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.

Szechuan pork and cucumber stir fry

One of my coworkers, I don't know who, brought in some garden vegetables and left them in the break-room on Monday. There were some grape tomatoes, some very nice banana peppers and a few rather large cucumbers. It was my duty, I thought, to make sure they were used well. The cucumbers were not only large, they were dense and meaty, nicely suitable for cooking.

A pork and cucumber stir fry's been on my to do list since I passed it over in favor of stuffed cucumbers back in April. I took a new look around for recipes and found I had the choice of a generic brown sauce, oyster sauce or a super-spicy Szechuan version. That last was definitely the one for me. I did pull in shiitakes from another recipe and red onions from a third to add some more textures and boost the vegetable to meat ratio.

Ingredients

8 ounces pork tenderloin, sliced into thin strips
2 teaspoons light soy sauce
1 teaspoon dark soy sauce
1 teaspoon rice wine
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon cornstarch

1 handful dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked and sliced

1 1/2 Tablespoons peanut oil
2 teaspoons bean paste
1 teaspoon chiu chow chili oil
2 teaspoons garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns, crushed
1/2 teaspoon chili flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt

1 pound cucumber, peeled, halved, seeded and sliced thin
1/2 large red onion, sliced thin

2 teaspoons light soy sauce
2 teaspoons rice wine
2 teaspoons white rice vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar

Instructions:

1. Combine soy sauces, rice wine, sesame oil and cornstarch in medium bowl. Add pork, toss to coat and set aside.

2. Heat a wok over high heat. Add oil, wait to see the oil shimmer and nearly but not quite start to smoke. Add bean paste, chili oil, garlic, peppercorns, chili flakes and salt. Stir fry 10 seconds.

3. Add pork (with marinade) and mushrooms. Stir fry 1 minute.

4. Add cucumber and onion. Stir fry 1 minute.

5. Add soy sauce, rice wine, vinegar and sugar. Stir fry 2 minutes more. With luck the liquid should have all evaporated, but I found I had a bit left at that point and I didn't want to overcook the pork. I wanted some sauce for the rice anyway.

Serve immediately with rice.



I'm a little disappointed with how this turned out, but just a little. The textures are all good. All of the ingredients are cooked well--the pork is tender, the cucumbers soft with just a little crunch, the mushrooms soft. But something odd happened with the flavors. Almost all of the heat is concentrated in the mushrooms. It's not just that they absorbed the sauce; they pulled that element out of the sauce and the remaining liquid doesn't have a lot of spice to it. Weird. The recipe I cribbed that ingredient from used fresh shiitakes, not dried. That probably would have avoided this issue.

That leaves the pork and cucumbers out there speaking for themselves and I'm still impressed with that unexpected (for the American cook, anyway) pairing. The cucumber is a light freshness adding high notes to the rich meatiness of the pork, tied together by the salty soy sauce and the tanginess of the bean sauce. Think of how sweet relish complements a hot dog. It's kind of like that, but not really. It's definitely worth a try--if not this recipe (minus the shiitake), one of the other versions.

CSA week 14 - hot and sour soup

I have to admit up top that this didn't come out as quite the restaurant style soup I was aiming at. I can think of three possible reasons why, but I really can't be sure until I buy a bowl and do some direct comparison. My first mistake was that I used Szechuan peppercorns for the 'hot' part. This is a Szechuan recipe so that is traditional, but I can't imagine any restaurants bother with it. I should have stuck with white pepper. Second, bok (or in this case mei qing) choy isn't a usual ingredient for this soup. I think it's more of a Fukien-style soup vegetable. Third, most restaurants go too light on the sour aspect. I may have overcompensated with too much vinegar. All three of these additions add to the high notes in the flavor profile so while it seems like the soup is lacking something; it may be a lack of a lack.

So, anyway, there are two philosophies on making hot and sour soup, judging from the variety of recipes. You can either stir fry everything, add the broth, thicken it up and soups on or you can boil the broth, dump in the other ingredients in turn, cook for a few minutes, thicken and serve. If I was working with a good quality chicken stock I thick I would have gone with the first version, but since all I've got is soup from a can, I went with the latter. (As soup in a can goes, Swanson low sodium chicken broth isn't too bad.) I had accumulated a good two cups of mushroom soaking liquid in the freezer from various risottos and such so I used that along with four cups of the Swanson. All chicken broth would be fine, too. I tossed in a slice of ginger, a couple cloves of garlic and a teaspoon or so of crushed Szechuan peppercorns at the start too so they could infuse their flavors.

The rest of the ingredients begin with soaking dried cloud ear fungus (a.k.a. tree ear or wood ear) and lilly buds in boiling water. While you're slicing the soaked mushrooms into strips you've got to watch out for little knotty bits on the fungus that you'll want to cut out. And you'll need to check through the lilly buds for those still on the stem. These are both mainstays of the otherwise flexible hot and sour soup recipe, but all but the best Chinese restaurants leave the lilly buds out. (I think you can pretty fairly rate a Chinese restaurant by its hot and sour soup. The main issues are that most are neither hot nor sour, but you have to look at issues like fresh vs. canned mushrooms and the presence of lilly buds once those basic requirements are met.)

Meanwhile I defrosted a quarter pound or so of pork and sliced it into strips. In retrospect I probably should have marinated it in a bit of soy sauce, rice wine and corn starch which gives it a nice soft texture in soups and stir frys but my reference recipes didn't mention it and I forgot.

Up next are bamboo shoots and water chestnuts, mei quing choy separated into stems and leaves, tofu and scallions. The water chestnuts and scallions I chopped, the rest I sliced into strips.

Once the soup was on the boil I added the cloud ear fungus, lilly buds, pork, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts and mei quing choy stems and simmered for ten minutes.

Then I added the mei quing choy leaves, tofu and fresh mushrooms and simmered for three minutes more.

Next I added the seasonings: 1 Tablespoon rice wine, 2 Tablespoons rice wine vinegar (probably too much), 1 Tablespoon dark soy sauce, 1 teaspoon salt, and red and white pepper to taste. Once that was stirred in the next addition is 2 Tablespoons corn starch in a quarter cup of water. I brought it all back to a boil to thicken, drizzled in a beaten egg and served garnished with the scallions and a few drops of sesame oil.

As I said up top, not exactly what I was hoping for but certainly not bad. It shouldn't be hard to tweak the leftovers into a better balance.

CSA week ten - Szechuan green beans with ground pork

If you look at my first attempt at Szechuan green beans with ground pork way back in CSA week three, you'll see that it didn't turn out so hot. So before taking a second shot at it, I gave the reasons a bit of thought.

The first problem was that I used the wrong recipe. Of the variations out there some use hoisin sauce, some use hot bean paste and the one I found used neither. And then I complained that the result was dull. What was I thinking? Really, all other things being equal, use the recipe that calls for hot bean paste. As it happens I don't have any on hand, but I do have not-hot bean paste and hot chili oil so I can make my own easily enough.

The second problem was that I used ground turkey. This is a recipe where the meat has equal billing with the main vegetable so it needs to have some character and ground turkey isn't going to cut it. I generally only keep it around for tacos where it's substituting for ground beef and the ground beef is substituting for ground mystery meat. It's completely drowned in chilies and spice because Mexican chefs like to retain the mystery. So using it in this dish was a lapse of judgment.

This time I went with the more appropriate pork and I ground it myself. The best cut to use for this is actually the packages the supermarkets sell as meat for stew. These are scraps of lots of different cuts of meat and since they're of such varying quality and size they're not really very good for stew. For stew you want to cut your own pieces out of pork butt or chuck eye roast. But the mix of different cuts is just what you want for ground meat. Just put the meat in the freezer for an hour to firm it up, put the pieces in your food processor and give it around ten pulses. Much better quality than pre-ground, quick and easy. Unless, of course, you forgot that your food processor crapped out last night while you were making lettuce soup and you have to run out and buy a new one. But what are the chances of that happening?

The recipe I used this time around was this one with, as usual, some modifications. Mainly, I kept the heat up on high and did a proper stir-fry instead of wimping out and doing most of the cooking on medium high as BarbryT who originally posted the recipe did. I had to adjust the cooking times on most of the steps down from a few minutes to under one minute. I did turn down the heat after adding the liquids for a bit of a steam, though. I also added red pepper as I thought it would add a bit of interesting flavor and look pretty against the green and brown. And I used rice wine instead of sherry but that's no big deal.

One thing I didn't change was the initial deep frying of the green beans to dry them out a little. I didn't take any pictures when I did this the first time but you can see it here. If you do it right (that is keeping the heat up) the beans are releasing steam the entire time they're in the oil so they can't absorb any fat. Most that sticks to the outside can be wicked away by a paper towel so the process should add very little fat to the dish.

Another difference between this recipe and the one I first used is that, after the original deep fry this recipe only adds the beans back at the very end, reducing the sauce beforehand. That works well; the extra minute or two of cooking in the original recipe make the beans a bit limp.

One final interesting point is the cider vinegar and sesame oil BarbryT adds just before serving the dish. The sesame oil is a nice touch, but the vinegar adds a sweet and sour touch that wasn't quite what I was looking for. It's not bad, mind you, but a bit more chili oil instead is better for my tastes. Yours may differ. But that's a minor quibble; it turned out quite nicely on the whole.