I went to sleep last night with a sweet tooth and woke up with a savory one. Does that ever happen to you? So scratch the blueberry pancakes I was going to make this morning. But savory breakfast options are somewhat limited at my house. There are no potatoes and even the bread I had to dig up from the freezer (yes, you can freeze bread and then defrost it in the microwave before you toast it. It tastes the same, I swear). But I really wanted something egg-y and since the shiitake mushrooms had been sitting in the fridge for so long, I decided to whip something up on the fly.

The first time I had wasabi was actually at home and it wasn’t with sushi. In fact, sushi was one of those smitten foods that I’d look at in disgust up until junior year of college. I remember when Stern took us out to Ruby Foo’s during my freshman year and a huge platter (like 50 pieces of sushi) arrived. Seven pairs of eyes around me started bulging out in anticipation while one pair essentially said, “Ugh, disgusting.” Most people use wasabi sparingly, taking a tiny grain sized portion and mixing it into soy sauce/ponzu, as if the specks of green are there to give the soy sauce some green freckles. But at home, I first had it with sashimi. My mother likes to take a whopping chunk, to the point where the ratio between wasabi and soy sauce is greater than 1. I experienced that insane tug up against my nose when I inhaled the wasabi, unsure what to expect. It was as if someone was having a wrestling match up in my nose and the round would only end with time. Man, I love that feeling.

Awhile ago, I got this jar of wasabi mayo at Trader Joe’s. I could spread it on slices of bread and be perfectly happy for breakfast and lunch. When I ran out of it a few weeks ago, I quickly made some of my own with regular mayo and some wasabi powder. Maybe it doesn’t have the same finesse as the Trader Joe’s jar, but it still works really well. Spread it on some toast, sautee some mushrooms, and fry an egg. You’ve got yourself a hearty breakfast. That insane feeling you get up your nose is a bit mitigated with the wasabi mayo, but still lingers in your nose.

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Wasabi Mayo (the quick way)
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Ingredients:

• 3 tablespoons any good mayonnaise
• 1 tablespoon wasabi powder
• Juice of 1/2 lemon (optional)
• Pinch of salt and black pepper

Note: For some people, 1 tablespoon of wasabi powder may be too much. In fact, many recipes call for only 1/4 tablespoon of wasabi powder for every 3 tablespoons of mayo. I’d experiment in increments of 1/4 tablespoons and adjust until you’re satisfied.

Recipe:

In a bowl, mix in the mayo and lemon juice with a whisk. I use the lemon because supposedly the acidity will keep its shelf life longer (although using already made/processed mayo, I’m not sure how much validity there is to that belief). Then add the wasabi powder and beat lightly with a fork. Season with salt and pepper.

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Interestingly, did you know that the vinegar and lemon juice in mayo, which makes mayo acidic, prevents harmful bacteria from growing in it? So even though that potato salad of yours may seem to spoil under the sun and grow mold, you won’t get sick from it! Mayo unrefrigerated will develop a taste and smell that you definitely don’t want to ever encounter though…

]]> http://savory-bites.com/2010/03/wasabi-mayo-with-a-sunny-side-up/feed/ 1 http://savory-bites.com/2010/03/mi-fen-%e7%b1%b3%e7%b2%89-fried-rice-vermicelli/ http://savory-bites.com/2010/03/mi-fen-%e7%b1%b3%e7%b2%89-fried-rice-vermicelli/#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:11:59 +0000 Jessie http://savory-bites.com/?p=3121

It’s been a while since the scent of curry lingered behind the kitchen walls of my home. Growing up, that scent undoubtedly meant having “mi fen” (or rice vermicelli as most people know it) for dinner. I dreaded that. Actually, reflecting back, I dreaded just about everything that my mom made. It wasn’t until high school that I magically lost my disdain for Chinese food and yes, even began looking forward to having mi fen for dinner.

Back then, I thought- “What could possibly be worse than the dry, rough texture of an impersonating noodle made from rice?” It was delicate and fragile, two qualities that it in my mind definitely didn’t qualify it to be worthy of liking. But now as I appreciate the story behind mi fan, why the Chinese eat noodles on birthdays (for good luck, of course!), and how mi fan wholly captures spices that few other noodles can, I’ve developed a fond liking for it.

Mi Fen (米粉)

Mi fen is one of those foods that bridges the cultures between Asian cultures including Chinese, Filipino, Malaysian, Vietnamese, and even Pakistani. In Filipino, it’s called “pancit,” which actually means “pian i sit” or literally, “something conveniently cooked fast.” In America, they’re labeled as “rice vermicelli,” or rice noodles. One of those lightbulb clicking moments where I realized that I actually liked mi fan was when I found it in the vegetarian spring rolls they sell at Costco. Go figure. Fake American Chinese food made me realize how much I liked authentic Chinese food.

So my mother, who is actually home for the next week (or two) cooked a heaping batch of her mi fan which will last me for a good three packed lunches. There are tons of variations on this dish, but I’ve never seen anyone make it the way my mother does because she uses curry powder. I think it provides an intriguing flavor, which only a thin noodle such as this, can pick up.

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Mi Fen (米粉) [Fried Rice Vermicelli]
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Ingredients:

• 1 pack of rice vermicelli
• 1/2 head of cabbage, cut to shreads
• Handful of mushrooms (dried or fresh)
• Shredded beef (pork or chicken works fine)
• 2 tablespoons oil
• Curry Powder
• Soy Sauce

Notes: Other traditional ingredients that go into this dish include carrots, shrimp (for Singaporean style), bean sprouts, scallions, etc… Measurements for the curry powder and soy sauce are not given since you should always season to your own taste.

Rice vermicelli may come in sticks (like Italian pasta) or in square-ish bundles that are entangled within each other. You can use either, but we use the latter.

Recipe:

In a pot of warm water, let the rice vermicelli soak and soften. This should take anywhere from 15-30 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare your vegetables and meats. If you’re using dried mushrooms, also soak it in warm water for 15 minutes before slicing as shown below.

Begin by cooking the meat first in the oil. When the meat begins to brown, take it out of the pan and set aside. You don’t want it to cook fully through or else it’ll overcook later. Then, cook the cabbage and mushrooms (oil the pan if it’s too light). The cabbage will begin to shed water and wilt. Add in the softened rice vermicelli and cooked meat.

Keep tossing until everything is well integrated. Add in curry powder and soy sauce. We usually go by a tablespoon of curry powder and around two tablespoons of soy sauce. Continue to stir fry for 2-3 minutes until the noodles turn yellow from the powder and the flavor sets in.

This may sound disgusting, but since I find that just about everything tastes great with ketchup and this is no exception, you should try it with ketchup. It adds a bit of sweetness that compliments the savory really well. Really, I’m not joking.

Look familiar? A pancake version of the crepes I made before

I should probably purchase Ina Garten’s cookbook or something by now since it seems as if all I cook are her recipes. But after her snubbing of Jennifer Garner (I was the hugest Alias fan ever!) I can’t seem to find the will to shell out  $20+ out of my pocket that’s only going to go into her already big fat piggybank (bolstered by her husband’s run on Wall St- betcha didn’t know that huh!!). I guess that’s what foodnetwork.com is for, eh? Free recipes at the convenience of a button.

So awhile back, I made these crepes and while they were awesome, I wanted something that was uh, not a crepe. I made pancakes. But what I really don’t like about pancakes is how full you get after eating that large stack (I still like the idea of stacking, just not the thickness of the stack) so I made my pancakes extra thin. Of course, the recipe still works for regular pancakes. Just pour more batter!

Ina Garten’s Banana Sour Cream Pancakes
Adapted from here (makes 6 pancakes)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cups flour
• 1 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 extra-large eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
• Unsalted butter
• 1 ripe bananas, diced, plus extra for serving
• MELTED CHOCOLATE, PEANUT BUTTER & HONEY

Recipe:

Sift together the dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together the sour cream, milk, eggs, vanilla, and lemon zest (I had none, so you can omit). Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones, mixing only until combined.

Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat until it bubbles. Ladle the pancake batter into the pan to make 3 or 4 pancakes. Distribute a rounded tablespoon of bananas on each pancake. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until bubbles appear on top and the underside is nicely browned. Flip the pancakes and then cook for another minute until browned. Wipe out the pan with a paper towel, add more butter to the pan, and continue cooking pancakes until all the batter is used.

Serve with sliced bananas, drizzled melted chocolate, peanut butter, and honey. O h  m y  g o d.  SO GOOD.

Pasta with tomato and clam $18.00

The maitre’d was nice. Really nice. But he gave a half baked response out of his behind to one of our questions and that sorta pissed me off. Let’s start from the beginning though.

It was a major fail on my end to secure a dinner spot (sorry Sabrina) last Saturday night. Apparently,  NYC restaurants are recession-proof because all of the restaurants we wanted to go to had like a 3 hour wait. I was afraid that Sabrina would eat the next moving thing if we didn’t get to a restaurant soon so after visiting Novita (and finding out that the earliest dinner slot for two would be at 10:30!!), we walked smack into Beppe and went in.

I love the decor inside Beppe. There’s a huge Piet Mondrian inspired glass panel in the back and little lights that hang from a high sweeping ceiling. Then there’s the brick that adorns the walls next to the booths, the wooden floors, and just this whole sense of rusticness. The place wasn’t exactly crowded but it wasn’t empty either.

We both ordered pasta and sat back to await the bread. The bread came within a few minutes, which I’d consider timely and all, but before the bread-plate even touched the table, we saw the pasta dishes arrive! Literally, like five minutes within ordering, our pasta arrived!

Chocolate pasta with wild boar $18.00

Don’t get me wrong- I love speedy service. But if I’m going to pay flipping $18.00 for a plate of pasta, that pasta better be made with some love. Assuming that the pasta only took 3-4 minutes to cook if fresh, 5 minutes is still too fast! So in my mind, it went something like this in the kitchen..

1. Order comes in. Chef reads order.
2. Takes pre-cooked chocolate pasta with pre-cooked boar with pre-made sauce and plops it onto the plate
3. Microwave time

That was probably a bit harsh, but what else am I supposed to think? Who serves pasta at a decent restaurant within 5 minutes?! I mean the bread couldn’t even make it to the table quick enough!

Despite all of this though, I enjoyed the pasta. You couldn’t really taste the chocolate part but the flavor from the boar was really rich and game-y and not at all overpowering. Sabrina’s dish on the other hand… let’s just say I could have made a better pasta dish.

The best part of dinner was actually that up there- a corn muffin. They gave every diner on her way out a tiny box with a corn muffin wrapped in orange tissue paper, which was a nice gesture. The maitre’d ended up passing by our table and asking us how everything was. We told him about the sub-par pasta dish that Sabrina had and he was sincere in saying how he was sorry, and that if we hadn’t closed out our check so soon, he could have done something. But then, when we brought up how fast the pasta came out, he said something along the lines of…

“The guys in the kitchen get the orders when they come in. So they just make the food as it comes along. Since you didn’t order any appetizers, the pasta came out more quickly because pasta by nature cooks so fast. blah blah blah…”

There are two issues with this answer that I have-

1. Even if there is NO ONE in the restaurant but me, and I order the single dish of the night, does that mean that you’re going to rush out the dish? Any decent restaurant would actually require their expo line to control the cooking time for the meal. You should know how long it takes to cook each dish and then time it according to that. Meaning, if we don’t order any appetizers, you delay the cooking by at least 7 minutes so that we can EAT OUR FREAKING BREAD FIRST!! I wonder what would have happened if I ordered steak and Sabrina ordered pasta. Would they have served the pasta first before my steak finished cooking? Oh wait- they probably would have pre-prepared the steak too…
2. Even if it takes a whopping total of 3 minutes to cook our dishes, have they not thought about the psychological aspect of serving it that quickly?! Like I said, if you’re going to charge $18 for a pasta dish and spend less than 5 minutes making it, there was obviously no love into making that dish. So why would I want to pay $18 for your pasta if I can pay $8 at a crappy restaurant for the same quality?

That’s it, I’m done. I was really disappointed. The sad part is, my disappointment was 95% from the timing issue. Sabrina may have a different opinion considering how her pasta was bland, but if they just took an extra 5 minutes, I would have been so much happier.  For god sakes, lie to me and make me psychologically happy. Sorry, but I’m just picky like that especially if I’m paying near $20 for an entree.

Yes, I ate all of that- no not in one sitting. Are you insane?

A few months ago, I was super excited to finally get a pizza pan. I never got a chance to use it until today. There were a few reasons for this, but perhaps the real reasons were because a.) I always forgot to buy pizza dough and b.) I couldn’t find my yeast packets when contemplating making my own pizza dough.

I had alot of downtime this weekend, partially because of all that snow. It’s the perfect excuse to stay indoors. So I cleaned and threw away alot of stuff and what do you know! I found the yeast packets! I was afraid they’d expire since I bought them last year, but they last until October 2010.

Pizza dough is possibly one of the easiest things to make because the yeast does all the work. You just have to wait for it to rise, fall, and rise again. While I love tomato sauce, I love white pizzas even more, so for me, it’s definitely worth making my own since pizza parlors charge so much for the white pies. But, that would also require me to have goat cheese, which I don’t. Next time I guess.

For the past 2 months or so, I’ve had at least a shiitake mushroom everyday. No joke. You can put it on anything. I’ve found that shiitake mushrooms pair really well with sesame oil so if I ever use shiitakes as a topping, I always make sure to drizzle them with a bit of the sesame oil. They go well in fried rice, sandwiches, salads, and of course, pizza. The sesame just brings out that particular flavor you can’t get from anywhere else.

The following recipe makes enough dough for TWO pizzas! HUZZAH

Mitch’s Basic Pizza Dough
Taken from here

Ingredients:

• 3 1/2 cups flour
• 1 cup warm water
• 2 tablespoons yeast
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Recipes:

By Hand- (Check out the original site if you want to make the dough in a food processor or a bread maker. Pft, tough it out and do it by hand!!)

Pour warm water between 85 to 115 degrees F into a bowl. The water should be very warm but still comfortable. It’s very important for the water to be between this range or else the yeast won’t be activated. Add the honey and salt and mix until well blended.

Don’t omit the honey because without it, the salt will kill the yeast. The yeast also feeds off the honey so that it can work to make the dough rise.

Add the yeast and mix some more. Let this mixture sit for about 5 minutes. After the 5 minutes, the yeast should be foaming, which means that it’s been activated. If it doesn’t work, it means your yeast is a dud and… you won’t be able to make pizza dough. But assuming it does work, add 1 cup of flour and the olive oil and mix until well blended. Add the rest of the flour (and any other additions) and mix well. The dough should turn into a ball. If the dough does not ball up because it’s too dry, add water one tablespoon at a time until it does. If your mixture is more like a batter, add flour one tablespoon at a time. Adding water or flour as needed to get the right consistency will assure you always get a perfect dough. Just remember to do it in small amounts.

Once the dough is balled up, place the ball on a floured board and knead for about a minute. This builds the gluten which helps the dough to rise and become fluffy when cooked. Place the dough in a plastic grocery bag or a covered bowl and store in a warm, dry area to rise.

After about 45 minutes the dough should have about doubled in size. Show it who’s boss and punch it down. That’s right, give it a good smack so it deflates. Let it rise for another hour to an hour and a half. The dough is now ready to be rolled out. You can punch the dough down one more time if you want and wait another hour or two before rolling out. The choice is yours.

This dough can also be made in advance and refrigerated for a day or so, or even frozen. Be sure to let it come to room temperature before using.

Assembling the pizza:

Yay! now you’re ready to roll out the dough and assemble the pizza. Mike does a wonderful step-by-step tutorial with pictures. Instead of using a rolling pin, I used my fingers to spread the dough out, but not before I gave it a few good kneads. So after some good kneading, roll the dough into a ball and begin to flatten it out with your palm.

At this point, you can attempt to toss the dough up in the air like the pros do. Don’t make the same mistake I did by coating the dough with flour and then tossing it because the flour landed everywhere on me. Eventually, the dough will stretch out like this below.

From there on,  use your fingers to spread the dough to the side. If the dough gets too thin in any section, just re-adjust and cover it up. Using your fingers, push the ends onto the side of the pan so that you form a crust.

Now, it’s time for the toppings! I used shiitake mushrooms, red peppers, and mozzarella cheese. I also used half pesto and half tomato sauce for the base. I have to admit, I liked the pesto side better.

I actually ended up making the tomato sauce because we always have tomatoes at home but never any tomato sauce. I threw a bit of garlic and diced tomatoes into some olive oil and cooked it until it was tender and the water came out. Then, I used a hand blender and pureed the tomatoes. At this point, it looked like this liquidity mess. Let it sit on the stove for another 10 minutes on medium heat. The liquid should evaporate and when it seems as if there’s only a little bit of liquid left, turn off the fire. I found the tomato sauce a bit on the salty side so I added about a tablespoon of ketchup. Yes- ketchup. It made it oh so yummy.

Bake in the oven at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes. When the crust begins to rise and brown and the cheese is bubbling, you’ll know that it’s done! Some people also like to puncture holes in the dough before topping it to prevent it from bubbling, but I didn’t. Just thought I should put it out there.