use real butter

Recipe: korean glass noodles

I have to admit that I wasn’t exposed to much Asian cuisine other than Chinese when I was growing up. It was a big deal when my mom started cooking more western style foods when I was in junior high. When Dad began his foray into gourmet cooking, he went for the big splashes like rack of lamb or roast pork loin – something that makes your guests go “wow!” while you serve it up with a flourish.

I had been eating sashimi since I was four or five years old, but wasabi was my only introduction to Japanese food and it was prepared unceremoniously at our house as opposed to a sushi bar. And on rare occasion in Washington D.C. my parents would take me to a Vietnamese place for pho and then they’d order all sorts of things I refused to eat like tripe… When I went to college, I began to frequent the sushi bars, Thai restaurants, and other joints around the LA basin serving up good authentic Asian fare. Imagine my surprise when I took my parents to our favorite Thai restaurant and their reaction was, “meh.”

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: shrimp and artichoke fettucine

So often, when I think of pasta, I feel uninspired. I shouldn’t, because I usually like it. I think my problem has been that I haven’t given enough of my attention to it, or perhaps haven’t been satisfied with too many of my experiments.

Last night, by a stroke of luck and perhaps a little forethought when I was at the store, I managed to throw together a keeper of recipe. I had these ripe tomatoes sitting on the counter that needed to be consumed ASAP, and a package of fettuccine that was accidentally opened last week, and some cream in the fridge leftover from making lemon curd and…

For Ro, I’ll post about my bbq beef brisket in the crock pot experiment. Typically bbq beef brisket is slow cooked/smoked over coals for 10-12 hours. I have no interest in keeping an eye on something that could burn my house and my neighborhood down for that long, so I had the choice between the oven and the crock pot. Oven is out of the question with the latest heat wave, and the winner is: crock pot.

I picked up a 2.5 pound beef brisket, which ended up being about a half pound of fat. Clever little butchers wrap the meat up so you can’t see the fat… You’ll want to remove as much fat as possible, which is a tedious, but sort of fun task. At least I take a sort of OCD pleasure in doing so with my very very sharp knife. Once the brisket is ready, pop it into the crock pot. You can cut it up if the shape results in appendages protruding unceremoniously above the liquid. What liquid? I’m getting to that.

I found a recipe that calls for a cup of water, 1/4 cup Worcestershire, a tbsp of vinegar, 1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/4 tsp ground cayenne, 1 tbsp brown (or any) mustard, 2 minced cloves of garlic, 1 cube of beef bouillon (I use a bouillon paste). Mix all of that together and toss it into the crock pot. Add more water to cover the brisket. I set it on high for 5 hours. At 5 hours, it was still pretty cohesive, so I set it for 6 more hours on low. By morning, it was at easy pull apart, although I suspect if I let it go another 3 hours, I could have had it falling apart – dunno.

Ro’s question was how to serve brisket. When I’ve had the Best Beef Brisket Ever, we always sliced it up and ate it with bbq sauce and all of the other delicious sides from Hogly Wogly’s.