CSA week two - Braised Chinese lettuce with dried shrimp

This is a recipe from the Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook that I've mentioned several times before. Like most of those thousand recipes, it's pretty simple but open to elaboration. And as usual for me, my elaboration got a bit out of control. Still, things turned out fine. Or should I have left some suspense?

The recipe calls for a full pound of Chinese lettuce but my half share didn't include nearly that much. When I added my leftover bok choy I got about half a pound so the recipe was workable.

Ingredients:
4-5 dried shrimp
2 dried black mushrooms (Both my shrimp and mushrooms were pretty small so I doubled these numbers back up to the original 8-10 and 4. You can judge from the pictures of the end result whether I had too much.)
1/4 cup ham (I used some leftover country ham I had lying around)
1/2 pound Chinese lettuce and/or bok choy
1/4 cup sliced bamboo shoots
1 Tablespoon oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup mushroom soaking liquid
1/4 cup picked crab (It doesn't store well so I'm adding it to everything this week until I run out.)
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
sesame oil

0. Separately soak shrimp and mushrooms in hot water. Reserve mushroom soaking liquid. The shrimp soaking liquid is kind of nasty. Toss that.

1. Coarsely chop lettuce. Fill a large pot with water, bring to a boil and add lettuce. Blanch lettuce for 1 to 2 minutes then drain.

2. Dump out water and reheat pot over medium high heat until it's dry. Add oil. Heat until it's shimmery. Add shrimp and ham and stir fry 2 minutes. Add lettuce, stir fry to coat with oil then sprinkle with salt. Add bamboo shoots and stir fry one minute more.

3. Add mushroom liquid. Bring to boil, turn heat down to low, cover and simmer 10 minutes.

4. Add mushrooms, soy sauce, sugar and crab. Turn the heat up a little compensate for heat lost while you were doing that, re-cover, and simmer 10 minutes more.

5. Add cornstarch (mixed into a Tablespoon of cold water). Stir and heat until the sauce thickens up a little.

6. Serve topped with a drizzle of sesame oil or chili oil might be nice too.


Surprisingly, the lettuce hasn't fallen apart after all that cooking. It's soft to the bite, certain, but not mush, and the leaves trap the sauce quite nicely. There's some textural interest from the mushrooms, ham and bamboo shoots so soft lettuce is fine. The sauce has picked up a lot of flavor mainly from the shrimp and soy sauce, but you can taste the lettuce in it too which I didn't expect. I think I overdid the salt a little since it came in from so many sources, but otherwise I'm happy with the results. Next time I'll serve it over noodles which, texturally, would be a better match than rice. As for the lettuce, I think the likes of Romaine would stand up to braising well. I'm not sure how much the different flavor would change the dish though. I'll have to try it and see.

Eggplant casserole with shrimp and country ham

Regular readers of my blog will know that I'm a fan of Mark Bittman's minimalist style of cooking. He's got a food blog for the New York Times, Bitten that I've recently begun reading. A couple days ago he was talking about his acquisition of a big chunk of high quality domestic prosciutto and how he was making use of it. One example was sautéing it with garlic, onion and peppers, adding a past-it's-prime eggplant and then cooking it down into a tasty mush. As I've got a past-it's-prime eggplant languishing in my vegetable drawer I took note.

However, I'm fresh out of prosciutto. What I do have is a pack of country ham chips. Fresh Market has just started carrying country ham in a few different forms. As a suburban boy from Delaware I haven't a clue what to do with it so I picked up chips as the lowest buy in for my experimentation.

Country ham changes my flavor profile substantially so the Italian flavors Bittman had in mind weren't going to work. While I was looking around to see how others have used ham and eggplant I came across this recipe that also includes shrimp and stale bread. I've got plenty of both of those at the moment so I was leaning towards that recipe. However I didn't really want to run the oven today so I ended up making something somewhere in the middle.

I started by chopping up and soaking the remaining quarter of the loaf of bread I baked last Sunday. I put in a good bit of rye flour so it was pretty hearty and had a nice rustic flavor.

Next I put a dutch oven on medium heat with a couple teaspoons of butter, an equal amount of olive oil, and a half dozen crushed garlic cloves. Once they got soft, but not browned, I added a small onion and a small bell pepper, both chopped, about a quarter pound of the country ham, a bay leaf, a teaspoon of thyme, a teaspoon of creole spice mix (paprika, garlic powder and cayenne primarily), a couple pinches of salt and a couple dashes more of cayenne.

Once the vegetables had softened and the spices and herbs were aromatic I added the eggplant, coarsely chopped, the bread and a half cup of chicken broth. I probably should have held off on the bread and broth to give the eggplant a chance to cook down a bit first. But I didn't, so all in they went. A stir and a bit more salt and on goes the cover. I cooked it for twenty minutes, stirring every five minutes and adding a bit more water. The bread broke down pretty quickly, the eggplant a little more slowly, but both were a thick mush at the end.

Meanwhile, I had a quarter pound of shrimp in a salt and sugar brine. The brine was strong enough to do the shrimp some good, but not so strong that I couldn't safely slosh some in to the casserole to add flavor and thin it out.

After the twenty minutes were up I chopped up the shrimp along with a large scallion and a handful of parsley. I added those to the pot, gave them a couple minutes to cook through and that was it.

I'll freely admit, the end result isn't the most texturally presentable dish around but I really like how the flavors play off each other. The bread has taken up flavors and now tastes like a particularly good bread stuffing. Each bite is a bit different; the bread/eggplant mush is first flavor in each bite, but it doesn't overwhelm whatever combination of firmer-eggplant, ham and shrimp you happen to have on the fork. Those three components do work well against each other and I think I made a good choice of herbs and spices to tie it all together.

A shame about the texture though. Maybe cooking it in an uncovered casserole dish would have let it firm up more. Certainly, browned breadcrumbs on the top wouldn't be a bad thing. I've put a couple extra servings into the freezer for later; when I take one out, if I remember, I'll reheat it an oven and add breadcrumbs to see how it goes.