Writing With My Mouth Full

Fennel, Chickpea and Almond Salad

Talk about an easy salad. My friend Stacie of OneHungryMama turned me on to this salad via Instagram. She adapted it from Homemade with Love by Jennifer Perillo.

Ingredients:
1 tbsp sherry vinegar
2 tbsps olive oil
juice of half a lemon
salt
pepper
1/2 bulb fennel, thinly sliced
1 can of chickpeas, washed and drained
1/4 cup parsley, torn into pieces
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
a handful blanched almonds, coarsely chopped

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, oil, and lemon juice until well mixed. Season the dressing with salt and pepper to taste. Add the fennel, chickpeas, parsley, and cheese to the bowl. Toss together to combine. To serve, spoon the salad onto a large platter, and sprinkle the almonds on top.

Related post/s:
Buy Homemade with Love: Simple Scratch Cooking from In Jennie’s Kitchen from Amazon.com
Check out OneHungryMama whose recipes are as friendly to children as they are to adults

Eggplant in Ginger-Garlic Sauce

Ever since I moved to my Harlem apartment, I had to keep myself from buying any more new cookbooks. It was hard enough to pare down my copies when I moved in, so I’m trying not to accumulate any more new stuff. I mostly borrow from the New York Public Library now just to get my fill of touching the cover and feeling the pages of a newly-published book, but when it comes to Fuchsia Dunlop, I make an exception.

Her books were my reference when I began my Sichuan kick a few years ago. Nothing out there compared to her work, living in the Sichuan Province and learning from the area’s cooking schools and the local chefs. I lived vicariously through her and her cooking.

From her latest, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking, I ended up adapting her eggplant dish, or rou mo qie zi, from Hangzhou. I found myself in Flushing, Queens with my friend Josh over the weekend and bought some eggplants on the cheap. I didn’t have all of her required ingredients, so I played with what I had. Instead of ground pork, I used the minced beef I had in my freezer. She also required a sweet fermented sauce but I figured a dollop of chili paste will do. I also skipped the potato flour because I simply didn’t have any and I didn’t want to substitute regular flour or cornstarch with it. I have two kinds of cooking wines in my pantry so I used both just to have something else to splash in.

Feel free to eliminate the beef if you don’t want meat in this dish.

Ingredients:
4 Asian eggplants
salt
cooking oil
1 lb ground beef
1 1/2 tbsps Sichuanese chili paste
1 small knob ginger, peeled, thinly sliced
5 cloves garlic, minced
a splash of chicken stock
2 tsps sugar
a jigger of Shaoxing wine, or Chinese cooking wine
a jigger of mirin, or sweet rice wine
3 stalks scallions, finely chopped

1. Cut the eggplant lengthways into three thick slices, then cut these into thin and even slices. Sprinkle them with salt, mix well and leave in a colander for at least 30 minutes to drain. Discard the water when ready to cook.
2. In a wok or a deep skillet, heat the oil for deep-frying. Add the eggplant in batches and deep-fry for three to four minutes until slightly golden on the outside and soft and buttery within. Remove and drain on paper towels.
3. In the same wok on medium flame, cook the ground beef until golden brown. Feel free to add more oil so it won’t burn. Add the chili paste and stir-fry until the oil is red and fragrant, then add the ginger and garlic and continue to stir-fry until you can smell their aromas. Add the stock and sugar and mix well.
4. Add the fried eggplant to the sauce and let them simmer gently for a minute or so to absorb some of the flavors. Splash the vinegar in and add the scallions and stir a few times. Serve with a bowl of hot, steaming white rice.

Related post/s:
Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking by Fuchsia Dunlop

Chicken-Fried Beef Steak with Curry Gravy

This recipe is from Filipino Top Chef Dale Talde. Don’t be fooled by the name; he used a simple fried chicken batter and applied it to beef. The original version required 1/2 cup of milk to make the batter, but I only had almond milk in the fridge that I didn’t really want to use, so I decided to skip it. It might not have made the batter stick the way it should, but my beef slices looked okay in the end without the milk. I also used lemon instead of lime and cut down the amount of ingredients needed here. This could have lasted 3 meals if only I stopped snacking on the meat while I cooked the pasta.

Ingredients:
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
salt
pepper
6 1/4-inch-thick slices of top-round beef
egg noodles

For the curry gravy:
oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
a small knob of ginger, peeled, minced
1 tbsp curry powder
2 squirts of Sriracha
1/2 cup strong-brewed coffee
half a 13-ounce can unsweetened coconut milk
juice from half a lemon
1 tsp sugar

1. In a shallow plate, whisk the egg. In another plate, generously season the flour with salt and pepper. Dredge the beef in the flour, tapping off the excess. Dip the coated slices in the beaten egg and dredge again in the flour, lightly patting the coating to help it adhere.
2. In a large skillet, heat 1/2 inch of oil. Working in 2 batches, fry the steak over moderate heat, turning once, until golden and crispy, about 5 minutes. Drain on paper towels and season lightly with salt. Slice in strips when cool enough to the touch.
3. In the same skillet, add a little more oil and sauté the onion, garlic and ginger. Cook over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until the onion is softened. Add the curry powder and Sriracha and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add the coffee and boil until reduced by half, about 3 minutes. Add the coconut milk, lemon juice and sugar, season the gravy with salt and pepper and simmer until thickened, about 5 minutes.
4. While the gravy is cooking, boil a pot of water and cook the egg noodles al dente, about 15 minutes. Drain and put in a serving bowl. Topped with the sliced chicken-fried steaks and pour over the curry gravy. Serve with some lemon wedges.

Easy Cocoa Brownies with Salt

Wow. I’m not the biggest dessert fan, but wow. I saw the photo of this recipe with the rock salt on top and I was immediately tempted to make it. Shauna was coming over with a bottle of wine to catch up, so I thought why not make dinner for the both of us while she made dessert?

Ingredients:
10 tbsps, or 1 1/4 stick, unsalted butter, sliced in small pieces
1 1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cups plus 2 tbsps unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 cold large eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
rock salt

1. Position the oven rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 325º Line the bottom and sides of an 8-inch square baking pan with parchment paper, leaving an overhang on two opposite sides. Set aside.
2. Simmer some water in a deep-enough and wide skillet. Combine the butter, sugar, cocoa, and salt in a medium heatproof bowl and set the bowl in the skillet when the water starts to simmer. Stir from time to time with a heatproof spatula until the butter is melted and the mixture is smooth and hot enough that you want to remove your finger fairly quickly after dipping it in to test.
3. Remove the bowl from the skillet and set aside briefly until the mixture is only warm, not hot. Stir in the vanilla. Add the eggs one at a time, stirring vigorously after each one. When the batter looks thick, shiny, and well blended, add the flour and stir until you cannot see it any longer, then beat vigorously for 40 strokes with the spatula.
4. Spread evenly in the lined pan. Bake until a toothpick plunged into the center emerges slightly moist with batter, 20 to 25 minutes. Let cool completely on a rack. Lift up the ends of the parchment, and transfer the brownies to a cutting board. Sprinkle with rock salt and cut into squares.

Recommended tool/s:
The Spatula by GIR (Gear that Gets it Right)

Green Tea Afternoon Cake

This is the non-baker’s version of green tea layer cake. The original recipe called for two extra steps to make frosting, but I didn’t want to buy all those extra ingredients to make this sweeter than I really wanted it to be. I wanted this cake to be more like an afternoon snack–with hot tea–rather than a dessert.

I didn’t have cake flour, so I texted Haewon from purplepops to ask what would make an okay substitute. When I got home from the store, I measured exactly 1 cup of all-purpose flour, flattened the top, removed exactly 2 tbsps from it, then replaced it with 2 tbsps of cornstarch.

I had to read about this substitute to understand how and why it would work. According to Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, cake flour has been treated and “strongly bleached” with chlorine gas. This causes the starch granules to absorb water and swell more readily to disperse the fat more evenly. This invention “allowed U.S. food manufacturers to develop ‘high-ratio’ packaged cake mixes, in which the sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40%.” The cornstarch replacement restrains the formation of gluten and avoids the cake from being tough and chewy.

I did notice that this cake is lighter, more velvety and more em-oh-eye-es-tee, even though I initially thought it was because of the yogurt. So maybe there is a case to buying my own package of cake flour after all, or at the least, substituting it the frugal–but exact–way.

Speaking of substitutes, I used the Maeda-en brand of green tea powder I bought from my local Japanese store. I gather you can open green tea bags and use those, too, or finely ground the dried green tea leaves you already have. I know I’ll be doing just that when I try the earl grey version of this cake.

This recipe made 2 small loaf pans and 3 minis. The one you see in the photograph above is a ceramic loaf pan that’s a mere 4 inches on the longer end: really cute. The small pan took about 40 minutes to bake, while the minis I put in for 30. It goes without saying that they’re great with a cup of hot green tea on a dreary afternoon.

Ingredients:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup cake flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons powdered green tea
1 1/4 cups white sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 cup plain yogurt
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 350º. Grease the loaf pans.
2. Sift together the all-purpose flour, cake flour (or substitute), baking soda, salt, and green tea powder. Set aside.
3. Using your electric mixer, beat together sugar, oil, and eggs until smooth. Stir in vanilla. Beat in the flour mixture alternately with the yogurt, mixing just until incorporated. Pour batter into prepared loaf pans.
4. Bake in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool on wire racks before slicing to serve.

Recommended tool/s:
Purplepops for mad inspiration
Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking
Amazon.com also carries the Maeda-en green tea powder I used