A Month of Food Blogging (4 of 28) : Chashu (Japanese stewed pork)

Most of my recipes are an amalgamation. I borrow a bit from here, a bit from there, throw my own twist on it... Not this one. This one is straight from the holy lips of the pork queen: Chashu Rice Bowl. It is perfect as it is.

Chashu is a stewed pork recipe. It's most traditionally served thinly sliced over ramen, but it's delicious in a lot of other dishes as well. It's not a 30 minute dish. To get the consistency right, it needs to simmer for one and a half to two hours. So why am I mentioning it? It's really easy to make, about 5 minutes worth of effort on a weekend, and then you can ignore it for two hours. It freezes really well, and it remixes endlessly for dishes that are less than 30 minutes. I'll give two recipes this month, one over ramen, and one as an Asian-inflected pulled pork sandwich, but you can have it as a stand-alone meat, as part of a rice bowl, in pot-stickers, as the base for a hearty and fast pork soup... Make sure to save the braising liquid as well, it makes a great BBQ sauce for the pulled pork sandwich.

Chashu

Servings: 8
Time: 1 1/2 hours
Planning Ahead: None
The Funny Stuff: Fresh ginger, mirin, miso paste
Virtues: 5 minutes of effort
Downsides: Pork shoulder is a fatty cut, so trim it and use sparingly
Calories: 297

Ingredients
1 1/2 lbs pork shoulder
2 cups water
1/4 cup soy sauce
2″ piece fresh ginger, sliced thinly
1 green onion
3/8 cup mirin
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp miso paste
3 garlic cloves
About 20 peppercorns

Directions
Smash the garlic cloves with the flat of your knife to partially crush them, then peel the skins off.


Put the pork shoulder and the dry ingredients in a pan.


Add the wet ingredients.


You want the liquid to almost cover the pork, but you don't want to dilute it, so cut the pork down into chunks until it's mostly underwater.


Cover it, put it over medium-low heat, and ignore the heck out of it for the next hour and a half to two hours. Go watch YouTube videos, or play with your kids, or do homework or something. If you're strangely anal, like me, you might want to flip it halfway through, so that the braising liquid colors both sides evenly.



Return to the scene of the crime. Should look something like this. It won't be pretty, but it should smell like a riot in a potsticker factory.


And it'll be crazy tender.


You now have chashu. Toss it in the fridge or freezer. Don't forget to save the braising liquid! Don't worry about straining out the ginger and peppercorns, they'll continue to slowly add more flavor.

Photo credits to Aaron Wood and Aleatha Parker-Wood.

A Month of Food Blogging (3 of 28) : Fish Picatta

Picatta is one of my new favorite dishes. It's fast, and it's delicious. It sounds like you slaved away over a hot stove for hours, whipping up Nonna's secret recipe, but it's actually stupidly easy to make. It goes over just about anything, from chicken to fish and seafood. Here I'm serving it with asparagus, along with some baguette to mop up any sauce that might remain. I should note that I made a terrible error when reading my fish package, and thawed an entire pound of instead of the half I've called for in the recipe. There's normally rather more sauce left over than you see in the photos.

Fish Picatta

Servings: 2
Time: 25 minutes to table if the fish is thawed, otherwise 35.
Planning Ahead: None, unless you thaw the fish in advance.
The Funny Stuff: Capers
Virtues: Low in refined starches, high in vitamin C and a number of B vitamins
Downsides: Totally addictive, uses butter
Calories: 301 or so, depending on your choice of fish.

Ingredients
4 oz mild white fish (I'm using Striped Pangasius from Trader Joes) sliced into thin fillets
2 tbsp flour
2 tbsp cornmeal
salt and cracked pepper to taste
1/2 tbsp olive oil
3/4 cup white wine
3 tbsp lemon juice
1/4 cup capers
1 tbsp butter

Directions
If you're thawing the fish, throw it in a sink of warm water. It should be hot, but not unbearably so. At about the same temperature that your skin starts to protest, the fish will start to cook, and we don't want that. This, of course, violates the directions on the package, and everything you have ever learned about food safety in school. However, it's only going to be in the sink for 8-10 minutes, which isn't long enough for even the most ambitious bacteria to make in-roads on your food. If you thaw it in a cold water bath, you'll be there all night.

While the fish is thawing, we're going to make a dredge for it. This step is somewhat optional, and if you're living gluten-free, like some of my friends, by all means skip it. I like the taste that the browned flour adds to the sauce, especially for fish, which doesn't add as meaty a flavor as chicken. Add flour, cornmeal, and some salt and pepper, and mix it together.


At this point, since I was waiting for the fish, I also pre-heated the oven for warming the baguette, threw the asparagus in a microwave safe bowl, and microwaved it for 3 minutes, loosely covered with a lid.


Heat your skillet to medium-high, and drizzle a little olive oil in it, then spread it to coat.


Dredge the fish in the flour, and add it to the pan.


When the fish starts to turn solid white around the edges, and is golden brown underneath, flip it.


Once the fish is golden on both sides, and cooked through, remove it from the pan, and set it on plates. Deglaze the pan with the white wine. Be sure to scrape all those tasty brown bits into the sauce!


Once you've finished deglazing, add the lemon juice...


And capers.


Reduce the sauce by about half, and then stir the butter. Remove it from the heat once the butter is incorporated.


Drizzle it over the fish.


In the dirty pan that I just poured the sauce out of, I drizzled a little more olive oil, and about 1/3 Tbsp butter...


And did a quick saute of the asparagus, picking up all that tasty lemon flavor.


Et voila, dinner.


The baby loves fish, so we checked it over carefully for bones, and diced a well-cooked asparagus tip for her.


Photo credits to Aaron Wood and Aleatha Parker-Wood.

A Month of Food Blogging (2 of 28) : Buta Kimchi (Pork belly with kimchi)

As soon as I launched into the first recipe post in this project, I realized that doing it directly in Google+ wasn't going to work. For starters, I couldn't put photos inline, just attach an album. So I'll be cross-posting from Blogger to Google+. It's OK, I'm still working the kinks out.

(If you have arrived through my blog, and are wondering what the heck is going on, look here for some context, and here for some pantry tips to get you started.)

For today's dish, I made buta kimchi. This is a staple Japanese tapas dish, traditionally made with pork belly. Since I rather spontaneously decided to start food blogging last night, I didn't have anything planned for today, but I did have some pork belly I picked up on Thursday as a treat for this weekend. Obviously this is not the healthiest dish when made with pork belly (although it's delicious), but you can just as easily make it with a much leaner cut, you'll just have to oil the pan first. I've made it here with white rice, at my husband's request, but brown rice would also improve its health value. The downside to brown rice is that it takes about 10 minutes longer to cook, which runs over our allotted 30 minutes. There are a couple of ways around this. 1) Soak your brown rice starting in the morning. Just throw it in a Ziploc in the fridge with some water. 2) Use precooked brown rice. (I often make a big batch and freeze it in half cup increments for lunches.)

Buta Kimchi

Servings: 2
Time: 30 minutes to table
Planning Ahead: None required
The Funny Stuff: Pork belly, kimchi, gochujang¹ (optional).
Virtues: Lots of vegetables, high in fiber
Downsides: High in sodium, high in saturated fat as shown
Calories: 599 as shown here, not including the rice and salad. 344 if you use pork loin instead of belly.

Ingredients
8 oz. pork belly
8 oz. kimchi
1/2 medium onion
1 Tbsp. gochujang
1 tsp. soy sauce
1/2 tsp. sesame oil
2/3 c. rice (white or brown)
1 1/3 c. water

Directions
First, start the rice. This will take the full 30 minutes to cook, so get it going promptly. Put the water and rice in a pan, crank it all the way up to high until it starts to boil, then turn it back down to medium-low, or whatever a gentle simmer is for your stove.

Next, admire your pork belly.


Don't admire it for more than five minutes, however. We are on a timeline here. Next, take your pork belly and slice it thinly, like so.


Admire it again. It's so darned pretty!


Moving on. Take your half onion, and slice it into strips, pole to pole, and then cut it in half along the equator. (I find this goes easier if you leave the roots on until the last cut, they'll hold everything together.)


Coarsely chop the kimchi.


Heat a skillet to medium high. If you have a heavy skillet, as I do, you might want to get it warming before you chop the onions. Add the pork, and lightly brown it on both sides. If you're using pork belly, you won't need to oil the pan, but if you're using a leaner cut, add some cooking spray beforehand.


Remove the pork from the pan, and set it aside. If you used pork belly, you now have a bunch of fat. Wipe almost all of it out with a paper towel. Then add the onions to the pan.


Stirfry the onions in the remaining fat until they are slightly translucent, like so.


Add the kimchi back in, and stir for a minute or so. Then add the pork back in, and a splash of kimchi juice, and stir.


Turn the heat down to medium low, add the soy sauce and gochujang, and stir everything together.


Put a lid on it, and let it simmer while the rice is finishing. (It should have about ten minutes left at this point.)


You now have ten minutes to make a salad to round out the meal. If I were a restaurant, or throwing a dinner party, I'd make an elegant Asian coleslaw with miso-sesame dressing, or some such a thing, but we are trying to get dinner on the table here, and we've had a long day, and we're tired. Chop some lettuce and put it on a plate, along with whatever veggies you have on hand. Here's the final product, plated over rice.


Since we are not only feeding two adults but a baby, it's worth mentioning the baby's meal as well. She likes spicy food, but kimchi is a little too hot, and it makes a mess, so she gets finely minced pork, some rice, and a bit of cauliflower, for sort of a deconstructed rice bowl. (Not shown, the leftover spanokopita that rounded out her veggies.)


(1)
Gochujang is a sweet and spicy Korean pepper paste. However, if you don't have any around, don't despair. A fair substitute is equal parts miso paste and sriracha, with a pinch of sugar. If you also don't have sriracha, use miso, sugar, and ground ancho peppers.

A love letter to America, on your birthday

Dear America,

We're both adults now, and realize that blind adoration is the province of children. I know your flaws as well as your strengths. I recognize that you are complex, contradictory, cocky, and, let's be honest, a little overweight, especially in your southern regions. I also know that you are strong, and beautiful, and have a good heart, although you may not always follow it. I respect your youthful idealism, even when I don't agree with it. I sympathize when you make tough decisions, because I know that idealism is often not the best or most effective course of action.

I know that we don't always see eye to eye, nor should we. We are, after all, distinct. We will, from time to time, argue, and question one another. If we're lucky, we'll learn from it. I pray that you will listen to your dissenters with an open mind, and respond thoughtfully to them. I hope that you will take good care of your children, and raise them to take good care of themselves, to grow up wise, self-sufficient, and inventive, poets and scientists alike.

I hope that your temper does not get the best of you, because those are the days that I fear you a little, when you are frustrated beyond reason and lash out at others. I hope that you will show patience as well as strength of character. That you will learn to deal with idiots gracefully. That you will know the difference between blustering fools and genuine threats.

These sorts of love letters are a little old fashioned. Maybe it would be better just to sit quietly with a beer, eat some BBQ together, and not talk about it too much. It makes people uncomfortable to see affection sometimes, and it's a little uncool to talk like this. It's easier to make jokes at another's expense, than to tell them you really do care. No one wants to be that guy, the one who clings like a limpet and can't stop talking about the AMAZING object of his affections because, let's be honest, he has no other claim to fame. But I think I can say these things without blushing. I am, after all, an adult, and I don't let cynical teenagers slow me down these days.

As a good friend should, I promise to tell you when I think you're wrong, to praise you when I think you're at your best, and not to turn away from you when you need me. You're not always perfect. But you are my country.

Security Aware Partitioning

Just a quick note to say that my paper on a new index partitioning technique for file system search has been accepted to the IEEE Symposium on Massive Storage Systems and Technologies. I'll post an overview of the research when I'm a little further along with the slides.

Hot fusion: Marco Polo, eat your heart out

I love reading 101 Cookbooks. Not necessarily because I want to make most of her recipes. I am a shameless omnivore who likes boeuf bourguignon better than quinoa, and likes bread best when it's a paean to the miracles yeast can work on pure white flour. No, it's her food photography I adore and aspire to. The lighting, the backgrounds, the skill... She can make even the crunchiest of flax and millet breads look delicious.

However, every so often she posts something that I just have to try. I stumbled across her recipe for Harissa Spaghettini, and it looked glorious. A blend of mediterranean flavors in a quick thrown together recipe, just in time for lunch. I'm a sucker for olives and lemon, what can I say.

But I had no harissa. I could order it from Amazon or Crate and Barrel. I could make my own from one of the myriad recipes around the internet and let it sit for a day so the flavors could blend. But I was hungry NOW. And I had no whole wheat spaghettini, which looked so lovely and hearty. I did, however, have soba. And red thai curry paste. So I embarked on a culinary journey worthy of Marco Polo, winding up with an Italian-Japanese-Thai fusion that looks great, and tastes better.

The journey:

I started with 1/2 T crushed garlic, 1 T tomato paste, 2 T thai red curry paste, 1 T olive oil, and a dash of salt. I blended it all together with 1-2 T water, to form a thick sauce. Taste for both salt and heat. I don't recommend this dish for the faint of heart, but at this stage, you can still cut it with more olive oil and garlic.

The resulting paste looks diabolical, but is delicious.

I toasted pine nuts, julienned some smoked sun-dried tomatoes, zested a lemon with a microplane, and threw in some spinach and kalamata olives.

One bundle of soba noodles, cooked...

Everything all together, prior to mixing. Next time I'll use the All-Clad pots instead, they photograph better.

Toss everything together until the sauce coats everything, and the spinach is wilted, and sprinkle with shredded parmesan. Behold!

And it was delicious.

Spam and schizophrenia: the hidden link.

I've been getting emails at school from some poor fellow who mined my address, along with about a hundred others, from some listing of UCSC students somewhere. As I understand the content, he's certain there's a conspiracy between the CIA, the Mormon church, and possibly Mossad and NOAA (I'm a little fuzzy on the latter two) to wipe out the east coast. Or black people. Or something. As an example of his writing style, I submit the following:

Is it better to protect faculty, staff, and students from spammers (some of whom will be CIA agent provocateurs in an attempt to discourage colleges/universities from posting email addresses), or, is it better to protect faculty, staff, and students and their communities from another attack on America (and more CIA mind-controlled suicide shooters on campus)?

CIA agent Matt Bakker and CIA agent Matt Bakerman (not their real undercover names) and some of the rest of the CIA agents here in Brooklyn (including some who live in Brooklyn Heights pretending to be Jehovah's Witnesses who also do not go along with the Mormon church's satanic hidden agenda), asked me to write this note to you to let you know that it is absolutely imperative that you authorize webmasters to include, at college websites, student email addresses, as well as, of course, all faculty and staff email addresses, so I can send emails to let them, informing them of some things some of the CIA agents in this area and in Brooklyn Heights who're pretending to be Jehovah's Witnesses, asked me to tell them.

However, crazy people on the internet isn't exactly news, or even interesting. I usually delete these out of hand. However, occasionally I take a peek, just out of morbid curiosity, before I bin it. How does this relate to NLP in anyway? Consider the following, out of a missive from last week:

Subject: http://XXXXXXX.blogspot.com/ - ACTION REQUIRED
Date: 4/22/2009 11:15:31 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
From: no-reply@google.com
To: XXXXXXX@aol.com
Sent from the Internet (Details)

Hello,

Your blog at: http://XXXXXXX.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at ...

Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn't belong to you, you don't have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won't be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: ...

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review: ...
(Email to me from Google Blogger.com, April 23, 2009)

Is spam permitted on Blogger?
What Are Spam Blogs?
As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.
(Google, Blogger Help)

In other words, the classifier they're using looks for obsessive linking and incoherent text. Great for most of us, but not so good for your average schizophrenic trying to get the good word out about potential hazards to the purity of our bodily fluids. In general, generated text tends towards the same looseness of association that schizophrenics do (for a brilliant example, try the SCIgen program out of MIT. It's admittedly a random context free grammar, and they've handcrafted all the sentences, but even so, the output reads like the ramblings of a madman.)

Just another interesting variant of the Turing test. Can a computer generate text good enough to pose as an *insane* human? And, perhaps more practically, can we build spam filters that can distinguish computer generated greed from the merely mad?