Classic Pad Thai

A new tradition was born tonight, Andrea Bocelli crooning Christmas songs while Shelese sets up the miniature Christmas tree and hangs the ornaments, and I slave away over a wok making pad thai. I know it's jumbled and cross-cultural but it somehow just works, take my word for it. Perhaps the holidays usually elicit thoughts of foods like pot roast, country ham, and pumpkin pie for most of us; but why not pad thai? Yeah, it makes sense, it should fit in! Soul satisfying, hitting on all cylinders in each corner of the flavor trifecta. Sweet, salty, and spicy dancing on the tongue like sugar plum fairies. Okay enough yuletide imagery; truth is, a friend requested the recipe and it's been awhile since I made the dish so voila.

Almost exactly one year to the day before the dreadful Southeast Asian tsunami that took the lives of many poor souls, I was in the very place the waves ravaged the shores. Actually, I was on the peninsula coast opposite of the heaviest hit beaches. The Thai people are a warm and welcoming group. While there, I was told that the literal translation of Thailand was, "The Land of Smiles." True or not, I can vouch for the abundance of smiles. Such a passionate and gentle nation with stunning nature and exquisite cuisine. My heart truly aches for the people shocked and awed by the violence nature wrought that inauspicious day.

As you hop around Thailand you'll see that pad thai is a popular dish offered at many street vendor stalls and ramshackle restaurants. There was not much regional variation that I picked up on; some places offered dried shrimp, others chicken. The dish was relatively consistent throughout the country, and I was fortunate enough to spend time north, east, south, and west. As the smiling Thai woman set my first plate of steaming hot noodles in front of me, a few scent waves permeated my nostrils and I knew life would never be the same! Alright, melodrama aside, I have to say it was frigin' awesome yo! Back in the States, I haven't been able to find a restaurant that produces classic pad thai. Most add such bastardizing ingredients as tomato and/or sweet and sour sauce, paprika, and pineapple. I apologize if you enjoy yours that way... no body's perfect.

While I was in the north in a city called Chiang Mai, I took a cooking course. We learned how to pick produce, make curry pastes, properly stir fry, make coconut soup, and prepare pad thai al la classico. The one dish that has been committed to memory from excessive preparation and consumption was pad thai. I'll get right to the point, here's how I make it now.

Like many Asian dishes, the labor is in the preparation of the ingredients and the cooking is fast and furious. What you'll need: thin, flat rice noodles (Thai or Vietnamese), soy sauce, fish sauce, tamarind juice (orange juice if you can't find it), tofu, green onion (reserve the green portion to be eaten fresh with the finished dish), sprouts, peanuts (roughly crushed), eggs, palm sugar (cane is fine as a substitute), and red pepper flakes. Not shown in the picture below are vegetable oil, and lime wedges. Prep everything as shown below and try not to be frustrated with the lack of exact amounts. The preparation of this dish requires some culinary intuition only gained through the trial and error of several batches. Don't let that turn you off, the first time you make this it will be somewhere between awesome and totally awesome; just realize that the dish gets better as you experiment with adding more soy sauce, and/or fish sauce, and/or sugar, and/or chili flakes. It may take a few tries to reach pad thai Nirvana but rest assured, it awaits you. 

Prepare the ingredients and turn the heat on the wok.

While the wok heats up, cook the noodles until just soft. They will continue to cook while you assemble the dish so don't over cook them in the water.

 

Once the noodles are cooked enough, add some oil to the wok and crank up the heat to high. Just before the oil starts to smoke throw in the drained noodles but BE CAREFUL! They are moist and the oil is hot and splats all she wrote. Wow! I cant believe how cheesy I can get sometimes.

Let the noodles fry, flipping them occasionally until there is a crispy skin formed on the mass of noodles. They will be a large congealed mass of glutinous, sticky noodles but don't worry. The juice, tamarind or orange, does a good job at de-gumming and de-tangling the mass of fried noodles. Continue to toss and the noodles until the juice has evaporated.

Move the noodles to the side and add a little more oil to the empty wok space. Crack in as many eggs as you like and scramble them up.

Next, add the sprouts, white part of the green onions, peanuts, tofu, fish and soy sauces, sugar, and chili flakes.

Give it all a good toss and taste for seasoning. Add more of anything to your preference and serve hot.

 

Garnish with the green of the green onions and a wedge of lime. In Thailand you would be provided with a tray of add-ons to top your pad thai with. They usually include sliced chilies in vinegar, sliced chilies in fish sauce, crushed red pepper flakes, chili paste, and granulated sugar. Any, all, or none of theses add-ons go wonderfully with the dish depending on your mood. For me, all I need is lime and the onion. Okay, going back for leftovers, thanks for reading. Kop khun krap (pronounced cup coon cup): thank you in Thai.

Hodgepodge Update

In an attempt to stay current with the blog I'll have to resort to random, hodgepodge updates from time to time. You can usually gauge how busy I am by how little I keep up the blog. No excuses now, got an hour back this weekend, even though it now gets dark at five frigin' o' clock!

Eesie (Shelese's pet name) and I fell in love with Fabio's (Top Chef contestant two seasons ago) butternut squash ravioli and vowed to reverse engineer them. Filling - sweet and savory, check; creamy sage sauce, half check (we prefer a simple brown butter sage sauce); noodle - great supple texture and perfect tooth, uncheck. We tried to make a rich egg yolk, light and delicate noodle. The flavor ended up great but the noodle was a little bit tough and it wasn't because it was undercooked. I have some ideas so I'll fire up the test kitchen and let you know when I have a winning recipe.

The filling was a winner! We used sweet potato instead of butternut squash. Sauteed some shallots in olive oil, threw in some garlic and deglazed the carmalized aromatics with Amaretto. Amaretto is an Italian almond-based liquor and rounded out the sweetness of the yams; a little S & P and processing with the yams and the filling was perfect.

Avante garde ravioli crafting. Did what we could to get them close enough to each other in size and shape. None of them bursted while cooking so that's all I care about. Topped with a little stinky parm and the brown butter sauce and enjoyed thouroughly.

The next project was to figure out how to use the turnips that came in our Abundant Harvest box. With a puree in mind, everthing else just kind of fell in place and it was convenient that we got some beautiful spinach in the box too. Boiled the turnips in milk until soft, sauteed some chopped shallots and garlic, and blended with butter, olive oil, and S & P. It had a subtle radish like spiciness and made for a cozy bed for the spinach. The spinach was topped with sea salt, pepper, and a very old Modena Balsamic Vinegar.  After the grilled and sliced skirt steak was placed on the spinach the firm leaves submitted to the heat and dutifully wilted after about a minute. I salted the skirt steak for about an hour before grilling but neglected to dry of the water that accumulated on the surface; this prevented the formation of the char I crave so but the meat was nice quality so it still shined.

The last project to update here is the roasted chicken and heaven sauce. The chicken was roasted in accordance with the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, minus the 2-3 day salting. This cookbook is great, you want it, get it if you don't have it. The recipe calls for an extended salting, initial stovetop browning, and high heat roasting; very simple and surefire!

... and the best part is that you cook it in a skillet. Consequently, you end up with an golden fond that really needs to be turned into a deep, unctuous, umami-loaded, silky, vibrant sauce. In fact, it is near criminal to not use that fond. After pouring off most of the chicken grease I added the mirepoix aromatics, garlic, thyme, and deglazed with dry white vermouth; added some chicken broth and butter and called it a day. The sauce went into some quinoa after it was cooked and made for a great side.

While the chicken ends up super moist and is perfect for almond chicken salad (which is what I did), it's almost worth it to make it just to get to make this sauce. Okay, thanks for reading. I'm going to fight off my fatigue for another hour in and attempt to adjust to this crappy daylight savings nonsense.

Salmon Dinner

So we're into our third week of Abundant Harvest produce deliveries and I feel as though I'm on Iron Chef. Our precious little box of organic fruits and veggies, hand-farmed by the modern-day bohemian hipster hippies of the 2000's, has been another thing that I look forward to on the weekend, besides the weekend itself. The box usually has a few items that I rarely/never purchase on my own. Last week the novelty items were chestnuts and radishes; I burned the chestnuts, which smelled incredible on the way to overcooked, and the radishes were so powerfully spicy I had no choice but to pickle them if I was to feed them to Shelese. Speaking of Shelese, my resident resident and wife, check out what she was doing while I made dinner tonight... she did do the dishes so it's all good. I would like to point out that, yes, that is a leopard print Snuggie and Bosley sprawled out trying to camouflage. 

This weeks novelties were sweet potatoes and pomegranates. I don't know why I have not cooked sweet potatoes on a regular basis, they are so good I eat them like I used to eat SweetTarts and sour licorice when I was a wee lad! They are adult candy and they are considered a superfood; not sure why they're not on my shopping list on a regular basis. Now hear me all! From this day forward, I'm gonna buy more sweet potatoes... that's it. I used America's Test Kitchen's recipe as a base for the sweet potatoes.

First peel them. Beautiful color combo, eh?

Chop them up, toss them in veggie oil, salt, and pepper. Bake, covered, then uncovered until brown

Another new item in my kitchen this week was frozen salmon from Costco. Pretty good deal and the fish is wild caught Alaskan Salmon. Normally I steer clear of salmon, neither because of it's gamey-ness, nor because of it's tendency to dry out. I just think there are so many other fish that taste so much better; but that's just me. I'm trying to introduce more healthy fats into our diet and that was the impetus for buying frozen salmon at Costco. Before you turn your nose up at buying frozen fish from a mega-box-mart, waiting angrily for the four people in front of you to greedily grab their sample like it's THE last meal and move their cart from the middle of the damn isle so you can get by, let me explain. First of all, the fish you buy is frozen. Whether or not you buy it frozen, it's frozen. State law mandates that all fish sold must be frozen to eradicate parasites. Unless you catch it yourself, it's frozen. To me that's an argument for buying fish frozen and thawing it yourself; at least you'll know it was thawed properly. And secondly, find me a better deal for wild-caught Alaskan. The color was beautiful and natural, not died neon orange and glowing. Such a fatty and sometimes gamey fish begs for a bright and bold salsa topping. I used the other secret ingredient like a good Iron Chef and made a salsa out of the ingredients below. I forgot to take the picture with the other ingredients: olive oil, parsley, mint, salt, and pepper. As a side carb we had cous cous topped with tomatoes, olive oil, and Hawaiian Sea Salt.

I was very happy with the way the meal turned out and Shelese enjoyed it too. The fish was moist and not even remotely gamey. I rubbed it with olive oil, salt, and pepper about 30 minutes before cooking and rested it in the fridge. It was cooked on a wire wrack in a baking sheet in a 300 degree oven for about 15 minutes. This salmon has most definitely exalted the species way up in my preferred fish list. I'm not sure if it was my not overcooking it or the quality of the fish itself, or both, but I will be buying more in the future. Stay tuned for the next secret ingredient...

Where's the Foie Gras and Duck Confit?

For those of you that don't know, I have enrolled in a Culinary Arts degree program at my local junior college. The impetus was to begin a transition into recipe development as an occupation at some point; either that or next Top or Iron Chef... we'll see. I am taking one to two classes a semester because I still work full-time in my adult-job and am in no hurry to leave. At this rate it should take me five to six years to get the degree. Perhaps, I can delay a little longer until my mid-life crisis kicks in so that I can begin my fun non-adult job to cope rather than purchase a Porsche or get an earring. If I do get an earring I promise it won't be a douchey gold hoop and I still might get a Porsche because, let's face it, they're rad! Okay, back to reality. 

This semester I am taking Sanitation & Safety and Nutrition. The former feels as though I'm jumping through a giant three hour hoop every Tuesday, although I'm mildly fond of my quirky and forgetful professor (she is a foodie after all). On the other hand, my nutrition class is very informative and has inspired me to examine, very closely, what comprises my typical daily intake. As much as I enjoy rich and flavor loaded cuisine, I am very conscious of what we eat on a regular basis. My basic, self-imposed, dietary guidelines go something like this: only whole grain, low starch veggies, a variety of lots and lots of vegetables, very little meat, low fat dairy, and two to three servings of fruit a day. We usually indulge one day on the weekends but try to remain cognizant of proper portion sizes. So hear I go, with a confident ignorance, to complete a Nutrition assignment to track our daily intake and compare it to the USDA recommendations. Sure I'm consuming just enough calories and all of the proper nutrients, I start the count and MAN do I put the calories down. Most of my nutrient sources are good choices; my total calorie intake, not so good. I wanted to see what my daily recommended intake physically looked like on display so that's what I did this weekend.

whole-grain bread, woven wheat crackers, quinoa, tomato, red onion, carrots, cucumber, lettuce, yogurt, feta cheese, jack cheese, milk, cannellini beans, eggs, pinto beans, hummus, olive oil, blueberry pomegranate juice, apple, plum, banana

It looked to me like this should sustain me for an entire day... the problem is that I really enjoy eating and tasting. My theory for my frequent calorie overage is that I am not getting enough carbs. You can see that I have about 150 more grams of carbs for maneuvering, granted I decrease in other areas to maintain the 3000 calorie limit and make sure they are complex carbs. I'll get back to you about this experiment after some time. On another note, I made some delicious beet chips from these beautiful organic beets from Amy (thanks again!). I was planning on taking some beets to work with me on Monday for her to try but they didn't make it. One batch was olive oil and sea salt and the other was olive oil, chili powder, and brown sugar. Sorry Amy. If you didn't give me such delicious beets they may have made it to work with me for you to try... and be underwhelmed with. I've got one more beet and intend to make another batch, I'm not promising they'll make it to work with me but I'll try.

Hodgepodge Update

Made some Umami Burger style burgers with fresh ground short rib, brisket, and flank steak. The meat was seasoned with Vegemite, anchovies, truffle salt, Worcestershire, tamari, and harissa. The seared patty sits on top of slow roasted thyme tomatoes and covered with melted Jack cheese. The buns are potato since I couldn't find Portuguese sweet buns. 

I had some left over burgers so I made a ragu with red wine and heirloom tomato on top of quinoa.

Very excited this morning because we got our fist shipment of Abundant Harvest Organics produce. The box is packed full of fresh goodies and is only about 20 bucks; I think it's a great deal.

Red plum, grapes, figs, daikon radish, tomatoes, arugula, leaf lettuce, summer squash,  basil, Kabocha squash, red onions, potatoes

Look at what my parents got us for our anniversary!!! I have my own ideas about what to do with it; anybody have any suggestions?

Fresh Black Truffle

When Life Hands You an Oversized Zucchini...

Thanks to Brent for sharing the garden bounty from his mega backyard farm and his nuclear mutated zucchini patch! As you can see this was no typical zucchini; consequently, it deserved a thoughtful preparation. Since the seeds in this behemoth were themselves behemoth (as far as zucchini seeds go) the vegetable was begging to be gutted and stuffed.

I sauteed some onions, garlic, and roasted Hatch Chile Peppers and seasoned with S & P and sweet paprika before throwing in some quinoa for a pilaf preparation with chicken broth. After the quinoa was cooked I grated in some cave aged Gruyere left over from appetizers with friends and family last weekend. I made a fast puree of tomato paste, tomato sauce, olive oil, and S & P to top the quinoa once it was stuffed in. I then pulled the provolone cheese over the snugly stuffed zucc like a loving parent would pull the blanket over their child after a bedtime story. Thirty minutes at 375 produced this!

I loved the amount of zucchini flesh in this big bad veggie. Because the classic zucchini flavor was a little more mild than most zucchinis (most likely a trade off for the size) it really served as a great stufee for a rich filling.

A pretty dish does not a tasty one make

If you're ever in the kitchen and find yourself bored and uninspired visit playing with fire and water for a dose far out creativity. The author of said blog is a true visionary and artist. Her dishes are not so much something to eat as something to gaze upon. We've all seen this food before and can envision it landing on the table in front of us from the hands of a Parisian waiter as he glares at you disapprovingly down the barrel of his French nose. Shocked it's been made to be eaten and not hung on a wall, unsure how best to consume the dish in the true fashion it deserves, being modern art and all. I don't cook like this in my kitchen... not because I find this food pretentious and not because I'm a purist who wants my dishes rustic and unrefined to stand alone on their exquisite flavor. The reason is that my pantry is usually not stocked with sodium alginate, calcium chloride, sodium citrate, and soy lecithin among other molecular gastronomy components. When I saw her coconut fig terrine with fig leaf and curry foam and Hyssop flowers, I thought, "hey, that's not so bad... I can do that." Here's her creation...

Nicely composed eh? Interesting combination of ingredients, some conventional techniques, one not so conventional, and Hyssop petals, notwithstanding, surely within my reach. Take a look at the recipe, it's pretty accessible to even an amateur cook (who possesses soy lecithin and a digital kitchen scale). The recipe calls for the curry foam to be made with a tea-like extraction of fig leaves with hot water. I didn't have fig leaves, or Hyssop flowers, so I used basil in the place of fig leaves and unflavored air in the place of the Hyssop petals. Let me preface the remainder of the post by sharing that I was on the three prescription medicines shown below for severe back pain and inflammation during the execution of the recipe so please refer to the actual recipe should you wish to give it a try (btw, two of the three made for a pretty groovy time in the kitchen).

The first mistake I think I made was to use light coconut milk. The end product lacked a bold coconut flavor and this is my best guess for the reason why.

The recipe reads more like a buffer formulation than anything by Betty Crocker. All ingredients amounts are specified in grams.

Blooming the gelatin

Fill halfway, harden, then fill all the way

I had some leftover coconut terrine mixture so I made a little taste test sample. After hardening, I sprinkled the gelatin with some honey and grated lime zest. This reminds me of an experiment I conducted a few years ago. I juiced fresh watermelon, strained it, and gelatinized it in two wide bowls. Once hardened, I sprinkled a variety of flavorings on the gelatin around the perimeter of the bowl. Sea salt at 12:00, pepper at 1:00, paprika at 2:00, cayenne, saffron, roasted sesame seeds, and so on. Shelese and I tasted each sprinkling with the watermelon gel; some great, some the opposite of great. I got this idea from Jose Andres who does this with grape gelatin to deduce successful pairings with wine.

To make the foam you steep the leaves in hot water for about five minutes and then combine it with the curry and soy lecithin. Then use an immersion blender to create the foam.

I didn't have a pyramid mold lying around the kitchen so the finished product was not as interesting to look at. The chef who wrote the recipe gives a tutorial on mold making if your into that sort of thing.

As it turns out, I don't think I really like fig. It has a dusty earthy flavor about it and I can't say it's pleasant. Furthermore, the essence of coconut is lost between the dirty filthy fig and the curry foam. While the dish underwhelmed me, it did inspire me to experiment with foam for the first time. It is a unique and effective way to deliver flavor; the incorporated air seems to enhance the featured flavor as it hits your tongue. When I ordered the soy lecithin I couldn't resist putting a couple other uncommon kitchen chemicals into my basket so more molecular gastronomy experiments soon to follow.

Executive Chef Bosley Oversees all Culinary Operations