NakedSushi

The BF was experimenting with some seville oranges I finally managed to score at the farmer’s market. I had to special order them from one of the farmers the week before so that he could bring me some this week. We were tossing around the idea of creating a literature-inspired cocktail for when some of my co-workers stopped by before the official literary pub crawl started to get in a bit of pre-drinking. Since this variation of a blood and sand contains rye, I thought it apt to name it ‘Catcher in the Rye’ — loosely literary.

The seville orange juice gives the cocktail a refreshing tartness with a bitter finish which prevents it from being overly sweet, or too much like a whiskey sour. I like that this mixture is both easy to drink but has enough depth to be a ’sipper’. I’d imagine that a mixture of tangerine (or a tart orange) juice and grapefruit juice could be used in place of seville orange if it’s not easily available.

Recipe by the BF:

1.5 oz Rye (I used Old Overholt for no particular reason)
1 oz seville (sour) orange juice
.5 oz sweet vermouth (I used Carpano Antica Formula)
scant .5 oz Heering Cherry

Shake, strain into chilled cocktail glass, garnish with brandied cherry and/or orange twist.

I’m in the middle of switching my hosts.  I’ve been with one for years, but always had problems and was too lazy to switch, but since my annual contract is up soon, I finally motivated myself enough to switch to a better provider.  Things should still be working fine for now, but just in case, if you come here through runawaysquirrels.com, the more reliable way is to come through nakedsushi.net because that domain is already set up.

Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop

(3 of 5 stars)

This is one of the times I wish we implemented half-stars in our rating system. As a non-fiction book about food, Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper is above average. It’s informative, has recipes, is easy to read, and is engaging.

The book took me a while to get into because for the first quarter of the book. I don’t think this would be the case if I weren’t Chinese and cynical about westerners who write about my mother-land. In the beginning, I was annoyed by the author who seemed an an over-eager, graceless, nosy foreigner trying to exploit the exotic cuisines of the orient. It’s a rough start, but the book does get better after that.

Dunlop weaves historical tidbits in with anecdotal tales of color characters and friends she meets in China. There’s a handful of political drama and commentary, but most of it is about the food in China.

One of the later chapters about industrialization, commercialization, and pollution in food felt out of place with the rest of the book, but I suppose it makes sense as a memoir since it describes the author’s shift in thinking about food. I read most of the book as just a story about food in China, told by an English woman, but if I had paid more attention to the title when I started and realized it was a memoir, I would have read it with a different eye.

This book should be put on a must-read list for anyone who’s thinking of going to China on a food excursion. It’s great that someone finally wrote about the different regional cuisines of the country. Maybe now people will stop patronizing places like Panda Express when they feel like having Chinese food.

One word of warning: don’t read this book on an empty stomach.

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Happy New Year everyone! It’s the year of the tiger, so if you’re a tiger, this is your year.

My parents gave me a narcissus plant in preparation for the new year last week and it flowered just in time a day or two ago! I hope this means good luck for the coming year.

It had been a while since we had curry. It could be because vegan curry blocks are really hard to find. The blocks of Japanese curry that I used to use turned out to have some sort of meat or animal derived product in it, oops.  I thought that we had finally found some veggie-friendly curry and bought a box to take home, but the other night, I realized it wasn’t just the curry seasoning and roux, but with veggies in it too. A foil pouch of ‘ready made’ curry. I wasn’t in the mood for that and noticed I still had a can of S&B curry powder.

It turns out that curry isn’t that hard to make from scratch! Well, kind of from scratch, if you have the ready-made powder.  All it takes is sauteing some chopped onions in oil, adding the curry powder, some tomato paste, and then the right amount of flour to make the roux.  Some vegetable broth, potatoes, carrots, and random things in the fridge later, I had curry.

One of the random things I put in the curry were wheat gluten puffs from the Chinese market. They’re these big puffed up balls of airy bread. I cut them in half, put them in the curry and mushed them around so they soften. When they’re properly cooked and soften, they soak up the curry sauce and have palatable, smooth and tender texture. It may sound gross, but it reminded me of a tender piece of bacon fat. Delicious.

I saw a post by Vegan Dad with a recipe for veggie lunch meat and it didn’t look all that hard. I already had most of the ingredients (other than vital wheat gluten) in my cupboard and vital wheat gluten was easy enough to get at Whole Paycheck. The recipe itself isn’t difficult, but there is a lot of “standby time” so I saved it for this weekend.

The end result was better than I expected! The ingredients by themselves didn’t seem impressive, but as a whole, they work! I followed the recipe fairly closely this time, but I’m probably going to make some variations of my own next time. Maybe a spicier lunchmeat? Curry lunch meat?

The first sandwich I made out of the veggie lunchmeat was just a boring ‘meat’ and sprouts sandwich with thick slices of seitan, sprouts, mayonnaise, mustard, and some sourdough bread I baked a long time ago that I found in the freezer. Since the sandwich was so plain, I could really taste the seitan in it, which isn’t really a bad thing since I don’t mind the taste of seitan. But don’t go in expecting it to taste exactly like meat.

The next night, I wanted to jazz up the seitan a bit, so I made a BBQ seitan sandwich with my own bbq sauce I made from scratch and some collard greens. Yes, it was southern food comfort night. For the BBQ sauce, which was thick, sweet, and vinegary, I looked up this recipe on chowhound for the basic proportions and made my own changes:

• I halved the recipe, which makes enough sauce for 4 sandwiches
• Instead of ketchup, I used 5oz of tomato paste
• I didn’t have onion powder, so I left that out
• The original recipe was way too sweet, so I added a healthy splash of soy sauce and a bunch of salt till it tasted more salty
• I also added in some healthy splashes of white wine vinegar (regular white should be fine too) because the BBQ sauce I’m used to is vinegary
• I wanted more kick in the sauce, so I shook in a bunch of cayenne pepper
• I don’t like the taste of chili powder, so I left that out
• I put in about 1/2 tsp liquid smoke even though I halved the rest of the recipe

After the BBQ sauce was ready (all the stuff I put in was nicely mixed in), I sliced the seitan thinly on a mandolin and put it in the sauce and stirred to coat. I already had some caramelized onion sitting on the stove so I threw those in too. I turned the heat on low and stirred every so often. It’s ready to eat when the seitan is heated all the way through.

Maybe sprouts aren’t the traditional condiment on a BBQ sandwich, but I have to say they are delicious on this. They soak up the sauce wonderfully and add a crispy texture. If you want to be really white trash, you can slather some margarine and vegannaise on the buns before putting the sandwich together.

The southern-style collard greens were easy to make as well. I chopped some onions and let it cook in a few tablespoons of olive oil till soft, and then threw in a clove of chopped garlic and put in pinch of salt and pepper. After another minute, I put in a tablespoon of tomato paste, turned up the heat, and stirred so the paste would coat the onions and garlic. By then, there will probably be some burnt bits of tomato paste on the bottom of the pan, so I deglazed with some vegetable broth and scraped the bits up to mix with the broth. Then, I poured in  1.5 cups of vegetable broth and then dumped in 1lb of chopped and washed collard greens. Covered up the pot, turned the heat to low and let it cook for 30 minutes. Every 10 minutes or so, I’d open the cover and give it a stir. After 30 minutes, add salt and pepper to taste, and a small pinch of smoked paprika to give it that campfire smokiness. The paprika’s optional, but since I can’t put sausages or ham in the collard greens, it’s the only thing that can give it that southern-greens smoke.

I drank my first Little Italy a week or so ago at The Tar Pit. It’s a Manhattan variation with more depth in the aftertaste thanks to the Cynar (Chi-naaaar). Because the drink is on the bitter side, it’s one to be sipped instead of gulped and might not be for everyone.

Cynar is an artichoke liquor that’s bitter-sweet, leaning more into bitter. It sounds gross, but it’s pretty good if you’re a fan of bitter liquors.  I think it knocked Campari out of its spot as my favorite bitter liquor. It has the bitterness of Campari, but is more syrupy sweet upfront. It’s good in mixed drinks because unlike Campari, it doesn’t have a distinct enough flavor that screams, “Hey look, I added some Cynar to this!”  Instead, it hangs around in the background waiting to be appreciated.

According to this post, the cocktail consists of:

2 oz rye
1/2 oz Cynar
3/4 oz sweet vermouth
2 brandied cherries skewered on a stick
flamed orange twist

The drink is made even better if Carpano Antica (the best vermouth evar) is used for the sweet vermouth. This sweet vermouth makes every drink magical.