Deep-fried Lunar New Year treats: Crispy Sesame Flower aka Dragon Cloaca

It's that time of year again, where old and young Asian kinfolk bring together their bickering over a family supper table. Yes, it is Chinese New Year today.

Aside from the traditional gut-busting home-cooked Chinese gastronomy the eve, there is also no shortage of Chinese tradi-superstitions, to which I don't really adhere; here's a shortlist of some CNY buffoonery:

• Cleaning your house on the new year (that's what domestic helpers are for).
• Avoiding the use of scissors or knives (so all haircuts happen before CNY mean barbers and salons gouge clients for 10x the normal fee).
• Eating as many sweets as you can stomach before your teeth fall out.
• Giving money in the form of red pockets is auspicious, especially if they're for me. 

However, stupidstitions aside, here's one deep-fried tradition I did honour for year 4710, or the Year of the Dragon: crispy sesame flowers (脆麻花, cheoi mah fah). They resemble nothing less than the anus of a dragon (mostly because my handywork is sub-par... sue me). 

[Crispy sesame flowers; definitely not flower-shaped, rather, they're like three-dimensional Möbius strips.]

The recipe is the same as the one used for Smiley Face Nuggets with a slight variation: a smidgen less sugar and the addition of one cube of red fermented bean curd (南乳, "southern fermented bean curd") for each cup of flour used.

[Red fermented bean curd. Again, the Western translations here are stupid; ridicule liberally.]


[Before the magic red fermented bean curd is mixed in the dough.]

Once mixed in (you might need a bit more flour), roll it out, cut into 2-inch strips and like a plastic surgeon, make an incision in the middle parallel to the long edge, and then thread one end through the incision. Deep fry the flipped dragon anuses doughthings until golden, and drain on paper towels.

[Rolled out and ready to go.]

A recipe using (1) one cup of flour will yield about 2.5 cups of deep-fried biscuits and raise your LDL cholesterol by 20 points.

Gung hei fat choi 恭喜發財! 
(P.S. My resolution this year is to clean my potty mouth. So far, it is not happening.)

Tourtière abberation by Chow

Whatever I'm going to write now about tourtière will probably receive some eyebrow-raising and some harsh poo-pooing from any bonne dame de région* but maybe not...!

This is a tale of the birth of a French-Canadian meat pie that was born out of wedlock and raised with love; this is the Chow tourtière made from pork, potatoes and chicken hearts.


[Diminutive version of the meat pie designed for loggers.]

Chicken hearts, though they might be the ugly duckling of the meat world, are (as Subordinate Chow put it) "the most tasty meat in the world until someone told you it was chicken hearts."

Traditionally served as a sleep-inducing meal (réveillon) on Xmas and New Year's eves, it is a perfect sedative for holiday church masses (if the actual mass doesn't put you to sleep first). Les québécois were pretty resourceful folk back in the day, and used whatever meats were local and available to them to make tourtière. (Perhaps I might not be off the beaten track after all.)

This aberration tourtière involves stuffing a double pie crust with a mix of ground chicken hearts and ground pork, with diced potatoes, onions, salt and pepper, herbs (thyme, bay leaf, oregano) baked in a deep dish pie plate (or double the recipe and bake in a cast iron Dutch oven for that extra authenticity no one really cares about unless it means more food).

[Keep the meat and meat grinder cold and your work will be cut out for you.]

The fact that there are not only one but two types of tasty animals in this dish means it's twice as tasty; my math is good.

(Take heed, vegetarians and vegematarians: skip the dead animals and use ground hazelnuts, seitan, ground chickpeas, lentils, TVP (textured vegetable protein), chopped mushrooms, and/or caramelized onions, or combination of all of them.)

May 2012 bring you new tidings of glee in the form of good food and drink! Now for the REAL new year celebrations...

* old bat from Quebec boonies.

Holiday cheer: butter up your days with shortbread biscuits

Cookies (or biscuits as they're called on the other side of the pond) are one of the reasons why Xmas was invented. Forget the religious business – Xmas is a vehicle for consumption of alcohol butter.

[Single batch of petticoat-shaped cookies.]

Full of buttery goodness, shortbread is originally a Scottish blessing made of pretty much just butter, oatmeal flour and sugar. Nowadays, one uses plain flour or mixed with oatmeal flour.

[Buttery proof is in the paper bag]

Taking off from the America's Test Kitchen recipe for perfect shortbread, you can clog a few arteries with a single recipe, or double it to induce a few heart attacks.

[ATK suggests how to properly bake them properly – notice the top one is still slightly wet in the middle... big no-no... I ate it anyways.]

[The middle piece! Or what's left of it.]

Happy butter season to all!

Try this: Hagelslag – the serious chocolate sprinkles

Hagelslag, according to the Dutch, is the reason bread was invented*. Bread, you see, is the vehicle for conveying hagelslag, chocolate sprinkles for grown-ups (though they do make kid versions).

It's ideal for people who want to relive the youth they never got to experience because their moms were scatterbrained anti-sugar fascists!

[Box of assorted hagelslag. The best is the original one and the pure chocolate one and the golden one.]

Around 1936, some enterprising Dutch man by the name of Gerard de Vries at the Venz chocolate factory decided to revolutionize the consumption of chocolate in the form of sprinkles – which, by the way, can only be called hagelslag if it's 45% chocolate or more, otherwise it's labelled chocolate-flavoured hagelslag.

Butter up your bread (or toast, though it might be frowned upon) and sprinkle hagelslag generously on top and eat with a grin: the butter is the binding agent that unites the world.

[I might go to hell for putting hagelslag on toast but it's totally worth it.]

Take it from the Dutch: chocolate sprinkles are serious business – about 14 million kilos of business annually, on 850 million slices of bread.

* Totally could be made up.

Baked bread so good, you can hide stuff in

Sometimes when you least expect it, you can learn something. In this case, I learned something revolutionary from the talented local photographer, Mr. Simoneau when I went to help him dispose of bodies learn desktop publishing crap – I learned that you can make [expletive]ly fantastic bread with very little kneading and patience.

Let's call it Fancy Bread for Lazy People.

I was in complete denial that this would work and boy was I ever schooled!


[Still hot in the Dutch oven]

The NY Times piece that first revealed this technique says that all you need is:

• 3 cups +/- (~750ml) of flour (mix and match)
• 1/4 tsp (1.5ml) instant yeast
• 1-1/4 tsp salt (6.5ml) (I found 1 tsp was sufficient)
• 1-5/8 cup (385ml) water
• Cornmeal, more flour, or wheat bran for dusting
• Big bowl
• A Dutch oven or something similar with an oven-proof cover. They're on sale this week at Canadian Tire, so you have no excuse unless you live in an armpit.
• Patience (also available at Canadian Tire for $12.99) 

The secret, Mr. Simoneau says, is magical unicorn saliva. But I think it's the humidity that gets trapped in the preheated pot for the first part of the cooking process.


[Mr. Simoneau making his olive version, where he reduced the salt by about a quarter. Please ignore the yelling face he is making at me.]


[A 50% whole wheat bread with black sesame]

Oh, btw, I said you can hide stuff in the bread; I tried hiding Pee-Wee in it while baking and it worked out quite well (wouldn't you say?).


Thanks, Mr. Simoneau for the great tip! And thanks to Pee-Wee for being such a good sport.

The Roast of Tomato McPomodoro, esq.

Who doesn't love tomatoes (aside for those who are deathly allergic to them)? With over 7500 varieties, these chubby little red a55holes really seem to have latched onto our culinary apron strings* and permeated our digestible landscape like someone passing bad gas in an elevator, except it lasting 500 years.

Sometimes, I don't love them because 1) like rabbits, they multiply in such abundance during that short harvest period that you can't eat them fast enough, 2) there's only so much tomato sauce one can eat before imploding, and 3) you can't play Scrabble against them without making a mess.


[Oven-roasted tomatoes ready to eat.]

Luckily, you can roast these bastards down to size for later consumption through our barren winter months (though evidently, not barren of snowfall).

For three pounds (3-4 lbs) of fresh tomatoes (I used Romas as they are meatier and less juicy and because I had a buttload of them from the CSA basket, but you can use whatever you like —  adjust the roasting time).

1. Clean them.
2. Halve them lengthwise.
3. Toss tomatoes with a generous spoonful of coarse salt, pepper,  +/- 3/4 cup of olive oil  as many cloves of garlic as you want (whole, or crushed or minced -- it doesn't matter cause the vampires won't come near them anyways).
     
   [A55holes.]
4. Spread them on parchment lined baking sheets with the cut side up (evaporates better). Drizzle with more olive oil. You will probably want to use parchment or aluminium foil because it's a biznatch to scrub clean otherwise.  
5. Slow-roast them in the oven at 275F for about 2 hours or 300F for 1h45 or 225F for 4 hours —  it really depends on how patient and hungry you are, and how you like the tomatoes (burnt or less burnt).
6. Once they're as done as you like it, let them cool, and then eat them. 

You can store them in jars and keeping them either frozen or storing them in the fridge (for up to a week, maybe two —  depends on how dry the fruits are).

* In the early 1500s, tomatoes (pomodoro) were introduced to Italy but used as Martha Stewareseque tabletop decoration because it was thought they were poisonous, and only the very poor Neapolitans ate them. Who's laughing now?

Keeping vampires away -- with pizza!

So my other job as a vampire hunter, as you know, takes up a bit of my spare time.

And of the brazillion pizzerias in Montreal, ranging from upscale to substitute for cardboard weather-shields even hobos wouldn't even use, there are a number of places where a part-time vampire hunter like myself can kick back and refuel.

Take for instance one of the newer spots – Pizzeria Magpie – in our (now famously famous) Mile-End neighbourhood; their Bianca pizza is perfect for vampire hunters: roast garlic, bechamel, ham, fresh basil, parlsey, dill and coriander. A must for regular humans and vampire hunters alike! 

[Oh how this Bianca pizza warmed my cold, black heart.]

Here's a shortcut for roasting garlic in the privacy of your own vampire-hunter lair.

1. Take a head of garlic.
2. With a sharp knife, slice off the top without separating the cloves.

3. Place it on aluminium foil and drizzle a moderate amount of olive oil over the head of garlic.
4. Wrap up the aluminium foil and bake it in a toaster oven for 10-20 minutes (depending on size of oven).
5. Remove from the toaster oven, open packet and let cool.
   
6. Squish them out of the garlic sheaths. Eat them on toast, pizza, in sauces, pop them in your mouth, or store them in a tightly covered container, preferably covered in oil. 

[Roast garlic squeezed to perfection.]

As for Magpie, I'd head back when I'm feeling peckish for some tasty vampire-hunting fuel. as it is in the mid-range price-wise, and only AFTER I collect my fang-bounty.

BTW, here's my business card for anyone interested in vampire removal services:

Pizzeria Magpie

16 rue Maguire
www.pizzeriamagpie.com