Week #21 Southern Thai

Posted on January 22, 2010 by Carol

Back in the fall I discovered Northern Thai cuisine, which is quite different from what you find in your average Thai restaurant. Now it’s time to head south, to where the flavors are bolder and the peppers hotter. Southern Thai includes more seafood, which is natural, since so much of the southern reaches of the country are surrounded by water. In contrast, the north is landlocked and so serves up more beef, chicken and pork. But in both the north and the south, the balance of sweet, salty, sour, hot and bitter is still the guiding principle behind every dish.

Himself and I went to Rainbow Thai Cuisine in North Hollywood, which our pal Chef Jet Tila places high on his list of the Top Ten Thai Restaurants in Los Angeles. North Hollywood is sort of a “Thai Town North” these days, and it’s loaded with Thai restaurants, groceries and bakeries. Since Thai is our favorite cuisine, we love it that our main problem at mealtime is deciding which Thai restaurant to go to. Oh, the sweet agony…!

We started with a fresh spring roll, Rainbow-Thai styled. Just because it has the word “roll” in its name, that doesn’t mean you can just pick it up and pop it into your mouth with your fingers. This thing is shaggy and messy, but oh so good. If you order it all by yourself, you really don’t need anything else but a glass of Thai iced tea or Thai iced coffee (it’s difficult to pick one, so we got one of each to share). This version is actually rolled in a sheet of pastry, and it’s topped with a wonderfully bright sweet-n-sour tamarind sauce, a few delicate shrimp and a handful of salad fixings. It looks like the chef got cute with the hot mustard–or perhaps he wanted us to be sure to remember the restaurant’s name change.

The menu includes a few curious and evocatively named meals: The Three Friends Salad has chicken, pork and shrimp, and Four Kings Fried Rice contains pork, beef, shrimp and chicken. But we couldn’t figure out why the grilled sirloin goes by the name of Crying Tiger, so we spent a portion of the meal coming up with silly explanations. (No, I won’t tell you what any of them are–you’ll just have to make up your own!)

Although this particular blog entry is Southern Thai, I just had to order Sai Oua, Thai sausage, a staple of the north, which is one of my most favorite foods in the world. Well, it’s pork, so what’s not to love? Not only that, but the flavor is superb–seasoned with galangal, lemongrass, lime, garlic, shallot and coriander, it is intensely flavored but not at all hot. You can add the type and degree of heat yourself with fresh ginger slivers, onions and green Thai chiles. Just below the chiles in this photo are some tiny bits of lime that you eat along with the sausage, peel and all. It adds a fresh burst that cuts through the richness of the sausage.
 
They gave us a generous portion of Hurricane Seafood Soup, which means plenty for lunch today AND tomorrow. The broth, laced with galangal, lemongrass, lime juice and chiles, would have been great all by itself, but it was loaded with fresh, fresh mussels, squid, shrimp and hunks of white fish, all of which were cooked perfectly–not a hunk of rubber anywhere!
 
I just love these dainty bites of squid–not just tasty, but looking like delicately carved little treasures.
Cha-Po is a trio steamed duck, barbecued pork and crispy, deep-fried pork belly served over rice with a sweet gravy. Once again, fresh veggies and cilantro leaves lightened the richness of this meat-heavy dish.
As if that weren’t enough meat, we succumbed to the Waterfall Beef, which was grilled and tossed with onions, chiles, coriander and lime juice. There’s a consistency to this dish that you also find with larb (see Week #3 Northern Thai) that comes from the addition of toasted and ground jasmine rice. It thickens the dish so that all those yummy juices don’t just slide away. It carries a moderate amount of heat from the chilies, and a nice zing from the lime juice. That generous wedge of raw cabbage on the side provides a little refreshment and relief when your tongue decides it’s had enough heat.
We waddled home positively drunk on the fragrances and flavors of this amazingly diverse cuisine, carrying enough to-go boxes to feed us through most of the following week. I stashed everything in the fridge and then curled up with an atlas and studied the map of Thailand. Then I checked out what Lonely Planet had to say about it: “To truly appreciate Thai culture you must understand and appreciate the food. If you become comfortable with both, perhaps you will become a kin jai (eat heart)… Finally you may come to understand what Thais mean when they say they are im jai (full heart), an expression that fuses culinary satisfaction with general contentment.”
What a lovely idea!
*If your travels take you to Las Vegas, I recommend you stop in at Wazuzu at the Encore, where Jet serves as executive chef. He’s a first rate Thai chef, but with a firm grounding in pan-Asian cuisine.
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Week #20 Islamic Chinese

Posted on January 15, 2010 by Carol

Did the name of this blog entry make you do a double-take? We did one the first time we found mention of Islamic Chinese food. Himself and I were amazed when we discovered this cuisine a few years ago, but I’m not sure why. There’s a good size contingent of Muslim Uyghurs and other Hui in western China, so it makes sense that they’d have their own Halal cuisine. As you can imagine, there’s no pork on the menu, and no alcohol.

Our friend Pat joined us at China Islamic Restaurant in San Gabriel to re-explore this cuisine. As a chef, a vegetarian and a kosher Jew, she was keen to know what they’d serve.

The main thing we remembered from our first experience was being bowled over by the bread. I’d never had anything like it before. And once again, it was my favorite thing on the table. Nang is a huge round of bread topped with lots of sesame seeds, which are there for flavor, not just for decoration. The seeds toast during the baking, which brings out their rich, nutty flavor. (Some nang I’ve seen looks just like the noni we had in the Uzbek meal, right down to the identifying imprints made on it with a chekich. Since Xinjiang is just a few exits east of Uzbekistan on the Transasia Silk Road Expressway, this should come as no surprise.)

Nang with scallions

The bread has a thick, crackly crust and is delicate and moist on the inside. This size nang fed the three of us with plenty to carry home.

A serving of nang: you can see in this cross-section the layers of bread with scallions and that super-crusty top.

The standard nang has sesame seeds, but we ordered one with green onions lacing throughout. They were especially good with the toasted seeds.

Lamb Stew

Himself was enticed by the lamb stew, which showed up still simmering in a huge, rippin’-hot clay vessel. Between the ladle and chopsticks, our server manipulated cellophane noodles and succulent hunks of lamb into three soup bowls for us. Those fresh cilantro leaves lightened the richness of the stew and gave it a nice depth of flavor. The stew was a hearty meal all by itself. We left with several days’ worth of leftovers. (I certainly don’t have a problem with this–every extra meal I get from leftovers cuts the bill in half.)

Cellophane noodles
 The cellophane noodles in the lamb stew were lovely and iridescent–I didn’t know whether to eat them or wear them!
Beef with Dough-Slice Noodles

I ordered the beef with dough-slice noodles. Called “dao xiao mian” in Chinese, they’re carved (or peeled) from a ball of dough by hand with a knife. They’re broad and irregular, almost shaggy in appearance, and really satisfying to eat. The noodles are broader than fettuccine, so you get a nice mouthful, but not as broad as lasagna, so that your mouth is blanketed in a single noodle. This dish gave us just the right proportion of velvety, lush noodles with spicy beef slices.

 
Tofu in Brown Sauce
Pat ordered tofu and eggplant dishes, both served in a brown sauce. This is probably the best tofu I’ve ever had, meaty and dense, as were the accompanying mushrooms. In fact, I think those thick beefy mushrooms probably could have been chopped with the tofu and made into a loaf, and most people would never have been the wiser. Pat has written a couple of books on tofu cookery, and she was impressed with this dish, and that in turn impressed me. Just as a good wine never tastes like grapes, to me, tofu should never taste like soybeans. Tofu badly done is a flavor vacuum. This tofu was imbued with the umami of the sauce and the full, meaty flavor of the mushrooms.
 
 Eggplant in Brown Sauce

While both the eggplant and the tofu were in the same brown sauce, I didn’t have the feeling that we’d been given the same dish with only the main ingredient switched. The attendant sauce seemed to sing a different tune in each case, working in tandem with the tofu while providing a secondary flavor to the eggplant.

When you have a well-rounded, varied, flavorful meal in a place that observes dietary restrictions, you feel no sense of deprivation. I think that any diet that says no meat or no this-or-that or only this type of this-or-that would do well do be sure that it does a crack job of providing a really tasty meal of what it does permit. I’ve had vegetarian meals in a particular Indian restaurant that were so varied and tasty that I didn’t miss the meat. That’s a smart way to do it.

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Week #19 Cuban

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Carol
I think Cuban food is destined to become another of my favorite cuisines (How many times have you heard me say that about a food in the course of this 52 Cuisines project?!). Himself and I visited Mambos, a little Cuban restaurant in that part of Glendale where you think you’re still in Burbank. Or maybe it’s in that part of Burbank where you think you’re still Glendale. Anyway, it’s an easy walk from Griffith Park, in case you forget your picnic. Lest you think we completely blew it out, this blog entry features food from three trips we’ve made to Mambo in the last few months. It’s getting to be quite a habit…
 
It’s tempting to fill up on the Cuban bread that hits the table first thing. This bread comes in long, squarish loaves and is soft and lush on the inside (mmmm, made with lard) and crackly on the outside. It’s advisable to eat your Cuban bread the day it is baked, so as not to break your teeth on it. (I visited Key West a few months ago, which has a strong Cuban presence, and found that the weapon of choice in this self-declared “Conch Republic” is a stale loaf of Cuban bread!) It’s great dipped in this house-made sauce. Our server either didn’t know what was in the peppery red sauce or didn’t want to reveal the secret (I suspect the later). It has a decent amount of heat that neither overpowers the food it accompanies nor fades into the background. We dunked our pork and beef into it, too. Next time I’m asking for extra.
I ordered a mamey milkshake (pronounced mah-MAY), in spite of my concern that it might be too heavy for the meal. I was surprised to find that it was not terribly sweet, certainly not cloying like milkshakes made in the States usually are. It had a delicate tropical fruit flavor but one I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I want to see if I can find the fruit itself in one of the international groceries around town and try it fresh. From what I hear, it’s divine eaten out of hand.
The deep-fried yuca was oddly both light and dense, with a pleasant starchiness–not as heavy as I expected. It came with an aggressive but wonderful garlic dipping sauce that I’m sure will protect us both from vampires for at least a week.
 
As if it weren’t tempting enough to fill up on bread and yuca, a platter showed up on our table loaded with empanadillas, croquetas, pappa rellena, chorizo and tostones, that is, twice-cooked plantains. The plantains are cut into rounds and fried. After they cool, they’re smashed and fried again, which makes them firm and chewy.
 
Here are the appetizers with a bite taken out of each, so you can see what’s inside. The empanadilla contains ground beef; the pappa rellena in the foreground is a potato ball filled with more ground beef (are you detecting a theme here?); the croqueta is a mixture of mashed potatoes, onions and still more ground beef, coated with breadcrumbs and deep fried. Stop looking for the veggies–there aren’t any in there!
 
This petite tamale was filled with pork and green onions. It was delicately flavored and quite seductive. I like my tamales to have those telltale signs that someone has lovingly folded the corn husks around them by hand. Those indentations down the center I’d call furrows of love.
 
 The Cuban sandwich is made with two types of swine, both roast pork and ham (can you really have too many? Maybe they should have included bacon as well!) and Swiss cheese, all tucked into one of those Cuban-style baguettes, pressed and cut on a bias, for easy handling.
 While I enjoyed the roast pork, being a Southern gal, I always expect it to be smoky, and this was not. Still it was moist and flavorful. On the far right side are maduros, sliced and fried plantains. Unlike the tostones, maduros are cooked only once and are soft. Tostones are much more toothsome.
Taking a steak and pounding it thin, breading it and frying it is not my favorite way to handle a piece of beef, but the flavor was good, and I’m sure it didn’t take long to cook, which might be why it’s prepared in this fashion. Using less time and cooking fuel is much more economical.
 
 I enjoyed the black beans and thought they were quite good. From what my Cuban hair stylist tells me, though, the most authentically Cuban black beans have a balance of flavors, of sweet, sour and garlic. These didn’t really have that balance. I’d still order them again, but it won’t keep me from seeking out black beans at another Cuban restaurant around town.
Aguacate Fernando is a cool, fresh salad of avocado, tomatoes, onions, garlic and cilantro, a nice foil for the richness of the fried foods and meats. It was as much a necessity as it was a nicety.
We have yet to save room for dessert. I just dug out the Old Havana Cookbook I bought in Key West and started perusing the dessert recipes. I’m tempted to go in search of some fresh mamey so I can make a pudding. Each recipe in this book is printed in both English and Spanish–it might be fun to see how successfully I can make a dish following the directions in a language that’s not my native tongue. Of course, the results might be inedible. I probably should think that idea through a little more carefully…
From what I’ve read about Cuban cuisine, the food from the west side is more Criollo, or Creole, strongly influenced by European cuisines. On the eastern side of the island, though, the influence is decidedly African. I suppose that’s from the slave trade throughout the islands that lie to the east of Cuba. A country doesn’t have to be an enormous land mass to host an array of culinary styles. I’m eager to learn more about Cuban food. It’s a party on a plate.
 
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Week #18 Israeli

Posted on January 1, 2010 by Carol

Another Mediterranean cuisine? Well, yes and no. One blog entry could never do justice to what is considered Israeli cuisine. While Israel is seated on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, generations of Jews scattered across the globe and returning home again have brought back layer upon layer of culinary influence.

Itzik Hagadol in Encino is a sister restaurant to one by the same name located in Tel Aviv, so we didn’t question its authenticity (the only difference in the two menus is that the restaurant in Israel offers more selections of offal). The menu is decidedly Mediterranean and strongly Sephardic (lots of ground meat), with the occasional Ashkenazi touch (they serve potatoes instead of rice). Himself and I strolled in, ordered an appetizer and a couple of entrées and ended up with a table full of dishes. (It reminded us a bit of our first visit to a Korean restaurant, when we ordered two entrées and ended up with 21 tiny dishes on our table!). The spread was generous and flavorful.

 laffa
 Laffa is a flatbread baked in a taboon, a tandoor-like oven in use since Biblical times. The larger piece was topped with sesame seeds. The smaller one looked more like a pita with a round cut out and seasoned with copious amounts of za’atar, an Arabic spice blend that includes thyme, oregano and savory–a seasoning combo that is as essential to the Israeli kitchen as it is to the Arabic. Laffa is great all on its own, but it is a multi-purpose bread: you can wrap it around meats and veggies for impromptu sandwiches, tear off a piece for dipping into the various puréed dishes and mop up the juices with it after you’ve polished off the grilled meats and vegetables.
portobellos with tomatoes and onions: mmmm, lovely, tasty char….

These portobello mushrooms were marinated before hitting the grill alongside the tomatoes and pearl onions. They’re the most luscious mushrooms I’ve ever savored. They looked just like slices of fatty meat and were smoky yet creamy smooth.

Along with the grilled veggie appetizer, our server trotted out this array of “salads.”

The red purée at the top left is matbucha, a.k.a. Turkish salad, a tomato and roasted red pepper dip that is similar to muhammara but without the walnuts. We tore off pieces of our laffa and dredged them in this one and in the one at the top right, a grilled eggplant salad called salat ḥatzilim. Both dips were incredibly rich and loaded with smoky, spicy flavors. In the middle is a roasted potato; the other dishes contain pickled cabbage (zingy), red cabbage mixed with mayonnaise (mild), and a house-made salsa, a concession to our Southern California locale, I suppose. This assortment of salads ran the gamut of flavors and was a great accompaniments to our kababs.

House kabab

I ordered the house kabab, a combination of ground veal and lamb. The meat was creamy smooth and delicately flavored. It was served with hummus and Israeli salad or salat aravi, a mixture of just about every vegetable you can name, tossed with olive oil and lemon juice. That pool in the middle of the hummus is tahini mixed with olive oil and finely chopped parsley. Yes, we did a lot of laffa dredging.

Romanian kabab 
Himself settled on the Romanian kabab, ground beef mixed with lots of chopped garlic. It had some serious personality going–really flavorful but not garlicky-hot. As you can see, there’s no filler in this meal–no heaps of fries and baskets of heavy breads. It’s all grilled lean meats, vegetables and protein-rich dips and spreads. Our wine was a cabernet sauvignon made of grapes grown in the Golan Heights. It was full bodied and ready-made for those grilled meats.
Malabi

Rosewater is one of the best things to ever happen to food, and malabi showcases it beautifully. For dessert we shared this vanilla custard topped with rosewater, ground pistachios, coconut and cardamom, a combination that was curiously both rich and light. I must figure out how to make this. It’s a dessert I could definitely cozy up to.

I know that the next Israeli meal we run across could look absolutely nothing like the one we just had. But that’s part of the fun of exploring the world’s cuisines. Nothing is as cut-and-dried, as easily definable as we’d like to make it. There’s always something new to sample and learn, and I get a kick out of seeing history in action as people carry their foods and cooking methods with them–and how they adopt new foods and cooking methods and bring them back home.

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To resolve or not to resolve?

Posted on January 1, 2010 by Carol

These are all books I began reading last year–the ones I haven’t finished yet. They perch perilously next to my pillow. I live in danger of a wee-hours earthquake bringing them down on my head. The stacks of books on Himself’s side of the bed are even bigger, but this is about my resolution, not his. I’m just glad I married a fellow reader. It makes for stimulating company.



Here’s my New Year’s resolution for 2010: To finish the books I begin reading (and that includes re-reading). No fair saying to myself, “I’ve read Moby-Dick before. It’s no big deal if I don’t finish it.” Because the me who rereads Moby-Dick now is an entirely different person from the me who read it for the first time as a 20-year old English major in college. I’ll get more out of it this time around, now that I’m not simply reading it with an eye toward being tested on it.

Good luck to all with their New Year’s resolutions. May 2010 treat you well.

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