And Another New Contributor

Good lord, this "work" thing is taking too much of my time. Anyway, I've got another friend who's offered to provide content here and there. Welcome Adley. A little while ago, he and I devised a couple of scales to rank new restaurants we visit, a little better than the standard Yelp 1-5 stars. I'll let him fill in the details.

New Contributor!

I love new blog content as much as the next person, but we all know life gets busy and I get easily distracted. So here's something new, I invited a couple of friends to be contributors to the site.

The first is Ryan, a friend in Austin, and a badass on a gas grill. Welcome aboard, man.

Rice-Cookers Are for the Weak

I grew up on diri (rice). The vast majority of the Haitian meals my mother and my grandmother would make would be served with rice. The same goes for my aunts, family-friends, etc. All of this has spoiled me on rice side dishes at American restaurants.

I remember once, when I was a kid, trying rice at a Red Lobster or Sizzler or some other fantastic establishment. I knew something was off when it looked like a little fallen mound of individual grains, no cohesion at all. And it tasted like nothing but chicken broth. Literally, it was as if they just poured the dry rice out of a bag and into boiling chicken broth, and drained it out before it was cooked through. God awful.

East and South Asian cuisines definitely understand rice better. It's given great body and texture to serve as a vehicle for the main dish. They do so with pressure cookers and rice steamers. In Haiti, rice cookers and pressure cookers are a real luxury; as far back as I can remember, every Haitian relative or family-friend I know has cooked rice with nothing more than a cast aluminum or stainless steel pot.

Anyone who's accustomed to a rice cooker will immediately say "but you have to watch it so much more closely," or "but don't you get burnt stuff on the bottom of the pot?" I say "not necessarily," but it does take a fair amount of practice. But once you get it down, and learn how to give rice real flavor, you'll realize it was worth the work. Below is a recipe for basic, plain Haitian-style rice.

Ingredients:

- 1/2 cup of diced yellow onions

- 1 Tbsp olive oil

- 1 cup white long-grain rice

- 2 cups water

- heaping 1/4 tsp garlic powder

- salt and pepper, to taste

- 2 cloves

- pinch of dried thyme

Procedure:

1. Bring the olive oil to medium-low heat in a small saucepan, and sauté the diced onions until they are translucent (but not browned).

2. Add the dry rice to the pan, still on medium to medium-low heat, and stir until all the grains are exposed to the oil. In the oil, the grains will get a little translucent. Heat the rice until you see some of the grains start to become opaque, about 1 or 2 minutes.

3. Once the grains start going opaque, add the 2 cups of water (and enjoy that sound of the water sizzling on the bottom of the pan for a second). Turn the heat to high and bring the water to a boil. Add the garlic powder, salt, pepper, cloves and thyme to the water, give it a good stir and let it boil for another minute. It's a very good idea to taste the liquid to make sure the seasoning is right. That's how your finished rice will taste.

4. Turn the heat to the lowest possible setting, cover the pan, and let it sit for about 10 minutes. By then, the water will have been absorbed into the rice and the grains will be cooked through but give the rice a stir down to the bottom of the pan just to make sure.

Yields about 3 servings.

Like I said, this is the stripped down, plain recipe; my mom would only prep it this way if she was planning to serve it with black bean sauce. Once you master the plain recipe, you can move on to more common Haitian rice recipes, like rice with red beans, or with sweet peas, or (one of my favorites) with Haitian mushrooms and shrimp.

Quick Stir-Fry Sauce

I don't have any photos for this post, or a nice story to go along with it. I'm just trying to get into the habit of updating a little more regularly, plus I wanted to log this before I forget.

The other day I was craving some stir-fried pork and tofu with veggies, and I wanted to pick up this "House of Tsang" spicy Sichuan stir-fry sauce I used to use for a similar dish in college. This stuff really delivered the heat, and had a really nice consistency to it, from what I remember. But I realized I'd have to stop by the store on the way home from work to pick some up. But then I figured I roughly know how to make my own stir-fry sauce and I have a lot of chili-sesame oil, to hell with the store-bought sauce.

So for 1 standard block of firm tofu, 2 large peeled and sliced carrots, and 1 small crown of broccoli, I made my stir-fry sauce out of the following:

- 2 Tbsp dark soy sauce

- 2 Tbsp rice wine (shao xing)

- 1 Tbsp oyster sauce

- 1 or 1.5 Tbsp hot chili-sesame oil

- 1 tsp cornstarch dissolved in 2 tsp water

- 2 tsp minced fresh garlic

- 2 tsp grated fresh ginger

- 2 stalks of scallion, finely sliced

1. Combine the soy sauce, rice wine, oyster sauce, sesame oil, and cornstarch mixture in a bowl, and whisk it well.

2. In the clean pan on medium-high heat, fry the ginger, garlic, and scallion in 1 or 1.5 Tbsp of cooking oil for about 30 seconds (enough time for it to get fragrant but not burn).

3. Pour the soy sauce mixture from Step 1 into the pan on medium-high heat. Keep stirring while the sauce begins to thicken from the cornstarch.

Crepes in Strawberry Syrup with Whipped Cream

Holy sh-t, I need to update more often. Work and miscellaneous travel has had me really busy for the past few months, and my cooking has slowed down noticeably. But things are easing up a little, thank God, and I'm starting to try some new dishes out. This one is from mid-June. My then girlfriend offered to make me dinner, as long as I made a sufficiently sweet dessert. Bear in mind a couple of things:

1. Growing up, my family didn't really do dessert very often. We'd have the occasional Haitian sweet potato pudding at a big family dinner, or store-bought desserts at parties. But the concept of "I just finished dinner on a regular weeknight. I need dessert!" is just foreign to me.

2. I don't like really sweet foods. I go as far as sweet fresh fruit, but anything with loads of refined sugar is just too much for me. The smell inside a Krispy Kreme shop makes my stomach turn. Not exaggerating.

Hence, I don't make dessert often... or ever, actually. But I have made crepes in the past, relying on fruit and fresh handmade whipped cream to provide the sweetness. To kick up the sweetness, I figured you can't get much sweeter than syrup. The end product was considered a success. Continue reading for the crepe, syrup, and whipped cream recipes.

Prosciutto-Wrapped Sea Scallops

I guess I haven't posted anything new for a minute, work has been consuming all of my time lately. I'm talking about some real I-Already-Work-Around-The-Clock stuff. I'm actually writing this while I'm collecting data on the test floor, too.

It's gotten so bad that I actually went a whole week or more without cooking, because I stay at work so late. I've had to rely on the cafeteria for lunch, and dinner has been catered by the program managers of one of the products I'm on. Granted that Jason's Deli is a healthier option than most other places that could have catered, I still want something hot and homemade.

A few weeks ago I saw Whole Foods had these monster sea scallops on sale, so I had to grab a few. In trying to decide how to prep them, I passed by the deli counter and saw this really good looking hunk of prosciutto. I've heard of bacon-wrapped scallops, and I am a fan of bacon-wrapped anything. But I do love me some prosciutto, with melon, on pizza, with arugala and olive oil in a panino. Why not on scallops?

So I carefully wrap each scallop in a slice or 2 of prosciutto, leaving the flat sides exposed. Skewer the scallop and prosciutto with a toothpick to hold it all together for cooking. I seasoned with some crushed black pepper and not very much salt at all, the prosciutto would be salty enough. I pan seared each side in butter (Whole Foods carries Kerrygold!) for a little less than a minute. You want the flat sides to be nicely singed but the insides to still be soft and just warmed. When the scallops were done, I sauteed some shallots, deglazed the pan with a cup of white wine (I think it was a pinot grigio), and melted in another couple teaspoons of butter. It was served with some asparagus, oven-roasted with salt, pepper, olive oil, lemon zest & juice, and minced garlic.

Mapo Tofu with Ground Pork

Recipe Source: The Food of China and some experimentation

Recipe Result: Great taste and texture

As much as I like meat, I do enjoy some tofu every now and then, and I don't think that tofu necessarily has to be a meat-substitute. That's why I love mapo tofu; the soft tofu complements the minced pork, and the chili-bean paste makes it really spicy and hearty. Back in college, there was a Pan-Asian restaurant near campus, Lulu's Noodles, and one of their best dishes was the mapo tofu. Instead of ground pork, they used sliced barbecue pork... outstanding. I especially liked how my friend Mona, a native Mandarin speaker, translated the name to "Old Bitch Tofu," and referred to Girish as such for ordering it every time.

The cookbook I got the recipe from didn't do a very good job of giving this recipe a lot of flavor. Every time I followed the recipe exactly, the sauce was really bland and watery and the tofu lacked flavor (surprise, surprise). But I tried messing around with the amount of soy sauce used, when to add the tofu to the pan, and the amount of broth to add at the end for the final sauce. I think the recipe I've got now is definitely a step up from the book's. You can find my version after the jump.

Yangshuo Eggplant with Pork

Recipe Source: Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth on Create

Recipe Result: Pretty good, you can really taste the eggplant itself... but needs more sauce

Growing up, my mom would often make Haitian braised beef with eggplant. The beef would be cooked in a way very similar to my Haitian chicken recipe, but the eggplant was essentially mush, and that made me dislike eggplant as a kid.

Fast forward to my undergrad years. We had some food trucks on campus, a couple of them serving Thai food, and that's where I rediscovered eggplant. Granted that the chopped chicken and eggplant from the Thai trucks was probably loaded with fish sauce and MSG, I realized that eggplant doesn't have to be a beige, flavorless mush.

For a while, I tried to recreate that flavor and texture, but I just didn't understand how to work with eggplant. I'd try to saute and braise it, but it just seemed to absorb all the oil I'd put into the pan, or never really cook all the way through unless I let it over cook and become mush. But lately I've been having some good luck getting that nice texture with stir-frying really quickly over high heat. And there's something about Asian flavors that really makes the eggplant stand out.

So I stumbled upon this recipe while watching a food/travel show on PBS. I've tried it a few times, and I think I've almost nailed it. You can find my recipe after the jump. Give it a try, let me know how you like it, or let me know how you made it even better.