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Recipe: soy sauce chicken

Hrm, some recent developments might require that I curtail the posting frequency. Not sure. We’ll see how it goes in the next few weeks.

A few folks have inquired about the lunch I had in this entry, so I figured I should write it up seeing as it is a great dish in cold weather months.

Chinese noodle soups in my mind are as versatile as sandwiches. You can put whatever you want in them. I think of it in terms of a few major components: the noodles, the broth, the fixins. Noodles can be bean thread (aka glass noodles), soba, somen, iron man, ramen, rice noodles, and the list goes on. The broth is whatever you want it to be. The fixins can be vegetables, meat, leftover stir-fry, delicious spicy chili radishes (my fav!)…

We’ll start with one of my standards: soy sauce chicken. It’s just chicken drumsticks simmered for a few hours, but what you get is chicken and a lovely aromatic broth.

ginger, green onions, sugar, star anise

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Jennifer of Bake or Break just announced the October 2007 DMBLGIT awards and I managed to nab a host award on my very first entry!

A big thank you to Jennifer and all of the judges, and congratulations to the winners this month. You can have a looksee at the creative and mouth-watering October 2007 entries here.

but does my blog look fat in this?!

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Recipe: carolina-style pulled pork

I wrote about pulled pork earlier this year during my Summer of Barbecue, but I never gave a recipe for it. Barbecue is regional in the US. Heck, my MIL just told me last weekend that barbecue in Memphis differs from barbecue in the rest of Tennessee! The varieties could make your head spin and your colon tremble: sweet, spicy, vinegar-base, tomato-base, thick, thin, beef, pork, ribs, pulled, sliced, smoked, and don’t forget the hot-links. I like them all, really. But in southern Virginia, we get a heavy influence from North Carolina and so tonight I paid homage to Carolina pulled pork for dinner.

One of my favorite acts in cooking is the Magic Act, where you take a cheap cut of meat and cook it forever, whether by dry or moist heat, and render it a tender heap of Culinary Nirvana. Since we’re talking Carolina barbecue, you automatically know it is 1) pork and 2) vinegar-based sauce. And if you didn’t know, it’s about time you learned. An excellent part of the beloved piggy (besides the belly and the leg) is the shoulder, aka butt, Boston butt, Boston roast, shoulder blade roast. It is a favorite for barbecue (and also of Chinese cooking!) for its wonderful flavor, marbling, tenderness, moistness, and low cost. The trick is low and slow heat.

I tend to believe that authentic barbecue is smoked over coals for hours on end. I could do that where I live, but then I might burn down the entire National Forest, so I slow cook in the oven. It’s a more practical approach.

the components of the dry rub

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