Jump to content

rxrfrx

participating member
  • Posts

    161
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by rxrfrx

  1. Is san choi bau (you know, the minced meat-vegies in lettuce cups) authentic Chinese or some Western-Chinese concoction?

    What's your cutoff for "authentic" here?

    Umm...whether it exists in China?

    Then yes, it's authentic. You can get it (usually made with pigeon, I think) at many restaurants in HK serving typical Cantonese food, alongside the roast chicken and suckling pig and sweet'n'sour pork. As for whether it's a US-inspired invention (similar to deep-fried walnut shrimp in mayonnaise with broccoli), I don't know.

  2. Satay Marinade

    This marinade can be used on any meat for satay. Cut the meat into small pieces and marinate it for at least two hours before grilling.

    • 1 T corriander seed, ground
    • 1 qt fennel seed, ground
    • 2 stalks lemongrass, tender parts, sliced thin
    • 5 shallots, chopped roughly
    • 3 cloves garlic, chopped roughly
    • 1 inch piece of galangal, peeled
    • 2 inch piece of ginger, peeled
    • 1 T tumeric powder
    • 1/4 c palm sugar
    • 2 T oil
    • 1 tsp salt

    Combine all the ingredients in a food processor and blend until smooth.

    Keywords: Appetizer, Easy, Chicken, Beef, Lamb, Southeast Asian

    ( RG2132 )

  3. South Indian Style Broccoli

    Serves 2 as Main Dish.

    Broccoli isn't a traditional Indian vegetable, but I designed this recipe to use up leftover boiled broccoli in the style of cauliflower.

    • 3 c broccoli, cut up and cooked
    • 3 T oil
    • 2 T cumin seeds
    • 2 tsp tumeric
    • 2 tsp corriander powder
    • 2 green chilis, sliced thinly
    • 1/2 c chopped cilantro
    • salt, to taste

    Fry the spices in the oil until they smoke a little. Add the broccoli and chilis and fry for a couple minutes to get the flavors mixed. Add salt to taste and stir in the cilantro before serving with chapati.

    Bonus recipe: just before adding the cilantro, crack 2-4 eggs into the pan and stir them around.

    Keywords: Main Dish, Side, Easy, Vegan, Vegetables, Indian

    ( RG2107 )

  4. Chicken Chettinad

    Serves 6 as Main Dish.

    • 4 chicken legs
    • 2 large onions, roughly chopped
    • 4 tsp tumeric
    • 6 T oil
    • 2 tsp corriander powder
    • 1 T Kitchen King or other commercial masala
    • 3 small tomatoes
    • 4 whole star anise
    • 8 whole cardamom
    • 10 cloves
    • 3 cinnamon sticks
    • 1 T fennel seed
    • 1 T cumin seed
    • 1/2 tsp fresh grated nutmeg
    • 3 T ginger garlic paste
    • 4 small green chilis, sliced thinly
    • salt, to taste
    • 1 c water

    With a cleaver, cut the chicken legs into about 8 pieces each. Add most of the tumeric and half the oil, and mix well by hand. This mixture can be marinated for a few hours if you like.

    Heat a small amount of the oil in a deep, heavy pot and brown the chicken in batches, pushing down on the skin to get it rendered. The pot will fill with chicken fat. Reserve the chicken.

    In the pot of chicken fat, fry the chopped onions, the ginger garlic paste, the rest of the tumeric, the corriander powder, and the commercial masala. Cook, stirring, until the onions are a little soft and glossy, but are not quite done. Place the contents of the pot in a food processor with the tomatoes and puree until smooth.

    Add the remaining small amount of oil to the pot and add the whole spices and nutmeg. Fry until a little smoke rises, then immediately add the water. Scrape the bottom of the pot to remove all of the browned bits, then add the chilis and the onion-tomato puree. Add salt until the sauce tastes fairly salty and the raw onion flavor is not apparent (adding the chicken and cooking it all down will dilute the saltiness).

    Add back the reserved chicken and its juices. Simmer on a low flame for about 90 minutes, stirring occasionally.

    Keywords: Main Dish, Easy, Chicken, Indian

    ( RG2105 )

  5. Note that Fa Gau (fish maw) itself doesn't bear any taste.  It is rather bland.  It's all about texture.  The taste is in whatever sauce it soaks up.

    Are you sure it never has any flavor? The one time I had it, it was in a dish with lettuce (at least, those were the only two ingredients I saw) and some kind of typical-looking brown sauce. The maw (yu tou) had the most awful flavor... very reminiscent of a tropical fish tank that needed cleaning. I never tried it again, assuming that was a characteristic flavor. Maybe it's worth trying again...

  6. I doubt it if you can find "egg drop soup" on a menu in Hong Kong or elsewhere in China.

    I've had something that was basically indistinguishable from the common American chicken/egg-drop type soup in at least a couple white-tablecloth places in HK (as the soup course for the whole table). It may have had some kind of shark's fin substitute protein. That's where I see the similarity- that kind of goopy texture and mild flavor is shared by both, and maybe having a buttload of egg chunks in there is more of an American thing, but there isn't a huge diffrence.

  7. And what a shame they didn't include PingKee Wonton Noodles in the blurb.

    CXB-

    I visited Ping Kee last time I was in Tai Po, thanks to a review you posted a couple years ago. It was pretty cool seeing the dude on TV and remembering I had seen him at his stall, making me food. I got won ton noodles and fish ball noodles. I thought that although the noodles were good, these dishes weren't good showcases for the noodles. The broth was nearly pure water, and the won tons didn't have much flavor.

    On the TV program you ordered some dry noodles- is this the best way to enjoy those noodles? Are there any other dishes there you'd recommend?

  8. That's not a particularly scientific explanation, though. I'd much rather see a source that says whether or not those "contaminants" do anything.

    It's not a particularly scientific explanation, just hand-waving. What are these contaminants exactly, and in what quantity? We'd need to know some specifics of the manufacturing process before we could really hypothesize about potential contaminants that appear in pure MSG, but not in other purified food-grade products like salt, sugar, corn starch, and so forth. This Italian gentleman loses some credibility when he says that we should be worried about contamination by "peptides."

    As for the claim about D-glutamate contamination: this is an easy enough hypothesis to test with a simple derivitization/LC experiment. And even if it turns out that off-the-shelf MSG consists of 10% D-glutamate (similar to an E. coli cell), then what? Meat, dairy, and vegetable protein products can easily contain 20-30% of a given amino acid as D-amino acid, and D-amino acids have not generally been shown to posess any greater toxicity than L-amino acids (Man and Bada, Ann. Rev. Nutr. 1987, 7:209-25).

  9. My favorite recipe for masoor (yellow-pink) dal:

    Heat black mustard seeds and curry leaves in oil until spitting

    Add dal and water

    Add salt and your favorite ready-mixed dry spices (Kitchen King, etc)

    Simmer until dal is done

    Add ginger-garlic paste (not as much as you'd need if you'd browned it first)

    Add kasoori methi to open up the flavors a bit

    Lime juice, lemon juice, or wine vinegar are also good for brightening the flavor

  10. I have never heard of a Jade melon but based off of your description, I can rule out the Chinese Okra because after you cook it, it's not as firm. 

    However, the vegetable you might be inquiring about is the Chinese Fuzzy Melon (it comes in a smooth skin variety as well.)  It's actually very firm when you cook it and a pale green skin with white on the inside.

    Yup, not chinese okra/loofah. That's "silk melon" in Chinese.

    Maybe I'm being dumb... I have bought and cooked fuzzy melon before. After peeling it and scraping the seeds, I stewed it with some meat until it was very soft and translucent. Could this be the same vegetable, just less cooked?

  11. In HK I ate jade melon (yook gwaa, 玉瓜) in a lot of dishes. Sliced and stir-fried, it's got a pale green side and is white inside. It's like a very firm courgette (zucchini). What's the proper English name for this, and where can I buy it in the Boston area? "Jade melon" is just a literal translation and I can't find any use of this in English. I have no idea what the whole vegetable looks like.

  12. Cream of Broccoli Soup

    Serves 5 as Soup.

    This has a lot of broccoli and the liquid is savory and lactic but not really rich. It's very chunky with broccoli flavor.

    • 3 T butter
    • 3 T flour
    • 2 c milk
    • 3 c chicken stock
    • 20 oz chopped broccoli

    Make a light roux with the butter and flour. Whisk in the milk and bring to a boil.

    Meanwhile, bring the broccoli to a boil in the chicken stock and cook until just done.

    Add the bechamel to the broccoli and add salt and pepper to taste.

    Keywords: Soup, Easy, Vegetarian, Vegetables

    ( RG1873 )

  13. Pancakes (yeast)

    Serves 2 as Main Dish.

    I used to always do chemically-risen pancakes, sometimes adding soda water for extra gas... but these are way better, and don't take very much longer. The texture is bouncy and moist (as opposed to fluffy), the way I like it.

    • 1 large egg
    • 1-1/2 c warm milk
    • 1/4 c sugar
    • 1/2 tsp salt
    • 1 tsp vanilla extract
    • 3 T melted butter
    • 2 c all-purpose flour
    • 5 g instant dry yeast

    Whisk the egg and milk well. Add the sugar, salt, vanilla, and butter, and whisk well. Add the flour and yeast and vigorously whisk about 15 seconds, until the batter is completely smooth. Unlike chemically-risen pancakes, you aren't trying to avoid developing gluten here, so go crazy.

    Let the batter proof for about an hour, until it's very bubbly. Cook over medium heat in a buttered pan.

    Keywords: Easy, Vegetarian, Breakfast

    ( RG1866 )

  14. Here's a loaf I made a couple weeks ago. The hydration is about 70-75%. This was kneaded, so it's not really an example of no-knead technique, but it did use only a half-pinch of IDY and a 36-hour fermentation (a poolish stage and then a second stage after adding more flour and salt). It was cooked in a Schlemmertopf clay baker.

    PB020015.JPG

  15. I bake my bread in a covered terra cotta pot (Schlemmertopf) that's essentially a cheaper version of the "La Cloche" product mentioned in the article. The results are far, far better than with steaming the whole oven.

    The bread will release from just about any surface after it's done baking. You shouldn't need to worry about the seasoning in your pan.

×
×
  • Create New...