CSA week two - Sayur manis bayam dan jagung muda

Roughly translated from Indonesian, that's stewed spinach and sweet corn. Less roughly, bayam--usually translated as "Indonesian spinach"--is amaranth, or, around here, callaloo.

Technique-wise, this recipe is very simple and pretty similar to a standard Islands preparation, but the inclusion of a lot of typical Indonesian flavors makes it distinctive. I found it at bigoven.com, but it's on most of the big recipe websites so there's no knowing where it came from originally.

Ingredients:
a little cooking oil
1 thumb-sized knob of ginger, julienned (my ginger was too dried out to slice so I just threw it in whole and fished it out later)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
hot peppers to taste (I chopped one and left another whole)
1 small shallot, sliced (the original recipe says onion, but shallot goes nicely with the other aromatics)
1 stalk lemongrass, cored and crushed
1 thumb-sized knob of galangal, sliced (I only have dried so I put in a big chunk)
1 salam leaf
1 cup chicken stock (the original recipe calls for vegetable stock, which might be fine if you wanted to go vegan, but I'd be concerned that the particular mix of vegetables wouldn't go well with Indonesian flavors.)
7 ounces (by weight) sweet young corn (the original recipe calls for "baby corn" but those little cobs would be pretty odd to use here so I'm pretty sure that's not what they mean)
2 bunchs callaloo, thick stems removed (around 10 ounces total)
1 cup coconut milk
salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil in a large pot over medium high heat. Add the fresh aromatics (garlic, peppers and shallot in my case). Cook briefly until aromatic. Add the dried or otherwise inedible aromatics (ginger, lemongrass, galangal and salam for me). Cook a little longer until even more aromatic.

2. Add the stock and corn. Season with a little salt and pepper. Return to a boil. Add half the callaloo. Stir to wilt until there's room for the rest. Add the rest and stir a little more. Cover, turn heat down to a simmer and cook seven minutes. Stir in coconut milk, recover and cook five minutes more.

3. Remove inedibles, adjust seasonings and serve over rice.


Callaloo and coconut milk are, of course, a classic combination. Corn less so, but cornbread is a common accompaniment so corn isn't a big leap. So that's all pretty accessible. The overlay of the floral citrusy Indonesian flavors is something else entirely, at least if you've got some expectation of Caribbean flavors. But, if you set aside your preconceptions, I think they do counterpoint against the callaloo's distinctive flavor. I know you guys don't have the galangal or salam leaf, but try using the lemongrass when you cook up your callaloo. It's not bad at all.

Assam pork curry

That's 'assam', the Malay word for tamarind, not the region of India. Although they have curries in Assam too. Particularly mild ones as Indian curries go, or so I read. Some of the recipes looked interesting so I'll probably be making one of those soon enough.

This is pretty much a bog standard Malaysian curry (found at the blog of a Malaysian woman sharing her recipes) so I'm not sure I ought to bother posting about it. But it uses lemongrass and curry leaves which I think tend to baffle folks when they show up in the CSA so it's probably worth putting another easy recipe out there. Also, I came up with a good trick with the coconut milk I want to share.

Ingredients:
2/3 pounds stew pork, cut into bite-sized pieces or strips

spice mix:
4 Tablespoons finely chopped shallot
2 stalks lemongrass, mashed (the lemongrass I had in the house was pretty old and dried out so I grated it on my microplane instead. That made the most of its faded flavor, but I still had to add the zest of a lime to bolster it.)
2-3 stalks curry leaves, destemmed and bruised
(the recipe also called for 1 Tablespoon of curry powder, but every curry powder is different. I have no clue what mix of spices they use in Malaysian, but I'm reasonably certain the Madras curry powder I've got isn't it. I know I'm losing some complexity of flavor, but safer to leave it out.)
3 Tablespoons chili paste (I used sriracha which is probably not quite right)

sauce mix:
1/2 cup thick coconut milk
1/4 cup water (even thinned down by a third like this, thick coconut milk is thicker than the standard canned coconut milk you can find in the supermarket so, although it's tempting to just use 3/4 cup of that, don't. Instead, put a can into the refrigerator for an hour or two. The thick cream will separate and you can spoon it out leaving thin coconut water behind. Hokan, my favorite brand, is thicker than most and yielded over 3/4 cup of coconut cream, but most brands should give you plenty for this recipe.)
3 Tablespoons tamarind paste dissolved in 1/4 cup water and strained (the original recipe calls for just 2 Tablespoons of the paste plus 3 pieces of dried tamarind in the spice mix. If you can find dried tamarind, you should probably do that instead. And as long as I'm on the topic, I've seen fresh tamarind in the supermarket and I've been curious how to use it. Any advice would be appreciated.)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 Tablespoon sugar
1 Tablespoon soy sauce


0. Brine the pork. Otherwise you'll end up with dull bits of meat cluttering up a flavorful sauce.

1. Heat 2 Tablespoons of cooking oil over medium high heat in a medium saucepan until shimmery. Add spice mix and fry just a few seconds until fragrant. Add pork and stir to coat the meat with the spices.

2. Add the sauce mix and stir well. Bring to a boil then turn heat down to medium low. Cook down the sauce until it's a thick gravy and the pork is tender, 20-30 minutes.

(Alternately, you could use a large pan, giving you space to brown the meat and allowing the sauce to cook down faster. It's not an authentic technique, but it would add some nice flavor.)

Check the flavor balance and maybe bolster the tartness with a little lime juice or the heat with a little more chili sauce. Serve over rice, sprinkled with some cilantro or chopped curry leaves.


The flavor is a sweet-tart with a funky edge from the curry leaves which come through surprisingly well considering the strength of the other flavors. There's a background of heat from the sriracha and richness from the coconut milk, but they don't overwhelm the more delicate herbal and citrus notes. It's a pretty typical Malaysian combination of flavors. But then it's a pretty typical Malaysian combination of ingredients so that's only to be expected. If you like that sort of thing then that's the sort of thing you like. And if you don't, well, you should.

CSA week four - Chao tom

a.k.a. Vietnamese shrimp paste on sugarcane.

How did I not think of this yesterday? This is, I think, the only dish with sugarcane most Americans have tried. I think it's the only one I've tried. It should have just popped into my head.

What's odd about this dish is that, while most Americans wouldn't dream of making it at home, what you get in restaurants isn't really right. It's not that it's prepared poorly--it's not a particularly tricky dish--but when you're eating it, you're supposed to eat the sugar cane too. I don't think most people recognize that stick as food and even if they did they wouldn't be willing to sit in public gnawing on it like a woodchuck and spitting the fibers out onto their plates.

As usual I looked around at different recipes. There's some small variation in binders and some recipes add a little pork but beyond that it's pretty straightforward. As usual I made it a bit more complicated.

This isn't really a recipe that requires a lot of measuring. The amounts of many of the ingredients I used were determined by how much I happened to have on hand.

Ingredients:
2 4-5" lengths of sugarcane, peeled and quartered
4 ounces raw shrimp, peeled and deveined
4 ounces pork, coarsely chopped [This is a much higher pork to shrimp ratio than the recipes call for so I supplemented the shrimp with]
1 Tablespoon dried shrimp, soaked in warm water for 30 minutes [Also, the recipes that called for pork generally specified fatty pork which the leftover pork I had wasn't so I added in]
1 Tablespoon lard
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 medium shallot, finely chopped
1 Tablespoon lemongrass, finely chopped [no recipes call for this, but I had it in the refrigerator and it didn't seem like it would hurt]
1 egg white
1/2 teaspoon fish sauce
1 large pinch salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 Tablespoon toasted rice powder [You can buy this in Indian and Asian groceries. If you do, look for the dark roasted variety. I made my own by pan-toasting two Tablespoons of risotto rice (glutinous rice would be better but I don't have any at the moment) with a tiny bit of oil for three and a half minutes in a cast iron pan over high heat. It goes from raw to burnt in the last forty-five seconds so be careful. And then, after it's cooled a little, ground it up in my spice grinder.]

0. Put the pork and shrimp in the freezer for a half hour to firm up a little. Preheat your broiler or your grill or a big pot of oil.

1. Put shrimp, pork, dried shrimp and lard in a food processor. Process until smooth.

2. Add everything else except the sugarcane. Process until smooth again. Remove the shrimp/pork paste to a bowl. You're going to be digging in there with your hands and you don't want the food processor blade lurking at the bottom. You might want to refrigerator it for a few minutes at this point to make it easier to work with.

3. Wrap each stick of sugar cane with shrimp/pork paste leaving an inch or so at either end. I had enough for seven so I saved one stick for dessert, but I think some of my paste-layers were a bit thick. A third inch is about right.

I took a while for me to figure out a good method and since my hands were full I couldn't get any pictures of it. Sorry. What I found was that if my hands were moist, but not wet, I could pat out a square of shrimp paste in the palm of one hand. All of those fibers in the sugarcane grab onto the paste so with just a little pressure it sticks more to it than to a slightly wet hand so I could put the cane at one side of the square and roll it across pulling up the paste as it went along.

The results aren't perfect so I had to patch up holes and then roll the stick between both palms like I was rolling out a rope of Play-Doh to even and smooth it out. I wonder how it's actually supposed to be done.

4. I broiled mine about five inches from the heat, five minutes on the first side and then two on the flip and they turned out looking quite lovely. I can't speak for the alternative cooking methods though.

The traditional dipping sauce is nuoc cham. I had a some left from the batch I made a while back.

The meat by itself has a nice mixture of flavors with broiled shrimp and pork accented by the tang of fish sauce and the herbal notes of the lemon grass, but it really perks up when mixed with the sugarcane juice. And it's even better with the nuoc cham so don't neglect that.

It is a bit tricky to eat if you actually try to bite off pieces of sugar cane from the side, although he bits of exposed sugar cane at the ends have been cooked into edibility. I found it easiest to bite down on the end to scrape off the meat and squeeze out the sugar juices with my teeth leaving a flattened strip of fibers that I could snip off with scissors. Very undignified but it did minimize the spitting.

Alternatively, you could skip the sugarcane and just add a couple teaspoons of sugar to the paste and make patties out of it, but where's the fun in that?

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.

CSA week one: Suon Nuong Xa

a.k.a. Grilled Lemongrass Pork Tenderloin Skewers

When I posted about the CSA box this week I wrote that lemongrass meant Thai cooking but when I actually looked around for recipes I found Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian recipes using it too. Since it's going to take four recipes to use up all the lemongrass I'm going to make a point of cooking recipes from four different cuisines.

First up is Vietnamese. This recipe is from Corinne Trang's cookbook Authentic Vietnamese Cooking via Sara Moulton's show Sara's Secrets. It's for a dish you'll recognize--those skewers of pork served over a big bowl of rice noodles in every Vietnamese restaurant on the planet (excepting banh mi stands, of course. Can you get banh mi anywhere in Miami? I think I'd actually drive some distance through Miami traffic to get some).

I didn't make any big changes to the recipe so here it is straight from the Food Network website:

Prep Time: 30 min
Inactive Prep Time: 1 min
Cook Time: 20 min

Level: Intermediate

Serves: 4 servings

1/4 cup fish sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 stalks lemongrass, outer leaves and tops removed, root ends trimmed, and stalks finely grated
1 large shallot, finely chopped
2 large cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 pound pork tenderloin, thinly sliced
16 bamboo skewers, soaked for 20 minutes and drained
1 recipe Rice Vermicelli: Bun Thit
1/2 cup chopped unsalted roasted peanuts
Nuoc cham, as needed, recipe follows

Stir together the fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar, and oil until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the lemongrass, shallot, garlic and pork and mix to coat the meat evenly. Allow to marinate at room temperature for 20 minutes or refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to overnight.

Slide 2 to 4 slices of pork onto each skewer so the meat is flat with the skewer going through the slices several times. Grill over a barbecue (make sure that the flames have subsided and the coals are red with white ashes). Alternatively, heat a well-oiled grill pan or non-stick skillet over high heat and, working in batches, cook the skewers until the edges crisp, about 1 minute per side. Remove the skewers from the grilled pork.

Divide the grilled pork among the bowls of rice vermicelli. Sprinkle peanuts and drizzle nuoc cham over each serving. Serve immediately.

Fish Dipping Sauce: Nuoc Cham

5 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons water
1/3 cup fish sauce
1/2 cup lime or lemon juice
1 large clove garlic, minced
1 or more bird's eye or Thai chiles, seeded and minced
1 shallot, peeled, thinly sliced, and rinsed (optional)

Whisk together the sugar, water, fish sauce, and lime juice in a bowl until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the garlic, chile, and shallot, and let stand for 30 minutes before serving.

Yield: 2 cups Preparation Time: 5 minutes Cooking Time: 5 minutes Non-Active Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Recipe courtesy Corinne Trang, Authentic Vietnamese Cooking, Simon & Schuster, 1999


Personally, I don't particularly like rice vermicelli (There's not a whole lot there to dislike there either, but I don't think it adds anything much to a meal.) so I served the skewers over a bowl of mizuna and a big scoop of white rice instead. The picture's harder to parse than I expected. Those are wedges of tomato on the left hand side and the fiddly bits on the pork over on the right are sprinklings of ground peanuts.

I also added dollops of hoisin sauce and sambal chili garlic sauce to complete the trio of sauces you need for a proper Vietnamese meal. Actually, I thought the hoisin and sambal were better accompaniments than the nuoc cham. I'm as big a nuoc cham fan as much as the next guy, but it was the weakest complement to the dish.

The marinade used most of the same ingredients so the nuoc cham just watered down the intense flavors of the pork which actually was best--hot, tender and juicy, bursting with complex pungent and herbal flavors--right out of the pan. The couple minutes it took for me to fix up the bowl all pretty were much to its detriment. On the other hand, the sambal and hoisin worked with it nicely and lots of other things will benefit from being dipped in the leftover nuoc cham.


Oh, and I should say something about grating the lemongrass. I only had to remove one outer leaf and a little wedge of woody stem out of the bottom before running it through my microplane grater. It was surprisingly easy and released lots of flavor that you could taste even through the fish sauce and pork fat in the final dish. Beats crushing it with a cleaver and fishing it out later by a long shot. That's the benefit of having fresh local ingredients.

CSA week six - asam pade daging and sambal goreng bloemkool

Over the last couple of days I made both the Sumatran beef dish and the Javanese cauliflower dish I mentioned earlier. There are some Indonesian ingredients you may be unfamiliar with that I'll talk about in a separate post, but the recipes themselves, both from The Indonesian Kitchen by Copeland Marks with Mintari Soeharjo, are quite straightforward. Actually, the beef stew recipe was rather too straightforward:
1. put everything into a pot and boil until cooked.
2. serve.

I put that at the world's fourth oldest recipe after
1. bury in ashes, wait until cooked,
1. impale on stick,
2. suspend over fire until cooked,
and
1. tenderize with rock.

Since I do have access to a modern American-style kitchen I added a few steps to improve the flavors and textures.

Asam Pade Daging
Sumatran Hot and Sour Beef

2 pound boneless beef chuck or round eye roast, cut into 1 inch cubes
1/4 cup thin-sliced onions
5 cloves garlic, sliced thin
1 slice fresh ginger
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons salt
1 piece of laos
2 salam leaves
1 stalk lemongrass
6 kemiri nuts, crushed
1 tablespoon crushed fresh or dried hot red chile pepper
2 tablespoons tamarind, dissolved in 3 tablespoons water (this is actually an enormous amount of tamarind and the dominant flavor in the dish)
4 cups water

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

2. Brown beef in batches with a tablespoon of oil in dutch oven. Remove to bowl.

3. Briefly sauté onions, garlic, ginger, chile, salt and turmeric in beef drippings to release flavors.

4. Return beef and add the rest of the ingredients. Cover dutch oven and place in real oven. Cook for 2 to 2 1/2 hours until beef is tender.

5. Bring dutch oven to stovetop and remove beef with a slotted spoon. Boil sauce down to 1 cup. Return beef.

6. Serve over rice with a bit of sambal.


Sambal Goreng Bloemkool
Javanese Cauliflower Stew

1/4 cup sliced onion
2 cloves garlic, sliced
2 small fresh hot green chiles, sliced thin
1 pound cauliflower, cut into small florets
1 cup coconut milk
1 salam leaf
1 piece of laos
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon shrimp paste
1 teaspoon tamarind, dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
1/2 cup cubed ripe tomato

1. Fry the onion, garlic and chiles in a tablespoon of oil for two minutes on high heat. Add the cauliflower and fry for two minutes more.
2. Add the coconut milk, salam leaves, laos, salt, sugar, shrimp paste and tamarind liquid. Cook five minutes over medium heat, stirring and basting frequently.
3. Add tomatoes and cook three minutes more.
4. Cauliflower should be tender but still crunchy. Serve over rice with a drizzle of kecap manis.