Daeji Bulgogi

Daeji Bulgogi is the pork version of what most people think of as bulgogi, which is made with beef. We first encountered this recipe on Serious Eats, where it no longer seems to be posted, so I have linked to a new source, but it is the same recipe. My copy calls for pork tenderloin instead of pork shoulder; I’m sure it is delicious with either. There are multiple ways to cook the pork that don’t involve actual charcoal as called for in the recipe. Sometimes we drain the marinade off and cook it on a flat griddle. Other times we stir fry the marinade and the pork together in a wok. The latter does have a tendency to intensify the spice. Both cooking methods make this a simple weeknight meal if you can put together the marinade the day before. However we cook it, we serve it with steamed white rice made in our rice steamer and sliced fresh cucumber for a cooling effect.

This is a good dish for people who like spicy food to make at home. Actually spicy food can be notoriously difficult to get in restaurants. I like this recipe because it’s a little bit exotic, calling for both gochujang and mirin, but not so exotic that the ingredients can’t still be found locally in most places. All of the ingredients called for in this recipe are standard pantry ingredients at our house.

When I was in college, one of my roommates was from Japan. At the time, I didn’t appreciate what an opportunity it was for me to live with someone from another country, another culture. Now, I am grateful for the experience. One of the things she taught me was to keep fresh ginger in the freezer. Straight out of the freezer, you can grate it into your recipe; in contrast to what many food experts on television say, you don’t even need to peel it. Use a microplane and you’ll never know the difference.

Best Hummus

Best Hummus is one of a family of recipes that runs the gamut from starts-with-dried-beans-soaked-overnight to its-ok-to-sub-peanut butter-for tahini. It falls somewhere in the middle. You use a can of garbanzo beans (confusingly also labeled chickpeas sometimes), and you must buy the tahini. Even though tahini falls in the pricier range, the good news is you only use a little bit for each batch of hummus, and it lasts in the refrigerator for a really long time. Nobody who owns a food processor should be buying pre-made hummus at the store. A blender would probably work as well, but in full disclosure I’ve never actually tried that myself. Hummus recipes are honestly a dime a dozen on the Internet. Most have very similar ingredients, as they should. It’s just a matter of choosing one as a starting point and then figuring out what you like.

We enjoy a fair amount of acid in our food so when I make this hummus, I use some extra lemon juice, maybe as much as a tablespoon and a half extra. I also mix in about a half teaspoon or so of paprika instead of the “pinch” to sprinkle on top, and throw in maybe a half teaspoon of salt. I’m not sure why this particular recipe doesn’t call for salt; it probably should. Making hummus is just a matter of experimenting with the basic ingredients and deciding what appeals to your palate and to that of those for whom you cook. When it’s delicious, it’s done!

Hummus can be enjoyed with warmed pita bread, pita chips, crackers, pretzels and crudite’. Fair warning, once you start making it yourself, you can never go back to the dense pre-made store-bought kind. With a lusciously smooth and creamy texture and flavors that you can customize to suit your own style, there is simply nothing available in the refrigerator aisle of your grocery store that comes close.

Emily’s Honey Lime Coleslaw

Emily’s Honey Lime Coleslaw has bright flavors of cilantro and lime so complements main dishes consisting of similar flavors, like Thai-Style Chicken Legs . With an oil-based dressing instead of mayonnaise, it is also lighter than traditional coleslaw, in taste if not in calories. We usually make this with green cabbage instead of the red cabbage described in the recipe. I’m sure it is good with red cabbage too; I just find green cabbage to be more versatile so I’m less likely to have leftover cabbage that I won’t use. Leftover green cabbage makes a nice addition to stir-fry and fried rice and is also tasty braised. For those who are cilantro-averse, you can leave out the cilantro and/or serve it on the side. I sometimes like to add half of a jalapeno, minced, for a spicy kick. We grow jalapenos in our garden in the summertime, and put some into the freezer for use throughout the rest of the year.

Turkey Lettuce Wraps

Turkey Lettuce Wraps is a simplification of a copycat recipe we found for P.F. Chang’s Lettuce Wraps. I have renamed it here because I sort of think our simplifications take it away from still being a copycat recipe. It is still their recipe in a basic sense, however. If you are really looking for the restaurant experience, then follow the link for their full instructions. The best place to buy the dried shiitake mushrooms is any mom-and-pop Asian grocery. Many sell great big bags of them for the same price that you pay for a little tiny bag at a regular grocery store. That goes for many of the ingredients in this recipe, including the wok. If you don’t have a wok, please just go buy a cheap one from that same mom-and-pop Asian grocery. We use ours so much it hardly ever even gets put away. The recipe as I have reproduced it here serves four people as a light-ish dinner.

Ingredients

8 dried shiitake mushrooms
1 tsp table salt
1 Tbs dark soy sauce
5 Tbs water (divided)
1 Tbs hoisin sauce
1 Tbs oyster sauce
1 Tbs rice wine
1 tsp cornstarch
4 Tbs canola oil
1 lb. ground turkey
1/4 tsp pepper
1 Tbs minced garlic
1/4 C chopped scallions

For serving:

1 head of lettuce, separated into leaves (green leaf, butter lettuce, even multiple heads of endive would be nice)
1 cucumber, peeled, seeds removed and chopped
salted roasted shelled peanuts

Directions

Rehydrate the mushrooms by filling a medium saucepan about halfway with water and add the salt. Bring to boil over high heat, then turn off the heat and add the mushrooms. Let the mushrooms soak for 30 minutes or until they are soft. Use a smaller pan to push down on the mushrooms to ensure they are completely submerged in the water.  Once the mushrooms are fully rehydrated, mince them finely.

Mix together the dark soy sauce, 2 tablespoons of water, sugar, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce and rice wine in a small bowl. Dissolve the cornstarch with remaining 3 tablespoons of water in a small container with a lid, shake with lid on until cornstarch is dissolved and add the resulting slurry to the bowl and mix to combine.

Preheat a wok with the canola oil over very high heat. When the oil begins to smoke, add the ground turkey and season with salt and pepper. When the turkey begins to brown, give it a stir.  Once the turkey is nicely browned, add the garlic and let it cook for about 20 seconds, and then add the mushrooms and cook for two additional minutes. Add the sauce, and continue to cook until the sauce reduces and the turkey is completely cooked through. Remove the wok from the heat, add the green onions and toss together.

Serve the individual components (lettuce leaves, the filling, chopped cucumbers and peanuts) as a make-your-own lettuce wraps bar. 

Grape Juice

The purpose of this website is multi-faceted. I wanted to collect my favorite recipes on-line as a kind of back-up. I wanted a way to easily share my favorite recipes with friends. And I wanted to be able to share a few family recipes with the rest of the family. This recipe falls into the latter category. My grandmother taught my brother how she makes her home-canned grape juice, and then he taught my sister and me. I told my sister that I would share my notes with her . . . a year ago. I guess late is better than never, right?

While we were growing up, Sunday breakfasts were often enjoyed at my grandparents’ house. On the menu was always waffles cooked by Grandpa, sausage, and Grandma’s home-canned grape juice, made with grapes they grew themselves.

Grandma told me that she planted the grapes on their property sometime in the 50’s. I think she said a neighbor gave her a plant from their property so she didn’t know what variety it was. This means her grape arbor is 70 years old! Her grapes are huge, dark purple and have a seed in the middle. They taste so rich that you can’t eat more than one or two at a time or it’s too much; they really are better for making juice.

As far as the Internet is concerned, grape juice is made by pressing the juice out of the grapes and then canning the product. That isn’t how Grandma does it, however. I don’t know the history of her process, or where she learned it; I’m not sure she remembers. Basically, she puts washed grapes into clean jars, fills the jars with water, and then processes them with water-bath canning. If this is your first go-round with water-bath canning, then follow the aforementioned link and read my previous article on the basics.

We know the jars need to set . . . for a while . . . before they become juice. All anybody really knows for sure is they’re always ready by Christmas.

Grape Juice

What You Will Do:

1.) Pick your grapes.

2.) Rinse grapes & put in quart jars about half full.

3.) Put 1/4 C granulated sugar in each jar.

4.) Fill each jar with hot water, about 1/2″ below the rim.

5.) Wipe the jar rims with a clean wet towel.

6.) Top each jar with a sterilized lid & screw on a ring until just finger-tight.

7.) Wipe jar with a towel, turn the jar upside down and shake vigorously so the sugar doesn’t stay stuck to the bottom.

8.) Put jars in boiling water so the jars are just covered. Adjust the water level if necessary.

9.) Turn the heat up to high and wait until the water is just barely boiling.

10.) Reduce the heat to keep just barely boiling. Adjust if necessary as needed to maintain a consistent temperature. Process for a full 20 minutes.

11.) Remove jars from water bath, transfer to a counter lined with towels and spread more towels over the top of the jars.

12.) Leave in place until completely cool, 24 hours or even more.

When ready to enjoy, strain the grapes out of the juice; they have done their job. Drink chilled. It can make life easier to invest in a mason jar pouring spout, which I don’t think existed while I was growing up.

Tomato Salsa (for canning)

Tomato Salsa (for canning) was a wonderful way to preserve our garden tomatoes, jalapenos and onions last summer. The recipe calls for 10 pounds of tomatoes and we had only 6, but we were able to scale it down successfully. I prefer salsa in half pints instead of pints as called for in the recipe because you can consume the entire jar in one sitting and not have more going bad in the back of the refrigerator. Out of 6 pounds of tomatoes, we got 14 half pints of salsa. It makes a nice salsa, not too spicy for those who are adverse to such things, such as our children.

If this is your first go-round with water-bath canning, then follow the aforementioned link for my article on the basics.

Chipotle Chicken and Rice

Chipotle Chicken and Rice provides alternate instructions for using this as a filling for quesadillas. We have done both the original recipe, and we have used the alternate instructions to make tacos topped with sour cream and baby greens. The chipotle that the recipe calls for provides plenty of flavor, either way. When I open a new can of chipotle chilis in adobo, I whiz the whole thing up in a blender and then freeze the puree in ice cube trays to use in recipes like this. The alternate instructions say to leave out both the water and the rice; the mixture seemed awfully dry so I added just 1/2 cup of water and that evaporated off during the cooking time.

Hibiskey Sour

The Hibiskey Sour is a cocktail invented and named by my wonderful husband. We had some leftover cold hibiscus tea in the refrigerator that needed to be used (I was trying to convince our 14-year-old that cold hibiscus tea would be an apt substitute for the brand-named cold tea that she was having trouble finding; I was not successful). The only problem with this creation was that it almost immediately necessitated the brewing of more hibiscus tea! Hibiscus tea bags may or may not be easy to find where you live. We found them at a local Japanese grocery store. That was years ago, honestly. I don’t even remember why we bought them. For a cocktail recipe, probably. It must not have been a very good recipe because the hibiscus tea bags have sat in our pantry ever since. This cocktail, however, is delicious. Enjoy!

Ingredients

2 oz whiskey, such as Jack Daniels
2 o cold hibiscus tea, prepared according to package directions
1/2 oz lemon juice
1 oz simple syrup (or to taste)

Directions

Combine all ingredients with ice in an old-fashioned glass. Serve. Makes one cocktail.

How to Hard-Boil an Egg

How to Hard-Boil an Egg is something that I do weekly, 12 eggs at a time. I like a hard boiled egg with my breakfast, and my daughter always takes one in her lunch. It seems like a crazy simple thing to post about, but then I can remember not knowing how to hard boil an egg. It required a phone call to Mom, which resulted in wishy-washy instructions since Mom, bless her heart, never seems to know exactly how she does things and for how many minutes (I had the same experience trying to learn to make spaghetti with meat sauce over the phone). I never did figure out how to add raw eggs to boiling water without cracking every shell and burning myself numerous times so I was delighted when I learned this method, which I have used for several years now.

I have learned to use a bigger pot with plenty of water because I end up with fewer cracked shells that way. Additionally, I have learned to use the biggest burner on my stove because my smaller burners take too long to bring the water to a boil, and the resulting eggs are dry and overcooked.

As far as doneness goes, I love a moist, soft yolk, which is what you get in 10 minutes, but I often do 11 or 12 minutes because my daughter likes them more “well done.” The beauty of it is that you can experiment with what you like, a minute less or a minute more, and arrive at an egg that is perfect for you.

Basic Buttercream Icing

Basic Buttercream Icing, after nearly 20 years of experimentation, is the frosting recipe that I am finally going to commit to as my favorite. Some recipes call for powdered meringue, which can be difficult to find. Others call for cooking to specific temperatures, which to my way of thinking just increases the number of places where I might potentially screw something up. Still others are easy but make a frosting that is either too dense or too light to be considered decadent. This recipe has none of these shortcomings. It calls for basic ingredients that I can get at my regular grocery and which I keep on hand anyway. It’s nicely fluffy but still rich. The basic recipe makes vanilla frosting, but we easily made it chocolate by adding 3/4 C melted and slightly cooled chocolate chips at the end. Melted chocolate works better than cocoa powder because the powder can make frosting oddly gritty. Try your chocolate frosting on Crazy Cake. Chocolate or vanilla, making your own frosting is tastier, cheaper and more flexible (you can make the amount you actually need) than using pre-made, and you get to lick the beater when you’re through.