My shrimp pasta – called “seafood pasta” at the house – has been a dinner staple for several years. I make it using the same methodology as my chicken alfredo recipe…but with seafood.
For the pasta, we’ve been using De Boles penne pasta, mostly because we haven’t found any other brand of rice pasta in our local markets. It’s not bad, but it is really hard to get a good, consistent level of tenderness. If we happen upon any other brand I’ll be sure to pass on the results.
I finally broke down and had myself some macaroni and cheese. It’s one of my favorite dishes, mostly because it transports me back to my childhood nearly every time. I decided to try out Annie’s rice pasta version, and it wasn’t bad. Really.
Today’s recipe is a quickie, mostly because I’ve written so much about fried rice already. Regardless, I though it was time to introduce nasi goreng (“fried rice” in Indonesian/Malay), one of my favorite fried rice dishes, to the world.
Nasi goreng is different from other fried rices in that it uses shrimp paste/powder (“terasi” in Indonesian, “belacan” in Malay, and could be labeled as either in the store), chilies, and a little palm sugar. The result is a taste that is pungent, spicy and sweet all at the same time. The traditional recipe uses “kecap manis” – a sweet soy sauce used in Southeast Asia – but I think that there’s enough sweetness in the palm sugar alone so I stuck with my tamari/aminos combo.
This recipe is similar to my original ribs recipe, but with spare ribs instead of baby back ribs, and with more ingredients in the braising liquid. It resulted in a rich, complex meaty taste.
The first thing you’ll probably notice right off the bat is that spare ribs aren’t very nice looking. “Spare ribs” is a phrase used for the lower ribs, which aren’t particularly evenly cut. That’s the sacrifice one makes for getting cheaper ribs! The ribs I used in my recipe were pre-cut but you may have to cut them yourself. Also, spare ribs are usually home to a bunch of pieces of cartilage, which some people find unappealing; personally, I like to dig around the ribs and find them.
I don’t write about breakfast much but I thought I should do a real quick post on my typical starting meal.
On weekdays, I generally focus on three items that I take to work: meat, cheese, and fruit. Breakfast is the only time of day that I actively eat fruit, one or two pieces a day. I tend to eat applesauce, berries, plum, or kiwi. The meat is generally four slices of uncured lunchmeat (usually from Applegate Farms), beef jerky, smoked or canned salmon, or a can of sardines. Cheese is usually Kerrygold grass-fed Dubliner or Blarney cheese, or Trader Joe’s grass-fed cheddar.
Weekends is usually the same combination but only one piece of fruit max, with eggs and bacon added. Often I skip the cheese as well. I’m not a big fan of mixing eggs with other ingredients, so I don’t usually make omelets or those crazy Paleo concoctions you’ve probably seen floating around the internet. Sometimes we’ll make something with potatoes, and very rarely we take a stab at gluten-free pancakes (usually to disastrous result). Fried rice for breakfast is pretty tasty, too, and nothing beats spam musubi every once in a while.
That’s basically it. What do you eat for breakfast?
Since most spring and egg rolls are made with wheat-based wrappers, Vietnamese spring rolls end up being one of the only spring rolls that are compatible with our wheat-free diet. Luckily, these spring rolls are nice and tasty.
The traditional recipe calls for cellophane noodles, which are usually made with bean starch (although which bean is sometimes hard to decipher). I decided to circumvent the whole problem by using glass noodles made with sweet potato starch, which you can find in many Korean markets for relatively cheap.
Man, I had the hardest time finding a chicken cordon bleu recipe in my French cookbooks. Turns out that this dish isn’t French at all; it was created in the US and we added the “cordon bleu” to make it sound awesome. And in that respect, it totally worked.
The challenge with making a grain-free chicken cordon bleu lies in its crispy outer crust, which is usually achieved through flour and bread crumbs. I experimented a bit and found that a combination of coconut flour and potato starch worked best: the coconut flour surprisingly doesn’t leave any sweet/coconuty flavor behind, and the potato starch creates a crisp, delicate shell around the chicken.
Mashed sweet potatoes have a distinctly different taste from your everyday mashed potatoes. Yep, you guessed it: they’re sweeter. They’re also much more delicate so they require a slightly different approach; namely, you steam them instead of boiling them.
For this recipe, I used three different sweet potatoes/yams, only because we had all three at the house. This recipe will work fine with almost any sweet tuber, although admittedly this dish looks pretty awesome with all three.
NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.
What’s there not to love about pork belly? It’s basically just super thick slices of uncured bacon. I’ve seen this cut at our local Asian market for years but didn’t know how to prepare it until I stumbled upon this recipe at Rasa Malaysia, and decided to give it a shot. What resulted was an impressive-looking dish with a crispy, flavorful outside layer and a tender and delicious center.
NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.
There are several types of chinese cabbage out there in the wide wide world (or your local supermarket), so let’s learn them real quick. Won bok (“napa” cabbage) is the large, football-shaped heads of cabbage that are used in making kimchee. Bok choy resembles celery but with large green leaves (as seen above). Lastly, choy sum is the inner core of bok choy, with narrow, green stalks. Now that the hard stuff is out of the way, here’s how to steam bok choy for an interesting and nutritious side dish.
The Domestic Man 