The internship will include three primary kinds of work.

1. Manuscript prep: I will be submitting a book manuscript to one of my publishers this summer. Intern tasks will include things like proofreading, bibliography/bibliographic formatting, and fact-checking for this ms.

2. Research: General library and Internet research for book and other projects, assisting with development and implementation of a survey for use in another book project.

3. Interview-related: Assisting with scheduling, tracking, and (where needed) transcribing interviews for a book project.

Candidates must be over 18 and both comfortable with and reasonably knowledgeable about sexuality topics. Must have excellent reading, writing, and research skills and be sufficiently conversant with technology to do things like upload/download files, do online research competently, and similar tasks. Those intending to telecommute must have their own computers and reliable Internet access. Interested? Please email hanne.blank@gmail.com with a resume and a non-academic writing sample and tell me why you think you’d be a good fit for the gig.

Please feel free to forward this listing.

                          

Which is all part of why I am stunned, right now.  I decided to make Lo’s classic Cantonese chicken stock from her enormous and well-worth-the-money teaching cookbook, Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. It’s on page 54 in case you’re wondering.   It has all the signs of an excellent recipe.  Indeed, even now it is beginning to perfume my house with the most wonderful scents.  But the recipe is a bit deceptive.  Let’s just say that what I thought I was going to end up doing turns out to be something very different from what I’m actually doing.

Essentially, it has become clear to me that Ms. Lo has a different idea of what a “large” stockpot is than I do.  As a home cook –  and this book is geared to the home cook — I have a couple of stockpots around the house.  The largest is around 3 gallons, maybe three and a half, a respectable size for a household stockpot.  In addition to this pot, I also have the bottom portions of a couple of very large multi-tiered Chinese steamers that I use when I am cooking dumplings either for a crowd at home or at a public event.  One of these, an aluminum behemoth, can hold a solid four gallons of water, which is enough to keep you turning out bao for a good long time.  Beyond that, I have a great big enameled iron canning kettle for hot-water bath canning.  And that’s pretty much the large pots scene around here.

Lo’s recipe calls for 2 whole chickens, 4 pounds of chicken wings, 12 1/2 quarts of water, and a bunch of aromatics — onion, scallion, ginger, garlic, cilantro, boxthorn seeds — and some salt.  It’s actually a pretty simple recipe, and a rich one, with all that meat.

She starts you out blanching your chicken and wings in “a large stockpot,” bringing them back up to the boil to cook off any surface proteins or wayward blood.  Clarity and color are very important to Chinese stocks, as important as they are to a classic French consomme, and of course different schools of cooking have different ways of achieving that clarity.  Blanching the meat will remove a great deal of the protein that is not intrinsically bound up in the chicken’s meat, bones, and skin, the stuff that usually forms a scum on top of the broth if it’s boiled.  So by boiling it intentionally, you can remove it.

So far so good.  I boiled a gallon’s worth of the 12 1/2 cups of water in my largest stockpot, as directed.  I figured I had better go with the biggest one because two chickens plus four pounds of wings is a mighty large pile of chicken parts, and I didn’t know how right I was.  When I added the chicken to the boiling water, I could barely get it all into the pot.  A festive thicket of wing-tips poked up above the waterline despite my best efforts. I was clearly going to need a larger pot in which to cook the actual stock.

I brought the chicken parts back up to the boil while I got out the big four-gallon bottom to my big aluminum steamer.  After having removed the chicken parts from the blanching water (which is now a really nice “chicken tea” sitting in a big bowl cooling while my dog gazes at it devotedly, having apparently already figured out that he’s getting some of it for his dinner), I rinsed the chicken as instructed in the recipe and placed it into the steamer bottom with the aromatics. Then I began adding the remaining 8 1/2 quarts of water.

It was right about quart number five that I realized I had suffered a failure of imagination: I had only gotten about half the water necessary into the pot, and I was running out of room.

Now, had I thought this through a little better, I would’ve known this would happen.  The stock itself calls for more than twice the amount of liquid that I used to blanch the chicken.  Increasing
the pot size to just the next available increment up was never going to be sufficient.  But as it was, I hadn’t imagined things accurately and so I stood there in my kitchen, staring at the cookbook page and shrieking “Eileen, what on earth were you thinking? This is never going to fit into a large stockpot!”

Wordlessly, my Belovedary, who has been home sick today, got up, pulled a kitchen chair over
to the high shelf where I keep my canning pot, and fetched it down.  I thanked him and began the process of shifting everything over to yet a third “large stockpot.”

Now all I have to do is wash all these pots.  But that’s okay, I have five hours of simmering time to do it in.  And I can tell by the way this stuff smells already that I am going to have completely forgiven Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, her editors, and the utter lack of specificity about pot sizes before the day is done.

I do encourage you to try making this stock.  Or anything else from one of Lo’s books.  Just bear in mind that when she says “large,” the woman means large.

                          

Astonishing, really, when you think about it.  People tend to have so much stuff in their houses, in their spaces, in their lives, and so much of it is, let’s face it, stuff that we don’t use all that often.  I try to be reasonably tidy and efficient about the material objects in my household, but even I end up with stacks of things — mostly papers, notes, mail, and books — that aren’t being used but also haven’t been put away properly.  And they do get dusty, given enough time, for values of “enough” that equal “fairly little, actually.”

That’s not to mention all the things that seem to get dusty the instant they enter your house.  Any sort of cable that dangles in loops or lies on a shelf or the floor is, I think, required by law to collect its weight in dust rhinos and cat-hair tumbleweeds within a week.  Bottom bookshelves are covered by a similar statute.  And any piece of electronic equipment that is not a laptop computer will attract dust to its surface instantaneously.

This all happens much faster if you have forced-air heating, or central air conditioning.  I do not care for forced-air heating and am only grudgingly accepting of central air con.  Mostly I do not like them because their primary purpose appears to me to be to dispense temperature-controlled air from floor level, moving whatever dirt and dust and shed bits of one’s epidermis and jettisoned hairs and tiny particles of cat litter and God knows what else from floor level up into the air.  I am sure that no one will cop to it, but I am equally sure that this entire system was designed to ensure a reliable and consistent deposition of dust on all surfaces.  I further note that I feel that entropy does a perfectly adequate job of dust distribution and does not in fact need the help.   Like a cat, I enjoy a good old-fashioned steam radiator. Much better than holes in the floor that issue conveniently pre-warmed dust.

I dust most of my house every couple of weeks.  Sometimes I do it every week, particularly during pollen season.  I can’t be the only person who does.  But I feel like I am.  No one talks about dusting, at least no one I know.  I occasionally see commercials on the TVs at the gym for things like disposable electrostatic dusters, or spritzes and sprays for dusting with.  But while my friends will commisserate with me and with each other about laundry — a perennially popular whinge — and about organizational troubles such as closet-cleaning or filing, no one talks about dusting, not even to gripe about it.  I find this odd, and a little disconcerting.

I am fond of dusting.  I like to get a clean old sock, or some pieces of old, well-worn, soft, laundered T-shirt, and run them over every surface in the house.  It’s got a bit of an air of reunion about it, dusting does, as I pick up all the various small bits from the mantel in the living room or the top of the chest of drawers just outside the bathroom door and renew my acquaintance with each one.  Sometimes when I dust the bookshelves I find books I’ve been looking for recently, but for some reason couldn’t spot when I was trying to find them, only when I wasn’t.  Now and then I find things I forgotten about completely, and when that isn’t annoying as hell, it can be delightful.

Dusting is satisfyingly instant in its reward.  Dust something and it is, with almost embarrassing ease, palpably clean.  It may not stay that way forever, but it does stay that way long enough that you can dust a room, then stand with your hands on your hips and survey your domain with pleasure, serenely confident that whatever else could be said of your parlor (or wherever), it cannot be said to be dusty.

Dustcloths, too, are satisfying.  You can see what you’ve done.  I’ve always thought that those  nose-pore-cleaning peel-off sticking plasters must have been invented by someone who really understood the visceral reward of looking at your dust-cloth to see just how mightily you have cleaned something.  (The nose-pore-cleaning strips are never, ever as good as dust-rags, though.  I think it’s a problem of scale.  Also they tend to leave bits of crusty adhesive on your skin.)  Just having a room look tidier or glossier or neater isn’t really enough.  Lord Chief Justice Hewart understood: “Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.”  The beauty of the dust-rag is in its evidence.

I cannot be the only one who thinks so.

                          

Here are the class descriptions (which are also at the link above), just to whet your appetite…

April 17: Veggie Boot Camp
Beginning at the Waverly Farmers’ Market and continuing at Mill Valley, Veggie Boot Camp will jump-start your vegetable cookery skills from shopping and selecting all the way to cleaning, knifework, stovetop technique, and the all-important improv skills that make vegetable cooking come alive.  Over our shared veggie-centric meal, talk about how to take your new techniques home to your own kitchen.

May 22: Spring Greens Intensive
Go green!  We all know that leafy greens are good for us.  Come learn how to turn them into compelling, delicious, center-stage dishes for any meal of the day.  What we make will depend on what’s best that week, but may include things like Turkish stuffed chard, bitter greens bruschetta, lemon-sesame spinach salad, and Cantonese stir-fried pea shoots.    Top it off with a shared meal of greens, glorious greens!

June 19: Vegan Peasant Kitchen
This class draws on time-honored farm and field foodways from around the globe to explore the down-home options for our own locally-grown produce.   The market will dictate what we cook, but it might include things like ful medames, Egypt’s national dish; frisedda alla Pugliese, a southern Italian bread salad; Central American treatments of common “weeds” like purslane and chicory; and more.

July 24: People’s Chinese Cooking
Here’s the real Ancient Chinese Secret: Chinese cooking is one of the world’s great cuisines, and you can make it at home without a kitchen full of exotic equipment!  This introduction to the essential tastes and techniques of Chinese cooking puts the basics within your reach.  The market will dictate what we make, but will definitely include things you won’t find on restaurant menus… like red-cooked tofu, Sichuan sweet water noodles, and savory jian bing, the Chinese answer to the Egg McMuffin.

August 21: Veggie Boot Camp II
Beginning at the Waverly Farmers’ Market and continuing at Mill Valley, Veggie Boot Camp will bring rigor and vigor to your vegetable cookery, this time with a focus on the high summer’s bounty.  We’ll cover everything from shopping and selection all the way to cleaning, knife work, stovetop technique, and the all-important improv skills that make vegetable cooking come alive.  Over our shared veggie-centric meal, talk about how to take your new techniques home to your own kitchen.

September 25: Yes We Can!
Make the most of every harvest by learning the art of hot water bath canning.  “Putting up” fruits, vegetables, sauces, pickles, and more is a satisfying way to ensure year-long access to high-quality local fruits and vegetables.  Imagine hot peach cobbler… in February! You’ll learn everything you need to know to ensure safe, hygienic, and delicious canned goods, and go home with a copy of the Ball Blue Book, a set of basic canning tools, and at least five jars of food to enjoy at home.  [This class has a $25 additional materials fee.]

October 16: Fall/Winter Greens Intensive
Go green!  We all know that leafy greens are good for us.  Come learn how to turn them into compelling, delicious, center-stage dishes for any meal of the day.  What we make will depend on what’s best that week, but may include things like colcannon, Istrian sauerkraut soup, chard and sweet potato pie, crisp-roasted Brussels sprouts, and torn cabbage with black vinegar.  Top it off with a shared meal of greens, glorious greens!

November 13: The International Holiday Table
Find a new favorite to add to your holiday celebrations, or just learn fun dishes from around the world as we explore food traditions associated with the Indian holiday Diwali or African and Middle Eastern celebrations of Eid el-Adha, create Sephardi and Mizrahi Chanukah treats, learn Mexican posada specialties, and more.

December 11:  Essential Chinese Dumplings
You’ve eaten them in dim sum houses, Chinese restaurants, and Mill Valley’s own Dumplings Take Over The World brunches, now learn to make them yourself!  This class covers four classic dumpling families, showcasing four essential cooking techniques and four central dumpling formats: steamed bao (filled buns), pan-fried quotie (potstickers), boiled huntun (won ton), and deep-fried egg rolls.

All the relevant info — where, when, etc. — is available at the link above.  If you have further questions, please email me!

To sign up, contact me at hanne@hanneblankcooks.com or stop into Mill Valley General Store in person and sign up with Cheryl or Pat.

Also: if you want to be sure to get updates from me about cooking-related events and activities, plus occasional bonus recipes and other such natter, remember to add www.hanneblankcooks.com to your blogroll or RSS reader!

                          

The Dumplings Take Over the World event scheduled for March 14 at Mill Valley is being rescheduled. Updates as I have them. Sorry for any inconvenience.

                          

Not loud in a literal sense.  I can be home alone, sitting in my office, the animals all fast asleep, nothing stirring at all, and the house can still be deafening.

“Wash me!” comes the soft, somewhat muffled cry of the laundry in its hampers.

“I’m choking on all these hair tumbleweeds,” the floors join in.  “It’s shedding season, you know!”

“We stink!” shout the litterboxes.  “You can’t smell it from where you are but we do!”

“I’ve got an appointment with the trashman, I haven’t got all day,” notes the recycling bin.

Sometimes I just plug my ears, or perhaps turn on some music, metaphorically at least, and keep slogging away at whatever it is that I’ve got to do.  Sometimes I have to.  But the more I do that, the louder the house becomes.  Eventually I can’t stand it any more — not the state of the house, not the awareness of its needs — and I give in.

I try to deal with it strategically.  I’ve got work to do, after all, that has nothing to do with the laundry, the floors, the litterboxes, or anything of the kind.  Getting up from the desk once an hour or so to spend fifteen minutes dealing with the laundry, or giving the bathroom fixtures a scrubdown, or something like that, is actually a pretty effective pattern.  A lot gets done on both the house side and the office side, so long as I can handle the interruptions, the breaks, the fits-and-starts.

Today was one of those days where I just couldn’t manage it.  Most of the time I can do the strategic housecleaning-as-breaktime-activity thing, parcel out the dusting and sweeping and dish-doing and whatnot across the day, and be just fine with it.  Today I couldn’t stand it.  I couldn’t bear going back to the office when I knew the dusting had been done but the floors hadn’t yet been swept, couldn’t make my brain deal with history of marriage when it was yammering anxiously about the fact that the floors had been swept but not all the furnishings had been put back properly.

I’m sure it counts as displacement activity.  I’m equally sure that some people will consider it fussy, or obsessive, and think of me as a tight-arse and a bore and wonder how on earth anyone could give enough of a damn about the state of her floors or her laundry or her dishes in the sink to be unable to concentrate on higher, more meaningful, more intellectual and highbrow and, well, just plain better things.

Well.  The fact is that this is not just a place I come back to every night when I’m done working, it is where I work.  The well-being of my house and my household is the well-being of the environment in which I write and, in no small way, my work as a writer as well.  If you have the luxury of working in a place you don’t have to clean, whose rubbish bins you don’t have to empty and whose bathroom mirrors you are never called upon to polish, I can see why it might be hard to understand the intimate entanglements of the priorites here in my house, my home office, and my working life.  Then again, as someone whose office is all of five feet from her bedroom and directly above her kitchen, I have a hard time imagining how you office workers can spend so much time and expend so much effort in a place from which you are so physically alienated and from whose workings you have — indeed, I get the impression many office workers can’t imagine not having — so much emotional and practical distance.

Some days the house is loud.  Sometimes it wants attention.  Maybe it’s irritable, or itchy.  Sometimes it just has the blues.  Part of my work is to listen to it, and give it what it needs as best I can, so that it will calm back down, quietly settling like the dog when he’s contented, and I can concentrate more fully on other things secure in the knowledge that the house is in good order, that unpleasantness does not await me, that all is well and quiet.

                          

Quick Pickled Onion

Peel, trim, and halve an onion. (Red, yellow, whatever you’ve got is fine.) Slice thinly and place in a heatproof, nonreactive bowl. Pour boiling water over the onion and let stand for about 10 minutes. While it is standing, in another bowl mix 1 cup rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar, 3-4 Tablespoons sugar (to taste), and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt until the salt and sugar are dissolved. Drain water from onions. Pour vinegar mixture over onions and let stand as long as desired, but at least an hour or two. You can store the onions in the vinegar mixture. Do not discard the vinegar mixture when the onions are gone, you can use it for more onions, or you can add other vegetables to it — thinly sliced cucumber or celery or carrot, etc., if wilted briefly in a boiling-water bath, are all nice.

                          

Mill Valley General Store Winter Produce Co-Op Food Demo and Sampling Saturday, February 20 at 10 am, 11 am, noon, and 1 pm

Free and Open to the Public

Join me Saturday, Feb. 20th. for a show-and-tell-and-taste as I walk you through these scrumptious recipes…

• Moroccan Orange Salad — Bright and zesty, this version of a traditional North African salad is great when more traditional salad ingredients are out of season.
• Roasted Baby Beets and Turnips with Mint-Garlic Yogurt — Roasted root vegetables served with yogurt are a comfort food throughout the Fertile Crescent.
• Mushroom-Celeriac Pecan Pate — This versatile, light, and savory vegan pate works with bread, crackers, or crudités, and makes a great sandwich filling. It is also delicious tossed with hot pasta as a pesto.
• Braised Red Cabbage with Apple and Mustard — A twist on a traditional Mennonite method of cooking the old faithfuls of winter produce. This holds well, so make enough for lunch the next day!

At Mill Valley General Store, 28th and Sisson St., Baltimore MD.

Call 410.889.6842 for more info.

* * * * *          * * * * *           * * * * *

Dumplings Take Over The World

Hanne Blank (that’s me!) and Mick T. Pirate of Whiskey Island Pirate Shop take over Mill Valley General Store to bring you another dazzling and delicious display of  dumpling derring-do!

Sunday, March 14 at  Mill Valley General Store

28th and Sisson, Baltimore, Maryland

Seatings at 9:30 am and 11:30 a

The last event sold out and seating is limited, so make your reservations early by contacting Mick at micktpirate@aol.com

March 2010 Dumplings Take Over The World Menu

A Bowl of Soul
Throughout China, a bowl of huntun — the Cantonese call them wonton
– is a favorite street food. Our fresh handmade huntun come in a
traditional pork and water chestnut filling or a vegan Buddhist
version with seitan. Try them northern style, with diabolically tasty
Chengdu ma la oil infused with chiles, Sichuan pepper, and spices. Or,
for those who “pa la” (fear chiles), the southern version with
Cantonese ginger-scallion oil is sublime.

Gunpowder Pearls
The Chinese invented gunpowder, but it took Maryland to produce
Gunpowder Bison. Coated with glistening glutinous rice and fragrant
with Mongolian spices, these steamed balls of ground bison are our
shout-out to Asian cowboys everywhere.

Lotus Seed Bao
Traditional dim sum menus include sweet items alongside the savory so
eaters can enjoy alternating tastes. Filled with delicate lotus seed
paste, these homestyle steamed buns will bring you a sweet and happy
Year of the Tiger!

Again, The last event sold out and seating is limited, so make your reservations early by contacting Mick at micktpirate@aol.com

                          

Some exquisitely pricey and uncomfortable dentistry was involved.

So was the death of one half of my ten year old pair of Yaktrax and my subsequent slipping and falling on Baltimore’s indifferently maintained sidewalks.

There was also the discovery that some of Baltimore’s Finest — by which I mean the large and industrious rats for which the town is justly infamous — had chewed a hole through the bottom of my hard plastic trash can, a discovery made by dint of removing the lid from what I thought was a sturdily lidded garbage can and having two sleek, well-fed, sturdy-looking rats look up at me as if I were the problem.

So I decided to make some Hunanese pickled cabbage.  Pickles and fermented foods, of whatever sort, give you something to look forward to.  There’s no instant gratification really, save the mild pleasures of doing a little work with your hands and the smells and textures of the food with which you’re working.  But putting together a batch of pickles or sauerkraut or what-have-you does provide one with the often underestimated pleasure of anticipation.  Anticipation is a cousin to hope, which is also relevant given the vagaries of pickling with naturally-occurring microbes.   And both are a fine counterbalance to a draining, dispiriting day.

I base my Hunanese pickled cabbage on the recipe Fuchsia Dunlop gives in Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, but I have my own preferences about seasonings and methodology that derive from my experience eating, and fermenting, other things.  (If you’re new to this sort of thing you may prefer to try her recipe over attempting my rather hand-wavy method.)

setup: crock, cabbage, vodka, seasonings, and salt

The mise-en-place is pretty simple.  Clockwise from the upper right are the pickling crock, the drop-lid to the pickling crock, some cheesecloth for containing the spices, pickled jalapenos, ginger, spices, garlic, salt, vodka, and cabbage.  I suppose the water-filtering pitcher you can just see in the right corner can represent the water that goes into the brine.

The crock is important, though it must be said you don’t have to have a purpose-built crock like I do (I commissioned mine from Wild Yam Pottery up the street).  You could use a big bowl and a plate, or a clean bucket and a Frisbee and some rocks for that matter, but after a while I decided a purpose-built vessel was a good idea. The biggest reason I commissioned one is so that I would have a suitable vessel of a suitable size for small-batch fermenting — it holds about three gallons — with a droplid that weighed enough to do what a droplid is supposed to do.

fermenting crock and droplid

You see how the lid looks like it’s just barely the right size for the crock?  Well, actually, it fits inside the crock.  Weighing in at about two pounds, the drop lid is heavy enough to keep whatever I’m fermenting weighted down beneath the level of the brine.  This keeps aerobic bacteria from colonizing the food and causing rot.  So long as the food is totally submerged, it will ferment but generally not rot. (Occasionally this does not hold true.  But mostly it does.)  Pretty cool, huh?

the droplid at the bottom of the crock

To make Hunanese pickled cabbage, you need a cabbage.  This one I picked up at the Asian supermarket because they were on sale, but you could use any kind of cabbage you like: green, red, savoy, flat head, cone head.  You could also use bok choy, or mustard greens.  Or you could pickle things by this method that weren’t cabbages or cabbage-relations at all, if you liked… carrots, beets, kohlrabi, turnips, etc.  I stuck with cabbage because I have Big Plans for a mess of pickled cabbage later on: one of my favorite simple homey stir-fries, which I will tell you about in a week or two, uses pickled cabbage as its primary vegetable. You also need some ginger, some garlic, and…

spice mixture for hunanese pickled cabbage

Spices. In the spice bowl, I put some star anise, some fennel seed, some green cardamom, some cinnamon bark, some whole coriander, and plenty of Sichuan pepper.  The “Hunanese” part suggests chiles as well as Sichuan pepper, so there are some dried Tientsin chiles in there, too.  For extra kick of a different sort, I also like to add some pickled jalapeno peppers, an element I borrowed directly from Fuchsia Dunlop’s recipe.  (Pickling them all over again doesn’t do them any harm, you can eat them later along with the cabbage.)

Because you don’t want to have to pick out those tiny little bits of spice from the finished pickle, nor do you want to bite down on them while you eat, tie the dry spices up in a piece of cheesecloth.  This acts like a big teabag, letting flavors permeate the brine and the pickled vegetables without letting the spices go all over everywhere.

pickling spices tied into a piece of cheesecloth

Once this has been assembled, and you’ve prepped your ginger and garlic as you desire (I like to peel my ginger and chunk it up, some folks don’t bother peeling it but slice it into coins, my only caveat would be not to slice it too small so you can find it later on), chop up your cabbage into bite-sized pieces.  How big “bite-sized” might be is completely up to you.

Pack the cabbage into your crock, and tuck the spice bundle in on top.  Festoon with ginger and garlic and pickled peppers, then make your brine.  For this recipe, I use a brine that is 3/4 cup coarse sea salt to 16 cups water, plus 1 cup vodka — the addition of spirits to pickling brine is a Chinese thing, and I like the way it tastes, but you can leave it out if you don’t like it or don’t have it.

the crock is packed, the brine is ready

As you can see, the crock is awfully full here.  I normally don’t pack it quite so full, but such was the size of the cabbage.  It’s not a big problem since the brine will wilt the cabbage considerably by tomorrow morning (and further from there), so the crock will end up less full than it began.  Filling a crock all the way to the brim does make it tricky to move, though, so unless you’re going to leave your crock more or less where you filled it, I don’t recommend filling your crock quite so full as I have here.

Add your brine until your vegetables are covered, and place your drop lid on the vegetables so that all the solids are submerged.

just barely covered!

It’s a little hard to tell from this photo, but the droplid is just barely covered with brine, by perhaps a quarter of an inch.  This will, due to the wilting action of the salt on the vegetables I mentioned above, probably increase to two or three inches of brine above the droplid by tomorrow morning.

This is the point where you carefully maneuver your crock into whatever out-of-the-way, relatively cool spot you have chosen as pickle parking… and leave it be.  Check it each day to make sure all is as it should be, thoroughly submerged and all that good stuff, and skim off any scum that forms.  (You can also drape a clean dishtowel over the top of the crock to keep dust out if you like.  Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.)  But otherwise, the pickling process is now between the veggies and the  local airborne bacteria, and there’s not much to be done except clean up after yourself, and anticipate the goodies to come.

About which there will be more when there is more to say.

                          

All quantities are approximate.  I made this for two people, although to be sure it would serve at least four who were less hungry, less greedy about mussels, or eating other dishes alongside this one.  We were in the mood to wallow in bivalves, and since they were on a very good offer at the market today, we did so.  Quite happily too.  I find mussels very restorative, especially when cooked with lots of garlic.  This is an excellent dish to make at the end of a day that has left you feeling a little dented.  It is vigorous in its flavors but light in its effect on the constitution.

A note about cooking vessels: Ideally you’d cook this in a great big wok over a really fierce flame.  Few Western stoves will crank out the heat you need to do something like this in a wok, though.  (You could do a half-pound of mussels at a go, probably, but not two pounds.)  I used a 14-inch diameter braising pan with a heavy bottom and a tight-fitting lid.  A large heavy saute pan with a lid (improvise one with a cookie sheet if you have to) would do well, too.

A note about mussels: Buy mussels the same day you plan to cook them.  If you can, choose only mussels that are shut tight or that shut themselves with alacrity when you tap their shells.  It is possible that you’ll be compelled to buy your mussels by the pre-filled mesh bagful, in which case inspect them as closely as you can before choosing your bag(s).  Have your fishmonger pack them in a plastic bag with plenty of ice for the trip home, and keep them on/covered in ice until you’re ready to work with them.  (Yes, even if you put them in the refrigerator.  Ice.)

Prep all your other ingredients and do your mise en place before you prepare the mussels.

When you go to prepare the mussels, put them in a large bowl and rinse them several times in the coldest water possible to dislodge grit.  Then fill the bowl with cold water and agitate the mussels a bit with your hands.  If any float to the top, discard them — they are either dead and decomposing or empty.  Also discard any with broken shells.  Slightly open shells are not necessarily a problem, but do discard any that refuse to stay closed when you pinch them shut. (They’re dead.  And possibly brewing toxic bacteria you don’t wanna eat.  So out they go.)  Clean them by pulling off any bits of “beard” (the hairy-looking stuff that sometimes clings to the shells) and giving the shells a brief but stern brushing with a stiff brush.  I use the same nylon-bristled brush I use on my root veg.  Works great.  Rinse them off and put ‘em in a bowl and heat that pan, baby, you’re ready to rock and roll.

Black Bean Mussels

2 pounds fresh mussels in their shells, prepared as above

1/2 pound garlic chives, chopped into 1-inch pieces
1/2 pound scallions, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
6-8 cloves garlic, minced or crushed

3 Tablespoons fermented black beans, soaked for 15 minutes in warm water, drained, and mashed to a pulp with the back of a spoon
1-2 teaspoons ground chiles in oil (or to taste)
1 teaspoon sugar
1 Tablespoon soy sauce

1/2 cup dry white wine or sherry
1 cup very hot water

1 generous teaspoon fish sauce (nam pla)

4 Tablespoons cornstarch (or tapioca starch) mixed with 1/3 cup cold water

Canola or peanut oil

1. Combine mashed fermented black beans, chiles in oil, sugar, and soy sauce, stirring until sugar is dissolved.  Set aside.

2. Heat your cooking vessel over a high heat until very very hot.  Pour in enough oil to lightly coat the inside of the wok or pot, and leave a minimal slick in the bottom.  Heat oil until shimmering but not smoking.

3. Add black bean mixture, scallions, and garlic, and stir briskly until fragrant.  Add mussels and toss to coat.

4. Pour in wine or sherry and water and slam on the lid.  Let cook 2-3 minutes, or until about half of the mussels shells open up.  Remove lid and stir (use a large slotted spoon) so that the mussels that are not yet open get closer to the bottom of the pot where the heat is.  Add the fish sauce.  Cover again for another 2-3 minutes.

5.  Remove lid and add garlic chives.  Stir to combine.  While stirring check to be sure all the mussels have opened and are looking opaque and set, but at least some of them should not be fully firmed up yet and the flesh of many of them should still be pale.  Toss once more and remove the mussels to a waiting serving dish (or 2), but do not turn off heat.  Carryover heat will finish cooking the mussels while you finish the sauce.

6.  With a spoon or whisk, stir the remaining liquid in the pan or wok briskly as you slowly drizzle in cornstarch/water mixture.  Keep adding cornstarch mixture slowly and stirring vigorously until it thickens to the texture of heavy cream.  You may or may not need to use all of the cornstarch/water mixture, it will depend on how much liquid is left in your pan.

7.  Pour the sauce over the mussels and serve at once.

Each diner should serve zirself by spooning some of the mussels and sauce on top of the rice in zir partially-filled rice bowl.  The rice is there to catch the sauce.  Pluck the meat out of the mussel shells with your chopsticks or a small fork, then pick up the shell with your chopsticks and, since you are at home and may be as greedy as you like, suck the sauce and chives off the shell.  (It’s delicious.)  Once all the mussels have been devoured, have your sauce-soaked rice for dessert.

Incidentally, if you do not favor chiles, or want less garlic, or what-have-you, do as you please.  There are as many ways to prepare black bean mussels as there are cooks who make the dish.  This is roughly how I did it tonight, but you should feel encouraged to make the dish your own.