Sorry for not being around

I was in Tokyo for the past 10 days and pretty much was too busy to be writing. I'll post a new challenge for the week soon, and I'll write a bit on the awesome food I had while I was over there.

Random Recipe: Arroz con Pollo-queta (Cheesy Rice and Chicken Croquettes)

I came up with this when I had all sorts of left-overs. It's kinda nice.

I called it Arroz con Pollo-queta 'cause I ended up with a rice pilaf that was kind of like Arroz con Pollo, and then I breaded it and fried it, making it purely EVIL. I'm keeping the falavoring deliberately simple here since this is all about leftovers and what you have in your pantry. Add this and that. Make it your own.


FYI, this is really similar to what you'd find in Italian cookbooks under "Arancini" The rice mixture is flavored with tomato in that version, but it's similar.

So,

Here's what you need. I'm not giving exact measurements since you can scale this up or down easily depending on what you have on hand.


Left over shreaded chicken from the chicken you baked last night or bought from the "rotisserie" section of your local supermarket.

Sticky Rice: whatever you have left over from last night or fresh. Just make sure you use a short grain starchy rice that "sticks" -- you can't use long grain or basmati-type rices in this dish because it won't come together.

Garlic, smashed and chopped
Onion, minced
Sliced Green Olives
A little chicken broth or chicken base and water
Saffron if you have it, turmeric would do if you don't, omit if you have neither -- it's for color more than anything.

Mozarella cheese (dry seems to work better here than fresh for me)
Bread Crumbs (panko, preferably)
Flour
Egg
---

Heat up olive oil in a pan with garlic and onion and saute until transluscent.
Add chicken and rice and saute until everything's heated through, and then toss in the olives.
Add a small amout of chicken broth or chicken base and water to flavor the mixture and then adjust the seasoning when it's almost dry with salt and pepper. Here's where you add the saffron (steeped in a smidge of warm rater to release the pigment) or turmeric to add color.

You're going to want to take a cookie sheet or rectangular bakin pan, and then spread the rice mixture out into it in as even and thin a layer as possible. Chill in fridge for at least an hour. This is important for two reasons: 1) it'll allow you to handle the rice and form it into balls, and 2) it will make the rice come together better.

Preheat oil in a deep fryer to 350 F

Once the rice is chilled, cut mozarella into small pieces. You want to take a piece of cheese, and then roll a bit of rice around it into about golf ball size. Repeat procedure for as many as you're going to make.

Roll rice balls in flour, then the beaten egg, then the breadcrumbs.

When the oil is hot, fry them until golden brown, about 3-5 minutes depending. Since everything is already cooked inside, you just want to make sure that a crust forms and things are heated through enough for the cheese to melt.

Let them cool enough to eat, and then enjoy. They're really good and addictive.

Weekly Challenge 2

This week's challenge is:

Chicken and Lemon

Not too difficult here. :)

Happy Cooking!

Random Recipe: Japrese

Here's my take on a traditional Italian Caprese salad, it's much lighter, and really refreshing. For those of you on a diet, the removal of the mozarella cheese is a plus!

Serves 1 as an appetizer/side:

4 Slices Very Ripe Tomato -- it should be sweet, but not falling apart.
4 Slices Silken (soft) Tofu
1-2 Shiso* leaves, chiffonade

Arrange tomato slices on a plate and then top with tofu slices, cover the whole plate in shiso leaves. Serve with your favorite vinaigrette -- I like to use either a balsamic vinaigrette with olive oil and garlic, or a soy-sesame vinaigrette. Also, I personally like the ingredients to be cold here. If the tomato isn't perfectly ripe, use it room temperature, to not lose the flavors.

* Shiso leaves (also known as Perilla, or Ohba) are a relative of the mint family and are refreshing and astringent like mint, but not "sweet." While there is no substitute for it, if you can't find Shiso (a Japanese market will usually sell them in 10-packs fresh, and larger Asian mega-marts have them from time to time), just use regular basil. While the flavor profile is different, it works just fine.

Happy Cooking!

Being a mutt and learning to cook from comic books.

My 14 year-old stepdaughter was really curious about how I learned to cook other day so I told her the story.

The quick version of the beginning of my culinary adventures is that I've always been fascinated by food and cooking. I remember as far back as when I was four years old burning myself on a toaster oven while melting dill harvarti cheese on a cinnamon-raisin muffin (yum). I guess I was lucky to have had parents who were willing to let me do my thing in the kitchen unsupervised (for the most part), and that I wasn't too accident prone a kid.

One of the reasons I'm probably inclined to experiment as much as I do is because I'm culturally and racially a mutt of the worst kind. My mom is French and Vietnamese and grew up in Japan, and my dad is Japanese and White American. That means that the cooking Mom did was a mixture of all those cultures. One day we'd have coq au vin, and the next cha gio (Vietnamese spring rolls), next soba noodles and tempura, etc. Even at an early age, there was a mixture of cuisines around me. Add to that the fact that I've had two step-dads of differing cultures (the first was Venezuelan, the second Swiss), and have lived at one point or another on all six inhabitable continents give rise to quite an experience with differing cultures. Without really knowing it, I was getting a first rate culinary education while growing up, and was thinking "fusion" without knowing it. I could fend for myself even as a kid in the kitchen, so I naturally took what I could get in whatever country I was in, and mixing it up with things I already knew. Naturally, as I got older and more sophisticated (ahem), so did my creations. I relied less and less on store-bought prepackaged ingredients (which have their place in the home kitchen), and started learning more proper technique... although I still have a long ways to go.

There actually is another reason/influence on how I learned how to cook. This one's the one that gets me some raised brows from my friends here in the US. I learned from reading comic books. Well, manga to be exact. See, around the time I was in fifth grade, this anime/manga series called "Mr. Ajikko" (translates into something like "Mr. Tasty) came out that was about this kid who helped his single mom run their little teishokuya (Japanese for diner). He's really creative and is this genius with food. Naturally, in this fictitious food obsessed world, he gets discovered by the "King of Taste" and is put up against a variety of culinary heros and villains in competitions... I truly believe that Iron Chef got its idea from this and other series like it. The interesting thing is that not only did this series exist, but it did well enough to actually become a hit with the 8-14 year old demographic. I fell in love with it and collected all the books and tried making some of the outlandish creations that were featured in it. I remember the first one that I made -- short spaghetti wrapped with thinly sliced eggplant in a bolognese sauce. I was maybe 10 at the time.

Once I got back from France to Tokyo in my mid teens to start 11th grade, I discovered the other culinary comic that greatly influenced me: "Oishimbo." To be honest, it wasn't a new series. It had already been running a number of years, and is STILL ongoing as a weekly publication. The basis of the series is a couple of newspaper reporters working in the culture section are traveling around Japan and the world looking for the "Ultimate Menu." Another newspaper company enlists the help of the male protagonist's estranged father who is the ultimate food authority and gourmet in Japan and strives to create their own version called "The Unsurpassable Menu." Both sided duke it out, yadda, yadda, yadda. The premise aside, the writers REALLY research good food and present it in an approachable manner from the history of the base ingredients to explaining the intricate details of the preparation. The series is such a cult hit that recipe books featuring some of the recipes have come out and online communities discussing the episodes and food exist in cyberspace. I must admit, I own a number of volumes (there are over 80 now and they're still being released) and I have the cookbook.

I got ideas on how things went together from these manga, and also learned technique since the cooking portions of them were really detailed and precise. The rest is just doing things over and over. I'm not saying that I can turn out a perfect "insert something difficult here" all the time, but I'm getting better and better. The only thing I'd like to add here is that the first time I had my own kitchen (right out of college) I found a book that really helped me find a way to put together things in the "right" way and how to think about food from a more thematic or ingredient based point of view. "Culinary Artistry" is a great book, and I'll write about it in another post, but it has oodles of information on flavor combinations (albeit from a very euro-american standpoint), and menu planning. I can't think of the number of times I've picked it up to come up with an idea of something to do with an ingredient.

Bottom line here is I've always been cooking, and I've always been experimenting for all the reasons above. Whether its finding a use for Japanese dashi stock in a risotto (works great for a wild mushroom risotto), or cooking a boeuf bouguignonne in a chinese clay pot, I'm always trying something new.

Happy cooking!

Weekly Challenge 1

This week's challenge is...

Portobello and Mozzarella

I'll be posting my creation later.

Happy cooking!