Chum Salmon with Roasted Hakurei Turnips and Gai Lan

As an East Coaster, I'm always surprised at the dearth of fish species that we have in our markets out here in the Pacific Northwest. Granted, a lot of what we harvest goes to Asia, but still, compared to what I am used to, we have very little variety out here.

Very little variety except for one fish family: the Salmonidae, the salmons. We have the very famous species that everyone knows: King/Chinook, Coho, and Sockeye. Also famous, but rare, is my favorite, the ocean-going rainbow trout that we call Steelhead Trout. Finally, we also have Pink Salmon, which in general ends up canned, and Chum, our most numerous salmon, but which is not held in very high regard, being associated with the salmon that the sled dogs eat.

Because of the stigma, Chum Salmon doesn't command the price of King, Coho, or Sockeye. But when caught out in the ocean in its silver phase, it's a delicious fish, milder and less fatty than the other salmon species, and a great buy for people looking for wild-caught salmon at an affordable price.

I scored a pretty piece of chum and some fresh hakurei and gai lan at the farmers market recently and decided to plate them all together for a delicious fall dinner.

Chum Salmon with Roasted Hakurei Turnips and Gai Lan

Everything on this plate is done simply. The salmon is seared in a black steel pan. The gai lan is blanched and then finished in garlic olive oil. The turnips are roasted at high heat until their cut surfaces brown. Everything in this dish is of pristine quality, so I didn't need to do anything cheffy to help it out, no sauces, no tricks, no pizazz. One of the great secrets of fine cooking is to start with the best ingredients. I used to tell my line cooks, "My job is to source the finest ingredients and yours is not to fuck them up."

Blooming Gai Lan and Hakurei Turnips

Gai lan is also called Chinese broccoli and is in the same family as our familiar broccoli. This bunch of perfect gai lan is in bloom. A bit of bloom like this is just fine. What you don't want is any kind of broccoli in full flower. Broccoli flowers, like all Brassica flowers, are edible and make fine garnishes for dishes and salads. I especially like radish and arugula flowers for garnishes.

Roasted Hakurei Turnips

Hakurei turnips are mainly sweet with just a tiny hint of radish bite. Although you can use them like any turnip, I prefer them for raw applications and roasted like this, in which case, they become very mild and melt in your mouth.

Browning Slivered Garlic in Olive Oil

When doing garlic oil as a garnish for vegetables, I like to sliver the garlic and serve bits of the browned garlic as an additional garnish. You can see in the very first photo that I have put some of the garlic on top of the gai lan. After blanching the gai lan, I reheat it in the garlic oil just before plating. In this way, you can blanch the broccoli hours before service, if you shock it in an ice bath to stop it cooking and from turning olive drab. I cooked my broccoli an hour before dinner so that I could concentrate on cooking the fish to perfection.

Seared Chum Salmon

I cook salmon skin-side down until the skin becomes very crisp and delicious. The skin is always the best part. Chum salmon, because it is very low fat when compared to red or silver salmon, wants strict attention in the pan. It is not a fish that can really tolerate extra cooking, so take it off the heat a little sooner than you might other salmon. In the lead photo in this post, you can see that mine went on the plate still showing a bit of pink in the center of the portion. By the time we got to the table to eat, it was perfect. Fish timing is not something I can teach in a blog post; it's just something you figure out by doing it over and over. You can't teach experience, alas.

Soba with Shrimp and Chinese Broccoli

Soba with Shrimp and Chinese Broccoli

I got off early last night, probably for the last time in a long time because my long-time sous chef's last day is Saturday and I have a new kitchen crew that needs guidance, so we took advantage of the nice weather (read "not raining") and took abut a 3.5-mile walk. Afterwards, we were both hungry naturally, but I didn't really feel like cooking.

While we were walking, Ann mentioned that we had some soba and that got me to thinking. While she was in the shower, I put on a pot of water for the buckwheat noodles. While the water was coming up to a boil, I raided the fridge and found some butter lettuce, Chinese broccoli, garlic, and ginger. I grabbed a couple handfuls of pre-cooked shrimp from the freezer.

I minced the garlic and ginger. I thinly sliced the thicker stems of the Chinese broccoli into coins and sliced the leaves into thin ribbons called chiffonade. In a really hot pan, I quickly cooked the garlic, ginger, and the broccoli coins. After a minute, I added the frozen shrimp and let them defrost, stirring well, for a minute. Into a bowl with these hot ingredients and to them I added a splash of rice vinegar, two splashes of soy sauce, a tablespoon of sambal oelek, and a touch of sesame oil.

As the noodles finished cooking, I tossed the broccoli leaf ribbons into the boiling water along with the noodles and drained the noodles into a colander. Into the bowl with all the rest of the ingredients, a quick toss, a slight adjustment of seasoning, and then onto lettuce-lined plates.

Tasty, flavorful, relatively healthy (while soba are better than regular pasta, they still are not great carbs), and done in less than 15 minutes. Having not had pasta in months, they were pretty awesome!

Shrimp and Vegetables

"I want something light!" Ann said on Monday when I asked her what she wanted for dinner. "Your choice, but make it light." We were both suffering from overindulging in meatball subs on Sunday evening. Knowing that we had some shrimp in the freezer, I stopped at the market on the way home and picked up some vegetables.

Shrimp and Vegetables

And knowing that we had a meeting that would keep us out until nearly 8pm, when I got home from the market, I marinated the shrimp in garlic and a couple of packets of sweet-and-spicy pickled turnips and steamed the larger gai lan (Chinese broccoli) stems, then refrigerated them for later. The other vegetables are sugar snaps and baby corn.

When we got home, it was not more than five minutes on maximum flame to bring this stir-fry to the table. We each finished our own bowls with a bit of soy sauce and a touch of spicy chile paste.

Light, bright, easy.

Ginger Chicken Soup with Lop Cheung and Gai Lan

Yesterday was supposed to be a beautiful day (being April 7) but it was not. It was a chilly 50 degrees and raining all day. My joints were aching. That beautiful Thai Beef Salad I was going to make for dinner? Yeah. No.

Who says the weather doesn't influence how we eat? Yesterday was a soup day if I have ever seen a soup day. And so it didn't take very long for us to abandon the beef salad in favor of a big bowl of soup.

Ginger Chicken Soup with Lop Cheung and Gai Lan

A big family pack of piernas de pollo (all the meat is labeled in Spanish at my preferred market), a pound of ginger, a bunch of gai lan (Chinese broccoli), a pound of udon, a small pack of lop cheung, a bunch of green onions, a bunch of cilantro, and a little bit of pickled mustard stems followed me home from the market.

The soup couldn't be any simpler to make. Into the bottom of the pot went about 8 crushed garlic cloves, half a bunch of cilantro (whole), the tops of a bunch of green onions, and about six ounces of slabbed ginger. On top went the chicken and all was covered with cold water, brought to a simmer, skimmed from time to time, and left to poach for 3 or 4 hours: we weren't keeping track of time.

At dinner time, I sliced half a lop cheung per person and the bunch of Chinese broccoli. And then dipped the solids out of the soup pot and brought the remaining stock to a rolling boil. The chicken was cooling a bit while I was seasoning the broth with fish sauce, soy sauce, and salt. Into the pot went the sausage, the broccoli stems, and the udon.

Meanwhile, I pulled a bit of chicken and put it into the serving bowls along with the sliced broccoli leaves, pickled mustard stems, and cilantro leaves.

Once the udon were done, I used tongs to take noodles straight from the pot into each bowl and then ladled the boiling broth over the top.

And it just couldn't be any simpler or more flavorful!

Red-Cooked Chicken

"Oh my God, I think this is better than your pork belly bánh mì!" exclaimed Ann. This is high praise indeed: my bánh mì, currently on the lunch menu at the restaurant, was tops on her list of all the dishes that I have ever cooked. And for such an unassuming looking dish to assume the mantle of the-best-dish-ever is saying something. Though no stranger to hyperbole when it comes to food, Ann seemed earnest in the extreme. I can understand her excitement: this dish clearly shows why Chinese cuisine is one of the world's great treasures.

Red-Cooked Chicken: Uninspired Plating, Inspired Flavors

Unwittingly, Ann asked me to cook this eastern Chinese classic last week. As she was flipping through some or another food thing, she showed me a plate of red-cooked pork and said she wanted it. The dish wasn't labeled red-cooked but that's what it was. It's been 30 years since I red-cooked anything at home (though it is the basis of many dishes at the restaurant). I decided to lighten up the calories by going with chicken, but chicken legs instead of insipid breasts.

Red Cooking Basics

I've been red cooking dishes so long that I no longer remember the prescribed formulae, if there ever were such things, for this braise. Because of the long cook time, I put together the dish in the slow cooker the night before, so that I could remove it from the refrigerator and start it cooking before I left for work in the morning, to have it waiting when I returned.

Into the slow cooker went the three huge chicken leg quarters, 6-8 star anise pods, half a cinnamon stick, a chunk of rock sugar, a handful of whole garlic cloves, several slabs of ginger, a couple whole green onions, the peel of a tangerine, and the stems from a bunch of cilantro. To this I added about half a cup, maybe three-fourths, of soy sauce, several tablespoons of Chinkiang black vinegar, and water to just reach the top of the chicken.

To finish the dish, I put some rice on to cook, removed the chicken to a plate, and strained and defatted the braising liquid which I then reduced to the point where if I reduced it any further, it would be too salty. At the very end when the sauce and rice were done, I blanched some Chinese broccoli and we sat down to dig in.

This dish clearly belongs in the pantheon of great dishes invented by humankind. It is that good. And that simple: try it yourself. If you've never had it before as Ann had not, it will be a revelation of the best kind.

Veggies

Veggies with Roast Pork and Lop Cheung

Sometimes I get a real hankering for a big plate of stir-fried vegetables, whatever's on hand. I love vegetables of all kinds and always have. As a kid, I had two rather finicky siblings who didn't like a good number of veg between them, and so I often got double helpings of those things that they wouldn't eat. Score!

Today, we went to the store in anticipation of the snow storm tomorrow and in anticipation of having red-cooked chicken tomorrow night to score some chicken and some rock sugar for the braise. While we were there, we grabbed a can of baby corn, some gai lan (Chinese broccoli), a few hon-shimeji (Beech mushrooms), and a few snow peas to augment what we already had in the refrigerator.

From the refrigerator, I grabbed a lop cheung, a small piece of roasted pork (from the last post), nappa cabbage, cilantro, pickled mustard stems, garlic, and ginger. I had hoped to put in a bit of pressed tofu, but our leftover bit was infected with a yeast and so I decided not to take a chance.

Fifteen minutes of prep et voilà!

High heat is the key to a great stir-fried dish. If you don't have a professional wok and wok burner (I don't and most fire codes prohibit them in residential kitchens and in many restaurant kitchens as well), you need to get a pan really hot and work in batches so that you don't overload your pan. You are looking for the elusive wok hei (breath of the wok) that comes from scorching heat. If you overload your pan, your vegetables steam and don't stir fry at all. A splash of stock or water added once the vegetables begin to brown will flash steam them to a perfect crunchy cooked texture.

My little stir fry here took four batches. I started with the items that wouldn't overcook while waiting for the other batches to get done (corn, lop cheung, pork, Chinese broccoli stems, pickled mustard stems) and ended with the most tender vegetables that would overcook most easily (snow peas, Chinese broccoli blooms, and green onions).

Vegetables to warm a heart!