November 8, 2009
Garnishes that you can put on your bun (pronounced "boon")
I know that nobody wants to eat cold noodle salad now that it’s fall, but I figured, it’s never too late for people to embrace bun tom nuong.
Bun is exactly like pho, but without the soup broth over the rice noodles. The garnishes are the same, too: cucumbers, carrots, coriander, peanuts, bean sprouts, eggs, lime and whatever meat you have on hand. In this case, we’ll use shrimp.
The refreshing dressing that marries all the flavors together would be nuoc cham, a fish sauce-lime concoction that seems scary-pungent at first, but once it’s tossed with all the other ingredients, it transforms into something so addictive that you’ll want to drink the leftovers from the bowl once all the noodles are gone.
Recipe after the jump.
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October 18, 2009
I drew this diagram for you so you know where everything goes.
Fetta is my favorite Egyptian food. Like most Egyptian dishes, it’s economical and makes use of a lot of extra leftover ingredients laying around the house. You basically layer bread, rice and meat in a casserole dish and smother the whole thing with a tangy, garlicky tomato sauce. It takes a bit of time to make, but the results are fabulous.
There are two kinds of fetta you can make: fetta hamra or fetta abyad. “Hamra” means red in Arabic, and “abyad” means white — so one version has a tomato based sauce on top and the white one well, doesn’t.
Recipe after the jump.
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October 17, 2009
I also drew this picture for you to show you what the garnishes on arroz caldo should look like. If you don't have calamansi, Philippine native lime, you can use lime or lemon.
On cold winter days, my Tito Maro — who used to pick my sister and me up after school — would surprise us with a big pot of arroz caldo waiting for us in the kitchen.
Min Min and I would eat about three bowls each and absolutely ruin our appetites for dinner, but we couldn’t stop.
Arroz caldo, a fragrant rice porridge with chicken, saffron and ginger, garnished with lime, fried garlic, scallions and fish sauce, just really hits the spot, no matter who you are or what culture you come from.
A little about the history of arroz caldo: it’s originally derived from the Chinese rice porridge dish, congee — and in Tagalog, it’s called lugau. But the Spanish settlers adapted it to their taste by adding saffron and renamed it something that they could understand — hence, arroz caldo — rice broth.
Recipe after the jump.
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October 12, 2009
I drew this for you, so you can see what it looks like.
Whenever you go into a Japanese restaurant, they give you the little salad after your miso soup, right? There’s almost always the same orange-colored ginger dressing on the salad — and I’m here to tell you exactly what it is.
You’ll need a blender to mix everything together, but I guarantee it tastes EXACTLY like the dressing from the restaurants. Looking back on the ingredient list — which includes ketchup and mayonnaise (no mayo in this recipe, though) — you’ll start to realize it’s a purely American invention. But who cares. The stuff’s addictive and it tastes awesome on top of a salad of chopped iceberg lettuce, grated carrots and cherry tomatoes — just like they do in Benihana.
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September 30, 2009
There's my flan at the potluck -- front and center.
A few weeks ago, my friend Becky decided to have a ROYGBIV potluck party — everyone was required to bring one food from one color of the rainbow. I took yellow and declared I would make FLAN.
FLAN!?!?! What the hell was I thinking? Who likes flan? I mean, my mother is a great maker of flan, but most people — I mean, it’s just not something that you would go out of your way to eat, you know? Even I can acknowledge that.
And I tried to cover it up at the potluck by passing it off as “creme caramel,” which sounds exotic and fancy — but people know what’s up.
Whatever, I’m just being negative. Seriously, though, it was super easy and the recipe is pretty foolproof. If executed successfully, you will have a lovely, light, creme-brulee-esque sugar cream heaven. But if you overcook it even just a tad, you will end up with rubber.
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September 27, 2009
I know, I can't believe we made it, either.
I know this is an ethnic food blog, but it’s safe to say that a French fruit tart — while familiar and from the Western world — falls under The Grand International umbrella.
It was rainy all day on Saturday, so my lady friends decided that it would be nice if we could perch ourselves on a couch at a cozy cafe, sip strong coffee and nibble on little French fruit tarts. But then we were like, fuck that. We can stay home and make it ourselves. Better.
And boy, did we make a French tart!
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