health

Pulled Pork

NOTE: An updated version of this recipe appears in my cookbook, The Ancestral Table.

Chances are you saw the picture above when you read my post about mac and cheese the other day. Maybe not. Either way, I think the picture is good enough to use twice.

This pulled pork recipe is very similar to my kalua pig recipe but with less salt and liquid smoke (and BBQ sauce). Like most slow-cooked meats, I think that less is more when it comes to ingredients, so I like the meat’s natural taste and the BBQ sauce do all the talking.

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Shrimp Satay

Satay is a dish that originated out of Indonesia. It’s basically just marinated, skewered, grilled pieces of meat. It’s most commonly found with chicken or beef, but like Japanese yakitori, you can find all sorts of weird varieties as well if you look hard enough. This is my shrimp version.

The most critical ingredient for this dish is turmeric, which gives the meat its yellow coloring. It’s somewhat hard to find but you’ll only need to get a small container, because a little bit goes a looong way.

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Creamy Shrimp Pasta

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.

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Gluten Free Mac and Cheese

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.

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Nasi Goreng (Indonesian/Malaysian Fried Rice)

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.

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Braised BBQ Spare Ribs

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.

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Mashed Sweet Potatoes

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.

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Roasted Pork Belly (Siu Yuk, 燒肉)

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.

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Steamed Bok Choy

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.

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Pepperoni and Basil Pizza

I’ve touched a little on gluten-free pizza crusts in this post, but I thought it was time to explain how I make pizza at home.

This recipe uses an Against the Grain 12″ pizza shell, which has an impressively simple ingredients list: tapioca starch, milk, eggs, canola oil, mozzarella cheese, cheddar cheese, and parmesan cheese. Simply put, if you allow dairy in your diet, this pizza crust is close enough to the real thing that you can easily ward off pizza cravings without any lingering guilt.

I also prefer to use 8oz blocks of fresh mozzarella cheese for practical reasons. I’ve found that using bags of shredded cheese never seems to work out for me, because I end up with too much or not enough cheese. Cutting fresh mozzarella is easy and takes all of the guesswork out of this simple dish. Plus, natural and fresh mozzarella is a lot easier to find than good shredded cheese anyway.

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