Noble Consort Chicken (貴妃雞)

A few weeks ago, a recipe in the Joyce Chen Cook Book called "Empress Chicken" caught my eye. I did a little translation of the Chinese name guifei ji, and discovered the real name is a little more interesting. The Chinese word ji means chicken, but guifei is more accurately translated as "noble consort." In Chinese history, a noble consort was one of the emperor's high-ranking concubines, who ranked just below the empress. I found a few websites claiming the dish was named for a specific Tang dynasty concubine, but like most food origin stories, this is almost certainly apocryphal. What the dish has to do with concubines is anyone's guess.

The dish itself is a classic example of a Chinese-style stew, known as hongshao, or "red cooking." I've made a few of these over the last couple of years, but this is the first to make it to the blog. The basic ingredients are soy sauce, sugar, and a selection of seasonings. Seasonings can include ginger, star anise, cinnamon, or bean pastes. This is the first one I've made that included mushrooms, and I found them a terrific addition. I use black mushrooms (dried shiitakes) a lot in various dumplings and stir-fried dishes, but stewing brings them to life in a new way. They basically last forever, so I tend to stock up when we go to Chinese stores. I used Chinese rock sugar in this dish, which is the traditional choice for this type of stew, but white sugar is fine if you can't get it.

Chen calls for 4 wings and 4 legs. Although I like chicken legs, I went with all wings for consistent cooking time. I scaled the whole thing up a bit to use a full package of wings I found at Walmart and played around with the proportions of ingredients based on what I like. The chicken comes out very tender, and the stewing liquid is full of flavor boosted by the mushrooms. That being said, the difficulty I tend to run into with hongshao dishes is that you have a ton of liquid at the end that is too watery to work as a sauce, but as you reduce it down it gets too salty. I don't think this is the traditional choice, but I think corn starch or some other thickening agent is the way to turn it into a sauce. I used 1/2 tablespoon, but I do think it needed more. I plan to experiment more with honghsao dishes, so you can expect to hear more on this soon.

Thai Yellow Curry with Pork

Today's post is my first foray into Thai food on No Free Lunch. It's definitely not an area of expertise for me, and I've mostly enjoyed it through restaurants. Ariel is a big fan, so we frequented the excellent Siam House back in Bloomington. These days, we no longer have such easy access. I have attempted pad thai a few times, based on Leela Punyaratabandhu's fascinating, five-part manifesto on the subject. Curry is a core part of the Thai repertoire, and probably the most accessible for home cooks, and that's where I'm starting here. Yellow curry is generally the mildest of the Thai curries, although it's still quite spicy by American standards. I definitely leaned on my Chinese cooking experience making this dish. While Thai cuisine, like many in the region, is influenced by China, it's very much its own thing. Don't take me as an authority on authenticity here (or anywhere, really). I do think I know what tastes good, though, and this dish fits the bill. 

The flavor base of Thai curry comes from curry paste. Most Asian stores have a selection of packaged curry pastes. Commercial curry pastes are very spicy, and even yellow curry paste really wakes up the senses. While making it at home could potentially yield better results, curry paste contains some hard-to-find ingredients. As such, I'm using this one from Mae Ploy. I only used a small amount of what was in this tub. Most curry pastes have a basic recipe on the package, which I used to get some sense of proportions, but ended up putting in a lot more meat and vegetables for the recommended amount of sauce. This yields a much less saucy result than I have typically seen in Thai restaurants. That's fine with me, as I think those usually have way more sauce than needed, but if I did it again I would increase the sauce ratio a bit. I was constrained by only having one can of coconut milk on hand. Increasing the curry paste, coconut milk, and water by anywhere from 50% to double would work.

The recipe is pretty loose here, and having limited experience cooking Thai, I'm not going for high authenticity, just what I enjoy. The pork is based on my recent beef chow fun recipe, but I pushed it in a Thai direction with fish sauce and coconut sugar. I have found coconut sugar in both Asian stores and the supermarket. The pork turned out just as tender as the beef did. The rest of the ingredients can be whatever is on hand. Potatoes and bell peppers are some other good options. I would recommend resisting the temptation to throw everything you have into the curry. I think one meat, onion, and then up to three other items (I used carrots, bamboo shoots, and tofu) is a good rule of thumb. As with fried rice, I like the individual ingredients to still stand out. 

Chinese-Style Shrimp Soup Stock

In quite a few posts, I've referenced my homemade Chinese soup stock. Most recently, it showed up in my corn fish recipe, and it also pops up in a lot of Pei-Mei recipes. Usually, a small amount is used to form the basis of a sauce for a stir fried dish. In a pinch, you can (I have many times) substitute a western-style stock, but I try to always keep some Chinese stock on hand. Compared to the western style, Chinese soup stock is mostly clear and is very simple to make. Take some kind of meat waste, such as bones, carcasses, or shells, and simmer with scallion and ginger. Take a look at just a few of the dishes you can make with this stock!

Sichuan-style eggplant, stir-fried rice cakes, fish with corn sauce,
fish with fermented black beans, spring rolls, minced pigeon lettuce cups

Taking something that would otherwise go to waste and making something useful is very rewarding. Luckily, a lot of these waste parts are key ingredients in making pantry staples. I like to call this "using every part of the buffalo." This includes saving bits of chicken skin and fat for schmaltz and pork fat for lard. I also save scraps of vegetables, bones, and shrimp shells for stock. This particular stock uses shrimp. I always buy shrimp with the shells on and save the shells. I put the shells in a Ziploc bag, fill it up with water, and freeze. Once I have enough of these frozen shell blocks, I make some stock. 

This is a very loose recipe because it doesn't require any precision. Pork or chicken bones can be used instead of shrimp for a different flavor. Shrimp gives the stock a subtle seafood flavor that works well in a variety of dishes and also as a broth for wonton soup. I add no salt to the stock, since it's headed for so many different uses down the road. This way, I have full control over the seasoning later. You'll need to add a lot of salt if using for soup. The stock lasts maybe a week in the refrigerator, so I always freeze it. Since only a small amount is used for most recipes, freezing it all in one block is not practical. I've come up with what I think is a clever solution: shattering it into small pieces with a hammer. Very satisfying. 

Pressure Cooker Pulled Pork

Pulled pork is a common sight in the Upper Midwest, where it's often prepared in a crock pot with a sweet and sour sauce and served on a hamburger bun. It's usually just called "barbecue," not to be confused with the smoked meats of other regions. The 1950s church cookbook passed down to me has a few barbecue recipes, which can include basically any meat. While I've eaten this style plenty of times, I happen to have gone a different direction with my pulled pork. My style is loosely Mexican-flavored, although it's not intended to be authentically Mexican. I started making my version a few years ago with the traditional 3-hour dutch oven method. It was a natural fit for my first Instant Pot recipe.

I've had an Instant Pot for a while, but have only recently started experimenting with my own recipes. It's the first pressure cooker I've used. The idea of sealing it up and letting it do its thing can be a little intimidating for someone who usually cooks on the fly. This is also why baking cakes is always a bit stressful for me, although I've gotten much better over time. I most commonly use the Instant Pot to make rice, which it does well. It can also shine when making stews and braised meats that usually take a few hours to cook. There is a lot written about the Instant Pot on the internet. What I often find frustrating about the recipes I find is that they aren't precise enough about the settings. High or low pressure and quick or natural release can make a huge difference. Since the Instant Pot doesn't operate by feel like regular cooking, I will be much more precise about it than my other recipes. That being said, the ingredients here are easily substituted and the ratios are variable. If you don't want to use beer, just use more chicken stock.

This recipe is closely built on my original one from 2018. The cut used is still Boston Butt. This is a great value cut of pork if you're willing to put the work into it. You can certainly roast it whole, but you can also break it down into useful parts. I start by trimming off the large amount of fat from the skin side. These can be rendered into lard or mixed into sausage or dumpling filling. Next, I slice off large strips of meat for char siu. If you like, these can then be cut up into smaller chunks for stew or kebabs. Once all the easily cut off pieces are done, I'm left with the shoulder blade and the less-accessible meat. I then cut the remaining meat off the bone, but you don't need to completely clean it off. These pieces will be much more irregular than the initial strips, so they work well for grinding. The pork I used in this post was from this trimming. The remaining shoulder blade with a little meat left on it can then be used to make soup. 

Upgrade: Pan-Roasted Chicken with Onion Gravy

Today's upgrade is based on a chicken recipe I wrote back in 2012. While there's nothing wrong with that one, it was quite basic, consisting of a pan-roasted piece of chicken with a simple onion gravy. I wanted to do something a little more interesting this time. The gravy has some real complexity. I cooked the onions longer than what you would normally do for a pan sauce, which brings out more sweetness. This balances well with the rendered fat from the chicken skin, salty soy sauce, and tart lemon. This recipe makes more than enough sauce for the chicken, and pairs perfectly with mashed potatoes. 

Leg quarters are quite underrated, I think. We got a big, deeply discounted bag of them a few weeks ago (the first use was smoked chicken) and have them ready to go in the freezer. When we were wedding planning last year, we had to get a kosher caterer for a handful of guests. The menu they provided had "chicken bottoms," which we had never heard of. Turns out, it's another term for leg quarters. The only references I can find to this term come from kosher websites. I always find these linguistic peculiarities fun.

As I've mentioned before, we are on a two-week grocery cycle, in which we carefully plan out 14 days worth of meals to limit exposure. I then categorize the meals based on how fresh the ingredients need to be. This is a perfect meal for the back half of the cycle. The fresh ingredients (potatoes, onion, and lemon) hold up well being stored. I harvested the rosemary from the garden. I highly recommend growing herbs that are better fresh than dry and are typically used in small quantities. This way, you can harvest a little instead of buying a big bunch that will go bad before you can use it. As such, I have rosemary, parsley, mint, and basil in the garden. Everything else in the recipe is a pantry staple. 

Pei-Mei and the Food Regions of China

Since I've done four different Pei-Mei dishes in the last month, I've spent a lot of time reading the books lately. From 2014 to now, I've posted my interpretations of 15 of her dishes, with a few others loosely inspired by her recipes. In this article, I will discuss the history and structure of these books, and how she classifies dishes into regional cuisines. Pei-Mei's Chinese Cook Book consists of three volumes. Volume I, published in 1969, presents 100 recipes roughly evenly split between four regions, plus 20 more listed under snacks and desserts. Volume II, published in 1974, switches to a categorization based on main ingredients (pork, beef, fish, etc.) and adds 110 new recipes. Although this makes it easier to find specific dishes, I do miss having the regional context. Volume III, published in 1979, is organized into menus for complete formal dinners of 12 to 17 dishes each. There are 7 regional menus, plus a vegetarian menu and a buffet menu, for a total of 130 more recipes. There are definitely some among the 360 total recipes that are very similar, such as three dishes that are basically slight variations on Lovers' Shrimp. One uses bigger shrimp, while one adds a third curry-based shrimp to the mix. My edition is clearly a matched set, probably printed when the third volume came out. Since my grandparents left Hong Kong in 1980, they must have purchased it just before they left.

In volume I, the recipes are split into eastern, southern, western, and northern China. Each section is preceded by a map showing which provinces are included. Since the book is from Taiwan, the map shown is actually the full territorial claim of the Republic of China, which includes the independent nation of Mongolia. The borders of the modern provinces of the PRC look a bit different, but I made the map above (credit to paintmaps.com, where you can make one) to show roughly what she means by these three regions. We can immediately notice that large portions of China are missing, and the book focuses on the heavily populated Han Chinese heartlands. The gash down the middle is interesting, as millions of people live there and have some intriguing culinary traditions. Shaanxi is famous for its noodles. While Hubei gets more press these days as ground zero for the coronavirus, they also have a rich food culture. 

Ultimately, trying to boil down a regional cuisine into a few pithy sentences is probably a mistake. It's like saying French food is just butter or Midwestern food is just hotdish and jello salad. All cuisines are varied. There are, however, some themes that reoccur within a region's cooking are useful to point out, as is highlighting some famous dishes. In the rest of this article, I will go through Pei-Mei's four regions and discuss some examples that have made over the years.

Beef Chow Fun (乾炒牛河)

Beef chow fun is a famous Cantonese dish combining wide rice noodles with tender sliced beef. Several years ago, I posted a chicken chow fun recipe using the same noodles. While this is not exactly an "upgrade," this recipe improves upon it with a better marinade inspired by Pei-Mei, and a sauce to tie it all together. This is also a companion recipe to my chow mein recipe from a few weeks ago. Grandpa and grandma would often serve us both in one meal! The name qianchao niu he is interesting. The first part - qianchao means "dry fried," similar to dry-cooked string beans. I'm not sure of the history of this dish, but this name may suggest the beef was originally deep fried. The rest of the name refers to beef (niu) and the wide noodles (he fen) in the dish. I was very happy with how this turned out, but in retrospect, this recipe makes a lot of food. I would probably halve everything next time, but there's nothing wrong with having some leftovers. 

I took the recipe for the beef from "Sliced Beef with Broccoli" in Pei-Mei Volume II. She tosses the beef with some blanched gailan (Chinese broccoli) and a sauce. The beef is phenomenal on its own, and I would happily gobble it up with some rice. When I cook flank steak whole, I typically pan fry it to medium rare to avoid drying it out. Here, the thinly sliced beef is cooked through completely, yet remains super tender. The key is the marinade, which includes baking soda as a tenderizer. If you've never tried this technique before, it will amaze you.

This recipe uses mostly pantry staples and easily found ingredients. The noodles can sometimes be hard to find, though. Rice noodles come in many shapes and sizes. I previously used the super-thin kind for minced "pigeon" lettuce cups. Medium-width rice noodles are used for pad thai. The widest rice, called shahe fen (sometimes transliterated ho fun), are essential to this dish. Part of the problem is that this usually doesn't appear on the package and, unless you know the Chinese word (沙河粉), you'll have to eyeball it. Although dark soy sauce is not typically added at the end of stir frying like it is here, it's essential to achieving the signature brown look for the noodles. Classic beef chow fun usually has mung bean sprouts, which are tragically not sold in Vermillion. I included napa and onion instead, which also makes this into more of a complete meal.

San Diego Part 6: Omakase

A little short of a year later, I'm pleased to finally complete the series on our San Diego honeymoon. It's been fun remembering everything we did and all the great food we ate. We packed a lot of activity into our eighth and final full day in San Diego. In the morning, we went parasailing over the Pacific Ocean. Since we went up together, I don't have any photos of us, but I took one of one of the other people in the group. This was a totally new experience for me, and was a lot of fun.

Back on dry land, we took a quick trip over to the "other" USD: the University of San Diego. The main goal was to get some t-shirts to wear around Vermillion, but we also explored a bit. The campus has a nice Spanish colonial revival style to it.

We stopped back at the hotel to eat the buns we picked up the previous day. On the left, a milk tea bun, and on the right, a chocolate chip bun.

We enjoyed them so much we went back to 85C Bakery for more. Pictured are a cheese pastry, dan tat (egg tart), and sausage bun.

For our afternoon activity, we went to Fiesta Island, a public park located between our hotel and Seaworld. There was basically no one there, so it was like we had a private swimming area!

We decided a sushi dinner would be the best way to spend our last evening before heading home. We managed to snag a late reservation at the bar at Sushi Tadokoro. It's an unassuming spot, nestled in a small strip mall just off of Old Town.

We decided to go for omakase style, in which the chef decides what to give you. He occasionally sent out plates to tables, but for the most part was focused on us. We also made a few requests. For items with a special seasoning (Himalayan salt, hot sauce, and so forth), he specified "no soy sauce."

I took photos of almost everything we had, and will show them all with minimal commentary. I don't remember which specific fish most of them were, but you can see all the unique toppings that you wouldn't see in a more run-of-the-mill place.