Eating & Cycling Toward Better Health
Perfect grilling means not dry meat. Since this was already cooked pork, I had to soak slices in a scallion oil blend and lightly grill it to just heat through.
I found some skinny baguettes in Oakland’s New Chinatown, which is where a lot of Vietnamese markets are located. The kale salad is definitely American but pretty fun in addition to the sandwich.
Grilled fresh oysters with..
Coconut milk, lime juice, roasted tomatillos and grated jalepeño!
Bonny Doon Contra wine.
Steamed cauliflower, spinach, tomatoes, grilled radicchio, with a dijon + balsamic vinaigrette.
Posted in Food
Beautiful day. These guys (loud sea lions) agree!
I like stopping by Phil’s Fish Market on my way home. I order a chowder bowl to go…
I also bought a cut of raw ono. I marinated my “steak” in coconut milk, Chinese cooking wine, grapeseed oil, and lime juice.
Grilled.
My portion. I made jasmine rice. I also made a sauce with all the same marinating ingredients, except oil, and added freshly chopped chilies and cilantro.
While we were eating dinner, this little fox ate a watermelon shell we had outside in the compost heap.
Zhajiangmian:醡醬麵, fried pork in homemade black bean sauce, Sichuan peppercorn, shaoxing wine, garlic, ginger, vegetarian hoisin. Cook fresh egg noodles, mixed with scallion, top with noodles, julienned cucumber and crushed peanuts. Mix all together. Enjoy.
I add a little black vinegar and Thai chilies to my noodles, too. By the time I’m finished with my bowl, my head is sweating and I’m super happy!
Ingredients (modified from Celia Chang’s recipe in The Seventh Daughter)
peanut oil or canola oil
2.5 cups of chopped pork (I used grilled pork, but fresh, raw minced pork shoulder is normally used.)
2 tbs ginger
4 tbs grated ginger
3 tbs shaoxing wine
3 tbs Hoisin
2 tbs yellow/black bean paste [since most jars of condiments include MSG, I tend to make my own "sauce" which is grated 1tbs of ginger, 2tbs sesame oil, 3tbs fermented black bean that has been rinsed in water for at least 15min, drained, then mashed with a fork.]
(my additions: 2tbs oyster sauce, 2 tbs minced zha cai, 1 tbs chinese chives, 1/2 cup of chicken broth to create more “sauce”)
Method:
All the condiments need to be prepped and chopped. Once you finish cooking, these need to be mixed in at a moment’s notice. You can add raw bean sprouts, julienned carrot / cucumber, chopped cilantro, soy beans, or chopped-cooked mushrooms. It’s easy to be simple, however, or embellished. It is really up to you.
Put a large pot of water on boil. Keep a lid on it.
In a large wok, heat and add oil until the bottom is lightly coated. Add garlic for 15seconds and stir in pork. If already cooked, just heat through. If raw, cook until you no longer see pink. Add grated ginger, fry until fragrant (add zha cai here if you wish for a bit of a spicy/sour kick). Add bean paste, shaoxing wine and mix until well incorporated. Add thick sauces (Hoisin and Oyster). Add chicken broth (or veggie if you don’t eat meat) to thin out sauce. It should be “coat the back of a spoon” viscosity and not watery like soup. If it is, turn the heat down and let simmer until it is a bit more reduced. (The concept is you dry fry all the ingredients that need to be cooked. Adding sauces with sugars makes things caramelize, so you need the broth to thin out and reduce so that the sauce coat the noodles later.) You can turn off the wok at this point.
I like using a handheld deep strainer for boiling batches of noodles. This allows you to make smaller portions and control the cooking temperature. I take a handful of soft, fresh shanghai or thick noodles and put in at least 2 cups at a time. Sometimes, the noodles take 7 minutes to cook. I use a pair of long chopsticks to stir the noodles within the ladle while it’s cooking. I have a bowl of cold water ready to chill the noodles when they are done. I like to put my cooked noodles into a cold bath so they do not clump or stick.
Typically, I will heat the wok up once more right before serving. I have bowls ready at the kitchen counter and take the already cooked noodles, put them BACK into the ladle (one serving at a time) and drop into the boiling water to again make the noodles hot. I like putting a little chili oil and raw chopped scallions in each bowl before adding the noodles. If you want to do this at the table, you can turn out the noodles onto a large bowl, pour the sauce on top of the noodles, add condiments in piles around the noodles and toss in front of your amazed and starving guests . . (or in my case, my hungry husband.) Personally, I like heating and mixing in the wok in little batches.
Appetizer. Beer steamed and wok tossed whole Dungeness crab with ginger, scallion oil, soy, with Chinese flowering chives.
Cumin, coriander seed, and cinnamon dry rubbed grilled chicken, and buttered corn on the cob.
Thai inspired rice noodle bowl with grilled lemongrass and tamarind pork, mint, Thai basil, cucumber, pickled diakon & carrots, cilantro, lime juice, cilantro chili sauce and a dollop of spicy coconut peanut sauce. Each person can mix their own sauce!
My order of a dozen sprouting seeds came in a week ago. It’s been warm in the house, so everytime I sprout a batch in my little hemp bags, it takes only 2-3 days for them to grow tendrils and become tasty treats!
If you’ve sprouted seeds, you know it’s an easy and fun way to have a variety of fresh, raw foods available at any time. I have 3 hemp bags and at least 2 varieties if seeds going at any one time.
This particular purchase was less than $40, including shipping. Each dry pouch of seeds could grow into 2 bursting hemp sprouting sacks. When I say bursting, I mean I have to gingerly work out the sprouted seeds because they’ve expanded so much that they bloated the bag and can’t move freely. Depending on the seed, err on the side of less dry seed= more space to expand.
Before I get boring and talk about how you have to soak the seeds over night and clean turn the bag inside out and rinse with the bag with boiled water before first using it (that’s it!) Here are my green lentils and mini mix. The mini mix sprouted very quickly and it yielded almost 8 cups of loosely packed “garnish”. I say that because it was too crunchy and little to eat by itself.
The lentils are 2 days sprouted and taste really great. I decided to have both this afternoon for lunch.
I made way too much hummus the other night, so I thinned a few tablespoons with lime juice and a dash of grapeseed oil and turned it into dressing.
I shredded half a carrot for the slaw and left the remainder as sticks so I could eat more hummus.
1/2 cup loosely packed sprouted green lentils, 1/2 cup mini mix of sprouted seeds, 1/4 cup grated carrot, a handful chopped parsley, *hummus dressing to taste.
*Hummus: 1/2 cup cooked garbanzo bean, 1 tbsp sesame paste, lemon juice of 1 golf ball size Meyer lemon, olive oil, water, harrissa to taste.
Posted in Food, Health, SP Cleanse
My order of a dozen sprouting seeds came in a week ago. It’s been warm in the house, so everytime I sprout a batch in my little hemp bags, it takes only 2-3 days for them to grow tendrils and become tasty treats!
If you’ve sprouted seeds, you know it’s an easy and fun way to have a variety of fresh, raw foods available at any time. I have 3 hemp bags and at least 2 varieties if seeds going at any one time.
This particular purchase was less than $40, including shipping. Each dry pouch of seeds could grow into 2 bursting hemp sprouting sacks. When I say bursting, I mean I have to gingerly work out the sprouted seeds because they’ve expanded so much that they bloated the bag and can’t move freely. Depending on the seed, err on the side of less dry seed= more space to expand.
Before I get boring and talk about how you have to soak the seeds over night and clean turn the bag inside out and rinse with the bag with boiled water before first using it (that’s it!) Here are my green lentils and mini mix. The mini mix sprouted very quickly and it yielded almost 8 cups of loosely packed “garnish”. I say that because it was too crunchy and little to eat by itself.
The lentils are 2 days sprouted and taste really great. I decided to have both this afternoon for lunch.
I made way too much hummus the other night, so I thinned a few tablespoons with lime juice and a dash of grapeseed oil and turned it into dressing.
I shredded half a carrot for the slaw and left the remainder as sticks so I could eat more hummus.
1/2 cup loosely packed sprouted green lentils, 1/2 cup mini mix of sprouted seeds, 1/4 cup grated carrot, a handful chopped parsley, *hummus dressing to taste.
*Hummus: 1/2 cup cooked garbanzo bean, 1 tbsp sesame paste, lemon juice of 1 golf ball size Meyer lemon, olive oil, water, harrissa to taste.
Posted in Uncategorized
Today, I used the last package of coffee beans from Sarawak, Borneo. We barely brought any souvenirs home from our trip, but what we did bring, we ate and drank and shared with our closest foodie pals. I savored this last bag for the last week. The nutty, smooth, rich and down right amazing flavored coffee it made was extremely tasty. This little coffee shop made our Sarawak food adventure complete. They hand sift through the beans each morning and offer green, unroasted beans as well as ground, packaged in airtight, gas releasing bags.
Until next time we go to Borneo… I’ll definitely miss this bean.
I’m under strict grocery bill rationing. Mostly because I just did our household budget and I realize I’m wasting a lot of money when I’m too lazy to cook.
Yesterday, I wanted something a little different. We hadn’t eaten lamb in a while, so when I saw little tender chops at the store, I couldn’t resist.
I have about a dozen types of rice varieties at home, so a basmati made the most sense to me. I had a spice jar of garam masala and used that and thyme leaves from the garden to dry rub marinate the meat.
I used a can of organic chickpeas, shelled the skins (took about 30 minutes) used half for hummus and half for my veggie tagine.
I had tzatziki and harrissa from a local gyro restaurant so I didn’t have to make more condiments.
Between my husband wanting to take the easy way for a pizza, and my wanting a nutritious, homemade dinner, we both won. He grilled the lamb perfectly, but I had a lot of prep and cooking to do.
It’s funny, because I made pizza for him just last Sunday. From scratch! I might add.
I was organizing the fridge and saw the inklings of a pizza, looked up “simple pizza crust recipe”, and 45 minutes later, there you go. Who knew 5 slices of salami, a small bunch of basil leaves, half an onion and sandwich slices of swiss cheese, and 8 oz of leftover filet mignon, and slices of a boiled potato could taste so good together. Pizza sauce and crust make everything come together, I guess.
Posted in Food
Pork shoulder, butterflied into .75″ thick slab, marinated in a sauce of chipotle, achiote paste, grilled onion, garlic, whole dried cumin, a dash of white vinegar and grilled tomatillo. (essentially salsa!) Grilled over charcoal for about 20 min + time, tented under foil, but amazing flavor and juiciness.
I bought some salsa, but made tomatillo+chipotle sauce because the salsa didn’t taste very great.
It was already 9:30 by the time we got the meat off the grill, so I used canned refried beans and steamed corn tortillas. I threw a half fennel on the grill and it ended up giving the tacos a really nice crunchy texture. It caramelized like onion, but wasn’t mushy or stringy. We had some yogurt in lieu of sour cream and I chopped a lot of scallions to top it all off.
Having some ingredients handy, like achiote paste, chipotle, Mexican espazote herbs, can really make a normal pork dish into an extroidinary one.
