I Don't Mess With Texas

I think it's apparent to me by now that every time I have American BBQ, my stomach hates me afterwards. But going to Texas and not having BBQ seems sacrilegious to me. Lambert's was highly recommended in Food & Wine so we decided to check it out during a recent work trip. Lambert's is in a very nice stylized Western lodge looking spaces. We had a table that was front row and center to the kitchen action.

We started off with a vodka cocktail with olives, pepper, and other pickled stuff. Tasted like a VERY dirty martini.
The cornbread that came with the meal was nice.

We ordered a chickpea with goat cheese appetizer. Interesting combo but not very Texan.

Our server recommended the baby back ribs. It came in a huge slab smothered with honey and malt vinegar sauce. Now, I know Texans grill rather than slow smoke and it's a style preference. But the meat was not soft, falling off the bone. You definitely needed your teeth for this one. Even though the menu billed the ribs as smoked, nary a smoke ring was found.

Our 20 oz brown sugar and mustard crusted ribeye was much better. The beef was perfect but kind of disappointed it was Niman Ranch meat and not some Texas ranch.

Fried okra.

Potato gratin.

Fried ginger and peach pie.

The meal was somehow disappointing to me even though everything was well prepared. I think I'm spoiled by SF and NY. That and my stomach hates BBQ.

Hot Peruvian Love

Oh La Mar, how do I love thee... Let me count the ways...
1) Your delectable cocktails - hierba buena and pisco sour pictured below
2) Your complex sauces that come with fried sweet potato chips
3) Cebiche chipotle. Full of spicy, smokey flavour.

4) Causa limena. Dungeness Crab, avocado purée, quail egg, cherry tomatoes,ají amarillo Huancaína sauce with basil cilantro oil. And oh so cute!

Close-up of its cuteness.

5) Jalea. Peruvian fish'n'chips. Fried to perfection. Never met a good deep fried tidbit that I didn't like.

6) Tequeños de seco. Braised lamb shank spring rolls with three dipping sauces:rocoto, guacamole, and creamed beans. Again, deep fried love.

Mastering Taiwanese with Chef A-Chi

Those of you following my blog know that I have been watching Chef A-Chi (the head Chinese chef at my aunt's hotel) on his cooking shows on Youtube. I made it over to Chinese bookstore last month and bought his new cookbook from the TV show. This is the book http://www.books.com.tw/exep/prod/booksfile.php?item=0010423789. David and I looked through the book and picked out a few dishes to experiment with.
The first dish is bitter melon with pork in black bean sauce. This was David's first time working with bitter melon. It came out very nice though a tad bit salty without steamed rice. It is less saucy than I usually do on my own but I like it better.
I've wanting to make oyster mee sua for a while. I made my own attempt which wasn't very good at all. Last time I used fresh oysters that come in the jars at the seafood counter. But they are so big and mealy that it ruins the effect of the dish. This time I used frozen small ones. Even though frozen is usually not as good as fresh, the trade-off of having a brinier and better mouth feel was well worth it.

So the basic instructions goes like this:

You boil the mee sua and rinse out the noodles to get rid of residuals. In another pot, add a handful of bonito flakes or shavings, fried shallots, chopped garlic, a bit of soy, a bit of rice wine and bring to boil. Add in the noodles. Then, slowly add in yam flour slurry. Make sure to use chopsticks to blend as you add for evenness. Coat the oysters in dry yam flour. Add in the coated oysters to the soup. Cook briefly til the oysters are done. Make a condiment of black vinegar, crushed garlic, and chili oil and add to soup as desired. Garnish with cilantro.

When I had this oyster mee sua, I was elated! Finally, a authentic tasting version that can quell my cravings.

The last dish, unfortunately we don't have a separate photo of it nor of its cooking process. It's the egg with garlic sauce on the right below. The cooking of the egg process is awesome. You add a tiny bit of tapioca starch slurry to the egg mixture and it puffs up during frying like a souffle. The result is a golden puffy cloud. The outside a a tiny bit crisp and the inside is meltingly smooth and soft. Truly amazing.

The meal wasn't necessarily a good combo of dishes with each other - the bitter melon and the egg dish really needed to go with rice instead and the oyster mee sua stands on its own. But man, what a lovely experiment. We are getting close to never stepping foot in a Bay Area Taiwanese restaurant again.

Moules Frites (Frites Courtesy of the Golden Arches)

With all the recent fanfare on Julia Child's, David wanted to watch her old "The French Chef" espisodes on DVD. Of course, that meant making a Julia recipe to go with the viewing that is easy for a school night endeavor. Moules frites was the answer but I was too lazy to even contemplate making frites at home. The answer? McDonald's!
The mussels were scrubbed and cooked in a mixture of wine, butter, shallots, bay leaf, and thyme.

The results were lovely and perfect with McDonald's fries and Japanese mayo.

Fried Chicken Two Ways for Hughes & Ringwald

For the third year in a row we attended Film Night in the Park in Dolores Park with John Hughes films. This year's offering was "Pretty in Pink." Fried chicken seems like good picnic food to me so I made my tradition Southern-style buttermilk fried chicken. I got a whole fryer chicken and cut into pieces. The chicken pieces went into a bath of buttermilk seasoned with Lawry's overnight. The chicken was then battered twice with flour (double dipped) by dunking the chicken back in the buttermilk mixture in between coats of flour. I fried the pieces on medium heat in a skillet for 16 minutes turning the pieces once. Shaking and cooling on drying racks helps to crisp and remove excess oil better than on paper towels. Beautiful juicy and crispy fried chicken!

This year I also wanted to challenge myself a bit a try making Korean Fried Chicken. I marinated chicken wing pieces in a mixture of low fat milk, soy sauce, salt, gochujang, chilies, and lots of minced garlic overnight . This is what the chicken looked like after I took them out of the marinade.

In a plastic bag, I added two heaping tablespoons of regular flour, one heaping tablespoon of cornstarch, and one heaping tablespoon of yam starch. I made sure the flour coating was very thin and shook of excess.

The chicken were then deep fried on medium for 10 minutes. They came out lightly golden.

Some places that serve Korean Fried Chicken serve it with a sauce on top. But I felt it to be slightly messy for picnicking. So I decided to try frying the sauce in. I made a sauce of soy sauce, garlic powder, gochujang, and water and coated the pieces of chicken with it after the first frying.
The sauce coated pieces then went back into the deep fryer on high heat for another 10 minutes. The first frying is to cook the meat. The second frying is meant crisp the outside and force any oil left in the top layer out. The results were Korean Fried Chicken that had sauce fried in!

Mad for Mee Sua

To say that I've been a little obsessed with mee sua the last two months is an understatement. Mee sua is Taiwanese for noodle thread (translated literally). The pinyin for it is mian xian (麵線). It is a flour based noodle and dried with salt as preservative. It can be either red (kinda burnt sienna-ish) or white. Many of the Asian markets in SF and Ranch 99 in Daly City do not carry this noodle. I found some at Pacific Super in Daly City and Marina Foods in Foster City.
I bought few kinds of the white kind and found the following brand to have the right bite and consistency for making Taiwanese style mee sua. The main thrust of my mee sua making has been for sesame oil chicken mee sua. One may think that having this in the middle of summer is too hot. But I live in SF and the cold, foggy nights are perfect for this dish.
The instructions for making this dish I found on a Youtube clip of Chef A-chi. You take some chicken thigh meat and cut into bite size pieces. Peel and julienne up a ginger root. The rest couldn't be simpler yet Chef A-chi's tips really make a difference. First you take some normal cooking oil (not sesame), I used canola, and saute the ginger pieces until fragrant and slightly burnt as the edges. In the meantime, add the mee sua to boiling water. When the noodles are cooked (after about 2 min), remove the noodles in to a separate bowl (don't get rid of the pasta water). Drain the canola oil into the bowl with noodles. Add 1/2 cup of rice wine and stir up the noodles.

Add a cup of sesame oil and heat with the ginger on medium (don't do high heat as the sesame oil will turn bitter). Add the chicken pieces in and saute until slightly browned. Then add a cup of rice wine and a cup of the pasta water. Bring to boil and let simmer for 15 minutes so all the flavours meld.

Add the soup mixture to the noodles and... Viola! Delicious sesame chicken mee sua. As a side note... do not ever add salt to this dish. The residual salt from the pasta water is enough.

I also tried the red mee sua noodles to make oyster mee sua.

The results were just okay. One problem is that our oysters in SF are too big. Also, I don't have broth quite right. I need Chef A-Chi to make a video for this dish...

Reward for Patio Work

I realized that I haven't posted in two months. I guess I've been busy. So the next few posts will be catch-ups. One of the things I've been working on is my patio. Yes, Patio 4.0 has been launched with help from David. So as thanks for his labour, I made this meal of porkchop with a caramelized balsamic reduction. I plated the protein over argula and a polenta mash (made by softening polenta with cream and butter). The plating is inspired by gardening and is to me a bit of wild English garden-like.