KennethT

Mapo tofu usually doesn't have Thai chillies. To me, it should be Sichuan pickled chillies and dried Heaven facing chillies.

Finally able to get my grocery store Thai basil to root. I was starting to worry about it! Now transplanted into a small amount of coir.

Tom kha mahi mahi with rice noodles. Kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass from the garden.

oops - I forgot- if using as a marinade, I'd also blend a shallot or two in there...

This is a pretty good recipe and similar to what I use for my Singapore version - but I don't use brown sugar (it's not common in SE Asia) - instead I'd use maybe a teaspoon or two of kecap manis (sweet soy sauce). And rather than mincing, I'd pound all the solids in a mortar/pestle. I'd also eliminate the sweet chilli sauce (you already have tons of sugar in there from the honey, brown sugar or sweet soy sauce and dark soy sauce), so instead I'd just add some chilli paste (like a sambal oelek) or throw 1 prik chee faa (spur chilli) along with 1 Thai chilli if you want it hot. Plus, I would definitely replace some of that dark soy sauce (you only need a little bit) with fish sauce - like a couple tablespoons. This is basically my marinade for the wings - and then you can just squeeze a bit of lime on just before eating and dip into the chilli sauce that I wrote down in RecipEgullet.

If it helps, this is the back side of the package: Also, I was to understand that Hunan food uses tons of pickled vegetables. I had read that it was the pickled vegetable capital of China. This is the webpage menu of my local Hunan place - they basically do most things over rice noodles (either dry or in soup) or rice if requested. Practically everything has a small heap of pickled mustard green tucked into a corner and you can ask for more for an extra $1 or so... https://silkykitchen.com/menu/

That wouldn't surprise me - the Cantonese were the original Chinese settlers in NY a long time ago - up until recently, anywhere you went in Chinatown, the defacto language was Cantonese but that's changing now, especially rapidly in the outer borough Chinatowns like Flushing, Queens and in Brooklyn.

Thanks. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it. I was debating between some Thai Khao Soi (I assume the Thai pickled mustard green would be similar enough - and the ones I've gotten before from the Thai store were NEON yellow, unrefrigerated and really unpleasant) of maybe making some Hunan stir fry - my local Hunan place puts pickled mustard greens in everything. I'm also open to suggestions.

that meal looked amazing. If I had time, I could picture myself booking a trip to Chicago just for that.

When I cook meats SV I usually don't salt prior to bagging - I find that it changes the texture giving it a cured meat consistency. My best results came from a fast hard sear, then bag and SV, then pat dry, season and resear.

I bought this package of pickled mustard greens the other day and had questions of usage: Obviously it should be drained before use, but should I also rinse it or even soak it to remove some of the pickling liquid? ps - why would any company use green writing on a clear package that has green just behind it? Are they trying to make it hard to read?

I'm planning to remake the Singapore wings tomorrow for the Superbowl - not that we'll be watching any of it, other than maybe the commercials, but we can see them on YouTube now. I was thinking about deep frying the wings to get them more evenly crispy and browned but I'm using a wet marinade and I'm having visions of being covered in exploding oil and taking another trip to the ER. Too bad I threw away my modified shoes from the Foot Burning Sauce episode. Any thoughts as to deep frying a non-battered or dredged wing that had been marinated for hours? Should I skip it and just do the whole broiling thing all over again (with a possible pre-steam to render more fat)?

One of the trucks that would commonly deliver to/pick up from us had a 55 gallon drum of some kind of vanilla syrup break and spill all over teh truck. You could smell it for a half a year!

Ha! Crab and avocado are a great combo. In the early days of Eleven Madison, just after the conversion from a bistro, (and long before the prices rose into the stratosphere) they did an awesome crab rolled in a tube of avocado. I think there's a YouTube video showing Humm making it.

Have you ever had Downtown Bakery?

Love it!!!

I know this is a Chicago FB, but doesn't Oklahoma have some good Mexican food?

Nice!

Did you get a chance to smell the coffee blossoms? When we were in Bali visiting a waterfall, our guide knew all the plants in the area and would show us arabica and robusto coffee plants in different stages - I was amazed when smelling the robusto flowers - it smelled like jasmine!

I get it with a whole chicken because a whole chicken would take a long time to leach all of its flavor into the poaching water - the surface area to volume ratio is much smaller than a wing. Years ago when I made a bunch of whole ducks, my preferred method was to poach the whole duck for 10-20 minutes to render a lot of the fat from under the skin, then dry and sit in the refrigerator for 3 days to dry skin. Then, when the duck was roasted (technically baked), most of the fat was completely rendered and the skin was amazing. The duck still had tons of flavor because the meat was barely cooked by the time it was removed from the poaching liquid. I think the next time I make wings - maybe next week as I just learned that my wife was a HUGE fan of the wings I made previously) - I'll try steaming them for a while to render the fat, then chilling them down before baking. Or maybe "super steam" in the CSO at like 250F....

Do you think they were, for lack of a better term, "less chicken-y"? I'm thinking that it's basically making chicken stock...

I wonder what the purpose of the parboiling step is...

@BonVivantWe were thinking of going to Oaxaca - partially just to have some real salsa pasilla de Oaxaca - it's really smoky. If I was there, I'd bring home a few pounds of the smoked/dried pasilla chillies from there - they're hard to source outside of Oaxaca - I can get them here in NYC but they're expensive.

Finally!!!!! My wife found the info... It's a ramen bowl from Miya - seee https://www.miyacompany.com/tabletop-bowls-ramen-bowls I think ours is the 8.25" brushstroke ramen bowl on page 2

I love these bowls - I got them online after a recommendation I got here (surprise, surprise) maybe about 6 months ago or so? I don't remember the name of the store but I'll try to find the post.