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!

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.

Lo Mein

Lo Mein: Wheat Noodles and Vegetables

Our dinner from last evening: very quick and easy. Boiled lo mein noodles tossed with a stir fry of lop cheung, green onions, orange bell peppers, snow peas, ginger, garlic, cilantro, and a really fun little package of sweet and spicy pickled radishes that I picked up at the store. The package wasn't labeled in English at all (and actually isn't legal for sale as it has no ingredients list or nutrition information listed, not that I care).

Thai Vegetable Chow Mein

The usual Monday morning conversation centered around what to make for dinner. No surprise there for a couple of hardcore foodies. We had hung up with a baseline consensus around pho or other rice noodle soup. A few minutes later I get a text from Ann: "Can you do those noodles in a pancake?"

Of course, I thought, but didn't really get to thinking about what to do other than a basic chow mein until much later in the afternoon when I remembered that when I had been weeding in the garden very early in the morning and that I had noticed that we have lots and lots of Thai basil that needed to be used.

From there, it wasn't a big stretch to combine Thai flavors with Chinese technique.

Thai Chow Mein

I decided as long as was mixing metaphors that it wouldn't hurt too bad if the vegetables were a mish-mash too. After work as I was heading home, from the market I collected sugar snaps (ours got pulled out of the garden this past weekend, sadly), an orange pepper, grape tomatoes, a pineapple, a knob of galangal, cilantro, bamboo shoots, and a pound of fresh noodles. From the pantry, I got fish sauce, ground white pepper, and dry roasted peanuts. And from the garden, I got lots of fresh Thai basil and garlic (Chinese) chives.

Flavoring Paste Basics

I made a seasoning paste to flavor the dish with from cilantro stems, galangal (aka kha or Thai ginger), shallots, white pepper, and fish sauce. Fresh galangal is very assertive, much more so than ginger, so I only used a few slices, finely minced, in my seasoning paste.

I fried the noodle cake and removed it to a platter, then I fried the seasoning paste and added the vegetables. After everything was warmed through, I added a few more splashes of fish sauce and tossed in the basil and chives.

A bit of prep work, but easy to execute and delicious!

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!

Mixed Metaphors

Pan-Fried Noodles with Shrimp and Thai Basil

No big Sunday post this week: Ann and I were both catering at Delaplane Cellars on Sunday, almost 600 portions! It was actually kind of a crazy week: we also did the food for the Glen Manor Vineyards vertical tasting this weekend too. Given that it was supposed to be 75 on Monday and we hadn't had any weekend and I wanted to spend some time with Ann, I was up before the sun on Monday and at the restaurant, powering through my Monday chores. This let me get home just in time to make lunch.

I didn't really want to cook anything involved, but was looking for something light, fresh, and simple. A huge bunch of Thai basil caught my eye at the market and from there it was just a matter of picking up some small (frozen, peeled and deveined, pre-cooked, if you must know) shrimp. Shrimp and Thai Basil (and its cousin made with squid) is one of the glories of Thai cooking. Dead simple and delicious.

Normally this dish would be served on rice, but I was looking for a one-pan meal with minimal cleanup, so I grabbed a bag of fresh lo mein noodles and fried them into a large pancake (chow mein style) which I topped with the shrimp and basil in a sauce of fish sauce, garlic, slivered chile pepper, lots of black pepper, and a touch of brown sugar. The frozen shrimp contributed all their water to the sauce as well.

So we ended up with a five-minute lunch that was half Chinese and half Thai and so what! It was quick, light, fresh, delicious, and there was but a single pan to wash. There's a lot to be said for not washing dishes and getting on with life!

Udon with Pork, Shiitake, and Tofu

Udon with Pork, Shiitake, and Tofu

At 4pm on Sunday, it went from hazily overcast to snowing so hard that we couldn't see across the street. Nothing like blizzard conditions to put me in the mood for comfort food and I had gone to FoodMaxx earlier in the morning with this dish in mind, so I was fully prepared. Slurping a big bowl of udon is comforting to me, seriously comforting.

I tossed the udon with a sauce of ground pork, diced spiced and pressed tofu, shiitake mushrooms, pickled mustard stems (zha cai), doenjang (Korean bean paste), Chinkiang black vinegar, ginger, garlic, green onions, and cilantro.

There were zero complaints from the peanut gallery about this dish, just dead silence while we all wolfed the noodles down!

Snow Day

The snowstorm of Wednesday March 6, 2013 will go down as pretty much of a dud, but I didn't know that when I walked the dogs at 7am with fresh snow well above my boot tops, howling wind, and swirling snow that had visibility at a couple hundred yards. From everything that I could see and feel and the forecast predicting hard snow through midafternoon with more snow lingering into the dinner hours, it was obvious that none of our vendors would be sending out their trucks and it seemed a no-brainer to close the restaurant for the day. Who knew? Who knew that by 2pm the roads would all be clear and the sun would be out and everyone would be asking derisively of the weather gods, "Is that all you got?"

So what do two foodies do on the rarest of rare days, a snow day? We eat and drink! Duh!

The Star of our Day

It just so happened that Tom Leonard of Leonard's Truffière in Tennessee was in town meeting with friends of mine and had stopped by the restaurant with a present worth a small fortune, this beautiful black truffle. And it just so happened that it was sitting on my counter at home on this wonderful day off from work.

My Mandoline is Perfect for Shaving Truffles

For maximum effect, truffles are generally best when thinly shaved over warm food so that the warmth of the food liberates the haunting smell. Though they make a specialized truffle shaver, which is essentially a razor blade in a handle, I prefer my more general purpose mandoline that I can use for many other things (pommes Anna!) besides truffles.

Eggs, Perhaps the Perfect Vehicle for Truffles

The French really do know a thing or two about cooking and not only did my mandoline come from France, but so did my black steel pans. These are the pans that we use at the restaurant not only to get that awesome crust on fish and scallops, but also for cooking eggs. Does this look like a non-stick pan? It most definitely is not. But once a black steel pan is broken in, almost nothing sticks to it, if you care for it properly. The cooks at the restaurant and I love these pans. They're cheap, nearly indestructible workhorses but they do require a bit of loving care and regular oiling to keep them from rusting. After wiping it clean, I always rub mine all over with oil before putting it away.



Can You Smell This?

Our breakfast was a big pile of what I call scrambled eggs but what the French would likely call an omelette. No matter the name, it is decorated with ultrathin truffle shavings that perfumed the kitchen gloriously. There is no substitute for fresh eggs and these came from a local farmer from her Rhode Island Reds. Once every couple of years when the egg production goes way down at the depths of winter, I will have to buy some commercial eggs to augment the supply at the restaurant. You should hear the cursing and muttering from the cooks when they have to use those thin-shelled, watery, tasteless things that they sell at the grocery store.

Ann Makes Spicy Dragon Noodles

Speaking of eggs, Ann scrambled a couple more of them for lunch along with a copious amount of crushed red peppers flakes, the beginnings of the dish that she calls Spicy Dragon Noodles. To these eggs, she added large wheat noodles, soy sauce, sriracha, and brown sugar. She finished the dish with some Thai basil, though in the past she has used green onions or cilantro, neither one of which we had on hand.



Spicy Dragon Noodles

Orecchiette with Garlic and Black Truffles

Dinner was quite the simple affair. We wanted pasta (yes, our second pasta dish of the day, thank you!) and simple pasta at that. I wanted to use the remainder of the truffle and with the addition of some slivered garlic and butter, that's about all you need for awesome pasta. Truffles shine best when they don't have to compete with other flavors. This is why you so often find them paired with very mild ingredients such as eggs and potatoes, or in this case, pasta.

The Art of the Sauce: Pork and Snow Pea Lo Mein

Well, Monday was to be date night but Ann wasn't feeling up to going out and she asked me if I would make lo mein with snow peas, so I grabbed some pork neck bones, snow peas, and lo mein noodles at the market on the way home.

I have never liked the usual casual approach to making Chineses sauces: thickening broth with starch. I don't mind dredging meat in starch, frying it, then adding broth and have it thicken that way, but thickening broth with a starch slurry seems like a cop out to me, a lazy way that says the cook doesn't care enough to make a good sauce. Maybe it's my classical French sauce background coming through that drives me to make my sauces by reduction. Maybe it's the flavor: the results are spectacular.

Pork Neck Bones

Into a screaming hot pot went the meaty neckbones to brown thoroughly on all sides, a process that took about 15 minutes. At various points, I added whole garlic, slabs of ginger, green onion bulbs, a halved shallot with the skin still on, and a bunch of cilantro stems tied in a bouquet, so that each item caramelized along with the pork. In went water to cover and after deglazing the bottom of the pan, I left the pot to simmer while we watched a movie. After the movie was done, I removed the solids, reserving the neck bones, skimmed the fat from the stock, and started reducing it over high heat until I had a cup of liquid.

Meanwhile, I picked the gelatinous neck meat from the bones, Ann pulled the strings from the snow peas, and I slivered garlic and green onions. And I got a jar of young slivered bamboo shoots in spicy chile oil out of the refrigerator.

Pork and Snow Pea Lo Mein

Once the stock reduced to a cup, I added a tablespoon of Chinkiang black rice vinegar, a couple tablespoons of soy sauce, a teaspoon of sambal oelek chile paste, and enough brown sugar to balance the flavors. I brought this down to about 3/4 of a cup and adjusted the seasonings to end up with a deliciously porky, sweet, sour, spicy, and salty sauce.

While the sauce was finishing, I cooked the noodles and stir-fried the other ingredients. It was then just a matter of mixing the noodles, the garnishes, and the sauce and serving. The results were delicious and a fair amount of work for a weeknight, but really worth it in terms of flavor. You just can't duplicate the depth of flavor of a carefully crafted sauce reduction by thickening some broth with starch.

Chow Mein

Monday a week ago (I'm getting behind in posting) Ann really wanted "those noodles you make." Those noodles I make are classic chow mein, fried noodles. First you fry a pound of fresh wheat noodles on both sides:

Fry Noodles on Both Sides, Tossing to Flip

and then you top them with something delicious. In this case, a stir fry of snow peas, lop cheung, pressed tofu, dried daylily buds, tree ear mushrooms, preserved vegetable (pickled mustard stems, zha cai), garlic chives, and lots of ginger and garlic.

Chow Mein: a Thing of Beauty

If you've seen a lot of chow mein on this blog, it's because we love it, it's easy to do, and there's never a problem getting Carter to eat it.

Red-Cooked Duck

Back in July (the first of July to be exact), Yael and Dan had us over to their farm for a splendid dinner feast and we have been trying to return the favor forever. Such is the nature of the restaurant life and the resulting 2-3 days off per month that it was the first of December before we could actually all get together for dinner at our house.

I have had duck on the brain for a month, red-cooked duck specifically, so I built a (non-traditional) Chinese menu around that.

Turkey and Black Truffle Rillettes

We had an extra jar of truffled turkey rillettes in the refrigerator from Thanksgiving that we started with. The flavor is now better than ever and it would probably get even better still except that now all three jars are gone, gone, gone.

Jook, Fully Garnished



Jook Garnishes: Cilantro, Spicy Cowpeas, Green Onions, Mustard Stems

Now that the weather is cold, my brain is about all things braised/slow-cooked and I have been on a jook tear recently. Jook, also known as congee, is quintessential Chinese comfort food: rice cooked in broth until it disintegrates and becomes a thick porridge.

For mine, I cooked down several chicken hind quarters and a bunch of chicken feet with about a pound of fresh ginger and a bunch of cilantro stems to make the stock. I picked the chicken meat and reserved it. Into the stock went some Carolina Gold heirloom rice and after simmering for about four hours, it had turned to a silky soup. Just before serving, I mixed the chicken back in and prepped a plate of garnishes: cilantro, spicy salted cowpeas, green onions, and preserved mustard stems (zha cai).

I know that jook is traditionally breakfast food, invalid food, and/or a meal by itself, but I like it as an appetizer in a western format meal.


Mise en Place for Pan-Fried Noodles

Because we had rice as a first course, I didn't want to serve it again with the main meal, so I decided to go with pan-fried noodles topped with a variety of vegetables and fungi: shiitakes, tree ear mushrooms, dried daylily blossoms, spiced and pressed tofu, snow peas, garlic chives, green onions, shallot rings, ginger and garlic. I finished the vegetables with a splash of soy sauce and sugar.

Red-Cooked Duck and Bok Choy with Pan-Fried Noodles in Background

Red-cooking is one of my all time favorite braising methods. I cut the duck into serving pieces and browned them. Then cut up the carcass and browned it very deeply in the oven. From this I made a rich duck stock. The duck slowly braised in the duck stock, soy sauce, brown sugar, and a really nutty Sherry with lots of green onions, a dried clementine peel, crushed garlic, and loads of sliced ginger. For spices, I added a sachet containing a few star anise pods, a cinnamon stick, and a handful of Sichuan peppercorns. The duck braised on Saturday for about three hours after which I removed the duck, defatted the stock, and reduced it to the point where I was happy with the flavor. Highly reduced soy-based liquids can get way too salty in a hurry.

Sunday, I put the stock back with the duck in a very slow oven and let it rewarm gently. Then at service, I pulled the duck and lightly thickened the sauce by adding a touch of hoisin sauce. I plattered the duck with some bok choy and poured the sauce over. Really, really good.

Binyamina's Farmer Series, Cab-Shiraz 2009

And speaking of really good, Dan and Yael brought this Cabernet Sauvignon-Syrah blend from Binyamina Winery, one of the largest wineries in Israel. The soft fruit went beautifully with the duck!

Chow Mein

Snow Pea and Shrimp Chow Mein

Ann and I went all over town on Sunday running errands and doing things that I would normally do on Monday, which would not be possible because of the Memorial Day holiday. Needless to say, all those errands and food shopping on an empty stomach made for a couple of hungry people. Good thing Food Maxx was one stop on the way home! Ann wanted noodles, Asian, of some unspecified variety. I'm easy that way. All I need is an idea and I am off cooking.

We bought some udon, preserved vegetable, green onions, and snow peas and during the drive home, I was thinking soup with udon, but then it was 90+ degrees in the shade and I don't think either of us were feeling a hot bowl of soup, no matter  how good. So while I was prepping, I asked Ann about the udon, "stir-fried or in a broth?" "Stir-fried!" we both blurted out simultaneously. Jinx.

At that point I was thinking lo mein, noodles mixed with the vegetables, but then that all went out the door when I remembered how awesome good chow mein is, crispy pan-fried noodles topped with a garnish, not the gloppy crap that they used to (and I presume still do) serve in the 60's and 70's in bad American Chinese restaurants.

I put the udon into a large skillet and crisped them first on one side and then on the other, making a cake of crispy goodness that I transferred to a platter while I quickly stir-fried the garnish: snow peas, garlic, ginger, preserved vegetable, pre-cooked shrimp, and green onions. Once this was going, I added a large pinch (1/2 a teaspoon or more) of ground white pepper, a big splash of fish sauce, and a bit of water. I let this reduce for a minute or so and poured the whole over the noodles.

Mise en Place: It Makes Cooking so Much Simpler

 Our lunch, this mutt of a dish, classic Chinese preparation mixed with Japanese noodles and Thai spicing, was absolutely amazing, one of the best off-the-cuff dishes I've ever made. Paired with a delicious Riesling halbtrocken, it made for a memorable lunch.

Noodles with Pork, Green Onions, and Snow Peas

I wasn't feeling well yesterday and the weather was turning chilly again: I needed comfort food. In the morning, when Ann and I were discussing dinner—isn't that a primary topic of conversation for all couples?—she said, "It's getting cooler; let's have something wintery one more time before it gets hot." Both of us on the same page is always a good place to start. "Or let's go out!" Oops, maybe both of us not on the same page.

I just didn't feel up to going out and so I brought home a few things to make a bowl of noodles. Noodles and soup noodles are my go-tos when I am not feeling well. Here you see my mise for dinner: wheat noodles, green onions, doenjang, preserved vegetable, sambal oelek (the jar just barely in the photo), snowpeas, garlic, ginger, and ground pork. I didn't bring the snow peas home; they were a lucky find in the refrigerator. Doenjang is a Korean soybean paste. I like it better than most Chinese bean paste because it still has some whole or partial beans in it for texture. Preserved vegetable is a mustard green that has been cured in salt and chile. Sambal oelek is ground fresh red jalapeño chiles.

Zha Jiang Mian with Steamed Yu Choy

The latest in our Wednesday night dinners continues the recent Sichuan trend; actually, the mapo dofu that I made Monday reminded me that I love zha jiang mian and haven't had it since I left Fairfax County in 2002, when I used to eat it weekly. Ann's never had it and I knew she would love it. What could be nearer and dearer to our salsa bolognese-loving hearts than Chinese noodles with pork sauce? If I had to wager, I would say that the Chinese zha jiang mian was the prototype for pappardelle bolognese, centuries ago.

This northern Chinese dish of noodles topped with ground or minced pork cooked with bean paste is so popular in the Asian world that both the Japanese and the Koreans have appropriated it for themselves. The Koreans call it jajangmyeon and serve it over the same large wheat noodles you see here. The Japanese serve jajamen over udon; their bean paste is miso. By whatever name, it's a great dish and is served in its most elemental form (such as you see here) to highly garnished elaborate preparations. For me, it's about the noodles bathing in a rich porky bean paste goodness; you can keep the fancy garnishes.

Here you see my mise for this dinner, save a tiny bit of chile paste. From the bean paste in the center working clockwise, you see firm tofu, yu choy, preserved vegetable, wheat noodles, green onions, garlic, and ground pork. My favorite restaurant always put finely diced tofu in their noodles; I like it and do the same. The sauce is trivial to make: brown the pork with the garlic, add the bean paste and some water, stir well and add the remaining ingredients except for the green onions which are garnish. Simmer and reduce while you steam the yu choy and boil the noodles. Dress the yu choy with a little sesame oil and serve.