The House of Good Smells

Happy 11th Anniversary to Us!

Saturday the 30th was the 11th anniversary of the sunny and happy day that we gathered with friends and family in our back yard in Winchester, Virginia and made our marriage official. Naturally, we wanted to celebrate and had been planning our anniversary dinner for a couple of weeks, both of us having arrived separately at having dinner at home versus going out to eat. Restaurants in Bend have let us down consistently this summer and I think we were both looking for something really good for dinner.

I call this post "The House of Good Smells" for a very obvious reason. Thanks to cooler outdoor temperatures, this was really the first time that I cranked up the oven and cooked for a lengthy period of the day, perfuming the air with the sinful smells of baking bread, sautéing mushrooms, and braising pork. After a warm summer, what a treat and a tease! There is nothing like smelling great food cooking all day and knowing that you cannot dig in until dinner time!

Happy Anniversary to Us!

After kicking around several ideas for our celebratory dinner, no doubt informed by the turn of seasons, we arrived somehow at milk-braised pork shoulder as the main course. Then Ann asked if I would make pommes Anna to go with it. Of course. I then thought, seeing how rich those two dishes are, that we should have a simple green salad with an acidic vinaigrette to cut through the fat. And then, no doubt responding directly to the chilly fall weather, Ann asked if I would reprise my mushroom toasts for an appetizer. And voilà! Menu planning done. And darned if we didn't come up with a classic French bistro menu.

Wild Mushroom and Cheese Tartines

Pork Shoulder Braised in Milk

Pommes Anna

Green Salad with Tarragon Vinaigrette

All that was left was to invite our good friends Rob and Dyce to celebrate with us. They arrived for dinner with outstandingly gorgeous flowers, a maple-pumpkin pie, and a bottle of olive oil-washed The Botanist Islay gin for pre-dinner martinis. They are experimenting with fat-washed spirits for their menus at their restaurants in Florida and decided that Ann and I should be guinea pigs. Poor us! I've had bacon-washed Bourbon, but never olive oil-washed gin before. The Botanist, on the spectrum of gins, is on the more delicate and floral side and is perfect for the application of olive oil, which softens the alcoholic feeling of the spirit and contributed a vegetal green olive component. Interesting. Very interesting to my chef palate.

How Stunning are Those Flowers?
Thank You Rob and Dyce!

Pouring Olive Oil-Washed Gin for Martinis

Ann's plan was to sit outside around the fire pit and have appetizers and drinks as the sun was setting and she had been making sure that our courtyard was just so with candles and fall-colored, terracotta-hued throw pillows. Naturally, the weather did not cooperate, with a multi-day rainy streak and cold to cool temperatures leading into the weekend. As needed as our first bit of rain since May was, and as beautiful as the powdered sugar dusting of snow on the Cascades is, I could tell that she was bummed by this turn of weather.

Weather: Rainy, Cold, and Gray
A Marked Contrast to our Sunny Wedding Day

Martinis poured around and toasts offered, we got to finishing up the wild mushroom tartines to accompany our drinks. Earlier in the day, I had made the tartines from a baguette; I would have made them the day before, but our rare patch of high humidity would have been working against having crisp toasted tartines. Early morning, while the tartines were browning in the oven, I prepped and cooked the mushrooms. When we were ready to eat, all we needed to do was to melt some cheese into the mushrooms, top the tartines with the mushrooms and some extra cheese, and put them into the oven to warm.

Tartines Ready for Oven

At the restaurant, we made thousands upon countless thousands of tartines. The process is simple and begins by slicing baguettes on the bias about 7mm wide, call it 3/8 of an inch. These go onto a sheet tray and get drizzled with oil. We used to brush the oil onto them with a paint brush at the restaurant, but really, drizzling works just fine. Then flip them over and drizzle the other side. Place another sheet tray on top such that the bread slices are trapped between the two pans; this will keep them from curling as they cook.

Put them into a moderate oven (call it 350F) and pull them after 20 minutes. Flip the tartines over and put them back into the oven for another 15 minutes. Pull them and flip them again. Cook until they are colored and crisp. Remove from the oven, uncover them, and let them cool to room temperature. If you are not going to serve them right away, store the cold tartines in a sealed bag or container so that they do not go soft in the ambient humidity.

Mushroom Mise
Rehydrated Porcini, Shiitake, Oyster Mushrooms, Shallot, Thyme

Mushrooms Ready to Cook

Mushrooms Ready to Add Cheese

At its essence, this appetizer is simply sautéed mushrooms on toast. But it is a bit more than that and its genesis is in Ann asking me years ago for "something with mushrooms, gooey, and sexy!" Although the mushrooms have varied each time that I have made these delicious bites, rehydrated porcini are the sine qua non of the dish. Their earthy and inimitably delicious flavor, I augment with fresh mushrooms, chanterelles (girolles) in the past, but this time, shiitakes and oysters, about a third each.

I always start by sautéing either leeks or shallots and fresh thyme (I just adore thyme with mushrooms) in butter or olive oil, then add chopped fresh mushrooms. Once these mushrooms have cooked down, I chop the rehydrated porcini and add them to the pan along with the carefully decanted mushroom soaking liquid. Porcini will often have sand or debris on them that will sink to the bottom of the rehydrating bowl and you really don't want that stuff in your dish, so be careful.

Just as we were ready to assemble the tartines, I melted a decent amount of Tallegio cheese into the mushrooms. I wanted, in this instance, to use a French cheese such as Reblochon, but Reblochon was not to be found at our store. This dish, made to pair with an older red Burgundy, really relies on using a stinky cheese. An aged Munster would have been delicious as would have almost any great washed rind cheese, such as Grayson from my talented friends at Meadow Creek Dairy in Galax, Virginia, great purveyors to my restaurant. Tallegio is just perfect as well and that is the cheese I used. Just before the tartines went into the oven, I put another slice of cheese on top to melt over the mushrooms.

[Total aside about Reblochon: Long, long before 9/11, I once went on a wine-buying trip to France and returned on Air France from Charles de Gaulle back to Dulles. At the duty free in Paris, I picked up a Reblochon to take home and boarded the flight. On arriving back stateside, I filled out my declaration card indicating a Reblochon and four cases of wine. After retrieving my wine in the baggage section, I loaded a handtruck with the wine and placed the Reblochon on top. At Customs, they had a conniption about the cheese and confiscated it without even glancing at the four cases of wine on which I owed duty, but which was never assessed. The cost of the Reblochon was far less than the duty (a dollarish per liter) on the wine, a very fair trade!]

Assembling the Appetizers

Mushroom and Tallegio Tartines

When I put the tartines on the top shelf of the oven, I had a chance to glance at the pork shoulder that had been braising in milk most of the day. Milk braising is a very old technique, documented way back into the 1600s, but no doubt predating the invention of books. If you think about it, cooking lamb shanks slathered in yogurt is a classic Persian technique that is still common from the Indian continent to the Middle East.

While pork shoulder braised in milk is known as an Italian dish (miale al latte), I learned the dish in my study of French peasant cooking. Ann owns a gorgeous cookbook called Pork and Sons (originally in French, Cochon et Fils) by Stéphane Reynaud that documents this technique among many others. Some years ago, this book re-reminded me of the milk braising technique which had slipped my mind.

The beauty of this technique is that the lactic acid in the milk helps tenderize the meat and ultimately, the milk mixes with the pork juices and reduces to an incredibly flavorful and gelatinous sauce. It is a technique worthy of remembering; the results are so sublimely good and tasty. It will have you asking how something so terribly simple can be so amazing.

Pork Mise: Milk, Pork, Thyme, Rosemary, Garlic, and Bay Leaves

Still Life with Pork

The Finished Product, 6 Hours in the Braise

I don't know how many times in my life I have made Pommes Anna, that classic French side dish that converts the three simplest ingredients (potatoes, butter, and salt) into something incredibly sublime, something way, way, way more than the sum of its parts. I've been making it so long that I have forgotten how I learned the dish. Although it was probably documented in La Technique by Jacques Pépin, my bible when I was teaching myself classic French technique in my late teens, I no longer remember with any clarity. And it is impossible for me to check, having donated about two thousand cookery volumes to the library at my local culinary school when I retired from the restaurant.

In any case, the dish involves layering potatoes, melted butter, and salt in a heavy pan over a low flame. When the pan is full, you cover it and put it in a hot oven for 20-25 minutes. Then you uncover it and cook it until it is just done all the way through, another 20-25 minutes. After pouring off the melted butter (and saving that for another day) you put a plate on top of the pan and invert it. Presto!

Pommes Anna, Just out of the Oven

Pommes Anna, Unmolded in All its Glory

To finish off our meal, I made a super simple salad. I had been thinking a classic bistro salad such as frisée with lardons, but with all the richness in our dinner, I really wanted something simple, peppery, sharply acidic, and palate cleansing. That ended up being baby arugula (salade de roquette) with a tarragon vinaigrette, a dressing that my dear wife just loved. I hadn't known before this year how much she adores tarragon, an herb that is much underappreciated in America. It is an herb whose licorice undertones I thought might put her off. My bad!

The night before making the salad, I chopped finely a handful of tarragon leaves and placed them in a newly-emptied mustard jar with a quarter cup or so of rice vinegar, a super mild and only lightly flavored vinegar. After sealing the jar and shaking it up to get all the mustard off the walls of the jar, I let it stand on the counter overnight to infuse. My tip to you: keep your emptied mustard jars in the pantry until you are ready to make a dressing using the leftover bits of mustard remaining in the jar. After using the jar to make a dressing, then you can recycle it.

When ready to make the dressing for the salad, I added a tablespoon or two of roasted hazelnut oil and then enough really good Tuscan extra virgin olive oil and salt to taste. Shake it hard to emulsify between tastes and additions. I probably used two parts oil to one part vinegar. Less to my taste would be a milder dressing closer to the classical vinaigrette ratio of three parts oil to one part vinegar.

I don't have a set recipe for vinaigrettes at home: they depend on my tastebuds and each dressing has to be adjusted just so. If I want a more acidic dressing (for counteracting a fatty pork shoulder, for example), I would use a lower oil to vinegar ratio. Otherwise, more oil. Also, the quality of the acidity matters too. Some vinegars are really acidic and require more oil (or even water) to tame them. Some vinegars are very mild and want less oil so that they are not overwhelmed. My rule of thumb: start with two parts oil to one part vinegar and add oil bit by bit until you are happy with it.

My Stealth Vinaigrette Maker: Newly-Emptied Mustard Jar

And that's pretty much the saga of our anniversary dinner. The food was so good, even if I say so myself. That pork, I cut it with my fork, it was so freaking tender. From the umami-laden appetizer to the crisp acidity of the salad, it was just a memorable meal. And the maple-pumpkin pie that the guys brought over was the perfect little bite to finish it off with, not too sweet and not reeking of pumpkin pie spice. The pie was well done.

After Rob and Dyce departed, I realized that there's only one real downside to celebrating at home and that is the somewhat large pile of dishes that has to be attended to after your guests have left. It's a small price to pay, but cleaning the cocotte below was a pain in the butt. I'd do it all over again for another bite of that damned pork, though!

Dirty Dishes: Fun Times!

Our anniversary celebration was a great one and I am looking forward to spending the time until the next one with my very best friend, the woman that I adore and who loves me to death. Ann, I love you!

Pan-Fried Noodles with Vegetables

In recent weeks, we've taken to celebrating our collective weight loss (about 55 pounds now) on weigh-in days, every Monday, by having a bit of a splurge dinner. The long and short of it is that we allow ourselves a few simple carbs: all stick and no carrot is no fun. This week, it was noodles. We love noodles in any way: in soup as in ramen, wet with sauce such as in lo mein, dry fried as in chow mein, and of course, Italian-style as in spaghetti aglio e olio.

This week, I decided to serve a mound of stir-fried vegetables on a cake of pan-fried noodles, a quasi Hong Kong-style dish. Call it chow mein, pan-fried noodles, or yakisoba as you will. I call it a delicious way to eat a couple hundred calories of simple carbs while still eating a pile of vegetables.

Pan-Fried Noodles with Vegetables

Frying Noodles

It all started by making a stir fry of nappa cabbage, bean sprouts, shiitake mushrooms, snow peas, green onions, garlic, and lots of ginger, with a splash of soy sauce for salt. And while that was cooking, I steamed some wheat noodles briefly in the microwave to limber them up and put them in a large skillet to brown into a cake, flipping halfway through.

And that's it. The vegetable prep takes a while, but the cooking is done quickly. Given that I prepped the vegetables sporadically during the afternoon, dinner was on the table in under fifteen minutes, a win all the way around.

Savory Bread Pudding: Shiitake, Leek, and Goat Cheese

Way back in the Thanksgiving time frame, Ann expressed a desire to have a savory bread pudding for Christmas Day brunch, by way of celebrating. We haven't been eating many simple carbs at all since August and the bread pudding would be a rare treat. I proposed making one with shiitakes, leeks, and goat cheese and she agreed, further asking if I could make it with challah. So I made a loaf of challah and assembled the bread pudding on Christmas Eve, baking it in early afternoon on Christmas Day.

Savory Bread Pudding: Shiitake, Leek, and Goat Cheese

I really love doing dishes like this for brunch because I can assemble everything the night before, leaving only to pull it out of the refrigerator and put it in the oven the next day.

Starting the Flavorings: Leeks and Shiitakes

Cooking the Leeks and Shiitakes with Thyme

I started by cooking sliced leeks and shiitakes with a bit of thyme. Thyme is one of my favorite herbs and I think it pairs extremely well with shiitakes.

Measuring the Bread

When making any kind of bread pudding, I always use the baking pan to measure the bread. I keep cutting cubes until the pan is full. That way, there's no guessing. Because challah is so soft, I cut it into very large cubes so that it will not fall apart when I add the custard. I prefer to use more substantial bread for bread puddings. When using bread with more body and a tougher crust, I would cut it much smaller.

You can use any bread you like. For example, I have made bread pudding with croissants and my grandmother used to smear store-bought white bread with butter and jam and shingle (overlap) the whole slices of smeared bread the length of her baking dish.

Dry Ingredients Before Mixing with Custard

Bread Pudding Ready to Bake or Refrigerate

The custard for bread pudding can be flavored or unflavored. In the restaurant days, I would infuse the cream for the custard with garlic, herbs, spices, and dried mushrooms, among other flavorings. For this bread pudding, I did not want to take that extra step, mainly because I had just made the challah and spent three days making French onion soup for Christmas Eve Dinner. Also, I wanted to reduce the fat in the custard by using low fat milk rather than the 40% heavy cream that I used to use at the restaurant.

A decent rule of thumb is that each egg will set one cup of liquid, so each quart of liquid requires four eggs. I always use five eggs. It's always a good idea to know how much custard volume you need for the size pan you will be using. A full shallow hotel pan will take a gallon (plus 20 eggs), a half hotel will take a half gallon (plus 10 eggs), and this 9x9 pan will take a quart (plus 5 eggs).

At the restaurant, in addition to making large puddings, we used to bake bread puddings in individual molds, in which case, we'd fill each mold full of bread and then ladle custard into the mold until the mold was full.

This 9x9 pan contains, in addition in addition to the bread and custard, a leek, a half a pound of shiitakes stemmed and sliced, and four ounces of fresh goat cheese.

 

Bread Pudding Coming Out of the Oven

Baking bread puddings is a simple matter of putting them uncovered in a moderate oven (350F) and waiting for them to set up and brown on top to the degree that you want. A bread pudding of this depth will take about 90 minutes, a good bit longer than many people expect. A full hotel pan of bread pudding is going to take about two hours to set in the center and brown. If you're wanting to eat your bread pudding while it is still warm, you'll probably want it to cool for 20 minutes before you cut it so that it has a chance to solidify a bit. All this is by way of saying that you should allow plenty of time to cook and cool your bread pudding before you want to eat it.

Prosecco: A Great Match for Goat Cheese

The slightly acidic flavor of the goat cheese in the bread pudding seems to go incredibly well with Prosecco, so we put a bottle in the refrigerator and had a glass while the pudding was in the oven and another glass with the pudding.

Friends for Dinner

We're finally settling in to the point where we can start entertaining again. So, Annie invited Valerie and Michael over to dinner. Michael's our insurance agent and Valerie and Ann had connected via a women's group to which they both belong. Long story short, Ann invited them over and let me run with a menu, mostly. She wanted to reprise the mushroom crostini that we had at New Year's Eve and I decided to keep dinner itself very simple: focaccia, an arugula salad, and porchetta. And a little plate to accompany a bottle of Port for dessert.

Thanks to Valerie for taking some of the photos below and giving me permission to use them here. Go have a look at her blog, V. Estelle Travel. It was so awesome to have someone else take pictures for once, but it looks like we both forgot to take people shots and bottle shots! Oh well, you'll have to trust us that a good time happened!

Chanterelle, Shiitake, Leek, and Taleggio Crostini

I couldn't find dried porcini to make the crostini, so I went with fresh chanterelles, which given all the rain we have had, were in really good shape. We had a bottle of Prosecco with the crostini.

Grinding Pork Trimmings for Sausage

I'm still looking for a good supplier of pork. Alas, the best I have found so far is from Carlton Farms out where we used to live in Yamhill, but it is definitely not the Berkshire and Ossabaw x Berkshire I was used to working with in Virginia.

"Porchetta" Ready for the Oven

I would really have preferred to make my porchetta with a suckling pig or a side of pork belly, but that would have been overkill for a dinner for four. So I faked it by butterflying a top loin and stuffing with a fennel sausage that I ground from rib and belly trimmings.

Slicing the Porchetta

Focaccia and Barbaresco

Focaccia has got to be the world's simplest bread to make. I started it first thing in the morning with a very tiny amount of yeast and cold water and let it rise all day. The first rise took about seven hours. We served Barbaresco with dinner and Michael and Valerie brought a wonderfully rustic Chianti Classico that we had as a second bottle.

Annie Making the Salad Dressing

Arugula with Clementines, Red Onion, Pine Nuts, and Ricotta Salata

Valerie's Plate with Salsa Verde on the Porchetta

I love a sharp salsa verde with pork to help offset the fat. This was parsley, anchovy, garlic, capers, red wine vinegar, and olive oil, all chopped together by hand for texture.

Blue Cheese, Candied Hazelnuts, Dates, Pinot Noir Syrup

For dessert, I had a bottle of Port that I helped blend at the winery and so I threw together a really simple port plate of Gorgonzola-like local blue cheese, local hazelnuts that I candied earlier in the afternoon, a pitted Medjool date, crostini from my focaccia, and a red wine syrup that I made from over-the-hill remnants of Pinot Noir from the tasting room.

This was the first time, other than Thanksgiving, that I have really cooked a nice meal start to finish since I left the restaurant back in August. It felt really good to get back in the saddle again and I really enjoyed getting head down in the kitchen again to knock out all the components of this dinner. It's not like the restaurant where we would have premade batches of salsa verde, salad dressing, candied nuts, crostini, or red wine syrup ready to hand. In that sense, it was an awful lot of fun to create a dinner totally from scratch. And an awful lot of fun to share it with Michael and Valerie.

New Year's Eve at Home

Why would you want to spend New Year's Eve at home?

Considering I have worked the prior 15 New Year's Eves as the chef and owner of a restaurant, the answer to that question ought to be obvious! If I never see the inside of a restaurant on New Year's Eve, that will be just fine with me. And of course, Annie was over the moon to have me at home. So we headed to the grocery store to see what we could find. I was in a seafood mood, but there's no good seafood in any grocery store around here. The best we could do was to grab a pound of Dungeness crab, wicked expensive and to my East Coast-born and -bred palate, not as tasty as blue crab. So I decided to do a crab risotto.

While standing in the store, Annie started describing an appetizer that she wanted, "something with mushrooms, gooey, and sexy!" Instantly I flashed on a mushroom crostino, so we got some dried porcini, some fresh shiitakes, and a small piece of funky Taleggio cheese to finish the mushrooms with.

Pashey Sparkling by Trisaetum

Leeks and Shiitakes

Porcini, Shiitake, Leek, and Taleggio Crostini

Who's Happy?

Risotto in the Works with Pancetta

Mise: Pancetta, Goat Cheese, Crab, and Chives

Dungeness Crab Risotto with Pancetta, Chives, and Goat Cheese

Roasted Rockfish with Mapo Dofu

Ann asked me to make Rockfish with Mapo Dofu sauce on Monday and so I obliged her, stopping by the store on the way home and getting some tofu and a rockfish.

Roasted Rockfish with Mapo Dofu

My kitchen Spanish was not good enough to keep my fish unmolested when I turned it over to the fish guy to scale with the instructions, "limpio y entero, con cabeza, por favor" and so it came home without fins or tail. Oh well, it would have been worse had I ordered it in English.

The Guest of Honor

I decided to do a vegetarian mapo dofu substituting shiitake mushrooms for ground pork, sautéing them in a bit of sesame oil with lots of garlic and ginger. Then I added pickled mustard stems, spicy bean paste, a sprinkle of freshly ground Sichuan peppercorns (in the spice mill cup), and a splash of soy sauce. After this cooked for a minute, I added a little water and the tofu, thickened the sauce lightly with a touch of corn starch slurry, and adjusted the seasoning, adding a bit more spicy bean sauce because I thought it wasn't spicy enough in the la sense, chile spice. It was plenty spicy in the ma sense, numbing and tingling, from the Sichuan peppercorns.

Mapo Dofu Mise en Place

Steelhead Trout with Gingered Nappa and Soy Shiitakes

Steelhead Trout, Nappa Cabbage, Shiitakes

We're still very much in the winter doldrums at the restaurant and I am able to leave the cooking to the cooks on some weeknights, giving me an opportunity to get home and have dinner with Ann and Carter. Last night was one such night that I took off, worked on the bathroom that we're remodeling, and made dinner for all of us.

Yesterday afternoon Ann and I were discussing dinner via text when she asked me to do something with the Steelhead Trout that I brought home on Monday. So I started sketching out an idea: gingered nappa cabbage, soy-glazed Steelhead, and shiitakes. No sooner had I written this on a piece of paper than she texted me: "teriyaki or hoisin." How crazy that we were on exactly the same page, miles apart?

The nappa I quickly sautéed in a little oil with a splash of sesame oil, a lot of minced ginger, and a bit of minced garlic. Once it wilted, I moved it on to plates, wiped the pan down, and quickly sautéed some sliced shiitakes with a bit more ginger and garlic, then as they were wilting, splashed them with a few drops of soy sauce, let that evaporate, and moved them to a plate at the back of the stove to stay warm.

Another wipe down of the pan, a touch more oil, and in went the Steelhead, skin side down until the skin was crispy and brown and the fish at least half cooked, about three minutes. Then I flipped the fish and let it go for another minute, splashed the pan with soy sauce, let it evaporate, and then I turned off the flame and let the fish rest for 90 seconds. The fish was perfectly cooked: crispy skin, soy char on the other side, moist, flaky, and pink center. Delicious!

The plate up as you see above is simple.

Ann did not like the nappa cabbage. She keeps surprising me with all the leafy vegetables that she will not eat, nothing except for spinach and maybe gai lan, Chinese broccoli. This is going to be a bone of contention when we are eating together full time, post restaurant because I've not met a vegetable that I won't eat and I love and have to have my leafy greens. More for me I guess! I ate her cabbage and enjoyed every forkful of it!

Shrimp and Lemongrass Soup

Shrimp and Lemongrass Soup

Monday I was in the mood for light fare and I wanted soup too, so I combined the two into a very colorful bowl for dinner. This soup is all about the broth as are most soups. I made a stock from water, chicken stock, galangal, kaffir lime, smashed lemongrass, smashed garlic, shiitake stems, and snow pea trimmings. The stock simmered for 90 minutes, at which point I strained it, seasoned it with fish sauce and lime juice, brought it to a slight boil, and added the shrimp and shiitakes. Once the shrimp were nearly cooked, about two minutes, I added the fresh rice noodles for another minute.

Then I transferred some rice noodles and shrimp to each bowl, garnished with sweet pepper rings, snow peas, and cilantro, and then ladled the boiling broth over the top.

Vegetables with Spiced Tofu

I admit that I wasn't too jazzed when I read in an email from Ann yesterday "Let's do a vegetable stir fry with tofu." But, I was in a hurry to get home and really didn't want to try to think of something different, so I just replied "OK" and grabbed a few things at FoodMaxx on the way home.

Vegetables with Spiced Tofu

I also have to admit that it really did taste very good and that my body was craving vegetables, after a week of heavy Thanksgiving eating.



Peppers, Snow Peas, Shiitakes, Green Onions, Carrots

Not shown here is a small crown of broccoli that I prepped into florets and steamed in the microwave for about four minutes before adding them to the pan to caramelize.



Spiced Tofu, Cilantro, Garlic, "Pickled Radish"

The prep took about 15 minutes of chopping and slicing during the afternoon and then it only took about 10 minutes to bring the dish to the table when Ann decided she was hungry. I seared the ingredients in three different batches to keep my pan smoking hot. This is where I miss a carbon steel wok and a smoking wok burner. ;) The heat and the smoke I don't miss.

The green onions and cilantro went in raw. And then when all was done, I put the so-called "pickled radish" into the pan and deglazed with a touch of water. In went a little bean paste, some hoisin, a little soy sauce and it all cooked for another 90 seconds at which point, I poured the sauce over the veg and tossed well.

As for the "pickled radish," that's the name on the shelf tag at the store. The packages themselves are not marked in any way in English, except for a use-by date. So, I don't really know what these sweet and spicy pickled vegetables are, other than addictively good. They are my new favorite find!