Panang Curry

I frequently go to the huge Korean supermarket near my house.  A few weeks ago, my husband found out about Great Wall, a nearby Chinese supermarket.  We both love dumplings, and he was told that Great Wall had some of the best.  Like any good little compulsive shopper, I went in looking for dumplings and came out with all kinds of extra stuff, including some panang curry paste.  I love ordering panang curry in Thai restaurants and wanted to try making it myself.  The result was so good that it's in my regular rotation now!

Yes, I know that's more than one standard service of rice.  

Tangy Bean Thread Noodles with Cilantro and Lime

Bean thread noodles are what I buy by accident when what I really meant to buy were rice stick noodles.  So they tend to accumulate in the back of my pantry.  Quick and Easy Thai is one of my favorite cookbooks, but I tend to make the same handful of recipes over and over.  I was cleaning out my pantry and found yet another bag of neglected bean thread noodles and found something to make with them.  This dish was pretty quick to make, except for the 1,000 years it takes to prep the cilantro.  I don't like the stems very much so I end up having to take all the leaves off and it takes forever.  I know I should attempt to embrace the stems because it would make my life easier.  But I just can't do it.

We didn't eat this dish as directed.  It's supposed to cool to room temperature.  This was so quick to make because we started dinner late, we were starving, and we wanted to eat ASAP so we could play computer games.  It's also supposed to be eaten with lettuce leaves.  Oops.

That said, the noodles were quite tasty!  They were what I consider to be mildly spicy and what normal human beings would probably consider to be moderately spicy.  The lime juice was significantly more noticeable than I expected.  I figured it would be barely there, maybe the fish sauce helped it out.  I'm definitely going to make them again.  Maybe if I'm not super hungry I'll actually follow the instructions for eating them.

Take note of this artistic presentation.  It'll be all the rage in New York by next week.  

Agedashi Tofu

I've loved agedashi tofu since I first had it back in law school.  It's pretty easy to make at home.  I use instant dashi instead of making my own from scratch.  It's easier, faster, and I can make mine more mild because I don't like the strong bonito flavor of full-strength dashi.  I've made this dish many times, and it's really important to get the silken tofu, it makes a huge difference.  Wegman's doesn't usually carry it and so I've substituted soft and firm and it will work, but if you can get silken tofu, it's worth it.  For this batch, I stopped by my local Korean supermarket and got some silken tofu.  The tofu is lightly crunchy on the outside and the silken tofu melted in my mouth.  The garnishes are a nice touch.  I used daikon, ginger, green onions, and a mix of basil and mint.  I served this with a side salad and some left over Asian style slaw.

Success! Mushroom Crusted Rockfish with Asian Coleslaw

A local restaurant that I really love makes amazing mushroom crusted fish.  I finally decided to try to make my own without a recipe!  I worked off my basic panko crusted fish recipe, but added some shiitake mushrooms to the panko mix.  Instead of using a lemon and caper sauce, I sauteed a random shallot I had sitting around and put it on top of the fish.  I made some Asian coleslaw with miso dressing to go with it. The slaw has a tasty dressing and a second sauce would have ruined the it.  The panko mushroom mixture browned nicely and the panko stayed crunchy even with the addition of mushrooms. It was the best of both worlds, a nice shiitake flavor but still crispy.

If you have a partner who is not a fan of mushrooms, this dish might be a good way to sneak some in because the flavor isn't overwhelmingly mushroomy. ;)

The Asian coleslaw was fantastic and went really well with the fish.  The dressing was tangy but not overpowering. There also wasn't a ton of it so it didn't make the bottom of the fish too soggy.With only one tablespoon of mayo for 6-8 servings, this salad is pretty healthy!  If you make extra dressing, maybe don't put the fish on top of the slaw.  If you're making both dishes, make the coleslaw first, the fish doesn't take very long.

The Asian Coleslaw is also quite pretty. 

Stir Fried Pork with Garlic Scapes

A few weeks ago, my husband and I visited my in-laws.  They took us to the West Side Market and I bought some garlic scapes on a whim.  I'd never cooked them before, but my mother in law said they were pretty awesome.  She suggested that they would taste good with pork.  I looked all over the internet for a tasty sounding pork and garlic scape recipe and stumbled across this one from Tigers and Strawberries, one of my favorite cooking blogs.  I'm sad that it hasn't been updated in a while, I've tried so many of her recipes!  I modified this one a little because I didn't have time to go to the grocery store and made it with what I had already.  So, no pressed tofu or dried mushrooms.  But it still worked out really well, and the garlic scapes really are quite tasty.  They have the consistency of Chinese long beans unless they're blanched.  I wanted a bit of a crunch, so I didn't bother.  They taste like garlic, but lighter and crunchy.

This dish is pretty quick to make if you marinate the pork and then chop everything while it's sitting in the fridge.

My frog chopstick rest is fabulous. 

Paper-Wrapped Chicken

This dish is probably in my top five list of most labor intensive dishes.  It looks cool, but it took a long time to assemble the packets, and I had help!  But, it was a fun step outside of my comfort zone.  Wait, what?  I'm supposed to wrap chicken in wax paper and then deep fry it in my wok?!  Uh...

Having never attempted anything like this before, I suspected that my neat little packets of chicken and veggies would turn into a peanut oil flavored mess wrapped in soggy wax paper. While some of the packets did get some oil in, most of them were fine! The marinated chicken was tender, the vegetables were flavorful and still had a little crunch to them, and the addition of some prosciutto to the packets was a nice way to add some saltiness.

Here they are before I fried them.  Packets filled with chicken, prosciutto, red chili, ginger, and cilantro.

Hot and Sour Soup!

A while back, I made some hot and sour soup from Williams Sonoma's Soup.  It was "meh."  Kind of bland.  It seemed like it was trying to capture the flavor of hot and sour soup without authentic ingredients.  The broth was very thin, and the "hot" and "sour" aspects were very, very faint.

Then, I tried Ken Hom's recipe.  This is an entirely different animal.  The broth has the right consistency.  The flavors are punchy, the mushrooms provide a great texture, and the egg is done right.  This soup tastes like what I've eaten at my favorite Chinese restaurants.  It doesn't take very long to make.

I was so happy that this looked like the real thing!

Dinner FAIL (Dan Dan Noodles)

I love dan dan noodles.  So, when I saw Martin Yan's recipe in my copy of Feast, I was eager to try it out.  However, I made one critical mistake.  I saw "sesame paste" in the ingredient list and figured hey, tahini is sesame paste, right? Wrong.  Well, yes, tahini is sesame paste.  But, it's not the same thing as East Asian sesame paste, as I was about to discover upon eating my rather unappetizing looking creation.  The sauce smelled quite good when it was sitting harmlessly in a bowl.  Sesame, soy sauce, and  hint of spice.  But, as soon as I cooked in the work with the chicken, it became a gooey, sticky mess.  It was even harder to toss it with the noodles.  But I soldiered on, determined to enjoy my noodles.  After taking a few bites, I found myself trying to like it, but the rational part of my mind realized that this was a massive dinner fail.  The tahini was too creamy, it felt like I had taken my noodles and smothered them in bleu cheese dressing.  The sesame taste was overpowering.  The texture was weird. And it just looked nasty. 

This does not look like the pictures on Google image search...

General Tso's Chicken

My husband and I are fighting the sick.  You know what's awesome when you're feeling crappy?  Chinese food!  Obviously, Chinese delivery or take out, because who wants to cook while sick?  I made this dish a few days ago, but it seems appropriate to post about now, since I had Chinese for lunch.  I think only college students do Chinese food twice in one day, so my post from tonight's dinner will probably be Easy Soup That Requires Minimal Effort.     

Appetite for China never fails to provide awesome Chinese recipes!  This recipe for General Tso's tastes like the real thing (well, as "real" as I've ever had, which isn't saying a lot).  The original recipe called for chicken thighs, which I'll use next time, but for this batch I used chicken breast and it worked fine. 

This is much better than grocery store buffet General Tso's because even though it's fried, the batter is light and the chicken pieces aren't gristly or fatty. I doubled the sauce (which is reflected in the recipe below), and used chili garlic sauce instead of chili paste, which I couldn't get.  The extra sauce is great on rice! The tomato paste makes it tangy, the sugar adds a little sweetness, but I added some extra chilis for a kick. Not only is this good, it's easy.  I don't make a lot of fried crispy food, but I'll definitely keep this recipe around for when I do!  I served it with some steamed broccoli like in Chinese take out. 

Success! Pork, Ginger, and Cabbage Stir Fry

Tonight the plan was to make a ginger and carrot stir fry dish that Dave and I enjoy when we don't have a lot of time to cook, but want a healthy dinner.  Too bad I forgot to buy carrots.   The rice was already cooked, so I felt pretty committed to a stir fry over rice dish.  I improvised, and it turned out really well! 

There isn't a lot in our fridge right now, we've got a lot of dinner plans in the next few days that don't involve cooking at my house.  I found some random ground pork in the freezer.  I decided to use the giant piece of ginger that I bought for the original stir fry.  The only vegetables in the fridge were half a red cabbage, a few sickly looking scallions, an almost used up head of garlic, and an onion that was past its sell by date.  I ended up using everything but the onion. 

My first notion for the sauce was to do a variant on potsticker sauce.  We make it all the time and it's super tasty.  Then Dave suggested a spicier sauce.  

The verdict: success!  The ginger and red cabbage softened in the wok, but were still crunchy enough to add some texture to the dish.  The ginger was very powerful, I'd probably use a little less next time.  The sauce went perfectly with the pork and veggies, it was the right combination of tangy and spicy.  I would definitely make this again.  I'm happy that I improvised something tasty from an almost empty fridge. 

Colorful and tasty!

Chicken Noodle Curry with Fried Noodle Cakes

This is seriously hands down the best Thai dish I make.  I first tried it a few years ago when I bought my copy of Quick & Easy Thai.  The cover of the book is a picture of this dish.  When I was learning to cook, this dish was intimidating.  The first few times I fried the noodles, I made a giant mess in my kitchen.  I think fire was involved at one point as well. 

I was drawn to the fried noodle cakes, they looked so...professional.  But the star of this dish is the curry broth.  The noodle cakes are simply a sauce-to-mouth vehicle, because this sauce is so good that you'll want to shovel it down in huge quantities.  I make extra sauce and noodle cakes.  The sauce is a great combination of coconut, lime juice, and spicy curry.  The lime juice is absolutely essential if you want this sauce to be amazing.  All of the garnishes work very well with the sauce, especially the shallots, definitely don't omit those. 

Green Chicken Curry with Zucchini

I'm still here!  I've made lots of tasty new dishes, but haven't had time to post until now.  I've been camped out on my couch reading the newest installment in my favorite book series, A Song of Ice and Fire.  A Dance with Dragons came out almost six years after the last book in the series; I've been waiting for a long time!  I'm finished reading it now, and can get back to writing about food. 

It's been a long time since I made a curry with coconut milk.  It's not the healthiest thing on earth, but it's soooo good.  This is a green curry with zucchini and chicken thigh meat from Quick & Easy Thai.  Normally, I use boneless skinless chicken breast, even when thigh meat is called for, but this time I decided to do what the recipe asked and use thigh meat.  I did remove the skin and cut off as much of the fat as I could, though.  The verdict: thigh meat is better!

I used to buy the small jar of Thai Kitchen green curry paste at Wegmans, but they stopped carrying it.  So I ended up going to the nearby Korean supermarket and buying the real deal.  My first lesson: the curry paste from the Korean market is significantly more spicy than the stuff I buy at Wegmans!  But, this curry still turned out really well.  It was spicy, but not overly so.  Usually, I make a side of rice to go with my curry, but it slipped my mind to put rice in the rice cooker until I was almost done.

This simple, quick curry is spicy, creamy, and filling.  I love zucchini so I enjoyed the flavor that it added.  The fresh basil adds a nice touch, but next time I'd consider adding some Vietnamese cilantro for a stronger, more lemony flavor. 

Mapo Ramen

Who didn't live on ramen in college?  You could eat ten meals for a dollar, and most of the time it was better than what they were serving in the cafeteria.  My 18 year old self didn't care that I was eating my monthly salt intake in one convenient, microwavable Styrofoam cup.  Technically, my first "cooking" happened while I made ramen in my dorm room during my freshman year of college.  I invented "gourmet ramen," which was a Styrofoam of instant ramen with one packet each of soy sauce and hot mustard from the previous night's Chinese delivery dinner. I think once I went so far as to get some scallions from the salad bar to put on my ramen after I nuked it. 

This ramen is different.  No super salty flavor pack or Styrofoam is involved. Oh, and it also tastes really good.  I've posted before about how much I love mapo tofu.  The same blog that created the awesome mapo tofu recipe I use added one for mapo ramen.  The thing I love about this dish is that it's a soup flavored like the spicy mapo tofu sauce I love so much.  Plus, it has noodles, and you can't go wrong with noodles.  This is enough food for a meal in itself. 

Yakisoba

At my grocery store, fresh Chinese noodles come in one pound packages, which is too much for two people.  So if I make noodles, I've always got half a pack sitting around.  This recipe from Harumi's Japanese Cooking is specifically described as a way to use up left over noodles, so I had to try it! Harumi's yakisoba recipe has a mild sauce, though you can spice it up by adding a splash or two of rice vinegar and a spoonful of Japanese or Chinese mustard.  Don't use yellow or Dijon mustard, it'll taste weird.

The noodles are supposed to be cooked until they're crispy, which takes a long time, at least it did for me.  The bok choy adds some extra crunch if the noodles don't cooperate.  I used baby bok choy, it comes in bunches of three and it was enough for two people.  Aside from cooking the noodles until crunchy, this dish is pretty quick!

A Japanese Meal

I bought Harumi's Japanese Cooking years ago, before I was ready to use it.  I was a little intimidated by the Japanese ingredients because I was still getting used to the idea that I could cook food that didn't get me a free ride in an ambulance.

I've been wanting to make chicken "kari kari" style from Harumi's Japanese Cooking for a long time.  But, I've never wanted to cut 1/2 cup worth of chives for one meal. Over the winter, I let my chives grow a little wild and they desperately needed a haircut.  So this was the perfect time to try it.  I needed a side dish, so I chose her green beans with black sesame sauce.  I also decided to toss in a Vietnamese appetizer because I wanted to try my new Vietnamese cilantro and I had rice paper in my pantry.  This meal was simple, healthy, and very, very good!  Leave out the Vietnamese summer roll and it can be made even more quickly. 

Mapo Tofu

Mapo tofu is a staple dish in my house; I've been making it since I found the recipe for it on Appetite for China.  It's really easy to buy some ground pork and freeze it in 6 oz portions.  Three of the ingredients (black bean paste, chili bean paste, and Sichuan peppercorns) require specialty shops, but they don't go bad for a long time, so one you've gotten them, you're fine.  I can never find fermented black beans, so I buy black bean paste from my local Korean supermarket.  I buy the chili bean paste there as well.  I get the Sichuan peppercorns from Penzeys.  The sauce is a great mix of spicy and savory, and the Sichuan peppercorn provides an interesting tingle on the tongue.  That said, don't overdo it with the peppercorns or your mouth will feel strange.  I don't think this dish is terribly wine friendly, so I drink almond milk with it.

Larb Mu, aka Holy ($*#&!@ This is Amazing!

One of my favorite Thai dishes is larb gai, a spicy ground chicken salad with lots of lime juice.  I came across a recipe for Larb Mu (pork instead of chicken) on Appetite for China and decided to give it a try.  HOLY CRAP THIS WAS AWESOME.  I'd never heard of toasted rice powder before, so I followed the instructions for making my own with some jasmine rice.  This salad tasted exactly like the larb gai I've had in Thai restaurants, except with pork.  It was the perfect mix of spicy, tangy, and minty.  The rice powder added some crunch and a tiny bit of toastiness.  If you make your own, make sure you grind the rice really well.  I had a few bits in mine that were a little too crunchy.   Aside from the chopping, this dish didn't take long to make because the herbs don't need to be chopped.  I made a half recipe for 2 people, but otherwise I didn't change anything.  Definitely have some extra lime wedges for squeezing after the salad is served.  When I make this again, I'll probably put some lettuce or cabbage under it and make less rice to serve on the side. 

Jade Chicken. Or, Why Fried Mint is Awesome

The first Asian cookbook I bought was Martin Yan's Quick and Easy.  Stir fry was one of the first cooking methods I attempted because it's quick and doesn't involve tons of prep work.  Initially, I failed to heat the oil hot enough, which resulted in below average stir fry.  Then, I read Yan's introduction in Quick and Easy and learned how to properly heat the oil to a high enough temperature.  Since I got a round bottomed wok, my stir fries are infinitely better.  If you have a gas stove, round bottomed woks are awesome. 

This recipe for Jade Chicken is one of the first stir fry dishes I ever made.  I still make it pretty often.  It's simple and the mixture of crispy fried mint and mint that was stirred into the sauce is unexpected and different.  The crispy fried mint is my favorite, and I usually make extra to put on top of the chicken.  The broccoli side dish is broccoli stir fried with ginger and Chinese cooking wine.  I love it because it takes 5 minutes to make.  Really.  5 minutes.  I make rice in my rice cooker, it's idiot proof and definitely one of my MVP kitchen appliances.  I'm not a huge fan of plain white rice, so I put a little rice vinegar in mine after I dish it out.

"Black" Sesame Otsu

This picture is a little grainy because I had to use my phone.  In a moment of genius, I left my camera open all night and the battery died. 

Dave and I both love soba noodles, so I'm always looking for new recipes that use them.  Tofu is a bonus, so this recipe for Black Sesame Otsu looked interesting.  I had no idea what an otsu was, but from what the internet tells me, it's a soba noodle salad with vegetables. 

Comparing my picture to the one on 101 cookbooks, it's clear that my tofu didn't brown properly.  This is something I need to work on.  Usually when I attempt to brown tofu, it inevitably sticks to the pan like hair gel to a Jersey Shore cast member.  I think it's because I turn my heat up too high and don't add enough oil to the pan.  Regardless, I've read up on it and hopefully it will work properly next time. 

I have black sesame seeds, but not enough for the 1/4 cup I needed to make the sesame paste.  I used regular sesame seeds mixed with some black ones for color.  All black seeds would have looked better.  I used more cayenne than the original recipe called for.  Unfortunately, I omitted the pine nuts from the paste.  I bought some, and then accidentally used all of them in another meal. 

Overall, this was a quick, easy vegetarian meal that was more filling than it looked.  The sesame paste was more flavorful than I expected, I normally consider sesame to be very overpowering, but I could taste the vinegar and cayenne pepper.  

Sichuan Wontons - These are Seriously Awesome!

Last night I made Pasta a la Stuff in a hurry and didn't feel like posting about it.  Instead, I'll post about something I made a few weeks ago that was awesome!  Dumplings and wontons are some of my favorite things to eat, but they're so time consuming!  Generally I like to make a big batch and then freeze some so that I can have them more than one night.  There's a restaurant near my office that serves "spicy Chinese ravioli" as an appetizer and it has some of the best dumpling sauce I've ever had.  It's a spicy, tangy soy sauce with sliced green onions in it.  The "ravioli" are served swimming in the sauce, which is part of the reason I love it so much.  The sauce on these wontons comes close, but I want to tweak it and see if I can get it closer to the sauce I've had in the restaurant.  I found this recipe for Sichuan wontons on one of my favorite food blogs, Appetite for China.  Everything I've made from there has been amazing. 

Despite being labor intensive, these are easy to make.  Dave and I made them while watching TV.  Instead of eating them as an appetizer, these were a meal!  I was afraid it wouldn't be enough food so I made a side of Random Noodles (barely in the picture) that turned out to be totally unnecessary. These wontons are excellent, and the freeze and reheat well.  A few days after I made them, I reheated some of the frozen ones and they were just fine, I just cooked them a little longer.