Sukhamvit Soi Five fried chicken

This is a modified version of a recipe I found about a year ago in theatlantic.com's brief-lived food section. It's still in the archive, but it's hard to find and only one other blogger seems to have written it up. The article accompanying the recipe is by Jarrett Wrisley who attributes it to Mr. Pee, a Bancock street vendor whom he met selling chicken outside the Foodland Supermarket on Sukhamvit Soi Five in 2001.

My only change was to use a whole bunch of cilantro instead of 10 cilantro stems and 4 large cilantro roots. I presume that made the marinade greener, but as I've never encountered a cilantro root, I don't know if there's any other differences.

Ingredients:
1 head cilantro including stems, chopped
14 (count'em) cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 Tablespoon black peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons salt
2 Tablespoons fish sauce
2/3 cup chicken stock
3/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons rice flour
1 chicken, butchered into serving pieces

1. Blend the cilantro, garlic, peppercorns, pepper flakes, salt and fish sauce until smooth. Add a little chicken stock to get everything moving around in the food processor. Remove to a large bowl, and stir in the rest of the stock. Add the rice flour gradually until a smooth loose batter forms. Add a little water if it gets too thick.

2. Add the chicken, coat well and refrigerate overnight.

3. Bring chicken up to room temperature. [I laid the chicken out on a tray to speed the process along.] The batter will have thickened up to a paste so make sure it's spread on the chicken evenly. Or, at least try to do a better job of it than I did.

4. Heat oil to 350 and fry around 5 minutes on each side until the center of the meet reaches 160 degrees. It should be more of a copper than a golden brown. [I had trouble cooking the chicken through before the crust burnt with my later batches so watch your oil temperature.]

Let cool a few minutes and serve with sriracha.



The raw batter is spicy and harsh so it's surprising that the cooked crust is more prominently salty. And the spicy notes are more in the Colonel's 11 secret herbs and spices vein than anything notably Bancockian. That's a little disappointing, but it's very tasty for what it is. The meat is flavorful and juicy. The crust is crackly crisp while being well adhered to the meat and inextricably merged with the skin. Gorgeous stuff and very easy. The sriracha isn't necessary, unlike for a lot of mediocre Thai food, but it adds the missing heat and a touch of acid that pops the chicken's flavor nicely so give it or your favorite other hot sauce a try.

Thai beef and betel salad

Well past time to use my betel. It's two weeks old at this point and a little faded. A little late on the blog post too; sorry about that. Mussels were on sale at Whole Foods and you've got to bump them to the front of the queue.

This recipe is a take off of a betel leaf salad recipe I found on ImportFood.com with some elements from the ubiquitous ground-beef-wrapped-in-betel-leaves recipe added in, plus some adjustments to compensate for the tiny amount of betel I've got and some adjustments that just seemed like a good idea at the time. Pretty standard origin for me, really.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup betel leaves, shredded
1/2 cup carrot, shredded
1 small handful cilantro, well stemmed and roughly chopped
1-2 sprigs mint, chiffinaded (is chiffinade a verb?)
1 medium-hot chili, seeded and thinly sliced

1/4 pound tender beef, sliced into strips and cut into sensible lengths
marinated in fish sauce and lime juice with a little sugar and a little cilantro

2 Tablespoons roasted unsalted peanuts
1 Tablespoon dried shrimp
ground together or crushed in a mortar and pestle

2 teaspoons tamarind pulp dissolved in 5 teaspoons water
juice of 1/2 lime
1 Tablespoon palm sugar or any sugar with some molasses left in
1 Tablespoon light soy sauce

salt, sriracha

1. If your betel leaves, like mine, are a bit soggy from moisture expressed during storage, lightly toast them to dry them out. Only a few minutes or they'll start to crisp up. Hmm...betel chips; I've got to make a note of that.

2. Mix the betel leaves, carrot, cilantro, mint and chili in a large bowl.

3. Heat a cast iron pan over high heat, add a little oil and heat some more. Drain the marinade from the beef. Add the beef to the pan and cook, stirring but not stir frying, until cooked though and maybe a little browned. Remove to a bowl. Feel free to add them to the vegetables, actually.

4. Strain the tamarind mixture into a small bowl. You'll have to force it through the mesh and scrape it off the bottom of the sieve most likely. Add the lime juice, sugar and soy sauce. Don't measure, just mix them to your taste.

6. Mix together the beef, peanuts and shrimp with the vegetables. Add the dressing bit by bit just until the vegetables are coated. I used about half, myself. Add salt if necessary and maybe a little more lime or sugar until the flavors are balanced.


OK, let's give it a try. This is my first time using raw betel, and I've seen a fair number of complaints about its strong medicinal flavor, so I'm not sure how this is going to turn out.

Oh, this is very nice indeed.
The betel is the foreground flavor, but it's not overbearing. The sweetness of the carrots, emphasized by the tamarind, and the tangy tartness of the dressing blend with it for an pleasantly interesting whole. And there's just a bit of aroma from the herbs floating above the bolder flavors.

It could use a little more heat--I shouldn't have seeded the jalapeño I used--so I added just a little sriracha. That helps and adds just a touch of burn in the aftertaste which I like. Brought up the acid a little too which isn't a bad thing.

Each bite has a slightly different character; I particularly like it when the beef-betel-peanut combinatination of flavors comes out.

Texturally, it's mostly the crunch of the carrot and the chew of the beef. The herbs have wilted a little but there's still a little leafiness in there.

I think it helped that my betel's flavor was faded. If I were working with perfectly fresh leaves, I think I'd boost the carrot and add some shredded daikon to thin it out. That would help making this more than two small or one large serving, too. The original recipe I based this on actually has double the betel to carrot ratio. I can't see that working, at least for my palate. I'm curious to try a properly authentically prepared Thai dish using betel leaves. I think Robert from Possum Trot is the only one growing piper betel locally. I know he's unlikely to be reading this; anyone else know if he's supplying any local restaurants?

CSA week ten - Thai canistel and radish omelet

OK, I recognize that this one is going to require a bit of justification.

First off, I had a leftover roasted canistel from last week that I was looking for ways to use. You may recall that I mentioned that it tastes rather like pumpkin which would explain why I was searching for savory pumpkin recipes. A technique I use while trolling around the web for recipes is to pair the ingredient I'm hoping to use with various proteins and cooking styles and seeing what pops up. In this case a search for "pumpkin and stir fry" turned up a couple of southern Thai recipes for pumpkin and egg stir fries. Who knew that was a thing?

As for the radishes, when you thinly slice them and fry them until they're browned around the edges they lose their peppery bite and take on a lovely savory/sweet flavor that goes well with eggs. I've substituted them in for the potatoes in Spanish tortillas before with quite good results so why not try them here too?

So I fried up a handful of thinly sliced radishes and a couple links of lop chong in a little peanut oil until both were nicely browned.

Removed them and fried the canistel until it was browned too. That went rather more quickly than I expected; it looks burnt, but it just tastes caramelized.

Returned the radish and sausage, squirted on some fish sauce and then added three beaten eggs and a handful of chopped cilantro.

My attempts at omelets generally fall apart at this point. It ended really more scrambled eggs. Ah well. But that just made it easier to serve over a bowl of rice with a bit more fish sauce and sriracha to taste.



I know this isn't terribly plausible, but I think it works. Both the canistel and the radish have been transformed. The canistel is more like roasted squash while the radish is savory/sweet without a hint of bite. Both flavors are enhanced by the saltiness and umami of the fish sauce. The radishes taste nothing like the Chinese sausage, but they both have similar savory/sweet balances that work well together. The eggs add richness and tie everything together. But the real standout here is the canistel with sriracha; the combination creates a lovely sweet heat that definitely merits more exploration. Give it a try and see what you think.

CSA week three - Thai basil eggplant

There are lots of recipes on the web for Thai dishes using basil and eggplant. Mostly they're just: fry eggplant, add soy sauce and basil, serve over rice. That not only isn't going to satisfy me, I wouldn't get a blog post out of it. So I started with the most complicated recipe I could find (which, as a bonus, uses the bell pepper) and messed with it.

Ingredients:
1 medium-sized European eggplant, sliced into 1"-square cross-section strips
1 1/2 suntan bell peppers (or one red and one green), sliced into short broad strips
1 medium onion, chopped into pieces roughly the same size as the pepper pieces
hot peppers to taste, finely chopped
all the garlic left in the house, finely chopped (up to 3 Tablespoons, but I only managed 1)
1 generous handful Thai basic, roughly chopped

3 Tablespoons Thai fish sauce
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon brown sugar
1 chicken thigh, deboned, deskinned and cut into bite-sized pieces (meat is optional, but I'm compensating for less eggplant than the 3 Chinese eggplants the original recipe called for. If you want to stay vegetarian bar the fish sauce, tofu would be fine or just reduce the amount of onions and peppers.)
1/2-3/4 cup warm water

2 teaspoons corn starch
2 Tablespoons warm water

Instructions:
1. Mix fish sauce, soy sauce and brown sugar. Add the chicken and put it in the refrigerator to marinate. Mix the cornstarch and 2 Tablespoons water.

2. Heat a wok over high heat until it's smoking hot. Add a Tablespoon of cooking oil, the eggplant and a pinch of salt. Fry, stirring frequently for 5 minutes, until the eggplant is softened and, in spots, browned. Remove eggplant to a large bowl.

3. Heat another 1 Tablespoon of oil. Add onions and bell peppers and cook for 5 minutes, until both are softened and a little browned and the onions turn translucent. Remove to the bowl with the eggplant.

3. Heat a third Tablespoon of oil. Add the garlic, hot pepper and fry briefly. Add the chicken (drained of the marinade) and cook until the chicken loses its pinkness. Add the vegetables and mix thoroughly. Add the marinade, and a judicious amount of the warm water. Wait until the water starts boiling and add the basil then cook for at least one minute. When everything looks about right to you, add the cornstarch and take off the heat. Stir until the sauce turns glossy and thickens.

Serve over rice, noodles or a salad.

Hmm...not bad, but not fabulous. The texture of the vegetables is just right--soft but with a little firmness left to the bite. But the sauce isn't quite as flavorful as I'd like. A bit more fish sauce, a squeeze of lime and a whole lot of sriracha wakes it up, but the balance is off. Stock instead of water would help, but I think I just don't have enough flavorings for this much vegetation. Maybe my ratios were off.How big are medium-sized Chinese eggplants anyway?

CSA week one - Thai corn, coconut and crab soup

This isn't a real Thai recipe. There's a real Thai corn and crab soup, Kaeng Poo Kab Kao Phod, but the recipes I found for it call for a can of creamed corn. I went a different way.

First up, I needed a base for the soup and this seemed a good time to make a batch of shrimp stock. Every time I cook shrimp, I keep the shells and I had accumulated a quart bag full in the freezer. I knew it was going to make more than what I needed today so I kept the seasonings simple:
1 quart shrimp shells
2 corn cobs
1 half onion, cut in two
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon whole peppercorns

All that went into a large pot with water to cover--around six cups--and simmered for twenty minutes. Then I strained it, set two cups aside to freeze, and started into the dish proper.

To start building the Thai flavors, I added:
2 lemongrass stalks, trimmed and crushed
1 hot pepper, split
2 cloves garlic
1 piece dried galangal (Galangal is a relative of ginger with a less sharp, more floral flavor)
4 ears of corn kernels

and simmered for a half hour.

Afterwards, I fished out the lemongrass, galangal and a cup of the corn, added:
1 cup coconut milk
1 Tablespoon fish sauce

and blended in batches until the soup was fairly smooth.

Then I returned the reserved corn and added:
6 ounces of picked crab (Lump crab would have been better. Crab claws would have been better still. Dropping in a whole fresh crab might have been interesting.)
and, if I had thought of it, this would have been a good time to add some thinly sliced kaffir lime leaves. But I didn't remember until much later so I only added them to the leftovers.

and simmered for 5 minutes to blend the flavors.

Finally, I garnished with copious cilantro and scallion, a squirt of sriracha and a squeeze of lime. And, after tasting, a bit more fish sauce and, to compensate for few-day-old corn, a bit of sugar.


I think you can see that the texture ended up kind of sludgy. The fresh corn was kind of tough and didn't blend so well instead of the creamy result you'd get from blending canned or frozen corn. You're going to get sludge from the picked crab anyway so that's OK.

The corn flavor, once I had tweaked it with a little sugar, was strong through and harmonized nicely with the crab. The lemongrass and galangal flavors, which were prominent before blending were kind of lost and the coconut was pretty mild so it was up to the herbs and the funkiness of the fish sauce and kaffir lime leaves to add complexity to the soup and make it definitely Thai. A slight shift and this could have easily ended up Chinese or Southwestern or a bisque and been just as good. Lots of room for variation to preferences here.

Larb salad

Larb (or laab or laap or, quite possibly, laarpb) is a salad from northeastern Thailand. There are a good many variations out there, all kind of complicated. The key, from what I've read, is balance between all of the different elements, but since we're talking Thai food here, this is the pyramid of circus elephants sort of balance, not the delicate flower arrangement of Japanese dishes. Did that metaphor work? Maybe Japanese food is a pyramid of crickets?

It's generally served rolled up in lettuce leaves, with papaya salad, with green beans, cabbage or spinach and/or with sticky rice.

Anyway,
Ingredients:
5-8 ounces of lean pork, chicken, duck, whatever, with some offal thrown in if you've got it. I just used pork.
1 Tablespoon rice
2 Tablespoons chicken stock
1 clove of garlic, minced
1 pinch sugar
1 pinch salt
1 or 2 limes
~2 Tablespoons fish sauce, the serious good quality Thai stuff. It should smell awful straight.
~1/2 teaspoon chili powder, freshly ground if you can manage it
1/4 to 3 shallots depending on how big your shallots are, sliced thin
1 large handful of mixed mint, cilantro and scallions, chopped
1 Kaffir lime leaf, slivered

1. Put the meat in the freezer for an hour or so to firm up and then chop it by hand for a few minutes until it looks like it's been ground. Apparently this makes a difference. It only took a few minutes so why not?

2. Toast the rice in a dry pan until it turn brown and aromatic. Grind it in a spice grinder or mortar.

3. Squeeze the juice of 1/3 of a lime over the pork. Mix well and marinate.

4. Add stock, garlic, sugar and salt to a small pan. Heat over high heat until boiling. Add pork and cook, stirring, for a couple minutes until cooked through and kind of fluffy in texture. The pork will stick and then unstick as it releases juices. Because it's being cooked in the liquids it shouldn't dry out too much.

5. Turn out pork and accumulated liquid into a large bowl. Add fish sauce, a couple Tablespoons of lime juice and chili powder. Taste and adjust seasonings until you're getting sweet, salty, spicy, sour and pungent all at once.

6. Add the shallots, herbs, lime leaf and most of the toasted rice powder. Toss well. The rice powder should absorb a good bit of the liquid.

Serve with whichever of the accompaniments listed above that you'd like. I defrosted some CSA green beans and made up a batch of sticky rice, myself. Garnish with the remainder of the rice powder and maybe some leftover herbage.


There are a whole lot of flavors going on here. The sour spicy funkiness of the dressing is up front, but it's on a foundation of meatiness and has a variety of herbal notes brightening it up with the aromatic mint clearly present. I'm finding the mint a lot more harmonious here with the fish sauce and lime than in the Iranian context I used it in a while back. You can taste the toasted rice in there adding its own unique not-quite-nuttiness too.

There's a good variety of textures too with the chewy meat, crisp vegetables and tender rice.

This is a dish that rewards concentration. I was paying close attention while I was writing the description, but then I sat down to dinner while reading a book and, while the larb was still tasty and unusual, I missed the subtleties of interplay between all those different elements and now that I'm finished I regret that decision. Stupid five-minutes-ago-me, doing two things at once!

CSA week 19 - Braised chicken with green beans, Thai style

I had a cold green bean salad with bacon and blue cheese all ready to go today, but I saw a recipe that looked better so change of plans. Unfortunately, the new plan involved buying a duck which is not so easy around here. All the ones I found were frozen solid (although I'll admit I only looked two places) so I just went with chicken thighs instead.

Here's the original recipe (from Mark Bitman) with notes on my changes:
___

Braising solves several of the challenges of cooking duck: it renders the fat completely and reliably; it browns the skin without spattering; and it makes the meat tender. It also requires very little effort from the cook. You put the duck in a covered pan, turn on the heat, and walk away.

Braised Duck With Green Beans, Thai Style

Yield 4 servings

Time 1 1/2 to 2 hours

Mark Bittman

Summary

If you can find duck legs in the store, go with those. If you can buy only a whole duck, the procedure for cutting it up is almost identical to that for cutting up a chicken. The joints are a bit trickier to find, but they are in the same places.

Ingredients

• 4 duck legs or 1 duck, cut into quarters [or four chicken thighs. Two if you're halving the recipe like I did]
  
• Salt and pepper
• 1 large onion, sliced
  
• 1 tablespoon minced ginger
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 or 2 small chilies, seeded and minced, or crushed red chili flakes to taste
• 1 1/2 pounds green beans, trimmed [each share was a handy 3/4 pound so this worked nicely]
  
• 1 tablespoon sugar, or to taste
• 2 tablespoons nam pla or soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons lime juice, or to taste
• Coarsely chopped fresh cilantro leaves for garnish, optional

Method

• 1. Remove excess fat from duck or duck legs. Season with salt and pepper, and put in a skillet that will fit it comfortably; turn heat to medium, and cover. Check once you hear sizzling: duck should be simmering in its own fat and exuding liquid. Adjust heat to create a steady simmer. [No real exuding from the chicken, either liquid or fat. I was hopeful about the liquid, but I knew fat would be a problem. To compensate, I stuffed a couple teaspoons of butter under the skin of each piece]
  
• 2. Once bottom browns, turn. Eventually liquid will evaporate and duck will cook in fat only; at this point, lower heat and continue to cook duck, turning once in a while, until it becomes tender, about an hour. [45 minutes seemed to be plenty so I stopped then. It all depends on how low you turned your heat, though.]
  
• 3. Transfer duck to a plate. Pour off all but a couple of tablespoons of fat. Turn heat to medium high, and add onion; cook, stirring occasionally, until it softens, about 5 minutes. Add ginger, garlic and chilies and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds. Add beans and sugar and turn heat to high; cook, stirring occasionally, until beans begin to brown, about 5 minutes.
• 4. Add 2 tablespoons water and nam pla or soy sauce. Put duck on top of bean mixture and bring to a simmer. [Problem in the recipe here as "bring to a simmer" is less accurate than "watch liquids evaporate immediately". The pot just spent five minutes on high. I turned down the heat to medium low and added plenty more water and some more nam pla too as the beans needed a bit more flavor.] Cover and cook until both beans and duck are very tender, 15 to 30 more minutes, adding a little more water if necessary to keep mixture moist. [15 minutes was more than plenty for me.] (You can prepare dish in advance up to this point; cover and set aside until ready to eat, then reheat.) Uncover and stir in lime juice; taste and adjust seasoning, then sprinkle with cilantro and serve.

Source: The New York Times

Not a half bad way to prepare green beans, I think. There's lots of flavor from the spices, fish sauce and all that fond and caramelization on the onions, but you can taste the beans through that too. They ended up rather soft, but the thing about green beans is that the flavor is best at a completely different cooking point than when the texture is. If you've had them prepared Greek-style, you know that.

The chicken is surprisingly moist considering the long dry-cooking time, but it's hard to completely ruin chicken thighs. It's almost got that confit texture to it, although the skin lost its crispness in the last cooking step. Something I only noticed after I finished cooking is that the Thai flavors never touched the chicken. It was only seasoned with salt and pepper. Still good, but a little odd next to the green beans. Maybe a marinade would help. Or maybe duck is a better match.

One last thing, I think "Thai style" is a misnomer. I've never seen a Thai recipe cooked like this. Let's say "Thai flavor" instead.

CSA week 11 - Thai braised cabbage

I said yesterday that I wanted to add fish sauce to the New Irish braised cabbage so today I did. I wanted to make it a proper main dish so there was actually a bit more to it than that.

I started by steaming a couple of Chinese sausages and marinating four extra large shrimp in a mixture of fish sauce, lime juice, sambal oelek and cilantro. Normally, I'd add ginger and sugar but those are all already there in the cabbage so I left them out.

Once the sausage was cooked (about 15 minutes), I sliced them up along with a red hot pepper, a bit of shallot I had left over, a couple cloves of garlic and some more cilantro.

I heated up some oil in a wok, added the pepper and shallot, stir fried until they turned fragrant and added the sausage. That got a minute before I added the shrimp, holding back the marinade. That got another minute before I added most of the cabbage (about half of what I made yesterday), the marinade and a bit more fish sauce.

That I cooked for a couple minutes longer trying to boil away all that liquid. I didn't quite manage it, but I did cook it down quite a bit. I finished it off with the rest of the cilantro and some ground roasted peanuts. If I was smart I would have held those off to garnish each serving so I could get a beauty shot, but I mixed them in while it was all still in the wok instead. Ah well.

Not the prettiest of dishes, but I think it turned out well. I didn't measure the fish sauce so I got a bit lucky that I did successfully manage to balance the ginger and the sweetness of the browned cabbage without overwhelming either. That new more whole combination acts as the background with the bits of chili, shrimp and sausage to the fore in different amounts in each bite. So there are a variety of interesting flavors and textures going on, but the cabbage and ginger aren't lost at all just now they're part of the team instead of just sitting out there on their own.

I'm starting to make a habit out of salvaging screwed up recipes. I'm going to have to create a tag for that.

CSA week ten - Thai green beans and scallops

This is the green bean dish I mentioned last Saturday with a sauce made of peanut butter and oyster sauce. A weird combination but not unique; I found a handful of other recipes using the two so I was prepared to believe that it wasn't a typo or a prank by some culinary lunatic. There were positive reviews from people claiming to have made the dish, but I've been misled by those before so I was still wary.

The original recipe was a side dish: just beans and sauce. It's a weeknight and I wanted a one pot meal so I added the scallops instead of making a second dish (as I had originally planned before I got lazy).

I didn't bother with making-of pictures since it's a such a simple and common preparation. Here's the recipe from its Recipezaar page, unillustrated but with my modifications noted:

"Thai-Style Green Beans Recipe #179660
This recipe in from the Summer 2006 edition of Cooking for 2. I made a couple of adjustments to the recipe. We really enjoyed it served as a side with Lemon Chicken and Sesame Rice.
by PaulaG

25 min | 15 min prep

SERVES 2

* 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
* 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
* 1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter
* 1/8-1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
* 1 tablespoon shallot, minced
* 1 teaspoon ginger root, grated [whoops. I used more like a tablespoon. Which wasn't bad at all. You need a lot to stand up to the oyster sauce.]
* 1 teaspoon oil
* 1/2 lb green beans, trimmed
* cilantro, chopped
* dry roasted peanuts
[ * six small ocean scallops, brined, cleaned and quartered]

1. Combine the soy sauce, oyster sauce, peanut butter and crushed red pepper in a small bowl; set aside.

2. Rinse the beans and place in a microwave safe dish, cover and cook until crisp tender; approximately 3 to 5 minutes depending on the wattage of your microwave. [I steamed mine for around 7 minutes instead.]

3. Remove beans from microwave, rinse in cool water and allow to drain while preparing the sauce.

4. In a skillet or wok, heat the 1 teaspoon oil add the minced shallot and grated gingerroot.

5. Cook the shallot and ginger for 2 minutes [add scallops after 1 minute] and then add the soy sauce mixture; stirring until the peanut butter is melted and the sauce is smooth.

6. If using a natural peanut butter, it may be necessary to add a tablespoon or so of water to the pan to aid in making the sauce smooth and creamy.

7. Once the sauce is thoroughly combined, stir in beans and warm in sauce. [I cooked over a quite high heat so my sauce shrank to a paste pretty quickly. A big spoonful of water thinned it out allowing me to deglaze the pan. Then I let it reduce into a nice clingy sauce as the beans reheated and got it the heck out of the pan before it pasted up again.]

8. Prior to serving sprinkle with chopped cilantro and peanuts if desired. [You should desire this. Those are important elements of the dish's flavors and textures.]"

To end any suspense, let me start by saying that the dish turned out really well. The key, I think, is that this isn't really a peanut sauce.

Usually, when I make peanut sauces they're for satay, either the Thai version with fish sauce and coconut milk or the Indonesian version that uses sweet soy sauce. Both are uncooked dips in which the fresh peanut flavor is very much to the fore. (It can easily go too far. The trick is to switch out maybe a third of the peanuts or peanut butter for tahini. That's a bonus tip for you right there.)

Here, the peanut butter has melded with the soy and oyster sauces to create a rich meaty tangy flavor. It's not impossible to pick the components out, but there is something greater than the parts created here. Over this foundation float the light notes of ginger, shallot and cilantro pairing with the bright flavor of the still slightly crisp beans and the slightly chewy scallops (which were a pretty good addition. Brining them really makes their flavors pop, too.)

Even with the beans, the sauce is pretty intense stuff, but a bowl of white rice mellowed it out nicely. Best green bean dish I've made in a while. If you haven't used yours yet, this is definitely a good way to go.

CSA week one - Thai lemongrass chicken stir fry

Well, my plan to use the four stalks of lemongrass in dishes from four cuisines fell apart pretty quick. This recipe calls for a quarter cup of thinly sliced lemongrass which took almost all of my three remaining stalks to produce. I've got about a Tablespoon of lemongrass left which I'll probably toss into some Thai fried rice.

But that's later, right now there's this stir fry to post about. I did a variation on this recipe from CD Kitchen. The big differences being that I decided ground chicken thighs would be much tastier (and more interestingly texturally) than sliced chicken breasts and that it would be better to include vegetables in the dish instead of serving them on the side. Unfortunately, I mainly cleaned myself out of suitable vegetables with the cottage pie a couple days ago, but I still had some mushrooms and bok choy available.

Here's my version:

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons canola oil
2 tablespoons shallots -- sliced
2 teaspoons garlic -- minced
1 1/4 pounds boneless chicken thigh pieces from around 1 1/2 pounds of thighs with bones
1 fresh hot chili, I used a serano because I couldn't find any bird's-eye and my cayenne pepper plant didn't like the summer rains - sliced, not seeded
1/4 cup fresh lemongrass -- thinly sliced
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 tablespoon palm or light brown sugar
2 1/2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 pinch ground white pepper
25 fresh Thai basil leaves, I used the very last leaves from my dying basil plant. My parsley, chives and sage are doing quite well I'd like to point out.
1 tablespoon lime zest, substituting from fresh kaffir lime leaves. I need to keep an eye out for key limes that come with some leaves still attached to the stem. I suspect they substitute well.
1 teaspoon lime juice
Stir-fried fresh vegetables (such as baby carrots, mushroom, bell peppers, squash and Thai, Japanese or domestic eggplant), eggplant would have worked very well. I'll have to remember that next time I've got some.

Directions:

0. Put chicken into freezer for an hour to firm up.

1. Remove skin and bones from chicken thighs and cut into pieces a couple inches to a side. Put them into a food processor and pulse seven or eight times to get a rough chunky paste.

2. Preheat wok or saute pan over high heat; add oil. Add shallots and garlic. Stir fry a few seconds until fragrant and light brown.

3. Add hearty vegetables, in my case the mushrooms and bok choy stems. Stir fry until starting to soften.

4. Add chicken all at once. Let brown briefly, flip the mass over and let brown a bit more. This makes it rather easier to break up into separate bits. Some larger bits will need to be cut in half with whatever you're using to stir with.

5. When it's well broken up add chilies and lemongrass. Continue to stir. Just before chicken is cooked through, stir in coconut milk, sugar, fish sauce and white pepper. Taste and adjust the seasonings and spiciness. Cook one minute. There's nothing in there to thicken up the sauce so cook it for a minute or two to a compromise between how thick you'd like it and your worry about overcooking the chicken.

6. Toss in Thai basil, lime leaves and lime juice. Serve immediately with steamed rice or rice noodles.

I found it to be sweet but not cloying, starting with a crisp citrus notes fading to the understated tanginess of the fish sauce mellowed by the coconut milk. Each bite has the savory chicken (which has a substantial mouth feel but tender chew I wouldn't have gotten with thin slices of chicken breast so that was a good call) with the aromatics of the lemongrass and basil floating up intermittently as I encountered into pieces of each. It could use a bit of crunch--peanuts, maybe beansprouts? I don't think the mushrooms and bok choy add anything, but they don't subtract anything either so that's OK. I'll have to revisit this recipe when I've got a different variety of vegetables to include.

Fried chicken with basil leaves

After coming back from my trip I was disappointed at how poorly my curry leaves fared. I stored some in a sealed plastic bag with a strip of paper towel to absorb any stray moisture and some in one of those perforated greens storing bags. The batch in the sealed bag had begun to rot. I think they would have done fine for a couple weeks, but it's now around four weeks since I got them in my summer CSA a la carte. The second batch was well on its way to drying out, but the leaves had lost all of their aroma and without that they're hardly worth calling curry leaves.

I'll admit that this is something I should have checked somewhat earlier than halfway through preparing a recipe called Fried Chicken with Curry Leaves. However, I had a back-up plan. I've been needing to prune the basil in my garden (Last year I didn't and my basil plant grew like I was under attack by Plantman but died just as quickly.) so I can move this recipe from Malaysian to Thai. Luckily I had already switched out the soy sauce in the marinade for fish sauce so I was on my way. I don't actually know what variety of basil I've got, but it doesn't have the peppery bite of real Thai basil so I'll have to toss in some peppers to compensate.

So here's how it went:

Ingredients:
oil for deep frying
2 chicken thighs, boned, skinned and cut into largish bite-sized pieces
1 large handful basil leaves
1 small onion, chopped into largish bite-sized pieces
1 small green pepper, chopped into largish bite-sized pieces
1 bird's eye or similar hot pepper, sliced (and seeded if you're a wimp)
Marinade:
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon white pepper (black pepper is fine, but I got tired of grinding. I need a new more efficient pepper mill.)
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 Tablespoon corn starch
Glaze:
1/2 Tablespoon oyster sauce, I used Chinese-style which worked fine although I've just learned that Thai-style is different
1 Tablespoon fish sauce
1 Tablespoon sugar
80 ml chicken broth
20 ml rice wine
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
juice of 1/4 lime

Directions:
1. Combine marinade ingredients, add chicken, marinate in refrigerator for one hour.
2. Heat oil for deep frying in a wok. Add chicken in batches without draining. Deep fry until golden brown. Don't worry about under-cooking as they'll be going back into the pan for a significant amount of time.
3. Drain all but 2 Tablespoons of oil (or heat 2 Tablespoons of oil in a wok at high heat if you used an actual deep fryer).
4. Add onion, peppers and small handful of basil leaves. Stir fry until onion and pepper begin to soften and become translucent.
5. Add chicken and glaze. Stir fry until almost, but not quite dry.
6. Add remaining basil leaves, toss and immediately remove from pan and serve over rice.

No offense to ponikuta whose original recipe this is based off of, but this turned out much better than when I followed her recipe to the letter. The switch from curry to basil leaves was, I think, a lateral one, but boosting the amount made the results much more aromatic. Adding the onion and pepper gave a better solids to glaze ratio so the sauce didn't over-reduce as it did on my first try. Instead of those overly salty and simple results, the flavors this time are a lovely blend of the savory chicken boosted by the oyster and fish sauces and the sweet of the lime and sugar with the basil wafting up behind and the pepper burning beneath. This would actually be a fine not-quite-vegetarian dish as the sauce brings out and supports the flavors of the onions and peppers. You could deep fry tofu and it would work really well, but don't use those frozen pre-fried tofu puffs. They'd absorb too much of the glaze and it wouldn't reduce right.

It's when I unexpectedly get these sorts of spectacular results that I regret that I'm only cooking for myself. Well, that's why I have this blog; If I can't feed you, at least I can record and pass on the recipe. Please make this; I promise you won't regret it.

CSA week nine - Thai collard-wrapped steamed dumplings

This is a variation on the recipe posted by Sam Fujisaka to the chowhound message board thread I linked to last week. His recipe called for kale, but I think the broad flat collard leaves are much better suited to wrapping than the curly and often piecemeal kale leaves. I was happy both at how easy it was to prepare and how tasty the results were. The collards added a pleasant flavor and texture to what would otherwise have just been a (pretty good) meatball.

mince
2 large green onions
1/2 jalapeño (or a similar amount of some other hot pepper)
1 garlic clove
1 inch chunk of ginger, and
2 Tablespoons fresh cilantro

add
2 Tablespoons fish sauce
1 Tablespoon lime juice
2 teaspoons hot chili oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, and
2 Tablespoons roughly chopped cremini mushroom

or if you prefer a Chinese version
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon rice wine or hoisin sauce
2 teaspoons chui chow chili oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 Tablespoons roughly chopped shiitake mushroom
2 Tablespoons roughly chopped water chestnuts

mix all of that with
1/2 lb ground meat (I used turkey which I keep around because it's neutral flavor makes it useful in many applications and it's often on sale)

depending on the meat you used and the fineness of the grind, you may want to add an egg to bind it all together. My turkey turned into a paste pretty quickly so I didn't.

If you've got the time, chill the meat mixture to make it easier to handle.

Lay out collard leaves light-side up. Slice out the stem as closely as possible. I saved my stems, along with my kale stems from last week in hopes of coming up with a use for them.

Preheat a steamer.

Scoop a large lump of the meat mixture on the large end of the collard leaf. You'll want to adjust the size of the lump to the size of the leaf, but go a little larger than you think you ought to. Remember that you're steaming the collards too and you don't want the meat cooked through before the leaves become tender.

Tweak in the leaf so that the far end overlaps to cover the empty space where the stem was, and roll up the meat mixture. After the first turn, tuck in the leaf to create a cylinder and fold in the edges tightly. Roll up the rest of the leaf and trim off the untidy bit at the end.

Place the rolls into your steamer and cook for around ten minutes depending on their size.

Thai dipping sauce
mix well
1/4 cup fish sauce
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1 scallion, chopped
1/2 jalapeño (or a similar amount of some other hot pepper)
1 1/2 teaspoon sugar, and
1/2 teaspoon hot chili oil

Thai chili sauce is good for dipping too.

If you made the Chinese version you might try a traditional dumpling dipping sauce.
1 T soy sauce
1 T rice wine vinegar
1/2 T mirin or sugar
dash sesame oil

CSA week two - Thai red curry with yellow squash and mustard greens

As I mentioned in my first CSA week 2 post, I wasn't thrilled with the range of recipes for yellow squash that my searching turned up. However, there was one, a curry, that stood out. I think it was just misfiled. There are plenty of Thai curries using squash, but they all call for winter squashes--pumpkin and butternut primarily. Both of those are new world plants so they're no doubt substituting for something similar native to southeast Asia. Bitter melon? More probably something I've never heard of (although bitter melon would have added a nice element to the dish I made).

Well, since we're already substituting, why not take another step and use summer squash instead? And for the bok choy commonly found in Thai curries, use mustard greens? Or if you got the full share, you've got some bok choy so there you go. To those I added two other standard Thai curry vegetables: bamboo shoots and peas. And for some protein I wanted seafood. A rummage in the freezer turned up a haddock fillet which is a suitably firm whitefish and some bay scallops.

For the sauce, I needed coconut milk and red curry paste (the best version for seafood). Normally, I'd also need fish sauce, stock of some sort, lemongrass, sugar and maybe some garlic or cilantro, but I had a shortcut handy. A while back, I made a drunken shrimp recipe that included just about all of those flavors. After picking out all the lemongrass, as one does, I found that I had a lot more sauce than really required for the shrimp so I packed the extra away in the freezer. I pulled it out for this and, just for the heck of it, I marinated the seafood in it for a while.

Making Thai curry is a pretty simple proposition. Simmer the coconut milk and curry paste for five minutes or so to get the raw taste out of the coconut milk and thicken up the sauce, add the rest of the seasonings and the tougher vegetables, simmer five more minutes, add the rest of the ingredients, simmer five minutes more and you're done. Mustard greens are tough customers so I gave them a bit of a stir fry in the pan first to give them a good wilt. It wouldn't have hurt to do the same for the squash, but ten minutes of simmering pretty much did the trick.

You might have noticed that I used a flat bottom wok. I don't actually recommend that. If the large burner on my stove was working, I would have used a dutch oven and my squash would be cooked evenly. Despite that, it turned out pretty nicely. It's a bit mild, but I blame that on the wimpy mass-market curry paste I used. (The price one pays for last minute dinner ideas.) And it used up a good chunk of the CSA vegetables. Tomorrow I pickle.