Apple bars

This is a quick, easy recipe for apple bars. It uses fresh apples and can be a party food.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9" x 13" baking dish.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 c. organic rolled oats
1 1/3 c. unbleached white flour
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking soda
12 tbsp unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), softened or melted
3/4 c. brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 sweet, firm apples (I used Gala apples)
2-3 tsp vanilla extract
1-2 tsp ground cinnamon

Directions:

1. In a bowl, sift flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon together; then mix in the rolled oats

2. Melt butter and let cool, then whisk together with eggs, vanilla, and brown sugar.

3. Fold together the flour mix and the butter mix until well combined. Pour into prepared baking dish and Bake for 35-40 minutes. Let cool for at least 30 minutes, then cut into bars and remove from baking pan.

Oven notes: My oven doesn't heat properly and heats up unevenly, so I tend to bake for 5-10 minutes longer. If you have an accurate oven, these bars should be baked for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean in the middle.

Elk curry

I am a big fan of wild game meat, except I live in a quaint suburb of Los Angeles and there's often no such meat to be had unless I go out of my way to a specialty meat shop. Fortunately, there's a shop a few miles away, Harmony Farms. I have eaten elk jerky before, but with all the spices really hard to tell what elk really tastes like.

Any meat cooked with curry is prepared a lot like a stew. You take some flavoring agent like ginger or garlic, heat it up with some oil (usually 2 tbsp) in a skillet and add whatever meat. With the exception to roast duck, I don't think anyone else in my family likes eating game meats. I love it and I love reading folklorist-styled cookbooks that talk about the olde ways of preparing food. Anyhow.. onto the recipe.

There's a small hole-in-the-wall Middle-Eastern foods specialty shop that sells a lot of dried goods and spices in Burbank called Y & K Distributing. The curry that I have is packaged under their label and the spice ratios of it are unknown to me; but it is rather mild and flavorful.

Ingredients:

4 tsp curry powder + enough water to make a paste
2 tbsp EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)
1 lb elk stew meat
boiling water
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp wine (I used red xiao-xing wine)

Directions:

1. In a skillet, heat oil until hot but not smoking; add curry paste and stir until fragrant but not burning.
2. Add the elk meat and brown the elk meat. This step takes a lot less time than with beef stew meat since there is a lot less fat in elk meat. About 5 mins, or less.
3. Add enough boiling water to cover the meat.
4. Add soy sauce (this is a natural glutamate)
5. Simmer for 45 minutes to an hour. You could add wine to this step. It is optional.

Serve with steamed rice, noodles, or fresh lavash bread.

IMHO, it tastes pretty good.

Red bean mooncakes

So, on my quest to make mooncakes from scratch this year instead of buying them for $20/4pc.. I soaked some azuki beans in water for 2 hours, drained off the water, then proceeded to boil them at a simmer until they were soft. I blended them into a soppy paste with some lard and sugar, except the paste has too much water in it. Hmm.. and, the paste is of a purplish hue instead of dark red -- like what you'd get out of canned, sweetened red bean paste. The recipe I'm using isn't for the faint of heart. There's lard in both dough mixes. Mmmm.. lard.. Well, these look pretty darn strange coming out of the oven (See also: pic2 & pic3). Since I didn't use an egg wash, none of the mooncakes retained their mould image. The crust is about right, a little on the thick side and not sweet even though I added about 1/8 cup sugar to the outer crust recipe. The purple azuki bean paste looks pretty purple, so maybe for the next batch I should use the canned red bean paste instead. Maybe there's a video on this somewhere of how to form these things. The instructions I have suggest to put the fold side into the mould so that the fold is imprinted, but that's just all wacky. Here're the ingredients: One 14 oz package of azuki beans water 3/4 c. lard 1 c. sugar Water-lard dough: 2 c. unbleached white flour 5 tbsp. lard 10+ tbsp cold water 1/8 c. sugar Flaky dough: 1 c. unbleached white flour 5 tbsp lard This batch yielded 12 malformed mooncakes. For this recipe, I used duck lard and while the dough faintly smelled of roast duck (kao ya), the taste didn't stay with the pastry after baking. I ended up using more than 10 tbsp water with the water-lard dough just to get the dough to come together. The bean paste doesn't taste all that sweet because I misread the recipe. It originally called for 1 3/4 c. sugar. Now that I've gone through the process once, I think that a bit of powdered sugar can be added to the water-lard dough without it drying out too much. It would impart more sweetness and still be a dough. The ratio has yet to be determined.

Mápó dòufu (hot spicy tofu)

This dish is commonly regarded as one of the signature dishes of the Szechuan province in China. It is pretty easy to prepare. I'm not a fan of this dish, but after watching this prepared in an episode of the comedy anime series Chuka Ichiban (Cooking Master Boy), I got awfully interested in cooking it. Everyone else in my family is proficient at cooking it. 

My mom tells me that it isn't complicated at all... "You fry the pork and green onion. Put in the tofu and fry it. Add the sauce and you're done." 

My dad's recipe, as it was told over the telephone, went like this: "Take one box of tofu and chop it into whatever shape you want. Fry ground pork until crispy with soy sauce. Add some chicken broth. Put a little salt on it. When it starts to bubble, put the ground pork in. Add 1/2 tsp black pepper. Cook with medium-thick cornstarch until it is a little shiny and sticky. If you like it hot, chop up a red pepper. Put spring onion on it. Add a few drops of sesame oil. Add the hot bean sauce last so that it's not too hot." 

My brother's recipe had less of the how and more of the what to put in the dish: sauce is 1/4 c. stock, 1 tbsp hot bean sauce, 1/2 tbsp light soy sauce; green onions, minced ginger, minced garlic, tofu, 1 lb ground pork, and Szechuan peppercorns (btw, these are no longer a banned ingredient in the USA). 

Here's what transpired on the stove tonight... 

Ingredients: 

1 box soft tofu (should be firm, but this is all I had in my pantry) 
1/4 pound ground pork 
1/2 tsp fresh ginger, minced 
2 cloves garlic, minced 
1 stalk green onion, sliced, for garnish 
1 tsp sesame oil (optional) 
1/4 c. chicken broth 
2 tbsp olive oil, for frying freshly ground black pepper 
Sauce thickener (optional): 1 tsp cornstarch 2 tsp cold water

Sauce (mildly spicy): 
1 tsp hot bean sauce (1 tbsp for very spicy) 
1 tsp light soy sauce
1/2 tsp salt (up to 1 1/2 tsp salt) 

Directions: 

1. Cube the bean curd into 1/2" pieces and set aside. 

2. Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a pan and fry the ground pork until almost no pinkness remains. Set aside. 

3. Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a pan and add the garlic and ginger. When these start to lightly brown, add the tofu and cook for about 2 minutes. Add the pork, chicken broth, and sauce. Simmer for about 3 minutes. 

4. Dissolve the cornstarch with the cold water and pour this into the pan. This will thicken the sauce. 

5. Stir in the sesame oil and sprinkle with green onions. 

6. Remove from heat and serve. Looked like mapo tofu, tastes like mild mapo tofu. Well, it has all the flavor and very little of the hot spicyness. This can be converted into a vegetarian dish by omitting the ground meat and using a vegetable broth instead.

The Asian shopping list - Dec '07

I only just realized that today is pretty much the last week before Xmas where everyone tries to do as much shopping as possible before that day. I had expected a large crowd at Ranch 99 and was not disappointed when I got there. While maybe 75% of the Chinese population or more in southern California does not celebrate the day, they still like to eat food a lot and any holiday that grants them extra time off to cook even more food is a good thing. Always write down what you think you need before you go to any Asian food mart. Things will be on sale that aren't on your list and you can easily find yourself overbudget and without any fridge space to accommodate it all.

I really only needed a few things from the store. Sure, it is 25 miles away, but these are kitchen necessities. Besides, how was I going to attempt mapo tofu (hot spicy tofu) without hot bean sauce?

A few things came out of this shopping trip. For one, I found that the Ranch 99 carries whole rabbit meat so that'll be an interesting item to pick up next Easter when every kid on the block is out hunting for eggs, I'll be roasting the iconic rabbit. Mmmm. Sounds like a plan. The second thing I found was that I was much less inclined towards the tempting items not on my shopping list. I think mostly it's because I know I could make the item myself but am too lazy to do it. Buying the item pre-made doesn't make me any less lazy, it just makes me fat and lazy. So, I have opted to not toss items like shao bing (flat sesame bread), green onion pancakes, chiao siu bau (?), and fried gyoza into the cart.

The list included ground pork, hot bean sauce, fresh shitake mushrooms, green onions, vegetables (I just pick up my favorites), ginger, garlic, large shrimp, and xiao xing wine (red rice wine). Of the vegetables, I got on choy, baby bok choy, bean sprouts (the mung bean variety, not the soy bean sprouts), a green cabbage, and Taiwan bai chai. Not on the list but also picked up were fresh giant enoki mushrooms (3/pk), normal enoki mushrooms, preserved duck eggs, chestnuts, two frozen ducks, three cans of the litchi-flavored grass jelly drink, and some red bean mochi.

The total bill? $50.