Chinese Lettuce Cups

Have you ever had the lettuce cup appetizers at chain restaurants like PF Chang’s, Cheesecake Factory, etc?  Last night we celebrated Trav’s mom’s birthday and I was in charge of appetizers.  This was my contribution.

Ingredients:

Cornstarch

Dry sherry

Soy sauce

1 lb ground pork, turkey, chicken (whatever you prefer)

Ginger, about 2-3 tbsps finely minced

Garlic, 2 cloves finely minced

Green onions, 2 finely chopped

8 Shitake mushrooms, stems removed, minced (soak the mushrooms in warm water for about 30 minutes beforehand)

1 8 oz can of bamboo shoots, minced

1 8 oz can of water chestnuts, minced

1 pkg of Chinese cellophane noodles

Hoisin sauce

Oyster sauce

Sesame oil

butter lettuce

WHEW!

Ok then. First, we chop and chop a lot. Chop and mince the garlic, ginger, green onions, shitake mushrooms, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and set aside. Keep the garlic, ginger and green onions separate from the other ingredients.

Second, in a large mixing bowl, add 1lb of ground pork and add the marinade and mix well. I’d just use your hands. Then add 1 tsp of cooking oil and coat over the meat. Set aside for about 15 minutes.

Marinade:

1 tsp cornstarch

2 tsps dry sherry

2 tsps water

2 tsps soy sauce

While the meat is marinading, prepare the cooking sauce.

Cooking sauce:

3 tbsp hoisin sauce

3 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp dry sherry

6 tbsp oyster sauce

3 tbsp water

3 tsp sesame oil

3 tsp sugar

4 tsp corn starch

Now, in a large skillet or wok,  add some cooking oil and cook the meat, breaking it up into small pieces. Set aside and pour out any excess liquid.

Add some more cooking oil and saute the ginger, garlic and green onions for about 2 minutes. Then add the rest of the filling ingredients: shitake mushrooms, water chestnuts, and bamboo shoots. Saute for 3-4 more minutes. Then add the ground pork  and the cooking sauce.  Cook until the sauce is thickened.  Taste and adjust with more hoisin and oyster sauce if you like it really sweet but it should be pretty sweet already.

In a pot, heat about 2 cups of cooking oil to deep fry the noodles.  Make the sure the oil is nice and hot and that there is enough oil for the noodles to fry up.  Drop in the noodles and it takes really all about 10 seconds to fry up.

Assemble everything on a nice big platter and dig in!

Pictures courtesy of Jess, Trav’s sister. My pictures never come out this good.  Isn’t the table set up so pretty too?

Movie Night

Movie night at my house growing up, we sometimes had microwave popcorn, but usually we had dried squid or fried calamari or something Asiany, I grew up with it so I love it but it’s not for everyone.  So I’ll share this instead.  Recently, Trav’s been reviving his childhood traditions with me and this is his recipe contribution to my blog for his childhood ‘Sunday Movie Nights’

Orange Julius and Stove Top Popcorn

Hmmm….follow the directions on the popcorn bag for stove top popcorn I guess. Put a little oil in a big pot, drop in a few kernels, when they pop, it’s ready for more kernels.  Make sure you constantly shake so the kernels don’t burn.  Add salt or butter or even better, both!

Orange Julius (yum!)

From Trav’s family:

Makes about 4 cups

1/2 can undiluted frozen orange juice

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup water

1/2 tsp vanilla

5-6 ice cubes

Blend in a blender and serve. (The other day, I ran out of milk, so we substituted the sugar, milk and vanilla for about 2 scoops of vanilla ice cream instead, and it tasted pretty good that way too)

Tomato Soup

I love tomato soup.  I think the first time I had it was in high school at our dining hall and I remember thinking it tasted so gross and then I had it again in college and it was divine. I just realized tomatoes are not used at all in Korean cooking…explains why I didn’t try this until i was 15.

Ingredients:

1 tbsp unsalted butter

2 tbsp olive oil

2 cloves garlic, crushed

1 onion, roughly diced

3 1/2 pounds of tomatoes, quartered

1/2 cup of water

1 bay leaf

1 sprig of thyme

2 tsps of Spanish paprika (pimenton)

1/3 cup of heavy cream

In a large soup pot, melt the butter and olive oil and add the crushed garlic and diced onions.  Saute for about 5 minutes.

Add 2 tsps of the smoked paprika and saute for about 30 seconds.

Add the tomatoes, water, thyme, and bay leaf and salt and pepper

Bring to a boil for about 15 minutes

Cover and lower to a simmer for another 15-20 minutes

Taste and adjust with more salt and pepper

Turn off heat and use a hand held blender and roughly blend the soup.  I like my tomato soup slightly chunky. It’s up to you how much you want to blend it. Or, you can pour it all into a blender and then strain it through back into the pot if you want it really smooth.

After you’re done blending, add the 1/3 cup of heavy cream and add more salt and pepper if necessary.

Serve with some delicious buttery grilled cheese sammiches. The ones here, I used fresh mozzerella.  Gruyere would taste good too I think.

Kimchi Jigae (Kimchi stew)

This is one of my favorite all team meals ever. It reminds me of home and tastes so good.

Kimchi jigae is best cooked with older, fermented kimchi. The soup base will taste so much better and will be that much more flavorful. Plus, more fermented kimchi has higher amounts of ‘good’ bacteria like those found in yogurt.

Recipe:

Use about 1/4 pound of pork belly, bacon or some type of pork. SPAM can be substituted here

Using a Korean style dutch oven or just a soup pan, add about 1 tsp of sesame oil, 1 clove minced garlic, and about  1 cup of chopped kimchee and saute for about 1 minute on medium heat.

Add the pork thinly sliced and continue to fry about 3 minutes.

Add about 1 cup of water and about 1/2 cup of the kimchi juice and let it come to a boil. Cook for about 10 minutes and lower to a simmer. (Sometimes, I like to add about 2 dried  anchovies (the same ones used in ‘Traditional Korean New Year Dish’) to add a little more flavor to the broth but this is absolutely not necessary).

Add some tofu and chopped scallions. I like to simmer for awhile with the tofu because I really like the soup to flavor the tofu so I’d say about 15 more minutes on a simmer. Taste and add a little salt or hondashi if needed.

I like to serve with a bowl of rice (of course) and a pan fried salted yellow croaker.

Pork chops with mushroom cream sauce

I love mushrooms but absolutely hate raw mushrooms. I don’t know people do it. Trav eats raw mushrooms all the time. ick. Anyway, I had a lot of mushrooms that needed to be eaten last night so this was my solution.

The sauce:

Finely chop shallot or onion, about 1/4 cup.

Finely chop garlic about 2-3 cloves.

Saute in a pan for about 2-3 minutes.

Add diced mushrooms. I like crimini, you can use whatever you’ve got.

Add a little salt and pepper and saute in the pan for about 3-5 minutes.

There’s probably going to be a lot of water from the mushrooms so use about a half a tablespoon of flour to thicken it up depending on how much excess water it looks like there is in the pan.

Then add about a cup of heavy whipping cream and lower the heat a little. Slowly bring it back up to a simmer and occasionally stir until the cream starts to thicken. I don’t like my sauce too thick so when it reduces to about half the size or so that’s when I consider my sauce done. Taste and adjust with salt and pepper.

The chops:

When you get to the ‘adding the cream’ stage of the sauce, start grilling the pork chops. About 1/2 inch thick chops. Season them with salt and pepper and grill them on a grill pan or a regular pan. Grill for about 4 minutes on each side or so.

The sauce should be nice and thick about the same time the chops are done.

Plate it all up and top with the mushroom cream sauce and serve with some veggies.

My boyfriend, the chef.

From time to time Trav likes to make me dinner and surprise me.  He’s really come far from sandwiches and eggs and his interest and desire to cook and learn how to cook is really nice and exciting. Trav usually lovessssssss cooking salmon, but recently he graduated onto the meats.

Check out this amazing filet mignon dish he made for me. Herb crusted filet mignon with a cherry tomato herb vinagrette topping with some roasted veggies.

I figured it out!

I figured out why SPAM is so prevalent in Asian cultures and cooking. As I suspected, SPAM was brought over by the Americans during their military occupation in Okinawa, Japan, Korea, Philippines and also Guam and Hawaii. Fresh meat was difficult to get to American soldiers, so during WWII, there was a large use of SPAM. Afterwards, there was such a surplus that natives from each territory began introducing it into their traditional dishes. In Okinawa, Japan, SPAM is so popular that they even serve it in a traditional Okinawan dish called chanpuru (see photo below). South Korea is one of the 3 largest countries to consume SPAM. The other two are the US and UK.

Spam Recipe Number 2

SPAM Musubi

A take off Japanese sushi, this is an incredibly popular snack in Hawaii.

There’s lots of variations. Some use a soy sauce/sugar marinade to fry and carmelize the SPAM, some add furikake (a dry Japanese condiment of seaweed, sesame seeds, sometimes dry fish, there’s lots of different kinds of furkake).

This one is the simplest.

Form the sticky rice into a rectangle shape and try to pack down the rice as much as possible. Lay on a piece of fried SPAM and wrap with a strip of nori (seaweed). That’s it!

SPAM SPECIAL NUMERO UNO

Kimchee Fried Rice with SPAM (of course )

One of my favorite meals that my mama made me growing up.  She actually used to use pork, and then no meat, and then introduced SPAM into the mix and my dad and I LOVED it.

Tip for any fried rice: Using day old rice is the best. For this use, day old sticky rice. Not long grain.

1) Dice SPAM, almost a whole can for 4 servings, into cubes and saute in a big non stick pot.

2) Once they get a little brown, add about 2 cups of chopped kimchee with 1/2 tbsp of butter. (The key is getting good kimchee, you want to buy ones that weren’t just pickled)

3) Saute the SPAM and kimchee for about 4-5 minutes.

4) Add the day old rice, about 3-4 big heapings and start mixing and frying.  Add a little more butter if the rice looks crumbly and dry.

5) Stir and fry for about 5-8 minutes.  I like to fry the rice a littler longer to make the rice all crispy.

6) Push all the fried rice towards the sides of the pot and make a little circle in the middle.  Crack 2 eggs and slowly scramble.  When they look about cooked, mix everything all together.

7) Add about 2-3 tbsp of sesame seed oil and about 2 tsps of roasted sesame seeds at the very end and mix.

Extras: You can garnish with a few green onions and a fried egg on top if you want.

My mom always served with a mild clear broth type soup. I made miso soup which is super easy so you can serve it with that if you want.

My homage to SPAM

Spam is amazing and I don’t want to hear it from anybody that it’s not. If you eat hot dogs, chicken nuggets, any fast food, you cannot diss on my SPAM. period! It’s my comfort food.

Asian people eat a lot of SPAM and I have no idea why, but we do and we love it. Open up any Korean family’s pantry and there will be SPAM. Japanese too. The McDonald’s in Hawaii has SPAM, egg and rice breakfast meals and for this reason I love Hawaii. well other reasons too, but this helps.

Anyway, I grew up eating SPAM, rice, and egg along with some kimchee of course and it’s my favorite comfort meal.

I have a few SPAM recipes to share and you can try it or you can be lame and use pork or beef instead or you can keep it vegetarian.  Suprisingly, a lot of Korean food has vegetarian dishes contrary to all the Korean BBQ hoopla.

Anyway, it’s going to be a special SPAM series so check back!