Hearty Wild Turkey Soup

Some of the best things about Autumn are the soothing hot beverages that make their annual comeback as the weather gets chilly.  Warm soups and warm wine (e.g. sake) are two items at the top of the list for me.  And for a while now, soups have been a big hobby of mine.  I love thinking about and making different stocks because:

1. The process is so simple,
2. The sky is the limit when deciding what goes into the stock, and
3. Depending on how you approach things, you can really stretch your dollar on several nutritious, filling meals.

I only make my own stock from scratch because, although it is more labor intensive, it is much more rewarding.  When the soup touches your lips, complex, awesome flavors begin seeping in and warming you up, and it only intensifies as it flows past the sensors on the tongue and beyond.  Being able to control nearly every ingredient that goes into the stock, and therefore the flavor profile of the stock, cannot be overstated.

For the last few years, I have been making my stock by starting in a sauce pot because I did not have a large stock pot.  After that, I would either make an overall smaller portion in the same pot or transfer it to a slow cooker for no hassle stewing.  This weekend, however, I finally stepped up my game by purchasing a legitimate stock pot.  (Did I mention this Winter is going to be an awesome soup bonanza?)

For this round, I wanted to create a stock that evoked a sensation of North American Autumn wilderness blended with the serene mountainous Chinese countryside near my home province.  Usually, I would be the first to claim that these two concepts are not only opposites in geography; they also clash in flavor.  But I think it can be done well by starting simple and harnessing the basic, wild aspects of both locations.  For reference, consider a seemingly untamed Shenandoah Valley in Autumn on the left, and the almost mystical Tianzi Mountains in Southern Hunan province on the right.

I began with two smoked turkey drumsticks and some ginger, washed, peeled, and chunked.  These two items were brought to a boil and allowed to cook on low heat for four hours, replenishing water and bringing back to a boil when necessary.  Since I could not finish making the soup in one day, I refrigerated it overnight.  During this first leg of cooking, the broth was extremely enticing because such a long process brought out not only the flavor of the meat, the bones, and the fat--it also elicited the smokey character of the drumsticks, which went perfectly with the desired imagery above (more so the one on the left).

On the second day, I brought the broth to a boil again, and this time, added four green onion whites and several fresh shiitake mushrooms to begin molding the flavor.  Two hours into cooking, I prepared and added diced carrot, chunks of lotus root, and a single star anise.  At this point, I was worried that the carrots and star anise would give the soup too much of a sweet profile, so I added some salt, which outside of the carrot and anise, would not have been necessary given the natural saltiness of smoked meat.  After another two hours of cooking, the broth was ready to sample.

It was delicious.  I spoke above of two opposites in flavor profile, but the only juxtaposition was how filling a small bowl turned out to be even as the gamy flavor of smoked turkey danced around ever so lightly with the flavor of the earthy vegetables.

The selection in vegetables was on par with my expectations.  I did not break new ground by choosing earthy, root-like vegetables, but the use of shiitake and lotus as opposed to more commonly chosen tubers like potatoes and other greens brought in a bit of the Chinese countryside.  Next time, however, I would add the carrots later so they are not so beat up and soft.

I wanted the soup to be deeper and richer, but at the end of the day I suppose you can only get so much out of two medium sized turkey drumsticks and eight hours of cooking.  By the way, what did the drumsticks look like after all was said and done?

Okay, so skin and bones do not look so appealing.  But what happened to the meat!?  I took that and stir fried it with leek and some sesame seeds to make lunch for the week.  Here, I did not bother to arrange the food in an aesthetic way, because it was just going to end up stuffed into a lunch container anyway.

Labor Day 2015 ('Murrca!)

My cousin, who recently came to the United States for school, visited me for Labor Day this year.  We romped around the DC Metropolitan area for 3.5 days, eating amazing food, enjoying DC yuppie life, and even getting a little nature time outside of the city.

This being my cousin's first American Labor Day, I thought it would be fun to show her a simple American way to celebrate every summer holiday: slapping some meat on a grill.  Only, I tried to make it anything but simple.  Having two days to prepare, I capitalized on time as my primary resource and did some research into good marinades for steak.  I pulled ideas from various websites to come up with a savory garlic two-day marinade (based largely on this recipe).  And in order to ensure that the quality of the steak matched that of the marinade, I bought two three quarter pound rib eyes from Whole Foods.

The marinade was made with the following:

• 1/2 cup vinegar
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1 entire head of garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons black pepper
• 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
• salt to taste

After one day, I flipped the steaks over in the marinade to ensure even soaking time.  Here is what the steaks looked like right after I put them on the grill (So. Much. Garlic.):

Here are the steaks after the flip.  I am still working on mastering the art of grill marks:

Here are the finished steaks:

They look a little darker because I let them cook a little longer to get to a medium-well finish.  Unfortunately, I did not do a good job with heat control, and I did not have a good grasp on the cut of meat itself.  The steaks turned out slightly overdone as a result, although the tenderness due to marination may have saved the day.

Overall, the flavor was slightly on the acidic side due to all the vinegar and lemon juice.  Next time, I would cut back drastically on the vinegar and add more lemon juice.  I would also use some Worcestershire sauce as the recipe linked above suggests (I did not have any on hand this time).

The only thing missing from this meal?  Some good ol' home baked American butter rolls, which I did not have any time to prepare.  So we went with a healthier carb option.

Kabocha Shrimp Salad (The Vancouver Files 267)

While I was visiting Vancouver this summer, I purchased a book of 365 recipes for traditional Chinese health food.  If you are wondering, Chinese "health food" is steeped in millennia of cooking traditions and Eastern medicinal practice.  While the medicinal aspect of these recipes is most likely unproven in controlled laboratories or questionable at best, a lot of these foods taste phenomenal.

With 365 recipes to taste, this book will last a very long time; but I can hope to one day get through every recipe.  This weekend, I made number 267:

Kabocha Shrimp Salad (杂粮南瓜沙拉球)

The recipe looked simple and the photo looked fancy.  It mixes mashed kabocha, rice, egg, and shrimp into appetizing morsels that sit on a bed of alfalfa.  So, I thought: why not give it a try?

As you can see, the recipe is given in traditional Chinese, so the first task for me--one who reads simplified Chinese at a three-year-old level--was to translate it with my handy dandy Pokédex--I mean pocket Google machine.  Below, I saved the reader any repeat translation work, in addition to including my practical modifications.

Ingredients

1 cup steamed rice
1.25 cup seeded, steamed, mashed kabocha
6 tiger shrimp
1 soft-boiled egg
Alfalfa sprouts
Mayonnaise to taste
Salt to taste

Instructions

1. De-seed and slice pumpkin.  Steam until soft and peel.  Using a spoon, press pumpkin until mashed.  Set aside.
2. De-vein the shrimp and rinse clean.  Bring water to a boil and cook shrimp for 1 minute.  Move shrimp from hot to cold water to help it cool down.  Dice the shrimp, soak it in slightly salted cold water to taste.  Drain the shrimp and set aside.
3. Dice the soft-boiled egg.  Lightly rinse the alfalfa sprouts and place it in a serving bowl/dish.  Set aside.
4. Combine the steamed rice, mashed pumpkin (Step 1), diced shrimp (Step 2), diced egg (Step 3), and mix well until even incorporated.  Form with the mixture and place on the bed of alfalfa.  Garnish as you see fit.

While the recipe calls for 南瓜 (nAHn-gwah), which can ambiguously refer to any pumpkin-esque gourd in Chinese, I chose kabocha because of flavor, texture, and context for the recipe.  Kabocha is a pleasantly mellow-sweet Asian pumpkin first popularized in Japan, and you may wonder what kind of mellow-sweet pleasantness could be found in this relative of the squash.  Imagine for a moment, receiving an innocent peck on the lips from your grade school crush, and that might be similar to the effect of kabocha's flavor profile on the senses.  How about that for pleasantness?

The recipe also calls for something called "five grain," which is a deeply complicated and mythologized food item supposedly from an ancient agrarian time before Chinese civilization was a coherent thing.  A good reference point for the imagination would be 2000 B.C.  Today, only historians really know, care, or debate about historical five grain; normal people combine any five grains they have on hand.  I just used Japanese white rice for the sake of practicality.

Along the way, I also decided to soft-boil the egg since the original recipe does not specify how well-cooked the egg should be.  I thought this made more sense for two reasons:

1. Soft-boiling an egg enables me to achieve a personally preferable result with the yolk: not dried out and not runny, a firm yet gelatinous state.
2. I also thought this would produce a better texture to go along with the mashed kabocha, and I would say it worked out well in this regard.

Incidentally, this was my first time soft-boiling an egg!  I think it turned out 80% correct.  The missing twenty percent, as you can see, comes from the edges of the yolk starting to turn into its familiar dry, chalky hard-boiled state.  Achieving the perfect soft-boiled egg will be a science for future trials.

Finally, I upgraded from just any old shrimp to tiger shrimp.  This species of shrimp is a more expensive, less sustainable, better textured shrimp.  It is called tiger shrimp because of the more pronounced, sometimes striking striations that conjure up images of a tiger's stripes.

Rainbow Trout Onigiri

One evening this summer I tried my hand at making onigiri for lunch.  This, in many regards, is meant to be a quick-and-dirty way to turn some left over scraps in the refrigerator into lunch for the next day, or so I have read.  So how did I do?  Meeeh--it took me a lot longer to put things together as I fumbled with the rice and the filling.  I also bought improperly sized nori.

Instead of more traditional Japanese fillings and toppings, I chose to make a teriyaki rainbow trout filling, and used a teaspoon of laoganma Chinese chili sauce.  Also, I am not one for hand-sculpting aesthetically pleasing creations, and that tends to apply to food I try to sculpt.  Still, the form and taste turned out to be all right.

The rainbow trout was diced and sauteed in soy sauce with some sugar and diced onions.

Rather than inside the filling, I put a teaspoon of laoganma chili sauce on top.

Many times over, I also made the classic noob mistake when making any grain or rice wrapped Asian delectable: using too much filling because I have no spatial intuition for the volume of filling and the available surface area of the wrapping material.  I only got better at judging this for dumplings because I have made so many.

Along the way, I also learned how to skin a fillet using a large Chinese kitchen knife.  Cool, right?

The Pacific Northwest, a Tale of Food Porn

At the end of July, I had an amazing opportunity to visit, for the very first time, the Pacific Northwest region of North America with my family.  I hopped through two states and a province of Canada, hitting up

• Seattle, WA;
• Juneau, AK;
• Skagway, AK;
• Ketchikan, AK;
• Victoria, BC;
• Vancouver, BC; and
• Richmond, BC.

I saw live bald eagles (aMURRca!), wild king salmon measuring two feet long, and active glaciers, the majesty of which cannot be conveyed by diagrams in classroom textbooks.  I crossed over a gorge in a wooden plank bridge that swayed and rocked dreadfully with every brush of wind and footsteps.  I got to explore an old growth redwood forest top-down, by walking along wood plank bridges connecting tree houses built high above the forest floor.  I learned that much of the Pacific Northwest region of North America is actually classified as rainforest of the temperate variety.  Imagine that!

And I had a lot of good food.  In this post, I think I have managed to boil down two weeks of delicious food into the key highlights, organized by food types and section links for easier consumption.  Photos also have hover captions if no other descriptions are available.  Please enjoy!

1. Live Seafood
2. Dining Like Royalty
3. Sweet Persuasions
4. Best Brunch in Vancouver
5. Vancouver Japanese Food
6. Summary and Food Map

Live Seafood

I had very high expectations for seafood from the Pacific Northwest, affectionately named the PNW, so I am told.  And the PNW granted me every wish I made.  There were cheap oysters at Seattle's Pike Place Market, Alaskan King Salmon sashimi in the salmon capitol of the world, and fresh caught king crab and lobster off the shores of Vancouver.

The night before we boarded the Alaskan cruise ship, my family decided to buy some live clams to make a seafood ramen dinner.  The light broth was brought together with clams, two plum tomatoes, four fresh shiitake, eight green onion stalks, and some dashi to taste.  It was much lighter fare than the heavy ramen meals I prefer, complete with deep, rich broths that have been cooking for days.  But the playful tease of flavors combined from fruits of the harvest and fruits of the sea suited the rest of my family very well.  Unfortunately, all we had for serving were cereal bowls.

Dining Like Royalty

Haute cuisine applies specifically to high dining establishments in the French tradition, but imagine French and Chinese food pretending like it was prepared for nobility.  This is some of what I was fortunate enough to sample on this trip.

Below is a "creation of the day" by the French chef aboard the Alaskan cruise.  Four samplings of meats, potatoes, squashes, and mushrooms were each diced, prepared in unique enhancing sauces, and presented delightfully in crispy wafer cones.

When a president or monarch visits China, the Chinese head of state lavishly wines and dines his influential visitors in a guesthouse called Fisherman's Terrace (钓鱼台), a place with historical significance dating back nearly one thousand years.  Because the food served here is intended to represent the pinnacle of modern Chinese cuisine, you might imagine that it is pretty ballsy, even on the other side of the world, to name your restaurant after the Chinese state guesthouse.  That is exactly what this restaurant, located in affluent Aberdeen Center, has done.  And while I have never been honored by a Chinese dictator so that I can compare one establishment to its copycat, I can say that Fisherman's Terrace in Vancouver is very top notch.  Here is their five course lobster dinner set for four, including Seafood Soup with Bird's Nest (a gourmet Chinese delicacy), Lobster Platter, Crispy Halibut, Scallops and Abalone (another Chinese delicacy), and Garlic Snow Pea Tips (a well-sought after vegetable).  The house dessert consisting of Sweet Red Bean Porridge and Almond Cookie Biscuits is not pictured.

On this trip, I also tried risotto for the first time.  It was tastefully presented in the fashion of fine cuisine, but the flavor carried none of the herbal character I would think to find in even a mediocre Italian dish.  It left me wondering if risotto is just not my thing or if the Italian chef on board was hired straight out of Olive Garden.

Sweet Persuasions

I have written before about how Chinese adults from my parents' generation often have an anti-sweet tooth.  Added sugar, to them, is like the plague  Having grown up American, I look upon sweets with far fewer inhibitions.  Can you imagine what it is like on an Alaskan cruise line tailored for Americans?  The breadth and depth of the dessert spread rivaled that of every other food item on the ship combined, although many of the desserts were rather forgettable.  Here are new and/or delectable sweets I encountered on my trip through Seattle, Alaska, and Vancouver.

Beard Papa, a Japanese cream puff bakery that I have been wanting to try.  Pictured here is a matcha cream puff.

A chocolate parfait consisting of fresh fruit slices resting on a bed of fluffy chocolate pudding held in a little bowl made of thin dark chocolate.

Banana, blueberry, raspberry, blackberry crepe with chocolate sauce and vanilla ice cream on top.

I got to try three new fruits this trip, and I learned why we really do not bother to eat two of them here in America.  Pictured below are finger grapes (left), figs (upper right), and passion fruit (lower right).

I am always learning new things about food, and on this trip, I learned I was very mistaken about the delicious Chinese baked good called Wife Cake (老婆饼).  I always thought the sweet paste in the center was made purely of sugar, but that is not true!  It is actually a winter melon paste.  This is a chewy, flaky, sweet treat originating in Canton, China.  Arguably, the best cakes are made by Hong-Kongnese producer Maxim's (美心), and there are many Taiwanese producers that make delectable wife cakes for cheaper prices.  From personal experience, avoid at all costs the wife cakes made by mainland Chinese companies (you get what you pay for).

Being in Canada, I did find it necessary to order a donut from Tim Hortons.  Check that one off the bucket list.

Best Brunch in Vancouver

Consistently rated the best dim sum joint in Vancouver, Kirin (麒麟) Seafood Restaurant easily meets those expectations.  They also price like they know they are the best.  Their cheapest dim sum platters are nearly $6, which is double those of most other dim sum restaurants.  But know that every dollar you fork over at this establishment is a dollar well spent.  After all, even a $6 dim sum platter is cheaper than your run-of-the-mill mediocre plate of tapas, to say nothing of really good tapas.  Here are some of my favorite dim sum dishes as imagined and prepared by Kirin.

Vancouver Japanese Food

Vancouver's Japanese food scene is as rewarding as its Chinese food scene, although I did not find as much presence from Japanese folks as I did from the Chinese folks in the area (numbering nearly 40% of the metropolitan population, I am told).  Many of my Japanese meals did not get photographed for various reasons, so I will provide a Vancouver food map at the end of this post, and provide notable feedback in this section.

During my stay, I enjoyed an alarmingly mouth-watering bowl of ramen at Ramen Jinya; two platters of Japanese curry at Clubhouse Japanese Restaurant and Zac Zac; one beef donburi at Gyudonya; and some very succulent karaage.

Most notable of all was the bowl of Jinya Tonkotsu Black for $12.95 at Ramen Jinya.  I alluded above that I like my broths so deep and rich, the flavors would seem to seep into your tongue as if it were a sponge.  This ramen broth, tasting like they actually stewed a pig carcass for days, blew me away.  When I ordered it, I regretted not including any extra toppings; but by the end of it, I had forgotten entirely about the toppings.  All I needed or wanted was more of that pork broth infused with black sesame.  Pictured below is their downtown Vancouver menu with the Tonkotsu Black featured front and center.  Apparently, they have branches throughout the West Coast, Texas, and Chicago.

On my last evening in Vancouver, I was really craving Japanese curry.  So I found Zac Zac, a fast-food curry joint tucked away inside the food court at the H-Mart near the entertainment district.  I found the curry to be much thinner than I would expect and a lot less spicy than I would like, but the other flavors were done well.  I ordered a spicy beef curry thinking they would take the heat up a notch, but they only added a few jalapeno slices, which can be hit or miss on the spiciness scale.  These pepper slices were mostly misses.

Summary and Map

And that was mostly it!  I enjoyed a bowl of pho one night at one of Vancouver's better rated restaurants, but it did not really measure up to Pho 75 in the DC Metropolitan area, and it fell far short of the amazing bowl of pho I had years ago in Toronto.  I was also tempted to try poutine until I learned that it was (or seemed like), for all intents and purposes, cheesy fries.  And honeslty, I prefer my terribly greasy, heart-attack flavored, obesity epidemic inducing cheesy fries "Made in USA."  The map below shows my notable food excursions in Vancouver.