Monthly Archives: April 2008

Satisfying Street Stall Fruit

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Satisfying Street Stall Fruit

Bought my first bag of fruit from a street vendor in LaLaLand. Sprinkled with some pico de gallo, a little salt and a squeeze of 2 limes, this $5 bag of fruit made me feel I’d ripped the vendor off¹! This $5 bag saved us both from dehydration. It’s so easy to get dehydrated in LA. It was cool on Thursday, which meant we got away with having about 4-5 drinks during the day. This needs to be increased to an hourly drink on hot and dry days, which is sometimes difficult if you’re juggling many experiments. And invariably leads to mild heat stroke and a sodding headache for the rest of the day. Oh, to be a camel.

The spiced and salted fruit also reminded me of a childhood of choosing fresh fruit over snicker bars just because it tasted so much better. We had street and food court hawkers of such a huge variety of fresh fruit that I never learned all the names. As an 8 year old, I swung between: “Aunty², can I have only watermelon?” and “Aunty, mixed bag please!”. Another favourite was guava with a 5-spice dip, to which P was recently introduced when we found some really small lime-sized guavas in the shop. Needless to say, instant convert to jazzed-up fruit³!

In yesterday’s mix: watermelon, mango, orange, melon and another melon/radish/turnip thing whose taste is familiar, but name is forgotten. It’s bugging me. We’ll just have to find the fruit vendor again.


¹ Relative sense of expense always increased when thinking in £ and shopping in Whole Foods.

² Aunty being a generic Singaporean way of showing respect to a lady older than yourself. Can sometimes be insulting to a lady who considers herself too young for the Aunty label. Use with caution. In fact, I think you can only use that as a kid. I dunno. It’s been a long time.

³ Guava is, in kind words, a hard, tart bastard. It makes a fantastic juice, and its use as flavouring in my new-favourite daifuku is enough for us to fight for the last one. But let’s be honest. It needs help to stop the insides of your mouth from turning into a desert.

Kimchi noodles revisited

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Kimchi noodles

These kimchi noodles were so good and so tasty, they prompted a blog post after a month of absence. This is round two, with udon instead of somen. The different noodles create completely different eating experiences. We had both cold, like noodle salads. Even so, the udon version was very more-ish. Chewy and mouth-filling, it’s the option for a hungry day. I can just about picture the somen version going to the Hollywood Bowl or Greek Theatre for a summer day’s picnic. That said, I can picture both versions in my tummy any day of the week.

Oh, and I added sesame seeds for some prettiness this time. That added another 5 seconds to the total prep time.

Hard boiled (egg)plant

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Hard boiled (egg)plant, originally uploaded by framboise.

The potential fruit of this plant has had a progression of names that track the continents I’ve lived on. It’s the brinjal of my childhood, aubergine of my twenties and now eggplant of my thirties.

I now need a new continent and local name for Solanum melongena for my forties.

(Incidentally, yes, I know it’s going to grow to be a monster… That little patch needs more shade anyway. So, grow away little brinjal!)

Ginger biccies

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Ginger biccies

Made some ginger biscuits, recipe courtesy of BBC’s h2g2 pages. Three substitutions: used butter instead of margarine, raw crunchy brown turbinado sugar of forgotten name instead of demerara sugar, and maple syrup instead of golden syrup. Just because those were staple pantry items.

It worked pretty well. I plopped two different sizes of dough on the floured baking sheet since the original recipe called for “walnut”-sized pieces, and I wasn’t sure if they meant the two halves of the walnut interior or the entire walnut in shell. Both worked fine, but I’d improve it next time by squishing all with the back of a spoon. The centres of some of the biscuits weren’t biscuity and resembled soft cookie instead. The edges, however, were perfect ginger snap crispiness, just a minute short of being burnt. Another thing I might do is use molasses instead of maple syrup. And I definitely want to try it without the egg yolk to decrease the moisture content (which may have been increased by my use of turbinado sugar).

I’ll reproduce the recipe here with my modifications later. I just wanted to post something before it became too onerous a task to get it all down. Catch ya later, alligators. And here we go…

Ginger Biscuits
modified from h2g2 recipe

  • 125g butter, softened on “defrost” in microwave for 10 seconds
  • 125g turbinado sugar (sugar in the processing stages)
  • 1 tbsp (15ml) maple syrup
  • 1 egg yolk from a US large egg
  • 180g self-raising flour¹
  • 1 heaped tsp ground ginger

Method

(I pretty much followed the h2g2 protocol, but this is what I actually did)

  1. Pre-heated oven to 350°F / 180°C.
  2. Sprinkled some flour onto 2 baking sheets and smeared them around with my mucky paws. I shook the excess into the bin. Wasteful, no? Incidentally, I like this a whole lot more than greasing the sheets then flouring them. It actually worked this time.
  3. Prepared all the ingredients, taking care to WATCH the butter to prevent accidents like this happening again:

    melted butter 1

  4. Creamed the butter and sugar using my trusty hand-held beater. I have no idea what I did before inheriting this hand-held beater. I have wonderful memories of my mother’s Kenwood Chef/Professional standing mixers, then a almost blank period of painful recollections of hours spent whipping cream and mascarpone for tiramisu as a semi-impoverished, aspirational under- and post-graduate and postdoctorate in Edinburgh. I’m still semi-impoverished, but at least I inherited a hand-held beater from a friend who left the lab.
  5. Added the egg yolk and maple syrup, beating it in well. Saved the egg white for cocktails later because my impressionable mind had read in some fancy foody website that egg white-containing cocktails were da bomb these days. Is it still alright to say “da bomb”? OK, forget I said it.
  6. Mixed the flour and teaspoonful of ginger well, then sifted it into the creamed mix in batches (about 4). After each sifting, folded the flour/ginger mix into the creamed mix. Final product was considerably softer than shortbread, a little softer than American cookie dough, but still firm enough to form tight balls in my mucky paws.
  7. Formed tight balls in my mucky paws. h2g2 recipe suggests walnut-sized balls that will later double in spread. I agree. I tried walnut nut-sized balls, which made cute little biscuits you could serve for a teddy bear picnic, and walnut-with-shell-on-sized balls, which were far more satisfying in my grabby paws with a cuppa tea.
  8. Baked in oven for the suggested initial 12 minutes, after which I added 3 min for the smaller biscuits (total 15 min). The bigger biscuits were left in for 18 min, mainly because I kind of forgot to set the timer again. Their bottoms were a bit on the dark side, but still edible. 2 baking sheets would have been enough, but I split the dough into three because of the following troubleshooting help on the h2g2 page:

I don’t have biscuits! I have one biscuit, and it’s huge…
* You probably underestimated the space that you need to observe between each of the biscuits on the tray.

As he stuck this paws into the biscuit tin, P’s first question was: “Are they crunchy?”

I didn’t hear a word he said for the rest of the night…

¹ I make my own self-raising/rising flour to the tune of: 4 US cups flour, 2 tsp salt, 2 tbsp baking powder (not soda). I sift each ingredient into a plastic container and shake shake shake it all about. Makes life a little bit easier when making mini pancakes.

Food and politics – Salad or Stew? Butter or Marge?

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Here’s a bit of silliness that combines my two casual interests: food and politics (via Serious Eats). Suffice to say, it’s demographics gone mad. Or maybe not. Consider the food preference of the “likely” McCain supporter: high-fibre cereal, protein bars, energy drinks are all foods I would previously have associated with a certain demographic of caucasian, middle-aged, fairly affluent gym-going males. But in California, I’ve met younger males and females who are die-hard Obama supporters who have similar shopping cart contents. Let’s take a look at the food profile of potential Hillary Clinton supporters: also high-fibre cereal, energy bars and energy drinks, but all of “trendier” brands that are associated with shoppers at the more expensive supermarkets (typified by Whole Foods). Hmm, I’m beginning to see a trend here… OK, final look at the third major-party candidate: Barack Obama. Oooh, he bucks the trend with granola and sparkling juice, but retains energy bars.

I think I’ll make one parabolic observation from this NY Times article: Americans like their high-fibre/healthy cereal, buy power/energy/protein bars and energy drinks, and have shopping carts that look nothing like mine¹.

[/tongue-in-cheek]

¹ I concede that the intention of the micro-targeting is to categorise the brand choices of the electorate; there is a certain trendiness to the list made for Barack Obama, which makes me suspect the writer of the sidebar of this NY Times article favours him over the other candidates, who have been made out to draw in an older crowd of supporters. The main article, on the other hand, makes a few good points about candidates and the different aspirations of their potential voters.

My usual disclaimer here: I’m not American, I can’t vote in the US elections, and I wasn’t sure who I’d vote for anyway even if I could, but hmm McCain supporters are more likely to go fishing? Sign me up..

Super-speedy Sesame-sprinkled Somen with Kimchi

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Sashiburi de, interwebs.

I return to report on what will become a staple super-fast dinner in my household: kimchi noodles¹. It’s not often that I have all the ingredients in the pantry for Serious Eats’ Dinner Tonight column, but in our recent East Asian phase, we have stocked up on kimchi and a variety of dried noodles, like udon and somen. Furthermore, there are almost always green onions in the fridge, and sesame oil, rice vinegar and sugar in the cupboards. So, ingredients: check!

Let’s see now, it took all of 30 seconds to decant half a jar of kimchi on the chopping board and a further 30 seconds to julienne the squares of napa cabbage/leaf. A further 30 second period was invested in thinly slicing a stalk of spring onions (aka scallions). It took about a minute² to extricate the large mixing bowl from its tall stack of precariously balanced dishes and mix in the kimchi, scallions, 1 tsp of rice vinegar and 1 tsp of sugar. All this time, the water for the noodles was boiling in the kettle, so I spent a further minute or two preparing the pot, colander, bowls and chopsticks. Choosing somen, from boiling water to finished product (2 min), rinsed under the tap till cool, was another time-saving choice. All the chopping, slicing, boiling, cooling and tossing of the noods in kimchi and a sploosh of sesame ooil took under 10 min. There was even time to prepare some kinugoshi (silken) tofu by topping half a block with a yuzu miso paste and more finely sliced green onions. So, speed: check!

Taste: check, check, check! It passes the D and P taste test. Depending on the kimchi you start with, of course. It’s taken me a while to find a mild kimchi that doesn’t disagree with the super-fussy stomach in P’s pathetic peritoneum, but still stimulates our tastebuds: K.J’s MSG-free Napa Kimchee. Made in Carson, California, so it passes the locavore test too. We definitely like the fish paste in our kimchi but not too sweet and no MSG, so recommendations welcomed.

No doubt, these kimchi noodles fail any Korean authenticity test, but so does pesto pasta another alliterative speedy carb-based mid-week meal. My two online sources of Korean foodology are pretty keen on what must be the original that inspired this super-fast take. Zenkimchi describes his search for the perfect summer dish: naengmyeon and thedelicious mentions cucumbers and pears in her bibim naeng myun, which is something to try next time.

Something else on the list of things to try is a Korean restaurant that does not specialise in soondubu or galbi… Again, recommendations will be appreciated.

Until my next sporadic spouting, mata ne.

¹Nae photos again. The trusty little Nikon 775 is with the boss. What he’s doing with it, I don’t want to know…

² It only took so long because the cupboards are filled to the gills and need to be emptied whenever I want something stashed at the back. Oh how I long for revolving Ikea shelves…