Fish Tacos with Avocado-Cilantro Lime Cream Sauce

Posted on 21 August 2010 by christao408

First, off, this isn’t my recipe. It came from Michael, known variously as Arenadi on Xanga and chow on IReallyLikeFood.com. He’s been AWOL for the last several months, wrapped up working on a congressional campaign in Hawai’i. He took the time a week or two back to post this recipe on his Facebook account and it sounded so good I figured I should do my part to share it with Xangaland.

As is often the case, I managed to vary the recipe a bit. It still turned out quite nicely.

You’ll need:

Yellow Corn Tortillas (the 4-5 inch kind)
Red Cabbage
Red Onion
Cilantro
Garlic
Avocado
Mayonnaise
Lime
Tabasco Sauce
Cream or Half-and-Half
Fish (firm white fish – snapper or cod are good)
Panko (Japanese-style bread crumbs)
Egg

Prep work:

First thing you want to do is get your mise en place set up for dressing the tacos. This means chopping the red cabbage and mincing the red onion. Chop your cilantro roughly. Slice your avocado about 1/4″ thick and remove the skin.

Put a handful of cilantro, a clove of garlic, about 1/4 of the avocado, a liberal dousing of Tabasco sauce, the juice of 1/4 of a Lime, a small scoop of mayonnaise, and about 2 Tbsp of cream into a blender/ food processor, and combine until you have a nice creamy sauce. Add more or less cream depending on how “loose” you want the sauce. Not being one to follow instructions carefully, I put the entire avocado into the sauce, making it very avocado-y and leaving none left for the taco itself. That’s okay, though.

Optionally, make some salsa.

This wasn’t in Michael’s recipe, but it is easy to make. Chop some tomatoes, onion, chili peppers (to taste), and green pepper and pulse a few times in a blender or food processor. Add some cilantro and a few more chopped tomatoes and then season to taste. A squirt of lime juice is nice. Some salt will work, too.

Make the taco shells:

Note – if you like your tacos soft shell (the way I do) you can skip this step, opting instead just to warm up the tortillas in the microwave or in a skillet.

Heat your oil in a skillet at about 1 to 2 inches depth to about 320 F. Using tongs or chopsticks, hold half of the tortilla into the oil and let it cook for about 30 seconds. Release it, pick up the other side (that was in the oil), and hold the side that wasn’t in the oil down into the oil to cook. Repeat until the desired crispness is achieved.

Cook the fish:

Heat the oil (1 to 2 inches) in a skillet to about 340 F. Cut your fish into strips. Roll in some flour and then shake to remove excess. Then dip the fish into a beaten egg, and then roll it in the panko bread crumbs. Fry fish strips in the skillet for about 3 minutes and then turn over for another 2 minutes. Note that the timing will depend upon the thickness of the fish and could be much shorter. It is a good idea to try one piece first, remove it once browned and cut it open and see if it is cooked through. Increase or lower the heat as necessary to ensure that the fish isn’t browning on the outside before the inside is cooked the way you like it.

To assemble:

Place red cabbage (you’ll notice I used green, which tastes fine) and red onion on the tortillas. Lay avocado slices on top of that. (Whoops – none left thanks to my mistake with the sauce!) Lay the fish on top of that. Put a nice dollop of avocado-cilantro sauce on the fish. Add some salsa (optional), a squeeze of lime, a splash of Tabasco sauce, and you are ready to serve.

Serve with some black beans on the side. I made some homemade beans with some sofrito to flavor them – a combination of onions, red bell peppers, and various spices. Easy and very healthy.

The finished product. Very tasty. Extremely tasty. That avocado sauce is amazing. Deep-frying the fish was an extra step that might be more work than I’d always want to put into it, but I think I could have just pan fried the fish and it would have turned out equally nice.

Thanks to Michael for sharing this recipe with me and I hope he puts it on his Xanga site soon enough.

Eggs Benedict

Posted on 18 August 2010 by christao408

Tawn and I enjoy poached eggs and find Eggs Benedict to be a nice weekend brunch treat. For some reason, though, we haven’t had a lot of luck learning how to poach eggs. Everyone has a special secret or tip to share – put vinegar in the water, stir the water in a clockwise motion before introducing the eggs, use only the freshest eggs, put the unopened egg in the hot water for ten seconds to firm up the whites – but we still come up with wildly inconsistent results. So we recently bought a non-stick poaching tray and set about learning to make Hollandaise sauce.

The Hollandaise sauce was surprisingly easy, employing a technique similar to making the wonderful French dessert sabayon, also known in Italian as zabagione. You whisk egg yolks with lemon juice (I managed to use a little too much, thanks to eyeballing it rather than measuring) in a baine-marie – a bowl set over a pan of simmering water. The gentle heat of the steam cooks the eggs slowly and as you whisk them, you keep them from scrambling.

Then, once doubled in volume, you add a stream of melted butter, whisking all the while to emulsify, or incorporate, the butter into the egg yolk mixture. This produces a thick, rich sauce that can then be seasoned with salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper.

On the back burner, the sauce is set to a low heat to keep it warm and I’ll add a few teaspoons of water to thin it out before serving. The egg poacher in on the front burner, with simmering water halfway up its side. In about four minutes, the eggs will be nicely done with firm whites and liquid, but warm, yolks. On the right, Tawn fries some ham slices.

The finished Eggs Benedict, employing a slice of homemade whole grain bread in lieu of an English muffin, accompanied with some fresh papaya. Tasty.

Shanghai Style Minced Meat with Pinenuts in Sesame Pockets

Posted on 15 August 2010 by christao408

One of my favorite places to find recipes is Joanne Choi’s Week of Menus website. That’s where I found a nice recipe for Minced Chicken with Pinenuts served with Shao Bing, something like a Chinese sesame pita bread. The chicken is prepared in a Shanghainese style with ginger, oyster sauce, and water chestnuts. The Shao Bing, something that you can buy ready-to-bake in the US, was an unfamiliar bread I would have to make from scratch since I am here in Thailand.

The Shao Bing was a bit of a mystery. Examples of it on the internet varied both in size, shape, and even technique. I pulled three different recipes from presumably reputable sources, compared them, and decided to try the one from Ming Tsai on the Food Network. After all, he’s Ming Tsai, so how could I go wrong?

The ingredients are pretty basic: vegetable oil, flour, yeast, baking powder, water, sugar, sesame seeds, and salt and white pepper.

You basically make three components to the dough: the first is a roux, a mixture of equal parts oil and flour, heated until the mixture thickens a bit. The second is a sponge, a relatively wet mixture of flour, yeast, sugar, baking powder, and warm water, which is allowed to sit and begin to rise. The third is a dry dough, a combination of just water and flour.

After letting the sponge rise and the dough rest, you combine them and knead until completely integrated. After another rest, you roll the dough out to about 1/16-1/8th of an inch. The oil-flour roux is spread on the surface of the dough. Despite following the recipe carefully, I found the roux was too runny – I’m not sure why this happened but it proved to be problematic.

Roll the dough into one-inch thickness, then cut into four-inch lengths. You can see that the roux was running out the ends. The subsequent instructions involve sealing the ends, rolling the dough thinner, folding it into thirds, basically creating what amounts to a typical pastry dough with alternating layers of dough and fat. The instructions for doing this confused me. Take a look:

Place 1 of the rolls seam-side up and seal the end using a small rolling pin (this will prevent the oil paste from escaping). Fold the roll into thirds, so that the seam is covered. Then roll this tripled roll into a flat dough about 5-inches by 2-inches. Fold this piece into thirds. The stack should be about 2 by 3/4 inches thick. Flip the piece over so that the seam and fold are on the bottom. Cover and set aside. Repeat the process for the remaining rolls.

Huh?

I did the best I could, but wound up with roux everywhere and too much flour on the dough. I sprayed one side of the dough with water and pressed it into the sesame seeds. These were baked in a 350 F oven for about ten minutes on the bottom side, then flipped over for another five minutes.

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The interior of the resulting Shao Bing looked like this, with distinct layers. The flavor was too floury and it was difficult to really open them like pita pockets. Maybe too many layers? After this meal, I tried cooking a leftover bread in a toaster and spreading it with peanut butter. Worked out much better then!

The second half of the dish was the filling you are meant to stuff into the pockets. The original recipe calls for chicken but I used a mixture of chicken and pork for more flavor. Instead of coarsely chopping whole pieces of meat, I used ground meat. It was marinated in a mixture of garlic, ginger, sake (substituted for Shao Xing wine), and soy sauce.

The other ingredients are a mixture of chopped celery and water chestnuts, pine nuts, and a sauce composed of more Shao Xing wine (or sake), oyster sauce, soy sauce, and sesame oil.

The meat is fried, then the celery and water chestnuts are added, then the sauce is added. Add the pine nuts when the mixture is finished. That’s all it takes.

For the final result, serve the Shao Bing with the minced meat mixture, stuffing it into the bread like you would with a pita. The dish was tasty, although the Shao Bing was a bit floury. In absence of the bread, you could actually use lettuce cups, which would be very nice, indeed.

I’ll need to try a different recipe for Shao Bing and see what the results are. The other two recipes I have for Shao Bing have different ratios of oil to flour for the roux. This recipe I used was 1:1 and the result was too thin. Another recipe is 3:2, which would be thinner. The final recipe, the one I think I will try next time, is 1:4. Amazing how different they are, no?

Mochi Cake

Posted on 20 July 2010 by christao408

It is late Monday evening and I leave early tomorrow for Los Angeles and then continue on my way to Bangkok via Taipei. A long travel day. There are still some more pictures and stories to share from the reunion but those will have to wait. In the meantime, I’ll share this Mochi Cake recipe (originally from Gourmet Magazine) that Joanne Choi at Week of Menus wrote about recently.

For anyone who doesn’t know, mochi is the glutinous rice that is pounded into a sticky semi-solid and used as an ingredient in several dishes, including various Japanese desserts like daifuku.

Mochi Cake
Gourmet Magazine | May 2005
Makes one 9X13 pan, or 24 squares

1 lb box of mochiko flour (3 cups equivalent)
2 1/2 cups of sugar
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 14 oz cans of coconut milk – not lowfat (I used two cans of 13.5 oz)
5 large eggs
1/2 stick of butter (1/4 cup) melted and slightly cooled
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease a 9X13 baking pan. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together mochiko flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt.

In a separate bowl or large measuring cup (4 cup capacity), beat eggs, then add coconut milk, melted butter and vanilla extract.

Carefully pour the wet ingredients over the mochiko flour mixture and whisk until mixture is smooth and uniform in texture.

Pour batter into greased 9X13 pan. Carefully smooth out the top. Bake for 90 minutes (yes, 90 minutes!), until top is golden brown and the cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan.

Allow cake to cool for about 30 minutes on a rack, and then carefully flip it out and cut into 24 squares, or the size of your choice. Can store mochi cake for three days, covered.

The texture is really fun – very moist and chewy. I think it would be excellent topped with some fresh fruit like peaches, strawberries, or mangoes. It also is quite nice just as a snack cake. Try it out.

As Bangkok Burned, I Baked

Posted on 21 May 2010 by christao408

In times of fiery stress, we all find different ways to cope. Nero played his fiddle (supposedly) while I turn to baking. Truthfully, I started my baking well before the Red Shirt leaders had surrendered and the angry crowd turned into arsonists. But I knew the army was making their move on the protest site and also knew Tawn and I would be stuck at home for the next few days, so a little bit of preparatory baking seemed wise.

The finished products: granola, oatmeal raisin macadamia and oatmeal chocolate chip macadamia cookies, and a loaf of rosemary-olive bread.

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

Based on a recipe for Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Pecans and Dried Cherries in the May/June 2005 issue of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, I omitted the cherries and then divided the batch in two, half with chocolate chips and the other half with raisins. And instead of pecans I used macadamia nuts.

6.25 oz all-purpose flour, .75 teaspoon baking powder, .5 teaspoon baking soda, and .5 teaspoon salt, whisked together. Mix together in a separate bowl 3.5 oz old-fashioned rolled oats, 4 oz nuts (pecans, but I used toasted and chopped macadamias), 5 oz dried and chopped sour cherries, and 4 oz chopped bittersweet chocolate. I used regular raisins and chocolate chips in place of the cherries and chocolate chunks. Improvise!

Cream together 12 tablespoons of soft but still cool butter and 10.5 oz of dark brown sugar. Once combined, beat in one egg and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract.

From there, add the flour until incorporated but be sure not to over-work. Finally, add the mixture of oats and add-ins. Before doing this, I divided my dough between two bowls, adding nuts and chocolate chips to one and nuts and raisins to the other. But heck, you could combine all three together!

Scoop out heaping tablespoons of the dough, forming a ball then mashing it slightly. Cook in a 350 F oven for about 12 minutes, rotating to ensure even baking. Take out of the oven while the centers of the cookies still look a little undercooked. Let sit on the pan for another five minutes before transferring to a wire rack. The cookies will remain soft and chewy this way, which is how I like my oatmeal cookies. Cook for a few minutes longer if you prefer them crispy. As my grandmother used to say, the world would be a boring place if we were all alike.

Rosemary Olive No-Knead Bread

I love making no-knead bread. It turns out every bit as nice as artisanal bread and it fills the house with a wonderful aroma. Oh, and it is easy because you don’t have to knead it!

I make mine with 20.5 oz of flour, roughly and even split between bread flour and all-purpose flour. You could substitute whole wheat for about half the flour, but up the yeast a little. I mix into that a scant 2 teaspoons of salt, 2 teaspoons of sugar, and .75 teaspoon of yeast. I stir it thoroughly and also add the chopped leaves from a few sprigs of fresh rosemary. Dried rosemary does not work here. Next, add one can of cold beer and stir the dough together. You may need to add a little extra water, but only enough to pull together a pretty dry and stiff dough. At this point you can add about a 1/2 cup of chopped olives, preferably kalmatta.

The secret to no-knead bread is time. I fold the dough over a few times just to make sure there are no dry pockets and then coat it with a little bit of olive oil. Put it in a bowl and cover tightly with plastic wrap, a lid, or aluminum foil. Then put it in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours, folding it over once during the time. This is when all the magic happens. The dough kneads itself, forming beautiful, elasticky protein strands.

Then, take the dough out of the refrigerator, turn it over on itself another time or two, then place it covered in a cool room for another 8-12 hours until the dough has doubled in size. Shape the dough into a loaf, deflating gently, and place on a parchment lined pie pan or oval casserole (if you want an oblong shaped loaf). Cover with oiled plastic wrap and let rise at warm room temperature for another 2 hours or so until doubled.

Preheat a 500 F oven, preferably with a pizza stone in it to moderate the heat. For the best effect, preheat a Dutch Oven (with lid) in your oven and, when ready and working very carefully, transfer the parchment paper with the dough into the Dutch Oven. Spritz a half-dozen times with water and then place the lid on, returning to the oven. After ten minutes, lower the temperature to 425 F and cook for another 30-45 minutes or until an instant read thermometer measures 210 F in the center of the loaf. If you don’t have a Dutch Oven just cook it on the breadstone or on a baking sheet. Will still turn out nicely but probably not as crispy a crust.

Use extreme caution when handling the Dutch Oven as it will be very hot. Lift the finished loaf out using the parchment paper and let cool on a wire rack.

Granola

A few years ago when I was still living over on Asoke Place I got into a granola-making kick. It is easy to make and relatively healthy, especially because you can control what goes into it. Tawn wanted to have some granola and yogurt as a change in pace to our usual breakfast of oatmeal, so I pulled up Alton Brown’s recipe from the Food Network and made a few changes.

Mix 3 cups rolled oats, 1 cup slivered almonds, 1 cup cashews (which I substituted with pecans), and .75 cup shredded coconut. You can also add wheat germ or other whole grains here to have some variety.

In another container, mix .25 cup vegetable oil, .25 cup maple syrup (or other liquid sweetener, I suppose), and .25 cup brown sugar. I realized later that the brown sugar is supposed to be mixed with the dry ingredients but it seemed to work this way, too. Please note that Mr. Brown’s recipe called for an additional 2 tablespoons of both sugar and syrup, which seemed a little too sweet for me. In fact, you could substitute a little orange juice for some of the maple syrup to good effect.

Pour the sugar-oil mixture over the dry mixture and stir for several minutes with the spoon until the mixture is evenly moistened. Note that it will still seem pretty dry; you don’t want it sopping wet! If you would like, you can sprinkle on some cinnamon, nutmeg, and/or ground clove to give it a little spice.

Then bake in a 250 F oven on some baking sheets, stirring every ten to fifteen minutes, for about 75 minutes or until there is a nice even golden color. After the mixture has cooled you can mix in 1 cup of raisins and/or other dried fruit to taste. Store in an airtight container once completely cooled.

Well, some might criticize me for doing something as trivial as cooking in the midst of Thailand’s worst political crisis in fifty years, but it seems to me that there is only so much depressing news a person can take. After a while, it becomes an echo chamber and you just get overwhelmed by the rehashed images, sounds, and stories. Best to do something productive in the kitchen, which nourishes both your soul and your body.

Second Attempt at Mozzarella Cheesemaking

Posted on 15 May 2010 by christao408

A week ago I tried making homemade mozzarella cheese, using milk bought at the local grocery store. The results didn’t come together – literally. Analyzing it, I figured it was either due to an insufficient amount of rennet, the enzyme that helps the proteins in the milk coagulate, or else it was due to the milk being pasteurized at too high a heat. Undaunted, I wanted to try again and learn how to do this.

While I originally put more weight in theory that the pasteurization was the cause, now that I look back on what I’ve learned, I suspect the insufficient rennet was probably more likely the problem. But hindsight, as they say, is 20-20.

In the wake of my first attempt, a German-Thai friend suggested I try buying milk from Murrah Dairy, the only water buffalo dairy in Thailand. Great idea, especially considering that the original Italian mozzarella is mozzarella di bufala – buffalo milk mozzarella. So I ended up driving to their retail store and bought five litres of raw buffalo milk. The best way to address the pasteurization issue is to use unpasteurized milk, right?

Sadly, I don’t have many pictures of the second attempt. You’re welcome to watch the video and/or read the description below.

After sanitizing everything in the kitchen, I started heating the milk. One challenge I encountered was that my recipe is in imperial measurements but the dairy sold the milk in metric measurements. Being an American (even a fairy metric-savvy one) I made a few errors in calculation and initially thought I was working with two gallons of milk, when in fact I had only about one gallon. Because of this, I prepared citric acid and rennet solutions that were twice as strong as necessary.

Thankfully, I realized this before adding the solutions into the milk, and added only about half of each solution. The proteins came together much more nicely than in the first attempt, although they still didn’t have the nearly-solid, soft tofu-like consistency shown in the recipe’s pictures. I strained the curds from the whey and ended up with a pretty nice mass to work with.

My next problem came from a lack of understanding of what was meant to happen in the next step. As a learner, it is helpful for me to know not only what a particular step is but the rationale behind the step. The recipe told me to either microwave the curds and then knead them, or else to put the curds in hot water (about 170 F) and use a spoon to fold them together, then pull them out and knead them.

The problem was two-fold. First, I don’t have a microwave. There goes the easy option. Second, I was hesitant to put the curds in the water because I thought they would just dissolve. Knowing what I know now, I realize that the whole point of microwaving or putting them in the water is that the cheese begins to melt a bit, helping it form more elasticky strands that you can knead. No heat and no melting means no kneading.

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Before I figured this out, I tried placing the curds, still in the cheesecloth, above some boiling water – kind of a bain-marie. This resulted in the bottom of the curds melting into the cheesecloth, while the tops of the curds didn’t change. Finally, I figured it out and put the curds into the water and used a spoon to shape them.

Of course, I didn’t have rubber gloves, so kneading the hot cheese was a little painful! Long story short, having a microwave would have been a huge help.

In the end, I wound up with a ball of mozzarella that was a bit tough and overworked, not nearly as elastic as it should be, and it had picked up a little bit of a greyish cast, possibly from the bread board I was using to knead it on. Also, cleanup was a pain as the curds cling to everything, especially the metal utensils!

The important question is, how did it taste?

Well, after a few hours soaking in a brine/whey solution, the cheese turned out okay. I used it on a pizza in a taste test, half of the pizza covered with my cheese and half with the Murrah Dairy’s cheese. My cheese was much more rubbery and not as bright white, but it actually tasted fine, like real mozzarella cheese.

Conclusion: This is a product that is probably worth buying in the store, even if it is a bit pricey. Making it is very time and effort consuming. That said, I’m kind of curious to try another time using store-bought milk, just to confirm my new understanding that the pasteurization wasn’t the issue. I still like the idea of making my own cheese, and if I had an opportunity to apprentice with a cheese-maker, I would jump at it. But the constraints of my Bangkok condo kitchen are such that I don’t think I’ll become a regular cheese-maker.

Okay, what’s the next thing to try?

First Attempt at Making Mozzarella Cheese

Posted on 9 May 2010 by christao408

As you may know, a lot of my choices of what to cook are dictated by my desire to try new things, to understand the characteristics of individual ingredients and the techniques used to coax the most flavor out of them. Recently, I’ve been keen to try my hand at cheesemaking.

My aunt’s sister Jan makes homemade mozzarella cheese and, assuring me that it is easy, sent me back to Thailand armed with baggies of citric acid and cheese salt (I swear, customs officer, that white powder is not what it looks like!) and some tablets of rennet.

Yesterday, I invited Ken over to help me. An American retiree, Ken has this dream of starting a goat farm up in Lampang province near Chiang Mai. He’s convinced there is an untapped market for chèvre.

Jan recommended a recipe for 30-minute mozzarella from cheesemaking.com. It is pretty straight-forward, except for the fact that I don’t have a microwave at home. They had an alternate recipe for those of us without microwaves, so I was pretty eager to give it a try. The big question mark that was facing me: could I make the cheese from the milk we have here in Thailand?

The recipe’s author insists you can use store bought pasteurized milk, so long it is not UHT (“ultra high temperature”) pasteurized, as this destroys the milk’s ability to curdle properly. But inspecting the labels of milk here in Thailand, there is no information about what type of pasteurization process is used, only that the milk is in fact pasteurized. Figuring I could afford a few dollars and an hour of time to experiment, I started with four litres (two gallons) of Foremost brand milk.

The process is pretty easy: you heat the gallon of milk combined with 1.5 teaspoons of citric acid diluted in a small amount of water. Once it gets to 90 F you add a quarter tablet of rennet which has also been diluted in some water. Thirty seconds of stirring to distribute the rennet evenly, then you cover and let the milk sit undisturbed for five minutes.

By this time, what you are supposed to have is the curd (milk solids) separating from the whey (liquid) in a pretty solid, tofu-like substance. Unfortunately, even after trying some of the suggested remedies, my curds never came together any more than runny cottage cheese.

I went ahead and scooped them out to drain, but most of them just ran through the colander. There wasn’t anything solid enough to handle.

Conclusion? Either I didn’t use enough rennet (although I did follow the recipe) or, more likely, the milk is UHT pasteurized.

Options: Try again with another brand of milk, give up, or be thankful that a smart Thai-German friend left a comment on my facebook page asking if I’d considered buying buffalo milk from Murrah Dairy, a local outfit that specialized in a breed of milking buffaloes from India.

What luck! They have a small cafe/retail outlet out near the airport, even though their farm is about a two hour drive east of the city. Tawn and I drove out there Sunday afternoon and located the shop in the midst of an old housing estate.

Murrah Cafe and Bistro: The first buffalo farm in Thailand. In Thai, it reads “The cheese restaurant that is the first and only in the country. You must stop by then you’ll know why.” Yeah, it doesn’t sound as compelling when you read it in English.

Talking with the owner’s daughter, it looks like although they don’t regularly open the farms for visitors, we could call and arrange a tour. She agreed that my problem with making the cheese was probably related to the pasteurization. As it turns out, they sell raw buffalo milk so I placed an order for 5 litres to pick up this Tuesday afternoon.

The cafe is cute but tiny. Lots of cheese and milk for sale and all of their espresso drinks are made with buffalo milk. Here’s the best thing about buffalo milk: 18% fat versus 4% for regular Jersey cow milk. Yum!

Since we were there and it was lunchtime, we ordered some food. The menu is mostly Italian and makes liberal use of buffalo milk products. (Worth noting, by the way, that their price for a container of mozzarella is 140 baht – US$4.40 – versus a minimum of 180 baht for the other locally made cow’s milk mozzarella and 250+ baht for imported. That in itself makes it almost worth the drive.)

What better way to really experience their excellent fresh mozzarella than on a caprese salad? Except for the fact that Thailand’s tomatoes are chronically anemic, it was wonderful.

Baked ziti in tomato sauce with… you guessed it – Mozzarella cheese!

And, finally, an excellent thin-crust Pizza Margherita. This was a small pizza and had a nicely charred, crisp-edged crust. Just like the real deal in Italy.

So here’s where I stand with the cheesemaking experiment: first attempt was a failure but I’m going to drive back out to Ramkamhaeng on Tuesday afternoon, but the raw buffalo milk, and then make a second attempt at the cheese. Stay tuned…

Ginger Macadamia Cranberry White Chocolate ANZAC Biscuits

Posted on 1 May 2010 by christao408

April 25th was ANZAC Day, the annual commemoration of the important role played by the Australian and New Zealand Army Corp in World War II, especially in the bloody campaign in Gallipoli, Turkey. To be perfectly honest, none of this would have been at the forefront of my consciousness, had Jacquie not sent Michael a box of ANZAC biscuits, an eggless cookie popularized by the wives and girlfriends of ANZAC soldiers. These oat cookies had a long shelf life and could withstand the rigors of being shipped halway around the world to their loved ones on the front lines.

Jacquie’s version differed from the ubiquitous one on the internet by the addition of ginger powder and toasted macadamia nuts. They looked scrumptious and since Tawn and I were going to have guests over for dinner last weekend, I decided to bake a batch. Along the way, I spontaneously decided to add some left-over white chocolate that was in the fridge as well as a handful of dried cranberries.

This is the recipe Jacquie provided with only minor modifications by me. An original recipe without nuts and ginger is located here.

Ginger Macadamia ANZAC Biscuits
1/2 c unstalted raw macadamia nuts
3/4 c all-purpose flour
1 1/2 t powdered ginger
1 1/2 c rolled oats
3/4 c granulated sugar
1/2 c dried shredded coconut
2 T boiling water
1 1/4 T golden syrup (or corn syrup)
1 t baking soda
4 oz butter

First step is to preheat the oven to 180 C / 375 F and, once warm, toast the nuts for a few minutes, stirring them to ensure even toasting. Remove when golden brown and aromatic and let cool in the pan. Then chop the nuts with a knife making the pieces not too large (they’ll fall too easily out of the cookie dough) but not so small that you lose the nice crunch of the nut.

Next step is to mix all the dry ingredients – except for the baking soda! – together. You may get the impression that there isn’t enough flour, but have faith that it will come together in the end.

Melt the butter on the stovetop. In a separate bowl, add the boiling water, golden syrup (which is a sugar cane based syrup – you can substitute corn syrup), and baking soda. Whisk briefly to set the soda bubbling then stir in the butter. Set aside for five minutes to allow it to cool slightly.

Pour the liquid mixture into the dry mixture, stirring throughly to combine. At this point, I decided to add a few more items: a handful of dried cranberries and about a 1/3 cup of coarsely chopped white chocolate. These were wonderful additions although by no means necessary.

You can then wrap the dough tightly and place in the refrigterator for fifteen minutes to firm it up slightly, making it easier to handle. If your kitchen is nice and cool and you aren’t having that problem, no need to refrigerate!

Prepare baking sheets with parchment paper then portion the dough onto the sheets. A heaping teaspoon full of dough should be enough, although you may want to experiment with sizes should you prefer a larger cookie. Bear in mind that these cookies will spread so don’t crowd them together. If you put the trays back into the refrigerator until baking, it will slow the spread.

Bake one sheet at a time in the oven for about 12 minutes or until golden brown, turning halfway through the baking to ensure even cooking. Cooking for a little longer will make for a crispier cookie. After taking the tray out of the oven, let the cookies rest on the tray for 5 minutes before transferring them to a wire rack. Let cool and enjoy!

As for the rest of our dinner, I prepared some nice crostini as an appetizer:

Balsamic-vinegar roasted sweet peppers on basil pesto.

Black olive and caper tapenade.

A fresh salad with feta, candied pecans, and cherry tomatoes.

A ham, black olive, and fresh mozzarella pizza.

And the real winner of the day, a white pizza with a simple white cream sauce, thinly sliced rosemary potatoes, a scattering of mozzarella cheese, and red onions. Divine!

Panini Extravaganza

Posted on 10 April 2010 by christao408

After dining twice at ‘ino in New York and purchasing their cookbook, Simple Italian Sandwiches: Recipes from America’s Favorite Panini Bar, you knew that I would begin preparing as many panini as were necessary for me to feel confident in my understanding of them, right?

Condimenti

The first step was to make some of the condimenti. Perusing the cookbook, I realized that one thing that had kept my pre-New York panini from really popping was the lack of a flavorful condiment. Generally, a panini is made with a meat ingredient, cheese, and an acidic or sour ingredient. Most of the time I was using mustard but that didn’t have enough impact.

I started with four main ingredients: garlic, red onions, red peppers, and a kind of chile that was the closest thing to a cherry pepper I could find.

Several of the red onions were cut into sixteenths and then tossed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

After about two hours at a low temperature with frequent stirring, we had a nice mass of caramelized sweet onions. I also made some balsamic roasted garlic bulbs.

Using some of the sweet onions as a base, I chopped some of the hot chilies (mostly deseeded to keep the heat at a tolerable level) and a little bell pepper to create a relish. Normally this is made with cherry peppers, which are mildly spicy round peppers.

Finally, I made peperonata, red peppers cut into one-inch dice and tossed with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, thyme and chile flakes, roasted for thirty minutes under tender.

Bread

The “secret” to ‘ino’s panini is that instead of using loaf bread they use ciabatta. Slicing the top off to make it roughly flat, they then slice the ciabatta in half length-wise. This way each bite has some of the nice crust on the bottom.

I made a couple of loaves of ciabatti and while the flavor was good, the rise wasn’t as high as I thought necessary and the crumb was very wide with large air bubbles. This made for a tough sandwich to grill as the fillings just worked their way through the bubbles and out the crust.

Batch #1

Italian Coppa, sweet onions, roasted garlic, arugula, and gouda cheese.

Homemade pesto, peperonata, and fresh mozzarella cheese.

The results: tasty, but a bit flat. The pesto nearly soaked through the bread.

Batch #2

Similar to the first sandwich – except with pickled red onions instead of roasted sweet onions. More cheese this time as the gouda seems to evaporate rather than melt.

Pesto, peperonata, mozzarella cheese (this time not fresh but lightly aged), with some chile relish for a change.

The results were better with this second batch – my ciabatti were higher thanks to folding over the dough several times during the rise. In this picture, you can see how the rolls have had their tops sliced. Still, though, the panini end up too flat because the bread just isn’t high enough.

Batch #3

This time a trio of sandwiches using a baguette I baked. Since I couldn’t get the ciabatta as high as I wanted, I decided to try an alternate style of bread.

Based on a suggestion from Sheldon (with some modification), here is rocket (arugula), camembert cheese, and the chile relish.

A scrambled egg with roasted sweet onions and gouda.

A different and prettier arrangement of peperonata, mozzarella cheese, and basil pesto.

This trio turned out very nice (accompanied with some of the balsamic roasted garlic) with bread that remained substantial after grilling. The only challenge was that since the diameter of the loaf is pretty small, there was a lot of crust to deal with. I love crusty bread but it was sometimes a bit tough on the roof of the mouth to chew!

Conclusions

One thing I’ve decided is that the regular loaf bread like a boule is the most suitable for panini, despite what ‘ino does. If/when I can make a ciabatti that has enough height or can find a place to buy decent ciabatta, then I’ll switch back to it. In the meantime, I’ll return to my pale ale boule recipe.

Another pleasant discovery – you can use the condimenti for other purposes.

Omelet with lightly pan fried zucchini, mozzarella cheese, and roasted sweet onions.

I hope you enjoyed!

From Pig to Porkchops

Posted on 17 March 2010 by christao408

We’re in Kansas City, which is experiencing slightly cooler-than-normal weather, visiting family and some friends and generally trying to unwind. The first several days of vacation have seen some of my attention turned towards work as a project needed to be wrapped up. Nothing too difficult, just some reading of documents.

Since St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, we decided to prepare an Irish (Irish-ish?) dish: shepherd’s pie. We involved both the nieces, figuring that one is much more likely to eat new foods if one has been involved with preparing the foods.

Emily and Tawn peeled and chopped potatoes, carrots, onions, and squash for the pie.

Ava assisted me in making a loaf of Irish soda bread, which had hints of orange zest in it and turned out very nicely.

After preparing dinner we headed about 30 minutes outside Kansas City (towards Lawrence) to visit the Gasper Family Farm. A local, family-run sustainable farm that I’ve been following for about a year and a half, I wanted to bring the girls out to see a real farm and, while there, to purchase some cuts of pork, some fresh eggs, and whatever else was available.

My parents decided to tag along for the ride. My father spent the first six years or so of his life living on a farm in central Missouri.

The farm is relatively simple – a house, a barn, and a few other small buildings. The cows are pastured a few miles away on rented land. There are pigs, geese, loads of chickens, and a horse that provides transportation.

The slightly older chickens – these are raised for meat – that haven’t feathered out enough to be taken to pasture, so they are still living in one of the chicken coops.

After a lot of coaxing, Ava and Emily agreed to pose by the pig pen. The animals were a little more “wild” than I think they expected, their previous farm experiences being limited only to petting zoos!

Everybody peering into the smaller chicken coop which contains the young chicks. They were running around, peeping, staying close to the warming lamps. It was chilly out on the farm and so after about twenty minutes we bundled back into the car with our sausage, pork chops, and two dozen eggs, and heading back to town.

After the visit to the farm, everyone was ready for a hearty dinner of shepherd’s pie, soda bread, and steamed artichokes – a not very Irish addition to the menu. Tawn and I were scheduled to head out to dinner with a friend, so didn’t join this meal.

Above, shepherd’s pie. We substituted pork for lamb and added some acorn squash for additional flavor. I did try a bite to make sure it turned out okay.

For dinner, we headed to Houston’s, a chain that has knife and fork ribs that Tawn really likes. We met our friend Jack there, a Thai who has studied and worked in the Kansas City area for more than a decade. This was a good chance to put my new camera to the low-lighting test. I’m happy with the results, although I need to play around with the instruction guide and settings a bit to learn how to coax the most from the camera.

Double-cut grilled pork chops with mashed potatoes and spinach.

Cous cous

Apple and walnut cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

Tag Archives: cooking

Fish Tacos with Avocado-Cilantro Lime Cream Sauce

Eggs Benedict

Shanghai Style Minced Meat with Pinenuts in Sesame Pockets

Mochi Cake

As Bangkok Burned, I Baked

Second Attempt at Mozzarella Cheesemaking

First Attempt at Making Mozzarella Cheese

Ginger Macadamia Cranberry White Chocolate ANZAC Biscuits

Panini Extravaganza

From Pig to Porkchops