A Tiger In The Kitchen

Green (Deviled) Eggs & Ham

If it's been a little quiet on this blog, well, there's been good reason.

There is the issue of this book, you see. A book editing deadline, to be precise. After following my various exploits while traveling and researching "A Tiger In The Kitchen," you'll be patient, I hope, as I wade my way to the finish line later this month. The blog, with all its death-defying bread baking, restaurant explorations and virtual lunch dates, will be back to normal in no time, I promise.

In the meantime, however, there are things that can prod the bloggery back to life.

In this case, that would be a carton of green eggs, large, pert and in the loveliest shade of pale sage. The moment they were spied, said carton was whisked off the table at the Brooklyn Heights farmers market and ferried home for further inspection.

What to do with these green eggs? I immediately thought of the deviled eggs a talented artist friend, Moses Hoskins, recently served up for lunch ...

Pineapple Tarts: The Start Of The Journey

 

In the beginning, there were pineapple tarts.

These buttery, crumbly, bite-sized marvels bewitched me as a child in Singapore. My paternal grandmother made the best ones, of course -- every Chinese new year, she would hit the kitchen to churn out her tarts, pushing me to eat as many as I wanted as we sat in her living room, unhurriedly passing time.

I never learned to make my grandmother's tarts as a child, unfortunately.

When I was 11, she died. And the chance for her to teach me anything suddenly vanished.

After many years of mourning this lost opportunity, I traveled back to Singapore in early 2009 to learn how to make these tarts from my aunts. My grandmother had taught them how to bake the tarts when she was alive and they were now the keepers of her prized recipe, which I've included below.

The experience was enlightening -- but it also generated a spark. I now knew how to make the tarts of my grandmother, a legendary cook in our family and to all she knew.

But still, I wanted more.

Thus began a journey of discovery -- one that would take place in the kitchens of my Singapore family. Over the next lunar calendar year, the women of my family would gather over hot stoves to laugh, tell stories, shake our heads and, above all else, cook.

The story of my journey will be shared very soon. (Hyperion's Voice is publishing "A Tiger In The Kitchen" in January 2011.)

But first, it must be written -- and so I must bow out of this blog for a while. Seven weeks, to be exact. (Special thanks to Yaddo, the artists' colony, for generously offering me a nook in the woods to think and create.)

I hope you'll forgive this absence, but you must admit, it's for a rather good reason. 

When I return in late April, I'll be looking for all of you. My year of cooking in Singapore is over but the journey continues here. And I hope you'll be coming along with me.

Until then, buon appetito and enjoy ...

Kitchen-Sink Stir-Fry: Spring Cleaning Your Fridge

 

It's hard to think about spring when there's still snow on the ground in New York. But one must be optimistic -- which we are over here in the Let's Lunch crowd.

Fresh off our breathless postings on aphrodisiac-laced dishes in February, our thoughts immediately turned to warmer times as we debated what to make next for our monthly virtual lunch date.

How about "spring cleaning (the fridge?)" Stephanie over at The Cosmic Cowgirl suggested.

And so, kitchen-sink recipes to help you springclean your fridge it was.

Now, since I have several solid grocers (and one neat butcher) within a 2-minute walk of my Brooklyn apartment, I tend to buy as I cook. (I've never really been one to stock up my fridge like there's no tomorrow, anyhow.)

Nonetheless, there are a few basics that I must always have in my fridge: Bacon, tofu and some sort of ground meat, usually pork or beef.

Bacon is a wonder that must be consumed on its own, in my book. (Or, in a bacon explosion. Or a BLT. Or ... I digress.)

But what to do with tofu and ground pork? The possibilities are endless ...

Prosperity Cakes (Fatt Gou): Ushering In A Rich Tiger Year

You will have to excuse the radio silence on this blog. 

Between stuffing myself with pineapple tarts and cooking up a storm in Singapore, there simply hasn't been a spare moment since the Chinese year of the Tiger began on Sunday to sit down and pen an intelligible sentence.

Amid the bacchanalia, however, some lessons have been learned. The deeper ones -- about family, love and the enduring power of ancestral lore -- I won't go into. (You'll just have to buy the book.) 

But the Chinese new year recipes -- usually designed to conjure success, prosperity or love -- now those, those I'm more than happy to share.

Over the last few days, I've had the good fortune of spending quality time in the kitchen with Auntie Hon Tim, the Colorado-based mother of my dear Auntie Donna in Singapore. Now, Auntie Hon Tim used to own and run a Chinese restaurant in Lakewood, Colo. -- so she's got some serious cooking chops. 

Besides teaching me the quickest way to skim fat off a pot of stew and how to rapidly chop carrots without slicing off my fingernails, Auntie Hon Tim has been showing me how to make some of her favorite lunar new year recipes.

On her must list every year is fatt gou, or prosperity cakes -- cupcake-sized desserts that she makes to send friends wishes of riches and sweetness in the new year. 

Oyster Omelette (Or Luak): The Food Of Love

 

Food, love, passion. They've always been intertwined for me.

Sure, diamonds and Louboutins are perfectly nice and all that. But a man who knows how to feed you well? Now that's truly priceless.

I've been thinking about why that is the case ever since my Twitter Let's Lunch bunch, a global group of cooks who have a monthly virtual lunchdate, decided to put together aphrodisiac-laced dishes in honor of Valentine's Day. In a story this week in the New York Times, food researchers say that the powers of aphrodisiacs have been rather exaggerated. Very few of the usual suspects -- asparagus, chocolate -- have proven to be able to boost the libido, apparently.

But how else to explain oyster-induced tinglies or the quickening heartbeat that truffles inevitably seem to cause?

Science be damned. I'd rather carry on believing in the potent sexual powers of food, thank you very much.

For my Let's Lunch afternoon delight, oysters immediately came to mind. They've gotten me into trouble more times than I choose to remember. And, they've also long been regarded as aphrodisiacs perhaps they're filled with zinc, which is a key nutrient for testosterone production.

Besides, there's a Singaporean fried oyster omelette dish that never fails to get my heart racing at the mere thought of it. 

Just like it can be with love (or what comes after love), however, this dish proved to be a little tricky to pull off ...

Indian Chicken Curry: A Grandmother's Recipe

A few weeks ago, I found myself on the phone, frantically shuttling between calls to my aunt and my grandmother, trying to jolt their memories and nail down the ingredients we needed for my Singapore family's take on chicken curry.

As the calls got more confusing and the ingredient list grew more nebulous, my friend Basil, a Singaporean of Indian ethnicity, sat nearby, listening in with an increasingly incredulous look.

"You're sitting next to an Indian," he finally said, "and you're not asking him how he makes his curry?"

A very good point.

It turns out Basil, better known to his friends as the hard-to-miss, gregarious guy at any bar that he frequents, also knows how to cook. He learned 20 years ago in his grandmother's kitchen, when he was drafted as a teenager to help her after she'd lost a leg to diabetes. "She would park her wheelchair at the entrance to the kitchen and bark out instructions to me," he said.

Well, her lessons must have stuck because Basil then proved that he could rattle off her curry instructions as quickly and surely as he can list the latest Manchester United stats.

The moment I got back to my Brooklyn kitchen, I knew I had to try it.

Chicken Adobo: Baguio Beckoning

 

As we were hunched over the stove, embroiled in some recent kitchen experiment, my Singapore family's maid Erlinda noted in passing that it'd been almost two years since she'd eaten her own home-made adobo.

Two years? This seemed like an interminably long time for a Filipina not to be enjoying her national dish, cooked by her own hand.

My mother doesn't stock vinegar in the kitchen, she explained, which instantly makes brewing a pot of the vinegary pork or chicken stew impossible. And the soy sauce that we Chinese use happens to be just a little too sweet for real adobo, it turns out. 

Now, being a massive lover of the stuff, I immediately decided that Erlinda's adobo drought needed to end. (This had nothing to do, of course, with the fact that my mouth often starts to water the moment I hear the word "adobo.")

So, with some instructions from Erlinda on what she needed for her adobo, off we went.

Debal: A Devil of a Curry

If you're still staring at a fridge full of Christmas ham, roast beef or turkey, here's something you can do with all those leftovers -- make debal.

The dish, a traditional spicy stew that Eurasians in Singapore make on Boxing Day, is a kitchen-sink concoction made with the myriad leftover meats of Christmas feasts. It's a classic dish in Eurasian cuisine, which developed in the 19th Century when European traders began migrating to Singapore and marrying into local families. Debal combines cooked hams and roast beef with spicy Southeast Asian chilis and ginger.

I spent a few hours last week learning how to make debal (pronounced "dee-bahl" and also known as curry devil or devil's curry) from chef Damian D'Silva of Big D's Grill for a piece for The Atlantic.

The process is fairly laborious -- you'll need to be stirring constantly for at least two hours. But the end result is out of this world.

Here's how to do it ...

The 12-Hour Bolognese

I used to think Martha Stewart was high maintenance -- but that was before I encountered Heston Blumenthal.

Yes, the man -- chef/owner of the three Michelin-star Fat Duck in Bray, U.K. -- is a molecular gastronomy genius responsible for tongue-boggling dishes like powdered anjou pigeon and scrambled egg and bacon ice-cream.  

But let's take something like, say, bolognese, one of the most basic dishes in classic Italian cooking. It should be fairly easy to make ... well, except that this is Blumenthal we're talking about.

His bolognese recipe includes this instruction: "Cook for at least six hours." And this would be taking place after a good two hours or so of cooking and prep work.

By the time my Blumenthal bolognese was done, it was 4:30 a.m. and the ragu had taken a total of 12 hours to make. I was mad at my oven, my bolognese -- while also plotting a trip to Bray to give Blumenthal a piece of my mind.

But then I had my first spoonful of the ragu, a rich and muscular concoction that was beefy and hefty but also so, so, so sweet. Each morsel had just the slightest hint of licorice and the beef was so tender that I wondered if it was possible that I was actually feeling it melt on my tongue.

It was, in short, a joy to eat.

Leftover Turkey Hash Brown Quiche: Dieters Beware

As much as I love Thanksgiving, I may adore the days after the holiday even more.

One word: Leftovers.

Sure turkey dinners with stuffing and corn pudding that have been doused in so much gravy that you have a thick, glistening brown moat on your plate are unbeatable. But this is also a great time to rev up your creativity in the kitchen.

What to do with your mounds of leftover turkey? Our Let's Lunch bunch -- a group of far-flung home cooks who have a monthly lunch date on Twitter -- decided to tackle this question for December.

My answer? A garlicky turkey hash brown quiche.