17 posts tagged “chinese”
Tofu is starting to grow on me. I've never actively disliked it, but it has neither taste nor texture — there's nothing to like or dislike, really. But you can marinate it and add whatever flavor you want to it, and you can sautée it to create a somewhat crispy crust. It's easy to work with. And I realize that there are countless others, much more exciting things that can be done to it.
Had a bit of a mishap with the noodles, mind you. My grip on the lid slipped as I poured the water out, and the noodles followed the water down the sink. Talk about a sinking feeling, seeing them things skidaddling down the drain like that — voilà; dinner's served: Schezuan tofu, but yeah, I decided against the noodles at the last minute. It didn't really create a balanced meal, you see... Not with the tofu. No need for noodles with this meal. Nope. D'oh.
This very simple vegetarian dish relies on hoisin sauce, red pepper flakes and garlic for flavoring. The rest is just onions, asparagus, and mushroom, with scallions for garnish. Some chicken stock and corn starch rounded out the sauce.
And then there was the tofu...
I'm a meat eater who considers vegetarianism and veganism irrational and/or extreme. But then I realized that anti-tofuism isn't very rational either. So I've tried it out a few times, and I've been fairly happy with it. Tofu has two big problems: it has a boring texture, and a boring taste. It does better when it comes to the nutritional aspect of things, but that becomes irrelevant unless you can address those two first ones.
My experience with tofu is very limited, but I like to sauté it, to add a little crispness to the surface. That helps with the texture problem. For the taste, I think it's a good idea to marinade it before you start cooking it. Tofu is very pourous, so it soaks it up ten times faster than meat does.
So that's what I did, in this case. I drained the (extra firm) tofu, and marinated it in soy sauce and toasted sesame seed oil. And then I sautéed it in a pan. The meal turned out great.
But the original recipe just suggested I'd just drop the tofu in as is — just plain tofu, heated up. That would have been extremely boring, I think. This is the first time I've looked at an entirely unfamiliar recipe and just said, "That's wrong. And I know how to do it better" — the first time I've said that, and actually been right.
What kinda idiot would just drop plain tofu in, without adding some taste and texture to it? No wonder people are suspicious of vegetarians.
Very simple and easy. And damn tasty. It was served over noodles, and eaten with chopsticks. This reminded me of an episode of The Sopranos, where Tony went on about the great achievements of Italian-Americans, while having some Chinese takeway with his family. His dim-witten son asked if it wasnt the Chinese who invented spaghetti, which of course irritated Tony no end. But I've gotta admire his answer: "Now, why would someone invent spaghetti, if they eat with sticks?!" So I switched to a fork after a while, heheh.
In the wok, purple onions and garlic, green onions, and finally asparagus, stir-fried. Meanwhile, the tofu was sautéed in a non-stick pan with toasted sesame seed oil. A sauce of low-sodium soy sauce, rice wine vinegar (that's the sour part), water and corn starch, along with lots of red pepper flakes and Schezuan peppers. The tofu was dumped in, and served, garnished with shredded basil.
It was quite good, but the tofu didn't take on much of the toasted sesame seed oil, though.
I didn't intend to use asparagus, but we had some left over, along with the red bell pepper I had intended to use (would have given it a nicer color combination, I thought). And red bell peppers last a lot longer than asparagus. So asparagus it was.
Given that this was a completely improvised thing, I'm pretty happy with it. I'm getting better at improvising, and coming up with my own stuff, these days. Hurray for confidence.
Well, uh, I don't know exactly what to say about this one. I was, in some regard, and by some definition, and by some people's narrow-minded, stubborn, blinkered definition of sobriety, not altogether, nor entirely, at all sober when I did this.
Onions, leeks, ground beef and tofu. Soy sauce, along with whatever black bean chili sauce you like, some freshly ground Szechuan peppercorns and toasted sesame seed oil. Very nice stuff. I was actually looking for a vegetarian dish when I stumbled across this one. It was in the vegetable main course-section of the book, but the dishes weren't all properly vegetarian. They were just based on, or focused around a vegetable. In this case, the leek. I like that approach to vegetarianism — non-fanaticism.
But damnit, I really feel like I need to expand my repertoire with some more vegetarian grub other than aloo gobi and mutter.
The idea here was one of casual little nibbly tasty things. It's a sound idea, at least as far as the eating goes. Cooking it on the other hand, is a bit of a pain... Or well ... I tell a lie. It's actually a huge pain.
This recipe book I've got has a bunch of simple and wonderful recipes, and well, I picked a couple from the appetizer section — pot stickers and spring rolls. Both can be cooked through deep frying, which is a smelly, dangerous mess, so I only do it if I'm fairly certain the result will be very, very good. But the recipes provided alternatives: pot stickers can be steamed, boiled, shallow fried and baked, in addition to deep frying (actually, I'm not sure if they are deep fried at all, traditionally), and spring/egg rolls can at least be baked.
But as Chris Rock once said, just because you can drive a car with your feet doesn't make it a good idea.
Well, here's my efforts. Le sauce:
This was just chopped garlic and scallions, with soy sauce and a chili oil. Very simple. And not all that nice.
First off, I just had to try making my own pot stick dough thingies. This wasn't something I had initially planned, but I like to play with dough. This was as simple as it gets: just flour, water and a little salt. The recipe was extremely wet, though. The first thing I tried, was to boil it:
These suckers were glue-y. The recipe called for boiling (even though the pictures in the book actually displayed the pot stickers in a bamboo steaming basket), but steaming would certainly have been a better idea.
Next up, I tried pan frying them (and I also tried assembling them in slightly different shapes). This was better — it was far less glue-y:
But even if it was better, it really wasn't all that good. So I decided to bite the bullet and go for the deep frying experience. This was much better:
Still, my effort at creating the little round pancakes just didn't measure up to the professional standard. So I used some commercial, pre-made ones. Or, that was the plan.
Sadly, I didn't even have the round ones that are used for pot stickers, but the square things that were recommended for wontons and ravioli. But at this point, I'd started to realize that the culinary results of my efforts were diminishing in returns, so I decided to go with the big, square ones. These suckers were recommended for lasagna, spring rolls and crêpes:
Now, that last one — the crêpe bit — that was a bad sign. I'm with Alton Brown on that whole unitasker objection — I don't like things that can only be used for one purpose. But on the other side of the extreme spectrum, you've got snake oil cure-alls. And lasagna, spring rolls and crêpes, well that's just like buying a tennis racket, expecting to use it for tennis, badminton, baseball, cricket, hammering in nails and flipping pancakes.
Spring rolls are great. So are crêpes. I don't know much about spring rolls, but I do know crêpes. And I can tell with some certainty that crêpes != spring roll wrappers.
But I digress. Well, here were some final efforts: baked spring rolls:
They were crap. I mean, they were just awful. The texture wasn't crispy and crunchy as when deep fried. It didn't crunch. It shattered. It was like chewing on slightly gummy, and resilient glass.
Damn, I sound a little grumpy here... I guess I had high expectations for this one, that just didn't pan out. But I learned a few things, though:
Making your own wrappers for pot stickers, wontons and ravioli is too difficult for me. Not worth the effort. And for all its drawbacks, deep frying generates a superior result to boiling, pan frying and baking — and, I'm fairly certain, steaming. Oh, and also, steaming surely must be superior to boiling, because those suckers became positively waterlogged.
But it looks good, mind you.
My notes to myself are:
1. More sauce. Double or quite possibly triple the ingredients for the sauce, since the rice really soaks it up. No point in doing it, if the starch is pasta (which I like), but for rice it's pretty much a must.
2. Don't skimp on the chili peppers, cashew nuts, or the Szhechwan peppercorns — and don't forget to properly grind the latter.
And I'm never using peanuts for this dish, ever again. Cashews are definitely the way to go: raw, uncooked cashews.
This time, I served it over pasta. If I were strict about such things as authenticity, I might have gotten some noodles, but seriously, it's pretty much the same stuff, you know? I enjoy my biryanis and risottos and all that, but rice can get a little boring. So I grabbed some spaghetti. The end result was very nice.
