On the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), a spiced orange chocolate and almond cake was produced. Twas tasty but needs further work on texture and serving technique.
And the very next day, the cookie monster, not satisfied with the chocolate cake, demanded some plain cookies. I complied.
After a certain amount of dithering, the food page has been resurrected. With the advent of tags on bloggers, it seems so unnecessary now. But it's just sitting there doing nothing. I felt sorry for it.
So it starts up again with some unfussy Japanese food we cooked or bought in the first week of May.
I was going to discuss the merits of different pizza styles and toppings, but I got side-tracked by the discovery that in Iran, pizzas are now known as elastic loaves (via).
So, instead of yet another dull "I made this, then ate it" post, we'll keep it to just the photo of my very-elastic loaf today:
Oh yeah, the beer was decent. A not-too-sweet pale ale with a hint of bitterness in the aftertaste. Slightly malty, slight hoppy. From the cutely named Otter Creek brewery.
Cross posted on akatsukieats.
I can't be much of an Asian. I've never had green chickpeas (garbanzo to the Merkins). But I bought them from Trader Joe's anyway. They've sat in the freezer for the last month. The green peas, broad beans (fava beans to the Merkins) and pre-shelled edamame have all been scoffed, leaving behind these green versions of my favourite pulse/legume. Chana masala, made with the more usual yellow version of chickpeas, is a favourite standby in our kitchen. Whipped up with tinned chickpeas, tinned tomatoes and whatever Asian spices I have in the cupboard, every chana masala is an adventure in itself. Especially when I get the chillies out (poor P... his poorly tummy can't take the heat).
So it was with a certain amount of suspicion that I opened the bag of frozen greenies today. We haven't had much luck with American frozen pulses. The broad beans are already too far gone for our preference of firmness. Which means we've been substituting it with edamame, which retains its bite a little better, for our other standby: beans and bacon. Anyhoo, a interweb search pulls up a rather tasty looking recipe for harbhara chaat. Seeing the chickpeas in a cone of newspaper reminded me of my childhood, buying kacang puteh from the little cart outside the cinema. We'd get to choose one cone each. My mother always went for the chickpeas, my father for the cashews, my brother for the sugar-coated peanuts. I *always* wavered between the fried lentils and the boiled chickpeas. Somehow, even though the chickpeas were the "healthier" option, I usually chose them.
Back to those greenies. They were a little over-cooked. I swear I only allowed them to warm up in boiling water for 2 minutes. Still. Beats soaking dried beans overnight and boiling for an hour. Not having the best stocked kitchen around, I substituted the onions with shallots and the green chilli with red jalapeno. Amazingly, there was a very old and wrinkled mango and lemon in the fruit drawer, so in they went. As for the spices, I'd be mortified if I didn't at least have cumin, coriander and ginger, so it wasn't too difficult to cobble together some chaat masala, after this recipe. Of course, without the powdered dried mango, it won't be the same.
Served with our current pseudo-Asian rice fave, fake biryani, consisting of whatever long-grain rice we have (usually Thai, but sometimes basmati), cardamom, random nuts (pumpkin seeds at the moment) and cranberries. (Yes, cranberries. Not a fan of sultanas, me. So I can't even make fake British-Asian biryani.) Don't knock it till you try it: sweet/sour dried fruit in rice works. Ask the Persians, inventors of polo, which inspired biryani, which inspired this:
I love pretending I can cook. And at times like these, when everything comes together even though nothing is authentic, I really feel like I can tackle anything. (Don't mention the pizza...)
Cross posted on akatsukieats.
Eh. Remember that post about the four staple meals in Britain? No? Never mind. Suffice to say, I made my annual allowance of spag bol today. Only it wasn't spag bol out of a Dolmio jar (let alone Loyd Grossman's). While looking for inspiration to cook the only mince I dare buy at Ralph's: ground buffalo, I came across this recipe for buffalo meatballs, which sounded far to easy to pass up. Plus, I was getting sick of buffalo burgers, buffalo black bean stir fry, buffalo burgers... And I was making cookies and onigiri at the same time, so something that was quick and could sit on the stove while I baked and shaped and walked the dog (re: the dog; just the walking, thanks. didn't cook her). And as the final nail in the coffin, the string of comments on my crappy pizza photo, which made me crave spaghetti.
The only thing I changed was the concentrated tomato soup, of which I'm not a fan. On the other hand, I love having tinned tommies in the store cupboard for my puttanesca fix. So, a tin of blitzed plum tomatoes went into making the sauce instead. If I wasn't quite so busy with other things, I might have added some 'erbs or accoutrements like capers. Oh there we go with the puttanesca again... Oh, and I added some paprika too. I'm currently having a love affair with my tin of Spanish paprika. Some nearly went into the cookie dough mixing bowl by mistake. Now, that would have been an interesting choc chip cookie indeed.
The cookies were something of an impulse bake. Was decanting a new bag of flour I lugged home on the bus (not a trivial undertaking with laptop in hand and other important groceries like milk to carry too), and drawn in by the "Extraordinary Chocolate Chip Cookies" recipe on the back of the packet. I like back-of-packet recipes. They're usually piss easy for idiots like me. But this particular recipe must have been developed for industry or a very big, multi-child family. It called for 4 cups of flour, 1 1/2 cups of butter, 2 1/2 cups of sugar (half white and half brown), 2 eggs, 2 tsp baking soda and a 24oz bag of choc chips (or 4 cups). FOUR CUPS OF CHOCOLATE CHIPS?!? P would accuse me of trying to induce a clogged artery so he could be replaced by an upgrade. Even when the recipe was halved, we still had difficulty finding enough containers for the surfeit of cookies.
Cross posted on akatsukieats.
Multiple copies of the LA Times were strewn across our apartment floors for a couple of weeks. Perhaps it's not in good taste to explain why in a food post. At any rate, the food section has provided some inspiration for baking the last few weeks. I've not had an upside-down cake for ages; not since childhood days of being allowed to make pineapple upside-down cake unsupervised. So it was with great glee that I made a lemon upside-down cake a few weekends ago for my BBQ. It allowed me to get all sorts of things going on the grill and make a cake at the same time. Recipes should always be this easy. Unfortunately, no photos were taken. A usual. You must think I fake these posts... I was going to link to the LA Times recipe, but found it's a pay-per-view article. Well, sod that. I'm not going to reproduce it here, because I've no doubt there's some copyright law on that. So, there goes my stupid plan of using this blog as my recipe archive.
To make up for a lazy Sunday of frozen waffles and blueberries, I got up early to make muffins on Wednesday. (If it was a lazy Sunday, does that make this a working Wednesday?) The recipe, again, was courtesy of the LA Times, so no link. It called for Meyer lemons, but we're swimming in mandarins at the moment, so mandarins it was. I like recipes that don't faff about too much during the prep stage. This one required the citrus to be roughly chopped, then food-processed, which wasn't overly complicated for early morning. The rest of the muffin recipe was the usual simple stir-wet-into-dry-but-not-too-much. I don't think I'll use this recipe again. It called for 1/2 cup of butter, which, compared to that epicurious recipe from before, is 1/2 a cup of butter too much. (Maybe the banana in the previous recipe added enough moisture and good fat to hold the whole thing together.) But I like the idea of using my spare citrus in this manner. Perhaps I could bastardise the two recipes and come up with something edible, yet P-heart-friendly. More experimentation beckons.
Cross posted on akatsukieats.
Best not ask what time I woke up today. I don't even know that. Been living without a clock since moving in. And my last functional watch died last summer. And my mobile phone has done a strange disappearing act every weekend ever since I was phoned on the morning of my last birthday (a Sunday that time) about the location of a chemical in my lab.
Sundays have never been good days for me. I feel as if I should be doing a million and one things, but my body refuses to budge out of the nest I've made in my bed. On rare occasions, I get up early enough to have what is commonly known as breakfast. Sometimes I even bake something for brekkie.
Not today. Courtesy of some clever forward planning by P, we had store-bought blueberry waffles with frozen blueberries on the side. They weren't "leggo of my eggo", but close. There's something about plastic, pre-fabricated waffles that appeal to me, along with equally hydrocarbon-chain-polymer-like hash browns. I prefer the "real thing", but on some occasions, when one has woken up far closer to lunchtime than decent folk should, plastic tastes just fine.
Cross posted on akatsukieats.
I wouldn't trust Lloyd Grossman as far as I could chuck him, but I guess he merely adds his face to some the apparently ubiquitous sauce bottles that have sparked some lively debate about the cooking habits of the British. OK, I exaggerate. That sparked an article on the four staple meals the British public resorts to by Zoe Williams, whose witty writing we enjoy in our household.
Now under the impression that my little household must also be stuck in the same rut, I felt quite determined to log our weekly diet. Like the state of Schrodinger's cat, the very act of observing one's diet can change one's eating habits. Under normal circumstances, that is. Like all serendipitous findings in the laboratory, our unique circumstances of not having much control over what time we get home, and hence when we eat our single cooked meal of the day, allowed me to log our weeks eating blind since I completely forgot that was what I was going to do anyway. (And you naive folk out there really think I know what's going on when I'm doing my experiments... I ALWAYS do them blind.)
So for what it's worth, and to qualify this as a sometime-food blog, in all its ugliness, this is what D+P ate this week for dinner (breakfast is almost always cereal unless I've baked bread, and lunch is always something leftover or from the canteen or me starving hoping to get finished earlier and thus eat a nicer dinner. ha!):
Sunday: BBQ (friends invited over to christen the pit's new home). Prawns smoked on cedar planks, garnished with garlic and lime. Grilled aubergines: large globes sliced and grilled, then layered up again with mozarella inbetween and oven-baked; chinese eggplant and mediterranean aubergine just plain grilled. Swordfish and mahi-mahi marinated in soya sauce and ginger, cubed and skewered up with a cherry tomatoes and lime slices. Fillet of wild-caught salmon smoked on an alder plank with lemon juice, lemon thyme (from garden) and salt and pepper. Couscous. Sour mango salad (Corrine Trang recipe).
Monday: Bad start to week. D in lab waiting for a 10pm experiment. Leftover breaded chicken from canteen lunch. Yoghurt. Mango juice. P, on the other hand, conveniently FORGOT to pack BBQ leftovers for lunch, and hence dined like a f-ing king while I starved in the lab. Dagnabit.
Tuesday: More BBQ leftovers. And lots of green salad. Dang, I should BBQ more often. Cook for an army, eat for three days...
Wednesday: Chicken wings baked in five spice powder. Steamed broccoli with oyster sauce. Steamed Thai rice.
Thursday: Roasted beef ribs in a pseudo-Galbi sauce. You know, the roasted beef ribs was another serendipitous finding. We left the ribs covered in foil in the oven at 300degF (dammit, I'm even using degF without thinking now; I'm screwed for returning to metric EU), went for a walk with the dog, stayed out longer than we planned (1.5h), and found the ribs cooked to tender perfection. Normally, I guess we'd have them bloodier, but the slow cook helped the tougher fatty and tendonous bits breakdown somewhat.
Friday: Thai takeaway. And no, I'm not proud of this one. In fact, we both acknowledged that we could have easily cooked something from the store cupboard even though the fridge was more or less empty and we left the lab after 9pm. In fact, we could even have had some of the frozen psuedo-siew mai (Japanese style with edamame), or thawed out some squid to fry in Szechuan pepper, or just had couscous and olives. But no, we thought we were desperate enough for takeaway. We didn't even enjoy it. Dog's tummy was bad all week, and cleaning up indoor **** really puts one off a curry. Dangitalltoheck.
Saturday: Post-ballet dinner at En Sushi on Santa Monica Blvd + Barry. Sushi (traditional): hamachi (yellowtail), raw scallops, octopus, snow crab. Agedashi tofu. Veggie tempura. Spinach+enoki cold appetizer. We'd driven all the way back from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion along Olympic in hope that we'd see some all-night Korean BBQ restau with lights blazing and a neon "Open" sign. Which we did. Only to find after parking that they were closed. Even Zankou Chicken on Sepulveda was closed. But En Sushi's kitchen doesn't shut till "late" on Saturdays. 11.30pm on this particular Saturday. It's one of these places we've avoided because it looks too trendy for us. The cheap and cheerful yakitori place half a block down is more our style when eating out in our neighbourhood. Or when we're feeling fancy, SaSaYa, the small-dish (can't remember the Japanese name) is our fave. It's not to knock En Sushi really. The food was great, the service ever so accommodating despite the late hour. It's the fact that every time I've crossed Barry, either to get to the DVD store or the other less trendy restaus, I very nearly get run over by some fancy SUV or noisy sports car leaving the valet parking for En Sushi. I have little charity for such folk, and avoid their company as much as possible. Which has till now deprived us of the very competent sushi chef at En.
Sunday: Dinner at the ex-neighbours' in thanks for looking after their dog while they were away. Some fabby Indian cooking. Rice+cardamon+sultanas. Chickpeas+spinach. Aloo ghobi. Eggplant curry. And some lovely double-fried sweets from the Sweet Shop (name?) on Pico + Fairfax.
So. In a blind study of the eating habits of some ex-UK inhabitants, we find no evidence for any spag bol (we probably eat that once or twice a year), tikka masala (D is not keen on sweet curries, Brummie or otherwise), chilli con carne (put off that during undergrad years; now have irrational hate of kidney beans) or bangers and mash (have to admit to eating that monthly in Edinburgh thanks to the venison and boar stalls at the fortnightly Farmers' Market in the West End). I think our rut comes more from not trying many new recipes or styles, rather than having staple set meals. Our cultural influences, while many, have grown stale. Sadly, without my library of cookbooks and their ideas or not reading the broadsheets' lifestyle sections or not having the time to browse Flickr quite so much, we've lost the will to try out more complicated dishes or experiment with the ones we know and love.
So, in the spirit Schrody's cat, or rather, in tribute to the spirit of Schrody's cat, we will attempt to change the diet by the very act of observation, thus leading to experimentation.
I'm always envious of those Martha Stewart types who seem to have it all together. You know, nice home, nice garden, nice kids, good food on the table, nice table settings. And I've always suspected that while Martha Stewart herself has a huge operational team to make that happen for her, there really exist real women and men out there who live the life she has trademarked. Such people can get up in the morning, put the coffee on, make the bed, groom themselves, get breakfast ready, get the kids ready, yadda-yadda-ya... And that's just within one hour in the morning.
On the best of mornings (and only weekend ones at that), I just about manage to get out of bed some time after 1000h, stumble to the shower, waste copious amounts of water to get my eyes open, and demand breakfast very loudly until P gets up and makes it. But today, for some odd and unknown reason, I made muffins. Banana and blueberry ones at that. I've never made muffins. Not successfully anyway. I can make the most intricate of damn sachertortes, but hand me a muffin tin and crap comes out. Figuratively. Please, what do you think I am? Cack-handed?
Recipe courtesy of Epicurious.com. Not having a Martha Stewart team of organised people to ensure all reagents were in place prior to baking, I was about 2 bananas short of a full cup and completely lacking oat bran. But I had frozen blueberries. That counts for something. Substituting oat bran with some weird New-Age seven-grain hot breakfast mix seemed to work, with the pleasant side-effect of crunchy, nutty bits without the sat fats of nuts. But substituting a shortfall of bananas with milk, vanilla and maple syrup results in an overly moist muffin lacking structure.
No matter. P liked it. While not a success, it wasn't a complete failure.
Eww. I've just looked at this post on Firefox and my muffins look like crap. They looked OK on iPhoto and Safari. What's up with that?
Cross posted on akatsukieats.
Feeling the heat in LA, both weather- and work-wise. Going through a depressive slump as a result. What's a girl to do to combat the resulting insomnia when crosswords aren't doing the trick? Buy some new cookbooks, that's what!
After a particularly cruddy day at work (and I mean this in the literal sense; omg i'm never going to do anyone a favour again), the satisfaction from opening the Amazon box sitting on my desk was close to that gained from tearing off the wrapping of an anticipated Christmas present. For within the box were two impulse purchases: Harumi's Japanese Cooking and Washoku- recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen.
I spent 20 minutes waiting for my agar to set salivating over the photo and recipe for Buckwheat Noodle Roll, an insane-looking maki sans rice, but made with buckwheat soba. That's definitely one to try one of these weekends.
Happy now...
Cross posted on akatsukieats.
Ce soir j'attends Madeleine.
J'aime des madeleines. And they're surprisingly easy to make. I simply followed the straight-forward recipe from Epicurious.com with a few modifications. Self-raising flour instead of all-purpose flour plus baking powder due to an unfortunate invasion of weevils in our store cupboard. And vanilla extract in place of the much better vanilla pod. (Sacrilege, I hear you murmur...)
I must say the use of a silicone madeleine tray probably made things easier. I didn't have to butter multiple moulds, nor worry about things sticking. The madeleines popped out easily. And there was only one disastrous batch of darker-than-necessary cakes. (still edible, just not very pretty.)
But critically, they passed the taste test of our French neighbours.
Technorati tag: madeleines..Cross posted on akatsukieats.
Omakase. Trust your Itamae. With instructions courtesy of our friendly and efficient wait staff. (No dipping! Dipping allowed.)
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Cross posted on akatsukieats.
After a half-hearted attempt to enjoy some jazz on Thursday, we gave up and went for more palatable sushi instead at Sushi Isshin (Lindbrook and Tiverton, Westwood). We've had all sorts of food at Isshin: bento for lunch, tempura, california-style rolls (like black dragon and caterpillar), chirashisushi, noodles. But we've never been on a Thursday, when the chefs make battera sushi!
Apparently, this is how sushi was for hundreds of years, before the advent of nigiri sushi (see here). The combo of pickled veg and fish was refreshingly different from nigiri sushi. And considerably easier to eat too, without the dilemma of whether to stuff ones mouth or bite the massive sushi in half. Much easier than determining if a ball has been tampered with when it starts to reverse-swing.
[and so we segue into cricket]
All too convenient for England, me thinks. What with the slim chance of catching up at all, let alone hanging in there long enough for a draw, this hulabaloo might be the way out of straight-out defeat.
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Straying a little further than usual, we spent a few twilight hours out west on Venice Beach last weekend. (And, yes. It took me a whole week to get round to writing this.) Someone had the rather nifty idea that we should try out Jin Patisserie on Abbott Kinney Blvd. While living out there last year, I walked past it SO many times, but never felt the inclination to go in alone. On the other hand, I went into the Taco shop and coffee place on California many times. Some places don't look so inviting when you're on your tod.
Anyhoo, we arrived to find a hen party in full swing. Or at least it looked like a hen party. It could have been a baby shower too. I'm not very good at identifying occasions of all-female parties, never having been to any. Besides, we got there too late too sip some tea with cake, and had to make do with takeaway. All the cakes had pretty names, but I can only remember the Louvre, helped by its pyrimidal shape.
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The cakes were absolutely fabulous, when we got round to eating them at midnight. What was meant to be mousse was. What was meant to be cake was light and spongy. What was meant to be stodgy and chocolatey also lived up to expectations. I'm sure our enjoyment of these delectables would have been enhanced in the calm garden/patio of the patisserie. The chef-owner must be living a dream come true: which food-loving little girl has never dreamed of owning a bakery or patisserie? Mine kind of died when science beckoned and I realised that one had to have the skill of decorating as well as baking. No matter. I can now spend my hard-earned money on such luxuries without the slaving away by a hot oven all morning bit.
We also went to Wabi-Sabi. But felt kind of out-of-place there. It was packed full of the typical beautiful characters of Venice. And while the menu looked interesting, something was lacking in us that day. It's like being back at school again. Sunday nights are always marred by the prospect of work on a Monday. I enjoyed the lychee martini though:
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Pad See Ew must be the Thai equivalent of Char Kway Teow (a dish truly deserving of captalisation).
And not having been back to S'pore for nigh-on a decade, this is the closest I've had to the magical fatty friedness that is CKT. Unfortunately, the use of broccoli and chicken makes it far too healthy to qualify as CKT. For that, one probably needs full-fat pork lard, cholesterol-laden prawns.
It was Ticketmaster what did us a favour. Their sometimes ridiculous "convenience" charges (ok for a couple of tickets, but not for ten!) forced us to the Hollywood Bowl's box office last Saturday. By public transportation, no less. It's one thing to take the Hollywood Bowl Park and Ride shuttle for a hour to get to the Bowl for a concert. It's quite another to trek out with the Metro bus system for the same amount of time. For one, you could get quite unlucky and get on a smelly one. Which always seems to happen to me whenever we have to venture further east than Westwood. So, a three hour round-trip requires maximisation of our time. While we had some hope of taking in a hike in the Hollywood Hills, it transpired that getting to somewhere fairly pleasant is not exactly easy once you're actually at the bottom of the hills.
No matter. We have more than one interest. And having been told about Thai Town, we were determined to get some Thai food after. Barcelona FC's visit to the nearby Hollywood and Highland mall nearly side-tracked us until we realised how long we'd have to wait to catch a glimpse of the second-highest paid (but best bang-for-buck) team in Spain. And the new Beard Papa made a stab at stopping us in our tracks too. A cool cream-filled chocolate eclair definitely makes pushing through the tourist-throng outside Mann's Chinese Theatre a little more bearable. By the time my lips were licked clean, P had gotten bored of looking at long-dead people's footprints. And off we set on our hunt for Thai cuisine. Helped by the Zagat guide.
Wee side note: does anyone else find the Zagat restau guide somewhat awkward when looking for food within a neighbourhood? Yes, they have a section at the back with lists of restaus by LA areas. But it's terribly difficult to wield the book, flip to the relevant page, check the darn address on a map balanced precariously between other hand and lap, give up cos it's not bus-able or walkable (in the heat, anyway), and whittle out the non-Thai places.
No matter. We found one within a 30 min walk. Palms Thai on Hollywood and Bronson is a somewhat canteeny looking place with an allegedly resident Elvis. But I guess an hour before real dinnertime starts isn't the best time to catch him. No maatter. That isn't why we went. We were after the exotics. Well, as exotic as it gets in LA anyway. Palms has a Wild Things menu, which includes raw shrimp, deer and frog legs. I think the only thing on that menu I'd find just beyond my ability is the raw shrimp. That's just asking for food poisoning, I reckon. In my prejudiced way.
But it was the leg of a frog that I managed to convince P to try. (Quail and deer are somewhat tame when one's had game all one's life.) The frog meat was a little tougher than I had hoped it would be. There's nothing quite like frog legs, French-style: all tender but with a garlicky kick. And I thought it'd be even better in a spicy sauce. Alas. I think our frog legs came out of a freezer drawer. And perhaps had been there a while too. I guess not enough people take advantage of the Wild Things menu to make getting in fresh frog legs economically viable. A shame.
Otherwise, we had pretty good service for off-peak. It wasn't overly attentive, and our bill (check, D! always ask for the check. no wonder no one understands you...) got a wee bit lost on its way to us. But that's kinda understandable when the entire wait staff is having their pre-game dinner. (Which looked soooo good.) It's also a little difficult to judge a restaurant's atmosphere at 5pm. The only other folk in were mainly small families with kiddies, and the odd tourist-looking couples (like us). Apart from the pad see ew, I enjoyed their coconut juice, which was really coconut water (the stuff wot will splash out if you're not careful when cracking the but) with floating chunks of coconut flesh. While not having to scrape crazily to get the sweet juicy flesh can be good, having it all in a glass can be somewhat.... mundane.
I think I'd go back again. But without the expectation of the exotic. (Goddamit. It's kinda hard to find exotic when you've grown up with the very cuisine Johhny Foreigner thinks of as exotic.) Maybe as pre-concert fodder for the nearby Henry Ford Theatre. (Did I mention I have tickets for the Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah concert? Yes, I do. Not that I was familiar with their music before coming over.) I guess my search for spectacular Thai food in LA will just have to continue. But next time, I'll leave the Zagat behind, and take some Santos™ with me.
Technorati tags: Palms Thai, thai food.
We've been away. And now we're back to the crazy heat of LA. It had been impossible to do anything in the daytime for at least a fortnight until it finally cooled off last weekend.
Which meant the weather was finally to my taste, and we could hit the beach. Manhattan Beach for a change. Lunch at Captain Kidd on Hermosa Beach was pretty good and not too expensive for fresh and varied seafood. The oysters were pretty good value at $1/shell. (That's in comparison to a pound a shell in Scotland.) And I got my bodyboard out for the first time this year. Wiped out on my first outing, and have a massive bruise to show for it. (exacerbated by volleyball afterwards. take my word for it: it's not fun to bruise a bruise.) Otherwise, a fun day oot.
Sunday was meant to be a chill-out day, but we had to work. :( We were rewarded in the evening when an otherwise ordinary trip to the supermarket ended in several hours of dancing ancestral worship that is the Obon festival on La Grange in Sawtelle. We had some pretty tasty Japanese fast food: beef teriyaki, char siew udon and shaved ice with red beans (kintoki). But we mainly had our sights set on having an imagawayaki to finish off the day. Blueberry flavour to boot. Not one I've ever had before. Alas, it was not meant to be. Having waited to digest our meal, we joined the super-long queue, only to be told 20 minutes later that they could only make one more batch of imagawayaki, and everyone in front of us had asked for the final 28 cakes.
We were, understandably, inconsolable. And spent the rest of the night throwing metal rings at money in a pit. (Some funky ring-throw booth.) I came pretty close to winning a $20 note. Close, but not close enough. But even a win would not have made up for the loss of the blueberry imagawayaki.
Oh yeah. And there was a lot of taiko-led dancing on the street outside. Some of it with fans and all.
Sawtelle Blvd's many nurseries beckoned last weekend. Salad leaves may result. Strawberries less likely. A wee Totoro was acquired and someone threw a tantrum until I bought him the neko bus from the giant robot store. And failing to learn his lesson from our visit to BCD Tofu House in Korea Town, someone upset his delicate stomach yet again in Tofu Ya:
Ah well. At least he enjoyed eating it.
And on Sunday, we retraced our steps, but replaced soon dubu with ramen two doors down (same lady seems to work in both restaus, and must have thought we're weirdos who take plants for walks). We like our local Little Tokyo. It feels almost like a warm and exotic version of Stockbridge.
Update: Nothing has died yet, and there are even some small green strawberries on the way (not at all due to our turquoise fingers; they came with wee babies). The mizuna is flourishing, but the poppies look unlikely to flower. An azalea was added to the collection last weekend, and we're on the hunt for more shade-lovers that produce fragrant flowers. Any suggestions?
The arms of Sukiyaki
Are all I long for since I left Nagasaki*
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Sukiyaki for dinner on our new Iwatani butane stove (bought following that bloody power outage on NY's eve... I'm still annoyed, is it obvious?) Further purchase of a sukiyaki pan made today (a semi-holiday for P and I), along with the necessary ingredients from Mitsuwa on Centinela and Venice. (We went in search of a pot for steamboat on CNY's eve, but as usual, came home with something unexpected but good all-the-same.)
Watching Totoro now, so recipe and more details later...
We had a sukiyaki-hunt in SF recently, when my mother decided that she just had to have some (OK, we wanted some too, but any excuse, eh). We even went as far as looking for Japantown in SF just to get some, but were left sorely disappointed with the sukiyaki we found there. In hindsight, it was listed under the "noodles" section of the menu, which could have been some indication that it wasn't going to be kosher. To make matters worse, we found another restaurant with sukiyaki on the menu just round the corner from our hotel in the opposite direction from Union Square. [kicks self in butt]
Since then, we've craved the sweet and saltiness of the sukiyaki base. The purchase of the portable butane stove from Ijiya a fortnight ago was the first necessary purchase. And today's Mitsuwa adventure saw us drooling at the meat counter, where we dithered between getting shabu shabu or sukiyaki cuts of lovely Angus beef. The marbling on the slices was beautiful, and if it wasn't quite so gross, I'd wallpaper my kitchen with it. Yah, just kidding.
What tipped the balance in favour of sukiyaki was the availability of a none-too-expensive sukiyaki pot. It's not as fancy as the cast iron versions, but has the slight benefit of having a lazy person-friendly non-stick coating. And the photo of sukiyaki on the front was a ready-made shopping list: enoki (straw mushroom), shiitake (most well-known Japanese mushroom), leafy cabbage (called Napa cabbage here, and Chinese leaf in the UK), some funky looking leaves which could be chrysanthemum leaves but probably aren't, giant spring onions (meant to be leek, but couldn't see any, so bought Tokyo onion instead), tofu (but idiot here bought regular tofu instead of grilled tofu, so she had to fry it), and some probably-none-too-kosher carrots.
Preparation was minimal. Sliced the onions (diagonally as per photo on box), trimmed the bottoms off the enoki (to remove the roots still bound to the growing medium), trimmed off the stalks of the shiitake and cut a wee asterix on top, trimmed the leafy veggies into manageable pieces, carved the carrots into hard orange sakuras and fried the tofu (should have bought the grilled tofu, dammit). Realised that I forgot to get some shirataki noods, and got the remnant saifun (from the random Japanese dish dinner), and stuck it on the plate too.
As for the cooking, easy peasy and extremely entertaining. (easily amused...) Heat the pan. Add some oil (and butter if being naughty). Fry the beef slices very quickly on each side. I took them off at this point because I hate over-cooked beef. Pour in a sploosh of sake (about 3 tbsp, according to about.com), some sugar (I used 2 tbsp), and soya sauce (again, used only 1-1/2 to 2 tbsp of the recommended 3... don't like too much salt). Add half the veggies (or the pot gets too darn full and nothing touches the sauce), and pour in a cup of dashi stock. Return the beef to warm through. Crack an egg into a bowl, and mix. (OR leave out the egg if you fear the dreaded Salmonella. Damn that Edwina Currie...) As the various ingredients cook, dip in egg and apply to face. Since I overestimated what we needed, we had enough to feed four, and had a second round**.
* Not terribly PC, but still comes to mind everytime I have sukiyaki...
** We also did something quite naughty, and added some rice to the pot at the end. Ach, I can't help it. It's in my nature to add rice to any thick soup. It's those years of training via Chinese steamboat...
Technorati tags: sukiyaki, recipe.
Cross posted on akatsukieats.
Ate quite a lot this past week, but failed to take many photos. Was also working my way through the freezer, so didn't feel enough pride to get the camera out.
Have also had a particularly sociable life this weekend (as opposed to lying in bed or watching football), starting with a 21st birthday party disguised as a knitting party at a lovely apartment on the border of the Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Spectacular view, great hosts, and super fun blowing up, and subsequently playing with, balloons. Did I mention the great hosts already? It's amazing how some people can make you feel at home instantly. I wish I had that skill. (But I'm working on it with my monthly lab BBQs... Each time, I spend less time over the BBQ and more with my guests.) I was, however, a little bothered by the behaviour of a fellow guest. He wasn't particularly offensive, but P and I were left in no doubt that here was a prime specimen of male chauvanism: snide remarks about how much better and faster he could hook up a VCR than a "bunch of girls" (which he failed to anyway), instant assumption that I would know nothing about sports (funny how I was the only member on my team to get all the "Sports" questions right on Trivial Pursuit), and general talking-down to the female members of his team. I hope never to meet him again.
Our other fun of the weekend came in the form of the opening of a photography exhibition, in which my neighbour has a few on display. Although it was all the way at the Metro Galllery in Silverlake (a little north and east of Hollywood), we managed to get there in under 45 minutes thanks to their knowledge of a fast-moving road (and hell no, I'm not telling anyone 'lest it becomes as clogged as Sunset, Santa Monica or Wilshire!). You know all those well-lit galleries with perfectly mounted displays of art that we mere passerbys feel too intimidated to go into? Well, we went in! (That's an all-time first for crowd-shy P and I.) It wasn't too pretentious, and we felt more at home as most of the guests were friends and family of the artists. (It was the teenage in the corner kicking his heels and playing his game-thingy that gave it away.) There may be more yet to come... And we'll have to try harder to put on the sociable "let's talk to strangers" facade which comes so difficultly to us.
The evening was finished perfectly by dinner in Korea Town with a friend, who has been telling us about a spicy tofu restaurant for weeks. BDC Tofu House on Wilshire Blvd is open 24 hours, and specialises in... Spicy Tofu (Soon Dubu Chige)! You can have Soon Dubu Chige on its own (choosing the type of meat you want in it), or with accompaniements like Bulgogi or Bibimbap. Whichever you go for, they serve you three types of kimchee (a mild soupy one, a dry medium, and a super-hot miniature serving on a bed of cabbage), some strange but satisfying mashed potato with pickled cucumber in it, and a fried fish. Apparently, there is a lot of competition between the Korean places on the side dishes.
I'm deeply sorry that I didn't have my camera on me, and can only point you to the soon dubu" tag on Flickr for some pictorial interest. The tofu arrives in a still bubbling spicy soup, and you crack an egg into the soup, either stirring it or leaving the yolk intact, whichever way you prefer. In addition to tofu, the spicy stew contains beef and clams (in this version anyway). Eat with plenty of white rice, and don't forget to ask for the mild version if you're not a fan of spice. The "medium" was perfect for me. And while P enjoyed it greatly, his stomach protested later... But that's wussy Scotsmen for you...
Update: While searching for recipes for soon dubu, I came across the FatMan Seoul blog (one that dropped off my reading list when my last computer died, and has now, sadly, stopped blogging about Korean food), which has an informative post with plenty of photos of Soon Dubu Chige/Jigae.
Cross posted to akatsukieats.
On our last sojurn to Little Tokyo, we purchased a Japanese cookbook, with an emphasis on home cooking as opposed to those pretty and fancy dishes you get in fusion books. Since we're kinda cack-handed, bog-standard Japanese fare sounded mighty fine to us.
Since then, we've only used the book once, a lack of time and the necessary ingredients being our main excuses (of which we have plenty). And the last time I dragged P out to Little Tokyo, he didn't stop whingeing about the super-long bus ride for weeks, so that was pretty much out of the question. But I've since done a little digging online, and found a little Japanese enclave so close to us, we could hit it with a cricket ball (in our dreams, I hear the skeptics exclaim).
So last Friday, we hauled our arses off the bus a third of the way home from work and took a small detour down Sawtelle. We despaired of finding any open shops until, all of a sudden, clusters of Japanese shops and restaurants revealed themselves. A merry little jig resulted when my eyes laid rest on an Iwatani stove (absolutely essential since the New Year's Eve debacle with the fucking oven). And while some of us were confusticated by the array of sweeties on offer, I unthinkingly grabbed a bag of crappy Japanese biscuits from my childhood:
As a result of this find, our diet this weekend has been fairly healthy (apart from multiple experimental waffles, which will be photographed when we get them looking remotely like waffles).
Dinner 1: sea bass and noodles in a clear dashi soup, spinach with sesame paste, and burdock (shop-bought). I particularly liked the way the cookbook suggested cooking the sea bass: lay the fish in a colander and pour boiling water over (I used about 6-8 cups in a kettle), followed by cold water to stop the cooking process. The fish can then be warmed up in the boiling soup when everything else is ready. Major plus: fish that isn't overcooked.
Dinner 2: agedashi tofu. With the leftover spinach and burdock.
My only grouse about our meals: we didn't put that much thought into what would go together, more on what dishes we could cook given the contents of our refrigerator. So the sesame-coated spinach didn't go all that well with either the fish soup or the fried tofu. The Japanese seem to be more in touch with the changing season, possibly as a result of centuries of etiquette trickled down from a culture-obsessed royal court, and they eat accordingly. In our modern society, on the other hand, you can get just about anything at any time of year, air freighted in from everywhere. And it doesn't help that this is Southern California, where you can still get fresh fruit and veg even in the dead of "winter". And I also seem to have forgotten dinners from my childhood, where although less-stylised, our Chinese dishes were still matched according to which flavours worked together. Time to apply some attention to menus instead of individual dishes.
Cross-posted on akatsukieats.
