Khao khua: when sticky rice isn’t sticky

Amidst my embarrassing attempt at karaoke at a back-yard party about a month ago, I had some really delicious baby green mangoes dipped in a funky brown sauce. One of the key ingredients of this sauce is a toasty goodness known as khao khua, which is a fancy way of saying toasted rice powder. It’s also the one thing I forgot to buy when I went to the market yesterday. So, homemade it would have to be. It’s also a somewhat tedious process, so you’ve got to be ready and willing to stand in the kitchen for a good long while, preferably without any young children tugging at your pant leg to play My Little Ponies or read another chapter of Captain Underpants.

So, khao khua is what happens when you decide that you should really be doing something slightly more productive while drinking Johnny Walker and catching up on those episodes of Westworld that you missed, and then you end up hovering over a hot pan in the kitchen for an entire hour, stirring rice as you watch semi-human androidy thingies murder people in horrific ways. Well, I suppose it doesn’t have to be like that, but that’s how it was for me. It starts out like this:

One of my favorite Lao cooking resources online, Cooking with Nana, says that she puts a bit of kaffir lime leaf and lemongrass in with her sticky rice during toasting, to add extra flavor. This seemed like a fantastic idea, so that’s what I did.

Shrimpy snacks

I’ve got a problem with shrimp. Not so much a problem with shrimp, per se, but with the fact that most of the shrimp you can find at your average grocery store tastes sort of, well, like poo. I don’t mean this in the figurative sense of, “geez, this shrimp tastes vaguely gross.” Nope. I mean it in the very, actually, literal sense of tasting like excrement. This is quite possibly because most of the farmed shrimp in the world are bathing in hideous bacteria, and therefore also taste awful. I’ve found exactly one type of shrimp in the past year that was phenomenally good – wild caught shell-on red shrimp from Argentina. These lovely creatures taste more like sweet lobster meat than shrimp. Probably not coincidentally, according to Consumer Reports, these are among the least bacterified of them all.

Unfortunately, my local grocery store is no longer carrying them, so when I went shopping last week, I made do with some wild caught North American shrimp. These shrimp have been peeled, deveined and frozen. I typically really enjoy shrimp that have been cooked in their shells, as I find them way more tasty and delicious. So, I am left with a bit of a dilemma. These shrimp taste better than their farm-raised, bacteria-coated counterparts, but still lack the rich, shrimpy flavor that I love so much in the less-processed beauties from Argentina. To solve this problem, I decided to pep them up a bit with some Southeast Asian flavors. Hence, the tod mun goong, or fried curry shrimp cakes, with sweet and tangy dipping sauce.

You can also make these with fish, by the way, but here’s the process that I followed for the shrimp cakes:

Thaw out 1 lb. frozen shrimp. Mine were peeled and deveined, so once they were thawed, all I had to do was throw them in the food processor and grind them into a gooey paste. Once you have your shrimp goo (sorry, that sounds gross, and it sort of is, to be honest), then you put it in a bowl and mix in the following herbs and seasonings: minced lemongrass, finely minced kaffir lime leaf, a touch of fish sauce, a little salt, a little sugar, and about a tbsp of red curry paste. Add an egg yolk, a little bit of tapioca starch (I used corn starch, since I was out of tapioca starch), and also some little tiny bits of cucumber in place of the traditional long bean slices. Mix, form patties, and if you like, dip in panko breadcrumbs (this is not necessary, but it does make the gooey patties easier to handle when you are putting them in the hot oil). Fry until brown and crispy, and then serve with a sweet chili sauce made of vinegar, water, sugar, salt, garlic and chilis, and slices of cucumber.

This appetizer takes some really lackluster shrimp and makes them so much more delicious. If you’re bored of always just pouring plain shrimp into a pan with some oil and garlic, give these shrimpy snacks a shot. You won’t regret it.

 

 

 

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DF Mudslides

So, first, I know my photography skills stink. I know nothing about lighting and I am using my iPhone camera with its dirty lens to take photos. There’s a glare off of everything, and I didn’t take the time to artfully arrange my ice cubes in an artful arc across a charming wooden cutting board. But that’s okay. I just don’t have time for that. Instead, please accept this garishly lit photo of my ingredients in front of my toaster.

I recently found some coconut milk in these fun little cardboard cube packages and decided to give them a try. So I bought a pack of 6 (if I remember correctly, it was way cheaper than the cans). I’ve been using it in some recipes (the coconut and pandan leaf jello dessert, a Panang curry sauce). Also, I generally don’t drink milk because of the um… er… unpleasant side effects, so I’ve been enjoying the coconut cream in my morning coffee.

The other night as I was rummaging through the liquor cabinet, I stumbled across a half-full bottle of Kahlua that some friends passed on to us when they moved. Sudden inspiration struck, and I started googling Kahlua drink recipes. Most of them seemed to involve some kind of milk or heavy cream, so I started thinking about how I could still have a mudslide without the dairy. And this is what I came up with: 1 oz Kahlua, 2 oz vodka, 1 oz coconut milk poured over ice and then stirred. Delicious, coconutty, and sweet, it was a nice dessert drink to enjoy while sitting around the kitchen table rehashing the details of the Mueller probe.

Nailed it!

Everyone’s seen those collections of Pinterest fails where bored stay-at-home moms try to copy the elegant food masterpieces that are so abundant online. I may have been guilty of this a few times here or there. It’s all good, though. Sometimes our attempts at elaborate dishes turn into a misshapen pile of barely-train-shaped cake covered in a hideously tinted blue frosting. The amazing thing is how no matter how truly difficult a dish is, they always make it look so easy.

Anyhoo this came to mind because I was attempting to offset the pizza that I ordered for dinner with some vaguely Asian fare tonight and came up with some fresh rolls. Which are more or less easy and delicious. But I pretty much did everything wrong. My rice wrappers were old and sort of disintegrate-y, my rice noodles were a few days old and really disintegrate-y. The shrimp were too small and tasted less than perfect. The cukes, carrots, and cilantro were fine, but I had no bean sprouts or mint, which might have been a nice touch. The first two rolls came out like a pile of barf. Everything fell apart and/or stuck together in all the wrong places. Eventually I sort of got in a flow and managed some loosely wrapped rolls full of flavorless filling and wet noodles, etc. They were more or less log shaped, and when dipped in Hoisin sauce and Sriracha, tasted okay. I gave myself a C- or a D+ for these rolls, and my husband didn’t even comment. So, yeah. Pretty much nailed it.

Tentacular Snacking

I get so nostalgic sometimes for Spain. Those ridiculously hot days spent sipping cervezas in the plaza and picking at a plate of octopus slathered in olive oil and sprinkled with smoked paprika. We always marveled at how the octopus was perfectly tender, and flavored just perfectly. I’ve cooked it myself a few times, and despite my best efforts, have ended up with too-chewy tentacles or squishy suction cups. I guess I never spent enough time tenderizing it by slapping the octopus on a rock for hours before cooking it.

Fortunately, someone does know how to cook it correctly. They just make you pay for it. I was walking around in Whole Foods the other day when I noticed some “quick-cooked” octopus tentacles in the seafood case. So I snagged a few. Yeah, they were probably way over-priced, but the benefit of this was that all I had to do when I got them home was slice them and add the finishing touches: olive oil, smoked paprika, Malden sea salt flakes, and a dash of lemon juice. Still not quite the same, but a nice quick substitute for a vacation in Madrid.

King Kong Crickets

I’m not going to lie. I struggled with this one. Let’s just say these little dudes are… an acquired taste.

Even though my tastes are generally pretty adventurous, even I do have my limits, apparently. And one of my limits is eating massive fried crickets.

I generally pride myself on eating pretty much whatever. My family lived on an island in Alaska for a while when I was little, and they ended up eating some pretty unusual things. I grew up hearing stories about boiled skunk cabbage and pig testicle sandwiches. So many family conversations devolved into a sort of contest of who had consumed the weirdest stuff in the most bizarre way: plucking raw salmon eggs straight out of the creek for a snack, or eating sludgy gray duck blood soup, for example.

So I consider it part of my heritage to eat all kinds of stuff. This is fortunate, since my husband’s tastes in food would be, well… challenging to a lot of people. I’ve eaten giant water bugs, dipped my sticky rice in a dip made with cow bile, eaten cooked cubes of pig blood, and even developed a sort of affection for fried silk worms.

So, when my husband decided he was going to cook up some frozen crickets that he found at the market, I pretty much thought I was up to the challenge. Oddly enough, though, I WAS NOT. First, these particular specimens were insanely large. They had heads the size of marbles and drumsticks only slightly smaller than chicken wings. Okay, I do exaggerate a bit, but trust me, they were monstrosities. I’m pretty sure the translation of the label was something along the lines of “King Kong Crickets,” if that gives you any idea of just how big they were.

The second challenge for me was that they put out a sort of unusual smell while they were cooking. If you ever wondered what cricket guts would smell like as they are warming up, well, just don’t. It’s not great. This is why Britney Spears named her designer fragrances things like “Curious” and “Believe,” and not “Curious About the Smell of Cricket Death” or “I Believe a Cricket Died Here Recently.”

But we seasoned them up just like we usually do with our silkworms: kaffir lime leaf, chilis, garlic, lemon grass, and salt once they were pretty crispy. The aromatics did A LOT to combat the ewy bug guts smell, and in the end, after eyeing them suspiciously for a while, I managed to choke a couple of them down. To be honest, the “drumstick” part actually tasted sort of like fried chicken skin, and the more I nibbled, the more the flavor started to grow on me. Perhaps as an accompaniment to a BeerLao or seven, they would taste magnificent.

The verdict: I would definitely try these again, because I do like to push the boundaries of my comfort zone, and my first experience with them made me feel like a total wimp. But I would look for smaller ones, as I think they would crisp up better, and not look so damn horrifying with their huge alien eyes staring out at me. I’m wondering how the Mexican-style chapulines compare, and already thinking about where I might be able to get some around here… But for now, I’ll probably just stick to chicken.

Note: Previously I had labeled these “grasshoppers” but they were actually crickets. I’ve updated the post accordingly.

Just desserts.

 

Sometimes I get bored. And when I get bored, this is what happens: glowing green ectoplasm-ish “Jell-o” made from algae, the leaves of an aromatic plant, and sugar, topped with a thick gelatinous layer of sweet coconut milk. Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Probably, you saw the picture and thought it was some new hipster cocktail, but nope. It’s just desserts.

Over the years, I’ve sampled a bunch of different Lao desserts, and a lot of them involve coconut milk, sugar, agar agar (the vegan version of gelatine, made from sea algae), along with a phenomenal green coloring and a flavor that you can’t quite put your finger on. Turns out, the green color and the unique flavor come from the pandan leaf, a popular ingredient in Southeast Asian desserts.

I’ve been thinking about this ingredient for a while, and trying to figure out how to use it. I’ve seen it in a can, and in a tiny bottle of extract, and finally, today, I found it fresh at the Five Star Farmer’s Market. Seeing as I needed to use up the agar agar powder that I had purchased about 9 years ago, and I already had some coconut milk on hand, I decided to give it a go, and make this, just for kicks:

If you have ever used gelatin to make your own jello, then the process won’t really be a mystery to you. You dissolve the agar agar powder in boiling water, and then you add the sugar and pandan juice. Chill the first layer, and then make the second layer while the first is Netflix and chillin’ in the fridge. The coconut milk layer gets poured on top and then chilled some more.

It’s a pretty unique flavor, but the combination with the coconut milk is really nice. The reviews are in: the kids did not approve, but my husband and my mom loved it, and my dad and I both liked it alright but didn’t love it. Mostly, I just really enjoyed learning how to make it. It definitely looked pretty fancy – I can see getting creative with this stuff in the future.

There are actually all kinds of fun things you can make with pandan leaf. I’ve frozen a few, so I may try another recipe or two next time I get bored.

You are appreciated…

Because I appreciate my wonderful husband, who is also a school counselor and teacher, I made him one of his faves – Lao curry noodle soup, or khao boun, since most of the time he is forced to eat horrible things like pizza, hamburgers, and spaghetti. Despite the pictures, this batch didn’t actually have any cooked pigs blood. I was all out of pigs blood for some reason. Oops. Anyway, happy teacher appreciation day!!!

Rice vermicelli, boiled, rinsed, and curled into little bundles in a colander.

Popular veggies for this soup are (clockwise, bottom left to bottom right) thinly sliced cabbage, mung bean sprouts, cilantro, lime, sliced scallions, bamboo shoots, and sliced banana blossom.

The broth is chicken based, and is infused with lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, and galangal.  It gets its red color from red curry paste, tomatoes, and chili pepper.  The creamy soup is made with coconut milk.  This photo shows a batch that I purposely made without too much spice so my toddler could eat it.  A better khao boun soup should have a bright red oily surface (for example) that will potentially kill you with spice by coating your tonsils with a clingy layer of pure chili fire.  One of S-Man’s aunties once tried to murder me that way, I’m pretty sure.

As I mentioned earlier, I left out the chunks of cooked pigs’ blood this time around.  It’s pretty good though, seriously.  It’s sort of like tofu with extra iron.

Riz perdu

There’s this whole thing we humans have about not wanting to let perfectly good food go to waste.  Take, for example, “Pain perdu” (meaning lost bread, or, as we like to call it, French toast).  Say you have a piece left of this lovely baguette that was perfectly good a day or so ago, but is now solide comme le roc.  You might have trouble throwing away this lump that took some poor struggling boulanger three days to make.  

And so faced with your day-old-pain, you have a few options.  You might take it to a lake and throw it in the water and watch it splash.  You might keep it around for self-defense (these things work well for fending off would-be thieves, I’ve heard).  Or you might slice it up (with a chainsaw, if it’s too hard to cut with a knife), dip it in egg, fry it, and eat it.  Seeing as I do not live near a lake, and I am a big scaredy-cat (all flight, and no fight, I fear), I personally would choose option 3.  

Now, say you were not French, but rather, you had grown up in, oh, say, Laos, and weren’t in the habit of buying baguettes from your local post-colonial boulangerie.  Your daily bread is the ever popular sticky rice.  And say you decide that you’d really like to warm up yesterday’s leftovers and enjoy them for breakfast.  You might, instead of chucking the lump of slightly hard sticky rice into the Mekong, form it into little patties, dip it in egg, and fry it up.  Plus, you might add a bit of salt or soy sauce to the beaten egg to add a bit more flavor.  No waste, and plenty of taste.  It’s a classic comfort food and a kid favorite. Let’s call it, “riz perdu.”

Ga-What?

This is pretty sick.  I mean sick in the good way.  I mean sick in the sense of, “You might just want to eat yourself sick on this.”  I was reading “Momofuku Milk Bar,” a cookbook by Momofuku’s very own Christina Tosi.  She says that there’s this test that things have to pass before they get on the menu.  It’s basically this: if you put out a tray of it in the middle of the kitchen, and everyone eats themselves absolutely ill on it, then it can go on the menu.  It Must. Be. That. Good.  So good that you just can’t stop yourself from having one more bite.  And just one more.  That’s more or less how I felt about this galette, when I took my first nibble.

A quick pie crust.  Super easy.  Flour, butter, salt, ice water.  Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re saying, amounts, please, proportions.  RECIPES g-d it.  But this blog isn’t really about recipes, you know.  It’s about the pleasure principle.  It’s about the sensuality of cooking, and baking, and eating good food.  It’s about little things, like the cool, creamy feel of massaging butter into flour with your fingertips.  It’s about the crisp crunch of that same butter and flour after its transformation by heat into deliciousness.  It’s about the silky sweetness of roasted leeks.  DIGRESS. DIGRESS.  DIGRESS.

1) Crust.

The filling was a CSA leftover smorgasbord… sure time to clean out that fridge!!!

2) Caramelized onion, fennel, thyme, butter.

3) A swirl of roasted beets (one red, one gold)

4) Roasted leek around the edge

The original recipe, from Yankee Magazine (thanks, Mom), called for chevre, but I sprinkled a fresh, local cottage cheese flavored with scallions.  I picked up this cheese at the Coventry Farmer’s Market last weekend when the lovely Ladies of Lebanon gave me a sample.  Yup, that’s me… SUCKER!!!!  It was so good.  All out of cash already, I managed to fumble around in my wallet for that one lonely check that I keep there in case of emergencies.  Yeah.  Huge freaking emergency.  Sudden need to purchase local cottage cheese.   Whatever.  I don’t regret it.

Finished galette, below.  Look for this in your CSB basket when the bakery opens!!!