Welcoming the Year of the Pig!

Last night was the opening of the week long celebration of Chinese New Year and ushered in the Year of the Pig. Babies born during this year will be gifted with extra luck and wealth, according to the ancient beliefs in Chinese astronomy.

In celebration, this week all of my posts will be relating to the Chinese kitchen, including answers to burning questions emailed to me by curious readers.

More Peas, Please!

It used to be that I hated peas.

I think it had to do with being forced to eat mushy, olive-drab, tinny-tasting canned peas with pearl onions as a child. Or worse, garden fresh or frozen peas cooked into a similar state of squishy, dull-green death. These poor malignantly mistreated morsels of former vegetation were regularly dropped on my plate in a pool of melted, liberally salted margarine, and to this day, I shudder just thinking about them.

For years, the only way I would willingly eat garden peas was either fresh off the vine and raw, when I would eat them pod and all, “like a rabbit,” as Grandpa would say, or frozen peas from the garden simply thawed and not heated up in any way. The latter was because I liked the fresh green flavor and did not trust my relatives to not cook the poor things into squicky oblivion.

To this day, I will do anything to avoid canned peas, as I believe they are a food fit for the denizens of hell, and I still do not love peas in most any other form, other than snow peas or snap peas. I will eat them if they are presented to me in order to be polite, but I will not generally go out of my way to either cook or eat plain old garden peas.

Morganna, who grew up with similarly abused peas at the tables of her grandmothers’ homes, has a similar aversion to them.

Which is a shame, because garden peas are one of Zak’s favorite vegetables, and in fact, is one of the original handful of vegetables that he ate when I met him.

So, inspired by the reading I have been doing on the net and in cookbooks on the foods of southern India, and by the recipes of Indira, my good friend from Mahanandi, I decided to give peas another try by treating them the way an Indian cook might.

I followed no recipe, but instead improvised with the techniques and ingredients I have learned from my research and reading, and came up with a simple, quick to prepare dish that all three of us could not only eat, but enjoy and yes, even relish.

The slightly bitter, somewhat musky flavor of the curry leaves really accents the sweetness of the peas, without allowing their sugary quality to take over the dish. The dalia powder not only thickens the sauce, binding the peas and flavorings together, but gives a nutty richness to the dish, while the reddish caramelized onion and garlic give a browned sweet savor to the curry. The cumin complements the musky bitterness of the curry leaves, while the mustard seeds synergize with the chilies to give the peas a warmth that spreads over the tongue and tingles at the back of the throat.

I can’t believe it–I ate two helpings of these peas and even wanted more! Hence the name I have given them….

I cannot wait until this spring and early summer to try this recipe with some verdant, fresh from the garden beauties.

Moreish Indian Garden Peas

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons ghee
1 small onion, thinly sliced
3 fresh curry leaves
2 fresh thai chilies, red or green, thinly sliced
3/4″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
1 teaspoon whole mustard seeds
1 clove garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
1 8 ounce bag frozen peas, partially thawed
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 tablespoons dalia powder (Indira’s Magic Powder)
salt to taste
1/4 cup minced fresh mint leaves

Method:

Heat ghee in a cast iron skillet that is big enough to hold all of the peas.

Cook the onion in it until it is golden brown, then add the curry leaves, chilies and ginger. Keep cooking, stirring, another minute or so, then add the whole spices and the garlic slices. Cook, stirring, until the mustard seeds begin to pop.

Add the frozen peas, and stir to cool the pan down slightly, to keep the spices from overcooking and becoming bitter. Add the water, the turmeric and the dalia powder and cook, stirring, until most of the water cooks away and the curry sauce thickens. Do not cook too along; allow the peas to retain their brilliant color, popping texture and sweet flavor.

Salt to taste and just before serving, stir in the mint leaves.

Variation: I think you could put red or orange bell pepper bits, diced very small (brunoise), into this curry after the peas and have another source of sweetness and a contrasting color and texture in the dish.

Confessions of an Alpha Cook

As a special Valentine’s Day treat, the New York Times printed an article entitled, “He Cooks. She Stews. It’s Love.”

Basically, it is about the power struggles married or cohabiting couples experience in the kitchen when it comes to daily meal preparation, cleanup, entertaining and just plain chores. Naming the primary cook in a couple the “alpha cook,” and the other member of the couple the “beta cook” (at least they didn’t adopt the newly trendy parlance of BDSM and call them “tops” and “bottoms”), the article stated that what often happens is that despite the fact that many beta cooks have perfectly adequate cooking skills, they often get treated to a litany of criticism, humiliation and impatience by the alpha cook to the point that many of them retreat from the kitchen altogether. (Hrmm. Maybe that BSDM lingo is more appropriate than it first seems.)

And, while there were a few examples of female alphas and male betas, most of the article focused on alpha male behavior in the kitchen and how tiresome and destructive it can be. One male alpha cook even stated: “Men have gotten better at cooking, and that’s all positive,” Mr. Richman said. “But men can’t share. If you can find a man who’s O.K. with a woman being in charge in the kitchen, tell any woman to marry him immediately.”

Whoa. Dude. Whatever happened to equality? You know, share and share alike?

And what a switch from Betty Friedan’s 1950’s when women were expected to have dinner on the table every night for her husband, as well as being “the hostess with the mostess” while her husband might be trusted to pour drinks and grill saurian-sized slabs of meat over a charcoal fire.I mean, which is worse–being expected to be the chief cook and cleanup crew, day in and day out, while getting accolades from the guests on the delectable feasts prepared, or being the unappreciated prep cook and dishwasher who is never appreciated by the guests, the host or anyone?

I can’t even begin to figure that one out.

However, it isn’t like I have one ounce of room to talk.

I admit to being an alpha cook, big time, however, I do attempt to moderate my critiques of those who graciously help out in the kitchen.

But what about Zak, my beloved soulmate husband? Is he the beta cook?

Hardly, though at one time he did try the job out for size.

Back about eight years ago, when I was successfully teaching culinary arts publicly and privately, he decided to become a student of mine. We decided we would use the dinner prep hours three times a week so he could learn how to cook.

It was an utter and complete disaster, and not because of Zak.

It was because of me.

In the classroom, and among the private students who came to my home for lessons, I was known as the soul of patience, wit, and generosity who would not hesitate to demonstrate a particularly tricky technique fifty two times if I had to, and who would answer as many questions as it took to get a point across. I was praised in evaluation forms as being a font of knowledge and creativity who always inspired her students to keep trying new techniques, recipes and ingredients, all with good humor and self-deprecation.

Well, I would like to say I was the same way with Zak, but I am ashamed to admit that I wasn’t.

I was impatient. I would show Zak a technique, and when he didn’t get it right away, I would sigh and roll my eyes. Zak’s culinary timidity did not help the situation, but it was mostly my own fault. He would struggle to cut vegetables precisely enough to stir fry evenly, and instead of just accepting imperfection, and being patient with the fact that he was slow at cutting, I would end up doing most of the cutting myself without giving him a chance to learn.

I discovered that trying to teach someone while I am hungry and attempting to cook dinner after a long day of personal cheffing or teaching was not a good idea. It brought out every ounce of my own native impatience, bossiness, and every insufferable quality I had witnessed among male chefs and culinary students during my education, and I didn’t like it.

As much as I disliked it, Zak hated it, and he put down his knife in frustration one night and has seldom picked it up since.

Even now, he will cook with Morganna, but not with me, and I have no one but myself to blame for that.

As for Morganna, after my failed experiment in teaching Zak, I have learned to be more patient in the kitchen, even when I am cooking dinner and starving. She is growing quite well into a budding culinary artist, though she has her own alpha cook shadow to confront. I have caught her now and again bossing around her friends mercilessly in the kitchen and have intervened. Once, she even had the temerity to snap at me that I was in her way in the kitchen.

I mildly smiled and informed her that a chef is never in the way in her own kitchen.

But, even as I try very hard to be quiet and compassionate in my kitchen, even as I am dismembering vegetables and dead animals and frying them or otherwise exposing them to soaring flames, I am told by my father in law that I am one of the most intimidating persons he knows, especially in the kitchen. And, I will admit to, even recently, (at Morganna’s birthday party last month) barking at Karl to not argue with me over how chafing dishes work, since I was the one who used to be a caterer, while he only used to be a doctor. He forgave me though, taking into account that I was feeding over twenty people an Indian feast of over twelve dishes and three desserts.

I have learned, however, that rather than accept help in the kitchen from others, sometimes it is just best to refuse politely, and do it myself. When Karl was visiting with his father last month, I was preparing a Chinese meal with homestyle bean curd and stir fried mixed vegetables. When Karl asked if he could help me prep anything, I smiled and said, “I love you, but no, thank you.”

I would have been fine if I had stopped there. Instead, out burst from my mouth, “This cutting requires precision, and as much as I love you, you are not precise.”

Sigh.

At least Karl took it well, with a laugh and a smile. He knew I didn’t mean it in any unkind way; I was just being honest. Maybe a bit more honest than perfect politeness required, but well, I am not perfect.

I guess I need to keep struggling to keep my alpha cook tendencies at bay. (Thank goodness for my study of Zen, the exercise of mindfulness. It helps. A lot.)

So, now that I have made my own confession, what about the rest of you? Any alpha cooks out there? How alpha are you?

And you betas–speak up, too. I want to hear from everyone.

Especially those of you who somehow manage to work and play well with others without falling into either category.

Variations on Chinese Recipes

Most of the recipes presented on this blog are ones that either are, or have become, favorites at my house, and they turn into standards that live in my head, and I no longer have to seek the written recipe in order to recreate them.

However, these recipes do not stay static. I do not make them the same every time, because I may not always have the necessary ingredients on hand, I may be cooking for people with different food preferences, or I just want to try something different.

Sometimes, I just happen to have some vegetables in the fridge that need to be cooked, and so into the pot or wok they go.

And, more often than not, the variant recipes come up because of a combination of the reasons cited above.

But, for whatever reason, I have some notes on how to make variations on several of my Chinese recipes, and I wanted to share them with you all, in one post, because none of the variations are substantial enough to warrant a single post on their own. But, in combination, they may help inspire readers to free their woks and minds and cook up some new Chinese dishes in their own kitchens.

The dish photographed above is a very simple variation on the classic Cantonese Chicken with Bitter Melon. With the classic dish, you get pretty much what it says: chicken and bitter melon. All the other ingredients are aromatics meant to flavor the light sauce and complement the costarring foods. For this variation, which I poetically like to call, “Phoenix with Two Colors of Jade,” I used the basic recipe with one simple addition: an orange sweet bell pepper, sliced thinly, and it turned out magnificently.

The texture and translucent color of the pepper matched those qualities in the melon, while the mouthfeel was slightly softer. What really made it wonderful was that the sweetness of the pepper was a perfect foil to the melon, without adding extra sweetness to the sauce.

I added the pepper near the end of the cooking, within the last minute, so that it didn’t get too soft or soggy.

Another great favorite recipe in my household is Ma Po Tofu, and is one that normally I would not play around with overmuch. However, last week, when the snow was deep, and the temperatures were below freezing, we had house guests in the persons of our dear friends Dan and Heather, who were escaping frozen pipes and a long drive to their place in the country. Heather is a Muslim, and thus cannot eat pork; if you are familiar with my recipe for Ma Po, you will remember that I use minced pork in it. Since it is the perfect recipe to warm the heart and stomach on a blustery night, I decided to go ahead and make it anyway. But instead of leaving the meat out of it entirely, I substituted ground lamb instead.

Lamb is not a meat one thinks of as a Chinese staple, but it is eaten often in the northern provinces, and is a staple among the Muslim population all over the country, so there was precedent for my choice.

The only other changes I made was I added two more cloves of garlic, a teaspoon more of fermented black beans and I was extra special careful to cook all the alcohol from the Shao Hsing wine out of the dish.

How was it?

Amazingly flavorful to the point where I cannot decide which I like better. Zak came down on the side of pork (no big surprise, as he is a big fan of the pig) and Morganna on the side of the lamb. Me, I am somewhere in the middle on the issue, and will have to give it much more thought.

Based on this experience, I am going to have to make a batch of lamb potstickers soon, just to, you know, see how they taste.

As much as I love Beef with Gai Lan, and every variant I have made of it, sometimes I don’t want meat for dinner. Sometimes I want tofu, but I don’t want it mixed with vegetables. So, what do I do in that case? Braise the bean curd, as in Peng’s Bean Curd Homestyle, and stir fry up some greens, especially gai lan, at least when I can get a hold of it.

For stir-fried gai lan, I follow the first recipe for beef with gai lan, except that I obviously leave out the beef and the marinade for the beef. To the aromatics (scallion, ginger and garlic) I add a tablespoon of fermented black beans, which counteract the slight bitterness that is inherent to gai lan. I use dark soy sauce, and instead of fresh water chestnuts, I usually use red bell pepper. The sweetness of it goes very well with both the gai lan and the oyster sauce, and the brilliant scarlet color contrasts beautifully with the emerald green leaves and jade stalks.

There, then are three variations on three of my favorite recipes. I hope that this shows that if you learn the basic underlying techniques of Chinese stir-frying, that one is then free to either customize classic favorite dishes, or come up with your own combinations which, in the coming years, may become classics within your families.

The Best Recipe for Culinary Cultural Imperialism

You know, I should just stop picking up Cook’s Illustrated Magazine.

I should know better by now.

I should know by now that the authoritative tone that their writers take works my very last nerve. I should know that, while their recipes are researched and tested obsessively and thus WILL work, most of them are bland and boring beyond belief. I should know by now that I disagree with most of their taste test reports and opinions on which cooking tools are the best; in America’s Test Kitchen, cheap tends to win out over good.

And I damned well should know better than to even look any Asian recipes that their writers decide to analyze. I have yet to read one recently which wasn’t buggered up in some way or another.
But, I get sucked in by the pretty cover paintings, and pluck the magazine from the stands and flip through it. Most of the time I put it back down again, but sometimes I see something that just burns me up, like this month.

I feel stupid about being so angry, because I should know by now that my cooking philosophy, particularly when it comes to ethnic cuisines, is antithetical to the whole nature of the magazine. Cook’s Illustrated’s raison d’etre is to present foolproof recipes. Not only are they rigorously tested such that they can be made by anyone who knows which end of the knife is the pointy one, but they will also appeal to whoever eats them, without unduly challenging anyone’s taste preferences.

That’s fine when they are covering American regional or European-based classic recipes like meatloaf, brownies, pumpkin pie, pot roast and lasagne. There is a need for recipes which any competent cook can use to create old favorites which will not fail them, time after time. Most home cooks don’t have time to fiddle with recipes and get them to work right, so America’s Test Kitchen does the work for them. That’s great. I applaud them.

I also support the sense of scientific inquiry that the recipe testers and writers bring to their investigations. As someone who can geek about food science all day and all night, who loves to use her knowledge of chemistry and physics in the kitchen to good effect, I can really get behind the careful analysis that each recipe undergoes before it is published. My nickname is the Culinary Nerd, after all.

However, the way in which Asian recipes are treated in this magazine never fails to set my teeth on edge.

It is one thing to experiment and play around with a recipe in the quest to simplify it and make it your own. However, when one violates the spirit of the cuisine in order to create a dish which no longer really resembles the original–that is culinary cultural imperialism. Instead of stretching their readers’ experience, the editors strip the unfamiliar, foreign foods of nearly everything unfamiliar or foreign; It’s much like when Chinese restaurateurs changed the perfectly respectable Cantonese chow mein into the strange glop that came to be called chow mein, with one significant difference: The choice isn’t being made by Chinese cooks in order to survive, it’s a change wrought by American writers for the sake of convenience, at best.

One of the main reasons the magazine gives for changing ethnic recipes is in order to allow an average American cook to make these dishes with ingredients found in typical American grocery stores. Apparently, typical American cooks cannot be bothered to frequent ethnic grocery stores. Or get ingredients online. Or, really, do much of anything that keeps them from going up and down the same grocery aisles, literally and figuratively. This shows that the editors have a pretty dim view of the American cook, and, what’s worse, they reinforce this parochial view.

One of the latest issues (February 2007) contained the straws that broke this camel’s back: two of my favorite dishes, one Thai and one Sichuan, are featured and, as usual, are turned into pale imitations of themselves. What I found perhaps more infuriating than the way the recipes were watered down was the more than vaguely patronizing way in which the foods themselves were described.

For their bastardization of Sichuan green beans, the editors chose these sentences as a subtitle: “This tangy, spicy dish offers an exotic change of pace from everyday green beans. We set out to overhaul its foreign ingredient list and simplify a troublesome technique.”

Every time Cook’s Illustrated writes about Asian food, the stuff is described as “exotic.”

Don’t believe me? Well, how about we take a peek at the subtitle for the tom kha gai recipe from the same issue: “Authentic Thai chicken soup gains complex flavor in minutes via a handful of exotic ingredients. Could supermarket substitutes deliver comparable results?”

And then, I look at the March 2007 issue and see that there is a recipe for “Chinese Barbecued Pork at Home.”

Would CI’s editors think of a better word than “exotic” to describe Asian foods? I hoped so. But, alas, no; the subtitle reads: “These lacquered strips of pork look exotic, but the meat is actually barbecued in the oven, making it an ideal candidate for home-cooking, in theory, at least.”

Why do you think this might rub me the wrong way? Here’s a suggestion that should clear things up: Step away from your computer, and tell an Asian woman of your acquaintance (or, if you lack same, the next Asian woman you run across) that she looks, “so exotic.” Note the reaction, then return and finish reading. I’ll wait.

Not only are Asian foods exotic, but, they are “foreign” and “troublesome,” and only easy “in theory.”

Those sentences smack of xenophobia. Not only is the use of “exotic” over and over in the descriptions offensive and redundant–the recipes are generally useless if one wants to actually make Asian food that tastes, well, you know, Asian. CI doesn’t increase appreciation of Asian cuisines, they reinforce fear of unfamiliar techniques and flavors.

And it seems to really only be Asian recipes that suffer from the “exotic” treatment. When Italian recipes are covered in Cook’s Illustrated, they are not described in a dismissive, condescending fashion. The authors simply present easier ways to create classic recipes, without removing every element of the recipes that make them recognizably Italian. The garlic is still present, olive oil is not replaced with canola, and milk is still used to make ground meats in pasta sauces tender. With Italian recipes, what the writers do is give readers step-by-step methods to create good versions of classic dishes in their homes.

This is perfectly laudable, and is akin to the way in which Julia Child made French cookery accessible to Americans back in the 1960’s. Julia’s philosophy was not that French food was mysterious or impossibly difficult for Americans to learn; it was simply unfamiliar. She gave Americans the cultural knowledge and techniques they needed to learn how to make authentic French foods in their homes by showing them that if she could do it, so could they.

However, the ways in which they remove much that is culturally unique about the Asian dishes they cover, are disrespectful to these cuisines and are distinctly not in the same spirit which Julia Child exemplified.

(What is really odd about this editorial xenophobia and policy of dumbing down Asian recipes is that it is fairly recent; in looking back over about a decade’s worth of back issues, I found that in August 2005, Thai Chile Beef was considered “exotic.” However, in 2002, both Pad Thai and Kung Pao Shrimp were presented with perfectly respectable recipes that included authentic ingredients with nary an “exotic” in sight. On the other hand, in 2001, Sichuan Noodles were “demystified” by being made “without exotic ingredients.” Perhaps what is recent isn’t the xenophobia, but instead a certain editorial laziness when it comes to finding different ways to say, “exotic.” Maybe I should send the editorial team a thesaurus.)

Back to the February 2007 issue: for the tom kha gai recipe, the author says you cannot substitute for galangal, lemongrass and lime leaves because it won’t taste right. But he then goes on to suggest replacing galangal–which by the way, is the dominate flavor in the soup, “kha” being Thai for “galangal–” with ginger, which he admits is not ideal. He does say that you have to use lemongrass instead of lemon zest (good for him), and extols the virtues of lime leaves vs. lime zest. But, due to how hard it is to find all of these ingredients, he suggest that the home cook use a mere two teaspoons of Thai red curry paste, “because it contains all of these ingredients” along with shallots, lemon grass, fish sauce and coconut milk. That way, he can avoid using ginger for the galangal, and produce a soup that “tasted every bit as good as that served at my local Thai restaurant.”

Wow. Two teaspoons of red curry paste substituting for fragrant fresh or frozen galangal (which are pretty easy to find in Asian markets, but then, that would necessitate going into one) and lime leaves make a really great tom kha gai? That can only be the case if your local Thai restaurant sucks.

I mean, I use a bit of red curry paste (usually homemade, but not always) in my own tom kha gai, but that is not -instead- of the fresh ingredients. It is -in addition to- the fresh ingredients, just to give the soup a little extra kick. Sure galangal, lime leaves and lemon grass are in the curry paste, but they are in such small amounts that it is utterly laughable to see two teaspoons of canned paste substituting for them in a recipe that purports to be as good as what one can get in a Thai restaurant.

Look, even if you don’t have a local Asian grocery store, you can buy fresh galangal, lime leaves, lemongrass and Thai bird chiles online at Thai Grocer. I have ordered from them several times and their quality is exceptional, and they have recently added new vegetables and herbs to their offerings.

As for the Sichuan Green Beans recipe–oy. First, the author tried to avoid using Sichuan preserved vegetables by substituting dill pickles. Then, she claimed to have discovered the way to cook the beans that avoided deep frying them–by using the technique of dry frying. I think she meant “discovered” in the same way that Columbus “discovered” America. Much as America was pretty well known to the millions of folks already living there, so dry-frying was more than passingly familiar to the home cooks of Sichuan who have been dry frying green beans for generations. I mean, how hard would it have been for her to try looking up some authentic recipes from a respected source like Fuchsia Dunlop and then find some sources for authentic ingredients online to help her readers make a dish that is not some jack-leg shadow of the real thing?

But, I guess that is just not what the magazine is all about. Based on what I’ve read, it is all about “do it yourself” kitchen discoveries, with a generous helping of culinary cultural imperialism on the side.

Needless to say, I am not going to bother buying Cook’s Illustrated ever again, even if I do like their Brown Sugar Cookie recipe in the March 2007 issue.

Note: I would like to thank Zak, my beloved husband, for his editorial assistance in writing this post.