Big Ass Trout

I did not realize how huge this fillet is until I plated it and it blotted out the whole plate, much as your gigantic ass blots out the field of vision of small children. Perhaps I should have cut it in half and made two servings? No matter, there is no way huge quantities of fish isn’t good for a mathematician.

It surely is a thing of beauty.

I wasn’t sure what to do with my trout. If left to my own devices I would probably have done what I usually do, a simple salt and pepper, and fry it up, possibly with some onion. But as I perused some recipes, I came across one called “Lime and Thyme”. You can’t pass up a name like that.

Lime and Thyme involves a marinade consisting in part of… get this, lime and thyme. NO WAI

Salt, thyme, pepper, and garlic.

Mix with olive oil and juice of a whole lime.

I put everything in a zip lock bag, cleverly submerging it under water, using the pressure to squeeze out all the air. I’m supposed to let it marinade for 2 hours, but I was hungry, so I just went ahead and made other dinner plans. Thus, a 2 hour marinade turned into a 24 hour marinade. That just means all the flavors got in there really good, right?

Fry, fry, fry. Are you beginning to grasp how geniusly apt the choice of the title was? I fry everything.

I made a sauce for the linguini with some wine and cilantro, and the marinade, and thar you go.

More Noodles ’n Shit Redux

Soba is pretty awesome.

(I had to go into MS Word to make the apostrophe slant the right way.)

For the broth: shiitake, garlic, ginger, sugar, and soy sauce. Although the recipe doesn’t call for it, I added some anise because I figured it would go well with that blend of seasoning. Trust me on this. I’m Asian; I have a sense for these things.

I was skeptical about a broth based on soy sauce, but this smells pretty good. Actually, this is the exact same blend of seasoning I used for the meat, minus the wine.

Meanwhile: more pressed tofu. This is a different brand than the one that’s been featured in previous entries. It’s got these air bubbles inside; I’m not sure whether they’re an artifact of the manufacturing process particular to this brand or of the fact that I froze them. Anyway, slice. i thought about lightly frying it, but decided to be lazy and just threw it in the broth for a couple minutes. It just needs to be hot; pressed tofu is cooked already.

Zen plate! Not pictured in the process: I found some dry seaweed in my cupboard, which I hydrated and tucked under the shiitake. Throw some green onion over it, and done.

Final moneyshot:

I’m not sure if the sesame seeds are a good touch. It’s a distracting. Almost too garish. The version without is simpler. On the other hand, it’s also a little boring.

Bonus: leftovers

(I figured out how to get a crisp image: you have to pull the camera back a little so it can focus, and zoom in.)

A mandate to man-date

I had a man date last night. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields was playing at Royce with Yuja Wang (or Huge-a, as we fondly call her) as solo piano. I have no idea how to install custom emoticons on wordpress.com, so I’ve uploaded to imageshack the correct one to describe the situation:

No, not towards my man date. Towards Huge-a.

After the intermission she came out with a different colored dress and Jewdar turned to me and said, “did she just change dresses?” In hindsight, that was a great set up for me to go “she did? OH NO I’VE GONE COLOURBLIND!”

In conclusion:

George Likes His Chicken Spicy

Kung Pao chicken is one of the fobbiest dishes out there. I mean that’s probably what you think of when you think Chinese food, along with, I don’t know, Orange chicken or something. I’m not sure how authentic it is. Would it be more correct to say it’s an American invention? I do not know! I am not familiar with the history of KPC. For all I know it’s had a long and celebrated history in the fobland. But I do know that I like Kung Pao chicken. So I decided to make it.

Ingredients: cooking wine, sesame oil, soy sauce, peppers, peanuts, chicken, green onion, garlic, and ginger. This is a really simple dish to make.

Cut chicken into bite size (well, or the same order of magnitude) and marinade in a mixture of–I used 2T soy sauce, 2T wine, 1T sesame oil, and 1T corn starch. Oh, I forgot to include it in the picture.

Half an hour later, we are ready to rock ‘n roll. No, that’s not how long it takes to chop up then garlic and ginger and green onion; that’s how long it takes for the marinade to do its thing. This is my whole mise en place! See, I told you this was simple.

I first fry the chicken in the nonstick pan, because… I don’t want it sticking to the wok. Because of the marinade, this part… hurt. It was popping all over the place. I mean, it’s not like it can do all that much damage, because the droplets that jump up aren’t that big, but it still stings. I need a bigger thing to stir with.

All done. That is a sexy brown!

Then, fry up the chilli, followed by garlic and ginger. I thought the kind of chilli they used for, well, these kinds of dishes were longer, but you know, there was a recipe for Kung Pao chicken on the back of the package, so I figure it must be right. I used only 6 things of chilli, which turned out to be not that spicy. Very mild. You wouldn’t have thought that from how they smelled as they were being fried, though. I got a runny nose from this.

After that you’re suppose to add the peanuts and let them roast for a while, but… I forgot. This part went by very fast, that’s why I only had time to grad a picture after I added the sauce. Then I added the peanuts.

Return the chicken, let the sauce thicken for a bit. After I turned off the heat, I mixed in the green onions.

Final moneyshot. I think this was supposed to be 2 servings, but I “accidentally” dumped all the food onto the plate. “Whoops.”

Epilogue:
As I was cleaning up, I spied a largeish spider hanging from the ceiling (from the light, in fact), mere feet away from my head! Upon this discovery I said in calm and reassuring manner, “Jesus fucking christ!” and then threw wads of paper towel at it in a pathetic display of poor hand-eye co-ordination.

More Noodles ’n Shit

More specifically, Soba ‘n Shit.

Soba (noodles made from buckwheat). What exactly is buckwheat? I assume it’s like wheat, except more buck.

It already comes sorted into serving size bundles, with a wrap ‘n everything.

These noodles know how to boil like it’s nobody’s business.

It’s done and then it’s ready to be plated (bowled?).

MEANWHILE!

The last time I made this, I boiled the shrimp and it ended up all curled up. I thought about how to rectify this situation. Well, I could cook it with the shell on, but then I’d have to deal with the shell as I ate. Then I thought about putting them on toothpicks and boiling them that way, to straighten them out, but I don’t have any toothpicks. I do, however, have these grilling skewers. I was going to put each shrimp on only one skewer, but I think this arrangement is superior. It saves more space, because in a single skewer arrangement, the shrimp is more aligned in the direction of the skewer and so takes up more space, but here it is orthogonal. And it makes them straighter.

Of course, I wouldn’t be able to boil them this way, because the skewers are too big to fit inside the pot. So I decided to bake them. (Faster than setting up the grill).

I didn’t know how long or how high, so I just set it to 350 and checked every once in a while until it looked all pink and done.

I was a little worried about overcooking it, but hindsight has revealed that, after I thought it was done, I should have probably left it in there for another while, because when I was eating it it turned out a little undercooked in some parts. Well, I looked up what I could get sick from eating raw seafood, and, basically, I think, if I don’t have a fever or vomit in the next 2 days, I’ll probably be fine.

(Digression: I’ve been a little paranoid lately, because my apartmentmate is away, that if something happened to me I wouldn’t be found until several days after my death. On the other hand, even when he is here, if something happened to me I probably wouldn’t be found until it was too late too, because it’s not like he comes into my room every few hours to check up.)

Hindsight has also revealed that I should have oiled the skewers beforehand.

ALSO MEANWHILE!

Usually I just drop the egg into the soup as I cook it, but this is different, since I’m cooking all the ingredients separately and assembling them at the end. If I just dropped the egg into the soup in the bowl, there wouldn’t be enough heat to cook it (as hindsight has also revealed…).

FURTHERMORE!

It’s only spinach.

Cut.

CONCORDEDLY!

I blew my entire shiitake wad on the meat last time, so I had to move to the dry stuff.

VIS A VIS! Oh wait, no, we’re done now. Parting moneyshot (closeup):

Heh, it’s backwards. The far things are in focus and the close things are not. What can I say, I am as terrible a photographer as I am a cook :shobon:

MEAT!

I made meat the other day, because who doesn’t love meat.

More specifically, pork ribs.

I also made coconut rice. I didn’t include a picture of the rice because it looks just like regular rice. Except, you know, it tastes like coconut. Probably because of all that coconut milk I put in there. Yup, that’s right, the whole can.

The seasoning consists of soy sauce, cooking wine,

fermented black beans, garlic (whole), aaaaaannnnnnd

these babies: anise seeds. I ended up using 3 whole things of garlic (all I had on hand), because I can always get more garlic, but I’m probably not making meat again for a while (by meat I mean pork or beef (or lamb or horse, etc), chicken is chicken). It’s really not used as seasoning, I just like to eat garlic when it’s been cooked like this, as whole cloves. Since it’s not chopped up or crushed, it’s very mellow.

It all simmers. Very slow. More than an hour.

Also added these. Fried tofu (cut in half). It’s all spongy inside on account of having been fried. Perfect for soaking up all the delicious sauce.

OH MY BLOG

I found out something AMAZING today. Did you know, that it is actually more likely to have 2 cards of the same suit on the flop than to have 3 different suits? I know, I didn’t believe it when I read it either, but numbers don’t lie:

The more you know!

Noodles ’n Shit

What is “Yokogiri Udon”? Is it the same thing as regular udon? I get the feeling it is not, as regular udon is thicker. Then is it another kind of noodle? Well, I googled it and only got results for that exact product in the picture. In other words, only one company makes “yokogiri udon”.

Boiled and cooled.

My noodles suffer from the same problem as my soups: too much shit in my noodles. Well, I like shit, but I also like noodles. It is important to strike a good balance.

Fry the meat. Didn’t have a container big enough, so… used the rice cooker again. Speaking of which, I made salad again, except with mangos instead of oranges:

Fry the vegetables.

Fry the noodles and add the sauce and mix all the shit in.

Shrimp and Avocado Salad

By that I mean (Shrimp) and (Avocado Salad), not (Shrimp and Avocado) Salad.

Here is the shrimp:

Here is the salad:

It’s also got some orange in it. I had a lot of trouble slicing the orange pulp from the rind, but I think I’ve got it down now.

One of the recipes I looked up (coincidentally, for a (shrimp and avocado) salad, but I didn’t use it) called for the avocado to be scooped out of the skin in one piece. I was wondering, how do you scoop it out in one piece? The answer: be as cool as I am.

But it doesn’t matter for this recipe because it’ll get cut up anyway.

I don’t have a salad bowl so I mixed it in my rice cooker. How crazy is I! LOL!

The dressing is made from olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lime juice (between this and the shrimp I used a whole lime), and cilantro. Then I remembered I have sesame oil and figured that would be good too, so I added that. Also I didn’t know how much of everything I was supposed to put in so I think I made too much dressing.

The shrimp was delicious but it was such a hassle deshelling all of it (in addition to the decapitation). When I make it asian style (lazyman style?) I just cook it with the shell and then deshell them as I eat.

The moral of today’s story is: oh cilantro, what can’t you do?

Thought of the Day #1

The people of Harbin should be called Harbingers. XD