Rice Cracker Snacks
Source: Modified from “Rice Cracker Snacks” from “Burma: Rivers of Flavor” by Naomi Duguid.
Year: 2012
Miso Soup
To make miso soup from dashi (dashi recipe is available here): Add a few tablespoons of dashi into a small bowl. Add some miso to the small bowl; you will need about 2 – 4 Tbsp of miso for 3 1/2 cups dashi. You can use one kind of miso, or you can mix two types (e.g. mild and a stronger aged miso) for a more complex taste. Use a spoon to dissolve the miso into the broth in the a small bowl (if you add the miso directly to the dashi it will be hard to blend and your soup may be full of miso pellets). Add the softened miso to the soup, to taste. That is, stir a portion of the softened miso in warm or hot dashi; keep adding the dissolved miso until the soup tastes salty enough to you and has as much miso flavor as you want. Optionally, instead of stirring the dissolved miso directly into the soup, you can pour it through a strainer to remove large particles in order to …
Dashi
Dashi (wikipedia definition) is a type of Japanese soup stock; one of the most well-known uses of dashi is as the base that you add miso paste to make miso soup, however dashi is also used in many other applications in Japanese cooking, similar to how French cooking uses stock. Dashi is extremely easy and quick to make. All you need to do is measure out ingredients, boil water, and strain. It is made from just three ingredients: konbu (giant kelp), katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes), and water. Quantities for these ingredients are given in the recipe below; however once you have made dashi a few times, you can eyeball the quantities since it isn’t necessary to use exact quantities. In fact, if you compare various recipes for dashi, you’ll notice that they often differ from each other in the amounts and ratios of konbu and bonito flakes used–I’ve seen recipes which use nearly twice as much konbu and bonito flakes and ones that use only half as much as my recipe below; you can adjust the …
Granola
Making granola is as simple as mixing together a bunch of ingredients and then baking them for 45 minutes. I often keep all of the ingredients needed for granola in my pantry, so the most difficult part is hunting for the nuts or seeds that end up in the back of a cupboard. Granola is very flexible (and it is especially good for cleaning out your pantry of random nuts and dried fruits). You can substitute any nuts, raw seeds, or dried fruits you like as long as you keep the volume about the same; taste the raw granola and adjust the spices, seasoning, oil, and sugar if needed. You can halve this recipe if you want to make a smaller amount. Most types of dried fruit should be mixed in after the granola is cooked because the long baking time will dry them out. However, by accident I’ve found that golden raisins will turn golden, slightly caramelized, and sweeter from the heat, so I like to mix them in before baking. (The picture above shows my …
Chicken Stock
My mother often made stock at home, so I tried out making stock soon after I started cooking. Michael Ruhlman’s is by far the simplest and easiest stock recipe that I’ve found, and it has given me the best results so far. I used a combination of Michael Ruhlman’s chicken stock recipe on his blog, and the chicken stock recipe in “Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook’s Manifesto” and some other tips from recipes that I’ve read over the years. The difference between the two recipes is that in the book, he suggests chicken has cooked in water for several hours and then adding the vegetables and aromatics and then cooking for 1 hour more. On the blog, he cooks everything together. When you break down a chicken, you can save the spare parts (e.g. backbone), in a bag in the freezer until you have enough to make stock. You can also save the carcass from a roasted chicken to make a dark roast chicken stock, . Cooking the stock in the oven was a revelation …
Thai Sticky Rice
Thai sticky rice is used all over Thailand in desserts (e.g. Coconut Sticky Rice with Mango) and also eaten with main dishes in northern Thailand. When eaten with a meal, small bites of this rice are grabbed with the fingers and combined with a small piece of a non-saucy main dish (e.g. larb), fresh crisp side vegetables (cucumber, lettuce, etc), or chili relish. Since this rice is traditionally eaten with one’s fingers, it is usually eaten with dishes that are solid and not very saucy; it shouldn’t be used to soak up sauces (so for example, it does not go with curry). This type of rice is called sticky rice, glutenous rice, or sweet rice. There are numerous cultivars of glutinous rice (including japonica, indica, and tropical japonica strains, see wikipedia), but the other types of sticky rice cannot be used as a replacement for Thai sticky rice (e.g. Chinese glutenous / sweet rice is something different). Milled glutinous rice is white and fully opaque when raw and slightly translucent when cooked (whereas non-glutinous rice which is slightly translucent …
Dau Chua (Vietnamese Carrot and Daikon Pickled Salad)
These lightly pickled carrots and daikon are a common Vietnamese salad. It is sometimes served as a small side salad to brighten dishes and can be used in banh mi or Vietnamese salad rolls. The daikon and carrots for this salad should be shredded so that they are about as thick as bean sprouts, i.e. they should be no thinner than 1/16 inches, and preferably be around 3/32 inches thick. They should have some crunch to them and be thick enough to stay mostly straight and only have a slight droop if you hold one up by its end. They should be thicker than vermicelli noodles; if you shred them too finely then they will tangle, have an unappealing hair-like texture, and not be crunchy. You don’t need to use your good vinegar for this. It is okay to substitute the rice vinegar for white vinegar or even apple cider vinegar. Source: Adapted from “Dau Chua (Vietnamese Carrot and Daikon Pickled Salad)” from “Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia” by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. Also …
Winter Salad with Fennel, Radicchio, Walnuts and Manchego or Parmesan
This is a very pleasing salad. I like the crunchiness of the fennel. The slightly bitter radicchio and walnuts contrasts with and brings out the sweetness of the fennel, and it has pretty white/pink/red colors. Source: Modified and reworded from “Winter Salad with Fennel, Radicchio, Walnuts and Manchego” from Melissa Clark’s “Cook This Now”. The radishes and poached egg, and a few other minor details are my own input.
Lox, Stock, and Barrel 