This is sort of an intro-to-fried-rice recipe. Fried rice is a gigantic family of dishes, with different versions all around the world. The vast majority of these are pretty inexpensive and quick to prepare, which means they get cooked often and modified often. You can pretty much use any produce, fresh or frozen, raw or cooked. You can even use leftover rice. This particular recipe is an intentionally simplified version, so that I can focus on the theory and technique. For veggies I’ve just used my two stir fry favorites, napa cabbage and mushrooms, but you can use anything. In future posts I’ll explore some more exotic flavor combinations.

 

Ingredients:

Rice Prep:

There is some debate about the state of the rice before it gets fried. How old it is, how warm it is, and how much moisture it still contains all affect how it will cook. The conclusion that I’ve come to is that you can get away with pretty much anything for all of these. The final texture may be different, and it may cook slower or faster, but it always seems to work. Lots of folks like to use day old rice straight out of the fridge, but that’s not something I’ve ever really gotten into. It’s certainly fine, and if you’re using leftover rice it’s nice to not have to do anything to it. I wouldn’t refrigerate or age rice just to fry it though. If I’m making rice just to stir fry, I prefer to cook it fresh, and give it like 10 minutes to come down in temperature a little bit.

So, you can either boil the rice or steam it. I use a rice cooker, which is really just boiling, except it doesn’t require any effort or attentiveness whatsoever. If you don’t have a rice cooker, you can boil it in a pot on the stove. 1.5 cups of rice will need just shy of 2 cups of water. Put the rice and water into a cold pot, stir it once, put a lid on it, and turn the heat on high. As soon as the water comes to a boil, turn the heat down to low and let it simmer for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, take it off the heat and let it hang out with the lid on for another 5 minutes or so. Do not at any point during the cooking open the lid, or stir the rice, or think scary thoughts about what can happen inside a pot you haven’t looked at for 25 minutes. The rice will sense your fear and turn to glue! Just let it sit peacefully and do it’s bit and it will come out just fine. While the rice is cooking, I do all the other prep for the recipe, and if I’m feeling particularly coordinated, I’ll even start stirfrying veggies as the rice is finishing.

Once the rice is cooked, I like to put it in a big mixing bowl and gently fluff it to let it steam off some moisture and come down in temperature a little bit. I use a stainless steel bowl because it doesn’t trap the heat, but it’s not necessary. When you’re moving the rice around, the key is to never exert force in a direction that rubs the grains against each other (again because of the glue effect). You always want a motion that moves them apart. It seems to be easiest to scoop from underneath as if you were folding cake batter.

Sauce:

Sauce for fried rice varies tremendously, but there are a few common themes that seem to show up a lot. Soy sauce is almost always involved, and when it’s cut back or omitted, regular salt takes its place. Most soy sauce on its own is too concentrated to properly coat the rice, so there’s most often some other liquid. Water is the simplest solution, and will work just fine, but much more often rice wine is used. That in itself is ambiguous, as there are hundreds of rice wines. Some recipes will even use citrus juice and other flavors to thin the soy sauce. The last factor that’s almost always present as a point of balance is sweetness. You can certainly just add sugar, but there are also sweet rice wines and sweet soy sauces that can be used.

For this recipe, I’m using 3 tbsp of regular Chinese soy sauce, with 3 tbsp of Shao Xing rice wine as the base for the sauce. Instead of using sugar, I’ve chosen a Thai style black soy sauce. (pictured to the left) If you’ve never had this stuff it’s worth looking for. It’s not as salty as regular soy sauce, but it’s very sweet and pours like syrup. I really like it in stirfry sauces because it seems to caramelize in a nicer way than regular sugar. If you can’t find black soy sauce, you can use Mirin instead of the Shao Xing. Mirin is sweetened, and I actually like to pair it with Tamari in fried rice.

Really the options are endless, just make sure you have a substantial savory component, and a slight sweet component. I usually keep a couple different soy sauces and rice wines in the fridge, so that I have options and I’m not making the same stir fry over and over. It’s actually quite popular to not mix the sauce before hand, and instead just drizzle the components into the pan one at a time during cooking. This gives you the option of “seeing how it goes” and adjusting your ratios on the fly to compensate. The reason I’ve taken to mixing the sauce in advance is that by now I pretty much know what I like. Having it measured out frees me from having to think about how much I’m using later on. If you’re trying new ideas or new sauces though, there’s definitely an advantage to continually drizzling and tasting.

Cabbage:

In order to best use the limited heat and limited space of your stove and pan, I’d recommend stirfrying the veggies on their own first, and adding them back to the rice at the end. This is pretty much how I approach any stirfry dish, possibly because I have an electric stove. If you’ve got a gigantic wok atop some ridiculous propane situation, feel free to do the veggies at the same time as the onions.

For folks with normal equipment, heat a wok or large fry pan on high heat, and add a little bit of oil. Ideally you want to use the smallest amount of oil you can get away with. For this reason I like to use a non-stick pan, as it lets you use less. Getting the pan absolutely as hot as possible also reduces the amount of oil required. This is my reason for using sunflower oil actually. Sunflower oil has a very high smoke point, which lets you get your pan to a higher temperature. So, heat the oil until it smokes, and then add the cabbage.

Quickly toss it to get it coated evenly with oil, and then allow it to sit and sizzle for a few seconds. Repeat tossing and waiting until the cabbage is well seared on a few surfaces and heated through. Because I’ve cut the cabbage into smaller pieces in this recipe than I have in previous stir fry posts, it will take longer to cook than it did in those recipes. Usually when I make fried rice, I don’t like the veggie pieces to be too big, but that’s totally a personal preference thing. When you’re happy with the color of your cabbage, set it aside.

Mushrooms:

Return the pan to the heat and add a little more oil. (Probably more than you needed for the cabbage) When the oil is smoking, add the mushrooms and quickly toss to coat. Add a little splash of water to the pan and again toss to coat. The water steams the mushrooms briefly in order to heat their own internal water, since they can take a while to get going without the help. Once they begin to heat up they’ll carry on cooking just fine without any more additions. Alternately toss and wait as you did with the cabbage, and after a couple minutes the sound of the cooking will change. The bubbly sound of the water will slow down, and they’ll begin to brown much more quickly. They’re done when you decide they’re done.. I like mine golden brown, but, once they’ve started to color you can really call them finished at any time. Set them aside for later.

Frying the Rice:

Bring the pan back to the high heat and add some oil. Once the oil is smoking, add the onion and toss to get it coated.

Stirfry the onion until it begins to brown. You should probably move on when the onion is about half as cooked as you’d like it.

Add the rice, along with a little bit more oil, and stir it to coat as evenly as possible. When you’re frying rice, there are a few different variables that you need to keep in mind. As the cooking progresses, observe carefully so that you can keep your head around all the various factors, and continually adjust your technique to compensate.

Everything you need to watch while you’re cooking has to do with determining the distribution of water in each individual grain of rice. When the rice first hits the pan, the water is evenly distributed and low in temperature. The first sounds you hear come from the water on the surface of the grain quickly boiling off when it hits the heat. As you stir the rice around in the beginning, you gradually dry the outside surface of each grain slightly, and begin heating the water contained within. As the internal water comes to the surface, the pan settles into a fairly consistent sizzle.

The water distribution also affects how the rice responds when you stir it. As I mentioned earlier, when it’s freshly cooked, you need to be very careful when you stir. This is because there is so much water on the outside of the rice that the grains are easy to damage. When you first add the rice to the hot pan, the same is true, and you should stir as gently and as infrequently as possible. Once the water starts moving and the fry settles down, you can stir fry it as you would anything else. Thoroughly toss, and then wait for everything to sizzle for a while before you repeat. If you use more oil, it prevents the rice grains from sticking to each other when they’re wet, and makes them easier to cook. This can quickly lead to a greasy dish however. It’s always my goal to make this dish with as little oil as I can, so that it doesn’t distract from the flavor. Cutting back on the oil you give to the rice itself is the most effective way to reduce the perception of greasiness, but also the most difficult. Next time you have a really amazing restaurant fried rice, note how little oil is actually left on the grains.

When enough water has worked its way out of the rice, the surface of the grains will be able to be heated above boiling temperature, and they’ll begin to color. At this point, move everything to the outside edge of the pan so that you have a space in the middle to work with.

Pour a little puddle of sesame oil in the center of the pan, and to it add the chopped garlic. After just a few seconds, the garlic will begin to color, and you can toss everything until it’s well combined.

Continue to stir fry the rice and garlic until you’ve worked out enough water to put a decent texture on most of the rice. You won’t be able to get it all to color, you’re just looking for enough cooked surfaces to affect the final texture. It’s important here not to go too far, as you have the potential to dry out the rice. If you listen closely as the cooking progresses, you should be able to hear the water content gradually decreasing. As there is less water, the outside surface of the rice grains will be able to cook faster and faster, and the idea is to begin adding sauce before that process gets away from you.

Drizzle a little bit of the sauce on, quickly toss, and then allow to sizzle. When you add the sauce, the water steams off and helps to keep the rice hydrated. The idea is to ration the sauce so that you can keep the water content in the pan fairly stable. Add a little, wait for it to steam… when you feel you’re about back where you started, add some more. It usually takes me about 4 or 5 splashes to go through all the sauce. (Save the last splash for when you add the veggies) Also, remember that you’re depending on the sugar in the sauce to caramelize, so don’t stir too often. It’s important that once a grain of rice has absorbed the sauce, it has some time against the pan for the flavor to develop.

Add in your cooked veggies along with the rest of the sauce, and stir to combine. Wait for everyone to get to about the same temperature and then serve!

Tomato sauce is the foundation of a huge selection of Italian dishes, so there are as many variations as there are folks who cook Italian food. Once you discount the gimmicky super simple recipes, the rest sort of separate into two separate philosophies. The first is the gourmet approach, which puts emphasis on subtle relationships between fresh ingredients and is careful not to overcook the tomatoes. I think these sauces do best when they are the center of the dish. The other philosophy is the homemade slowcooked sauce, and that’s what this recipe is. The intent here is to concentrate the flavor of your ingredients, yielding a thicker sauce that’s great to support other dishes. This is the kind of sauce I go for if I’m making pizza, lasagne, baked eggplant, etc…

This recipe takes a little while to cook (2-3 hours usually), but it’s really low involvement. You spend a few minutes at the start getting it going, and then just come back every once in a while to stir. If that still sounds like a long time to spend, you can get more for your troubles by making a lot. The quantities scale up really easily, so you can make a big batch and keep it in the fridge (for a couple of weeks) or freezer (for a couple of months).

 

Ingredients:

So I liked the coding system that I used for the ingredients in my last post. Just to recap how it works: Bold ingredients are essential and define the recipe, italic is for historically proven good ideas that are often used, and everything else is pretty specific to this particular iteration of the recipe. As you can see from the list below, I’m not shattering the world of Italian cooking with this one, everything is pretty classic.

Slowwww:

First, get a nice big saucepan going on medium-low heat. You want a temperature that gets your onions entirely transparent before they begin to color.

Add enough olive oil to generously coat the bottom of the pan (like 3 or 4 tablespoons?), followed by the onion and bell pepper. Give everyone a good stir and let them slowly begin to sweat. You won’t need to pay much attention to this process, just a little stir now and then to prevent whatever surface is touching the pan from cooking faster than the rest of it.

Once your onion and pepper are all the way see through and a little bit golden, you can add the garlic. Give it a nice stir and resume the slow golden-ing process.  : )

When all the aromatics have a nice gentle golden color (not browned), you can add the tomatoes. Stir them for a while at first to ensure they combine well with the ingredients in the pan, and then turn the heat down to low so that they can simmer.

Stir the sauce around only as often as is necessary to prevent the bottom from burning, and when the temperature in the pan has caught up to your adjustment of the burner, add the sugar and salt.

Continue to slowly allow moisture to escape, stirring when needed. Eventually the sauce will reduce to a point that the water/oil balance changes where the sauce contacts the pan. The bubbling that occurs for most of the cooking process will slow considerably, and hissing will also be audible. When you’ve reached this point, taste test and adjust the salt and pepper. If you feel you can continue to drive water out without changing the color of the tomatoes, then you should probably try and do that, you don’t want the tomatoes to actually brown though. If you’re going to push, taste often to make sure things aren’t getting out of hand. If it does go a little funky you can usually rescue it with a bit more sugar as long as you catch it soon enough. Don’t feel obligated to take a risk though with your 3 hours of work, if most of the excess liquid is gone, then you’re good to go as is, anything more is a bonus. Stir in the fresh oregano, give it a few seconds to come to temperature, and then remove the pan from the heat.

Pizza is probably the easiest way to eat this sauce, just spoon some on a crust, top with veggies, and pop it in the oven! I’ll be posting some more exciting applications for it in the future though. Enjoy!

Tofu scrambles are pretty weird. I’m just gonna be up front about that. Another thing that we need to get out of the way is the word scramble…. I didn’t name this dish, and if I did, I wouldn’t have used the word scramble because immediately people think of eggs when they hear scramble. Granted, it looks a little like scrambled eggs, and it’s good for breakfast, and it’s good with ketchup, but that’s where the similarities end. (whether or not ketchup is good with scrambled eggs is not up for debate, nor is it “regional”, it’s just true.) Lots of times when people first try a tofu scramble, their reaction is something like “this doesn’t really taste like eggs”. Recently I even got a “this would be great with eggs in it”. Ok. This is a weird dish whose cooking method and flavor have nothing to do with scrambled eggs. Disclaimers sorted, moving on!

I love how popular this dish has become! The vegan community discovered nutritional yeast and suddenly everywhere there are tofu scrambles. I’ve had it from nice restaurants, quick buffets, frozen food, “just add tofu” mix from a box, plus a few dozen varieties from my own kitchen. As you might expect, the ones I’ve been cooking lately are a mix of theories from all the strange iterations I’ve had. Most of the time this dish ends up being a really casual, slow cooked affair. This is the first of many different takes that I’ll eventually blog about, and my primary motivation this time was just to cook a lot of hearty food. The nutritional yeast matches well with basic American staple flavors, so I used corn and pasta this time to get a bunch of food without too much fuss. Spinach isn’t exactly necessary in this dish, but at the same time I can’t ever recall having it without it. Also I just love spinach.  : )

 

Ingredients:

Tofu:

I do the standard tofu drying process here that I always do when I cook tofu. First thing, before you prep any other part of the recipe, spread your broken tofu out on a paper towel. Cover it with another paper towel and then wrap the whole business in a nice clean kitchen towel. In a lot of recipes the tofu gets cubed, or cut into some other fragile shape, so you’ve got to be careful about evenly distributing weight and not weighing it down too much. The crumbles in this recipe are much easier, and you can just walk over to them every couple minutes and give them a good squish with your palms. Getting the tofu dry helps it to pick up more interesting flavors, and in this recipe also makes it easier to get the color and texture you want when you sautee it. If you’re really ambitious you can swap out the kitchen towel for a fresh one when it gets soaked. Ideally you want no less than half an hour of drying.

The sautee:

You’ll need a big frying pan, nonstick is really helpful when working with tofu, because it likes to stick to everything, including itself! As I mentioned earlier, this recipe cooks at a leisurely pace, so set your burner to medium/medium-lowish. You’re looking for the slow side of sautee, almost to the point that your onions go completely see-through before they start browning. Almost.

Once your pan is hot, toss your onions in with a little veggie oil and let them acquire some color. The way I think of the timing in this recipe is to let each ingredient get half cooked before you add the next. So when the onions are half as colored as you’d like them, move on to the tofu.

Stir the tofu around thoroughly at first, to make sure it gets evenly covered in oil, but take care not to beat it up too much. Add a little oil if it looks like it wants it. Essentially it’s impossible to get the tofu evenly browned in this dish without it either falling apart or getting tough. Instead I try to selectively brown a few surfaces so I end up with contrasting tofu textures. Cooked enough that there are brown chewy bits, but not cooked so much that the lovely bite sized pieces have turned to crumbles. This balance is easy to achieve by allowing the tofu to sit and cook on one side until it gets color, and then stirring it around again. If you listen closely to the way it sizzles, you can get a feel for when it will want to be shaken up, but until you’re familiar with the sounds, picking up a piece and checking out the color is easy enough. Usually I end up stirring like 3 or 4 times before I’ve reached half cooked. By this time the onions should be about 3/4 cooked.

You can add the garlic and corn at the same time, because they both need very little cooking, but still have to make it into the pan before the powders. Again, when your garlic is half colored, move on.

Scatter the spice powders around the pan as evenly as you can, and begin to stir them in. If you’ve read my Saag Aloo post, the behavior of these spices will already be familiar. Basically when you first add them they put up quite the fuss about being combined. It looks like there’s not enough oil, it looks like they might burn, it looks like they’re drying out the tofu…. but it’s fine! Don’t worry. Just keep stirring slowly, make sure no single area stays in contact with the pan for too long, and eventually it’ll all come back together. The salt will pull moisture out of everything and help the powders dissolve, the oil will run back to where it belongs, and the spices will just start cooking and toasting up nicely. The trick to making nutritional yeast taste really good is to make sure it has time to mingle with everything around it. You’ll notice as everything is cooking that the tofu takes on more of the yeast than the other ingredients, and that actually helps it to finish getting the texture that you half started earlier. The spinach is a very water laden ingredient, so when you add it to the pan you’ll effectively stop the sautee. Make sure your tofu and garlic and onions and yeast are all cooked enough now because this is the last time they’ll be able to color.

Stir the spinach in, and when it has come up to temperature, add a little bit of water to help it out. The spinach will need like 3-5 minutes of cooking. Because this is being cooked on a fairly low heat, I don’t add water with the expectation that much will reduce out. The spinach will also give up some water to the sauce as it cooks, so you can add a little at a time to keep it moist. Ideally you want enough moisture in the pan so that at the end of your 3-5 minutes, you have just enough sauce to coat the pasta. Now is probably a good time to taste test for salt as well.

Toss the pasta in and stir it around until it’s picked up the sauce pretty evenly.

Take the pan off the heat, and stir in most of the tomatoes. Use what’s left, along with a squirt of ketchup to garnish the plate. Enjoy!

This is totally my new favorite recipe! I have very little experience with baking and sweets and that whole universe, so muffins this good are doubly exciting to me. It’s also nice for a change to cook something that doesn’t even pretend to be healthy. A bit about how this began: Over the winter, my cousin Erin made for me a batch of zucchini muffins, and I was amazed how good they were for vegan pastry… all the vegan baking recipes I’d tried had always come out dry, or heavy, or required some weird egg replacer or something. Months later, I finally got my hands on Erin’s awesome recipe and couldn’t resist tinkering.  : )    The first thing I tried was a pumpkin spice version, and it was delicious! (I’ll have to post that one on here someday) The recipe held up really well to all my adjustments, so I decided to keep exploring… lots of baking is exact chemistry, and doesn’t tolerate such nonsense. Years ago, before I was vegan, I had some chocolate chip banana bread that my friend Scott’s mom made for everyone, and it blew my mind. It seemed like such an unlikely combination of flavors, but they go perfectly together! That recipe of course was not vegan, or even close, and I had no idea how to go about converting it. The muffin recipe on the other hand turned out to be an excellent way to get chocolate and banana together, and lots of other flavors too as it turns out. This won’t be the last weird combination to come out of this recipe.  : )

 

Ingredients:

Mix:

This is a really simple thing to put together, minimal amount of technique needed. First, get your oven preheating to 325. Meanwhile, sift your flour into a giant mixing bowl, then whisk all the other dry ingredients into it. In a smaller mixing bowl, whisk together all the wet ingredients except for the banana. Best if you wait until you’re ready before you puree the bananas, because they start to oxidize and turn brown as soon they’re exposed to the air. Also, use extremely ripe bananas, probably riper than you’d want to eat. The ones I used were alright, but if I wasn’t really craving these muffins I would’ve given them another couple days. So puree your bananas and then whisk them into the bowl of wet ingredients. Ok, this is the only part where you actually need to pay attention for a second…. : )   Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and quickly combine with a wooden spoon, taking care not to over mix. Basically as soon as the baking powder and baking soda get wet, they start doing their business of producing air bubbles. If you keep stirring while that happens you just end up knocking all the air out that you just made. So stir like mad until there’s no more dry powder showing and then step away! Give the batter a few minutes to rest before you go any further. (This is a good time to line your muffin pan with muffin cups. (P.S. There’s a company called “If You Care” that makes 100% recycled, 100% compostable muffin cups and parchment paper and the like, so you don’t have to feel terrible about throwing that stuff out all the time.))

Spoon the batter into your muffin cups so that they’re well heaped over the top. Because there are no eggs in this recipe, the batter does most of it’s lifting before it goes into the oven. Bake at 325 for about 25 minutes. If you don’t use Earth Balance, and instead just use all coconut oil, they may not be brown on top after 25 minutes, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be brown on the bottom. You’ll have to experiment with cooking times to get a nice balance between a colored top and a bottom that isn’t overcooked. After they come out of the oven, let them rest for at least 15 minutes before you devour one, they’ll really be better in a couple hours though!

Try these with a cup of coffee… it seems obvious enough, but I thought I ought to mention it because I didn’t want anyone to miss out on the experience.    : )

This is my take on an Italian classic. First of all, what can be said about fresh, raw tomato and basil? Pretty much any excuse you can find to get these guys in a dish together will be delicious! When I went shopping to make this awesome snack, sitting right next to the fresh basil at the market was some beautiful fresh marjoram, so I decided to throw some of that in as well. These three summery flavors sit atop fat slices of crusty Ciabatta that have been toasted up with homemade garlic oil.

 

Ingedients:

8 slices of tomato
4 tbsp chopped basil leaves
2 tbsp marjoram leaves, just plucked off their stems
4 slices ciabatta bread
3-4 tbsp garlic oil
extra virgin olive oil
coarse sea salt

Garlic Toast:

Preheat your oven to 450, and place your sliced bread on a cookie sheet. Evenly dress each slice with 2-3 teaspoons of garlic oil. Ok, maybe not perfectly evenly…. I tend to give the crust a little bit more oil than the rest of it because it’s a little bit more dense than the rest of it.  : )   When your oven is at temperature, toast the bread for about 8 minutes or until you like the color. I prefer mine to be a standard happy golden brown, but I’ll leave the decision to you. It’s actually quite popular to broil these instead of baking of them, so that you can almost blacken the corners and leave the center nearly raw. While I like the flavor that that technique gets you, I prefer the texture you get from baking. I read a recipe once that actually pan-fried the bread in the oil! Sounds really good but I’ve never tried it… any volunteers?

Assembly:

First, evenly divide the marjoram among the slices of bread, followed by the basil. Lay 2 slices of tomato on each piece of bread, and then liberally salt them.

Finally give them a quick drizzle of extra virgin olive oil over the top. If you happen to have a really nice (read: expensive) olive oil that you save for when it can truly be appreciated, now’s the time.   : )    Enjoy!

This garlic infused olive oil can be prepared and then kept in the fridge, ready to add flavor to all kinds of different recipes. Use it in grilled sandwiches, salad dressings, pasta dishes, on pizza crusts, drizzled over casseroles, the possibilities are endless! In my next post I’ll use some to make a quick bruschetta.   : )

 

Ingredients:

garlic, minced
extra virgin olive oil

You’ll notice that there are no quantities listed… you can make as much or as little as you want, and you can make it as light or as strong as you want as well. This time, I used a whole head of garlic, and enough oil to submerse all the garlic, plus a little bit.

Prep:

I’ve mentioned before that sometimes a food processor will do just as good a job at disassembling veggies as manual tools will, depending on the recipe. Unfortunately in this recipe, I find that mincing the garlic with a chef’s knife yields much better results. The food processor tends to knock a lot of liquid out of the garlic as it chops it up, and we really want that liquid to stay put so that we can boil it out slowly and concentrate it’s flavor. Also, if you keep good oil alongside your regular oil in the house, just use the cheap stuff for this recipe. Any awesome subtleties in a high end olive oil will be totally wasted for this application.

Place your garlic in a small frypan or saucepan, and add enough oil to come over the top of it by a few mm. You can use less oil for stronger flavor, or more to thin it out. Turn the heat on low and allow the pan to come to temperature with the ingredients in it.
Your goal here is to provide the minimum amount of heat necessary to keep the garlic bubbling. The slower it cooks, the more flavor we’ll be able to get out of the garlic and into the oil before the garlic gets toasty. If you’re using a non-stick pan, you’ll barely have to stir this throughout the course of the cooking, if not, just come back every 5 minutes or so to make sure the stuff on the bottom isn’t cooking faster than the rest of it. Because this cooks so slowly, it’s pretty much impossible to estimate how long it will take. The freshness of the garlic, how finely you’ve minced it, how much you’re making, and the temperature of the pan are all significant variables that contribute to the cooking time. This batch took me a little over half an hour, but I’ve had instances as short as 15 minutes and as long as 90. Essentially, when the garlic has a nice toasty color, and the bubbling has slowed down, it’s ready. This is also a varaible you can play with to affect the final flavor. Taking it off the heat earlier will create a sharper, brighter tasting oil, but may not force all the liquid out. Leaving it longer will round out the flavor and make it more toasty, just be careful not to let it burn. If you intend to use the oil as a seasoning (for garlic bread, or salad dressing, etc..) then extra liquid won’t matter. But if you intend to actually cook with it, sautee, stir fry, whathaveyou… any remaining liquid will affect the way heat is transmitted to whatever you’re cooking, and may also splatter a bit when you heat it back up. When it’s done cooking, strain out the garlic solids, and reserve the oil!
 
 

Summer is finally here! We had some hot weather this week and it really made me want to cook something spicy and fresh. All of the local herbs and aromatics are starting to show up at the market, so I thought it was the perfect opportunity for a green curry. This is a coconut milk curry, flavored by a freshly ground herb and spice paste. When you’re shopping for your herbs, there are a few classics to look out for, but this recipe is really open to anything fresh and green. I picked out the best looking stuff at the market and ended up with basil, coriander, lemongrass, scallion, and jalapeno. Like most Thai curries, this one also has ginger, garlic, coriander seed, and black pepper. I’ve also added a little fennel seed to bring out the bright fresh flavor of the greens. For me this dish is all about the sauce, so I like to use steamed jasmine rice, and vegetables with a subtle flavor that won’t overwhelm the herbs. This time I went with napa cabbage, tofu, potatoes, and cashews. Many times I’ll roast my potatoes to concentrate their flavor, but I actually boiled them in this recipe to keep them a little quieter. This curry gets even more summery at plating time with the addition of cucumber and lime!

 

Ingredients:

green curry paste:

1 bunch coriander leaf, roughly chopped (stems and all)
1 bunch basil, roughly chopped (stems here too, just not the really big ones)
2 jalapenos, seeded and sliced
2 scallions, sliced
1 lemongrass stalk, sliced
3 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 tsp ginger, nicely chopped
1 tsp coriander seed
3/4 tsp fennel seed
10 black peppercorns
2 tsp sesame oil

veggies:

~2 cups napa cabbage, in bite size chunks
3 yukon gold potatoes, boiled 20 minutes, and then cut into big chunks
1lb extra firm tofu, cubed and pressed
1/2 cup dry roasted, unsalted cashews
1 small cucumber, cubed

sauce:

1 shallot, sliced
1 green bell pepper, diced
13.5 oz can of coconut milk
3 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp sugar
limes, sliced in half
veggie oil

Curry Paste:

I like to put my paste together in a mortar and pestle as it gives you a bit more control over the final product. In many recipes the extra effort is really worth it, but luckily this isn’t one of them. If you want to save some time here, go ahead and use a food processor, it’ll still be delicious. The food processor will also let you be a little more lax about chopping your stringy veggies. Whatever method you use, start with the seeds and peppercorns, and get them most of the way to a powder. Then go for the ginger, garlic, and lemongrass, as they’re a bit more tough. When you’ve got a nice paste going, add in everything else. In the end I like my paste a little coarse, it makes the final sauce a bit more varied from bite to bite and rustic looking. If you want a really polished gourmet sort of presentation instead, you can blend the paste until it’s entirely homogeneous. They’ll both taste great! When you’re happy with your texture, add in the sesame oil and combine well.

Cabbage:

The cabbage just gets quickly stirfried, and then we can move right on to the curry. Heat a wok or large non-stick pan on high heat, and add a little veggie oil. When the oil is smoking, add in the cabbage and give it a few tosses to distribute the oil. Let it sit and pick up a little color before you toss it again. You’re looking to just barely cook it, brown on one side and heated through, nothing more. It’ll probably only take 30-45 seconds or so. When it’s cooked, set it aside for later.

The Sauce:

We’ll start the sauce with some aromatics. Return the pan to high heat with some more oil, and add the bell pepper. Give it a quick shake to evenly distribute the oil, and then let the pepper sizzle for about 30 seconds. Add the shallot and toss frequently until it’s got a nice golden color.

Add in the tofu with a little more oil, and stirfry until it starts to brown. This takes like 1 and a half to 2 minutes, tossing every 15-20 seconds. I don’t like to put too much of a fry on the tofu in this recipe because it tends to take it away from fresh and toward dark and savory. When you’ve got a color that you’re happy with, add in your paste.

Stir the paste around continuously, taking care not to rough the tofu up. As the paste cooks, the liquid will boil out of it, imparting flavor to the tofu on the way. Listen for the water content in the paste… it will start out quiet, and then boil fiercely. As the amount of water reduces, the boiling will turn to a sizzling / frying. When it’s about equal boiling to frying, add in your coconut milk. We’re not trying to toast this paste, as you might with a red curry, it’s important to keep this one tasting fresh and green. Bring the coconut milk up to a boil, stirring constantly, and then lower the heat to medium.

Add in your sugar and soy sauce, stir to combine, and then add the potatoes. Pour in enough water to almost submerge them. This dish is essentially done when the potatoes are done, figure about 10-15 minutes. Keep boiling everything on medium heat the whole time, stirring occasionally, allowing the sauce to reduce. After about 10 minutes, start stabbing the potatoes with a fork every now and then to test the texture.

When the potatoes are just about cooked all the way through, toss in your cashews. They’ll need about 2 or 3 minutes to just soften a little. Now’s a good time to guess at how much sauce you’ll have left as well. For this particular dish, I like to have some liquid left at the end, as opposed to all of the sauce just coating the veggies. If you think you’re going to have too much liquid, you can turn up the heat to force a little more out. If it looks like it’s not enough, add a little bit of water. You don’t really want to be turning the heat down at this point, because we’ll soon be adding veggies that will need some heating.

When you’re just about ready to take the pan off the heat, mix in the stir fried cabbage and cucumber chunks. Allow them to spend just enough time on the heat to equalize temperature, and then serve! You can squeeze lime juice over the entire thing, but I prefer to put half a lime on each plate and leave it to the taster.

A Chinese take-out favorite, and it doesn’t even take long to make! This is an extremely savory dish, whose flavor is built by double black soy sauce, sesame oil, fermented bean paste, and high heat cooking. Once you’ve made it a couple times, it’s totally possible to put together in a half hour, which is a sharp contrast to most of what I cook.   : )

 

Ingredients:

noodles:

1 reasonable handful thin rice noodles
veggie oil
sesame oil
double black soy sauce

veggies:

3 cups napa cabbage, hacked into bite sized pieces
3/4 cup sugar snap peas, topped, tailed, and halved
2 portobello mushroom caps, in bite sized dice
veggie oil (i’ve had sunflower in the house lately, but this dish is particularly good with peanut)
sesame oil
water

sauce:

1 shallot, thinly sliced
1 mild red chili, seeds removed, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp ginger, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 tsp chinese fermented bean sauce
2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp rice vinegar
2 tbsp rice wine
3 tbsp light soy sauce
veggie oil
sesame oil
water

Noodles:

First off, boil some water for the noodles. If you’re trying to be quick you can get done all the veggie and sauce prep while the water is coming to a boil. When your water is ready, boil the noodles using the instructions on the package as a guideline. I find noodles this size take about 3 minutes usually, so start tasting them at 2 so you can be sure. As soon as they’re a texture that you’d be happy eating straight out of the pot, toss them in a strainer and rinse them under cold water. The water will bring their temperature down quickly and stop any residual cooking. Keep rinsing though, the noodles get a starchy film on them when they cook, and the more of this stuff you wash off, the easier it will be to get an awesome texture when you stir fry them. Set them aside to drain, and heat a wok or large non-stick pan on high heat. When the pan has come to temperature, scatter a little veggie oil around and wait for it to begin smoking. (Oil gets added a bunch of times throughout this recipe, so each time try and add the smallest amount that you think will work. In most cases, you have a little time to add more after the initial guess.) Add the noodles to the pan (careful of splatter!) and immediately scatter a teaspoon or two of sesame oil over them. Toss them around quickly to evenly distribute the oil.

So there are a couple things to be accomplished by your stirfry technique here. The noodles are already cooked, so we don’t need to worry about making sure everything gets even heat, or enough heat, or anything like that. This allows us to selectively impart flavor and texture to some of the noodles, while conveniently forcing a little bit of water out of the rest of them. Getting rid of some water now will allow them to take up the sauce later without getting soggy. So once you’ve tossed your noodles in oil, let them sit and sear for about 30 seconds. You can give the pan a little jiggle to get as much of the heat stored in the pan onto the noodle surface as possible, just make sure the same surfaces are in contact with the pan for the whole sear time. If your noodles are sticking to the pan, that either means the pan is not hot enough, or you haven’t used enough oil. Break the noodles apart and give everything a nice toss. You don’t have to be thorough, just make sure to expose new surfaces to get seared, and then wait again. Repeat this process until the noodles begin to take on a golden color and stick to each other a bit. Scatter a couple teaspoons of double black soy sauce over all the noodles and give them a good toss. Once they’ve been sauced you should shorten up your waiting period significantly, as the noodles will take on color much more quickly. After 2 or 3 tosses, give them another hit of the soy sauce and a final sear, and set aside.

Napa Cabbage:

 

Sugar snap peas:

 

Portobello Mushrooms

The mushrooms get cooked very similarly to the snap peas, except they will only need water once or twice at the beginning. Mushrooms contain a lot of water internally, and as soon as you get it boiling, you won’t need to add any more of your own. I find that they take very well to being stirfried almost well-done. If you’re careful, you can really bring out a good smokey flavor, so I’ll generally try to push them as far as I can. Use your nose! Get close to the pan (careful of splatter etc..), and really take in the aroma. If you pay close attention and investigate often, you can go quite a ways before they burn. As you feel like you’re getting to the end, keep them in constant motion and it’ll reduce the burn chance even further. When you think they can’t take anymore, set them aside with the other veggies.

Sauce:

The unique character of this sauce comes from fermented soy beans. There are literally hundreds of different bean sauces available at asian markets everywhere, and they each have their own unique taste. As you’re shopping around just be aware of sketchy ingredients that sometimes show up in these things. Koon Chun Sauce Factory makes a bunch of nice Chinese cooking products that seem to be free of scariness, at least based on the label. The Koon Chun bean sauce is the one I used in this particular recipe, but I’ve also included a picture of another one (“Comrade Brand”) that I had in the house. Experiment, try a few different ones! Sometimes you get them and the soybeans are still whole, which is cool for certain applications, but in this dish I’d recommend smashing them up.

In something that can measure liquid, mix together the bean sauce, sugar, rice vinegar, rice wine, and light soy sauce. Add enough water to bring the total volume up to about 3/4 cup, and set aside. Return your pan to the high heat with a little oil and when it is smoking, add the shallot. Stirfry the shallot until it has gotten a little bit of color, and then move it all to the outside edge of the pan. In the center of the pan, pour a puddle of sesame oil about 1 tbsp.

Add the chili, ginger, and garlic, and stir to ensure they all get coated evenly in sesame oil. Once you’ve done that you can mix the shallot back in, and let everything continue to brown.

When your aromatics have got a nice golden brown color, add the liquid ingredients you mixed earlier. They’ll rapidly come to a boil and you should stir nearly constantly while the sauce reduces. Continue reducing the sauce until it’s thick enough that it doesn’t immediately run back when you push it around the pan.

Add in the contents of your big bowl of veggies, and toss to quickly coat with sauce. Then add in the noodles, and stir to combine everything well. Give everything a final shake of double black soy sauce and serve!

This is a classic Indian dish that I make using mostly authentic methods.  Actual masters of Indian cooking will probably disagree with my interpretation because I’ve made a bunch of little changes here and there over the years.  Saag Aloo literally translated is just “Spinach Potato”, but it’s the complex curry sauce that gives this dish its character.  It starts with whole spices fried in oil, followed by fresh aromatics and home made curry powder.  Golden raisins and coriander leaf balance the spiciness of the sauce.

 

Ingredients:

veggies:

2.5 cups potatoes, in bite sized dice
10 oz. chopped spinach
1/4 cup golden raisins

curry powder:

1 tsp fenugreek seed
3/4 tsp coriander seed
1/4 stick cinnamon
6 black peppercorns
1 clove
1 tsp chili powder
1.5 tsp turmeric powder
1 tsp ground paprika
1/2 tsp garam masala
3/4 tsp salt

sauce:

1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 or 3 stalks worth of curry leaves
1 tsp cumin seed
3/4 tsp black mustard seed
pinch of hing
1/4 cup coriander leaf
1 tbsp Earth Balance
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp brown sugar
veggie oil (I used sunflower)
water

Get the potatoes going first:

Preheat your oven to 325.  Lightly dress the potatoes with veggie oil, just enough to coat quite thinly, and then lay them out in a single layer on a parchment lined baking sheet.  Bake for about an hour, or until nicely golden brown. If you’re using frozen spinach, now would be a good time to start defrosting it.

Prepare the curry powder:

Place the coriander seed, cinnamon, clove, and black peppercorns into a small, dry frypan over medium heat. Allow the pan to slowly heat up with the spices in it, jiggling them around to ensure they don’t burn. You can start by shaking the pan every 30-45 seconds while it’s still cool, but near the end you’ll need to keep everything in constant motion. The spices are ready when they smell fragrant and toasty, and the coriander seeds have taken on a little color. In a mortar and pestle, combine the fenugreek, salt, and toasted spices, and work them to a powder. Once your powder is fine and homogeneous, add in the chili powder, turmeric, paprika, and garam masala, and combine well. Set aside for later.

The sauce:

When your potatoes are within 10 minutes of being done, you can start to cook the sauce. The beginning happens quite quickly, so have all your ingredients on hand and ready to go. Heat a nice wide frying pan (non-stick is helpful) over medium heat. When the pan has come up to temperature, pour about 1 tbsp of oil in the center, followed by the whole black mustard seed. The oil should be deep enough to completely submerge a single layer of seeds, so add some more if it’s not. Soon after you add them, the mustard will begin popping around. When it sounds like the majority of the seeds have popped, or will soon, add the cumin seed and the hing. When the cumin begin to change color (this doesn’t take long), add the curry leaves and toss the oil around to coat them. Curry leaves sputter like mad, be careful! If the timing has worked out well, at this point about 45 seconds will have elapsed, your mustard should all be popped, your cumin should all look and smell toasty without threatening to burn, and as much surface area as possible of your curry leaves should be fried in oil. Now add the onions and bell peppers and toss around thoroughly to stop the spices from cooking. If when you first toss your seeds in you find things are happening too fast, just throw all the spices in at once, followed straight away by the onion. It’s not a huge deal if they don’t toast up all the way, it is a huge deal if they burn. If on the other hand your mustard hit the pan and don’t immediately begin popping, that’s fine too. Just wait them out, they may not ever get as vigorous but they’ll still toast. Once you can smell them and they look like they’ve had a little cooking, continue on with the process. The hard part is over! The rest of this dish goes much more simply.

Sautee the onion and bell pepper until soft and golden. If you’re getting golden before soft, the heat is too high, and vice versa. When you’re happy with the color you’ve got, push everything to the outside edge of the pan and melt the tablespoon of Earth Balance in the center. Add the chopped garlic and stir around to ensure all of the garlic’s surface area comes into contact with the fat. You can then go ahead and incorporate the garlic back with the rest of the ingredients.

Continue cooking until the garlic is a nice golden brown. Add in your curry powder and stir to combine with the ingredients in the pan. The powder is going to try and drink up any available oil and moisture, so it will resist combining at first. Just keep stirring, trying to expose new surface areas, eventually the salt in the powder will work some water out of the aromatics and the powder will start to dissolve. In the mean time, you’ll notice that as it cooks dry it toasts up a little bit. After the moisture situation has balanced out, and the powder has taken on some nice toasty color, add in the rice vinegar. Continue cooking until it all boils off and then add enough water to cover all the ingredients. Stir while the sauce is coming to a boil.

When you’ve got a nice strong boil going, add in the brown sugar and spinach and then reduce to a simmer. Overall you’re trying to simmer about 25-30 minutes. You know you’re done when there is no more excess water in the pan. The sauce should be thickened enough that it all sticks to the veggies. You can add water if things are moving too quickly, or turn up the heat if they’re moving too slowly.

When you’ve got about 5 minutes to go, add in the potatoes. The wet sauce will make them mushy if they go in too soon, but they do need to spend some time with the other ingredients since they’ve not received any seasoning yet. With about 2 minutes to go, add the raisins. They need time enough to soften, but not so much that they swell up and lose their sweetness.

Finally, just before you’re ready to take everything off the heat, mix in most of the coriander leaf. Save a little bit to garnish the plate. This time I just served this with simple basmati rice, but it matches well with most types of rice and bread. Enjoy!