02.19.07
Posted in Chinese cookbooks, Hunan cuisine, Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, cooking, culture, kitchen learning at 9:42 pm by Hanne Blank
Back to Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cooking tonight, for a fine trifecta. We decied to revisit the smoked tofu and bacon with chiles, because we had some smoked tofu that wanted using up, and to accompany it I made stir-fried peppers with black beans (p. 201) and spicy coriander salad (p. 59).
Together, the three dishes make a smashing combination. The heat and unctuousness of the bacon and tofu dish are balanced out by the crisp, clean vegetal and vinegary flavors of the coriander salad, and they are both countered by the sweetness and pungency of the peppers and black beans. Texture-wise, they also play well together, with the leafy, tender salad, the oily, meaty bacon and tofu, and the just-barely-the-other-side-of-crunchy peppers.
The coriander salad is gorgeous visually as well as being tasty, and, if you are fortunate enough to have a bunch of friends who happily eat quite hot dishes, would make a dynamite summertime contribution to a potluck or dinner party.
What makes it so hot is not just the salted chopped chiles, of which there is only a moderate amount, but also that the light dressing for the greens uses a liberal quantity of hot chili sesame oil. Less flaming tastebuds might halve the hot chili sesame oil or leave it out altogether, relying on only the salted chopped chiles.
The peppers recipe calls for both red and green bell peppers, but we had only green ones. Nonetheless, it is an appealing and delicious dish, and I suspect it will reheat nicely too.
And then of course there was the bacon and tofu, which I think I really nailed this time (last time I overcooked the bacon a bit in the wok, this time I was more sparing because I realized it really didn’t want to be treated to quite so much heat for quite as long as I had done before). The textures were outstanding and the flavor superb. I used more chiles this time, as well, as I had slightly wimped out on the number requested in the previous iteration out of conservatism occasioned by having just bought a new bag of dried Tientsin chiles and not really knowing how hot they were. Now that I know, though, we used the full complement and it was perfection itself. (So much so that my Belovedary has just scarfed one of the the last remaining bits of bacon out of the bowl… we haven’t quite gotten around to putting the leftovers away yet.)
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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?
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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.
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