NakedSushi

It was 84F today and I didn’t want to warm up the kitchen by cooking. Luckily, there were a few bunches of kale in the fridge, two carrots from the garden, and more kumquats than I know what to do with from the neighbor’s yard. Dinner was kale salad. I get this paranoia when I make salad that it wouldn’t be filling enough. Maybe that’s why I ended up adding so much stuff to it.

The kale was de-ribbed, washed, rinsed, and dried. Then I made a dressing of preserved meyer lemons, the juice of half a fresh meyer lemon, olive oil, salt, cayenne pepper, brown sugar, and black pepper.  I shook the dressing in a small bottle, dumped it onto the kale, and got my hands in there massaging the oil into the salad.  Once every leaf was evenly coated, I let it sit for 45 minutes. It’s important to let the kale sit so that it can tenderize in the dressing.

In the meantime, I did some yoga (wow, kale AND yoga??), sliced up two small carrots, a handful of dates, and a handful of kumquats. I also added some roughly chopped pistachios and chopped tempeh bacon I crisped up in a pan.  At the last minute, I chopped up a pretty ripe avocado, added everything to the kale, and smushed it around with my bare hands. Barbaric, I know.

I’m happy to say the salad kept me and Will pretty full for dinner.

Spicy City opened up semi-recently in The Great Mall of China aka 99 Ranch Plaza on the corner of Del Mar and Valley.  I  believe it took the place of a fairly old Taiwanese o ah mi sua (oyster vermicelli) restaurant.   Will and I visited for a spur of the moment lunch this weekend and were less than impressed.

The typical cold appetizer 3-way combo was at the back of the restaurant.  You may need to flag someone down to help dish the stuff up, but luckily it’s close to the kitchen and cashier, so there’s always someone who can help.  I got the cold bamboo, brined string beans, and fried tofu.  The overwhelming flavor of all three was salt, but they had some differences. The string beans were crispy and savory, just what I expected. The tofu had an interesting chewy and dry texture. I wonder if this is the vegetarian equivalent of the dry sliced beef that’s usually at the cold plates table.  The bamboo would have been better if it were not so salty.

Will ordered the cold Szechuan noodle, which was a surprisingly large bowl of noodles.  The undissolved sugar crystals added an interesting crunch to each bite, but the entire bowl was tipping heavily toward the over-salted side.  He liked that the noodles were chewy, but thought that they were dangerously close to being chewy in an underdone kind of way.

I ordered the crossing bridge noodles. What?! Yes, that’s what I said. Crossing Bridge Noodles is more of a Yunnan specialty, why would I be ordering it at a Szechuan restaurant? Normally, I wouldn’t, but considering the first page of their menu was dedicated to this humble bowl of noodles in chicken broth, I just had to try it.  I did and it was okay.  There wasn’t anything wrong with the bowl. The waitress brought it out in the usual style, with the soup, noodles, and toppings separate, to be mixed together at the table.  The chicken was tender and flavorful, the soup was not too heavy on msg, the rice noodles were plenty, but something was missing. I was expecting some flavorful slices of ham or smoked pork in there, and instead I had some flavorless slices of pork.

Spicy City was not technically bad, but I wouldn’t get off the freeway for the sole purpose of visiting this city.  If one were already in the area and wanted something spicy, maybe. But in the Great Mall of China, where the options are plenty, I’d say this place is skippable based on the stuff that I’ve had. Still, I’m glad I went here, if only so I can stop wondering if this place was any good. Now I know if I want this type of food, I should just go to Lucky Noodle King down the street.

I have a basic recipe for granola.  3 cups of oats to 1/3 cup fluid and 1/4 cup sweetener.  The variations and add-ins are endless.  This time, I used a handful of chopped pistachios and a handful of chopped pecans.  For fruit, I added in a handful of seeded and chopped dates and dried currants.  For sweetener, I used brown sugar. Finally, I mixed in a tablespoon of hemp protein powder and a pinch of salt and stirred all the dry ingredients together.

In a pyrex measuring cup, I used a mix of 1/4 cup melted margarine and canola oil, then a healthy glug of maple syrup and molasses.  Drizzled all of this over the dry ingredients, then tossed to coat evenly.

Cook this mixture on a flat baking sheet in a 250F oven for 1-hour (stirring after 20 minutes and then every 15 minutes after) to perfection. Tastes great mixed into yogurt with a banana and some frozen berries.

In the mornings before breakfast, I like to do as few complicated things as possible. That’s why making oatmeal the night before in the rice-cooker is great for me. An alternative I’ve been doing lately is fridge oatmeal, which are rolled oats rehydrated in the fridge overnight.  I’ve been waking up super hungry lately, so I added a little extra boost to the oatmeal.

Here’s what I put into the little glass jar:

• A few tablespoons of rolled oats. Quick oats will do well here too. Just add as much as you think you’ll eat. Don’t forget that the oats will expand.
• A few tablespoons of milk. I used almond milk, but I’d probably use soy milk if I had some around.
• Twice as much plain yogurt as you put in oats.
• A few teaspoons of maple syrup. Or leave off the syrup if your yogurt is already sweetened.
• 1 teaspoon chia seeds (for omega 3′s and protein)
• 1 teaspoon hemp powder (for protein)
• Stir these ingredients together in the jar until they’re mixed together.  If it seems too dry, add more milk.
• Top the jar with sliced bananas and berries. I used frozen berries which will thaw just fine overnight.

The next morning, take it out of the fridge, give it a stir, and enjoy.  Oats by themselves don’t keep me full very long, but I’ve found that combining them with all the stuff in the jar seems to do the trick.

I know this fermented soy bean product is natto everyone’s cup of tea, but I don’t mind the taste, smell, or texture and sometimes I even crave it, so I keep my fridge stocked with at least one of these styrofoam packets on hand.  Today, for a snack, I prepared it in a new way that I will likely repeat in the future because it was so good!

Will is addicted to these Trader Joe’s rice crackers. I admit they’re pretty hard to stop eating once you have that first crunchy, salty bite. If I had fresh green onion in the fridge, I probably would have chopped that up and added it to the natto.

Mix the following together and top your rice crackers with it.

• 1 package natto including its seasoning packet (leave off if you’re vegetarian since the non-mustard seasoning often has fish)
• 1 small pinch of yuzu pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ponzu
• healthy pinch of roasted seaweed cut into strips

Happy New Year!

Last year I read 90 books.  Some were really good, some were really bad, and most were somewhere in the middle. I read a handful of 5-star books that I’d consider the best books I read of 2012.  Here are a few of them. Click the book cover for the long review on Goodreads.

The Merchant And the Alchemist’s Gate
This is a short story by Ted Chiang. If you haven’t realized by now, I’m a big Ted Chiang fan. What was surprising about this short story was how much I liked it despite it being a time-travel story. I’m not that interested in time travel plots because sometimes always seems off like I over-think it, or I just can’t suspend my belief long enough to immerse myself into the story. Not this time. This is a time travel story that works. It also doesn’t help that it makes you scratch your chin at the end and go “Hmmm….”


The Tender Bar
It’s hard to describe this book without it sounding too corny. It’s a bildungsroman set in a small town on the east coast. Nothing really surprising happens, but the cast of characters from the boy’s childhood to his manhood is rich with wonderful descriptions. His anecdotes really made me feel fake nostalgia for growing up during those times.


Code Name Verity
This book took me a while to get into because I couldn’t completely orient myself in the world of this story until much later. Part of it is because the world is so much like ours during World War II that I kept thinking of it as real. It’s pretty hard to explain the book without giving it away. It’s about women who serve their country during the war. The story and characters are mostly revealed through a series of letters and sometimes that conceit is its weakness, but by the end, I was all on board.


Wool Omnibus
Self-published books get a bad rap. This self-published book was wonderful. It’s a collection of novellas set in a post-apocalyptic time. Instead of falling for the usual cliches or straying too far in the direction of differentiating itself from other PA books, it embraces the genre by focussing mainly on normal people trying to go about their everyday lives in an after-doomsday world. After the first novella, which brought my hopes up for one character, I was hooked and had to read on.

When people ask why I don’t fly with Will to New Jersey for the holidays…

When people ask why I never say pho ga at a restaurant is any better than “okay”…

When people ask if there’s one dish I can eat for days without getting tired of it…

This is why:

Pho ga lovingly made by my mom and aunt.

Mature chickens stewed for hours.  Fresh chicken poached, cut into pieces, and marinated with a bit of fish sauce. Thinly sliced chicken skin, freed from any chicken fat.  Rich, savory slices of chicken liver. Rice noodles just made from the factory this morning. The house perfumed by the aroma of chicken broth. The incomparable first spoonful of slippery noodles, hot soup, and a bright kick of a single bit of scallion.

Nothing beats homemade when homemade tastes like that.