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.