Hunkering Down

Somehow there is a lot to report, but not much that has gone on of late. We're still waiting for baby to introduce himself to the world. Not yet at the due date, but close enough to keep a close vigil for signs of the little man with an apron.

In the meantime, I'm cooking as usual. I guess I should have already mixed the bread dough if I was planning on putting it in the fridge overnight tonight, but I always like to think there is tomorrow for these things. It is officially exam season in law school, so while I tend to have very little time to mess around in the kitchen, I do get the benefit of not having to be in class during the day. Sometimes that results in a little extra time here and there.

This weekend, the Mrs. and I went to the Christmas tree lighting in Montclair, New Jersey, where we live. Afterward, we went to our new favorite pizza spot, Leone's. I swear it had a website not long ago, but I can't seem to find it now. You'd be surprised to find out that even though we live in an area that is choc full of Italian-Americans, it can still be challenging to get a truly good pizza. Too many places serve some doughy pizza-like substance. Not to mention, we're surrounded by Papa John's and Dominos. "Better Ingredients" my ass. The Papa delivers up MSG and partially-hydrogenated oil in his garlic dipping sauce and dressings.



So, imagine my delight when we discovered that a restaurant sitting on our list of those to check out in our fair city turned out to have awesome pizza. No kidding. Really awesome pizza. So, after the tree lighting, we went to Leone's for a pizza and some calamari. Their calamari was surprisingly good too. I prefer my calamari with spicy asian sauce, but they have a garlic-bomb marinara that while difficult to digest, was an absolute joy to consume.

On the home front, I've been toying around with a few ideas, and I might as well share a recipe for one of them. It's not perfect, but it was tasty.

Remember the roast pork I wrote about in my first post? I had lots of fun coming up with all sorts of ways to eat the leftovers. But, like any resourceful person, I also froze some for a rainy day (or in this case, rainy/snow).

So, while in mood for some of that delicious pork, I used the last of it for this Pork and Beans dish that I dreamed up. It came to me as many good things do, while flipping through the pages of Fuchsia Dunlop's Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. If I could only bring one book to a desert island, and that desert island was well stocked with chickens, pigs, chili peppers and shao tsing wine, then this would be my one book.

Not to say that this recipe is in the book. It's not. But I just sort of flip through and close my eyes and get my imagination working. I look really silly when I do it. Also, the pictures have navy beans in the dish in addition to kidney beans. They were tasty too, but they didn't hold up to the stirring quite as well, so I didn't include it in the recipe. You could use black beans or any other beans you want for that matter.




Pork and Beans Noodle

Ingredients
2 cups of cooked roast pork, preferably leftovers, cut into bite size pieces
1 can of kidney beans
1/4 cup of shao tsing wine
1/4 soy sauce
2 cups of water or stock
2 Tbsp of Garlic Chili Sauce
1/2 cup of chopped leaks
5 garlic cloves, minced
2 Tsbp fresh ginger, minced
2 Tsbp fresh Basil, course chopped
1/2 lb. Shandong Ramen noodles
1/4 cup peanut oil



Boil water in a large pot first. When water is close to a boil, warm up a large wok or skillet on high heat. Add peanut oil and swirl to cover inside of wok. Add pork after the pan is warmed up a bit but before the pan gets extremely hot. Stir in the pan to coat pork with oil. Gently stir in beans, taking care not to crush or misshape too many of the beans. Put noodles in boiling water. Add garlic, ginger, leaks, and chili sauce. Stir gently. Add wine and soy sauce. Stir gently to coat all ingredients with wine and soy sauce. Don't let the mixture sit in the wok too long for any given time, be sure to stir often. After 8 minutes boiling ramen, strain the ramen noodles. Add the noodles, the water or stock, and the basil to the wok. Stir gently so that all of the indregients are mixed together, and the water in the wok is boiling hard. Turn off heat, continue to stir for another 2 minutes. Serve hot.

In a Past Life, I was Hunanese.

Immediately after I made my roast pork a few weeks ago, between mouth fulls of luscious pork sandwiches, a buddy of mine and I started to think about what we should do with all of the leftover crispy skin. He suggested dipping them in white chocolate and letting the chocolate re-harden for a seriously rich savory-salty-sweet dessert. Not really my style, but a pretty good idea I thought. I knew I'd have to come up with something better than my usual add hot sauce and soy-sauce routine.

The pork skins pack a ton of flavor, and they cry out to not have to compete with a thick sauce. So the following recipe is what I came up with. In the amount of time that it takes to boil some noodles, this project is cooked and ready to eat. Of course, its getting the pork skins that it extremely time consuming, although if you live in any place that has a significant Latino community, say New York City, you could probably go to your local Spanish deli and get roast pork, with the skins. A friendly deli would even just sell you the skins, since not everybody likes them. Just don't tell them you are using their roast pork to make Chinese food.



Ginger Pork Noodles
Serves: 2


The amounts of pork, ginger, and fresh green chilis are really all a matter of taste. But here is what suits my taste:

2 cups of roasted pork skins
4 Tbsps of freshly chopped ginger
4-8 fresh green chili peppers
1/3 cup Shao Hsing cooking wine (substitute w/ white wine and a splash of soy sauce)
1/2 lb. rice noodles
1 Tbsp peanut oil

Get a pot of fairly large pot of water boiling for your rice noodles. When the water in your pot is hot, but not yet boiling, start heating up a large skillet or wok to high heat. Add peanut oil to coat pan once pan is at least warmed up.



While waiting for your pan to heat up (we want it pretty hot) chop up the pork skin into size-sized strips. Then chop the ginger into very fine pieces. The smaller the better. You might also have time to prep the chilis, but be careful, if you chop chilies and wipe your eye, it will hurt. Be warned. I actually just use clean scissors nowadays for my chili chopping. The scissor cut leaves the chilies into more visible sized pieces that pack a punch and are also pretty nice to look at. The ginger just about becomes invisible in this dish, but the chilies add some nice color, and fantastic flavor.

Now that you've got a hot pan, throw in your pork. It should start sizzling pretty quick. Remember, this is pre-cooked, so we're just trying to get it hot, cook off a little of the white fat leftover, and get some of the crispiness back to the skin. Hopefully, around this time, your water is boiling too and you can add your noodles. I find timing stuff like this to be one of the really challenging things about preparing a whole meal for a lot of people by myself. Of course, this recipe is comparatively easy in terms of timing, but I think its important to try for good timing, if just for the efficiency of it. If you have to wait too long for the noodles, it makes the whole dish take longer to prepare.



So, by now your pork is re-crisping and your noodles are just put into the pot of water. Remember to keep the pan as hot as possible. We're going to throw the ginger in, and give it a good stir. After about 1 minute, put the chopped chilies into the pan. Give it a good stir, and after about 1 minute, add half of the shao hsing wine. Doesn't have to be exact, just make sure you have a little leftover for the end. The pan should be sufficiently hot that the wine cooks off almost immediately. If it's not immediate, that is fine, just give the wine time to cook off, we just want the flavor of the wine, but not the liquid of the thing.

Now, when the noodles are cooked, turn off the heat on your pan, drain the noodles, shake 'em around a bit to get off excess water and throw them into the pan. Keep stirring! You don't want to get them stuck to anything, and you want some of that pork fat to coat the noodles. The ginger will also tend to want to stick to the noodles, which is exactly what we want. While everything is still sizzling, throw in the rest of the shao hsing wine. Keep stirring to make sure everything is mixed together well. Serve in a bowl, preferably with chopsticks, but I suppose that is your own business.



The thing that I really love about this dish is that the pork, the ginger, and the chilies each have their own character to contribute to the dish, but no one ingredient dominates. You'll get bites of noodle without the pork and find that the noodles with the ginger have a ton of flavor in their own right. The pork pieces are big and intense, but not in the same way that a plate of meat would be. It's a little more subtle. I can't think of any reason why you couldn't skip the pork and just do ginger and chilies for a vegetarian dish. It would probably make a great first course if you had something else planned.

Update (11/13/09): Upon further experimentation, you could cook the chilies separately and throw them on top when the noodles are in the bowl. For that matter, you could replace chilies with scallions if you don't like heat. Remember that the more you cook the chilies, the less hot they are.

Update 11/18/09): I made the vegetarian version, without pork, just the ginger, chilies and noodles for a little birthday gathering we had last night. It was a huge hit. No leftovers, amazing.

Rock Hard Loaf

After our party last weekend, I've been inundated with leftovers. Aside from finding endless ways to prepare leftover roast pork, I've got an entire loaf of french bread that went untouched.

With all of this talk about food miles, and carbon footprints, and law firm layoffs, the idea of wasting food really does not appeal to me. But what am I supposed to do with this bread?

Well, the bad news is that it appears that it is too late for me, but it might not be too late for you. Here is some stuff you can do with bread that is a day or two old.

In case you're wondering what I'm doing with my leftover pork, here is what I've been eating all week:
1) Leftover brown rice, tsp of olive oil, tsp of water, leftover pork. Microwave with lid on. It somehow tastes like you are eating healthy, but don't be fooled.

2) Pork sandwiches: Take a kaiser roll cut in half, and cut/scrape/scoop out some of the bread on the inside of the roll. (You could probably make some croutons with that scooped out bread, btw). Reheat pork in medium heat pan. Add abt 1/4 cup broth if you got it, just to more fully re-moisten. If you have to open a can of broth, then don't bother, we're trying to get rid of leftovers, remember? Add swiss when its all hot and get that nice and melted.

I like mayo on my pork sandwich, but that's just me. Hot sauce is also a must. (Eventually I'll write a post just about hot sauce.)

3) Pork Vindaloo: Rice, Pork, 1/4 cup broth, 1/4 water, 1-2 Tbsps of Vindaloo paste or powder. Stir-it-up!

Of course, you could also try pork fajitas, tacos, burritos, empanadas, etc. Since the pork was properly slow-roasted, you could shred it and make pulled pork. But, for pete's sake, if you're going to make pulled pork sandwiches, make some coleslaw. It's just not pulled pork without it.

Last, but certainly not least, I plan on using the remainder of the crispy skin to make a concoction of rice noodles, pork skins (the skins only, no meat), and chili peppers. This might be a total disaster, but I suspect that the simplicity of the ingredients, along with the richness of the pork skin will make it a really memorable experiment. My fellow foodie friend (we're ffffs) also suggested taking the leftover pork skin and dipping it in melted white chocolate and then letting the chocolate reharden. Not my style, but I thought it was pretty brilliant.

P.S. - Don't worry, I didn't forget about the beer. I will try to go to the wine & beer making store tomorrow. That place is amazing. I'll explain later.

First Post, Coast-to-Coast

Hi Everybody,

So... I started a blog today. I guess I'll tell you a little about myself and what I intend to do with this thing:

I love to cook. And I LOVE to eat. Whenever possible, I really like making things that are either extremely time-consuming (think BBQ pork, smoked 14 hours) or somewhat unusual (I've been making a lot of Hunanese food for the past year). So, my primary objective with this blog is to document some of my culinary projects, with pictures and comments. I'll try to talk a little bit about where I think it could have been improved or what about it went particularly right. I like to do a lot of experimentation, and I generally think of recipes as suggestions, not something to be strictly adhered to.

I make a lot of pork. I recently slow roasted a fresh ham, which I am especially proud of. The way I made it is typically referred to as Pernil around here (the NY/NJ Metropolitan Area), and when I say slow roasted, I don't mean I put it in for a few hours. I roasted this meat for 18 hours, actually putting it in the oven right before I went to bed and taking it out the next evening for a dinner party.

So, there it is. I want to cook awesome shit that requires the sort of care and attention that my generation is not known for (suffice to say, I sit on the cusp of Gen X and Gen Y). Then, I want to share the love that I poured into that meal with my friends and family. And now you too.

I can't promise a ton of posts, but let's just see where this thing takes us. Perhaps I'll link to other sites that seem along these lines and are pretty cool as a way to bridge the gap between foodie projects.

Adios.