CNY Lunch at Home

Well, one of the downsides of living in the U.S. is that CNY isn't a holiday! (Although our HK and Singapore business locations are closed, lucky them!) So, we kind of have to celebrate on the days that are convenient--therefore, we had our main CNY meal over the weekend. I seriously think I gained about 3 pounds just from this one meal alone. Just take a look at our groaning board (another advantage to a lunch versus dinner--enough light for good photos! Hehe. You know you have a problem when you try to plan to have food ready when there's still natural light to shoot photos with.) All of this was made by my mom--she's very talented, right?


The "cold plate"--I suppose you could call these appetizers? Anyway, clockwise from the top: a type of bitter green cooked with mushrooms, dry-rubbed chicken, cabbage and carrot pickle, waxed meat and Chinese sausages. Braised eggs in the center. Most of these foods are chosen because they are symbols of luck, prosperity, and happiness, although don't ask me which means what. I was too busy stuffing my face to remember :)


Our other appetizer, stir-fried diced shrimp, water chestnuts, and mushrooms wrapped in lettuce. This is traditionally made with pigeon, but I vastly prefer shrimp (when I think of pigeon, I think of your standard dirty NYC pigeon. Which reminds me, does anyone know why there are so many freaking pigeons on 32nd St. by Penn station? What gives!)


Another cold plate, with kao fu (fried wheat gluten cooked with woodear fungus and bamboo shoots) and a vegetable salad. The kao fu is one of my favorites! I know the description doesn't *sound* that appetizing, but seriously, the chewy wheat gluten and crunchy fungus and bamboo shoots are so good together.


My absolute favorite! These are supposed to look like gold ingots and are egg sheets rolled around a pork filling. Some of them are wrapped in tofu sheets instead, and the whole thing is braised with napa cabbage. I took a huge container of this home with me. So yummy.


Claypot fish head soup! The fish head is underneath the other goodies (tofu, glass noodles, veggies, and chilis) and was really, really good. Fish cheeks, yum. This would not have made good leftovers, so I did not get to bring any of this home :(. The noodles soaked up all the flavor of the soup and were soooooo yummy.


Nice plating, huh? These are "red-cooked" (braised in soy sauce) pig trotters. Like any long-cooked, braised dish, the meat was super tender. Great to eat with rice, although we totally forgot that there was rice because there was so much other food. And the bok choy was good for fiber :) This is also the sauce that the eggs from the cold plate were cooked in.


And last, but not least, braised pork ribs, thick fried tofu, and bamboo shoots. Another good-with-rice dish. I should have brought more of this home, I loooooooove fried tofu.

Can you imagine that after all this, we still had room for dessert? Well, a few hours later anyway ;) We had bunny cookies, pineapple tarts, and jiu niang yuanzi dan. I don't know how to translate that, exactly, but it's a sweet dessert soup made with fermented (and slightly alcoholic) sweet rice, with dumplings, fruit, and egg in it. It probably sounds crazy to you if you haven't tried it, but it's delicious and winy and totally warming. Unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of it, but next time I'm home, I will demand some and take a picture then. Oh, and of course, lots of nian gao (sticky rice cake) to snack on. You can check out this post from last year for photos of nian gao and a recipe to make the coconut type.

Well, I think that's the end of my CNY posts! The food is gone, but at least the memories (and photos!) are still there :)

Thanksgiving 2009

Well, I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving! I checked my archives and apparently last year I was so overcome by turkey that I did not write anything about the meal. (Actually, what really happened is that we went to Charleston right after T-day last year, and I was overcome by South of the Border along the way.) Anyway, enough digression, you can probably guess what my brother (making his first guest appearance here--maybe I should tell him...) is doing in the photo above--yes, that's right! Setting up the fryer for our 3-year-running deep fried turkey tradition. I mean, brined turkey is pretty great, but it's got nothing on the deep fried version. But before we got to that point, there was a lot of prepping of the side dishes...


Like chopping celery and onions for the sausage stuffing...the one downside to deep fried turkey is that you can't really stuff it. Boo. Small sacrifice though!


And here's the stuffing after being packed into a casserole and baked with a splash of turkey broth over it. Not as good as last year's (a bit dry), but, pretty good anyway.


Of course, we had to have cranberry sauce....I love the colors and am always tempted to eat one uncooked because it looks so pretty. After one, I am cured of that particular temptation!


My recipe (such as it is) is super simple--washed cranberries go into a pot with a few spoonfuls of sugar, grated orange zest, and the juice of an orange. Also a splash of water (but not much!). Cook until the berries pop and taste to see if you want more sugar. I like mine mostly tart. And isn't it a gorgeous color? (You'll notice my book in the corner there--I was reading A Suitable Boy while waiting for various things to cook.)


We also roasted up some red potatoes and sweet potatoes, which are always good. I didn't get a photo of the finished potatoes or of the brussels sprouts, which I boiled and then glazed with butter and soy sauce, because by now we were almost ready to eat, the sun had gone down, and the lighting sucked. Also, I was ravenous by now! But let's back up about an hour and go out to where the main action was going on.


Lots of peanut oil coming up to temperature. I don't know why I find that Caution Hot warning so funny. I think it's because this pot was sitting over a giant flame, and, you know, self explanatory?


The turkey rests on this rack with a handle so you can lower it, versus dropping it. Now would be a good time to say that if you are planning on deep-frying a turkey, you should do it outside, probably farther away from your house than where we had the fryer set up. An oven mitt would be a good idea too, as would closed toe shoes (click here to see a photo of my brother frying a turkey in a stylish Doraemon glove a few years ago). Every year you hear about people burning their garages (or houses!) down--seriously. Don't do this inside a building!


This is about 5 minutes in, and you can see the hook I was talking about earlier.


Alright, I didn't get the greatest photo of the whole turkey because it was dark by the time it was done (damn these early sunsets!). But here is a closeup of the yummy, crispy skin (and you can click the link to see the whole bird). Surprisingly, deep fried turkey is not greasy at all, and it is my favorite way to eat it now. Hm, I just realized that I also did not get a photo of the gravy. Oh well, it wasn't that exciting, trust me.


And of course, we had dessert! This might be the first Thanksgiving I've ever had with no pie, but my brother found a recipe for Apple Bread Pudding over at Smitten Kitchen. I sort of wish I had also made a pie, but no doubt my scale will be happy I did not.


And here's the bread pudding out of the oven. I think it could have used slightly more custard (I didn't do the measuring, just the apple chopping) but admittedly, I like my pudding very custardy. Nice flavor, though! (And nice afternoon sunshine.)

Needless to say, we (or at least I) ate more than I should have. But it was sooo good. It was a fairly low key one for us this year, so some of the other stuff I had planned to make (pie! celeriac salad!) did not get made...but fortunately I came home with like, half of a turkey so I think maybe I will have to Thanksgiving v.2 in a couple of days. (And if I blog about it, I promise it will be shorter. Yikes! When did I get so long-winded?) Hope yours was good too!

Another Classic: Almond Tofu

Here's another Tofugirl family classic--almond tofu or xingren dofu (also known in Japan as annin dofu). This is one of the easiest desserts to whip up, but it is so perfect for summer--so refreshing and light, yet indulgent all at the same time. My mom would always make up a giant pot of this and just keep it in the fridge so that we could all help ourselves whenever we wanted some (which, in my case at least, was all the time). Tofu is a bit of a misnomer, actually, since this is really more like almond gelatin--no tofu involved. We always had it with canned fruit cocktail, which I still kind of love (although I still pick out all the horribly colored cherries) but I decided to jazz this one up a bit by using a fresh fruit salad steeped in ginger syrup. I know the weather is starting to cool off in NYC at least, but we've still got a couple of weeks of warm(ish) weather left--so go on, have a bowl of this and relive your summer memories.


Since this is comprised of milk, some sugar, and fruit, I consider this darn near a health food--so enjoy, guilt free!

Almond Tofu
Makes about 8 servings

For the tofu:
2 packets unflavored gelatin
1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups boiling water
2 1/2 cups whole milk
1 1/2 teaspoons pure almond extract

For the fruit salad:
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup water
a slice of fresh ginger, crushed
assorted fruits (I used grapes, a nectarine, and a plum)

Combine the gelatin with the sugar; use the larger amount if you have a serious sweet tooth, but keep in mind that you are going to be serving this with a sweet syrup and sweet fruit. Pour the boiling water over the sugar and gelatin and stir until everything is completely dissolved. It's much harder to dissolve sugar once you add the cold milk, so try to get it all now. Add the milk and almond extract and stir. Give it a taste, and if you think it needs more sugar or almond flavor, correct it (if you think you need more sugar, I recommend using sugar syrup rather than straight up granulated sugar). Pour into a shallow pan (I used a 9" round pan which gave me a layer about 2" high, but you can use any shallowish pan), cover, and refrigerate until set, usually about 4 hours or so.

While that's setting, you can make your ginger syrup, which is so simple that all you do is dump your sugar, water and ginger slice in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir to dissolve the sugar, and let simmer for another 2 or 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool. Store in the fridge (with ginger slice) until you are ready to serve. When that time comes, cut your fruit into small bits--in my case, I thinly sliced a nectarine, cubed a plum, and thinly sliced some red grapes--and toss in the syrup.

To serve, cut your tofu into diamonds; the size isn't super important, you just want to break it up a bit. Spoon a few pieces of tofu into a small bowl and pour a couple of spoonfuls of syrup and fruit over the top.

Birthday Steamboat & Lemon Syrup Cupcakes

After the initial gnashing of teeth and wailing about the indignities of age, I finally calmed down enough to answer my mom's question of what I wanted to do for my birthday dinner. I had already gone out with a bunch of my lovely friends on the Friday before (at a fantastic restaurant which I will write about in a separate post sometime) so all I really wanted to do was to stay home with the family and indulge in one of my all-time favorites--HOTPOT.

Hotpot is also known as steamboat, and is similar to shabu-shabu in that you get a big cauldron of stock into which you dip thinly sliced meats of seafood. Because they're so thin, they cook in a flash and then it's ready to be dipped in your own personal bowl of sauce and eaten. My personal blend is sha-cha, soy, and sesame oil, whereas my brother likes to go for straight gochujang (Korean bean paste) and my parents like to include fermented bean curd. It's a nice, communal way of eating, and although it's obviously more appropriate in winter, I love it enough to eat it anytime.



Here's a closer shot of the contents of our stock--there are as many variations as there are cooks. Ours had lots of fish balls, fishcakes, bok choy, beef tendon balls, pork balls, frozen tofu, regular tofu, and pumpkin. There almost wasn't enough room for the meat :).

All in all, a nice birthday!



And on a related note, one of my coworkers has the same birthday as I do, so I brought him a card and a lemon syrup cupcake. I just used the recipe for Lemon Bread from the Williams-Sonoma website, except that I doubled the syrup recipe and baked it in 12 cupcake liners instead of a loaf. When the weather starts to turn warm, I find that I prefer fruit and citrus flavors rather than chocolate, and this fit the bill nicely.