Author: foodnerd

tallasiandude ran a half-marathon this morning, and for various reasons didn’t manage to eat well the rest of the day. Meanwhile I happened to go to the Super 88 Market downtown with my parents and nabbed some good stuff. So I made yu hsiang pork (out of Pei Mei volume I) and chinese broccoli, and a double batch of rice. The pork was nice and spicy-salty, and I put in thin-sliced wood ears and red peppers just for texture and extra flavor, which worked well. I love yu hsiang dishes even in crappy restaurants, so I think this one is going into regular rotation along with the beef & broccoli recipe. The chinese broccoli, which has to be one of my favorite vegetables, was just blanched and drizzled with oyster sauce mixed with a little soy sauce to thin it down.
8-10 oz pork, boneless, cut into thin strips
2 tbsp wood ear
half a red bell pepper
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp corn starch
vegetable oil to fry
2 tsp chopped ginger (I used 4 small slices)
1 tsp chopped garlic
sauce:
1 tbsp chopped green onion
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp black chinese vinegar
1 tbsp hot bean paste
1/2 tbsp shaoxing wine
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cornstarch
1 tsp sesame oil
1/4 tsp black pepper
Marinate pork in 1 tbsp cornstarch & 1 tbsp soy for 15 min. Soak wood ear in warm water 15 min, then cut out & discard hard stemmy parts, then slice thin. Dice pepper. Mix up the sauce and let stand. Heat a little oil quite hot in a wok or skillet, fry the pork just until not pink, and remove to a plate. Add a bit more oil and fry the pepper, wood ear, ginger & garlic for a minute or so, scraping the pan if necessary. Add the pork back in along with the sauce, and fry until the sauce thickens a bit. Serve with lots of rice.

I have been kvetching a lot lately on this blog about my inadequacies with pastry and sweets of all kinds. Normally I have the same trouble with pie crust. My mother has the magic hands, and can just chuck ingredients in and make beautiful crusts by feel. Her mother was even more brilliant. I however generally get floury or oily crapola.
Tonight was different. Tonight was a good crust day. I found a recipe online and just went for it. 2 cups flour, 12 tbsp cold butter cut into chunks, a sprinkle of salt. Cut the works with a pastry cutter (I am finding smearing motions along with cutting motions work well) until finely combined but not completely without chunks. 6 tablespoons cold water (plus more if needed, this time i think i used 7), stir with fork until it starts coming together in parts, then use hands to knead and squeeze gently together until it’s not got any flour left. It barely held together, there were lots of cracks, but I could *feel* the beautiful soft elasticity in the dough. Normally it doesn’t feel anything like that, so I don’t know what I was doing right this time. I squished it together, worrying I was overworking the dough, and rolled it out on a floured marble board. No holes, no insurmountable cracking. I didn’t chill the dough before rolling as most recipes have you do — i just went straight from bowl to roll, and then once the bottom crust was in the pan, i stuck the whole pan in the fridge. Then the top crust went outside into the 40F night, still on the board. Filled crust right from fridge and then straight into the 400F oven.
It came out flaky, crisp and super-buttery (it was an all-butter crust, it oughta be). Imagine that. Yay!

I dug out the Trader Joe’s whole wheat pizza dough from the freezer today, and so my heart got set on pizza for dinner. Per tallasiandude’s pizza preferences and the fact that we had long-leftover pepperoni in the fridge, I made pepperoni & mushroom ‘za. Several things were learned:
1. Cento San Marzano passata crushed tomatoes make a fantastic pizza sauce if you sprinkle it with salt, pepper, oregano, a tiny bit of basil, and garlic powder. A lazy girl’s dream.
2. Don’t use an insulated cookie sheet, and do be sure to heat up the pan before putting on the dough if you can. Otherwise you get soggy bottom crust. And then you have to put two pieces on top of each other, douse them in olive oil, and rebake them like faux calzones, flipping the sandwiched pizza lumps to crisp up both crusts. Oops. Still tasted good.

Continuing on the eat-lots-of-veg and spend-little benders I am on these days, I give you a quiche made of leftover napa cabbage sauteed in leftover bacon fat, leftover broccoli, leftover scallion, free extra-sharp cheddar from the parents, leftover cream, 4 eggs, and a lonesome leftover frozen pie shell. With a bit of salt, pepper, nutmeg & savory. Nummy, if a tiny bit watery from slightly undersauteed cabbage. *grin*
I should have photographed the stir fry the other night — pork cutlet, broccoli, napa, onion, garlic and ginger, in a plain sauce of shaoxing wine, soy & cornstarch, with a sprinkle of red pepper flakes. It was really good, if I do say so myself. Hee.

I was seized by a fit of discontentment and restlessness and frustration today, and though I am not generally an emotional eater, I just could not stop looking for something to eat. Since cooking usually keeps hunger at bay for me, and since nothing in the house looked good anyway (I must have PMS), I decided to MAKE a snack. The box of faux Rice Chex had a snack mix recipe, which I adapted liberally, and the result is insane salty spicy goodness. You might want to be less salt-rageous.
4 cups chex
some peanuts
2 tbsp butter
2 tsp worcestershire
1-2 tsp hot sauce (Frank’s), to taste
1 tsp or more garlic powder
1/2 tsp onion powder
few dashes chili powder
few pinches salt (I used more than a few)
Melt butter in large bowl in microwave, add seasonings, stir, add chex and peanuts, toss a lot to combine (rubber spatula works well), microwave 2 min, stir again, microwave 2 min, stir again, and if they seem well seasoned and dry enough to be crispy, let them sit until cool enough to eat, otherwise nuke 2 more min then stir and let cool. Mack down as needed. Let the rest dry completely and then put it away in a tupperware.
If you don’t like it as it’s heating, you can sprinkle more stuff directly over it, toss to blend, and keep going — i did that with worcestershire, hot sauce and garlic powder, and salt (which was probably unnecessary, but oversalty got the job done today). This has the advantage of being wheat-free, if you use rice and/or corn chex, which is nice if you are unfortunate enough to be sensitive to it, and really it’s not so much butter, so it’s almost kinda sorta healthy and stuff. Yep, right, uh huh.

I admit it: I didn’t have the energy to think up a taboo food situation, and I bailed outright. I suck. Reading through the entries for the latest IMBB was extremely cool, and I felt guilty. But then tallasiandude reminded me that NoodleFest ’05 (about which he STILL has to post, hint, nudge) involved something that most of the attendees found fairly icky, but that we love love love: beef tendon.
Now I always avoided beef tendon in vietnamese soups because it sounded tough, and when tallasiandude named it as a critical ingredient in beef spicy noodle soup, I was wary. And even so, some restaurant versions of beef spicy noodle include tendon that is still quite, um, chewy. And it looks truly scary when raw, as you can see from the picture, especially when you touch it and it feels hard and slippery, almost like bone. And it’s about as hard as bone to cut while it’s raw. But when you stew tendon for hours and hours and hours, it turns soft and gelatinous, with a rich taste and comforting texture, and it is by far the best part of beef spicy noodle soup as far as I’m concerned. Which is good, because our 20+ noodle-guests ate up all 5 pounds of beef, but left lots and lots of lovely tendon floating around in the broth, and so we had tendon spicy noodle soup for several days afterward. Deelish!

Ahhh, EOMEOTE, my favorite foodblogging event! I love the story behind it, i love the low-rent spirit of it, and i love the eats. *contented sigh* This month, continuing with the spend-less-on-food project currently underway here Chez Foodnerd, I am trying to eat all the stuff I have stashed around my larder. Today breakfast was the last of the frozen waffles that have been kicking around the freezer for well over a year, plus a last bit of magic bacon I forgot about in the fridge, the meyer lemon marmalade I made last week — too thick because I am incompetent with all sugared foods but delicious still, and boiled cider that my mother gave me at Christmas.
Waffles are I suppose not technically toast, but I think these qualify for two reasons: 1, they were dredged up out of mealtime desperation, and 2, they were prepared in the toaster. Boiled cider is quite lovely, and I am glad to have the excuse to blog about it — it looks and functions like maple syrup, but it’s got the tangy fruitiness of apples, so it’s much lighter feeling than maple. Tallasiandude didn’t dig it so much; he got out the maple to go with his EOMEOTE, which also he deconstructed so it was more an EOME next to TE. But mine was a salty, bacon-fatty, tangy treat, with the tart lemon and cider sparking up the egg and bacon and waffle into something really rather nice.