Beef stir-fry with leafy greens and rice sticks
Beef stir-fry with leafy greens and rice sticks began as “Beef Slivers With Water Bamboo” from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. Korean rice sticks, called tteokbokki are stubby, chewy, and completely addictive. I keep mine in the freezer, where they tend to crack. This has no impact on their better qualities. I used…
Mandarin Beef Stir Fry
So, hi. It’s a new year. The holidays are behind us. However you spent the past week, we can all heave a sigh of relief: the fuss is over until next December. You’re wondering about the stir-fry. Even as we vaccuum up those pesky Evergreen needles, here I am, fussing…
Beef Rendang
Rendang daging sapi, or beef rendang, is a specialty of West Sumatra. Rendangs are dry curries, not loose affairs you pour over noodles or rice. While beef rendang begins as wet curries do, with copious amounts of coconut milk, it diverges in cooking method. Prepared in a wide, shallow pan instead of a…
Pork Rib Curry
I apologize for the quiet around here. We live about thirty miles south of Santa Rosa, California. As I write, firefighters are slowly gaining control over the fires. People are returning to their homes, or what’s left of them. Berkeley Fire Engine Six was called to help fight the fires…
Stir-fried Beef with Shrimp Paste
This post was written last week, before events in Las Vegas or Tom Petty’s untimely death. Much as I’d like to add some sensitively worded writing about either event, words fail me. Thank you for reading. — Last week found me at the used bookstore, where I found the companion…
Thai Beef with Rice Noodles
Poke around the internet and you’ll find guay teow neua sab interpreted any number of ways. The noodles are invariably rice, but the meat can range from braising cuts to ground beef. Some dishes are wet enough to qualify as soups. Others are dry enough to be eaten with forks. However you…
Dried Shrimp and Pickled Lettuce Salad
Occasionally you pick up a cookbook at random. You park it on your “to read” shelf with every intention of getting around to it. Meanwhile, various disasters transpire: dental work, feline illness, neighbor drama, spousal sickness, inept national leadership, world mayhem. Finally you open the cookbook. There, glimmering, is the…
Bitter Melon Curry
— Bitter melon, like okra, is a polarizing vegetable, capable of evoking extreme responses. Those who enjoy its bitter flavor don’t just like it, they crave it. Recipe headers invariably use the word “addictive” to describe the intensely bitter flavor note that sounds on the tongue long after you’ve…
Kitchen Note: Rage, Despair, and Baking
Recent events have left me careering between rage and despair. Occasionally there’s a comparatively calm moment of depression, a lull in the mental action, before some tidbit of horrible news sends me bouncing off the walls again. Writing is nearly impossible. How do you sit down and write: “Today I…
Chinese Takeout Noodles
Breezy little blog posts are increasingly impossible. This week gave us Chester Bennington’s death, the migrant tragedy in the Texas Walmart lot, Venezuela, Yemen, and Syria. Atop all this, a gibbering idiot is running amok in the White House. In this context, Chinese Takeout Noodles are beyond trivial. Then again,…