Compensatory Duck Fat and Brandy

Sigh, requisite apologies are in order for being such a terribly negligent gastroslut. I moved to a magical land where one can fritter their time away in public saunas, and the excessive consumption of alcohol is accepted - nay, encouraged! So really, my absence should come as a surprise to nobody. 

Sorry pals, here's a little something to tide us all over until I morph back into a responsible adult:

...aahahhahah, GOOD ONE ALI!!!

Good Greasy Greens:
Duck, Mushroom, and Spinach Sauté

-3 cloves garlic

-1 yellow onion

-8 oz smoked duck breast

- 5 cups spinach

- 6 cups mushrooms of your choice 

(I did shitaake, oyster, and button)

-1/3 cup brandy

-pepper+salt to taste
-1/4 tsp hot chili flakes.

Really, all this dish involves is sequentially throwing things in a hot pan to get brown, but I will elaborate for the curious.

start by NOT WASHING THE GODDAMN MUSHROOMS and NOT ADDING IN ANY SALT UNTIL THEY ARE DONE BROWNING. Brush them or wipe them, hold on the salt - doing otherwise ensures that they flood the pan with water and don't brown as quickly.

Mince the garlic, dice the onion, and chop the mushrooms to whatever size you like - same goes for the duck and spinach. You should know that all of my amounts are pretty approximate and very flexible...meaning that I did a shit job of remembering to measure things before I stuck them in a pan.

Now the cookery: put a large pan over high heat, and fry the duck until crisp and brown. Remove the meat and set it aside for now. Also remove most of the rendered fat from the pan - keep about 3 tbsp in, and set the rest aside for other purposes. 

Add the mushrooms to the hot duck fat and fry until nice and dark. You don't need to stir constantly, just shovel it around every couple of minutes and repeat until thoroughly browned. Add the onion + garlic to the mix, and stir often until the onion bits soften and go a bit translucent. Pour in the brandy (cheap is fine, I used the last of an $8 bottle from Christmas) to deglaze the pan. Finally, lump on the spinach and allow it to wilt for a minute or two. Give it all a  quick mix and allow the greens to cook for a couple more minutes. Throw in the chili flakes, and season with salt and a generous amount of pepper  to taste. Boom, you're done.

....Sort of. It's very tasty as a side or as a savory crepe filling, but I like it atop noodles best. Toss some freshly boiled pasta in a tablespoon or two of the rendered smoked duck fat from earlier, liberally dole out some of the sauté, and cream your effin' pants while you down it like a champ. I'm sure this concoction would also work great with thick slab bacon in lieu of the duck. Enjoy until I sober up long enough to post again!

A Very Congee-nial Soup

Shut up, I know that title sounds weird. This is one of my favorite comfort foods ever, and one of the few things from home I can make with ingredients readily available here in Changwon.

Congee has always been a dish with a very annoying duality for me: my experience eating congee anywhere but home has always been kind of horrid. I know I'm going to catch flak from those who love the canto-sludge, but plain rice soup dressed with stuff like century egg has always grossed me out.

This iteration of congee is Burmese, and like all Burmese cuisine, is anything but subtle in flavour. Although it calls for a ridiculous amount of onion and garlic, the alliums will melt down into a sweet base of pant-creaming goodness (as opposed to pant-soiling pungency).

The King of Congees

-1/2 cup white short grain rice

-1/2 cup weird hippie rice

-12 cups water
(+ more if needed)

-1 whole chicken

-2 tbsp salt
-6-8 black peppercorns

-2 inch knob of ginger

-5 onions, quartered

-2 heads garlic

-4 tbsp oil

-scallions, for garnish

-sesame oil, to taste

-fish sauce, to taste
**see addendum

A quickie about the rice: you'll notice that I do not only use white rice for this congee - you certainly can, however I think that the visual and textural interest benefit from the addition of some kind of weird hippie rice. In Vancouver I usually add 1/4 cup wild rice and 1/4 cup brown rice to the 1/2 cup of white rice, but here I went for a blend which appears to have black rice, brown rice, barley, and millet (among other things). It worked well.

The white rice I use for congee specifically is typically short grain. Short grain rice is much more glutinous and starchy than long grain rice, and it will give your congee a creamier texture. The soup isn't going to be a total loss if you don't use short grain rice, use whatever the hell you want - it just may not taste as rich as its short grain counterpart.

Okay, the actual recipe now. Start the pot off by cutting your ginger lengthwise and splitting it slightly by smashing it with the side of your knife (or whatever's handy). Combine the first 8 ingredients in a large pot, and bring it all to a boil. Once it's boiling, turn the heat way down and keep it at a low simmer. Let your concoction cook for about 90 minutes uncovered. Try to shovel things around every 10 minutes or so to keep any rice from sticking to the bottom of the pot. If your chicken isn't totally submerged, be sure to roll it over halfway through the cooking time.

After the 90 minutes you can remove your chicken from the soup and set it aside to cool. While it's cooling, mince your garlic. When you can stand to touch the chicken, strip the meat from the bones and skin, and tear it all into small pieces.

Combine the oil and garlic in a pan, and fry over medium-high heat until the garlic begins to turn a golden brown. At this point you can add in your chicken bits, and mix it all well. Continue cooking it  all over medium high heat until the chicken is well mixed with the garlic and oil - just a couple of minutes. Then dump all this glorious melange into your congee and stir a couple of times to combine it all. If the soup is too thick or not salty enough for your liking, by all means add in some more water and/or salt until it reaches your desired consistency and taste.

Just prior to serving, top each bowl with some fresh scallions, a drizzle of sesame oil, and a few drops (A FEW DROPS! NOT A LOT!) of fish sauce. Congratulations, you now have a metric shit tonne of congee to devour.

Addendum

I'm sure some will cringe at the thought of adding fish sauce to their congee, but trust me on this one: it's imperative. You don't need much, maybe 1/8 of a teaspoon per bowl, but the savory flavor really rounds out the soup well. No, your soup won't taste exclusively of fish sauce, but yes it will be missing a certain je ne sais quoi if you don't add it in. Normally I use nam pla, however I found that Korean anchovy sauce (myeolchi aecjeot) works just as well. Although similar in taste, the Korean fish sauce is definitely stronger in flavor than its Thai counterpart - keep that in mind when adding it to whatever you're making.

Clean the Fridge, Cook Some Chicken.

It's only been about 2 months since I arrived in Changwon, but I've already managed to amass an astounding amount of crap in my fridge. Much of this stems from my crippling inability to cook for just one person - something a lot of you have benefited from in Vancouver. I'm trying to use up the detritus in my kitchen before buying anything else, and in doing so, I made a rustic chicken stew. It is entirely unremarkable to look at, but GOD DAMN is it tasty! This is my attempt at bringing order to my poor fridge by cooking what vaguely resembles dakbokumtang - Korean spicy chicken stew.

Dakbokum ....ish

-1.5 cups cabbage
-2 cups squash
  (I used Kabocha)
-2 onions, diced
-15 cloves of garlic
-2 carrots, diced
-2 cups water
-1 chicken
  (bones in and skin on)
-1/3 cup soy sauce
-3 large green chilis
-3 tbsp Korean red pepper paste
  (gochujang)
-2 tbsp Korean red pepper flakes
 (deol maewon gochu garoo)


Before I start on with the recipe, I will first insist that there is no good substitute for either gochujang (red pepper paste) or deol maewoon gochu garoo (red pepper flakes). I use mild red pepper flakes because I feel that the dish is spicy enough with the paste - the flakes just add to the depth of flavor. If you want hot pepper flakes, look for maewoon gochu garoo. Gochujang (the paste) is thick, slightly sweet, and awweeesomme. You can find both at any Korean mart, they are cooking staples over here. For my Vancouver folks: T&T has them both.

Prep your veg as per the photo below. As you can see, things are cut up pretty roughly. I quartered the onions, diced the squash and carrot, and roughly sliced up the cabbage. I didn't even bother to cut up the garlic, and settled for just smashing each clove open with the side of my knife. If you can stand to cut your carrots and squash into smaller bits, please do, it'll help them disintegrate and add awesomeness to your sauce. You will probably also notice that I have green AND red chilies in the mix, which I did not mention in the ingredients. This is because, in retrospect, I would have liked to omit the red ones as their skins are super waxy. The green chilies are a really mild variety; I'd use poblanos or maybe jalapenos if I couldn't find Korean green chilies.

If you aren't into butchering a whole chicken apart, get an equivalent amount of thighs and or drumsticks instead (8) - be sure to have the bones in! I left the skin on all of my chicken because I think the rendered fat imparts a very pleasant savory richness to this otherwise lean stew, but you can take it off if you are some kind of fat-phobic loser.



Mix the soy sauce, pepper flakes and pepper paste in a small bowl. Then dump it, along with everything else  in a pot, and bring it to a boil. Once it is bubbling, cook it covered over medium-low heat for 40 minutes. You'll want to give it a stir every 10-15 minutes just to be sure that things aren't sticking to the bottom of your pot.

 I put 2 cups of water in, but you can always put more or less in depending on the consistency you prefer. Just make sure there's always some liquid for the goods to cook in. After the first 40 minutes, cook for an additional 20 minutes with the pot uncovered - I did this to thicken up my batch a bit. Because of this last step, I didn't add any salt to the stuff until after I had reduced it to my liking. I would recommend you do the same so as to avoid making a briny pot of inedible shit.

The end result should be sweet from the veg, and savory from the chicken - something great to eat in the company of rice and stupidly cold weather.

Om-nom-nomenclature

Being partially Polish has left me with strong ideas regarding what criteria do and do not constitute "sausage". For much of my life, if you had presented me with a meat patty and called it "country sausage" I probably would have just fixed my stare and slowly turned my head sideways (much like a confused dog). I suppose distinguishing ground meat from tubular ground meat really shouldn't be such a big deal. However, I am weird enough to have gone through a childhood phase of eating sausage casing while discarding the meat filling.

Yup.

Anyways, for the sake of my pointless and discriminatory food compulsions, I'm going to call these seasoned-but-nitrite-and-casing-free sausage meat lumps something else. Err, turkey-maple-something something.....

Squasage
(makes a dozen)

-1lb ground turkey
-1/2 lb ground pork
-2 tbsp caraway seeds
-1 tbsp ground corriander
-1 tsp paprika
-5 cloves of garlic
-1 medium onion
-1/3 cup maple syrup
-8 fresh sage leaves, minced
-1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
-1/2 tsp ground black pepper
-2 tsp salt
-olive oil

Grate the onion and garlic into a large mixing bowl, then add in everything else except the oil. I use a mix of turkey and pork for taste and texture, but I think any white meat would do alright as long as you've got a bit of fat in it. Smush it all around with your hands until the ingredients are decently mixed, then leave for at least an hour for the flavors to properly mingle.
Pre-heat your oven to 450 degrees and shape 1/3 cup portions of meat into patties about an inch thick - keeping them relatively the same size will help them cook evenly. Place a large oven-proof pan over high heat with enough oil to thinly coat the surface. Once the pan is good and hot, go ahead and lay down your meat - it should begin to sizzle immediately. Make sure to not overcrowd the pan as you need ample space to turn the damn things as well as keep the pan from getting too cool. Spend a couple of minutes browning each side (shouldn't take more than 5 minutes total) and then stick the whole pan, uncovered, into the middle rack of the oven for 10 minutes. You may need to cook the entirety of the meat in a couple of batches if your pan isn't large enough, just make sure you wash off the burnt stuff in between batches or transfer your squasage to a baking sheet as the maple in the recipe will burn pretty easily with repeat performances.

After the 10 minutes remove the pan from the oven and serve them up. They're already pretty flavorful, but drizzling them with a concoction of maple syrup and dijon mustard (about equal parts each) makes for a pretty awesome finishing touch.

Mange-o Italiano

This is Joe:
He comes replete with thick moustache, strong accent, and a plethora of prostitute jokes. Joe is the resident Italian stereotype at my community center and I can't think of anybody who doesn't love having him around. His description of our relationship? "A-marry on a-Saturday, a-honeymoon on a-Sunday. A-Monday? Deevorce."

He's always bringing us goodies like apricot cake, home-brew wine, and biscotti so I figured that he was good in the kitchen. Last week I asked Joe if he could show me how to make gnocchi because I've always found the store-bought stuff to be pretty vile. Although this nonno cooks the dumplings in tomato sauce for his grandkiddies, I'm serving mine with pesto braised chicken. That's right, I'm whipping up a two-fer in order to try and compensate for my apparent inability to post with any degree of regularity.



Gnocchi

-10 medium-sized yukon gold potatoes
(he specified yukon gold, anybody know if the type of potato actually matters?)
-3 cups of flour + more as needed
-water as needed

Note: this will make a ridiculous amount of gnocchi.

Peel and steam the potatoes, once they're fork tender immediately mash them finely with a ricer. Combine the flour and potato and knead into a homogenous mass. If you need a little water or flour to improve the texture go ahead and kind of tinker with adding stuff slowly until the dough feels "right". The texture was akin to fresh out of the can playdough: holds its shape, but still quite soft and only moderately sticky. Joe says that the faster you work with this stuff the better, because the longer you wait the softer the dough gets (making it increasingly difficult to roll).
Lightly flour your work surface, twist off some lumps of dough and roll said lumps into snakes. Maria (Joe's wife) couldn't stop pointing out the fact that my hands were smushing the dough too much as opposed to lightly rolling it out so...y'know...don't do that shit.

Once you've got your snakes all rolled out cut them up about 2 cm wide and toss in flour. The portion of this process that I was exceptionally terrible at was rolling the little pillows into slender curls. Maria explained that you use two fingers to softly press into a gnocco while rolling it towards you. I then proceeded to unceremoniously smush mine into the floured board. Er, I was then instructed to return to snake-making duty. Sigh. You might think this an uncessessary process, but the little nook you create helps hold more sauce once they're cooked.
Boil a large pot of salted water and cook these guys for 3-5 minutes, or until they float up to the top of the water. These are smaller gnocchi, suitable for a rich sauce like the one I will show you how to make next (buuut you can make them larger if you like).


Pesto chicken

-6-8 chicken thighs
(skinless, bone-in)
-1/2 cup basil pesto
-3 cups chicken stock
-1 1/2 cups dry white
wine
-a few sprigs of thyme
-5 cloves of garlic,
minced
-1 shallot, minced
-1/2 cup of half and
half cream

salt&pepper to taste

Start by patting your chicken dry with some paper towels and then season with salt and pepper. Put a large pan over high heat and warm up a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Sear the chicken in batches until the outsides are browned, and set the meat aside. I suppose you could use drumsticks as well if you had them on hand. I prefer thighs because their flattened tops tend to brown more nicely. Avoid chicken breasts at all costs; trust me, they develop an off-putting stringiness when cooked this way.
Fry the garlic and shallot in the oil until fragrant and then deglaze the pan with the wine and chicken stock. Add in the thyme sprigs (I just put them in whole and pluck them out afterwards) and let simmer uncovered over medium-high heat for 15 minutes or so to reduce a bit. If the sauce is a little too watery for your liking then by all means reduce it down a litte more and season with salt to taste if need be. Take out the thyme, add in the pesto and dairy, stir it up and then place the chicken back into the sauce. Cook it all covered for 10 minutes then set aside to cool. I suppose that you could eat this stuff right away but trust me when I say it tastes much better a few hours later.

Serve by doling out a puddle of sauce atop the gnocchi and your favorite kind of veg. I know the gnocchi kind of look like little green slugs in this photo so I drizzled some tomato olive oil along my plate in order to gross you out a little less. Regardless: LOOK BAD - TASTE GOOOOOD!