What's Cooking (Take Three!)

I had half an heirloom red tomato hanging out in the fridge for two days , also two Ortega chiles. There is a package of low calorie/carb English muffins in the freezer. I toasted one muffin and put a smear of TRUFF on each half. Then topped with the
fried tomato slices, Ortega peppers, and a fried egg . A bit messy to eat, but very yummy breakfast.

"I'm about to make a pot of roasted red pepper soup, too. It's a wonderful season for one of my favorite raw vegetables. Bought some a few weeks back that were taller and wider than quart canning jars. Never in my life seen anything like it--and they were as good as they were big. 68 Cents each. Ridiculous!"
Jenise, might those peppers have been the long, slender Sweet Marconi Red pepper?

So after a touch of monsoon season here in New Hampshire, last night it was clear enough to bring out the grill. I made grilled chicken wings and midway through cooking brushed on some TRUFF hot sauce. The result was delicious. Thanks for the idea, Jenise!

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

"I'm about to make a pot of roasted red pepper soup, too. It's a wonderful season for one of my favorite raw vegetables. Bought some a few weeks back that were taller and wider than quart canning jars. Never in my life seen anything like it--and they were as good as they were big. 68 Cents each. Ridiculous!"
Jenise, might those peppers have been the long, slender Sweet Marconi Red pepper?

No, not narrow. On the big side of conventional size, probably 5" across. The biggest one might have been 6".

[Jenise]

Last night we had cauliflower steaks--pan grilled for color, then baked for full-cooking with grana padano on top, served on a bed of vermicelli with slivered lacinato kale and a butter/caper/lemon/garlic sauce.

I think I mentioned that nearby cities of Madison and Oshkosh are home to the largest population of refugees in Wisconsin from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, thus the great markets for expanding my table offerings. On my way for a haircut today I spied a new shop, International Halal Market. Owned by a family from Afghanistan and just opened 2 month ago I am thrilled to have another source so close to home. To celebrate I am making a recipe from 2021 Saveur, Kofta Chalau. Afghan style meatballs with saffron, split peas and sour plums. Served over basmati rice, the longest grains I have ever come across. I am using the Urfa pepper rather than cayenne as listed.

[Jenise]

So jealous of your middle eastern shops, Christina. We have nothing here--except bountiful dungeness crab--to crow about. Btw, going to try a local Afghan restaurant soon--local Canada that is. My side of the border is pretty boring.

Calamari steaks tonight with local kale rabe.

[Jenise]

Last night I turned another bundle of kale rabe into a salad. Cooked them for 3-4 minutes in boiling water, drained/squeezed/chopped them, mounded them on a plate and drizzled them with lemon juice, extra good EVOO, and Asiago cheese. A great first course. They were followed by lamb chops--a previously marinated rack of lamb (vermouth, soy sauce) sliced into chops, sprinkled with onion salt and pan fried. Served them over moist but chewy-crisp chunks of sourdough bread tossed with sauteed red onions. Delish!

Tonight it is rib eye pork chops, thick cut with a spice rub of lime zest, brn. sugar, Steak Seasoning, cumin, coriander, allspice. they will go on the grill pan. Also, a cucumber and radish salad with shallots, dill, white wine vinegar, lemon juice. olive oil, and dried, oregano. Roma tomatoes halved and roasted with thyme, and olive oil until charred a bit. Topped with Burrata cheese and fresh basil and served over sauteed broccoli, bok choy and mushrooms.

Jenise, I love the idea of the chops over sourdough. I cook a whole or half chicken over thick slices of sourdough, so delicious.

I got a package of fresh Chinese rice noodles recently and so tomorrow I'm going to make beef chow fun (also known as beef ho fun), one of the traditional Cantonese dishes popular at old school Chinese-American/Polynesian restaurants but shunned by US Mandarin/Sichuan restaurants.

The 'fun'-style rice noodles come in folded-up sheets. They have to be kept refrigerated and one unfortunate property of fresh rice noodle is that it becomes stiff and brittle when cold. For me unfolding the sheets has always been tedious and problematic, and even when unfolded I've found that if you try to cut the sheet into individual noodles by stacking them they don't separate properly when stir-fried. So I have resorted to slicing the noodles in a single layer, which seems to take forever. I just read a recipe that says to cut the noodles to proper size while still folded and then parboil them briefly to separate out the individual noodles. I'm going to take out the noodle package a day ahead of time to let it come up to room temperature, and I may try the parboiling trick if they're still too stiff to handle.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Paul, what if you sprayed the individual sheets with cooking spray before stacking them for slicing?

Tonight's T-bone steaks. I got a package of two that was mispriced (I love it when they do that). Lighter packages of two were marked over three dollars more.

At $3.99 for a 12 oz package of frozen artichoke hearts at the Middle Eastern Market I can't resist and so it will be a variation of Artichoke Carbonara. A sauce of leek, shallot soffritto deglazed with a white vermouth and thinly sliced artichoke hearts. Finished off with a few garlic chives and lemon zest. Likely homemade fettuccine which will be finished off in the sauce and grated Parm to a creamy consistency. Wait.....no guanciale, no egg so not really Carbonara but I did say variation. I want the chokes to shine so trying to pare away the heavy flavors and texture.
I can't buy one medium sized artichoke for less than $4.99 so these frozen ones are a real bargain and huge time saver and will likely be OD'ing on them for awhile.

I love the marinated artichoke hearts but only very rarely have them otherwise. I do recall some really excellent fried ones that I ate in Rome (where else?). Wonder if I can get a.h. around me?

Not that Pumpkin will touch them, but we often eat at different times on Thursdays so I can schedule it for then.

Paul, what if you sprayed the individual sheets with cooking spray before stacking them for slicing?

They already come coated with oil so that they can be folded up without sticking together. The problem is that fresh rice noodles are rather fragile and once you cut the sheets into individual noodles it is difficult and tedious work to separate them without breaking them. The quick parboil with a gentle stir suggested by that recipe seems like the best remedy.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Christina, love your ersatz carbonara. Our supermarkets usually have frozen artichoke hearts (although everything's dicey these days, lately I haven't been able to find lima beans) which I love to keep on hand. Threw some in a skillet the other day with sections of red onion and browned chicken thighs. Added olive oil, thyme and vermouth and cooked for about 30 minutes--when the pan went dry, the chicken was done. Excellent one-pan meal.

Golden Oyster Mushrooms are new to me. Never heard of them until a trip to Farmer's Market yesterday. A new vendor has a bunch of interesting mushrooms. I picked the Golden becuse they are so pretty, and have a nutty cashew flavor. A sauté with butter, a little olive oil, a splash of white wine, within seconds they browned and turned crispy. Not what I expected for the stir fry, but they gave a nice crispy touch. Anyone else had experiences with them?

I made the beef chow fun (niurou chow fun or niurou ho fun) last night. I had some trouble cutting up the rice noodle sheet. The package I bought was the last in the store and now I know why nobody else had bought it. Instead of being flat the folded noodle sheet was all scrunched up. Even after being left out all day and being soaked in hot water (fresh from the electric tea kettle), I was having trouble unfolding it without breaking it apart. I finally gave up and just sliced through the folded sheets. The resulting noodles weren't of uniform width and won't win any beauty prizes, but they worked out OK. It was raining so I couldn't use my 100,000 BTU propane ring. With some patience I was able to get that nice char using the indoor butane gas ring.

It came out delicious. Much better than the one I'd bought last week from a local Chinese restaurant in order to see what ingredients they used. Their sauce was terminally bland. The beef was tough and was cut into irregular chunks without regard for the grain. When I moved to Nashua NH in 1980 this was the second worst* of the many bad Chinese-Polynesian restaurants in the area. The Chinese restaurant scene has improved vastly since then, but this place is the only one that still makes chow fun.

-Paul W.

* The worst Chinese restaurant at the time was a place called Cathay Island. It got closed down by the state Board of Health for numerous food handling violations. The owners of the restaurant that replaced it had to strip the kitchen walls down to the cinder blocks and thoroughly steam-clean the kitchen. I rate it as worse than the place I bought the chow fun because that place just serves food that tastes bad. Cathay Island served food that was downright dangerous to your health.

[Jenise]

Karen, our local organic mushroom grower does the yellow ones sometimes. Must be a little harder to grow because they usually only include them in mixes where there seem to be plenty of standard and blue oyster mushrooms to sell them in baskets of their own.

Last night we went Asian. I had a perfect young head of iceberg lettuce from which I removed the core then dunked in ice water for an hour before breaking into two halves (don't cut, tear!) on a platter for two with a bowl of ground pork with chopped shiitake mushrooms, onions, serrano chiles, bamboo, nappa cabbage and walnuts cooked together with oyster sauce and Lan Chi, all glued together with a handful of panko crumbs so the crumbly mixture didn't fall out of the lettuce wraps once placed there. Just love this stuff.

Paul, I like Chow Fun but have never made it. So it's fun to read about your adventures. Anyway, chow fun maltagliati doesn't sound bad at all! --Jeff

The golden oyster mushrooms I see in my downtown Manhattan markets tend to be smaller, thinner and more delicate than the other oysters. But wasn't sure if that was a property of golden oysters in general, or just the way these folks happen to grow them.

I like them and they do get crisp quickly. But I like to roast oyster mushrooms and some of the more delicate oyster mushrooms burn too easily!

Paul, I like Chow Fun but have never made it. So it's fun to read about your adventures. Anyway, chow fun maltagliati doesn't sound bad at all! --Jeff

Once you get the noodles prepared it's a rather simple, straightforward stir-fry. Dried wide rice noodles work also, but the texture is not quite the same as when you use fresh fun. The only tricky bit in the stir-fry is obtaining that wonderful smoky nuance by deliberately putting a light char on the scallions and the noodles.If you have a high-BTU heat source such as a restaurant chop suey range or my 100,000 BTU propane outdoor wok ring, getting the char is easy. But you need a complete mis en place before you start the stir-fry--if you have to stop to measure anything out the dish will burn. Indoors, you just have to get the wok as hot as you possibly can (it can't be too hot) and leave the aromatics and noodles in place for half a minute or so at a time to let the char develop. If your wok's hot enough nothing will stick, and you just need patience until the noodles develop some brown spots.

I love the term fun maltagliati. It's like Paul Prudhomme's comment on some long-cooked Cajun dishes ("looks like hell, but tastes great").

The rest of the fun maltagliati is destined to become Thai mahogany fire noodles once the weather is good enough for me to use the outdoor wok ring. I don't make that dish indoors because of the fumes during the initial stir-fry of the seasoning paste, which has 30 red bird's eye chiles and 10 cloves of garlic. I'd want a Chemistry lab fume hood if I were to make this indoors.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Paul, let's talk about wok char. The flavor that I think is wok char isn't the browning on the food in the wok, but the flavor of flame on the wok's contents which may leave behind no color at all. Hence the high BTU's requried to achieve it. Am I wrong?

I just googled for "getting that Chinese restaurant char flavor" and found this very interesting New York Times article by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.

The Chinese term for that char quality is wok hei, which translates as "wok breath".

You're right, Jenise--the wok hei in restuarant dishes is at least partly the result of the interaction of the very high heat of the flame on the ingredients. Lopez-Alt uses a blowtorch to achieve this in a home kitchen. I've watched Chinese restaurant chefs do stir-frying and the high flame (2+ feet) of the chop suey range certainly does get into the wok periodically. But I don't think it's necessary. I can achieve wok hei flavor on my 100,000 BTU outdoor burner without the flame getting inside.

The technique of pouring soy sauce, rice wine, etc. down the sides of a very hot wok, versus into the middle, also seems to be important to achieving wok hei. Lots of stir-fry recipes call for that; the beef chow fun recipe I use is among them.

I think the interaction of high heat (with or without contact of direct flame) with the food and seasonings is the key here. You can get this with a normal gas ring if you heat the wok to smoking before starting and leave the food in contact with the wok periodically rather than continuously tossing it. As I remarked in my previous post, it takes longer to get to wok hei with a normal gas ring than with a high-output one (such as my outdoor wok setup or a propane burner intended for deep-fried turkey or Cajun blackened dishes). But it does work. Whether or not actual browning of the food is required is an open question. In restaurant chow fun and lo mein dishes I've had that had the wok hei quality, there have always been some brown spots here and there on the noodles.

You can smell the wok hei aroma come up as the stir-fry progresses. I'll have to see if I can get that to happen without any actual browning occurring.

-Paul W.