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Recipe: hunan tofu

At the beginning of the week you’re tip-toeing across frozen goose poop-laden grasses an hour before sunrise and by the end of the week you’re dodging fancy cocktails and flame throwers on a packed second floor of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Oh wait, that’s me. I was shooting the Boulder’s Best Mixologist competition on Sunday. Quite a change of scenery.

one of the sponsors

hapa sushi’s station was hopping

the gals from the kitchen were shaking things up

oak was on fire

No matter if I’m on the road in Middle-of-Nowhere or navigating the great eateries in Boulder, it doesn’t take long before I miss a home-cooked meal. That’s partly because I am a homebody and partly because I know how to cook. I hear of people getting bored with the same five meals each week and wonder to myself when was the last time I repeated a recipe at home? It seems there are always new recipes to discover and try.

ingredients: green onions, tofu, garlic, thai bird chiles, country ham

shaoxing cooking wine, dark soy sauce, sesame oil, black bean sauce, cornstarch, chicken broth

I have been on the lookout for a tofu recipe for several years. My grandma always ordered it when we went to dinner at Chef Chu’s in Palo Alto: tender tofu slices fried then simmered in a sauce with some salty country ham, a little heat, some black beans, garlic, and green onions. They called it Hunan Tofu. I scoured my recipe books, looked online, and chatted with Grandma on more than one occasion about what we thought might be the recipe, but nothing seemed to match.

helps to wear disposable gloves when handling the chiles

sliced and julienned

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Recipe: chinese xo sauce

I sometimes forget that I’m Chinese. It sounds crazy, but it is true. I don’t look in the mirror often (this you can probably tell if you have ever encountered me in real life), there aren’t many pictures of me since I’m usually the one behind the camera, and I live with a white guy and a black dog in Colorado. So it startles me at times when I do take a picture of myself and I think, “Oh yeah… I’m Chinese.”

after a happy day of skiing

And then there are times when I really feel it.

There is a young woman, Janet Liang, who was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the age of 22 in 2009. She underwent some nasty chemotherapy treatments and was declared in full remission in 2010. Except she relapsed at the end of 2011. She’s undergoing more chemo now, but her best chance to beat this cancer is to find a bone marrow match and the chances for finding a match are higher within her own ethnic group. She has until April of 2012 to find the perfect match, so time is short. And you know, there are a lot of people out there waiting for a bone marrow match. If we all registered, we might save that many more lives. I tweeted and Facebooked the link to spread the word, and then I went to register online.

I know that fear of wondering if cancer will snuff you out. I knew it at age 36 and it scared the shit out of me. Janet is only 25 years old. She is so young. I was a complete moron at age 25, I can’t even imagine how I would have felt or reacted. I knew the chances of me being a match were slim, but I hoped I could help. When I read the instructions on how to join the bone marrow registry, my heart sank. My history of cancer precludes me from being a donor. I read the guidelines over and over again and the tears spilled down my face. Damn cancer. But my pity party was only a few seconds. If I couldn’t register, I would at least let everyone in my circles know and perhaps get a fraction of them to register. It’s so simple, and yet it’s huge. It is life. Not just for Janet, for many others.

If you feel so inclined, please consider registering through Helping Janet which has links on how to join a bone marrow registry. She’s got just over a month and registration takes a little while, so time is of the essence. And if you could spread the word, that would be aces. Thank you so much. xo

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I think it is very Chinese to be skeptical of Chinese food you aren’t familiar with. Take XO sauce, for instance. This is a spicy condiment chock full of seafood that we usually eat with dim sum, on noodles, on rice, on vegetables, on tofu – pretty much with anything. I grew up knowing it as a true sauce with bright orange oil, colored from the chile. I found a recipe while flipping through my Momofuku cookbook and was pretty jazzed. Homemade XO sauce, at last!

grapeseed oil, garlic, ginger, country ham, chile pepper, dried shrimp, dried scallop

For the uninitiated, there are some items that may be hard to find. Mainly the dried scallops and the dried shrimp. The dried scallops are expensive, but a little goes a long way. When I told my mom I needed to find dried scallops she nearly screamed, “I have some in the refrigerator in our Boulder condo! Use them!” These were whole scallops, which cost more. I said I might use them if I couldn’t find any at Pacific Ocean Market. The scallops are typically found at the front of the Asian grocery store where they sell medicinal items, teas, and ginseng. I had never shopped for them before, but as soon as Mom described where they would be, suddenly the “front counter” of every Asian market I’d ever seen flashed through my brain. Pieces are the cheapest, then they become progressively more expensive for small, medium, large, and extra large.

the array of scallops

whole and pieces

I decided to buy pieces as they were cheaper and I didn’t want to use up Mom’s scallops. I’m still unclear as to why you would buy whole ones anyway because when you rehydrate them, they fall apart. Can anyone enlighten me on that? Oh, and the dried shrimp will likely be in the refrigerated section (in the main part of the store) where they have fresh noodles and pickled vegetables. I was quite pleased to find this kind with no food coloring because all of the ones with food coloring scare me.

small or medium? who knows – i never claim to understand chinese labeling

soak the scallops and shrimp overnight in water (do this first!)

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Recipe: taiwanese beef noodle soup

Our house sprung a leak. We don’t know when it happened because it’s somewhat of a slow leak, but when Jeremy discovered it Friday night in the ceiling of our ground floor, it had soaked four shelves’ worth of backpacking, ski, and mountaineering gear, as well as drywall. We pitched tents, spread out sleeping bags, poured water from boots, unraveled ropes, removed crampons and bindings from sopping wet boxes. This gear is meant to get wet, after all. Jeremy isolated the cause of the leak and our plumber is coming on Monday.

I kept thinking I should be really upset, but it didn’t dampen (ha ha! pun!) our spirits one bit. Freaking out adds nothing. Say NO to Drama, folks. Too many people self-destruct under the weight of their own drama. Energies are better spent on positive things like:

playing with puppies in the snow

baking carrot cake for your neighbors (and another for yourself)

…or sitting down to a bowl of beef noodle soup after ski touring the backcountry with your sweetheart. I’m not talking about western beef noodle soup. That’s not even on my radar. No, I am referring to the ultimate beef noodle soup – Taiwanese beef noodle soup. This is the noodle soup of my people.

beef shank, beef marrow bones, green onions, ginger, garlic, thai bird chiles

soy sauce, soy paste, dark soy sauce, chili black bean sauce, fermented bean curd, tomato paste

brown sugar, star anise, cinnamon sticks, dried orange peel, bay leaves, fennel seeds, cinnamon bark, sichuan peppercorns, black peppercorns

I’ve had a variety of homemade and restaurant versions of this beloved soup. I’ve flipped through many recipes and never found one that really called to me, until the other day when Carolyn posted a link to Chef Hou Chun-sheng’s winning spicy beef noodle soup recipe. Winning, because Chef Hou dusted his competitors at the Taipei International Beef Noodle Festival in 2011. I had most of the spices, but for those in short supply or those I didn’t have, I knew where to go.

got some more fennel seeds, bay leaves, cinnamon sticks, and picked up cassia bark

from savory spice shop, of course

chinese herb bags: cinnamon stick, cinnamon bark, orange peel, anise, fennel seeds, sichuan peppercorns

Savory Spice Shop in Boulder always has what I’m looking for. However, there were two items that I think are pretty specific to Chinese herbal medicine stores: the cassia buds and the angelica root. They didn’t have them (although they looked them up and told me what they were) and I decided it wasn’t worth the scavenger hunt at the Asian markets. My parents hadn’t heard of those either and my dad suggested I omit them. I don’t know if this is kosher or not, but I dried my own organic orange peel. I got beef marrow bones because the butcher said it would lend a deeper flavor to the broth. This soup is ALL about the broth. It costs more, but I am convinced it is worth it. As for beef shank, I rarely find whole beef shank anywhere but in the Asian markets, so I picked up a few pounds of the bone-in cut beef shank.

make broth from the bones

aromatics: green onions, ginger, garlic, thai bird chiles

adding soy sauce, brown sugar, and hot bean paste to the sautéed aromatics

Now, you can make this in one longish day or you can make this over the course of two days. It really depends on a couple of factors: 1) if you use a conventional stock pot or if you use a pressure cooker and 2) if you defat the broth and sauce (at all, the quick way, or the slow way). Personally, I feel the pressure cooker is the better choice because it is so much faster, more energy efficient, and achieves a tenderness in the beef that is effortless. Physics. It is totally your BFF.

let the sauce cook for a minute

then pour it into the beef stock

add fermented tofu, tomato paste, herb bag, bay leaf, and black peppercorns to the broth

**Jump for more butter**