Cherries, of course, are the fruits used in the most classical French preparation of clafoutis. As recently as 2 weeks ago, black cherries were in abundance all over my local markets. I bought them for eating whole, for making black cherry iced tea, but not for baking. Now it's too late, and the only cherries left are rotten-looking and expensive.
Yesterday at the grocery store I grabbed some lychees, which still seem to be semi-abundant. Not best looking lychees ever, but good enough for Beijing. Lychees hold their shape very well when baked, so I just soaked them in rum and made tropics-influenced clafoutis with a coconut milk custard. They took longer to bake than I thought, because the deepness of my ramekins. But they did make my kitchen, and entire apartment for that matter, smell like lychees. Really, there is no need for scented candles or home fragrance sprays when you live with a baker.
I like to think of this as the Punky Brewster of fried rice dishes. While seafood and pork versions would easily get upstaged by lots of vegetables, vegetarian versions are as colorful as your market's produce section allows. Today I brought home green beans, purple cabbage, and red and yellow bell peppers to go with my blackish shiitake mushrooms. To my knowledge there are no blue vegetables in existence, or I would have gotten them too.
My recipe eschews the scramble egg that is so many other fried rices. It doesn't seem needed, with so many textures already, but you can certainly throw some in for protein. As for the vegetables, the only important factor is that they are chopped small to cook quickly. This is a good way to use up not only leftover rice, but also whatever produce is close to being tossed out.
As for the rice, I always use cold rice for stir-frying because it has the right stiffness. But if you don't have leftovers and absolutely must make this (I'm touched), try cooking your fresh rice with a little less water.
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Vegetable Fried Rice
Serves 2
Last week, while recovering from bad restaurant overload, I cooked at home every night. The rain and gray skies were making me thoroughly depressed. Jacob was in Shanghai on business, so I was cooking just for one. I started to rely on fast fixes for food, including my all-time quickest, unhealthiest, and yet oddly delicious comfort meal: fried eggs and rice doused in hoisin sauce. No wonder my palate was deadening.
In the essay "A is for Dining Alone" from An Alphabet for Gourmets, MFK Fisher wrote,"It took me several years of such periods of being alone to learn how to care for myself, at least at table. I came to believe that since nobody else dared feed me as I wished to be fed, I must do it myself, and with as much aplomb as I could muster." After discovering that dining out alone meant a succession of bad seats and pitying stares, she settled on making well-planned meals for herself at home.
I can't celebrate today without also paying tribute to someone else who shares the same birthday. The late M.F.K. Fisher, arguably the best American food writer of the 20th century, would have turned 100 today. If you haven't read anything by her already, do it, starting with The Gastronomical Me. Her enthusiasm for food and eloquence with words have no parallel.
The last book of hers I finished was A Stew or a Story, a collection of short magazine pieces. In one essay about picnics, her al fresco dessert suggestion was a chilled chocolate mousse. I liked the recipe for two reasons: 1) No heavy cream, which is hard to find within walking distance, and 2) Because the recipe was written before the ubiquity of electric mixers, it assumes that you will mix and whip everything by hand.
I hadn't whipped egg whites in far too long, so my forearm got a workout getting the whites to soft peak. The old-fashioned simplicity of the recipe did seemed nice, I thought. I just melted the chocolate, stirred in the egg yolks and rum and vanilla, and folded in the egg whites. The puddings were all set to pop into the fridge to chill for 12 hours.
Every time I am at a congee shop, I wonder if the congee business might be the most lucrative and relaxing in the restaurant industry. Your main ingredients are rice and water (and stock, but that's also mostly water), which are dirt cheap. You make one big vat of porridge beforehand. Your menu can be vast, but each of those variations (pork, egg, seafood, whatever) requires just a tiny bit of cooking or heating up at the end. And congee is such amazing and versatile comfort food that people will flock to it for breakfast, lunch, or hangover relief.
My latest congee "effort" makes use of stir-fried chicken and goji berries. The latter is because I had leftover meat from my Orange Sesame Chicken, and the former because I just bought an expensive bag of organic gojis that I should cook with instead of snacking on like raisins. I don't know how many of the antioxidant claims attributed to gojis are true, but I'll keep eating them if they are reputed to help your eyesight. (Food blogging and other frequent computer usage doesn't exactly do wonders for myopia.)
While I sometimes complain about Chinese food in the U.S., there are certain foods and restaurants I love and miss. One such place is a tiny kosher restaurant near Boston that serves unabashedly Americanized Chinese food. The food was good in the low-brow indulgent way that Kewpie mayonnaise and powdered Milo on ice cream are good. And given the depressing state of "authentic" Chinese food in the Boston area, I ended up eating there about every other week during my college career.
Taam China was close to my very Jewish university, so it seems that everyone who patronized the restaurant either attended or graduated from the same school. I was frequently the only Asian face there other than the staff's, which probably lent the place a tiny whiff of authenticity for the duration of my meal.
I meant for this to be my dinner appetizer, but I spooned so much into my bowl that it became a meal.
Hot and sour soup didn't appear in my childhood of Cantonese home dinners. It did, however, appear in my Chinese-American childhood, as a Sichuan/Northern Chinese dish that became bastardized for the greasy take-out joints of suburban America. I have had one too many versions that were so thick and rubbery I could stretch them with my hands like Silly Putty. Here is some advice to the aforementioned Chinese restaurants in the US: Cornstarch is never a main ingredient; just use sparingly.
(From upper left: Wood ear, lily buds, fresh bamboo, shiitake mushrooms. Bowl: fresh firm tofu.)
In the US, hot and sour soup also tends to lack the lily buds, shiitake mushrooms, and bamboo shoots that make it a nutrient-rich, even somewhat refined, dish. (This is the Chinese version, not to be confused with Vietnamese, Filipino, or Thai hot and sour soups.) I also like to add wood ear and tofu for texture variation. Today I also used fresh instead of canned bamboo shoots, which I couldn't find when I went food shopping this morning.
The easiest way to make a thick stewy dish into a summery répas is by adding tropical fruit. Or so I told myself yesterday, when I was craving curry but wasn't too keen on the standing in front of a hot stove for the better part of an hour. The mangoes on the fridge were radiating their very ripened, last-day-for-eating aroma. Into the curry they went.
Yes, I did gluttonously attacked the pits after the flesh was chopped up. And yet much of the juice still found its way to the floor and all over the counter. Mango-soaked kitchen rags may be a side effect of this curry, if you choose to make it with the ripest fruit possible.
I have seen and eaten mango curries that contained chicken, pork, and lamb, but not vegetables. And why not, when this curry can accomodate whatever assortment you bring back from the market, as long as you cook starches and carrots first, and leave the green stuff until the end. The vegetable selection below was based on whim and color and texture variety.
I did need a glass of ice water to cool off after cooking, but the curry was worth the extra rise in body temperature.
This is what I drank after a long hot sweaty bike ride in Beijing.
I have a $25 one-speed from the local Carrefour which I am supposed to leisurely pedal. Cheap one-speeds are not meant to go fast. Sometimes I forget this, especially when I go to my favorite grocery stores that happen to be half an hour away by bike. My tendencies to zip by old men on their Flying Pigeons and come home glowing with perspiration I blame on having commuted to work by road bike on New York's Greenway, alongside the multitude of spandex-clad cyclists. Here, there is no spandex in sight to make you feel the need to ride fast. Everyone just glides gently along with grocery-filled baskets.
So until I learn to slow down, I am keeping a pitcher of something cold and a tray of ice cubes ready in the fridge. Today I cooked down a pound of black cherries, added some lemon juice and sugar, infused the liquid with a bit of star anise, and mixed in some strong black tea. The star anise adds just a touch of unexpected spice to the fruity tea. This batch should hopefully last a few days.
The hardest part is not snacking on the cherries before you start making the tea.
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Other summer coolers:
Since my trip to Hangzhou's Dragon Well tea fields, I have made use of the famous leaves less often than I should have. See, I went on a tea-buying binge after coming back to Beijing. In my cabinet right now there is an ample supply of not only Dragon Well (longjing), but also sheng and shou Pu'er, rose buds, chrysanthemum, barley, hibiscus, a fruit tea mix, and regular green and black tea. I'm sure some native Chinese would scoff at my puny tea collection (just like I would scoff at their wine collections of Great Wall and Dynasty bottles from Carrefour), but for me that is quite a lot of tea for the months ahead.
My right-brain demeanor also leaves me unfulfilled when I just drink the tea. (Purists, you may not want to read ahead.) I also must do something with it. Things like making rice pudding with rose tea and alcoholic granita with hibiscus. But before getting too experimental with my longjing, I thought I should whip up the classic Hangzhou shrimp dish that uses the tea.
