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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01.20.07
Posted in art, good things, jewelrymaking, shiny at 9:10 pm by Hanne Blank
I’ve been working on a suite of items in advance of Valentine’s Day. The whole suite is, as an homage to Frank Zappa, called “Broken Hearts are for Assholes.”
These are two of the pieces I like best so far.
These are called “Rebound,” and are made of plastic (the hearts), bone (the skulls), and sterling silver (everything else).
This is a single earring (intended to be worn that way), which could also probably be converted to be a pendant if the wearer wanted. It’s called “Pirates Never Say Goodbye.” It’s made of plastic, bone, silver, peridot, cultured pearls, and jade.
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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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12.03.06
Posted in cooking, good things, how to at 7:30 pm by Hanne Blank
So what do you do with all that duck stock you made?
Well, you can make soup! Many kinds of soup. But it is particularly nice, I think, for pho, the Vietnamese noodle soup. The soul of the bowl, with pho, is the broth. And now that you’ve got a nice rich duck stock to work with, you might as well, no?
Take 2 quarts of stock and put them in a pot. Add a good sized bundle of green onions (trimmed) and a thumb-sized hunk of ginger root that has been peeled and cut into coins. Then pop in a small piece of star anise, an inch-long section of cinnamon stick (the Vietnamese kind if you’ve got it), some whole coriander seed (if you don’t have whole coriander, a light sprinkling of the ground kind is fine), a couple of whole cloves, and a half teaspoon-ish quantity of sweet fennel seed. A healthy shot of nam pla (fish sauce) will salt and season at the same time. Cover and simmer for an hour, strain, then hold at a low simmer until ready to serve.
When you are getting ready to make and serve your pho, take two cooked duck breasts (I don’t add the breasts to the cassoulet, so I used those) and slice them thinly. If you have any leftover other meats — fish, thinly sliced steak, tofu, tempeh, seitan, whatever you have around that needs to be used — cut them into bite-sized bits and set them aside, too. If you have leftover Asian dumplings, those can go in, too, particularly the won ton sort, and pot stickers work too (but not the steamed buns like gai bao). You’ll also want some sort of vegetable component. Mung bean sprouts and Thai basil and cilantro are traditional; a chiffonade of romaine lettuce is very nice, or if you enjoy bitter greens like endive that’s good also.
Last, cook up some noodles. Thin rice noodles are traditional; thin egg vermicelli are also good. Whatever sort of Asian noodle you like is fine, really. Cook them according to package directions and drain them.
Then assemble your bowl of pho. Noodles first, then non-vegetable toppings, then broth, and don’t forget to leave room for veggies.
Delicious and light and savory. A pound of noodles, two quarts of broth, and two duck breasts will serve 4. Finish the bowl by squeezing in a healthy wedge of lime (or two, if you’re like me and you really like lime) over the top of it all. It also helps the duck go further, and since duck is a little on the expensive side, why not?
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Posted in cooking, good things, how to at 4:07 pm by Hanne Blank
Assembling a cassoulet is embarrassingly simple.
You need a great huge pot or pan with a lid, and all of it, including the lid, has to be able to go in the oven. This is the one I have, it’s fabulous and worth every (considerable) penny, but I have made happy cassoulets in everything from Corelleware to cast iron Dutch ovens to a big Chinese clay pot. So it doesn’t much matter what you’re gonna cook it in. There ain’t no such thing as a “cassoulet pot.” (Of course I believe that there isn’t any such thing as a paella pan or a tarte tatin pan or a pommes Anna pan either, because I make them all in varying sizes of cast iron pans. My kitchen is small and I just don’t have room or patience for 9000 fussy singlepurpose pans. Who does? I don’t know these people.)
Drain your beans. You remember the beans. You put them in to soak last night. Those. Drain them. Put them into the baking dish.
Next, put your faux-confit duck parts in, nestled down into the beans. Ditto with your pork bits. Chop your sausage(s) into portion-sized chunks and put those in. Peel and halve a couple of small onions and put them in, and maybe a few small turnips if you have them, or a couple-four carrots. Definitely throw in a handful of peeled whole garlic cloves. Tuck in a bay leaf, and if you have some fresh thyme, tie a few sprigs together with kitchen twine and pop that in too. It is a nice touch to take one of those halved onions and stick a few whole cloves in it before you throw it in, but it’s not necessary.
Pour in about a quart and a half of poultry stock if you have it or water if you don’t (it certainly isn’t going to suffer for flavor regardless of which you use). The beans should be covered to the depth of about an inch of liquid.
Cover the pan and put it in a moderate (350 degrees F) oven. Leave it in there at 350 F for an hour and a half, then reduce the heat to 250 degrees F. Leave it for another hour or two, then remove the lid. Move the meat bits around so that the parts that have been out of the liquid get a chance to be in the liquid, etc.
Return to the oven, uncovered, to let some of the liquid cook off. As it cooks it’ll form a delicious crust on top. Great battles have erupted between the kinds of people who have great battles about these things over the issue of how often this crust should be broken and pushed down into the bubbling beany goodness below. Frankly I fail to detect any significant difference no matter how often or how rarely I do it, so I don’t worry about it one bit. But I do, a few times over the course of the day that a cassoulet spends in my oven, give it a stir/redistribution of goodies.
Let it cook until it’s done. It’s done when you want to eat it, as long as when you want to eat it coincides with at least 4-5 hours of oven time after you turned the heat down. If it gets too dry, add more stock or water. It shouldn’t be too soupy, unless you like that.
Eat. With a green salad (you need some greens with this, and some vinegar, to balance the richness out). Some crusty bread is nice to sop up the juice with. Beer, or cider, or a red wine you like that isn’t too sweet, or just cold good water.
If you must have dessert, fruit is the way to go, and maybe a small quantity of very dark bitter chocolate.
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