shiso mama

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, although it does occasionally hit the spot. (As an aside, did you know that there was a short-lived peanut butter restaurant in NYC? One of our friends was interviewed on CNN, waxing poetic about Fluffernutter sandwiches.) I do, however, love me a pb+j cookie. Same idea but in cookie form! Brilliant. Here’s a recipe I recently made up, adapted from various recipes. My cookie actually has relatively little sugar in it, because I prefer a less sweet cookie to go with my jam. This version is a little sandy in texture.

ingredients:
1/2 c unsalted butter, softened
3/4 c peanut butter (I used the natural, salted pb from Trader Joe, which is much runnier than Skippy, and has a nice, salty edge)
1/4 c sugar
1/4 c packed brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 t vanilla extract
1 1/2 c flour
3/4 t baking soda
extra granulated sugar, for rolling dough
jam

Cream the butter, peanut butter and sugars together until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla extract and continue mixing until well combined. Whisk flour and soda together and then add to the wet ingredients. I chilled the dough until firm, but I’m not entirely convinced this step is necessary. Form 1″ balls of dough and roll in granulated sugar. Use your thumb to make an indent and slightly flatten the dough, and fill the well with jam. I added another small piece of dough on top, to make it look more like a sandwich, and because, well, the last recipe I shared with you was a thumbprint cookie and I was feeling a bit unoriginal, but hey, you don’t gotta live with my guilt, so feel free to leave this step out. Bake at 350 for 13-15 minutes.

A package of these will go out the door tomorrow to a friend who’s celebrating a birthday soon.

One of the first things I have to do when I come back to Taiwan is head over to Shiao Ding’s (Little Ding’s) and have some traditional Chinese breakfast food. Shiao Ding has been around for at least 20 years, serving up breakfast in their little shack of a building. They moved away for a while because their building was condemned, but business at their new site was poor, so they moved back, at reduced rent and with the understanding that the landlord was not responsible if the roof caved in. It adds to the air of authenticity to eat street food with the possibility of the building falling on your head, don’t you think?

Here are a few things you can eat:

soy bean milk

This one’s salty, with pickled mustard stems, tiny dried shrimp, crispy pieces of you tiao (chinese donut), cilantro, scallions, chili oil, sesame oil, soy sauce and vinegar, which gives it a sort of curdled look. Maybe sounds a little gross, but it’s tasty. You can also have soy bean milk sweetened with sugar, hot, warm or cold.

Here’s you tiao, which is a long piece of fried dough, airy inside. A bowl of hot sweet soy bean milk with you tiao used to be my favorite meal as a kid, but now I’m more of a salty fan.

This is shao bing, which is a flaky sesame flatbread. Many people split them open and fill them with fried egg, you tiao or sliced meat (although you really eat that in restaurants rather than at streetside vendors). The one in the picture is actually a sweet one, with a slightly sweet sugar filling.

Another one of my favorites: fan tuan. It’s a glutinous rice ball, with filling inside. I like mine sweet, with you tiao, ground peanut powder and sugar, but it’s more common to find salty ones, filled with picked mustard stems, pork or fish sung (which is dried and fried) and you tiao). It’s chewy and crunchy at the same time, and I love them.

I don’t eat these that often, but they are very popular: dan bing. It’s an egg, fried with scallions, and just as it’s about to set and finish cooking, a pancake is thrown on top. They slice it up and serve it with thick soy sauce.

Shiao Ding serves a few other things, but these are my favorite.  I can get most of these things in California fairly easily, but it just never tastes as good.  And newer, cleaner, safer places have opened up near my parents’ house, but I think my heart will always belong to Shiao Ding.

This weekend was supposed to be really small and low-key and casual, a chance for Otis to spend time with family and a few friends. And it was an opportunity for me to cook, which I feel I do so rarely nowadays. What does Otis want to eat? my mother would ask in response to the ideas I listed to her, and my answer was always, “Uh, I dunno.” I sort of figured that at this age, Otis doesn’t truly care what you serve at his party, as long as there’s meat and cake, and you don’t force him to eat vegetables. In my book, that means that I get to make whatever I want to eat.

And what, pray tell, did I want to eat? Well, tonkatsu sandwiches (also known as katsu sando), of course! Tonkatsu is Japanese fried pork cutlet. So, yes, you guessed right, it’s a fried pork sandwich. Sounds kinda gross and absolutely tasty, no? Actually it just sounded gross the first and only time I ate it, but after a few bites, I was looking around at my family members, resenting their loud smacking and their fast eating, and trying to calculate how quickly I would have to eat to be able to eat as many of the remaining sandwiches as I could.

Not convinced? May I remind you that the pork is fried? Deep fried? In fat? Oh, and it’s also got mayonnaise in it, the sweet Japanese kind. How could you arrive at such fat achieving Japan, and the party seemed like the PERFECT opportunity to make them. And it continued to sound like a good idea until I was frying my 24th pork cutlet while still wearing my nightgown, my face feeling like I was 16 years old all over again. But now I cheerfully submit my recipe:

For the tonkatsu, I used pork chops, pounded until they were uniformly thin, and approximately bread sized. I dredged them in flour, then egg, then covered them with panko and fried them until golden and crispy.

For 24 sandwiches, I sliced a head of green cabbage very thinly, and added paper thin slices of half a yellow onion. Then I soaked them together in water for a few minutes and then thoroughly dried them (supposedly it makes the cabbage crunchy, and I think it takes a lot of the bite out of the onion).

I used the big white loaves of Pullman bread that you see at the Asian bakeries, and layered thusly: white bread + cabbage/onion (not too much) + tonkatsu sauce + Japanese mayonnaise + tonkatsu + more tonkatsu sauce + more Japanese mayonnaise + cabbage/onion + white bread. Yes, I know it’s a lot of sauce, but it’s supposed to kind of soak into the meat. The cabbage provides some crunch and prevents the bread from getting too soggy. You can eat it hot (pretty good) or let it sit for a few hours to let the flavors melt and soak in (pretty darned good).

Then there was the matter of the ice cream cake. Did you see that thing?

Oy, it’s a thing of beauty. Like I said, it was candied kumquat and Earl Grey tea sandwiched in vanilla sponge cake and covered in Italian meringue (which has a real saltiness to it). It’s magic. When I cut the cake, it was still pretty stiff from being in our deep freeze, and when I gave Otis his piece, it was a solid hunk. He picked up the entire thing and tried to gnaw on it whole (which I’m pretty sure he tried with his tonkatsu as well).

But that’s not it for the sweets! Here’s something else I made:

Can you tell what it is? It’s marshmallows! I’ve seen homemade marshmallows around, but have always thought that people would be nuts to pay that kind of money when they could just go to the store, buy a jar of Fluff, and sit in front of the TV just the same with change in their pockets. But I think these changed my mind. They’re quite a bit of work, and you have to be careful not to cook the egg whites when you add the boiling sugar syrup, but they literally do melt in your mouth yet have a sort of toothsome quality when you bite into them. They’re disgustingly sweet, though, so I couldn’t really recommend eating the equivalent of a jar-full. I packaged them up with graham crackers, some Valhrona bittersweet chocolate, and directions for making s’mores, another one of my absolute favorite foods in the world. I used a recipe from this book.

I don’t know that these would be particularly appropriate for the kids, but I’m hoping that the parents all enjoyed them as much as we did.

*****

While we’re on the subject of food, here’s what I made tonight for Tuesday Night Dinner with our friends, David, Lynna and Emmett:

It’s kotopita, and the recipe was given to me by a friend of Joanna’s. It’s absolutely amazing, though I wouldn’t dare share the recipe without her permission. It’s a flaky, buttery filo pie with chicken, raisins, cinnamon and a ton of onions in it, and it was mighty tasty. Do you think your friend would approve, Joanna?  It’s not as pretty as hers, of course, but I’m just an amateur.

What you see on top is one of the dishes that Fifth Aunt Grandma K brought. It’s a pickled, preserved vegetable that gets julienned and sauteed with chilis, garlic and pork. It’s salty, it’s sour, it’s sweet, it’s garlic-y, it’s HOT. And when you’re really lazy, you can eat it the way my father does - plop a mound of it on a piece of bread, fold it in half, and snarf it.  It’s kinda like a Chink-y version of the chop suey sandwich.

One of the biggest disadvantages of having my parents live far away - I mean, besides not being able to bask in the glow of their parental affection and nurturing - is that I don’t ever get to just go home and get a dose of home cooking. This fact has been complicated in recent times by the fact that my mother has been diagnosed with diabetes, because when I do go for a visit, I can’t very well ask my mother to deep fat fry me up some of that Chinese lovin’ when she’s just eating steamed vegetables, can I?

Fifth Aunt Grandma K to the rescue again. She doesn’t cook often, but she slaved in the kitchen for us. And not just Otis! She loves us too, because she even brought spicy versions of food so that F’s cheeks would sweat! I told F he could eat Otis’s non-spicy version, but even though he claimed he “had no pride,” he once again subjected himself to ridicule when he tried to eat the spicy version between big gulps of beer and crazy tasty healthy rice (holy crap, did I just put the words “crazy tasty” next to the words “healthy” AND “rice”??). K, I didn’t know this until tonight, but radish cake is one of F’s favorite foods too.

And speaking of relentless hinting, I have another story to share with you. One week, I made Grandma R and Grandpa G a lemon bread. They talked about it several times, so then I baked them a banana bread. When I asked them which one they liked better, they both volunteered immediately, “Lemon!” Then the next week, they showed up with this:

Uh, do you think this is a hint?

Well, after discovering that yes, there IS a limit to how many sidecars a person can drink, I made a couple more lemon breads today. One is for Grandma R and Grandpa G, because we will not get to see them for over a month. And then, because I am a giver AND a taker, I gave Fifth Aunt Grandma K one and forced her to give me a hunk of it, since in spite of the fact that I’ve baked tons of these things, I’ve never tasted it. And good god, we still have 400 lemons left!!

I discovered this recipe in the never-ending free sample issues that Cook’s Illustrated sends me. I think they probably have good recipes, but I’m just not interested in knowing the process. It tortures me, much like when F likes to give me TOO MANY DETAILS about everything, from salt to the cosmos, when I forget to ask him for the “short answer.” But this cake is really easy and tasty, especially if you like really tart lemon cake. You need a food processor (or a blender)

2 sticks unsalted butter, plus some extra for greasing the pan
1 1/2 c flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
1 1/4 c. sugar
the grated zest of 2 lemons, plus 2 t. lemon juice
4 large eggs
1 1/2 t. vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease and flour a 9×5 loaf pan.

Whisk together the salt, baking powder and flour.

Melt the butter in the microwave or on the stove, whisking to reincorporate the milk solids, if the butter has separated.

In a food process, process the sugar and zest until mixed. Add the lemon juice, eggs, and vanilla and process until combined, about 5 seconds. With the machine running, add the melted butter in a steady stream (it will take about 20 seconds). Transfer to a large bowl and sift in the dry ingredients in 3 steps, whisking gently after each addition until just combined.

Pour batter into the prepared pan and bake for 15 minutes at 350. Reduce the oven to 325 and bake another 35 minutes, until golden and a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes and then turn onto a cooling rack, and poke all over the top, sides and bottom of cake with a toothpick. Brush with the lemon glaze. You can wrap up after cool and store at room temperature for 5 days, if you have the willpower.

Lemon glaze:
1/2 c sugar
1/4 c lemon juice

Bring to a boil and stir to dissolve sugar. Simmer until thickened slightly, about 2 minutes.

If you’re sitting there, thinking, “Yes, sounds very good, but how did this genius come about? I just don’t know enough!” then rush out and buy an issue of Cook’s Illustrated. And remind me never to get stuck in a corner with you at a party unless I have a very large drink in my hands.

I guess it’s time to finally get over the shame and horror of having friends who belong to Chocoholics Anonymous, and acknowledge that hey, they’re people too, albeit people with an addiction I can’t identify with at all.  In the spirit of everyone getting along, I baked these Mayan chocolate cookies today.  I used to bake these in the restaurant I worked at during college, and they’re really unusual.

3/4 c. unsweetened butter, softened
3/4 c. sugar, plus extra for rolling
1 egg, at room temperature
1 1/2 t. vanilla extract
1 1/2 c. flour
1 1/2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. allspice
1/2 t. fresh ground black pepper
1/8 t. cayenne pepper
3/4 c. cocoa powder
chocolate chips
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Beat in the egg and then the vanilla extract.  Sift together all the dry ingredients and add in increments.  Refrigerate for 30 minutes.  If you’re fancy and you have a kitchen scale, weigh out 5 chocolate chips and add enough dough to make 1/2 ounce balls.  If you don’t have a scale, make approximately 1 inch balls, trying to make your balls all the same size.  Roll in granulated sugar.

Bake at 350 for 8 minutes.  You may open the oven after 8 minutes and think, Uh, these cookies don’t quite look done, so I will be smart and bake them a little bit longer.  And you would be wrong.  I said 8 minutes and I mean exactly 8 minutes.  Let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets.

They’re not pretty.  They look like little chocolate turds.  But really, they’re good.  Don’t serve them to superficial people who will judge your cookies by their appearance because they’ll never get over the fact of having to put a chocolate turd into their mouths.

I’m not convinced you chocolate freaks will make these things anyways.  There are too many spices to compete with your precious chocolate.  But let me know if you do.  Or if you live close, come by and eat a few.

I had to go to San Francisco yesterday for some blood tests, so I used the opportunity to go and have wings at San Tung. To me, it’s really the perfect food. Chicken wings? Love them. Chicken wings fried in a vat of fat? Fantastic idea. Fried chicken wings drenched in a sweet, spicy, sticky sauce? I’m dead and I’m in heaven, right? It’s kinda like General Tso’s chicken, which used to be one of my guilty pleasures back in New York, when I could order them from the bullet-proof glass Chinese takeout restaurants. I had never heard of these before Mrs. Kwong introduced them to me, but they are evidently some sort of hybrid Chinese Korean dish, and when you go to this restaurant, every single table has a plate of these things.

When I walked into the restaurant, it was just noon, but the place was already packed. I was seated at a 10-top table all by myself, but was soon joined by a very large man wearing an extremely loud Hawaiian shirt. We ordered the same thing, the gan pong chicken. Except for him, he wanted the sauce on the side. And instead of plain rice, he wanted fried rice. And when that fried rice came, he drowned it with soy sauce. Which he also added to his soup. And he never touched his gigantic bowl of sweet, syrupy sauce! What a travesty. I almost reached over and spooned his sauce directly into my mouth. But man oh man was that chicken good. The chicken is fried perfectly so that it still crunches when you bite it, even though it’s covered with sauce. And when you’re done eating the wings, you can spoon the sauce onto your rice and slurp the whole bowl down. Too bad they don’t travel well at all, or else I would’ve ordered a vat to bring home.

When Mrs. Kwong comes to the Bay Area, it’s wings wings wings, gimme more wings. I think she finds excuses to come to the Bay Area just so she can have wings. Since she introduced them to me, I’ve become hooked. It was one of the few things I craved when I was pregnant. Unfortunately we live too far to go to San Tung often, but I just read on Chowhound that there are restaurants that serve gan poang chicken. I’ll have to try them and report back to Mrs. Kwong.

We finally went to the post office on Friday to send out some mail. Some collages went out, a long-awaited Christmas present (I know, but would you feel better if you knew that it was for one of F’s family members, and that the tardiness of this present is not out of the ordinary?), and a box of cookies for a much-too-skinny baby in Massachusetts.

When I was in college, I baked desserts for this great little restaurant. And I always wanted to make something with hot fruit. I love hot fruit. Fresh fruit? Good. Hot fruit? Dy-NO-mite! But no one would ever order any of it. Why? Because people love to eat chocolate-covered everything. I always rampage that people would look at a dessert menu with the item “chocolate-covered poo” and never get past the word chocolate, saying, “Wow, I’ll take the chocolate one!” So I never EVER order chocolate. I’ll always order the warm tarts, the crisps and crumbles, and the pies, preferably warm and with some whipped or ice cream.

I’ve actually been craving jam thumbprints for some times now, but I discovered it’s one of those things that maybe aren’t fashionable to bake at home. So there weren’t a lot of recipes to choose from. Or maybe because it’s so easy that the recipe writers can’t be bothered. But this is the recipe I used:

1 1/2 c. (3 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 c. sugar
1 t. vanilla extract
3 1/2 c. flour
1/4 t. salt
jam of whatever variety you prefer, though I like the tart ones for this recipe

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the vanilla. Slowly add in the flour and salt (do not overmix). Refrigerate the dough for about 30 minutes. Roll the dough into 1″ balls, make an indentation with your finger (making sure that you leave a “retaining wall” on all sides, or else the jam will spill out and make a regrettable mess on your cookie sheets) and fill with jam. Bake at 350 for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown on the edges.

If you’re too lazy to bake, yet you’re desperate for a taste of not-too-sweet buttery goodness, you can come to my house. I’m baking some more tonight.

He doesn’t know, but Otis is willing to endanger limb and soul to test the limits of human knowledge and find the answer. Yesterday’s Korean-ish lunch when I packed it (and I say -ish so as to not offend my Korean readership):

That’s TWO layers of rice wrapped with authentic Korean, Aunty Susan kim. A whole (albeit small) chicken thigh. And a couple of steamed carrots, just so I could feel better about making the effort to get a vegetable in him.

We met our friend Elizabeth at the Berkeley Rose Garden and hung out among rows and rows of gorgeous roses. And I have to say that I doubted my baby’s ability to eat all that food (sheez, I doubt my own ability to finish that much food in one sitting), but we don’t call him The Mouth for nothing. (Do you think there will be some real competitive eater who will be offended by our stealing his/her moniker? Like the whole Heidi Klum/Elle MacPherson thing?)

The carnage:

I can state with some confidence that the only reason he touched those carrots is because he had such momentum going with the eating of all the other salty, oily morsels that he did not notice the offending bits of vegetal matter until he bit into them and he realized that they resisted his tooth in a healthful, nutritious manner.

As part of my new push to cook Asian, I decided to start easy and find something that I could make that was easily transportable so Otis and I could eat while we were out and about. Otis and I both love rice balls, but just plain rice doesn’t quite seem nutritious enough, so I decided to make the salted salmon that my grandfather has eaten for as long as I can remember to flavor the rice balls. He used to live in Japan and I think he must have picked up this method of cooking while he was there.I conferred with Fifth Aunt Grandma K about how to cook it. She convinced me to buy a salmon head instead of a fillet or steak. She likes to suck on the bones, and pick the little bits of meat apart, so she prefers this part. I liked the idea that it was not too much salmon so if it was utterly disgusting, I wouldn’t feel bad about throwing it away. I salted it and stuck it in the refrigerator, waiting for her to look at it before I cooked it.

When she came over, she took a look at it and exclaimed, “Oh! You refrigerated it. You’re not supposed to do that. You have to let it sit on the counter for a few days. It’s too bad it’s not hot anymore, because now it’ll take a little more time to get ready. And when it’s done, don’t wash it, unless it really smells. Then just give it a brief rinse.”

The idea seemed pretty unsanitary and unsafe, but I decided to persevere. I checked it after a day, and it started to smell like the fish I remembered. I felt better and promptly forgot about it. I finally worked my way up cooking the fish after walking into the kitchen for the umpteenth time and thinking, “Man, those diapers are really smelling. I gotta take that trash out.”
But then I couldn’t decide which smelled worse, diapers or that tupperware container of fish when I opened it up. I took it out to give a brief rinse, and then tried to scrub my the hand that handled the fish without touching the other hand, for fear of spreading the smell. I covered the fish with scallions and oil and popped it into the rice cooker. Here’s what it looked like before cooking:

Please add your own smell effects.

And afterwards:

Still somewhat menacing looking, but at least recognizable to me.

We waited until Fifth Aunt Grandma K came to inspect (and taste test) the fish, and then I made him a big seaweed-wrapped rice ball for Otis, which he rolfed down. Then I made a couple more with minced carrots for him to take to Grandma R’s house.

I believe the salmon will keep for a while so it’ll be easy to make him more later. Despite the squeamishness that this experiment triggered, I would definitely make it again.