Chinese Five-Spice Brownies

It is widely acknowledged that Chinatown in any city has a distinct smell. Or several, rather: most people would say fish, pet store musk, and, well, sewage come to mind. New York Times olfactory journalist Jason Logan also reports “clay, crabs…and pickled cement.” Those are the outdoor smells, but upon entering any Chinese foodstuffs shop one is confronted with another pungent combination of a million different spices and dried mushrooms, vegetables, and fruits. Plastic bins and ceramic urns nearly overflow with unrecognizable fungi or all-too-recognizable dried fish, shelves stocked with boxes and bottles seem as if they’re about to topple onto you at any minute, and the space seems as filled with scent as it is stocked with goods. Chinese five-spice powder combines the most memorable of those fragrances and the flavors they belong to: typical recipes include star anise, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon (or cassia, a close relative), and peppercorns. Chinese chefs strive to find the perfect balance of the spices involved, and the result is a single coherent flavor with a distinctive earthy depth, and a smell that evokes the memory of every tiny Chinese corner store you’ve ever set foot in.

Five-spice is usually used in savory dishes, but I had used it in a molasses ginger cake with excellent results, and I had read about it being added to chocolate cake recipes. Chocolate is uncontroversially great, but it is easily made even better by pairing it with other flavors. Italians figured out that combining it with espresso magically makes chocolate more chocolatey, Mexicans have created sophisticated hot chocolate by pairing it with cinnamon and complex savory sauces by mixing chocolate and chili peppers. I wanted to see if the Chinese culinary tradition could have something to say about chocolate – but I wanted it to be a quick and relatively effortless test, so I turned to boxed brownie mix.

This experiment was supposed to be about the five-spice powder, but I couldn’t help testing another variable. I’d heard that yogurt can replace the oil and water in boxed mix recipes, and I had a large tub of plain yogurt with an approaching expiration date. So I mixed the yogurt, eggs, and brownie mix together, added five-spice until its taste was sufficiently present (several taste tests were necessary, but it ended up being a teaspoon and a half), and sprinkled in some flax seeds (thanks to Chase I’ve discovered that they’re good in everything, especially strawberry chocolate chip milkshakes).

These brownies are more cakey than fudgey, but I suppose that was determined by the kind of mix we bought (Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate). The yogurt seemed to work, although I’m more of a supporter of Rob Ammirati’s “Add an Additional Stick of Butter to Whatever the Box Says” method of brownie making. But these brownies are not the kind that satisfy a typical gooey-chocolate-thing craving. They are much more interesting – more like an exciting spice cake, the smoothness of chocolate enhanced by a backdrop of exotic smoky flavor. Perhaps not best for a brownie craving, but perfect for a day when you want to go to Chinatown (or China?) but can only make it to Key Food.

Gado Gado

I should probably be writing about Texas barbeque this week. There’s about seven pounds of beef in Chase’s oven right now, slow-cooking in its own fat behind an oven door taped shut with a “Leave Closed” note (the whole process takes about six hours, and neither of us are very good at hands-off cooking). Last night the kitchen counter was covered with at least half a dozen colorful spices that would become part of a powerful dry rub, after lots of tinkering and ratio adjusting. It’s all quite exciting.

But I’ve been writing about meat a lot, and Texas seems to come up disturbingly frequently, and I feel like it’s time to get back to my roots. I’ve never eaten a lot of meat; I’m not from Texas, and I never will be. I’m also not from Indonesia, but I decided to make gado gado anyway.

Since Chase was providing the main dish for today’s picnic, I thought I should contribute a “side,” an all-important part of Texas barbeque. Rudy’s, a Hill Country establishment and the setting of one of my favorite nights in San Antonio, serves creamed corn, coleslaw, and potato salad along with their brisket, and I could have tried out any number of Southwestern recipes that probably would have been delicious. But I’d been meaning to make gado gado all summer, and I enjoyed the subtle rebellion in the idea of bringing it to a brisket-inspired picnic.

Gado gado comes in many shapes and forms, but it’s essentially a salad of steamed vegetables with a chili peanut sauce. Typical ingredients include mung bean sprouts, green beans, carrots, tofu, hard-boiled eggs, and potatoes, but how they're prepared and served varies considerably. Given the flexibility of the dish, it seemed reasonable to turn it into a mostly-potato barbeque side. Having eaten more of the bag of potatoes during the week than intended, I bulked it up with steamed green beans, shaved carrots, and cucumber slices, and although it didn’t look remotely like American potato salad, the colors formed an appetizing combination.

Then there’s the peanut dressing, the component that turns a simple bowl of vegetables into gado gado. The bottled kind they sell at Ranch 99 in El Cerrito was my introduction to the undeniable goodness of combining peanuts and chili, and the delicious complexity of Indonesian spices. In New York I get it at an Indonesian grocery store in Chinatown, somewhere in the vicinity of the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. The very helpful proprietor sells it in dehydrated blocks, and will always ask you if you’re sure you like spicy things before accepting your money. The block form is useful because you can determine the thickness of the sauce yourself; I make it thick to use as a dip for roasted potatoes or carrots, or thinner as a sauce for noodle dishes. Either way, all you have to do is add boiling water and stir vigorously until it looks right.

The second best part about serving gado gado (I’ll leave it to you to guess what the best part is) is telling people what’s in front of them and watching them try to figure out if the syllables they think they’ve heard should mean something to them. There’s no need for further explanation (barring peanut allergy precautions) – no one questions gado gado after they’ve tried it.

Gado Gado Picnic Salad

-Six(ish) baby Yukon gold potatoes
-Several handfuls of green beans (about a cereal bowl’s worth)
-Medium-sized carrot, grated or shaved with a vegetable peeler
-Two Persian cucumbers, or half an English cucumber
-Gado gado dressing

Boil the potatoes until fork-tender, remove from water and set aside to cool. Blanche green beans in the same water for three minutes, drain and add to carrot gratings. Slice cucumber into half moons. When the potatoes have cooled, chop into bite-sized chunks. Mix all vegetables together and add sauce. If using dehydrated gado gado, smash about a third of the block into fine crumbs, then add a small amount of boiling water to form an even paste. Add more water until salad dressing-like consistency is reached. Toss the vegetables with the sauce to coat evenly.

Making Meatloaf for (Mad) Men

I’m sure I’m not the only one who recently rewatched all of Season 2 of Mad Men in preparation for the third season’s premier. Seeing it all again, this time without commercials and in epic late-night three-hour chunks, the central message of the series came through loud and clear: having a successful husband and a house in the suburbs isn’t enough to satisfy a woman, so if you are female, be grateful you weren’t born in 1945.

Yes, it is infuriating when Joan’s fiancé orders her to get him a glass of water as if the idea of turning on a tap himself was never a possibility, and it makes me cringe whenever the wives on the show act like airline stewardesses in their own homes. How tragic that all Betty has no choice but to drown her misery in red wine as her family slathers ketchup on the meatloaf she slaves over every day and generously places on the checkered tablecloth.

Seriously, Mad Men would have you believe that all people ate in 1960 was meatloaf. Maybe we’re supposed to feel liberated from meatloaf too, grateful for a Vegetarian Entrée Liberation that occurred some time during the 90s. But this one doesn’t quite resound for me like the feminist message. Instead, it just makes me want meatloaf. And this Sunday, I decided that I am liberated enough to make it as part of a nice, home-cooked meal for some hardworking men on the occasion of the premier of Season 3.

Meatloaf seems to have gone out of style, but it shouldn’t have. It’s wonderfully easy, since it involves only two culinary skills: mix and shove into oven. And I have a feeling that it’s fairly foolproof – I’m not convinced that adding or leaving out an egg, or using more oats or less breadcrumbs will make too much of a difference, at least not a negative one. You thought it couldn't get better, but wait – you also get the delightful sensory experience of sticking your hands in a bowl of ground up meat! (If you were a sixties housewife, of course, this would be the only joy in your day.) For this one I wanted to test out a basic recipe I could add on to in the future, so I kept the seasonings simple. But I have lots of ideas for future loaves: roasted squash, mushrooms, curry, gorgonzola….

This one seemed to be a success – the three guys who tried it all had second helpings. Since it’s 2009, my opinion counts as well, and I can say I was very happy with it. It also made a very tasty sandwich the next day.

 

Mad Men Meatloaf

1 ¼ pounds ground turkey
¾ cup oats 
1 medium onion, minced (reserve a few slices for top)
1 carrot, minced 1 clove of garlic, minced
dash of hot sauce
2 (generous) tablespoons tomato paste
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 ½ teaspoons fresh sage, chopped
pinch of salt, dash of pepper

For rosemary balsamic glaze:
½ - ¾ cup ketchup
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary, chopped
¼ teaspoon chili powder

Mix all ingredients for meatloaf together and form into a loaf on a greased baking sheet. Stir together the ingredients for the glaze and brush about a third of it onto the loaf, then top with the onion slices. Bake at 350 F for an hour, glazing it two more times during baking. Let it rest for a few minutes after removing from the oven (it will stay warm for an impressively long time).

Cooking What Your Mother Tells You

My mother has long insisted on the theory that the cheapest (and best) way to feed yourself is to eat mostly chicken liver. My reaction was always one of mild disgust followed by dismissal. Not that there's anything wrong with liver - I've always liked pate; but the memory of reaching into my lunch box and pulling out a bag of liver-and-onion flavored potato chips to resounding "ews" from my classmates scarred me into rejecting any kind of advocation of liver coming from my mother. However, some recent events compelled me to follow her characteristically English suggestion for the first time.

A few nights ago, I had dinner at the Atlantic Chip Shop, a pub that serves fish and chips, meat pies, and offers a full English breakfast in the morning. Although the people who run it are clearly in no way English, the food is right and they know enough to list a Snakebite on their drinks menu. I went with my cousin Talei, who had recently returned from a trip to Ohio to visit her boyfriend’s hometown and witness the phenomenon that is the Ohio State Fair. She was extremely impressed by this butter cow she saw there, and I suppose she thought it was time to reciprocate the cultural exchange and introduce Adam to her people’s food.

On the whole, there’s nothing too complex about the aesthetics of English cooking. The basic tenets are that things taste good when they contain large amounts of butter, frying is an ideal method of cooking, and most things on your plate should fall into either the Meat or Potato category, so as not to over-complicate things. These were the concepts that went into making my fried fish, Adam’s shepherd’s pie, and Talei’s sausage and chips as delicious as they were. But Chase’s dinner was a step above ours, an example of how some traditional English dishes can go beyond the obvious comfort food and satisfy your taste buds in a new way. He had asked for steak and onion pie, but they brought steak and kidney pie, and I’m glad they did – and even happier that he let me have his leftovers.

Kidney has such a distinct flavor, one that I’m compelled to describe as “dark”; but to distinguish it from gamey meats like goat and lamb to which I might apply that adjective, I’d have to add the qualifier “dense.” It’s rich, but not in the way butter is rich – it has a bite to it that makes you realize you’re eating something very specific, something that fulfilled a definite function for the animal it came from, something with more stuff per ounce (iron, cholesterol, whatever else) than anything you’ve eaten all day.

When I mentioned my kidney experience to my mother, she seized the opportunity to repeat what she’s been telling me for years, that chicken liver is the best way to feed yourself cheaply. It was simple, apparently: “What you need to do is put some chicken livers in a pan with some butter, and have them with a huge pile of fried onions.” Apparently the Offal Speech is a major part of British parenting, because when I turned on BBC America, Gordon Ramsey was trying to teach a similar lesson. He had just slaughtered his sheep and was preparing a feast to introduce his children to sweet breads, brains, and tripe. At the end of the meal, he asked who would eat any of it again, and amidst a lot of bouncing up and down and shouts of “Me!” his oldest daughter exclaimed, “Me please, especially sweet breads!”

With encouragement coming from so many directions, I felt I had no choice but to try cooking some kind of internal organ for myself. A container of chicken livers cost $0.90 at Key Food, so chicken livers it was. Chase and his roommates were grilling that night, and were very polite about allowing my slimy experiment sit next to their steaks. I sealed up some liver pieces in a tinfoil pouch along with onion wedges and a few dashes of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. When I took it off the grill after about 20 minutes (probably way longer than necessary, but it's hard to gauge the temperature of the electric grill and I didn't want to risk undercooking), I had a steamy pouch of velvety liver and onions infused with its juices.

Layered on a baguette with some Dijon mustard and roasted grape tomatoes, the liver and onions made a pretty tasty sandwich. It wasn't exactly something you'd find at every pub in England, and perhaps it strayed a little from my mother's instructions to "fry up a heap of liver," but I still felt I was heeding the advice of my English kin in appreciating the deep flavor and cost effectiveness of this distinctive ingredient.

Paratha

The other day, while investigating the possibility of buying goat meat at the halal market around the corner, I discovered something in the frozen food section that almost made me shout for joy and jump up and down. I was alone, so I didn’t; but I immediately got out my phone to broadcast my discovery in all caps: “PARATHA."

I have been searching for frozen paratha, passively and without much hope of success, for many years. It was a major part of my diet for a few months in middle school, when it appeared at Canned Foods, the grocery outlet that my mom shopped at almost exclusively. As I have alluded to before, good food was not always easy to find in our kitchen, and the contents of the fridge and cupboards was largely determined by what you could buy in quantities of 20 for a dollar. So, whatever we were eating any given month was determined by the whims of the Canned Foods management. And one month, they decided to bestow us with endless packages of frozen parathas.

Paratha is an Indian roti bread, thinner and more buttery than naan, and better suited for sweet preparations. The frozen kind are packaged as discs of dough separated by wax paper, and are heated in a frying pan for a few minutes until they reach golden, flaky perfection. Paratha can accompany any Indian stew or curry and is on the menu at a lot of Indian restaurants, but seems to get overlooked as people tend to be more familiar with naan. It is also commonly eaten with yogurt sauce and pickled chutneys, or simply slathered in butter. It can be a dessert as well – I’ve heard of people eating it with caramelized sugar and condensed milk, and it seems like a good idea to me.

My sister and I usually ate them plain or with copious amounts of butter, arguing during commercial breaks about whose turn it was to walk all the way to the stove to heat up the pan. These arguments often involved claims about complex hypotenuse theorems that aimed to prove that the other person was “closer” to the stove, even though we were sitting two feet apart on the same couch. I also remember eating it with honey and applesauce on some occasions, and when I heard about the Irish delicacy of fried candy bars, I wrapped a mini Caramello bar in a piece of paratha dough and pan-fried it. It was delicious.

Sadly, once paratha disappeared from Canned Foods, it disappeared from my life as well. Sure, I could get it at restaurants, and I have from time to time, but there’s nothing like the convenience of being able to fry up a hot paratha in your own home at a moment’s notice. Now that it’s available around the corner from my apartment, I can have it whenever I want, not just when the Canned Foods gods are feeling generous.

I ate the first paratha of my adult life with roasted curried cauliflower and a minted yogurt cucumber sauce. It was as good as I remembered: flaky in some areas, doughy and elastic in the more grease-saturated ones. There are two left in the packet, and my plans for them involve something sweet – if not a candy bar, then maybe some nutella.

Mint Cucumber Yogurt Sauce

1/3 of an English cucumber, grated or very thinly sliced and then chopped
the juice of two lemons
1/3 cup of thick plain yogurt
1 teaspoon chopped fresh mint
salt and pepper

Thin out the yogurt with the lemon juice, then add the rest of the ingredients. Adjust seasonings to taste, chill in the refridgerator.

Roasted Curried Cauliflower

florets from half a head of cauliflower
2 or 3 tablespoons olive oil
1 ½ teaspoons curry powder
salt

Mix curry powder and olive oil in a small bowl, then pour over the cauliflower in a baking dish. Sprinkle with salt and stir to coat. Bake at 400 degrees F for about 20-25 minutes, until the cauliflower is tender and beginning to brown.