Thai one on

I finally got around to freezing the 15 pounds of tomatoes I got from Gary Argyle’s farm this past weekend. Of course, now I had to find room for 15 pounds of tomatoes in our tiny chest freezer. In order to make more real estate, I pulled out a few odds and ends to be made into dinner including some corn (from McNab’s farm) and a few meatballs leftover from a Frikadeller dinner a few weeks back, a couple cups of beef stock and a block of Pete’s organic extra firm tofu. Tofu freezes beautifully and can be thawed either at room temperature or immersed in boiling water. Just make sure to press out the excess water. The tofu takes on a meatier texture after being frozen.

The possibilities are endless, especially with a vat of ready-to-go roasted veggies at my disposal. I could have done a stew or a tomato based chowder. I could have done a funky Ma Po Tofu or a miso-marinated stirfry. I could have done a savoury risotto with corn & tomato salsa. Or just toss the stock back into the freezer and used the rest of the ingredients as the base for a super-simple pasta.

I was still savoring last night’s noodle dish and wanted something warm and comforting. So I decided on my Thai One On noodle soup. Here’s the Fast & Dirty directions for soup:

3-4 oz rice sticks

5 meatballs – quartered

1 heaping teaspoon minced ginger

1 garlic clove- minced

1 green onion/scallion chopped

3 cup cilantro chopped

2-3 oz of extra firm tofu – pressed and cubed

2 cups roasted veggies

½ cup frozen corn

2-3 tomatoes chopped into chunks

2-3 cups diluted beef broth. Basically 2 part broth to 1 part water. Veggie or chicken broth would be fine. Use low-sodium if you’re using pre-fab.

2 tablespoon fish sauce

½ teaspoon sambel oelek

2 kaffir lime leaves minced fine – use fresh or frozen

juice of ½ lime

couple shots of sesame seed oil

peanut or veg. oil

Topping options – chopped cilantro/parsley/scallions, shredded carrots, fresh thai basil, lime wedges, shredded egg omelet/scramble egg, bean sprouts, dry roasted peanuts or any other nuts or seeds

Soak rice sticks in boiling water. Cover and set aside. Once soft, drain and rinse in cold water. Set aside.

In a wok, heat up the oil over high heat. Dump in meatballs, ginger, garlic, cilantro, scallions. Stir fry for a few minutes. Take a moment and inhale the wonderful aromatics.

Dump in tofu and let that brown a bit. Dump in roasted veggies, tomatoes, corn, beef broth, fish sauce, sambel oelek and lime leaves. Bring to a boil and lower to a simmer for 10 mins.

Finish off with the lime juice and the sesame seed oil.

Arrange noodles in bowls and top with the piping hot soup. Garnish as desired. I just had some lime slices on the side just in case folks wanted a larger slap of citrus.

So good on a cold fall night. This is one of my favorite soups. I love the beautiful, robust flavours of Thai cooking. I often keep a small jar of 'Thai It Up' sauce in my fridge. Here's the fast & dirty recipe for that:
1/3 cup fish sauce
1/3 cup lime juice
1/3 cup rice vinegar
1 teaspoon organic cane sugar or honey
1 thumb of ginger grated
1-2 garlic cloves crushed
2-3 kaffir lime leaves minced fine
1/8 teaspoon sambel oelek (you can use more if you want)
a couple shots of sesame seed oil

Dump everything into a jar and store in the fridge for up to a month. Shake before using.

You can use in absolutely everythng ;)
You can add it a simple brothy soup, drizzle it over scrambled eggs, use it as seasoning for a stirfry, add a spoonful to fish congee with lots and lots of cilantro, use it as a dipping sauce for gyozas/potstickers or dimsum (so good with har gow and sui mai), dump it over cellophane noodles and let marinate overnight for the best noodle salad or use it as a slaw dressing.


Speaking of slaw, (look Kev, a segue) for our first course I made a quick asian slaw with gomashio dressing. As mentioned before, gomashio is one of those items that is usually grossly overpriced when bought already made. Along with the fact that it will start going rancid as soon as it’s made, it’s just absurd to be paying $6 for something that really only costs 25 cents and 3 minutes to make. Just toast up a couple spoonfuls of black sesame seeds in a dry pan over medium heat until you smell the toasted sesame seed goodness. Then with a good pinch of sea salt and pound in a mortar & pestle for a few seconds or toss into spice/coffee grinder and pulse a couple times.

Here’s my Fast & Dirty Asian Slaw & Gomashio Dressing recipe:

In the bowl that you’re going to serve the salad in dump in (because you don't really need more dishes to do):

2 tablespoons rice vinegar – just eyeball it

½ teaspoon honey – I used a wonderful local wildflower honey

1 tablespoons gomashio

Mix until the honey has dissolved.

Then add in (again eyeball it because it would be stupid to actually measure this out):

1 cup finely shredded cabbage – pretty much any type of cabbage will do. I’m still working my way through a red cabbage.

½ cup carrots- sliced fine

½ cup English cucumber sliced fine

Toss and let sit while you prepare the rest of dinner. You could let the veggies marinated overnight too.

We had our usual last minute, drop-in dinner guest show up and the above recipe was enough to feed me and two grown men.

Of course, all the veggies and the meat from the meatballs are from local farms. Dinner itself took less than 30 minutes to make. You can play around with the vegetable and meat options for the noodle soup. Use whatever leftover meats or seafood you have on hand. It's a great way to use up leftover baked salmon. Just add right it to the soup at the very end so it does get too fishy. Or use tofu, tempeh & /or beans like chickpeas . Instead of rice sticks, you could use udon or egg noodles but I like rice sticks best with this soup. The veggie alternatives are pretty much whatever you can find. Again, leftover veggies do well in this soup. If you really want to go super-deluxe, you could even toss in dumplings.

Enjoy!
Jen

Nanaimo's 100 Mile Diet Challenge

Noodling around

In answer to Anon.'s question about cleaning chantrelles: I can't take all the credit for how spiffy and clean those mushrooms look. My friends who gifted me with them did a bit of cleaning before handing them over. I find a mushroom brush and any cleaning brush with stiff tooth brush is all you need. Chantrelles get waterlogged very easily so a dry approach is the best bet. If they are really dirty, a quick splash under running cold water should be all you need. Part of the solution is in the picking itself. Pick chantrelles that are already clean. I'm still seeing them out there on grocery shelves. Get them while you can!

Yesterday was a Novocain infused haze after an emergency dentist visit. Thanks to everyone at Dover View dental for making my ordeal as pleasant as possible. Dentist’s offices have really come a long way. They had a TV imbedded into the ceiling like my old dentist in Vancouver which was pretty much what sold me. Pretty cool except that when I first was lowered to start the session, there was some horribly, traumatic hospital soap opera scene that didn’t help much to calm me. They also had a pretty sweet LCD computer screen in front of the chair that flashed a slide show of postcard perfect scenes including some gorgeous shots of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, my new mountain crush. They even brought up my x-ray on it so I could check it out. I hope my maxillary molars never have to get yanked because those roots look pretty gnarly.

DH got washed up across the border and back home the night before. He insisted on driving me to the dentist and I’m glad he did. I got two shots of Novocain and that left me tired and wanting to simply curl up and hide from the world. Well, part of that was because I was doing a really drooly Jean Chrétien and just didn’t want to face the world ;)

Needless to say, I wasn’t in the mood of doing much except for knitting and zoning out with my DH. Knitting in itself was a bit of adventure. I’m coming close to the homestretch with my kimono-shrug-wrap and would be done expect for all the frogging I had to do thanks to my inability to count. Oh well.

Dinner was a chicken & roasted veggies in black bean sauce and pan-fried udon noodles. A pretty simply, peasant meal. Thank goodness I had the vat of roasted veggies to draw from. It certainly made things a whole lot easier. The chicken and all the the vegetables are all locally grown. Here’s the fast-& dirty recipe for that meal (recipe for 2)

½ chicken breast – in 2cm cubes (can substitute with firm tofu)

1-2 cups cabbage shredded – I used red but you can use any cabbage from green to any of the asian cabbages

2 cups roasted veggies

1-2 tsp grated ginger

1 tablespoon fermented black bean sauce – you can make your own, I just used stuff out of a jar

1 package udon noodles

½ cup liquid for deglazing – water or stock

peanut or veg. oil

In frying pan (I’m using a Teflon), add a teaspoon of oil, coat the bottom of the pan over medium heat. Once hot, add the noodles, arranging them in a single layer. You want as much of the noodle in contact with the bottom of the pan. Let cook for 3-4 mins. Do not move it around. You want the noodles to get crunchy and brown. Once they’re done you can just take the pan off the heat and put aside.

In a wok, heat up 1 tsp oil over medium-high heat. Place chicken in a single layer, uncrowded onto the bottom of the pan. Again, don’t be messing with it, you want it to brown. Let cook for 2-3 mins before turning the chicken pieces until their nice and golden brown and then turn over and brown the other side. Once cooked, removed to a bowl and keep covered.

Add a touch more oil if needed, return wok to heat and add ginger. Stir fry for a few seconds and then add the cabbage. Stir-fry for a minute, then add the roasted veggies and the chicken back in and cook for another 2-3 mins. Move the chicken & veggies to a side of the wok and dump in the black bean sauce. Let the sauce heat up for a minute before mixing with the veggies. This allows the sauce to cook and caramelize a bit and that helps bring out the fermented black bean yumminess. Deglazed with liquid and thicken with a cornstarch slurry if you want.

I like the serve the noodles and the veggies beside each other so that pan-fried noodles maintain their crunchiness. Even in a doped-up state, I made this in less than 20 mins.


Tah-dah...

Even though I could only chew and taste on one side of my mouth, it was so good. DH loved it. He loves anything in black bean sauce. I could serve cardboard in black bean sauce and he’d probably eat it.

This is a total yin-yang dish. The sweetness of the roasted veggies helped balance the saltiness of the fermented black beans. You had the different crunch factors of the cabbage and the pan-fried noodles play up nicely against the soft texture of the roasted vegetables and the meaty chicken. And of course, the darkly-sauced veggies and chicken visually play up nicely against the white udon noodles.

Now, if you wanted to, you could make a double batch of this and have some for a soup version of this dish the next day. When I say soup I mean nothing more than heating up a couple of cups of chicken stock, dumping in the leftovers and simmering for a few minutes. That's my idea of fast food ;)

Enjoy!

Jen