Vietnamese Steamed Stuffed Cabbage (Bap Cai Nhoi Thit)

My very first cookbook ever was a pictureless Vietnamese cookbook I bought about 15 years ago, now considered an antique, called simply, "Vietnamese Dishes", by Duong Thi Thanh Lien, a pediatrician and professor who lived through World War II and who wrote her book after urgings from friends whom she cooked for while undertaking her medical fellowship in the US. One of the recipes I've used over and over again from her book is the Steamed Stuffed Cabbage, but over time, I started using napa cabbage (cai bac thao) instead of the usual cabbage (bap cai) because it was simply larger and easier to separate, and I changed a few other things around.

Ingredients:
12 napa cabbage leaves
12 green onion stems, bulbs removed
1 lb ground pork
2 tablespoon onions, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
dash black pepper

Ingredients for the Sauce:
1 cup chicken broth
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon hot sauce (leave this out if you've got kids like I do)

First blanch the cabbage leaves and green onions in boiling water until they're pliable, about 10 to 20 seconds.

Prepare the stuffing ingredients by mixing the ground pork, salt, pepper, and onion.

Stuff the cabbage by placing about a tablespoon and half of the stuffing onto the cabbage leaves, tucking in the sides, and rolling it. Then tie up each roll with the green onion. I often cut up the stems of the napa cabbage before rolling if it's too stiff, although in the photo above I left it on.

Place the cabbage rolls into a shallow dish and into a steamer. Cover the steamer and steam for 30 minutes.

Prepare the sauce by placing all the sauce ingredients into a saucepan and simmering on low heat for about 10 minutes.

Remove the cabbage when done (there will be lots of liquid in the dish in steamer), and spread the sauce over the rolls.

Riley's Los Rios Rancho in Oak Glen, California

At the base of the San Bernardino mountains about an hour and a half east of Los Angeles sits a small apple growing community that gives meaning to the phrase "as American as apple pie". One of these apple farms is Riley's Los Rios Rancho, a historic apple farm in SoCal, and this was our destination on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Once you start heading up the lower slopes where Los Rios Rancho is located, you start finding yourself transported into a different world, that of one of a time when things were much simpler. The air is chilly up here, the folks friendly. I wanted my kids to experience the essence of autumn, and I found it here. If you want to pick your own apples, you can come here around the end of August to mid-November, but I wanted the kids to come when the leaves have really changed color. The trees in the orchards were bare at this time, but don't fret even if you come now as the farm's shop have plenty of apples of many varieties to sample.

There's also apple butter of many, many varieties to try out. I couldn't find the white egg and jalapeno one, but I will continue looking on my return trip here. Next weekend is actually the Apple Butter Festival here, so this would be a good time to go if you're interested.

Fresh baked apple pies abound.

C and J got some caramel apples to take home. They were Granny Smiths which are not my favorites, but the kids loved them.

We sampled some cider.

And then we really wanted to press our own apple cider as this handsome hunk was demonstrating, but alas, they had already taken the last group in.

So we settled for fresh already-pressed apple cider. It was absolutely delicious and sweet.

I saw this hound sitting there at the apple cider demo area and just had to take a photo. His little owner said that he's not that bright, but just look at him. By the way, there is a petting zoo and also hayrides offered at the farm, but we didn't have time to do these.

Cooking up some tri-tip just outside of the bakery. Smelled wonderful, but the lines were too long.

Now, like I said we didn't just come here for the food. After a lovely picnic, we took a nice, two hour hike on the trails of the adjacent Oak Glen Preserve. Both this preserve and Riley's are maintained by the Wildlands Conservatory. They've done an amazing job, because look at this beautiful picnic area on the trails that is just beyond the apple orchard itself.

You'll also pass huge Sequoais, pretty ponds full of birds, one of which has this floating dock.

Then as you follow the seasonal stream, you'll enter this deciduous forest. Doesn't it look like something out of a fairy tale or Anne of Green Gables?

On the return trail, you'll walk along a boardwalk through wetlands, which I'm planning to return to in the spring because I've read that there will be butterflies then. We spent a bit of time here on the return trail.

We had our picnic under gorgeous red Japanese maples. In a nutshell, I was in heaven.

How do you and your family celebrate autumn in your neck of the woods?

Riley's at Los Rios Rancho is located at 39611 Oak Glen Rd. #13, Oak Glen, CA (909) 797-1005

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.

Shau May Restaurant in Monterey Park

As fires continued to creep closer and closer to my home, I sat here making a mental list of the things I'd grab if things get any worse. Photos, video tapes, computers, essential papers. And then I looked through my food photos and reminisced about the day we went to Shau May in Monterey Park. It was a chilly day after a night of rain, and yet this was just a couple of weeks ago. What a difference a few weeks make. And although right now would be prime weather for shaved ice, it's much too smoky to be anywhere outdoors.

Cooler weather didn't stop us from getting shaved ice that day. Shau May is the best place to get it, in my opinion. It's a cheap heaping serving of goodness topped with yummy condensed milk. I always get my faves: the almond jello, black grass jelly, and pink and white glutinous rice balls. It use to be much cheaper back in the days, but I guess inflation has taken its toll. And I also remember the rice balls back then were actual balls, not irregular shaped chunks. Anyways, still good and still cheap. Hubby likes lychee in his. I don't. One serving is always good for two people, as I always get an attack of painful, frozen throats when I eat these. Our family actually heads to the Hsin Hsin Shau Mei in Rowland Heights more often for our shaved ice needs, and both locations pretty much have the same shaved ice. But for a more extensive menu of other food items, go to the Monterey Park Shau May.

The parking lot for this place is large, but I always have a hard time finding parking here, even at 3 in the afternoon as it shares its parking lot with the neighboring eateries. Inside the restaurant, it's usually packed, but I guess not so much at 3 pm.

You can order cheap combo plates of various food items at the counter, but I had a craving that day for some of Shau May's Shanghai pan-fried dumplings. These are really large fried dumpling balls sprinkled with black sesame seeds and green onions and filled on the inside with juicy pork. Be careful biting into these because you might get sprayed with hot juice. Might be my imagination, but I remember these used to be juicier a few years ago, but they still got lots of flavor packed into each bite.

What the inside of these looks like:

We also got the steamed pork dumplings which were flavorful as well, but the pan-fried ones are definitely the better of the two.

Shau May has plenty of other dishes available, including Taiwanese breakfast dishes which I will probably never get to try since I can never get myself over there that early. It's is open late for the partying crowd though, great for the younger folks in town. I still put myself in that last category, by the way.

Live life to the fullest. Don't hold on to the material stuff in life as those things can go poof in a second. Enjoy a good meal out with your family when you can because goodness knows, I'll be cooped up indoors tomorrow with the kids since the fires have closed up the schools tomorrow, wishing I could go out and get some shaved ice.

Shau May is located at 104 N Garfield Ave., Monterey Park, CA (626) 571-2727