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Menu name: “North Szechwan Spicy Cold Bean-Starch Noodles” (chuan bei liang fen). The “noodles” were much like Japanese harusame (mung-bean noodles), but thicker and softer.
Forget Hong Kong, think Chengdu and Chongqing. For the past two years, Carlos and I have been eating deeply at home from Fuschia Dunlop’s cookbook, Land of Plenty: Authentic Sichuan Recipes Personally Gathered in the Chinese Province of Sichuan. The long, hot, numb buzz of Sichuan pepper and the hearty and deep flavors of Sichuan food moves me deeply: a long overdue visit to Hong Kong Palace in Falls Church was rewarded by a deeply delicious meal.
After a marriage-testing four passes on Route 7 across Seven Corners intersection, we finally called and let them guide us in: “We’re across from Sears.” We sit, I’m all blog-bling with my notebook and my dented and scratched Fuji FinePix. I open to the notes I copied from Tyler Cowen’s blog and Washingtonian.com. I ask the waitress to recommend something from the specials board.
The board is tantalizingly handwritten in Chinese characters. Being a major kanji dork, I try to read the writing anyway, thinking I might see something Japanese-ish, but I get only “[unintelligible] fish” or “[something-something] tofu.” I give up. She asks if we like spicy food, we say yes, and she tells us to order the “Stuffed Pepper Chicken.” So we do.
Menu name: “Chengdu Zhong Spring Dumpling” (boiled pork dumplings with spicy chili and sesame oil sauce)
But first we have some slippery bean-starch noodles with sauce of fermented black beans, green onion, sichuan pepper, and sesame seeds. Then some boiled pork dumplings with a chili oil sauce. I’m already grinning and moaning.
A more authoritative person appears at our tableside (perhaps the owner?) and asks, “May I ask who told you about us?” When I say, “Tyler Cowen’s blog,” she laughs and gestures to the far corner of the room, “Yesterday, he was here with a big table of guests. Just returned from a foreign country and came to eat here right away.” OMG, I’m a Tyler Cowen groupie. Just missed him.
From the specials board July 25th (not on the menu): Stuffed pepper chicken. The chilies were stuffed with sesame seed paste and then fried. Gah, awesome.
Crispy fried chicken pieces with garlic and ginger chunks, whole sichuan peppers, hot red peppers, green onions, and peanuts—like the best kung pao chicken ever, but then they add fried medium hot red peppers stuffed with whole sesame seeds and a sesame paste (the pepper and stuffing is crispy and nutty and hot). The earthy sesame nuttiness against the chicken and hot-and-numbing spices is incredible (praise the Zanthoxylum simulans). They sprinkle cilantro over the whole thing; my cilantro-impaired husband will decline the garnish next time. I thought it superfluous myself, but tasty.
I asked the waitress to show me the characters for “Stuffed Pepper Chicken” and as I wrote them down she leaned over me, cooing, “Oh, you can do Chinese.” Not exactly. The Chinese characters [口口香脆鸡] have literal meanings of something like “mouth mouth fragrant [tsuki radical and the kanji for "dangerous"] chicken” (kou kou xiang cui ji). I don’t know how they combine into units of meaning. I look later in my Japanese kanji dictionary for the full “dangerous” hanzi. No dice. I find the character only in Fuschia Dunlop’s cookbook as cui [脆], “a certain quality of crispiness, a texture that offers resistance to the teeth, but finally yields, cleanly, with a pleasant snappy feeling.” That is the texture of the fried chicken, yes, but the name of the dish doesn’t seem to mention those outrageous stuffed peppers. The Tasting Table D.C. has a post about the Stuffed Pepper Chicken, see the mention of the “Cantonese” peppers.
Menu name: “Stir-fried Shanghai Greens and Black Mushrooms” (bok choy, shiitakes, ginger, garlic slivers). The greens were perfectly cooked and this mild standard paired well against the fried chicken.
Anyone know what “mouth mouth” (kou kou) means?
Apparently my next stop is Sichuan Pavillion in Rockville…
Stir-fried cucumber and pork with golden garlic from Grace Young’s Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge. The beni shoga (red pickled ginger) just wanted to be there for the photo.
Just ’cause are my favorite kind of gifts. My mother sent me Grace Young’s Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge, not for any particular reason, but because she suspected it could be a cookbook I didn’t already own. I skimmed the book on the bus to work this morning and—remembering two homegrown cucumbers given to me by my next-door neighbor—I decided to make the recipe for stir-fried cucumber and pork with golden garlic. The cookbook features many stories from ex-pat Chinese who speak of trying to recreate “real” Chinese food in Peru, the United States, Burma, Jamaica. Some of the stories ramble a bit and could have used tightening up. And one particular story concludes with an attempt at a kind of metaphysical food writing that can fall very flat. Writing about how a simple eggplant stir-fry is delicious made either with or without ground pork, she states:
I no longer ponder how the magic works—how one meatball’s worth of pork or that tiny pinch of minced ginger can even be detected in the final dish. That is part of the mystery of a well-constructed stir-fry. It is built on layers of flavor and texture, and every ingredient, no matter how seemingly insignificant in quantity, contributes to the alchemy.
Besides the fact that this could describe almost any cooking anywhere in the world (layers of flavor and texture), I’m not sure magic and alchemy explain being able to taste ground pork in an eggplant stir-fry. It seems more like, well, logic and chemistry to me. I do love good food porn, but I like it well written. I’ll give her a pass on the poetics: the photos of Chinese women holding up woks and bowls full of Chinese food are very sweet and make me hungry.
The technical information is very clear and well-written. For example, she spends 16 pages on buying, seasoning, and caring for a wok. I was extremely surprised and smugly gratified to find a page with a photo of a carbon-steel wok that had been used for two years (and was therefore properly seasoned) that looked exactly like my well-used black beauty that I bought 17 years ago. Yes, ol’ Grace had me there. So, having convinced me with her good tips and ego stroking, I decided to get to work right away trying out the recipes.
For the pork and cucumber stir-fry, I had the cucumbers and I bought some Niman Ranch pork. I was already starting with delicious ingredients; it would be up to me to not screw them up. In this recipe you mince a large amount a garlic and pre-fry it to infuse the oil. The garlic cooks only until “light golden” and then is strained from the oil and reserved. The pork gets a marinade of soy, sugar, salt, and corn starch. Like most stir-fry recipes, you must prep everything in advance and then go for it because after you fry off the garlic, the rest of the recipe takes about 4 minutes: fry up slivers of ginger, brown pork in wok, but do not cook through, add cukes, toss, splash in some soy sauce, mix in reserved garlic, serve. I added hot chili flakes because my Bolivian husband gets nervous if his food lacks capsaicin.
Good stuff, thanks mom.
Edamame (fresh soybeans) and tomatoes. The edamame had been rubbed with kosher salt to remove (somewhat) the fuzz on the outside of the pods.
All my garden plantings have been experimental and freeform. As much as I would like to perspire through my kerchief while squinting knowingly at the sky, all I did in April was search for last frost dates for Zones 6b-7a, then push seeds in the ground and wish them well.
Although my first “crop” of tended-from-seed edamame only half filled a cereal bowl, the soybeans were of course absolutely delicious, buttery and nutty. Frozen edamame taste ok, but these took me back to Japan for the short time it took the two of us to devour them. Upcoming Crop Two will be eaten Japanese style, accompanying a frosty mug of beer.
Corn, perhaps a strange hybrid of “Sugar Pearl” and “Luscious.”
Mama’s trying not to love the tall pretty babies more than the stunted cobs. I planted Sugar Pearl and Luscious sweet corn, but I think the Luscious scrambled up first. Or the ears were a marriage of the two. A friend from the Midwest said I needed to wait a bit longer, but some of the cobs were opening at the silks and I had already lost one or two to bites from squirrels or some other Del Ray mammal (I have now seen an opossum, a rabbit, and a raccoon). The other week a storm had blown over some stalks. I righted them and tied the weak to the strong in a cat’s cradle of twine. All these challenges were making me suspect I had better take the corn that was ready now.
The corn was plump and medium sweet with a clean corn taste, which sounds obvious, but have you eaten picked-within-the-hour corn recently? Even farmers’ market corn seemed flaccid and old compared to this. In all, a “Fuck yeah!” kind of meal. Munching along, I thought about when I planted this corn 85 days ago, how I had watched it grow and watered it, that I had made the corn’s life force part of mine, and I started to feel a bit like a cannibal. Needless to say, I ate on.
Photo: Caboose meat combo III, chicken infillay, beef alitcha, doro watt, zilzil tibbs, beg watt, with salad and “harvest veggie” (carrot, green bean, onion, and tomato), and gomen (collards).
You’d never know it from the coffee shop/soup & sandwich decor, but Caboose Cafe in Del Ray serves Ethiopian food at dinner Monday through Saturday. We’ve been back quite a few times for this unpretentious but delicious food. They go easy on the spice for the Del Ray-eans, so we promise the waitress we can take the heat. No raw kitfo, no tej, but a decent selection of dishes from the Ethiopian owners.
I love the “harvest veggie” in the vegan platter. When I asked the waitress what the dish is called in Ethiopia, she didn’t know, but my Time-Life African Cooking from 1970 has a photo/recipe of something that seems very similar called yataklete kilkil (potatoes, carrots, beans, onions, etc.). Why not just call it that on the menu?
They also sell bread (baguettes and rustic loaves) and they serve an ok soup and sandwich for lunch. Blah blah cafe stuff. Mancini’s down the street does a better breakfast. It’s the Ethiopian food that brings us back here.
Photo: Vegan sampler, miser watt, gomen, cabbage, kik alitcha, and harvest veggie (aka yataklete kilkil?).
Photo: Mozzarella di bufala. A bit old because it flew from Italy, but still delicious.
Here plops the cheese. I was deciding on what we should eat for breakfast while doing our Saturday morning routine (Del Ray farmers’ market, Steve the Butcher, Cheesetique, Planet Wine, Gold Crust Baking Company). I stood in front of the refrigerator in Cheesetique contemplating the burrata and the mozzarella and the fior di latte. The farmers’ market had piles and piles of ripe, red tomatoes, but I knew I could pick some partially ripened ones in my backyard.
Photo: Two kinds of homegrown tomatoes, an Old Virginia between two Rose de Bernes (from Switzerland). Picked not fully ripe, on purpose, see below.
Insalata caprese is one of those ubiquitous dishes that never seem to be done quite to my liking. As much as I dislike cooking doctrine, I personally stick to a few caprese rules:
1) This is a summer dish to be enjoyed only in response to heightened UV rays, heat, and pulsing alive tomatoes (see rule 3). If you serve this to me in the winter, I will eat it politely with a sad heart.
2) The cheese can be either buffalo milk mozzarella or cow’s milk fior di latte–yes it matters what you call it, but either is fine for the salad, with a caveat.
3) If using mozzarella di bufala, the tomatoes should be not fully ripe, a small amount of green in the tomato provides some texture and acidity against the creamy sweetness of the cheese. Taste the fior di latte you have because it is much more variable than cheese made from deeply fatty buffalo milk; if it is not very creamy and sweet, a very ripe tomato will bring a sweetness to the cheese. Nevertheless, I prefer the texture of slightly green tomatoes against the soft cheese. We lived in Naples for several years and I was never served an insalata caprese with very red tomatoes. Why is it that every recipe I read in various cookbooks and magazines calls for fully ripe tomatoes? I really think the texture and acidity balance requires 3/4 ripe tomatoes: good tomatoes, ones that had happy lives with roots in the dirt, ones that resisted bug attacks on their own, and perhaps (but I’m flexible on this) ones that came from seeds that remember their grandparents, seeds that have stories of the old ways in them.
4) The rest of the ingredients are fresh basil (but not much, negligently toss a few leaves in), a drizzle of good olive oil, salt, and pepper.
5) Layering slices of tomato and cheese and drizzling the oil to make a fancy presentation is fine, but a mess in a bowl sopped up with bread is optimally delicious.
Photo: Messy, delicious, sop-with-bread insalata caprese.
