Just a couple of notes to self:
– A while ago, i made some oden using the dried flavor packet you can buy at the Japanese markets. It was pretty meh. Today, i had some daikon to cook up, so i used another of the packets in a medium pot of water, but i amped it up with maybe 1/4 cup shoyu, a big splash of sake & a bigger splash of mirin. MUCH better.
– Tonight we made the Ma Po Tofu recipe from the Pei Mei cookbook volume 1. I didn’t bother deepfrying the tofu first, nor did i have the required pork — all i had was some fresh shiitake. So i just put a bunch of peanut oil into the big skillet, added the garlic & shiitake, fried them a while, then added some more peanut oil (a bit too much really) and the tofu. Then i added the spicy bean paste and soy sauce and let it all fry up for a while. Last went in the chicken broth, which i then set to boiling down. I ground the black pepper on top of the tofu and let it sit there to add flavor. The cornstarch slurry went in just at the end, when the broth was reduced but still entirely liquid. This came out VERY nice indeed, spicy and rich and with a bracing hit of fresh black pepper. The shiitake add a sweet flavor that is entirely lovely, and i would recommend this substitution for any vegetenarians wanting to make a Ma Po Tofu. I like the flavor of this at least as much as any restaurant version, and it goes together in a flash, presuming of course you have spicy bean paste in the house. Which you all should — it’s yummy and has a multitude of uses.
1 package tofu, cut in large cubes
sm package fresh shiitake, cut chunky
4 sm cloves garlic, cut rough
several tbsp peanut oil
2 tbsp spicy bean paste
2-3 tsp soy sauce
sprinkle of salt
1 cup chicken broth
lots of fresh ground black pepper
2 tsp cornstarch + 2 tsp water = slurry
chopped green onion (i didn’t have any)
also it specified to drizzle sesame oil on each serving, but since i overdid it a little on the peanut oil, i skipped it. And yes, we ate it up without taking photos. sorry, y’all.
one other note: though it’s not super spicy and has no szechuan peppercorns, and therefore perhaps is not strictly speaking an authentic szechuan recipe, the recipe from Pei Mei is very tasty. I may try goosing it a little szechuan-style next time, to see what happens.
Author: foodnerd
bacon club eats
The delights at Bacon Club run the gamut from subtle scones to insane desserts to the bacon-wrapped classics. Everything was good, some things were great. We are full. Note to self: Miller High Life is the perfect beer for Bacon Club.
The photographic evidence:
hunter bacon (raw smoked/cured bacon from the russian shop, very chewy & salty and lovely on a vimta cracker), and choco maple bacon bites
did i mention, choco maple bacon bites? holy crap. yum. crispy bacon, with maple cream made with maple syrup and bacon fat cooked & whipped, and topped with a roasted cocoa bean from the Dominican Republic.
crustless fluffernutters with bacon. Elvis-rific.
Korean braised pork belly (braised plain with garlic) with salty sesame sauce & scallions
brussels sprouts with bacon & hot pepper flakes
my bacon cups with mac & cheese on the left, arancini with asparagus & bacon on the right. The bacon cups with mac-cheese did in fact work well — they were tasty and popular, and even the shaggy and tiny ones held their filling well. We filled them before we left home, then ran them through the oven to heat through and crisp the last flabby bits of bacon.
arancini (mmmmmmmm)
tomato-bacon soup (also nice as a sauce for arancini)
bacon-pepper-cheese scones
bananas foster with bacon & pecans
bacon flavored toothpicks
lentils with carrots, celery, onions with slab bacon
artichokes & mushrooms with pancetta & lemon
artichokes with mustard, wrapped in bacon and broiled — this is a really tasty thing, and probably quite easy… i may steal it for my next party
borscht with bacon… i didn’t actually try this last one, as its maker arrived with it long after I had already stuffed staggering amounts of bacon down my gullet
Also, special bonus recipe from our lovely Bacon Club hostess: for bacon caramel popcorn, cook equal parts B-grade maple syrup and bacon fat to the hard crack stage, mix with popcorn, crisped bacon pieces and pecans. She said that 2 cups each syrup & bacon fat was enough for 10 cups popcorn. Let me know if you try it before i do.
bacon club
We have some friends who came over for Chow & Chow, and we got to talking about other forms of gastronomic excess… which led us to discuss their ongoing potluck series, Bacon Club. You see where this is going, don’t you? Heh.
Bacon Club involves a number of pork-fat-loving folk gathering together, each with their own bacon dish, and consuming all those bacony treats and compatible alcohols in one evening of porcine delight. Obviously we were not going to miss this.
It’s tonight, and we are making bacon cups filled with macaroni and cheese. We’d recently seen the bacon cups on Not Martha and been exceedingly impressed, so of course they sprang immediately to mind. Those had been filled with lettuce and tomato, for a breadless BLT, but tomatoes are appallingly out of season at the moment, so we cast about for a more suitable filling. Mac & cheese seemed suitably excessive and decadent.
I never like most homemade mac & cheese, because it’s insufficiently cheesy. So i surfed around, and my conclusion is that the inadequate cheese flavor is due to two things: use of mild rather than strong cheeses, and use of bechamel. The flour dulls the taste of cheese. Interestingly, a 19th century recipe involved only laying slices of cheese in layers with macaroni and baking till melted.
stove-top mac & cheese, smooth and cheesy like it should beI found a few recipes without any flour, and it’s easy enough to swap in whatever cheeses you like… so i settled on Alton Brown’s stovetop recipe, with a bit heavier hand with the hot sauce and mustard powder and cheese (12oz instead of 10), and a bit of sauteed onion just for grins. This came out rather good, though tallasiandude thought it too sharply cheesy (sigh). Anyway, i think that i will stick with this as a basic template, and perhaps next time i will add a bit of prepared mustard to give it a little acid zing to balance the cheesy richness. Or swap in a little chevre for some of the cheddar, mmmm. Or perhaps even a little Velveeta, for that low-rent orange meltiness — i used to make my grilled cheese sandwiches with one Kraft single and one slice of sharp cheddar, to get the best of both worlds. Those were frickin’ awesome.
But back to bacon… the first few woven bacon cups came out perfect, though they took about 40 minutes to fully cook, but the last few batches have shrunk too much too fast and been done in about 20 mins. Part of it is that the different packs of bacon have slices of different widths, and it’s harder to get it right with thinner slices, but the other part must be that the oven is now too hot. So we have a number of raggedy-ass bacon cup-slash-scraps, and a few that are tiny little thimbles, but perhaps once they are topped with creamy mac-and-cheese, no one will notice.
first cups
tiny cups, falling off the forms
ragged cupsHmm, I’ve just now done another batch and they seem fine, and i think i’ve figured out the problem: one of my muffin tins is modern and flimsy, and another is vintage and heavy… and the problem was with the heavy old tin. As I was pouring off the fat from a pan that’s been sitting out of the oven for 15 minutes — the cookie sheet base was cool enough to lift up and pour from — I noticed that the muffin tin itself was still hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold. If the inner support is hot enough to cook the bacon from inside at the same time as the oven cooks from the outside, that might be what’s shrinking them up and popping them off the tins.
I’ll post again once we’re back from Bacon Club, with the final verdict and photos. Either way, it’s awfully fun to spend a morning doing arts and crafts with raw bacon and then filling the house with the smell of crisped bacon. Yay.
BTW: we used 4 12oz packs of regular thin-cut bacon for this, which filled two large trays (maybe 25 cups). I made a whole pound of pasta rather than Alton’s 8oz, and it seemed cheesy enough, but perhaps it would be saucier with less pasta. In any case, a drier, clingier mac-n-cheese was just the ticket for this application, as it stayed in the cups properly and didn’t ooze liquid cheese through the holes in many of the cups when re-heated. Not that you need even close to that much mac-n-cheese; we’ve got 2/3 of the pot left for dinner tomorrow.
(PS: I don’t seem to have any posts about Chow & Chow, and neither does tallasiandude — we must have been too busy. This was a rather fun party in which we made a boatload of dumplings and other chinese dishes, ate them, and then stayed up far too late watching Stephen Chow movies. Recommended.)
it’s been said before…
…but i am not sure what my work life would be without Coke Zero. It’s not a habit or a daily thing, but when one works on data verification until 11:45pm and gets up at 5:15am to catch a flight to a client site, and must still be lucid and presentable and, saints preserve us, personable for the entire afternoon — it simply would not happen without a slow drip of the Zero.
Whole Foods Veggie Beans snack
OK, this product is just weird. Freeze dried green beans, somehow processed with canola oil, dextrin & salt to become a crunchy snack. I get it — a salty crunchy snack with a low glycemic index and lots of fiber. But i tried a few just now, from the box that I got from my parents for Christmas, and they’re just somehow *wrong*.
They do taste identifiably, if faintly, like green beans, which is nice, but with a faintly unpleasant sweet taste, and a few hard bits mixed in with the crunch, like when you get Corn Nuts that are a little over-cooked and you think you’re going to break your teeth. (I don’t eat Corn Nuts anymore either, so maybe I have a thing.) I had to put the lid back on the box and stop after like 4 beans, and i still have a little icky feeling on my tongue which i might have to drown with a few Utz Cheez Balls.
spam musubi
This is one of the more notorious specialties of Hawai’i, but I’ll tell ya, these little buggers are awfully tasty. And handy, too — when you can nip into any convenience mart and snag a portable block of tasty handheld carbs+protein+fat, for less than 2 bucks, and be back on your way to the beach, there ain’t nothin’ not to like about that.
I think every single spam musubi we bought on the islands was different than the others, which is hilarious. Some have teriyaki sauce, some have panko crumbs, some have egg, some have furikake, some are plain. Sometimes they’re in the hot case, sometimes out at room temp (rarely in the fridge, these people are respectful of their rice).
But my most favorite of all of them was the first, the hot-case teriyaki-brushed spam musubi clearly handmade by someone at the Kukui’ula Market on Kaua’i, between Kahoa & Poipu. They were the most flavorful, thanks to the play between sweet-savory teri sauce and salty-savory spam, and the rice was warm and soft and held together just right. The nori got a little chewy, but i can overlook such a flaw. Once we found these, i think we ate at least one every day the rest of the time we were on Kaua’i.
(more musubi photos to come)
Pita Kebab
Whilst downtown today, i walked by a little hole in the wall labeled “Pita Kebab” that had a newspaper review on the window that said it was Persian and had great kubideh.
Say no more.
I stopped in for lunch, and though that kubideh was perfectly fine, especially for wicked-fast takeout, it wasn’t all that. The clipping said it was richly spiced, delectable, etc., and frankly I didn’t detect much spice at all, and it desperately needed salt. Ditto on the rice: fragrant and tender, but a little bit bland, in dire need of some nice salted butter. The chopped salad, however, was top-shelf, super flavorful and lemony and minty, yum yum.
So Molana is better, though twice the price, and my own kitchen is better even than that, but if you work in the Downtown Crossing/Chinatown area, it’s a nice change of pace for lunch takeout.
Trader Joe’s Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Caramels
I just finished off the box of Trader Joe’s Sea Salt Dark Chocolate Caramels, and felt moved to blog.
These are great. More please!
Actually, i do agree with the assessment on the site i linked to above — they are not perfect, i have had better caramels — but damn, I sure do like caramel + dark chocolate + big crunchy hunks of salt. Short of a trip back to LA’s Little Flower Candy Company, which sold me the best freaking salt caramels I’ve ever eaten, this massmarket treat will most certainly do.
i just hope they don’t sell them only during the winter holidays…
Duane’s Ono Char-burger
oh. my. god. Best Burger Ever.
It may have been the fact that we’d been surfing all morning and were really really hungry, but even in retrospect the Local Girl burger at Duane’s is well into the top 5 burgers of all time, no question about it.
First of all, the burger itself is perfect — not too thick, just thin enough to balance with the toppings, and well-cooked. Then you factor in the usual lettuce-and-tomato being yummy because, well, you’re in Hawaii, and then things just get crazy: teriyaki sauce, pineapple, swiss cheese and mayo. These add up to one insanely good treat, but really it is the combo of mayo with teriyaki that makes my eyeballs roll back into my head with the sheer deliciousness of it all. I can hardly stand it just writing about it now. Yum.
tallasiandude revealed his California roots with his choice, a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, sprouts, mayo, cheddar, and vast amounts of buttery Hawaii avocado. This too is a spectacular burger, perfectly executed.
The onion rings are some of the best we’ve had, super sweet, thick rings with ultra-crunchy batter, and the fries are great too. I loved my papaya-and-i-forget-what-else drink, smoothie-fied with blended ice to become cool, refreshing and energizing. The marionberry shake was the only disappointment — it was a perfectly fine shake, but not very berry-tasting, and its okayness suffered by comparison to the superlatives of everything else.
We went at about 3 in the afternoon, so the lines weren’t too bad. There’s a few tables with umbrellas, but if you go when it’s busy, you might want to get back in the car and head back to the beach for a picnic.
We ate a lot of good food in Hawaii, but this may rank as the single best meal of the whole trip. Viva Duane’s!
bakesale betty’s fried chicken sandwich
We take a break from our overdue Hawaii programming to bring you an update from Oakland, CA where i am visiting my pal R. Today we went to the farmer’s market and ate a bunch of free samples (especially the breads and spreads at the Afghani prepared foods booth, YUM), bought some gorgeously cheese-tastic pastry at Arizmendi, and went for a walk through the attractively early-20th-century architecture of R’s neighborhood, including a spur-of-the-moment visit to a house for sale that either of us would have bought on the spot if we had a spare $800,000.
By then we were hungry again, and we headed across town to Bakesale Betty’s. They have cookies and cakes, but we got fried chicken sandwiches. These somehow embody the city of Oakland to me: soul food fried chicken, on artisanal bread, with crispy crunchy fresh slaw and no mayo. They were so damn good. The chicken is boneless but otherwise strictly traditional, moist with thick, crisp, spicy crust. The slaw is full of parsley and jalapenos, giving it just a little kick and a crunchy cabbagey sweetness and a touch of vinegar. It doesn’t need mayo, and in my opinion, nearly everything could stand a little mayo. Mayo would push this sandwich over the edge into decadence, and somehow at the same time would make it more pedestrian.
We gobbled up every bite. Highly recommended.