Chicken Pastina Bake February 5, 2009

I haven’t broken out the dutch oven in a while, but it was pretty wicked cold today, so I wanted something warm and delicious. I made the the chicken pastina bake that we like so well. Here it is:

Cooking Time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

1 lb cherry tomatoes

2 tbsps olive oil

2 tsps salt

1 tsp black pepper

4 skinless chicken thighs, bone-in

1 onion (red or yellow, doesn’t matter) finely chopped

4 cloves garlic

2 cups (approx) chicken broth

2 cups penne

Optional: 2 cinnamon sticks, 1/2 cup orange juice

Instructions:

If you can chop an onion, you can make this. It’s so delicious and easy, it quickly became a favorite of the Snappy Dish and me.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. As the oven heats, toss together the salt, pepper, tomatoes, and olive oil in a dutch oven. When the oven is hot, insert the covered dutch oven and bake for 15 minutes.

While the tomatoes bake, chop the onion and garlic and gather the rest of your ingredients (if you haven’t already). After 15 minutes, remove the dutch oven and add the chicken. Salt and pepper to taste, then add the penne, onion and garlic. Add the cinnamon sticks and orange juice, then pour in enough chicken broth so that the pasta is just covered.

Re-cover the dutch oven and put it back in the oven for 40-45 minutes, then go catch up on your Tivo backlog.

After 45 minutes, remove the dutch oven, spoon a thigh and some pasta into a bowl, and enjoy. A side of crusty bread is good for mopping up.

Secret ingredient soup October 28, 2008

Towards the end of Kung-fu Panda, one of Mr. Fortune’s favorite movies, our beloved hero is told exactly what’s in his father’s Secret Ingredient Soup.  The soup is quite famous, drawing customers from all over the Valley of Peace, so learning its secret is rather a big deal.  If you haven’t seen the movie, it really is worth a Netflix so I won’t spoil it for you.  But if you have seen the movie, then you know that the moment is both revelatory and touching.  The reproachful father encourages the misunderstood son, and sets in motion a conclusion both sweet and satisfying.

The soup below isn’t that meaningful, but as I was making it this evening I recalled the movie and thought it would make a good lead.  (No?)  At the very least, it is the first time I ever have made a noodle soup, so perhaps that is significant enough.  The weather’s turned cold in DC, and since most of my clothes are packed away in a vault somewhere in San Diego, I’ve been woefully unprepared.  I’ve had to rely instead on warming myself from the inside out, and this was a very good start.

As a bit of warning, this dish was a little labor- and pot-intensive because I prepared the pork, the noodles, and the broth separately, but the pork can be done hours in advance.  Once you get close to dinner time, boil the noodles and heat up the broth, then combine all the parts when you are ready to eat.  It’s simple and delicious.

Mixed feelings fish October 13, 2008

This recipe comes from the cookbook My Grandmother’s Chinese Kitchen, by Eileen Yin-fei Lo. I chose this book because out of all the cookbooks at the bookstore (there weren’t that many), this book seemed the most sincere. The recipes are organized according to theme instead of ingredient, so the cookbook is as much a family history as it is collection of recipes. We learn not only what the author’s grandmother served to her guests, but how it was prepared. Furthermore the author is from Guangzhou, home to many of the foods most familiar to the American palate. I was reluctant to use a book by a Cantonese author because I am not Cantonese.  I recognized many of the dishes, though, so I figured they reached beyond provincial borders. At the very least, Guangzhou borders Hunan, whence my father came, so close enough.

I might have been wrong. The first recipe I tried was an oven-baked fish that used ketchup as part of its sauce. I chose the recipe because it was one of the few for which I had all the ingredients, and I held out hope the ketchup would mix quietly with the other ingredients, namely ginger, scallion, and soy. The recipe also called for baking the fish, a technique I rarely saw in my family’s Chinese kitchen. I was skeptical from the start, and I’m still skeptical after tasting it.  I’m not sure I made a Chinese dish.

This brings me back to the question, “What is Chinese?” Until now I’ve thought “Chinese” to be a gestalt impression, an overall sense upon tasting. I thought “Chinese” would look and taste familiar, even if in a vague, ethereal sense. This dish was none of these. It tasted good, but it wasn’t what I was aiming for. The ketchup didn’t mix quietly, so I had an unexpectedly sweet-tasting entrée. The use of the oven was foreign to me as well because I rarely, if ever, saw my ayi or my mother use the oven for cooking. Perhaps that is merely a sign of my ignorance and there is a whole other world of Chinese tastes and techniques still unknown to me. If that is so, then I am happy I already have begun to learn. If it is not, then I am disappointed I have wasted my time.

Noodles with Brown Sauce September 30, 2008

This dish was one of my favorites growing up.  The recipe comes from my mother, and it could not be simpler.  It came together so quickly, in fact, that I had to recalculate my finish times for the other dishes I was making.  The “sauce” isn’t so much a sauce but a quick stir-fry of ground beef, dried tofu, scallions, and sweet bean sauce.  Although this was the first time I had ever tried making one of my mother’s dishes, it still came out quite nicely.  As I ate it for dinner I could not stop talking about how happy I was with the results.  Partly because it tasted good, but mostly because I was relieved.  I had another dish under my belt; I was feeling less and less like a Chinese impostor.

As a side note, this dish has an emotional element to it, as well: it was one of my friend Andrew’s favorites.  Way back in high school, my mother made this dish for his family when his mother fell ill.  Next thing we knew, my mother was making it for his family even when his parents were perfectly healthy.  Andrew himself was not perfectly healthy, however, as he developed liver cancer and died at age 24.  In my family, we still refer to these noodles as, “The ones Andrew liked.”

Recipe after the jump.