foolano's food blog

my american broiler

2006-04-29T17:20:00.000-07:00

someone wanted to see pictures of an american broiler (I'm not sure what makes it american) but here is my humble broiler.

nasi lemak

2006-04-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

more backlog posts, this one is obligatory of all singapore food blogs, nasi lemak or rice with coconut milk. i paired it with spicy deviled eggs, tomato salad and homemade beef rendang (next time i'm putting the spices into a bag or something they make the rendang too crunchy; but it looks ok i s'ppose). yes that is a real banana leaf.

chillo isleño: red snapper with island (ie puerto rico) sauce

2006-04-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

got quite a backlog of posts to make, this one is from my wife. islander snapper. mmmmm. delicioso.

Review of mad about food: the cookbook by sylvia tan

2006-04-28T17:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes change is good. i just received my copy of singapore journalist Sylvia Tan's newest cookbook, arguably her first cookbook (more on this later), and my interest is certainly piqued.

For those of you unfamiliar with her works, Ms. Tan is a senior editor at the national English daily in Singapore, the Straits Times. For many years, she has written a column called Mad About Food, from whence she dispenses culinary tips to housewives across the island nation and diaspora (no I'm not one of these housewives, more on this later). In the mid nineties, various more interesting entries were collated into 3 cooking booklets appropriately titled Mad about Food, Madder about Food, and Maddest about Food. These cookbooks sold very well locally, because of her intimate, self-depracating, sympathico style and because the advice was generally sound and pragmatic, for example, roasting belachan fermented prawn paste is certainly much easier in a microwave oven than over an open fire. All was quiet for a few years, as Ms. Sylvia lived out the good life with her Hollywood actor husband Lim Kay Tong (as seen in the movie Anna and the King).

Then in 2004, Ms. Sylvia Tan ignited interest with her Singapore Heritage Foods, an opus of Singapore food history tracing the island nation's humble itinerant street vendor foods to the modern deconstructed asian cooking found in the high tech financial capitol city today. Readers the world over, praised her careful and thoughtful analysis of the evolution of food in Singapore, driven by changing tastes, availability and affluence of the populace. Some remark that the recipes were almost an afterthought, but traditional recipes from the chinese, malay, indian and european communities were duly collected and compiled by Ms. Tan.

This book published in 11/2005 in Singapore by Marshall Cavendish Cuisine (a subsdiary of the newspaper holding company Times International), is meant to stead Ms. Tan as a cookbook author in her own right. The kitchen tips are minimal (even though many of the recipes were reiterated from the Mad about Food series hence the title), the old-time stories are minimal, and there are NO traditional singapore recipes collected and recorded here, NOT one.

Well what does it have? It has 100% Sylvia Tan cuisine. A gutsy combination of asian ingredients and flavorings in western european preparations and presentation. The book itself is divided into categories cleverly targeting the demographics of her hip audience; they are family (read good parent), one-dish (read busy parent), quick (make that a really busy parent), low fat (health conscious parent) and occasion (ambitious parent). Under the categories are dishes like tom yam bouillabase, coconut bread pudding, spaghetti with chinese dried fish, fish satay, and rendang roast beef.

Each recipe comes with a paragraph of Sylvia's thoughts (eg, this is really the best way to prepare crab!), the ingredients, the methods, and a gorgeous accompanying photo of the finished dish. Once in a while, Ms Tan will suggest ready made sauces and even helpfully name brands that she finds are the better ones (a look through the book yields no sponsor information).

The recipes themselves look simple enough, often consisting of 5 steps or so. And they seem to make sense. Although I have yet to kitchen test any of them.

Do I like it? I honestly don't know. I'm not much of a fusion food fan, but then again, Sylvia Tan's cuisine may use entirely asian ingredients so maybe it isn't even fusion food. If you're looking for a introduction into Singapore cooking, look somewhere else, it is likely that no one else other than Sylvia tan (and her multitudes of fans of course) prepare anything even remotely like this.

Yet its impossible to dislike this book (am I saying this just because I've already paid?) no really this is one attractive book, even the photo of Sylvia is attractive. I am fortunate enough to be able to get authentic Hainanese Chicken Rice within a block of me, and I work in Brooklyn! So my taste buds are clearly ready for change from the traditional nonya this and hainanese that of Singapore cooking, and with the courage and fortitude of such unlikely and taboo combinations in the shape of Sylvia's unique concoctions perhaps change is good after all.

Now if I could just find the guts to actually try a recipe.

brave enough? take the Sylvia Tan challenge here.

eat fish, live longer

2006-04-27T17:21:00.000-07:00

toasted artisan wholewheat, arugula greens, pan grilled tilapia, french mustard. in that order.

home on the range

2006-04-26T17:13:00.000-07:00

oh give me a home where the buffaloes roam ... and the ribeyes end up on my plate. seriously though i thought i'd post a pic from my cast iron adventures. grilled ribeye marinated with EVOO, kosher salt, black pepper, and chinese rice wine (hua tiao from shao xing province). mmmm perfection. the only thing was it was a large piece of meat and the pan juices made the other side less crisp, i think here is where elevated grills would have been helpful but i opted for flat bottom for better heat transfer and easy cleanup.

cast iron, usa

2006-04-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

here is my new lodge cast iron dutch oven and skillet set. damn they make me proud to be an american.

potstickers

2006-01-07T16:07:00.000-08:00

been making these for many years, these are beef and chives filling with the recipe from kitchencapers.net

gina's singapore claypot chicken rice

2005-12-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

gina from kitchencapers.net in all her infinite wisdom decided to share her heirloom recipes with pictures and forum and everything. followed her recipes as best as we could. turned out simply amazing, better than any i've tasted. recipe here

L&L hawaiian BBQ

2005-11-10T05:47:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, I roomed with some hawaiians, ever since then, I've loved hawaiian food. Recently L&L one of the plate lunch franchises from hawaii opened up in Manhattan, I highly recommend the fulton street location.
While poi (fermented taro paste) and lomi lomi salmon (salted salmon salad) aren't available here, you could get lau lau (pork bundle wrapped in taro leaves), kahlua porked (roast shredded pork) or any of the teriyaki style bbq meats like kalbi (short ribs),chicken, beef or spam, musubi (nigiri sushi made with a meat topping), or saimin (noodle soup). My choice here always is the cadillac of their menu the lau lau kahlua pork combo.Clockwise from top left: macaroni salad, japanese garden salad, kahlua pig, lau lau. Not pictured (underneath): 2 scoops of white rice.

The lau lau is clearly the piece-de-resistance. The outer wrapping is done with Ti leaves that you discard (imparts a woody aroma vaguely similar to the bamboo leaves or lotus leaves used in chinese cooking).Once the Ti leaves are removed, the inner bundle is edible Taro leaves (from the tapioca plant) wrapped around a piece of pork (or chicken) with usually a small sliver of salted butterfish for flavor.

Traditionally these are cooked in an underground oven called an imu (basically a pit dug out and filled with burning charcoal). Today, lau lau's are commercially made and steamed in large industrial steamers. L&L uses Keoki's brand of lau lau shipped in from Hawaii.

If you get a hankering to try, they are actually amazingly easy to make if you are willing to make substitutions. First you start out with a 3 inch chunk of beef, chicken or pork. Coat generously with kosher salt (if Hawaiian alea salt isn't available). Sandwich the meat between 2 thin slices of salt cod (bacalao). Pack with thawed frozen spinach or fresh spinach that has been quickly blanched until you cover the meat completely in several layers of spinach leaves (takes a lot of spinach! usually a brick of frozen spinach will only give 1 lau lau), salt lightly each time you cover with a new layer of spinach. Finally if you have a chinese grocery accessible, get bamboo leaves (chuk yip) used to make rice dumplings. soak the leaves in hot water until they are soft and pliable (about 1 hour). Lay 2 leaves one on top of each other to make a cross, put the spinach-meat bundle in the middle where the 2 leaves intersect. Then bring the 4 outlying tips together and tie with a piece of string.

To cook them, I recommend baking them covered with foil in the oven at 350 fahrenheit for 1 hour. This makes the meat nice and succulent and is closer in concept to the traditional imu oven anyway. Steamed laulaus taste dry to me, even commercially done ones such as at L&L.

I order the lau lau kahlua combo mainly for nostalgia. I actually prefer their kahlua pork, since I find their lau lau meat too dry. Since no one has an imu anymore, kahlua pork is nothing more than a pork shoulder simmered in soy sauce, ginger, sugar, and "liquid smoke" which is basically bottled up nitrates that you can use to give your food a smokey flavor (use sparingly for obvious health reasons), then shredded when fork tender, and served with boiled cabbage.

L&L serves up one mean kahlua pig, moist tender juicy and smokey.

apple tart with ice cream a la mode

2005-11-06T18:37:00.000-08:00

went apple picking in Croton Falls, New York this weekend. we picked ida reds, matsu, and golden delicious; although everything tasted like a fuji apple to me (which I like!). here is my wife's apple tart with home made crust, served with cookie's-n-cream ice cream.

Sambal Shrimp

2005-11-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

Here's my wife's creation sambal shrimp with pomegranate sauce from a recipe she found on the internet: 1 tbsp of peanut oil, 1/2lbs of shrimp, 2 tbsp of pomegranate juice, 1 tbsp of chile sauce, 2 tbsp of ketchup, 1 tbsp of soy sauce, 1 lemon, 1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes.

it's spicey, good.

Laksa lemak

2005-11-04T18:42:00.000-08:00

This one is a singapore classic, laksa lemak (curry coconut gravy noodles). My wife and I made it with half a can of roland laksa paste:

half a can of grocery store chicken broth, half a can of coconut milk, and some dried rice noodle called tung kow noodles that I got from chinatown:

the final product (garnished with langostines, choy sum, and hard-boiled egg:

espinal's carribean cafe

2005-11-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

it's fitting that my first post is close by, both to my heart and where I live. there's a puerto rican lunch counter on 70th street between 1 st and york avenue in manhattan. it's called espinal's and it's clearly a throwback to an earlier new york, at 4 to 8 bucks per plate the prices aren't bad either. especially recommended are the pollo fricasse (stewed chicken), and the bistec encebollado (steak and onions). for the uninitiated, puerto rican food is simple and earthy, meat and potatoes (or actually plaintains which look more like big bananas but taste like potatoes).

here are some pics of their pescado en salsa (fish in sauce) ordered with arroz amarillo (yellow rice) and maduros (riped plaintains). i'm not sure what kind, probably kingfish. due to spanish colonial heritage and a deep-seated collective fear of endemic fish poisoning known as ciguatera, the seafood options are largely limited to imported north atlantic commercial fish like bacalao (cod) or kingfish (some kind of mackarel) with the occasional snapper or shark; a shame since I've dived in carribean waters and have seen the myriad of colorful species of fish, most of which are shunned as table food except by the most intrepid of old timer subsistence fishermen.
on another visit I got the bistec encebollado (beef steak with onions):