Taro Update

I stuck a taro root that I got from H Mart into some potting soil & put it on my porch about a month and a half ago. Just in the last week, it's started shooting up.

This was completely non-existent a week ago:

Quick-and-Dirty Shrimp Stir-Fry (or, Oops, is it Lent AGAIN?)

I am feeling pretty good about my eating-out habits this week. Specifically, I haven't been doing it. And there have been several opportunities for me to do so this week. Nope! Instead I have been dutifully bringing lunch with me. I almost didn't yesterday - I had $10 on me, enough for a slice of pizza and about $7.50 left over. Instead, I made myself a ham and cheese sandwich.

Wait, it was Ash Wednesday yesterday, wasn't it? Oops. (Actually it was my mother's idea. She became Catholic several decades ago, not long before she married dear ol' dad, so she is usually on top of this sort of thing. Slipping, Mom?). I guess I should also feel bad about the delicious bacon I ate with breakfast.

At least I remembered for dinner - which, again, I narrowly avoided buying out, to celebrate the Chinese New Year (all these holidays at once). I made a none-too-pretty but still tasty enough stir fry. After putting (a little too much) vegetable oil in the wok, stirred in 3 cloves chopped garlic - I like garlic - and one chopped small onion. To that I added a few tablespoons of a sesame ginger stir fry sauce I got at Trader Joe's, some carrots and bell pepper slices from the freezer, a dash of fish sauce and (at the tail end) about ten raw shrimp. Stir fry until cooked through, and eat with some glass noodles. Put a little fish sauce and some jalapeño slices in a little bowl and let sit for a minute for an okay dipping sauce.

So back to Lent: These days, when I try to give up anything at all, it's for personal betterment and not punishment and denial, my motivation when I was a good, neurotic, closeted little Catholic boy. Maybe I should give up cookies, or snacking between meals. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination "fat" but I could stand to lose a handful of pounds. Or forgo spending (Yeah! save some money for Amsterdam, why don't you?). Or I could give up women. I know I'd stick to that!

Catfish Stir Fry with Bean Threads

While at Geresbeck's yesterday (see previous post), I decided to shop for ingredients for dinner. I haven't had a chance to use my wok since unpacking it and decided to put it to work. Tonight: a stir fry with whatever vegetables seemed good, and some sort of seafood base. I had considered reusing meatloaf stocked away in the freezer, but what person would actually stir fry meatloaf? (Google it - you find nothing but pages where the words "meatloaf stir fry" are coincidentally next to each other.) I found my answer at Geresbeck's: catfish. At about $4.80 a pound.

Catfish Stir Fry with Bean Threads

Ingredients:

for the dipping sauce:
2 T. fish sauce (Vietnamese is the best - try to find one with no corn syrup in it)
2 small Thai chilies, chopped, not seeded (unless, of course, you're a wuss)
about 1 T shavings from carrot (julienned or shaved with the vegetable peeler)

for the wok:
1 T vegetable oil, for frying
2 cloves garlic, smooshed and chopped
2 - 3 Thai chilies, chopped, not seeded (again, note the wuss comment above)
1 cm. cube fresh ginger, sliced into strips (yes, I went metric on you)
1 small yellow onion, sliced or chopped
1 red bell pepper, cut into strips
1 carrot, peeled and julienned or shaved with vegetable peeler
2 handfuls snow peas, in pouches
1 handful Thai basil
fish sauce to taste
1 lb. catfish fillets, cut into 1" pieces and marinated in:
2 T fish sauce,
1 chopped Thai chili,
juice of 1 - 2 limes, and
3 c. apple juice

for the bean threads:
1 small pot's worth of boiling water
2 nests of bean threads

Serves three to four

Prep:
Combine the ingredients for the dipping sauce in a small bowl and let sit until you're ready to eat.

Put the catfish into a glass or other non-reactive container with the fish sauce, apple juice and chilis, and let sit at least 20 minutes.

Boil water. Add bean threads once boiling, remove from heat, and cover for 15 minutes.

Coat the wok with the oil, dumping out excess oil if necessary, and fry the ginger, garlic, chilis and onion over low heat (or else they will burn). Throw in the red pepper, carrots and snow peas and stir fry over low heat, adding fish sauce as desired...

A note about the fish sauce: there's a lot more available these days in the US, and at least in a large metro area, you don't need to travel far to find some. There is some junk out there, but some good stuff as well. The "nuoc-mam-miers" (fish sauce snobs) recommend the fish sauce from Vietnam. Even so, look for the kind with sugar instead of corn syrup. Okay, back to the recipe.

Take the catfish and add that to the wok, stirring occasionally. Cover the wok and let cook until catfish breaks easily and is not transparent.

Drain the bean threads. Put a small amount of the transparent bean threads on plate (as much or as little as desired), and put stir-fry on top. Serve with dipping sauce. I liked to dip my fish in the carrot-chili-tinged fish sauce instead of sauce (ooh, note to self: buy soy sauce). It's some tasty catfish!

The Noodle Whore (?)

I was watching Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations: Los Angeles just now on the Travel Channel. He visited Thai Town in LA, and met up with a blogger from the San Gabriel Valley, LA, CA. He spoke to this one blogger who calls himself, simply, the Noodle Whore. How funny! When I visit SoCal this April, I may need to take some of his recommends for good Asian noodles. Mind you, his last entry is for September 2006, but hopefully most of these places are still open.

An Unconventional Use for Fish Sauce

Whether it's called nam pla (in Thailand) or nước mắm (in Vietnam), fish sauce is one big condiment in Southeast Asia. In the US, it's primarily found in restaurants sweetened with little julienned strips of carrots, maybe pepper flakes, and the occasional small slices of green onion. I have been using it for years, though admittedly not often. When I'm not cooking Vietnamese or Thai food, I get some extra use from it in recipes that I get from The Classical Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger. This book adapts ancient Roman recipes for the modern day, as faithfully as possible - and these recipes all come from a time long before pasta, tomatoes or potatoes were ever introduced into Italy.

So the next question on your mind might be: how authentically Roman is Southeast Asian fish sauce? Turns out that scholars had been scratching their heads trying to recreate the ancient process for making garum, a fermented fish gut product that was used in Rome as often as ketchup is here. Long story short: nothing the culinary archaeologists did worked, but it hit them that garum and Thai / Vietnamese fish sauce were actually made in much the same way (though, disturbingly, Thai / Vietnamese fish sauce, according to the above link, is probably not as strong as garum, because they don't throw in the guts of just any fish into the mixture in Southeast Asia; the Romans would just throw in guts from any fish). Why recreate garum when it's being made in Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillippines?

The recipe I use most often is adapted from one for mushrooms. Just bring equal parts of olive oil, honey and fish sauce to a boil, add lovage or celery leaves, and throw in sliced up mushrooms - about 1 to 2 cups of the sauce per pound of mushroom, depending on how much of the sauce you really like (I like more). This recipe works very well with portabello mushrooms.