tofu, shrimp, vegetables

I'll get a craving for tofu and theoretically that should suffice but it never does. Around here tofu always ends up being combined with another convenient protein. 

Part of the vegetables are frozen. That's another convenience. I saw the capsicums in the grocery freezer, and thought, "Those look kind of good." They're not bad, but not as good as fresh. Freezing does quite a number on their delicate little cells. 

The marinade is my favorite Asian things all combined in small amounts. I didn't even taste it. Water added to top the tofu.

* soy sauce (salty)

* mirin (sweet, if not mirin then honey or sugar)

* fish sauce, about 1/2 teaspoon (umami)

* saki (I don't know what that does, it's just everything is better with sake. If I didn't have sake then I'd use any white wine. If not that, then vinegar, preferably rice vinegar, so I suppose sake is sour)

* cayenne

* black pepper

* coriander because I love it

Your marinade can be anything you prefer. A hint to interesting marinades is to consider the areas on the tongue and try to hit those with something, and then balance out the hits. 

Right before frying, the tofu is drained, the marinade reserved. Now, chefs will always tell you not to reuse marinade for sauce to avoid cross-contamination, and I suppose there is wisdom in that caution, but it is not a rule I live by. I ask you, what here is being cross-contaminated? The shrimp is not soaking. If anything is alive in that marinade it will be killed by boiling. So for resource conservation purposes, and because I'm incredibly lazy, one teaspoon corn starch is whisked directly into the marinade after the tofu is added to the pan of frying vegetables. The shrimp is added to the pan of frying things last, of course, and removed before it cooks completely, confident that carryover heat will finish the job in a reserve bowl. All the combined fried items are heated in sequence as a stir-fry; mushrooms with garlic, then tofu, then fresh courgette and yellow squash, then frozen and thawed vegetables, finally shrimp. It's all removed to a separate bowl, caryover heat finishing off the shrimp.  

Now the pan is still hot and available for the tofu marinade with whisked corn starch. The mixture is re-wisked because the corn starch tends to settle, the whole bowl is dumped unceremoniously into the hot pan. It thickens immediately into a glossy syrupy bubbling sauce, a thing of real beauty to behold, if only plain brown. 

Once set up, the cooking is done very quickly. No fussing around at the hob. 

Oh, I forgot to mention, but it's showing in the photo, the tofu is squeezed between layers of kitchen towel to rid it of excess water before being placed in the marinade. The idea is to help the tofu to be a better sponge, so that towel ↓ is damp with tofu-water. 

ARTS !

tempura, shrimp and vegetables

A dipping sauce is prepared in advance. This sauce includes soy sauce, honey, mirin, chicken broth, rice vinegar, ginger, mixed dried chile flakes. Taste-tested and adjusted. 

To give you ideas, the sauce could contain lemon, lime, tamarind, grapefruit juice, low-sodium soy, tamari, beef broth, kombu dashi, bonito, clam juice, broth made from the shrimp shells, vegetable broth, garlic, shallot, scallion, sugar, coriander or cilantro, cayenne, pepper, saki, wine, fish sauce, oil, sesame, and so on, you name it. Just make a sauce of your favorite ingredients that you want that day or that you have.

Oil is pre-heated to 350℉ / 175℃.

A cold thin batter is prepared. I observed Japanese cooks shallow fry tempura in a wide low cast-iron pan. They drop the item into the oil and then as it floats there at the beginning they spoon extra batter directly onto the frying item and immediately next to it so that the additional batter builds into bizarre spattered shapes that extend beyond the item's immediate batter coverage requirement. The extra batter added this way sometimes looks like insect legs. Other cooks simply let the cold batter splatter into artistic shapes and set that way in the hot oil and then handle the items gently to avoid breaking off the extended pieces of cooked batter. I do not do that because I do not like having the oil getting all messed up, and it is a bit of a mess. 

Two bowls and two whisks are used to prepare the batter but it does not have to be done this way. A small egg and ice water is whisked in one bowl. The liquid could be soda water, tonic water, beer, something carbonated, or not. A combination of dry ingredients is combined in the second bowl. I wanted to include rice flour but I couldn't find it. So I whirled white rice in a coffee grinder. So white rice powder, AP flour, corn starch and a tiny amount of baking powder since I didn't use a carbonated liquid, and salt, are whisked together. The items are first coated with the dry ingredients in that second bowl to help the batter adhere. The items are removed and placed on a plate which frees up the bowl of dry ingredients which then can be poured into the liquid mixture until a thin batter is formed. The batter also contains an ice cube from the cold water.

Now there is a plate of prepared ingredients that are dusted with flour, a bowl of cold batter, a pot of hot oil, and a draining towel. 

Next time I'll add a little sugar to the batter. 

The sugar peas were gently scored with a small grater to rough up their surface so the batter would stick better. 

It is more convenient for me to place several items into the batter together then carry the batter bowl containing the ingredients directly to the hot oil. Flick off extra batter and carefully place the items into the oil, then hasten to rinse off the goopy battered up hand, I'm neurotic that way, remove the items from the hot oil when they're done, they fry for only a minute or two, then repeat the process until all the items are deep or shallow fried. This goes very quickly so everything must be set up and prepared. (Up to three or four hand-rinsings, or else I'd be handling the camera with a battered-up hand. You might not have that concern, but I'd rinse anyway because like I said, I'm neurotic about goopy fingers.)

I ran out of paper towels so the fried items were removed to a regular kitchen towel. 

Previous tempuras:

Chicken tempura

Tempura catfish and butternut

Chicken and shrimp tempura

Salmon tempura

Chicken tempura

pork, vegetables

I found this pork shoulder in the freezer whilst shoving things around in there to make room for the ice cream cake. Wouldn't do to have the cake get squished. The chunk of pork is cut into strips. I didn't know if there is a bone in there or not. I had no real idea what to do with it. I managed to break off a single strip while the whole thing was still frozen and cut the strip into chunks. Went paleo with it. The little pile of brown stuff is South River miso, the best in all the land, spooned out for condiment.

vegetables with rice

Olive oil flavored with a single smashed garlic clove in an oversized pot, then removed. First, purple cabbage, because it is the most dense,  then courgette and yellow squash cut into irregular wedges and seared in the flavored oil to near perfection and then removed to a holding bowl. A single beef patty, pre-formed and frozen broken into the hot pan. Deglazed with a tablespoon sake, tablespoon shoyu, tablespoon mirin. Prepared white rice held over from the ebi sushi made a few days earlier heated through with the beef chunks. Vegetables returned to pot to heat through. Egg turned throughout the mixture off the heat. And let me tell you what; rarely, if ever, will you have a stir-fried rice fantastic as this, minus the bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, and mushrooms, which goes to show you, or maybe just show me, that making do with what one has on hand often leads to outstanding result. 

chicken broth, miso, vegetables

Staring an empty pot in the face.

* Garlic clove, smashed, minced.

* Fresh ginger scrapped, cut into discs, smashed, minced.

* Into a heated pot with olive oil, that quintessential Asian ingredient … not!

* Chicken broth from a carton.

You can stop here and call it a day.

Or.

Get to scrounging.

* Remnant tree mushrooms, beyond their prime.

* Fresh crimini mushrooms, sliced

* Broccoli pieces.

* Onion slices.

* Tomato, cut into rustic chunks. We're all about being rustic over here.

The magical mixture.

* Tablespoon soy sauce.

* Tablespoon mirin.

* Tablespoon saki.

* Tablespoon miso paste.

breakfast soufflé

New American Breakfast, 11th in a series. This time entirely French and adapted to suit our requirements, ingredients available to us, our equipment, our tastes, our own schedules. Thank you, France. We owe you so much, and while I'm on it, thank you for the statue too. It's lovely. Very popular.

The thing that the pictures do not show are the middle parts, because once you get going it's simply not possible to pick up the camera for every little thing. What? Do you imagine I have four hands?

* Vegetables heated in olive oil/butter, steamed with wine, cooked to soften, collapse, and release their liquid. We want them to do that now rather than when they're baked with the egg.

* Trois oeufs were used, les blancs separated from les jaunes into separate bowls. Les blancs whipped to stiff peaks bolstered with cream of tartar. Oh boy, I'm really into this now.

* A plain white sauce is prepared with a roux then tempered into the yolks. Discard the pan that cooked the sauce. The cooked vegetables are added to the yolks/sauce along with the grated cheese. The mise en place bowl is discarded, and the cheese bowl is discarded. Now we have two bowls along with the two baking bowls that are coated with butter and grated cheese.

In a good French novel, say Les Miserables for example, a lasso is cast around the principles and they're tugged together, as Hugo did so skillfully, so they finally all meet in one place. Likewise here is where the ingredients of the soufflé come together into one bowl, a portion of the whites are whipped into the yolks/sauce/vegetable/cheese mixture to lighten the contents of that bowl, the one that originally held the egg yolks, then that lightened mixture is folded back into the whipped egg whites. The messy sauce bowl is discarded to where the pan and other bowls went. Now you have one bowl with the puffy soufflé mixture and two smaller prepared baking bowls. It could have easily been one large straight-sided baking bowl. Spoon the fluffy mixture into the prepared baking bowls, discard the egg whites fluffy mixture bowl to where the other dishes went, and bake at 350℉ / 177℃ for 25 minutes or so.

I like to pretend I have a sou chef standing nearby to whom I hand off these vessels as they're used but in reality I put them in the sink and that's not nearly as romantic.

The baking dishes were prepared with butter and grated cheese as a first step. Doing that allows the egg mixture to rise up the walls as it bakes and it creates a wonderfully crispy cheese coating. To omit that step would be tragic. Look, we're pretending to be French over here today -- a bit of melodrama can be expected.

chicken noodle soup

This is not Mother's chicken 'n dumplings. My mothers's chicken and dumplings would more properly be called chicken and noodles. I didn't know what a proper dumpling was until they served it in school cafeteria. Even so, this was my favorite thing my mother made.

The chief difference, if you discount poblano pepper and avocado, I use roasted chicken parts and broth previously frozen, and dear ol' Mom boiled a whole chicken. My egg noodles are mostly semolina, her's 100% AP flour, which suited us kids just fine, with our perverse taste sense that considered a hospital menu haute cuisine.

Roasting chicken and vegetables concentrates flavor. Boiling chicken and vegetables dilutes flavor into the water, which isn't altogether bad because is all still there in the water, but it forfeits the additional flavor that would be possible by the chemical reaction between amino acid and reducing sugar of singed foods known as Maillard. Now there's a bit you can take with you to culinary school to put you a step ahead of the class.

The vegetables were sautéed in butter/olive oil until they burned on the bottom of the pan. Those burnt bits, the fond, was lifted off naturally by the broth and floated around the soup. Excess flour dusting the noodles thickend the broth.

Pictured below: broth frozen in cubes, frozen chicken bits, semolina egg dough, vegetables.

Not pictured: garlic, sage, cilantro, S/P.







I like it when noodles stick together forming a careless gloppy noodle clump. For some reason that appeals to me.

American fried rice

Oh, my God. Hold me. This stuff is good. All my favorite things brought together onto one plate.

Hot with habanero pepper flakes (grown on window sill), salty with fish sauce which is made from anchovy, sweet by the addition of small amount of brown sugar, tart with unique flavor of pineapple. Sour with unfresh white wine gone off. Flavor blasted with cumin because I just bought a new jar and felt like using some. Aromatic with basil because the cilantro I have is ready to toss out. All this at once! Like a party gotten all rowdy and out of control right there in your mouth.

White rice cooked the usual way; 25 minute on low simmer, 10 minutes off heat, covered throughout. This time it's not particularly sticky because I didn't intend to eat it with chopsticks, and looseness achieved by frying the grain in a Tablespoon of oil for a few minutes before starting off

Mushrooms in quantity. Onion, garlic, chubby hybrid snow peas, small harmless colored peppers, fresh pineapple, and of course, roasted chicken previously frozen the natural result of producing home-made chicken broth.

Shape with a moistened container like a tea cup or a bowl.

What? Want to know how to pull this off with the breeziness of a master chef? Fine.

Start the rice. You now have 25 minutes to prepare whatever ingredients you chose to include, which is more time than you need. Make sure you have a comic book or internet connection to keep you entertained for the additional minutes. Bored cooks tend toward meanness. Chop everything. Collect your flavorings. Decide if you want to include an egg or not. Go through all the flavors that can hit your tongue and imagine how you intend to cover them, taking care not to accidentally double down. For instance, salt could be soy sauce, fish sauce, or, er, salt. Sweetness could be mirin sauce, cane sugar, turbinado sugar, Splenda™, brown sugar, white sugar, honey. See what's going on here? You'll never make this dish the same way twice. Get the vegetables together. They can be fresh or frozen. Use whatever you have. Choose a protein, it can be anything, even tofu or beans. For my very first stir fry when I was ten years old I used a chopped up hot dog. Our Asian housekeeper, who was the person who taught me, thought that was hilarious. My flavoring was catsup which turned the whole mass pink and oddly overly sweet, she thought that was hilarious too. Turns out, she adopted my choices. Well, at our house anyway.

When you have four minutes remaining for the rice to finish steaming off the heat, begin heating the vegetables as a stir fry. The longest cooking vegetables first. Blast everything on high then abruptly kill the heat once they're all done which should be just a few minutes. This time, I used a large heavy pot rather than a large pan or a wok because I'm tired of things spilling out over the edges or flying all over the kitchen, and because I just don't care. And it's not like I was on television or anything. The last thing added is the rice freshly opened from the steaming pot or an egg worked into the mass. That is all. It's fun!

Ohferchristsake! Just realized. The whole point of making this dish was to use up some of the prewashed slaw mix that I was forced to buy in quantity. And I forgot to include it! What a dunce.