Stir-Fried Plums with Carrots and Red Cabbage

Hey, I'm back!

A lot has happened since the end of August. We moved (end result=bigger kitchen - hooray!), and then I lost the cable that connects my camera to my computer. Not that that's a sufficient excuse for not posting this recipe until now, since I took the pictures back in... July? Whenever plums are in season. Anyway, here's to more frequent posting.
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I have come into a million plums from someone at work who has a plum tree and keeps bringing them in. I think I will have to eat several for breakfast, then make a couple of pans of crisp when I get home, just to make sure I use them all. It's great! And these plums are gorgeous (see below).

Last night, I made a plum cake (which is now gone). Tonight, I thought I'd try to use them in a savory context. Our produce drawer is running low on veggies at the moment, but the plums at least get us in the same general section of the nutrition pyramid - right??

Yeah, I think so. Anyway, here's what I used:

• 2-3T oil (enough to cover part of the bottom of a medium-large non-stick skillet
• 1/4 small onion, halved and sliced into thin strips (if you magically have shallot on hand, that would probably be cooler)
• 1 boneless chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces (freezing it for 10-20 minutes makes it easier to cut, IMHO)
• 2 carrots, sliced diagonally
• 4 garlic cloves, sliced
• handful chopped red cabbage
• 3 plums (I used the little Italian ones), sliced into eighths
• enough cooked dried udon noodles (fresh are even more delicious, though!) to serve 2-3. I had planned on this being only enough for dinner, but as it turned out I had leftovers for lunch the next day.
• 2 T soy sauce
• splash of sherry, if you have it
• 1 T brown sugar
• 1 T roasted red chili paste (I use the "Taste of Thai" stuff)
• lime wedges for garnish (you could splash a little vinegar in at the end, instead)

1) First, heat up the oil in the skillet to a pretty extreme medium/medium-high. Then fry the onion for several minutes, stirring a lot, until it is nicely browned. Browner than you usually want your onions. Scoop the onions out into a bowl to save for later, but leave as much oil as you can in the pan.

2) Reduce heat to medium, add chicken to skillet, and cook until no longer pink. Add garlic slices and cook for 30 seconds or so.

3) Add soy sauce, sherry, brown sugar, and roasted red chili paste. If everything is way too smoking hot, you can add some water too, to buy you some time. Cook for a couple of minutes or until it's all melted into a kind of sauce.

4) Add carrots and stir-fry for a minute or so (depending on how thinly they are sliced). Add plums and red cabbage and stir-fry briefly just to coat them with the sauce, and to warm them. Don't let the plums get too mushy.


5) Stir the reserved cooked onions back into the pan. Add the cooked udon noodles to the pan, and stir to combine.

6) Serve with lime wedges, if you have them. If not, put a little splash of vinegar (rice vinegar would be good) in the dish before serving.

Ribollita with Rosemary Croutons

Here's another oldie. We made this a couple of months ago. Ah, well.



My coworker brings me her old "FoodDay" inserts from The Oregonian when she's done with them, and that's where I found this recipe. It's actually a quartet of recipes: the end product is the ribollita (and no, I had no idea what a ribollita was before I made it), but you also get "Tuscan White Beans," "Spicy Garlic and Herb Oil," and "Rosemary Croutons" out of this article. I didn't make the oil - I like regular old extra-virgin just fine and didn't have the counter space.

The Matthew Card article (link above) describes ribollita as "a rib-sticking minestra, or thick stew, of white beans, vegetables, hearty kale and stale bread flavored with great lashings of garlic, pancetta and fruity olive oil." Hmmm... you had me at "stew." And then again at "kale." And a third time at "great lashings of garlic." Basically, I'm a sucker for everything in this dish.



Here's the recipe for the Tuscan White Beans. Of course, you could also just use white beans, but they were really flavorful made this way.

Ingredients
2 to 3 ounces pancetta, minced [I just used two strips of bacon from the freezer. Tasted great]
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium red onion, diced fine
1 large carrot, diced fine
½ large fennel bulb, cored and diced fine, or 1 stalk celery, diced fine [I used celery. As much as I want to, I just don't like the taste of fresh fennel].
Pinch crushed red pepper flakes
Pinch fennel seeds
Salt
1 pound Great Northern beans, sorted and soaked in water overnight
1 head garlic, top ⅛ cut off to expose cloves
1 bay leaf
6 cups chicken broth and/or water
Granulated sugar (if necessary)
Garnishes
Extra-virgin olive oil
Coarse sea salt
Grated Vella Monterey jack or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese[Carrina's note: or Parmesan from the green can]

Instructions
Combine pancetta and olive oil in a large Dutch oven set over medium-high heat and cook until pancetta has rendered its fat, 3 to 5 minutes. Add onion, carrot, fennel or celery, red pepper flakes, fennel seeds and large pinch salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until beginning to brown and sticking to bottom of pot, 12 to 15 minutes. Stir in beans, garlic head, bay leaf, and broth and/or water; bring to boil, then reduce heat to low and simmer, partially covered, until beans are soft and tender (adding additional liquid as necessary to cover), 1½ to 2 hours.



Remove garlic and bay leaf from pot. Discard bay leaf. When cool enough to handle, squeeze garlic cloves from papery skins, mash to paste with back of knife, and stir into beans. Adjust seasoning to taste with salt and a pinch of sugar, if needed. Serve with desired garnishes.

And now come the rosemary croutons:
Ingredients
Half to three-quarters of a stale baguette or rustic loaf, cut into ¾-inch cubes (3 to 5 cups)
3 to 4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 sprig rosemary or sage
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
Instructions
Place bread in large bowl and toss cubes with enough water to make bread soft, moist and pliable, but not crumbly. Squeeze bread and drain excess water from bowl.

Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat until just shimmering. Reduce temperature to medium, add bread and rosemary sprig,

and cook, stirring infrequently, until bread cubes are lightly browned, 7 to 10 minutes (you may need to use spatula to scrape any stuck-on bits of bread free). Remove rosemary and season bread generously with salt and pepper.

And now, the ribollita!
Ingredients
Salt
1 large bunch lacinato kale, stemmed, rinsed and chopped coarsely
½ to ¾ cup diced canned tomatoes, drained
4 to 6 cups Tuscan White Beans (see accompanying recipe)
3 or more cups Rosemary Croutons (see accompanying recipe)
Garnishes
Spicy Garlic and Herb Oil (see accompanying recipe) or extra-virgin olive oil
Lemon wedges
Coarse salt
Crushed red pepper flakes
Grated dry Vella Monterey jack or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
Instructions
Bring large pot of water to boil over high heat and season liberally with salt.

Add kale and cook until tender, 5 to 7 minutes. Drain and cool under running water. Squeeze dry and chop coarsely.
Heat tomatoes and beans in Dutch oven set over medium heat to slow simmer (add splash of broth or water if necessary to loosen consistency). Stir in greens and croutons to combine. Divide equally among bowls and drizzle liberally with olive oil or Spicy Garlic and Herb Oil, and serve with other desired garnishes.

Noodle Bowl #4 - brown sugar-roasted green beans and celery

I don't feel like I've been in the kitchen any less than usual, but it seems like every time I reach for the camera to record the haps, it's either out of juice or MIA. Nevertheless, I've accumulated some acceptable pictures over month since my last posting, so here's my plan for hopping back on the weblog-wagon: immediately post 4 or 5 things that I made back in April, then rest on my laurels for another week until I feel like posting again (unless my camera is magically within reach and charged when I make this rhubarb chutney tomorrow - mmm... so good on lamb!)

So, here's another episode of "Pimp My Ramen" (hey, I kind of like that...). This time around, I had some old leathery green beans and just a teensy bit of baby celery, from the very inside of the group of stalks.

I smashed the heck out of some ginger, as is my routine... (mainly sharing this picture because my Ikea meat mallet looks like something out of one of my husband's role-playing games):

I tossed the celery and green beans in some vegetable oil, brown sugar, salt, and five-spice powder... (green beans not shown here)

...and roasted them at 450 for a few minutes - until I could tell that they'd been roasted, but they weren't blackened or anything.

...Stuck them in with the already-simmering water/chicken broth combo (the smashed garlic, ginger, and a star anise have already made it into the broth at this point as well)

...And from here, it's just a matter of following the instructions of Maruchan or Top Ramen, depending on who was on sale last time I stocked up: Boil noodles for three minutes, and serve!

No, we don't actually eat on the windowsill. It's just the only place in the apartment with good light.

Noodle Bowl #3 - Mustard Greens

Can I just say that I don't think I'll ever get sick of noodle bowls? They're the only thing I'm in the mood for on Saturday afternoons, and this week I realized that they also have the side benefit of helping me use up unruly produce that is just threatening to get slimey before I get to it.

That said, I don't really expect anyone else to share my interest in the whole thing. But since I've started taking pictures of them, I think I'll just keep doing it. I'll try to title the posts appropriately, so that anyone reading knows it's not an actual recipe.

I had some turkey lemongrass broth, left over from this recipe, sitting in my freezer for the last 4 months. Honestly, I had forgotten to label it and so wasn't sure if it was chicken broth, or turkey lemongrass. When its thawed scent revealed it to be the latter, I used it for a noodle bowl. Yay!

I used:
-2 cups broth
-1/2 teaspoon five-spice powder
-dash soy sauce
-a few drops Sriracha or some other spicy ingredient
-a few drops dark sesame oil
-1 carrot, peeled and sliced thin diagonally
-about 2 cups chopped mustard greens
-1 green onion, chopped
-1 wedge lime, squeezed (or dash seasoned rice vinegar)

Instructions:
Bring broth to a boil. Add five-spice powder, sesame oil, Sriracha, soy sauce, and carrots, and simmer for 3-4 minutes. Return to a non-spilling-over boil, and ramen, and cook for two minutes. Stir in mustard greens and cook for another minute or until wilted. Pour into deep bowl. Squeeze lime into bowl (or splash with rice vinegar). Sprinkle with green onion.

Kimchi!

My kimchi had it all - it was spicy and salty, with just a hint of scandal!

...Daikon radishes!

Now, I know next to nothing about kimchi. All I know is that Big Kahuna's BBQ in St Johns offers it as a condiment for their saimin (Haiwaiian-style noodle soup - I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that's the quick description), and when we lived in St Johns, I learned to like both - a lot. It's spicy, crunchy, tangy, salty, and a teensy bit sweet.

I'll now cut straight to the Wikipedia definition, so I don't screw it up: Kimchi is "a traditional Korean pickled dish made of vegetables with varied seasonings. Its most common manifestation is the spicy baechu (cabbage) variety. Kimchi is the most common banchan, or side dish. Kimchi is also a common ingredient and combined with other ingredients to make dishes such as kimchi stew (kimchi jjigae) and kimchi fried rice (kimchi bokkeumbap)."

I saw some big, beautiful daikon radishes on sale at the store a couple of weeks ago. I don't really like radishes, but I had read that daikons are sometimes used in different varieties of kimchi, and seeing them reminded me that I'd wanted to try making kimchi. So, I picked up a bundle... of three. Huge. Radishes.

When I got home and looked up some kimchi recipes online, I discovered that just to get by with basics (so leaving aside powdered dried shrimp and all that good stuff for the moment), I'd also need Napa cabbage, onion, ginger, and garlic, and maybe some bottled kimchi paste. In fact, it sounded like the daikons were a bonus, and actually turn the kimchi into a different variety. In other words, you can make kimchi with cabbage or radishes (or cucumber, etc.) as the only crunchy veggie - you don't have to have both. The recipes also called for a Korean red pepper powder called kochukaru, but since I started this insane quest on a Sunday, it seemed that all of the groceries that might have sold it were closed, and I wasn't about to trek across the river to Uwajimaya (though it was tempting - maybe next time!). So, I ended up using regular ol' red chili powder, and while I am the first to admit that the result was not identical to the bliss I experienced at Big Kahuna's, it was still better than I expected.

Much like my recent experience with shepherd's pie, I was nervous about putting all of my recipe eggs in one basket. So, I went back and forth between two recipes I found online: this one and this one.

I used:

• 2 large Napa cabbages, quartered and chopped into a combination of 1/2-inch little ribbons, and little squares. It's okay if the cabbage doesn't all look the same. It should definitely be a meatier cut than for coleslaw, though.
• 2 large daikon radishes
• 6 cloves garlic
• 3-inch knob ginger
• 1/2 large onion
• 1 cup red chili powder
• 1.5 cups sea salt or regular salt, plus extra for the first step
• 1.5 tablespoons kimchi base (I found a brand called Momoya at Fubonn)

Instructions (again, these are cobbled together from the two sources whose links I included above):

1. Place the cabbage pieces into a couple of gallon-sized bags, layer by layer, sprinkling a fair amount of salt between layers. So basically, add some cabbage to a bag. Reach your hand into the bag to sprinkle salt over all the cabbage. Repeat 2 or 3 times for each bag. You will probably use about 1/4-1/2 cup of salt total.

2. Let the cabbage and salt sit in the bags for a couple of hours (one of the recipes I read asks for the cabbage to sit for 5 hours. I found another one that asks for it to sit for 12 hours. I may try this next time, but I was doing this on a Monday night! I hedged my bets with 2.5 hours). Shake the bags around a couple of times.

3. While the cabbage is resting in the salt, prepeare the other ingredients: fine-chop the onion, mince (or press) the garlic and ginger, and peel and chop the radishes into 1/2-inch cubes.

4. Dump the cabbage from both bags into a colander and rinse really, really well.

5. Mix the chili powder, remaining salt, kimchi base, ginger, garlic, and about 1/2 cup of water together in a bowl. You may need to add more water - it should be sauce-y when it's all mixed up.

6. Dump the rinsed cabbage, onion, and radishes into a bowl big enough to hold everything when it's getting tossed around. Add the pepper sauce to the bowl, and stir, stir, stir!

Now comes the uncertain (for me, because I don't know any kimchi experts, or if I do they haven't revealed themselves) part.

I'm pretty sure the mixture needs to be fully immersed in liquid in order to ferment/pickle. My mixture didn't contain enough liquid as it was, so when I spooned it into the three containers I used, I added a little more water, salt, and kimchi base to each container and stirred the heck out of it until the mixture was pretty much covered in liquid.

Then, I crossed my fingers and let the containers sit on the counter for two days.

And, a week later...

Hey, it's pretty good! (below is a picture with flash - the red color shows up a little better). I stirred it into a noodle soup I made for dinner one night. It gave the soup the perfect amount of kick!