Fried pork dumplings

It's leftover season. What with the cooking for holiday parties, there's a fair amount of food floating around our house. What to do? What to do? How about fried pork dumplings?

Start with twice- boiled Chinese pork dumplings.



Pour one medium-sized splatter of sesame oil into a heavy pan, and heat over medium-high heat. When hot, toss in a few dumplings, far enough apart that they're not touching.



Sear on each side a few minutes, until nice and crispy.



Serve with mixture of soy sauce and sambal olek.  This is a nice, crispy alternative to standard Chinese pork dumplings.  Yum.

Spanakopita

I am descended of hearty Scottish and Mennonite stock. Hence, my penchance for wereneke and haggis.  So it may be considered a tad odd that I have in my family recipe folder a recipe for the classic Greek dish - spanakopita.  My mum made this for us when I was a kid, and I've been making it at home as long as I've been cooking.  I bring this recipe out every year, and serve this as an appetizer at our annual Christmas party.  It's a crowd-pleaser:

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil + extra for brushing
2 small onions (minced)
4 tbsp fresh parsley
16 oz crumbled feta cheese
8 oz cream cheese (light)
8 oz Monterey jack cheese (grated)
4 eggs lightly beaten
2 tsp grated nutmeg
2 -12 oz package frozen spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
1 package phyllo/filo pastry - found in the freezer section of most grocers

Make sure you thaw the spinach in advance, and squeeze it well. You don't want a soggy filling. Also, thaw the phyllo dough.

Sauté the onions in the oil until softened and transparent.  Remove from heat.  Mix well with the cheeses, eggs, nutmeg and spinach.



Prepare some oil for brushing the phyllo dough.



Pull out one sheet of phyllo dough.  When working with phyllo, you want to work fast, so that they don't dry out.  The individual sheets may stick together if they've gotten at all wet during the thawing process. Be gentle separating the sheets.

Place the sheet on your work surface, and cut into three equal strips, sliced so that each sheet is as long as the original sheet is.



Brush the strips very lightly with oil. Place a small dollop of filling on one end of the phyllo dough.



Fold the phyllo across the filling to form a triangle.



Fold again, continuing to make triangles with each fold.



Continue folding, until you run out of phyllo dough for that individual spanakopita.  Set aside.



I package the individual spanakopitas in tupperware containers between layers of wax paper.  They freeze well at this point, or you can cook them now.  Raw or frozen, you place them directly onto an oiled cookie sheet.  Bake in a pre-heated oven, 350°F. 30-45 minutes if raw, one hour to one hour and fifteen minutes if frozen until golden brown.



Serve immediately. You won't often hear me praising vegetarian cuisine - but these are delicious. Rich, cheesy, spinachy goodness. Perfect.

Miso bagna càuda

I'm in danger of seeming a miso fanatic.  But it's a tasty source of umami flavours, and, well...  Umami!

We recently had the great fortune to dine at Morimoto Napa, while visiting the lovely wineries of Napa Valley.  It's a pity I forgot my camera in the car, because in addition to being one of the tastiest meals of my life, it was also one of the most beautiful.  But none of the dishes was more magnificent than the bagna càuda.  It was an umami bomb coated in vegetable oil.  A little blob of brown paste at the bottom of a ceramic container, covered in a deep layer of olive oil, and warmed by a candle underneath, this stuff was like heaven.  Rich, sweet, delicious.  A hot dip for the perfect and crisp vegetables that were served.  And when I asked the server what it was, he said it was a dip made of anchovy paste, miso and dashi.  Well here's my attempt to re-create that delightful umami bomb.

Traditional bagna càuda is (according to the Wikipedias) Piedmontese for "hot sauce":

The dish, which is served and consumed in a manner similar to fondue, is made with garlic, anchovies, olive oil, butter, and in some parts of the region cream.

I used the bagna càuda recipe in Morimoto: The New Art of Japanese Cooking as the starting point, and modified it, more olive oil (though most of it not mixed in), plus red miso - I had no dashi on hand for this attempt:

3 large heads garlic
1 cup whole milk
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp anchovy paste
½ tsp red miso
salt and pepper
veggies

Crush and peel the cloves in 3 large heads of garlic.



Cover with water, and bring to a boil.



Discard the boiling water, and retain the garlic. Repeat twice. These steps extract some of the stronger, bitter flavours of the garlic, and mellows it a bit. It also extracts a tiny bit of the color, resulting in pure white gloves of garlic.



Now pour in the milk.  Bring the milk to a boil, and boil for ten minutes, or until the garlic is tender.  Discard all but 1 tbsp of the milk.  Again, this extracts some of the fat soluble bitter compounds.  This is going to be some very mellow garlic.

Purée the garlic in a food processor until smooth.  Add the anchovy paste, the miso, the reserved milk, salt and pepper to taste and 2 tbsp of olive oil.  Purée until smooth.  Refrigerate until ready to serve.  When ready to serve, place some of the paste in a small serving dish.  Heat in the microwave (or over a candle, if you have such an apparatus).  Heat the remaining olive oil on the stove until hot and cover the hot paste with hot olive oil.  Serve immediately with fresh chopped vegetables.



This was really great. Very tasty, but missing something. It wasn't as dark in colour or rich in depth of flavour as what we had at Morimoto Napa. Still, we all ate a ton of this.  When I asked Mrs. Dude, "If what we had at Morimoto was an A+, and and F is the bottom grade, where does this fit?" She thought for a moment, "B-". Okay, well clearly I have some work to do to get this up to par. But really, if on any scale that Morimoto ranks an A+, I get a B-, I suppose I can't be too sad.

I'll be working on this recipe some more. Stay tuned.

Chocolate Easter bunny: or rabbit mole

We have a tradition in our household, going back to my days as an undergrad, that we cook up a rabbit every year at Easter.  It's true.  We cook the Easter bunny.  And every year, he's delicious.

This year, I had grown a tad bored with my standard preparation of rabbit, so I decided to do two traditional cute Easter critters.  For main course, we served grilled leg of lamb.  That's become a standby recipe here in the Dude household.  Well, what about appetizers?

Well what says Easter more than the Easter bunny?  I suppose it's a chocolate Easter bunny!  So here we go, Rabbit Mole.  It's rabbit.  It's chocolate.  It's spice.  Yum.

Modified from the New York Times:

8 dried ancho chiles
2 cups boiling water
1 cup drained, stewed whole tomatoes
¼ cup sesame seeds
1 tablespoon oregano
2 whole cloves
2 whole allspice
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
9 cloves garlic, peeled
1/4 cup ripe banana
2 tablespoons dry bread crumbs
¾ ounce bitter chocolate, melted

Soak the ancho chiles in the hot boiled water for half an hour (heat off).



Turn a couple times, to ensure you wet the entire chile.  Remove the stems and seeds from the chiles.  Save 1 tablespoon of the now brown soaking water.  Toss the ancho meat into a blender.

Meanwhile, toast the sesame seeds in a dry pan over medium heat for a few minutes, until they start to turn brown, or until they're nicely fragrant.



Toss the sesame seeds in the blender with the ancho meat.  Add the oregano, tomatoes, cloves, allspice, cinnamon and garlice.



Blend until smooth.



The photo doesn't quite do justice to the colour.  It's a darker, chocolate brown colour.  Add the banana, bread crumbs and melted chocolate.  Blend until smooth.  For the rabbit:

1 tablespoon bacon fat
1 2 1/2-pound rabbit, cut into 5 pieces - 4 legs and the saddle
1 medium onion, minced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper, plus more to taste
2 cups chicken broth

Fry up some homemade bacon to generate some bacon fat.  Add the rabbit to the hot fat.



Brown a few minutes on each side until nice and caramelized.



Add onion, garlic, salt, pepper and thyme.



Sauté until the onions are soft.



Add the chicken stock.  Simmer on low heat for 30 minutes.



At the end of the 30 minutes, remove the meat from the stock.  Pull the meat off of the saddle, so that the difficult to access back and rib meat is pulled free.  Coarsely chop the meat.  Leave the leg meat on the legs.

Put the mole sauce into the chicken broth/onion/herb mixture.  Season (if needed - I added about half a teaspoon of salt).



Add back the shredded meat, and the four rabbit legs.  Cook for five minutes to warm the meat (you don't want to overcook the rabbit).

Serve with homemade tortillas.  (My favourite recipe here).



This was a delicious recipe.  Mild in spice.  Rich in flavour.  Thick and tasty, a nice start to a hearty Easter dinner.

Happy Easter.

Roasted rice cakes

I'm sorta loving me some Momofuku. It's a pretty fun book, and there's a fair amount of deliciousness to be found in there. It's no "semi-homemade" *gag*, but it's good fun. This dish, for example, uses no fewer than three other recipes in the book (four, if you count that the ramen broth requires another recipe). But that's fun, in and of itself. You're building towards the other recipes in the book when you're cooking.

This recipe was... challenging... to find the ingredients. Mostly the rice cakes. There are 3 Japanese grocery stores in San Diego. I visited two of them, and even then, I wasn't sure I had the right thing after I left Mitsuwa. They're described in the book as:

"Rice cakes are sold frozen and they keep in the freezer for months. You can buy them at any Korean (or Japanese) grocery store."

Well, the frozen rice cakes that the manager in Mitsuwa sent me to were pink and labeled as a dessert. The other rice cakes they had that even looked remotely correct were in the dried, package section. And they were individually wrapped, and rather looked like bricks. Heavy. Dense. Pasty White. Bricks.

Well, I bought them and brought them home. And hoped they'd be delicious (spoiler alert! They were delicious! Though even now, I'm not sure if they were what the author intended. Ah well, deliciousness happened, who can complain?).

Alright, the rest of the dish:

¼ cup mirin
¼ cup ramen broth
½ cup korean red dragon sauce
¼ cup roasted onions
2 tbsp canola oil
6 rice cake sticks
1 tbsp sesame seeds
½ cup green onion

Mix the mirin and ramen in a saucepan. Boil over medium heat until reduced, a few minutes. Add red dragon sauce and continue to reduce, a few minutes. Add roasted onions, and reserve sauce.

Heat the oil in a pan, once the oil is hot add the little bricks rice cakes to the pan. Watch them puff up. Rapidly.

Neat. Sear 3 minutes to a side, until nicely browned.

Remove from the heat, chop into small chunks, and toss them into the sauce. Throw in the green onions.

Toss well to coat the sauce all over the cakes. Place into a serving dish, then sprinkle on the sesame seeds.

Serve as a side or an appetizer. These little crispy, chewy rice cakes are delicious. They have a sweet, sticky interior, and a rich, spicy, hot exterior. The bean paste flavour in the dragon sauce is delicious. And the sesame flavour on top is really, really nice. And as side dishes go, this is an easy one to assemble. Most of the work is in making the ramen, onions and dragon sauce, and that can all be done in advance.

Delish.

Chinese pork dumplings

The first time my wife and I threw a party together, we each prepared a number of dishes. She claimed she wasn't much of a cook, I claimed I was. We were both wrong. I made a large spread of dishes, she made one dish. Her one dish was the hit of the evening. Chinese pork dumplings.

As scientists, we have the privilege of working with people from all over the world. This recipe comes from a Chinese post-doctoral fellow that we worked with in the late 1990s. It's pretty simple to make, and people *just love* it.

2 lb ground pork

1 tbsp salt
2 tsp sesame oil
4 tbsp or more soy sauce
1 head Chinese cabbage, finely chopped
8 green onions, cut finely
4 grated carrots
4 eggs
~ ½ - 1 C flour (to dry out filling)
wonton wrappers

Chop the vegetables finely.

Mix.

Mix in the pork by hand.

Add the flour until thickened to the point that it's no longer runny. You just want enough to absorb the free liquid.

Pick up a wonton wrapper, and dip your finger into a dish of water. Gently run your finger around the edge of the wonton wrapper (this will be the "glue" to seal the wrapper). Scoop enough pork mix into the wrapper that it will be a tight fit to get it all in there. Free flappy dough isn't delicious, you want it to be full.

Pull one corner across the wonton to the opposite corner.

Seal the edges.

And set the dumpling aside.

Meanwhile, get a large pot, half full of water, boiling. Drop the dumplings into the boiling water.

As you add the dumplings, the water will stop boiling. When it comes to a boil, add 2 cups of cold water to the pot. This will stop the boiling. Repeat this two more times so that the dumplings come to a boil three separate times. Remove the dumplings from the boiling water.

Now, quickly mix up a dipping sauce. Pour sesame oil on a plate. Drizzle on some soy sauce, and drop a glorp of sambal olek (Asian hot sauce) in the middle.

Dip the dumplings in this sauce.

Crazy delicious. Porkish. Deliciousish. Perfect.

We'll make a bunch in advance, boil twice and remove to freeze. Boil one more time to serve. That way you can make this amazing delicious thing weeks in advance, and still be able to serve yummy homemade pork dumplings while taking care of other dishes. Yum.

Veal Sweetbreads

As we rapidly approach the end of 2009, I've started to reflect on my year. At the end of 2008, I resolved to eat and cook as many varied creatures and parts of creatures that I could find time for. In that, I haven't been as good as I could have, so in an end-of-the-year push, I'm going to try to remedy this.

I begin with veal sweetbreads.

Veal sweetbreads come from the thymus, and are responsible for immune cell maturation. They're a delicacy that doesn't freeze well, so one is advised to purchase them as fresh as possible. I special ordered mine from my local butcher.

I hadn't the foggiest how to prepare them. I had never eaten them before, much less cooked them, so I poked around on our lovely internets, and found a recipe at the New York Times that looked like fun. I modified it slightly:

1 1⁄3 pounds sweetbreads
Salt
1 lemon
½ cup dried cherries
1⁄3 cup dry red wine
3 tablespoons flour
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 ½ ounces pancetta, in one slice, diced
½ cup finely chopped onion
24 very small cremini mushrooms, stems removed
2⁄3 cup pork stock
1 tablespoon minced tarragon

Dissolve a tablespoon of salt in 2 cups of water. Pour overtop of the sweetbreads, and soak in the fridge for an hour and a half. While you're soaking them, mix the wine and dried cherries, and soak (all day if you want to. Watching them plump up is pretty fun).

Fish out the sweetbreads, and gently peel off the membrane.

You'll know you're starting to go too far when the sweetbreads start to fall apart into little chunks.

You may need a knife to cut off bits of the membrane. This was the only tricky part of the preparation, because it's really hard to know when to stop. You really never run out of membrane.

Place the sweetbreads in a saucepan, and cover with water.

Bring the water to a gentle simmer, and simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off the stove and let it cool down. I briefly considered abandoning this project at this point. The smell of liver was rather overwhelming... But push past it, and you will be rewarded.

Place the cool sweetbreads in the fridge until you're ready to complete the dish. Half an hour before serving, remove the sweetbreads from the water, and break into small chunks. Pat dry.

Season the flour with salt and pepper. Gently coat the sweetbread nuggets with the flour mixture.

Gently brown the floured sweetbreads in melted butter.

Take the browned sweetbreads out of the pan and let cool.

Coarsely chop the pancetta and finely chop the onions.

Sauté the onions and pancetta together in butter.

Add the mushrooms, and cook until softened. Add the pork stock and cherry-wine mixture. Add the sweetbreads, cover and simmer for 10 minutes.

Sprinkle tarragon on top and serve. The sweetbreads were the same consistency as a bread stuffing. The mushrooms were delightful. And the sauce was sweet and tasty. Sweetbreads are very mild flavoured, but delicious. The worst comment from our guests that night was, "If I had been raised differently, I could like this. But I was raised to think that organ meat isn't edible."

Delicious.