I, actually, am not a fan of left overs.  I get bored with eating the same thing more than, um, once.  So, I like to take left overs and make them into something slightly different, or completely different.  So, I decided I was going to make a sandwich with the turmeric fish.  But, it would be too boring to just put the fish between two slices of bread, right?

On a completely different cooking experiment, we were eating watermelon the other day and I decided I wanted to try to pickle the watermelon rind.  This is actually something I remember my mom trying to make, but I don’t think she tried it more than once or twice.  I remember liking it, but probably not so much so, or else I think I would have tried to make it before last weekend.  Anyway, I thought, why not add the watermelon to the sandwich?  Why not, right?

Pickled Watermelon Rind

3 cups watermelon rind, skin peeled, with just a little bit of the pink left on

4 cups water

2 tablespoons salt

3/4 cup apple cider vinegar

1/2 cup water

3 tablespoons sugar

Place the watermelon rind in a glass bowl that is large enough to hold the 4 cups of water.  Add the water and the salt and stir until the salt is dissolved and then let it stand for a few hours in the fridge.  Drain the water out and put the watermelon rinds in a pot.  Add the cider vinegar, water and sugar.  Heat until the water is just about to boil.  Let cool completely.  Place pickled watermelon rind in a glass jar and then fill with the vinegar mixture.  Done.

Kimchee Coleslaw

There’s this yummy Korean fried chicken restaurant in NYC that has kimchee coleslaw.  It’s actually more like just a spicy coleslaw and this is my home-made version of it.  This recipe should be just enough to make two sandwiches.

1 cup of shredded cabbage

1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1 tablespoon mayonnaise

1/2 teaspoon Sri Racha chili sauce

Mix everything together.  Done.

Turmeric Fish Sandwich

Lightly toast two slices of bread, whatever kind you’d like.  In between the two slices place the fish, kimchee coleslaw and pickled watermelon rind.  Done.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of this.  I wasn’t going to add it to this blog because it’s not something my mother made and I was trying to stay focussed with the blog, but it is way too yummy to not share it.  The combnation of the warmth of the turmeric, the creamines and heat of the coleslaw and the sweet acidity of the pickled watermelon is absuloutely scrumptious!  I’ll make it again soon and take a picture – it was actually also pretty with the color golden color of the fish, the pink color of the watermelon and the green of the cabbage.

However, there is much to be said about the methodical preparation of ingredients for a dish.  I love the fine detail and work you put into something while the entire time being able to envision the end product.  For me there is a certain calmness and meditativeness about being in the kitchen, when it’s just you, your cutting board and your knife.  I think, perhaps, it’s probably the equivalent to how runners feel when they describe a great run and how running gives them time to think and how they feel so reinvigorated at the end.  I’m sure there are a lot of you who have no idea what I mean and a lot of you who are thinking, “I get that.”

Today I am giving you a recipe with a lot of ingredients.  Char kway teow, or fried flat noodles.  You can actually choose what you want to go into the dish and totally make it your own.  Now, I’m trying to recreate this dish based almost entirely on taste memory.  Everyone has taste memory – a dish that you’ve had in the past and loved so much that you’re constantly on the look out for it and then when you find it, it inevitably is never as good as the taste memory. Why is that?

So, I’m basing this recipe on my taste memory of my mother’s dish.  The most memorable ingredients of this dish for me are the cockles and the bean sprouts.  The cockles give it a unique taste and the bean sprouts a little crunch.  Because I am trying to reconstruct my mother’s char kway teow, I have a number of ingredients in my recipe below – my mother is no slacker for getting all the perfect ingredients for each dish.  So, finally, you are getting a recipe with more than five ingredients!  You don’t have to have everything in your dish and the ones you can play around with, I’ve listed as optional and you can always substitute any of the items, except for the noodles, of course.

Fried Flat Noodles – Char Kway Teow

Char Kway Teow

3 tablespoons oil

1 clove of garlic, minced

1 red chili sliced

1 chicken thigh cut into thin bite-sized strips

2 Chinese cured sausage links (lap cheong) (optional, but not really – who would leave out the lap cheong?)

1/2 pound of large shrimp, shelled and deveined

1/2 cup chopped cabbage (optional)

1/2 cup chopped baby bok choy (optional)

1 pound of fresh flat rice noodles

1/2 cup cut Chinese garlic chives or green scallions, green parts only

1/2 cup fresh cockles, steamed and shelled (optional, but I think this makes the dish)

1 cup of bean sprouts, roots discarded

3 tablespoons of black/dark soy sauce

1 tablespoon of light soy sauce

1 tablespoon of hoisin sauce

1 tablespoon chili paste

2 tablespoons of chicken stock or water

2 eggs beaten

When I was young, helping my mother in the kitchen was based on a pass/fail system.  She’d start you off with something small and then work you up to other tasks, but only if you sufficiently completed the previous task.  I generally passed, but not without scrutiny.  However, the lessons I learned in the kitchen from my mother are lessons I’ve never forgotten.  One of the first things I helped my mother with was snapping the roots off the bean sprouts.  I’m not kidding.  My mother would give me a huge pile of bean sprouts and I would sit there and snap the roots off one by one.  It wasn’t until I got older and started eating at restaurants that I noticed others would just leave the roots on.  To this day, whenever I make something with bean sprouts I get torn between honoring what my mother taught me and just being lazy and tossing them in.

After having snapped off the roots of about a million bean sprouts, I wanted to do more.  I wanted a knife!  So, I was given the task of deveining shrimp.  There must have been tasks between bean sprouts and deveining shrimp since it’s such a huge jump, but I can’t remember.  Shelling and deveining shrimp is easy.  The way you think you should shell shrimp is likely the correct way.  There really isn’t that many ways to do it, and the shells always come off pretty easily.  And, once you’ve deveined three shrimp, you automatically become a pro.  Just take a small paring knife and cut along the outer curve of the shrimp.  You should see a black vein, although not all shrimp have this.  If you don’t see a black vein, leave as is.  If you do see it, pull it out…and then you’ve deveined the shrimp.  Done.  I once asked my mom what the black stuff was and she said “poop.”  I guess this is sort of true, since it’s actually the digestive track of the shrimp.  It won’t kill you to eat it, but you might get some gritty bits, because you know, it’s poop.

Break apart the fresh rice noodles.  If they’re not breaking apart easily, place them in some warm water for just a few minutes, just to help separate them.  Don’t soak them for too long, you don’t want them too soft.  If you’re usig warm water to break them apart, make sure you thoroughly drain them before frying.  Heat a large fry pan or wok and add the oil, garlic, chili, chicken and Chinese sausage.  Fry until the chicken is cooked.  Add the shrimp, cabbage and bok choy.  Fry until the shrimp starts to turn pink.  Add the noodles and green onions.  Fry for a minute or so and then add the cockles, bean sprouts, soy sauces, hoisin sauce, chili paste and chicken stock.  Fry until the noodles soften up.  Once they’re soft, move the noodles to make a well in the middle of the pan.  Add the egg and fry until the egg is cooked.

Char kway teow noodles, which my family just called fried noodles, is a popular street vendor/hawker food in Malaysia and Singapore.  It was originally made with pork fat and pork croutons (doesn’t that sound good?), and was a sustenance meal for laborers.  Nowadays, I think most people just use cooking oil…too bad…

Well, this turmeric fish isn’t a fishy fish, at least it isn’t unless you choose to use a fishy fish with this recipe, but I always just try to use a simple white fish that isn’t too flaky.  I used basa fish when I made this the other night, but you can also use cod, pollock or tilapia.

I used the basa because I had never tried basa fish.  I wasn’t sure what it was, to tell you the truth.  The fishmonger told me it’s a catfish – which works for this recipe – so I bought it.  I actually really liked it.  It’s a sturdy fish, so it didn’t flake apart when I fried it – which is good because eating an intact filet is always more enjoyable and more pleasing to the eye.  I also always feel better about my cooking skills if I can get something to come out looking like I knew what I was doing!

I can’t tell you if the basa fish is eco-friendly.  I know it was farmed, but I don’t know where it was farmed.  I could have asked the fishmonger, but usually when I ask they seem to get annoyed, so I don’t ask as often as I guess I should.  I just looked on my Environmental Defense Eco-friendly Fish Guide, but basa is not listed.  I admit, I have a really hard time memorizing all the good fish from the bad fish, and I think if you compare one fish guide to another, it’ll list different good fish and different bad fish.  It’s too confusing…

The other key ingredient is turmeric.  I LOVE this spice.  I love the mellow yellow color it gives to dishes.  Turmeric comes from the same family as ginger.  Fresh turmeric in the store looks like a smaller, thinner version of fresh ginger.  For cooking, it’s usually used in it’s dried powder form, which is made from boiling the turmeric stems and then drying them and then pounding them into a powder.  Dried turmeric is a gorgeous yellowy-orange color, which is why it is also sometimes used as a dye – so be careful if you’re wearing a white shirt!  Turmeric is used in many South Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern dishes.

Turmeric Fish with Sweet Chili Soy Sauce

Turmeric Fish (serves 4)

1 pound of firm white fish filets

1 cup flour

2 tablespoons powder turmeric

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon pepper

2 tablespoons oil

Pour the flour, turmeric, salt and pepper into a re-sealable plastic bag and mix.  Rinse one fish filet and place in the bag.  Cover each fish filet with the flour mixture.  Heat the oil in a heavy pan.  Place the filets down on the oiled pan and fry about 2-3 minutes on each side, depending on the thickness of the filets.  Serve with chili soy sauce.

Sweet Chile Soy Sauce
1/4 cup low sodium soy sauce

1/2 a lime

1 serrano pepper, chopped

2 tablespoons of sugar

Mix the soy sauce, juice from 1/2 a lime, chopped pepper and sugar together.  Stir until the sugar is dissolved.  Serve with the turmeric fish.  This sauce is actually also really good on chicken.

Pork belly is one of those cuts that would make any nutritionist cringe and run. But for me, the words “pork belly” make me salivate. It always comes out so juicy and tender. But, so as to not freak out all the nutritionists out there, I would recommend limiting your consumption of pork belly to a minimum. (Although, I think pork belly will be, if it’s not already, the new gastronomic craze.)

The cut is from – you guessed it – the belly of the pig. Most people would say they have never eaten pork belly, but I would argue that most people have since it’s the same cut of meat that is used for bacon, which is another one of my all-time favorite things. It’s almost impossible to ruin a piece of pork belly because it’s fat layered with some meat.

So, how did I ruin my slab of pork belly…well, I’ll tell you…

For Chinese roast pork belly you use a slab of meat that has a layer of meat on the bottom, and then a thick layer of fat and then the skin of the pig. Yes, the skin of the pig. The Chinese way of making the roast pork belly is to roast the slab in an oven and then place the slab under the broiler for a few minutes to crisp up the skin. If done correctly, you end up with an incredibly juicy and flavorful piece of meat and a crunchy outer edge that adds this wonderful texture to each mouthful.

If done incorrectly, you end up with a juicy and flavorful piece of meet with a hard outer edge that will fatigue your jaws because it’s so hard to chew. Unfortunately, that’s what I ended up with the other night. But, everyone can learn through trial and error, right?

Chinese Roast Pork Belly
2 pound slab of pork belly
1 clove of garlic
3 tablespoons of five spice powder
3 tablespoons of salt
1 tablespoon of white pepper

On Thursday I went to Chinatown to get the pork belly. I find it impossible to find pork belly at my local grocery stores, and when I do find it, the cuts are really thin, sort of like thick bacon. But, what you want for this recipe is a slab. Since pork belly is used in so many Asian dishes, you will have no problem finding this in Chinatown. I bought a two-pound slab, which cost me $4.70! C-H-E-A-P!

Pork belly - see the layers of meat and fat?

I also picked up five spice powder. This is also something I haven’t seen in local grocery stores, but it’s quite easy to find in the Asian markets. Five spice powder is a mixture of star anise, cloves, ginger, cinnamon and fennel seeds. It’s used to season a lot of different dishes in Malaysian and Chinese cuisines. I think it adds a nice richness to the dishes. To me it adds that same kind of warmth and comfort that adding cinnamon and nutmeg does for pumpkin pie.

Take the slab of pork belly and just rinse it under cold water. Make sure you dry off the slab with paper towel and make sure to dry the loose layers in between the fat and the meat too. Cut the clove of garlic in half and then rub the garlic all over the slab. You want to just infuse a bit of the garlic to the meat. Mix the five spice powder, salt and pepper together and then rub it all over the slab and make sure you get in between the layers too. Now, place the slab on a raised roasting rack with a pan underneath. The slab will produce a lot of drippings, so you need something to catch the drippings. Place the pan, uncovered, in the fridge for at least five hours and up to 24 hours. By letting is sit in the fridge uncovered, you’re further drying out the skin and making it easier to have it crisp up.

Leave the pork belly, uncovered, in the fridge for at least five hours

Once you’re ready to cook, take the pan out of the fridge and let the slab warm to room temperature for about 15 minutes or so. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the pan in the oven and let roast for about 30 minutes. After it has been roasting for about 30 minutes, place the pan under the broiler to crisp up the skin…and this is where it all fell apart for me…

During this process you want to check on the pork belly fairly often to make sure it doesn’t burn. I remember when my mom would make this she would squat in front of the oven door and just stare at the pork belly until it was done. This process can actually take about 20 minutes – so you know my mother was getting a great thigh and buttocks workout from this!

Anyway, I was making this at J’s place, so I wasn’t completely familiar with the oven (not that I’m making excuses) and I didn’t know how to turn the oven light on. So, I opened the oven door to check on the pork belly. The first time I opened the door, everything looked good and smelled good. The second time I opened the door, everything looked good and smelled good…and then the smoke detector went off. The whole apartment was totally smokey. I quickly ran to the smoke detector waving an oven mitt and was able to reset it. Phew. I went back to the kitchen and checked on the pork belly, again opening up the oven door. Again, the smoke detector went off. Again I went running with the oven mitt and was able to reset it. I did this routine about five times until J came home only to see me mid-flight between the kitchen and the smoke detector. He tried to take off the smoke detector, but I think the code for new buildings is to have smoke detectors that can’t be taken off. And, by this time the apartment was so smoky that the smoke detector couldn’t be shut off or reset. So, I had to just turn off the oven and take the pork belly out.

Burnt roast pork belly - ugh!

So, there are a few things that might have gone wrong:

1) I placed the pork belly too close to the broiler,
2) You’re supposed to take a paper towel and pat off some of the grease on the skin throughout the broiling process, but maybe I should have done this before the broiling process
3) I should have first figured out how to turn on the oven light

Anyway, it certainly didn’t turn out looking the way I had wanted it to – the skin hadn’t crisped up and some of it was burnt – but, we ate it anyway and it tasted OK.

My family’s house was close enough to the school that my brothers and I could go home for lunch. I remember I had this one elementary school teacher who would always sit us down in a circle after lunch and then would ask us, one-by-one, what we had eaten for lunch. I think I always said either macaroni and cheese or a grilled cheese sandwich – my teacher must have thought that my mother only fed us cheese.

The truth was, my mother always had something hot, delicious, but Asian waiting for us. She’d make Chinese egg noodles with oyster sauce and fried garlic and a side of Chinese vegetable, or a whole steamed fish with white rice, or a steaming bowl of rice noodles with roasted park. I look back now and see how lucky my brothers and I were to be able to eat foods that came from fresh ingredients and not from a box or a can. But, when I was 10, I didn’t want to have to explain oyster sauce.

Egg Noodles with Oyster Sauce
1 package of Chinese egg noodles
2 tablespoons of cooking oil
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
4 tablespoons of oyster sauce

There is that age-old argument about who first invented the noodle, the Asians or the Italians? According to a Wikipedia (yes, I am quoting Wikipedia…) post on Chinese noodles, “In October 2005, the oldest noodles yet discovered were found in Qingha, China, at the Lajia archaeological site during excavation of a Neolithic Qijia Culture settlement along the Yellow River. The 4,000-year-old noodles appear to have been made from foxtail millet and broomcorn millet.”

I am sure that this debate will continue for a few more centuries, but what we do know for certain is that both cultures have a love of this versatile yet basic ingredient. Most pasta or noodles are made primarily with flour and a liquid, which is then mixed to form a dough and then either rolled, cut or pulled to make noodles. With egg noodles, an egg is added to a wheat flour and water mixture.

Boil fresh egg noodles for about four minutes or until the noodles are soft and separated. If you’re using dried noodles, boil the noodles following the instructions on the box/bag.

While the noodles are boiling, heat the cooking oil in a pan. Add the chopped garlic and cook until it starts to brown. Watch this process carefully. Once the garlic starts to get even slightly brown, take the pan off the heat. The oil is still hot and will continue to cook the garlic and turn it even more brown, so make sure you take the pan off the heat. You want the garlic to have a nutty crunch and flavor, so you do want it to be brown, however, the difference between brown and black is about three seconds, so watch this process carefully.

Fried Garlic

Once you have the garlic oil ready, drain your noodles and place the hot noodles in the pan with the garlic oil. Add the oyster sauce and toss. You can serve the noodles with a side of steamed Chinese vegetables, if you’d like.

Egg Noodles with Oyster Sauce

I also like to eat it with some pickled chili peppers.  Eating it with the pickled peppers is not for everyone.  I happen to like the combination of the oyster sauce, garlic and the vinegar in the chillies, but I can see how this might be too much for some people.  But, I’ll tell you how to make the peppers anyway.

For a long time I thought my mom was the only one who made these pickled chili peppers.  I never really saw it at my relatives or in Asian restaurants, and I certainly didn’t see it at my friends’ houses.  It wasn’t until about 10 years ago when I was in Philadelphia that I saw these peppers served as a side condiment in a Chinese noodle restaurant in Philadelphia’s Chinatown.  I was so excited to see it that when my noodles came I think I ate every bite with a piece of pepper.  The difference with the peppers in Philly and my mom’s peppers was the actual pepper.  I think my mom used serrano peppers whereas the restaurant in Philly used jalepeno peppers.  The jalepeno peppers work much better, I think.  They’re a much meatier pepper than the serrano peppers and not as hot.  Now, I see these pickled jalepenos in a lot of Vietnamese and Mexican restuarants, and my old co-worker, who is Korean, said that her mom makes these chilies too.

Pickled Jalepenos Jalepenos                                                                                                                                                                                       White Vinegar

Cut the jalepenos and place in a pot.  Pour in the white vinegar until the jalepenos are covered.  Cook until the vinegar has boiled and the jalepenos have just started to change color.  Turn off heat and let cool.  Pour into a glass jar.  These will keep in the refrigerator for a few months.