is it asian food if a white guy makes it up?

I've been playing a lot with Vietnamese-style noodle bowls lately, which generally consist of fine rice noodles over a bed of lettuce, assorted herbs, and bean sprouts, with some grilled meat on top and dressed with a fish sauce/vinegar dressing of some sort. Good stuff, relatively quick to prepare, and very healthy.

Tonight while walking the dog I passed someone's house that was simply redolent with the smell of cooking garlic. It put me in the mood. I spent the rest of the walk home dreaming up dinner, and came up with a winner. The sweetness of the sausage and the bitterness of the bok choy compliment each other well, and the garlic ties it all together.

Garlic bok choy with sausage and tofu

serves 2

For the bowl:

red leaf lettuce (6-8 leaves), cut into 1/2" strips
fresh basil (~12 leaves, or to taste)
a handful of fresh bean sprouts, washed and briefly (~10 seconds) blanched
rice vermicelli, boiled or soaked to preferred softness, drained and fluffed

For the tofu (optional, I did this for variety of texture but don't think it is essential):

8 oz firm tofu, sliced 1/4" thick
fish sauce
fresh ground black pepper

For the the stir-fry:

peanut oil
pretty much an entire head of garlic, peeled
6-8 heads baby bok choy
3 small links Chinese sausage, steamed 10 min (if not already cooked)
oyster sauce
soy sauce
salt
pepper

1. Take all the garlic, smash it to a paste in a mortar and pestle with some salt (I used sea salt, kosher should be fine too) and fresh ground pepper to taste. Put a generous amount of peanut oil in a wok (maybe enough to cover the bottom by 1/4-1/3 of an inch) and heat it to medium low. S-L-O-W-L-Y cook the garlic in the oil for 8-10 minutes. The goal here is to infuse the oil with garlicky goodness, and not brown it AT ALL.

2. In the meantime, slice up your tofu (if you're having it), put it on a plate or shallow dish with enough fish sauce and pepper to marinate it. Wash and trim the root ends from the bok choy. Slice your sausage up, 1/4" thick.

3. Strain the garlic from the oil, leaving most of the oil in the wok, and reserving the garlic. You really need to get all the garlic out, so you can crank the heat up to high and...

4. Fry the tofu, a couple of minutes per side, in your garlic-infused oil. Set it aside on a paper towel to cool and drain.

5. In the meantime, toss the lettuce, basil, and sprouts together into a couple of big soup bowls. Put the noodles on top.

6. Once you're done with the tofu, you're going to want to dump maybe half of your oil, leaving enough to just cover the bottom of the wok. Return it to the heat, and toss in your bok choy. Keep it moving for a minute, and then add the sausage. Keep it moving for another minute or two, and add a little bit of oyster sauce and soy sauce (maybe one shake each), and the reserved garlic. Stir it all together for maybe 30 seconds, remove from the heat, and serve it over the noodles and salad in the bowls, dividing all the liquid from the wok between them. Add the tofu on top.

(in which a white guy stumbles onto a flavor vaguely resembling authentic vietnamese food)

I've been working on my stir-frying skills a lot lately, spurred on by: 1) a profusion of vegetables arriving in our crisper every week because we subscribed to a CSA box, 2) my introduction to the Tahnanh Son Tofu Manufacturing store, a few blocks from where I work, where fresh (still warm!) tofu that is 100 times better than anything you will ever find in a supermarket can be had for $1.25/pound, and 3) the realization that this combined with the uber-cheap noodles to be had at any number of stores in the ID makes for quick, healthy, and very affordable meals.

Last night I think I nailed it to the wall.

Brian's as-yet-nameless awesome tofu dish:

(all measurements are approximations)

1 lb tofu, cut into 1/2" cubes

1 Tbs fried chili paste (less if you have a sensitive stomach...seriously)
1 Tbs natural peanut butter (i.e., just smashed peanuts with no oils added)
a few shakes of fish sauce
1 tsp sugar
juice of 1 lime

2 cloves garlic, diced
1 inch ginger, diced
1 head of broccoli, chopped medium-fine
1/2 yellow onion, sliced
1/4 large or 1/2 small head of red cabbage, sliced(I'm sure green would be fine, too, or some chopped bok choy)
1 green bell pepper, cut into 1/2" squares
a couple of handfuls mung bean sprouts

peanut oil
soy sauce
fresh ground black pepper
corn starch

1. Whisk chili paste, peanut butter, fish sauce, sugar, and lime juice together in a bowl until more or less homogeneous. Toss with tofu. Set aside while prepping the vegetables.

2. Whisk a couple pinches of corn starch together with just enough water to make a slurry, and set aside.

3. Heat a large wok on high until a drop of water boils away on contact. Then add enough oil to liberally cover the bottom, and heat until nearly smoking (if you heat the wok propperly first, this should take no more than a minute.)

4. Shaking off (but reserve) excess marinade, add the tofu to the wok. There is a lot of water hitting a lot of oil here, so BE CAREFUL. (I recommend rolling a few pieces down the side of the wok at a time...don't just plunge it all straight into the oil at once.) Fry in the oil, for several minutes, turning periodically, until the tofu is browned on all sides.

5. Push the tofu to the edges and make a well in the middle. Add the garlic and ginger, and fry that for 20-30 seconds (do not let it brown!).

6. Add all of the veg except the sprouts, and stir fry that until the onions and cabbage start to wilt. Everything should be well-coated in the chili/peanut/oil mixture at this point, with little to no liquid in the pan. Add the sprouts, a few shakes of soy sauce, and pepper to taste, and stir fry another minute or so. Then add the reserved marinade and the cornstarch slurry, and stir fry another minute. Remove immediately to a (heat-safe!) bowl.

7. Serve over noodles (or rice) and top with fried shallots (a bit of a specialty item, but available in Vietnamese-oriented grocery stores.)

quick review: dos perros

M and I finally made it over to Dos Perros the other night. The space looks great, and is a welcome addition to downtown Durham's small--but scrappy and growing--restaurant scene. We sat at the bar, and (being a Monday and fairly late) had our server more or less to ourselves.

The requisite chips and salsa were good: chips cooked on premises, and the salsa (I think a roasted yellow pepper concoction of some sort) was pleasantly tangy, though M's super-sensitive taste buds quickly discerned that it needed salt. Once some salt was added, the salsa was great.

We shared an order of ceviche, which was very fresh and pleasantly subtle in flavor. Also, it was nicely layered (rather than mixed to homogeneity) with large chunks of seafood on a tostada and a more salsa fresca-like component on top.

For entrees, we had the chicken in mole poblano and a baked corn pudding topped with asadero cheese and garlic sauce. The poblano was competent, but not terribly interesting. Far too timid for my tastes, really, and the chicken was actually a little bit dry. The rice and beans that came with it, however, were both cooked to perfection and packed with flavor--I'd say about as good as rice and beans can be expected to be. (I realize this may sound like damning with faint praise, but I really don't mean it that way...attention to detail on "sides" that people tend to take for granted is the mark of a great cook, in my book.)

The corn pudding, however, was sublime. The melding of flavors and textures was really superb, and well complemented by the vegetables served with it. It isn't often that my eyes are drawn to the "vegetarian" section of a menu, but I am very glad that they were in this case. This dish will be hard to pass up in favor of trying something different on the next visit.

Also, I was very happy to be able to have a Dale's Pale Ale on draught with my meal. Hoppy pale ales and IPAs are the perfect complement to spicy food, and it's great to see restaurants catching on to this.

taqueria lopez is closed

So it appeared when we tried to eat there last night, and their webpage confirms it. This must have occurred very recently; while we were there (waiting for the people we were meeting for dinner), at least half a dozen cars pulled up that hadn't gotten word yet, either.

Does anyone know what happened? They seemed to be doing a pretty brisk business to me...

This is a tremendous loss for good, affordable food in the Bull City.

why are you going to vietnam?

I can't tell you how many times I heard this question in the weeks leading up to our departure. It got fairly grating, especially when it was inflected in that way that implies "are you crazy?" This generally didn't come from close friends or family, who are at least accustomed to our incessant novelty-seeking, even if they don't completely understand or appreciate it. More typically, this question came from the sort of casual acquaintances that fill the gaps between the times I get to be with people whose opinions I actually care about.

Unfortunately, life is full of these people.

It took all the self-control I could muster to not say "because you would never go there," even though there is more than a little truth to this statement. (Someone even asked me if we were going there to adopt a Vietnamese baby. You can't make this shit up.) Even the travel agent M spoke with was perplexed. Needless to say, this travel agent did not get our business.

I could give you a lot of high-minded stuff about broadening horizons, challenging assumptions, testing the limits of ones comfort zone, etc., etc. And all of that would have a kernel of truth to it. I could also point out that while getting there is expensive, being there is terribly affordable, and you get tremendous value for your money.

But the honest answer is that we went there to eat.

If you know anything about Vietnamese food, you know about pho*, the beef noodle soup that is generally consumed for breakfast in Vietnam. To be sure, we had plenty of pho, though to be honest, I've had it just as good in Vietnamese restaurants here. Soup for breakfast is highly underrated in the west.

But really, pho is just a good place to start. Vietnamese food is all about flavor and freshness. It is very light. Fresh herbs (especially basil, mint, and cilantro) abound, as well as very flavorful lettuces and varieties of green onion. Fish sauce is the main condiment (try it on pizza!) Meat is typically marinated without oil, and grilled. Seafood is big on the coast. Pork is big everywhere. And of course, rice is the main staple, though often in the form of noodles, wrappers, dumplings, buns, or cakes. There is little in the way of "added fat": no cheese, little cream, and even things that are fried are typically done very fast at very high temperatures so that little oil is absorbed.

It is actually quite difficult for me to say what the best thing I had was. The truth is, we never had a bad meal in Vietnam. Probably the worst thing I ate was a banana crepe I had at a hotel breakfast one morning that was cooked in too much and/or too cool vegetable oil. And even that was pretty good.

Highlights (far from exhaustive):

--The food counters at Ben Thanh market in Saigon. We ate here a lot. There are probably two dozen stalls you can sit at that serve up various specialties. Wander into this section of the market, and you will soon find yourself seated on a tiny plastic stool with food in front of you, whether you are hungry or not. The ladies behind the counters will point you to what they are most proud of. Just go with it. Spring rolls. Pork skewers. Banana leaves wrapped around some delicious concoction of meat and fruit. Meat paste wrapped around bamboo shoots and grilled to perfection. And, yes, they all have pho...

--Banh mi: the Vietnamese equivalent of a sub sandwich. A baguette (God bless French colonialism!) typically filled with grilled meat or pate, vegetables, herbs, and (I think) some sort of vinegar-based dressing. Generally found on the street, and well into the night, typically for about 10,000 dong ($0.60) each.

--Banh xeo: rice pancakes filled with bean sprouts, pork, and shrimp, fried, wrapped in lettuce or mustard greens and dipped in fish sauce.

--Banh beo (see the picture above): steamed rice buns filled with all kinds of savory goodness. Regional variations exist...in Hoi An, they had pork, bean paste, fried shallots, and a boiled quail (or some other small bird) egg. Also available on the street. They sell out quick.

--Cha Ca La Vong. A Hanoi institution that serves one dish, a fish fried in a hot oil pan at your table. You add herbs, greens, and noodles. It's stupidly good. They re-named the street for the restaurant.

--Quan an Ngon. A massive restaurant near the Reunification Palace in HCMC. Everyone will tell you to go there. Everyone is correct...but go for lunch, or an early dinner at a minimum. We went there (for the second time, thankfully) after 8PM and 2/3 of the menu was "finished". I ate a lot of different stuff there, but the best was snails stuffed with pork, which nearly moved me to tears.





*Apologies to any Vietnamese readers/speakers...I just don't have it in me figure out the coding for all the inflection marks that would make this and all other Vietnamese words I'm going to use correct.

ceviche!

Sometimes, an idea occurs to me, and then I find that I can't account for why I didn't think of it sooner.

And so it is that I sit here nearly literally kicking myself for the fact that tonight is the first time I've ever made ceviche myself. It's stupidly easy. If you can operate a knife and boil water, you can make ceviche. And the only reason I thought to do it is that I realized I had about a dozen limes in the fridge that were on their last legs and I didn't know how to use them up, except by making mojitos, and I don't do cocktails when I'm home alone.

What I did tonight was more or less Mexican in style (I think), and I will consume it on a tostada with some homemade guacamole.

First, I juiced all my limes (ended up with just shy of a cup of juice).

Then, I poached a pound of peeled shrimp in 50/50 beer/water with a couple of tablespoons* of the lime juice and some salt...brought to a boil, tossed in the shrimp, and removed from the heat just as the boil resumed. Drained, and then let shrimp steam in the pot about 10 minutes, then removed to a bowl and put in the freezer for quick chilling (about another 10 minutes).

Meanwhile, I chopped up most of a red onion, a cucumber, a smallish jicama, most of a bunch of cilantro, four radishes, two jalapenos**, and a tin of anchovies. Mixed all that together with the lime juice, a few shakes of Valentina, a few shakes of olive oil (plus the oil from the anchovies), kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepper to taste (which means lots of both). Made sure the shrimp were cool, and added them in, mixing thoroughly and them pressing the shrimp down so they were all submerged in the juices. I'm trying to let it sit for an hour before I really dig in, although I've been tasting it all along and it's already pretty good.



*As always, all measurements are very, very approximate. I eyeball almost everything.

**Salmonella can kiss my ass.

sweet thoughts on valentine's day

My first job was at a fast-food restaurant in a mall (a certain chain specializing in chicken that is only open 6 days/week). There was a phenomenon that I first noticed on that job that, though I did not appreciate its significance at the time, I have since come to believe is instructive.

It goes something like this: a customer of some—shall we say, considerable carriage--comes up to the counter. He or she orders a fried chicken sandwich or two, often with cheese, a large order of fries, a cup of cole slaw (~30% mayonnaise by volume), and a 32-oz—wait for it--diet soda.

Now, far be it from me to extol the virtues of high-fructose corn syrup, the consumption of which (in quantity) has been linked to elevated levels of ureic acid in the blood which definitely leads to kidney stones and may (there is mounting evidence) be linked to cardiovascular disease. (All of this is in addition to the problems associated with consuming such concentrated calories in the form of simple carbohydrates; i.e., elevated blood sugar, insulin resistance, and weight gain.) However, even if you assume that our corpulent customer is making a one-to-one substitution of diet soda for leaded—and I’m not sure we should assume that; more on that below--the caloric savings is clearly not enough of an offset to make a difference. S/he’s still fat.

Now I realize I’ve given you an anecdote here, and that you have to trust me (and my memory some 14 years out) when I say that this customer was not exceptional but in fact typical—an overweight customer eating a large amount of food and washing it down with diet soda. And even if I had hard data to support my more general assertion that the habitual consumer of diet soda is, on average, overweight to obese, you could still argue that this is a matter of which comes first: the (deep-fried) chicken or the (4-)egg (Denver omelet)? More to the point, do people drink diet soda because they’re fat (and don’t want to be), or is the diet soda making/keeping them fat?

While the first option is appealing in its simplicity, I think that the second bears careful consideration. So, too, do the authors of an upcoming paper in Behavioral Neuroscience discussed briefly by Art de Vany here.

The rats who ate artificially sweetened yogurt consumed more food overall and gained more weight. The body temperatures of those rats also didn’t rise as high as the others. “That might be a kind of measure of energy expenditure, suggesting not only are the animals eating more calories, they may be expending or burning up fewer calories,” Swithers said.

I haven’t been able to pull up the paper yet [Ed.--here it is], but as Dr. de Vany points out, this sounds like artificial sweetener may be tricking out the satiety centers of the hypothalamus, causing a release of insulin in advance of a blood glucose spike that doesn’t come…with the net effect of causing blood sugar to fall precipitously, stimulating hunger. Couple that to a change in thermoregulation (which may or may not be directly related, but in the rats certainly seems to be happening) and you are set up for weight gain.

My personal prejudice is that I am against “fake food” in all its forms. I won’t eat anything with artificial sweetener in it on purpose—not only because I think these are chemicals for which we have absolutely no metabolic adaptations, but because they taste awful. Reduced fat dairy is OK for cooking some things—even though I generally hate it—as long as there is nothing synthetic put in to “replace” the fat. Don’t even get me started on soy products—after trying out soy milk a few years ago, I found myself with an odd craving for the stuff and eventually developed what I am 90% certain is a mild allergy to it, and only “mild” because I quit drinking it the moment I made the connection.

But beyond all of that, I have generally found that “diet food” is tremendously unsatisfying, I think in no small part because it contains less of the natural components of food (protein, fat, sugar) that signal to your brain that you have eaten. My guess is that people tend to eat more of it, or just more of everything, as a result. However, if this study translates to humans at all, the situation might be much, much worse than that.

I also wonder the extent to which this may be related to the phenomenon that many people report upon reducing the amount of sugar and starch in their diet; namely, the less of it you consume, the more you lose your taste for it. I can definitely vouch for this—I almost never drink soda any more, and generally regret it if I do. I find orange and other fruit juices unbearably sweet. I’m pretty much done with pasta. The only candy I like is chocolate—the more bitter, the better. [m], who bakes all the time, is constantly cutting the sugar down (not replacing it) in her recipes, and we both tend to like the result much better than if she’d followed the recipe exactly. If instead of reducing sugar in your diet, you are replacing it with a hyper-sweet synthetic, you probably aren’t benefiting from losing your taste for sugar.

The take-home message here, as far as I am concerned, is ditch the fake food. Eat well…and less.

pork+beer=happiness

The recipe for palette de porc al la biere in Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook is so incredibly good and so stupendously easy that I'm still kind of in shock. I never thought it was possible for pork shoulder to be good if you cooked it for any less than 6 hours.

I was very, very wrong about that.

butternut squash risotto

It is cold.

I have a freezer full of chicken stock.

It is time for risotto.

People geek out about and/or are intimidated by risotto. I do not know why. If you can stir, you can make risotto.

This was inspired by a dish I had at The Federal last fall. As always, all measurements are approximate, and this goes a lot better while imbibing the beverage of your choice (though I really do recommend a tall, cold beer for this, because you will be standing over the stove more or less continuously for about 40 minutes.)

1 butternut squash
1 med-large white onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, smashed and diced
3 slices bacon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
olive oil
1 1/2 cups arborio
6 cups chicken stock (bring to a simmer and keep hot)
1 cup white wine
5 Tbs parmesean and/or romano (I used about half and half...the sharpness of the romano balances the sweetness of the squash rather nicely)
2 Tbs butter
4 oz baby spinach
salt, pepper, cayenne, sage, saffron, and nutmeg (to taste)

1. Preheat oven to 425.
2. Peel, seed, and cube the squash into ~1/2-inch pieces. Toss with olive oil to coat, season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Roast until they start to caramelize (start checking after 20 minutes...you'll probably smell it when they are done.) Set aside or just keep warm in the oven.
3. In the meantime, saute the onion, garlic, bacon, with some olive oil in a large pan until the onions are translucent and the bacon is just starting to crisp. Add the rice, and continue cooking for another minute.
4. Add the liquid (wine first, then the stock) about 1/2 cup at a time, stirring more or less constantly as the liquid is absorbed. You're going for a creamy consistency and just on the soft side of al dente. (You may not need all of the stock). This will take 15-20 minutes.
5. Reduce heat; add the squash, cheese, butter, and spinach. Cook until the melty things melt and the spinach just wilts. Season to taste.

foodblogging (and parenthesis abuse)

It occurs to me that the casual reader may come by this blog thinking it is culinarily (please pardon the gratuitous adverbification...and the verbification...and the...oh, never mind) oriented, because of the address, and leave disappointed. (The origin of the address, and I suppose de facto title of this blog is here, BTW).

I live to please, so before you run off, here's a little something I whipped up this weekend. My wife is away in Montreal at the moment, and being a southern expat I am perpetually missing real barbeque, and the only thing that these two things have to do with each other is that they converged into:

Pulled Pork Poutine

(All measurements, including time, are approximations. This is basically glorified bar food, so lighten up!)

First, the pork:

-one 4-lb pork shoulder
-one onion, ideally a Vidalia, failing that any sweet/mild onion will do
-one jalepeno (I used a red one, mainly b/c that's what I had)
-1 cup of BBQ sauce (use what you like)
-1/2 cup of bourbon (more, if you'd like to drink some)
-one 12-oz beer (I used a porter, but...well, you get the idea)
-a dry rub mix consisting of salt, pepper, cayenne, paprika, dry mustard, garlic powder, and brown sugar to taste.
-1 Tbs vegetable oil

1. Grease a slow cooker (i.e., a crockpot or comparable) with the oil.

2. Slice the onion. No need to be precise...it will liquify during the cooking process anyway. De-vein and de-seed the jalepeno, and chop. Throw it all in the bottom of the cooker, along with the sauce, bourbon, and beer.

3. Rub the seasonings all over the pork, and place the cooker. Set it to 190° F (or the lowest possible setting above that, if not available) and cover. Go about your day. You may want to periodically turn the pork, and you may need to add water to keep a sludgy caramelized mess from forming on the bottom of your cooker. (This may not be an issue if you have a better quality cooker than I do--mine tends to heat a lot and then coast, rather than maintaining a constant, even heat).

4. The pork is done when you can't turn it anymore because it just falls apart (6 hours or so). Shred it by dragging a couple of forks through it in opposite directions.

For the rest:

-1 russet baking potato per serving (as I mentioned, I'm cooking for one)
-enough corn oil to cover the ammount of potato you intend to cook in a fryer
-the gravy and shredded cheese of your liking (for me, this was a simple storebought pork gravy from a mix and some Jarlsberg, respectively)
-some chopped parsely, to assuage you conscience about the lack of green on your plate
-salt

1. Prepare the gravy and cheese first.

2. Pre-heat the oil to 375° F before cutting up the potato(s) into 1-cm x 1-cm x the length of the potato pieces.

3. Fry the potatos until they look like something you'd like to eat. Drain (carefully) and plate. Salt liberally. Pour the gravy over them, then about half the cheese. Top with a fistful of the pork (heat it up in the microwave if you prepared it ahead of time), then the rest of the cheese. Sprinkle the parsely on top, if you can be bothered.

4. Enjoy! (Bon appetit!)

Addendum--I have since learned that the secret of perfect pommes frites is to blanch them first in oil at 325° F, then finish them immediately before serving at 375° F. Also, if you have duck fat to augment your vegetable oil, even better.