We are Asian food fanatics!

 

Yes, we've been on a kick lately.  It happens.  Japanese- everything from the hibachi joints to sushi. Thai- making it ourselves and stocking up various curry pastes from our favorite Asian market.  Chinese- digging dumplings, which we prefer our own homemade versions!

Viv is a dumpling devotee.  But it's only been this week that she wanted me to show/teach her to make them from scratch.  She's really been getting into cooking recently, which makes me so happy, of course.  We found round Hong Kong style dumpling wrappers at our favorite market, Asian Market on Dutch Square Blvd. I just gave Viv the basic run-down verbally, and while I was out working, she whipped up the filling herself.

We got the butcher at Publix to grind some pork for us. Then, Vivian used that, some chopped serrano pepper, finely chopped carrot, green onion, ginger, garlic, an egg, and some soy sauce to create the dumpling filling.  We wrapped them up, and off to the races.  If you've never made your own, it's quite simple.  The most challenging part is learning the various methods to folding and crimping the dumpling. But, simply folding and sealing is ok; no need to be fancy. 

You heat a very thin layer of oil in a skillet. Place dumplings bottom (flattened) side down to fry and get golden crispy. Then, you (carefully) add about a 1/3 cup water and smack a lid on that baby. Crisping up the bottoms before adding water keeps them from sticking; skip this step, and you have a stuck on mess (thus the name potstickers.) Turn the heat down to med-low and let them steam about 3-4 minutes. Then, remove lid, turn heat up a bit to cook out any remaining liquid and to make sure dumpling bottoms stay crisp. Now, get your chopsticks and get ready to have (IMHO) better than restaurant dumplings.

I like mixing up a simple dipping sauce of soy sauce, rice vinegar, thin slices of ginger and sliced green onion.  

Tonight, we wrapped them all up, cooked a few, served with some sauteed baby bok choy and put the rest of the dumplings in the freezer for another day!

In the style of the Shepherd

Around here, the little Akre crew can dig on some Mexican food. As children of the 70's, Neil and I are nostalgically fond of the good ol' American Tex-Mex ground beef taco with crunchy shell, cheddar, onion, tomato, lettuce, etc., you get my drift.  Make no mistake, I still make these kind of tacos every time we have one of those busy weeknights. I.LOVE.TACOS.


But, as we have aged and evolved, we have been fortunate enough to actually experience Mexico and myriad really, good, authentic Mexican restaurants and Mexican people here in the U.S.  As time has gone by, our knowledge (by "our," I mean Americans in general) of true Mexican food has gradually been realized.  True Mexican style tacos are something relatively new to many Americans, as many of our brethren still flock to the standard Tex-Mex "Somebody's San Jose" and order crap like the "Speedy Gonzales" or the ubiquitous "Lunch #3."  

One of my favorites is Tacos al Pastor.  I've always wondered about the "al" part of this name, so I checked into the history of this dish.  From what I've read, this dish was actually introduced to Mexico by Lebanese immigrants.  It was inspired by schwarma, also one of my favorite dishes, so this is all starting to make sense.  If you are unfamiliar with "al Pastor," it is a mixture of marinated pork, onion and pineapple served in a warm corn tortilla and topped with finely diced onion, cilantro and a squeeze of lime.  

So, as you can probably deduce by now, I like making stuff at home.  I recently got a shipment of beautiful boneless, center cut pork chops.  Pastor time!  It is surprisingly easy to make and so worth the small amount of effort.

Guajillos:  I use these for enchilada sauce, my tamales and now for this!

 

Chop up those finishing touches for your tacos

Boneless pork & pineapple in marinade

 

Draining off marinade

 

Cookin' up that goodness!

Taco al Pastor with homemade refried beans

Tacos al Pastor
5 dried Guajillo chiles
1 chipotle pepper 
1 med onion, chopped
1 can pineapple chunks 
1/8 cup vinegar
1 Tbs minced garlic
1/2 tsp cumin
1 lb (roughly) boneless pork, cut into small cubes
1 Tbs canola oil
Corn tortillas
Chopped cilantro
Chopped onion
Wedges of lime

1.  Boil about 1 cup water and soak chiles for about 10 min to soften.  Cool, then remove stems and seeds.

2.   Chop onion, strain pineapple and reserved the juice.

3.   Transfer guajillo peppers, chipotle pepper, half of the chopped onion, 1/2 of pineapple juice (save the rest for another use), vinegar, garlic and cumin in food processor.  Puree until smooth.

4.   Transfer mixture to saucepan and bring to a boil; cook until raw onion taste subsides, about 2 minutes.  If you want it spicier, add some adobe from the can of chipotles. Cool then combine in a ziploc bag with pork, remaining onion & pineapple.  Refrigerate and marinate at least 2 hours, up to 24. 

5.    Drain meat/pineapple mixture & discard marinade.  Heat a bit of oil in skillet.  Add pork and pineapple and cook until dark golden brown and cooked through, about 15 minutes. 

6.   Dry "fry" corn tortillas in skillet to soften.  Add meat, pineapple, finely chopped onion, cilantro and give it a good squeeze of lime.


I served our tacos with homemade refried beans. These are so simple, you'll wonder why we ever bothered buying them in a can.

1. Take a 30 oz. can of pintos and "lightly" drain them.
2. Heat about a Tbs oil and add a couple of garlic cloves.
3. When they are lightly brown, crush them up with a fork.  Or, if you prefer, just use minced garlic.  The point is to flavor the oil. 
4. Add beans, 1 tsp chili powder, 1 tsp cumin, salt to taste.
 5.  Cook about 5 min until beans are heated.  Mash with potato masher until consistency you like.  Squeeze in some lime juice, stir and enjoy! 



 

Free Range from a Friend

When you give yourself the luxury of a few minutes of quiet time to just think, you realize just how cool this life is. We all meander in and out of each other's lives; sometimes only once in a blue moon, sometimes daily. But, regardless of frequency, these relationships are truly what life on this planet are all about.

Neil and I live in an awesome neighborhood with neighbors that we've known for many years. Yeah, it's that kind of place. We move here, get to know each other and we never leave. We are Rosewood lifers.  One such neighbor is Sharon.  She and her sig-other James decided a few years ago to become farmers.  They still live around the corner but they operate Carolina Bay Farms over in the Hopkins area. As I remember, it started with fresh eggs.  But, just a few days ago, Neil ran into her and became aware that they are now raising heritage meats. He came home with a bag full o' pork chops!

Tonight we cooked those little babies. Neil is big on really tasting the flavor of meat, so all we did was salt & pepper them. I seared them in my grill pan for about 2 minutes/side on high heat then transferred them to a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes.  Meanwhile, I made a mushroom/white wine sauce to serve alongside.

In a word...perfect.  The pork is so flavorful without a lot of "flavoring."  No need to marinate, is what I'm saying.  The time and method of my cooking resulted in a perfectly cooked yet moist pork chop, which you all know can be quite a challenge at times. I toasted some good Italian bread and served our chops with mushroom sauce over the bread and green peas on the side.  As Wayne & Garth would say, SCHWIIING!

So, if you have not heard about Carolina Bay Farms, please check them out.  Thankfully, Columbia is hot and heavy (finally) on the farm-to-table and eat local movement. Sharon and James are doing good things just 20 minutes from town. Seek them out, support them and eat good pork chops!  

Beef, I mean Pork, with Broccoli

Friends, I have been away.  To give you the short version, my mom had brain aneurysm surgery at the beginning of January and unfortunately, suffered a stroke during or right after. She's spent 2 weeks in the hospital and is now in a rehab hospital. She's improving everyday but it's a long road we have been set upon.


Here's something I can tell you:  if you're a food lovin' fool like I am, it's really, really hard to assist someone you love with a "mechanical soft" diet.  Know what that means?  It's not pureed, which is gross on a whole other level, but it's not much of an improvement. It means whatever is on the menu gets chopped up beyond recognition.  Tastes the same, but presentation goes out the window.  And bless her heart, I think my mom has been served mashed potatoes at every meal.  I mean, everyone loves mashed potatoes, but if you want to kill that for someone, just serve it to them meal after meal after meal. 

My dad and I spend every day at the hospital, helping with therapy, hypothesizing with the doctors, watching and observing.  I have to hand it to Neil; he has really stepped in and taken the wheel many a night on the dinner front because after spending a day in a hospital, you return home a victim of the mental time suckage vortex.  You hardly know your own name and all you want is wine.

Today was a really good day and I was excited about cooking tonight.  I mean, that's my hobby, right?  I had a beautiful pork loin that I had already cut up into chops. (Used part of that yesterday for a crockpot going all day at my dad's pad and one here!). The remainder I used tonight for stir-fry.  For some reason, my mind settled on the "beef with broccoli" idea but with my boneless pork.  So, I followed my basic Bw/B recipe and just jazzed it up a little.

I sliced my pork into thin strips and marinated it in 1/2 cup soy sauce, 2 Tbs cornstarch, 2 Tbs Sherry cooking wine and 2 tsp sugar.  I then stir-fried chopped onion, small broccoli florets, & julienned carrot. I took those out of the wok and then added chopped ginger and the pork. After a couple of minutes, I added my veggies back in, added the marinade liquid and some chiffonaded (is that a word "chiffonade-ed"?) spinach.  Served it over fragrant jasmine rice and we were happy little people. 

You know, if I were to chop up the pork, I bet this could qualify as "mechanical soft." It sure as hell looks better than what mom's been getting at the hospital! 

 

Mission: NOT Impossible

Of all the cuisines, Mexican is one of my all-time favorites.  I love queso and chips as much as the next guy, but for me the ultimate Mexican dish is tamales.  And they are hard to come by. Not many restaurants serve them and it’s even harder to find a person who makes them.  I know. For years, I’ve wanted to learn to make them. I’ve always been told that they are soooooo hard to make.  They are soooooo complicated. They are such a project that someone’s grandmother might make them for a very special occasion. So, I’ve merely dreamed and aspired to become a tamale cook for a very long time.  

I came across an old 1980’s Mexican cookbook that a friend was throwing out.  I scooped it up and there it was.  A tamale recipe.  I read it over and over again because I just couldn’t grasp what was so difficult about what I was reading.  And then it happened.  I bought a Boston butt and I made tamales.

I don’t know what I’ve been waiting on. I let others convince me that this was some insurmountable task. But here’s the news flash…it is not difficult to make tamales.  At all.  It takes some time, but it’s not hard. And, they were fabulous!

I started with a Boston butt; trim excess fat and cut into pieces

 

Stewing on the stovetop for about an hour

Guajillo chiles are the base for the sauce

Gorgeous color!  Homemade enchilada sauce

I love that happy little corn man

You spread the masa on the corn husk with your fingers

Add a little filling

Fold sides over filling and pointed end under

Steam bath for about an hour

My finished product

OMG!  My tamales were fantastic, if I do say so myself!  The sauce has out-of-this-world flavor.  It’s so simple to make. You soak the chiles in hot water to soften them up, then remove seeds and puree them with the soaking liquid. Then you cook the puree with some garlic, flour, vinegar, cumin and oregano. Nothing difficult about that. The pork is stewed with some garlic, onion, bay leaf and peppercorns. After it’s cooked, you shred it, mix with sauce and refrigerate overnight.  Nothing hard about that. 

You also save the pork broth for the masa. Refrigerate that overnight so you can skim the fat off before mixing up the masa.  The next day, you simply mix the masa with warm broth, shortening, and baking powder until it becomes a soft, wet dough.  You soak your corn husks in hot water for about an hour to make them pliable. Then, it’s just a matter of spreading out some masa, add some filling and fold.  They steam for about an hour and then you are ready to dig in. The masa was so soft and tender and flavorful. This is key because even in restaurants I’ve had tamales with dried out masa and it ruined the whole dish. The pork was tender and that sauce, oh the sauce!   

And none of this was hard to do!  It takes some time, but anything worth doing is worth the time. My parents came to dinner and we all fell in love with the tamales.  So much so that later that  week, I made another batch.  A double batch!

We Love Dumplings!

 I started making wontons back in high school.  My mom had come across a recipe for "Tex-Mex Wontons" and we made them for pretty  much every party we hosted.  In essence, it was taco meat folded into a wonton skin and fried. They were awesome.


After college, my friend Susannah showed me how she makes her famous dumplings.  You may call them potstickers. Do you know the reason they call them that? If you steam a wonton skin, it becomes soft, pliable and kind of gummy.  So, they will stick to a pot in a heartbeat unless you know what you're doing. So what do you do?  You fry the bottoms of your dumplings in a thin layer of oil until they are crispy.  Then, carefully (very, very carefully) add water to the pan and cover it quickly to steam.  The fried bottom keeps the dumpling from sticking to your pot.  Skip this step and you have one stuck-to-the-pot fiasco.

So, ever since Susannah taught me this technique, I've been making my own.  They are ridiculously easy and so darn tasty.

Tonight's batch started with about a pound of ground pork.  I grated ginger and garlic over the meat, added chopped green onion and chopped water chestnuts.  Then I added just a little soy sauce for flavor and mixed it all up with my hands. 

Then, I placed about 2 teaspoons of meat into the center of my wonton wrapper, wet the edges with water and just twisted them up.  

Like I said, heat a thin layer of oil in a skillet with a good fitting lid.  Fry the bottoms of the dumplings until they are browned and easily lift from the skillet.  Next, add about 1/4 cup of water.  I shield myself with the lid as I add the water to prevent spatter and then cover it quickly.  Let steam a couple of minutes and that's all she wrote.


I like to mix up a dipping sauce of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and some sliced green onion.  Simple and delicious.

Tonight, I served the dumplings with a vegetable fried rice, using peas, carrots, green beans, onions and scrambled egg.

This is a great way to spice up dinner at home and you can make big batches and freeze these little babies for another day. And, just like stir-fry or fried rice, you can make your dumpling filling with pretty much whatever you have available: ground pork, turkey, chicken. Ginger & garlic, green onion, carrot, bean sprouts, you name it.  Don't let this simple dish not make its way into your home.  So very easy and something interesting on the plate.  Enjoy!

It's Hardly Even Cooking

You know how you always hear people say things like "keep it simple" or "it's the simple things" or "the simpler the better?"  The reason you hear these phrases is because they have become cliches.  Why have they become cliches? Because they are true.  As much as I love elaborate, gourmet food, the simple truth is that sometimes, the simpler the dish, the more complex the satisfaction factor.

 Our dinner tonight was a classic example of this phenomenon.  I found this on Pinterest and as I recently said to a high school friend via Facebook, it's hardly cooking at all.  It's embarrassingly easy, especially for someone like me who loves to cook, experiment and tell the world about it. I've made this dish several times because a) it's really good b) it's crazy easy and c) my husband practically breaks down in tears when I tell him it's what's for dinner. So far, I've shared it with my friend Laurin, who has some challenges getting her kids to eat.  They love this dish.  I've also shared it with my mom, who tells me that she's also made it with chicken with great results.  


Today was one of those action-packed days. Pick up the veggie box first thing in the morning, hit Bed, Bath & Beyond for coffee, shop for birthday gift, take Vivi to birthday party, meet with clients while she's there and then home for a minute (or two) of Saturday relaxation. (I have to tell you that Viv cracked me up today in the store when she declared that Bed, Bath & Beyond wasn't really "all that beyond.") Knowing that the crockpot was bubbling away eliminated one important part of the day for me to be concerned about. 

The ultimate beauty of this dish is its simplicity.  Like I said, it's hardly even really cooking, but the result is very tasty and it seems to please everyone.  As you can surmise, this is perfect for weeknights when we all need about 12 more hours in our days.  I don't actually fool with the parmesan potatoes because I think it's overkill.  A simple, plain mashed potato is all you need because of the flavorful sauce.  But, you feel free to make whatever kind of potatoes are your favorite. Tonight, I served this with a simple side of steamed broccoli drizzled with a little lemon butter.  Simple and satisfying.

Chop Chop!

We are fans of "the other white meat" around here.  Recently, I went shopping and had boneless pork chops on my list because they were on sale.  I bought a pack that contained about a dozen chops.  When I got home, I looked closer at the label and realized that they had been mismarked as "country style ribs."  This is significant because the ribs were about $2.00 less per pound.  Nice little accidental score!

Yesterday we had some cold weather again.  Last week we were wearing shorts, but now it's more November-like.  So, I wanted to cook something kind of homey.  I went to my old, well-worn Weight Watchers cookbooks. 

These are some of the best cookbooks that I own.  The recipes are excellent, they always work and they've been made healthier by the good people at WW.  This recipe comes from the book Simple Goodness.

Oven "fried" Pork Chops

• 4 (6oz) lean pork chops
• 2 Tbs pineapple juice (or lemon, orange, whatever you have available works)
• 1 Tbs soy sauce
• 1/4 tsp ground ginger
• 1/8 tsp garlic powder
• 1 large egg white, lightly beaten
• 1/3 cup dry bread crumbs
• 1/4 tsp dried Italian seasoning
• 1/4 tsp paprika
• dash of garlic powder

Heat the oven to 350.  Trim the fat from the chops.

Combine juice and next 4 ingredients in bowl; stir well.  Combine bread crumbs, Italian seasoning, paprika and garlic powder in a shallow dish; stir well.

Dip the chops in the juice mixture and dredge in the crumb mixture.  Place on a broiler pan coated with cooking spray.  Spray the tops of the chops as well.  Bake at 350 for about 40-45 minutes.  Let them rest about 5 minutes before digging in.  

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