those things included carrots, lotus root, fried tofu and hijiki. Who has these sorts of things just extra laying around? Very odd ducks, that's who. It's ok - it keeps my roommates from being tempted to eat the food on my shelves. Hijiki, by the way, is the healthiest of the seaweeds. Lots of iron. Just about as much iron as eating rusty nails, and slightly more palatable!

Kamaboko - ungodly pink product of the sea

We also served kamaboko with the meal, which is among the weirder things that human beings make out of fish. But it's festive!

Datemaki - rolled sweet omelettes

And these were rolled sweet omelettes. Eggs, with a little soy sauce, some sugar, some honteri and a dash of dashi. ;) They work the best with a very non-stick pan. Pour out a thin layer and wait until it's almost set, and then start to roll it up with a couple deft spatulas. When it's one long roll at the edge of the pan, lift it up a bit and pour another thin layer underneath. When this gets set, roll the new layer around the roll. Then transfer the whole thing to a bamboo sushi rolling mat and roll it up and let it sit for 5 minutes. Let it cool, and then slice it. You would think I would have taken pictures of this weirdly complex cooking method but why on earth would I have had the good sense to do that?

Shiyoyakizakana - grilled fish

Finally, I made something that's Japanese, if not actually traditional せち料理. This is shiyoyakizakana, which sounds like a crazy samurai or a WWII bombing plane, but actually just means "salted grilled fish." In Japan, you buy fish that are filleted open and presalted and you just stick them in the little tray in your gas range that they engineered for grilling fish. (And who is the most civilized country in the world, I ask you?) Here, though, they don't come so handy and ready to go. But I got tilapia fillets at Macey's for 48 cents each (!) and so I just soaked them in salt water to help them thaw for a couple hours and then stuck them in a glass pan under my broiler. And look, my beauties. The most delicious thing around.

Overall, it was a lovely experience. But let me interject something about osechi ryōri. The sugar. The sugar gets to you. Japanese people don't even like sweet things. Overly sweet things. They can't eat American candy (and who can blame them?) and their candy is this vague hint of sweetness. But they do enjoy the vague hint of sweetness in everything, and by the time you're done with the meal you just want some dang salt. There is plenty of salty food common in Japan, but most of it, now that I think about it, is from China. Thank goodness for China, though. Heavens. The intervention of the Middle Kingdom was a blessing. It brought a written language to Japan, the civilizing influence (?) of Buddhism and a little culinary relief for those of us on Team Salt.

I enjoyed the New Year and the excuse to stay home all day to cook, and also the fact that Japan moved their New Year to coincide with the Gregorian calendar because that means we get to do this all AGAIN, China-style, in February.

新年快樂！

Cakes of Epic Import

2009-12-23T11:03:00.000-08:00

Then a songge of Cake was sung,
So that the mann’s warlike example would inspyre the warriors
Beseachyng on God for aid, they joined battle
Emilysch, who sangge very well,
Rode on a swift horse before the Duke
Syngging of Charlemagne and Roland and Oliver
and the knyghts who died at Ganache

Yes, dear compatriots, this is the epic story of two cakes whose glory and power in battle defied all challengers and brought honor and laud to their gallant Lords and their noble King for whom they pledged all. Many brave souls perished in the fray, but their song shall live on.

First we have the chocolate cake recipe, borrowed from a random Iranian on the internet, which was rather delicious but still too dry, alas, though I have endeavored tirelessly to create a truly moist cake. I think the secret may be in the serving - a cake coated in good frosting or ganache which is then left in the fridge for at least a day moistens up inside, but we were weary and the enemy approached and we did not have the 24 hours respite we needed. Had I the battle to fight again, I would have bided my time and kept my men wrapped up in their ganache before sending them out to their doom.

I shall not bore you with the gory details of the cake batter. Suffice it to say I made two of these cakes, with the following recipe. The only adjustment I made was using Pero instead of Coffee (infidels!) and adding an extra 1/3 cup of flour for high elevation baking. And I only baked it for 30 minutes, which was plenty.

1 ½ C sugar
¾ C cocoa
¾ C coffee (room temp)
¾ C sour cream
6 tbs oil
2 eggs
1 tbs vanilla
1 ½ tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1 1/3 C flour

Preheat oven to 350. For the cake, mix the first 7 ingredients well then add the last three (baking soda, cream of tartar and flour) and mix with as few strokes as possible but until well blended. Pour in buttered cake pan and bake for about 35 to 40 minutes.

Here lies the virginal cake.

And here be the glorious yet fierce beginnings of white chocolate ganache. Ganache is the beginning of noble and good in the world. And it is simple. And good for you. And high in, um, fiber. All you need for a beautiful ganache (and ganaches should always be dark, dark chocolate unless it's, like, for a Japanese Christmas cake and so you want it to be white) is:

1 cup heavy whipping cream
2 tbsp unsalted butter
12 ounces chocolate chips or (even better) chopped baking chocolate

Simmer the cream and butter on low to medium heat until it bubbles, then whisk in the chocolate and stir until smooth. Refrigerate for an hour or two before you pour it on the cake, or add flavorings (orange zest!) and refrigerate overnight and you've got truffle centers.

This ganache I wanted really white, and I wanted it to disguise the chocolate cake inside, so I added a couple cups of powdered sugar and beat it with my one-legged lame little electric beater. Which was glorious.

In the middle of the cake, an entire pound of strawberries (minus the 6 most beautiful) sacrificed their lives.

The first coat of ganache-plus-powdered sugar. It helps to refrigerate between coats to get smooth, even coverage.

And then he rode out to battle, victorious, waving his strawberry ensign aloft. (The strawberries were migratory, which thing vexed me exceedingly) To crown his victory at the end of the day I dusted him with powdered sugar and Christened him Holy Roman Japanese Christmas Cake of the Year of Our Lord 2009.

But the battle had just begun for our second brave cake: The Epic Candy Dot Cake of Gloucester.

He was alike his brother in many respects, but as for the frosting, he was of the more traditional buttercream sect.

1 cup softened unsalted butter
2 tbsp cream
5 cups powdered sugar
2 tbsp rosewater (oh no, you daren't! Oh yes, my young squire. I dare.)

Here be the lady Emilysch frosting the brave young knave as he prepares to ride out to face the foe.

2 painstaking hours later, after a feat of dexterity not unlike the embroidery of the Bayeux tapestry, we unveiled his Royal Nobleness, sir Epic Dot Cake of Gloucester, in his finery.

Much carnage and death ensued. I will not illustrate the more graphic and bloody details. I shall only sing the lilting refrain.

Dead lay the heathens, or turned to flyght,
And Dot was victor in the fyght.
Down Glucosa's wall he brakke
Defens he knew was none to make.
And as the city law subduéd,
The hoarie king all proudly stood,
There rested his victorious flours.
The queene hath yielded up the towers
Ten great towers and fifty small.
Well strivves he whom God aids withal.

Communist Dinner

2009-12-13T20:44:00.000-08:00

The scenario: ward dinner. Your assignment is to use your house's Sunday dinner budget to create a potluck item that will regale and satisfy members of the entire ward while still transmitting a little local ethnic charm. Not too much ethnic charm, mind you, because even though these are all ostensibly cosmopolitan language students, they still complain under their breath about the mugi cha the Japanese house made us drink last month. (I went to the mattresses for you, though, mugi cha. I'm your sole defender!)

The plot twist: Right as you get home from grocery shopping, having purchased the retailer's entire supply of ground pork for a massive project of epic Chinese proportions, the powers that be inform you that ward dinner has been canceled and you should just feed your own house. Your poor little vegetarian stomach with its lack of bromelain starts to weep as it eyes the ten pounds of styrofoam-packaged pork you just stuck in the fridge.

To the rescue: the Russian house, your communist allies. When the Capitalist Pigs cancel ward dinner, we come together! "We will eat your Chinese delicacies!" your Marxist pals vow, and in return they pledge a salad, some frozen lasagne, and a defunct space program. Together! To progress!

(The party makes me say things like this...)

So we will forge ahead, and with our brothers and comrades we will make 餃子. Jiao zi. Gyoza. Potstickers. Chinese dumplings. The one food that everyone who ever eats them is guaranteed to love. Even poor little vegetarians who can't digest pork anymore. They love them too, but it's a painful love that follows them around for 48 hours. This was enough potstickers for 20 people, turns out, but my usual quantity-buying was thrown off and I had far more filling than skins. I could have remedied this by making my own skins out of flour and water, but that would have required far more physical labor than my minions were ready to give by the time we were done. So we ended up stir-frying the leftover filling with day-old rice for instant delicious fried rice. (Fried rice will always save the day)

The hardest part about Chinese food again is the chopping. It's even harder when you live in communal housing with inadequate knives. But these are the People's knives and we are hardy laborers for the Common Good and we will make do. We will also go borrow some more knives and cutting boards from the German house.

Hui Lian and Charlie chop green onions for the Common Good.

Here is the finished amount of green onions and green beans (about equal amounts of both; and your vegetables combined should be a greater volume than your meat. Sounds crazy, I know, but it's true! Remember also that vegetables shrink when they cook.) Other vegetables you can use include 白菜 (baicai, Napa Cabbage), 清耕菜 (chingensai, Baby Bok Choy) or 韭菜 (jiucai, aka Garlic Chives, Chinese Chives, Nira), with the latter being the most delicious thing in the world.

Meat. Meaty meat meat. We're about to season it with soy sauce and sesame oil. I used dark mushroom soy sauce, which is way blacker than soy sauce tends to be. It's like the tar baby of soy sauce. You have to use a lot, though, and you have to season by sight because you can't so much season it by taste. I probably used a cup and a half of it on this huge amount of meat, and maybe a quarter cup of sesame oil. Are you ready for the least appetizing picture you'll ever see in my blog? Here you go!

Mmmm. And now we mix it all together. Tommy voluntarily mixed it with his hands, which I wouldn't have done but which turns out to be surprisingly effective. Let's all pause a moment to try to imagine the sensory experience that would be mixing ground pork meat covered in sauce and oil with your bare hands, squeezing it through your fingers.

And now we bao the jiaozi. Bao, bao, bao, with some of us having better bao des than others. First, you trace the edges of the round skin with water and then you put just about two tablespoons of filling in the middle - not too much, not too little. The main trick is to make it a beautiful half moon with gathered folds on one side but not the other.

And then when they're beautiful we stick them in the pot. We pot-stick the potstickers. You could boil them if you wanted to, but the People tend to be a lot less likely to revolt in the countryside when you cook them in oil.

This is an electric wok that I love as if it were my own offspring, but you can also use a frying pan. Strangely enough, non-stick pans tend to produce the best potstickers. First, heat up a shallow bit of oil. Lay your little guys in there all close and huggy, and cook them until the bottom starts to brown. This would be a nice way just too cook things if we were looking for pretty, but we're also looking for thoroughly cooked pork products, so after they start to brown, pour in about a half cup of water or so and stick a lid on the pan. The steam then cooks them thoroughly. When the skins are transparent and clinging to their little brown cargoes, they're done. Usually about 10 minutes total per pan. Then you should be able to slide the whole little huggy group off onto a plate without too much pot stickage.

At this point someone steals your camera and starts taking snapshots around the room.

....and pestering you while you cook. "What?!" *click*

Slimy little communist glories

and, all's well that ends well with a happy populace.

Baby, Don't You Cry. Verse 2.

2009-12-12T22:56:00.000-08:00

This culinary adventure was inspired by the upcoming ward talent show. I had just learned to sing the pie song and accompany myself on guitar, which the way I do it is kind of like the servant who was only in charge of one talent and goes and buries it in the backyard. So that on its own wouldn't have merited signing up for the ward talent show. But my roommate Julia Child suggested that I couple it with an actual pie, and the postmodern appeal was just too much for me to pass up. I practiced the song and made a plan for Julia Child to help me out by serving the pie while I sang. And thus begins our tale.

Our pie needed to be strawberry of some sort, because the song has it full of strawberry love. And even though a fresh strawberry pie is all sorts of lusciousness, what kind of showing off would it be to just make a fresh strawberry pie? So this is going to be a Strawberry Chocolate Oasis Pie. "Nobody in the world can make strawberry chocolate pie like you. Wednesday is my favorite day of the week just cause I get to have me a slice of it. I think about it as I’m waking up. It could solve all the problems of the world, that pie. It’s a thing of beauty….how each flavor opens itself, one by one, like a chapter in a book. "

I had to make something up, but let's try to live up to expectations.

First of all, remember pâte brisée? Well, you should, because pâte brisée is your new BFF. I know that last week cumin was your BFF, but didn't you ever go to Girl Scout Camp? "Make new BFFs but keep the old - one is silver and the other gold."

I made a double recipe of the pâte brisée, which makes 4 crusts. I only actually needed 2, ends up, so unless you need four pies, don't double it. But I also accidentally doubled the chocolate filling so I used a whole nother crust just to contain my delicious cup runneth over.

Here's all you need for the Strawberry Chocolate Oasis Pie. You know what happens, though, when it's December and you're dead set on having strawberry pie? First of all, you pay 4 dollars a pound. Second of all, the strawberries are tasteless and sick. I think from now on this is a June Only Pie. It was still OK, but you can only compensate so far for tasteless sick strawberries.

For the chocolate part of the pie, I went to France. Virtually. All good pies, ultimately, come from France. They know how to not use too much sugar. I hate to tell you this, American friends, but I am a pinko subversive when it comes to American sweets. American Capitalist Pig Pie, that's what I should call all those other recipes for chocolate pies. They start with such a beautiful concept - chocolate in a pie shell - and then they adulterate it with their filthy capitalist lucre and put like four cups of sugar in it. No! Too much! Think of the proletariat!

So we're using a beautiful simplistic recipe. One that's beautiful and simplistic and lovely. And in French.

Ingrédients (pour 6 personnes) :
- 70 g de sucre
- 4 oeufs entiers
- 120 g de chocolat noir à cuire
- 50 cl de crème fraîche épaisse
- pâte (sablée, feuilletée ou brisée, selon votre goût) pour plat à tarte de 23 cm de diamètre

Préparation :

Dans une casserole, faire fondre à feu doux le chocolat cassé en morceaux dans 2 cuillères à soupe d'eau, jusqu'à obtenir un ensemble lisse.
Ajouter tout le sucre, continuer de mélanger au fouet.
Ajouter les quatre oeufs un à un, mélanger toujours au fouet.
Ajouter la crème fraîche épaisse, et mélanger.
Tapisser le moule de la pâte à tarte, la piquer, y verser la préparation ci-dessus.
Mettre au four (préchauffé à 180°C) durant 20 à 25 min. Piquer pour voir si c'est cuit selon la convenance.

Good thing someone got her bachelor's degree in a totally unmarketable liberal arts subject!

Ingredients:
-70 grams (1/3 cup) sugar
-4 whole eggs
-120 grams dark baking chocolate (3/4 cups if they're chocolate chips)
-50 centiliters crème fraîche. (Good luck finding crème fraîche. Try heavy whipping cream. 2 cups of it)
-pie crust

On low heat, melt the chocolate in 2 tablespoons of water. Did anyone in America ever tell you to melt chocolate into water? No! They didn't! It's like a state secret they hid from us or something. If you're not using chocolate chips, if you're using baking bars or something else delicious, chop them before this step.

Mix until smooth

Add in the sugar

Add in the eggs, one at a time (this looks like a lot in my pan - it's because I'm making a double recipe. You just keep following that single recipe I gave you there, though. Unless you want a LOTTA chocolate pie. Even if you're making the two pies, just do the single recipe)

Add the cream. Pretty!

At this point, the mixture was way too pale for my taste so I added two huge heaping spoonfuls of cocoa. It could've still been more, but some of my audience commented on the darkness of the chocolate so apparently this was enough for them.

Next step: get chocolate on virtually every cooking surface available to you.

Now we roll out the pâte brisée, which may seem like a daunting task, but you will be fine. The whole point of this crust is to not touch it very much so the chunks of butter remain chunks of butter until it's time for them to melt and make your crust beautiful and flaky. So even though it seems like your pile of dough is crumbling into oblivion, just keep patting the sides together and rolling and rolling and eventually...

Lovely!

I pulled off the edges of dough to make the extra hearts. I thought I'd need a whole separate crust to cut the hearts out of, but I didn't. So now I have a whole separate crust in my freezer, awaiting the next adventure.

Pour the chocolate mixture, which is very very liquid and really makes you doubt its ability to set up, into the crusts. I had made a double batch of chocolate, heaven knows why, because I had planned to only pour half a recipe into each pie to leave room for the strawberries.

Now we bake it at 350 for 20-25 minutes, which is really more like a half hour plus some 5-minute snoozes. Basically just cook it until the center doesn't move like liquid anymore, which despite my scoffing, actually happened.

Meanwhile, let's make the strawberry glaze! Start by making a corn starch slurry. All the best things in life start with a corn starch slurry.

I hate white sugar with an unfair ideological passion, so I'm making the glaze out of water and honey.

And red food coloring... and when it starts boiling, add in the corn starch slurry. Goopy globs of goodness!

Except it wasn't enough, so I doubled the amount of honeywater (you could use sugar water) and then did another batch of corn starch slurry. And more red food coloring of course. However, it tasted boring and just sweet so I added lime juice. Too much lime juice, it turns out. You could taste it in the final pie. But just a splash of lemon or lime juice would do you well.

Glazing the sick lame strawberries to make you forget that it's December and our capitalist pig supply and demand selves carted them up here from Mexico.

The chocolate pies come out looking all lovely. I baked the two dough hearts in with them, glazing the top with honey and sugar.

I used the rest of the bag of semisweet chocolate chips for a drizzly garnish, but I was in a super hurry by now - the talent show started in 20 minutes - and it came out ugly and gloppy. Were I to do it again I would have been more meticulous.

Strawberry Chocolate Oasis pie! Hinted to in a movie, invented by me (with a little help from my friend France) and apart from the too-strong lime and the sucky sucky strawberries, pretty dang delicious. Also, at least one boy there said I was the best talent of the night. I like how you can trick boys' senses of artistry with a little butter and fruit.

When I got home, I used the third crust and the rest of the chocolate filling to make just a chocolate pie on its own:

Look at the bottomside of a beautiful, beautiful pâte brisée!

The texture is surprisingly fluffy. I would have preferred denser and richer, but that's personal taste. I like my men that way too, you know - smooth, rich and European.

Chocolate pie = definitely added to the repertoire.

Cupcake Frenzy

2009-12-12T22:38:00.000-08:00

I like to consider myself cooler than most cooking trends. Like cupcakes. Cupcakes are so Rexbourgeois. But sometimes I go because I'm on the Relief Society activity committee so I have to be helpful and not a snob and then before I know it, I find myself making tiny roses out of fondant. And I end up enjoying myself, dangit.

Here are some pictures of the lovely colorful fun we had at our activity. The dragon may or may not have been my attempt at introducing reptiles into the world of fondant.

This piece is called "The ephemerality of well-wishing. When boys walk through the room."

Kodak Moment

2009-12-12T22:28:00.001-08:00

Piao Liang is an MBA student who is way too busy for anything. She came home from campus the other day, having eaten nothing all day but shrimp chips. From this bag of shrimp chips larger than her head. Everyday objects are just everyday objects, until they're bigger than your head. Then, they're postmodern and fascinating.

Chinese House Dinner, Southern Style

2009-12-01T09:20:00.001-08:00

The way the Chinese house works, is: you pay a little extra every month and then with that money they buy food for you to eat together five nights a week. Whoever is in your "language house" is who you cook and eat with - in the case of Chinese, we've just got one girls' apartment and one guys' apartment - 10 people. I used to live in the French House, which was like 30 people and cooking dinner was intense but you only had to do it once a month or so. This is smaller and nicer, and you cook more often - once every two weeks. The ostensible purpose of this is to have time together to converse in the language you're learning. The real purpose, we all know, is to amaze your roommates with your culinary prowess and find new and exciting edible creations to soothe the savage hordes. It's a game, you see, and if the boys compliment your food, you win. (Somedays I think I may be the sole inhabitant of my little planet.)

Today's recipe. This feeds 10 people!

This week it was me again - I plan the meal and Tommy helps me cook. Next week on Monday, Tommy will plan the meal and I help him cook. Tommy is a good sport. He makes things like enchiladas, and my job is to open the cans of sauce. I make things like Thai spring rolls and his job is to de-vein the shrimp and chop the cabbage and help me roll the rice wrappers. This week, though, we went easy on Tommy and made one of the easiest meals of life - beans. And since they were real beans, I soaked them the night before and then cooked them in slow cookers all day so when he showed up to help me, the only thing left to do was the:

Cornbread! More on this later.

But let's start with the beans. Here is my slow cooker. You will notice that it's not so much a slow cooker as a rice cooker. This is because one time when I lived in Japan I found a Brazilian grocery store and they sold giant bags of lovely dried beans. Not sweetened, slimy little Asian beans. These were proper feijão - black beans and pinto beans and blackeyed peas. You know what else they sold? CUMIN. My little heart was so happy. So I bought as much as possible and went home and realized we had nothing to cook them in. But we did have a rice cooker. Turns out if you soak them the night before and then throw them in there with cumin and onions and salt and cook it on the brown rice setting and let it sit on "warm" all day, you come home to a glorious pot of beans. And then you serve it on top of a bowl of rice and put it in front of your Japanese companion and she bursts into tears. "I'm sorry! I just can't eat salty beans. Too gross! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." And then you learn a cultural lesson. But at least now you know that rice cookers can cook beans and a couple years later when you have one crock pot but you need two, you need not fear. Also, I got this rice cooker at Costco and it was only 30 bucks and it's glorious and doesn't leave your rice soggy at all. If you're in the market, look it up.

The next important friend we need to make is Cumin. Some people buy cumin in small bottles and measure it with teaspoons. This is just silly. Cumin is your BFF. You can put it in just about everything you ever create to make it taste 1) Mexican, 2)beany, 3)Middle Eastern or 4)sassy, and you need to have large, large quantities of it on hand. I own a cumin shaker - it's that little tupperware thing on the right. That way I can buy cheap, cheap cumin in bags and then keep it in that shaker. The two cheapest places to buy it are: the Mexican aisle and the Asian market. If you're lucky enough to live somewhere glorious that has a dirty little import store like Many Lands, you can buy giant bags of Laaxmi brand Indian spices that will satisfy your need for copious amounts of cumin. (And amchur powder. Though I don't yet know what the need is, I do have the copious amounts on hand, should it arise.) If not, and you live in most of America where your local chain grocery store carries real Mexican things from Mexico, you can usually get little plastic bags with paper headers full of the comino molido we all love and pay something ridiculous like 69 cents. Never, never buy cumin in a little vial in the spice aisle. It will cost you like 5 ridiculous dollars.

No matter how much cumin you put in the beans to start with it is never enough. This is how much cumin I put in the one pot. This is the third time I did this, however. You just keep adding cumin and salt. How this worked was, I soaked the black beans (and it was 3 pounds total - the amount that's missing from the bag of beans in the first photo. 3 pounds for 10 people is way too many beans, by the way) overnight the night before. Then I woke up Monday morning, split them in half into a crock pot and the rice cooker, covered them each with water maybe 30% deeper than the beans, chopped 3 onions and threw them into the 2 pots, and added salt and cumin and chili powder. Then I set the crock pot on low and the rice cooker on "brown rice" and went to class. I came home 4 or 5 hours later and the beans were cooked but still a little firm. At this point I tasted the broth and found that it tasted like neither cumin nor salt. So I added more of each. It's best just to do it by taste at this point because however much I could tell you to add, someone would think it was too salty and I would think it wasn't salty enough. At this point I also found a little bag of black pepper and had pepper guilt, so I threw that in as well. This turned out to be a little bit of a mistake. See, I kind of hate black pepper but I realize that it makes things taste good so when I get pepper guilt I have to throw it in. The one pot of beans, though, turned out too spicy and I think it was the dang black pepper that threw it over the edge.

Part of soothing the savage hordes involves giving them some sort of meat, but I try to do it sparingly to not fuel the fire of American diet ridiculousness. So to one of the pots of beans I added bacon - one package, cut up like this. They loved it. I had thought about frying it first, but I ended up just putting the pieces straight in and I think the fat made it taste better and that was the key, apparently, to Win Beans.

At this point I wondered if anyone had ever tried shabu shabu with bacon. I imagine it's only a matter of time.

Here's my beautiful side dish that made the meal worthwhile but wasn't hard enough to merit any description of its own: spinach. It was fresh spinach, but there wasn't enough (there never is) so I added frozen spinach. I seasoned it with salt, lemon juice and butter. It's good to mix in with the beans or to just eat and make Popeye jokes in Chinese, apparently. Which turns out surprisingly funny.

But now onto the pièce de résistance, the cornbread. Here's where I make a shameful but brazen admission: I STOLE IT FROM THE SMITTEN KITCHEN. Verbatim, just about. But what are food blogs for if not plagiarism, I ask you? I found their recipe for caramelized onion and goat cheese cornbread and ~~bastardized~~ adapted it to fit our level of ~~poverty~~ frugality. It turned out fan-frickin'-tastic. (Did you know that that's the only infix in the English language?)

The first frugal measure was to use cream cheese instead of goat cheese. Because I had decided to make this at the last minute and because my personal chauffeur only goes about as far as the average bicycle, all I had access to was the local college convenience grocery store. But it's OK, we all survived. Also, I don't have an electric beater. And the whisk had disappeared. So I beat it by hand with the short little whisk that goes in an electric beater. Hence the... um... delicate texture.

Also, I substituted brown sugar for regular sugar. At this point, though, I tasted the batter and it wasn't recognizably sweet so I committed a cardinal sin and added more sugar. But by now I was out of brown sugar. The shame!

I probably added a half cup of sugar extra, and this was a double recipe. So, um.... double the sugar it calls for. And it wasn't even that sweet to the taste!

I almost put it all in one 9 x 13 inch pan, because the batter was really thin and I didn't think baking soda-leavened things would rise that high. I was very wrong. I spied on them in the oven and look how big they got!

I ended up cooking them for slightly over 40 minutes, making dinner start late (dangit! Again!) But they were so very, very beautiful I think I was quickly forgiven.

And we all ate, and were edified and rejoiced together.

Even Piao Liang, who has the most discriminating of tastes. Everyone of course ate the ones with bacon, leaving a LOT of baconless leftovers, but the meal went off very well and I was happy to eat it again, pepper overdose and all, for breakfast.

Chinese Dinner in the Wilds of Montana

2009-11-28T20:22:00.000-08:00

I'm home for Thanksgiving and wanted to make something for my family. Turns out they're my most critical audience to date, which is probably good for me.

14-Year Old Sister: What is that?

Me: Chinese food

14-Year Old Sister: Are you going to put rice in it or something?

Me: Chinese people don't mix their rice in with the dishes, they eat it in separate little bowls

14-Year Old Sister: It looks weird.

Me: It tastes good.

14-Year Old Sister: What is it? Some kind of salad?

Me: No, salads aren't usually cooked.

14-Year Old Sister: So it's just vegetables in a bowl?

Me: Is that OK?

14-Year Old Sister: It's weird.

Another challenge I faced was the fact that I'm in the Wilds. Now, truthfully, I don't think we can call anywhere that you can buy chingensai the "Wilds." However, I had forgotten the challenges of living in Montana since I've been off to school in the magical land of Asian grocery stores. It doesn't make things impossible, but it makes them a little pricier. I cooked this same meal last week for my friends at school and it cost me $14 for everything. (Granted, I used my own rice) Here, I paid $26. Which is still pretty good for a meal for 8 people. I had to buy Sun Luck brand, though, which hurt my soul a little bit.

This is tonight's recipe

A note about my cooking blog: I generally don't use recipes. Unless I'm baking, where chemistry matters, I do a lot better shopping for quantities I've got in mind and buying whatever is on sale/fresh where possible. To communicate this the best I can in a blog format I have decided to take pictures of what I bought and told you how much it made. (This is way better than shopping for 2 1/4 cups of rolled oats anyway.) So tonight's recipe made 3 dishes for 8 people and consisted of:

Sushi rice (calrose rice is actually my favorite, but I didn't want to buy 10 pounds so I paid a little more for a little tub of sushi rice. I think writing the word "sushi" on anything increases the price $2)
1 package of tofu
1 bottle of black bean & garlic sauce. It's very cheap if you find it at an Asian grocery - I haven't noticed a difference between Chinese, Korean or Japanese varieties. And all they had here was Sun Luck, in the "Ethnic Foods" aisle right between the chow mein noodles and the taco shells, and it was just fine.
5 bell peppers - red and green. Festive!
Sesame oil. See above - it tastes just fine from the American grocery store, but you'll find it a lot cheaper at an import market. If you're going to cook a lot of Asian, invest in a nice big bottle. Kadoya is a brand I really like, but again, buy whatever is the best deal.
Soy sauce. Did you know that the stuff you get in the little Kari Out packets from Chinese restaurants isn't even soy sauce? Kikkoman has been trying to get exclusive labelling laws - apparently the American brands aren't the same at all, and that's why La Choy is only 2 bucks... it's just salty water. Salty water with carcinogens. (Jennifer 8. Lee rocked my world; take it from me, if you only ever buy Kikkoman from here on out the world will be a better place.)
1 small head of Napa cabbage (白菜). I only used half of it, though.
4 chingensais (小白菜; チンゲンサイ) - some people call it baby bok choy; others give various variations on "Chinese cabbage"
1 leek
A couple pounds of fresh green beans. Could have bought more - there were no leftovers.

Things I had at home and ended up using included:

Flour
Salt
Oil for frying and deep frying (vegetable, canola, whatever - even though sesame oil is delicious, it is A GARNISH! We do not cook in sesame oil or it burns. We pour it on afterwards like a liquid candy.)
Garlic powder (fresh garlic would have been better)
Red pepper flakes (or, you know, anything spicy)
Corn starch

This made three dishes: tofu in black bean sauce, spicy green beans, and Chinese cabbage with leeks. But you can use the cooking methods for whatever vegetables are fresh and cheap. Even tomatoes. Chinese people are awesome.

What we used for the tofu in black bean sauce - the signature dish

The first job is to deep fry the tofu. First, start a few inches of oil heating in a small saucepan. Medium high is good. I like to use firm tofu, but you can use softer varieties for a slightly different outcome. Cube it, and then dust it lightly in flour.

This is the point where my dish failed a little for the evening: usually, right after you coat the tofu in flour, it should go straight into the hot oil. But my mom had been helpful and taken the oil off the heat so it didn't overheat while I thought it was heating up and when the tofu was ready, the oil was cold again. I then had to wait for it to get hot enough again, and the tofu soaked up the flour and turned into a sticky mess. It ended up tasting just fine, but didn't have the lovely golden brown coats it should have, and the texture lost a little because of that.

Meanwhile, while your tofu's frying, chop your bell peppers into pieces about an inch long & wide. Don't ever cut anything too small to pick up with chopsticks. That's the secret to Chinese cooking - remember, we don't have steak knives at the table, but we don't have spoons either. 80% of your prep time is chopping, and that's how we show our guests we love them. Chopping.

The tofu frying to a not-so-beautiful, not-so-perfect crispy loveliness. It never gets perfectly crispy; it's done when the flour coating starts to turn golden. Keep your oil pretty hot or this takes longer than it should.

While the tofu's still frying (I had to do two batches in my little pot), start stir-frying the peppers. Nothing but oil, and when they start to get tender, add the black bean sauce. I added three huge spoonfuls this size. Maybe that was excessive... no, no it wasn't.

This is what the sauce should look like. This is nothing but the moisture from the peppers and the black bean sauce, which starts out as a paste.

Stir this around occasionally, and meanwhile start chopping your other vegetables. This is actually best if someone who loves you like your mama is helping you cook. She chopped the leek and chingensai (front bowl) and half of the napa cabbage (back bowl) into chopstick-sized pieces. Meanwhile, I had my little brother wash and pull the stems off the ends of the green beans, which is all that those need.

This is the point at which I took out the tofu. Remember, this is slightly Fail Tofu. It's usually lovely little golden cubes. I just lift them out with a slotted spoon and stick them straight in the wok with the peppers and sauce. They don't even need to cook very long after that - just stir them around gently so they're all sauced up and your tofu in black bean sauce is done.

After that's ready, use your other giant frying pan for the green beans. Oh wait - you only have one frying pan and it wasn't even big enough for the first dish? That's OK. We're pioneers. We'll use a big soup pot. Someday when my prince comes he'll bring me a wok.

Pretend the soup pot is a wok. Heat some oil in the bottom just until it smokes and throw the green beans in. These are a dish that is most delicious the more oil you have going on, so don't be shy. I don't think I have a picture of this step, but you also should add some water because green beans are a vegetable that needs a little help getting soft - green beans and asparagus and broccoli and carrots and other hard vegetables - while you're stir frying you want to occasionally add a half cup or so of water and cook it out. The vegetables will steam as the water steams out of the wok.

This is how we make the green beans delicious. Soy sauce, garlic powder (though fresh mashed garlic would have been lovelier) and red pepper. I've also used laoganma. Life is beautiful. Oh, and don't forget to top it off with sesame oil!)

OK, for the final dish we want to prepare a corn starch slurry. When I'm cooking multiple dishes that I want to have that lovely thick slimy Chinese sauce that we all love, I make a big glass full of this and throw it in at the end of every dish. In this case, this is enough for one dish. Start with that much corn starch (like in that photo there) and add that much cold water (like in that other photo there). Stir it up with a spoon and save it by the stove until the very end.

The cabbage/leek dish is going to have a light sauce. I start by stirfrying it in my ~~soup pot~~ wok and then add some water. With the green beans we added the water to steam then - in this case we don't really need to, but we want a little more sauce so we can make the thick sauce at the end.

We add a little bit of soy sauce, but we don't want it to be too dark. So I just flavor it the rest of the way with salt. This is one of those dishes that people usually ask "what spices do you have in here?" and I say "soy sauce, salt and sesame oil" and they don't believe me. The leek adds a lot of flavor of its own, though. Anything in the onion family - Chinese chives are fantastic as well, or just onions if you're up for chopping them. To tell the truth, I started buying leeks when I was too lazy to chop onions and I've never regretted it.

Adding the sesame oil - look how much sauce there is in this one compared to the others. Cabbages are juicy little guys! And then adding in the corn starch slurry at the end - this all cooks very fast, and just stir it around at the end until the sauce is thick and slimy.

This is where your 14-year old sister says "What is that, a salad? Just vegetables in a bowl? Weird."

And here we go! Relatively quick, if you've got people to help you chop, and very very tasty. The green beans won the popular vote, though the tofu in black bean sauce is always a champion. I tried to tell my family that real Chinese families eat their rice in individual bowls and just eat the dishes with their chopsticks out of the serving bowls in the middle of the table, but they had already had too much foreign culture for one night and they insisted on mixing everything together and putting it on top of the rice. It's OK - we are in the Wilds, after all.

Overall, a successful meal, even though the tofu was a texture fail. And as we all know, bad Chinese food is infinitely better than no Chinese food at all.

This post wouldn't be complete without a shoutout to my Chinese homegirls who taught me how to cook and, more importantly, that food equals love. I love you and miss you all!

Qiao Jing, Jo, Jenny and Dong Mei

Gonna Make a Pie With a Heart in the Middle

2009-11-27T16:38:00.000-08:00

This isn't the most conventional way to kick off a blog that's ostensibly about food that I make in the Chinese house because today's food was neither in the Chinese house nor made by me. But it's a family tradition, and it's that time of year, so I'm gonna make you a pie with a heart in the middle.

But first of all, get thee to iTunes and look up Quincy Coleman, "Baby Don't You Cry (The Pie Song)" from the Waitress soundtrack. And if you're 99 cents richer than you need to be, buy it and listen to it as you make the Southern Pecan Pie that my family is famous for.

Baby don't you cry
Gonna make a pie
Gonna make a pie with a heart in the middle

Baby don't be blue
Gonna make for you
Gonna make a pie with a heart in the middle

Gonna be a pie from heaven above
Gonna be filled with ~~strawberry~~ corn syrup love
Baby don't you cry
Gonna make a pie
And hold you forever in the middle of my heart.

This year we had Thanksgiving in the mountains. I went home to Montana with Mom and the siblings and my brother's new wife and baby and we got to spend the night in a friend's cabin up the West Fork. It wasn't as extensive as meals in years past and I didn't even make any of it because I was up early in the morning to run an 8k with my sisters (cop out!). But it was just lovely, and the best part was the famous pecan pie, made this year by my Japanese sister-in-law. She added a little Japanese touch to the Texas classic, garnishing the top with a heart in the middle. かわいい！Because the best thing that Japan offers to the world is the propensity to take everything, perfect it, and make it cute.

The recipe originally came from a junior league cookbook from somewhere in Louisiana that my mom picked up when she lived in Southeast Texas when I was a baby, but we've appropriated it and introduced it to the Great White North, where it belongs. I like to make it with my pâte brisée crust.

All Butter Crust for Sweet and Savory Pies (Pâte Brisée)

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for rolling
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, very-cold, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 4 to 6 Tbsp ice water

1 Cut the sticks of butter into 1/2-inch cubes and place in the freezer for 15 minutes to an hour (the longer the better) so that they become thoroughly chilled.

2 Combine flour, salt, and sugar with a pastry blender until mixture resembles coarse meal, with pea size pieces of butter. Add ice water 1 Tbsp at a time, mixing until mixture just begins to clump together. If you pinch some of the crumbly dough and it holds together, it's ready. If the dough doesn't hold together, add a little more water and keep going.

3 Place dough on a clean surface. Gently shape into 2 discs. Knead the dough just enough to form the discs, do not over-knead. You should be able to see little bits of butter in the dough. These small chunks of butter are what will allow the resulting crust to be flaky. Sprinkle a little flour around the discs. Wrap each disc in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 1 hour, and up to 2 days.

4 Remove one crust disk from the refrigerator. Let sit at room temperature for 5-10 minutes in order to soften just enough to make rolling out a bit easier. Roll out with a rolling pin on a lightly floured surface to a 12-inch circle; about 1/8 of an inch thick. As you roll out the dough, check if the dough is sticking to the surface below. If necessary, add a few sprinkles of flour under the dough to keep the dough from sticking. Carefully place onto a 9-inch pie plate. Gently press the pie dough down so that it lines the bottom and sides of the pie plate. Use a pair of kitchen scissors to trim the dough to within 1/2 inch of the edge of the pie dish.

5 Add filling to the pie.

6 Roll out second disk of dough, as before. Gently place onto the top of the filling in the pie. Pinch top and bottom of dough rounds firmly together. Trim excess dough with kitchen shears, leaving a 3/4 inch overhang. Fold the edge of the top piece of dough over and under the edge of the bottom piece of dough, pressing together. Flute edges using thumb and forefinger or press with a fork. Score the top of the pie with four 2-inch long cuts, so that steam from the cooking pie can escape.

Pecan Pie

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 cup corn syrup (or molasses. I've done it with molasses before and I prefer it, though I am a fundamentally bitter person)
• 3 beaten eggs
• dash of salt
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup pecans

1 Cream butter with mixed sugar and flour; add syrup and eggs

2 Beat until frothy, add salt, vanilla and pecans

3 Pour into 9" unbaked pie shell, bake at 350 for 40-50 minutes, or until middle doesn't slosh around anymore.

I've also made this same pie, but with walnuts instead of pecans. It was a win, and added to the overall sense of adventure in the Chinese House.

But it's definitely better with the (literal or metaphorical) heart in the middle.