We came up with Thai-Style Cole Slaw for the carb-shunning Always Hungry diet. But it’s so good it’s joined our regular rotation. The sesame oil, rice vinegar, fish sauce and lime juice go together like a barbershop quartet, creating a perfect harmony. Makes 4-8 side dish servings.
8 c shredded cabbage or cole slaw mix
2 T toasted sesame oil
1 T rice vinegar
1 T fish sauce*
1 T fresh lime juice
1 t Kosher salt
½ t ground pepper
½ t crushed red pepper or to taste
¼ c roasted mixed nuts or peanuts
3 green onions, sliced into rounds, white and some of the green
Method: mix all ingredients except nuts and taste for seasoning. It should have a balanced flavor profile, not too salty or tart. Top with nuts and serve immediately.
*We tried it without fish sauce, thinking this is the one ingredient not everybody has in their cabinets, but it really is essential. If you need to buy some, get Red Boat.
Yummy is a new song and video in which the shape-shifting Justin Bieber is seen cavorting with various 50s-inspired dishes and Jello molds. And my Yelp friend Eric T has alerted me to a Buzzfeed compendium called “21 Truly Upsetting Vintage Recipes” which features such gems as Ham and Bananas Hollandaise, recipe here. Where are these creepy foods coming from?
It seems the 50s are back, with Tuna and Jello Pie taking its place alongside such icons/memes as the iron lung and Our Friend The Atom. But why? To the observer, it seems like many of these dishes represented a conspiracy among home economists and food stylists to foist bizarre foods onto the American household which even the most ambitious homemaker would never come up with on her own. Often they featured sponsoring products, like Hellman’s Mayonnaise or Jello, and not a few highlight variety meats that were very cheap at the time. Some of us have spent a lifetime putting those memories behind us and it’s upsetting to see a new generation bringing them back, ironically or not.
But wait. What if some of these dishes are actually good? A visitor to the Highland Park Cafeteria will be greeted by any number of delightful aspics, jiggling and gleaming like a beached jellyfish in the sun. My grandmother’s recipe for Carrot Pineapple Jello is both easy and tasty. And let us not forget Amish Pickled Tripe in Aspic. If a new generation discovers the delights of congeals, maybe that’s okay.
Eric also pointed me to Mid-Century Menu, a site that does taste testing on vintage recipes by serving them to a pliable husband. It’s a treasure trove of old newspaper clippings, Jello art through the ages and whatnot and you should definitely check it out, especially this creepy video for Frosty the Slaw Man.
Perfection Salad. Yummy!
Meanwhile, here’s a recipe for “Perfection Salad” which reads just fine and only becomes repulsive when you view the Great American Recipes* photo which looks like shards of random vegetables were dumped into a knight’s helmet which was then filled with Jello, chilled, and tossed into the shrubbery. Why not put a toe in the water, and try it tonight?
Perfection Salad
2 envelopes unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 can (12 oz) apple juice
1/2 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 cup shredded carrot
1 cup sliced celery
1 cup finely shredded cabbage
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
1 can (4 oz) chopped pimiento
Method: Combine gelatin, sugar, and salt in a small saucepan and mix well. Add 1 cup water. Heat over low heat, stirring constantly, until sugar and gelatine are dissolved. Remove from heat. Stir in apple juice, lemon juice, vinegar, and 1/4 cup cold water. Pour into medium bowl. Refrigerate 1 hour, or until mixture is consistency of unbeaten egg white.
Add carrot, celery, cabbage, green pepper, and pimiento; stir until well combined. Turn into decorative, 1 1/2-quart mold. Refrigerate 4 hours,or until firm.To unmold: Run small spatula around edge of mold; invert onto serving plate. Place hot dishcloth over mold; shake gently to release. Repeat, if necessary. Lift off mold. refrigerate until ready to serve.
Makes 8 servings.
*In another life, your correspondent was responsible for the writing in the “control” direct mailing to sign up customers for this recipe card continuity program, meaning many thousands of people bought in as a result of our efforts. Yummy!
Octopus Lentil Pesto Salad seems sophisticated and complicated, thanks to the dramatic combination of tastes and textures. But it comes together in just a few minutes when you have the core ingredients on hand. Serves 2 as an entree or 4 as part of a mezze platter.
Ingredients:
½ cup black or green lentils
1 c water or chicken stock
Kosher salt to taste
½ c broiled baby octopus, chopped
¼ c pesto
Your octopus dish won’t look as spectacular as this from L’Express in Montreal, but it won’t take hours to prepare either. Photo from Shawn on Foodspotting.
Method: cook lentils in water or stock until tender, about 15 minutes, adding more liquid if needed. Taste for seasoning and add salt as needed. Mix in pesto and set aside to let flavors blend as the salad cools to room temperature. Serve.
Broiled baby octopus is easy to make and a versatile addition to mezze, antipasto or appetizer combos (terminology defined by the cultural palette you’re using) as well as a distinctive and flavorful addition to a hearty salad. Rest assured that no actual baby octos are harmed in the preparation of this dish; the base ingredient is actually a smaller species of octopus that is also more tender than the big guys. Allow ¼ pound per person as a main, maybe half that as a combo of an appetizer platter.
Ingredients
1 lb baby octopus, cleaned by your fishmonger*
¼ c good olive oil
1 t fresh lemon juice
1 T dried oregano
½ t salt
Method: mix all the ingredients and marinate in refrigerator at least 8 hours, and as long as a day or two. Broil over a medium-hot heat source (you may need to use a finer mesh grill basket like this one to keep the octos from falling between the grates on your grill) 5 minutes, turning several times, until legs have lost their white color and curled up and charred somewhat. If your guests are squeamish, consider coarsely chopping the octopus so it won’t look like a real animal. Serve warm, at room temperature, cool or reheated.
*I’ve only encountered pre-cleaned baby octos, which have a small slit cut in the sac from which the guts are removed. Do the same yourself if you need to prep the product at home. (Do not go in through the mouth, as you would with a squid, but do remove the hard beak if there is one.)
Porchetta-Style Pork Loin Roast, sliced for serving
This Porchetta-Style Pork Loin Roast is a good way to enjoy the flavor profile of porchetta—primarily fennel and aromatic herbs—without the hassle of buying and rolling a whole pork belly (which we still have in our freezer, btw). We essentially followed Kenji’s All-Belly Porchetta recipe, modifying the amounts for a smaller piece of meat. The result was melt-in-your-mouth delicious, ideal for serving with applesauce or kraut or in a hot sandwich with some sharp cheese. Allow 1/4 lb per person.
Ingredients:
Boneless pork roast, approximately 3 lbs
2 T Kosher salt
1 t whole black peppercorns
2 t whole fennel seed
½ t crushed red pepper
3 garlic cloves, chopped fine
1 T fresh thyme leaves or 1 t dried thyme
1 T fresh rosemary leaves or 1 t dried rosemary
Method: rub in the salt all over both sides and the ends of the roast. Toast peppercorns and fennel in a skillet for 3 minutes or until aromatic; grind in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder. Mix with all other ingredients and rub into the roast on all sides.
Method 1: place the roast on a rack in a small pan and cook at 400 degrees for 30 minutes to crisp the surface, then turn down heat to 350 degrees for an additional hour. Allow to rest, then transfer to a serving plate and spoon juices over the top before slicing.
Sear pork roast after sous vide in a super hot cast iron skillet.
Method 2 (what we did, and recommend): seal the roast in a vacuum bag and sous vide at 140 degrees for the time recommended by your cooker for medium. (We cooked it for 6 hours.) Remove from bag, reserving liquid inside, and sear all sides in a very hot cast iron skillet. Transfer to a serving plate; add juices from bag to pan and cook down and spoon over the roast before serving.
Sous Vide in the Instant Pot Viva. Set for 140 degrees; water is 134.2 after two hours.
Can you do sous vide in the Instant Pot? Instant Pot, the company, is now making its own immersion circulator, with a design similar to the best-selling Anova. (Warning! Affiliate links!) You can purchase the giant Aura Pro Multicooker, whose 11 functions include a sous vide setting but not the smart pressure cooker technology that made the brand. But that’s not what we’re talking about. Question is, can you do sous vide in the original IP, the pressure cooker shaped like C3PO which has a sous vide button on some newer models?
We were skeptical but willing to find out, and Best Buy had a Black Friday sale on the Viva, a model with the sous vide function. (To give ourselves credit, that was not the only reason we purchased; our early edition Duo was getting long in the tooth and we wanted access to any upgraded functionality.) And we decided to give Instant Pot sous vide a shot using a boneless pork loin roast, a cut that is very forgiving of temperature variations.
Temperature variations, indeed! We set the Viva to 140 degrees for medium/medium rare but after a couple of hours the water bath was just under 135 degrees. A variation like that would be fatal for a more delicate dish, like soft boiled or coddled eggs. We then cranked the setting up to 145 for the rest of the cook time and got the delicious, tender, almost-white slices we were looking for. A related problem is that the IP doesn’t have any kind of a circulation system which, of course, is going to exacerbate those temperature variations because water next to the product you’re cooking, the wall of the pot or the weight you might need to hold down the sous vide bag is going to be a different temperature than the open water in the pot.
Here’s the finished product, after searing in a skillet and slicing to serve.
Our conclusion: technically, you can sous vide in the Instant Pot, but you shouldn’t. It’s a good way to ruin an expensive piece of meat and maybe create a health risk. About the only thing sillier is the commenter in the thread on this post who uses the IP’s inner pot by itself as a receptacle when sous viding with a Joule circulator. Well, maybe that’s not fair (although there wouldn’t be much room for the food product after you mount the circulator on the side), but it shows the lengths to which IP fanatics will go to use their device for every meal.
Food of Sichuan: Fuchsia Dunlop with her fish-fragrant eggplant. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
We received The Food of Sichuan for Christmas and discovered that, rather than an entirely new book, it is “a new updated version of the classic Land of Plenty”. If you didn’t get the older book on our recommendation, you should almost certainly purchase the new one instead. It has excellent pictures of almost every dish, and the author says there are 70 new recipes plus 12 reworks of old recipes. (That’s according to the Fuchsia Dunlop page on Facebook, which is well worth following.)
We were heartened by the change to fu qi fei pian/man-and-wife meat slices (p 178 in the old book, 97 in the new one). Flank steak has been replaced by a beef shank/tripe combo (two meats in harmony, echoing the relationship of the partners who came up with the original version in Chengdu) which is a huge upgrade and makes us realize this is the basis of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a similar dish at one of our favorite local Sichuan places. Hopefully there are similar improvements throughout.
However, we did find tweaks that we’re not sure we agree with and Dunlop does not include all of them in her short list of reworks. Si chuan pao cai/pickled vegetables (p 71 in the old book, 420 in the new one) has lost its star anise and “strong rice wine or vodka” has given way to “strong Chinese baiju grain liquor” which may be difficult to find stateside. There are likely other variations like this and it would be nearly impossible to identify all of them because the organization of the books is completely different and the index for Food of Sichuan is very non-intuitive. (There is no table of contents.)
If you have taken a deep dive into Land of Plenty and fallen in love with the flavor profiles, then you are one of the few who maybe shouldn’t upgrade. Otherwise, get the new book. It’s a better value with more recipes plus the photos, and the revised recipes are almost certain to be delicious. Check it out.
Conch Fritters made it onto our bucket list during a long-ago visit to Key West. They were on the menus everywhere, and we couldn’t afford them. So when we recently found (probably frozen and defrosted) conch (pronounced “konk”) meat at our local Asian market, we had to try making conch fritters at home. Do take the extra trouble to prepare the tangy dipping sauce, which comes from this site. Makes 2 entrée or 4 appetizer portions.
Ingredients:
Peanut or other oil for deep-frying
1 c conch meat (about half a pound), chopped into ½ cubes*
¾ c all-purpose flour
1 egg, lightly beaten
½ cup milk
½ t baking powder
¼ t ground cayenne pepper
¾ t Kosher salt
¼ ground black pepper
½ c onion, chopped
¾ c mixed green and red bell pepper (or all of one or the other), diced
½ c celery (about 1 big stalk), diced
2 or more garlic cloves, chopped fine
For the dipping sauce:
2 T ketchup
2 T fresh lime juice
2 T mayonnaise
1 t Tabasco sauce
Kosher salt, to taste
ground black pepper, to taste
The “necks” of conch meat tend to be a bit chewy, so be sure to chop in small cubes.
Method: Heat oil to 375 degrees. Combine milk and egg then add baking powder, cayenne, black pepper and salt. Mix thoroughly then add flour and stir till well-blended. Add conch, bell pepper, onion, celery and garlic and stir till evenly distributed in the batter.
Using a tablespoon or small scoop, drop spoonfuls of batter into the hot oil, taking care not to crowd them and using the spoon to keep them from sticking together. Cook about 4 minutes until the fritters are nicely browned but not dark. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Repeat until all the batter is used up.
Mix the dipping sauce ingredients and serve with the fritters immediately, or after leftover fritters have been reheated in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes. Do not microwave leftovers.
*Conch has a pleasant but mild flavor, so you could substitute chopped shrimp, clams or scallops and come out with an equally tasty product.
Guerrilla Seafood Taco made with hamachi crudo and uni on The Chef Show (screenshot; play arrow will not work)
Chef friend Brady Duhame suggested we watch The Chef Show. After dumpster-diving half a dozen episodes, we can see why. The interactions of Roy Choi, Jon Favreau and guest chefs are packed with good kitchen technique and preparation tips we can learn from, and the celebrity guests are a bonus (and sometimes a distraction) rather than the main event.
The show is a spinoff of the 2014 movie Chef, in which Favreau plays a guess-what who quits his restaurant job because of a conflict with his boss, has a personal crisis, then finds happiness operating a food truck. Roy Choi was an advisor on that show and now is the active driver of The Chef Show, but Faveau turns out to have quite a few kitchen chops as well. (All puns intended.) The fact is, not all great chefs are great philosophers we want to hear pontificating onscreen and not all celebrities are amusing when playing with food. If you are going to do a serious cooking show with personalities, this is the way to go.
In the kitchen at Guerrilla Tacos with chef Wes Avila, Rob Choi and Jon Favreau
We’d recommend you start with the three-episode sequence Pizzana/Guerilla Tacos/Hog Island in Season 1/Volume 2 then, for comic relief, watch Episode 1 of Volume 2 in which Roy Choi appears to be putting us on. He demonstrates perhaps the worst veg prep skills you’re likely to see from a CIA grad, and berates the others for using “big” chef’s knives rather than the little tiny knife he’s holding. (The guest this episode is Seth Rogen, which may explain the general atmosphere of befuddlement.)
The show has a website which offers recipes from the episodes but there are tantalizingly few of them. However, there’s a frame in each show where all the ingredients appear as part of an annoying animation, so you can screenshot it, copy the ingredients, then make the recipe using the very good in-show demonstration. The Chef Show is well worth your time. Check it out.
Cake cookies, front left, made with corn cookie batter; corn cookies upper right
Our cake cookies are not made from cake mix like this appealing recipe, but actual leftover cake of the type that is often found around the holidays. It’s best to use a cake with some body to it or else a cake that has been sitting around and dried out. Not sure what to do if it has frosting: scrape it off, or leave it and see what happens. Makes 20-24 cake cookies.
Ingredients:
1 recipe Cristina Tosi’s Corn Cookies batter or equivalent containing egg and a good amount of butterfat
1 to 1 1/2 c leftover cake (we used a walnut cinnamon coffee cake)
Method: prepare cookie batter according to directions in a rotary mixer. (If you’re using the corn cookie recipe you could substitute regular cornmeal for the ground-up freeze dried corn). Crumble cake into the bowl of batter and mix on first speed until well combined, a minute or two. You can add as much cake as you point up to the point where the dough is about to pull apart because it can’t absorb any more crumbs.
Use a quarter cup measure (or guesswork) to form finished batter into balls. Place these on a half sheet pan lined with silicone pad or parchment paper, then press down to flatten tops (we use a second sheet pan for this). Wrap well with plastic wrap and refrigerate until stiff, ideally overnight.
To bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare a second lined half sheet pan and distribute the cookie balls over the two sheets with good separation between then. Bake for 22 minutes, checking to make sure they don’t burn. When done the cookies should be crisp around the edges and slightly soft in the middle. Rest on the pans until they firm up, then transfer to wire rack and cool completely. Will keep up to 5 days covered at room temperature, or a month or two in the freezer.
We received 
