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Sunday, December 06, 2009
Modification combining several recipes and to make veggie rather than meaty... delicious!
Mapo Tofu (Modified from The Washington Post and the Gourmet cookbook)
4 to 6 servings
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 chopped scallions (white and light-green parts only)
1 Tbsp minced ginger root
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4 cup broadbean paste (I use Lee Kum Kee Chili Bean Sauce)
2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon Shaoxing rice wine
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup water
12 to 15 ounces (1 package) soft tofu, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
cornstarch for thickening, if needed.
1/2 teaspoon crushed Sichuan peppercorns
Bring a small pot of water to a simmer, add cubed tofu and simmer for 10 minutes, to firm it up.
In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, cook scallions, garlic and ginger 2 minutes. Add broadbean paste and cook 1 minute. Add soy sauce, rice wine and sugar, and stir until dissolved. Add water and simmer until slightly reduced, adding a bit of corn starch for thickening if desired.
Drain simmered tofu and add to sauce, stirring to mix. Allow to meld for about 10 minutes over low heat, adding Sichuan peppercorns near the end.
Serve over rice and stir-fried veggies. Yum!
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Another great family recipe... currently rising in the oven!
2 cakes compressed yeast (you MUST find the "active" yeast bricks next to the butter in the grocery store. Active dry packets do NOT taste the same)
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup butter
1 tsp salt
Crumble yeast cakes in a little bowl. Add 1 tsp sugar and a little of the milk (warmed, but not too hot). Cream butter, sugar and salt. Add well-beaten eggs and yeast mixture. Add half of the sifted flour and remaining milk, and beat well. Mix in the rest of the flour with your hands.
Knead gently in bowl until smooth Place in a well-greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size.
Remove dough from bowl to a floured board, and cut in two. Roll out each piece to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut like a pie into 16 pieces. Roll up each into a croissant shape, beginning at wide end of triangle. Roll tightly, and pull each roll out longer by gently tugging on the ends. Let rise about 1/2 hour.
Bake at 400 for 15 minutes. For a tender crust, brush with melted butter when removing from the oven.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
After looking all over the web, I haven't found this particular recipe, so I decided to share it after a nice evening of baking. It is my grandmother's recipe, and one of my dad's favorite Christmas cookies. They are very best after they've aged a few weeks (up to a month) in an airtight container... the icing gets really nice and hard, and the cookies are awesome dunked in tea or coffee. They're so good, though, it's hard to make them last that long!
Pfeffernuesse-- Makes about 4 1/2 dozen
1/3 cup unsalted butter, room temp
2 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar
4 eggs
Zest of one lemon
3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup finely chopped candied lemon peel
1/2 cup finely chopped candied citron
1/4 cup finely chopped candied orange peel
1/2 tsp almond extract
4 cups sifted flour
1 Tbsp cardamom
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground aniseed
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
Lemon Icing
1 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar
4 to 4 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice
Directions- Cream butter in a large bowl, and beat in powdered sugar in small batches. Add eggs and beat until well blended.
- Mix together lemon juice, zest, chopped candied fruits, and almond extract. Add butter and egg mixture and stir until well blended.
- Sift together flour, spices, salt and soda to evenly distribute spices. Add butter and fruit mixture, and stir until well blended.
- Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour. Grease and flour cookie sheets. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
- Lightly flour hands and roll into 1-inch balls. You can place them fairly close together on the sheet because they don't really spread. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until barely browned but dry.
The icing is the tricky part. It is not icing so much as a thick, opaque white paste. The best way to do it is to put a dab on top of each of the cookies while they're still pretty hot, and then go back and squish it around with your finger. It's indelicate, but it makes a very nice, tangy sugar crust on top.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I have been on a book buying binge recently. Amazon.com's Amazon Prime is a killer, I tell you!
And I am not alone... talking about which book his book club should read next, a friend explained his dilemma:
Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler describes the "abundance of a bookstore" this way (I put the categories into list format):
1. Books You Haven't Read
2. The Books You Needn't Read
3. The Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
4. Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
5. The Books That if You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read but Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
6. The Books You Mean to Read but There Are Others You Must Read First
7. The Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait Till They Are Remaindered
8. The Books Ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
9. Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
10. Books That Everybody's Read So It's as if You Had Read Them, Too
Friday, May 09, 2008
As painful as this particular retreat was for me, it opened my eyes to the extraordinary amount of time my mind spent in monitoring and evaluating my success or failure, and in making reality match my ideal image of myself. With my newfound awareness, I would notice how there seemed to be an endless tape-loop in my mind that evaluated my progress: "Okay, now I've accomplished this, and this, and this. I'm doing alright." This compulsive internal dialogue is quite normal in a culture that rewards achievement, wealth, beauty and success above all things, and especially in a culture that rewards the achievements of the highly individuated, separate "self under its own power." In this milieu, the internal dialogue is actually a form of self-soothing, of reassuring ourselves that we're really okay. When we can stand back from this compulsive internal dialogue just a bit, we can see the intensity of the craving for solidity and security that drives it.
.Stephen Cope. Yoga and the Search for the True Self.
Monday, March 10, 2008
But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder if it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of 'passing emotion' and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.
.E.M. Forster. Howard's End.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
.Robert Hass.
