Chinese Lion's Head Meatballs

I find it totally fascinating that in general most people across the planet are eating the same things: sandwiches, fried dough, bread, stew, sausage, meatballs... It's not surprising - since our ancestors learned how to farm and cook grains, it wasn't a far jump to begin milling the grains to produce dough that could be baked into bread, fried, or used to make things like noodles, dumplings, or pie. Bready concoctions provided a cheap vehicle for all other foods in the form of sandwiches, wraps, pizzas, etc. Stew is the ultimate one-pot-cookery. Every culture has some form of "put everything in a pot and let it cook until it's done". Stew is simply an efficient way to make do with whatever you have. Sausage and meatballs are a method for making delicious use of cheap and otherwise unexciting or unappetizing parts of the animal.

Meatballs made of entirely pork seem to be surprisingly uncommon. Rather, ground pork is frequently used across the globe as an additive to increase the deliciousness of other meats. Pork fat is especially sought after for it's excellent ability to add moisture to leaner meats. (The sensation of "moist" or "succulent" food usually comes from fat, not water). Anyway, the Chinese don't shy away from pork. A popular meatball in eastern China (particularly Shanghai) is known as the Lion's Head (the meatball is the head, and the bed of cabbage it's served on is the mane). According to Wikipedia, Lion's Head meatballs can be up to 10cm in diameter!

Lion's Head Meatballs

1# Ground Pork

~1 tsp Fresh Ginger, minced

1 1/2 Tbsp Cornstarch

1 Tbsp Water

2 tsp Soy Sauce

pinch salt

(add 2-3 eggs to make these fluffier)

(chopped mushrooms are also a common addition)

....

oil for frying

...

1 head Bok Choi or Napa Cabbage

Mirin

Stock

More Soy Sauce

(optional garlic)

...

Green Onion for garnish

Put pork, minced ginger, and salt into a large bowl. In a second bowl, stir together the cornstarch, water, and soy sauce until it's a smooth slurry - add this to the bowl with the pork in it. Thoroughly mix together and use your hands to form whatever size meatballs you want - I made roughly walnut-sized balls. To avoid an impossibly sticky mess on your hands - wet your hands with water before diving in to form meatballs. 

I think it's easiest to form all the balls, then wash your hands and start frying. Otherwise you could risk getting pork everywhere or burning your balls while you're trying to wash the pork off your hands. Alternatively, if you don't like cooking with your hands - you can use an ice cream scoop or spoons to make each ball.

Heat up some peanut oil (or sesame, or grapeseed, or canola) in a wok or heavy-bottomed pan on medium to low heat. Meanwhile, get some rice cooking!

When the oil is hot - add your balls! You should have enough oil to come at least half-way up each ball.

Don't touch the meatballs immediately after you put them in the frying oil! They will likely be stuck to the bottom, but if you give them a minute, they will unstick themselves. Whereas in my experience, if you try to unstick them right away, they will inevitably turn into a sticky mess. Let the meatballs fry for a few minutes until browned on the bottom and then turn them over and fry until they are nicely browned all over.

Move browned meatballs from the frying oil onto a paper towel to let the excess oil drain off.

Prepare the mane of the lion: Chop up some bok choi or cabbage and use it to line a large pan.

Drizzle maybe a 1/2 cup of mirin, 1/2 cup of stock, and a few Tbsp of soy sauce over to the bok choi. I also added some sliced garlic (fresh ginger also would have been good!). Place the fried meatballs on top and let simmer for about 20 minutes until the bok choi is wilted and tender. Season with salt.

Serve with rice and fresh green onions.

References:
Two Red Bowls
The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook

Carnitas

My good friend Sarah makes the most incredible carnitas I have ever had. Her carnitas are better than any carnitas you will get in a restaurant. No joke. Every time I've ordered carnitas at a restaurant I've been horribly disappointed. I think there's a few reasons for this - (1) Sarah always used Skagit Valley Ranch pork, which, is the best pork you will ever eat. (2) Sarah always used Skagit River Valley Ranch bacon grease, or even sometimes lined the pan with bacon, and (3) Sarah always pan-fried the carnitas just before eating them, to give them even more flavor and delightfully crispy little edges.

Here is a quote from Sarah's blog post about carnitas:

"In Spanish, carnitas translates to "little meats". Little tiny meats dancing upon your corn tortilla. Little tiny meats dancing on your tongue. Carnitas, second only to bacon, are a great blessing from the cloven hoofed pig."

And now, here is how to make the best carnitas you will ever eat:

1) Buy a really excellent pork shoulder and bacon.

(if you're in the Bay Area, I recommend Prather Ranch or Marin Sun Farms ....side note: Marin Sun Farms sometimes has "mystery boxes" containing 15 pounds of high quality meat for $20!!)

2) Line a cast iron pan with bacon, cut the pork shoulder into chunks and put them on top of the bacon

3) Add a couple cups of water to the pan so the pork is mostly covered.

4) Cook it in the oven at 350F for 5-6 hours till the meat falls apart.

That's it. The only ingredients are pork, bacon, and water. If you don't want to use bacon for some reason, you'll want to season the meat with at least salt and probably pepper. In fact, if you're not going to use bacon, I'd encourage you to get creative with spices! (curry carnitas? cuban carnitas? BBQ carnitas?)

During the cooking process, keep an eye on it to make sure the water doesn't evaporate. About half way through cooking, I turned all the meat pieces over and added some more water.

After 5 hours, the meat seems to fall apart at the shear thought of touching it. Take it out of the oven and shred all the meat, pulling it apart into "little meats". Don't worry about the liquid, it will keep everything moist and delicious.

This is when I realized another brilliant thing about Sarah's carnitas. I have no idea what exactly happened to the bacon. It was gone. It liquified into pork-flavored pork seasoning. I chose the fattiest pieces of bacon on purpose for these carnitas, so it's not too surprising if all that fat really did just liquify into delicious pork juice. Mmmmm. Remember folks -- fat is flavor.

So now you have carnitas. What do you do with carnitas? First you should pan fry them, and then the rest is up to you. Though, it's wise to exercise a reasonable amount moderation with these. A little bit goes a long way, and a lot might actually give you a heart attack. A delicious, delicious heart attack.

Carnitas can be eaten alone, in a taco, or a burrito. Carnitas scrambled eggs or panfried with potatoes for breakfast. Carnitas nachos. Carnitas quesadillas. Carnitas everything.

P.S. Sarah just mentioned that she sometimes adds beans to the carnitas water while its cooking to make porky beans.

Honey Mustard Pork

For the record, here is Alex's honey mustard pork recipe. I believe this recipe is still evolving, but we wont know unless we have a record of it now, to compare to it later. Perhaps one day we will mine the data in this blog to construct a phylogenetic tree that explains the evolution of our recipes and eating habits. But in the mean time - pork!

We had a lonely pork chop in the freezer that Alex used for this, though he would have preferred a Boston Butt, or a similar cut of pork better used for slow cooking.

Brine the pork for 1 hour prior to cooking, though Alex is curious to explore alternatives/longer brining procedures.

Brine

2 Tbsp Salt

2 Tbsp Sugar

1/4 cup Apple Cider Vinegar

Water

Mix together the ingredients for the brine, plus enough water to cover the pork in a baking dish. Let sit in the fridge for an hour.

Take the pork out of the brine and sear it in hot bacon grease in a cast iron skillet. It should be thoroughly seared, a little charred even.

Dump the brine out of the baking dish, place the seared pork back in the dish.
Deglaze the cast iron skillet and caramelize some sliced onions and garlic in the skillet.
Top the pork with the onion/garlic/pan-juices.

In a small bowl or 2-cup measuring cup, prepare the sauce:

Sauce

2 Tbsp Honey

1/4-1/2 cup Coffee, fresh brewed

1/4-1/2 cup Apple Cider Vinegar

1 Tbsp Molasses

at least 1Tbsp+ of Mustard Powder... probably more

a healthy dash of Saigon Cinnamon

sizable pinch of Applewood Smoked Sea Salt

some Crushed Red Pepper Flakes

a healthy amount of Cumin, maybe 1-2 tsp

~1/2 cup Boiling Water

Vigorously stir together all the ingredients for the sauce, then pour it over the onions, garlic, and pork in the baking dish. Cover the dish with foil and bake at 250F for 2 hours.

Remove the pork from the sauce, blend the sauce, then reduce it on the stove until it has a good BBQ sauce like consistency. Alex also made cornbread and I whipped up a coleslaw to make a meal out of it.

The Joy of Cooking has a great cornbread recipe. I make coleslaw a little different every time. My goal is to make it as colorful as possible, here's the gist of it:

Coleslaw

Red Cabbage - very thinly sliced

Carrots - grated

Peppers of every possible color! - grated or thinly sliced

Cilantro - coarsely chopped

Green Onion - sliced

Red Onion - minced (maybe a Tbsp-ish)

Dolup of Mayonnaise

Big splash of Apple Cider Vinegar

Dash Cinnamon

Big dash Paprika

Huge pinch of Salt

...

Additional suggestions for coleslaw:

Kale - thinly sliced/chopped

Beets of any/all colors - grated

Lemon and/or Orange Zest

Apple - diced
Mustard

Herbs! - play with herbs!

Play with Spices too! (Fennel an Cumin come to mind first..)

Inaugural Grill

When Alex and I moved into our duplex apartment last August, the modest back yard was a disaster of ancient things from previous tenants and construction equipment from our landlord. We generally ignored the fact that we even had a backyard. Until we realized months later that the growing jungle of weeds might be a problem, as it was quickly engulfing all the junk in our back yard. We donned our grungiest work clothes, heavy gloves, bandana masks, and lab goggles to eradicate the weeds and transform our backyard into a space we actually want to spend time in.

Among the weeds and junk was an impressively rusty old charcoal grill. Alex took it on as a mission to get the grill back into working condition while I tore up and removed the concrete from what is now our veggie garden space (still pending veggies). After a lot of scrubbing and a grate purchase - we have a grill! Here is the first meal we cooked on it:

It began with coals, prepped in a chimney...

The coals heating up, while sugar snap peas grow slowly in the background...

Getting things ready to be grilled!

Salted Eggplant

Summer Squash

Cremini Mushrooms with Balsamic Vinegar wrapped in foil

Prather Ranch Hot Italian Sausages

(and the plastic patio table that we rescued from the backyard disaster!)

Alex gettin' his grill on!

Grilling things! And toasting some sourdough bread.

 

Candlelight grilled dinner in the backyard!

We paired grilled foods with Mississippi Mud, a Black & Tan beer, and we used Annie's Goddess Dressing to use as a dip for everything.

Peaches, Pork, Pancakes

After a week+ of celebrating birthdays, the end of the school year, second-years advancing to Ph.D. candidacy, and friends from out of town - Alex and I have been eating out a lot which results in a sparse kitchen and a serious yearning to cook something awesome. Here's what we came up with out of some left over pancakes, the only fruit we had in the fridge (1 small peach and 1 small aprium), and the pork chops that have been calling out to us from the freezer.

The Cornmeal Pancakes 
(modified from the Joy of Cooking)
3/4 cup AP Flour
3/4 cup Cornmeal
1 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1 1/2 cups Whole Milk
3 Tbsp Butter
2 Eggs
pinch salt

Combine the dry things in one bowl and the wet things in another bowl. Then add the wet things to the dry things and mix together until smooth. Then make pancakes! These last for quite a while (especially in the fridge) and are great re-warmed in the toaster.

The Pork

2 Tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar

2 Tbsp Liquid Aminos

~1 Tbsp Molasses

~ 1/2 Tbsp Fennel (dried and ground)

couple dashes Cinnamon

pinch Applewood Smoked Salt

Alex seared the pork, sauteed a chopped onion and some garlic in the pan after the pork was removed, and then mixed this all together with the above ingredients in a baking dish covered with foil. This all cooked in the oven for over an hour at 375F.

While the pork was cooking, I sliced our lonely peach and aprium and then went spelunking in our spice "shrine" (as a friend recently called it).

The Stone Fruit

1 Peach

1 Aprium

Harissa

Fennel

Red Pepper Flakes

Cardamom

Cinnamon

White Pepper

Nutmeg

I just sprinkled spices on the fruit until it looked right. I used harissa and fennel the most with slightly less of all the other spices. Then I melted some salted butter on the stove...

...When the butter was good and hot (just about to start turning brown), I threw in the spiced peaches and fried them until they were brown.

I finished by deglazing the pan with a bit of water and letting it evaporate off to make it kinda saucy. 

Lastly, we sauteed up a few carrots, potatoes and a medley of braising greens. Here's the finished product with cornmeal pancakes topped with sliced pork chop, topped with spiced stone fruit, with a side of sauteed veggies. Super delicious! I'm stoked that stone fruits are coming into season so I can continue to play with them in a savory way!

Pork Chops with Strawberry Salsa and Yam Fries

Alex and I have been on a roll coming up with excuses to use fruit in a savory way. Yesterday we got some pork chops form Prather Ranch at the Grand Lake Farmers Market, and this is what we ended up making...

All good things begin with sauteed onions and garlic!

Onions and garlic we removed from the pan to make way for the chops! We seared these until they were well browned or even slightly blackened in a few places.

We made a sauce in the bottom of a baking dish with a big drizzle of molasses (maybe a Tbsp?) and about a 1/4cup or so of apple cider vinegar. This is where the sauteed onions and garlic went to make room for the pork chops in the pan. Then when the pork chops were thoroughly seared, they too were moved to the baking dish.

Then the pan where the onions, garlic, and pork had been was deglazed with some water, once the pan was deglazed, the liquid was also poured into the baking dish. Chopped carrots and half a diced apple were also added to the baking dish...

Then it was wrapped in foil in put in a 350F oven with the yam fries.

To make the sweet potato fries, we simply sliced some yams, tossed them with Portuguese olive oil, salt, and spread them out on a baking sheet.

Before:

When baking fries, they need to be stirred/flipped to ensure even cooking.

After: 

While everything was in the oven, I made a strawberry salsa:

1/2 pint of strawberries, diced

1/2 bunch of cilantro, chopped

1/2 bunch of green onions, thinly sliced.

1/4 Fugi apple, diced

juice from half of a tiny lemon (maybe a tsp of juice)

pinch salt

This turned out to be kind of a ridiculous amount of food, but it was soooo delicious!

Pilgrimage to Pinky's

I've gone mobile! This is my first post from my new fangled smartphone! I'm back in Seattle for a few days and had to stop by Pinky's Kitchen (aka Pig 'n Chips). I purposefully had a tiny breakfast before lunch at Pinky's, so by the time I got to the order window I was starving and ready for a hefty delicious BBQ extravaganza!

I got two sliders: brisket with sassy molassy sauce and pulled pork with sweet Caroline mustard sauce. I also got a small mac 'n cheese and a side of cole slaw.

Right now I'm feeling like a beached whale, happily blissed out on BBQ. ... Perhaps one slider would have been sufficient.

** Sent from my hand-held super-computer!

Jambalaya...

There was a joke between my class in culinary school that whenever someone asked, "What are you making?", the reply was always, "jambalaya", regardless of what was actually being made.

I've always thought of jambalaya as a one-pot/clean-out-fridge dish of Cajun/Creole origin--perhaps my definition is rather loose considering that jambalaya is a specific cultural dish along the lines of browned chicken, spicy andouille, shrimp, onions, celery, peppers, rice, tomatoes, stock, and seasoned with bay leaves, red pepper, and salt.

When I make jambalaya - I use the basic outline of meat, onions, peppers, rice, red pepper, and bay leaves all cooked together with stock. Then I improvise with whatever is around my kitchen - evoking the historical origin of jambalaya as a meshing of Spanish paella, French herbs/technique, and native Louisiana food culture. 

This jamabalaya started with a need to use up some Prather Ranch whiskey maple sausage, so I started by slicing the sausage and browning it. Browning is an important technique for getting that delicious Cajun flavor.

Then I added some chopped onions, carrots, peppers, and garlic and sauteed these all together until they had a bit of color on them.

Rice gets added before any liquid. The rice will cook better if it's warmed and coated in fat first - this is easily achieved by stirring raw rice into the sauteing meat and veggies for about a minute. 

Next add stock and some spices. This time I used a liberal sprinkle of paprika, a pinch of saffron, and a dash of cumin. And shame on me for not having any bay leaves at hand! Bay leaves are so prevalent in the Bay Area, there's no excuse for me to not have fresh bay leaves in my kitchen!

Let everything simmer together, stirring occasionally, until the rice is tender and the liquid is gone. Voila! Jambalaya!