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Recipe: curry laksa

The heat is on. I believe they are going to be flirting with triple digits down on the flats (in Denver) soon. But it’s a dry heat. Whatever that means.

Actually, I know full well what it means. It means the difference between feeling hot and cranky (dry heat) and feeling homicidal (humid heat). There are places I have avoided visiting because everyone has warned me about the heat and humidity. Diane once told me that I should visit Vietnam. “Sounds great!” I said, “when are the cool months?” There was a long pause and Diane informed me that there aren’t any “cool” months, just hot and really hot months.

Oh…

I am drawn to Southeast Asian food with its exotic ingredients, tropical influence, and spice. I love it. What intrigues me is how so many hot climate cuisines have so many spicy dishes. Sweat will pour from my brow when I indulge in a bowl of spicy noodles in winter. Imagine having a bowl of hot and spicy something or other in summer. That’s just Crazytown!

fish sauce, pepper, shallots, garlic, lemon grass, galangal, curry, turmeric, chiles

let’s get our spicy on

But you know what? It’s addictive. Spicy is addictive. Yes, even in summer. I’ll turn down a bowl of perfectly tender beef stew while we’re in the throes of summer, but I will crave curry laksa like nobody’s business. We used to enjoy a bowl of this spicy broth filled with noodles, shrimp, vegetables, and tofu puffs when we lived in Southern California and frequented wonderful ethnic restaurants. Which is why I had to learn to make my own now that we live in a bit of an Asian food vacuum. To quell the beast, you know. I am a noodle girl. In the past I would make laksa the cheater way. I would buy a jar of some spicy curry, add chicken broth, other ingredients, and call it good.

i like to add sprouts, tofu puffs, egg noodles, rice vermicelli, and shrimp

the spice paste in all its glory

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Recipe: taro tapioca soup

gong xi fa tsai!

Xin nian kuai le. Wan shi ru yi.

Happy New Year, everyone! It’s the year of the Rabbit. Rabbits are lucky little guys, so I wish you all a very lucky, happy, healthy, and fruitful year ahead. The house has been busy here at urb-central as it always is before Chinese New Year. We have spent the past few days preparing food, cleaning the house, following the news, and hunkering down during the wicked cold spell that had a hold on much of the country recently. A couple of weeks ago, my friend Kitt had posted a cool video of a young woman throwing boiling water into the -40°F air. Can you guess what happened? As Jeremy watched the outside temperature plummet the other night to -25°F, we wondered if we could get that same phenomenon to work. So we went outside on the deck to give it a try.

cool (literally)

love the droplet trails

The water evaporates in the air before hitting the ground. I’m pretty sure our neighbors thought we were on crack tossing water off the deck and firing the flash several times in the night. [I guarantee you we are the most sober residents in this town.] The next morning, it was still -23°F. So before Jeremy left for work, he humored me and we tried another boiling water toss off the deck. And because it was daytime, I was able to shoot a nice sequence of it. You can see more of the nighttime shots and larger daytime shots on the photoblog.

science!!!

That was pretty COLD. Kaweah kept wanting to come out onto the deck with us because she equates baking her brains in the sun with walking onto the deck. But we’ve been keeping her inside the warm house since her old body gets very stiff when it’s cold. A few times Jeremy has had to go and rescue her at night when she was let out to potty because she got stuck in the snow when her paws got so cold she couldn’t walk. She’s more susceptible to temperature extremes as she has aged, but she’s not any smarter.

that’s okay, we’ll just keep her on the snuggy blankets

Right now, our house is clean and our refrigerator is full of lucky foods. Per tradition, we always clean the house on Chinese New Year’s Eve because you can’t clean the house for the first two weeks of the new year or else you will sweep out the good luck. This put me in a bit of a panic because I’m hosting something during that time period at my house. I also made a small feast for our New Year’s Eve dinner – each dish or component represents some form of health, luck, fortune, and happiness.

fu is luck and it is upside down on our front door – it means “luck arrives”

potstickers, soybean sprouts, lucky ten ingredient vegetables, lucky bean thread noodle soup

And then there is dessert. I almost always make western desserts when we entertain because most people I know aren’t that thrilled with Asian or Chinese desserts. When I was a kid, the typical dessert in my house was fruit. On special occasions, my dad would make almond jello or sesame bananas, reading the recipe from a fat book packed with delicate, thin pages covered in Chinese characters. Kris and I would get so excited. At the real Chinese restaurants (the ones where the waiters can barely speak English), they would serve a warm sweet soup of some kind for dessert. Sometimes it was sweet red bean soup, sweet green bean soup, tapioca coconut soup, black sesame soup, or sweet peanut soup… Soup. And there was taro root soup.

taro root

coconut milk, taro root, sugar, tapioca

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Recipe: potato leek soup

My friend sent me the coolest package in the mail the other day. We both shoot Nikon and since he got one for himself, he decided to get one for me too. It was so generous of him, but I think it might be hard to distinguish between the 24-70mm 2.8 Nikkor that he sent me and the one that I already own.

practically identical

It’s disconcerting how similar they are, because one is a lens and the other is…

a mug

But I love it, because I’m a Nikon fangirl and ’tis the season for hot drinks. I only drink hot beverages from December to March because it’s too warm for me the rest of the year. I have nothing against hot beverages. They are especially appropriate after a day spent outside in the snow.

like a day at vail

the view west from one of the back bowls

When we get home from the slopes or the backcountry, the first thing we do after greeting Kaweah and putting away our gear is heat up some soup. We have four different kinds of soup in our refrigerator right now. It’s the best kind of food to warm you up and rehydrate your body. One of my favorites is potato leek soup.

leeks, potatoes, parsley, salt, pepper, and butter

slice the leeks in half

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