02.14.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:00 pm by Hanne Blank
Step One: Love things, and people, and places. Animals, too, they’re very important, and also trees, the sun and moon, the smell of good earth, and art in all its manifestations. Love them hard. Love them even when you want to strangle them or pitch them into the bin or set fire to them. Love them anyway.
Step Two: Love yourself. Take care of yourself the way you would take care of a small child in your care, with gentle firmness, providing for your needs and seeing to your own happiness with joy and generosity but without too much coddling, paying attention to the things you need to grow (even when those things might be less than pleasant). Don’t take any of it too seriously. It’s much too important to be grave about it.
Step Three: Love things so much that you are willing to go to the mat for them, and do it. Love things that make you push yourself to be a better person for their sake. Love things that take lots of hard work to bring to fruition. Love things that force you to be honest, and not self-servingly faux-honest either, but genuinely, humbly honest. Love things so much that you don’t care who knows that you’re busting your butt to live up to that love, or who sees you sweating. Love things that seem impossible so much that you learn how to make them possible.
Step Four: When Valentine’s Day rolls around, repeat steps 1-3. For additional happiness, share.
Permalink
02.10.07
Posted in cooking, domesticity, geek, good things, original recipes at 9:02 pm by Hanne Blank
I have a new wok. It is my new boyfriend. My Belovedary bought it for me when he was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, knowing that my old wok — a long-suffering, slow, old, overly-heavy monster I bought when I was in college — was making me crankier and crankier the better I got at Chinese cookery.
It is indeed difficult to cook good stir-fry in the wrong pan. Seriously. I can turn out a highly creditable stir-fried dish in a good cast-iron skillet and have done so many times, but to tell you the truth they just don’t get hot enough. The metal is too heavy and the cooking surface, because it is flat, radiates a lot of heat straight up. Woks are (duh) hottest in the center, since that’s what’s right over the fire, and good woks are quite thin, so that you don’t lose too much heat to the metal. Also, with a wok, you never have the unpleasant experience of chasing the food all over the skillet with a spatula, trying to get it to flip, or to pick it up to take it out of the pan. The curvature of the wok means that this isn’t a problem. Woks also are less likely to spatter you with hot oil, even when you are deep-frying. Bonus: you can deep-fry in a wok with far less trepidation than you might with a straightsided pan, because with a wok, you fill only the bottom of the wok with hot oil (about 1-2 cups, as opposed to a quart or more for a lot of conventional Western deep-fat frying vessels) and there is still plenty of wok space left over for the oil to bubble up over the food without any worry that oil might escape the pan. Did I mention that you can conveniently push mostly-cooked food up to the sides of the pan while you finish the sauce that remains in the bottom center, then incorporate the solids right back in? Yeah. Try that in a frying pan. Pretty sweet.
I will note for the record that I stopped subscribing to Cooks Illustrated after one of their writers — I think it may have been Christopher Kimball himself — asserted that a large frying pan was a better vessel for stir-frying food in than a wok was. I remember reading that and thinking it was patently insane. Even with my old crappy too-heavy wok I thought it was insane, and I had had plenty of experience with cooking Chinese food in a Western frying pan by that point when I got fed up with my dissatisfying wok to know full well that really, a Western frying pan was not really any better than a bad wok, and was a whole lot more frustrating to work with in some ways to boot. Now that I have a better wok, I can state wholeheartedly that I am still right and CI is still wrong wrong wrong like a wrong thing that is wrong.
Here’s the thing about woks and Chinese cookery: the cuisine and the vessel used to cook it evolved in response to one another. There really isn’t another cooking vessel (except perhaps the Indian karhai/kadai, which is, as you’ll notice if you click, rather like a wok) that does the same job in the same way. So if you’re going to go in for Chinese cookery in any kind of earnest, do not walk, run (or click) straight to The Wok Shop, in beautiful San Francisco’s Chinatown. They will be happy to help you figure out what kind of wok will work best with your cooker and heat source, how many people you will be cooking for, etc. Fabulous customer service, too. And they’ll ship anywhere… my Belovedary bought my wok (and a new steamer, and a handful of other things) while he was there and simply had them shipped home.
Anyhow. My new wok has been making me very happy, and I have been doing lots and lots of cooking in it since it arrived last week. Including developing my first Chinese recipe! It was originally a happy accident of combining leftovers… a sort of “hey, that might taste good if I added some of this, and put some chicken in it, and what if I did that?” thing that turned out so tasty that I thought I should develop it into an actual recipe.
And so I have, and I present it to you thus:
Stoplight Chicken
I called this Stoplight Chicken because of the green watercress, red chiles, and yellow ginger.
4 chicken thighs, boned and skinned, cut into thin strips
1 Tablespoon dry sherry
1 Tablespoon regular soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch
5 cloves garlic, crushed or minced
2 Tablespoons minced fresh ginger
1 pound watercress or spinach, thoroughly cleaned and trimmed
2 Tablespoons salted chopped chiles (see note at end)
2 Tablespoons chicken stock or water
1 Tablespoon sesame oil (Asian style)
1 teaspoon cornstarch
peanut, soybean, or corn oil for cooking
Have all ingredients ready before you start heating the wok.
Combine sherry, soy sauce, and 1 teaspoon cornstarch in a large shallow bowl and mix thoroughly. Add garlic and sliced strips of chicken meat and stir so that meat is well-covered. Cover with plastic wrap or some other sort of covering and set aside to marinate for 10-15 minutes.
In the meantime, mix together the chicken stock, sesame oil, and one teaspoon cornstarch in a small dish and set aside.
Heat wok until it is smoking. Add small amount of oil (@1 T) in steady stream down the side of the wok. Swirl hot oil in wok to coat sides a bit. Add marinated chicken to pan and stir-fry briefly until outside edges are opaque, then add salted chopped chiles. Allow to cook a few minutes longer, until pieces begin to brown and are mostly cooked through, stirring occasionally. Remove chicken to a clean bowl and set aside.
Rinse out wok and dry over a hot flame. Again add a small amount of oil down the side and swirl. Add ginger and stir-fry until fragrant and beginning to turn golden. Then add watercress (or spinach) by handfuls, stir-frying with other hand to coat all the vegetables with hot oil and disperse the ginger throughout. The watercress/spinach will wilt quickly and cook down considerably, exuding a fairly substantial amount of liquid — this is okay.
As soon as the vegetables have cooked down by about 2/3 their original volume, return the chicken to the pan and continue stirfrying as you add the stock/sesame oil mixture. Keep stirfrying! The liquid will boil and will thicken somewhat. As soon as this happens, remove the food to a serving bowl or platter and serve with plenty of nice hot fresh rice.
Serves 4 as part of a multi-dish meal.
Note: To make salted chopped chiles, get a pound (more or less) of a sort of chile you like. Hotter if you like that, less hot if you don’t, there are plenty of options. I find that a middle-of-the-road chile is most versatile. Wash them, dry them, stem them, and chop them into a coarse dice, seeds and all. Put ‘em in a bowl. Measure out 1/4 cup salt. Add 3 T of the salt to the chiles in the bowl and stir it around to mix. Then put the chiles in a clean dry jar (an empty pickle jar works fabulously) and pour the rest of the salt on top. Put a lid on the jar and set it in a cool dark place for a week or two, then they are ready to be used. Refrigerate after opening. They do keep approximately forever, but they’re so tasty you’ll use them up instead.
Permalink
02.08.07
Posted in Chinese cookbooks, Hunan cuisine, Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, cooking, culture at 9:31 pm by Hanne Blank
Another resoundingly successful meal derived primarily from Revolutionary Chinese Cooking. We are fortunate to have a very good local smokery near us, Barbara Lahnstein’s Neopol Savory Smokery, and since we can get our hands on smoked tofu and some of the best and most lovingly smoked bacon it has ever been my pleasure to eat, the choice to try the bacon and smoked tofu dish was a no-brainer.
It is an intensely winter-appropriate dish, consisting as it does of bacon, smoked tofu, chiles (see ‘em all in there?), and green onion; it is also a dish that you really must not try to eat without rice or it is easily too rich to be pleasant. Because the bacon is steamed first, then stir-fried, it has a lovely texture and is not greasy in that unpleasant mouth-coating way that bacon can sometimes have. No element of the recipe is optional: the chiles give it body and important top notes that balance an otherwise bass-drum dish, and the green onions clarify the flavors beautifully and brighten the sweetness of the pork and the misty-smoky notes of the smoked tofu.
The smashed cucumbers are a marinated dish, also from Revolutionary Chinese Cooking. They use a judicious dose of the chopped salted chiles that I made a week ago when this:
Was transformed into this:
And tonight they lent a lovely fruity-sour spiciness to this:
Lastly, I made a simple dish not in any of the cookbooks I am using these days, of spinach stirfried briefly with a goodly amount of garlic and ginger, and a simple 1:1:1 mix of dry sherry, sesame oil, and soy sauce. I had been thinking of a different hot vegetable dish but then I spied the spinach and realized that it needed to be used up sooner than some of the other veggies I had been contemplating. Fragility won over Chefly Idealism, in other words. I think that by preference, next time I make the bacon and tofu dish, I will make a spicy or vinegary cabbage or other brassica dish to balance out the unctuousness of the bacon/tofu. But the spinach worked too and it is always very tasty cooked this way, one of our favorite ways to eat spinach in this household — who cares if it’s mostly a vehicle for lots of ginger and garlic?
Permalink
02.05.07
Posted in Breath of a Wok, Cantonese cuisine, Chinese cookbooks, Hunan cuisine, Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, cooking, kitchen learning at 10:10 pm by Hanne Blank
Wow, that makes a really satisfying dinner.
Tonight I used two cookbooks, Breath of a Wok and Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province (hereafter RCC). The pattern we’ve been using, of two dishes to a meal for two people, with one of them being a meat-inclusive dish and the other being a vegetable-only dish, has been working out very well for us and even for our needs in terms of leftovers for lunches and so on. I knew I wanted to try the pork dish, since both my belovedary and I adore black beans, and since Dunlop characterizes the dish in question, Farmhouse Pork and Green Peppers (RCC p. 85) as being one of the homestyle classics of Hunan cuisine. Hard to go wrong with something so beloved, I figure.
I needed a strong, stand-alone vegetable dish to stand up to the pork and peppers. Gai lan, sometimes called “Chinese broccoli” but really a lot closer to rapini — eaten primarily for its stems and leaves, rather than the buds or flowers as with regular broccoli — seemed like the perfect thing, and since I had the Hong Kong style gai lan recipe (BoaW p. 140) in the list of recipes I’d shopped for over the weekend, I fired it up, with (I confess) a little extra ginger for the joy that’s in it.
It was a good pairing, the astringency and mild bitterness of the greens cutting the unctuousness of the pork perfectly. Watercress with garlic would’ve been another nice option for the same reason. The pork and peppers is deservedly well-loved. It’s rich, but not overly so, with the small quantity of pork belly providing moments of melting savory fattiness (with just a hint of bacony crunch) among the languid, sweet just-cooked-enough peppers and the nice lean pork loin I used for the main portion of the meat for the recipe. And oh, man, the black beans! The preparation was a far cry from the usual Cantonese mode of using them mashed into a paste for sauce, and it is really out of this world if you like black beans (but might, I caution, be a little offputting if you weren’t prepared for them or didn’t like them).
We’ll definitely be making this one again. Chances are good I will also try it with other meats. I think it’d be swell with turkey. And, in another direction, with shrimp.
Permalink
02.03.07
Posted in Breath of a Wok, Chinese cookbooks, cooking, culture, domesticity, kitchen learning at 9:53 pm by Hanne Blank
Tonight’s dinner was Uncle Sherman’s Home-Style Chicken and Vegetables (BoaW p. 69) and Virginia Yee’s Dry-Fried Sichuan String Beans (BoaW pp. 160-161).
My comment about homestyle Chinese dishes having very different meat-to-veg ratios than banquet or restaurant (and especially American restaurant) cooking? Well, I meant what I said, and if you want proof, look no further than Uncle Sherman’s chicken recipe, which produces a really mainstream, really tasty, really just textbook Cantonese dish. Ginger and garlic are both present in sizeable quantity, the meat is small in quantity and marinated in ginger and garlic and very little else, and a variety of fresh green veggies (plus the suave velvety meatiness of mushrooms for contrast) are put into play to carry the chicken along.
It’s pretty much the sort of dish that is comfort food for a lot of Cantonese: a simple stir-fry, lots and lots of green veg, plenty of ginger, plenty of garlic, nothing fancy at all. The bean sauce grounds it, a gentle, well-rounded bass to the treble of ginger and garlic and the great green chorus of broccoli, bok choy, mushrooms, and so on. Also, thanks to the high vegetable-to-meat ratio, it makes quite a lot of food. It was the first dish I’ve made from this book where I thought “gee, I hope it’s good, ’cause we sure do have plenty of it!” And it is.
Virginia Yee’s recipe for Sichuan-style string beans was a little weird. The title of the recipe actually calls it “Sichuan,” but I have to insist on adding the “-style” part, because the recipe calls for no fiery or numbing spice at all, and one or the other (if not both) are traditional in this dish in every Sichuanese recipe I’ve ever encountered. I confess I read the recipe three or four times trying to figure out where the chiles or Sichuan pepper came in, and only when I had gotten over my disbelief at not seeing them anywhere did I finally decide that no matter how well-meaning Ms. Yee may be, I could not bring myself to eat a dish of Sichuan-style green beans without any fire at all to them… I had been looking forward to it all day.
So, Ms. Yee, I apologize: I added a liberal quantity of crushed dried Aleppo pepper and a bit of another sort of Mystery Chile I had sitting dried in a jar in the cabinet, as well as substituting red chile oil for half of the sesame oil, and it was delicious. I am grateful to know that the green beans for Sichuan style beans need not be deep-fried for their first cooking. Dry-frying them (I used a heavy, huge cast-iron pan) is genius. I also concur that the splash of Chiankiang vinegar at the end is a great idea.
And speaking of Sichuan…
In preparation for the excursions we’ll be making into Sichuan and Hunanese cooking around these parts, one of my jobs today was to start the process of making salted chiles, which are used in a number of different ways. They need to sit for at least several days, and preferably longer, before you use them, so that the salt has the time to do its magic with the water in the peppers. My Belovedary took some pictures of the process and I will put them up eventually, but right now I am having trouble getting that to happen so it’ll have to wait. Suffice to say that it involved chopping a pound and a half of wicked, but gorgeous, long hot red chiles! Things are gonna be getting nice and hot here at the Little Purple Rowhouse That Could, just in time for a predicted cold snap. Excellent.
Permalink
« Previous entries · Next entries »