CSA week seven - Not quite banh pho xao he

This is a pretty straightforward vietnamese noodle dish modified from using a pound of garlic chives to using everything leafy and green within reach. The recipe I modified was from Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen cookbook.

I cut the recipe down by about a quarter to adjust for the amount of noodles I had on hand. I'm going to use the original amounts to avoid weird numbers.

Ingredients:
1 pound banh pho flat rice noodles
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar, divided
3 Tablespoons fish sauce
3 Tablespoons water
2 Tablespoons cooking oil
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 pound shrimp, peeled and cleaned
1/3 pound ground pork, broken up into bits
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 pound assorted leafy green vegetables [I used 1 bunch each of garlic chives, mizuna, swiss chard and cilantro], chopped or torn into 3- to 4-inch-wide pieces.
1 lime

1. Put the noodles in a large bowl and cover with hot tap water. Let them soak until pliable and opaque, 15 to 20 minutes. Drain. Cut into short lengths. The original recipe called for 3 to 4 inches, but I liked them a little longer.

2. Coarsely grind the shrimp into pea-sized pieces. Break up the pork into similarly sized pieces and mix with the shrimp.

3. Mix the fish sauce, water and 1 1/4 teaspoon of the sugar in a small bowl.

4. Heat oil in a wok over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and fry until fragrant, about 15 seconds. If it took less time and/or the garlic started to brown, turn the heat down; this isn't real stir-frying. Add the shrimp and pork. Break up the meat and add the salt and remaining sugar. Cook, stirring and breaking up clumps, until shrimp and pork have turned opaque, about 2 minutes.

5. Add the greens. Stir and fold to mix in the shrimp and pork and get different bits of the greens on the bottom. When the greens have wilted down by a third, add there's room in the wok, add the noodles. Mix well and add the fish sauce mixture. Turn the heat up until the sauce starts to sizzle and continue stirring 2 to 3 minutes longer, until the noodles and greens are soft and the noodles have absorbed a bit of sauce and darkened in color.

6. Remove from heat and squeeze in the juice from the lime. Mix once again and serve.


Hmm. Not bad. The shrimp and pork are, of course, great together and enhanced by the fish sauce. [When genetically modified lab-grown meat improves (right now they can just do a meat paste suitable for hot dogs and not much else and they have to use cells from animals that actually exist), they really ought to work on shrimp-pig.]

The chard goes pretty well with the other flavors and adds a substantially different flavor and texture than the garlic chives which I think is an improvement in the dish. The mizuna and cilantro seem to have wilted away to nothing, though, which is a shame.

I used the milder Vietnamese fish sauce so it's a low key dish that could do with some nuoc cham (or at least a little more fish sauce and lime juice) and sriracha to perk it up and maybe some fried garlic or shallots for crunch. Most Vietnamese recipes, I think, assume you've got your condiments and garnishes on hand to finish the seasoning of the dish. I added ground peanuts to my first serving, but the flavor isn't quite right. Fried garlic is a much better choice.

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.

Steamed scallion and sausage buns dee-luxe version

The steamed scallion rolls I made a while back were good, but they were simple and straightforward. I was making another batch because they're such convenient snack food and I thought I'd complicate them up a little to a) see if I could improve the recipe and b) get a blog post out of it.

The dough stayed nearly the same:
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
2 1/2 cups bread flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
3 Tablespoons sugar [I reduced this last time]
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup milk

Mixed, rested, kneaded, risen and rolled out.

For the filling I used:
4 Tablespoons chopped scallions
4 Tablespoons chopped garlic chives
1 link lop chong, microwaved one minute to partially cook and then sliced thin and chopped
1 chunk Chinese bacon about the same size as the lop chong, chopped and pan fried until cooked through
2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 Tablespoons sesame oil

If you compare, you can see that this coats the dough rather more densely and a lot more oilily. Part of that is the extra fillings, but I've also got a new somewhat smaller cutting board and couldn't roll the dough out as thin.

I rolled it up, sliced it into 2-inch segments, stood them up, let them rise and then steamed them for 13 minutes to cook through.

You can see the earlier version for more details if you're interested. I want to talk about how things went wrong here, because these aren't nearly as good as the first batch.

First off, take a look at these two rolls. See how the one on the left is deflated? That's what happens when you have too much water in your steamer leading to lots of dripping off of the cover. That roll was boiled, not steamed. I had nearly boiled dry over the three batches I steamed last time so I was being careful to have lots of water this time. Better to have just added some water after the second batch.

Second, there are some problems with the flavor. I described the dough last time as mild, but it was a nice sweet contrast to the savory fillings. Here it's been coated in sesame oil and its flavor can't come through. And that contrast between the mildly sweet dough and bright savory of the isolated bits of filling really worked. Here the contrast is between the light flavor of the lop chong and the heavy soy flavor of the bacon. One problem is that Chinese bacon shouldn't be fried as I burn the soy coating a little. You can find the pairing in recipes for sticky rice and turnip cake so they can work well together, but they need other strong flavors and textures in there too and this bun has nothing that can stand up to them. A baked bun, I think, might have had a chance.

And I'm disappointed that I can't taste the garlic chives at all. Darn. Both Chinese bacon and garlic chives go well with eggs so what I really wanted to do was to make another sort of Chinese bun I've had that uses all three, but I couldn't find a recipe. Just now doing some more research on Chinese bacon I find that the reason I couldn't find a recipe is that the creamy filling that works so well with the bacon and chives isn't a custard, it's a mayonaise. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Anyway, the lesson here is that scallion and sausage rolls work best just like that. Make my original version (and you should. It was really good and hard very hard.) with maybe some extra scallion, but that's the only change you should make.

CSA week five - potstickers, part 2

I stopped by Lucky Oriental Mart on the way home from work today and picked up some dumpling wrappers to substitute for my failed attempt last night. There were four choices: square vs. round and egg vs. eggless (and also, eggless with yellow die #2 so it looks like it has eggs in it). With egg was labeled Hong Kong-style and eggless Shanghai-style. I was tempted to go for Hong Kong as that's the home of dim sum, but I wanted to reproduce what I tried to make so round, eggless it was to be.

Once I had the package defrosted it was time to stuff. I didn't ruin any even from the start but it did take some time to find a method that worked really well.

I understand that fresh dough would stick closed on its own, but this dough I had to wet around the edges. I kept a little bowl of water and would dip a couple fingers and run them around the circumference. I tried a brush (as I had to redip a couple times to make it all the way around), but that spread too much water and made the dough mushy. So fingers it was to be which slowed the process down considerably.

For each dumpling I scooped out about a Tablespoon of filling using a coffee scoop and dislodged it onto the wrapper using a teaspoon so I didn't get it all over my fingers. After a bit I realized I needed to put the filling in the top half of the wrapper and press it down a little to spread it out. Then I could fold the bottom half up and seal it at one spot at the top. Once the wrapper was held in place I'd seal up which ever side had the filling closer to the edge first, pushing it in to even things out, and then the other side ending not quite at the bottom so I could squeeze out any excess filling as if it was a little pastry bag.

Once I had it sealed up I had to make sure it stayed closed so I pleated the edges starting from the top and then a couple times down each side ending with a folded in corner if I had enough spare dough to do it. It's a two hand process so I'm afraid I didn't get any pictures of the process; sorry. Try YouTube; there are video tutorials that are better than anything I could have done.

It's not tricky after you get the hang of it--kind of meditative, really--and my end results look about right, I think. Pretty time consuming, though. I filled up 38 dumplings total which is not a whole lot for the amount of filling I had. They do seem a little plumper than most I've seen. But then I'm not selling them by the dozen so it doesn't pay me to skimp.

I put most of them onto a sheet of freezer paper on a baking sheet so they can freeze individually before I pack them away. I made sure to press them down a little bit to give them flat bottoms so they'll sit up in the pan later.

But several I kept aside for dinner. You can steam them, boil them in soup, deep fry them, but I wanted to do use the real potsticker method. So I lighted oiled a non-stick pan (If you do this right, non-stick isn't necessary. That's how this method developed and how they got the name. The dumplings stick at first and then unstick themselves.), laid in the dumplings and then added enough water to come about halfway up their sides. Optionally, you can use chicken stock, but I wanted to see how my dumplings held up on their own first.

Then I just covered the pan, with the cover slightly askew to let steam escape, turned the heat to medium high and waited for the water to completely evaporate. When the water's gone; they're done. I gave them an extra minute since, as you can see, they bloated monstrously and I wanted to be sure they were cooked all the way through. That was a mistake, though, and I ended up overcooking the flavor out of them. When cooking them from frozen, you need that extra minute and this is the first time I've cooked fresh. I'll know better next time.

I am pleased that, despite the bloat, none of them burst (at least until I picked them up. They didn't stick to the pan, but they did stick to each other). Partially that's thanks to the store-bought, machine-manufactured wrappings, but my seals stayed sealed so there's that. They're nicely crisp on the bottom and soft and chewy on top as potstickers should be. And, even overcooked, they made fine meaty dipping sauce delivery tools. I made the traditional sauce: soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a bit of ginger, a bit of scallion and a bit of sesame oil. I like chiu chow chili oil thinned with a little soy, too.

You know, the pre-made wrappers were just fine and they only cost around $2.29 and I have trouble imagining my homemade would be any better even if I made them perfectly. I'm choosing to be O.K. with not successfully making my own.

Before I sign off here, I'd like to mention that, in a remarkable synchronicity, La Diva of http://ladivacucina.blogspot.com is making gow gee, just about the same dumpling but steamed instead of potstuck. Check out her post about it here.

CSA week six - Potstickers, part 1

Usually I put the non-English name in the subject line to foster a little suspense before you click through and find out what I'm talking about. Not this time, though. Potstickers are both a Japanese (gyoza) and Chinese (jiaozi) thing and my standard method of cobbling together recipe from a bunch of different ones gave me something with elements of both.

The "part 1" is because I decided to make my own wrappers and had some difficulty. It sounds easy enough: mix two cups flour with one cup boiling water (The hot water improves the dough's ductility.), knead briefly, roll out in the pasta machine that's been sitting in the back of a cabinet unused for the last five years and cut into 3" diameter circles. But that two to one flour/water ratio gave me an intractably sticky dough no matter how much more flour I added and now my pasta machine is all gunked up and it looks like it's going to be a pain in the butt to clean.

I should have known better, really. Using a new gadget never works right the first time out and that's just when a dough will decide to defy all laws of culinary science and do whatever it wants. Fine, I need to go to the Asian grocery to restock on ramen anyway; I'll pick up some ready-made gyoza wrappers (or wonton wrapper at least) and finish this up tomorrow.

But for now there's still the filling which turned out fine. I used:

3 cups cabbage, finely chopped
6 garlic chives, finely chopped
2 teaspoons ginger, minced
4 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 pound shrimp
1 pound pork
6 small dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked
3 Tablespoons light soy sauce
2 Tablespoons dry rice wine
1 Tablespoon sesame oil
1 large egg
salt and pepper to taste

I sprinkled the cabbage with salt and let it sit for 20 minutes to purge a bit of water. Otherwise the dumplings get soggy I understand. But I used too much salt and had to rinse it off so it may have added all of the water back in. But it looked like substantially less volume after I wrung it out, so maybe not.

Everything but the vegetables went into the food processor and got processed to a fairly smooth paste. Then I folded in the vegetables and put it into the refrigerator to firm up and be easier to work with.

One of the recipes I found suggested boiling a spoonful of the mix to check for seasoning before starting the wrapping. Pretty good idea; the wrapper dough has no salt so it's easy to underestimate the seasoning the filling requires. I ended up adding more salt, pepper and sesame oil and I'm still not sure I'm entirely happy with it.

So, that stays in the fridge until tomorrow. The dough I'm saving too--it may not want to be noodles, but maybe it'll make a decent loaf of bread. Right now, I have to order a pizza.

In search of a better quiche crust - part four

In previous installments of this series (I didn't think of giving it a title until now so just click on 'quiche' in the tag list if you want to know more) I first disparaged the idea of a crust on a quiche as it's always soggy on the bottom and dried out on the edges and while my crustless quiche was tasty, something was missing; then I took up Sara Moulton's idea of a savory cracker-crumb crust but didn't care for the aggressive flavor of the crackers or the enormous amounts of butter required; next I lined the bottom of the pan with bread crumbs. They melded into the bottom of the quiche instead of forming a proper crust, but they showed potential.

In considering my next attempt, I gave the standard quiche recipe some thought. Most recipes layer the bottom of the crust with shredded cheese before adding the rest of the fillings. I suppose the idea is to form a fatty layer insulating the pastry crust from soaking up the liquid in the quiche, but I've never seen it actually work. For my crumb crust, what would happen if I mixed the cheese in and then blind baked it?

Only one way to find out. I used generous amounts of bread crumbs--a mixture of panko and homemade-- added just one tablespoon of melted butter and mixed in the 3/4 cup of Emmentaler Swiss cheese I was going to use in the quiche anyway.

After 10 minutes at 350 degrees, the crust looked like this:

Pretty promising, although I should have broken up the long strands of cheese to get more even distribution. But the proof is whether it will retain its integrity after the quiche is cooked.

My recipe this time was four eggs mixed with 1/2 cup cream and 3/4 cup milk along with another quarter cup of liquid from my fillings.

Those fillings are a couple handfuls of large shrimp, quickly blanched to just barely cook through (since they'll be spending another half hour in the oven); a bunch of chives from my garden, a giganto clove of garlic, one large scallion and maybe two cups of baby spinach. All the vegetables got a sauté in olive oil and butter and a bit of a wilt with a splash of sauvignon blanc (he says as if he has more than one bottle of white wine in the house at any particular time).




The fillings go on top of the cooled crust and are topped with a grating of Parmigiano Reggiano,








then the egg mixture, and in to the over for 30 minutes at 375 degrees.






Resulting in this:








After letting it cool off for ten minutes, I cut a piece. Here's the bottom:


Looks pretty good. As for the texture...let's take a bite...well, I wasn't expecting that. Somehow I've managed to turn the breadcrumbs back into bread. It's like the quiche is sitting on a light fluffy slice of white bread. Weird. There are some chewy bits where there was an unusual concentration of cheese, too. I can't say that it's bad, but it's not what I was aiming at.

As for the quiche itself, I went a bit light on the salt, but it has a nice light texture, a tasty blend of herbal flavors and a good balance of flavors with the shrimp. Not too shabby.

I'll have to give the crust some more thought, though.

If you'd like another interesting crust option take a look at Kat's polenta crust here.

Community Supported Agriculture - bonus week

So this is the last week of regular CSA shipments for me. I thought that would be true for most of the other subscribers too, but if my drop off point is typical most of you didn't miss any weeks and finished up last time. I guess I shouldn't have saved my wrap up post for today.

Overall I enjoyed the CSA experience. The surprise selection of vegetables each week forced me cook more, cook better and cook more interestingly than I would have otherwise. I could have done with a lot less lettuce and I never need to see another sapote, but otherwise I was pretty happy with the selection we got. The quality and flavor were always tip top which works well with my natural tendency to keep recipes simple.

It also gave me plenty to fill up the blog with and, if I understand my stats right, around two dozen regular readers (most of whom are no longer judging by last week's numbers). I was disappointed that the other blogging subscribers dropped off posting about their cooking very quickly. I was hoping for a community with discussion to develop instead of just me monologuing on. Next year it would be great to have a discussion board on the Bee Heaven website for people to ask questions, give advice and post recipes. I'd happily abandon the blog and put my support behind that. On the other hand, having an audience was crucial to getting me to try new recipes instead of just getting rid of everything in the same old recipes again and again.

And speaking thereof, I managed to use up one of last weeks cucumbers and half a squash along with substantial amounts of dill and garlic chives in a tuna tartar yesterday. It didn't seem worth a blog post of its own since I've discussed tartars a couple times before. But it is worth mentioning briefly as I could easily have used tuna from a pouch (much better than the canned. You really should switch over if you haven't.), cut the cuke and squash a little smaller and had a quite presentable salad. Or I could have sliced the vegetables thin, mixed pouch tuna and the herbs with mayo and layered them in sandwiches. Thinking back to the very tasty cucumber sandwiches I made last month, now I'm really regretting not going that last route. I've still got another squash and cucumber left so I still might.

And by the way, last week I described the share as winter vegetables. While I was researching recipes I learned that they were really an typical end of summer vegetable collection. Just shows how dissociated from the natural harvest cycles I am from a lifetime of shopping in supermarkets. I know you guys knew better; why didn't you correct me?

Anyway, on to this week's share.

First up are scallions and yukina savoy. The scallions are so crisp and fresh that I really want to feature them in something right away. I never made the spiced beef with lime marinated scallions recipe that I found a while back. Maybe I'll do something with that.

The yukina savoy adds to the pile up of cabbage in the house. I still have all of last week's baby bok choy and a bit of the head of Western cabbage from before. If I want to go through a lot at once I think I'll have to do a stir fry or maybe a slaw.

Next I've got more tomatoes, which I will eat fresh this time since I squandered last week's box, a couple peppers once of which looks stuffable, a couple of possibly radishes/possibly turnips I found in the extras box that will roast up nicely either way and a nice big bag of shiitake mushrooms. If I'm going to do a stir fry with the cabbage, the mushrooms will likely end up in there.

And finally, a daikon, some Japanese eggplant, strawberries and cilantro. I did a bit of poking around for a recipe that would use both the daikon and the eggplant (and preferably some of the cabbage too), but nothing presented itself. I could do a tempura, but I've been defaulting to deep frying too much lately and I'd like to go another way.

The cilantro looks a bit faded so I wouldn't be surprised if it goes off before I get to use it, but otherwise I'll find a use for it.

And that leaves the strawberries. Last week I made some whipped cream to accompany them, but I don't think the whipping added anything. It'll be just plain cream this week.

Blogger (or possibly my internet connection) is being temperamental. I'll add the pictures later when I can. Or, alternatively, I'll accidentally delete them. Ah, you know what all those vegetables look like by now.

CSA week 15 - yakisoba, sort of

I was due another clear out the refrigerator dish and I was craving noodles so I decided to go with yakisoba or some facsimile. There were a range of noodle dishes up and down the east Asian coast I could have done and since I wasn't paying close attention to the mix of vegetables the major differences were in the type of noodle and the sauce.

An interesting thing about yakisoba, I learned as I was researching the dish, is that apparently it is very difficult to do well outside of Japan. All but the least ambitious recipes I saw were preceded by a lament over the fact. Maybe it's just people complaining that they can't reproduce what their favorite childhood corner dive made, but I'm willing to take them at their word that I've never actually had a decent example. Given what I've had at Japanese restaurants I actually wouldn't be at all surprised.

The first problem is finding the flat egg noodle required. As I wasn't planning a trip out to the Asian grocery I didn't even try. I used the instant yakisoba noodles I had in the freezer. Upon inspection they replaced the egg with yellow die #5; that was a bit of a disappointment.

The second problem was the sauce. It's amazing how many recipes there are on the web that do a basic Chinese noodle sauce and think that's good enough. The better recipes called for Japanese ingredients that I at best don't have handy and often didn't even recognize. The key seemed to be trying to approximate the meaty and fruity flavor of the traditional ingredients. I grokked the variety of recipes and came up with this:
1/2 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
1 Tablespoon mirin
1 Tablespoon rice wine
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon chili oil

A lot of the sauces were sweeter, but that didn't make a lot of sense to me. Keep in mind that this is not meant to be a balanced sauce. It plays as an earthy base for the slivers of pickled ginger and nori that I belatedly discovered I was out of.

Beyond the sauce, some recipes called for steaming the vegetables, but I just did a stir fry as it was easier. I started with the mei qing choy stems, broccoli and the leftover roasted chicken. After a couple minutes I added the mei qing choy leaves, mizuna tops, garlic chives, scallions and ham. After those were nicely wilted I added the noodles, omelet slices and the sauce. Let that cook until the sauce was reduced a little and served.

I'm pretty happy with how the vegetables were cooked; the broccoli stems were still al dente while the mei quing choy were more tender. The rest wilted away but still had a bit of chew to them and some individual character. And please note the quite good noodle/vegetable ratio. That's not something I usually get right. The sauce wasn't bad although it clearly was missing sharper flavors to play against. Some bean sprouts would have helped making the dish yakisobier too. I'll make a note for next time.