First Post!2.0- Jingle Bell (Chinese Steamed Ground Pork)

Alright, time to justify why our About section uses the first person plural.

I've been putting this off because I tend to think of my food as simple adaptations of basic techniques, and not really original creations, so I feel a bit silly posting recipes for my food. But I think I've figured out a way to make 'em work. If Quinn's recipes are sometimes more like guidelines, consider mine to be more like shouted instructions to a dizzy blindfolded kid trying to hit a pinata. Even if that is the case, I'd like to think I'm a pretty good pinata directions giver, and done right, we should all end up with something tasty.

In this case, the pinata is filled with steamed ground pork with lap cheong (chinese sausage) and ginger. This was my Mom's favorite dish that her father cooked. I can't for the life of me attempt to type its name out, since I've never seen it written down, but since I couldn't pronounce it properly as a little kid, I just called it jingle bell in my head, for that is what it sounds like so that is what we shall call it today. (In all seriousness, some googling suggests the first two words are zheng rou, but nothing came close to whatever that third word is)

Serves 1-2
1 lb ground pork
2-3 slices of ginger
2-4 lap cheong (again, chinese sausage)
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 tbsp soy sauce
salt
pepper

The lap cheong is in place of the more traditional fermented fish, which is sour and pasty and disgusting. Whereas lap cheong is sweet and oily and tasty. I've also done this with black bean and garlic sauce in it, as well as green onions. Really, you can add or subtract a lot, but the ginger, sesame oil, and ground pork are the heart of the dish.

As for amounts, well, those numbers are very very loose. I usually use a pound of ground pork if I'm just serving one or two, and the rest is sort of instinctive. Don't haul out a measuring spoon or anything, just use enough of everything to get the flavor throughout. If you like the lap cheong and are using a bit more, go a little light on the oil, cause you'll be feeling the lap cheong in your pores anyway (in a good way!).

• Chop up the lap cheong into bite sized pieces. Mix all of the ingredients together.

• Mold the pork into a patty-ish shape in whatever dish you'll be steaming it in. I use a ceramic bowl with a lid, but pyrex will work as well.

• Cover and place the bowl into your steamer. If you're lacking a big ole Chinese restaurant steamer like me, you can do like I do. Fill a big pot with a couple of inches of water. Place a pyrex or similarly indestructible bowl with a flat-ish bottom upside down at the bottom of the pot. Cover the big pot and add heat until the water starts steaming. Place the dish with the pork on top of the bowl, and recover the big pot. Voila, instant steamer.

• Let it steam fifteen to twenty minutes (just enough time to make rice! Yay!) and pull your pork out. It should be a greyish, frankly not all that appetizing color. It will be delicious.

• Serve with rice.

Roasted garlic, cherry tomato and broccoli with Italian Sausage and spaghetti

Patrick and I are coming off the heels of a stellar, all-chefs dinner night on Saturday night. The details, including our two dishes (And Patrick's first post!) will but up shortly.

In the mean time, I have a confession to make... I don't like vegetables.

Alright, so that's not completely true. I don't like cooking vegetables. By themselves they're usually fairly lifeless and I haven't always had the best luck integrating them as components. Either way I've always thought they were a bit of a hassle to cook.

After this dish I'm going to have to reassess my vegetable prejudices.


This is effectively a deconstructed spaghetti sauce with broccoli. The veggies are roasted, which not only amplifies their flavors but is also an extraordinarily easy way to cook them. Combined with roasted garlic and Italian sausage, this dish is full of robust flavors and actually fairly healthy for you. If you wanted to go even more fit, you could substitute a turkey or chicken sausage in lieu of the fatty Italian.

Serves 1-2
2 Italian Sausage
~10 cherry tomatoes, cut in half
~10 cloves garlic
1 head of broccoli, trimmed down to just florets
~1/4 lb spaghetti, or some other pasta of your choosing
1 tbsp tomato paste
Balsamic vinegar and olive oil to coat the pan

Directions:

1. Pre-heat oven to 350. Cover a cookie sheet in aluminum foil and coat lightly with olive oil and vinegar and place the garlic, tomatoes and broccoli on it. Place the sheet in the oven for 20-30 minutes or until all ingredients are cooked.
2. While the vegetables are roasting, cut the casing off the Italian sausage, break into small pieces and saute with the tomato paste until cooked through
   
3. Bring a pot of water to boil for the pasta and cook following whatever directions the package suggests
   
4. When all ingredients are finished, lay the pasta on the plate and top with veggies and Italian sausage
5. Enjoy!
   

unCaldo Verde

Welcome back to the second post!

Apologies for the delay. I actually cooked this over the weekend, but Patrick and I didn't have time to get the picture off his phone until now (sidenote: apologies for the low quality. We're working on getting a cheap digital camera to photograph our food in the future)

This recipe is based on a traditional Portuguese dish known as Caldo Verde. It's a soup with potatoes, kale, linguica (a Portuguese cured sausage) white wine a variety of spices including, most importantly paprika and allspice/cloves. Essentially my goal was to deconstruct the dish and create little packages of linguica wrapped up in kale. I decided to call it unCaldo Verde. So how'd it turn out?

Well, they certainly weren't packages.

The presentation definitely didn't work. I needed bigger kale leaves and kitchen twine to pull this off. The small leaves made it difficult to really wrap up the linguica morsels, and just using skewers didn't really hold them together.

That being said, the flavors were dead on. The filling was smoky and spicy with notes of garlic and white wine. Combined with the kale it perfectly distilled the flavors of caldo verde while ditching a lot of the heavier elements (this is a very low carb dish) A rough recipe follows, although I'm omitting the instructions since they didn't turn out so well. I plan on revisiting this in the future, at which point I'll put down what works!

Serves 1-2
4-6 kale leaves, de-stemmed 1/2 up
1/2-1 linguica sausage, diced
1/2 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
~1 cup white wine
~1 tbsp flour
1 tbsp butter
1 dash allspice/ground cloves
pepper, paprika and cinnamon to taste

First Post! - Avocado, lime and mint soup

Shown with accompanying homemade tortilla chips and Mexican spiced pork tenderloin

I figured the trial run for our blog ought to be an original recipe at least.

Breaks in college are always a bit of a boring time for me and this past winter break was no exception. I struggled for days, trying to find something to do. Then I remembered something. I love cooking.

Something about the weather had me on a southwest/Mexican roll all break, but this particular day I wanted to try something a bit more upscale than traditional fare. This meal was based on an avocado soup I made from one of my cookbooks and found to be lacking in flavor. Avocado needs offsetting tastes, and the sourness of lime in addition to the coolness of mint were the perfect partners. Here's a rough recipe.

Serves 2-4

3 avocados
2 limes
1 lime's worth of zest
3-5 mint sprigs
2 cups chicken stock (use homemade; tirade in future post)
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 jalapeno, deseeded
1 large onion
2 cloves garlic
2 tbsp butter
Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Finely chop the garlic, onions and jalapeno pepper
   
2. In a large pot, heat butter and sautee garlic and onions until translucent (also: appreciate wonderful smell)
3. Dice the avocado and put it in the pan to saute briefly
4. Add to this the chicken stock, the juice of the two limes, the lime zest and the mint. Allow this to simmer for five minutes or so.
5. Take this mixture and run it through a food processor so the ingredients are fully broken up
6. Return the soup to the pot, add the heavy cream and simmer for at least ten minutes to allow for the flavor to develop.
7. Serve!