Feast: Gung Hei Fat Choi! Kung Pao Prawns and Squid

Welcome to the Year of the Dragon!

According to this cbc.ca article, the Dragon brings optimism, as well as high amounts of energy and prosperity, and specifically movement.

Whether or not you believe in zodiacs, is truly beside the point. It's a cause for celebration...and with celebrations come food. (Really...I don't know of any joyous moment where food is not present).

This year I decided to play with a favourite at many Chinese restaurants: Kung Pao Chicken.

Like many dishes, this one is open to interpretation. At its heart are chicken and chillis and nuts. I've had some really salty versions (where the only seasoning seemed to be soy sauce) and I've had others where it seemed to be a chicken and veggie stirfry with chilli peppers and peanuts.

My version is heavily borrowed from a Kung Pao Chicken recipe I found on NPR, by the wonderful Fuschia Dunlop. Apart from the pedigree, one ingredient struck me: Sichuan peppers.

I first used the fizzy, rose-tinted pods when I reviewed Beyond the Great Wall a few years ago. They are gorgeous, tiny little pods that make your tongue go tingly and fizzy...and, if you're like me and tend to snack on such things, just a wee bit numb. Apart from their signature buzz, there's a citrussy note to them that, to me, borders on juniper. They aren't peppercorns per se, but the Chinese prickly ash seeds. They aren't necessarily the easiest spice to find in shops (unless you've thorough spice merchants or gourmet shops in town), but you can purchase them online.

I really can't think of another spice you can use, that has a similar effect to Sichuan peppercorns. If you don't have them, you could use lightly crushed black pepper (not fully ground pepper) and you should be fine, and add a squeeze of lemon near the end of the recipe.

As it's the Dragon, I thought I'd take liberties and make this a seafood kung pao, with jumbo prawns and squid. I suppose you could throw in some scallops as well, or just leave it as one type of seafood--it's up to you.

This is a very quick and easy recipe to pull together--the important things to keep in mind are to realise there's a balance of flavours: salty, hot, sour and sweet and not to overcook the seafood.

Gung hei fat choi!

Kung Pao Prawns and Squid
adapted from Fuschia Dunlop's Kung Pao Chicken Recipe
Serves 4

Ingredients
225g (0.5lb) jumbo prawns, cleaned, deveined and chopped into two-three pieces each
225 (0.5lb) squid, cut into rings

2-3Tbsp (30-45ml) flavourless oil, as needed
0.5-0.75tsp (2.5-3.75ml) Sichuan (Szechuan) peppercorns
1-2 fresh red chilli peppers, seeded (if you wish), finely sliced, to taste
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 thumb (4-5cm/1.75"-2" piece) ginger, grated
6 green onions, white and light green parts only, cut in 2.5cm (1") pieces, slit in half

200g (250ml/1c) toasted cashews

For the marinade
0.5tsp (2.5ml) salt
1Tbsp (15ml) light soy sauce
1.5tsp (7.5ml) rice wine vinegar
2dspn (20ml/4tsp) water

For the sauce
2dspn (20ml/4tsp) brown sugar
1.5tsp (7.5ml) cornflour (cornstarch)
1.5tsp (7.5ml) light soy sauce
1.5tsp (7.5ml) dark soy sauce
1.5tsp (7.5ml) rice wine vinegar
1Tbsp (15ml) black Chinese vinegar
1.5tsp (7.5ml)sesame oil
2dspn (20ml/4tsp) water

For the garnish:
finely minced spring onion greens (to taste)

Method
Mix squid and prawns in the marinade ingredients and let sit for about 15 minutes.

Mix the sauce ingredients and set aside.

Heat the oil over a high flame, until it's almost smoking. Drop in the Sichuan peppers and the chillis and stir until the the spices release their scents. Remove from the wok.

Add the garlic and ginger to the seasoned oil and stir until fragrant. Add the seafood and stir until the prawns are opaque and take on a pinkish hue.

Add the white and light green parts of the green onions as well as the fried chilli mixture. Stir to combine. Pour in the sauce, stir so everything is coated and the sauce thickens. Balance flavours to taste. Tumble in the nuts and stir.

Garnish with the minced stalks of the green onions and serve with rice and veggies.

Note:

• If don't have Sichuan peppers, you can use crushed black pepper instead ( you won't get the same buzz as with Sichuan peppers) and add a squeeze of lemon.
• Traditionally peanuts are used instead of cashews
• Of course, if you don't want to use seafood, you can use 450g (1lb) of chicken or pork instead

cheers!

jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!

Settling in for a good, long soak

The other week my parents had some guests over for the weekend. In amongst the various plans and whotnots was the slightest sledgehammer of a hint to have them over at mine. Not being as dim as I could pretend to be I offered my place up for lunch.

"Oh, can you make dessert, then?" asked my Dear Little Cardamummy.

"Yeah, no problem but I'll bake at yours." Beelzebub is still as trustworthy as whichever politician who's causing the greatest grief in your life at the moment.

The day before I went over to make the cakes and the super secret DB August 08 Challenge, I arrived at theirs to hand over one of the giant courgettes my colleague made available.

"How are we going to have lunch?" she said.

"Well, we'll serve it on plates and eat." I responded.

She glared at me...that special Mummy glare that means "behave."

"Well, I'm making the dessert, so I thought you'd be bringing the rest." I said...feeling I was being set up.

"Oh, that's too much work," she said.

"Well, what do you want to do?"

"I want to make pork chops."

"Okay."

"You make such nice ribs," she said setting me up.

"Mmm-hmm."

"Are they difficult to make?"

"No. You just need the rub and the barbecue sauce," really feeling set up.

"Hmm."

"Do you want me to make the meat?"

"Oh, that would be a great help. Wow look at that zucchini--what do I do with that?"

"Well, you could make fritters--like your corn fritters, but with grated zucchini."

"Hmm...that's too hard."

"No it isn't"

"Yes it is...but they would be nice to have."

She blindsided me with that one.

"Do you want me to make them?"I asked (sighing on the inside, rolling my eyes on the outside).

"Oh yes. That would be good."

"Okay...but you're grating it." (it was the only victory I could claim).

For the next couple of days she asked about what I'd do with the pork chops, assuming I'd make them the same way as I did the ribs. At the last minute I changed my mind and decided to forego my ribby ways.

"So what are you going to do?"

"You'll see."

"Will it be good."

"It's always good."

"But what will you do?"

"You'll have to wait until Sunday to see."

My parents weren't happy with my responses, but then again, from whom else would I have learned such deflection and vaguaries?

The truth was, after going through Beyond The Great Wall, I was still in a mood for China-influenced cooking. I flipped through the book along with a few others, but doctored marinade found in Nigella's How To Eat (p443). She followed Dr. Jonathan Miller's lead and called it "char siuish" as it's not quite char siu, but instead inspired by Chinese barbecued or roasted pork.

The greatest departure from her marinade is my inclusion of orange marmelade for citrussy notes along with a bit of garlic and hot red chillies. The quantities I'm giving will fill a 400ml jar--there were a lot of porkchops--if you have unused marinade, it can be refrigerated.

I made the marinade the day before and let the chops soak in the flavours overnight. The verdict? Everyone liked it--and my dad is itching for the recipe...so consider yourselves blessed as you'll be getting it a few hours before him.

If Nigella's version was char siuish, mine is that much farther removed from the original inspiration...I suppose it could be called ishy char siuish.

Ishy char siusish marinade

90 ml hoisin sauce
60 ml soy sauce
60 ml black bean sauce
60 ml tomato ketchup
60 ml black rice vinegar
2 bulgey tablespoons runny honey
2 bulgey tablespoons orange marmelade
2-3 cloves minced garlic
1 thumb of grated ginger
2 minced hot red chillies
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/2 tsp chilli oil


cheers!
jasmine

On my rickety shelves: Beyond the Great Wall

Thanks to the good people at Random House Canada, I received a copy of the latest offering by Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid.

Beyond the Great Wall
By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid
Random House Canada
304 pages; $70.00

Beyond the Great Wall: recipes and travels in the other China by husband and wife team Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s is one of those books that jumped my review queue. I try not to let that happen: my usual rule review them as they come in but every so often a book beckons to be let in a little early. And since the 2008 Olympic Games are in Beijing, I thought this was the perfect book for August.

Alford and Duguid are travelers, cooks, photographers, and writers, and are fascinated in understanding and appreciating home cooking within their cultural context. They’ve travelled throughout the world, but spend several months each year in Asia. Several of their previous titles are award-winners: Flatbreads and Flavors: A Baker's Atlas was named James Beard Cookbook of the Year and won the Julia Child First Book Award; Seductions of Rice was named Cuisine Canada's English Language Cookbook of the Year, and Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey through Southeast Asia was named James Beard Cookbook of the Year. They guest-teach and lecture about food traditions around the world.

As the title suggests, the authors take readers and cooks beyond food fare commonly found in their typical local Chinese restaurants. You won’t find mushu anything, nor will you find nuclear day-glow red sugary sauces clinging onto deep-fried globules of meat and fat. You will find introductions to the cultures and histories of the various peoples that make up modern China, including Dai, Miao, Taji, and Uighur. It’s the authors’ treatment and respect of these cultures, told in a mix of essay and reminiscence that drew me in and kept me reading.

Like many of their other titles, Beyond the Great Wall is one of those utterly gorgeous works, filled with intimate and engaging pictures of various foods and the people who cook and eat them. Not all the photos are theirs—studio photographs are credited to Richard Jung—but the food photography is not cold and impersonal like so many food porn offerings tend to be. Images of tree ears, a kitchen kit, and deep fried whiting all look as if they were made and served in someone’s home; the bowls and trays are worn and the light is generally warm. The people who appear are filled with character—from Tibetan monks and nuns to a man happily slurping from his noodle bowl all illustrate snatched moments from places and lives many of us in the West may never encounter.

The problem with an oversized book brimming with full-page images is that it’s bound to be seen as the equivalent of the conventionally pretty blonde girl with the big doe eyes: not much use for anything but an aesthetic decoration. But guess what…this pretty girl not only can hold a conversation but also probably write an anthropological dissertation on tribal nomads of the Gobi desert. In other words—it’s more than a functional cookbook because it gives the readers cultural and social information about the foods and people who cook them. There is a plethora of foods presented including condiments and seasonings, soups, salads, mostly vegetarian dishes, noodles and dumplings, breads, drinks and a number of different meats.

What I really enjoyed was combining simple and tasty ingredients to make hearty and filling dishes. The recipes generally work well but I must say some of the instructions confused and frustrated me. I also noticed an oven temperature (385F) that didn’t seem to follow standard Fahrenheit or Celsius scales.

When choosing my four sample dishes, I looked for different cuisines to try as most of my Chinese-food eating have been labelled as Cantonese, Sichuan, Sinagapore or Canadian-Chinese. Two came from Tibet, while the others were Sichuan and Hui.

Beef with Mushrooms and Cellophane Noodles (p 280) Comfort food. Plain and simple. This Tibetan dish of meat and mushrooms in a gingery broth is also known as ping sha (ping meaning cellophane noodles and sha meaning meat). It came together so easily and quickly—I will probably continue to make variants of this as a mid-week lunch.


Cheese Momos (p 212)
With the words “cheese” and “momos” how could I not make these? These Tibetan dumplings are made from basic dough and filled with an equally simple filling of savoury cheese and green onions. Deep fat frying made them good.




Flaky Fried Sesame Coils (p 202)
These are a stovetop-fried version of the oven baked Sichuanese shaobing flatbread. The bread was very easy to make, but the coil-shaping ritual drove me a bit loopy. After a batch or two, I just made spirals. I know it affected the flakiness, but it didn’t matter—they were still tasty with bits of astringently spiked heat from the Sichuan peppercorns and sesame seeds.

Hui Vegetable Hot Pot (p 117)
This soup—as delicious as it was—was more than a pain and a half to put together. You are essentially making a shish kabob soup, skewering like veggies together and cooking them in separately, according to cooking time. I’m not a good skewerer, I guess as many veggies fell off the sticks and into the soup…and I found stabbing broccoli with a pointy stick futile. Next time the broth will be made and the veggies added and kept in the broth.

Beyond the Great Wall delivers a fascinating travelogue, an ode to traditional Chinese cookery and an accessible series of cultural studies. Anyone interested in learning and trying “real” Chinese cooking would do well by this book

So how does it rate?
Overall: 3.5/5
The breakdown:
Recipe Selection: 4/5
Writing: 3.5/5
Ease of use: 3/5
Yum factor: 4/5
Table-top test: Pretty much lies flat

Kitchen comfort-level: Novice-intermediate
Pro: Contains a wide range of foods representing a number of different Chinese cultures
Con: Some of the instructions could be better written.

cheers!
jasmine