Andhra Spiced Eggplant and Andhra Scrambled Eggs

From time to time we fall into a rut.  I think everyone does, whether it's a food rut, an exercise rut, an occupation rut, etc.  There are certain ingredients we always have in the apartment and that we use with abandon because we are so comfortable with them.  But most of the ingredients in this meal did not fall into that category.  This meal was so different from anything else we have made in recent memory that I think it completely blew any rut we might have been in right out of the water.  I'm not sure exactly what drew me to these two recipes, except that I was thinking that I have been neglecting a bunch of my cookbooks recently.  While we use Hot Sour Salty Sweet quite often, we rarely use this cookbook, Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent.  Both books are by the same authors, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid and both are fantastic, but while Hot Sour Salty Sweet is right in our Asian wheelhouse, the recipes in Mangoes and Curry Leaves are not.  One problem with the recipes is that they often require a number of Indian, Nepalese or Sri Lankan ingredients that we don't have in the apartment.  I'm not even sure if or where I can find some of the ingredients.  Unfortunately that knocks out a lot of recipes.  Luckily I happened to have everything we needed (or I knew where to find it) for these two recipes.

I can't think of enough good things to say about the Andhra Spiced Eggplant, which both Alex and I were fairly blown away by.  The flavor combination is just so unique and wonderful.  I really thought that the eggplant would be spicy, but somehow all of the flavors really melded together to create a very nice savory dish with great depth of flavor.  The recipe recommends serving the eggplant as a dip for chapatis/pita or serving with white rice.  We happened to have some frozen parathas that we served with the eggplant dip and the buttery, flaky parathas worked really well but I'm sure that chapatis/pita would be an equally good combination.  I will definitely be serving this one again in the future.  As for the eggs, I thought they were nice too.  We both preferred the eggplant, but I was very happy with the eggs.  I don't generally like cooked tomatoes (I love them raw, but I don't like the mushy texture when you cook them), but they really worked in these eggs, which is something I never thought I would say.  Scrambled eggs and tomatoes are a very typical homestyle Chinese dish that they used to serve in China all the time that I avoided like the plague.  But it was good! 

Recipes after the jump!

Ginger Catfish (Trey Cha K'nyei)

Somehow we are on a Cambodian kick, which is a little strange considering I don't think we have ever cooked Cambodian before and I went on this whole tangent in my last post about how Cambodian food didn't make an impression on me while I was there.  And here we are, making two Cambodian dishes in a row.  Random, huh?  Anyway, I know I have said this before but catfish and/or basa are not among my favorite fish options.  I tend to find catfish/basa to be bordering on fishy with a strange mushy texture and a muddy flavor.  But every once in awhile I have a catfish dish that surprises me by how tasty it is.  This was one of them.  Another is the Crispy Basa (Catfish) with Onions and Coriander.  I guess I only like Asian catfish dishes?  Anyway, I was surprised by how tasty this dish was.  I actually liked it better than the Quick Khmer Pork with Green Beans, which also surprised me.  The onions were delicious and the fish was really tasty.  The crispy ginger is really nice too, but I could see how some people would be turned off by that amount of ginger.  This quantity of ginger is powerfully warm and spicy.  If you want to cut it back a little so that the ginger perfumes the dish, rather than permeating the dish, go right ahead.  We used slightly less than the recipe called for (mostly because we got lazy with the julienning).  For what it was, I can't think of anything I would change in this dish.  And Alex agrees.  This isn't one of those dishes that you will dream about for years to come because it was so amazing, but it is exactly what it is meant to be - a simple, flavorful stir-fry.  And I really appreciate that from time to time.

Recipe after the jump!

Quick Khmer Pork with Green Beans

Cambodian food left the least impression on me out of all of the countries I visited in Asia.  The Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia left a huge impression on me, but that is a different matter entirely.  All I remember about food in Cambodia was that their curries were pretty good (less spicy and different from a Thai curry, with lots of coconut milk) and in Phnom Penh most of the restaurants serve what they call "happy pizza" (which is pizza with marijuana on it).  Other than that, I don't remember many specifics.  Cambodian food wasn't as fresh and bright as Vietnamese food, or as spicy as Thai food, but there were many similarities to those cuisines.  The Cambodian food I ate during the week that I traveled around Phnom Penh and Siem Reap was... simple (for lack of a better word), with mild flavors and little complexity.  That isn't to imply that the food wasn't very good.  It was good.  It just lacked the flash and liveliness of other Southeast Asian cuisines to really distinguish it.

 

This Cambodian dish is mild and simple, but flavorful - it just screams home cooking to me.  It's the type of dish I can easily imagine my mother or grandmother throwing together in the kitchen at home (of course this is all presupposing that my mother actually served pork at home, which she never really did and also that she has some familiarity with Cambodian cuisine, which she doesn't).  But that is beside the point.  The point is that this dish is simple, comforting and easy to make.  It's not the best dish we have ever made, but after a long day at work, it was a really nice homey thing to throw together for casual dinner.

Recipe after the jump!

Chinese New Year Meal #7 - Lion's Head Meatballs

 

I'm not sure if I am happy or sad that this is our last Chinese New Year meal for 2012.  The funny thing is that I sat down in January and got really excited for our Chinese New Year meals and picked out a bunch of recipes.  I got so excited that I couldn't wait until Chinese New Year and picked some recipes to make as a warm up - Chicken with Ginger (La Jiang Men Ji), Red-Braised Pork (Hong Shao Rou) and Stir-Fried Mongolian Lamb with Scallions.  Somehow I managed to not make a single recipe that I had originally selected for Chinese New Year.  Instead, I went out and found a whole new set of recipes.  I did stick to some of the same categories - I wanted to make dumplings and noodles, I wanted to make seafood, I wanted to make tofu and I wanted to make meat.  Plus I wanted to throw in a few new sides so I did that too.  Alex and I are in total agreement with each other on our favorite meal.  Our favorite new side was definitely Daikon Slivers in a Spicy Dressing.  And our favorite entree was Ants Climbing a Tree.  

This recipe falls somewhere in the middle of our Chinese New Year meals.  The meatballs were incredibly moist and tender and had really good flavor.  Somehow the broth didn't have quite as much flavor as I had expected.  Therefore the cabbage didn't soak up quite as much flavor as I would have hoped, although the Taiwanese cabbage is inherently nice and sweet.  Although this dish wasn't as labor-intensive as the Pork and Napa Cabbage Water Dumplings (Shuijiao), it didn't exactly come together quickly and easily.  And while the meatballs were pretty good, I don't know that I would go to the trouble of making them again, especially as they didn't rank among my favorite Chinese New Year dishes.  Strangely enough, my favorite Chinese meal of late was the Red-Braised Pork (Hong Shao Rou) we made back in January.  It was amazing!

Recipe after the jump!

Things I love about Austin, Texas...

Alex and I recently made our first ever trip to Austin, Texas with a group of friends.  Having never been to Texas before (or at least never having stepped foot outside of the airports in Houston and Dallas Fort Worth) I wasn't really sure what to expect except that I had been warned that we would be eating a LOT of barbeque and drinking a lot of beer over the course of our long weekend.  But I didn't realize that in addition to the barbeque (and more on the bbq later because we had a TON of it), Austin actually has a really good overall food scene.  We had really great ice cream at Amy's Ice Creams and a phenomenal meal at Uchiko.  For those of you who aren't Top Chef fans or just haven't been watching closely this season, Paul Qui (my favorite contestant) is the executive chef at Uchiko.  The meal we had there was better than anything I have had recently in New York City.  That's how good it was.  We did the 10 course tasting menu and there were a few courses that just blew me away - the jar jar duck (duck confit and crispy duck skin in a jar with candied kumquats, endive and rosemary smoke), the uchi salad (baby romaine leaves crusted with a bit of sea salt, served with an edamame-based dipping sauce/dressing) and the fried milk dessert (pictured below).  I wish Uchiko were in New York so we could go all the time.

More (including pictures) after the jump!

Radish Sliver Omelet

I love easy egg dishes.  Eggs are one of my go-to quick and easy meals because you can do so many different things with them.  And they are so freaking easy to make!  In the spirit of Chinese New Year I decided to make this Radish Sliver Omelet from the Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province with the eggs and daikon that I picked up at the farmers' market.  I'm on a bit of a daikon kick lately, in case you couldn't tell.  I am addicted to the crunch.  I briefly considered counting this as one of our Chinese New Year meals, but then I decided that was lame since the dish is so incredibly simple.  So I'm giving you guys another bonus Chinese recipe!  It's not an earth shattering/ground breaking recipe, but it is tasty and very simple to make.  Alex thought the omelet would benefit from a slightly sweet dipping sauce, but I thought it was perfectly fine on its own.  It does require a little time because you have to salt the daikon slivers and set them aside for 30 minutes to remove excess moisture, but aside from that it comes together in a matter of minutes.  You could do what Alex and I did and prep the daikon, then go shower, and then come back and cook lunch.  It worked out pretty well if I do say so myself!

Recipe after the jump!

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!