Galbi Jjim

In the grand tradition of pretending like I know anything about other countries, I have selected "Korean" as a flavor palate for Saturday's game night fare.

[On a side note, game night= what happens to you when you are a couple. You end up seeking other couples to do activities that involve staying in. An ethnic cooking challenge and elaborate beer tasting menu become your only consolation that you might still be somewhat young/hip or adventurous.]

Galbi Jjim is Korean for tender beef short ribs with a delectable glaze of East Asian flavors.

You see, the Koreans have developed this exotic and mysterious food ritual where they smoke ribs on the grill using a tangy thick brown sauce mainly composed of sugar, onions, salt, and spices.

Image from Grit

It's really weird.

Being a formerly-lifelong vegetarian, my venture into something as ubiquitous as good ol' BBQ is, by necessity, just as anthropological as it is culinary.

Image from Travellious

Sometimes I feel like an outsider even in my own country.

"You've NEVER had barbecue ribs?!" a girl from Austin, Texas asked me incredulously. About eight months after I had, at the age of 19, literally taken my first bite of chicken ever.

"No, I've never had barbecue. I don't even really know what that is."
My parents were Yankees. In addition to being raised on Taco Bell Gordita Supremes with beans instead of the meat (you can just imagine the hundreds of confused cashiers), what exposure would I have had to ribs on our northbound drives to visit family?

"What about when you GO to a barbecue?"
I guess barbecuing in Texas is about as popular as, well, barbecuing in Kentucky. Except not at my house.

"At cookouts we always ate Smart Dogs®."

I guess if you have any frame of reference for imitation meat, or even just click on the link for Smart Dogs®, you'll know just how hilarious and preposterous that is.

Being as accidentally mis-cultured as I am, I am somehow more comfortable trying a recipe from the other side of the earth than I would be venturing into the sacred folklore of what is, for the vast majority of folks, a down-home American tradition.

Saying that I'm eating Galbji Jjim or Bulgogi makes me feel as if my totally dense and meaty dinner plate is somehow more sophisticated. I got the ingredient list from NPR, for Buddha's sake.

Fine. It's well established that I am all backwards in life. Let's skip down to the pictures.

Marinating...

Browning...

Daikon is really, really fun.

With honey and chili paste.

Pretty

Stewing in the pan with the chili daikon and marinade, then later sprinkled with baby bok choy and chopped leeks

Note: I did not fire up the grill. These ribs were actually braised in the oven for about 3 hours on low heat. The first time I made them I used the crock pot, which is still the fan favorite.

[the photos are blurry because i was eating it so fast!]

Half of the daikon I cubed and braised with the beef and marinade, and the other half I grated into my citrus carrot salad.

Carrot salad

About 3 carrots, 1/2 of a large daikon radish, and a bit of purple cabbage and white onion grated finely, stirred together and seasoned with chopped cilantro, rice vinegar, white sugar, sesame oil and key lime juice.



Tomorrow, maybe we'll tackle this totally enigmatic phenomenon known as "barbecued ribs and cole slaw." Naaawww, I may not be ready for that.

Broke but happy

So I've been, um, a bad blogger.

These last coupla months have been busy. There is a very small number of things in this world that I get paid to do, and unfortunately, taking pictures of my lunch before I pour it down the front of my shirt is not one of them.

I did manage to orchestrate a move this summer. From one apartment to another. In the same city.

It was time to move out of the student ghetto.
To a place architecturally designed to accommodate more activities than just drinking.

...Which also means I get a whole new kitchen!

The pile of furnishings I rent now include (get this) counters, cupboards, a pantry, and even a dishwasher!

Guys, this is a big step up.

Now, since I have been doing nothing but laundry and watching Telemundo for about a week straight,
it's time to ease back into blogging.
I will begin by traversing a territory in which my undergraduate repertoire has left me feeling very practiced.

(Dun-Dun.)
The Ramen noodle.

And, without further ado, today's lesson:

How to make Ramen noodles taste okay (Thai-style)
Brought to you by four years' experience of periodically eating lavishly in an expensive restaurant only to come home and be broke for the next two weeks.

1. Start with this. You know how to do this. Takes three minutes in the saucepan, as per package instructions.


2. Go 'head and add the flavoring. This is the "Oriental" spice packet (the one that comes in the blue bag). Then, I'll dash in a bit of Thai red curry paste, which is what you see on the bottom right.

3. You know exactly what this is.

And before you start to protest in disgust, think about Thai peanut sauce.
Then, think about how much a bowl of Ramen normally does not fill you up.

I'll take all the cheap protein I can get!

This is creamy, but the crunchy variety would also bring a little faux-Pad Thai-zing. I would be into that.

4. chili and lime, two of the best things to ever happen to food...

5. Mix and throw on a little cilantro.

Now, don't go jumping out of your pants over it or anything.
They're just Ramen noodles.

Ginger Tofu and Bok Choy

Did you know there was an Asian grocery store 5 minutes from my house? I didn't. There could be one around yours, too, and you just don't know about it. You should check. It's quite the experience.

I was planning on making a regular old irreverent pan-Asian for dinner tonight, and didn't get across the parking lot after work before an Asian grocery store sprung up from the ground and stopped me in my tracks (well, not literally, or my car would have been flying through the glass storefront).

I decided to go in, expecting that I would shop Ina Garten-style: take a slow, meditative walk around the market, pretending that the aisle shelves are garden patches, humming softly to myself, describing produce items as "whimsical", casually picking up whatever looks fresh that day as if plucking it off a sun-ripened bush (arms linked with Alec Baldwin optional).

But this is not The Hamptons. This is the Yu Yu Asian Market on Waller Ave.

(Basically).

Luxurious browsing, I realized, is not a possibility. There are rows upon rows of little dried things in totally opaque packages that I cannot read, and probably would look just as foreign even if the label were translated in English. Whole 3' long dehydrated squids lying around. Flies swarming open bags full of chickens' feet. The whole place stinks with the odor of the live crabs crawling all over each other, which about make me jump out of my skin when I peer into their soggy cardboard box. The whole time I keep thinking it would be totally awesome if I had the prowess to kill my own crab, but I don't. Instead, I decide to get the two or three things in the whole place I actually recognize and get out as quickly as possible. (I also really had to pee).

Here was my small loot:


The moment I get home I realize that I don't actually know anything about this stuff, so I immediately begin typing all kinds of things into Google

how to drain tofu

how to cook tofu

how to chop bok choy

how to cook bok choy

what are enoni mushrooms

how to cook enoki mushrooms

First of all, the package of tofu had a promotional sticker for Kung Fu Panda 2, which made me LOL.
What I did was "dry fry" it according to this method, then marinate it for 30 min.
I like really firm tofu in a stir fry. Some takeout places call it "home style." Cut it up into triangles, thoroughly press in towels to collect the moisture, and then brown it low and slow in a dry pan. You've got to resist the temptation to move them around in the pan, otherwise they won't get that nice crispy texture on the outside. Don't forget to periodically press it with a spatula to get the extra moisture out (the article describes the sound as a 'sizzle' when the water hits he pan, but it's more like slowly letting the air out of a balloon).
Like I said, I like my tofu to be firm, but I always assumed that places generally deep-fried it. You'd be surprised how little fat is actually in this recipe. The dry pan method takes a while, but it's worth it. Once it comes out of there flattened, firm and crispy, it really soaks up that marinade and tastes delicious.

As far as marinade... as you can see in the photo, I actually bought a spice packet for yellow curry, but then decided to make my own flavor combo and save the yellow curry for a later time. Here is what I came up with.

Asian Marinade
1 Tbsp fresh grated ginger
2 cloves fresh grated garlic
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup canola oil
3 Tbsp sesame oil
1 Tbsp fish sauce
2 Tbsp rice vinegar
8 minced chilis, red, yellow, and green
sweet chili paste
3 Tbsp white sugar

Those measurements are rough; everything is pretty much to taste.
Of course you have to de-seed the chili peppers because they are HOT! We like things hot and spicy, but these raw peppers were making us sneeze and cough all over the place.
I slice them lengthwise like so and just remove the core with a small, sharp knife.



Here are the little enoki mushrooms out of their pack:

So baby-baby!

I guess they're a lot more delicate and cute than they are flavorful. They are best enjoyed raw or nearly raw, because otherwise they'll break.
To me they just add a nice visual element.

First I heated some oil with garlic and shallots. Washed the bok choy, chopped the stems up and separated them out from the leaves, washed it again. Stir-fried the stems 7 minutes, then the leaves: I stirred them around for 5 minutes along with 1 julienned carrot. Finally added the enoki mushrooms.
I finished it by adding the tofu and pouring the rest of the marinade overtop. So really it was like a wilted bok choy salad.

The one thing I would do differently next time is not cook the bok choy for so long--I think I over-steamed it in the pan, it could have had more crunch to it. The tofu was just perfect--about Asian restaurant-quality, if I'm allowed to say so myself.

I'd like to try this salad with a grilled white fish, too. Of course, you can always eliminate the fish sauce from the marinade and it'd be 100% vegetarian.
Served with fluffy white rice!

Legumes in Hiding

Title refers to a book I had and loved when I was a baybee, called Pigs In Hiding.
As you can see, it's about hundreds of thousands of pigs who are playing hide and seek in a house. This is what I have to do with lentils, as well as garbanzo beans, every time we have Indian night.

Like anything else, Indian food is easy if you never bother to learn how to do it right.

I'll explain in a minute.

So the other day I was driving to Kroger in the rain and about killed a pedestrian when I saw out of the corner of my eye that I was about to pass up a new Indian grocery store in town. I made a 180 to go check it out right away.

It's in the same building that used to be a tanning salon called "The Toasted Kitty." Wonder why they closed...?

The place had a whole aisle of ready-to-use spice mixtures in more varieties and combinations than I could ever use in a lifetime.
...Unlike my house.
God knows we need more spices. We actually did just ran out of turmeric [from being clumsy and spilling it everywhere] and it was a catastrophe. (What is going to dye the floor highlighter yellow now?!)

I settled on a box of something called "Kitchen King Masala," hoping that it was vague and powerful sounding enough to be an all-purpose spice mix for the casual, interloping Indian food admirer.
Me gusta los Kitchen Kings! I don't know how long it's going to last on my shelf, because I will be using it by the pound from now on! So good. It must be the turmeric. And fenugreek, what even is that?

So I whipped out an old bag of lentils for din dins.
I love daal about as much as I love anything else on an Indian menu, and it's a really healthy option for getting lots of iron & protein.

The only problem is, Katie has a historic loathing for beans as well as anything bean-related. After all, the great mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras did once say "abhor all beans."
How in the world am I going to feed her lentils?!
Answer: I will hide them.

I started out by boiling lentils and some peeled chopped potatoes in the same pot. They don't have to boil at the same rate, because it's all just going to end up as mush, right?
After 20 minutes I strained them (saving the water), rinsed them in cold water, and threw the lentils, half of the potatoes, and a bit of the water into a blender.

What came out was was a thick, gray paste.
Appetizing, right?

...It is with the help of Kitchen King.

Kitchen King Masala.

I should also mention that I purchased a jar of ghee, the Hindi word for clarified butter.


This jar holds the secret to the deliciosity of Indian cooking. I have just used regular butter in the past, but nothing holds up to the flavor of ghee.

Ghee + heaping amount of spices only Shiva could appreciate = Indian food.

Maybe throw in a vegetable or two for substance, but it's not necessary.
I asked the bald orange guy at the counter (he really is orange! I swear! Must be residual spray tan particles in the air) whether I should refrigerate the jar of ghee after I open it.
He gave me that sideways head bobble that Indian people throw out when they want to answer your question with both a yes and a no. "Just put the lid back on and maybe kind of turn it."
Got it. I will turn the shit out of that lid, orange man.
Maybe what he was getting at was that a jar of ghee won't last long enough to go bad.

My food creation:

Directions
1. Heat about a 1/4 cup ghee in a large pot. Sautee chopped onions and garlic along with several tablespoons of an Indian spice mixture.
2. Add the reserved water from boiling the lentils, mashed lentil/potato paste, and 2 oz. tomato paste.
3. Stir in the rest of the boiled diced potatoes, and any other vegetables you want. I chose frozen peas and frozen okra.
4. Continuing to heat thoroughly and stir, add more spice as you see fit. Do not skimp on spices.
5. Make rice. I made white rice, which I sprinkled with salt, nutmeg and a couple of whole cloves. (The real Indians do something more delicious to their rice but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is!)

YOM! I wish I had me some naan.