Happy New Year!

A preview of tomorrow's countdown party:

Champagnes and sparkling wines from around the world!

Langer's Deli

We finally made it to Langer's, home of what many consider the best pastrami sandwich in the United States. That's right, people claim it's better even than the famed Katz's in New York City.

#19: the famous hand cut pastrami sandwich with cole slaw, swiss cheese, and Russian dressing.

#4: corned beef with swiss cheese and Russian dressing.

A giant krinkle cut fry.

We also had an excellent vanilla malt that I forgot to photograph. All in all, a great meal for about $15 each. But (gasp) we liked the corned beef more than the pastrami!

Our friend, who's been to Langer's many times and just got back from a trip to Katz's, said after a few bites "Maybe Langer's is better!" He said Katz's pastrami might have a slightly stronger pepper flavor, but that Langer's bread blows Katz's out of the water. I have to agree. The rye at Langer's is crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, and wonderful warm.

Taiwanese Oyster Pancake

I've embarked on a mission to find the perfect oyster pancake recipe. Photos to follow.

Merry Christmas!

Happy holidays, everyone. Here are a bunch of pictures from Christmas hot pot, and a few from other recent meals:

Hot pot base made with chicken broth, napa cabbage, and a lobster head.

The rest of the lobster, cracked and cut into chunks.

An oyster the size of my palm. Gross to me, but J ate it.

Lobster, assorted mushrooms, tofu, pork blood pudding, napa cabbage, and tong hau (a Chinese vegetable).

Clams, oysters, beef, and lamb.

Potato pancakes, for the Hanukah lover in everyone.

Taiwanese squid fishcake noodle soup.

No Cooking Friday!

There will be no cooking today. Instead:

I finally finished a knitting project! Actually, this was knit in chunky yarn and only took me two days. And I know I owe someone a hat, but seriously, the yarn on that is tiny. It cramps my hand and I can only finish a little at a time. I'm workin' on it! I need the 100% wool hat because I'm being dragged to Irvine Lake for fishing at 5 a.m. tomorrow (cue the pity party--pooooooooooor Pei!)

And even though there was no real cooking, a girl needs to eat. Freezer scones and bacon crumbles are always tasty.

Pink Grapefruit Marmalade

Yes, more Christmas gifts. You'd think I have a ton of friends, but I really don't. They just eat a lot. Chopstick present to conceal the names of the unknowing.



I thought the colorful printed paper was a nice touch. It's also fair warning that I like my marmalade bitter, and that the receiver should proceed with caution.



I love scrapbook paper, as long as it's not used to make a real scrapbook (which I find are almost always overly precious).

Biscuit Basics

Well, here it is, Mark Bittman's biscuit recipe from How to Cook Everything.

• 2 cups all-purpose flour (please use a light flour like White Lily, especially if you're a beginner; it makes all the difference)
• 1 scant teaspoon salt (use half if you're adding bacon
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 5 teaspoons cold butter (or as little as 2 if you're watching the fat intake)
• 7/8 cup plain yogurt or buttermilk (yogurt will give you a slightly sour, more crisp biscuit)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees, and fry up some bacon if you're going to use it. Crumble the bacon into very small pieces and plaace in the fridge to chill. Also grate about half a cup of cheddar if you're going to use that.

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl and cut in the flour. You can use a food processor, but I find for one batch it's not worth the cleanup. Just use your fingers, making sure your hands are cold. Press the flour into the butter, working quickly so the butter doesn't melt. You' want to break the butter up enough to make it look like rolled oats are floating in the flour. You're not trying to get the flour to become completely uniform in consistency; by the time you've done that, the butter will have melted. The idea is to have small chunks of butter no bigger than peas floating throughout the flour. Add cheese and bacon at this point.

Use a large spoon or spatula to stir in the yogurt or buttermilk. Dig to the bottom of the bowl and turn the flour over, cutting through the dough occassionally. Stir as little as possible until the dough barely forms a ball. Less is more here, as you can tell by this photo. The dough is barely holding itself together. That's good.

Dump the dough onto a floured surface and knead no more than 10 times. It might stick a little, but try not to add more than a sprinkle of flour if any.

Press into a 3/4 inch thick rectangle and cut into rounds or squares. I like to just cut the dough into triangles because I don't want to re-roll the dough left over when I cut circles. Every time you re-work dough, the gluten in the dough gets stronger and chewier. Not good for biscuits.

A few more tips: when you cut, whether it's with a knife or a cookie cutter, press straight down into the dough and lift straight up. Don't twist the cutter or drag your knife. Doing so will keep the dough from rising in the oven. Place on an ungreased baking sheet about an inch and a half from each other. The steam from the biscuits help each other to rise, so don't put them too far from each other.

You can freeze the dough on a tray, then put the frozen triangles in an airtight container. I'm not sure how long they'll keep, but I assume at least a month or two. You can put the frozen ones directly in a 400-450 degree toaster oven for about 20 minutes, or until the top of the biscuit is browned and firm.

The tips in this post also apply to making the scones below, so happy eating!

Buttermilk Scones

Having made great biscuits with my White Lily flour, I tried savory scones last night instead. Here's the recipe, which I adapted so I didn't have to use self-rising flour.

In addition to being salty and cheesy, these scones have very crispy top. Doesn't it look like the batter on a good piece of fried chicken? The crunchiness tastes like I'd put cornmeal in it, even though I hadn't.

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons butter, cut into small cubes
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 3 ounces grated cheddar (two large grabs of loose cheese)
• a pinch of salt
• pepper to taste (I used about 20 cranks, but I love pepper)
• 1 large egg, lightly beaten
• 3 tablespoons of milk

Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and pepper in a mixing bowl and stir with a whisk. Cut butter in with food processor or hands until the flour looks like a coarse meal. Because this recipe doesn't have as much butter as a biscuit recipe, my flour never quite looked like meal, but it was okay.

Stir in the egg and 2 teaspoons of milk very gently. You want to just combine the ingredients, not beat them together. If you need it, add the final tablespoon of milk. I added a teaspoon at a time and didn't need the last teaspoon (1 tablespoon=3 teaspoons).

Dump the dough onto a floured surface. My dough barely came together. I just slapped it into a rectangle, cut it in half the long way, and then cut each log into small triangles. I ended up with 10 mini scones. Bake in a pre-heated 425 degree oven for 15 minutes and serve immediately. OR...

FREEZING AND RE-HEATING

This is the fun part. You can find a scone recipe anywhere, but it's hard to find opinions about how to make it easy to have fresh scones any time you want. So, for the sake of science, I baked my scones three ways to see what was best.

#1: fresh dough into a pre-heated toaster oven. You never want to put fresh dough in a lukewarm oven, so make sure you give the oven ten minutes or more to heat up. Unsurprisingly, this scone turned out very well and took about 15 minutes to bake.

#2: frozen dough in a cold toaster oven. The next morning, I threw a frozen scone in a cold oven set to 425 degrees. About 20 minutes later (for a very small scone) it was puffed up and ready to go. Just to get it more brown on top, I turned on the broiler for the last two minutes. Success! The perfect thing to throw in the toaster oven when you wake up, and grab to eat on your way out the door.

#3: frozen dough in a pre-heated toaster oven. After I toasted the first one in an oven that started out cold, I put a second one in the hot oven. No big difference, so don't waste your time on this.

The winner: method #2. So now I know I can make a batch of scones, cut them up, freeze them on a tray, and throw them in an airtight container. That way, fresh scones are never more than 20 minutes way. It's like having my own Pillsbury frozen doughs on hand, but better!

Future attempts will include different kinds of cheese, chives, bacon, and/or ham. Any other suggestions?

Holiday Sugarfest

Today I put together a box for J to take to his co-workers. Let's just say I don't plan to set foot in the kitchen tomorrow.

The box of goodies included the bacon cheddar biscuits I made this morning, some biscotti from last week, an array of gingerbread people and trees, rose flavored caramels covered in dark chocolated and sprinkled with sweet paprika, and pecan pralines. C came over and decorated gingerbread people with me.

Mine were sweet and imbued with traditional holiday spirit.

Hers had a lot more personality. Serves me right for letting a lawyer handle royal icing unsupervised. The evil gingerbread person is herself. She's going to set it on her desk as a guard cookie.

A closeup of a rose caramel. Oops, didn't notice that hole in the side until it was magnified to twenty times its actual size.

Buttermilk Biscuits with Bacon and Cheddar

I love buttermilk biscuits. In fact, biscuits and gravy is probably my favorite breakfast dish.

Today, I made mini biscuits and added bacon crumbles and cheddar to the mix. Biscuit recipes are quick and easy, but the quality of ingredients really makes a difference. I used Niman Ranch applewood smoked bacon and Tillamook sharp cheddar. Together with White Lily all-purpose flour and Plugra butter, they made some light, fluffy, buttery biscuits that were crisp around the top and crunchy browned on the bottom.

Here's a close up of the inside of a biscuit. I made square biscuits about an inch and a half across. They're the perfect size for snacking on, but I sacrificed some of the height that make big biscuits so appealing.

I used Mark Bittman's recipe from How to Cook Everything. I'll post details if someone will promise to make it and send me photos!

Innards Two Ways

I know I promised gingerbread men, but I didn't feel like playing with frosting today. So, some photos.

Lunch was chicken and port pate with a few dabs of fig balsamic jam. If there's an Olive & Co. in a mall near you (they're affiliated with L'Occitane) go get yourself a jar of this stuff. It's so delicious!

This is a cow's stomach. I'd never taken a picture of it before, so I thought it was worth a shot. Weird, right? Chinese people cut it into strips and simmer until soft. Then it's used in all kinds of things. My favorite is a light soup with Chinese barley in it. I call it barley, but it's some kind of barley/oat that I don't know the English name for.

Gingerbread Cookies, Part 1

Making the perfect gingerbread cookies isn't easy.

First you have to find a recipe. I haven't found my perfect gingerbread recipe yet, but the one I used today from epicurious.com was not bad. I would add more spices than it calls for.

This is the molasses, sugar, and spices after baking soda is poured in. Follow the recipe's advice to use a large pot, because look how much two cups' worth of liquid puffed up!

Add flour and salt, mix, and knead for a minute until glossy and oily rather than sticky.

Roll out to 1/8 or 1/4" thick, cut out cookies, and re-roll the scraps. I rolled the scraps two or three times and the cookies all turned out fine.


Tomorrow: photos of baked and decorated cookies.

Dukk Bok Gee

Someone really needs to tell me how to spell the name of this dish (I suspect it's actually duk bok gee).

It infuriates me that Korean, which has such a logical, standardized, near-perfect written form, has no standard English phoneticization. Dukk is one of my favorite foods. I've made it so many times I don't really have a recipe, but here's a photo walk-through.

Collect ingredients. You must have dukk separated and soaking in hot water. I have a can of garlic that I pureed in the food processor and keep in the fridge. I eat a lot of garlic. Mild miso is a plus but not necessary. Gochujiang (Korean chili paste) is a must. Something spicy--I chose a jalepeno and four tiny red peppers. Onions and napa kimchi round out today's version. Vegetables like spinach or zucchini are also good, as are fish cakes.

Sear jalepenos over an open flame to char the outside. Char=flavor. Char also=fun, if you haven't tried it.

Sautee the gochujiang, miso, garlic, and peppers together until fragrant and slightly charred.

Sautee the onions until soft, then pan fry the dukk until they're brown on all sides. Add the gochujiang mix, two tablespoons of any kind of sugar, and the kimchi to the rice cakes and stir to mix. Add a cup of water or chicken stock (I used water and boullion today). Simmer, covered, for half an hour to let the dukk absorb all the flavors. You can simmer this as long as you like, or add a cornstarch slurry to thicken. You can tell today's dukk was thicker than last time's (below) because I used cornstarch.

My last dukk post

Bacon and Eggs

Mmmm, bacon!

Claire clued me in to the $3.79 Niman Ranch applewood smoked bacon they sell at Trader Joe's. Niman Ranch is one of the most sustainable farms that sell widely available products, so when I can afford it I like to buy their meat. Plus, their bacon is delicious.

I found this photo on a craft blog and had thought it was adorable. Coincidentally, I had striped fabric left over from another project, so:

We'll see how it turns out.

Haggis!

Haggis is a strange Scottish food.

It's hard to find it in the states, but I found a canned version at Surfas in Culver City. The back of the can says the ingredients include lamb, pork, various stomach/intestines, and oats. Traditionally, the mash is stuffed into a lamb stomach and cooked.

For lack of a lamb's stomach (I can never find one of those lying around when I need one!) we served our haggis on homemade rye bread.

To be honest, haggis is pretty good. It's sort of like corned beef hash or like liver pate in texture, but with a lamb flavor. The oats (steel cut in style) give it a bit of a pop.

I also invented a dish last night: deep fried salt n' pepper pork intestine. I know, it sounds vile. However, it's sort of like the salt n' pepper popcorn chicken served at Taiwanse boba shops. I just cleaned out the intestines, simmered until they were soft, sliced, dusted with five spice powder and a sprinkling of salt, coated with a light flour mix, and deep fried until crispy. The flour mix included a 2:1 ratio of flour to cornstarch, salt, white pepper, and five spice powder.

Truck Food

West LA is usually ridiculously expensive, but taco trucks are my friend.

Three tacos, a charred jalepeno, and a pickled jalepeno for $3, and a huge sack of mixed fruits tossed in chili powder and salt for $2. My taco selections were carne asada, chicken, and beef tongue. Deeeeeelicious!

More Christmas Crafting

Crafts are fun. I'm unstoppable, and determined to use up every last scrap of fabric I have. No waste!

A tower of origami gift boxes,

an envelope clutch,

and a purse-sized tissue pouch (clever presentation, eh?).

Seafood Fried Rice and Miso Halibut

Look! Food again!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I love fried rice. Yesterday's version was asparagus, shrimp, and scallops. I ran out of eggs, but I have to say it didn't really need anything interfering with the seafood flavors.

I'm trying hard to eat fish a few times a week, and it's dishes like last night's miso halibut that keep me coming back for more. I had tried the same recipe a few nights ago, but discovered the miso really needs to marinate for about two days before it really seeps into the flesh of the fish. For the marinade, I whisked together two tablespoons of mild yellow miso with equal parts water, a teaspoon of sake, the juice of half a lime, a scant tablespoon of brown sugar, and a dash of soy sauce. I poked about 10 holes in the raw fish steak with a chopstick, then smeared the miso all over it and covered well. I was afraid it would spoil in the refrigerator, but I used very fresh fish and the salt probably kept bacteria at bay. To cook, I rinsed off the excess sauce (which would burn) and dried the fish well. I cooked this in a nonstick pan over medium heat, and it got very nice and brown.

And...more crafts.

More Crafts

I know, you want to see food. Too bad. Maybe tomorrow. I need to finish Christmas presents!

I crossed my fingers and hoped to die, and it fits! My bag actually comfortably fits a ThinkPad! Phew. C'mon, it's almost cute enough to eat.