uchiwaaaat? who needs a paper fan when you've got a turbo electric one.
Kestrel futo-maki, salmon california roll, and some experimental thing with Asian pear. I crazzzy.
All rolls assembled in less than an hour. No wonder they look pretty darn messy. Well, I never claimed to be a sushi master.
This year, I was my own Valentine. I decided to spoil myself with a tasty dinner since I’ve been pretty good about sticking with my diet, and one day off wouldn’t kill me but would make me happier.
Happy Valentine's Day!
The menu?
The whole meal complemented itself very well. Ponzu’s zingy flavor cut the richness of the steak and all the butter. The five spice powder in the mashed potatoes added a nuttiness and emphasized the sweet, richness of the potatoes. The peas were only cooked the bare minimum necessary and had just enough pungent garlic and a little bit of a rich juicy, sauce.
Highly recommended.
Many of my male friends were quite jealous of my dinner, needless to say.
Low-cal, Low-carb bún results
Bún is a Vietnamese dish that makes use of rice vermicelli and, as far as I can tell, the kitchen sink– veggies, herbs, meat, egg, fish sauce, you name it. It can come in soup, but the form I’m most familiar with is just the noodles in a bowl, topped with said kitchen sink. It sounds really healthy, right? Rice noodles and mostly veggies? Well, just 1 cup of rice noodles alone will set you back about 500 calories. Top that off with meat roasted in sweet sauce, eggs, and daikon and carrots that were marinated in sugar and vinegar, and as you can imagine, those calories inevitably add up.
I happened to have some konnyaku noodles lying around. Famous in Japan and China as “diet noodles”, they have very few calories and are full of fiber– filling you up without expanding your waistline. You can usually find them at Asian groceries (particularly ones that target Chinese/Japanese folks), but I think I saw some tofu shirataki noodles (similar, but with tofu added and marginally more calories) at Safeway the other day.
These things sound amazing. The problem is that when you first take them out of the package, they smell kinda funky. To counter this, rinse them a lot and boil them. Problem #2 is that the texture is pretty darn rubbery (sort of like eating soft rubber bands), so using them as a substitute for regular pasta isn’t really going to make you very happy.
*Unless*…I thought to myself…you substitute them for rice vermicelli. Rice vermicelli has a little bit of a rubbery texture– not quite as bad as konnyaku noodles, but some nonetheless. What contains rice vermicelli? Bún bowl!
The results were pretty awesome. I’d skip the salted duck egg, myself, because this brand shown in the picture isn’t that great. I’d use a regular chicken egg and subtract about 30 calories. Overall, with the duck egg, the dish came in just under 400 calories and has a lot of vitamin A, fiber, and decent amounts of other vitamins. And it’s a *lot* of food. The key to successful bún is to have the marinated shredded carrots and daikon, usually done with rice vinegar, water, sugar, and salt and let to sit at least overnight. I substituted Splenda and didn’t notice much of a difference. I roughly followed the recipe at Battle of the Bahn Mi, found here.
Low Calorie, Low Carb Bún
Makes 1 *large* low calorie serving
Rinse, then boil the konnyaku noodles for 5-10 minutes. Simultaneously, brown the sausage. When the konnyaku is done (which can basically be whenever, it doesn’t need much cooking but can take as much as you throw at it), drain it and rinse it with cold water. Let it dry.
When dry, put into a bowl and top with veggies, marinated carrot/daikon, cilantro, sausage, and chopped up egg. Squeeze lime wedges over the top and pour a tablespoon or two of fish sauce. Admire the pretty food, then eat it.
I couldn’t finish the whole bowl…
I discovered this weekend that I have an amazing tendency to cook things just for fun that are ridiculously complicated, but when it comes to meal times I often wind up submitting to the instant gratification of lazy-people food (instant ramen, frozen sausages, etc.).
Yesterday my breakfast consisted of toast with butter, and lunch of instant ramen with an egg. But somewhere in there, I went shopping and decided to go on a culinary adventure. I decided to make chashu pork and tea eggs, and also to make some onigiri for my friends’ going away party. Nowhere in there, though, did I plan to eat any of that fancy food as a meal. Just instant ramen and toast. Oh, self, I am ashamed of you. At least the end result tends to be that I wind up having fancy lunches at work during the week (as such, I invested in a bento box today).
Anyway, I’m not entirely sure how I got on the chashu kick, but sure enough I was tromping off to the Chinese grocery in search of the perfect cut of pork. For those out of the know, chashu is the Japanese interpretation of the Chinese charsiu. Unlike charsiu, chashu is actually braised pork in a soy sauce, mirin, etc. mixture, not barbecued. Marc Matsumoto, in his sexily illustrated chashu recipe, advises that pork cheek is the best for ultimate chashu amazingness, I wasn’t so fortunate. There was, indeed, some pork head meat…but it was just that, pork head. Complete with ears. While I’m an adventurous cook at times (known for thwacking off the head of a [dead] duck with a cleaver in an illustrious birthday potluck episode), I didn’t quite feel up to chopping off ears that day. So, I settled for pork belly.
The tea egg kick is a little more understandable; my Chinese friend made some tasty tea eggs for a hike/picnic we had a couple of weeks ago and I was hooked (despite my typical dislike of hard boiled eggs). So while at the Chinese grocery, I also picked up some cheap looseleaf black tea in a tin. I couldn’t quite remember which type of tea was required and was too timid to ask the Chinese clerk in my workable Mandarin, but it seems I chose correctly. Hooray! After searching the internet for tea egg recipes, I settled on this one from Allrecipes because it seemed to have a sufficient mixture of spice (I omitted the licorice root and substituted a little brown sugar for rock sugar).
The end result of this was me making use of all four gas burners at once: rice in a pot on the back left, chashu in a le cruset on the front left, tea eggs simmering away in their sauce on the back right, and some steelhead trout cooking away in miso and onion on the front right.
And so, my tiny little apartment smelled like a Sino-Japanese wonderland, filled with the scent of pork, fish, rice, and tea eggs simmering away while I watched some terrible Korean dramas. The chashu took considerably longer than an hour to get tender enough, but had a great flavor (I have to admit I added extra garlic and a bit of MSG though); the tea eggs were decent right away, but I’m not particularly fond of yolks with green on eggs, so I’ll probably soft boil them and then do the simmering next time.
I contemplated how I could use all this damn food, since I hadn’t really thought of that beforehand (bright, I know). I decided to combine my strange cooking urges into a decent lunch for the week, and settled on an offshoot of a salad I whipped up last week involving belgian endive, egg, and other stuff (then, it was sweet potato). This, I think, was when I realized that I really do have some sort of diet identity crisis, and that maybe I should blog about it. My friends, also, are to blame for their suggestions that I seem to have a lot to say and perhaps blabbering on the internet would be a good outlet.
So, this morning, after eating wheetabix and milk (virtually ignored in the U.S., but delicious) and a tea egg for breakfast, I started installing wordpress. After returning from the gym, I combined my rich and flavorful tea eggs (rich, spicy), chashu pork (rich, salty, sort of sweet), and belgian endive (crunchy, bitter) with some green onion (zingy), shaved parmesan (salty, sort of crunchy) and pickled garlic (tangy-sweet) my mom made. In order to balance out the rampant salty-rich flavor of this, I’ll be bringing along a couple of mandarins for dessert.
And thus, I present to you my humble bento that actually wound up taking about 6 hours to prepare:
Have I convinced you that I’m insane enough to have a blog yet? :)
P.S. I apologize that the steelhead trout onigiri were neglected in this post, but they were taken to the party and eaten rather quickly. I’ll do another post someday. Also, future posts should hopefully have more sexy food pictures.
Recipes used for inspiration in this post:
http://norecipes.com/2009/10/05/japanese-chashu-recipe/
http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/oriental-tea-leaf-eggs/Detail.aspx