foas: char siu bao, la times article
jessyf
14 years ago
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foodonastump
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Char Siu Sauce
Comments (15)I do not (have the magic). My broth either seeps out through the dough, or soaks into it, so that I end up with either a deflated bao or a tasty but squishy bao without the right ratio of broth to wrapper. Because xiao long bao is supposed to be all about the broth. You dont want to be chowing down handfuls of bao just to get 10 cc's of broth. The broth to bao ratio should be more like a water ballon. I am fairly convinced that I'm missing some trick with the dough or the steaming - perhaps I am making the dough too thick so that they require too much steaming, or maybe I need to knead it more to develop gluten, or maybe the dough is supposed to include oil, or perhaps I'm just not getting the incantations right or not offering the right human sacrifices. I am going to try again soon, and be more scientific about it - make five xiao long bao one way, five another way, and so on. Here's why I have to get it right, and soon. Our friend is about to start an intense regimen to lose 15 lbs. It is interesting. She is 60 y/o, an awesomely beautiful woman - and notice I did not say ''for her age'' - and she's been doing some modeling. We think of modeling as a young person's gig and for the most part it is, but the ad agencies want older people too. But naturally they won't settle for normal older people, they want ultra-slim radiantly gorgeous older people. We're all supposed to look like Katharine Ross when we're getting our first smartphones at 60 y/o, you know? Anyway, to get back to the subject of food, when she finishes her regimen, we're supposed to celebrate with a beef tongue dinner. I really want to have my xiao long bao appetizer well figured out by then. Because, you see, not only is SWMBO is well aware of my infatuation with She Of The Beef Tongue, SWMBO has ratted me out by telling her friend that I have a crush on her. Talk about betrayal! Hasn't she ever heard of the legal doctrine of husband-wife privilege? So now I have to watch how much I drink around SOTBT lest I get caught openly staring. Which means I need something very distracting and non-alcoholic. Which a good xiao long bao certainly is. Not that mine are, but here's to never giving up....See MoreNostalgia.....
Comments (17)Where I went to university (Rice, in Houston), we had residential colleges, like Harvard and Yale, and the freshmen were require to sign up to serve tables for dinner, generally on alternating weeks, depending on how many freshmen there were to go around. We had seated dinners with white tablecloths, and the waiter-freshmen would go to the food service kitchen with a huge tray to pick up the plates of food for the tables they were serving. Everyone was required to wear a tie for dinner, and on Sundays a coat and tie. If people at the table wanted seconds, the freshman server would go back to the kitchen to get them. At the end of the meal, we would clear the table, take orders for coffee or tea and come back with dessert and the coffees and teas required. I hated the food service food, and the meat they served helped me to decide to remain vegetarian at that time. The tea was terrible too, and so I would bring my own tea bags to dinner, which a few people thought was a tiny bit strange, but most thought it was a good idea, and it caught on. At dessert, I would have to ask for "hot water" instead of "tea" to make sure that my cup did not come back with a tea bag already in it. I used to have tea parties in my college room, and I would serve cake from one of the local delicatessens - usually Alfred's in The Village, which is no longer there. I had an electric kettle and a Bavarian porcelain tea pot and cups. I also had sterling silver sugar tongs, to use with sugar cubes. If any guest picked up sugar cubes with his fingers instead of with the tongs, he didn't get invited back. Fortunately Houston had good restaurants, and Alfred's was a good alternative to university food - plus it was walking distance. Also as a freshman during the first month, we were supposed to wear stupid beanies and vests (only Hanszen College required this, and I happened to be in Hanszen), and we also had to learn each upperclassman in our section (Hanszen had five sections) by name and greet him by name if we passed each in the quadrangle. If we failed to do this and were caught, we were then forced to do "shack runs", which meant that we had to go to all the rooms in our section and take orders (and money) for take out food from the local "Chicken Shack" restaurant on the other side of Main Street from the university. This part of freshman orientation had become voluntary by the time I was a freshman, and so I volunteered not to participate. Later in the year, I was elected to the freshman council and got some of the more (to me) humiliating traditions abolished, in order to bring Hanszen up to date with the other colleges - all of which had already abolished those traditions. I didn't oppose freshman orientation, but I did oppose the "Shack Runs". I also did not oppose having freshman wait tables, which of course lasting beyond freshman week. The worst tradition at Rice was the water balloon fights. I was lucky enough never to get hit, but I had some close calls. Also at Rice, despite a male/female ratio of about 3/2, there were no panty raids on the female colleges (housing was segregated back then, although visitor of both sexes were allowed in rooms). Instead, the female residents had jock raids on the male colleges, in an effort to get attention. All they got instead was a bombardment of water balloons. Lars...See MoreCarnivores Unite! Secrets Of Superb Steaks.
Comments (104)Ann_t, I've considered it but it isn't worth it for us. The Costcos are not close to us and driving to areas I don't normally visit aren't worth my time/energy/gas. I enjoy cooking but not every day. Our budget is generous for going out and that's what I most enjoy. I LOVE chicken fried steak! But it is possibly the worst thing in the world for you, LOL. Restaurant versions are okay, but The Real Thing is dynamite. I wrote up my mother's method one day, when I was doing a restaurant review of a cafe that did a decent chicken-fried steak we liked. My younger friends and family have never had this recipe, so I included it in my email as a humorous touch. BTW, I do not claim this is an authentic Southern Recipe. This is just how my JapAm mother made it when we were growing up in Chicago, after she learned it from the Mississippi AfrAms in our neighborhood: *The Traditional (e.g., home-cooked) Chicken Fried Steak Yes, this is another thing my Japanese-American mother learned to make from Southerners (Mississippians transplanted to Chicago, hence our familys love of sweet cornbread and really good fried chicken from the legendary Harolds in Chicago [you can look up Harolds Chicken in Wiki]). It can be eaten for dinner or breakfast. Or lunch. Or....well, you get the idea. Like most Southern food, it goes best with biscuits. Real biscuits, the kind made with white lard and even whiter soft wheat flour, rolled and cut with a biscuit cutter (what do you mean, youve never seen a biscuit cutter?!?) and served hot out of the oven with lots of butterc. Definitely not the fake Pillsbury-in-a-can stuff. To the day she died (at age 84), my mothers idea of heaven would have included a hot biscuit dripping with butter. Start with decent-sized pieces of beef, well trimmed of fat. Bottom round is ideal. The mechanically tenderized "cube steak" is sheer laziness and has the wrong texture. Traditionally the pieces of bottom round meat are pounded thin with the edge of a heavy china plate (okay, my mother did use a traditional meat mallet instead). Never, under any circumstances, do you use a wet batter. Never, ever! The egg and the flour do not mix together promiscuously in a bowl; this is a worse heresy than a mechanically tenderized steak. As you are pounding the steak pieces thin, you sprinkle them generously with seasoned flour. The flour, up to a cup or more, is pounded into each steak. "Seasoned", BTW, means salt and pepper. Thats it, no garlic (powder) or onion (same). Just lots of the evil white Mortons. Heres where you get a split between the thin batter-fried and the thick batter-fired recipes. My mother was a thin batter advocate, so she fried the steak after pounding it with the flour. The opposing camp sets out a beaten egg and a pan of more seasoned flour. The steak is dipped in egg and then in flour again, making a thicker batter coating. Either way you do it, next you fry the bacon remember I said there was another whole level to this dish? The bacon doesnt actually appear anywhere else in the recipe, so you probably just nosh on the crispy strips which youve fished out of all that bacon-y, salty, greasy artery-clogging saturated rendered fat. If you happen to have rendered bacon fat on hand, why are you reading this recipe? You already know how to make this. While youre chewing and swallowing bacon, you fry the steaks really crisp in the bacon grease. This is where most restaurants fail. Its bad enough they use some kind of healthy polyunsaturated oil but to make things worse, they dont cook it long enough to really get it dark brown. Drain them on newspaper in a warm oven, while you toss leftover flour into the pan to soak up the bacon grease of course you dont drain any of the fat out, why would you do something so silly when thats where all the flavor is stirring and scraping for a few minutes to cook the flour. Then in goes the evaporated milk whole milk, not that ridiculous reduced fat stuff just enough to make a thick gravy that holds in nice clumps on the spoon. Not glue-y, just very thick. Some people make a thin gravy, but not in our house. Oh, and more pepper, too. Serve with two fried eggs. Or maybe three. Or better yet, eggs and biscuits so you can chase all that yummy gravy around the plate to sop up every bit. Real biscuits, the kind made with white lard and even whiter soft wheat flour, rolled and cut with a biscuit cutter (what do you mean, youve never seen a biscuit cutter?!?) and served hot out of the oven with lots of butter handy. After that, you go clear out an entire field of cotton, or chop down every tree in the forest, for the next eight hours straight (as youve already worked five hours before lunch). The discovery of statins to lower cholesterol is obviously Gods way of saying that every American has a right to copious quantities of salt, fat, and cream, three times a day. Also sugar, but that goes into the coffee, tea, and peach cobbler....See MoreAnyone Do Serious Wok Cooking?
Comments (39)Firearms? Have you been hunting for your food? One of the reasons I left Texas was the proliferation of guns. I cannot imagine ever owning one, but I'm good with a bow and arrow. I saw on CBS news that guns are the most effective method for suicide, and so I understand that someone who suffers from depression should not have access. I hope your son get professional help - there might be medications that could help. I personally think that depression is in part caused by chemical imbalances, and diet can possibly be part of the reason. For me, sugar could trigger what appeared to be manic depressive episodes. Trailrunner, have you tried rotating your phone when taking photos, or does it automatically convert them to portrait orientation? I rotated this photo for you because it was difficult for me to identify the food in the portrait orientation. Are the red bits tomato? At first, I thought they were red bell pepper, until I checked your second photo. I've never cooked tomatoes in a wok, and so that is an interesting variation for me. I really like the large shadow of the wok in the first photo, and I love the outdoor wok setup! Now I want one of those....See More
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