Ginger BBQ Sauce

This is a pretty standard KC-style BBQ sauce with a ginger kick.

2 thumbs ginger
2 c ketchup
1 c water
1/2 c cider vinegar
1/2 c brown sugar
3 T olive oil
4 T smoked paprika
2 T chili posder
4-6 cloves garlic
2 t chili flakes

Thinly slice one thumb of ginger - no need to peel it. Bring the water to a boil, add the ginger, reduce heat to a bare simmer for 30 minutes. Remove from heat, strain, set aside.

Peel and finely dice the other thumb of ginger. Smash and dice the garlic. Heat the olive oil in a small saucepan, add the ginger and garlic, and saute gently until the garlic starts to color. Add 1/2 cup of the ginger-infused water and all the other ingredients. Stir, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Between the sugar and the vinegar it'll keep indefinitely in the fridge.

Ginger Braised Chicken

1/2 chicken
1/2 lemon sliced in thin rings
3-4 celery stalks
8 oz whole button mushrooms
1 Tbsp olive oil

1 cup sake or dry white wine

2 thumbs ginger, diced

8-10 garlic cloves, bruised and peeled

1 Tbsp butter

1 handful celery leaves, roughly chopped

juice of 1/2 lemon

1 tsp soy sauce

2 good glugs fish sauce

2 tsp cornstarch

Combine sake, ginger, garlic cloves, butter, celery leaves, lemon juice, soy sauce, and fish sauce in a glass bowl. Microwave on high for 2 minutes; whisk lightly.

Preheat oven to 300F. Put a cast-iron skillet over high heat. Add oil and when hot, place the chicken skin-side down. Cook 4-5 minutes or until well-browned.

Turn the chicken over and remove the skillet from heat. Place lemon slices on the chicken and arrange the mushrooms around it. Pour on the braising liquid, cover loosely with aluminum foil, and place in oven for 60 minutes. Uncover, add celery stalks, and bake for another 15 minutes.

Remove chicken, mushrooms, and celery to a serving platter. Whisk cornstarch into the braising liquid; there should be enough residual heat in the skillet to thicken - if not put over a low burner.

Serve with rice.

Seared Tuna Salad with Wasabi Vinaigrette

Dressing

1 Tbsp wasabi powder + 1 Tbsp and a bit water or 2 Tbsp prepared wasabi paste
1/4 cup olive oil

1-2 tsp rice vinegar

1 T honey

1/2 tsp garlic powder

pinch powdered ginger

pinch salt

Mix wasabi powder and water to form a paste. Slowly whisk in olive oil. When thoroughly combined, add vinegar, adjusting amount to taste. Whisk in remaining ingredients. Allow to sit at room temp for at least 1 hour for flavors to blend. Taste, adjust sweetness with additional honey and spiciness with a pinch of cayenne pepper if desired.

Salad

1 8 oz bag lettuce or greens, your choice.

1 dozen calamata olives

1 dozen grape tomatoes, halved

1 avocado, cubed

4 oz feta cheese, crumbled (optional: substitute 2 oz bleu cheese for half the feta)

handful sliced almonds

Toss together lettuce, olives, tomatoes, avocado, cheese. Sprinkle with almonds.

Tuna

1-12 oz or 2-6 oz tuna steaks

2 T toasted sesame oil

1 T chili oil (“Mongolian Fire Oil” is good)

corn or canola oil

sesame seeds

Buy only tuna steaks that are still cryo-sealed and frozen hard. Do NOT accept partially thawed steaks from the display case. Thaw in the refrigerator for 36 hours.

In a bowl whisk together the sesame and chili oils. Open the tuna and roll around the bowl to coat well; cover and marinate in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Get a cast-iron or nonstick skillet burning hot over highest heat. Put a little corn or canola oil in the pan. Sprinkle the tuna with sesame seeds, place seed-side down in the pan and sprinkle the top with sesame seeds. Cook for 90 seconds only - DO NOT MOVE the steaks until it’s time to flip them. Flip, sprinkle cooked side with sesame seeds, and cook for 60-90 more seconds. The sides should be just completely grey. Remove from pan and allow to cool.

Slice tuna thinly (about 1/8 inch) along the grain. It should be nicely pink in the center. Arrange atop the salad. Drizzle the dressing over. Serve.

Quick Szechuan Chicken

2 large chicken breasts, boned and cut into bite-size pieces
1/2 can coconut milk (don't open the can yet!)
3/4 cup hot tap water or stock
handful peanuts
1 Tbsp miso paste
1 tsp chunky rooster sauce
1 Tbsp garlic powder
1 thumb fresh ginger, peeled and diced
3/4 cup frozen peas
1 Tbsp oil
Rice or pasta

Put the peanuts into a small Ziploc bag and use the unopened can of coconut milk to smash them into little pieces. Pour the peanuts into a bowl. Open the can and mix the coconut milk, chunky rooster sauce, garlic powder, and diced ginger. Whisk the miso into the hot water or stock until dissolved and combine.

Heat the oil in a skillet or saucier over a medium-high flame. Add the chicken and brown, 1-2 minutes on each side. Reduce heat to medium, pour in the miso-coconut mixture, and poach, covered, for 5 minutes. Uncover and poach for an additional 5 minutes. Add the frozen peas and poach for another 4 minutes.

Serve over rice or pasta, and sprinkle with peanut pieces.

Vacation post: steamed asparagus with ginger-lime sauce

Fresh asparagus

1 large thumb ginger

2 c water

2 limes

2 T cornstarch

dark brown sugar

Slice the ginger into 1/4" rounds. Make an infusion: put the ginger and water in a small saucepan, bring to a boil, then cover and simmer 45 minutes. Add the juice of 2 limes. Mix the cornstarch with a little water to make a slurry, add to the ginger-lime infusion. Stir until it begins to thicken then remove from heat. If desired, sweeten to taste with dark brown sugar.

Drizzle over steamed asparagus.

Candied Ginger

As promised.

1 c fresh ginger, peeled and sliced into 1/8" rounds
1 c water

1 c plus 1/4 c sugar
OR
1/2 c plus 1/4 c sugar
1/2 c real maple syrup (Mrs. Butterworth is an abomination before the Lord. I hear she puts out for the Poppin' Fresh guy, too.)

A shot or two of bourbon or brandy (optional)

Put the ginger in a small saucepan. Cover with cold water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat and simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, until the ginger is fork tender. Drain.

Stir together ginger, water, sugar, and maple syrup in the saucepan. Add liquor if desired. Boil uncovered over medium heat, stirring frequently. Heat control is pretty important. If the temp goes over 260F the sugars will start to caramelize before they recrystallize and you'll end up with charcoal. Not so yummy. You want to keep stirring until the liquid is almost completely gone and what's left looks like boiling grainy white paste. You can let it take a little color but not past a very very pale amber.

Dump the ginger into a colander. (Any remaining liquid will be very hot and very sticky so be very careful not to get any on your skin, or you'll be enjoying the fruits rhizomes of your labor at the ER burn unit.) While the excess syrup drains, put 1/4 cup of sugar in a glass baking dish. Use forks or tongs to pull apart any ginger pieces that are stuck together, then toss until coated. Cool to room temp. Store in a dry place.

Candied Ginger Vegetable Curry

Inspired by a Bulgarian hangover breakfast.

1 medium onion, sliced
1 medium potato, 1/2 inch dice
splash olive oil
handful okra, chopped
1 red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
1 cup Bulgarian yogurt (runnier than normal Dannon, or just plain yogurt thinned out with a couple tablespoons of water or white wine)
1 T curry paste
1 t garlic powder
1 t sweet paprika
half dozen grape tomatoes or 1 small roma, chopped
half dozen pieces candied ginger
kosher salt

First: Candied ginger is absurdly easy to make. You can easily find plenty of recipes for it. I'll post mine later.

Put olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion, potato, and a pinch of kosher salt, and saute, tossing occasionally, until the onion is translucent.

Reduce heat to low. Add the yogurt and curry paste and stir until well-combined. Mix in the okra, ginger, tomatoes, garlic powder, and paprika. Cover and simmer for half an hour until the potatoes are tender. Add the bell pepper, turn off the heat, and cover for 5 minutes.

Serve over brown rice or some other favored starch.

Egg-Drop Corn Soup

Chicken stock:

a chicken carcass or equivalent

1 onion

1/2 bulb garlic

2 stalks celery

8-10 cups water

kosher salt

yield: 4-6 cups stock

3 ears corn

1 t grated ginger

1 T soy sauce

2 T cornstarch

4 green onions

2 eggs, lightly beaten

There's a grocery store nearby that has chicken leg quarters on "permanent special" if you buy 3 kilos or more. So every couple of weeks I go buy 3 kilos. I roast them or BBQ them or pan-fry them in a batch, and then I have a week's worth of lunch if I'm too lazy to whip something else up. And that leaves me with a big pile of bones. I give one or two to the kitten who makes the most amaaaazing moaning sound of pleasure as he destroys them. The rest get frozen until I need some stock. And then I do like so:

Put the chicken carcass, onion, celery, and garlic in a large pot with 8-10 cups of water. The vegetation is just for flavoring and will be strained out, so there's no need to chop it finely. I just cut the onion and garlic cloves in half and break the celery into pieces small enough to fit. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, all day - 6 hours, minimum.

If you keep the simmer at the proper level over the cooking time the liquid will reduce to 4-6 cups. When it reaches that point, remove from heat and strain. Voilà, chicken stock. Salt very lightly, not to taste - you'll be adding soy sauce in a minute.

Put the stock back on the fire. Add the freshly-cut-off kernels of three ears of corn, 1T soy sauce, and 1 t freshly-grated ginger. A Microplane® fine grater works best for this. (It's only recently that I learned that Microplane was a brand name. Duh.) Simmer 30 minutes until the corn is tender.

Raise the heat slightly until the soup is at a low boil. Put 1 T of cornstarch in a small mise-en-place bowl or ramekin. Skim off a couple tablespoons of the soup and mix it into a slurry, then stir it back in to the soup.

While the soup thickens, coarsely slice 2 green onions and lightly beat 2 eggs. While stirring the soup slowly, drizzle in the eggs so they feather as they cook in the hot liquid. Remove from heat, salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with chopped green onions.

Hmmm, the corn kind of overwhelms the egg flavors in these proportions. Maybe use less corn next time. And I don't like my soup to be thickened a lot so others may wish to use more cornstarch than I did.

It's only knife work, or, Phake Pho

I started out the evening by making Francis Lam's ginger-scallion sauce, even though I don't have a food processor. (I haven't bought one yet because the good quality models are ludicrously expensive in Israel.) I told a friend I was going to try making the sauce and she suggested I buy one of those mini-food-processoids, basically a glorified POS stick blender with attachments. But it only took about 10 minutes of knife work to reduce the ginger and scallions to the prescribed consistency.

There's certainly nothing wrong with using a labor-saving device. I don't have a food processor now but I used to. Actually, I used to have two. And a stick blender. And I still have an orbital mixer, a coffee grinder (plus another one for spices), and for that matter an automatic drip coffeemaker. Technology is a wonderful thing. I like wearing ready-made clothing and pooping indoors.

But if you have the time and if you enjoy it, there's something to be said for the sensual pleasure that comes from doing your food prep "by hand". I enjoy the rhythm of the knife rocking back and forth, the tension in my biceps and across my shoulders as I control the blade, the fresh aroma of the ginger rising up.

Francis Lam, by the way, is one of the few remaining interesting voices on Salon.com. If I detailed all the ways that that publication no longer satisfies me I would stray into a subject area that I promised myself I wouldn't allow on this blog, so I'll just leave it at that.

Now that I have some yummy yummy ginger scallion sauce, what to do with it...?

1/2 cup white rice (dry)

2 T miso

some kind of meat-substitute snausage

a medium onion

half a red bell pepper

a stalk of celery

oil for pan-frying

pizza pepper

soy sauce

Cook the rice. Dissolve the miso in 2 cups of water in a small pot. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer.

Slice the snausage into long, thin strips (almost bacon-like) and pan-fry it in more oil than you would normally use until it is very crisp. The more crisp, the better it will taste. Drain and set aside.

Slice the onion, celery, and bell pepper into thin strips and saute with a pinch of salt; finish with a dash of soy.

Put a scoop of rice in a deep bowl, then some of the vegetables and strips of snausage on top. Ladle the miso over and season generously with ginger-scallion oil. Eat with chopsticks and a big spoon, like pho. In fact, you could dress it with a squeeze of lemon, some fresh basil, and some rooster sauce if you wanted. I don't have any basil or rooster sauce tonight, but it was still pretty yummy.

Serves 2.