Recipes, randomosity, and rats

[oyceter]

I've been playing around with my subscriptions and juggling things between what I read on DW and what I read via my RSS reader. It is so sad that I feel like I can't even keep up with less than 100 people, but so it goes. As usual, every day here is de-subscribing/ungranting access amnesty day.

Also, eventually I will start to talk about books again! Possibly when I start reading again, ahahaha. I'm still trying to figure out why my attention span still feels shot for fiction; I haven't been able to hang onto manga or fiction, although apparently Mythbusters and non-fiction about germs and parasites are right up my alley. I wonder if it is because I am socializing more offline and thereby using up more of the part of my brain that keeps track of people there? No clue.

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I have officially named the ratlings! Meet Momiji and Hatsuharu! (Hopefully with more pictures to come.) The decision was hard, but ultimately it came down to the fact that I have better nicknames for these names (Momo and Haru) and that Momo is so cute and sweet that I cannot quite see him as a Hitachiin. So far, both ratlings go through bouts of energy that have them jumping and running and climbing; they remind me of popcorn or little jumping beans, they are so tiny and move so fast. The scuffles with Ed have continued, although Ed is now quite consistently flipping the ratlings over and exerting his alpha rat status. Some of the fights have gotten a bit more squeaky than I like, but in general, they are pretty friendly. It's also funny watching Ed as alpha rat; I think he and Al were fairly balanced, with Ed being more aggressive but Al being much bigger. Ed now seems to be like, "WAHAHAHA I am no longer the smallest (shortest? bwahaha) rat in the cage!"

Also, I left a ziploc bag of sunflower seeds on the sofa, and when I came back, I found a ziploc bag, complete with a giant Ed-rat inside. Ziploc still sealed. I promptly freaked out and worried that he was suffocating, then regained my senses and realized he had chewed his way inside. But instead of taking a few seeds out and eating them, he squeezed himself into his tiny hole and took over the bag.

Momo seems to be the sweeter of the two ratlings; he really enjoys just sitting on my shoulder or the nape of my neck and hanging out. It totally reminds me of Momiji from Furuba hanging out on Tohru's head in rabbit form. But he also goes through spates of popcorn rathood, in which he and Haru swarm Ed and bounce up and down and spring up my sleeve and across the couch and to who knows where else. Haru seems to like hanging out with (read: bugging) Ed more, and they're the ones who scuffle the most. Momo gets into it every so often, but less.

It's also hilarious that Momo and Haru have not yet figured out what treats are. Ed, who is very good about it, rushes up to me as soon as he smells something edible, even if I'm not going to feed him, but when I tried to offer cupcake crumbs or rice or sunflower seeds to the ratlings, they sniffed at it suspiciously and very delicately took the treats from my fingers after the investigation.

Also, Momo has not only tried to stuff himself into my nose, he has also been trying to alternately tunnel his way into my ear and sometimes to get his nose through my hoop earrings.

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General cooking and recipe notes

As previously noted, these aren't hard and fast recipes. These are also recipes from someone who has only been cooking (edible) Chinese food for a few months; as such, I'm still experimenting a lot. The recipes below are ones I've made several times, or ones that I've made successfully enough that I'm sticking with what I did the first time around.

This may also be complete common knowledge to most people, but just in case not, my staples for cooking Chinese food generally include soy sauce (low sodium for dipping, dark soy sauce for cooking), rice wine, Chenjiang vinegar (can use balsamic in a pinch if the vinegar will be combined with sugar), scallions, ginger, garlic, salt, corn starch, cooking oil. There's other stuff like assorted 豆瓣醬 (bean sauces), but the above are things that I use in basically everything. I have yet to discover how to keep scallions fresher, but with the ginger, I usually peel it, cut it into slices, then stick it in the freezer and take it out when needed. My sister doesn't even bother to peel it and just slices it.

Recipes with both Chinese and English, because I find it very hard to think about Chinese food not in Mandarin. I have not written Chinese in forever, so I probably have 錯字 (spelling mistakes*) galore. Measurements are mostly using the English system, although I may stick in metric, since that is what all my cookbooks from Taiwan use. Most measurements are extremely futzed.

* Technically not spelling, but things like using homophones and etc.

Recipes

糖醋排骨 Sweet and Sour Pork Ribs

1-2 hours.

I have eaten this four times in the past month. These are not the US-ized Chinese food sweet-and-sour, but they're a bit darker in flavor, thanks to the Zhenjiang vinegar.

• 600 grams 排骨 pork ribs (I have used spare ribs and baby back ribs cut lengthwise into thirds, the bone should be about two finger joints long? I liked the baby back ribs better because there was less cartilage, but I am a lazy eater who would rather pick around just bone than bone and cartilage. 600 grams is approximately 1/3 or 1/2 of a slab of ribs.)
  
• 1 tbsp 米酒 rice wine
  
• 2 tbsp 醬油 soy sauce
  
• 3 tbsp 糖 sugar
  
• 4 tbsp 鎮江醋 Zhenjiang vinegar (it is black and very strong. I love it so! Friends have also told me you can use balsamic vinegar as a substitute, but if you do, cut down on the sugar.)
  
• 5 tbsp 水 water
  
• 2 slices 薑 ginger
  
• 1 stalk diced 蔥 scallion
  
• some 油 cooking oil

I like using a non-stick pot for this, since my sister made it with a normal pot and accidentally burned it. But I have done it in a normal pot, and it was fine. You just have to keep an eye out to make sure the water level doesn't get too low.

1. 先把血水去掉。 Get rid of the impurities in the meat. (This is usually the first step when you're going to stew meat for a long time.) You can just chuck the meat into boiling water, but my mom said someone else told her that if you do that, the meat shrinks and doesn't look as nice, so now she puts the meat into a pot of water and brings the whole thing to a boil. You can boil the meat for a fair amount of time, and technically you should boil it until little bits of blood and meat and fat stop coming off, but I sometimes get lazy. I then rinse off the meat in water and slice it into pieces. You can also slice before the boiling, but I mentioned my being lazy?
   
2. 把薑蔥爆香。 Bloom the aromatics. (I am stealing this terminology from what what heresluck said. about Indian cooking.) Heat the pan. When water drops skittle across, heat up a bit of oil (depends on how much you like. Usually I go for a little puddle about the size of my palm.). When the oil is hot, throw in the ginger and scallion. You can tell if the oil was hot enough if the oil starts to spatter when you throw stuff in. The recipe says diced scallion, but usually I am too lazy and just slice the stalk in half and then split it down the middle. It's going to be stewed anyway, no one will notice! Stir fry the ginger and scallion until they smell good. (This should only take a minute or so.)
   
3. Add the ribs. Brown them a bit if you want.
   
4. Add the sauce mixture (rice wine, soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, water). The handy thing about this recipe is that they are in 1:2:3:4:5 proportions, but I usually add in a little more vinegar and more sugar. And then I pour in more water so it doesn't cook too fast and burn when I'm not watching. Bring the sauce to a boil, then turn down the heat to let it simmer. Cover the pot. Cook for about one hour, or until the sauce is at a taste and consistency you like, and the ribs are dark brown and the meat easily comes off the bone.

I like this recipe because a) sugar + vinegar = BLISS, b) sloppy measuring!, and c) the rendered pork fat in the sauce makes it extra good on rice. I still measure for the sauce, but now that I have realized it is a roughly 1:2:3:4:5 ratio, I will probably stop so I don't have to wash my tablespoon. It does take a while to cook, especially if you get rid of the impurities in the meat first, but most of that time involves having stuff on the stove and ignoring it.

大白菜粉絲 Nappa cabbage and fen si (mung bean noodle)

• 大白菜 nappa cabbage, sliced into maybe 1x1 inch chunks? This is a stew, so I like bigger pieces, and I like having stem in each bit. I usually try to get the ratio so that there's less cabbage than fen si, but enough so that you get a fair amount of veggies in each spoonful.
  
• 粉絲 fen si (mung bean noodles/vermicelli). Note: this will be much easier to work with if you buy the kind divided into little portions in the packet, unless you really want to try to untangle a giant bag of dried noodle. Because seriously, that stuff is hard to untangle while dry. I usually use 2-3 of the little portions. This also needs to be pre-soaked.
  
• 蝦米 little dried shrimps. These need to be pre-soaked (you can save the water and stick it in the broth later if you want). I usually use about six or so shrimps, but I like them. You can also use dried scallops, but I am too cheap.
  
• 高湯 stock. I've used beef stock. I've also used the water from soaking shiitake mushrooms, dried scallops, and dried shrimp, then reduced it over the stove and poured it in. I added a Japanese dashi packet for more flavor. I think if you don't have any or don't want to bother, you can use chicken powder or water, but it will be slightly less flavorful.
  
• 金針菇／冬菇／豆腐 enoki/golden needle mushrooms or shiitake mushrooms or tofu. All these completely optional. I think softer tofu would be better, but not so soft that it disintegrates. If you use the dried shiitakes, you have to pre-soak, but you can then use the liquid for the broth.
  
• 醬油 soy sauce
  
• 鹽 salt
  
• 薑 ginger
  
• 水 water

1. 把薑和蝦米爆香。 Bloom the aromatics. (Heat pan, then heat oil, then throw in shrimp and ginger and stir fry until they smell good.)
   
2. Add nappa cabbage, stock, and water. Usually I add enough to cover the nappa cabbage, and occasionally replenish as it cooks. Add a little soy sauce (a small pour?), because usually this dish isn't too brown or salty, then add more salt to taste. Cook the cabbage until it's a little harder than the texture you want. I like it not crunchy but also not at the squishy and completely falling apart stage, so I add the fen si when the cabbage is just a tiny bit crunchy.
   
3. Add fen si. Cook until fen si is clear. (This doesn't take very long. You can cook for longer if you like softer noodles, or if you just forget to check the stove.)

餃子 dumplings

Warning: dumpling filling is pretty time consuming, as is dumpling wrapping. I like dumpling parties, and then everyone can share wrapping techniques and then bring some home!

This is a recipe I have messed around with A LOT. I would say you can probably forget a lot of it, but don't forget the salt, scallion, ginger, and garlic. (You can probably leave out some of the scallions, ginger, and garlic, but if you leave them all out, the dumpling tastes kind of boring.)

肉餡 Meat filling

• 1 lb. 絞肉 ground meat. I usually use half of the fattier ground pork and half of the leaner. I have also thrown in firm tofu up till about 1/3 of the mix (more than that and it gets a bit crumbly and dry) and mixed in ground turkey. I also want to try this with ground chicken and corn, since I had that at a restaurant and it was awesome.
  
• 大白菜／四季豆／高麗菜 nappa cabbage/string beans/cabbage. Usually I pick one type of veggie to use. This is really just random vegetables. I like string beans because they are crunchy. I have also thrown in whatever random vegetable was in my fridge. The key here is to cut the veggies into tiny pieces, then to salt them, let them sit for a bit, then squeeze the water out so the dumplings don't get soggy interiors when you cook them. I think the salting is skippable if you want, but I have always done it, so cannot vouch to as how it will affect the dumpling. As noted above, I want to try this with corn! I have also used a mixture of string beans and broccoli rabe when I ran out of string bean, and that worked fine (crunchy!). The crunchier and less leafy the veggie you're using is, the less I think you have to salt it. When I dice the leafier greens, I try to keep the leaves and the stems apart, but that is just me.
  
• 醬油 soy sauce
  
• 鹽 salt
  
• 糖 sugar
  
• 薑末 ground or diced fresh ginger
  
• 蔥末 diced scallion
  
• 蒜末 ground or diced garlic. For all of these, I dice instead of grind because I am lazy and hate washing the grater. Really, just make sure the pieces aren't so big that if someone bites down on them, they will get an unpleasant surprise.
  
• 油 cooking oil

For some reason, my mom says if you are stirring the ground pork, you should always stir in one direction. And that you can add oil if you think your filling doesn't have enough fat.

I actually have no idea how much stuff I put in. Usually I put in enough veggies so that you can get a fair amount in each bite, but not so much that it overwhelms the meat. I think I tend to do a stalk or two of scallion, 2-3 cloves of garlic, and maybe an inch of ginger per pound of meat, with maybe a tablespoon of salt, a small pour of soy sauce, and a little bit of sugar. To test how it tastes, stir fry a teeny bit and eat it. It shouldn't taste very salty, since the dumplings will be dipped in vinegar and soy sauce. This recipe, as noted, is hugely variable, and I have also thrown in fen si (soak, then chop into teeny bits with scissors), carrots, mushroom, whatever else I feel like and/or need to get rid of that's sitting in my fridge. Also, if you put in something cool, tell me!

素菜餡 Veggie filling

Veggie dumpling filling can be more annoying because it sticks together less well than the meat. You can skip the egg for a vegan dumpling, but then either add soft tofu to help bind it, or just wrestle with it a little more when wrapping.

They can also be much more time consuming because all the veggie material should probably be salted and then have the water squeezed out, since there's no meat inside to absorb all the water.

• 菠菜／青江菜／韭菜 spinach/bok choy/Chinese chives. I like using greener veggies for veggie dumplings, mostly because I think they taste stronger. Also, green! I also like using bok choy because it's crunchy, though my sister like frozen spinach because it's easy.
  
• 蛋 egg. Binder... beat it before mixing in.
  
• 豆腐 tofu. I have used firm and really soft. For the firm, I pressed out some of the water first, but I don't think that's necessary. The soft was pretty helpful as an egg substitute.
  
• 粉絲 fen si/mung bean noodles. Again, pre-soak these. These are annoying while wrapping the dumpling, because they stick out everywhere, but I really love the texture of fen si in dumplings. You can also use other clear noodles. I wouldn't recommend rice noodles/mi fen, because I think they get less soft, but I've also used potato starch noodles (thick and harder to cut/wrap, but tasty!).
  
• 冬菇 shiitake mushrooms. Pre-soak, squeeze out the water (so annoying! Also, your hands will smell like mushroom all day), slice off the stem, then dice the cap. Try to squeeze even more water out while cursing at your decision to use mushroom.
  
• 馬蹄 water chestnut. I am lazy and just get the canned kind. Dice. Not necessary, but I like it for the crunchiness.
  
• 紅蘿蔔 carrot. Shred, then salt and squeeze out water. I skip this sometimes because I hate washing the grater. Nice because it adds some more color.
  
• 醬油 soy sauce
  
• 鹽 salt
  
• 糖 sugar
  
• 薑末 ground or diced fresh ginger
  
• 蔥末 diced scallion
  
• 蒜末 ground or diced garlic

Mix everything together. When you add the fen si, cut it into teeny pieces with scissors. Make sure stuff will stick together enough so wrapping isn't too hard. I think I usually chuck in the vegetable filling first, then stir in the binder and check the consistency, then either add more veggies or binder.

As with the meat dumpling filling, pretty much everything can be varied except possibly the binder and the seasoning. I am debating trying diced bamboo next time. I almost always include the mushroom and the water chestnut, but that's because I like the crunch of the water chestnut and the mushroom taste.

水餃皮 dumpling wrappers. I usually buy the ones marked for "sui jiao/sue gao/boiled dumplings" instead of the ones for pot stickers, since they're thinner and therefore I get more per package. You can also make your own, but I am too lazy, especially since wrapping dumplings already takes a lot of time.

If you use the New Hong Kong Sue Gow wraps that I have found in Ranch 99, approximately 3/4 of a package is enough for about 1 lb. of meat. 1 lb. of meat makes about a tray and a half of dumplings. 2-3 lbs. is good if you have a lot of people coming over, but 1 lb. is a good amount for a solo dumpling wrapping session. 4 lbs. is not advisable by yourself (I find these things out so you don't have to!).

How to wrap: set up the table with the filling, the stack of dumpling skins, and a bowl of water. I usually also have a cookie tray lined with foil to put them on, although for various holidays as we have run out of space, dumplings have basically gone on any flat, portable surface imaginable.

Put about a spoonful of filling in the middle of the skin, then dab your finger in water and go around the skin (this helps it stick closed). This is how I wrap my dumplings, although I only do three folds per side. Terrible text description: fold the wrapper in half, and pinch it at the top. On the back side, starting from either the left or right side from the center, make a fold pointing toward the center, then do it again two more times. Go to the other side, then make three more folds pointing toward the center. The folds should basically only be on one half the wrapper, with the front half being smooth. Then pinch all the edges together. The dumpling looks a bit like a bonnet shape, because all the folds on the back make the dumpling curve slightly inside. I like it because then they sit up nice and neat when you pan fry, but I think there are about a billion different ways of wrapping dumplings as there are families. Uh. Just don't do it ravioli-style with two skins.

I usually stick each tray in the freezer as it's finished, and then cook the fresh dumplings from the last tray. If you leave them unfrozen in the fridge, the wrapper will soak up all the water in the filling and it will be extremely gross and gummy.

How to cook: You can just dump them in boiling water, then wait until they float. Or you can steam them! (I haven't tried this.) I am usually less confident in my wrapping skills, so I pan fry. To make pot stickers, heat the wok, then heat the oil. I like using a non-stick pan for this, since every single time I've tried making pot stickers in a normal pan, they really do stick to the pot and then I am left with a bunch of dumpling bottoms stuck to my pot and naked dumplings on my plate. Line the dumplings in the wok. I like a pretty circular pattern, and mine look kind of like this. Terrible text description: my dumplings are like little crescent moon shapes, and I line them in a circle around the edge of the wok, each dumpling facing the next, not the middle, so they kind of nestle together. Depending on how much space is in the center, I either do another ring of dumplings, or I just squash in whatever fits.

Let them fry until the bottoms are slightly brown. Pour in water until it reaches about halfway up the dumpling, then cover the wok and let the water boil away. This steams the tops. Once the water is nearly gone, watch it boil off, then watch the brown crust start to form on the bottom. Turn off the heat before the crust turns black (or, you know, lose track of time and have burnt dumplings). Use a spatula to loosen the bottoms of the dumplings from the wok. When everything seems loose, if you are very skilled and not terrified of accidentally burning yourself, you can put a plate over the dumplings and flip the wok over. This is super pretty and leaves all the nice brown bits facing up! I have not yet successfully done this. Or you can kind of slide the circle of dumplings onto your plate. Or, if you were not successful in getting the bottoms to unstick from the wok, you can just kind of scrape them into a pile. They taste the same no matter how they look!

I usually dip mine in a mix of soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil, though I think dippings vary depending on regions and families and etc.

Haha, hopefully all this typing in Chinese will eventually make me faster than the ten-second hunt-and-peck I do for every word right now.

Comments

[oyceter]

Yay, I am glad it turned out well for you! Also OMG tofu and fresh shiitakes sound awesome, as does the addition of 上湯!