THE PROBLEM WITH AN ANTIPASTO THAT TASTES THIS GOOD, IS…
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IF THERE’S ANY SHOT AT PRE-DETERMINED HAPPINESS IN LIFE,
IT WOULD BE TO ACQUIRE A TASTE FOR SPICY FOODS… EARLY IN THE WOMBS
OH relax, it’s not for me. This is for Jessica.
Some 2.5 years ago, voluntarily jobless and air-dropped to a place where I found mostly disagreements, I fled into the universe of food-blogosphere shielded behind self-loathing, desperation, and above all, in an impenetrable armour of cynicism. In the mist of not knowing what to expect, I kindly assured myself that there’d be absolutely nothing, not a cunning whiff of hope, don’t you dare, that could pull me out of the comfort of negativity. I was going to cook, record, and wither anonymously into early menopause.
Some 2.5 years later, this universe has turned out to be more unpredictable than I thought. Not fame, not money, not even a humble sense of accomplishment that came, but from this most unexpected of places, I found… a group of friends.
Friends whom I have never met, never actually talked to, whom I don’t know a lot or any personal details of, but more genuine, generous and sincere than most I’ve actually met in real life. Stranger friends, like Jessica.
Jessica is, for the lack of better words, an odd number by normal standards. Nowadays when the mere act of holding the door for the people behind you can feel troublesome, it takes more than cultivating social relationships to offer compliments or helps to total strangers. But Jessica is kind of girl who, out of the mere kindness to inform, would write you an email, a full email, to offer encouragement and support. This is for her and many other dear strangers, whom I would never have the pleasure to call friends, if I hadn’t started this url.
So when I was invited to join Jessica’s awesome cyber baby shower, it wasn’t excitement or party-fever that I felt. Instead, I felt touched. Touched, in an unconventional yet familiar kind of way, that I’m considered part of an awesome community. More than an assignment, this is the first time actually, that I wanted to contribute to a party.
But enough about me. Let’s trash up this party real good.
THE FOOD-EQUIVALENT OF BATMAN AND ROBIN, THE BRANGELINA OF ICONIC TURKISH EATS
AS some of you may have noticed from this particular announcement, that I am now officially divorced… from the commitment of owning a stand-mixer (easy, gentlemen…). More accurately, a surprised appliance–widow if you may, still deeply hurt by the concealed unhappiness my stand-mixer had apparently suffered from in the past 4 years, which finally led to his jump off the kitchen counter on a cloudy Oct 24th, decapitating himself in his last, escapist act. The lumpy splatter of an unfinished pizza-dough over the black pavement, was his first and last, silent yet loudest protest, before declaring eternal freedom… from me. Looking back, devastated, I don’t think he has ever loved me…
Now, mid 30’s, dumped, and less equipped…
I know at times like this, I’m suppose to resort to less labour-intensive tasks in the kitchen, a pasta-salad perhaps, or a one-bowl-pancake mix with added sparkles, maybe even the unthinkable salad, to hide the scars from this tragic embarrassment, and more importantly, look really hot while doing it. But no. In an counter-protest to the irresponsibility of a suicidal stand-mixer, giving up making doughs is admitting defeat. With bare hands, I’m gonna prove that without him, I’m still highly desirable in the dough-market and totally dough-able. Not just the same dough down the sad memory lane, but I’m gonna make something awsome-er, something super-er.
I’m gonna make the incredible, lamahcun and ayran.READ MORE
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AS HAPPY AS A CLAM
It’s veterinarian-day for me again, how about you? Whatever your day’s like, appetize it with this spicy, herby, briny and juicy cockle salad (you heard right), from one of Fatty Crab’s and Fatty Cue’s Zak Pelaccio. It tastes like the ocean with an attitude, certainly one of my favourite, and most interesting and delicious treatment of shellfish yet. And I promise it will kick-open your palette, get you ready for whatever that’s on your plate. Wish you a day as happy as a clam.
Serves: 4 as appetizer
Adapted from Zak Pelaccio’s Eat With Your Hands
I like to use an assortment of cockles and clams for this dish. In this case, tiny cockles for their meats plus larger/prettier clams for their shells. You can choose whatever variety you like. The original recipe does not include the kaffir lime leaf, but I added it because I think it gave the dish a sharper edge. Use if you have it available (they freeze really well in the freezer).
Ingredients
Instructions
DON’T GIVE ME THE BULLSHIT, IN THE END, DO I TASTE FREAKING-ABSOLUTELY AWESOME?
To be honest, I don’t think I have ever truly enjoyed BBQ ribs. It has always been, to me at least, more enjoyable as an idea – the smile of the pit-master, the black smoker hissing under the Southern sun, the sense of all American lifestyle – than in actuality. In actuality, I’ve been waiting my whole life so far, to be impressed, turned, proven wrong, by something that I so desperately would like to grow more fond of. But in the end, picking at a pile of ribs that are often borderline dry and overly sweet, I always ended up wondering if I have missed something.
This isn’t to say, the rib’s problem. In fact, any form of scanty meats adhering to a disproportionate amount of bones, that requires bare hands and sheer fangs to tear down, I’m there. In fact, the rib-hole that had been ironically left hollow in my long years spent in holy BBQ-land, was immediately filled and nurtured within a month after I moved here, by the most unlikely of all cuisines. A Northern Chinese creation called, cumin spare ribs. Typically you wouldn’t think the word “mild” is the most associated vocabulary for American BBQ ribs, where plenty of spices and smokes coincide in effort to achieve the opposite. But when put side by side with Chinese’s answer to finger-licking ribs, that’s exactly how they will appear.
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PUFFED, BLISTERED AND DELICATE, A PERFECT ALTERNATIVE FOR THIS TASTY ITALIAN TREAT
A “SOURDOUGH STARTER”… HOLD THAT THOUGHT, LET ME TAKE AN ADVIL
IF a consistent, punctual biological clock is the indicator of good health and well-being, surprisingly as evidence suggests, I may live much longer than I expected.
On a daily basis, for past 2 decades, my body insists on living breathing sleeping and eating, in a strict and firm accordance with… the Parisian time-zone. They say that your body is always trying to tell you things that you may not realize about yourself. To that, I have no argument. Then on a monthly basis, the beautiful reminder that I am, again, one-month-less away from entering menopause, always comes reassuringly and dependably… 10 days late. Punctual in her own ways, she loves suspense and once in awhile, watching me peeing on sticks. But here comes the part where I’m most proud of, a yearly reoccurrence, the kind that only wild animals who are most in tune with nature will demonstrate…
The pre-winter hair-shedding and my October flu.
OK, fine, maybe that sounded a little over-dramatic. Maybe I just count the hairs on my pillow more nowadays as a sign of mid-life crisis, and instead of a full-blown flu, it’s more like a passive-aggressive, trickling but ever-flowing stream of runny nose. The kind that is incompetent of granting me a whole week of in-bed movie-marathon, but at the same time, makes damn-well-sure that I look, walk and feel like a days-old, soggy unglazed donut. So this year, in response to a seasonal time like this, a new behavioural pattern has emerged. I bake breads.READ MORE
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JUST WHEN I THOUGHT THE SHOW WAS GONNA EXIT FASTER THAN IT ENTERED, ON THE SIDE OF A NEIGHBORHOOD ROAD…
A NEW JOINT OPENED
I must admit, my belated appreciation for the hype of Xi’an Famous Foods, was a slow, reversed progression.
Six years ago before we left New York, it wasn’t yet a thing over there. Then after six years of looming around Hong Kong and then now Beijing, I barely noticed its presence let alone recognizing it as an established “food category”. It was a shameful episode of my negligence, one of which I could only redeem by… well, help you not to repeat my mistake. The first noise I heard from this funnily named Chinese regional cuisine from central-west, ironically, was when a few months ago, I was on my Beijing couch watching America’s Food Network featuring a micro-trending street-eats in New York, called “liang (cold) pi (skin)”. Liang-pi? You mean, the liang-pi they sold from a booth right next to the cash-register in my local supermarket? The liang-pi that periodically showed up on my dinner menu? The liang-pi that, yes, there at the corner groceries as well. And yes, there at the food-courts in malls, too! Now that I’m consciously aware of such thing, the liang-pi that was previously invisible to my radar, now appears to be, actually, everywhere!READ MORE
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JUSTIFICATION – MAXIMUM CARAMELIZATION
SO you watched Tony Bourdain in Bronx, didn’t you?
And if in the next following days, a certain very catchy phrase got stuck in your head like the most maddeningly annoying tune, echoing “chop’cheese… no, chop-peh-ded cheese… chop’cheese…”, steady, you are not mad. You are just, like me, actually more Bronx than you ever thought you were. This supposedly Bronx-via-Harlem native dish, even though, was not at all the leading lady in the narrative of that show (i mean let’s face it, Chuchifrito… who can beat that diva), but she struck a tune that I couldn’t stop singing, and there’s only one way to shut her up.
But just because I wrote about this handsome dude here awhile back, doesn’t mean I’m familiar with the other girl next door. So who’s chopped cheese? With a name like “chopped cheese”, you know she’s not the kinda girl who reads Goop, al’right. She doesn’t take the hipster burger non-sense or customizable patty elitism, in fact, pffff, she doesn’t even give a fuck about her slightly more polished cousin, cheese burger. Chopped cheese, is about disrespecting a patty in the most gloriously wrong of ways, dismantling it half-way during cooking with complete disregard to the concept of, juice, or the ludicrous question of, doneness. Hey. Just ain’t the way she likes it. Everything we’ve been taught not to do to a patty, she’s done. Justification? Maximum caramelization. To brown every possible square inch of ground beef to draw out the beefy-ness within, and let the cheese melt into the desperate nooks and crannies in between in a greasy, fluid unison. In the most non-vogue sorta way, she’s some kinda sexy.
So here you’re thinking, how do I get me some of that sexiness. Well first, before you even pull your pants up to go out to the grocery stores, you gotta put your mind right. Any obsession within you for refinement, artisanal bullshit, the love for your French cuffs, should be tossed out the window. She’s not impressed with your suits and ties. She likes fatty and economically friendly ground beef (and if you even raise a thought of grinding your own beef? To the left.). She works better with non-real American cheese and a soft, squishy bun. And she likes to be eaten instantly when you’re still in your grease-splattered T-shirt, standing by the edge of the kitchen counter, marvelling. It makes her feel special.
Well now… so you’ve been introduced. I guess this is the perfect time to… leave you two alone. READ MORE
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(IT WOULDN’T KILL) ME TO SWAP 1/2 OF THE CHOCOLATE WITH PEANUT BUTTER. SO INSTEAD, IT KILLED THE BROWNIES
HERE’S the thing. I am not particularly built for baking.
I know this sounds like false modesty… unappetisingly pretentious, especially after a consistent offering of bakery recipes in the past 2.5 years, ranging from simpler things like an imploding honey custard cake or blueberry muffin-french toasts, to more elaborate things like a gateau a la sour cream or a laminated Nutella morning bun. Sorry if I forgot to mention my relentless pursuit of everything-biscuits, and right, you’re absolutely right, this deep-fried apple/persimmon pies, despite of myself, were eeeeeeh-pic~~
Uh-hem, ok now seriously though, truth aside (….), that when it comes to baking, I struggle with a high precipitation of unnatural disasters with only a slight chance of prevalence. Not to mention that either ways, the day will only end sadly in tears, or, happily in fat thighs. Baking, is a no-win situation.
But let’s just say, we don’t have problems with fat thighs. Just saying… then why the struggle? Well… I was born, with a medical birth defect, which disallows me to follow recipes… precisely. There. It’s a chemical imbalance in my brain creating an illusion that makes me believe I am, at the very least, marginally smarter than a cookie-dough. Turns out… I am not. No one is. But this condition has grown resistant even to such keen awareness, to a point that… I can’t even follow my own recipes! At this very moment as we speak, a batch of brownie lies mutilated on a white sheet of parchment, recipe of which was tested, then tested, and thus theoretically foolproofed for people like myself, who’s really good at fucking up a recipe… yet I still did. Would it have killed me to swap 1/2 of the chocolate with peanut butter? No, no it wouldn’t at all. So instead, it killed the brownies. Certainly not the only dead thing here… A runny banana bread batter – not a pie-filling makes. Ricotta pastry cream – yikes.
I’m bringing this up at a very carefully timed juncture, a serene and orderly period right before the tsunami of holiday-pastry-season hits, so I have enough chance to reflect and ponder on my illness. Who am I but a good-hearted amateur baker – guided by presumed logics, set out to make the recipe-world more interesting, if not tastier – only to be haunted by unintended consequences. A walking cautionary tale marked with a bloody scarlet A-for-effort, and the stain of broken whipped cream. But if to tackle this illness fundamentally, means to obey a recipe unquestionably, then what is my trickling value in recipe-blogosphere without adding personal inputs?
IF YOU CAN POUR YOURSELF A HOT SALT BATH, THEN MOVE INTO SAUNA TO SIT STILL,
YOU CAN ROAST THIS DUCK
TODAY, I’m here to answer the question that has long infected the everyday-home-kitchens, with unending fatigue and boredom. The underlining puzzle that, as a result, has put the other undeserved, pale and bland poultry, onto the seat of power in the dinner-menu arena for far too long. The question that we, if we say we love foods at all, should all ask ourselves…
Why are we so scared of ducks?
I mean yes, they are physically slightly larger than the other poultry – chickens – which has enjoyed unchallenged dominance in the everyday kitchen-politics, for reasons that are insufficient at best. For one, the only difference made by the small increase in size, is an increase in cooking-time that requires no additional effort from you. Second, that effort-that-you-didn’t-really-have-to-make, will buy you incomparable rewards in flavours, succulency, and rest assured, rock-star-level wow-factors. So despite the many… almost universal disagreement I hold with this happiness-forsaken country, I got to admit that they do, do one thing right. They know how to do their ducks.READ MORE
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WHEN I’M REALLY BUSY.
THIS IS WHAT I EAT.
