Sweet Potato Shibori with Azuki Beans

I found this great dessert recipe online. It's grain free and sweetened with honey. They look like little pouches! They are filled with azuki beans and soy sauce/honey mixture. I did my own variations: I cooked my own azuki beans from scratch, stuffed half the pouches with a honey/soy sauce mixture, and garnished with toasted sesame seeds.

Ingredients

• 2 sweet potatoes (not yams)


• 1 tablespoon honey


• Pinch salt


• 1 can (15 ounces) Azuki beans

Click here for the full recipe

My variation--stuffed with a honey/soy sauce syrup


The azuki beans before twisted into a pouch

Bamboo and Shiitake Mushroom Rice

I went to Nijiya the other day and picked up a whole bunch of unusual vegetables that I have never cooked with before. One of them is familiar to anyone who eats Asian food--bamboo shoot. It's quite labor intensive to get raw bamboo shoot and prepare it, so I bought the pre-cooked one. When you cut the bamboo in half, there will be a white powdery substance in it. Just wash that out. I was worried what it is, but looked it up on the internet and I guess this is normal.

This recipe makes a quick and healthy vegetarian breakfast. You can add thinly sliced meat if you wish. Enjoy!

Ingredients

1/2 young bamboo shoot, cooked and washed
6 shiitake mushrooms, fresh
1 cup cooked rice
1 Tb soy sauce
1 Tb mirin
salt to taste

Cut up the bamboo and mushrooms into small pieces and sautee everything together for 3-4 minutes over medium heat.

bamboo

Mochi Ball Dessert

This is a very quick dessert that you can make with few ingredients. It's perfect when we feel like an after dinner dessert but don't have any chocolate or cookies around the house. Serve with tea.


Ingredients

1/2 cup Mochiko (Sweet glutinous rice) flour
pinch of salt
soy sauce
sugar
ground toasted sesame seeds
cinnamon

Add salt to mochiko flour. Heat 1/4 cup of water until warm and slowly add to mochiko flour until mochiko is a crumbly consistency that can be shaped into balls (you might not need to add all the water, or you might need to add a little more. Go by how it looks.

Shape mochi mixture into chestnut sized balls.

Boil a pot of water. Add the balls and boil for 3-4 minutes. When balls float to surface, take them out and place them in a bowl of iced water to stop cooking. Dry on a plate and then toss the mochi balls in your choice of: soy sauce, cinnamon/sugar mixture, or ground toasted sesame seeds (or all 3!).

Pumpkin Soup with Almonds

This is sort of a dessert soup, but you can also have it as a meal in itself!

Ingredients

1/2 deseeded Kabocha (or any type of pumpkin, butternut squash)

15 raisins

water

honey or sugar

1 tsp mochiko

pinch of cinnamon

pinch of salt

sliced almonds to garnish

Roast the 1/2 kabocha (or whatever pumpkin you choose) at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Scoop out the meat and mash it with a fork. In a pot, combine pumpkin meat, raisins, water, and mochiko. Stir all together well and heat on medium heat for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and add sugar or honey to taste. Garnish with a pinch of cinnamon, pinch of salt, and sliced almonds.

Azuki bean dessert soup

Lately I've been getting into dessert soups, which are common in Asian cooking. It's a great way to be healthy while satisfying your sweet tooth at the end of a meal. This soup is like zenzai, a Japanese azuki bean soup, except it has some Chinese and S.E. Asian influences as well with the dates/tangerine/coconut milk. You can easily add sticky rice or sticky rice balls to it for added texture contrast. You can also make this with mung beans.

Ingredients

1 cup raw azuki beans, soaked overnight

4-5 cups water

4 honey dates

2 pieces tangerine peel

handful of sliced almonds

1/3 cup coconut milk

sugar or honey to taste (optional)

Soak azuki beans overnight in water, then in a large pot combine beans, water, dates, tangerine peel, almonds and coconut milk. Simmer on low for 2-3 hours. Stir occasionally and add more water if needed. Turn off the heat and add sugar or honey to taste (optional).

Fried Chicken Gizzards

Whenever I go to the market, I'm always drawn to the offal in the meat section. Nijiya frequently carries liver, chicken hearts, and chicken gizzards, and I've been eyeing the gizzards for quite some time, but with some reservation. You see, I made gizzards a while back in a stir fry, but I wasn't a fan of its chewy texture. So I bought a tray of gizzards this past week with the intention of stewing them--slow cooked for 3 hours to make them tender. It made a delicious broth (with daikon, onions, 1/2 lemon, star anise, cloves, garlic, ginger, goji berries, red and honey dates, and sweet potato). The slow cooking also made the gizzards fork tender. The bad news? They were tasteless. I tried to choke them down with soy sauce, but they really tasted like nothing at all. Yuck.

I thought all was lost and was about to chuck them, but then decided (brilliantly, I might add) to toss them in mochiko flour (sweet rice flour) and then fry them in olive oil. Sprinkle some salt over it, serve with a side of soy sauce. The result? DELICIOUS! Like calamari!

Fried Chicken Gizzards

1 tray chicken gizzards

salt

soy sauce

sweet rice (mochiko) flour

olive oil

Simmer the gizzards in water until fork tender (about 1-2 hours I would imagine, although I did mine for 3 hours). Cut into small pieces and dry. Toss in mochiko flour to coat, then pan fry in a good amount of olive oil for about 3 minutes, turning to make sure that all sides cook. Transfer gizzards to plate covered in paper towel to soak excess oil. Sprinkle with salt and serve with a side of soy sauce to dip in.

Before frying, coated in Mochiko

Beef Tendon Soup

Don't knock it till you try it. That's all I'm saying.

Beef Tendon is full of collagen. If you are a woman, you might know that collagen is very good for your skin. It is included in beauty creams, and in Asia some women take collagen pills because they think it makes them look younger. I can't vouch for any such claims, but I can say that beef tendon soup is delicious--health benefits or not.

I found the beef tendon at Nijiya, on sale for about $3. I didn't know what to do with it at the time, but it looked so intriguing that I had to buy it. I then looked online and found a bunch of soup recipes. Beef tendon needs to be cooked for at least 3-4 hours. This makes it tender and jelly-like... Kind of like the consistency of pigs snout (trompa). After that long cooking time, it releases its collagen into the broth. When you refrigerate the leftover soup, the broth turns to gelatin, which shows that the collagen is in there.

Ingredients

Lotus root, peeled and sliced

2 purple okinawan sweet potatoes

1 peeled carrot, chopped

1 large wood ear mushroom, sliced into thin strips

1 leek, chopped

1 garlic clove

1 star anise

1 lemon, already juiced, just the rind

salt to taste

1 package of beef tendon (about 3/4 pound)

1 handful of goji berries

1 handful sliced almonds

4 inch piece of daikon, sliced

Add water to cover and simmer for 3-4 hours.

The purple of the sweet potatoes leached out into the soup, creating a purple soup! The flavor was earthy yet refreshing. I served it with a little dish of soy sauce to dip the tendon in. It was soooo good! I can't wait to make my next batch.

Wood Ear Mushroom

Loteria Grill, Farmer's Market at the Grove, Hollywood

After doing some wedding dress shopping, my friend and I went to The Farmer's Market at The Grove for some lunch. We got the famous 12 piece sampler from Loteria Grill. Each mini corn tortilla is loaded with various toppings. I didn't even know what I was eating half the time, but I could identify some toppings like the mushrooms, pork in mole sauce, and nopales (cactus). It was all really good. We were still hungry after, so we split a chestnut crepe at the French Crepe Company across the way. Delish!

Lotus Root Soup

I'm slowly getting into Chinese soup recipes... I love how the Chinese use dried herbs and fruits to season their soups. Not only do they add a depth of flavor, they also provide health benefits.

I picked up a lotus root from Nijiya the other day. It's a giant one!

I decided to make it into a lotus soup. I didn't have all of the necessary seasonings that I would have liked (dried dates, honey dates, dried cuttle fish), but I made do with the goji berries that I have been snacking on all week. This soup is outstanding. Sensational, really. It makes me think, "What have I been missing out on all these years??"

Ingredients

1 Lotus root

1 Purple Potato

Dried Goji berries (handful)

2 slices ginger

1 crushed garlic

1 peeled carrot

2 inch piece of daikon

1/4 onion

1/2 lemon (no juice left, just the rind)

cilantro to garnish

salt to taste

You can also add couple dashes of fish sauce or soy sauce (or both!) to taste (optional)

Add all ingredients to a pot and cover with water. Let simmer on stove top for 2-3 hours. You can add meat to this recipe too! I think it would be great with pork short ribs thrown in.

Here is another lotus soup recipe that I will be making once I get the other ingredients!

Everyday Meals

Just some pics of recent everyday home made meals...

Brad's fried rice

Ingredients:

Brown rice

Any veggies you have on hand, chopped up (he usually uses napa cabbage, leek, onion, de-seeded shishito peppers, red bell pepper)

Thinly sliced beef or pork

Dash of Mirin

Soy sauce to taste

Pinch of sugar

1 egg

Red ginger slices to garnish

Shredded nori to garnish

This is my fake clay pot everyday meal. I guess I should be making this in a clay pot to be authentic, but I don't have one so I just do it in a regular stainless steel pot. The ingredients vary from day to day but include:

Ingredients

daikon

carrot

onion

leek

lotus root

potato

napa cabbage

ginger

garlic

Thinly sliced beef or pork

1 cap full of mirin

1 cap full of soy sauce

1 tsp miso

I put an inch of water in the pot and throw all of the ingredients in except for the meat and the miso. Then I let it boil on the stove top. You can simmer for hours, but I usually get impatient after about 15-30 minutes. Then I add the meat and let cook for a few minutes. Then I add the miso at the very end. This is because miso has good bacteria in it (like the bacteria in yogurt) that you don't want to kill in the cooking process.

Congee (Rice Porridge) with Bitter Melon

This is my favorite food lately--Congee or Jook. It's so easy to make, and all it requires is a little patience. As I said in a previous post, all you need are:

1 cup washed rice (I use brown rice)

9 cups water

Cook low at a simmer for 3 hours or more. It will turn into a cloudy porridge. Add more water if necessary, and stir every now and then to make sure that the rice doesn't stick to the bottom. You can alternatively make this in a crock pot.

Congee is very easy to digest. You can add soy sauce or miso afterwards for flavor. I like to throw in a couple of small pieces of ginger into the rice as it simmers and then eat it with some bitter melon. Here's how I prepare the bitter melon:

1. Cut bitter melon in half lengthwise and spoon out the inside (the seeds)
2. Cut into pieces and then boil the pieces in some water and a dash of salt for 3 minutes. This gets rid of some of the bitter flavor. Warning: it's still really bitter though! Haha
3. Drain water and add a tsp of soy sauce and a tsp of mirin. Saute for a couple of minutes. You can add thinly sliced meat to this if you like.

I eat bitter melon by dropping it into my rice porridge. The bitter flavor is tempered by the rice, and they both complement each other so well.

Bitter melon has tons of health benefits and is used by cultures around the world as a medicinal food. It's said to be great for diabetics especially. It should not be eaten by women who are pregnant.

Job's Tears Drink

My friend drinks a hot drink made of powdered Job's tears every morning. She says that it's considered a traditional Chinese "beauty" drink and is said to be good for your skin. I just started drinking it, and it's a great tea replacement. Job's tears are actually a type of fruit, but it looks and tastes like a grain. You can buy them whole and make porridge, or you can buy them powdered and add to hot water. I got mine at a Chinese herbal store, but you might also be able to buy the whole grains at large Asian markets. I also found both versions for sale online.

Chinese Medicine and Food

I have just started researching Chinese medicine online. From tongue reading to acupuncture, I think it's all fascinating. The Chinese approach towards nutrition is also interesting--there are "hot" "cold" and "neutral" foods. These foods don't necessarily correlate with the actual temperature of the food. For example, meats and dairy tend to be "hot" foods while bitter vegetables and coconut water are very "cooling".

By looking at your tongue, tracking your pulse, and noticing how your body feels, you can determine whether you are too "hot" or "cold". If you are too "hot" (yang) or "cold" (yin), you can remedy that by eating foods that are opposite your constitution, or neutral.

Here is a link that explains further:

Chinese medicine and foods

So I went with my friend to a Chinese traditional medicine doctor and she diagnosed me as "too cold". She gave me these yummy "candies" made of dried plum and hawthorne berry and instructed me to eat 5-10 of them at each meal. They will bring more hot energy to my stomach. They taste just like haw flakes, if you ever had those candies as a kid. It's hard to stop eating them! :)

In the Kitchen

Our kitchen window sill. Yellow pancake spatula from Crate & Barrel, pot holder and white latte bowl from Anthropologie, bee glasses from World Market.

Mirin (sweet cooking wine) is a necessity for Japanese cooking.

Bitter melon tastes great with rice porridge. It is also very good for you. To cut down on the bitterness, boil it in salted water for a couple of minutes.

Thinly sliced meat from Nijiya has become one of my staples

Dashi konbu is dried seaweed that is used to make a broth called dashi. This is a pantry staple for Japanese cooking.

The organic brown rice I get from Nijiya. It is called akita komachi.

Our orange medicine (and apparently pretzel) holder from Crate & Barrel.

Martha Stewart Cast Iron

Brad and I were so lucky to receive a large red Martha Stewart cast iron casserole dish for an engagement present! We have already made chili and tons of rice porridge with this pot. The Chinese call rice porridge congee or jook. It is very simple to make: put one cup of washed rice (I use brown) with 9 cups of water, and simmer it on low for 3 hours. You can throw in some mung beans for added nutrition if you want. Once you are finished simmering, you can eat it with a bit of soy sauce or miso. I personally love it with bitter melon cooked in soy sauce and mirin!

Click here for recipe.