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Showing posts from November, 2011

Vietnamese Coffee

This one's for Jenny who read my favorable comments about In the Vietnamese Kitchen and asked if there were a recipe for coffee. I haven't tried it, but it looks like a danged good excuse to open a can of condensed milk! For that matter, it's a good reason to pick up a can of Cafe du Monde coffee, which I'm lucky enough to have stores carrying. (One of the perks of being this close to East Texas.) Coffee and Condensed Milk An opened can of sweetened condensed milk is a great excuse to indulge in Vietnamese coffee, called ca-phe sua. To create this jolting beverage, brew an inky-strong cup of coffee. Any full-bodied, dark roast will work, although a perennial favorite of Vietnamese Americans is Cafe Du Monde from New Orleans, which contains chicory. Regardless of the coffee, brew it in a regular electric coffeemaker or a stove-top espresso maker. (The small Vietnamese stainless-steel presses are slow and often don't work well.) If you are starting from beans,

Chinese Pork with Eggplant and Rice Sticks

Turn Rose loose with a lot of eggplant from our CSA and a recommendation that my Cooking Light cookbooks usually include lots of vegetables in main dishes ... and certainly get a really delicious result for dinner. She made this a few weeks ago. I loved it so much that I ate leftovers for breakfast ... three days running. The one change I might make would be to use either thicker pasta or serve it over rice. The rice sticks we had were of angel-hair pasta consistency and didn't mix gracefully with the mixture. CHINESE PORK WITH EGGPLANT AND RICE STICKS Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2000 (November, pg 278) 1/2 lb boneless pork loin roast 1/4 tsp salt 1/2 tsp cracked black pepper 1/4 tsp ground red pepper Vegetable oil 4 cups eggplant, 1/2 inch cubes (8 oz) 2 cups onion, chopped 1 clove garlic, minced 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper 1/4 cup chicken broth 2 tbsp rice vinegar 1 tbsp brown sugar 1 tbsp ketchup 1 tsp soy sauce 2 tbsp sesame seeds 1 cup fresh cilantro, c

Burgers with Blue Cheese Mayo and Grilled Onions

I made this this weekend and, since I was using the torn out page from the magazine, thought it was from Fine Cooking. That's how good it was. Imagine my surprise at getting ready to share the recipe here and finding it was from Cooking Light! These blue cheese burgers with the somewhat charred grilled onion rings were simply fantastic. I actually can't wait to make them again. I have to admit I used the recipe as inspiration rather than following it to the letter. Although what I did was pretty close. Looking it over, the most variations were to the onions. The recipe was sent in by a reader and you can see it in its entirety at Cooking Light . I used: Chuck instead of sirloin Hellman's regular mayonnaise instead of a canola version (for all I know it may be made with canola) Dried thyme (have you seen the price of fresh thyme?) Regular onions (if your CSA farmer continually kept bringing onions for weeks, you'd ignore buying special onions too ... plus I'

Rose - The Cook of the House

About three weeks ago, completely frazzled from our huge annual project which takes all waking hours, I assigned Rose the dinner duties for weekdays. She's home for a bit between graduation and heading off to L.A. to seek her fortune in film editing. Other than training the dogs to do tricks (three now know "down", two also know "shake" and all are gradually coming to grips with "fetch), she's been whiling her time away reading Middlemarch and working on screenplay ideas. She likes to cook but hadn't been expecting this, which began with a phone call (as she reminded me the other day), "Check the freezer for things to use, but you've got to make dinner tonight. And the rest of the week." Rose rose nobly to the challenge. I don't remember what she pulled together for that evening, but she has been planning weekly meals that reminded me of the joy that can be had preparing and consuming meals when you go beyond the same old thing