Weaving Delicious Nightmares
Cooking
Foodie Friday: Ivan’s Nam Sod
Friends, this nam sod is a golden trifecta: Fairly low in calories, certainly cheaper than my usual fare, and ready in less than 30 minutes; but it tastes like none of these are true.
It’s good hot off the stove or cold the next day for any meal. This is a great weeknight recipe, especially during these hot summer months.
As with all my recipes, remember that I loooooove garlic and strong flavors. You could certainly pull back on any of this except the orange juice to protein ratio.
Ingredients:
- 2 Tbsp sesame oil
- 2 lbs ground chicken breast
(You can use ground chicken, ground turkey or ground pork, but this is the low-cal version) - 8 cloves minced garlic
- 3 Tbsp fresh minced ginger
- 1 cup fresh orange juice
- 6 Tbsp low sodium soy sauce
- 4 Tbsp sweet chili paste (I use Mae Ploy red curry)
- 1 1/2 tsp fish sauce (optional, but brings the delicious funk out)
- 2 Tbsp crushed peanuts
- 2 Tbsp fresh cilantro leaves
Options:
- Rice to serve in a bowl (Brown or wild is healthiest, it goes very well with Jasmine rice, though)
- Lettuce leaves to use as wraps
- Green onions, radishes, bean sprouts, sliced water chestnuts … any crunchy vegetal bits
- Broccoli, green beans … any side vegetable that’s bright green (adds color to the plate)
- More peanuts or cashews
- More chili paste, or crushed red pepper
- Lime wedges to squeeze over the entire thing
Directions:
- Heat the sesame oil over a large skillet and brown the chicken on all sides.
It doesn’t need to cook fully, just brown. - Add the garlic, ginger, soy sauce, chili paste, fish sauce and orange juice and bring to a boil.
- Turn the range to low and simmer until you’re ready to eat.
- Top each bowl or wrap with peanuts and cilantro, plus any of the options listed above.
Adapted from Frugal Nutrition’s Orange Ground Chicken Bowls.
Currently Eating: Duck Duck Goat
Duck Duck Goat is star chef Stephanie Izard’s “reasonably authentic” take on Chinese food, located in Chicago’s West Loop – the Fulton Market District. My friends Carl and Nancy snagged reservations in late May and invited us along for the ride.
First off, let’s discuss the decor. Each room in this multi-room, high-ceilinged restaurant is decorated in a different but striking style. The lounge area is a lovely jade green, with a small but well-tended bar behind which rises an old fashioned mirror and about two dozen statues of goats. Many with lucky coins, others without. The room in which we ate was also jade green, but festooned with around sixteen different Bob Ross style paintings of calm forest waterfalls. You think they’re all the same at a casual glance, but if you look more closely you’ll pick up on the differences. The ceilings were dark cork for style and sound-dampening properties, inset with colorful crests and ornamentation.
The main room feels taller as well as larger thanks to the exposed pipes and the mahogany shelves up where our ceilings were, filled with goods that give the feel of an Indiana Jones market set-place, well-lit against the scarlet walls. I could spend a happy hour just walking through the place and taking in the feel.
We started in the lounge with Blind Goat Old Fashioneds: J. Henry Blind Goat Bourbon, Birch-Sarsaparilla, Angostura Bitters and an orange peel the likes of which I’ve never seen. Their mixologist really knows what he’s doing – not a hint of pith, and about as wide as a woman’s palm.
Our lovely server Sara recommended two dishes apiece for a group of four, as the food is served family-style typically in sets of 3-5 items. We wound up with eleven dishes total, plus dessert and perhaps another cocktail apiece.
Starters were possibly my favorite item of the evening: goat and duck skin spring rolls, lightly fried and served with two sauces. These little morsels could be a lunch for me and I’d be well pleased. The snap of the roll against the slightly musty flavor of good goat’s meat combined with the richness of rendered duck skin and the wonderfully hot mustard.
After that, wood-grilled duck hearts in horseradish aioli sauce. The lovely copper tang of organ meats blended with a perfect amount of smoke, with sliced scallions offering some vegetal relief from the supreme richness of the meat and sauce combination. At the same time we were served scallion pancakes with hoisin sauce and cabbage coleslaw. I’ve never had scallion pancakes this light and airy – thin, crisp, and warmed just so to balance the coolness of the slaw. These two together were a lovely combination.
After that we got pickled cucumbers as a palate cleanser followed by pork fried rice. I’m not normally a fan of fried rice, but the manner in which we were eating was protein-heavy, and carbs sounded like a good idea. (I would have preferred to try the Forbidden Goat, black rice with goat and pickled quail eggs, but I wasn’t about to push anyone at this stage.) The dish wasn’t as heavy or greasy as most fried rice, as I expected, and the pork belly and sausage were a real treat.
Frankly, I could have stopped here and been immensely satisfied. But no, oh no! There was more on the way.
Horn Shu Rao – braised pork belly – which was properly prepared, but a bit gelatinous for some members of our party. I enjoyed the entire thing immensely and wound up enjoying their servings as well. A plate of pickled mixed vegetables and a dish of the most amazing green beans in black bean sauce with fried onions and cashews I have ever had. These two vegetable dishes together gave me a world of enjoyment.
Barbecue pork Bao buns, half apiece, really put me over the edge. These were good, and it may be my increasing discomfort, but I don’t think I’d get them again personally. On top of that pork we got jiazao – fried potstickers of short rib and bone marrow – which would rank as my second favorite items of the night after the spring rolls we started with. Completely different profiles, with these being rich and dark and smoky and divine; much better suited for the end of an evening.
Of course, then we saw a plate of regular wood grilled short ribs being served at the next table and, being who we are, added an order of those. Again, I’m afraid I wound up eating more than my share as some in the party had believed they would be boneless rather than bone-in. Saucy, sesame-laden, and pillow-soft to the tooth once you got through the tantalizingly crisp wood crust.
For dessert, blueberry and bullet chili sorbet topped with shaved rhubarb ice, “crunchy corn cereal” which I believe – but cannot prove – came from a certain Captain of the cereal industry – caramelized condensed milk, blueberries, and an incredibly delicious take on rhubarb slices that melted in the mouth.
The bill was also … remarkably low. I have honestly had much less food at a similar price here in the suburbs, routinely. I had fully planned to spend twice what I did for this experience, which makes it all the sweeter.
Admittedly, sleeping was an issue after that much rich and incredible food, but I’ll gladly trade a good night’s sleep for a meal I’ll still be thinking about for years to come. I am an unabashed fan of Duck Duck Goat and look forward to trying Chef Izard’s other locations in the near future.
The First Dish
The first thing I ever “cooked” was … well, something I didn’t cook at all. I planned the menu, though. And we all paid the price.
I was in my elementary school’s “gifted” program for a while. In the seventies, this was a place they put kids who either showed an awful lot of promise or a lot of trouble paying attention, on the grounds that maybe they’re just under-stimulated. I’ll let you guess which camp I fell into.
One of the books we read was Old Yeller. I know, right? Deep end of the pool for young kids. Now, part of the gifted program involved taking the literature we were assigned, and doing something different with it, often something tactile.
(As an aside, I think this is where I first heard about the different types of learning – at the time, classified as visual, auditory, reading and kinesthetic. That fascinated me then and it still does today.)
One of the many things I wanted to be as a kid was a chef. Before they were celebrities, before they were world travelers. I just loved eating, and I loved reading about good cooking, and I wanted to share that with people. So, when I saw “cook a frontier meal” on the list of sanctioned activities, I grabbed it, then went home to tell my mother, bless her heart.
My mother’s a saint, and my memory is that we sat down to plan the meal we would serve to my classroom. It was all set out in the book.
A more reasonable child might have gravitated to the turkey suppers, or the pork which Old Yeller is introduced as stealing. A less indulgent mother might have insisted. But that wouldn’t do for me. We ate pork and turkey all the time, that wasn’t a frontier meal. No, we had to do something to show I’d paid attention to the novel, that I was invested in the process, and one sentence in the book had leapt out at me:
“After that, Old Yeller caught onto what game we were after. He went to work then, trailing and treeing the squirrels that Little Arliss was scaring up off the ground. From then on, with Yeller to tree the squirrels and Little Arliss to turn them on the tree limbs, we had pickings. Wasn’t but a little bit till I’d shot five, more than enough to make us a good squirrel fry for supper.”
Squirrel fry? Squirrel fry?
FASCINATING. MOTHER WE MUST DO THIS THING. WITH CORNBREAD.
Did I mention my mother’s a saint?
Now, our family wasn’t a hunting family. Dad was a scholar, not an outdoorsman, and this was before girls were encouraged to take up arms. Fortunately, one of mom’s friends had a son who hunted, and he was able to deliver a reasonable number of pre-skinned rodents without too much advance warning.
I have no idea if mom butchered them herself, or if they were pre-delivered as discrete chunks of protein; but I know for a fact she went the route of stew rather than fry, because the seventies were the start of the health-conscious craze and mom was right in the thick of it. I could tell you stories of tofu’s first appearance in the Midwest that would roil your stomach, but I digress. Stew she was willing to make, stew it would be, though I vividly remember she dredged the meat in flour, salt, and pepper before browning them to drop into the stew. I’d never paid so much attention to food prep in my life.
Potatoes, carrots and celery were staples. Black-eyed peas featured heavily in the book, so in those went, and a pan of cornbread to spoon the stew over. We drove to school with the unplugged crock pot feeling very proud of what we’d managed.
The class was excited, too, to have something besides the industrial lunches of the educational cafeteria. A room full of third-graders and their teacher, tucking eagerly away into a hot home-cooked meal, smug and self-assured. One of my classmates, about halfway through, mentioned that “this chicken stew is a lot better than cardboard pizza.”
“Oh,” I said, “it’s not chicken.”
I like to imagine the teacher paused here, spoon halfway to her lips. I do recall her asking, “Well … what is it, then?”
“Squirrel,” I said. Pandemonium ensued.
If you’re a parent, I want you to imagine this. Really imagine it. Today, as I understand it, a single peanut is classified right below an AK-47 in terms of no-nos for your children to bring to school. Try to picture your precious little Madison or Jayden texting you, “Ivan just made me eat a squirrel! OMG. And cornbread isn’t even Paleo!”
I don’t know for a fact that this faux pas got me removed from the gifted program. It’s possible that I just wasn’t keeping up.
But I do remember coming home with a lot of leftover stew, and I remember the phone ringing quite a bit that afternoon, and a few days later I was in a different program altogether. One which featured a lot more one-on-one time with a counselor.
Hells Yes Hawaiian Chicken
Chicken:
Serves plenty.
- Chicken thighs and breasts, as many as you need.
- 1 cup soy sauce
- 2 cups pineapple juice
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
- 4 tablespoons brown sugar
- 5 teaspoons garlic powder
- 4 teaspoons ground ginger
- 2 teaspoons dry mustard
- So much ground pepper
- Combine soy sauce, pineapple juice, oil, brown sugar, garlic powder, ginger, dry mustard and pepper in a saucepan.
- Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 5 minutes. Let cool.
- Reserving 1/4-1/2 c of sauce, pour remaining sauce over chicken breasts in a shallow glass dish or ziploc bag.
- Cover or seal and marinate at least 2 to 3 hours, or overnight, turning occasionally.
- Grill over medium heat approximately 6 minutes per side, basting with reserved marinade. Grill until done.
- Tent with tinfoil.
Pineapple Rings:
- I whole pineapple cut into rings
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 1 cup brown sugar
- Ghost chilis, to taste
Grill ’em up after the chicken is tented.
Black Rice and Lima Beans:
- Follow the directions, honestly.
FAMISHED: The Cookbook – Burnt Leeks in Smoky Romesco
Barton Seaver is an interesting guy. Not only an expert chef, he’s also a National Geographic Fellow, a Harvard Director, and a man with a serious mission for sustainability in cuisine. That’s a mission I can happily get behind!
I have his second cookbook, Where There’s Smoke. It was actually a Christmas present, but focused as it is on grilling fresh vegetables, I haven’t been able to experiment with the recipes until now. The Midwest isn’t known for early spring.
This recipe, adapted from his book, was a revelation to this weekend – for the first time in ages, I preferred an herbivore’s side dish to the carnivorous centerpiece.
Leeks are favorites of mine already. There’s a primal thrill both to burying them in the coals of a fire and stripping away the charred layers. Meanwhile, the Romesco sauce is incredibly simple, but manages to feel both rustic and elegant, perfect for an outdoor party. I’m going to try adding paprika and chilis next time …
I highly recommend this dish (and the cookbook) to anyone who cooks over live fire.
EMBER-BURNT LEEKS:
Rinse the leeks and trim the green leaves away.
Bury whole leeks in the embers of a medium-hot charcoal or wood fire.
After 15-20 minutes, the outer layers should be charred black, and the vegetables yielding to the touch.
Remove the charred outer layers and cover with Romesco sauce.
SMOKY ROMESCO SAUCE:
4 plum tomatoes, quartered
6 cloves garlic
1 small onion, medium dice
1 red bell pepper, medium dice
1/4 cup slivered blanched almonds
Combine the ingredients with olive oil to coat and salt to taste.
Grill over a medium fire until the onion is softened, about 15 minutes.
Transfer to food processor and slowly add in 2 Tbsp olive oil.
Serve warm.
