Babbling Blueberry

Not Tuan and An’s cat.  Penne pasta.  The sauce was actually the yummiest part.  Butter, garlic, morels, milk, flour for thickening, cherries, and a little manchego cheese.  We mopped it all up!  I love how the sauce turned purple.  Mmmmm, so delicious.  Morels are magic.

I also wound up making strawberry jam out of those frozen strawberries.  And ate a lot of PBJ sandwiches.  As I’m getting older, it’s good to have opportunities to make you feel young again!

I love Mark and Joshua and Katee on SYTYCD.  They make me smile.  And laugh.  And I love their dancing.

Chinese-style pancakes with squash

These aren’t like scallion pancakes that require you to make a flour-water dough and then roll the dough out and then roll it up to roll it out again. Lots of rolling. That’s how you get the layers. If I make that sometime, I’ll write a post about it w/ photos.

But we’re not talking about those kinds of pancakes. These are just eggs, flour, water, salt, white pepper. I don’t really measure anything - I just play with the ratios until I get a consistency that I like, that is a little runnier than a typical American pancake batter.  I threw in some grated white zucchini (I first salted it, let it sit, and then squeezed excess water out - it helps me control the moisture in the final batter). You can also use scallions, carrots, and other things that grate easily and that cook pretty fast. Then you just cook them up like American pancakes.

They come out really soft and tender, with crispy edges.

I also made a dipping sauce - soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, red pepper flakes, sugar.

Our fridge is too cold (maybe that’s related to the ant story). So we had some strawberries that got frozen. Any suggestions for what I can do with them? Jam? Sauce? Something else?

Here’s the recipe for Christina’s birthday ice cream! Oh yeah, she wants me to use nicknames for everyone. I’ll call her Cardamom Koala. Here’s the recipe for Cardamom Koala’s birthday ice cream.

The recipe is kinda based on bits and pieces from recipes in Perfect Scoop with some additional tweaking and guessing. It came out pretty well. My only complaint is that it was a little icy, but that was because of the pear. I definitely wouldn’t cut any of the pear, so maybe in the future, it would be better to add more egg yolks?

Pear Cardamom Ice Cream

• 3 pears, peeled, halved, and cored
• 1/2 c sugar
• 3 egg yolks
• 2 c heavy cream
• little squeeze of lemon or lime juice
• a small handful of cardamom pods, but adjust depending on how strong you want the cardomom flavor

1. Mix the heavy cream and sugar in a pot. Heat the mixture until it is almost boiling but be careful to not let it boil. Throw in the cardamom pods and let it steep for an hour.
2. Cover pears with water in a pot and cook until the pears are soft. I test that by sticking a knife in to see that it goes through easily.
3. Puree the pears in a blender with lemon or lime juice. Pour the puree into the container that will eventually hold the final mixture and chill.
4. After the cardamom is done steeping in the cream, remove the pods and save them. Reheat the cream and make custard with the heated cream and egg yolks.
5. After the custard has thickened, pour the custard into the chilled pear puree. Add the reserved pods back in and chill the whole mixture. Don’t forget to take the pods out before you make the ice cream in the machine.

Christina, oops, Cardamom Koala, and I are cardamom buddies… I decided to make ice cream with cardamom for her birthday and because I was watering her plants and getting the mail for her, she independently got me some cardamom infused chocolate.

I had some coconut milk that I wanted to use up (actually, some frozen grated coconut that I thought I could squeeze milk out of, but it turned out to be the wrong kind… young coconut and not old coconut). So I decided to make some ice cream. What goes with coconut? To get some ideas, I flipped through The Perfect Scoop and when I saw the fresh ginger ice cream, I knew what had to be done - ginger coconut ice cream!

So I could definitely use the strategy for getting ginger infused ice cream from the fresh ginger recipe, but now I had to figure out how to get the coconut milk in. The recipe for coconut ice cream only used cow milk. There was a pina colada sherbet recipe that used coconut milk, but that wasn’t going to be as creamy as I wanted it to be. So I decided to add coconut milk to the basic milk and cream combo and fiddle with the ratios until I got the right amount percentage of fat and the right volume. The book’s standard ice cream recipe has 1 cup of milk:2 cups of heavy cream. I modified that (with the help of Excel and looking up the percentages of fat in different types of milk) to be 1/2 cup cow milk:1 1/2 cup coconut milk:1 cup heavy cream. Added bonuses: this ratio seemed like it would have a good balance of coconut flavor. And 1 1/2 cups of coconut milk is exactly one standard sized can of coconut milk!

The full recipe:

• 3 oz. unpeeled fresh ginger
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 1/2 cup coconut milk
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 5 egg yolks
• 1 cup heavy cream

1. Thinly slice the ginger (doesn’t have to be peeled) and cover slices with about 1 - 2 cm water in a pot. After boiling for 2 min, pour off all the water.
2. Add the cow milk, coconut milk, and sugar to the pot with the ginger and heat it until it’s warm. Cover the pot and let the ginger steep for 1 hour.
3. Meanwhile, whisk the egg yolks in a bowl.
4. Pour the heavy cream in the container that will be the eventual chilling place for the custard.
5. After an hour of steeping, remove the ginger with a slotted spoon (You’ll strain it more thoroughly later). Rewarm the milk mixture. Slowly pour milk mixture into the egg yolks, making sure to whisk the egg yolks constantly and thoroughly. No scrambled eggs!
6. Return everything to your pot. Heat the custard until it is thickened so that it passes the wooden spoon test (custard coats a wooden spoon and doesn’t drip or flow after you pass your finger through it). If you have a heat-proof spatula, use it to stir and scrape the bottom constantly. If you have a whisk, use that, but make sure you get into the corners of the pot.
7. Strain the thickened custard into the heavy cream.
8. Chill this mixture for at least 8 hours until it is thoroughly chilled. Then it’s ready for your ice cream machine!

The final result of my experiment (standing on the shoulders of giants) was pretty tasty. Perfect balance of coconutty richness, subtle sweetness, and zingy gingeryness.  My one complaint is that it was a little on the icy side. So to fix that, I could either add more sugar to the recipe (but I like the subtle level of sweetness now) or I could add more fat. But actually, I think I need to do nothing to the recipe and next time, just make sure that I don’t make scrambled eggs in the corners of the pot when I’m thickening the custard. It’s likely that the fat that I lost to the scrambled eggs would be enough to make the ice cream smoother next time.

They should have an all pastry chef Top Chef next season! I’m supposed to avoid using the word “awesome” because the more you use it, the less effective it is. And it also dates me, I think. But having only pastry chefs compete against each other in various dessert and pastry challenges would be AWESOME!

To get your mind focused on pastries and to help convince you that a Top Pastry Chef season would be AWESOME, I’ll tell you about the nien gao that I made tonight. It’s a Chinese cake made with glutinous rice flour and often has red bean paste swirled in. It’s kinda custardy and eggy, like a clafoutis, but chewier. Speaking of clafoutis, I am having a baking craving for a blueberry clafoutis, and I’m just waiting for blueberries to get sweet and juicy and in season!

The recipe I use for nien gao:

• 1 1/2 cup sugar
• 6 eggs
• 2 1/4 cups milk (I usually use cow milk, but today I used soy milk. Cow milk is better [firmer, denser, chewier], but soy milk is still pretty good.)
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 lb glutinous rice flour (make sure it’s glutinous! I once accidentally grabbed a bag of regular rice flour and it came out really dry and pasty.)
• 1 (approx 18 oz) can red bean paste

1. Whisk the wet ingredients and the sugar together.
2. Whisk in the glutinous rice flour, until the batter is mostly unlumpy.
3. Pour the batter into a 9×13 pan, leaving a tiny bit of the batter in the mixing bowl.
4. Mix the red bean paste into the remaining batter. Plop the red bean paste mixture into the pan, distributing evenly, and then swirl it a bit with a knife or knife-like utensil.
5. Bake for 50 minutes at 350 degrees F.

The finished product (I cut the recipe in half and used a smaller pan):

The edges have a really great texture when it’s still freshly baked! So the corners are the best part! Not living in the same place as my family, I have no competition for the corners so I can’t feel guilty about being selfish. All four corners for me:

A closeup of the clafoutis-like texture in the middle and the nice crust of the corner:

In Thailand, especially in Northern Thailand and around Chiang Mai, we ate these yummy noodles in a red/yellow curry soup (see photo on left). I don’t really see this dish in Thai restaurants in the U.S. and I don’t know why. It seems like it would be a dish that would be quite popular here - it’s topped with fried noodles! (Apparently, Marnee Thai in the Sunset has khao sawy/Chiang Mai noodles during lunch, but I’ve never seen it anywhere else.)

I cooked dinner for Christina and Ben last night - they did me a huge favor for me and I wanted to thank them. Since khao sawy is hard to find in restaurants, I figured that I’d make it for them. Plus, I made it in the cooking class that I took in Thailand (see photo on right), so I figured I wouldn’t be completely lost.

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Other items on the menu:

• green papaya salad but with jicama instead of green papaya (I forgot to add the peanuts - oops! I’m eating leftovers with peanuts added for lunch right now and it’s much better.)
• coconut sticky rice with mango (the yellow/Philippine-type mangos that are grown in Mexico are really good now so go get some)
• strawberry lemonade (It’s not Thai, but it was quite refreshing. I threw some strawberries into a blender, added some lime juice and sugar, and then added it to Odwalla lemonade)

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Here are the “tricky” ingredients that you’ll need. Except, it’s not actually that tricky and they’re easy to find, at least in California. The Ranch 99 in Daly city had everything. Sunset Super has pretty much everything except for the curry paste.

The egg noodles that are used in Thailand are pretty flat. I bought these round and fat egg noodles (fresh, not dried) and it was a bit odd that they were so round, but it was still tasty. If you want to be more authentic, maybe you can try to find flatter egg noodles.

You can find red curry paste in these little tubs in the non-refrigerated sections. They’re in a vacuum packed bag inside the tub so they don’t need to be refrigerated before opening, I guess. The red curry paste has all the ingredients that are in the curry paste we made in the class. But it also has quite a bit of salt. Since fish sauce is supposed to be used as the salty component, I had to cut back on the fish sauce so that the curry wasn’t too salty.

You actually mix Indian curry powder into the Thai red curry paste. Old school fusion cuisine. I just used whatever you find at regular grocery stores. My apartment smells really good now because of that whole mix of spices.

In the class, we made coconut milk by squeezing freshly grated coconut milk in cheesecloth into water. Here, you can buy coconut milk in a can, frozen coconut milk, or frozen grated coconut that you squeeze yourself. I used frozen coconut milk that comes in a package like the one in the photo. But the photo is actually of frozen grated coconut. I’ll have to try squeezing that into milk some day. And maybe compare it to the frozen and canned coconut milk.

The only palm sugar that I found was palm sugar candy that I broke into pieces and dissolved into the curry. In Thailand, the palm sugar was a thick paste. The candy seems to be pretty much the same thing except with less moisture. You probably could just use regular sugar or brown sugar.

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Here’s the recipe, from the cookbook from the cooking class and then modified a bit by me!

Ingredients (for 1 serving):

• 150 g egg noodles (50 for deep frying and 100 for boiling)
• 50 g chicken or tofu
• Optional: vegetables (I used red bell peppers)
• 2 tbsp oil
• 1 tsp Indian curry powder
• 1 tbsp red curry paste
• 2 cups coconut milk
• 2 tbsp fish sauce (or soy sauce for vegetarians)
• 1 tsp palm sugar
• Garnishes: chopped green onion, chopped coriander leaf, chopped shallots, limes cut into eighths

Steps:

1. Deep fry the egg noodles (50 g) until they are golden. You don’t need to have the oil any deeper than about 1 inch because the noodles float up to the top as soon as you put them in the oil. And it only takes a few seconds to fry them to the right level, so keep a close eye on them and don’t let them get too brown.

2. Boil the rest of the egg noodles (100 g).

3. Mix the red curry paste with the Indian curry powder.

4. In a wok, heat the oil over low heat. Add curry paste and stir continuously until fragrant.

5. Add chicken and 1/4 cup of coconut milk and stir constantly until chicken is cooked. If you want to add any vegetables, add them in at this point as well.

6. Add the remaining coconut milk (you can adjust this amount to your taste).

7. Add fish sauce and palm sugar (also to taste)

8. To serve, place boiled noodles in bowl. Pour curry over the noodles and top with the deep fried egg noodles. Serve with the lime, shallots, cilantro, and green onions.

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Here’s the final product!