Chinese New Year Meal #6 - Stir-Fried Squid with Black Bean Sauce

I wanted to do something entirely new for our second to last Chinese New Year meal - no more Sichuan or Hunan dishes from Fuchsia Dunlop for at least the next few days.  And I have picked out a traditional Shanghai dish for our last Chinese New Year meal so I think we have done a pretty good job mixing things up this time.  I looked around for awhile before deciding that this dish fit my goal of trying a new dish really well.  We rarely made squid and when we do, we tend to make Mario Batali's Two-Minute Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style or some form of calamari salad.  We also rarely make anything with a black bean sauce.  We buy fermented black beans and use them for a number of dishes, but they are usually only one of many flavoring components.  And black bean sauce is such a classic Chinese sauce that I find it hard to believe that we have made so many dishes without ever making black bean sauce.  So this was an interesting alternative.

Let's see.  What were my thoughts on the meal?  I thought the squid was really tender and the dish had a very different flavor from everything else we made for Chinese New Year.  I was really happy with both of those things.  However, I didn't think the flavors were that amazing.  I would say they were...pretty good.  I'm still going to consider this dish a win because it was a new technique (poor Alex was in charge of scoring the calamari so that it curled up all nice and pretty), a new sauce, and a new flavor that we threw into the mix.

Recipe after the jump!

Squid and Rice Vermicelli Salad with Ginger-Garlic Dressing

This recipe was adapted from the Squid with Ginger-Garlic Sauce recipe from Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.  We were originally going to follow the recipe as written and then I got the brilliant idea that rather than making the squid and then a random side dish, we should make the squid into a squid salad with some noodles.  I don't know.  It made sense in my head (and I contend that it would have made sense outside of my head too).  Anyway, it made sense, but it felt like the dish was missing something.  It was a nice and flavorful dish, not to mention light and healthy.  I just wished that there was something else to give the dish a little more texture and flavor.  Perhaps some fried shallots or peanuts for crunch?  Alex votes for peanuts.  I might have to agree with him.  The calamari itself had a ton of flavor, particularly given that it was basically just poached and tossed in a mixture of lime juice, s&p, and fresh herbs.  It also had a nice texture - a little chewy, but very tender.  The dressing (which was originally intended to be served with the calamari as a dipping sauce) had some serious kick to it.  I guess the jalapeno we threw in there was particularly fiery.  I find hot jalapenos to be much spicier than your average serrano chili and this one was HOT.  But I ate my plate full of salad and was left wanting more.  Not more calamari salad, but something else.  Something crunchy - perhaps a fritter of some sort or some prawn crackers.  Actually, I think if you served this salad with a plate of freshly fried prawn crackers that would be a fantastic meal.  Oh well.  Maybe next time!

Recipes after the jump!

Two-Minute Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style

After spending most of the time leading up to Christmas gorging with Alex and my mother, I wanted something light, but hearty for dinner tonight.  Over the course of a few days, we had lobster rolls at Luke's, amazing seafood at Il Pesce (the seafood restaurant at Eataly), really tasty noodle soups and dumplings at Lanzhou Handmade Noodle in Chinatown, and global tapas at Tolani.  So I immediately thought seafood.  And when I looked in the freezer I saw we had some calamari in there.  While I never tried this dish the one time I ate at Babbo, it has become the calamari go-to recipe in our apartment.  I first stumbled across the recipe online on the Food Network website and then realized that it was also on my bookshelf in The Babbo Cookbook.  I'm not sure what the name is supposed to mean, or if it is supposed to mean anything at all, but it doesn't do the dish justice.  It almost seems like ordering a dish on a Chinese takeout menu - where "Phoenix Rising Shrimp" turns out to be fried shrimp with pineapple chunks in a variation on sweet and sour sauce.  What is that all about anyway?  I am not sure what I would call this dish, except that I think the name should be more descriptive of what is on the plate.  Perhaps that's a little simplistic of me, but that's how I feel.

Moving on!  This calamari is something like a stew.  It has a wonderfully spicy and flavorful broth.  There is something about the mix of the spicy red chili flakes, the sweet currants, the briny caperberries and the buttery pine nuts combine to create what the cookbook calls a "sweet, hot and sour Arabic kiss."  I dunno about that description either, but it is delicious nonetheless.  I do play with this recipe a bit from time to time.  I love the brinyness of the caperberries so I tend to add more than the recipe calls for, but that's just me.  I have also substituted fregola for the Israeli couscous in the past and that works well, but you have to cook it a lot longer than the couscous.  This time we used a Trader Joe's Harvest Grains Blend, which contains Israeli couscous, orzo, red quinoa, etc.  It was wonderful and perhaps my favorite adaptation yet.  If you make the Basic Tomato Sauce in advance, the entire dish takes less than 30 minutes to create, including prep time!  One warning - be careful not to overcook the calamari or you're going to end up with little white rubber bands in your lovely broth.

Recipes after the jump!

White Beans with Squid, Arugula and Cherry Tomatoes

Recently I went to Le Pain Quotidien and fell in love with one of their tartines (open faced sandwiches on nice hearty wheat bread).  I actually really like quite a few things that Le Pain serves, but this tuna tartine special was delicious.  The tartine had a thin layer of hummus, topped with tuna and cannellini beans, then drizzled with freshly-made basil pesto.  Somehow the entire thing just sang spring to me.  I'm hooked.  So I went out and bought a bunch of basil and some tuna and a bag of dried beans to try it out.  And I downloaded a recipe for cannellini beans.  In the same shopping trip I picked up some calamari.  Then while looking for nice spring-appropriate calamari recipes, I stumbled across this recipe for White Beans with Squid, Arugula and Cherry Tomatoes, which featured the same recipe for Cannellini Beans with Garlic and Sage as one of the components of the recipe.  I love it when things just come together like that!  These beans are actually featured as a component of several delicious-sounding recipes on the Epicurious website.  As soon as I try all of them, I will have to let you know!  First up for tonight was the calamari, then maybe this recipe for Sausages with White Beans in Tomato Sauce.  Oh and I won't forget my version of the Le Pain tuna tartine either.  Don't you worry.

This salad was a nice light summer or spring time meal.  I served it with toasted baguette crostinis slathered in the nice soft garlic that I simmered with the white beans.  And then topped with sea salt.  The addition of the crostini honestly made the dish, so definitely don't throw that garlic away.  I also think this salad would be improved by the addition of some thinly shaved red onions, but that's just me.  I love onions.  Plus they would provide the salad with some bite, as well as the textural contrast of the onions.  I also think that the next time I make this salad, I might halve the amount of calamari and throw in some cooked shrimp, for the sake of variety.  I love playing with recipes.

Recipe after the jump!

Thai Green Curry with Shrimp, Bay Scallops and Calamari

After this weekend's epic grocery shopping trip to the Indian and Korean grocery stores I have been dying to make some green curry.  I had a bag of frozen seafood mix from Trader Joe's in the freezer and all kinds of wonderful Asian produce to throw in.  The one thing that I wanted but didn't have was Thai basil, but regular basil works fine in this too.  So after looking through all of my ingredients I realized that I didn't have a recipe to follow.  The Thai Green Curry with Seafood recipe from a recent issue of Bon Appetit looked ok, but I wanted to use different vegetables.  I wanted to throw in some of the beautiful produce I had purchased yesterday along with a few other things that I found in the pantry and the fridge.  So I looked at a few other curry recipes that I had bookmarked over the years, including this recipe for Jungle Curry with Pork and Thai Eggplant from Gourmet and Nigella Lawson's recipe for Thai Yellow Pumpkin and Seafood Curry.  None of them were really what I was looking for, but as always, I stole things I liked from each recipe and ignored everything else.

This curry has a great spice level to it.  It isn't "Thai spicy", but it is spicier than I know a lot of my friends would be able to eat.  The rice does a lot to soak up the spice on your palate but this curry isn't for wimps.  I would actually be perfectly happy to leave the seafood out of the curry because the vegetables were my favorite part as they soaked up the most flavor from the curry broth.  Next time I think I will try it with fresh shrimp, scallops and mussels and see if that changes my mind at all.  I am glad I decided to use the Asian eggplant, zucchini and baby corn in the recipe because they were all delicious.  If I had been in the mood to use red curry paste instead of green, I might have thrown in a few cubes of fresh pineapple for a little sweetness.  My one complaint about this curry is that it did turn out rather soupy.  I have changed my recipe to cut down a bit on the amount of liquid.

Recipe after the jump!