Peanut Sauce

I had a bunch of extra coconut milk from making the challenge so I decided that a good thing to do with it is to make peanut sauce. This is super easy and delicious. I made lots and lots of it this summer when I was too overheated (and too temporarily situated) to go buy lots of ingredients and all I had was vinegar, soy sauce and sriracha for seasoning things.

The basic version (all measurements are approximate, it won't matter really) :

Peanut butter: about 2, 3 heaping spoons.
Sriracha sauce (to taste)
Soy sauce (about a teaspoon)
vinegar or tamarind liquid (a few teaspoons) If you know how to deal with tamarind it is totally the way to go.
about cup of water or coconut milk. It's totally fine with water. The coconut milk version is probably too rich to use as say a pasta sauce.

Stir this up in a saucepan. It will look gross and terrible. Don't worry. When the peanut butter is more or less in suspension (there shouldn't be any huge chunks in the bottom of the pan), but it on the stove and bring to a boil. This is the tricky bit. For a while it will bubble normally, but then it will start to thicken and the bubbles will rise in the pan. When this happens be ready to take it off the heat very quickly because soon it will start spattering like a mud pot at Yellowstone. You should preferably have it off the heat right before it starts doing this. It is now done!

Put it on anything you think it will be nice on. The most recent batch I made found its way onto some poached chicken and cucumber slices.

The other dish on the plate was my rendition of the cooking challenge.

Salt-and-Butter Salmon & Potatoes

As long as we're talking about fish, here's an easy recipe for salmon:

(Serves 4)
3 cuts of salmon
2 medium potatoes
1 tbsp butter
100 ml water
salt
pepper

1. After cleaning the salmon, sprinkle both sides thoroughly with salt and pepper, and let sit for 15 minutes.
   

   Instead of fresh salmon, I actually used leftover smoked salmon, which still turned out perfectly fine and allowed me to skip this step altogether.
   

2. Cut the potatoes into sixths (or eighths, if your potatoes are large), and let sit in a bowl of water for 15 minutes.
3. Fry (pan-fry?) the salmon in butter (margarine), then add the potatoes, making sure to allow the butter to coat everything.
   

   Using smoked salmon makes the first part of this step pretty minimal.
   

4. Add the 100 ml of water and let cook for 10-15 minutes (lid on) until the potatoes are soft and the water is essentially gone.
5. If necessary, add more salt and pepper to taste.

This is a fast and easy way to prepare salmon, and using smoked salmon not only makes everything even easier but almost eliminates the need to add any salt.

What I cooked in Berlin

While visiting Dustin, we had dinner with friends. I made a Peanut Soup, Dustin made dessert. Perhaps you'll enjoy the soup.

Peanut Soup, Senegalese Style

3/4 roasted and shelled peanuts
2 tablespoons peanut or neutral oil
1 medium red onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon peeled and minced fresh ginger
1 tablespooon minced garlic
pinch cayenne
salt and pepper
6 cups vegetable stock
2 sweet potatoes or yams, peeled and cut into thick slices
8 to 12 plum potatoes, cored and halved (canned without their liquid ok too)
1/2 pounds collards or kale, cut into wide ribbons
1/4 cup chunky peanut butter

• Break the peanuts into large pieces
  
• Put the oil in a pan over medium high heat. When hot, add onions, garlic, ginger. Cook, stirring until soft, 3-5 minutes.
  
• Add 1/2 cup of peanuts and the cayenne, salt, pepper. Stir in the sock and sweet potatoes, bring to a boil, and turn the heat down to medium low so the soup bubbles gently. Partially cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until potatoes are tender, about 10 minutes.
• Stir in tomatoes, collards, and peanut butter. Cover and cook until collards are tender, 5-8 minutes. Garnish with remaining peanuts.

Note: You can also serve this with millet for a more substantial meal.

Quick and simple way to cook fish!

I am generally not a fan of seafood, but the one thing I do eat is fish. So I've been trying to come up with ways to cook different types of fish. But, since I have no oven (a very unfortunate thing that I keep complaining about, since it seems like every good recipe I find requires an oven), I'm basically limited to cooking things on the stove (or the microwave), so I can't try baking the fish. But I've realized that I like frying fish, because it is so easy and quick. I've only tried this on two types of fish so far -- salmon and sea bream -- but it's turned out delicious both times.

Ingredients:
fish filet
lemon
herbs
oil, salt & pepper

1. Heat up oil in skillet.
2. Lay down fish filet (skin-side down).
3. Squeeze lemon juice over it. (TIP: Lemons last for a pretty long time in the fridge. To make a lemon easier to squeeze, microwave it for 15-20 seconds first so that it's warm-ish, and roll on the table a bit.)
4. Sprinkle some fresh or dry herbs (I recommend rosemary or dill, or (my favorite) Herbes de Provence mix -- which usually includes rosemary, sage, thyme, basil, lavender, etc). If you use fresh, it's probably better to sprinkle them right before you eat instead of while frying.
5. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
6. Let it fry on that side for 5-7 minutes, depending on how thick the piece of fish is. (The skin side should start to get brownish).
7. Turn fish over, repeat sprinkling with the lemon juice, herbs, and salt, and fry another 4-5 minutes, or as long as you need for it to cook through completely.

That's it! Takes about 15 minutes since you need no preparation at all, and tastes great. I like to serve it with potatoes or rice or green beans. As I said, don't know if this works well with any type of fish, but try it!

Mission Impossible

I'm finally going to be moving to my new apartment this weekend, which brings with it a new set of cooking challenges: I have a vegan roommate, and so our kitchen is vegan. In general, this works well for me since I'm allergic to milk, fish, and (mildly) eggs. However, I still haven't tried baking without eggs, aside from the things (like most pies) that don't have any eggs in them to begin with.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to discover or invent a recipe for vegan lemon-meringue pie. I understand that this may seem like an oxymoron, and it probably is. But lemon-meringue pie is one of my favorite desserts, but, unfortunately, one that my steadily worsening allergy to eggs has made it impossible (or at least really unpleasant) to eat.

I'll probably try some experiments to this end as well, but at this point I have no idea even where to begin. I look forward to your suggestions.

Toaster-Oven Cookies

On a day I would now very much like to forget, it was discovered that I do not know how to cook in English or in US customary units. This is of no particular concern to my mother, who believes that a very good reason for my learning how to cook is to avoid becoming American, but this does present some challenges to cooking and writing blog posts accessibly.

A challenge of cooking in general, furthermore, is not having all of the necessary materials. It is often said that all of the required ingredients should be assembled before starting on a recipe, but I have realized that it is equally important to have all of the listed equipment. I made cookies from scratch last night, and the recipe calls for a kitchen scale, food processor, rolling pin, and cookie cutters, none of which I own in my incomplete studio kitchen.

The recipe is as follows:

50g peanut powder
20g chopped peanuts
100g flour
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp butter
3 tbsp milk or water

1. (Optional) Roast peanuts in a toaster oven for several minutes to give the cookies a more savory taste.
   
   

   I actually didn't have peanuts, so I substituted with Unsalted & Dry Roasted Almonds (Sliced and Slivered) from Trader Joe's. Since they were already roasted, I skipped this step.

2. Chop enough peanuts (almonds) in a food processor to obtain 50g of peanut powder. Also chop 20g of peanuts (almonds) for several seconds.
   
   

   Thankfully, the bag of almonds indicated that 30g was equal to 1/4 cup, which allowed me to get around the issue of not having a kitchen scale. In hindsight this method was not altogether accurate, since the bulk of unpowdered and powdered nuts are different and I didn't notice the gram-cup conversion until after I started chopping, but I don't think it matters all that much. As for the chopping itself, I did it by hand, which is not all that fun and results in a somewhat coarse powder.
   
   

   Just getting started.

3. Mix the 50g of peanut (almond) powder, shaken (?) flour, sugar, butter, and milk/water in a bowl. After these ingredients have been kneaded together, add the 20g of peanuts (almonds) and mix. Let the dough sleep (sit?) for 30 minutes. If the dough is too dry or crumbly, add more milk/water.
   
   

   I used margarine instead of butter. I also actually added 4 tbsp of sugar here instead of 2 tbsp, because the recipe indicated that the cookies made with 2 tbsp would be barely sweet. The suggestions were to add marmalade (à la scones), honey, or extra sugar, and I went with the extra sugar because I do not have marmalade or honey. 4 tbsp, though, is still probably not sweet enough for most of you. For reference, 200 ml of flour is supposed to be equivalent to 105 g.

4. Roll out the dough to about 7-8 mm in thickness, and cut with cookie cutters.
   
   

   I know that a simple alternative to a rolling pin is a glass, but remarkably I do not have a single one in this apartment. (I do drink things, it's just that I only have mugs.) And so I basically pounded out the dough with my palms to the right thickness, although this isn't particularly recommended because the coarse peanut/almond bits can be a little painful. A glass would also have been helpful as a makeshift cookie cutter, but in true Japanese fashion I replaced that with the bottom rim of a rice bowl. Harhar. This resulted in 38.5 small (~3 cm in diameter) cookies.
   
   

   In case you were wondering.

5. Bake the cookies in a 300-watt toaster oven until the cookies become golden brown, then cool on a wire rack.
   
   

   This took about 15-20 minutes of baking, but my toaster oven was too small to accommodate all 38.5 cookies at once, so I had to split it into two rounds. Some of the cookies came out a little harder than the recipe suggested, which leads me to wonder whether the margarine-butter substitution was a bad idea, if I didn't have enough liquid, or what.

The last step was the reason I was initially drawn to this recipe--I do have an oven, but it's not very efficient to heat it for a small batch of cookies, and the baking tray I have is not oven-sized. A toaster oven is really easy to use and the cleanup is minimal.

By the way, this is the original recipe, even though in all likelihood it will not help you: http://cookpad.com/recipe/914586

Tags!

This blog is growing, and I worry that it may soon become unmanageable. I was thinking about adding tags, but I don't know which ones to add. Perhaps "dessert" and "pasta" and "sauce." And then One-Haw already tagged some posts with "Cantonese," which I think is a good idea. Anyway, suggest some tags in the comments!