C. sapidus

I notice that you use a brand of Sriracha sauce other than Huy Fong. Do you find this brand tastier? Is the taste noticeably different, and if so, how? ← I usually use Huy Fong, but the Asian market was out last time we needed Sriracha. I like the taste of this brand, but the glass bottle is a pain - Huy Fong's squeeze bottle is much easier to use.

I need some quick advice on cooking Southern-style greens. We have two bunches of collard greens and one bunch of mustard greens. Smoked ham hocks are already bubbling away in four cups of water. Question 1: For the collard greens, how much of the stem gets used? Do I cut the two leaf-sides away from the central stem, or do I just cut off the tough stem end? Question 2: Should I throw the mustard greens in with the collard greens, throw them in later, or not mix greens in the same pot? Yeah, I'm "green" when it comes to greens. This is my first time so please be gentle.

After lunch, I made some Vietnamese coffee in special filter. I first drank Vietnamese coffee two decades ago, and immediately fell in love with it. After a number of attempts to make it without the special filter, I finally invested the necessary $3.69 and followed the instructions in Vietnamese coffee, MmmMmMm (clickety). Ingredients and equipment: Special filter assembled. The kettle is sort of fun – it sounds like a harmonica when the water boils. I'm still working on the optimal combination of grind size/filter loading/filter pressure, but it seems pretty forgiving. Oh. My. Goodness – if ca phe sua nong isn’t the ultimate way to drink coffee, I don’t know what is. I prefer a relatively dark roast and about a tablespoon or two of Carnation sweetened condensed milk (other brands of SCM have a nasty aftertaste, in my experience). I’ll probably try Trung Nguyen coffee and Longevity brand sweetened condensed milk eventually. Any recommendations on which Trung Nguyen coffee to use? Vietnamese coffee terminology according to this site (click). Ca phe nong = coffee, hot Ca phe sua nong = coffee, sweetened condensed milk, hot (my favorite) Ca phe sua da = coffee, sweetened condensed milk, ice

For lunch, the boys made grilled cheese again. Mrs. Crab makes grilled cheese with Pam, but the boys like theirs with butter. Elder son cut up an apple. Apple art: Grilled cheese art (courtesy of younger son). Mrs. Crab had a portabella burger on whole wheat English muffin, and TrueLemon in her water. She uses the citrus powders on raw vegetables, too. Three WW points for lunch. [dog]”Hey, you gonna eat that?”[/dog] I had leftover smashed potatoes with Sriracha, fruit, and Ibuprofen.

We have two geriatric former pound pups. Yellow dog, nearly 16 years old, has dedicated her life to the acquisition of food. Despite sleeping for 22 of every 24 hours, she still manages to haul her arthritic hips onto the dining room table if we leave food unattended. I am quite confident that our kitchen floor is free of food molecules; I wish that I could say it was free of dog hair. White dog, eleven years old, enthusiastically repels squirrels and rabbits from the back yard. He understands sentences and Pidgin English, and believes that his stuffed animals possess protective powers. Yellow dog, in her usual spot when not underfoot in the kitchen. [dog]“Hey, did he just drop some food?” “Did you say, ‘food’?”[/dog] We make the dogs sit and stay before we put down their dog bowls. “Yay, it’s dog food again!” (apologies to Gary Larson).

Our carnivorous boys have been lobbying for barbecued ribs. I know that folks have strong opinions about this, so I will show our “barbecuing” process with some trepidation. We do not have a smoker, so we use our gas grill, indirect heat, a water tray, rib rack, and foil packets of wood pellets. I know that this isn’t “real” barbecue, but with some fiddling around the end result can be delicious. Anyway, we started with three racks of pork baby back ribs: Removing the silverskin - I use a paring knife to get a corner started, and then grab it with a paper towel and pull. Throwing away the silverskin - this picture is just an excuse to show the trash pull-out. It keeps the dogs out of the trash, and the location flanking the sink makes doing dishes, well, not exactly a pleasure but less of a burden. Shaking on the dry rub – we use the Memphis rib rub from Barbecue Bible with a few modifications. Ribs ready to go in the fridge for a few hours. Oops, forgot to upload the picture – I’ll fix that in a bit.

Good (late) morning! Mrs. Crab made coffee and breakfast while I slept in. Ingredients . . . . . . and the finished product: bacon and eggs on a whole-wheat English muffin. The boys drank Danimals (a sweetened yogurt and fruit drink) with their breakfast. I ate my breakfast with Sriracha, and Mrs. Crab had hers without bacon - 4 WW points, plus she assigned herself half a point for eating a bite of bacon. [dog]Smells good - are you gonna eat that?[/dog] Mrs. Crab made an extra egg, so I finished it off with more Sriracha. We always have fruit around for snacking during the day. This week we have bananas, Fuji apples, blood oranges, and Clementine oranges. We often need to buy more fruit (especially bananas) during the week.

After some calculations this morning ("How many Saltines are in a cup of crushed Saltines?"), Mrs. C determined that the crabcakes were 5 points apiece.

I have to say that I'm really intrigued about the idea of broccoli slaw in borscht. Have you made it with this before? How does it taste? Cabbage is, of course, de rigeur for borscht, but broccoli...sounds yummy. (I'm a big, big fan of the borscht...the ultimate winter comfort food. And I'm a HUGE fan of the Please to the Table cookbook.) ← Mrs. C has used broccoli slaw in her borscht before. For those who may not be familiar with it, broccoli slaw contains stalks of broccoli, cauliflower, and red cabbage, shredded to the size of toothpicks. Mrs. C uses broccoli slaw interchangeably with cabbage slaw – it stays crisper in her Asian-style salad (similar to the Asian-style salad that SuzySushi showed in her blog). For the borscht, the broccoli slaw will soften but remain intact during the long simmer.

I hope to cook my first recipe from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen this week.

Credit to Mrs. Crab for the pancakes. I always enjoy your Dinner! posts - you have such an interesting mix of cultures going on in your kitchen.

Oops, I gave the wrong impression - we will be eating crabs, but not making them. Going to a crab joint with newspaper on the tables is a quintessential Maryland experience (although some of the high-class crab joints use brown paper rather than newspaper). The main drawback to making crabs at home is the next day - the, um, powerful aroma of rotting crab guts can perfume an entire neighborhood. I prefer to enjoy the crabs and leave the stench behind. We did steam crabs once when I was about 12. On vacation at the Outer Banks of North Carolina with a friend's family, we saw a fishing boat captain pulling crabs from his net and tossing them in the water. We asked the captain if he would give the crabs to us, and he did (I later discovered that they aren't supposed to do that, but apparently he was willing to bend the rules for two enthusiastic twelve-year-olds). Anyway, we brought the crabs back to the RV in a cardboard box and steamed them according to the directions on a can of Old Bay. We did a lot of things wrong, but the crabs were delicious anyway. Thank you, Shaya - please do let us know the next time you and your family are in the area.

Why thank you, but you are way to generous. I'm trying a lot of new things these days, so I really haven't mastered any of them. I had trouble with the fish fragrant pork slivers, too. Favorites from Land of Plenty include dry-fried chicken (gan bian ji), dry-fried beef slivers (gan bian niu rou si), fish braised in chili bean sauce (dou ban xian yu), fish-fragrant eggplant (yu xiang qie zi), and the cold chicken appetizers - chicken in red oil sauce (hong you ji kuai), hot and numbing chicken slices (ma la ji pian), and bang bang chicken (guai wei ji si)

Thank you, Pontormo. I grew up inside the beltway in Silver Spring. Progress has changed downtown Silver Spring, sometimes for the better and sometimes not so much. National chains have displaced a lot of the inexpensive “ethnic” places that I loved, but a few old favorites are still around. I took some pictures a couple of weeks ago, all within a single block of Thayer Avenue. The Thai Market is excellent – I frequently see it listed as a resource in the back of Thai cookbooks. Negril has amazing beef patties, jerk chicken, and an incredibly dense and delicious sweet potato pie. Ethiopian restaurants seem to have moved out to the suburbs. Back in the day, we had to go to Adams-Morgan for Ethiopian food. The sign for an Indian restaurant in the next block is too small to read. My favorite Indian vegetarian restaurant, Siddhartha, would have been behind me as I took the picture. Their Mysore masala dosas (dosai?) were among the best things I have ever eaten.

Lucylou - Thank you! Jumbo lump crab meat is mostly huge, unbroken, gleaming-white chunks of pure backfin crab meat. "Backfin" is a lower grade, with smaller pieces and more dark claw meat mixed in. It still tastes great, but jumbo lump crab meat is glorious stuff. I'll ask Mrs. Crab about the WW points in the morning - she said that they were fairly low.

Elder son is a newly-minted teenager, and younger son recently hit double digits. Not tonight - I'm going to bed soon, but I do have some pictures to share later this week. In the meantime, I described our kitchen renovation in excruciating detail on Dave Hatfield's thread Kitchen remodeling, see what others have recently done (Post #23) (scroll down a bit - there are pictures after the verbiage).

Thank you, Teepee - I have always enjoyed your pictures, and wish that you posted more often. The boys seem interested in learning how to make their favorite foods. As I'm sure you know, teaching is much easier when you have a receptive audience.

The grownups usually plan the meals, but the boys will occasionally request a particular dinner. They have been lobbying for ribs lately, so I’ll probably make some tomorrow. There will be dog pictures. Sorry, we don’t have cats.

:laugh:

No cow tipping – those are street-smart urban cows. Thanks for reminding me. We did not have beer with dinner, but we did have a dry Riesling. Later on, I’ll show you some extremely local beer – a Russian imperial stout that Mrs. Crab and I brewed at the Flying Barrel (clickety), a brew-on-premises store in town. When we don’t have a batch of homebrew, we usually stock Blue Ridge porter from the former Frederick Brewing Company. They started out where the Flying Barrel is now located, but have moved to a larger facility near town. Apparently, the Flying Dog Ownership Group has purchased the Frederick Brewing Company and renamed it Wild Goose Brewery. Crabs and beer - it doesn't get much better than that. A Maryland blog would be remiss without steamed blue crabs and cold brew. We hope to partake later this week.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Crab made smashed potatoes with tarragon, olive oil, salt and pepper. An otherwise exemplary human being, Mrs. Crab has a weakness for puns (visual or verbal). Fingerling potatoes. Mrs. Crab also made a big pot of borscht for later this week. To a previously-prepared chicken-vegetable stock, she added red and yellow beets, orange and yellow carrots, parsnips, white turnips, onions, celery, broccoli slaw, and thinly-sliced deli ham. Beets - caught red-handed! Borscht simmering in the pot – it smelled and tasted really good.

I use an Ikea drying rack over the prep sink as my cookbook-holder. Normally I’m a recipe-follower . . . . . . but cultures often clash when I wing it. The veggie stir had ingredients from Mexico, China, and Thailand: Prepped and ready to go. Turn the hood fan on high and fire up the wok: Stir-fry the garlic and ginger for a few seconds, and then add the baby bok choy and sliced Poblano chile: When the veggies are mostly done, add Shaoxing rice wine, Chinkiang vinegar, and fermented soybean paste: Give it a taste, and add a little fish sauce and chile bean paste. Oops, forgot the tomatoes so I stir-fried them separately.

For dinner we had crab cakes with homemade tartar sauce, a vegetable stir-fry, and smashed fingerling potatoes with olive oil and tarragon. I started the crabcakes early because they need to chill in the fridge for an hour. None of the stores had jumbo lump crab meat, so we used backfin instead. Crabcake ingredients: Making crab cakes is like playing with lumpy, crabby play-do. We picked out any shells before mixing the ingredients: Dividing into eight portions: The key is not to squeeze too hard when forming the crabcakes - you want them to just barely hold together. Chill the crabcakes for an hour in the fridge. While the crabcakes were chilling, I made some tartar sauce. It was good on the crabs and the potatoes, but I forgot to take a picture of the finished product. Anyway, these were the tartar sauce ingredients. After an hour in the fridge, the crabcakes are ready for 4-5 minutes per side under the broiler. Last time we made crabcakes we ran a family crabcake taste test – broiled versus pan-fried. The family preferred broiled. Crabcakes ready to eat.

Thanks, Susan! Having hungry boyz in the house definitely forces the grownups to be more organized.

Making a meal plan works very well for us. You will see why when we go back to work on Tuesday. We try to shop once a week, but I often make a second trip to the Asian supermarket or regular grocery store for produce.