Red curry salmon with steamed rice and garlicky bok choy

I'm always looking for new things to do with salmon, because it's so wonderfully healthy (and delicious), and Dog knows I love a curry. This is an easy little weeknight recipe I came up with from a few different sources of inspiration, including this one (and all the comments) from an old Bon Appetit. The curry takes a different form from how I usually prepare it; instead a making big pot of curry and cooking other stuff in it, it's simmered down into a thick sauce and drizzled over the other stuff.

Bok choy is flourishing in my garden right now, along with spinach, lettuces, and about a million beets and carrots I can't wait to pull up. Are they ready? I don't know. It's so excitingly mysterious. Anyway, my bok choy is doing fabulously, and I hope you have some in your garden too.

Burmese red pork stew

I love it when you read a recipe and can tell exactly how it's going to taste. I love it even more when that taste is something you've been looking for but couldn't really find or articulate. This is one of those recipes, discovered in last September's Bon Appetit. For a kid who grew up in Southeast Asia, this is comfort food at its absolute finest.

But a word of caution, if you couldn't tell by the ominous appearance, it is not for the faint of heart. It's intensely spicy, salty, and porky (my faves, eee!). The heat is pretty strong, but the final dish is not nearly too spicy for us. The sambal oelek and chili oil function as major players in the flavor profile rather than just agents of spiciness (you should be able to find both at any upscale grocer, and many options of each at your local Asian market). That being said, I definitely wouldn't prepare this for anyone who couldn't handle some heat.

Like my mom's stew chicken, caramelized sugar provides the foundation for this dish. Add to that the sheer deliciousness of just garlic, ginger, chili, and just a little soy sauce, and the final dish is so much more than the sum of its parts.

Udon noodle and miso soup with avocado and peanut salad in ginger dressing

I've tried (in vain) to ignore the reports of crippling snowfall in other parts of the country but deep in the heart of Texas, the weather has finally turned as well... this displeases me. I'm one of those people that become miserable when temps dip below 80 degrees, so the threat of an overnight freeze is particularly shitty news. Winter. I hate it so. But I do like toasty fires and have a darling collection of cozy hats... so there's that.

The real silver lining on this looming prolonged torture cloud is a change in cuisine, a chance to bring back all those lovely hot soups and stews I couldn't imagine cooking a couple of months ago. This is another great staple from the Bible, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. There are a couple of potentially unfamiliar ingredients, but nothing you wouldn't be able to find at any Asian market (and probably at most upscale grocers).

I suspect most of us have had miso soup at some point, likely a steamy little bowl with soft cubes of tofu and some scallions at a sushi bar. Miso is most commonly prepared by fermenting soybean paste but the internets tell me you can make rice or barley miso as well. Any will work in this recipe. Dashi is a stock made of bonito flakes (dried tuna flakes) and kombu (dried kelp, which brings the umami. You want this. Umami is good). Udon are thick wheat Japanese noodles that are traditional to the dish, but if you couldn't find them you could certainly substitute any noodle you like. And of course, you can add any meat you like or none at all; here I've just used a few shrimp.

Asian-inspired grilled chicken thighs with asparagus and jasmine rice

 

I've been working on a soy-based chicken marinade for a long time, and I think I've finally got it. The much sought-after balance of salty, sweet, spicy, and savory. When allowed to marinate for a day or two and then grilled, the result is intensely flavorful moist dark meat on the inside with a crispy charred exterior. Glorious!

If it's five billion degrees where you are, you can certainly prepare these on a grill pan or under the broiler. The cast-iron Le Creuset grill pan actually does a pretty decent job because it gets so nice and hot, but it's incredibly difficult to clean (I can't figure out how to get the damn thing to season). If you go the broiler route, watch closely for burning as there are some sugars in the marinade. Anyway, because I am stupid, I insist on grilling these outside on the actual grill even when it is 108 degrees. I just don't think you just can truly recreate the char in any other way. There are plenty of dishes where I don't think it matters (shrimp, for example, I almost always cook inside regardless of the recipe directions because I don't really notice a difference - and who wants to bother with the grill for 1 minute of cooking per side?) but in this case, if you can stand it, use the grill.

Pad Thai

Behold, my first attempt on the glorious takeout classic. We love pad Thai - whenever we order from our amazing neighborhood place, we inevitably get one pad Thai and one something else (gai pad gra pow or green curry, usually) and go halfsies. I shouldn't have waited this long to try making it at home, it wasn't nearly as scary as I feared.

Unless it's a dish that I recognize will taste a certain way by just the ingredients, I read a lot of reviews before I try a recipe. I really recommend it, often there are suggestions for improvements posted by the folks that have already tried the recipe and found it lacking in something or other. However, I actually had a hard time finding a pad Thai recipe that had 5-star reviews, so I was even more nervous.

Red curry noodles with ground pork, red pepper and carrots

I've been slowly accumulating food magazines over the last couple of years. I knew I wouldn't make probably a quarter of the recipes in them and the pile was beginning to get unwieldy, so lately I've been flipping through them and cutting out the ones that speak to me (then taping them to paper and sliding into plastic sheets in a cute binder). This simple and adaptable recipe was yelling at me the loudest, "Make me! ME!"... So I obliged.

Whatever you've got in the crisper is going to work in this dish. I used a red pepper and the rest of the carrots from my garden but it would be great with cabbage, zucchini or summer squash strips, beans or snap peas would be particularly good, and so on. You could certainly use any ground meat you like, and if you don't have ground meat you could just slice a chicken breast or pork chop thinly and use strips. 

Tilapia and vegetables in coconut chowder

This is a quick, colorful, super healthy weeknight dish. And infinitely adaptable to what you have laying around the kitchen and don't know what to do with, much like my frittata recipe. In this case, I had a handful of snow peas, half a red bell pepper left from a moderately successful peperonata experiment, couple of fingerlings, chunk of butternut, and a lonely old carrot. It's also easy on the dishes, only two pots! If your two-legged dishwasher is anything like mine, they'll be psyched.

And a few leaves of basil to tie it all together. Thai basil would be ideal and I will plant it again in the garden this year, but this is regular ole Genovese and it was just fine.

1 Thai chili, minced (seeds removed if it's going to be too hot for you)

1/2 an inch or so of ginger, minced or microplaned

1 garlic clove, minced or microplaned

1/4 a yellow onion, finely diced

handful of snow peas

half a red bell pepper, julienned

2 or 3 fingerling potatoes, cut into small rounds

chunk of butternut squash, cut into cubes the same size as the potatoes

lonely old carrot, diced finely

1 can coconut milk (I generally use the "light" one)

~1-2 cups of vegetable broth

~2 tsp green curry paste

zest of 1 lime

few dashes of fish sauce (don't chicken out, it's non-negotiable for authenticity - and, it is salty awesomeness)

few pinches of brown sugar

2 tilapia fillets

4 or 5 basil leaves, torn or julienned

1/2 cup of white or jasmine rice

sprinkle of cilantro

My white rice technique is pretty simple. I have never trusted the add-double-the-water thing where you just clamp a lid on and never stir, for me it always turns out gummy and stuck on the bottom. So I cook my rice in plenty of salted water and drain into a metal sieve just before it's cooked through. Then I pop the whole sieve back into the pot with a little water on the bottom, put it back on the heat, then clamp a lid on and let it steam for a few minutes. Voila, gorgeous fluffy rice every time. Anyway, yeah - do this.

Meanwhile, in a large heavy-bottomed pot or dutch oven, saute the chili, ginger, garlic, and onion in a drizzle of vegetable oil. Once the onion has softened, add your potatoes, squash, and carrot and allow to cook for a minute before adding the coconut milk, vegetable stock, green curry paste, lime zest, fish sauce, and brown sugar. I was careful to only add a little green curry paste since I didn't intend this to be a curry. It functions more as a seasoning here. Fish sauce is mad salty, so you may not need to add much more kosher salt for seasoning - just taste it as you go along. Ditto for pepper, considering the Thai chili. Cover and allow to cook for about 10 minutes, then add the red bell pepper, snow peas, and dunk the fillets right into the sauce, thinning with more vegetable broth if necessary. Cover again and let the fillets cook, probably another 7 or 8 minutes. Once everything has cooked through, stir in the basil.

Serve your lovely coconut fish and vegetable chowder in a wide shallow bowl with a scoop of rice and sprinkle of cilantro on top.

Serves 2, takes half an hour.

Chicken and spinach potstickers

I've been thinking about starting another blog about experimenting with making foods you usually buy, for all my bread and sausage and also otherwise non-whole meal recipes... But considering I can barely find the time for this one, I'll just post those recipes here. Documented experiment, the first: potstickers!

I just had a hankering. I'm sure everyone's bought a bag of frozen MSG-coated potstickers from the grocery store at one time or another, and they do cure a craving, but I always wonder what's actually inside the ground mystery centers. Pig tails? Chicken feet? (My mother's mouth is watering somewhere). Yeah... gross.

Beef broccoli over jasmine rice

This may be surprising, but I don't often attempt to cook Asian cuisine. [Correction - I don't often attempt to cook Asian recipes that are *supposed* to taste a distinctive way. I do actually cook with Asian flavors all the time. Resume post!] I just feel like it's always missing something, I can never get it quite right - kind of like how I'll ask my mom for the recipe to make a Trini dish, and she'll describe it and I'll write it down explicitly, but mine never turns out as good as hers. Then one day I'll watch her make it she'll add in all kinds of other stuff and say, "Oh, didn't I mention that? Yes, you must add some of that. Well, I don't always add that, but today, I am."  And it always turns out better than mine. Job security, Mom.

Anyway, I've got Thai green curry and a simple little shrimp and cashew stir fry down pat, so it's time to branch out. Beef broccoli, y'all. The American Chinese-take-out staple. And really, it was quite easy and turned out pretty good. A little ginger-heavy, even for ginger people like us, so be careful - the ginger and garlic cook only very briefly so retain most of their pungency. Use a light hand.