Filed under Pasta + Noodles + Rice, Vegetables + Salads · Print This Post
Southern cuisine’s “dirty rice” gets its name from the offal pieces they add in their rice. Comfort food often contains more than its fair share of fried stuff as well as heavy starches and some people say “dirty” is also taken from that. I honestly fucked this dish up so I had to literally scramble and rename it “dirty”. I stir-fried the Brussels sprouts and carrots with the salted black beans and then browned the tofu. When it was time to turn the tofu over, they just fell apart. Fuck it, I thought, and I just mixed everything together.
Mark Bittman recently featured canned black beans and I immediately recognized them as the 89-cent cans I see in Chinatown. Filipinos call them tao-si because the black beans come from long string beans we call sitaw. Reverse that and you get taw-si. The spelling changed to make it sound more Chinese. Oh, those Filipinos! I knew they were salty–the beans, not the Filipinos–but not that salty, so I added rice to the dish to fix it up. Sometimes, the most wonderful dishes come out of mistakes made in the kitchen.
Ingredients:
2 small buckets of Brussels sprouts, hard tips sliced off, quartered
a handful of baby carrots, julienned
1 package of extra firm tofu, sliced into strips
1 can of salted black beans, drained
2 cups of steamed white rice
juice from 1 lemon
1 onion, finely chopped
oil
1. In a large skillet, heat some oil. Sauté onions until translucent. Add black beans and cook for 1 minute. Add Brussels sprouts and carrots and stir-fry until carrots are tender. Set vegetables to the side and make room to fry the tofu.
2. Add some more oil if necessary. Brown the tofu on one side. When turning tofu over to cook the other side, they may stick. That’s okay. You can mix them up with the vegetables and make a scramble. Add rice and continue to mix until fully combined. Add lemon juice to control the saltiness of the black beans.
Related post/s:
Part of my Mother Hen project: omakase bento #4
Stuff tomatoes with rice this summer
Filed under Pork · Print This Post
Twenty-four hours before, we were in Philadelphia, the so-called sixth borough of New York City. It was like summer and everyone was out walking and enjoying the weather. From the Reading Terminal Market, we picked up some purple potatoes and apples, a bunch of arugula and escarole. We planned to cook a nice fish dinner back in New York City with the fresh produce we stuffed in my canvas bag. Alas, there were no more whole fish at Eli’s grocery store when we stopped by in the upper east side so we moved to Plan B. We bought two pork chops from the back and I thought of baking them with the Fujis. The Dr. was exhausted and just wanted to leave the cooking to me. I’ve done a similar dish before using red and white wines, but we were starving and this had to be fairly easy and quick. We snacked on the beef jerky we bought from Philly and drank the Hungarian red brought by co-workers from Budapest while we caught up with New York City news.
Ingredients:
2 pork chops
1 Fuji apple, peeled, sliced
1 onion, finely chopped
5 small purple potatoes, halved
1 cup veal stock
2 tbsp mustard
1 tbsp brown sugar
2 cloves
salt, pepper, oil
1. Preheat oven to 375º. Sprinkle pork chops with salt and pepper.
2. In a large skillet, heat some oil and brown the pork chops on both sides. Remove to a plate. Using the same skillet, sauté onions while scraping the bottom of the pan to include the pork bits. Remove to another plate.
3. In a small bowl, combine stock with mustard, sugar and cloves. Whisk and season with some salt and pepper.
4. Transfer pork chops to a baking dish. Add potatoes around them. Top with caramelized onions and pour in flavored stock. Bake in the oven for 45 minutes, turning chops over during the last 15 minutes of cooking. Remove the chops to a chopping board and let rest while the potatoes roast for another 15 minutes.
Related post/s:
My first pork chops with apples included white and red wines
Craving pork chops after Ramadan in Tunisia
Pork chops with summer cherries
