foodnerd – Page 29

Hamura’s Saimin (and several others)

Hamura’s Saimin

Originally uploaded by tallasiandude

aaah, saimin.

Ramen by any other name would not be served in such delightful weather — nor would it contain spam. The night we arrived in Kaua’i we went directly to Hamura’s Saimin, both because it sounded AWESOME in the guidebook and because it was about the only place still open at that time of night.

The place was jammed with locals, and we probably looked like the worst sort of fresh-off-the-plane tourists, pasty white and studying the menu with wide eyes. Well, maybe not the *worst* sort, but you get the idea. We got a regular and a wonton saimin, plus some BBQ chicken. (BBQ chicken is hawaii-speak for yakitori, a pleasant discovery.) The regular is in the back and the wonton is in the foreground, wonton being a bit of a superset of the regular, containing meaty wontons and roast pork slices in addition to the spam matchsticks, green onions, and fishcake shreds.

All this arrives on top of well-textured wheat noodles in a rich and savory pork broth. Tallasiandude eats his plain, but I found I prefer the addition of a bit of spicy chili vinegar, just as i prefer my pho with lots of lime. There’s also hot sauce, shoyu, and chinese mustard on offer, and we saw all of them used liberally, though the shoyu & mustard was primarily for dipping wontons & pork.

On our return trips, we ordered the special saimin, which comes with everything the wonton comes with, but with a few of the wontons swapped out for a hardcooked egg and some mustard greens. (We saw the guy next to us order this the first time, yummy.)

We had some other saimin on on our trip, and all were good, varying slightly in their toppings and broth but always containing rich pork soup with spam, kamaboko and noodles, a reliable comforting dish. But for pure pleasure, and with special style points for dive-ness and laconic waitresses, Hamura’s does take the prize. We can’t wait to go back.

li hing mui

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: li hing mui is really a borderline revolting food.
I had heard so much about it, how people crave it, how it is the most awesomest flavor since chocolate. And I was hell-bent to try some once I got to Hawaii.
I started out with a passionfruit margarita with li hing mui powder sprinkled in and coated onto the rim with the salt. This was absolutely delightful, and only jet lag and monstrous fatigue kept me from ordering about 5 in a row. For starters, passionfruit + tequila + salt = most perfect cocktail foodnerd can imagine. And the li hing mui gave it a little smoky-tangy kick. I licked the whole rim clean, and loved the whole thiing.
So i had high hopes for the little packets of li hing mui plums, and other things like ginger and mango with li hing flavoring, that I kept scooping up at Longs and at the supermarkets, etc. as gifts for friends back home. Then i figured maybe i better try the damn things before I got too carried away, so I had a little bite of a plum in the airport on the way from Kauai to the Big Island. EEEEW! YUK! I ingested maybe a microgram-sized bite, and it was awful, completely overwhelming, and fake tasting. (I noticed after this that absolutely every single li hing mui product involves aspartame, which i am still befuddled by.)
I scaled it back after that. But i did have a packet of seedless li hing mui plums for spleen and littlelee, and we busted those out a few nights ago. These were slightly less horrible than the seeded ones, but still, spleen made the most appalling faces and ran for the kitchen to spit it out. Littlelee and I could find some pleasure in it, but still that one plum we’d nibbled at got chucked into the trash. I had some li hing ginger for my mom, who loves all ginger things, and she thought it was pretty bad.
So what gives? Why does a tiny bit of the powder do fantastical things for my cocktail, but yet the smallest bites of the dried-fruit forms make even the hardest-core foodnerds run gagging? Are we just Yankee lame-asses? WTF with the aspartame?
I have a packet of the powder, and I will be doing some cocktail experiments as the opportunity arises. But those fruits are all getting the boot, sadly.

new year’s eve dinner party: the francophone world

We were lucky enough to be invited to tag along to a fabulous dinner party thrown by friends of friends on New Year’s Eve. They managed a fully-plated, multicourse dinner for 20, incorporating dishes from all over the french-speaking world, including both fish and lamb chops that were cooked *perfectly*.
I was impressed. And very well fed. Here are pictures:

brik of chicken, charmoula and egg, with homemade harissa

amuse bouches: cherry tomato with feta, potato with truffled foie gras, creme fraiche and caviar

vietnamese crab and asparagus soup (in an exquisitely subtle pork/ginger broth)

sea bass in madagascar spices, with cucumber-onion salad

palate cleanser of mango and grapefruit granitas

gorgeous lamb chop in homemade demiglace, with wok-fried green beans and a phyllo package of lobster, chanterelles & nuts, in a red-wine-cream sort of sauce. purported to be quebecois; delicious no matter where it’s from.

cool rice salad with chevre, sun-dried tomatoes, yellow peppers and scallion

cheese plate, including dried cherries, date paste and home-candied grapefruit peel

chocolate gateau and gelee of champagne with winter citrus fruit

desert depot lunch counter

Kelso Depot sign

Originally uploaded by foodnerd

The mayhem of work (and everything else) finally stopped, primarily because I left town to visit my parents for the holidays, then headed to LA to visit the husband’s family en route to the honeymoon in Hawaii. Hot damn.

So posts will be sporadic while we’re traveling, but I have every hope of posting lots of stuff about kalua pig and poke and shave ice real soon. I have been poking about on the various hawaiian foodblogs looking for tips…

Anyway. While in California we took a long weekend to go camping with friends in the Mojave Desert, which was awesome — I love this particular bit of desert, and always find it relaxing and refreshing just to be there. We did a couple of really great hikes, one up a wash to a steep climb to a rockface, and another up a pair of big cinder cones. And by camping, I mean sleeping in a tent cabin with a wood stove and a ceiling fan and electricity to run the toaster oven that hedge brought along for cooking cornbread. For dinner the second night we had ribeyes grilled on the cast iron pan over the fire, with sauteed chanterelles foraged by a friend from the Bay Area. Really roughing it, you know.

On the way home, we stopped in Kelso Depot to check out the new visitor’s center. They’ve restored the old early-20th-century train depot building, and installed a bunch of pretty nice natural history exhibits and restored the upper rooms where depot and railroad staff lived, and set up some historical displays. It’s worth the time if you are in the Mojave, and the gift shop has some very good botanical guides and a field guide to scat and tracks, if you’re nerdy like us about your hiking.

And the point of all this, at last, is just to show you a cool photo I took outside the depot building, of the sign for the depot lunch counter which has been restored to its 1924 glory (considerable) and is just aching for a good line cook to bring it back to life. Really — the park service is advertising for a concessionaire to put the lunch counter back into service. I am irrationally fond of this picture, and will probably blow it up, frame it, and hang it in my kitchen so i can think happy thoughts of the desert whenever I see it.

pear celery walnut salad

We didn’t have many fresh vegetables of the non-root variety, but i really felt the need for a salad. What we did have was a bunch of pears that were about to go overripe.
So i sliced up the pears, sliced up some celery, and chopped some walnuts, then drizzled the works with sherry vinegar, olive oil, salt & pepper.
Holy cow. YUM. Even the tallasiandude, who was monumentally struck by the weirdness of this food, thought it was tasty and snarfed half of it right up.

fresh winter mushrooms

we were at the 88 market last night acquiring ingredients for our next social-cooking adventure, and my eye was caught by a package of fresh winter mushrooms. These look just like the common dried chinese brown mushroom, with cushiony tops with lots of pale cracks, and they smelled nice, so i bought them to see what they were like.
They are intoxicating. I’ve not even opened the cellophane of the package, but they are perfuming my whole kitchen with the most incredible rich, savory smell. I keep getting up from the computer just to go downstairs and sniff them again. I want to roll around in that scent, to wallow in it and become one with it, it is so delightful.

I have an email out to the mother-in-law to see if there are any special recipes for these treasures, as it seems somehow wrong to treat them the same way as their dried brethren. If any of you have any suggestions, please do let me know before Friday, when they will be cooked one way or another. I may have to go buy another package, to tie them up in a mesh bag and hang them in my office or my clothes closet so i can smell them every day.

comfort food

I went to the Korean market to buy kimchi, because we were completely out, and this household does not run smoothly without kimchi for the spicy ramen that functions as security blanket and default nourishment for a stressed-out tallasiandude, and for the tofu kimchi bokum that is my most favorite treat.
And while i was waiting in line, clutching my big jar of kimchi and my plastic box of spicy garlic cucumber pickle, I didn’t go even 5 minutes before i was overcome by the most intense craving to run home immediately and scarf down delicious kimchi and pickles with steaming hot rice. (Clearly I have gone completely native.)
And it didn’t stop there. Tallasiandude looked longingly over his ramen bowl at my hot rice, fried egg, and kimchi deliciousness. He made some for dinner that night. And we both had more for lunch yesterday. The craving appears to be bottomless right now for plain hot white rice, eggs over easy, super-fermenty kimchi (some thicker pieces have bubbles you can feel on your tongue), and salty garlicky cucumber pickle.
I figure it’s the weather — it’s finally gotten really and truly cold, and there’s ice everywhere — and the fact that we’re both tired and sick and struggling to recover.

back in the saddle

we’re having people over tonight, so i am cooking for pleasure, hurray! tonight’s menu is fennel-orange-radish salad, stracotto (aka italian pot roast, with red wine and tomatoes), and either chocolate fallen souffle cake or cinnamon poached pears. Tallasiandude is agitating for cake. 🙂
Fennel-orange-radish salad, aka happy summer sunshine on a plate
Trim a bulb of fennel, slice in half the long way, then slice very fine; a regular size fennel bulb is usually enough for two salads or one giant lunch salad. Slice up some red radishes. Supreme some oranges, usually one per salad unless you have giant navel oranges: slice off the top and bottom, then slice off the peel in vertical strips, making sure you get all the grody white pith off. You’ll lose a few microns of pulp, but it’s worth it. Use the paring knife to cut out the individual sections of orange, pith & membrane free. Cut the sections in half. Combine the fennel, radish & orange bits on a plate. Drizzle over some olive oil and a splash of mild rice vinegar, grind over black pepper and sprinkle with salt. Or, you can make an actual dressing with the juice from the bowl you cut the oranges into, a bit of vinegar, the olive oil, and salt & pepper, but i find it’s easier to just drizzle things over the salad.

guajillo salsa from frontera

just a quick note to recommend this product from Rick Bayless:
Rustic Guajillo Salsa, available at your local Whole Foods if nowhere else
It’s delicious. Great the first time as a dip for chips, great several more times as i used up the jar as a cooking ingredient, either alone with a bit of chicken broth to finish off a thick pork chop, or mixed in with onions and other stuff i forget what to make a thicker more complex stewy dish. Stands on its own, plays well with others, keeps months in the fridge, tastes great. Yummy. Bayless continues to rule.

finally pie

Last night i caught up with work by about 5:30pm, astonishingly enough, and so i went downstairs and made that apple pie. The apples were just about to croak, but they were still fine, and last night’s first slice was delightful.
I am really trying to work on my pie crust, since i come from a line of women who make truly great pie pastry and mine is not yet up to snuff, my impending middle-age notwithstanding. Last night’s crust ended up being extra-flaky, which i attribute to the speed with which cold butter can be cut in when using an old-school wire-style pastry cutter (which i’ve not done lately, because I forgot where it was). It was shatteringly crisp and golden, but yet somehow still a little bit tough. I wonder if I overworked it a bit, trying to get the water incorporated? Or trying to roll it out thin enough? Or perhaps it’s because I made the crust then realized I’d not peeled a single apple, so I put the crusts into the fridge to hold for a half hour or so while I cranked out filling. Not sure, but will continue to experiment.
Also, I am not sure I approve of tapioca as a thickener for apple pie. It seems texturally weird to me, in a way that it doesn’t when it’s in a berry pie. Perhaps I will go with flour next time.
(photo coming)