07.03.08
Posted in cooking, food at 6:55 pm by Hanne Blank
As the mercury climbs here in the Northern Hemisphere, the one thing I reliably do (aside from envying the hell out of those of you who are as far south of the Equator as I am north of it) is to make up plenty of infused waters to help make the task of staying hydrated a pleasanter one.
Infused waters are just that: water that has been infused with some flavoring agent. Tea, technically speaking, is an infused water, as is coffee, but there are many other options. Some infusions, like ginger or mint, can be made very strong, quite the equal of tea or coffee, particularly if done with hot water, but infusions need not be either strong or hot. What all infusions have in common is the steeping of a flavoring agent in water, so that the volatile oils and other flavorful compounds — juice or sap, for instance — are dispersed into the water. When it’s done steeping you drink the flavored water and discard the solids.
This being summer and it being somewhere in the nineties here in Baltimore lately, I’ve been making one of my favorite infused waters, a green and pleasantly astringent mix of lime, cucumber, and corn mint. For a three-litre glass jar full, I first add to the jar a lime cut into wedges, half of a small Japanese cucumber cut into thinnish slices, and a largish sprig of corn mint from the patch growing outside my kitchen door. I fill the jar with filtered tap water and set it in the fridge overnight to steep. The next day it is faintly tinted with pale green, has an enticing fresh herbal scent, and tastes deliciously crisp but simultaneously lush. It is marvelously thirst-quenching, and looks beautiful in the glass, particularly if you serve it over ice and with a few bits of lime, cucumber, and mint in it.
Other excellent summer flavor combinations for infused waters include peppermint and stone fruit, such as plum or peach slices, or the stunning pairing of a few shredded leaves of basil and a few chunks of the white part of watermelon rind (cut it from just where it becomes pink). Traditionalists would likely favor borage and cucumber. Even cucumber alone is lovely, but if you are like me and fond of vegetal flavors, you might try celery, cut into inch-long pieces, with a few slices of green tomato. A few springs of flatleaf parsley, or better yet fresh summer savory, if you have the means to get your hands on some of that all too often overlooked herb, are a wonderful addition. And even if you think cucumber is icky and the idea of green tomato flavored water too horrid to contemplate, there still aren’t too many things wrong, on a hot summer day, with a pitcher of ice-cold water in which some kind soul has steeped slices of lemon, lime, and orange.
Even if that kind soul is you.
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In regard to the previous post about fried rice, Pathar asked about my feelings regarding the presence of egg in fried rice. My feelings are this: if you like it, use it, and if you don’t care for it, don’t worry about it. Most residents of the First World get considerably more protein than their bodies strictly need, so even if it means you end up with a proteinless meal once in a while it won’t do you any harm.
If you do like eggs, scramble them and cook them, then shred into pieces of a suitable size before adding them to the fried rice. Or, for a less orthodox but still tasty way of having your egg and fried rice together, fry the egg just as your fried rice is done, and pop it on top — yolk still at least semi-liquid — of your bowlful of fried rice. I am particularly fond of a fried egg on top of a plate of kimchi fried rice, where the unctuous egg yolk makes a brilliant foil for the fiery peppery pickled cabbage. Experiment, if you’re an egg-eater, and see what you like best.
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07.02.08
Posted in cooking, food, kitchen learning at 9:33 pm by Hanne Blank
The first time I encountered fried rice outside the confines of a Chinese restaurant, it was when my friend C. destroyed my wok with it.
We were undergraduates, and thus you may take it as writ that we were callow and just a bit reckless. This very much included an attitude toward cookery that was equal parts ignorance, ineptitude, and an unshakable faith that just about anything could be considered edible if one put enough soy sauce, ketchup, or cheese on it.
Thus did my friend C. attempt to make fried rice in the wok I had only recently bought for myself in Boston Chinatown, in the kitchen of an apartment I was renting in a neighborhood that still had a long time to wait for its first brush with gentrification, during a weekend when he was apartment-sitting for me while I was away. When I returned home, my wok was crusted with lumps of carbon black in spots, shining steely-grey in others. C. apologized, and said he’d had to take a break from scouring the burned stuff off, but he’d give it another scrub in a bit.
C. had, he explained, been making fried rice. For some reason, it hadn’t worked. He’d put oil into the wok, and then dry, uncooked rice. He heated it until the oil smoked, but it didn’t seem to be working. He turned down the heat, added a liberal quantity of soy sauce, and continued cooking, sure that if he just cooked it long enough, the rice and oil would somehow magically transform into something fragrant and savory.
I suppose “fragrant” is one word you could use to describe the scent of carbonized grain. But no vat at the Kikkoman factory could have contained enough soy sauce to render it savory.
My wok never did recover completely. No matter how C. scrubbed it, or how I did, it never heated evenly afterward. The black burned patches thickened as other foods I tried cooking in the wok clung to the speckles of char I hadn’t been able to get off, burned faster than I could scrape them away, then liberated themselves into my dinner in gritty black flakes like the Devil’s dandruff. Eventually I threw the wok away.
New woks solved the problem of uneven heating and charcoal specks. It took quite a bit longer, however, for me to become brave enough to attempt cooking my own fried rice. For years I read recipes for various versions, all of which seemed simple enough, and educated me amply on just where my friend C. had gone wrong (namely, right at the beginning: fried rice is made with rice that has already been cooked). I learned to cook dozens of other Chinese dishes with success, from simple stir-fried greens to homemade har gao (translucent shrimp dumplings), ji gai bao (paper wrapped chicken), and tea-smoked duck. I learned to make my own Sichuan-style pickles, Cantonese master sauces, and make enough jiao zi (potstickers) to feed a houseful of guests. Yet somewhere in the back of my brain I felt certain that fried rice had to be some sort of trick culinary question, that the instant I attempted it, some cosmic force of culinary retribution — the souls of a thousand Ming Dynasty epicures rising up to smite my round-eyed white bone demon kind for the mere existence of chop suey — would incinerate my wok on the spot, leaving me scraping away yet again at clots of carbohydrate as thoroughly carbonized as Han Solo.
In the end I wound up making fried rice by accident. I suspect that this may well have been how the dish began. In Chinese cooking, fried rice is not something one sets out to make, after all. It is the Chinese equivalent of making hash, a thing one does not merely with leftovers, but with the kinds of odds and sods of food that aren’t enough for even a full small serving, but are still sufficiently more than a mouthful that you’d feel wasteful throwing them away. It’s the thing you do when you have half an onion, and three tablespoons of peas, a handful of cooked asparagus stalks from the other night, two handfuls of spinach leaves, a third of a cup of leftover stirfried bok choy, the wings left over from that roasted chicken, and the leftover rice from two nights ago. Which was more or less what I had on hand when it dawned on me that if I threw it all into a hot wok with some garlic and ginger and a little oil, and seasoned it with a dribble of oyster sauce and a slosh of soy sauce and a liberal drizzle of sesame oil, it’d probably taste pretty good.
What it tasted like, in point of fact, was fried rice. Because it was. Really good fried rice, in fact, with a distinctly more varied and vegetal tone than any fried rice I’d ever eaten in a restaurant. The various seasonings I’d used on the components when I cooked them the first time — a hit of lemon pepper on the asparagus, a bit of sage and celery seed in the chicken — flirted with the garlic and onion and ginger, and mingled surprisingly smoothly with the oyster sauce and soy and sesame. Thrilled, I devoured the whole dish, and would’ve eaten more had there been any.
Since then fried rice has entered regular rotation in my kitchen. Any time I become aware that I have completely run out of empty plastic food storage containers in the smallest sizes because they are all in a ziggurat in the fridge, full of dribs and drabs of things, there is sure to be fried rice for supper. Fried rice is pretty much endlessly forgiving. I have yet to meet the savory leftover it could not accomodate — although it is true that I do not (due to casein allergy) eat dairy products, so I haven’t attempted to add anything silly, like scalloped potatoes or macaroni and cheese. I have made fried rice with cabbage, with corned beef, and with cauliflower, although not, it must be admitted, simultaneously. I’ve made it with freshly shelled peas (I only had a handful to work with). I’ve made it with the tail end of a bag of frozen okra. Some have been better than others, I grant you. But they’ve all been pretty good.
There isn’t much to the process of making fried rice. As with all Chinese cooking, you have to prepare all your ingredients in advance of heating the wok, chopping what needs chopping, mincing what needs mincing, right down to mincing your ginger and garlic, scrambling and shredding your egg(s) if you’re using them, sauteeing your half an onion or your three elderly mushrooms or whatever raw vegetables you’re trying to use up, and mixing your preferred blend of oyster sauce and soy sauce and sesame oil with a little bit of water or broth in a small bowl or cup so it is ready to add when the time comes. (Don’t ask me how much of whatever you are supposed to use. You’re supposed to use enough. Not too much. As much as you like. Do I look like a mind reader? They’re your leftovers and it’s your tastebuds. You figure it out.] Break up your leftover rice so that it isn’t stuck together in chunks. If you want to and you have one, slice up a green onion so you can sprinkle it over the top when it’s all done cooking.
To put it all together, heat the wok until it is very hot indeed, and add a healthy skosh of oil, coating the inside of the wok as well as you can. Add your ginger and garlic and stir, and as soon as the fragrance blooms, add the rice and toss it well, distributing the oil, ginger, and garlic thoroughly. Cook, stirring frequently, until the rice begins to color a little in a few places — then start adding your other ingredients, combining each one into the rice as you stir-fry. At the end, pour in your sauce, stir to combine, and let it all stand for a minute before you serve.
Okay, so maybe fried rice takes a little practice. Most of the alchemical cookery that turns scraps into meals does. After all, any fool with a decent cookbook and the willingness to follow directions can turn an ample supply of raw ingredients into a passable dinner. It takes a different approach entirely, and a whole lot more fluency in the kitchen, to take whatever scraps fall to hand and turn them into something tasty, nourishing, and satisfying. It’s worth the effort.
Just please, cook the rice first.
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09.03.07
Posted in cooking, domesticity, food, good things at 8:33 pm by Hanne Blank
Today in the Cupcake Factory, we learned something important.
Namely, that when you take a recipe for a layer cake, and you decide to bake up the batter as cupcakes, you may get a whole lot more cupcakes than you were really shooting for.
In this instance, 45 cupcakes, when I was really thinking that 24 would be about right.
So, in the end…
I made 36 cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and glittery rainbow sugar for M to take to work tomorrow for his belated birthday treat to share with his coworkers.
And Malcolm ate one, as quality control, because I’m trying to keep concentrated doses of sugar out of my mouth for the most part because it tends to make me first hyper, then psycho, then feel somewhat ill.
What happened to the other 8?
I dolled them up with extra swirls of buttercream, since I had more than I needed, and sprinkled them with chocolate sprinkles, and took them down the street to my neighbor Erica, who is a single mom who runs her own housecleaning firm and has a toddler to run herd on. She was very happy to get them and demolished one in the time it took her to say thank you and chitchat for a few minutes. I am told that the buttercream is particularly good. I imagine that’s because of a) real butter, b) real vanilla, and c) a touch of almond extract for depth of flavor.
I’m not sure I ever thought I was going to grow up to be the kind of person to sorta randomly take plates of cupcakes down the street to the neighbor’s house, just because, but apparently I have done.
It’s not so bad.
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07.22.07
Posted in cooking, food at 8:53 pm by Hanne Blank
Here is part of what you would have had:
Sockeye salmon steaks au poivre fumé (With my thanks to the glorious Barbara of Neopol Savory Smokery, who made the smoked black pepper! Hi Barbara!). For another view of the salmon steak, click here.
I served the salmon along with with spinach stirfried with ginger and garlic; spears of sweet Japanese cucumber; and jasmine rice.
For dessert:
That’d be fresh, peeled lychee in a bowl of ice, one of the easiest and most delicious finger-food desserts around. (Do it with cherries, too, it’s outrageous. Or tiny sweet plums, like Methleys. Fantastico. For extra points, serve in a big crystal bowl, or if there ain’t no one around but us chickens or you, like me, haven’t got a crystal bowl, any old bowl will do, really.)
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07.12.07
Posted in cooking, culture, domesticity, food, how to at 8:01 am by Hanne Blank
When got back to Maryland on Monday night from Ohio and my mother’s house, I had several of her old cookbooks in tow. I am very happy about this, because I have been sort of hinting to my mom for years now that when she was ready to give up her old cookbooks, I was ready to give them shelf space. Finally, after many years of my hinting, it was time.
I am nowhere near proud enough not to admit that my favorite of these older cookbooks, and the ones I wanted most for her to give me, are the sorta trashy ones. Parent-Teacher Association cookbooks from my grade school, for instance, the kind with recipes for s’mores and play-doh on adjacent pages. A totally cheeseball but fantastico cookbook that is a compilation of recipes from 1970s-era Deep Southern charity, Hadassah, League of Women Voters, and Junior League cookbooks, and which has the hands-down Intergalactic Blue Ribbon best recipe, ever, for hush puppies. (I note that this is also a cookbook in which there are a few recipes which include the instruction “advise your cook” of such-and-so, suggesting that the ladies to whom the recipes were attributed likely did not always actually cook them themselves. O tempora! O mores!)
One of my favorites, maybe my most favorite, is the 1965 Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book. I learned to cook many things, particularly cookies, from this cook book, and most of the recipes are still pretty sturdy. It also has some excellent simple recipes for “variety meats,” as organ meats were known back in the day before Fergus Henderson made “nose-to-tail eating” a matter of some preoccupation for foodie trendsters, which could be revived to considerable benefit.
Then again, some of its recipes have not, shall we say, aged well. I present to you:
Bologna-Rice Skillet
(Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 1965)
One four-and-five-eighths-ounce package precooked rice (1 1/3 cups)
1/2 pound big Bologna, cut in 1/2-inch cubes (about 1 2/3 cups)
1/2 cup extra-spicy catsup
2/3 cup hot water
One 3-ounce can (2/3 cup) broiled sliced mushrooms
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
2 Tablespoons chopped green pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons butter
Combine all ingredients in skillet. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, till hot. Cover tightly, reduce heat, an let stand about 5 minutes or till done. Serves 4.
Mmmm, mmm, good, what? To make it up to you, though, here’s one of my favorite recipes from this cookbook from when I was a kid:
Apple Fritters
(Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, 1965)
1 1/3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 Tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 beaten eggs
2/3 cup milk
1 Tablespoon salad oil
3 cups small matchstick strips of apple [emphasis in original]
Sift dry ingredients together. Blend eggs, milk, and salad oil; add dry ingredients all at once and mix until just moistened. Stir in apple strips. Drop from tablespoon into deep hot fat (375 degrees F). Fry until puffy and golden, 3 to 4 minutes; turn once. Drain on paper towels. While warm, sprinkle with confectioner’s sugar. Serve at once. Makes 3 dozen.
For the record, these are kind of addictive, and you should save this recipe to make them in the fall when the first really good firm tart apples come in. I usually add some cinnamon and allspice and a tiny pinch of ground cloves, too. Oh, and substituting soy milk for milk works fine, though I haven’t tried them with egg replacer so I can’t say whether that works.
When I have time, I may root through some of the other cookbooks and share some of the more amusing recipes from those, too.
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