08.25.07
Posted in arrrrgh, geek at 7:53 am by Hanne Blank
There’s this poor girl who keeps sending email to my spam filter who says that her boyfriend’s penis is so small it keeps slipping out when they have intercourse.
Then today she sent me email saying that her boyfriend’s penis was too large for her mouth, so she can no longer give him oral sex.
Some questions have come to mind:
a) Do you suppose this is in reference to the same man?
b) Do you suppose they’re both really from the same woman? They do have the same name. But different e-mail addresses.
c) Or is the girl two-timing the guy with the small penis?
d) If she is, does he know?
e) If he knows, does he care?
f) Do you think he gets angrier about her two-timing him, or about her disclosing personal information about his genitals to random people on the Internet?
g) If these are two separate men, do you think the second guy believes that the girl is only with him because of his gigantic schlong?
h) If these are two separate men, do you think the first guy believes the girl is only sleeping with the second guy because of his gigantic schlong?
i) Which of these two guys is more likely to be willing to get out of bed early to go down to the corner for bagels and coffee and a newspaper in the morning?
j) Which of these two guys actually pays more attention to the woman’s sexual pleasure? (I am not the only woman of my acquaintance to have perceived that guys with Louisville Slugger-sized whangdoodles often fail to perceive the need to have any actual, y’know, technique.)
k) Has her mother met both of these guys?
i) Which of them was nicer to her mom?
j) Would you call the second email a complaint, or a boast?
k) Do you think the guys who buy penis enlargement products are more afraid of ending up in the first scenario or the second?
l) Do you think the guys who buy penis enlargement products would buy them if there were a realistic chance that using said products would mean they’d never get another blowjob?
m) Do you think the second guy used penis enlargment products, or is he just a ringer brought in for the occasion?
n) Hasn’t anyone told this poor girl about Kegel exercises?
o) Hasn’t anyone told this poor girl that God gave men hands and tongues for a reason?
p) Seriously, most of the women I know (and I know some very highly sexed women) don’t get quite so exercised about the sizes of their partners’ penises, so why is this woman so fixated?
q) Do you think this woman suffers from penis envy?
r) Would it help matters, do you suppose, if they had a threesome?
s) Or would that only make things worse?
t) Did this woman meet either of her two partners through online personal ads?
u) If so, were they on some “adult” personals site, or on a regular one?
v) Did the guys send her dick pix to help her make her choice?
w) Why does this woman feel so compelled to share the details of her personal life with strangers, anyway?
x) And where did she get my e-mail address?
y) Is she related to the bored Russian girl who wants me to go look at her pictures?
z) Is it perhaps the same man, and the same woman, and indeed the same penis, only the woman has an extraordinarily capacious coochie and a preternaturally tiny mouth?
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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.
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02.02.07
Posted in cooking, culture, geek, ingredients, kitchen learning at 8:10 am by Hanne Blank
Somebody asked me, in relation to the previous post, whether “dark” soy sauce was the same as “black” soy sauce.
This is a good question, and one that I had to wrestle with quite a bit when I was first learning Chinese cooking. After all, to us round-eyed folks there are usually only two varieties of soy sauce — maybe three. Regular soy sauce, “lite” sodium-reduced soy sauce, and possibly tamari, if one has encountered it.
(In truth there’s also the really awful stuff they put in packets and hand out in the cheapest of cheap Asian restaurants, which is more or less salt water darkened with caramel color, with no soybean or wheat flavor at all.)
I note that only two of these, regular soy sauce and tamari, are types traditionally used in Asia.
Soy sauce is a bit of a universe of its own, really. Japanese and Chinese approaches to the stuff are different. Other soy-sauce-using nations, like Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia (whose kecap manis is sweetened with palm sugar, yum!) or the Phillipines, also have national preferences in their soy sauce formulations, but Japanese and Chinese are the ones I use and thus the ones I will talk about here. I’ll start with what I know about the Japanese types because they are fewer in number and simpler to describe.
Soy sauce originated (so I read) in China, but the leading brands sold in North America are Japanese, with Kikkoman brewing sauce on American soil (quite heavy on the wheat, the American made Kikkoman, by the by). There are three basic types of Japanese soy sauces, and they differ based on the ratio of their ingredients, which are soybeans, roasted wheat, and salt. The soybeans and wheat are then fermented using an Aspergillus mold of which there are a couple of types, although loosely speaking they are all referred to in Japanese as koji.
Tamari is technically 100% soybeans, with no wheat. Or at least it should be, although I have seen several brands that contained wheat; it will in any event have the highest soybean-to-wheat ratio of all soy sauces. Originally this was the liquid produced as a byproduct of miso fermentation. It is very dark, very savory, and thicker and more opaque than what most people think of when they think of soy sauce. It has a very intense taste and is usually used in braising, stews, and other long-cooking dishes with other intense flavors. (It also rocks on popcorn if you use a spray bottle, just noting.)
Dark soy sauce (shoyu, koikuchi) is the “normal” Japanese soy sauce. It has a vibrant reddish-brown color and nutty and meaty notes along with the saltiness.
Light soy sauce (usukuchi) has a higher ratio of wheat to soy sauce, a paler more caramel color, and a significantly different taste. The salt presents itself more straightforwardly, so it may sometimes seem saltier on the tongue at first. But it also has a certain amount of sweetness from the wheat. This is apparently popular in some of the northern provinces in Japan. Also, some usukuchi types have amazake, sweet rice wine, added to them.
There are also apparently two other Japanese types, shiro shoyu or “white” soy sauce, and saishikomi or “twice brewed” soy sauce, but I have never seen or used either one. Shiro is supposed to be almost clear in color, composed primarily of wheat and salt, and employed in dishes where a brown or reddish color isn’t desired. Saishikomi uses koikuchi (regular soy sauce) instead of brine in the process of making new soy sauce, and is supposed to be very strongly flavored indeed, as a result.
Those are the basics. Most of the soy sauce sold in the USA is plain old koikuchi of one sort or another — some of it with reduced salt, the American “lite” soy sauce, but the same basic soybean-to-wheat ratios. Don’t let “lite” and “light” confuse you! If the color is the same as regular soy sauce, it’s just “lite,” with less salt; if the color is different, it’s actual light soy sauce, which has just as much salt if not more.
Now on to Chinese soy sauces. The Chinese prefer a robust soy sauce with plenty of soybeans involved. 醬油 is the Chinese generic term for what we call “soy sauce” if you are looking for it on bottles, by the way. Pronunciation will vary by dialect, but Mandarin is roughly “jiang you” and Cantonese, “see yau.”
Regular soy sauce, in China, is “sheng chow,” 生抽, (or jiangyou in Taiwan) characterized as “fresh” or “light.” It is roughly analogous to the Japanese koikuchi although typically more opaque.
Dark or “old” soy sauce is “lao chow,” 老抽, which is aged. In addition to the usual soybeans, wheat, and salt, it also contains molasses, which gives it a thicker (and sometimes viscous) texture and a distinctive taste. The sweet note of the molasses is very useful in certain recipes, but is a really good reason that it cannot be substituted for regular soy sauce, as well as an excellent reason that you wouldn’t want to substitute Japanese “dark” soy sauce for Chinese ones.
Thick soy sauce (醬油膏) is a whole different ball game. It comes in jars, not bottles, because it is too viscous to pour easily. It is not really a soy sauce type but instead a separate preparation that is made of regular soy sauce thickened with molasses and some sort of starch. Occasionally they also contain MSG, so read labels carefully if you want to avoid that. Thick soy sauce is used in dipping sauces and such where its texture is useful, I also have several recipes that call for it in sauces that will be used on cold noodles, where again the thicker texture helps the sauce cling to the food.
Flavored soy sauces: Chinese also use a variety of flavored soy sauces, of which the most popular is mushroom flavored, made with lots and lots of black mushroom and imparting a dense shiitake-fungal kick (brilliant, by the way, in the filling for stuffed eggplant). It is somewhat thicker than regular Chinese soy sauce and also contains some sugar that seems to potentiate the mushroom flavors.
The Japanese also use flavored soy sauces, of which the one I have seen and eaten most frequently is flavored with ponzu, a citrus sauce, used often with tataki and nabemono dishes.
And now you know everything I know about soy sauce!
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02.01.07
Posted in Breath of a Wok, Chinese cookbooks, cooking, culture, domesticity, geek, housekeeping, kitchen learning at 8:54 pm by Hanne Blank
Recently, my Belovedary and I acquired a raft of new Chinese cookbooks. While we cook Chinese — well, Cantonese anyway — at home pretty frequently and I am proud of the fact that I managed to unravel a lot of the basic mysteries of Cantonese cooking on my own by reverse-engineering things I ate in restaurants, talking to my father-in-law (who is Cantonese-American), and reading a few books, I have been feeling like my Chinese cooking skills wanted polish and virtuosity.
Moreover they wanted variety. China is, as you probably know, an awfully big place, and referring to “Chinese” cooking is a little like referring to “American” cooking: there’s an awful lot of regional variety that gets elided that way. Since the Chinese part of my extended family is Cantonese, that was where I started, and, in all honesty, is where I began tonight too, but more about that in a minute.
This is all by way of preamble to say that we’ve begun a new project here at the Little Purple Rowhouse That Could, namely, teaching ourselves some of the elements of Sichuan and Hunan cooking, as well as learning Cantonese and Shanghai dim sum cooking, and also learning more about wok technique, by cooking our way through a handful of very good Chinese cookbooks… and blogging about it as we go.
We’ve seen an awful lot of Chinese cookbooks in our time and bought only a few, because a lot of them are very dumbed-down and Americanized, which has never pleased us much (although Americanizing things is not always bad, pace the late, great, much-missed Barbara Tropp, who had a knack for “fusioning” around the edges of Chinese cooking so that it was still very Chinese in addition to being more accessible).
So, having sifted through any number of Chinese cookbooks in bookstores, and read bunches of reviews, we finally settled on a clutch of new books to add to our collection and from which to do this round of learning. Fuschia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty (Sichuan) and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (Hunan), and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s Dim Sum Dumpling Book. To round it out, we got another wonderful one from our wonderful friends Leigh Ann and Joe, Grace Young’s The Breath of a Wok.
I chose The Breath of a Wok (hereafter BoaW) for planning my first few outings. Like a large proportion of Chinese-Americans, indeed like my partner and his family, Young is of Cantonese origins. I’m already pretty familiar with the essential tastes and techniques of Cantonese cooking, particularly the passionate love of ginger (with and without its bosom buddy, garlic) and the emphasis on clean, fresh tastes and an abundance of green and especially leafy vegetables. So this seemed like a good place to start.
Tonight’s dinner was Ray Lee’s Chicken and Choy Sum (BoaW pps. 76-77) and Walter Kei’s Roasted Sesame Spinach (BoaW p. 196). I chose two dishes in keeping with the principle that one should serve as many dishes as there are eaters, plus rice and a light soup, although we did not end up having soup because we pigged out on the other dishes. Both are intended to serve 4 as part of a multicourse meal, but we barely had enough of the chicken dish left over to bother saving, and we ate the entire batch of spinach! (Of course, we are both serious spinach lovers, so the fact that we plowed through the entire pound worth of spinach should come as no surprise to anybody. It wasn’t to us.)
Walter Kei’s Roasted Sesame Spinach is a very simple and lovely preparation. The grammar of the name is a little deceptive: the spinach is blanched, then thoroughly drained/dried, but not roasted. It is the sesame seeds that are dry-roasted in a wok (or small frying pan, your choice), and sprinkled over the spinach along with a very simple sauce of Shao Hsing wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil. It is slightly edgy with Shao Hsing wine, I find, and I think next time I make it I will probably try it with dry sherry instead (a common substitution for Cantonese cooks, and one that is in fact suggested in the recipe itself). I think I might also use black sesame seeds the next time I make it, since I think their depth of flavor would be a nice thing to try, to see which I prefer.
Ray Lee’s Chicken and Choy Sum is likewise pretty simple, although the choy sum is twice-cooked in a manner that may be unfamiliar to Western cooks, briefly blanch/steamed in a small quantity of stock, drained, then briefly stirfried. This is how Cantonese cooks often get vegetables like choi sum, bok choi, and similarly crunchy cabbage-family vegetables cooked well without being overcooked, the intense moist heat of the stock allowing you to avoid the unpleasant stringiness that would ensue if the vegetables had been cooked only in the wok. When done well, it is a technique that gives even the surliest cabbage a sweet and satisfying tenderness without making it the slightest bit mushy. If you’re not familiar with the technique this would be a nice recipe from which to learn it.
I also have to give major thumbs up to the seasoning and sauce. Ray Lee, the chef who came up with the recipe, is absolutely right about this being a place where you want black soy sauce, a sweeter, thicker sauce than the one most Westerners are used to. It has a lingering molasses note that is fantastic here. I’m sure you can make it without the black soy, but frankly, I wouldn’t want to, it elevates this dish in a way that is a little surprising for such a humble ingredient. It made the rice in the bottom of the bowl a real treat, too, even after the chicken and choy sum were gone. My Belovedary and I both polished off all our rice very happily with that lovely sauce on it, I can tell you.
In the future when I make this, however, I will be quadrupling the quantity of choi sum. One of the failings, to me, of many Chinese cookbooks intended for American audiences is that they skew the ratio of meat to vegetables so that the American palate, accustomed to a Big Lump Of Meat on the dinner plate, will feel that it has gotten enough of whatever animal protein is in the offing. Chinese home cooks have rarely had this luxury! Meat is more often used to flavor a dish, in China, and provide protein in small amounts, than it is to actually fill people up — filling people up is what rice and veggies are for.
I tend to prefer this over the more meat-centric mode, and so when I cooked this dish tonight I intentionally doubled the amount of choy sum from 6 ounces to 12 (one entire modest head of choy sum). Even so, it was pretty meaty. The meat was delicious, so this wasn’t a problem. But I did find myself wishing there were some more of that yummy choi sum in the serving bowl when I went back for seconds, and there were only a few lonely pieces left. So for those of you who side with me on the veg-to-meat ratio issue, allow me to recommend two modest heads of choy sum, more on the order of 24 ounces, along with the 12 ounces (I mean, c’mon, almost a pound?!?) of chicken.
Minor quibbles, really, and excellent recipes. The sauce of the chicken dish alone was worth the price of admission. I look forward to cooking from Breath of a Wok again tomorrow night!
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12.09.06
Posted in Belovedary, domesticity, geek, good things, shiny, writing at 8:35 am by Hanne Blank
By rights, this entry should probably begin “Captain’s Log, Stardate such-and-such.” Why? Well, fortunately for all of us including him, it isn’t because I am channeling William Shatner. Rather it has to do with how I am writing this entry.
With a pen. On a plastic tablet. Just like Yeoman Rand, but not with that hair. I can’t rock that complicated a wig at 8 am on a Saturday.
The tablet is something called a Wacom Graphire tablet, and the pen is an induction stylus that goes with it, and both were an early Chanukah gift from my Belovedary, who reasoned that perhaps my RSl issues might be helped by my having alternate input devices for my computer, enabling me to vary my arm and hand movements more. So far so good, although I must note in the interest of full disclosure that it is now possible, should a person get a little manic about keeping a deathgrip on one’s stylus, to get writers’ cramp from using the computer.
I rather like handwriting into my computer, though. There’s something about it that profoundly satisfies my innermost Luddite. It is much slower than typing, partly because it is, and partly because the character recognition takes time, and then going through what you’ve written to make sure the character recognition was correct (varies, depending on your handwriting and on the vocabulary you use; it tends not to recognize unfamiliar words as well as familiar ones, etc.) takes more time. But there are some nice things about having it be slower: one thinks more, or at least I find that I do, while writing. It’s one of the things I like about using manual typewriters, too. They just slow you down a little bit.
In other news-you-can’t-probably-use, the bathroom entropy situation is significantly improved although not yet completely rectified. We were able to shower yesterday, though not without the adjunct of some duct-taped plastic sheeting over critical bits that have yet to be retiled. I can’t tell you how jolly it was to be able to take a shower without worrying that I was secretly soaking the (ugly, but you know, we’re not yet in a position to replace it, so not ready to ruin it) kitchen’s drop-ceiling, or worse, shortcircuiting the kitchen ceiling lights.
Still, I am superstitious and paranoid about things for a while when my house has gone crumbly on me, even after I fix things (we replaced our roof two years ago, almost, and I still run up to check that things aren’t leaking when it rains heavily, because we spent three grand on a rubber roof with a 20 year materials warranty and I’m paranoid), so I took a short shower, did not shave my legs, and then ran downstairs to the kitchen as soon as I was dry so I could check and make sure that nothing was leaking. Because you never know, it could be leaking secretly. Just to vex me.
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