4 posts tagged “lunch”

The Chinese sure seem to know how to make dozens of starch variations using rice. Aside from white rice, there are rice noodles, rice noodle sheets, edible rice paper, rice milk, rice flour, glutinous rice and its various incarnations. One particular product, made from glutinous rice flour, you may have heard of - the nian gao. It's a sticky, chewy, popular dessert for celebrating Chinese New Year. A variation of the nian gao is a long log made out of glutinous rice flour and water, which is sliced on the diagonal to achieve thin oval slices, commonly known as "rice ovals" in English, but still called "nian gao" in Chinese. These rice ovals have no flavoring, but are an opaque white color and have a distinctive chew to them. They are usually sold pre-cut and either partially or completely dried, to be reconstituted in water before using.

Rice ovals are used in a variety of dishes and soups in Chinese cuisine. One of its most popular uses is in Shanghainese cuisine, where they are stir fried with sliced meats and vegetables in a clear sauce. My mom makes a lot of great authentic Shanghainese food at home, and she likes to make stir fried rice ovals with a brown sauce (which is called "red braised" in Chinese, even though they're not red nor braised in this dish haha). When cooked properly, rice ovals are uniquely chewy but also soft, which is an interesting way to vary the starch in the dish. The brown sauce is made thickly so that it coats the rice ovals generously, and gives them a lot of wonderful color and flavor. It's one of my favorite Shanghainese dishes, and it always reminds me of home when I think of it. Since today also happens to be Mother's Day, this recipe is my tribute to my mom's home cooking. She inspires me as a cook, and I am always amazed at how there is nothing that tastes quite like a mother's cooking, made with love and care. A woman who has made countless delicious dishes, who cannot write down a recipe for a single dish... that is a woman who knows how to cook with her heart, to harmonize ingredients rather than to follow a list of instructions.

This recipe is made with a package of partially dried rice ovals that I got from a Korean market, also available at most Asian markets. I made red braised rice ovals with beef and Shanghai bok choy (you don't get much more Shanghainese than that!). There is really no difference between using partially dried and fully dried rice ovals other than in preparation, so if you happen to get fully dried rice ovals (they'll be dry and hard, like little oval plastic chips), soak them in a container full of cold water overnight before using them. Otherwise, if using partially dried ovals, they just need to be boiled prior to stir frying.

Shanghainese stir fried rice ovals with beef and bok choy

Shanghainese Stir Fried Rice Ovals (上海红烧炒年糕)          (serves 4-6)

Ingredients:
1 package of partially dried vacuum packed rice ovals (2 lbs) - see here for picture of what they look like
4 heads of Shanghai bok choy, washed and chopped into bite-sized pieces
8 oz. lean beef, sliced thinly
vegetable oil for stir frying
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tbsp rice wine
1/2 tbsp cornstarch
dash of white pepper
soy sauce and oyster sauce to taste

Directions:
1. Marinate sliced beef in soy sauce, white pepper, rice wine, and cornstarch, for about 15 minutes.

2. Bring a pot of water to boil. Place rice ovals in water for 6-10 minutes, until soft and chewy. In my case, I dumped the whole 2 lbs into a small pot of water and it didn't really come back to a boil, but after about 10 minutes they were done. Rinse with cold water, drain, and toss with a little vegetable oil to prevent sticking. Set aside.

3. In a hot skillet with vegetable oil, stir fry bok choy with a few pinches of salt until soft but still a little bit crunchy, about 5 minutes. Remove from skillet.

4. Now sear the beef on each side until almost cooked through. Turn the heat down to medium.

5. Add the boiled rice ovals to the skillet, add soy sauce and oyster sauce (I can't tell you how much I ultimately used, but maybe start with 1/2 tbsp soy and 2 tbsp oyster sauce first, and add as needed), and stir around to coat rice ovals evenly. Try to separate the ovals that are stuck together.

6. Add the cooked bok choy back to the skillet and mix everything together. Heat through and adjust for taste by adding more oyster sauce as needed. The final sauce should be thick enough to stick to the rice ovals. Serve immediately, and store the rest in an airtight container, reheating in a microwave until it is hot all the way through before serving again to avoid hard rice ovals.

Shanghainese stir fried rice ovals

Enjoy and happy Mother's Day!

A few weekends ago I had to go into work on the weekend (which is one of the things that I dread most), so I dragged my boyfriend along to grab lunch afterwards. Hehe the 30 minute walk to work in the cold weather is a bit more bearable when there's someone with you, and a hot lunch afterwards is great incentive for both parties :) Unfortunately when we were leaving my workplace and making the 10 minute walk to the Indian restaurant for lunch, the weather reared its ugly head. It was cloudy as I left my work, and then a minute later it began to rain, just a few droplets at first, then a little more, with the wind picking up dramatically. I was getting blown over, when next thing I knew, there was a gust of small snowflakes, which then turned back into rain. But no, the sky couldn't make up its mind, and in the next minute, the rain became a wall of little tiny ice pellets, flying sideways with the strong wind. Within literally a few minutes, I could no longer see ahead of me... the icy rain was coming down so hard and dense that it was completely white-out conditions. I was caught right in the midst of it all, and the icy rain came pelting down so hard that my face felt like it was being battered with needles, and I had to take cover next to a building before running the rest of the way to the restaurant yelling "ow ow ow!" the whole way there. Crazy weather I tell you! Of course, minutes after I was seated, the icy rain turned to a falling blanket of giant snowflakes, and another few minutes after that, bright sun. What a storm!

Anyway, we were getting lunch buffet at the Indian restaurant, which is called Royal Bengal. They serve mostly Northern Indian and Bengali cuisine, even though I don't really know what that really means hehe. Indian buffet is always a good time, because well first it's all you can eat, and that's always exciting for students living on a budget, but also because I don't eat Indian food often and it's fun to have something different every once in a while. The prices uses to be great, with the lunch buffet costing about $6 on weekdays and $7 on weekends (more meat dishes), and over the years it has risen gradually, to the point where weekend lunch is now $9.50 per person, which is at the threshold where I would not be willing to pay for it if it went any higher. Luckily MIT and Harvard students get a 10% discount, but honestly that's like less than $1 off, so it's not that much of a difference. So that particular weekend they were serving goat curry, fish tikka masala, and fish curry as their specials. The usual fare includes chicken tandoori, aloo gohbi (cauliflower and potatoes cooked with tomatoes, onions, herbs and spices), vegetables curry, daal (a creamy lentils dish), samosas, vegetable pakoras (battered and fried pieces of cauliflower usually), and some fresh vegetable salad with chutney and pita bread available on the side. Yum, here's my first platter of goodies. I try to get a little of everything, but I have to admit I'm not very good with spicy food, so I try to stick with less spicy stuff or else I'd be drinking water like crazy. I usually get a generous portion of the lentils, and some masala item, as they are mild and help give a little buffer to the spicy curries :)

Indian buffet at Royal Bengal

The other thing I really like about Indian buffet is their rice pudding, which is called badami kheer. Indian style rice pudding tends to have a harder rice kernel (not as soft and mushy as English rice puddings) and a more liquid milk that makes the pudding a very refreshing dessert, especially after the spicy entrees. Served cold, it's usually flavored with cardamom, almonds, and raisins, although I try to avoid picking up the almonds and raisins since I like the pure texture and flavor of the rice with the milk. I grew up loving the Kozy Shack style of rice pudding, topped with a healthy bit of cinnamon, and while that is still one of my favorite comfort desserts, I am always looking forward to the Indian rice pudding each time I'm at Royal Bengal. Mmm yum.

Indian rice pudding (badami kheer)

Other things I've had lately include a good deal of homecooked meals. On the day that I got back from my latest NYC visit, my boyfriend had prepared dinner for us, which I thought was a really nice gesture especially after my long bus ride back. He pan fried together some onions and a bunch of garlic marinated pork chop medallions, which were thin and juicy with a slightly crispy layer of thin cornstarch. We ate them with rice and a side of garlic stir fried broccoli, and it was a great satisfying meal to come home to after a long day traveling. It's really nice to have someone there who can pick up the cooking when you just don't have the time for it (I had been thinking of getting fast food for dinner when he called me on the phone to let me know he was making dinner - good timing!).

pan fried garlic pork medallions

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To return the favor, I was in charge of dinner on a night when Greg had to meet with some classmates for a group project right around dinnertime, so that he could come back and we could have dinner ready to eat before like 9pm. Even though cooking alone takes a while since prep time and cooking time can't be cut down by doing both simultaneously (not very well anyway), I really do like having total control over our tiny kitchen space and trying my best to multi-task while planning out what I wanted to make. I definitely relish in the execution of my dinner plan. That's the thing about cooking which makes it so different from baking. For the most part, at least in Asian cuisine, you never have to worry about perfect portioning of ingredients. A dash here, and spoonful there, and a sip of what's in the pot are really the only things you need. Everything else is just trial and error (and execution via familiarity) until you get things to be exactly (or close to) how you want it to be. It's difficult to mess up... as long as you're not burning anything.

There's so much personality in each dish, so much room for variation, that I honestly believe no two dishes I ever make come out the same. Which is fun for me, but I guess difficult for many Westerners to manage, since so often Western cooking is governed by recipes (even when they don't really need to be). That said, I believe cooking is a very intimate thing, and one that you can really only improve on with experience and a flair for experimenting. Whenever I ask my mom how to cook the dishes she likes to make at home, she can never spit out a recipe for me. Never. She'll just insist that I come and watch her cook, and she'll be able to rattle off the general steps, just never the amounts of the ingredients used. And now that I've done a bit of cooking myself, I know just how true that is. When you're just adding and adding an ingredient until you get that satisfactory taste, you definitely lose track of how much is going into the dish. Anyway... heh tangent.

So that night I made a simple cabbage and bacon dish, which is one of my go-to dishes for fast and fool-proof cooking. First off, cabbage must be the world's easiest vegetable to cut. All I do is rinse it, peel off the outer layer, cut the head in half. Then I cut out the stem and proceed to cut the half-head horizontally and vertically in just a few fell swoops before the entire thing is cut into a bunch of small rectangles, since the head holds together so well. So fast! Then I sizzle up some bacon until it's a little bit crispy, and I set that aside. I leave the oil from the bacon in the pan to cook the cabbage with, until the leaves are nice and soft and a bright light green color (the parts closer to the stem will stay a light yellow color). A dash of salt goes in, and then I throw the bacon pieces back into the pan for a quick twirl and it's ready to serve. I personally think cabbage is just as tasty without the bacon, but my boyfriend really likes it with bacon, so I throw some in to humor him. Cabbage just has a great mild but slightly sweet flavor that makes for a nice refreshing vegetable side for most dishes I think.

cabbage with bacon

The other dish I made was improvised on the spot because when I reached into the fridge after defrosting my chicken thighs, I realized that the mushrooms I had intended to use for a nice chicken and mushroom dish were moldy. Fungus growing on fungus is some nasty stuff. So plan B was to use whatever else was in the fridge that could be used to make a chicken dish (and honestly, there wasn't a lot that day). I had onions, carrots, and two small tomatoes. So I cut those up, and softened up the onions and carrots in a skillet while the chicken was cubed and marinated with salt, sugar, white pepper, rice wine, onion powder, garlic powder, cornstarch, and soy sauce. When the carrots were 2/3 of the way done, I threw in tomatoes which soften pretty fast, followed by the chicken, and let that sear to just a bit underdone before adding in some water to make a sauce. For the sauce I used soy sauce and hoisin sauce to achieve a balanced flavor that was neither too salty nor too sweet, something similar to a teriyaki but with a stronger hoisin flavor which made it a rich and rounded sauce. Finally I added a cornstarch slurry and brought the sauce to a boil until it thickened slightly.

chicken with carrots, onion, and tomatoes in a brown sauce

You know... it boggles my mind, but how DO people come up with names for their dishes? Like the one I improvised above, I wouldn't know the first thing to call it other than just describing what it is. Who came up with the names like scallopini and casserole? Pad thai? General Gau's? I'm going to call this... hoisin chicken... even though the translation into Chinese makes it mean seafood chicken lol. What, I'm not good at making up names! :P

For Chinese New Year, which I apologize for not having had any interesting entries about despite being Chinese and enjoying its cuisine (I just don't have the ingredients to make those special new year's dishes), I spent the day eating something pretty normal. Greg had the chance to grab a big family dinner in Chinatown though, and brought back some leftovers for me which included a beef clay pot dish, some taro fried duck, beef with tofu, and Cantonese style chicken. He also brought back some dessert that one of his relatives picked up at an Italian bakery... some mini cannolis! Mmm I love cannoli... it has the most interesting texture combination - crunchy outer shell with a creamy but gritty ricotta-like filling. The big cannolis can be a big daunting to handle in one sitting, but the mini ones are great for a bite-sized dessert :)

Vanilla cannoli

Well, it's officially 2008! I didn't have a New Year's Eve feast of any sort, but I've been enjoying lots of down to earth home-cooked food at home, prepared by my mom. I'm going to miss it terribly when I leave to go back to school in a few days. So, as far as resolutions go, I guess eating better (not tastier but healthier!) and exercising more always tops the list. I think finding time to cook more of my own meals is also up there. I'm hoping I'll be slightly less busy this semester. And, for a non-food-related resolution, I'm going to work on finding a partner to travel with to China this coming summer. It'll be my last real "free" summer before my life gets sucked away by medical school, so I want to make sure that I get a chance to travel and see my relatives in China that I haven't seen in about 8 years now. Hopefully one of my friends will want to take some time off and have some fun traveling with me :)

Now then, back to the yummy stuff... here's some of what I've been enjoying while at home:

(炸酱面) Noodles with Chinese spaghetti sauce

One of my favorite comfort dishes of all time is my mom's noodles with Chinese spaghetti sauce. The sauce is made with ground pork, eggs, and a variety of minced vegetables that happen to be on hand. This time, she added black wood ear fungus, onions, and scallions. Everything is sauteed in a pan with a soy and oyster based sauce, which is very different from Italian spaghetti sauce. It's a wonderful savory brown sauce, and is often done poorly at Americanized Chinese restaurants (too salty, too thick, vegetables too chunky), which is always a disappointment for me. Just imagine, going out and seeing one of your favorite dishes on the menu, only to get something completely different from what you were expecting. This is the reason that I always ask my mom to make me some when I come home :)

Chicken soup with winter melon

Shanghainese people love their soups. We spend hours and hours simmering soups that are full of flavor but still light and refreshing, and we always like to start off our meal with soups whenever possible, as a way to prepare and clean the palette. Soups are unfortunately a luxury I cannot afford at school, as I simply don't have the time to be simmering away on a stove all day, nor do I have a big enough dutch oven. This particular soup is made from simmering water with a young hen (using things such as chicken and beef stocks is such blasphemy in Chinese soup-making). My mom puts lots of sliced ginger in the water, as well as some white pepper. After the soup has simmered for several hours, she puts in some other items such as sliced Chinese sausage and chunks of winter melon. Winter melon is this big green melon with a stark white flesh surrounding a small cavity full of seeds, just like a honeydew. You can find winter melons at Asian supermarkets, where they are usually sold in sections instead of the whole melon. You remove the outer skin and the seeds, and then cut the melon into rectangular chunks to boil in the soup. They are ready when they turn translucent and become soft (they should not have any crunch to them). Winter melon has very little flavor of its own, but absorbs the soup and is very refreshing. Finally, the soup is finished off with salt as necessary, and topped with scallions. It's very simple, but wonderfully appetizing. It really brings out the gentle flavor of the chicken, and is a very healthy soup with all that winter melon to add to your vegetable intake!

Fish filets in a sweet and sour sauce

My mom made this dish to take to a potluck, and left me a little platter all decorated with a ring of broccoli, how cute! She used flounder filets, which were lightly floured and fried, before tossing with black wood ear fungus, sliced bamboo shoots, and onions in a soy and black vinegar-based sweet and sour sauce. She loves to make this for dinner parties, because it's easy to do but tastes like you spent hours trying to prepare it.

Soy bean sprouts with sliced pork

I'm big on both mung bean and soy bean sprouts. The difference is that the mung bean sprouts have no real mung bean left on the ends of them, since they sprout from the beans themselves, whereas the soybean sprouts have that characteristic crunchy yellow bean at the ends. These are great as a main vegetable in a dish, because the crunchy beans really command your attention (whereas the mung bean sprouts tend to be used as a garnish). My mom stir fries them with thinly sliced pork in a soy-based sauce (yes, we like soy...). Just one warning: while mung bean sprouts can be eaten raw, soy bean sprouts should not be. It can lead to diarrhea

Sliced pork liver in a brown sauce

Remember the pork liver dish I got in California just a little while ago? Well it's also one of my favorites, and my mom knows this, so she went out and bought pork liver to make for me when I came home :) When she makes pork liver, she likes to make it very simple, without lots of extra vegetables to distract from the unique flavor and texture of the liver. It's made with a brown sauce, that is, you guessed it, soy and oyster sauce based. She also added some sha cha sauce (Chinese bbq sauce) to it, and threw in some scallions for color and contrast. The pork liver was tender and the sauce was at just the perfect flavor and consistency, with a bit of sweetness to offset the saltiness. Mmm delish!

Shanghai bok choy

My family is never far from its trusty Shanghai bok choy. I know you've seen it on my Vox a zillion times, but part of going home is eating more veggies too, right? My mom likes to sautee these until they become pretty soft, while I like them a bit more crunchy. Granted, since these are part of the mustard plant family, the rarer the vegetable is, the more likely you will encounter a mildly pungent sting, something 100 times milder than wasabi.

Mom's fried rice

Fried rice is my mom's go-to dish for a quick and easy dinner when she's terribly busy. It's a lot less greasy than anything you'll encounter in a Chinese restaurant, and the rice is more tender, even though we use day-old rice (ever had that dreadful fried rice where the rice kernels are hard and chewy? bad!). We don't use a lot of soy in our fried rice, so it's not dark brown either.

Seafood soup with tofu

So the past few days I've been visiting California to interview at Stanford and to see some college friends. The weather was amazing, it felt like Boston's spring. The sunshine was warm, there were palm trees, and dusty mountains in the distance everywhere I went. Stanford itself was the most extravagant campus I have ever seen. They really spend a lot of money spoiling their kids lol (maybe me one day?). The sunny happiness of the students being in a country club-like campus and a relaxing curriculum was really infectious. They were literally all smiles, and every student I met couldn't seem to shower the school with enough praise. I have yet to see a school where the students were this much in love with their school (Rochester and Dartmouth are distant seconds).

fountain pool in front of Stanford University Hospital

There were ducks in the pool! So cute :)

Um, bamboo forest in the middle of a building anyone?

After seeing Stanford, I had time grab dinner with my friend Tony near the school. We walked up and down the main street with restaurants, and finally decided to stop in at a place called University Cafe, which served American food at a moderate price. First came a bread plate with a tomato-based dipping sauce (I couldn't figure out why it was orange, but it was similar to a marinara I guess). The bread itself was too hard on the outside, and a little soggy in the middle, but it still tasted fine because we were both starving lol.

bread with tomato dipping sauce

For my entree I got a chicken pot pie with tossed greens on the side. It was the type of pot pie that has a cap of puff pastry on top of the liquid pot pie, and I really like this kind of pot pie because it was the kind that Baker dining used to serve all the time. The pot pie filling itself was delicious, as it was sort of like a cream of mushroom soup, with asparagus, mushrooms, onions, peppers, corn, peas, and chicken chunks. The flavors came together really well, and even though I was starving when I came in, I was definitely satisfied afterwards. The greens on the side were tossed in a vinaigrette that contrasted nicely with the sweet creaminess of the pot pie. It was jazzed up comfort food, and it definitely hit the spot.

Chicken pot pie with tossed greens

Tony wanted to get a 12 oz steak au poivre, but the waiter got confused and gave him a steak salad instead lol. The steak tasted like it was marinated with teriyaki sauce, which I thought was kind of interesting. It came on top of a bed of stir fried vegetables and some salad. Not quite what he wanted, but at least it wasn't a bad replacement heh. (Sorry, pic is a little blurry, I blame Tony because he took it lol).

Teriyaki steak salad

And for dessert, we went across the street to a Japanese-European fusion bakery called Satura Cakes, where after trying some free samples of a very rich and dense chocolate cake, we decided on sharing a bread pudding together. For the life of me I can't remember right now what type of fruit was in the bread pudding, but I know the dessert itself was a great way to end the meal. It had the spiciness of a pumpkin pie, with the soft-crunchy chunks of fruit like an apple pie, combined with soft bread and a creamy mousse-like filling, all topped with whipped cream. It was light and refreshing, and although it was cold, the flavor of the spices made a warm impression on me. It was a quintessential autumnal dessert, even though autumn has already passed.

Bread pudding dessert

The following day for lunch, I went out with Tony and another friend, Linda, for Shanghainese cuisine at an Asian strip mall. The food was amazing, and reminded me of all the Shanghainese dishes that I've eaten growing up. We ordered "jiao bai" (water bamboo) with peppers and pork, "nian gao" (rice ovals) with napa and beef, pork liver in brown sauce, and "xiao long bao" (Shanghai meat buns). Everything was delicious, and the cooking style was light and clean, just like Shanghainese cuisine is great at when it wants to be. When I had this meal, I realized just how sick I was of the greasy, fried food of Cantonese cuisine up in Boston's Chinatown. They're not kidding when they say that Chinese food is better in California (there are so many Asians here!).

(茭白) Sliced water bamboo with peppers and pork

Pork liver with onions and peppers in brown sauce

(小笼包) Shanghai meat buns

And finally, a picture of me and my friend Tony (I'm almost embarrassed to post this because I look so stupid here, but I guess what the heck, it's for the memories right?). I wish I could have stayed a little longer, and done some more "Californian" things heh, but there's always next time!

Me and Tony