I had so many delicious noodles in Hong Kong, and I've been doing my best to do justice to those spicy bowls back in America. Some of my favorite noodle shops--Good Hope Noodle in Mong Kok, Mak's Noodles in Central, and Ho To Tai Noodle Shop in the New Territories--serve fried egg noodles with BBQ pork belly. It's amazingly good. So I took a stab at my own version.
Using some Chinese five spice, s&p, fresh tomatoes, vinegar, olive oil, soy sauce, and just a few tablespoons of some Texas-style sweet and tangy BBQ sauce (I said this was a take on the dishes I had!), I whipped up a sauce to accompany the noodles and pork belly. You'll need a few hours to make the pork belly, but once it's done this dish is quick and easy. And you can even cook up the pork belly the day before you're planning to make your noodles.
Want some music to go with those Hong Kong noodles and pork belly? Here's Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Hong Kong Garden."
Ingredients:
--pork belly
--1 lb. Chinese egg noodles (I prefer the super skinny kind, and you can find them at an Asian grocery)
--1/2 tsp. Chinese five spice
--3 tbsp. soy sauce
--1 medium-sized tomato, pureed
--1 tsp. pomegranate vinegar (you could use a simple balsamic vinegar instead)
--2-3 tsp. olive oil
--2 tbsp. Texas-style BBQ sauce (feel free to make your own too, of course!)
--1 tsp. salt & pepper
--1-2 tsp. coarse sea salt
Preheat oven to 475 degrees F.
You're going to make the pork belly first, and you'll need to make it at least 3-4 hours before you plan to start on the noodles.
Score the skin/fat of the pork belly with a very sharp knife, being careful not to cut into the meat. Sprinkle the coarse sea salt over the skin and rub in, pushing the salt into the score marks. Pour about 1 tsp. or so of the olive oil over the skin and rub in thoroughly.
Place the pork belly on a roasting rack in a roasting pan, and place in the hot oven for 20 minutes, or just until the skin begins to bubble. Turn the heat down to 325 degrees F and continue roasting for about 2.5 hours, or until the meat begins to easily pull apart. Depending on the size of your pork belly, you'll need to keep an eye on it and adjust accordingly. Once it's done, remove from the oven and allow it to rest, covered with foil, for at least 20 minutes.
Onto the main dish. In a small bowl, combine the Chinese five spice, soy sauce, tomato, pomegranate vinegar, BBQ sauce, about 1 tsp. or so olive oil, and 1 tsp. s&p. Whisk together to combine, then set aside.
In a medium-sized pot, boil your egg noodles for just about a minute and a half, then drain and rinse with cold water. Set aside for just a few minutes while you get the pork belly ready.
When your pork belly has cooled, slice and chop into about 1/2" strips. Over medium heat in a sauce pan, fry the pork belly to crisp it up, about 5 min. Once it's sizzling, add the sauce mixture and continue to fry for another minute or two. Add the egg noodles. Cook for another minute or two as you mix the noodles with the pork belly and sauce, just until everything is crispy and ready to serve. If you have more noodles than you can eat, this dish makes for some great leftovers.
I can't stop dreaming about Japanese matcha desserts. In case you're not familiar with matcha, it's a ground green tea in powder form, and it's one of the most brightly colored teas you'll ever see. I bought some from Ippodo at their main store on Kyoto's Teramachi Street, and I brought it home with me to Virginia. I plan to make as many matcha sweets as possible before its expiration date. This mousse tart takes a little bit of time, but it's light, airy, and earthy. Oh, and it's a magnificent shade of green.
While in Kyoto, I sampled a very wide variety of matcha desserts, and aside from the ice cream, a slice of a matcha mousse tart was my favorite. It turns out it's difficult to find a good recipe in English. Thanks goodness for GoogleTranslate! Despite its many idiomatic dilemmas, running a search for "抹茶のタルト" provided me with precisely the information I needed. After some initial translations back to English, I realized the recipes used metric measurements. But with some math, baking intuition, and luck, I managed to make a dessert that brought me back to Japan.
The recipe involves making a matcha sponge cake crust, and then following that with the matcha mousse. Plan for some refrigerator time, too--it'll need about 3 hours to set.
Thinking about being lost in translation, so to speak, and the memory of walking through the streets of Kyoto, it only makes sense to give you this song: here's Air's "Alone in Kyoto" from Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation soundtrack.
Sponge Cake Ingredients:
--2 large eggs
--1/4 c. granulated sugar
--2 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
--1/4 c. all-purpose flour
--2 tbsp. cornstarch
--1 tbsp. matcha
Mousse Ingredients:
--3 large egg yolks
--1/4 c. granulated sugar
--1/3 c. whole milk
--1 c. whipping cream
--2 heaping tbsp. matcha
--1 package gelatine
--2 tbsp. luke-warm water
--2 tbsp. hot water
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
Make the sponge cake crust first. In a stand mixer, beat eggs and sugar until pale yellow. Add butter and continue to mix on low speed.
In a medium-sized bowl, sift together cornstarch, flour, and matcha. Slowly add, bit by bit, to the wet mixture in your stand mixer. Mix on low speed until the dry ingredients are fully incorporated.
Line a springform pan with parchment paper and pour in your cake batter (there's not going to be very much of it at all, so don't be alarmed). Bake for about 15 minutes or until a cake tester comes out clean. Remove from oven and allow to cool. Once it's done cooling, trim the edges so the cake fits in the bottom of a tart pan or a pie dish and refrigerate until you're ready for it.
Onto the mousse. Clean your stand mixer bowl, and whisk the egg yolks and sugar until they're fully combined. Set aside for just a minute or two.
In a small bowl, incorporate your gelatine into the 2 tbsp. of luke-warm water. You'll need to whisk it just a bit. Set aside (but not for too long--it'll begin to congeal). In a pot, whisk together the matcha and the 2 tbsp. hot water. It'll be just enough liquid to form a matcha paste. Now add the whole milk over low heat and whisk constantly to incorporate. Bring to a boil, and as soon as the milk begins to bubble around the sides, remove it from the heat. Only after you've removed it from the heat and it has just started to cool, whisk in the gelatine. (It's really important that the milk isn't boiling when you add the gelatine--it'll kill the gelatine.)
Add the green tea/milk mixture to the egg yolk mixture a bit at a time, and beat on medium speed for several minutes until it gets frothy. Your green tea/milk mixture should be warm enough to temper the egg yolks.
Now pour the whipping cream into a separate bowl and whisk until medium peaks form. Slowly fold it into the green tea/milk mixture until it's incorporated. You've got your mousse!
Remove your sponge cake crust from the refrigerator and pour the mousse mixture over it. Cover very tightly with plastic wrap, being careful not to let the plastic wrap cling to the top of the mousse. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours.
When you're ready to serve your matcha mousse tart, use a flour sifter to dust the top with matcha. Serve chilled.
The first of my glorious recipes from Hong Kong! This one's usually a winter dish, warm and comforting. But I tried Chinese clay pot rice for the first time in Hong Kong this summer at Ser Wong Fun despite the hundred-degree weather and stifling humidity. Ser Wong Fun is known for making delicious snake soup and clay pot rice when it's cold outside, and it's located just a few doors down from Linva Tailor, the shop that made Maggie Cheung's cheongsams for In the Mood for Love.
You could make this rice in any heavy cookware, but a Chinese clay pot is the best and most authentic way to cook up this dish. The traditional kitchen shops along Hong Kong's Shanghai Street stock stacks of them, but lucky for everyone outside of China, they're pretty easy to buy online, too.
You can put just about any ingredients you'd like in your clay pot rice. I tried to mirror the dish I had at Ser Wong Fun, so I mixed fresh ginger, scallions, and lap cheong (Chinese sweet sausage) in with my rice. Since this dish originated so close to the fabrics and dresses of the Wong Kar-wai film that stole my heart, here's Nat King Cole's "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás" from In the Mood for Love.
Ingredients:
--1 c. purple rice (you can buy Chinese rice at an Asian grocery store if you've got one, but otherwise, a jasmine rice will do)
--3 full tbsp. freshly minced ginger (don't buy ginger that has already been minced and canned--you need to buy it fresh, and then peel and chop it yourself)
--3 sweet Chinese sausages (as with the purple rice, an Asian grocery should sell these sausages, but you could substitute a hard salami)
--2 tbsp. freshly chopped scallions
--1/4 c. soy sauce
--1 tsp. salt
First, immerse your clay pot in water and then towel dry it. Add 1 c. rice, salt, and 1 1/4 c. water (or whatever water-to-rice ratio your rice calls for--this dish is best with your rice a little bit al dente). Heat over low-medium heat, uncovered, until the water just begins to boil. Reduce heat to low and cover. Allow to cook for approximately 12-15 minutes or until the rice has absorbed all the water.
Meanwhile, remove the casing from your sausages and chop into roughly 1/4" quarters. Pan fry the sausage until it's cooked and crispy, about 4-5 minutes over medium heat. Mix the sausage, 2 tbsp. of the freshly minced ginger, and soy sauce to the clay pot. Mix and continue to heat over low heat for just about 5-6 minutes, or until the soy sauce has cooked into the rice mixture.
Top with the remaining 1 tbsp. of fresh ginger and scallions and serve warm. We sauteed some bok choy on the side. Yum!
In the weeks leading up to my trip to Hong Kong, I did a lot of baking but didn't leave much time for blogging. As a result, I'm writing up a few of those blogs now while the rain pours down in Kowloon. (By the way, I was hoping to make some Cantonese food in my Kowloon kitchen during my month-long stay here, but the kitchen is even smaller and more ill-equipped than I had imagined, so any new dishes are going to have to wait until I'm back in the U.S.).
Most people don't think of plums as a likely pie filling, but like any stone fruit, they're delicious when baked into a flaky crust. It's best to use plums that are just getting ripe--not too soft. And one of the great things about a stone fruit pie is that it's really simple. You'll be able to get this dessert in the oven with about 15 minutes of prep time.
What song? For such a delicious stone fruit pie, here's Van Morrison's "And It Stoned Me" (and the lyrics to this song fit the weather in Hong Kong, too).
Ingredients:
--2 pie crusts, rolled and ready to go (recipe here)
--6 plums, cored and sliced thinly (leave the skins on)
--1/4 c. cornstarch
--1/4 c. granulated sugar
--juice and zest of 1 lemon
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
In a large bowl, combine plum slices, cornstarch, sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest. Pour into a prepared pie shell. Add the top pie crust and pinch crust however you'd like. I did a lattice weave and then sprinkled some turbinado sugar on top before baking.
Cover the crust with foil and bake for 25 minutes. Remove foil and continue to bake for another 25 minutes. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
Who doesn't love a good sandwich cookie? Truth be told, ice cream sandwich cookies from The Coolhaus are my favorite variety (hmm, maybe I should make some). But when I can't have ice cream "sammies," a Linzer cookie (or two) makes for an excellent treat.
How do you make pomegranate and orange cookies, you ask? You could do it a lot of ways, but my recipe involves pomegranate jelly-filled orange shortbread. I've modified my vanilla rum shortbread recipe to add some sweet citrus flavor.
Since Linzer cookies require more steps than your typical cookie recipe, I'll keep this post short and sweet. Here's R.E.M.'s "Orange Crush."
Ingredients:
--2 sticks + 6 tbsp. chilled and chopped unsalted butter
--zest of one orange (approximately 1 tbsp.)
--2 tbsp. freshly squeezed orange juice
--1 c. turbinado sugar
--1 c. cornstarch
--2 c. all-purpose flour, + extra for rolling
--1 tsp. salt
--pomegranate jelly (I used one from Kozlowski Farms in Sonoma, CA)
--about 1/2 c. confectioners' sugar for dusting
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
In a large bowl, sift the flour, cornstarch, and salt. In a food processor, combine flour mixture, butter, orange zest, and sugar. Pulse for about 1-2 minutes. Slowly drizzle in the freshly squeezed orange juice and continue to pulse until a dough forms.
On a floured surface, separate your dough into quarters. Roll each piece of dough until it's about 1/4" thick (you can make thicker cookies if you'd like, but since these are going to be sandwich cookies, I like them on the thinner side). Use a floured Linzer cookie cutter and cut enough cookies for both the bottom layer and the top layer (the one with the decorative cutout). Repeat with remaining dough, incorporating the scraps until you've used all the dough.
Place cookies on a parchment-lined sheet and bake for 8-9 minutes (no more!). If the cookies become golden on top, they're a bit overdone. Remember, they'll be *really* soft when you take them out of the oven--it'll seem like they're not done, but they are. Place on a cooling rack using a thin spatula and allow cookies to cool completely.
Once they've cooled, place about 1 tsp. pomegranate jelly on a "bottom layer" cookie and put a "top layer" cookie on top, making a cookie sandwich. The jelly should poke through the decorative cutout. Repeat until all the cookies have become delicious little sandwiches.
Using a sifter, dust all the cookies with confectioners' sugar before serving.
The weather is hot, hot, hot here, and I was in the mood to make a summertime pie. Looking for something new, I began perusing the archives of Saveur, hoping to find a unique idea. I came across a recipe for a Concord grape pie and decided to adapt it for this delicious grape pie a la mode (no grape pie is complete, in my opinion, without a scoop of vanilla ice cream). It's so simple yet oh-so-good.
While this pie is delicious warm, you've gotta let this one cool once you take it out of the oven. The filling really needs to set. If you want to have your pie warm with some ice cream or whipped cream on top, first let it set and heat it up just a tad later on. (By the way, you'll notice my new Le Creuset red "pie bird" in my pics. Super cool. Thanks, Happy Cook!)
I'll let you in on a little secret: my new thing for fruit pies is adding some jelly or preserves. It helps the filling to firm up a bit, and it adds a great jammy flavor.
And another not-so-secret tip: grape juice really does stain! After making this pie, my fingertips were purple, and my white melamine bowls were flecked with purple. My kitchen was in, well, a bit of a purple haze. Naturally, here's the Cure covering Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze."
Ingredients:
--2 pie crusts (my truly never-fail pie crust recipe here)
--1 pound black grapes (you could definitely use Concord grapes, but our Virginia grocery stores don't seem to stock them)
--1/4 cup grape jelly
--1/4 c. granulated sugar
--juice from one lemon (freshly squeezed is always better!)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Line a 9" pie dish with your first pie crust. Now, I hope you have some patience. Fill a large bowl about halfway with ice water and set aside. Bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil and drop your grapes in. Let them sit for just 20-30 seconds, then remove and place in the ice water. This is all to make "skinning" your grapes a little bit easier. (The skins will peel off relatively easily, but this is still a labor of love.)
Put grape skins in a large bowl and set aside.
Add skinned grapes to a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, stirring regularly for about 12-15 minutes, or until the grapes are quit soft.
Using a potato masher or a fork, mash them just a little bit (you want them mashed but retaining a bit of shape). Transfer them into the bowl with the skins. Add grape jelly, sugar, and lemon juice. Mix and pour into unbaked pie shell. (If you have a "pie bird" like mine, place him in the center of your pie crust before pouring in the grape mixture.)
Cover the pie with the second crust. You can do a lattice pie if you'd like, or simply cover with a full pie crust and cut a small hole in the center. Pinch the edges and cover them in foil.
Bake for 35 minutes with crusts covered. After 35 minutes, remove the foil and bake for about another 20 minutes, or until crusts are just golden brown and the top of the pie crust is firm. Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely.
I really recommend serving warmed, a la mode. The pie leftovers will keep for quite a few days and are also delicious straight out of the fridge.
This dessert is my own version of a deconstructed (or reconstructed, as it were) gingersnap cookie dipped in bittersweet lemon curd. It's a ginger cookie crust, filled with homemade lemon curd, and topped with a molasses whipped cream.
It's been awhile since I've made a tart, but every time I do, I think about "Queen of Tarts"--a gorgeous little food and pastry shop in Cape Town, SA that's more than worth a visit (or two).
The Felice Brothers have a new album coming out, "Favorite Waitress," and it features a pretty excellent song I heard about a year ago on a recording from Asheville's Orange Peel. Here's that acoustic version of "Cherry Licorice."
...All she wants to drink is lemon spritzer/ she don't care if the image fits her/ Who wants to spend their time/ choking on lemon rind
Ingredients:
*Adapted from Ina Garten's "Lemon Curd Tart"
Ginger Cookie Crust:
--12 tbsp. unsalted butter, chilled and chopped
--1/2 c. dark brown sugar
--1 3/4 c. flour
--1/2 tsp. salt
--1 tsp. ground ginger
Lemon Curd Filling:
--5 lemons
--1 1/2 c. granulated sugar
--8 tbsp. butter, softened at room temperature
--6 eggs
--pinch of salt
Molasses Whipped Cream:
--1 pint heavy whipping cream
--1/2 c. granulated sugar
--2 tbsp. molasses (you could add more or less depending on taste)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
First make the crust. In a food processor, combine butter, dark brown sugar, flour, salt, and ginger. Pulse until the mixture begins to form a crumbly dough. Form into a ball and press into a 10" tart pan. Press dough from the center outward until the interior of the tart pan--bottom and sides--are covered. Cover the crust with aluminum foil and bake for 18 minutes. Remove tart crust from the oven and remove the foil. Poke fork holes throughout the dough and continue to bake uncovered for another 20 minutes, or just until the crust begins to turn a light golden color. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
While your crust is cooling, it's time to make your lemon curd filling. Zest all five lemons.
Then cut the lemons in half and juice them. You should have just about one cup of lemon juice. Pour through a sieve and set aside.
Combine the zest and the 1 1/2 c. sugar in a food processor, and pulse for about 2 minutes. You'll want the zest to be extremely finely ground and completely incorporated into the sugar. In a stand mixer with a paddle attachment, cream the zest and sugar mixture with the butter until smooth. Add your eggs one at a time and mix at a low speed. Drop in a pinch of salt. Slowly add the fresh lemon juice, continuing to mix at a low speed until all ingredients are combined.
Transfer your curd mixture to a medium saucepan and heat over low for approximately 10 minutes, stirring constantly, until the curd has thickened. Remove it from the heat, allow to cool just slightly, then pour into the cooled crust. Allow the mixture to set for 30 minutes at room temperature and then transfer to the refrigerator.
When you're ready to serve, make the molasses whipped cream. In a stand mixer with a whisk attachment, combine heavy whipping cream, sugar, and molasses until you have your desired thickness. I like to whisk mine until medium-stiff peaks form. Top your ginger lemon tart with the molasses whipped cream and serve.
