CSA week 12 - A couple of yukina savoy recipes

One stir-fry and one cream soup. Normally, I'd just give them a passing mention in the weekly round-up, as they're simple stuff, but there are so few yukina recipes on the web that I wanted to put these out there for bewildered folks to find so they know a couple more options.

I separated the leaves and stems for these because I had two heads of yukina, both large enough for a full dish, and I wanted the variety. If you've got just one head, either one would work using the whole thing.

Let's start with the leaves.

Yukina savoy and pork stir fry

1/4 pound pork, sliced thin [I only had a center cut pork chop on hand which isn't the right cut for stir frying. Use something more tender, like loin.]
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon rice wine
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 bunch yukina savoy or leaves from 2, about a pound, cleaned
a few cloves garlic, minced
an equal amount ginger, minced
2 Tablespoons black bean sauce [I used black bean chili sauce since I like it hot]
1 Tablespoon peanut oil

1. Mix the pork with a bit of soy sauce, a bit of rice wine, a little sugar and some cornstarch. Maybe some sesame oil. No need to measure precisely. Let marinate around 20 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, stack the yukina leaves and slice them crosswise into ribbons about half an inch wide. If you're using the stems too, slice them into pieces a half inch wide too.

3. Get your garlic, ginger and black bean sauce ready.

4. Heat a wok really really hot. Add the oil. Add the garlic, ginger and black bean sauce. Cook briefly until aromatic. Add the pork (along with the marinade) and stir fry until it loses its pinkness. Remove to a plate.

5. Add a little more oil to the wok, swirl it around then add the yukina. If you're using the stems, add them first, stir fry until mostly cooked, then add the leaves. Toss the leaves around a bit so they all gets somewhat wilted. When there's enough room, return the pork. The yukina will be releasing some moisture (plus there will be some water still clinging to the leaves from when you washed them) so a sauce will start forming. As the cornstarch on the pork dissolves, it will start to thicken. It's pretty variable so add a little water if necessary or add a little more cornstarch (dissolved in an equal amount of water first) until the sauce is thick enough to cling to the leaves but not goopy. When you've gone from stir frying to simmering, turn down the heat to medium and cook until the leaves are tender.

Serve with white rice.


Yukina works pretty well here as it's sturdier than spinach, but doesn't need to cook nearly as long as, say, collards. Plus it's got enough flavor to stand up black bean sauce.

And now for the stems.

Cream of yukina savoy soup

1 bunch yukina savoy or stems from 2, about a pound, cleaned
whatever other green vegetables you've got lying around [I used a spring onion and a couple handfuls of parsley leaves], chopped
1 large or 2 small potatoes [white or russet would likely be best], diced
1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tablespoon olive oil
4 cups chicken stock
1 cup cream [or sour cream or yogurt if you'd like it tangy]
salt and pepper and possible some other spices or herbs

1. Break the yukina stems into pieces no more than 5 inches or so long.

2. Add the butter and olive oil to a dutch oven over medium-high heat. When the butter has finished foaming, add whatever vegetables you'd like to get a little color on, in my case the spring onion. After a bit I added the parsley. [Maybe parsley leaves taste good browned. Who knows?] If you're using the yukina leaves, you should probably wilt them down now.

2. When the vegetables a softened and browned to your liking, add the potato and cook 2 minutes more. Add the yukina stems and the chicken stock. The vegetables should be just about submerged. If not, add more stock to cover. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to medium low and simmer until everything is tender, around 10 minutes.

3. Remove everything to a large bowl and cool until you can get it into a blender without burning yourself, around another 10 minutes.

4. Blend well in batches, straining the blended soup back into the dutch oven. Yukina stems tend to be stringy, so even with serious blending, I had to strain out a good wad of gunk.

5. Add the cream and season to taste. Now's the time to add any additional flavors that you think might go well with what you've got so far. I added some pimenton which I though went nicely with the celery notes in the soup.

6. Put the pot back on the heat and bring back up to serving temperature.

You probably ought to garnish it because otherwise it looks like this:


I should have saved a little spring onion to sprinkle on top.

My soup ended up tasting somewhere between cream of cabbage and cream of broccoli. Not what I expected, but pretty good. And, like both those soups, tasty served cold too.

Like I said up top, nothing groundbreaking here, but both successful applications of yukina. If you're not sure what to do with yours, I can recommend either strategy.

CSA week ten - Jirou chao qincai

That's chicken and celery stir fry in English.

This recipe comes from Beijing chef Deng Haiyan via the Saveur website (and an article in the paper magazine at some point I presume). It's a pretty basic and straightforward Chinese recipe adjusted to accommodate the American kitchen and further mangled by my own contributions.

Ingredients:
2 chicken thighs (or breasts), deskinned, deboned and sliced thin (freezing briefly helps a lot here)
1 egg white
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1/2-inch piece of ginger, finely chopped
1 leek, halved, cleaned and julienned
5 ribs celery, cut into 1/4-inch slices
1 1/2 Tablespoon soy sauce
a little more seasoning of your choice. I used 1 Tablespoon chui chow chili oil
3 Tablespoons canola or other high smokepoint oil

1. Mix the chicken, egg white and cornstarch. Let sit 10 minutes. [Doesn't that look tasty?]

2. Meanwhile, while chopping the celery, wince at the fibrous toughness of the stalks, remember why everyone hates celery, say "screw this" and harvest a whole bunch of celery leaves instead.

3. Heat a flat-bottomed wok over high heat until smoking. Heat a while longer. Add 2 Tablespoons oil. Swirl it about then add the chicken along with the egg white mixture. Stir fry until the chicken becomes opaque, approximately 2 minutes. Remove to a plate. [It doesn't look any better cooked, does it?]

4. Add the remaining 1 Tablespoon oil to the wok. Swirl it about then add the ginger and leek. Cook briefly until you can smell the leek as well as the ginger, approximately 30 seconds. Add the celery. Cook until it wilts down and you think, maybe, you can smell celery too, approximately 2 minutes.

5. Return the chicken and add the soy sauce and, as the reviews of this recipe all agreed that it was a little bland, some extra seasoning. If not chili oil, oyster sauce might be nice. Stir fry until the chicken is cooked through, approximately 2 minutes more.

Serve with white rice.


There are two interesting aspects here.

First, the method of cooking the meat in an egg white coating, called velveting, which reputedly keeps the chicken succulent and soaks up flavor. I can't speak for the succulence since I used chicken thighs instead of the originally called for chicken breasts. Thighs don't need the help. It did pick up the flavor from the vegetables and seasonings nicely without covering up the flavor of the chicken, though, so that's a success.

Second, and more importantly for our purposes, does the celery taste both good and like celery? (Some would say that's a contradiction, but let's give it a chance.) One immediate problem; The celery leaves are kale-tough. I didn't expect that so they're still pretty chewy in the finished dish. On the other hand, they release a lot of celery flavor as you chew them so there's a lot of variation of flavor in different bites which I'm going to count as a plus. As for that flavor, I'm going to say, yes, I do like it. The aromatic sharp herbal flavor of the celery floats above the rich savory heat of the soy, chicken and chili oil quite pleasantly. Unless, that is, you get a whole wad of celery to chew through. That's rather too strong and too harsh. Otherwise, I actually like its pairing with the other flavors quite a bit. So, on the whole, yes, this works and I can recommend it this dish.

I'm not sure how I could have kept the leaves from matting up as they wilted, not while keeping this a stir fry. I'll bet if I add another non-leafy ingredient at the same time as the leaves--bamboo shoots maybe--that would have helped. If you try this recipe, try that.

CSA week two - Stuffed eggplant in black bean sauce

I started this dish with a recipe by Richard Ng, the owner/chef of Bo Lings in Kansas City. The original recipe calls for slicing the eggplant into thick rounds, slicing a pocket into each, stuffing them with shrimp, deep frying them, making a sauce from scratch, dipping them in the sauce and then steaming them.

I changed it a bit to emphasize the eggplant over the shrimp and simplified it so it was suitable not just as a weekday dinner, but as a weekday after going shopping and discovering that Whole Foods doesn't carry dried shrimp any more so you can't do the callaloo recipe you wanted to and they also don't have creamed corn so you can't do the back-up recipe either, not as written anyway, dinner.

Instead of cutting the eggplant rounds, I just cut it lengthwise (and then across so so it would fit in the steamer), sliced off a little bit of the skin side so it would sit flat and then scooped out a shallow trench to put the shrimp in.

The shrimp, instead of cutting into pea-sized pieces and stirring for four minutes until it gets sticky, I just blended (with the scooped out eggplant) in a food processor into a coarse paste. Shamefully, I didn't even bother to devein them. I did season them with generous salt and white pepper, I should mention.

Instead of deep frying, I browned the eggplant on both sides in just a Tablespoon or two of oil. Since I made boats instead of sandwiches, I did this before stuffing the shrimp in.

As the eggplant cooled, I made the sauce. I started with Lee Kum Kee prepared black bean garlic sauce and doctored it up with a little of soy sauce, sugar, rice wine and sesame oil--all the ingredients in the recipe that weren't in the ingredient list on the bottle-- until I got the flavor in the right neighborhood. Then I added a little corn starch so the sauce would thicken up during steaming and stick to the eggplant better.

I flipped the eggplant boats over, spooned a little sauce over the bottoms, flipped them back, stuffed them with the shrimp mixture, put them into the steamer (in the same pot I fried them in earlier), spooned some more sauce over top, covered and steamed for 13 minutes. That's it.


I think I missed the mark on the sauce, but not too badly. It thickened up a little too much, but the flavor's pretty close to what I've had at dim sum places. The salty deeply savory richness pairs well with the sweet eggplant and shrimp, but it's maybe a little bitter. I should have added a little more sugar and it could have used some ginger too. Visually, it could be a lot more appealing, I'll grant you.

The thicker pieces of eggplant is falling apart, but the thin end holds together well. The deep frying in the original recipe must drive out enough moisture that it firms up and can survive the steaming better. The texture of the shrimp is pretty good, though--a nice meaty chew.

Overall, not bad at all for a quick dinner. The biggest problem was that it was best hot out of the steamer, but cooled down quick while I took pictures and stopped to write up my impressions. I'm not used to that happening in Miami. Weird.

Salt baked shrimp

I mentioned in my previous post that I bought some shrimp along with the conch I used there. What I didn't mention was that these shrimp were about 18 per pound (headless) which makes them Extra Jumbo. A pretty good price for such sizable shrimp too, I thought, until I did some math and realized that a good price per pound still meant I was paying nearly a buck a shrimp. So, the question became what to make that would take best advantage of the unusual size I was paying a premium for.

My original plan was to try a dish I remember from a Good Eats episode where you bury the shrimp in salt and cook in a baking dish. That, it turns out, is called salt roasted shrimp; salt baked shrimp is something else entirely. It's actually salt boiled, deep-fried and then stir-fried shrimp.

On Chinatown-online.com it says "The name is a result of the historic popularity of salt-baked chicken, which led to many foods being called "salt-baked," even though they were not, says Yin-Fei Lo." I'm assuming that's Eileen Yin-Fei Lo who's written a bunch of Chinese cookbooks and, although I know nothing of this historic popularity of salt-baked chicken, I'll take her word for it.

The three step process would be easy enough to do in a restaurant kitchen but it's a bit of a pain at home.I simplified by merging the deep-frying and stir-frying steps into a shallow fry and making some other adjustments to compensate. It does lose a little by this--mainly the little bits of fresh hot pepper embedded in the crust. That's a shame as it add as a rather nice dimension of flavor. I'm not sure I'm explaining this well so I looked for an image to illustrate. I couldn't find one, but you can see them in this salt baked squid image I found.

I just noticed in all the salt baked shrimp images, the shells are whole which means they weren't deveined. Big shrimp means big veins filled with lots of icky shrimp crap so I don't consider that a viable option. I found that I could cut through the back of the shell and the back of the shrimp simultaneously with a pair of scissors so it was pretty easy to get through the batch. It was a two handed operation, though, so tough to get a picture of the process.

In the original recipe, the boiling step was just a 10 second blanch, to remove liquids, the deep frying for a minute to cook and create the cornstarch crust and the stir fry a few moments to coat with salt. I adjusted to a 40 second boil to cook the shrimp most of the way through and then 30 seconds per side in the shallow oil to create the crust. I put the salt directly into the cornstarch slurry along plenty of black and white pepper. That technically turns this into a version of the much more sensibly named salt and pepper shrimp, but I started out making salt baked shrimp so I'm sticking with that for the post.

Here's the result:


I probably should have used a thicker cornstarch mixture to get a more robust crust, but this turned out pretty well, I thought.The crust is light and crisp with a surprising amount of flavor past bold salt and spice, the shells crisped up too and the shrimp cooked up tender. I was winging it on the oil temperature and cooking times so the good results were probably due to jumbo shrimp having jumbo margins of error too. That makes it a good use of the large shrimp so mission accomplished. The coating to meat ratio wouldn't have worked with anything much smaller so there's that too.

The open shell did capture a bit of oil, though. The alternative was leaving the veins in so I think I made the right choice. I'll need to do some better draining next time or at least serve with enough rice to offset the greasiness. The greasiness moves this from sophisticated dim sum to a beer-accompanying finger food. Not bad at all, just not classy.

CSA week 18 - Momofuku scallion noodles with roasted cauliflower and quick-pickled zucchini

Momofuku is such a hot restaurant and cookbook right now and this recipe so easy, it's all over the cooking blogosphere. Oddly, nobody really tries to describe what it tastes like. I suppose it seems like it should be obvious--ginger and scallion--but like the Chinatown scallion sauce this is a refined version of (which I talk about a bit at the bottom of this post) there is a profound synergy here that has an electrifying effect on whatever food you use it with. You can read the chef raving about it here, but there's no reason not to just try it for yourself.

Momofuku Ginger Scallion Noodles

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups thinly sliced scallions, greens and whites
1/4 cup peeled and finely minced fresh ginger
1 fluid ounce grapeseed or other neutral oil
1 teaspoon light soy sauce
1/3 teaspoon sherry vinegar
1/3 teaspoon kosher salt, or more to taste
1/2 pound ramen noodles
Momofuku roasted cauliflower
Momofuku quick-pickled zucchini

1. Mix together the scallions, ginger, oil, soy sauce, vinegar and salt. Let sit for 15-20 minutes.

2. Cook noodles. Drain and toss with sauce. Top with cauliflower, zucchini and your protein of choice (I seared a handful of bay scallops). It's important to dress the noodles well. I found that the dish improved as a dug down into the bowl and got to where the sauce had dripped down.

Momofuku roasted cauliflower
[I just did a little more reading and found that the Momofuku cookbook just uses a simple pan-roasted cauliflower without the dressing. This works too.]

Ingredients:
1 small head cauliflower
1 drizzle peanut oil
2 Tablespoons Thai-style fish sauce
1 Tablespoon rice wine vinegar
2 Tablespoons sugar
juice of 1/2 lime
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small medium-hot pepper, seeded and thinly sliced
1 Tablespoon cilantro stems, finely minced
1/4 cup cilantro leaves, roughly chopped
2 Tablespoons mint leaves, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon shichimi togarashi [so-called Japanese seven-spice powder although it's mostly not spices. It's citrus peel, ground chilis, Szechuan pepper, sesame, poppy and sometimes hemp seeds and powdered nori]
[The stand-alone cauliflower recipe calls for toasting the shichimi togarashi onto puffed rice. I figured that would get soggy mixed into the noodles so I just added it to the marinade.]

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cut cauliflower into florets. Toss cauliflower with the oil and spread on a baking sheet without crowding. Put in over and roast for 30 minutes, stirring once. Check doneness; the cauliflower should be tender and spotted with brown bits.

2. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine fish sauce, vinegar, sugar and lime. Stir until sugar is dissolved adding a little water if necessary. Add garlic, pepper, cilantro, mint and shichimi togarashi. Add a little more water if there isn't enough liquid to moisten everything.

3. When cauliflower is done, cool briefly and dump into the large bowl. Toss to coat and let drain as there should be excess dressing.

Momofuku quick-pickled zucchini
[The recipe originally called for cucumber, but zucchini is close enough and closer to hand.]

Ingredients:
1 cup zucchini, thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1. Toss zucchini in sugar and salt. Let stand 5-10 minutes.



Like I said up top, the scallion and ginger merge into something more than the sum of the parts. It's fresh, sharp, a little tangy, a little salty. It's just gorgeous and it actually brings out the best of the noodles flavor rather than just using it as a vehicle. The zucchini doesn't add a lot, just some textural interest, really. It's interesting on its own but it's slight bite (surprisingly tart given the lack of vinegar) can't stand up to the sauce's intensity. The cauliflower on the other hand are sweet and earthy with a nice crunch to them. A really good combination of flavors and textures, really easy and using a lot of CSA vegetables I had on hand. Winner all around.

CSA week 16 - Two sides brown noodles

A traditional chow mein seemed like a good way to use up the rest of the bok choy and at least some of the celery. Two sides brown is a name I've seen associated with the version that has the vegetables topping a crispy noodle cake. Because I looking under a different name, I only just now noticed that La Diva posted her recipe for a crisp noodle cake and stir fry not long ago. You shoudl probably read that too.

Mine uses a somewhat different technique and I think I've got a few interesting things to say. Still, it's marginally post-worthy. I'll try to make something you've never heard of when I get back from Passover.

The first step is choosing the right noodle for the job. From my research I found that fresh egg noodles were the way to go. I was going to make them myself, but I saw one recipe that called for wonton noodles and I thought I recalled seeing such a thing down at Lucky Oriental Mart. And indeed I had. I think this is wonton wrapper dough sliced long and thin.

Once it was cooked al dente, I drained but didn't rinse it and patted it down into a pan to cool and starch-weld itself together into a solid mass. This preparation is really helpful for later. It means that instead of trying to fry the noodles in a pan they barely fit in, I can use the wok and instead of having to use the tricky Spanish tortilla two-plates method of flipping after the first side is browned, I can just flick it up high and over. (I did take the wok outside to give myself plenty of room to maneuver and to keep the splattering oil from going all over the kitchen. Shame I didn't have anyone to video it; I'll bet it looked pretty cool.)

The stir fry is pretty standard chow mein mix. I used the rest of the bok choy, a stalk and a half of celery, a carrot, water chestnuts, onion, mushrooms and bean sprouts. The sauce is mostly soy and oyster sauce with good hits of sriracha and sesame oil. I made more and thinned it out with more chicken stock than I would usually use to make sure there was plenty for the noodles too. The umami-heavy oyster sauce makes for a heartier gravy-ier sauce than a lot of chow mein recipes use, but it goes well with the egg noodles.

Ideally, I'd serve this by presenting the stir fry over top of the noodles, but I've got a bunch of servings here and I'm just one man. I'm carving off a wedge of noodles and serving the stir fry alongside.



The noodle cake is crisp outside, soft inside. That's a style not a mistake, but it's a style that would work better with the thicker round noodles I was hoping to find at Lucky. (The wonton noodles were a second choice.) That would have given a crisp/chewy contrast instead of the crisp/soft I'm getting here. For flat noodles, a thinner cake and/or a looser weave so the oil can penetrate and crisp everything up would be a better choice.

Oh, I nearly forgot, I bought some La Choy chow mein noodles too for the authentically midwestern approach to the dish. Let's see how they work...Hmmm, they're pretty wheaty since there's no egg in there, but they're not a bad match for the sauce and bring out the celery flavor for some reason. Keep their crunch too. Nah, still like the noodle cake better.

The stir fry itself turned out great with the vegetables fresh, colorful, crisp but not undercooked and meat tender and tasty, but since I wasn't paying close attention to what I was doing, I can't tell you just why. And you know how to make a stir fry, right? If you don't, post something in the comments and I, and readers who feel like jumping in, can try to troubleshoot whatever problems you're having.

CSA week 14 - Lion's Head

I said I was in search of something a little different to do with the bok choy and I'm pleased to say that "a little different" is a pretty good description of this dish. "A little silly" would be a good description too considering it's giant meatballs in a bed of shredded cabbage. The story goes that it's called lion's head because the fringe of cabbage resembles a lion's mane; Judging from the Google Image search results, most folks try for something a bit more dignified. Not me, though.

First things first, though. The meatballs:
1/2 pound ground pork
2 ounces (by weight, 1 ounce by volume) water chestnuts, chopped
1 green onion, minced
1 1/2 teaspoons ginger, minced
1 Tablespoon dried shrimp, soaked 30 minutes and minced [I don't like little hard bits of ginger and shrimp in my meatballs, so I ran them, along with the green onion, through my spice grinder.]
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 1/2 Tablespoons rice wine
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 beaten egg
2 teaspoons cornstarch

1. Mix gently but well and form into two or more meatballs depending on the serving size you're aiming at.

2. Heat 2 inches of peanut (or other high-smoke-point oil) in a wok until shimmery. Add meatballs and fry 3 minutes, turning halfway through, until the outside is well browned. Set meatballs aside to drain. Let oil cool and drain off all but 1 Tablespoon.

Now the cabbage. Napa cabbage or bok choy, whichever you've got seems fine judging by the recipes. Select two large leaves for each meatball. My bok choy didn't have enough large leaves so I used some small ones too which caused a little problem later on. Separate the thick stems from the leaves, break the stems into serving-sized pieces and shred the leaves. I sliced the leaves thickly; next time I'd go thinner, I think.

And for the sauce:
1 clove garlic, minced
1 quarter-sized slice ginger, minced
3/4 cup chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
pinch white pepper

3. Reheat the wok. When it's quite hot add the garlic and ginger and stir fry a few seconds.

4. Quickly dump the bok choy stems into the wok and adjust them until they form a single layer. Place the meatballs on top so they're well elevated. Pour in the chicken broth (and some water to compensate if a lot evaporates immediately). Bring to a boil, turn down heat and simmer uncovered five minutes.

5. Toss bok choy leaves with sugar, salt and pepper. Layer leaves in the wok to cover the meatballs, cover the wok and cook gently for 15 minutes more. Optionally, remove the meatballs and cabbage from the wok when they're done and cook down the sauce a bit.

Serve each meatball with a couple pieces of cabbage stem surrounded by a wreath of cabbage leaves and topped with a couple spoonfuls of the sauce. Some recipes suggest mixing the leaves with bean-thread noodles (2 ounces for the halved recipe I made). It seemed like a good idea so I included them.



The texture of the meatballs is a little off, pretty clearly from the cornstarch. Just leave that out and and think it would be fine. Actually, now that I consider it, I think the cornstarch got misplaced into the meatball ingredients from the sauce ingredients in the recipe I cribbed that aspect from. The sauce could have done with some texture.

The flavor of the meatball is good, though; the seasonings are subtle and nicely enhace the porkiness. And it's a good match with the flavor of the bok choy.

The bok choy leaves still have a bit of flavor and bite to them as do the larger of the stems. The thinner ones got mushy, though. The rice noodles are a nice addition; They add some textural interest and hold on to the sauce which is important since it wasn't thickened.

So, overall, not bad, but not the classic dish it's cracked up to be. That's probably my fault. I should try a restaurant version to see what I should have been aiming at.

That reminds me, I finally had restaurant mofongo recently. I wasn't all that far off from my disappointing homemade version which turned out to just be too heavy on the raw garlic. There really is nothing much to it. I don't understand the enthusiasm some folks have for it.

CSA week ten - Szechuan shrimp and scallion stir-fry

This is an exceptionally simple recipe from my favorite purveyor of exceptionally simple recipes, Mark Bittman. Here's his introduction:
"It isn’t often that I stumble across a dish that’s minimalist in every aspect: quick, simple, requiring few ingredients and yet sophisticated, or at least unusual. This stir-fry, a mixture of shrimp, scallions and not much else, is one of those."

Oh, I didn't notice that weaseling before. Unusual. That's a big step down from sophisticated. Well, I've already got the shrimp defrosted, peeled and deveined so I might as well go ahead and see how it turns out.

He tried a half dozen variations that detracted from the dish; maybe I can find an improvement he passed by. I suspect it's going to involve chili oil.

Ingredients:
salt
2 store (or 1 CSA) bunches scallions, cleaned
1 garlic clove, peeled
3/4 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined
1 Tablespoons peanut oil
1/4 cup cilantro, chopped

1 teaspoon black bean sauce
1 teaspoon Guilin chili sauce

1. Roughly chop 1/4 of the scallions. Chop the rest into 3- to 4-inch lengths.

2. Boil a pot of salted water and blanch the lengths of scallion for 1 minute. Remove to a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking. Put in a food processor with the garlic and a little of the blanching water. Blend until smooth.

3. Heat oil in wok or large pan over high heat. After a minute or so add the sauces. Stir and cook briefly until they become fragrant. Add the shrimp, toss and cook until almost fully cooked, 2-3 minutes. Turn the heat down to low, add the cilantro and the chopped scallion, toss, add the scallion purée. Stir, check for seasoning and serve with rice.



Oh yeah, that's some good stuff. The fresh bright bite of the scallion and the rich butteriness of the shrimp are the stars, but the sauces I added give it some subtle extra dimension and just enough of a savory backbone to tie it all together. Really tasty.

I think I missed out on sophisticated though. And it reminded me of Chinatown-standard scallion sauce so it wasn't all that unusual. Now I'm wondering what I missed by not making it straight.

CSA week six - Szechuan clementine chicken

Nothing novel or exotic here, just a more authentic alternative to the recipe in the newsletter for the same dish. There are a few variations on this particular recipe on-line and I think I've worked my way back to the original at fiery-foods.com. At least that appears to be where it first appeared on the web, but I think it likely had a former life on paper somewhere. I made an alteration in the directions to bring it even closer to the traditional method so this is a new variation on the theme.

Ingredients:
Marinade:
1/2 tablespoon cornstarch
1 Tablespoon dry rice wine
1/2 pound boneless chicken thighs, cut into 1/2 inch pieces

Sauce:
1/2 Tablespoon minced ginger
1/2 Tablespoon minced garlic
1 green onion, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground Sichuan peppercorns
1 Tablespoon dry rice wine
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon hot bean sauce
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

Stir-Fry:
1 Tablespoons peanut oil
5 small dried hot red chiles
2 Tablespoons clementine peel, torn into 1 inch pieces

1. Cut up your chicken and toss with the wine and cornstarch. Let marinate 30 minutes.

2. Combine the sauce ingredients.

3. Heat a wok to smoking, add the oil and then the chiles and peel. Stir fry briefly until they darken and become aromatic. Add chicken and marinade. Stir fry 1 minute until chicken is cooked through. Add sauce. Stir fry 30 seconds until sauce is thickened and bubbling.

Remove the chiles and peel before serving with a big bowl of white rice.


This is almost right, but the flavor has nasty bitter notes from burt orange oil. I should have added the peel with the sauce instead of blackening it with the peppers. Oddly that's one thing the newsletter recipe kept traditional so it's going to suffer from the same problem. ... There may actually be a problem with these clementines too. I've just tried the fruit and they've got the same bitter edge to them. Ech.

I added a little more sugar to the dish to compensate for the bitterness; It doesn't fix the problem, so I don't think I'm going to be keeping the leftovers, but I can just about look past the bitterness. The other flavors are, I think, just about right. I really want to try this recipe again with peel from extra-sweet oranges added late in the recipe (and maybe with a few more chilies). I think it'll be dead on traditional Szechuan and really tasty.

CSA week two - potsticker redux

When I set out looking for recipes, I wanted to find a pork and garlic chive recipe distinct from all the other sorts of Chinese dumplings. Not only didn't I find one, I can't even find a name for them distinct from the rest. Pork and chive seems to be the basic default from which those variations stem.

Given that discovery, there wasn't anything stopping me from winging it. Not that there ever really is, but if there is a traditional recipe for what I'm making, I feel obliged to at least try it. Since there is only a continuum of options, I just looked at what I had around and tossed some ingredients together.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup pork
1/4 cup beef
1 bunch garlic chives, finely chopped (~1/2 cup)
1 inch ginger finely grated (with a microplane is ideal)
6 small dried shiitake mushrooms, rehydrated
2-3 ounces firm tofu
1 Tablespoon rice wine
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 drizzle sesame oil
salt and white pepper to taste
no garlic
no scallion
no cabbage (so the chives are really the star of the show)

1. Grind beef and pork, until it doesn't quite form a paste.

2. Grind together mushrooms and tofu. The broken down tofu had an unexpectly sticky texture which let me do without the egg I was going to add as a binder.

3. Add everything else and mix well together. Chill for a whle to make it easier to work with.

I had a little trouble filling my wrappers. They've been in and out of the freezer a few times now and the edges are getting dried out and difficult to make stick together. I ended up bundling some of the dumplings up in burrito-style wraps just to get them to hold together. I had more trouble just with my lack of facility with the dumpling filling-process. I underfilled the dumplings and didn't get all the air out, so these aren't very elegant.



But, pretty or otherwise, the cooked up just fine. Surprisingly, despite the wrapping problem, the batch I made were all sealed air tight so they blew up like balloons during cooking and then collapsed back down.

The filling's a little dry, so maybe the egg would have been a good idea after all. Or maybe a little more of the rice wine and soy sauce as a boost in those flavors wouldn't hurt. Then again, I'm not using a dipping sauce which solve both those problems.

The beef isn't bad, but the combination of beef and chives brings thoughts of beef stew topped with chive dumplings or steak and baked potato--neither of which are helping me enjoy these dumplings. But that's my brain's fault, not the dumplings'. I tried something different and something different is what I got. There are some plusses here even if beef may not have been the best choice. The tofu binder is pretty interesting and the chive flavor is coming through nicely.

CSA week one - Restaurant-style bok choy with shrimp

This is the first re-working of a dish I made a while back that I want to improve upon. We'll see how it goes.

This is a modification of the dish your vegetarian friend orders in the better sort of Chinese restaurant--the surprisingly yummy lightly-dressed big dish of wilted greens. You probably shouldn't tell her that the sauce contains oysters.

The first time I made it, I added beef and tofu which made it too heavy and detracted from both the quality of the fresh vegetables the light simplicity of the original. I still wanted to add a little protein to it to make sure I don't end up going out for a hamburger later, but I wanted to keep it light. My solution was to add a few shrimp, but chop them up so they're part of the sauce and the bok choy is still the center of the dish. I also added a little cilantro to brighten up the finish. Not really necessary given the very brief cooking the bok choy gets, but I do like the herbal note.

Ingredients:
1 bunch young bok choy - I should have weighed them. A scant pound I think. [This would work fine with a variety of semi-tender greens so don't feel limited to bok choy.]

1 Tablespoon peanut oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 dried chili pepper, whole
1 handful cilantro, chopped

1 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 Tablespoon water
1/2 teaspoon sugar
2 dashes white pepper
1 handful shrimp - around a quarter of the weight of bok choy, peeled and cleaned

0. Remove the wilted or yellow leaves from the bok choy, separate the remaining leaves. Clean them and remove the nasty bottoms if necessary. If you're using baby bok choy, just slice each head in half.

1. Heat a medium pot of water to a boil. Add the bok choy and blanch for 30 seconds. Remove, drain well, salt lightly and keep warm on a rack in the oven (or on a plate over the pot of hot water if you didn't pour it out) so they stay warm.

2. Heat peanut oil, garlic and chili pepper in a small pan over medium high heat. Keep an eye on it once it starts to sizzle and remove from heat once the garlic has just started browning. Add the cilantro while the pan is still sizzling.

2.5 Lay out the bok choy on a serving plate.

3. Mix the oyster sauce, water, sugar and white pepper in a small bowl. Chop, grind or process the shrimp not quite into a paste. Heat a teaspoon of oil in a small pot over medium heat. When hot, add the shrimp and still until it becomes opaque. Add the oyster sauce mixture and cook briefly until it thickens slightly. Pour or spoon over the bok choy.

4. Pour the garlic oil over the bok choy too.

Serve with other Chinese dishes and/or a big bowl of white rice.


The flavors of toasty garlic, umami oyster sauce and sweet shrimp would do fine blending together, and if you take a bite without any bok choy, they're great by themselves over the rice. But if you have a forkful that's mostly the bok choy, the flavors revolve around it, each complementing or enhancing the vegetable's flavor without quite cohering into a separate whole. The shrimp is also a great addition texturally, adding a meatiness to the crunchy shrimp and chewy bok choy leaves and still a bit crisp stems. The hot pepper and cilantro? Completely lost; you may as well leave them out. Maybe some fresh scallion sprinkled on top--not wilted in the oil--would work, though. Not really necessary, though; this is just dandy as is.