Category: Recipes

NY Daily News pulls through with a nice article on citrus fruits.  There are some great looking recipes, including a very exciting Kumquat Mojito recipe that I would love to make for a summer cocktail party.

I was at a dinner party at my friend Julie's house this weekend and we were discussing the merits and demerits of the Meyer lemon, which Amanda Hesser once said should replace regular lemons.  One guest at the dinner party said that he loves Meyer lemonade, but that he wouldn't just substitute Meyer lemons for regular lemons.  I couldn't agree more.  Meyers are a different creature.  They lack that zing that makes lemons, well, lemony.  But the Meyer Lemon souffle recipe the NYDN suggests sounds like a great vehicle for the milder fruit.

I love eating citrus in winter -- they're like little shots of sunshine.  Though it seems counter-intuitive, citrus fruits are actually a winter crop.  I once helped production on an audiobook for teens that took place on a Florida orange grove.  One fun fact I learned from the book was that in the winter, the trees have to be hosed down to keep the tree temperature level at 32 degrees (the freezing point of water).  Otherwise, the tree is susceptible to cracking and death.  Who knew?!

Here's a fun (though slightly confusing) recipe for Thai Pomelo Salad (about half way down the page).  Just mix all the ingredients together, you can't really go wrong.

Wow.  This recipe from the Daily News for Blueberry, Cheese & Cinnamon "Soufflé" is all kinds of wrong.  Gross much!  Never trust a recipe that uses margarine or frozen convenience foods as an ingredient.  My question is, how on earth could she call it a soufflé?  I think Blueberry, Cheese & Cinnamon "Glop" or Blueberry, Cheese & Cinnamon "Primordial Ooze" might have been more appropriate.

One of my favorite recipe moments is that salon scene in the beginning of Steel Magnolias.  I can't remember the character names so I'm just going to use the movie actresses' names:

Olympia Dukakis:  What's that recipe, cuppa cuppa cuppa?

Dolly Parton: Oh, that's real easy, you don't have to write it down.  It's a cuppa flour, a cuppa sugar, a cuppa fruit cocktail with the juice, mix and bake til gold and bubbly.

OD: Sounds awfully rich.

DP: It is, so I serve it with ice cream to cut the sweetness.

I vacillate between "Hmm" and "Mmm" and "Eew" when I think about that.

Back in the day, I purchased the rights to www.yellowtrash.com, which is now available for you enterprising types to stake a claim on if you wish. I was going to post recipes for "yellow trash" foods -- spam onigiri, hot dog fried rice, rice porridge with bacon, etc. Well, this recipe for twinkie sushi, courtesy of my friend Tobin, would have fit in perfectly. I'm not sure it's something I want to eat, but I bet the kids love it. Are fruit roll-ups green now?

**OOPS! Looks like you're too late, kids. yellowtrash.com now belongs to one Samuel Yu in Burbank, CA. But I'll have you know, I thought of it first.

Did you know that Saveur now has a website?  Now you can look up recipes by cuisine, course or keyword.  They even have thumbnail pictures.  So of you get a craving for Fruilian, Savoyard, or Macanese dishes, you know where to go.  Okay, I'm going to geek out on their website some more.

On Sunday, I took the train to Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave. to go to the Thai Buddhist temple in Queens. I don't go often, usually only to make merit for loved ones who have passed, or to check out Thai New Year festivities. My visit this weekend was twofold -- I wanted to pray for the people in Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia who were affected by the earthquake and tsunamis, but I also wanted to make an offering to my grandparents, at my mom's request. When I need comfort, I feel fortunate to have the Buddhist rituals of my youth to turn to.

The temple was teeming with talkative people, as well as a camera crew who I guessed were there to interview people about the disaster in Thailand. I wrote my grandparents' names on a piece of paper and brought a ceremonial brass bowl and the accompanying small brass genie's bottle filled with water to a space on the hardwood floor in front of the officiating monk. I also had an envelope with my monetary donation and a basket filled with the saffron monk's robes, rice, soap, candles, and incense -- the traditional offerings for these ceremonies.

As the groups of black-clad temple visitors swarmed around us, I kneeled before the monk. I said the opening prayer three times and read the Pali script, transcribed in Thai, and then the Thai translation. I placed the basket and my envelope on the folded saffron fabric the monk used to receive my offering. The monk placed the paper with my grandparents' names in the brass bowl and, with a long-nosed campfire lighter, set the paper on fire. As I placed my hands together in the lotus shape and touched my fingers to my forehead, he chanted the prayer over the fire in musical Pali. The monk, who spoke to me benevolently in that way that only monks can, told me to take the brass bowl back and pour the water from the brass bottle over the ashes. He began to chant again as I thought of my grandparents and the people who lost their lives so tragically and suddenly. When we finished, I took the bowl of water and ash to the tree outside, pouring the water over the roots of the tree and making a wish to the spirits for release from suffering for the souls of my grandparents and the souls I didn't know.

When I returned inside, the ceremony complete, I lit incense from a candle flame and said a final prayer. As I headed towards the door with my burning incense, a man kindly said to me in Thai, "There's rice soup downstairs. Make sure you get some before you leave."

Rice soup is the ultimate comfort food for me. I have eaten it following tradition on many a New Year's Day, in the wee hours of the morning before heading home. I have eaten pots of it when I was ill and could keep nothing else in my system. My family ate it nearly every weekend for breakfast, sometimes with cubed salmon, sometimes with chicken. In troubled times, eating rice soup is, like going to temple, a ritual I can return to for reassurance. It is the ultimate sense memory trigger -- the familiar aroma as the food cooks, the steam bathing my face as it cools, the taste that takes me back to thousands of meals in my past. As I walked down the temple stairs towards the bowl of sand where my three stems of incense would burn down to their red tails, I realized that rice soup was just what I wanted -- and exactly what I needed.

Pork Sparerib Khao Thom

1 1/2 lbs. pork spareribs
12 cups Water
2 inch piece of ginger, sliced into 1/8" pieces
10 cloves Smashed Garlic
2 stalks Chinese celery, sliced, with the leaves
1 tbsp. Fish Sauce, plus more to taste
2 tsp. Chinese preserved vegetable (comes in a stout clay pot)

Rice, preferably day-old

Garnish:
Peeled and julienned ginger
Thinly sliced Scallions
Chinese preserved vegetable
Thinly sliced Chinese celery stalk

Ask your butcher to cut the spareribs into 1 inch pieces along the length of the bone. Bring the water to a rolling boil. Add the pork spareribs and return to a rolling boil. Add the ginger, garlic, celery, fish sauce, and preserved vegetable. Cook down over medium heat for several hours, skimming often, until the pork is very tender and falling off the bone. Add fish sauce to adjust the salt level.

Fill each bowl with day-old rice. Pour the soup over the rice, and allow each person to add their garnish to taste.

This is a similar soup to the first, which I've never seen on the menu of a Thai restaurant. It's peasant food from the northeast region of Thailand. I first tried it at my uncle's house behind the county jail complex in Conkan, Thailand. My aunt and uncle made amazing meals in their outdoors kitchen area, which was comprised of a glass-doored cabinet to keep away flies and ants from fresh food, a spigot and tub for washing up, one plug-in electric burner, and one wood coal-burning cylinder on the dirt floor, out of which spilled a little hill of gray ash and orange embers. They had a refrigerator, which was used mostly to keep the drinking water cold and to chill fruit. All of the ingredients were bought fresh at the nearby open-air markets -- gorgeous yellow het nang fa, oyster mushrooms which are called female angel mushrooms in Thai; fuschia dragonfruit with succulent snowy white flesh; wood-fired fish grilled to flaky perfection.

My grandma would come out for her once-a-day "outside time," slipping on the ubiquitous flip-flops which every member of every Thai household owns a pair of, and stepping onto the fine reddish dust of the "porch" area. My aunt would set up several dishes on the low wicker table which served as both chairs and dining table for the whole family, and later in the day, chaise lounge for grandma, under a straw mat overhang which did little to block out the fierce equator sun. My uncle would come out in his natty brown polyester jailer's uniform, my cousins in their neatly ironed uniforms of pilgrim collared white blouses and long, pleated navy skirts, and my aunt in her country wrap sarong and tank top. We all sat down with five inch Corelle plates to share our hearty breakfast in the relatively low humidity of a northeast Thai morning, reaching across the wicker for a hunk of hot sticky rice, or a little grilled fish, or some spicy bamboo stew. The molting pet chickens would come by, clucking and pecking at stones on the ground, trying to sneak a bite off of our plates and hurrying away, even if it was chicken they were stealing. (Chickens are not very discerning eaters.)

I loved dipping my ball of sticky rice into this hot, savory soup, crunchy with fresh herbs and full of incredible flavor. Chickens in other parts of the world just seem to taste better. They don't look like our white, hormone-pumped Schwarzenegger chickens. They're scrawny, a bit stringier, but one little chicken adds more flavor to a soup than ten Purdue specimens could. That said, use free-range chicken, organic if you can get it. This soup keeps fairly well -- just add more chopped herbs when you heat it up for the second day for that extra punch of freshness. Here, the tartness is provided by macam pieak, cooking tamarind, which can be found at the Thai and many Asian grocery stores. It comes in a little shrink wrapped 5x4" block in the dried foods section.

Swa

12 cups water
1 tasty chicken, cut into pieces
1 stalk lemongrass, cut into 3 inch pieces and pounded
5 double-leaves of kaffir lime leaves
1 3 inch piece of galangal, cut into 1/8" slices
3 shallots, sliced
1 finger-size block of macam pieak,cooking tamarind
1 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. uncooked rice
1 tsp. dried crushed red chili, plus more to taste
4 scallions, sliced thinly
handful of cilantro with stems, roughly chopped
handful of mint, roughly chopped
Fish sauce to taste

Boil the water. When it comes to a rolling boil, add 2 tsp. salt, lemongrass, lime leaves, galangal, shallots and tamarind. Bring to a boil again and add the chicken. Boil it at a rolling boil, skimming the scum. In another dry pan, toast the rice until it is the color of almond skin. Crush the toasted rice in a mortar pestle until it's pretty fine, like the texture of white sand. When the chicken is tender and cooked, 20 minutes, remove from heat. Add the crushed chili, the crushed toasted rice, the chopped herbs, and some fish sauce to adjust the salt level.

****

I thought a lot about those poor chickens when the bird flu epidemic hit southeast Asia. This is a picture I took at dusk behind my uncle's house, when the roosters flew up into the lower branches of the tamarind tree to roost for the night. When I was there in November of last year, chickens were everywhere. Everyone had pet chickens, and the fully plumed roosters were kept under big straw domes in front of many houses in Ban Ponesawang, the tiny dirt-road village my mother grew up in. Every morning, starting at about 3 or 4 a.m., those roosters would start crowing as though someone were cutting their gonads off. Now I grew up sleeping through the sound of train horns blasting, the reverberations of the chugging wheels shaking the house; I've slept through snake-like lines of speed-freak cab drivers honking their horns incessantly at the corner of Bleecker and the Bowery; but I could not get any fucking sleep once these g.d. roosters started up at the crack of dawn. My mom went to visit Thailand after the bird flu forced a mass chicken-cleansing across the nation, and especially in my family's region. She said there were no chickens anywhere; no more roosters crowing in the morning, no more scraggly chickens to wave away at the breakfast table. I felt guilty for all of the murderous thoughts I had, lying awake in the mosquito-buzz mornings at my uncle's house. The moral of this story? Don't count your chickens before they're hacked. And eat more Swa while you can.

Thai soups are perfect for cold season. They're warming, easy to sip, and they'll clear your sinuses. The balance of spice, tart and salt can cut through even the most stuffed up palate. In my parents' La Puente backyard, we have lemongrass, a lime tree, and a kaffir lime tree that grows completely out of control. A couple of years ago, my parents decided to hire a gardener to take care of their thirsty plants out back. When the gardener lopped the tops off the unruly bushes hiding our house from the main road, the lone kaffir lime tree got a little haircut to even out the levels. My mom kind of freaked out about the loss of all of the fragrant kelly green leaves, so the gardener was told to keep his shears away; now the tree grows wildly above the tops of all of its neighbors. I miss having the ingredients fresh and handy, but Bangkok Center Grocery has everything you can't get at the normal markets. You could easily subsitute chicken for shrimp in Tom Yum Goong (which would make it Tom Yum Kai) if you've got something against crustaceans -- just add bone-in chicken bits at the same time as the lemongrass and skim the broth as it cooks. This soup is fairly easy to make, but it doesn't keep very well, so eat up and get well!

Tom yum goong

8 cups water
2 stalks lemongrass
2 inch piece of galangal, sliced into 1/8" pieces
5 smashed cloves of garlic
3 shallots, sliced thinly
5 double-leaves of kaffir lime leaves
2 handfuls oyster mushrooms, cut into large 3" pieces
(you can subsititute enoki mushrooms or canned straw mushrooms, which I am very fond of)
12 shrimp, peeled and deveined (or 8 shrimp, head-on for authenticity and more seafood flavor)
1 tbsp. nam prik phao, roasted chili paste in oil
Whole Thai chilies, optional (for spice fiends)
1 tbsp. fish sauce, plus more to taste
2 limes, juiced, plus more to taste
1/2 cup roughly chopped cilantro

Boil the water. Cut the lemongrass into 4 inch pieces, and smash each piece a couple of times with a mortar and pestle or the back of your knife. Drop them in the boiling water, along with the galangal, garlic, shallots, and lime leaves. Add 1 tbsp. fish sauce. Boil on medium heat for 20 minutes, until the broth is fragrant. Add the oyster mushrooms and optional fresh chilies, cook for another 3 minutes. Add the shrimp and cook until the shrimp is just opaque. Remove from heat. Add the lime juice, nam prik phao, cilantro and more fish sauce to taste.

***

A note on kaffir lime leaves: as you can see here, the kaffir lime leaf grows with two leaves attached on top of each other on a single spine. This is what I refer to as a double-leaf; when I was a kid, my mom sent me out to the garden to get ten leaves from the kaffir lime tree. I came back with five double-leaves, and was promptly sent back out to get five more. The tree has a built in defense system against plunderers, with sharp, inch-long spines growing along every branch, so it can be a tricky, scratchy job. I remember one of the parents at the Thai temple had a blood-red splotch in the whites of one of her eyes. I asked her what happened (being the nosy and insensitive inquirer I was/am) and discovered that one of those needle-like spines had flown into her eye during a kaffir lime leaf snipping. Think about that should you feel like griping about how expensive they are...

Last night I had some friends over for Thai food. I was a little nervous because I haven't cooked Thai food in ages. It's a pain in the ass to round up all of the ingredients -- you gotta go to the Thai store for the herbs, pastes, sauces, etc., then I like to get the organic meats from Whole Foods, the veggies from the Greenmarket, etc. By the time I've gathered everything, I am too exhausted to cook. Thai food and Indian food -- I get a headache just thinking about making them.

The grocery store situation in major cities is definitely changing when it comes to inclusion of international foods. I remember that when I first moved to Windsor Terrace in Brooklyn, a primarily Irish- and Italian-Catholic community, the local Key Food grocery store had an "international foods" aisle which included all the Goya products and a whole array of disgusting La Choy (or whatever it's called) brand products; I was appalled that it was located directly across the aisle from all of the dog food and cat litter. Keep in mind that grocery floor planners know exactly what they're doing -- at my old Berkeley Safeway on College Ave., the tampons and feminine products were located in the same aisle as the PMS friendly cookies and potato chips.

But these days, soy sauce, Japanese short-grain rice, miso, and all sorts of Asian staples are readily available at normal supermarkets. It's a far cry from the canned chow mein and water chestnuts days of yore. And it gets better every year as people become more accustomed to foods of different cultures and request products at their local supermarket. Still, Thai ingredients like good curry paste, holy basil, lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves make a trip to the Thai market worthwhile. This time, I went to the excellent Bangkok Center Grocery on Mosco St. in Chinatown. (Who knew there was a "Mosco St."? Not I!) They have beautiful fresh kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, fresh curry pastes, frozen specialty vegetables, and the best mortars and pestles in a clean, well-lit and fairly roomy shop.

The menu for the evening:

Tom Yum Goong
Sauteed sweet potato greens
Glass noodle salad
Red curry with beef and pumpkin

The easiest dish (besides the sweet potato leaves), and probably the most impressive, was the red curry with beef and pumpkin. The beef was tender and the pumpkin was creamy and sweet; the curry was incredibly fragrant, redolent with aromatic leaves. My secret, and the secret of practically every Thai family? Store-bought curry paste. I mean, who has time to sit there with the mortar and pestle, taking their frustrations out on some resilient herbs and spices? This time, I used a refrigerated paste they had in packets at the Thai grocery store. Highly recommended.

Red Curry with Beef and Pumpkin

2 cans coconut milk -- do not shake!
2 tbsp. red curry paste
1 lb. stew beef, chunked
1/2 medium kabocha pumpkin, peeled and cut into large chunks
Handful of Thai basil
10 double-leaves of kaffir lime leaves
2 red finger chilies, sliced thinly lengthwise

Turn the heat on high on a large pot or dutch oven. Open up your coconut milk cans and spoon the fatty coconut cream off the top. Melt it down in the dutch oven with the curry paste until bubbly and well mixed, 1 minute. Add your beef and cook until nicely browned, 5 minutes. Pour the remaining coconut milk into the pot along with five lime double-leaves. Cook on medium-low heat for 1 hr. or until the beef is nice and tender. Add the pumpkin and the red chilies and cook til the pumpkin is tender, 5-10 min. Remove from heat. Chiffonade the remaining kaffir lime leaves. At the last minute, add the basil, chiffonaded lime leaves. Serve with jasmine rice.

****

A public service announcement for all you vegetarians, kosher-keepers, and shellfish allergic -- don't eat the curry! One of the main ingredients in curry paste is fermented shrimp paste.

Ah, Thanksgiving.  Thanks to the god of gluttony for creating a day in which we solely celebrate the joy of snarfing.  Thanks to my Tibetan friend Tashi 2 at the Greenmarket who proclaimed this glorious holiday "Turkey Graveyard Day."  Thanks to my friend's friend Cory for making me get off my ass and post something about this, the greatest food holiday EVER.  Thanks to tryptophan.  Thanks to Martha Stewart for the original recipe from which this is adapted.  Thanks to my friend Miho for introducing this transcendent recipe to me.  And thanks to all four of you, dear readers, for hearing this tree fall in the forest.

Adapted from Miho who adapted it from Martha

Best Thanksgiving Side Dish Ever

This is a great dish to eat with turkey or chicken.  It's like forest nymph manna, full of fruity, nutty, herby goodness.  It makes you feel like a mighty forager in some wooded area, cooking up the bounty of the earth. 

2 cups brown rice

1 cup wild rice

9 cups chicken broth

2 tbsp. rich, creamy, delicious, irreplaceable butter

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

1 handful chopped celery

1 large cooking apple, skin-on, cored and diced

2 handfuls of dried apricots, (don't get those gross unsulphured hippie market apricots, please.  California or Mediterranean sulphured are best for color and flavor)

1 handful almonds, coarsely chopped

1 glass of white wine

1 tbsp. fresh thyme

1 tbsp. fresh rosemary

2 more tbsp. fresh, scrumptious butter

In a large pot, cook brown rice and wild rice together, substituting chicken stock for water, according to directions (they have the same cooking time). 

Heat a large pan over medium flame.  Melt butter.  Saute onion, celery and apple til translucent.  Dice each dried apricot into 3 pieces.  In a separate dry heated pan, toast the chopped almonds til golden brown.  Add wine to onion celery apple pan, and pick up the brown bits with your spatula.  Add the apricots and cook a minute or two until they plump up a little.  Add almonds, herbs and butter and remove from heat.  Fold fruity nutty herby mix into cooked brown and wild rice.  Serves a lot.

***

Don't burn your rice.  My tip on cooking any rice: when you start cooking it, the liquid takes time to come to a boil.  When it comes to a boil and you turn the heat down to simmer, the steam will be coming out like crazy.  When the steam starts to dissipate and then the steam almost stops being released from the covered pot, you know your rice is done.  It's like microwave popcorn -- when the popping slows to 3-4 seconds apart, you take know it's done, and you take it out before it burns.  And use your nose -- cooked rice will smell like delicious cooked rice.  If the steam has slowed down a lot and it smells good, take it off the heat.  Trust your nose.  Or use a rice cooker.

I am going to my co-worker Dottie's house for Thanksgiving and I am very very very very excited.  A full report forthcoming, if I can ever wake up from the post-turkey coma.

I went over to a friend's house for the presidential debates on Thursday. She made an incredible Mexican spread of pork cooked in banana leaves, tomatillo salsa, rajas, black beans, guacamole, and sauteed purslane. Purslane is a wild green, often thought of as a pesky weed, which can be bought at Alex Paffenroth's stand for $1.00 a bunch.

She asked me to bring a salsa, so I made a very simple roasted tomato salsa. When you need a salsa, don't pick up the Pace -- there's no reason to fool around with those strangely viscous boiled jar salsas. Salsa is very easy and quick. It's a good way to use the last tomatoes of the season before the frost comes in (*sniff*sniff*). Though I will say that if you MUST get a jarred salsa, the Whole Foods brand roasted tomato salsa is excellent, as is Rick Bayless's Frontera brand. I like to cook that up with some tofu for a San Francisco style tofu scramble in the morning. It's delicious, trust me.

Roasted tomato salsa

Tomatoes, three large or 10 plum -- just choose the tastiest, ripest looking ones
1 medium white onion, chopped
1 or 2 cloves garlic
chopped cilantro to taste
jalapenos -- 2 for mild, 3 or 4 for medium, 5+ for picante!
(alternatively, use habanero peppers for that searing heat)
2 limes
Salt
Splash of red wine or cider vinegar

Put a cross hatch in each of the tomato butts. Drizzle a little olive oil over them and the jalapenos in a roomy baking dish. In the hottest temperature your oven can dish out, roast roast roast until the skins turn black. Don't be afraid of the smoke, just keep the oven door closed and open all the windows. Flip them once in a while.

In a large bowl, mix together the onion, cilantro, and maybe a minced fresh jalapeno for a little extra kick. Add the roasted tomatoes and stem-free jalapenos, skins and all. Using a hand blender, crush gently. If you have a molcajete (mortar and pestle) go ahead and use it, crushing the garlic in the molcajete and then adding the other ingredients. Don't go overboard, it's not soup. Add juice of 1 lime and about a teaspoon of salt to start. Taste. Add splash of vinegar. Taste. Tastes pretty good, right? Add lime and salt and vinegar to taste, slowly, but do not go overboard with either one. Makes two spaghetti jar-fuls. Eat with eggs, with quesadillas, black beans, bring it to a party. Yum.

***
They say salsa is more popular than ketchup these days. But which of those disgusting tomato sauce and rehydrated onion stews is getting the most market share? I used the like the Herdez salsa that came in a can but the last time I bought one, it really tasted like the can. When I was in school in Berkeley, I used to go to the Cancun taqueria because they had the most mind bogglingly good salsa bar -- as much as you wanted to eat for free, with purchase of your mole and nopales burrito. They had strawberry salsa, avocado salsa, pineapple salsa, salsa borracha (drunken salsa), tomatillo salsa...yum.