We had dinner Christmas day with tallasiandude’s LA-based extended family, and damn, was that a spread! Enough cold plates to feed an army, followed by an equally staggering battery of hot dishes and a pair of desserts.
I may have forgotten something, but to the best of my recollection there was:
salted eel (kind of like less-salty salt-cod)
vegetarian duck (layered sheets of tofu skin from the look of it)
wood ears and vegetarian kidney (some kind of gluten I think cut to look like kidney)
jalapenos stuffed with ground pork and braised in soy sauce & sugar
steamed egg loaf with 1000-year eggs and salted duck egg yolk
turnip pickles with soy sauce and szechuan peppercorns
cold tendon
sweet & sour spare ribs (not very sour, mostly savory)
salty ham with boiled lotus seeds, on lightly toasted bread to make a li’l sammich
clams steamed with scrambled egg and green onion
shrimps sauteed with garlic and green onion and spicy stuff
braised pork hock with bok choy
tofu noodles with green beans, ham and mushroom
mustard greens with shredded ham and dried scallop
soup with bamboo, enoki, napa and egg dumplings with pork filling
rice cakes sauteed with mushroom and cabbage in a brown sauce
sticky rice with red bean paste and dried fruits
my cranberry upside-down cake
Author: foodnerd
Momofuku secrets
I got a copy of David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook, and it is some of the most enjoyable food porn (and writing) I’ve seen in a long time. He paints himself as a bit of a bumbler, if perhaps one with borderline sociopathic passion for good food, and frankly I find that entirely charming. The fact is, this dude likes to eat the way I like to eat, throwing the low in with the high without regard for anything but deliciousness (and maybe the occasional gleeful fuck-you gesture).
Plus, there are recipes for nearly everything we ate at the restaurants. Nom nom nom nom nom nom.
I think that part of the reason I loved the sauce that came with our bo ssam is that it may actually have been pureed kimchi. And pureed kimchi is such a blindingly simple, wonderful idea that I can barely imagine I never thought of it myself. I am going to puree up some kimchi and start putting it on EVERYTHING.
UPDATE: now I’ve read through the bo ssam part of the book, and the sauce I really loved wasn’t the puree, but I now know for sure why I loved it so much. He thins down his spicy sauce with sherry vinegar, my hands-down favorite vinegar of all time. OMG yum.
Still gonna puree some kimchi though… and maybe thin it down with sherry vinegar too so it’ll drizzle. Be still my heart.
celery sticks, cocktail style
I have hated celery for years. As a child, I never liked any of the standard 1970s snack preparations: celery stick with peanut butter, celery stick with cream cheese, celery stick with dip. BLECH.
Readers of this site may recall that in recent years I have come to enjoy celery, even raw celery, in certain preparations — notably the celery and pressed tofu salad in certain Chinese restaurants. (RIP Wing’s Kitchen *sob*)
With this newly-opened mind, I decided that for my most recent cocktail party I’d put my oft-used green-olive cream cheese spread into celery sticks for a fancier presentation. I tried piping it with a big star tip but that was a non-starter so I snipped the end off the ziplock and piped it that way. Much more successful, if perhaps a little more rustic than I’d imagined. I figured other people would like it, but I’d probably not dig it so much.
WRONG.
The olive-pimento-parsley flavors in the cream cheese are great with the savory celery. The whole thing is like a crunchy martini in your mouth. Love them, and have been eating a couple before starting dinner prep every night this week. Yum!
Who knew?
fish soup
We got some fish frames for free and I made two soups with ’em. First I made a big pot of fish stock, pulling out the fish once it was cooked and picking off the meat, returning the bones and skin to the simmering soup.
Half the stock became a ghetto bouillabaisse, with only the picked fish meat in it along with the fennel and onion and saffron. Very nice, and much cheaper than the regular bouillabaisse we make for company.
The other half became a Russian fish soup with potato, onion, mushroom, tomato, wine, garlic, dill, lemon and paprika. I used some Trader Joe’s mahi mahi and mixed seafood (scallop, squid and shrimp) since the free fish bits were all gone. This was very nice indeed, warming and refreshing at the same time.
mashed potatoes and celeriac
mmmmm… mashed potato and celery root with butter and salt and pepper and just the littlest bit of milk. diet-ish food that is SO tasty.
Kaya in Cambridge has kimchi bokum
Had lunch with K today at Kaya in Porter Square, and they now have tofu kimchi bokum on the menu. Turns out to be a very nice version indeed, quite rich and full of delicious chewy rice cakes. Nom nom.
Frantic Miscellany, part 85743
Still in a place where the last thing I want to do with my leisure time is stay parked on my ass in front of the computer. Sorry, Internet. However, while on a conference call, I share with you a few nuggets:
– a can of adobo flavored Muir Glen tomatoes plus a can of kidney beans plus random salsa makes a chili that really isn’t half bad for something that took all of 3 minutes.
– pie plus cheddar cheese really is the breakfast of champions. Yum, and usually I’m not ready for lunch until after 1pm.
– dark chocolate covered shortbread stars from Trader Joe’s are freaking AWESOME.
– also, Trader Joe’s Nutty Bits nut-and-seed candies are pretty great too.
– I LOVE STUFFING.
The Publick House
We had some dance workshops in Washington Square, Brookline today, and we were starving at the end of it. We looked at the cheap sushi place, then decided we’d rather the fireplace at The Fireplace, but that was an hour wait, so we bailed and walked up the street to see what else was around. The Publick House had lots of belgian beer signs in the window, so we figured what the hell and went in.
Yay for us, because it reminds me a lot of my beloved Hop Leaf in Chicago. The food is not quite as great, but very very good nonetheless. The mac and cheese is in fact all that. The mussels are very nice — we had the ones with smoked beer and fatty chunks of bacon. Squash soup was well executed. And the frites… I was picking bones with the frites because I prefer mine much crunchier, but they were quite tasty, and then I started to notice just HOW tasty, with the delicious whiffs of animal fat coming off them. So I snagged the barman and asked what they fry in, and he grinned at me in a knowing way and said “Lard.”
HOT DAMN.
I have forgiven them for not being crunchy.
And please, if you like beer, you’ll love this place. Tons of Belgians, exotica of every sort, and this particular barman took my vague mutterings of “german beers, marzens, dark lagers” and in about 3 seconds brought me a hoppy little octoberfesty sort of thing that was just exactly what I wanted.
Snug, brown, woody, and gezellig, as they say in Holland and I assume they also say in Belgium. We will be returning.
miscellany
I have developed an odd pattern of craving PB&J sammiches every morning for breakfast. Not sure what to make of that, other than that possibly I am morphing into tallasiandude.
Two nights ago we ate dinner in a Chinese restaurant and somehow managed to order only exactly enough food and we left without any carryout boxes. Miraculous!
To use up the last of the season’s bumper crop of pears, my mom made us a pie (nom) and a poundcake/upsidedown cake sort of thing that was quite lovely in both taste and appearance. I should get her to type up the recipe so i can post it.
While we were away for the weekend, the cats for some reason jumped onto the table and started chawing on the lotus seed mooncakes we left there. They didn’t do too much damage, so maybe they didn’t like them after all?
Things are busy with work, so I’m not spending much leisure time at the keyboard. Hopefully it’ll mellow out soon.
Kabab & Tandoor
There is a Hyderabadi restaurant here in Waltham called Kabab & Tandoor. I went to it once when it was still a temptingly dumpy little hole. It was delicious, very spicy and offering lots of dishes unfamiliar to me, and it was full of people who I assumed to be native consumers of the cuisine. Yummy. So when I noticed that they’d moved to a fancy new storefront right on Main St, complete with gilt script on the sign, I thought perhaps that was a good sign, that they were coming up in the world and the spicy dishes were perhaps turning enough profit to pay for some banquettes and fancy lamps.
We went to the new and improved version tonight, and the food is still really good. There’s a full menu, which makes it a lot easier to figure out what you’re eating, and there were more not-Indian folks in the place for sure. It offers a mix of familiar Indian-restaurant favorites and unfamiliar sounding things, often involving goat or mutton, which to my way of thinking is always a plus. The decor is really rather good, with soothing mustard yellow and leaf green on the walls, modern lamps (detectably from Home Depot but who cares, they chose the one attractive lamp at HD, so bonus points for them!), and some appealing art.
We got a chhole, which was well balanced and sparkled with raw onion and cilantro, and a paneer makhni, which was a rich red creamy spicy treasure. I suspect they make their own paneer, as it had a very good texture and there was plenty of it. There was also a goat passindai, an earthy meaty gravy full of chunky soft-braised goat and herbs. The raita was unusual, very runny and as it turns out quite spicy. I asked the waiter and he said they mix the yogurt with cream, and spice it with garlic and ginger and green chilies. Delicious, especially on the chhole.
We were too full to try the sweets, but there’s a full roster. We’ll be back many times, to try all those things we’ve never had before, and perhaps we should bring friends, so we can order more dishes… Yum!