Kitchen Interviews

A trip to the grocery with no recipe in mind can sometimes result in a great dinner.  Such was the case last night.  Entering the store, I had a yen for certain flavors, and before you could say ‘carambola’, there were salmon filets, zucchini, English peas, mint, and French Feta in the cart!  Here’s what came together in the kitchen shortly after.

Beautiful wild King Salmon.

One filet gets a home-mixed honey mustard and hoisin glaze (foreground,) the other a marinade of "East Meets West."

Great product.

Slice two zucchini, throw in a very hot saute pan with some olive oil, sear and move pieces around quickly with a wooden spoon for about 2 minutes (no more.)   Remove from heat and pour into a large bowl.  They will continue to cook off the heat, but still maintain their crispness and not go limp.  Add the shelled peas and small chunks of French Feta. Tear a small handful of mint leaves into pieces with your hands and sprinkle. Stir to combine, so the feta breaks down a little and the mint oils are released.  Add a tiny bit of salt and a few turns of black pepper, to your taste.

So easy.

Since I’ve ventured into the foreign outpost known as the Asian market, I’ve experimented in the kitchen with some interesting results. This one, a flash-boiled vermicelli noodle with seared pancetta and yellow onion, held together with a slurry of goat cheese, soy sauce, and spices, is worth repeating here. Just a few ingredients — some Oriental, others Mediterranean — come together in a pot and a pan. In about 10 minutes, they end up twirled on a fork or in chopsticks, and into your mouth. It’s fun to make and to eat, I think.

Here’s the “recipe” for one serving:

1 cup of water

2 “spools” of mung bean vermicelli

1/4 cup soy sauce

1 disc of pancetta (1/4 inch slice)

1/2 yellow onion, roughly chopped

1 1/2 tablespoons fresh, mild goat cheese (chevre)

*1 tablespoon spice mixture with equal parts Hungarian paprika, cumin, and curry powder

Salt and pepper to taste (benefits from a lot of freshly-ground black pepper)

Slice up the pancetta into little lardons and add to a hot saute pan with the yellow onion. Melt the fat. When the meat is just about crisp and the onion cooked through with a sear, remove from heat. Place a medium sauce pan on the burner with the 1 cup of water. Once boiling, drop in the vermicelli and cut the heat. It’ll be limp in about one minute, and then you can add the soy sauce, goat cheese, and spice mixture to the hot liquid. Using a fork, lift the noodles up and down to thoroughly combine. Top with the pancetta/onion mixture, add a pinch of salt to set off flavors, along with generous turns of black pepper.

*The picture above includes the “spice mixture;” the noodle image below does not.

Had there been eggs and thyme in the refrigerator, they would have been beaten and scrambled with the pancetta/onion mixture for the best result.

Enjoy!

The finished product in all its glory. I chose peanut oil. Good call, although I'm sure corn would have yielded a different yet equally as stunning result.

On Saturday, I’m attending a Wok Star cooking class taught by the Wok Star herself, Eleanor Hoh, for an upcoming story on Short Order.  Her approach doesn’t revolve around cookbooks or recipes.  It’s instead about learning a few techniques that can help you improvise your way to simple, healthy Asian meals at home using only a few ingredients.  Sounds right up my alley.

I’ve always been fascinated with the far east, both cuisines and cultures.  You name it, I love to eat it and learn about it.  Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese… another helping, please?   But in my own kitchen?  Leave it to the experts, I would say.  “I’d sooner attempt brain surgery!”

I mean, where does one begin to create something close to what a bonafide restaurant of any of the above persuasions can plate?  Asia summarized in a pre-made sauce like Soy Vey was the, shall we say, lazy extent of my foray.

A couple months back, I had read about Barbara Tropp’s cookbooks in the New York Times Bitten Blog, usually the realm of recipe brahman Mark Bittman, but that spring day offered up to his friend Edward Schneider for a tribute to the late author and San Francisco restaurateur.  It was one of those online reading excursions of infinite tangents when you read a story and then get lost in the comments, only to link elsewhere to better understand what people are referring to in the thread.  It was as exhausting and enlightening a surf as any, and three Chinese cookbooks from Amazon later (two of which were Barbara’s,) I was on my way to attempting the “goop” her fans swore by in the thread.

The kitchen fridge: Boar's Head BBQ chicken, manchego cheese and eggs. Lightly scramble two, whites if you prefer, and grate some manchego right before you pull them out of the pan. Plate in a bowl on top of the sliced chicken. Top with a drizzle of chili oil, goop included. Scrapped together, crazy good.

Online search led to offline hunt, as I piled my weekend-bum-self into the rental (thanks to previously tweeted car crash) on a Sunday afternoon.  Destination: North Miami Beach, the P.K. Oriental Market.  Mission: China Moon Hot Chili Oil ingredients.  The China Moon Cookbook (first printing 1992) calls for:

2/3 cup shockingly pungent dried red chili flakes

1/3 cup Chinese fermented black beans (do not rinse them), coarsely chopped

4 large cloves garlic, lightly smashed and peeled

2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger

2 1/2 cups corn or peanut oil

1/3 cup Japanese sesame oil

The “goop” Barbara refers to is the yummy stuff that settles to the bottom of the just-as-yummy oil.   My first try was a success, and it actually reminds me of the hot oil at one place in Miami, Stir Moon in Coral Gables.  But so much better, of course.  It’s very easy.  Add all the ingredients into a sauce pan on the stove and cook at a soft simmer on low heat for about 12-15 minutes.  Let it cool and then pour into a clean, air-tight container or glass jar for storage and use whenever you want to “light a spark” in sauces, noodles, salads, marinades…  you get the idea.  There’s a whole section of divine condiments like this one to drool over, not to mention the other 250 recipes I’m rarin’ to tackle.  China Moon Cookbook.  Get it, use it, love it.  End of story.

Here are some other things I found while at P.K.’s.  It can be an intimidating experience, being unfamiliar with most of the products and foods, especially with such an absence of English packaging and like-speaking staff.  But oh what fun, especially when you run into something you recognize from a special meal you once had in Chinatown, or something completely foreign that turns out to be a taste treat of infinite possibilities once you bring it home.  Thanks to helpful tweets, I will be trying Lucky’s closer to my neck of the woods next time.  Not that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy P.K.’s, with Sang’s next door and King Palace with its shrimp stuffed bean curd down the street, but it’s kind of a haul.

Shrimp chips, all time favorite. The rice noodles were 69 cents per pack on sale. Need I say more? The iced tea with lemon was quenching, but the "mandarin salt" flavor iced tea with honey, a whole new level.