Another holiday dinner. I’m calling it The Brown Meal. Penne with Oyster Mushrooms and Ricotta, Sourdough Raisin Bread with Young Camembert, Basque ‘Burnt’ Cheesecake, Ginger Soda:
House mushrooms, ricotta and herbs:
House bread and cheese, house ginger beer, and the magnificent Basque ‘Burnt’ cheesecake:
Yum!
-R
This would be vegan — except I forgot, and used an egg in the buns –, and all homemade, including the pickles:
Spicy Chickpea Patty with Tahini Slaw in a Sesame Bun, Onion Rings, Dill Pickles:
Yum!
-R
Beef heart, chicken, shrimp, fish:
Home made (and rather clumsy) tortillas, too!
Beef heart:
Fish:
Shrimp:
Chicken:
Yum!
-R
Egg rolls, spring rolls, call’em what you will, they’re the perfect food. There’s the crispy, crunchy exterior, enclosing a filling of meaty/vegetably deliciousness, and the sauce of your choice. One thing I love is their versatility, and that they’re infinitely customizable to whatever one likes.
The only bad egg rolls I ever got came from a local Chinese restaurant, unsurprisingly now defunct. The filling was just shredded cabbage, and I suspect they were reheated in a microwave. Still ate them though 🙂
I made three kinds:
(1) Pork:
(2) Chicken:
(3) Cha gio, pork and shrimp (Vietnamese):
Some egg roll recipes use raw meat/seafood, but I worry a bit about food safety and always at least partially cook things first:
You can make your own wrappers, but I’m not that ambitious. The frozen kind are fine, but be sure to defrost them completely first, and it’s best to keep them under a damp towel while you go about your business.
Filling the wrappers itself isn’t difficult, the one guideline being that you want to gently compress the filling to eliminate any air pockets.
Tuck those remaining bits inside! I would highly recommend using a bit of cornstarch mixed with water on the top flap before rolling it up (again, gently compressing). That will help to seal the wrapper and prevent oil from getting in when you fry them.
Done!
If you mess up, DON’T PANIC! Just put the mess on a new wrapper and double roll:
Another thing to love about egg rolls is that they are as good from frozen as from fresh, and you can pop the frozen ones into the oil without thawing. But they should be frozen individually, so they don’t stick together, before putting them in freezer baggies:
Plum sauce and hot mustard don’t seem to be authentic, but after decades of Chinese takeout, I’d miss them. A light and unbalanced dinner, hot & sour soup and three kinds of egg rolls, plus nuoc cham dipping sauce for the cha gio.
-R
Kimchi and Spam Fried Rice . . . described on one site as “the ultimate Korean-American drunk food,” and delicious. Spam is sort of Korean, introduced by GIs back in the 1950s.
It is indeed delicious, but there’s lots of ingredients, so if you’re drunk, get someone to make it for you 🙂
-R
A friend speculated (jokingly) that Backlick Road got its name when someone saw a cat licking its back.
Backlick Road: Got its name over 200 years ago from the salt licks along the road that attracted deer to the area. These deer were hunted by the Powhatan Indians who were early inhabitants of the area.
I always assumed that Gallows Road, less than a mile from where I live, got its name from someone named ‘Gallows.’
Gallows Road: This road led to the Fairfax County gallows which were located in the Freedom Hill area near Tyson’s Corner. Offenders were tried in Alexandria and then transported on Little River Turnpike and then on Gallows Road to the gallows themselves.
Freedom Hill got its name because its concentration of freed slaves. Tyson’s is now an up-market shopping area.
I’ve always been curious about the Cabin John bridge. It’s high, enough to send an acrophobiac like me into overdrive, and the only single-lane (so, alternative one way, then t’other) bridge I know of in this area. It turns out that it’s just pavement over part of the Washington Aqueduct, built in the mid-1800’s, and still the major water supply to DC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Aqueduct
It’s scarier than it looks, about 100 feet above what’s below.
-R
I didn’t make the dumpling/egg roll wrappers, although I did make the rice noodles. And the rest was all done by hand . . .
-R
Surely on everyone’s wish list is to have some mycological goodness in the comfort of their own home, and just like the government, I’m here to help.
There are lots of articles on the net about how to grow mushrooms, but they are often very specific or very general. This article combines the worst of both, specificity in terms of what works for me, and generality in terms of the mushroom life cycle. I’ll assume you want to grow oyster mushrooms, in this case pink oysters, which are the prettiest (and taste pretty darn good too) . . . and throw in some general information about the mushroom life cycle, but only enough as you need to know.
This is still going to be long . . .
I’m going to break this post into three parts: (1) Get Mycelium (2) Grain Jars and (3) Growout.
Step One: GET MYCELIUM: To grow mushrooms, you need mycelium. If you’ve forgotten your high school biology, a quick reminder: mycelium is often white, stringy, fuzzy; and is the equivalent of the body (roots, stems, leaves) of a plant. The mushrooms you buy are roughly the equivalent of a plant’s flowers, and the minuscule spores are analogous to a plant’s seeds.
1) Buy spore prints. To make a spore print, you just place a mushroom cap that’s about to release its spores on a piece of tinfoil, cover it and let the spores drop. Then you seal up the tinfoil and sell it for $4.99 on eBay.
Once you’ve bought a spore print, you scrape some of the spores onto an agar plate, under sterile conditions. With any luck, you get mycelium, like this:
2) Buy a mushroom, cut a piece from it, soak it in hydrogen peroxide for 20 minutes, then put it on agar. This method usually results in contamination, but sometimes you get lucky (the round bit is a cross-section of the stem):
3) Buy a mycelium syringe. This is just a syringe filled with water, and floating around in the water, bits of mycelium. They run about $15-$50.
With a mycelium syringe, you can inoculate agar plates, or you can go directly to . . . GRAIN.
(What do vegan zombies scream? “GRAINS! GRAINS!”) (Sorry.)
Grain jars are STEP TWO. Pretty much any grain will work, as well as things like bird seed and even popcorn, but the standard is rye, which is both cheap and effective. You soak the rye overnight, boil it for 20 minutes, then load it into jars and pressure cook for 90 minutes to sterilize it.
The mycelium needs to breathe, but you want to keep the jar contents as sterile as possible. And you might want to use one of the afore-mentioned mycelium syringes. There are lots of ways to do this, but this works for me:
On the left is a 0.5 micron filter, which lets oxygen in but keeps contaminants out. You can pay mucho bucks for a few square feet of 0.5 micron filter from a scientific supply house, or you can use Tyvek, which is what the USPS uses to make its Priority Mail envelopes (!). On the right is a self-sealing injection port for a syringe – – its name describes its function pretty well. Both sealed with an abundance of silicone glue.
So, once you have your grain jars, you need to get the mycelium in them, while not introducing (again!) contamination. You can open the jar and pop in a bit of mycelium/agar cut from a plate, a bit of grain from an existing jar, spores from a print (but that takes forever), or use a mycelium syringe. Mycelium syringes are by far the best, because you’re spreading the bits of mycelium out in the jar, rather than just having a single growth point (like from grain or a bit of agar), plus they are far less prone to, erm, contamination.
( Incidentally, it’s easy to make mycelium syringes with one of these:)
. . . which is just a sterilized jar with some water and pebbles. You pop a bit of mycelium (on agar or grain) into the jar, shake the hell out of the jar to break up the mycelium, then use the SSIP to extract the mix into syringes.
Then the mycelium spreads through the jar. This is a G2G (grain to grain) transfer; the pic isn’t very good, but you can see the original grain (whiter) towards the right, and the mycelium colonizing the new grain:
Then, two to six weeks later, you have this:
STEP THREE: Growout, the Fun Part!
This step varies more than the preceding steps, depending on the species of mushroom. Some mushrooms want a sterilized wood substrate to grow out on, but oysters are happy with pasteurized straw. So get out your weed trimmer, and whack some of this up into 3-4″ lengths (you don’t need to measure):
Pasteurize it (heat or lime), then mix it with your colonized grain, in a ratio of about 1:6 by weight (grain:straw), push it tightly into bags, tie off the bags, cut little Xs about 4-6″ apart around the bag ,and bung them into the fruiting chamber:
I haven’t mentioned ‘fruiting chamber’ . . . it’s basically just somewhere you can keep the humidity up around 85-90%.
Then, for oyster mushrooms, about a week or 10 days later, you get “pins,” wee babies:
They grow incredibly quickly, doubling in size every day, so a few days later you have this:
Eatin’ time, Pink Oyster and Ricotta Omelet with Sichuan Flavor Bacon and Sourdough Toast. Yum!
-R
I hate Kung Pao chicken, but love Gong Bao chicken, even though it’s the same name, just transliterated differently. Explanation: every Chinese takeout has Kung Pao chicken (even though it’s a Sichuan dish), and it’s generally made with a sickeningly sweet fluorescent orange to red sauce, which I’m convinced comes in 55 gallon industrial drums and doesn’t require refrigeration.
I think Gong Bao is now the preferred transliteration (I’m just guessing though) . . . so I associate it with the ‘real’ dish, first introduced to me via Fuschia Dunlop’s book Land of Plenty. In this version, the sauce is much more balanced, with less sweetness, and much more depth from the use of black vinegar and both light and dark soy.
There’s something like 18 ingredients, and lots of prep work, but once ready, the recipe comes together quickly.
Ms. Dunlop’s version calls for breast meat. Normally I’d use thigh meat, for additional flavor, but I couldn’t say ‘no’ to Aldi’s mislabelled $1.53 bargain:
Only when I got home and straightened out the label did I realize that what I had misread as $1.53 was $4.53. Never mind.
The chicken’s cut into 1 cm/ 1/2″ cubes, then goes into the marinade, which is just soy sauce, rice wine or dry sherry, cornstarch and water:
Cut up the other ingredients:
And make the sauce: sugar, cornstarch, dark & light soy, black vinegar, sesame oil, and stock.
The cooking is dead easy: heat a couple of tablespoons of oil and fry the Sichuan peppercorns and red peppers until fragrant. Add the chicken and fry until the cubes start to separate. Add the ginger, garlic, and scallions and continue to cook until done. Stir in the sauce and cook until thickened.
Yum! Here with some Chinese broccoli and fried corn/peppers with sesame oil:
-R
Finally decided this print looked better on the wall than on the floor 🙂
It humanizes that awkward space at the top of the stairs . . .
-R