Category Archives: Ginger

Ginger Time

One scoop? Or two?

Yes, I have a thing for ginger.

Big-time.

Whether it’s pickled, fresh, crystalized, or dried, I can never get enough of it. That sweet-heat on the back of the throat wins me over every time.

So you can just imagine my delight when two new ginger products landed on my front porch for sampling.

First up, the new Haagen-Dazs “Five” ice cream flavors. There are seven flavors — each of them containing only five ingredients: milk, cream, eggs, sugar, and one wild card for flavor. The five-ingredient concept is played up to denote purity and simplicity. The ice cream comes in vanilla bean, milk chocolate, mint, coffee, brown sugar, passion fruit, and ginger.

Guess which one I opened first?

That would be correct.

The mouth-feel of these ice creams is wicked good — rich, smooth, and creamy as all get out. But then you expect no less from Haagen-Dazs.

The ginger one had a musty-ginger flavor. It had fairly subtle heat, too. Perhaps, too subtle for a true ginger addict like yours truly.

I had high hopes for the brown sugar one. After all, it tastes exactly like brown sugar. But let’s face it, how much brown sugar would you really want to eat? After one taste, that’s pretty much enough.

The vanilla bean was the epitome of purity — very vanilla-like. The milk chocolate made me think of my childhood — in a good way. It reminded me of eating cups of Carnation frozen milk chocolate out of paper containers with a tiny wooden spoon.

My favorites were probably the coffee (very perky tasting), the mint (incredibly cool and refreshing), and the passion fruit (like a tropical island on a spoon).

Itty bitty, but with a huge taste.

Next up, the Ginger People’s new Ginger Snaps. A 5.3-ounce box is $5.50.

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Longing for Pungent Dried Fish

Steamed pork hash with salted fish served over Chinese sticky rice.

Sometimes you never know what you’ll end up missing.

For me, it turned out to be — of all things — a most humble Cantonese dish of steamed ground pork, strewn with finely julienned ginger and copious amounts of preserved, pungent mackerel.

Yes, stinky, salted fish is what I longed for. Who would have thought?

This steamed pork hash or cake, otherwise known as hom yu jing jiu yok bang, was not something I missed at first. Not when my Mom had a stroke, limiting her ability to cook this dish and so many others I had grown up with. And not even years later, when my Mom passed away, and this home-style dish faded into memory.

It was only a year after her death, when I happened to be at Asia Village, a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Sunnyvale, when I saw the dish on the menu and decided to order it for old time’s sake.

It came to the table, looking a lot like what my Mom used to make — a 1-inch-thick pressed round patty of ground pork, topped with a couple small pieces of salted fish, all floating in its own lovely juices.

It was tender, a bit briny, incredibly succulent, and the perfect foil for plain, fluffy rice. One taste is all it took to make me sigh wistfully.

I’m not the only one. I started asking my Chinese-American friends if they remembered this dish. All did fondly from their childhood, but almost all of them had not eaten it in years. They didn’t cook it now, having never learned how to make this basic dish. And they didn’t eat it when they went out, because of its scarcity on menus.

“It’s classic Cantonese comfort food. It was truly one of my favorites growing up,” says Chinese cooking expert and cookbook author Grace Young, who grew up in San Francisco and now lives in New York. “Steamed pork cake dishes are seldom found in restaurants. I think they are so simple to make that when people go to a restaurant they want to eat dishes that are too complicated to make at home.”

It’s a family-meal dish beloved by both the Cantonese and the Hakka, neighbors in Southern China, according to Bay Area food writer, Linda Lau Anusasananan, who is writing a book on Hakka cuisine.

“It combines pork, preserved ingredients, and strong seasonings — all main elements in Hakka cooking,” she says. “I love the dish for its simplicity.”

If I wanted to enjoy hom yu jing jiu yok bang regularly, I realized I would have to learn how to make it myself. The key would be finding just the right fish to use. That turned out to be far easier said than done.

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Awesome Abalone

"Super'' red abalone. (Photo courtesy of Steve Lonhart, SIMoN/NOAA)

Face it, not many of us can sport six-pack abs.

But the Highlands Inn in Carmel can give you “Super Abs” — for a price.

That’s short for abalone that’s farm-raised in a sustainable manner by the Monterey Abalone Company. And these particular ones are ”super” because the red abalone (the most common type raised off California waters) are being cultivated wtih a new method that results in faster growth, a brighter color, and apparently more flavor. (Yours truly has only tasted the “regular” Monterey Abalone Company abalones. And those are mighty fantastic already.)

Abalone ceviche. (Photo courtesy of Steve Lonhart, SIMoN/NOAA)

The abalone company is working in conjunction with Moss Landing Marine Laboratories to do this. Highlands Inn has exclusive rights to all of the “Super Abs” now available to be harvested.

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The Joys of Jook

A big bowl of comfort -- turkey and ham jook.

For most people, the big winter celebrations come to an end when the Christmas tree is taken down, and the New Year’s streamers and empy Champagne bottles are tossed out.

Not for me.

It never really feels finis for me until I make my huge pot of jook, the creamy, comforting rice porridge that I, like so many others of Asian heritage, grew up with.

My late-Mom always made it with the Thanksgiving turkey carcass. She sometimes made it, too, right after Easter with the leftover ham.

Following her tradition, I freeze my Thanksgiving turkey carcass exactly for this purpose. A few weeks later, it’s joined in the freezer by the big, bulky bone from Christmas’ centerpiece, a Berkshire ham. There, these two picked-over, yet still flavor-packed specimens wait until Jook Day comes.

And that day is usually sometime in January when we start to crave turkey and ham again after having had more than our fill over the December holidays. Then, I defrost the ham bone and turkey carcass overnight in the fridge.

In they go into the biggest pot I have in the house, where they combine slowly for four hours with grains of rice: Short-grain if you like your porridge or congee exceedingly creamy with the rice grains almost completely broken down; Jasmine or long-grain if you prefer your jook to be a little more brothy with still slightly distinct grains of rice.

I like to cook my porridge with coins of fresh ginger, Chinese black mushrooms, a drizzle of sesame oil, and a pinch of white pepper. When it’s finally creamy, practically custardy, I ladle it into big bowls, then sprinkle on slivers of green onion.

Then, I sit back and savor my favorite one-last-taste of the holidays.

My Version of Jook

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Stew Sensation

Fennel stars in this awesome stew.

This is without a doubt one of the best stews ever.

Since it was published four years ago in Gourmet magazine, I’ve made this “Braised Pork with Orange and Fennel” at least annually, if not twice or thrice a winter. It’s the one stew I can’t wait to make once the weather turns the least bit chilly.

Moreover, it’s the stew that created a sensation when I wrote about it a year or so ago in the San Jose Mercury News Food section. Readers wrote to tell me how much they loved the flavors of orange zest, fresh ginger, soy sauce, cinnamon, and anise seeds. A friend even recalled that women friends at her gym were all gabbing non-stop about how divine the dish was.

Who can blame them? The pork shoulder cubes cook up tender alongside slices of fennel in a sauce that’s hauntingly part Asian and part Italian. Serve it over plain steamed rice or, as I do, over soft, spoonable polenta cooked with plenty of Parmigiana.

The presentation is pure rustic comfort. The taste is a savory sensation. It’s homey enough for family; chic enough for company. And it’s a straightforward recipe that cooks up mostly unattended, so it can be easily whipped together even on a weeknight if you find yourself with a little extra time on your hands.

I’ve already made it once this winter. Try it, and there’s no doubt, you’ll be making it again and again, too.

Braised Pork with Orange and Fennel

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