I am passing off this dish as a "main" dish for my company's potluck lunch. It seems that a lot of would-be appetizers in Asian cuisine can be eaten en mass and then counted as a main entree. The sheer lack of a key ingredients (fermented black beans) made me buy pre-made hoisin sauce instead of making it from scratch for this recipe. This one came out tasting better than expected. This is one of those needs some assembly meals if your guests were to be serving themselves.
There are two primary components to it: the lettuce leaf and the filling. You fold the leaf up like a pocket and eat it with the filling inside. 1 head of fresh butter lettuce leaves (or a few Romaine hearts, if butter lettuce not available) Carefully separate the leaves from the stem, wash, and pat dry. Stack leaves on a plate and set aside.
Filling ingredients
1 lb lean ground beef a few stalks of green onion, white part only, chopped
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil one 8oz can of sliced water chestnuts, minced
1/2 cup dried shitake mushrooms, reconstituted, minced
a few stalks of green onion, green part only, minced
2 tsp sesame oil 2 cloves fresh garlic, minced
2 tsp fresh ginger, minced
1 tbsp rice wine vinegar
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/3 c. hoisin sauce (optional)
1+ tsp chili pepper sauce or 1+ tsp Tabasco sauce (depends on how much heat you want in this dish)
Directions
1. In a large skillet over medium-high heat (if using olive oil, high heat if using other cooking oil), brown the ground beef and stir often so that it doesn't burn or stick to the bottom of the pan. Remove beef to a bowl and set aside. Leave the juices in the pan, this will help keep the next set of ingredients from burning.
2. Add the chopped white part of the green onion and stir frequently. Add garlic, ginger, soy sauce, vinegar, hoisin sauce, and hot sauce (optional) together. Stir/mix in water chestnuts, shitake mushrooms, sesame oil, and chopped green part of the green onion stalks.
3. Return ground beef to the skillet and mix until well combined. Remove from heat and set aside.
4. Assembly: Take one lettuce leaf and place it on a plate. Fill it with a few tbsp of ground beef filling. Wrap like a pocket and eat.
Oh, a kitchen note on the spacing between ingredient sets. You could save yourself some time and combine each set of ingredients into its own bowl. Then add the bowls of already combined ingredients to the skillet as they are fried together. I'm thinking that this would be a good filling for a Chinese meat pie or potsticker.
This recipe ended up being one of two items that I decided to bring to my company's potluck lunch. I'm dubbing these not your average cookie since there's a key ingredient missing from the authentic taste of these cookies, the almond extract. Having moved to this area about a half year ago, my kitchen boxes are still in quite a sorry state of disarray and while I know I have at least four bottles of almond extract, none of them chose to materialize today. So, I swapped out the almond extract with another extract in my pantry, lemon extract. I suppose then the name would surely change to Lemon Almond Cookies, but who has really heard of those things?
Both Fred Meyers (owned by Kroger) and Trader Joe's didn't have any blanched almonds in stock, so I decided to pick up a few whole raw almonds and blanch them myself. Despite just about every online and cookbook resource that says this is easy to do, it really isn't. In fact, peeling the damn almonds was more time consuming than baking the entire batch of cookies. Ugh. The dedication to cooking I have for a mere garnishment... anyhow.
To blanch almonds, simply put your almonds into a heatproof bowl. Barely cover them with boiling water. Let the almonds sit for about a minute, drain, and rinse with cold water. Have fun peeling the almonds.
The almond cookie recipe is almost a standard sugar cookie ratio, except it has almond meal in the flour mix. It is traditionally made with lard, which is hard to get, make, or find fresh these days.
Ingredients
3 c. unbleached white flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 c. almond meal (or finely ground fresh almonds)
1 c. unbleached cane sugar
1 large egg
1 1/2 sticks butter, softened
3 tbsp water
1 tsp almond extract (if you wanted to make real almond cookies)
about 1/4 c. raw whole almonds, blanched (skins removed)
1 egg, beaten (optional egg wash for top of cookie)
1/2 tsp almond extract
1. Sift together flour, baking soda, salt, almond meal, and set aside.
2. Cream butter and sugar together, blend in the egg, water, and almond extract.
3. Combine 1&2 together to form a dough.
4. Form dough into 1-inch balls, and flatten slightly with your fingers onto the cookie sheet. The cookies spread out a bit, so, space them at least an 1-2 inches apart.
5. Press a whole blanched almond into the center of each cookie.
6. (optional) Brush each cookie lightly with an eggwash.
7. Bake at 350 degrees F for about 20 minutes, or until the tops and edges of the cookies are light golden brown.
I used an egg wash (1 egg whisked together with 1/2 tsp almond extract) on this batch, but it's not necessary. It's for aesthetics only.
Imagine if you could if you had everything listed in this recipe except for the almond extract. While I could have used vanilla extract, that'd just be boring and I wouldn't learn anything from the experience. So, in went lemon extract. There you have it, not your average Chinese Almond Cookie. There are almonds in the recipe, but that's not what comes to mind for the name. It's the aroma and pleasing scent of almond extract that everyone remembers; not the almonds themselves.
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