You don't need a "chef" to learn to cook

As I keep saying, cooking at home is much healthier and just as fast as many of the "convenience" foods available. Yesterday, for a party, I made a Thai-style green curry: tofu, bean sprouts, bell peppers in a basil-based sauce that I'd made in a huge batch frozen last summer. My friend, who drove down from Dallas, picked up a shrimp scampi box at Sam's to take to the party, so we made linguine to go with it. It took me 25 minutes from the time I started marinating the tofu to when I took the one pot (!) curry off the stove. It took us 15 minutes to make the shrimp scampi linguine. But boy ... was that shrimp scampi greasy! The glass dish we transferred it to was so greasy that it took two washes to get all the grease off. And that's the crap people eat day-in and day-out!

I've never understood people who say cooking at home is too slow. Because it doesn't need to be fancy. What could be faster/easier than a fish fillet rubbed with olive oil and lemon juice and stuck under the toaster oven? Toss a bowl of vegetables in the microwave with ground pepper and salt and you have a high-protein, high-fiber, low fat, full course balanced meal in under 15 minutes.

In a pretty good article promoting cooking (what use is growing your own vegetables if you can't cook 'em?), Amanda Hesser throws out a fact which astounded me:

According to a 2008 NPD study, of all supper entrees “cooked” at home, just 58 percent were prepared with raw ingredients.

and a recommendation which made me uncomfortable:

Mrs. Obama might want to expand her food message to include cooking. Just as she highlighted American fashion by wearing the clothes of young designers, she could call attention to cooking by bringing America’s talented young chefs to the White House for a food summit meeting. Then she could turn them into a national task force, asking them to reach out in their communities and give free cooking lessons to the next generation of cooks and eaters.

Of course, she's a food writer and she's thinking in terms of chefs. But restaurant cooking is nothing like home cooking -- and few chefs and food writers are able to make that transition. So, forget the chefs.

Folks have been making simple, fast food in their homes for millenia and it's that simple style that people ought to get back in touch with. If they start cooking, and then find that they want to take advantage of unusual flavors and exotic cooking techniques, then they should go look up chef's cookbooks and a more complex pantry.

But to start, all you need in your kitchen are olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. You don't need any equipment beyond a stove and an oven. In fact, you could get just as good results using a microwave and a toaster oven.

Cooking Dinner

This blog has veered into book reviews, bridge, travel stories, football, data mining and politics. Pretty much the only one of my interests that hasn't yet been touched on is cooking ...

Today afternoon, the wife was off in her pottery studio, the kids were taking a nap and I was at a loose end, so I decided to cook. Normally, I cook the Thai, Chinese or Western dishes at our house and the wife does the South Indian stuff -- she cooks Indian dishes better than me. But this this time, I decided to cook mostly Indian.

First off, what every South Indian meal ought to have: sambar. I made it with chayote squash. Normal, standard stuff. Even used ready-made sambar powder.

The other thing every South Indian meal has is a vegetable side (called "poriyal"). I did it with sweet potatoes. I modified Mark Bittman's recipe for mashed potatoes, except that instead of milk, I used the broth in which I'd cooked the sweet potatoes. And instead of brown sugar or maple syrup, I added green chilies and mustard seeds fried briefly in a teaspoon of oil.

I then made a Goa-style curry. The recipe is straight out of Camellia Panjabi. We find her curries too watery, so I simply doubled the main items and reduced the water a bit. The recipe calls for fish; I used tofu and shrimp. And oh, that hot-pot (the one with the brown glaze) on which the curry is resting is something the wife made ...

While the curry was cooking, I also made a tabouli salad. This was not for dinner. I'm leaving for Detroit tomorrow morning. For lunch, I need something that I can take through airport security (needs to be dry), tastes good when cold, and does not get soggy after 4 hours. Tabouli fits the bill perfectly.

The whole thing, from starting to chop the vegetables to cleaning up after, took a little over 2 hours. We have enough to last 5 to 6 meals. I can never understand why people think that eating out is faster than cooking.

Sichuan tofu and onion soup

For Christmas, I got the wife "Land of Plenty" by Fuchsia Dunlop. This is widely reputed to be the most accessible and best cookbook on regional Chinese cooking. I know, I know. It's sort of a bowling ball present.

Tonight, she asked me to make something from the book. S1 wanted a soup for dinner. There was a cake of tofu lying in the fridge that dated to last month's visit to Cao Nguyen's (Oklahoma City's Vietnamese grocery store). I found a recipe for fish-fragrant tofu in the book and decided to modify the recipe to be a soup. After all, it called for broth and if I didn't reduce it, it would become a soup. But then, the recipe called for pickled chili paste. Our pantry is well-stocked, but not that well stocked. So, substituted pickled chili paste with a combination of sambal oelek and rice vinegar. No scallions either -- it's been a month since our last visit to Cao Nguyen's. So, substituted onions and cilantro instead. The recipe also called for deep-fried tofu. And we're never going to buy that, so I used instructions from a previous recipe to create "bear's paw tofu". With all these modifications, I don't think it's an authentic Sichuan recipe any more. But it was delicious all the same. So, here you go (it's vegetarian):


Lak's Sichuan-style Bear's Paw Tofu and Onion Soup (with apologies to Fuchsia Dunlop)
Preparation time: 5 minutes Cooking time: 20 minutes Serves: 4 as a main meal

3 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp sesame oil
1.2 lb firm tofu sliced into 1/2" X 2" X 2" slices
1/2 onion finely chopped
6 cloves garlic peeled and finely chopped
2" piece of ginger peeled and finely chopped
1.5 tbsp sambal oelek [reduce if you can't handle spicy hot food]
1 tbsp rice vinegar
3 tbsp soy sauce [reduce if you are using canned broth]
1 tsp sugar
2 cups broth
2 tbsp cilantro finely chopped

(1) Weight the tofu down to squeeze most of the water out. I just lay the cakes flat on a cutting board and press down on them with my palm.
(2) Heat the oils until smoking in a flat bottomed pan
(3) Put in the tofu slices and fry quickly on both slides and remove with a slotted spoon. Do in batches if your pan is too small to hold all the tofu.
(4) Add onion, garlic, ginger and sambal oelek to the pan and reduce heat to medium. Stir-fry for 2-3 minutes
(5) Add rice vinegar, soy sauce, sugar and broth. Taste and add water or soy sauce so that the soup is salty enough. [I make my own fish broth -- if you use canned vegetable broth, reduce the amount of soy sauce since the commercial stuff has a lot of salt]
(6) Add tofu slices, bring to a boil and simmer gently for 10 minutes. This gentle simmer is the "trick" behind getting the tofu to absorb the sauce flavor.
(7) Garnish with the cilantro

Serve in a bowl. Place a tofu slice on the bottom and ladle over some soup. Serve with crusty wheat bread. Serves 4.

A relaxed Sunday morning

I spent almost the whole morning cooking and the results are on the left ... Clockwise from top-left: mixed vegetable sambar, sweet potatoes, cabbage, fish curry and kidney beans.

It's less work than you might think. It took me 2.5 hours to cook, wash the pans, take a picture and write this blog entry! The kids and wife were off to the temple, so I could have Mani Iyer blasting away while I cooked. Music and cooking -- now, that's a very relaxing way to spend a Sunday morning.

Home cooking

Decided to cook dinner. I had a whole month of sambar-and-rasam in India. And last week in Helsinki has put me off and sandwiches for a while.

So what to cook? Gujarati food perhaps?

Constraints? The wife had left yoghurt in the fridge and home-made yoghurt tends to sour quickly. So needed to use it up. Also, the only fresh vegetables I could find in the market were: Brussels sprouts, carrots, celery and cucumber.

This is what I ended up cooking:

1. Bhatia Kadhi. A sweet and sour sauce for rice made from toor dhal liquid, sour yoghurt and vegetables (in my case: Brussels sprouts).

2. Lachko Dhal: Cumin-flavored dhal that you pretty much need to make if you are making bhatia kadhi because what else are you going to do with the toor dhal after you take out the liquid?

3. Cucumber-Tamarind Kuzhambu: a spicy-hot gravy that makes a nice contrast to the mild flavor of the first two.

It all turned out quite good. Pity that I'm the only one eating them.

Things to not give an Indian grandparent

Sundar is making a list of the stuff to give to hard-to-buy-gifts-for parents, in-laws and grandparents. Another aspect of the immigrant experience ... there are several points to balance: it should not be available in India, should work there (for example: 110V applicances are out), should not violate the elderly's concept of what's appropriate (harder than it sounds), should not depend on a computer (texting is more popular than email in India because most folks don't have broadband access), should not be too expensive (after converting dollars to rupees, although with the booming Indian economy now this rule's not inviolable).

I think that some one should make a list of the things you should not give even if it is something you enjoy. These are lessons I have learned from the unalloyed look of annoyance from the intended recipient. Feel free to add to this list in the comments.

1. Dark chocolate. I love chocolate with 70-80% cocoa. Apparently, it's an acquired taste.

2. Rolled (old-fashioned) or steel-cut oats. Also an acquired taste. Just buy the quick-cooking stuff.

3. Home-baked cakes and cookies. "Not at all sweet."

4. Henckels or Wustof's knifes. "Too expensive. And besides, an aruhamanai is a lot more convenient and can be used without standing up."

5. Watches whose face and wristband is not gold-hued. "Silver looks cheap. Who wears silver?"

6. Dark-hued shirts. "It's okay for youngsters like you but old people like us have to look decent."

7. Electric shavers: "Not smooth enough". "Give it a few weeks." "But I look like a rowdy"

What my camera phone captures about our kids

My camera phone takes pretty lousy pictures, but I've found myself treasuring the pictures from it quite a bit. The phone pictures seem to capture the essence of our kids growing up, mainly because the phone camera is always on hand.

This is S2, the three-year old, trying to use chopsticks at a dimsum restaurant:
Five years ago, there were three dim sum restaurants in Oklahoma City but we are now down to just one. Mostly due, I think, to bad management at the other two restaurants and not because of any lack of interested diners.

This is S1 showing us snakes do have legs. Apparently pythons have vestigial legs. Imagine my surprise when my six-year old suddenly flips over the tail of a 8-foot long python to show us two dark spots:
It was all I could do to pull out my phone to capture the moment.

This is S1 and S2 watching TV together (their usual routine on Saturday mornings):
Notice that he has two remotes in his hand. And S2, who'd normally fight him for everything, is happily sitting by him watching. Apparently, she's figured out that you don't separate a guy from his remote control.

All of a sudden, S2 has developed an interest in an old set of cooking toys. These were the toys that my wife's grandmother played with when she was a little girl. So, several of the things are quite obsolete:
I asked the kids to guess what each thing was used for. We had a lot of fun. They guessed that no. 3 (tied to a rope and used to haul water out of a well) was an "easter bunny's basket for easter eggs". That no. 6 (a seat) was a table. They had no clue about no. 7 (used for cutting vegetables) or no. 9 (used to carry water on the hip). The coal stove (not shown) really threw the kids for a loop.

The second best food ever

S1 is going to be so jealous.  When his kindergarden teacher asked the kids to write down their favorite food, he wrote down "crab".  In a sea of "pizza" and "candy", that really stood out enough that the teacher mentioned it to us at the next parent-teacher conference.

"He likes to watch me cooking crabs more than he likes to eat it," I said.  She looked at me uncomprehending (this is Oklahoma; if it doesn't have hooves, it's not edible).  "The way you cook crabs is to boil them alive," I explained.

My crab boil doesn't hold a candle to what I was served for dinner yesterday.  In fact, it was probably the best food dish I've ever had (other than a can of beets we cooked over a fire in Big Bend National Park after a long, exhausting day of hiking in chilly weather -- we were so famished that the can of beets will remain heads and shoulders over anything else).

Black pepper crab:  deep-fried crab in thick, fragrant black pepper sauce.   The unreal spicy hotness of black pepper with the soft, silken, sweetness of crab flesh ...  

I've got to go to a book store here and pick up a Singapore cookbook.  After I check prices on Amazon, of course.

Keeping the bathwater and throwing out the baby

Remember the Sichuan cookbook I was talking about a year ago?  I was talking about trying to make a fried tofu soup, except that the recipe asked for ingredients that we didn't stock. So, I ended up replacing pretty much everything: the fried tofu with "bear's paw tofu", the ya cai with onions and vinegar, etc.

As I've been working my way through the Sichuan cookbook, I've also been building our pantry, so that we now stock most everything that the recipes call for.  But it's a process.

When I tried to make Dan Dan noodles, for example, the recipe called for several things I didn't have on hand: ground pork, ya cai, chili oil and sichuan pepper.  So, I substituted soft tofu for the ground pork; marinated lemon peel for the ya cai, sambal oelek and sesame oil for the chili oil, black pepper for the sichuan pepper.  I also noted down all the stuff that I wished I'd had and bought them the next time we went to the Asian store in the city. Pickled mustard greens (the true ya cai) in the fried tofu soup was a revelation.  There really is no substitute, so  we now always stock it. In general, that has been the case for most ingredients that Fuchsia Dunlop calls for.

And so, I picked up dried sichuan peppers with anticipation. It ought to be much better than using black peppers, no?  It wasn't. It was hard and had an unpleasant, crunchy texture.  Perhaps one ought to grind the pepper corns before using it? The next time I made Dan Dan noodles (i..e yesterday), I ground the peppercorns in a spice grinder before making the sauce. Now, the dish had a nice aroma, and the taste was good -- better than black peppers -- but unfortunately, the gritty texture remained.

Finally, I decided to look up how to use sichuan peppers and Wikipedia helpfully notes:

Recipes often suggest lightly toasting the tiny seedpods, then crushing them before adding them to food. Only the husks are used; the shiny black seeds are discarded or ignored as they have a very gritty sand-like texture.

Only the husks! Aha! Maybe I ought to read up on unfamiliar ingredients before I start cooking ... you think?

p.s. In case you don't cook, the title of this post may make no sense. Using just the husk is very unusual. There are spices (such as cardamom) where you discard the husk and use the seed, but this is the first spice I know of where you discard the seed and use the husk.  It's as if one were to keep the bathwater and throw out the baby.

The land of good Chinese food

I'm sitting in the airline lounge in Hong Kong, slurping noodles and waiting for my flight back to the US. This was my first visit to China, and perhaps it is apt that I started in Hong Kong and then across Shenzhen Bay to the first region that benefited from the economic opening.  And benefited, it has.

Shenzhen is vibrant, in every sense of the word. The buildings are tall, the streets are clean and people are busy. It is closer to the wide-open parts of Europe (Estonia, say) than to other developing countries like India. The fourth biggest city in China, Shenzhen, beats Delhi or Bangalore on pretty much any measure.

The most surprising thing to me about Hong Kong is how green it is.  The picture you have of Hong Kong (at  least the picture I had before coming) was of Hong Kong Island.  But Hong Kong is not just that one island. It also comprises quite a bit of Kowloon peninsula.  And the peninsula is full of hills and completely wooded. Hong Kong, in other words, could have sprawled Phonex-style, but they have done the smart thing and remained compact.

This is the ferry that takes you from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon.  Pretty cool ride.  You can also take the metro, but the metro is not as cool.  It is, surprisingly, also more expensive.

Hong Kong is most famous for its shopping. America, however, spoils you because nowhere else do you have the selection or the prices that you have in pretty much any medium-sized city in America. So, it was more amusing than anything to see people lining up to enter a handbag store:

It is not just handbags, of course. I have not seen as many ads for luxury watches than I saw in Hong Kong. I used to think the Lake Geneva was quite tacky with huge signs representing different watch brands, but Hong Kong beats it in sheer quantity.  Wonder who buys all those watches. When I mentioned the watch ads to my Chinese hosts, one of them pointed to his smartphone ("who needs watches any more?") but the other one said that she was wearing a Swiss watch. So perhaps every Chinawoman will one day own a Swiss watch, and these ads are simply fighting for that market share.

The night-time view of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon makes Manhattan look provincial.

I was visiting China to visit the Shenzhen meteorological department and Sunday happened to be "open" day.  These are Chinese citizens visiting the observatory.  The TV screens with familiar weather forecasters reading the forecasts were the big draw.

The radar in Shenzhen is atop the observatory. In fact, the observatory was specially built to house the radar. The building has 15 floors, but the floors are 30-40 feet tall. So, with their high ceilings, the office spaces feel light and airy.  Before they moved here, the meteo department was in what is now the second tallest building in Shenzhen:

The hospitality was astounding. When we have visitors to NSSL, we may do one dinner with the visitors at a local restaurant. Here, one or the other of my hosts accompanied me at lunch and dinner each and every day. I told them at the outset that I loved food, was not picky and as long as they chose food without beef, I would be quite happy. They seemed thrilled that I ate with chopsticks and that I would eat fish with bones.

I also told them about cooking my way through Fuschia Dunlop's book on Sichuan food. "An English book," waved one of my hosts dismissively.  But he was from Sichuan and so he had to show me what real Sichuan food tasted like.  Off we went to a gourmet Sichuan restaurant.  That clothesline-type thing in the picture are cold cuts.  The noodles and vegetables were awesome. I think I come close in how my noodles taste, but the variety and taste of Chinese food in China is simply incredible. Chinese food in America doesn't hold a candle to this. Even the supposedly authentic Chinese places are poor echoes of Chinese food. I wonder how Chinese people can stand it (perhaps, they get served proper food when they visit and I get crap because I am not Chinese? -- I know that I can get proper Indian food at Himalayas, a local Indian restaurant in Oklahoma, but what they normally serve in their buffets is creamed-up junk).

Close to the observatory is one of the largest parks in Shenzhen. It was built for some flower expo and consists of houses similar to what you will find in different provinces of China.  A very cool park, and I took advantage to people watch in the mornings ...

The really cool thing was that people would "walk" their birds and hang them from trees.

One evening, I went to Darfen "village", a colony of painting shops. I had read about it in the NY Times a few months ago and thought it would be cool to get an oil painting of the family done.  Turns out, though, that it is the completely wrong mix of convenience, price and quality.  The painting would take two weeks to do (so it would have to mailed to me), would cost about $300 and consist mainly of transferring the photograph to canvas.  The examples they showed looked nothing like paintings -- the art was lifeless and failed to capture the spirit of the subjects.  There is no point to a low-quality painting -- I might as well hang a high-quality photograph -- and so I decided to not get a painting done.

With my work mostly complete, I had a day of looking around in Shenzhen. Unfortunately, the city is only 30 years old, and so there is nothing historic here.  The best option was "Splendid China", a theme park that  has small models of architecture from all over China.  A little cheesy, but it was perfect for me, with my passing acquaintance of Chinese provinces and building styles.

The entrance to the park has these three "gods" reflecting Chinese aspirations. The first one is the god of family, the second the god of wealth and the third the god of long life.  And I think that order is roughly right, because nothing provoked as much admiration in China as the size of my family -- two children!, everyone remarked, one boy and one girl. Put together those characters mean the word "good". Very fortunate, etc.  etc.

 All the Chinese forecasters and scientists had exactly one child each, of course.  We seem to take for granted that this means that the population of China will slope gently downward in the next few decades and so the demographic dividend will lag behind that of the United States (or India) whose populations are yet to peak. I think we are mistaking quantity for quality.  I observed that, because they have only child, Chinese parents pour all their hopes and resources into that one child. Get ready for a generation of extremely well-educated, well-rounded children.  Good for the world as a whole, but it is going to be a tough country to compete against.  Think South Korea, but more focused, militaristic and ten times as large.

Any way, back to the theme park. There was a quite a bit of Tibetan stuff there, placed in the context of grottos and Buddhas from other provinces in China. The subtext here was quite clear.

They also had quite a few shows of minority (i.e., non-Han) peoples. The subtext here seemed to be that these were primitive peoples practicing primitive religions and lifestyles.  Maybe it is even true.

The last evening in Shenzhen, one of my hosts (who is from Guanxi) decided that he had to introduce me to food from his hometown. We went to a restaurant that sourced all its food from that province. In other words, they did not shop the local markets. They got all the fish and meats and vegetables from Guanxi to Shenzhen. And yes, the food was delicious.

But the really interesting thing was the ordering of the food. We ate in a private room (Chinese restaurants have huge halls, but they also have dozens of private rooms, and most companies get one of these rooms for their groups. As far as I could tell, there was not a significant price difference between eating in a hall and eating in a private room). But we had to go downstairs, to where the food was kept and select the fish and vegetables and tell them how we wanted it cooked.  Selected fish would get whacked right there. The manager would write up a bill and then as the food got served, it would get crossed off the list.  The cost of a dinner for five with about a dozen dishes ran to about sixty US dollars.

All in all, in less than a week in China, I got to taste five different Chinese cuisines -- Cantonese (mostly steamed), Guangdong (cooked in meat fats), Mongolian (mostly grilled), Sichuan (mostly pickled-peppery) and Guanxi (cooked in mild sauces). I could live in China forever for the food -- the US now feels like the land of bad Chinese food ... but then you also quickly notice the drawbacks of living in China. No, not the pollution. It rained like crazy while I was there, so the air was quite humid, but clean. There was the time when one of my colleagues posted a link on Facebook to a New York Times op-ed about being a woman programmer and I found that I could not access it.  I could not access any New York Times article while I was in China. It was only when I was back in Hong Kong that I could read even that rather innocuous article.

Interesting story about the rain photo (above), actually.  The colleague who had taken me to Splendid China resolutely kept his phone-camera pocketed for over two hours. Meanwhile, I had taken about 200 photographs.  But the rain moved in, and out came the camera.  Weather geeks!  They are the same every where.

Almost had me ...

Quick: who works longer overall? men or women?

If you add up the time spent working for money ("market work") and the time spent at home doing work that needs to be done (cooking, washing, etc.), it turns out that men and women spend about the same amount of time working ... in rich countries at least.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w13000

Don't know if there was a reporting bias there (did any respondents exaggerate, or shy away from revealing housework?) -- the paper's too full of social science jargon to tell.

Still more food

Continuing my observation of food, food everywhere in Oklahoma (perhaps I notice it more now that I've been away so long ...):

Went to a a friend's barbecue on Saturday. I took along chicken marinated in a ground mixture of basil, green chilies, fish sauce, cilantro and yogurt.

"Wasn't it too spicy?", asked the wife. She knows all about taking spicy stuff to parties [blog from 1998!].

"No ...," I said, "it vanished five minutes off the grill."

I didn't mention that the vanishing act was no testament to my cooking skills. More likely that the chicken vanished because there were graduate students at that party.


And today, there was an ice-cream social at the building where I work. The ice-cream brought out all manners of cubicle dwellers. They even talked to each other!