I’m featuring the Paella today because my sister’s friend was kind enough to cook this for my mom’s birthday lunch.

Flickr Image: avlxyz

(I have the photo, Tom, the previous editor of Noodles and Rice, had the recipe.)

I miss Paella! It’s a shame that Spanish is just as unpopular as Filipino cooking is, here in Christchurch.

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Signature Saturdays: PAELLA

My 2 year old daughter got the obento of her dreams last week.  Imagine a cute little beautifully presented lunch in a hard plastic reusable Hello Kitty.  She was over the moon.  In the end she ate hardly any of it, but that is what being 2 is all about.  But she did love the box and probably would have taken it to bed with her if I had let her.

Japan loves Hello Kitty, and so does a lot of the world.  

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Hello obento

I took a holiday that involved a shinkansen bullet train journey last week.  On the platform I grabbed the nicest looking obento to eat on the way.  By chance I stumbled on a self heating beef obento.

The deal is, you pull a string that is sticking out of the cardboard box and after 7 minutes of steam and heat, your obento is ready.

It all relies on the chemical block that sits under the plastic tray of food.  Apparently ripping out the cord, activates a chemical reaction which generates enough heat to almost burn your lips. 

Very handy, very cool and very wasteful.  I enjoyed it but the environment can’t afford too many of these things.

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Self Heating Obento

This was a recipe adapted from Susanna Foo’s cookbook.

It’s quite surprising, the use of thyme and tomato — ingredients you don’t usually see in Chinese cuisine. However, curiosity got the better of me and I tried it anyway. While this is a dish that’s easy enough to tackle on a hot summer evening, I would much rather have tried the soy sauce-rice wine-black vinegar of which Ms. Foo speaks in her notes. This one was just too much an amalgam of stuff that none of the individual elements stood out in the end, unlike Chinese dishes where certain things pop out at you: SWEETNESS! HEAT! Nothing like that happens here. This may be a good introductory recipe, though, for someone just beginning to cook/eat Asian food.

2 tablespoons canola oil
2 pounds country-style ribs
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 cinnamon stick
2 tablespoons grated orange zest
1 teaspoon anise seed
1/2 cup Madeira
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar (I used black instead)
1 tomato, peeled and cubed
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 cup pork or chicken stock
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Heat oil in a large saucepan/casserole over medium-high heat. Add ribs through anise seed. Cook a few minutes, turning, until ribs are seared. Add remaining ingredients up to thyme, plus 1/4 cup of the stock. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, 45 minutes to an hour, or until pork is tender. Remove ribs from pan and deglaze with remaining stock, scraping up any brown bits. Boil down sauce until thick and syrupy. Strain sauce through a sieve before serving, sprinkle on salt and pepper to taste.

Post from: Blisstree

Braised Country-Style Ribs

Country-style ribs or spare ribs, cut into individual ribs or riblets
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup honey
1/2 teaspoon five-spice powder
juice of 1 lime
several grindings of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste

toasted sesame seeds for topping

Cook ribs in the rest of the ingredients, in a large saucepan, over medium heat, until mixture is bubbly. Lower heat and cover, stirring every once in a while, for about 15 minutes or until rib meat is tender. Remove ribs and set aside. Boil down cooking liquid until syrupy, then return ribs to pan and swirl to coat. Transfer to serving platter and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

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Honey-Spiced Ribs

Simple to prepare and very simple to eat, Ginger pork should fit right into the easy cooking category of any household’s recipe file.

Ingredients

Enough pork to feed the household, thin (6mm) loin cut up into bite size pieces

1 teaspoon of ginger juice (squeezed out of half a grated knob of ginger)

2 teaspoons of sake

1 tablespoon of frying oil

The sauce:

1 tablespoon sake

1/2 tablespoon of sugar

2 teaspoons of soy

1/2 tablespoon of mirin

1 grated knob ginger

Marinate the pork in the ginger juice and sake while you get everything else ready

Mix all of the sauce ingredients and put them aside

Heat the oil in a large wok or frying pan.

Cook the pork on both sides in a single layer.

Drop the cooked pork on a bowl of rice with some salad vegetables and dribble the sauce over the lot.

Even if you stuff around a lot, I don’t think you could take longer than half an hour to get this on the table (as long as someone puts on the rice in advance).  Its fast, it tastes good and the ginger makes your kitchen smell great.

Post from: Blisstree

Japanese Ginger Pork

Here is an easy and delicious meal that has a seriously passionate following in Japan.  Most people eat this dish at one of the millions of Tonkatsu restaurants, but it can also easily be cooked at home with common ingredients.

For each serving, you will need:

1 pork cutlet (boneless loin chop about half an inch thick)

a little flour

Coarse breadcrumbs

half an egg

oil to fry it in

1. Simply tenderize the cutlet with the back of a knife or a mallet
2. Lightly coat it in flour, shaking off any extra
3. Dip it in some lightly beaten egg
4. dip and press it into the breadcrumbs coating it evenly ( at this point they can be frozen for latter cooking)
5. Deep fry in oil at 340 degrees F (170 deg C) until both sides are golden.  Alternatively they can be slowly shallow fried to the same degree.
6. Cut it into bite size pieces and serve

Tonkatsu is traditionally served with a pile of finely shredded raw cabbage and sometimes a bit of grated carrot, some tomato or other salad vegetables.  Over the top of the tonkatsu, most people like some specially labelled Tonkatsu sauce (which if you can’t buy it, you might try replacing it with western style BBQ or Worcestershire sauce).  A little lemon juice also is very nice and some people add some mustard, but I leave this off.

 This is hardly health food as the pork itself as well as the method leaves it crisp but loaded with fat.  But it doesn’t matter, as long as you don’t plan to make it your staple diet.  I tend to buy a large tray of 10 pork cutlets at a time.  I crumb them all at the same time and then freeze those that I don’t cook immediately.  That way I have a stock ready to quickly cook up at short notice and the whole dinner can easily be on the table in half an hour.  

Post from: Blisstree

Tonkatsu – Pork Cutlet

• Quick cooking means the best cuts would be steak cuts, such as tenderloin or sirloin or rib eye. Rib eye can easily be found at Asian markets, usually sold as meat for Korean bul gogi or Japanese shabu shabu.
• A quick marination is adequate for these tender cuts, 30 minutes or so, especially when sliced thin. However, if you are in a greater time crunch, you may omit the marination and, instead, pan-fry the meat very quickly, then braise on very low heat, so the meat doesn’t get overcooked, for 10 minutes or so. The meat will come out nicely flavored but still tender enough to enjoy with the crunchy onions.
• You can even totally omit the marination/braising. This isn’t traditional but some of you may enjoy the natural taste of the meat coming through. Grass fed, free-range beef is especially nice prepared this way.
• Or, if do have time, opt to use one of the tougher cuts of meat, such as roasts. Slice thin and marinate overnight. You can then braise itfter a brief pan-frying, until fork-tender.
• Another option using the less tender (aka cheaper) cuts of meat, is to slice thin, marinate, then coat in flour and cook as if doing a roast — brown for a bit in oil, then add your liquid and braise for an hour or until fork-tender.

That last option was totally unheard of, to me at least, when I was younger. However, my uncle’s wife prepares it this way all the time and I have to admit it has grown on me.

Meanwhile, the onions can be prepared any way you want. Some people like them crisp and barely cooked. Others prefer them soft. Some people like the sweeter onions for this, such as a Vidalia; others prefer the biting flavor of a red onion. I actually like ALL of these, hubby prefers them somewhere in between, and my kids like them melt-in-your-mouth tender. So I use a combination when I’m not in a hurry. Two onions, two ways, all piled up on top of tender, soy-and-citrusy beef.

It’s perfect as sandwich filling, and you can certainly add such things as roasted peppers and grilled tomatoes. However, as is traditional in Filipino cuisine, it’s best served with steaming hot Jasmine rice.

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Bistek

This is another example of a recipe whose history I am not sure about .  It looks similar to a lot of traditional Japanese recipes like Niku Jaga, but I haven’t found one exactly the same yet.  This makes me think that it is my own recipe but if you think otherwise please feel free to let me know. 

It is a very simple recipe that is a regular participant in our meals. 

The ingredients:

A handful of very thinly sliced beef (about 1 or 2mm thick)

About two handfuls or a medium sized potato for each serve

About a handful of mushrooms

About a cup of  cheap sake

About a cup of mirin

about a half a cup of soy sauce

The method:

Roughly chop and boil the potatoes for ten minutes then drain them.

In a large pot (with a little oil) fry the potatoes, mushrooms and beef for about 5 minutes.  Then drop in the sake and it will sizzle like crazy.  When the sake is substantially gone, turn down the heat a little and do the same with the mirin.  When the mirin is almost gone drop in the soy and leave it to cook for maybe ten minutes.

Serve it up on rice with some green vegetables and never look back. 

Post from: Blisstree

Japanese Beef and Potatoes

For those of us who need to content ourselves with the homemade version, you can find recipes at All Favorite Recipe, dyaryoboy, and Pinoy Cook.

Mine is simply made with pork shoulder or pork picnic butt; make sure you get the cut that includes the skin. I boiled it in water to cover, with salt, for five minutes, threw the water out, and started afresh with cold water to cover. Brought to a boil, then down to a simmer for 45 minutes or so. The goal here is to tenderize the meat but not break apart the skin, so if you’ve got a smallish roast adjust the time accordingly. I then refrigerated it overnight coated in a paste of lemongrass, garlic, salt and pepper, a bit of vinegar, and some water to reach paste consistency. A food processor is highly recommended here, or the patience to do it by hand in a mortar and pestle. Because the size of your pork will vary, you’ll need to play with the amounts here, but what I used were

4 lemongrass stalks, trimmed
10 cloves garlic
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons vinegar
enough water to make a paste

There will be some roughness to the paste, which you can scrape off when you’re ready to roast.

Roast in a 450 degree oven (convection if you like), until tender in the thickest part of the flesh and skin is crackly. I also recommend the use of a V-rack set over a pan so you’ve got air circulating all over. Of course, if your oven is equipped with a rotisserie then so much the better. Mine took about 3 hours to get to the perfect combination of crisp and tender.

Allow to stand 30 minutes to 1 hour before carving. A heavy cleaver and a quick, firm chopping motion is all that’s needed. Cut into 2-inch pieces and you’re all set.

You can serve store bought lechon sauce with it (mostly bread crumbs but you could fancy it up with some liver paté), or if you’d like to make it yourself, here’s a recipe. You can also use a simple sauce traditionally meant for crispy pata but would also go well here — soy sauce, vinegar, minced garlic, chopped onions, minced ginger and freshly ground black pepper if you like.

This is a very easy dish to prepare as long as you plan for it. Fancy enough for party or picnic fare, but painless enough for cozy Sunday dinners with the family as well.

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Lechon sa Hurno