(Belated Again) Chinese New Year Meal #7: Crispy Pan-Fried Noodle Cakes with Seafood

Guess what?  We finally finished our week of Chinese New Year meals!  It only took a couple months...  When I first started posting a week's worth of Chinese New Year meals on the blog I spent hours pouring over recipes trying to represent the different regions and cuisines of China.  I wanted seven meals made from different ingredients, some spicy, some meaty, some vegetarian, some noodles, some dumplings...  It was quite a process.  This year I didn't have a lot of time to plan.  And since I was so behind the ball in getting started I rushed into things a little.  Fuchsia Dunlop is always a good source for a few Chinese New Year meals.  I love all three of her cookbooks.  In the past year or two I have come to rely more and more on Serious Eats for new recipes.  I love that they make up their own recipes in addition testing out cookbooks.  I also love that their recipes run the gamut of different types of Chinese cuisine.  Four out of the seven Chinese New Years meals I made this year (including this one) were from Serious Eats.  There were a few other recipes I found elsewhere, but for one reason or another they didn't make the cut.  Some were a little too fusion-y, others involved ingredients that I couldn't find.  But what tended to happen was that I stumbled across a recipe that I wanted to make more.  This recipe for pan-fried noodles wasn't one that I originally planned on making.  I don't typically make more than one noodle dish, but I really love pan-fried noodles.  But other than the double-up on the noodles, I think we did a pretty good job of diversifying our meals.  We did one Sichuanese dish with beef and another with chicken, one Taiwanese dish with pork belly, one Xinjiang dish with lamb, one Cantonese dish with seafood...  

This dish was surprisingly successful.  I was pretty happy with it.  When we tried to make pan-fried noodles in the past we always ended up with burnt noodles that stuck to the wok, which resulted in burnt noodles and made it far more difficult to transfer the noodles from the wok in order to flip them over and cook the other side.  But these worked out pretty well!  There was some sticking on the first side after we added the water, but the second side worked perfectly.  And the process of parboiling the scallops and blanching the greens worked out really well because both ended up perfectly cooked.  The original recipe on Serious Eats calls for the addition of calamari and fish balls, but the grocery store was out of calamari and I don't really like fish balls so I decided to leave them out.  I really liked the combination of bay scallops and shrimp, but I might try the calamari next time if it was available.

Recipe after the jump!

Moroccan Baked Scallops

I will be the first to admit that scallops in our apartment tend to be epic failures.  Actually, I am being a bit hyperbolic there.  The few times we have tried to cook scallops they have tended to be quietly sad and disappointing.  Sometimes they are overcooked, sometimes they are underseasoned...  They just don't seem to work out for us.  But these scallops were by far the best scallops we have ever made.  They were beautifully cooked and very tasty.  The word that comes to mind is lovely.  The scallops were tender and silky, with a really nice crispy breadcrumb topping.  Texturally speaking, they were flawless.  And the compound butter added just the right level of spice and flavor without overpowering the natural sweetness and flavor of the scallops.  I was a huge fan.  Even Alex, who is generally not a big fan of scallops, was really impressed by this dish.  I think that one of the best things about this dish is that it could be the perfect dinner party dish because it is both elegant and delicious, but it could also be an easy midweek dinner dish because it is so easy to put together.  And the recipe would be easy to tweak to use slightly different flavor combinations.  I'm thinking it would be really easy to do Italian - use some parsley and lemon zest in the bread crumbs and garlic and more herbs in the compound butter.  Maybe add a little white wine to the bottom of the gratin dishes to add some steam and extra flavor?  I don't know.  I just know that I really really liked this recipe.  Thanks Serious Eats!

Recipe after the jump!

Scallops with Cilantro Sauce and Asian Slaw

 

I will be the first to admit that this meal is crazily not seasonably appropriate.  Given that it is now 30 degrees Fahrenheit in NYC, the more obvious decision would be to make chili or fried chicken, or something else warm, meaty and hearty.  Instead I decided to sear some scallops and serve them over Asian slaw.  Why would I make such a decision?  Well, the recipe sounded pretty good and we had some nice scallops in the fridge just waiting to be cooked.  Plus Alex and I are both still kind of in the mood for light meals after the past few weeks, so it just seemed to make sense to go for a light refreshing dish like this one.

My main complaint with this dish is that it somehow felt incomplete on almost all levels.  The flavors were good, but I wanted something more to bring them to the next level.  I also really wanted something crunchy to provide a textural contrast.  It would have been even better if the crunchy bits had a bit of salt to them (perhaps some finely chopped salted roasted peanuts would have worked).  The slaw was quite good.  I enjoyed the addition of the granny smith apples for some extra sweetness and crunch.  However, should I make this again in the future I think I will alter the ratio of apple and carrot to daikon, or make sure that the daikon is cut smaller than the apples.  In some bites there was a bit too much bitterness from the daikon radish and it overwhelmed all the other flavors.  I thought that the cilantro sauce had nice flavor, but I wanted there to be a little more heat and a little more zip to it.  But the lack of heat could have been due to the fact that our serrano chili just wasn't that hot.  Somehow the balance between the sweet, sour and spicy flavors that I expected in the sauce was just a bit off.  It was more muted than I wanted it to be given the ingredients - a little delicate, rather than in your face.  And while I wanted a light meal, some in your face flavors would have been appreciated.

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!