Summer Eats: Sesame Sōmen with Shrimp and Edamame

When the temperatures soar, who feels like eating large, hot meals? We certainly don't. High summer is the perfect time for a cold pasta salad such as the one I made the other night with sōmen, thin wheat noodles from Japan, poached shrimp, shelled edamame, and a soy-sesame dressing augmented with a healthy dose of crushed red pepper flakes.

Summer Salad: Sesame Sōmen with Shrimp and Edamame

The really great thing about this salad is that you can make it in the morning in just a few minutes, put it in the refrigerator, and it will be ready for you when you get home from doing whatever it is that you do on a wonderful summer day.

Although at the restaurant, I developed a standard recipe for the soy-sesame dressing, at home, I don't bother with a recipe, preferring to eyeball it instead. I use roughly equal parts of soy sauce (or tamari), unseasoned rice vinegar, and toasted sesame oil, which I whisk together roughly with a fork just before dumping in the warm wheat noodles.

I pour a bunch of frozen shelled edamame onto the warm noodles; they will defrost quickly in the salad.

For salads, I use small shrimp which I dump into boiling salted water which I turn off. I let the shrimp stand in the hot water until they are just cooked through, a minute to three depending on size. They go into the bowl of warm noodles along with sliced green onions and a healthy pinch of crushed red pepper flakes.

Toss the salad well and let it cool a few minutes before putting it in the refrigerator. Don't worry about seasoning the salad until you are ready to eat. It will take a few minutes for the noodles to absorb the dressing, which can change the seasoning balance. The flavors are better if you let the salad warm up a few minutes on the counter before serving. Just before serving, taste and season as necessary.

Summer Sipper: Txakoli

What to drink with this salad? The obvious choice for a lot of somms is Riesling. Others might go with a Chenin Blanc or even a fragrant Sake. For my part, living in one of the great Riesling producing parts of the world, I drink a gracious plenty of Riesling in the summer. While I am not over-sated on Riesling by any stretch, I do like to taste wines from elsewhere on occasion. Moreover, I like serving obscurer wines that others might not have tasted. Summer screams to me of Vinho Verde from Portugal, but these days, it is ubiquitous. So for me in my quest for obscurer wines, branching out to its Spanish cousin from Basque country makes a lot of sense.

Txakoli (or Txakolina as the bottle in the photo above is called) is a great lightly effervescent alternative to Vinho Verde. Pronounced CHACK-uh-lee, this wine, like Vinho Verde, comes in white, red, and rosado forms, though most people know only the white form made from Hondarrabi Zuri grapes, if they know the wine at all.

It's a high acid, low alcohol, clean and easy-to-drink wine. Depending on the producer, it may be vinified in a riper, more aromatically fruity style, or as is my preference, in a more lemony and saline style reminiscent of great Albariño that has been picked slightly early.

Here's to cold salads and crisp wines to beat the summer heat!

Singapore Noodles

Yesterday was such a beautiful spring day and I had finished all my Monday paperwork and errands and was home by the civilized hour of 4pm. By 5, it had cooled off enough to move outside and enjoy some Garnacha on the patio. What you see below is a classic Ann-pour. Our glasses are marked with a pour line so that the servers pour a consistent amount for each glass. The bottom of the W logo represents a 5-1/2 ounce pour or a fifth of a bottle. When Ann pours for herself, note how far up on the W logo it comes! Also note last year's parsley bolting to the right of the water bottle in our little garden.
I very rarely get in the mood for any kind of food. I'm a classical omnivore; if it's for dinner, I'm all about it. But yesterday I had Singapore noodles on the brain. By the way, Singapore refers to a style of noodle flavored with Madras curry powder, not a noodle dish that you might find in Singapore. While it's not a dish from Singapore, it's also not an American one either, being more of a pan-Asian fusion dish that is common in Hong Kong. Moreover, it is one of my favorite of favorite noodle dishes.

Below you see the mise for this dish, absent the bean sprouts, thin egg noodles, Madras curry powder, and fish sauce. From the chorizo clockwise you see ginger, garlic, preserved vegetable, green onions, edamame, and cilantro.

Before you go getting all technical on me, I'm going to state that I have had Singapore noodles hundreds of times and I know that they are traditionally made with very thin rice noodles. I also know that the best I ever ate in a crazy good hole in the wall Chinese place was made with wheat noodles like I used here. And chorizo? Yes, chorizo because it was what was in the fridge. Traditionally the dish is made with char siu, Chinese roasted pork. Well, damn it, I didn't feel like making my own char siu, which is the only way to get it around these parts. And, consider the role of the char siu in the dish. It is there for its bright reddish color and for a little punch of flavor. And that's exactly the role of the chorizo in the dish. A thrifty Chinese cook would approve.

The edamame are definitely not traditional either, but you'll find every kind of vegetable garnish known to man in some version somewhere. I was just looking for bright green color and there were edamame in the freezer. Typically, I make the dish with slivered yellow onions, because Madras curry and onions is a match made in heaven, but I had these gorgeous green onions that needed to be used.

In other words, it's my dish and I'll fry if I want to, fry if I want to! All I am saying is relax: noodles, like soup, are a great vehicle for whatever ingredients are at hand.

Below you see the finished dish, a result of sautéeing all the ingredients while the noodles were cooking, adding the drained noodles to the toppings, and finishing to taste with copious amounts of curry powder and fish sauce.

Broiled Spanish Mackerel

Last night's dinner had a decidedly Japanese character: miso soup, rice with furikake, broiled marinated Spanish mackerel, and steamed edamame. Ann had already made the dashi from kombu (kelp) and hanakatsuo (bonito shavings) when I arrived home with the guests of honor.

I quickly filleted the two mackerels and marinated the fillets in equal parts mirin, shiroshoyu, and sake with a lot of freshly minced ginger. This is one of the most delicious ways I know of preparing mackerel and mackerel is one of the most delicious fishes that I know. It has a very high oil content—the raw flesh almost feels buttery—that lends itself to high heat cooking applications such as grilling or broiling.

While the fish was marinating (for a total of about an hour), we prepped for for Ann's delicious shiromiso soup with tofu, straw mushrooms, and green onions. And then we put on a pot of rice with a couple more pieces of kombu and the katsuobushi left over from making the dashi. In retrospect, we wouldn't add the bonito to the rice again: too fishy. The edamame come in handy plastic bags that can be microwaved, so we just let Chef Mike cook them for about five minutes. I've never done edamame in the microwave before and probably won't do it again. Much better to boil them in salted water or even steam them. Still, I'm not complaining. Some edamame is better than no edamame! While the rice was finishing and the edamame were in the microwave, the fish went on a sheet tray (on oiled aluminum foil) under the broiler for a scant five minutes. You can see the gorgeous bronze hue that the fish takes on from the marinade, almost as if it had been smoked. The result was utterly delicious!



PS. I learned something new about wine (but that's nothing really new: I'm always learning about wine). I was drinking Thistle Chardonnay Dundee Hills 2008, a fairly oaky and buttery Chard that still retains fair acid. Though I would never pair this wine with a fishy fish, I decided to try it for giggles. It was a train wreck. The wine tasted awful and the fish tasted wretchedly fishy. Yuck. Note to self.