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Recipe: fish-flavored pork

Fish-flavored pork is the translation for yu-shian ro-tse, a tangy and spicy Chinese stir fry of pork, water chestnuts, tree ears, and other fragrant ingredients. My mom makes this dish to perfection with her hands tied behind her back. Whenever we would go home to visit my parents, or if they came to visit us, they would invariably end up cooking a feast of our favorite Chinese dishes (and for Dad, he would do his western specialties like Bouillabaisse or roast rack of lamb). This happens to be one of Jeremy’s favorites. My mom is the type who, once she learns what your favorite foods are, will do everything in her power to make those for you. Got a little strange when she got me and Kris mixed up and kept buying gallons of cranberry juice for me when I’d come home from college!

One day, I thought to ask my mom for the recipe. Nothing is ever measured out in my family and documenting a recipe is an even more ludicrous concept. It’s all intuition with them because they’ve been cooking for decades. So I’ll sit on one end of the phone while mom says things like “a little sherry” – “well, how much sherry?” or “and some green onions” – “how many green onions?” I know I don’t cook this as well as my mom does. It will take a few decades to dial it in the way she has, but every time I make the dish I think of her and I feel a small tug from inside pulling me in the direction of my culture and my mom.

Recipe: roasted brussels sprouts

Generally, when I don’t feel so hot, I find comfort in spicy or acidic food. I know that seems counterintuitive to many people. Jeremy is the opposite – he says dairy settles his stomach. Good lord, dairy would have a disastrous effect on me, seeing as I’m lactose intolerant. I didn’t figure out I was lactose intolerant until I got into college, believe it or not. That probably explains a lot of evenings spent lying on my side, unable to move. Like my father, I treated my stomach like it was made of iron. Unlike my father, I couldn’t stomach everything I put down my gullet. I could stomach most things, just not *everything*, like the time I was six years old and mixed vanilla frosting in 7up and wound up with a stomach ache that lasted for two days. Crazy kids, huh? I know!

I’m all for food safety, really. Just that, growing up in the 70s and 80s, my family didn’t practice that whole food safety thing too closely… or at all come to think of it. When I began to cook, I was the one who urged my mom to take care when handling raw poultry and raw pork. She was pretty nonchalant about the whole thing for a looooong time. I definitely have a strong constitution when it comes to salt, spice, and sour. No problem. Iron stomach! There have only been a couple of occasions when I was laid out in serious stomach pain and I think they both involved Jimmy Dean sausage, a trip to the ER, and drugs that knocked me out for several hours (probably to shut me up from moaning). So yesterday… yesterday I scarfed down three Chinese dumplings that had been sitting out for a few hours. I mean, I’ve done this for decades with no ill-effects. And yet, my tummy felt progressively worse and worse until I was lying on the couch all yesterday afternoon, staring at the dog trying to telepathically convince her to let herself out to potty.

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: candied orange peels

For many years we rented because we were in grad school, because post-docs are so short-term, because we lived in Southern California… All those years I cooked and produced vegetable and fruit scraps and bemoaned the fact that I didn’t have a compost pile of my own, in a yard of my own, to put on a garden of my own. Now that we’ve been in our own house for 2 years, I’ve been rejoicing in my own compost pile (well, compost bin – otherwise the winds would have my potato peels strewn across the next county) which sits in my own yard. I don’t have my own garden yet, but one day I will figure out what to grow in our 2-week growing season…

So it’s great that I have a composting system because I can reduce the amount of trash we take to the dump by half! Even so, I would prefer not to have to throw things away if possible. Since I was juicing oranges recently, a flash of brilliance hit me smack in the forehead and I decided to make candied orange peels. Mind you, I don’t dig on candied orange peels myself. I mean, I can stomach maybe one, or two – but that’s enough for the year. Jeremy on the other hand… he’ll sit there and eat one after another.

It’s a fairly simple process (but not a quick one) to make candied orange peels, but I never had a desire. In my pastry course, we did a massive candied orange peel campaign one night in a frenzy of garnishes and decorations. I loved that class, but it was fast-paced and because we divvied up the duties, I wasn’t able to get my hands on everything. All I ended up doing was peeling a dozen oranges and taking a ton of notes.