The Maltese Bacon

Chinese Sausage with Sticky Rice and Ginger Scallion Oil

 
If I could eat Chinese sausage every morning with a bowl of sticky rice, I would. Whenever I go home to see my parents my mom is always sweet enough to make some for breakfast. I started making it recently, and am finding it difficult to want to make anything else. It had taken me so long to make it because I was always so blocked with the idea of steaming the darn sticky rice. (But I don't have a steamer, and and why does rice need to be steamed and i just can't freakin' deal. Where are my tortillas? )

Luckily, I meditated for a long time and some tension cleared up and my ego suppressed to levels low enough so that I was finally able to proceed with the sticky rice. I went looking for a steamer a couple times but didn't find one. Then I remembered Adela using a regular old plate to steam that lovely carp one night. This is why Adela is a doctor who can perform deliveries involving human beings and I still can't tie my shoes properly. So here we are. One makeshift steamer:

Watching raw rice being steamed into perfect grains is like magic. While the rice is steaming, cut your Chinese sausage. Cut it very thin, on the diagonal, and saute in a little oil. Saute some minced rehydrated shitake as well. This is the type of Chinese sausage I like:

It says "lap xuong tuoi" and is from Westminster, CA which is also known as Little Saigon.  According to my mom, Vietnamese style Chinese sausage has more wine and less fat. There are a million sausage brands out there and some of them are terrible. If the sausage feels as hard as a rock, that is probably how it will digest. E-mail me for directions on how to find this particular brand.

Top the rice with the sausage and the shitake mushrooms. Eat with ginger scallion oil and a little Maggi seasoning.

Ginger Scallion Oil adapted from Francis Lam

Make a batch and have for the rest of the week to add lots of flavor to stir fries or plain rice. This stuff is amazing.

1/4 cup corn or peanut oil
maybe 3/4 Tablespoon of ginger
3 scallions loosely chopped
salt

In a food processor, grind the ginger and scallion. Put in a tall bowl or cup. Add healthy pinches of salt. (It should be enough to salt the 1/4 cup of oil.) Heat oil until just smoking. Pour oil over ginger scallion. Be careful, because it will smoke and sputter when you pour it.

Sticky Rice

With sticky rice, soak 1-2 cups of rice overnight (for at least for 2 hours) in cold water. Drain and rinse it. Create a makeshift steamer by balancing a plate on a bowl in a large deep pan/stock pot.Fill the pan with water up to about 2/3 the way of the bowl or as high as you can. Put the rice on the plate. Bring the water to a boil and put the lid on. Steam on a low simmer for 20 minutes. During that time stir a few times to make sure the rice cooks evenly.

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Sorry for the absence. I've been strangely busy. Can't say with what exactly. There was pre Halloween and post Halloween and Adela, one of my oldest friends, was in town. She insisted we go to Nyonya, which she had seen here on this website. I love eating Asian food with her because the girl can go to town. She has a tendency to chew on any bones in her sight - chicken bones, pork bones, beef bones. She didn't bless us with a performance this time, even though there was a whole plate of spare ribs just waiting to be gnawed down to their last thread of meat.

What else has been on the food horizon? I've been eating apples up the arsenal and making baby bok choy once a week. Here is some baby bok choy with black cod, during a night that Dana wanted me to teach her how to make fish. I know black cod is overfished, but it is a full proof butter bomb of a fish, good for a lesson. I marinated it in sesame oil, ginger, soy sauce, sugar, garlic and lemon for 20 minutes and stuck it in the oven at 400 degrees for close to 15 minutes (it was really thick).

Another night, I made more successful bok choy with a not so successful pairing of pork chop with cumin apple compote. Although the pork made a great sandwich the next day, sliced very thin and served cold.

Baby Bok Choy with Crimini (for about 6 heads of baby bok choy)

Chop the bottom nub off the baby bok choy and separate. Rinse the bok choy rigorously under cold water and shake dry. Chop the bok choy, segmenting the leaves away from the crunchy white body. Heat 3 tablespoons of oil at high heat. Throw in a clove of minced garlic and stir for a 10 seconds. Throw the white parts of bok choy. Stir around and cook for 3 minutes. Throw the leaves and sliced crimini mushrooms in. Pour 1 tablespoon of sesame oil in. Cook for 2 more minutes. Reduce heat to low. Add 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. Stir and serve.

77 degrees

Bless us, we are in the prime of summer. I've been eating tomatoes like there's gonna be a tomato armageddon tomorrow. Standing at my kitchen counter, I top the damningly gorgeous things with crunchy salt, red wine vinegar and olive oil and fork them into my mouth. I like to eat them with anchovies on toast and soak the bread with the juices on the plate.

Besides tomatoes, summer brings other delights like the other night, when I found myself in the Central Park Zoo, at a karaoke party of all things. We were there like thieves, after the zoo had closed, serenading the poor sea lions to a terrible rendition of "99 Red Balloons". The party was hosted by John's friend, also named John, who used to work for the Central Park Zoo, before he moved to New Zealand.The whole affair was so righteous, in that way that only a New York night can be. Cold barbecue chicken, screw top wine and some black headed swans to cheer us on.

Karaoke has a strange power. All social graces, or rather barriers, are tossed out the window. Once someone has heard you sing badly, do you really need to bother with "So, what do you do?" or "How do you know Evelyn?" Armed with a small TV monitor and a song list from the collective pop-consciousness, things happen quickly and all of a sudden you find a nice stranger putting their arm around you while you both shriek to "Our Lips Are Sealed".

But back to the business of tomatoes. A recent posting on Serious Eats reminded me about my thoughts on tomatoes' involvement with meatballs, which is ubiquitous. Never been a true fan. Yes, I do enjoy the odd meatball sandwich from Parisi Bakery, the meatballs sitting in a thick garlicky tomato sauce . However, left to my own devices, I'd rather my meatball resemble dim sum innards. The ones I make at home is a recipe passed from Diana, who got it from her mom. Sometimes, I add a little sesame oil to make it taste even more like dumpling filling. I usually use ground beef, but this time I used ground turkey, which I purchase like once every 3 years, to see if they've genetically modified it to make it taste any closer to beef. They haven't, but the meatballs were still pretty good, with the sesame oil and the ginger doing well as clutch players. (You will never ever see me eat a turkey burger. I'd rather gnaw on deep fried Astro Turf.)

MinMei's Meatballs

1 pound ground beef (or turkey or pork)
1 bunch of finely chopped scallions (I even use the white part of the scallion stalk, but if you want more uniformity you can just use the green parts.)
1 tablespoon of ginger
1 teaspoon sesame oil (optional)
2 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons corn or vegetable oil (You will want to use more oil if you are using turkey because the meat is so lean.)
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1. Put meat in a bowl. Squeeze the ginger through a garlic press and into the bowl. If you don't have one, then just make sure the ginger is very finely chopped before you add it to the meat and just use one teaspoon of ginger. Add the rest of the ingredients. Form the balls into any size you like, but make sure they are all about the same size. I tend to make mine into gigantic meteors out of laziness, but they do take longer to cook, so it's probably a wash time-wise.

2. Heat the corn oil in the pan on medium high heat. Arrange the meatballs evenly on the pan. After about 7 minutes, turn the meatballs on the other side and cook for another 7 minutes (for large sized meatballs). For small meatballs (1/2 inch), it may be done after 10 minutes total.

Shopping with King Phojanakong

Kuma Inn's baby bok choy

I wanted to meet the man who transformed Chinese sausage. In my mind, Chinese sausage has always been a cheap but delectable staple like the hot dog. Fully cooked, long shelf life, stuffed with fat, and normally smoked. Unlike the hot dog, Chinese sausage is sweet and dried. Mothers can keep it in the pantry and throw it into anything for a little taste and protein – fried rice, omelettes, and stir-fries.

King Phojanakong, owner and chef of Kuma Inn, took this humble ingredient and sang it a new tune. He put it to a high flame and added caramelized onions. Then, he offered it with his Thai chile-lime dipping sauce. The dish went from being the original "Sea of Love" song to Cat Power’s cover, familiar but newly seductive. (For a suitable photo of the dish, click here.)

If you added the amount of money the gang and I have spent on this dish over the past three years, you might have been able to put a down payment on a boat named Porky’s Wake. The last time we were at Kuma Inn, I "politely" asked the table if we could refrain from ordering the 3 dishes that contained Chinese sausage.

I wanted to pick Phojanakong's brain, so I arranged a meeting.When I catch up with him in Chinatown he is grabbing the meat at his butcher’s for the evening service. “I pretty much shop every day. As long as you are working with fresh product, you don’t have to do too much to it,” he said.

His Lower East Side restaurant has a menu that is inspired by dishes from all over Asia but with deft touches from his French training. It seems like he, along with the likes of David Chang from Momofuku and Sohui Kim of The Good Fork, is part of a growing movement of Asian chefs who have used their eclectic training backgrounds to open up their own small, personal restaurants and stake a unique toehold in the New York culinary scene.