Spicy Rice Cake Soup, Others

An initial attempt at cooking Friday led to rotisserie chicken from the grocer and a Pixar movie. The next night, after a long day of climbing, scrambling, and exploring up the coast, nothing seemed like a better idea than cooking what we didn't the previous night. A recipe from Momofuku was picked, entailing blanching and peeling a pint of cherry tomatoes. Mayhaps a poor idea given the exhaustion from a long day, but the idea we went with. The salad was a take on caprese, with silken tofu providing a base. Served with rye soda bread, miso butter, and soft boiled eggs it made an interesting snack. You can find a photo lower in the post; below this, however, is the title of the post.

I decided, somewhat accidentally, on a new take of a previous dish. This time, the soup would be more of a soup and the cauliflower on the side. The idea was to take a tomato-basil soup, provide the creaminess with silken tofu instead of dairy, and throw in grilled rice cakes for the hell of it. I ate it with two quick side dishes - blanched snow pea with rice vinegar and quick sweet pickles - and the mentioned cauliflower. The sides were, frankly, somewhat conflicting with the soup and I wouldn't recommend them. But the soup itself - yes. To further confuse the reader is a photo of the previous night's dinner of salad and toast.

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Spicy Rice Cake Soup

Serves 2-ish

2/3 cup uncooked sushi rice + water

12 oz silken tofu

1 large heirloom tomato (or maybe 6-12 oz canned tomato)

1/2 cup water

2 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp sesame oil

spiciness to taste (sriracha, dried cayenne, fresh jalapeno, anything really)

several leaves basil

Cook the sushi rice per instructions - rinse thoroughly, heat to boil, cook covered until the water is gone, fluff the rice and let sit covered for 10 minutes. After the rest, put the rice in a bowl to cool. Do some prep-work on sides if you want. When the rice is cooled, use a wet spoon or your fist to mash it into a pulp. With a spoon, use the back to smear sections along the side of the bowl, doing this until you get something like a paste or get tired. With wet hands, form it into a log and set aside.

Prepare the soup. In a saucepan, add the water, mirin, and sesame oil. Heat to a boil and let reduce for a minute - consider adding onions or garlic before, but I didn't. Add the tomato, mushed, to the soup - try and avoid adding skin as it will add texture, but a little bit is fine. Simmer for another minute or so, then add tofu and spiciness. Reduce heat to low. Prepare a cast iron over medium heat with a bit of oil. Slice the rice cake into patties and grill until browned on both sides, about 5 minutes total. Split soup between bowls, add the rice cakes to each, and top with torn basil (or basil chiffonade if you want to be fancy).

Roasted Cauliflower & Grilled Rice Soup

Have you ever tasted an ingredient and thought to yourself "where have you been all my life"? Have you ever had mirin? Go ahead, Wikipedia it. I even gave you the link. It is sugar and booze, rice wine specifically. And, at least in the dish I made for dinner, delicious. The impetus for trying this was, of course, the Momofuku cookbook I received as a gift. I went to the store knowing I needed mirin and sushi rice, and had remembered something with fish sauce and cauliflower or brussels and silken tofu.

My memory failed me - there was something with fish sauce and cauliflower, and also something with silken tofu and sushi rice, but it was not the same recipe. So I improvised and ended up with what could only be described as a matzo ball soup that took a red eye from New York to Tokyo and dealt with its debilitating fear of flying by getting absolutely smashed and waking up in the seedy underbelly of Tokyo with no clue how it got there.

Or, as I called it in the title, Roasted Cauliflower & Grilled Rice Soup. You may or may not want to cook this; you could probably make a great meal out of it (instead of a delicious but incredibly mis-matched one) by removing the cauliflower/fish sauce and substituting some pickled carrots and more flavor in the tofu.

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No formal recipe here, only an ingredient list and prep. Part of this (the cauliflower) is because it is mostly ripped from a cookbook and the other part (sauce for the rice) is that I didn't measure. But, yes, the meal.

The cauliflower was tossed in oil and salt then roasted until it started to brown. Afterwards, it was tossed in the fish sauce vinaigrette from Momofuku. The recipe was supposed to have other things, like toasted puffed rice, fried cilantro leaves, etc. I ignored all of that.

The grilled rice patties were formed by cooking some sushi rice and then beating it into a pulp - first with a spoon then, when I realized the futility of that, with my hand. Make sure you let the rice cool a bit (so you don't get burned) and keep your hand a little wet (so the sushi rice doesn't stick to you) if going this route.

After getting the rice pulpy, form it into a cylinder with wet hands and put it in the fridge for a few minutes to chill while you prep the sauce. I didn't measure anything, really, so these are my guesstimates: 5 parts mirin, 2 parts sesame oil, 1 part sriracha, a dash of soy sauce, and a clump of black sesame seeds. After mixing the sauce, heat a bit of oil in a pan over medium-high. Remove the rice cylinder from the fridge and cut into pucks.

Throw into the pan and sear/sautee until they have developed some golden-ness on one side, then flip over and repeat. Once both sides are looking a little browned, turn down the heat to medium-low, let the pan cool down a bit, and throw in the sauce, tossing to coat.

All of this was served in a bowl of silken tofu, vigorously stirred with a spoon then heated until it began to separate slightly, about five minutes.

Something Like Bento

I've been trying to cook more, well, defined meals recently. The easiest way to do this is via a recipe, which usually don't make their way to this soapbox. The desire stems from my limited cooking vernacular; E ribs me about cooking "Mikey food" so often yet, without a recipe, that is the extent of my ability. Cook veggies so they are tasty? Sure, saute and season, maybe bake. Cook tofu? Sure, saute and season, maybe bake. So, to fix that. More recipes, more adventurous cooking. And, so, I bring you... Mikey food. Whoops.

While, yes, it is just cooked veggies, each bit was prepared individually, allowing me to play around with a whole four different preps in a single dish. The squash has rice vinegar and cayenne, the apple a mustard seed/sesame oil/rice vinegar dressing, the mushrooms soy sauce, and the rice furikake. I admit, none of that is very inventive, but it was a nice platform for experimenting.

The squash prep was probably the most involved; thinly sliced squash tossed in a bit of olive oil, cooked over medium without flipping or stirring until they became a little translucent. Sprinkle some cayenne over the pan, flip everything, add a dash of rice vinegar, and stir a bit. The mushrooms were equally simple - after the squash was out of the pan, the mushrooms went in until they started to sweat, at which point they were splashed with soy sauce, stirred a few times, and taken off heat.

The apple dressing is approximately 1 tsp coarse mustard, 1 tsp rice vinegar, and 1/2 tsp sesame oil. The proportions were easy but far from perfect; the main flavor was mustard seed. The egg was an attempt at soft boiling; the egg was too fresh, so I mostly destroyed it in removing the shell.

Commissioning a Supper in C

I got a cold, which sucks. Though, in my search for non-orange sources of vitamin C, interesting facts were learned. Such as: a single red bell pepper has 2-3 times as much vitamin C as a single orange. A good fact to know; bell peppers can have hummus on them, oranges not so much. Bell peppers easily go in most cooked dinners, oranges not so much. Bell peppers taste good, oranges not so much. So; a dinner. It should contain red bell peppers and be warm, those being my only constraints. I went with a slightly-modified standard of my college days - Spanish rice. It defied all earthly descriptions.

Too many times I've burned my Spanish rice due to poor pots and improper heat; I finally found a way around that. I cooked everything in a pan, stirring constantly, instead of in a pot with the lid in. I used arborio rice, which you can probably find at your local upscale grocery store or any place with a wide grain selection. It's the rice you would use for risotto. You can also substitute other beans in this recipe for garbanzo, or leave them out entirely - if so, use some vegetable or chicken broth in place of the bean liquid. A perfect dish for a cold, much better than the canned soup I had for lunch; warm and golden, like an oven that's wide open.

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Spanish Rice and Beans

Serves 1

1/3 cup arborio rice

1 small (8 oz) can garbanzo beans

1 cup liquid consisting of all the bean juice + water to top it off

1 red pepper, diced

1 flavorful and soft (heirloom) tomato, chopped into 8+ pieces

dash cinnamon

dash cumin

dash ground ginger

rosemary for garnish

In a pan, heat a bit of olive oil over medium-low. Add in the diced bell pepper and cook for 5 minutes. While that is cooking, separate out the bean liquid from the beans themselves and add enough water to get a cup of liquid. Add rice to the pan and sautee for a minute before adding 1/4 or 1/3 of the liquid, the tomato, and all the seasoning but the rosemary. Stir constantly; don't let it boil, though it should be hot enough that if you were to stop stirring it would boil. Once all the liquid is absorbed, pour in half the remaining liquid. Continue stirring; once all of that liquid has been absorbed, add in the beans and the rest of the liquid, cooking until all is absorbed. Top with rosemary and serve; to your nephew you can give it as a present.

You may need to (or choose to) add more liquid; this will make it more of a risotto. If you go this route, you will want to add more flavor; either in the form of butter, more tomato, or stock of some sort.

Kale (not at all) Bibimbap

Continuing my week of destroying Asian dishes by using kale (yesterday I did it to sushi, tomorrow I'm going to cancel the trend of destroying them with kale because I'm now out of kale), I've moved a bit west to Korea. I get Korean food cravings every now and then, which is hampered by a lack of good Korean food in SF. Specifically, dolsot bibimbap. While my dining companions are getting their fill of sundubu jjigae, I'm patiently waiting for my egg and rice to crust-up on a hot stone bowl. Well, I don't have a hot stone bowl at home, so I'll have to settle for bibimbap. Except not really, because I'm busy destroying regional cuisines.

This dish can only barely be called "bibimbap". "Influenced by" might be a better term, but maybe I'm better off just not mentioning the inspiring dish. For one, my dinner lacked cucumber, bean sprouts, mushrooms, and basically all of the signature veggies you expect to find. It did have the signature egg, the spicy chile sauce, and seaweed. Still, a far cry from the real thing. Also it had avocado because, hey, who doesn't love it? The flavors were mostly right, given my massive substitutions, and I'd file this under "easy" as far as prep goes. So why not give it a shot the next time you've got some lacinato kale?

You could definitely add some sauteed sprouts and mushrooms to the recipe below, and optionally some tofu. I've also suggested you eat it with lots of banchan. I didn't have any, so I just had some amazing hummus and chips. Not traditionally a Korean side, but it will do in a pinch.

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Kale Bibimbap

Serves 2 (assuming a healthy selection of banchan)

2/3 cups rice

2 eggs

5-10 leaves of lacinato (dino) kale

1/2 red onion

1 small, ripe avocado

1 tsp rice vinegar

1 tsp olive oil

furikake (or other form of seaweed/fish flavoring)

lime juice

sriracha (or other form of spicy chili paste)

salt

honey

Cook the rice as per the cooking instructions. When the rice has about 10 minutes to go, dice the red pepper and cut the kale into strips, widthwise. Put in a frying pan with a dash of olive oil over high heat. After 5 minutes, add in a small amount of the following: lime juice, sriracha, honey, rice vinegar, and a dash of salt. Continue stirring until it looks mostly cooked, then remove from heat.

When the rice is done, add in 1 tsp rice vinegar and 1 tsp olive oil, plus a small pinch furikake and stir. Put rice into 2 bowls and split the kale and onion mixture between them; garnish with sliced avocado. In a frying pan over medium-high, crack in the two eggs. Fry them as to your liking, preferably leaving the yoke runny. When you think they are cooked enough, immediately (but carefully, so as to no break the yoke), place an egg on top of each bowl. Add a dash of furikake on top of the egg for a visual garnish. Eat immediately, breaking the egg and stirring everything together.

Lazy Spanish Rice

Spanish rice is one of those dishes I grew up with that I don't like cooking due to time involvement, but would love to eat every day. And the few times I've tried it recently have ended in scorched rice, or worse. The proper way, or at least the way I learned, is to replace 1/2 cup of water with 1 cup of tomato paste when cooking rice, and to cook it very slowly. Think an hour or more. Plus seasonings, etc, but the important part is cooking it covered for an hour. Stirring - that is the hard part for me to remember.

I was feeling a little lazy about my dinner plans; I had wanted to do an oven-bake involving butter beans, tomato paste, and cauliflower, but work interfered and I had about 30 minutes to cook dinner before I began gnawing off my arm. So, lazy dinner. I ended up creating a very hearty thing - it was somewhere in the spanish rice/jambalaya family, but could have easily moved in the direction of a soup. And it was pretty damn tasty.

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Lazy Spanish Rice

Feeds 2 (great for leftovers)

~40 minutes

2/3 cup uncooked rice

1 can butter beans

1 red onion, chopped

Enough water for the rice + 2/3 cup additional

8 oz can of tomato paste (not sauce, paste)

2 tsp white wine vinegar

1 tsp + splash olive oil

Dash of cumin

Dash of dill weed

Dash of chili flakes (optional)

Start cooking the rice, adding 1 tsp of olive oil and 1 tsp of white wine vinegar to the water. Assuming your rice takes 30 minutes to cook, 15 minutes after starting it place the red onion in a large frying pan with a splash of olive oil and cook for 5 minutes. At this point, I added the 2/3 cup water and steamed cauliflower in the pot (which I removed before adding the rest). If you don't want to steam a veggie, you can add the water and let simmer over low.

Once the rice is about to finish, add the tomato paste, spices, and second tsp of vinegar to the onion and water mixture, stirring to mix it all together. Add the rice and beans and cook on medium-low until you either think it is done, or get too hungry and just call it done. This varies, but should take about 5-10 minutes.

Some Easy Meals

Some days, I feel like cooking an epic feast; spending an hour or more in the kitchen, chasing down exotic ingredients, and cleaning a myriad of dishes. Other days, I just want some rice with tasty stuff on it and to play videogames. Friday was one of those lazy days. The request for dinner was "something with crunchy vegetables" and, if you ever get that request and are feeling a bit lazy, have I got the meal for you. Prepares in the time it takes too cook rice plus 5 more minutes, only dirties a pot and a cutting board beyond what you eat with (and if you eat out of the pot, I won't blame you), and is good as leftovers. I present: crunchy vegetables over rice!

The recipe is at the end of this post, but the basic idea I had in my head was "some vegetables that are crunchy and good cold plus some rice plus some seasoning". I managed to find fresh, organic carrots and broccoli plus some fresh (but not organic) snap peas. That plus my go-to asian seasonings of sesame oil, soy sauce, and furikake makes a pretty good meal over cold rice. Some people disagreed and said it should be warmed with more seasoning. It turns out some people were right.

I also tried something new with my tried-and-true vegan pancakes - cornmeal. Lessons I should have learned from previous uses of cornmeal: it does not substitute 1-for-1 with flour. It is something more like 1 cup of flour --> 1.5 cups of cornmeal if you don't adjust the liquid. They came out a little gummy and not very cornmealy; next time I'll up the cornmeal amount (and I've done so in the recipe below). They still managed to be completely delicious if a bit weird on the tooth.