A Personable Chef

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chinese.  Perhaps it is the American debt crisis. Perhaps it’s their government’s , how shall I phrase this politely, umm… interesting position on the UN use of force against totalitarian governments repressing  democratic uprisings…but most likely it’s just a personal problem… such as what’s for dinner?  Lately I’ve been a bit bored with my diet…   Greek, Indian, South East Asian are all still fun to cook, but I’m looking for something new.  Still needs to be healthy, but with some new flavors that really challenge me…and if it happens to be incredibly hot…all the better.  Which brings me back to China; somewhere in that vast land must be some flavor combinations that I haven’t tried…

While visiting my brother’s family last fall in Plano Texas I took a field trip to a local Asian supermarket with my sister in law, Rebecca, to stock up on some ingredient that can be hard find where I live.  Rebecca, a professional photographer, took some fantastic pictures for future use in this blog.  Some of which appear now.  After we finished our shopping we decided to have lunch in the area.    Now, I don’t want to generalize but I’m going to… the vast majority of Chinese restaurants in the US , again how to say this politely,… SUCK.  The food is bad and bad for you, the menus are identical, deep-fried everything with insipidly sweet sauce of a hue not actually found in nature.  Yes there are exceptions… but if you have eaten at ten Chinese restaurants in Colorado Springs I guarantee it applies to at least nine but probably ten of them… but we weren’t in Colorado Springs so what the heck.

To be a “good” Chinese restaurant in most places all that is required is that you serve Chinese food or perhaps I should say “food in the style of China.”  To be a “good” Chinese restaurant in a place with a huge Chinese community you need to be actually good… and this place was.   As we entered I began to look around at the clientele and the signage and I said to Rebecca “I think we might be out of our league here” And sure enough, I was right.  Problem one… Rebecca is a vegetarian and they were serving  Dim Sum.  Cart after cart of steaming dumplings were offered to us; all of which we declined, mostly because it was unclear as to their contents.  I would have loved to feast on random mystery dumplings but wanted to eat with Rebecca so we waited for menus to appear… and waited.  While I’m sure there were English speakers in the building they were neither pushing dim sum carts nor waiting on us… and hilarity ensued.  The menu was in both Chinese and English but resembled very much the one pictured here.  There was however a section pretty clearly labeled “vegetarian” and Rebecca picked a random dish from that section and using the “point and nod” method we both managed to place our orders… mine a random dish from the beef section. 

On to the next phase of our adventure… as I have since learned, in traditional Chinese restaurants, everything is served family style and presumed to be shared so dishes are brought when they are prepared  with no particular attention to the order or timing.  Not surprisingly, given Rebecca’s luck this day, mine arrived and hers did not…  After waiting about 10 minutes Rebecca insisted that I eat and I wasn’t about to say no.  It was delicious:  light, well balanced, and more importantly different… I couldn’t say exactly how but new flavors to my palette.  When I was almost finished, Rebecca’s dish appeared … beautiful: noodles, vegetables, and MEAT lots and lots of meat.  Rebecca is very sweet and polite and with more amusement than anger used the menu to indicate that this was not what she had ordered.  The waitress who was clearly more frustrated than we were grabbed the plate and stormed off.  A minute later the manager arrived and apologized sincerely, but communication was still a problem so once again the point and nod method was used and off he went to correct the problem.  No question he was trying, and less than five minutes later he returned personally presenting a brand new steaming plate of… exactly the same thing.  At this point the sun went down and we had to get a box so we could go home and make dinner… Good news I ate the take home and it was equally fantastic.  We both left with a smile… I had a great meal and we both enjoyed an entertaining, cross-cultural, shenanigan-filled afternoon.  Best we can figure the English words did not match the Chinese characters and as to the “Vegetarian” section well… almost.  Translating Chinese is an inexact science at best, especially when it comes to food.

Long story… but it was a long lunch… and there is a point… sort of.  Skip forward to this week:  I made a new friend who has traveled extensively in Asia and she was lamenting that Colorado Chinese restaurants don’t even serve a bad version of her favorite dish… Mala Tofu.  She even sent me a recipe:

 Ingrediants

• tofu 200 grams
• 50 grams of meat
• 50 grams of vegetable oil
• red pepper 1,
• 5 pepper
• ginger
• garlic
• diced green onion
• sesame oil
• the amount of MSG.

Procedure

Approach to take a small bowl, into the 25 grams of vegetable oil, salt amount, respectively, diced green onion, minced garlic, add a little broth to boiling water 2 / 3 bowl, stand-by and turned into juice.

Tofu cut into small boxes, into the boiling water for 5 minutes or so I fish out.

Wok set the fire, pour the oil until the oil temperature to Bacheng hot, pour the minced garlic, flavor burst immediately into the meat with a shovel zoned fry, meat color, then add pepper, red pepper Chao Chu flavor, and then against the good juice into the.

Pot-open, into the tofu, compaction, do not stir, use a slow Dunzhi soup decrease, with the shovel flip until the bean curd into a bubble, the leaching of starch in water, to leave the eyes of fire, holding wok Britain turn, tofu hang time syrup pan.

On pre-poured sesame oil, sprinkle MSG can be.

Ummmm….

Well since I couldn’t exactly follow that recipe… I did some research of my own and made up my own version.

 Chef Corey Recipe:

Stir-fry some chopped or ground pork in a little or lot of chili oil, when cooked add a LOT of crushed red pepper, some ginger and garlic and fermented broad bean paste, stir-fry for a few seconds, add some stock (any kind will do) a pound of tofu cut into one inch cubes and a bunch of green onions cut into 1 inch pieces.  Simmer for 15 minutes or so.  Thicken the sauce with cornstarch slurry and just before serving sprinkle with a generous dose of ground Sichuan peppercorns.  One note of caution be careful when adding the pork to the hot chili oil… if the pork is too wet and the oil is too hot it can vaporize and fill your kitchen with rather nasty smoke…  the commercial name for vaporized chili oil:  Pepper Spray.

Sichuan peppercorns are not hot they instead are a natural anesthetic and numb the mouth… eat enough and you could perform home dental surgery. This dish is also referred to Mapo Tofu which translates as Smallpox Grandma’s Tofu????  Note to Chinese: stick to manufacturing or hire better branding people that name is not ready foor the international market.  The combination of heat from the chilies and numbness from the peppercorns is uniquely Chinese and something I haven’t previously experimented with.  But I’m intrigued and can’t wait to continue my Chinese adventures.  This could in fact be my new favorite dish but beware it is unbelievably hot…

Ah… St Paddy’s Day, along with daylight savings time and baseball it reminds me that spring is almost here.  And with spring comes another season of food… fresh food.  So what’s the deal with corned beef and cabbage (and potatoes)?  How did this become the meal of choice for this holiday?

Well lets begin with eating locally grown food…which was, of course, the only way we ate for the vast majority of our existence on this planet.  In northern climates (before refrigeration) potatoes and cabbage were probably all that was left in the cellar come March.  Certainly no fresh fruit or green vegetables made it through the winter… perhaps some onions and other root vegetables but the local grocer didn’t sell Mexican mangos.  More likely than not, the human root cellar was almost empty as well.  No not the cellar where we store dried humans… the cellar where you store your energy for the winter…  your fat,or my fat, as the case may be.  When the food really started to get short in February our bodies began to slowly consume all that fat we packed on in the fall… perhaps on Thanksgiving.  Well of course not in Ireland, but trust me every high latitude culture pigs out in the fall.

This leads to the next question; how did the potato get to Ireland?  Potatoes are a New World food so pre-Columbian Europe had never experienced a French fry (or a marinara sauce, as tomatoes came from the Americas as well, but that’s another post).   It took quite a while for the potato to catch on but, by the end of the 18^th century it had become the staple crop of Ireland.  For a white vegetable it is very high in vitamins, “C” in particular which helps with the problem of “scurvy pirates”…arrrhhh. More importantly it yields many times the calories per acre of any other crop.  It is possible to survive on little more than potatoes and milk.  For how shall we say… cultural reasons there were quite a few more new mouths to feed in Ireland than in its wealthier neighbor/conqueror England and potatoes fit the bill.  It was potatoes success, in fact, that later led to tragedy.  Potatoes were so successful that most of Ireland stopped cultivating almost anything else and when the blight destroyed crops for several seasons in a row, millions starved.

Are they good for me or not?  Get to the point. Well… if you are starving or plan on starving anytime in the near future potatoes are without a question the crop of choice.  Potatoes are very high in starch, and the body loves to turn starch into sugar, and sugar into fat.  Glycemic index is  measure of how quickly sugar gets into the blood stream… steamed potatoes get a 65, a Mars bar 64, a baked potato 85.  Higher is not better.  I’m not a nutritionist and won’t get into the details but the short version is this: when there is more sugar in your blood than you need at any given time, the body turns it into fat to store it for the future.  And, since it is unlikely in this day and age that you will ever run out of food, you will never have to go into your cellar  (fat) for survival.  In the Garden of Eden as soon as you get even remotely hungry you eat a piece of fruit (no not that one) and problem solved.  In Ireland you eat as many potatoes as you can today because there might be none tomorrow.

But it is St Paddy’s and I am going to eat corned beef and cabbage. I’m just going to eat more corned beef and cabbage and less potatoes… way less potatoes.  And if you are blessed with a metabolism that allows you to eat whatever you want… it must be the luck of the Irish.   Here’s a link to a bunch of ways to cook this meal: http://www.cooks.com/rec/search/0,1-0,baked_corned_beef_brisket,FF.html My recipe: boil beef, add potatoes then carrots then cabbage.  Eat when all are done.

One final thought… potatoes only taste good with a healthy helping of fat.  And not healthy fats… no potato and avocado recipes; potatoes and olive oil… not so much.  Now saturated fats… bacon, butter, cheese, sour cream… that spud is loaded.

Hey folks, just wanted to let you all know I’ll be appearing on Theresa Farney and Aaron Seller’s local foodie talk show Table Talk today between noon and 1:00pm.  www.kvor.com to listen to the stream.   By the way can you really “appear”" on a radio show???  But if that’s not the word what is…

When I started cooking long, long ago the culinary landscape was very different.  There was no food network, Julia was the only celebrity chef, grocery stores sold only four kinds of cheese, and pizza was still “ethnic food”.    Around the same time the idea of  “Fusion Cooking” started showing up on the pages of the NY Times and “Gourmet “ magazine, and chefs at restaurants I couldn’t afford started experimenting with mixing  ingredients and techniques  from around the world.  Sadly early results were mixed at best… Reindeer Goat Cheese Pizza… Spam Sushi???   I have seen many menu train wrecks in the never ending quest to push the culinary envelope.  Truthfully, I’ve been responsible for a few over the years.  In my time at The Blue Star we cooked chicken more than 200 different ways… they weren’t all good. Even when fusion did work it was rarely accepted by the critics and to this day it’s a bit of a dirty word in most cooking circles.  Often when I hear a foodie use the word in a conversation it gets air quotes around it.  And that’s a shame… because it’s never been easier or more fun to fuse your food.

In 1991 the entire Asian food section of The Andover (CT) market consisted of soy sauce and canned water chestnut… that’s it.  No one in the 06232 zip code had even heard of cilantro or tomatillos.  If I wanted to experiment with authentic Asian or Latin ingredients I was going out of town, maybe out of state.  Now when I’m in the mood for Thai Tacos I shop in aisle seven AND aisle nine at the local whole foods.   CRAZY…I know… seven and nine… it will never work…it can’t be done… or can it???

Thai Fish Tacos with Cilantro Pesto … that’s right I’m throwing in some Italian technique just to up the “FUSION FACTOR”.  Sounds difficult to make at home and any restaurant that would put it on the menu would charge you twenty bucks for tacos.   Nothing could be further from the truth… This is a complete and healthy meal made from scratch in less than 30 minutes with ingredients you could probably even find near Andover.  Don’t like fish just substitute chicken anywhere the word fish appears. 

The idea started last night at one of my interactive cooking parties, I made traditional Italian basil pesto: basil, evoo, garlic, parmesan, and (thanks to Warren) pine nuts…truly one of the great flavors of the world.  Someone asked what else they could do with it besides pasta or bruschetta, just brainstorming  I suggested  spreading a bit of pesto on a warm four tortilla, filling it with grilled garlic chicken, shredded romaine, fresh mozzarella, diced tomatoes, drizzle of balsamic reduction… one sexy chicken taco di Caprese.

Skip forward to tonight… after a very entertaining visit to a huge Asian market http://www.99ranch.com/ over the holiday weekend I am on an Asian kick at home (more on that field trip soon).  Pesto technique mixed with Thai inspired flavors stuffed into a taco presentation… dinner is served and fantastic.  For the pesto I put cilantro, garlic, ginger and peanuts into the food processor , pureed with just enough coconut milk to make a smooth “pesto” a shot of thai hot sauce, a squeeze of lime,  shot of fish sauce (soy works too.) That took about 3 minutes…  broiled some swordfish .  I had some left over roasted eggplant in the fridge, warmed that up.  Warm flower tortilla, fish, eggplant, spoon full of “pesto”, shredded cabbage, chopped peanuts, green onions, a little fresh basil… serve with lime wedges and more hot sauce .  Absolutely fantastic.  Next time sautéed onions and peppers instead of cabbage= Thai fajitas.  Just don’t call it fusion.

Thanks to my sister  in law Rebecca Bell Wilson for the fantastic food pictures. http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Rebecca-Bell-Wilson-Photography-and-Social-Media/275837500799 for the fantastic food pictures.  This one is completely unrelated to the topic but I just can’t help myself… he’s so damn cute.

Tired of cooking… tired of eating out…don’t think you can afford a personal chef, how would you like to eat free homemade food delivered to your house… FOREVER.  Sound impossible, not with Chef Corey’s new take on the “Food Pyramid”

Soups, stews, casseroles, etc… take about the same amount of time to cook regardless of whether you make six portions or 36 portions.   A little bit more time chopping and such… but use a food processor and bigger pots and it is pretty negligible.   Most of these dishes taste fine, if not better, as leftovers, but who wants to eat the same leftovers 36 times.

It starts with you and seven suckers…err… friends.  The pitch: “If you cook from scratch just once a week I will bring you homemade meals for the other six days.   What’s the catch? When you cook you have to cook a huge batch, enough for you and seven other families.    Cooking day is Sunday… After making your big old batch of whatever, sit down and enjoy you dinner.  After dinner, package up the leftovers into seven disposable plastic containers and bring them over to my house. On Monday I‘ll swing by your house and drop off six dinners worth of leftovers.   Just reheat something each night and I’ll see you next Sunday.”  So, if you haven’t figured it out yet… here’s the scam:  Sundays, seven suckers bring you seven suppers   (say that three times fast), 49 meals.  On Mondays you deliver all seven suckers six suppers (try that one too), 42 meals.  Where do the other seven meals go… IN YOUR BELLY.  Free homemade food forever… BRILLIANT!!! 

“BUT…”, you say, “I still have to drive around every Monday delivering food.”  Solution:  sell the system…  Tell each sucker that they too can eat for free SIX days a week.  All it will cost them to learn how is one meal a week delivered to your home.  Each of your seven suckers finds seven suckers of their own, and from their seven free meals they kick one back to you.  They drop that one meal off on Monday’s while doing their other deliveries.  You get seven free meals a week (while doing nothing). They get six free meals a week (for an hour or two of driving), and their friends…err… suckers still get 6 homemade meals if they spend only one day cooking.  EVERYONE wins… especially me… err…you…

Like any pyramid scheme… eventually the market will be saturated and the will be no new su… frie… FRUCKERS.  But by then you should have saved enough money to hire a personal chef for the rest of your life.  End of the day… eat well, eat free… FOREVER.   How’s that for today’s time saving tip of the day.

You’re probably wondering:  “why is Chef Corey just giving away this BRILLIANT plan?”  To find out send me five dollars.  I will send you:  that answer, ONE DOLLAR, and my patented system on how to make that ONE DOLLAR into ONE MILLION DOLLARS in GOLD

SO… I guess I owe a few of you an apology.  My post last night has generated more hits than anything I have written yet… good news… sort of.  A couple of readers have  let me know that the title was a bit… err… deceiving.  They told me  that my solution of “make time to cook” wasn’t particularly helpful… and the 5 minutes they wasted looking for a time saving tip that never came, was 5 minutes of their lives that they would never get back…    In some ways… it does just reinforce my point about the paradox of “saving” time, but I realize that is of little comfort to those of you struggling with dinner tonight.

Mea culpa/ My bad

So this week I will post a healthy and hopefully time saving idea every night.  Starting with tonight

Bulgur wheat:  Mother Nature’s minute rice

Here are the “cut and pasted” directions from “their” website  “Use equal amounts of water or liquid and rice, bring liquid to a boil, add rice and let sit covered for 5 minutes or until liquid is absorbed. In just 5 minutes, you’ll have fluffy, delicious rice that is easy to prepare and healthy too.” 

So my first question is: what, exactly, do they mean by “or liquid”????” … any liquid??? motor oil, embalming fluid, mercury????  The offensive possibilities are endless…   My second is “and healthy”???   While minute rice isn’t in any way bad for you, and really doesn’t contain any weird ingredients; it’s a bit like eating sawdust, but with less fiber… and flavor.  How to cook Bulgur wheat??? Use the exact same recipe as minute rice, except, substitute broth for “or liquid” DO NOT USE MERCURY.  Nutritionally: more vitamins and FIVE GRAMS of fiber vs. one in minute rice.

My least favorite argument: “my kids won’t eat it”.  They will eat “mcgarbage” and they would probably try mercury, so break out the “when you grow up” defense and be the grownup.

I like to cook.  In fact… I love to cook.  Now, if I could just figure out how to make a living cooking…

On days that I am not getting paid to cook… I still cook, and write about cooking, and think about what I’ll cook tomorrow.   It keeps the creative side of mind busy and it keeps me on my feet and doing other chores.  I do some laundry, pay some bills, often I even set my lap top up on the counter and get this stuff done… all while I cook.  The longer dinner takes to make …the more stuff I get done, because when I finally sit down to eat; I’m pretty much done for the day.  How bassackwards is that?  More cooking = more time…at least for me.

I realize that this is exactly the opposite of how many, if not most, of you feel.   I should also disclose that I don’t have kids and I do work for myself, so my challenges are not your challenges.  I know many of you can’t wait until they build the” iStove”… work, network, and cook all at the same time, or perhaps the “Lazychef”… a recliner with a built in freezer and microwave.  Add paper plates and a Wii fit and you’ll never have to leave the living room again.   But if you are reading a personal chef’s blog I am probably not describing you…exactly.  So let’s just talk about those folks down the street… the ones who work 100 hours a week between them, whose kids do everything, who go the gym four times a week, but don’t have time for less important things… like eating.

What could possibly be more important than eating… maybe sleeping, but they probably don’t do enough of that either. If you have at least two kids try this experiment at home this week…  don’t let one of your kids get on the computer or phone for the whole week… no Facebook, no texting, no www.apersonablechef.com.  Now take another kid and don’t let him or her eat… Point proved. You can do this with your partner if you don’t have children.

Life’s not easy and we make difficult choices about how to use our time every day… but feeding your kids fast food so that they have time for Tae Kwan Do is probably a net sum loss in the bigger health picture.  It’s like using the elevator at the gym.  They will eventually forget all those kicks but diabetes is forever.   Is that extra hour at work worth eating out of a box… how many hours will it cost you in the long run?  Everyone’s life is different, but here’s how it works for me:  The more I cook the better I eat, the better I eat the better I feel, the better I feel the more I do, the more I do the less I weigh.  Cook more = weigh less… take that Slimfast. 

Your other options: hire a personal chef OR move into a neighborhood with a unmarried personal chef who is addicted to cooking.  Just ask my neighbors.  Leftover night has a very different spin around here.  And that’s what I had for dinner tonight…  left overs, and all I got done was this post…  I should have been cooking.

Sorry no recipe ideas tonight… Tomorrow I’m teaching a class at the CHEFs Catalog outlet store here in the Springs.  So if you want LOTS of recipe ideas all at the same time sign up and come hang out with me. http://www.chefscatalog.com/promotion.aspx?promoid=outletstore

Colorado Springs friends, there are still a couple of openings for my Holiday cooking class this Monday at the Chef’s Catalog outlet store on Centenial.  I will be preparing (and you will be eating) a variety of new twists on Holiday side dishes.  The class runs from 6 to 8 and is $65.00 per person which includes wine.    You also get a 15% discount on anything you purchase at the store that evening.  Sign up through the store at 719 272 2700, for more information look here  http://www.chefscatalog.com/promotion.aspx?promoid=outletstore Hope to see you all there.