Homework

This is one of those dinners that is not for the kind of person who is afraid of mixing things on the plate.  I caramelized zucchini in a tablespoon of olive oil with whole cloves of garlic — a medium heat, with infrequent stirring and a good stout pan, will get it done in a reasonable amount of time — and then fried two eggs over easy in the residual oil left in the pan.  After breaking the yolks, I ate the garlic and zucchini with yolk and bits of eggwhite and some black pepper.  Sublime, especially because I made a nice cucumber salad to chase it with.  The salad is a riff on the cucumber salad from Friday last, only since I had no cilantro left I used some onions pickled in rice vinegar that were lingering in the back of the fridge.  Salt-fermented chiles add a little dimension and floral heat.  A fine contrast to rich eggyolk and unctuous-yet-nicely-crusted zucchini and garlic.

These tomato babies were hanging out in their fetching green hats, soaking up the sun when I went out in the garden a little while ago.

Ushi likes to watch over the garden and supervise me while I work.

A couple folks have asked, so here’s the approximate method for DIY salt-fermented chiles.

You need about a pound of chiles of your desired degree of hottitude.  Wash them, remove the stems, and chop them coarsely.  I often bung them in the food processor and whir them until they are mostly coarsely chopped with a few bigger and a few smaller bits.  It saves a lot of time.

Put your chopped chiles in a large bowl. Add about 2 Tablespoons kosher salt for a pound of chiles, and combine thoroughly.  Feel free to knead the salt and the chiles together if you like.  Pack salt and chiles into a clean glass jar or jars and put lids on them loosely.

Leave the chiles out on the counter at room temperature for about 2-4 days depending on how warm your kitchen is.  Less if it’s warmer, more if it’s cooler.  They’ll give off some liquid and you’ll see some little bubbles starting to form in the liquid.  Stir things around some with a chopstick, put the lid(s) back on (still loosely) and put your jar(s) in the fridge.  Every day or two, stir things around some more with a chopstick.  In about a week to ten days your chiles will be sufficiently transformed that you can start using them.

They will continue to improve over the space of a couple of months.  If you use them at a steady clip you’ll figure out eventually how much you have to make in your initial batch so that you will not run out until after they’ve had a chance to reach their peak.  What their peak is, of course, is subjective.

If things get fuzzy, remove the fuzzy bits and carry on.  If things start getting blue or grey, though, or it smells like a horrible dead thing that has died horribly, throw it away and start over.

And if you are even more adventurous than this, you can use Andrea Nguyen’s amazing recipe for homemade fermented Sriracha sauce.

This is a dish that falls squarely into the category that my friend Jeannette calls dolce far niente cooking.  Perfect for hot weather, it is light and cooling but has strong, invigorating flavor.  And, as the dolce far niente thing implies, it requires hardly any effort.

You’ll want a couple-few cucumbers, a healthy-sized bunch of cilantro (yes, cilantro is a vegetable, now hush), a couple cloves of garlic, and a hot chile or two of your preferred degree of heat.  Additionally you’ll need some salt, some rice vinegar, a little sesame oil, a colander, a bowl, and a knife.  Proportions may be varied to suit your tastes and the number of mouths you’re feeding.

Peel your cukes if the skins are thick or bitter, or not if they aren’t.  Seed them if they’re the kind with lots of watery seeds, or leave them intact if they don’t.  Cut the cukes into happy bite-sized pieces and strew with a tablespoon of salt, toss, and let sit while you clean and coarsely chop your cilantro and your chiles.  (If you happen to have a jar of salt-fermented chiles in the fridge, this is a good time to use them.  You can also use drained chopped pickled chiles if you like.)

Rinse your cukes in the colander and give them a good few shakes to get the water off.  They shouldn’t be too salty but they should be a little salty.  Rinse out the bowl.  Put the cukes back in the bowl with the cilantro and chopped chile.  Crush a couple cloves of garlic, or mince them, or however you prefer to render a garlic clove into something approaching a fine schmear, and add that to the mix.  Add a glug or two of rice vinegar and a glugette or demi-glug of sesame oil, toss, taste, correct the seasonings if need be, and serve.

If by chance you should recall, as you head to the table, as I did this evening, that you have an avocado that is on the overripe side, or even one that is just becoming ripe I suppose, seize it up immediately, peel it and chop it up and add it to the salad.

This is very fine as a side dish, especially with cold noodle dishes, fried plantains, or with fish or seafood.  It is also a delight as a main dish on a hot evening, particularly if you add the avocado.

Gearing up for Sunday’s strawberry brunch, so dinner tonight was a bit of an afterthought.

Still, even an afterthought can be well-thought.

Soy tempeh, cubed, fried, seasoned with Chinese black beans and chile paste and a little soy sauce, over a bowl of fresh spinach.

It was fab.

Right now I’m waiting for my batch of granola to be ready to come out of the oven.  Smells fantastico.  Oats, wheat, barley, rye, triticale, almonds, pecans, agave syrup, maple syrup, a little oil, a little salt, and a blend of cinnamon, clove, allspice, mace, and nutmeg.  Kinda like the topping of an apple crisp.

One of the reasons I get so fed up with omnivores who trash-talk vegetarianism is that they frequently act as if tofu were a a sort of anti-matter where meat is concerned–or perhaps the Bad Kirk to meat’s Good Kirk–in addition to being a slow-acting poison that turns red-blooded American he-men into chinless girly-men with bad combovers, weak ankles, and a low sperm count.

One of the many reasons I adore this dish, which we ate for supper tonight, is that it puts such tofuphobes on serious notice: You think you know tofu? You know nothing. Watch and learn.

This is a Hunanese dish, a stir-fry of smoked (streaky) bacon, smoked tofu, garlic chives (used here as a vegetable, obviously, not an herbal seasoning), and chiles. The recipe in Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook is a very tasty version; mine usually uses slightly different proportions and is heavier on the greenery and tofu, lighter on the pork, and I have a heavy hand with the chiles.

These are, of course, only stylistic differences. The real artistry here is the marriage of cured smoked pork belly and toothsome smoked tofu. Without the intense savor of the chives and chiles, this dish doesn’t really work: I’ve tried making it without the chiles for friends who don’t tolerate them well, and that dog just won’t hunt, as they say here in Maryland. But with the chives and especially the chiles, something really magical happens. The tofu picks up some of the bacon-grease goodness, but the bacon also picks up some of the firm rooted quality of the tofu, and it’s more than the sum of its parts.

Bacon and tofu, you discover when you eat this dish, do not exist in opposition to one another, at polar ends of some spectrum with bacon at one end and tofu on the other. They are both superstars of the proteinaceous world, and justly so, and if this dish does nothing else, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are also the best of friends. I mean, just look at them:

The tofu, golden brown around the edges, sliced into thin rectangles so it approximates the shape of the chunks of yielding, steamed-then-stirfried sliced bacon, both of them glowing with incredibly savory oil to which the chiles and garlic chives have lent their essences… if that isn’t a happy couple I don’t know what is. Whoever first had the brainwave to combine tofu and bacon is one of my personal heroes.

To go along with this orgy of protein, I made a simple dish of blanched, briefly wok-tossed Shanghai choi sum. The choi sum were a gift to us from one of the Belovedary’s coworkers, who grows them in his garden, and they were delicious indeed, much more richly flavored than the ones I find in the markets.

I drizzled a little bit of black vinegar over them just before serving. A dish like the tofu and bacon needs a good clean clear vegetable to go with it, to help cut the fattiness and to refresh the palate. The astringency of the vinegar helps with both things, but you don’t want to overwhelm the greens, just spark them lightly with a touch of sour.

Even if you are not a bok choy fan, you should consider trying choi sum. There are many varieties–choi sum is more a description than a name of a particular vegetable, many kinds of “choi” or green leafy vegetables can be said to have a “sum” or heart, meaning the tender sweet inner parts of mature vegetables or the entire things when they are young–but none of them are as big, as fibrous, or as celery-ish as bok choy. They sort of split the difference between spinach or chard and Napa cabbage. I find them very rewarding, and they are versatile, equally happy in stir-fries and in soups.

Oh, one small note: pick the dried chiles out before you eat. They can be eaten, though the texture is a bit unpleasant. But they’re not actually meant to be. They’re just there to flavor the dish. No worries.

We like chiles around here.  We don’t actually like heat for heat’s sake, and couldn’t begin to give one tiny little mouse dropping for the whole “anything you can eat I can eat hotter” routine.  But we do like chiles.  We feel similarly about ginger and garlic.  I find, in fact, that if I don’t get enough chiles, ginger, and garlic in my regular diet, along with green vegetables and especially brassica-family veggies, I soon feel out of sorts.

Tonight’s dinner was all about trying to meet that quota.

Above, green beans first dry-fried (no oil) to blister them thoroughly, then stir-fried with oil and  a salty, spicy, delectable mixture of minced dried shrimp, minced garlic, minced ginger, minced salted Tientsin cabbage, and chili paste. A slosh of black vinegar and a demi-slosh of soy sauce and that was that.

Below, stem lettuce, blanched and squeezed dry, stir-fried with ginger, garlic, pressed spiced tofu, Sichuan pepper, and dried whole chiles, with a little bit of sesame oil.

I’m afraid the descriptions of the dishes are as close to actual recipes as I’m going to get.  If you are adventurous, I’m sure you could approximate.

I will note, for the curious, that yes, this meal was very nearly vegan but for the dried shrimp in the beans, which could have been left out without undue harm.  I’ve had a few people write to me since I posted my “They’re Called Vegetables. Get Over It.” inquiring, sometimes rudely and sometimes just out of curiosity, about my own eating habits.  So I thought I’d point out that I eat what I feel like eating, for the most part. Sometimes that means meat.  Sometimes not.  It almost always means lots of vegetables.

And, as I say, plenty of ginger, garlic, and chiles.