I mentioned yesterday that we were both slightly under the weather, probably as reactions to the vaccines we'd received the day before. One or both of them walloped him hard last night, and he went to bed very early. Without dinner. Wasn't hungry. (He's better today.) It's just as well. My cooking project turned out to need some tweaking, and it's a dish he's never had before: larb. I had what passes for the dish at a wedding buffet catered by a beloved restaurant, the Duluth Grill. They give out their recipes freely, and I came away with recipes for their larb (which they call pork burger) as well as pickled onions, pickled chilies, kimchi, a soy aioli, a curry sauce, and a Korean BBQ. You can expect to see some or all of them turn up on this trip.
The first challenge is cutting their recipe down to size. I didn't want to make 20 pounds of the stuff! But proportioning "1/3 cup sesame oil" appropriately was a bit of guesswork. I did my best.
The next challenge was whizzing all the stuff up. They use a Vita-mix, of course, and the Princessmobile doesn't have such a sophisticated or expensive device. We did have a wonderful battery-powered KitchenAid wand blender, with lots of attachments, and I used it happily until the power supply died. That sad tale is told here. I still haven't found a way to rebuild the battery pack. My darling's son says he may be able to do it.
I bought another battery-powered wand blender at Bed, Bath and Beyond a few years ago, but it's underpowered and only has 1 speed, and thanks to some road abuse it's beginning to fall apart. It's riding in an overhead cabinet, and I have to decide whether to keep it or donate it to a garage sale.
Late last fall I spotted a lightning deal on Amazon, and bought this (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) for $30:
Time to give it a road trial! I used its food processor bowl rather than dig out the existing food processor. I love having multiple speeds. It handled things pretty well. Its only drawback is that I had to have the generator running to use it. That would also have been true of the food processor. It wouldn't have been true of the battery-powered wand blender, but that doesn't power a chopper. (I realize: the other alternative is to chop and mix all that stuff by hand, or maybe try one of my hand-powered gizmos. I didn't wanna. We were at the evening's usual generator running time anyway.)
I didn't take any pictures of the mixing and cooking process. In fact, I cooked one small burger of the stuff for myself and set all the rest aside in the refrigerator to firm up. Here are the original ingredients (Yker and Thell are the local farmers who supply the pork and beef) and the patties this morning:
It's just as well my darling wasn't awake to try it. I thought it rather needed some tarting up, and gave it extra cilantro and a squeeze of lime juice. This morning I realized I'd forgotten the ginger! I can remix it all and add more of the souring ingredients.
Now, as I look back at the larb laap larp topic, I can see that the ingredients as provided by the Duluth Grill are quite different from those discussed in our topic. There's no rice flour or toasted ground rice. @KennethT has commented that he's never seen ginger in a larb recipe, althouugh @C. sapidus noted that he had used it as a substitute for galangal. Lime is frequently used. I thought it was needed here, but the recipe as given doesn't call for it. So I'll be messing with this, and adjusting it to our tastes.
