I got a few cookbooks for Christmas this year.  They have all been fun to look through and cook from over the weeks after the holiday.  One of the books I got was the Steamy Kitchen Cookbook by Jaden Hair (who also writes the food blog of the same name).  I was excited to look through it because the recipes seemed simple, but still tasty.  Turns out I was right!

I like to try recipes from cookbooks, unaltered.  This seems to be something that foodies decry as being a silly exercise in mindlessness, because all cooking should be improvisational.  I call bullshit.  I’m happy to improvise and come up with a meal from various cuisines, but if I’m cooking something I’ve never made before, I’m not just going to look at a recipe once and wing it.  I want to understand the intention, what the published dish is supposed to taste like.  In my mind, I’ll compare it with other things I’ve had.  Maybe I’ve had the dish in a restaurant, or I’ve enjoyed other meals in the same ethnic family.  Once I’ve tried it, I can move forward with a little more understanding.

For trained chefs, this is what cooking school seems to be all about.  You learn techniques and flavor profiles from a few different regions of the world and then they are challenged to regularly innovate on those ideas.  If you’ve ever read about someone going through cooking school, read any cooking school text, or watch any episode of Top Chef, you’ll see that chefs are expected to cook from experience, not books.  However, ask them to produce a dish in a cuisine they haven’t mastered and they’ll usually turn up short.

For me, I still feel like I’m learning a lot about Asian food.  The ingredients and techniques are in some ways very different from those used in Western cuisine.  Since I haven’t taken the opportunity to attend any local cooking classes, like those taught by Tien as part of an adult education program, I take my chances learning a lot from books.  Without further ado, let’s get into the book at hand.

Whether you’ve made pho from scratch, or never heard of chap chae, Jaden Hair’s cookbook has something to offer.  Since I have had some experience cooking variations of many of the dishes in the book, some of the recipes worried me a little bit.

How good could “Quick Vietnamese Chicken Pho” be?  Pho (pronounced “fuh”) is supposed to use a richly flavored broth that requires long simmering, not some Rachel Ray 30-minute abomination.  My fears were unfounded, though.  The technique worked really well, infusing classic pho flavors like star anise and clove into chicken stock.  I think the real secret to success here is starting with a good chicken stock.  Trust me, making your own stock is easy and uses up stuff you’d probably just throw away otherwise.  You’re not too stupid to cook.  Apologies for no photos… it was really good and we ate it too fast to stop and take photos.

I’m sure nearly everyone in America has eaten egg rolls in their lives, but how many people think of making them?  Well, we did, using “[Jaden Hair's] Mom’s Famous Crispy Eggrolls” recipe.  I shared a video of my daughter rolling them, but here are some more pictures of the before-and-after, as well as our younger daughter enjoying them with “dip” (a/k/a hoisin sauce).  The proportions of this recipe are huge.  We made about 40 egg rolls, perhaps being a little bit conservative with the filling.  We went on to make a couple dozen pot stickers and a batch of fried rice with the left over filling.

Jaden includes a really great recipe for a peanut sauce that serves as the base for another dish, “Thai-style Chicken Flatbread”.  This one I took her inspiration and ran with it.  After all, it’s really just another pizza topping suggestion.  I made my own dough, since I had the time.  We served it with some brussels sprouts cooked with bacon (not from the book).  This one was pretty popular with everyone in the family.

One dish I wasn’t crazy about was “Clams Sautéed in Garlic and Black Bean Sauce”.  I was lucky enough to go to the store right after a shipment of clams came in.  They were beautiful clams, too.  Unfortunately, the sauce was  a bit spicier than we wanted, and the flavor just didn’t do it for us.  We ate it… all… and enjoyed it, but it’s not on our must-repeat list.  No finished-dish photo, but aren’t the clams lovely?

Chap Chae (or Jap Chae, Japchae) is a dish of sweet potato starch noodles with some vegetables and (usually) beef, flavored with sesame oil and soy sauce.  If you’re used to Italian pasta made from wheat, these noodles are weird.  They start out bumpy and greyish, then when you cook them they turn nearly clear, smooth, and the texture is springy and chewy.  They have very little flavor on their own, but they absorb flavor well.  This dish is one that I order in restaurants often, because I really love it.  The Steamy Kitchen recipe came through again, with a dish that we all loved.

Last, but not least (in this post), I’ll mention a couple of the vegetarian dishes in the book.  We made a big pot of jasmine rice and invited a couple of friends over one night and had the “Garlicky Tofu and Spinach” and the “Asian Style Brussels Sprouts”.  The tofu and spinach were cooked quickly until they were silky and smooth, with a delicious sauce rich with garlic and sesame oil.  Did I ever mention sesame oil is one of my favorite Asian ingredients?  Great stuff.  Anyway, the hardest part of the meal was the brussels sprouts, and only because I took the time to trim and slice them all by hand.  They are cooked quickly with some Vietnamese touches, like fish sauce and lime juice, just to start softening them.  They are bright and still a bit crunchy, offering a contrast to the soft tofu and spinach.  Best part about this meal?  I started when I put the rice in the rice cooker, and had all the food ready just as it was finished.

The theme of this book seems to be fast, flavorful food.  Jaden’s a mom, she does all the writing and photography for her blog and the cookbook herself, she’s obviously putting lessons from her own life on these pages.  The book is filled with so many beautiful photographs of her food, her travel, and her kids.  The great thing is that these recipes work.  It’s not just fast for the sake of being fast.  That said, the speed of Asian cooking usually relies on the cook’s diligence at the cutting board, prepping all the ingredients before-hand.  Take it as an opportunity to practice your knife skills, or an opportunity to buy pre-cut vegetables.

I’ll be doing another post soon with a recipe from the book.  It’s a versatile Korean recipe that you can bend to your will.  Stay tuned!

On a blog note, I’ve adjusted the line spacing (not everywhere yet, gotta track down a working Firebug), as it was mentioned in the survey that the text was a little dense and hard to read at times.  Let me know if you think it’s better, worse, or didn’t notice!

After seeing me taking photos and trying all sorts of things in the kitchen, my wife wondered aloud why I never wrote any posts about the bento lunches she makes for our daughter.  In our house, we tend to cook separately.  She doesn’t want me in there.  She loves it and excels at it, and I just don’t have the experience to write about it.  The next time she asked me about the bento post, I said “would you like to write one?”  She finally agreed, so here is her first guest post.  She’d love any questions or comments you have, so please share them.  Oh, and the pictures in this post are really useful, so I encourage you to click to get the bigger version to see all the little details that go into them.

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I’ve had my eye on the Alinea cookbook for quite a while (long before this previous post). It’s a gigantic book–heavy, wide, and full of beautiful pictures. It’s inspiring in its use of traditional and modern techniques in imaginative ways to make food that is not only beautiful, but delicious. The book tries to give the world a view into how the food is made and served at the restaurant named the tenth best restaurant in the world.

Some of the recipes seem to be more science experiment than recipe, relying on chemicals or equipment that one would expect to see in a lab, not a kitchen. Some, however, really rely on very traditional ingredients and techniques. No matter what the components are made of or what machine is required to prepare them, the dishes presented in this book are original and innovative in their pairing of flavors, textures, and visual elements.

The first recipe I’ve made from the book is YUBA, shrimp, orange, miso. This may seem like an odd title for a recipe, but it tells the reader (or diner) the main focus of the dish and the major contributing players. I’ve also seen this dish (presumably the same preparation) labeled as YUBA, shrimp, miso, togarashi.

Now, I know some of you out there may not know what yuba or miso, or togarashi are. I’ll start with the easiest, togarashi. It’s pretty much just Japanese chili powder. Miso is a fermented product made (usually) with rice and/or soybeans. It comes in many varieties, but white (shiro) and red (aka) miso are the most common. I almost always keep some miso in the house, as we love many Japanese dishes that use it. Yuba is made from the skin that forms when you heat soy milk. It’s apparently available dried or fresh, but this recipe leads you through making some yourself.

Like many recipes in the Alinea book, you make various components and then assemble them at the end. Some dishes may have dozens of components, some have very few. This one was pretty straight-forward, only 4 major components.

Following the precedent by the (much more famous than I) Carol Blymire (Alinea at Home) and Martin Lindsay (Alineaphile), I won’t share exact measurements for any component. In fact, since I was a bad blogger, I didn’t take photos of the whole process. Unfortunately neither Carol nor Martin, known for their diligent photo-documentation of these recipes, have done this one yet. Go buy the book… even just to look at it. Worst case, go look at it at the library (like I did).

First you make yuba. Simple enough, since it’s been made in China and Japan for hundreds of years, right? Well, it is pretty easy. This recipe calls for you to make soy milk (soak soybeans, blend with water, boil, strain) first. Then you simply heat it, wait 12-15 minutes until a skin forms, and take it off. This is somewhat easier said than done, since this stuff is slippery when fresh. The traditional way is to use chopsticks to gently lift it out, so that’s what I did. Lay it out, roll it up (if it wasn’t already all smushed together), and dehydrate it.

Orange in this recipe comes from candied zest. Peel off the zest, cut into strips “as thin as possible”, and blanch in some simple syrup. This component was pretty easy.

The miso goes into the sauce–a mayonnaise. If you’ve never made mayo before… go do it now. It’s one of the culinary wonders of the world. An egg yolk offers up its lecithin to emulsify oil and citrus juice, producing a creamy, tangy, clingy sauce perfect for just about anything fried (and sandwiches, and spoons). This mayo is flavored mainly with miso and lime juice. The recipe made way more than I needed for the (more than called for) yuba I made, so I’m looking to find something to pour this on soon. The only bad thing about homemade mayo is that it’s quite perishable.

The shrimp are supposed to be cut in a manner that I can only assume is easy on very large shrimp, producing an even strip of shrimp meat that gets wrapped around the yuba. Mine were not pretty, as I used what I had–frozen shrimp. I think they were a little too small.

Fry the yuba sticks, wrap them with shrimp, bake to cook the shrimp, sprinkle with salt and togarashi, and dress with the orange strips and some small chives.
Compare mine with pictures taken by Alinea diners on Google Image Search. I think I did pretty well. I definitely impressed my wife and our 6-year-old daughter. They both really liked how it looked and tasted. Our chives were not very potent, so their flavor didn’t come across very much, but all the other components played together so nicely. The soft shrimp contrasted with the crunchy yuba and the sweet orange complemented the flavors in the miso mayo.

You could probably “cheat” on this recipe with store-bought breadsticks or pretzel rods. Get some cocktail shrimp, cut them in half, lengthwise, and drape them around the breadsticks. Mix some miso and lime juice (and a little sugar and cayenne) into some store-bought mayo. Not sure how to cheat on the orange zest and togarashi… maybe just mix some into the mayo?

The point is that the flavors work so well together. The hardest part of this recipe is the time commitment. Soak the soybeans overnight. Cook up the milk. Each sheet of yuba takes 12-15 minutes. I made a dozen. Then you dry them for 3 hours. We’re already talking around 24 hours for one (albeit major) component of the dish. It was fun, but if I did it again, I’d buy soy milk, get bigger shrimp, and make more and bigger yuba sticks. They were good.

We’re at the stunning, non-vegetarian conclusion of the Chickpea, Butternut, and Lamb meal. The lamb in this case is in the form of a kebab. When I was younger, kebab meant cubes of meat threaded onto a skewer between chunks of tomatoes and onions. Those kebabs are good, but I’ve learned that the term kebab opens up to a world of flavorful creations in many forms. This could mean chunks of meat, like the aforementioned cubes on a skewer, but the ground meat possibilities are even more interesting. Sure, you could have ground meat on a skewer, but it could also be baked in a pan, or made into patties and fried. In learning about Indian cuisine, I’ve encountered all 3, and I would be hard-pressed to pick my favorite kebab archetype. Today, we’ll focus on ground meat, heavily seasoned, fried in a pan.

Since we’re dealing with Indian food, and most Indians don’t eat beef, the primary red meat source is going to be lamb (and goat). You could certainly do this recipe with beef or any other ground meat. The recipe I’m using is from “From Curries to Kebabs” by Madhur Jaffrey. This book, as you may guess from its title, has a number of kebab recipes from many parts of the world. I really like the original recipe, which calls for mint, but I had cilantro on hand. That’s the only change from the original recipe.

There are a couple of interesting parts to this recipe, different from many other “meatball” recipes I’ve encountered. First, the meat is mixed with the seasonings and left to mature for up to a day. From my experience in trying to rush things, this appears to accomplish a few goals. The meat breaks down a little, thanks in part to the salt, which gives the kebab a smoother texture, and allows the meat the ability to bind together without much help from, say, an egg. The recipe recommends serving with thinly sliced onions and mint chutney.

Lamb “Galavat” Kebabs (Galavat Kabab)
Meat & Seasonings
1 pound ground lamb
1T finely chopped fresh mint leaves (I used about 2T cilantro)
1 1/2 T peeled, grated ginger
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 1/2 t garam masala
1 t cayenne pepper
1 t salt
1/2 t finely chopped fresh rosemary (optional)

Binding & Frying
Peanut or corn oil for shallow frying
1 medium onion, sliced into fine half-rings
4 t chickpea flour
4 t plain yogurt
2 T kewra (screw pine) water (optional)

1. Put the meat in a bowl.
2. Add all the rest of the seasoning ingredients and mix well.
3. Cover and refrigerate for 3 to 24 hours.
4. Pour oil in a medium pan to a depth of 1/8 inch and heat over medium-high heat.
5. When the oil is hot, put in the onion and fry, stirring, turning the heat down as needed, until the slices are reddish-brown and crisp (they will crisp more as they drain). This will take 10-12 minutes.
6. Remove the slices with a slotted spoon, saving all the oil left behind in the pan, and spread on paper towels to drain.
7. Once the onions have drained and cooled, crumble or chop finely (or put them in a clean coffee grinder) and add to the meat mixture.
8. Toast the chickpea flour in a small heavy-bottomed pan and add to the meat mixture.
9. Add the yogurt to the meat mixture and mix well.
10. Wet your hands (with the kewra water, if using) and form about 20 meatballs, flatten slightly into patties.
11. Strain the oil used from frying the onions and add additional oil to a depth of 1/4 inch.
12. Heat pan over medium-low.
13. When hot, add as many kebabs as will fit in a single layer, fry 2-3 minutes on each side or until reddish-brown.
14. Drain on paper towels.

The kebabs come out crunchy on the surface with a soft, moist interior. They go great with any Indian bread, but we usually serve rice.

I love Indian food. I can’t get enough of it. One of my favorite things about Indian cuisine is that a lot of it was borne out of poor circumstances. Many dishes evolved in times where there wasn’t refrigeration, thus strong flavors were used to trick the senses. Likewise, a lot of the cuisine is very inexpensive to produce. I love the bold flavors, the colors, the aromas. It may take some time and some work. You may have to go out to stores you haven’t been in before to pick up spices you’ve never used. If your impression of curry relies on a pale yellow curry powder from the supermarket, you’re probably missing out on a world of flavors.

When cooking for my family, I try to be conscious of choosing healthy options and a wide range of foods. These days, for health and cost reasons, I’m trying to incorporate more vegetarian items into our menu. One popular staple in the house is the chickpea, also known as a garbanzo bean. Of all the lentils and beans available, I think they are one of the “meatiest.” They are available dried and canned, but I find the canned tend to have an off, metallic flavor and tend to break down too easily. Dried chickpeas are great (and much cheaper), but they do take a LONG time to cook. My method is as follows:

For 1c dried chickpeas (yields a little over 2c cooked)

1. Rinse the dried legumes with plenty of cool water, checking for rocks.
2. Put into a bowl and soak them overnight, at least 8 hours, no more than 24.
3. Drain and rinse with cool water.
4. Put in a crock pot, cover with 1.5 inches of water, and cook on low for 8-12 hours.
5. Drain and use in any recipe as you would canned chickpeas, or store in the refrigerator, covered in the cooking liquid, for up to a week.

Chickpeas cooked this way are tender, but firm. At this point, they can be fried, mashed, or cooked in a sauce for another few hours, which is what I’m usually doing anyway. If you want meltingly-soft chickpeas, you can cook them longer, or cook them on the high temperature of your crock pot.

The chickpeas I made tonight are from a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey’s book, From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail titled “Easy Chickpea Curry”. Since it’s such a flavorful dish, canned chickpeas would be fine, but I really prefer the texture of home-cooked. The “easy” in this recipe comes from a long list of ingredients that just get blended together, no need to carefully chop onions, garlic, ginger, etc. Here’s an abbreviated, annotated version of that recipe:

Easy Chickpea Curry
by Madhur Jaffrey
(serves 4 to 6)

2c drained chickpeas

Curry Paste
2 smallish tomatoes (about 8 ounces), chopped (I used a half-can of diced tomatoes)
2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and chopped
4 cloves garlic, chopped
3 to 6 fresh hot green chilies, chopped
1c cilantro tops, chopped (save some for garnish later)
1T ground coriander
2t ground cumin
1/2t ground turmeric
1/2t cayenne pepper
1 1/4t salt

3T oil
1 medium stick of cinnamon
5 whole cardamom pods
2 bay leaves
1c finely chopped onion
2 medium potatoes (about 9 ounces), peeled and cut into 3/4-inch dice

Put all the Curry Paste ingredients (from the tomatoes to the salt) in a blender with 5-6T water and blend until smooth.

1. Heat the oil over medium-high heat in a wide, lidded, medium pan. When hot, put in the cinnamon, cardamom, and bay leaves.
2. When they start to color, in about 10 seconds, add the onion and potatoes.
3. Stir and fry for about 6 minutes, or until the onion is lightly browned.
4. Add the curry paste and stir for a minute (deglaze the pan, scraping any stuck bits).
5. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook for 6-7 minutes, stirring occasionally.
6. Add 1c of water and the chickpeas
7. Stir and bring to a simmer, cover and cook 20 minutes for canned chickpeas, up to an hour for homemade.

I like to serve this with rice, garnished with a little finely chopped fresh cilantro.

You’ll see the other components of tonight’s meal over the next few posts. If you try the recipes I write about here, let me know how they turn out. If you have any questions about any of the ingredients or techniques I use, leave a comment and I’ll make sure to respond.