Monthly Archives: January 2011

You can eat that?!: Nettles

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Tromping through the woods as a kid, I had my fair share of nasty run-ins with the leafy vengeance of the Stinging Nettle.  If your bare skin runs into it, it will cause an obnoxious itchy sort of pain (and in my case, gives me little blisters that fade away after a bit).  As unpleasant as it is, though, I consider it the ‘wasabi’ of the pain-inducing-plant world, because the discomfort usually subsides in less than 30 minutes…unlike the everlasting misery of poison oak.

As per Wikipedia‘s illustrious description, the mechanism for this action is:

“The plant has many hollow stinging hairs called trichomes on its leaves and stems, which act like hypodermic needles that inject histamine and other chemicals that produce a stinging sensation when contacted by humans and other animals.”

Fun times, right?  Now you’re totally thinking, “how awesome, I want to eat tiny hypodermic needles that inject histamines into me!”  Well, the good news is that if you rinse them thoroughly and cook them (only for about 5 minutes), those chemicals go away and you’re left with a tasty vegetable that causes no pain.  It has flavor somewhat like a herb-y, mellow, very fresh spinach and a nearly melty texture.  I think it is best described as the “sophisticated cousin of spinach”.

The optimal time for picking nettles is early spring when they’re still fairly small, because they’ll be the most tender and not gritty.  My family is located in the Pacific Northwest, spring tends to start a little earlier here thanks to the temperate, moist climate.  It’s only the end of January but there are already flowers blooming and frogs croaking…and nettles that are about 10″ tall.  Perfect!  My dad and I grabbed some gloves and a bag and went for a walk, picking the nettle tips.  I have to give him credit for teaching me how to pick them without causing that annoying discomfort (use gloves, and apparently the underside of your hand is less susceptible to the stinging parts).

Tip: only use the very top, budding leaves.

We brought them back and cooked them, then ate them with dinner.  They were fabulous!  I was thinking they might make a delightfully mellow pesto (cooked first of course) and could see how folks in Europe could like making a creamy sort of soup of it.  It could also make a spanakopita type thing, who knows!  Too bad their best season is so fleeting and there certainly aren’t any near me in the bay area.  Those of you on the east coast are lucky– You probably have a month or so to wait for that snow to go away, then you can go out and harvest some yourselves!  Plenty of time to plan some good recipes.

Rinsing

Sorting out the larger leaves for tea

Cooking in water

Vegan for a Day

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Lately, I’ve found myself eating a lot of saturated fats and cholesterol in the form of cheese, meat, butter, etc.  My body doesn’t seem too happy about it, and I’m a little paranoid of an expanding waistline. Today my plan was originally to eat only fresh fruits and vegetables, to help give me some fiber and vitamins I’ve probably been missing out on.  I realized, though, that my taste buds wouldn’t forgive me for that, so I included some nuts and carbs.

Breakfast: banana, fruit and almonds from farmer’s market

Lunch: vegetable (green been, green onion, turnip, and cilantro) fried rice and miso soup with spinach, edamame, and corn

Snack: sourdough toast (with olive oil, salt, and paprika), a grapefruit, and some black tea

Dinner: portobello mushroom tacos (recipe below)

Portobello Mushroom Tacos

(Serves 1– 2 tacos)

The trick here to keep the mushrooms from getting too soggy is to roast them at 375 F for a while, drain off the water, then broil them for a few minutes.  This will make your tacos neater to eat and let the mushrooms have a good chewy texture.  If I were going to do this again, I may actually mash the avocado and spread it on the tortilla before adding the mushrooms and everything on top of that, to make it a bit more like cheese.  Overall, it came out quite good and refreshing, even if it was vegan.

Ingredients

  • 1 portobello mushroom with a firm cap, sliced into 1/2″ thick strips
  • vegetable oil spray
  • 1/2 pasilla pepper, sliced into 1/4″ rings
  • 4 cloves garlic, peeled but left whole
  • pinch salt
  • a couple of pinches of cumin
  • 2 corn tortillas
  • vegetable oil
  • 1/4 of an avocado, sliced into 4 strips
  • veggie toppings recommended: cilantro (lightly chopped), finely diced onion, diced tomato, lime (to squeeze on top)
  • hot sauce

Preheat oven to 375.  Spray a loaf pan lightly with vegetable oil spray.  Lay mushrooms, peppers, and garlic in the pan.  Let roast for about 20 minutes, then drain the water off.  Sprinkle with salt, cumin (and perhaps a little black pepper or cayenne pepper if you want).  Set oven to broil, return mushroom mixture to the oven and let broil for 5-10 minutes, until garlic cloves are well roasted.  Remove from oven and let cool while preparing tortillas.

Fry the tortillas on each side in a little vegetable oil, until golden brown.  Place on a plate, top with mushroom mixture.  Top this with avocado, cilantro, onion, tomato.  Add hot sauce as desired, and squeeze lime juice on top.

Would I do this whole-day-vegan thing again?  Not unless necessary for my health, I think. The tacos were pretty good, though.

Some of the Best Things in Life are Free

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Having grown up in a fairly rural area with a family that possessed both culinary adventurousness and ingenuity, I have a deep seated appreciation of foraging.  While the things you can get in a more rural area in the Pacific Northwest are a little different than you can get in the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay area, all of California is really blessed with an abundance of edibles just waiting for the taking.

Over the past two years living in the ‘burbs, I’ve kept my eyes open to see what was around me.  There really is a crazy amount around, if you’re just willing to look.  Many people have fruit trees that are unmaintained, the fruit going to waste in their yard.  If you just ask, they’ll often let you pick some.  Other bushes grow over fences and onto the sidewalk.  My general rule of thumb is, unless I’ve asked, it has to be A) obviously going to waste (lots of fallen fruit) and B) somewhat in the public domain (over sidewalks, on city land, etc.).

I don’t just walk into a random person’s yard without their permission and jack their peaches.  In fact, that tends to anger me.  We have a very nice, huge avocado tree in the front of our complex, but someone who didn’t speak much English was there with a professional fruit picking poll with the obvious intent of selling them for profit.  Thus, even though I pay rent to live where I do, I don’t much get to enjoy the abundance of avocados on that ancient tree.

Anyway, since about September, I’ve been a bit more into documenting my foraging activities, so here are some pictures.

September

black mission figs and lemons, all in my shirt.

October

mission olives from my friend Ben's tree (turned out to be somewhat of a bust, thanks to olive fruit flies)

November

chanterelles near my parents' house

December was a little busy and full of rain, so there wasn’t a whole lot of time for foraging.

January

citrus critical mass: lemons, meyer lemons, yellow grapefruits, and mandarin oranges

To me, it almost seems crazy to buy fruit now, just because of the overabundance all around.  There are a number of benefits to foraging: 1) You know where your food is coming from 2) A carbon footprint of near zero if you walk or bike 3) Most of these fruits are grown without pesticides 4) People with fruit trees in their yard also tend to get sick of the fruit after a while, and if you asked if you could take or buy some, they’d probably be pretty glad.  One thing to keep in mind though, is to pick sustainably.  This generally means being nice to the trees/bushes/fungi and not ripping them to shreds or beating them up, leaving some for others and so that the source can keep producing for years to come.

Anyway, I’m not going to tell you where my foraging locations are.  That’s somewhat top-secret, just because if there are too many people hitting up the same trees, bushes, or mushrooming grounds, there just won’t be that much left!  My best advice is to just wander around your neighborhood, get to know your neighbors, and keep your eyes open.  There’s plenty out there waiting for you.

Any ideas on what I should do with all this citrus? :)

Chashu Pork and Tea Egg Salad

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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