Rau Muong Xao Toi (Stir-Fried Water Spinach with Garlic)

I have a love-hate affair with rau muong (water spinach). I can't stand it because its cousin, the field bindweed, has taken up residence all over our backyard, but I love it because as a food, water spinach is just so healthy and delicious in every way. I love it in spiral strips in our bowls of bun rieu, but mostly, I love it sauteed with nothing but garlic and a little bit of fish sauce. My kids slurp these up.

Ingredients:
Water spinach, 1 pound
Garlic, 6 cloves minced or chopped
Fish sauce, 2-3 tablespoons
Oil for frying, 2 tablespoons

Wash the water spinach and cut off about 4-5 inches of the tougher parts of the stem, leaving the skinnier parts and the leaves behind. Let dry completely.

Heat up the oil in a wok to medium high heat and sautee the garlic to release the fragrance, about a minute.

Add in the water spinach and start stirring with a pair of tongs to evenly wilt the spinach. This will take about 3 minutes or so. Season with the fish sauce to taste and then remove, getting rid of the excess liquids left behind.

Bamboo Shoots with Ground Pork the Japanese Way

Besides mushrooms, one of C and J's other favorite veggie to eat are bamboo shoots. I often prepare this dish for them when I want something fast and simple. This dish is adapted from a recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks, Japanese Cuisine for Everyone (A Quick and Easy Cookbook).

Ingredients:
1 lb boiled bamboo shoots
1/2 lb ground pork
cooking oil

Sauce:
1.5 cup dashi stock
3 tablespoons mirin
1/4 cup soysauce
1 tablespoon sugar

Mirin is a sweet cooking rice wine that you can purchase in the Japanese section of your supermarket or at Japanese or most Asian supermarkets. Making dashi stock deserves a post in itself. But simply, you can make dashi stock by soaking an ounce of kelp (kombu) in 4 cups of water for an hour, bringing it to a boil and then removing the kelp from the water just as it starts to boil. Or you can do what I do, buy the instant tuna (bonito) dashi powder and follow the directions. It's much easier to buy already cooked (boiled) bamboo shoots in packages or cans, but you can get them fresh and prepare them by scoring them first, boiling them for 20 minutes, and then peeling them.

First cut the bamboo shoots into 1.5 inch chunks.

Stir-fry the ground pork in a bit of cooking oil until done, about five minutes. Remove the wok.

Put the sauce in the wok and bring to a boil. Add the pork and bamboo shoots and turn the heat down to low and continue simmering until most of the sauce is gone (about 10 minutes).

That's it! Simple, quick, and easy to make in bulk.

Beech Mushrooms in Oyster Sauce and Fruit Vinegar

While shopping at the San Gabriel Superstore, my mom told me she came across these ladies who were demonstrating how to cook these brown and white beech mushrooms. She tried a few and liked it, so she bought three packages home and showed me how those ladies prepared them.

I don't remember the exact numbers, but my mom told me that the prices on these were not cheap. But I was shopping at Arirang Supermarket in Garden Grove for Korean BBQ beef recently and saw that there were also demo ladies there selling beech mushrooms for $1.79 for a package of 100 grams (3.5 oz).. Much cheaper. I bought two packages there myself because C and J look at mushrooms the same way they look at candy. I would have bought extra for my mom but I didn't think they'd keep long, but I later found out that they will keep up to 30 days. Nice!

At first sight, I thought these looked like larger versions of enoki mushrooms, but after looking them up, I found that they are very different from enoki mushrooms. Brown beech mushroom (Buna shimeji) grow on beech trees in the wild, hence their name. These are prized and are popular in Japan. I thought they are quite pretty and are very clean looking. Here are the three ingredients that go into the sauce: fruit vinegar, oyster sauce, and black sesame oil.

Demo ladies told my mom that one can either boil the mushrooms in water for a minute, or steam them for 5 minutes. I always prefer to steam when I can because I don't like losing the nutrients in the water if I'm not going to drink it.

So here's how my mom prepared the mushrooms:

1. Wash and clean 3 packages (about 11 ounces total) of beech mushrooms.
2. Steam them for 5 minutes.
3. Remove the mushrooms and to them add:
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon black sesame oil
1 tablespoon fruit vinegar
4. Sprinkle some sesame seeds on top and serve either hot or cold.

When I ate the mushroom in the sauce, it was sweet and delicious with just that barely noticeable bitter taste. But that bitterness is the antioxidants at work! I actually preferred the cold leftovers the next day. When I prepared this myself the following week, I just used regular sesame oil and cider vinegar and the taste was pretty much the same.

If anyone has tried beech mushrooms in a different recipe and liked it, let me know because I do love these.

Persimmon and Marinated Salmon Salad

My parents have freaky persimmons. Perfect for Halloween. The first year their persimmon tree produced fruit, the persimmons were the size of cantelopes. I'm not joking. Thinking back I should have entered them into some strange persimmon contest, but I was too young back then to think entrepreneurially. Now the persimmons that the tree produces are smaller, but they are still strange looking and often have these spokes coming off of the main body. Like these....

...and these...

Well, since my parents unloaded some of these freaky persimmons on me, I had to come up various ways to use them up. Now, I also love the Morey marinated, grilled wild Alaskan salmon from Costco and had some on hand, so I had to try persimmon and salmon salad.

I baked half a pound of salmon 400 degrees 20 minutes skin side down. That was enough for 6 servings of salad. You can use any salad and I prefer lots of spinach, but hubby had purchased whatever was on sale, and whatever was on sale was a romaine lettuce/iceberg lettuce/cabbage mix. I'm almost certain that this would taste better with a spinach salad mix.

Dice the persimmons. One to two medium sized persimmons is enough. And you don't need to use freaky persimmons either.

Assemble your salad and serve with ranch or blue cheese dressing. Using a larger portion of the salmon would be great too if you'd like the salad to be a meal in itself.

Has anyone come across persimmons like these?

Chinese Long Beans Stir-Fry Thai Style

Last week, I bought some Chinese long beans thinking I'd chop some up to put into some Thai fish cakes, but since I never got around to cooking it, I ended up using them in a stir-fry dish. The long beans I usually get from my Asian supermarket always comes in giant bunches, a couple of pounds each or more, so I had a lot of leftovers to cook for future dinners.

Chinese long beans, also called yardlong beans, are absolutely healthy for you. They are high in vitamins A and C and folic acid. Each bean is about 2 feet long (not quite a yard in my experience), and they are more slender than the regular string beans you might know of. When used in stir-fries, the long beans wrinkle up as they become more tender.

This dish uses a recipe adapted from one of my favorite cookbooks. I love the Quick and Easy series, and this one is from the Quick & Easy Thai Cuisine: Lemon Grass Cookbook and is titled "Beef with String Beans". Since my kids have a tough time chewing chewy beans, I fried the beans separately first to get them more tender. You can find this dish in Chinese cuisines too, but the sauce would be soy sauce based and not fish sauce based.

Recipe:
Cut into 2 inch slices 2 cups of the long beans.
Chop 4 cloves of garlic.
Cut 1/2 small bell pepper into slivers.

Stir-fry the beans in a bit of oil on medium high for a few minutes (about 5 minutes) and remove from heat.
Add in a pound of ground beef with the garlic and stir-fry on medium high until the meat is cooked through.

In the meantime, prepare a bowl with 2 tablespoon fish sauce, 1 tablespoon sugar, dash of black pepper.
Add the beans back to the beef, and add the bell pepper along with the sauce ingredients. and stir until the beans and pepper are as soft as you'd like.

Quick and easy, for sure, the way I do most of my cooking nowadays.

Bitter Melon (Kho Qua) with Eggs

When I was a wee girl back in the day, my mom would put some bitter melon in my rice bowl and tell me to eat it because "it's good for you" and it will "cool you down". I'd smile and say "cam on", which means thank you in Vietnamese, and then when she wasn't looking, I'd push the bitter melon underneath my rice. Why? Because I knew that after a while, I'd start to accumulate things like bones and whatnot that would continue to hide that piece of bitter melon as I finish up my rice. And when dinner was over, I'd dump the bones along with the lovely piece of bitter melon.

To this day I still can't stand the taste of bitter melon, but I can tolerate it if I hold my nose while eating it. Anyways, for those of you who like bitter melon (and I last night, I found out my two year old, J, likes it), or for those who haven't and would like to be adventurous, here's a simple and supposedly healthy recipe for you, courtesy of my mom. Variations of this dish is found in many cuisines, including Vietnamese, Filipino, Thai, and Japanese.

You will need four bitter melons:

Cut them up, and scoop out the seeds:

...and then slice them up further into strips:

Prepare the egg batter by mixing 6 eggs, a quarter cup of chopped cilantro, a quarter cup of chopped green onions, about 2 teaspoons of fish sauce, 1 teaspoon of sugar, and a dash of pepper:

Now mince two cloves of garlic and stir fry the bitter melon strips for about 5 minutes with the garlic and a few tablespoons of oil until the melon is soft but not soggy. You can sprinkle about a tablespoon of salt over the bitter melon strips to keep them from becoming soggy. Add in an extra teaspoon of sugar to flavor the melon strips.

Then add the egg batter and gently scramble it with the bitter melon until the egg is done, about five minutes.

Enjoy your bitter creation, and if you believe what my mom was telling me last night, drink some water afterwards and the water will taste so sweet. So do you like your bitter melon or can you do without it?

Ya Want Some Dong Gua, Don'tcha?

Last weekend, my mother-in-law gave me this gigantic and amazingly fresh wintermelon (dong gua in Chinese, bi dao in Vietnamese) that she grew in her own backyard. So of course I made traditional wintermelon soup with it. You can find wintermelon in asian supermarkets. They have a mild, refreshing taste to them, almost like a cucumber. Did you know you can keep unopened wintermelon for months and then cook them in the winter? Hence the name wintermelon.

To make good wintermelon soup, the secret is in the stock. I simmered a few chicken bones and a tablespoon of ground pork in two quarts of water for about two hours.

In the meantime, wash 8 shitake mushrooms (I used dried since I didn't have any fresh on hand). Then, cut into the wintermelon and scoop out the seeds. Peel, wash, and cut into large chunks about a quarter of a large wintermelon. I also like tofu skin in my soup:

I usually get the sheets of tofu skin, but Ranch 99 didn't have any, so I got these rolls of tofu skin instead. Tofu skin is actually the sheets that are left over after you boil soybeans for a long time. You can get them dried or fresh. I prefer fresh, but I find that they go bad very quickly, so I always use them within a day after purchase. These are also called yuba in Japanese.

When the stock has been going for an hour and half, add in the wintermelon and the mushrooms and continue simmering. Add in the tofu skin after another 15 minutes and then flavor with about a tablespoon of salt, a tablespoon of sugar, and a teaspoon of black pepper. Simple and healthy.