Fire Horse Noodles

 Celebrating the Lunar New Year is always fun There are fireworks and bao or dumplings. There are homemade dishes to bring in the Year of the Fire Horse. There es one dish rich with fire and flavor that's perfect for this night.

I wanted to celebrate the holiday with a dish that's a riff on PF Chang's Mongolian beef and also on the Szechuan classic ants climbing a tree..It starts with Gardien's plant based beef crumbles

This , , a quarter cup of soy sauce (you can add more if you want more flavor) and a cup of sliced scallions are browned in olive oil. 

}Garlic is crucial in any Chinese dish and for the heat I used about five to six grinds of LIdl''s black pepper ground into the meat. You can use  whole Szechuan pink peppercorns for more fire and crunch.

Cook until the ground meat is brown and crispy. Add another cup of fresh scallions right before serving for more flavor.

This can be served with noodles or rice. I like it with noodles and even Pasta can work here. I used Ronzoni's spaghetti but you can also use angel hair or even bucatini.

Fill a bowl halfway with the pasta and spoon the beef over rit. You can add more soy sauce if you want.

I absolutely loved this and plan on making it again.I may add fresh or dried ginger for more zing but still it was one of my favorite creations. The flavors , from the beef to the scallions worked so well together and the noodles were a great buffer tempering the fire.

It's the Year of the Fire Horse. Make this spicy , tasty dish to celebrate and ring in the New Year. Its'a great dish of exciting flavor.

A Chef's Kiss

 What happens when a restaurant loses a master chef? It continues as best it can. The recipes carry on despite  them not being as good as the original.

I feel that way with my Mom whose birthday is today. She would have been 101  - a great age.Her years with us were  very  great learning periods.Her imprint is felt in our cooking  and baking today. She was always a big one for mixing olive oil and butter to temper the oil. It's almost a knee jerk reaction to add a knob or two of Melt plant butter (what would she have thougth of that - maybe she would have liked it). Combining the two also gives sauteed and fried dishes a better flavor along with some body. Mom also cooked rice in vegetable broth which makes for a perfect quick lunch or weekend supper, but also a good base for ratatouille.Her risotto was amazing too and her patieince in creating this tempermental dish was also nothing short of amazing either. Both it and her other signature dish polenta (which she grew up on thanks to my Piedmontese grandmother) require constant stirring. That takes a  great amount of patience especially during warm weather. Yet the end result is worth it as she always proclaimed.

My Mom also passed down her love of culinary travel and boldness in making dishes from other cuisines. We were the first family on the block to have tacos for dinner. She was the first to have a wok.One of her all time favorite dishes , the Szechuan ants climbing a tree is still made. It's what connects me to her. I've tweaked it and made it vegan , using plant based beef crumbles instead of the real thing.Her culinary sense of adventure made me try Ethiopian lentil and tomato stew with Berbere spices.I try to step put of the box as I test out new recipes or vegan versions of traditional ones. Would she have like the fact that everyone uses the internet instead of traditional cookbooks nowadays? That's a good question. It is easy to get any kind of recipe yet there is something about reading a cookbook cover to cover. You do learn about the recipes better instead of a quick glance before combining ingredients. She loved to pore over the glossy photographs and imagine that's what her rendition would look like. There's also something about a cookbook with stained pages and tweaks pencilled written in.

It's hard when a master chef leaves. Yet the restaurant goes on. The food may not be the same but the love and sense of love for food still exists.

A Cozy New Year Dinner

 The Lunar New Year starts this Sunday. You can celebrate the Year Of The Rabbit in a fancy restaurant but a smaller homemade meal is perfect too. There are many easy dishes  that both Asian and non Asian home chefs can try. It's just a fun day to experiment,

You could try Genvieve's Ko's wontons if you're adventurous. Ms. KO gave the recipe for them and wonton soup in wednesday's New York Times Food section. She gave them the traditional Hong Kong filling of shrimp and pork. They can also be filled with crab or chicken too. Keep in mind that making the wontons are easy (it's a basic pasta recipe) but then cutting them and filling them is another story. They have to be filled and sealed assembly line style and that involves another set of hands.Chow mein is an easier cook and you can have fun adding the ingredients you want.It's usually made with rice but you can add crispy noodles for crunch.It's just frying them up in canola oil until they're golden and crispy. These are set aside after cooking. It's then adding mushrooms and bok choy  and cooking until the bok choy is wilted. Add a sauce comprised of oyster and soy sauces, spiked with ginger and sriracha sauce (you can omit the sriracha if it's too fiery). Everything is then mixed together and  served. 

A truly delcious meal and one that's a snap to create is the Szechuan ants climbing a tree or ma yi shang shu. This is cooked glass noodles (which resemble vermicelli) ar e first boiled and then cooked with any kind of meat. I usually use Gardeins crumbles mixed with chopped or sliced scallions and soy sauce for flavoring. These are cooked first until the crumbles are crispy . The noodles are then added .The original recipe calls for ground pork but you could add ground beef or chicken.It's first cooking minced ginger and oil and then adding a fermented bean paste for heat. The chicken or pork is  added and fried until done. There's also a  sauce of chicken stock, mixed with light and dark soy sauce. The scallions and noodles are added to this and it's mixed with the meat. I find this to be too saucy and a bit too fiery. The soy sauce works for me and it doesn't overpower the crumbles and scallions flavors. What to serve for dessert? The Chinese usually have a plate of oranges since the Chinese word for orange is the same for gold. You also could try an easy almond gelatin which is just gelatin cooked with almond flavoring and sugar.

Celebrate the Year of The Rabbit with a simple home cooked meal. It's a nice way to bring in the New Year with good food. These are meals easy to make  but complex with flavors.

Five Years Without The Chef

It's been five years since we lost the master chef, my Mom. I still miss her - her culinary advice and her joy in discovering new places to  food shop and eat. She has been on my mind a lot these last few weeks as I esplore new farms and shops.

My Mom would have loved Terhune Farms in Princeton and probably would have liked a sip of their many wines instead of cider. Apple butter would have been on her list of must buys along with a good crusty bread to spread it upon. She would have been intrgued by the Asisan food Market I just visited down in Pmainsboro. How she would have felt about seeing th elive fish would have prompred a few remarks about capturing animals to cook them (although she was no vegan or even vegetarian, she did not like the idea of seeing animals suffering). The endless aisles of all sorts of Asian and Indian foods may have made an impression and I know she would have definitely bought cellophane noodles for  one of her signature dishes , a take on the Szechuan ants climbing a tree. This was always a favorite in our house, with ground beef, and later soy crumbles sauteed with scallions and cooked clear rice noodles.The endless shelves of teas would have also caught her fancy and I'm sure we would have brought home a few boxes.

As for some of my new dishes - I hoped she would have liked my  air  fried zucchini boats. She loved zucchini and tryung this way with bread crumbs and tomatoes would have also appealed to her. It's reminiscent of our family dish tomatoes provencale. She may have made ti with variations such as a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese or added the soy crumbles to the filling.she may have suggested air frying zucchini slices or coins until they're crisp for a fun side with hamburgers. How would she have dealt with the new barbecue? This is the most luxurious we've ever bought so she would be engrossed in not only barbecuing but also smoking a variety of different meats. It definitely would have cooked whole Cornish hens and possibly London Broil along with the usual hot dogs and hamburgers. She may have liked Mexican street corn or eliote and she wouldhave put her own spin on it. The ears would be brushed with butter, roasted and then sprinkled with Parmesan and maybe some oregano.

Five years is a short time in the eternal spin of things. However it is too long without her.So much has happened, so many places she would have liked visiting and so many new recipes she would have loved trying.

A Century of Advice

 One word of advice for any novice chef - listen to your elders. The more experienced the home or professional cook, the better their advice. They are a rich encyclopedia of what to do and what to make along with how to avoid disaster and what to do if it occurs.

This is how I feel about my Mom whose advice I still follow. Today would have been her one hundredth birthday (and she would not have liked me putting it out there).  Her cooking advice and culinary curiosity is still being followed today. I constantly hear hear her words and instruction with every vegetable chopped and sauce whisked. She herself came from a rich culinary background with a Piedmontese Italian mother and a Swabian German father. She learned from her immigrant grandparents on how to make a mouth water risotto and tantalizing sauerbraten. it was definitely the best of Northern Italian and Southern German cuisine. There were no measurements. Just intuition and instinct with these  century old recipes that came from both sides of the Alps.I learned these recipes young.One of my favorite , especially now i s her pomodori e uovi, the tasty marriage of tomatoes and eggs. I've adapted to fit a vegan lifestyle by using Just Egg an egg substitute. The flavor and texture is there and I think she would have liked it.

Even though she had a wealth of family recipes to use my Mom was also adventurous. She was the first and the only one on the block to get a wok and cook authentic Chinese food. One of my favorites of hers was Ants Climbing A Tree, a yummy mix of ground beef ,soy sauce and scallions cooked with boiled cellophane or rice noodles. I used to make it with the vegan beef and she liked it.There were also fried dumplings which were a great New Year's Day treat. I feel like I'm copying her when I ]m trying new dishes myself like the Ethiopian stew made with Berbere spice. Her motto always was be curious about the world of cooking.She made tempura when it was popular in the Sixties when the US was discovering Japanese food. We had Mexican long before Taco Bell  and those taco kits came to New Jersey.Her forte was French. She was a big fan of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. Nothing beat her cassoulet on a cold winter's night. She made Croque Monsiurs when everyone was frying up grilled cheese. Again this was another favorite I learned and enjoyed making for her.Baking she got from her German grandmother. Nothing beat her oatmeal lace cookies and moist cakes with homemade frosting.

I always feel I've inherited a wealth of culinary advice and recipes.My Mom is responsible for that. Through her I can continue the tradition of good family recipes and adventuresome cooking.

Ease Into Fall Cooking

The temps may not be as hot as they once were. The days are starting to get shorter. Autumn is coming and it's time to ease into cooler weather cooking. What does that mean? Adding different ingredients and thinking about more complex cooking.

One thing to do is take advantage of the harvests out now. Tomatoes plants are still yielding an amazing amount.It's a great time to make sauce and freeze it. You can also use herbs from the garden, such as oregano and rosemary as well. Tomatoes can also be turned into salsas and chili too and these can be frozen for later.If you want to be more adventurous try making ketchup. Many are put off by the idea of making  a condiment in their kitchens but it's pretty easy. It can be done in a slow cooker and you could easily have a bowl of ketchup for dinner that same day. Also take advantage of other harvests such as eggplants and onions. Again late summer and early fall is the perfect time for ratatouille, the mix of those veggies plus tomatoes. It has a fresh summery taste yet warming on nippy nights when the temps drop. Have it with warmed, sliced French bread and olive oil. Eggplant is also good sliced , breaded and air fried . You could slice it into sticks for a different and fun lunch or dinner.

Cooler days mean more elaborate yet still fun meals. Think tacos with different fillings. You can still have barbecued beef but shred it and use it as the main filling. The same with barbecued chicken. You can also grill salmon or tilapia for a different variation.A vegetarian option would be mashed kidney beans topped with  shredded cabbage instead of lettuce or even broken cauliflower or broccoli florets. This is nice way of using up the first of the fall harvests.Hamburgers can still be made but why not turn them into Salisbury steaks with gravy? They can be served on toast or with a side of homemade mashed potatoes.Ground beef or even vegan beef crumbles can also be turned into the Szechuan classic Ants Climbing A Tree. This is an exciting combo of cellophane noodles cooked with beef and soy sauce, zinged up with scallions. Kids will love this variation of hamburger and a fresh take on takeout food. It's also a time to start those sheet pan dinners. You can follow recipes or make up some combo of meat and veggies or just veggies for dinner. Try chicken with potatoes and sliced Brussels sprouts or  salmon with bok choy and green beans.

Ease into fall cooking with fun dishes that are warming and delicious. You can use the last of the summer harvest for ingredient as well as the first of the autumn ones. It's time for some serious cooking!