Pork Roast: Apple-Sauce Version

This is not really a roast. Actually, it's not a roast at all, but it's another pork recipe that can be adopted to be a roast recipe. I made it with bone-in pork chops, and it literally took me 10 minutes to have dinner on the table. It was so good that 10 min later, it was gone.

1. Cut a hole in the pork chop. This is to stuff some goods inside in the subsequent steps.
2. Mix applesauce and dried hot peppers, adding the peppers to your liking.
3. Stuff the pork chop with applesauce/pepper mixture.
4. Mix dried thyme, rosemary, and salt with mustard. I go heavy on the herbs (2 tsp per 1 tbs mustard) since mine are not very potent. I think I had about 1/2 tsp of salt.
5. Slather mustard mixture on one side of the pork.
6. Heat a skillet. When hot, put the pork in, mustard-side up. Turn down heat to med-high and cook 5 min or so. I cover my skillet here to speed up the cooking process.
7. Turn up heat back up to high and flip pork. Cook 3 more min or so.
8. Flip pork over again, add 1/2 cup of sake, close lid, turn down heat to medium and cook 5 min or so, until sake has evaporated.
9. Check that the pork has reached internal temperature of 160F or so and remove from skillet.
10. Add 2 tbs of ketchup and 1/4 cup of sake to the skillet, scrape any goodies off from the pan and blend into ketchup sauce. Serve pork with sauce.

I microwaved pre-cut broccoli and baby carrots while the pork was cooking. Since I hardly eat starches, I don't bother with rice, bread, etc, but the Papa Bear supplemented dinner with white rice.

The applesauce kept the pork very tender and the sauce complimented the sweet and spicy pork so incredibly well. I feel a tad awkward complimenting my own recipe, but this was a true winner. And the speed of it all? That's the best part!

Dinner Parties: Mexican Night

Because I have had little motivation to go out to eat lately for caloric and economical reasons, I've been hosting a number of dinner get-togethers. Luckily, my friends have not complained having to eat at Izakaya Alice (yet), but I try to limit repeating menu items as often as possible. Besides our now standard Sushi Party, I've thrown traditional roast-poultry American, Americanized-Italian and Slightly Japanese-Mexican-themed dinner parties. Well... if we get really technical, all my cooking uses the Japanese elixir, dashi, for broth, so they all are slightly Japanified. Izakaya Alice is fusion at its core...

What I learned from throwing dinner parties is that the protocol for success is very much like what I do in the laboratory at work. If the party starts at 7 PM, I go to my whiteboard in the kitchen and start with this:

t=0 7 PM

time=0 indicates when the party starts; in other words, that's when all the prep work need to be completed. Then, I fill the rest of the menu items, so now my whiteboard looks like this:

Mango salsa
Salsa
Guacamole
Ground meat
Drum sticks
Taco veggies
Mexican Rice
Beans
Set up quesadilla bar & taco shells

t=0 7 PM

Finally, I add when I will need to start to have the dish/prep work done by t=0. I also order things so that things that can be made ahead are done first, so as to serve hot foods hot when at t=0.

5:00 PM Mango salsa
5:00 PM Salsa
5:00 PM Guacamole
6:20 PM Ground meat
6:00 PM Chicken drumsticks (oven, 6:30 PM)
5:45 PM Taco veggies
5:00 PM Mexican Rice (stove, 6:30 PM)
6:00 PM Beans
6:30 PM Set up quesadilla bar & taco shells

t=0 7 PM

I then get started with each task, referring back frequently to my whiteboard to plan a few steps ahead as I prepare dishes. I even actually check off items as they are completed. This organizational tedium has helped me throw parties with minimal time commitment and pressure. In fact, with my super dishwasher with its godzillion plate-load capacity, throwing a dinner party, start-to-finish, is leaps and bounds easier than going out to dinner in San Francisco!

Here are a few winners from the Mexican Dinner Party:

Izakaya-Alice Non-refried Beans:
Sautee 1 onion and 5 cloves of garlic. Puree sauteed stuff. Add 2 can canned beans to food processor, making separate batches if needed to fit into food processor. Puree beans with the onion-garlic mixture. Add dashi to thin if pureeing is difficult. When liquefied, put bean mixture into a pot and mix dashi to achieve desirable consistency. Add salt to taste.

Izakaya-Alice Guacamole:
Sautee 1 onion and 5 cloves of garlic. (I actually made a big batch of this onion-garlic mixture and used it in several recipes during the evening. This heating step is necessary for me, because I am allergic to raw onions and garlic. It's likely not necessary for anyone else, but heating it definitely brings the sweetness out of the onions.) Puree 2 avocados, 1/2 cup fat-free cottage cheese, and onion-garlic mixture together. Chop tomatoes and add to avocado mixture. Add salt and lime juice to taste.

Photo: compliments from Jumprdude.com. I have a contributing photographer now, so you will likely start seeing more pictures on MED again!

Pork Roast: Mustard Version

I love the pork tenderloins they sell at Trader Joe's. The ones that are tubular in shape? They make great roasts that take about two seconds to prep and are great for a busy weeknight dinner. I dress the pork, throw it in the oven, go do something else for 15 min or so, come back to whip up a salad, microwave some more veggies, and voila! Dinner is served!

I have several different versions of the pork roast, but this one is what we are having for dinner tonight:

0. Turn oven on to 400F.

1. Cut pork tenderloin in the middle without slicing into two discrete pieces (just enough of a cut to allow goodies to be put in the middle).

2. Slather apricot jam/orange maramalade/or anything else like that in the middle.

3. Fold the pork closed and place in a roasting pan or Pyrex dish.

4. Mix:
1/4 cup mustard
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1.5 tbs toasted sesame seeds
1 tbs dried oregano
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper

5. Slather mustard mixture on top of the pork.

6. Bake, 400F, 25-30 min or until center portion reaches at least 160F.

Recycling Leftovers

One of my most useful skills is my ability to recycle left-overs. I can take left-overs and odds and ends in the fridge & cupboard and feed myself for up to 2 weeks. There was a time when I was just too busy/tired to go shopping and I managed to feed 2 adults (and 2 kids for 2+ meals) literally for 2 weeks. I haven't topped that one yet, but in general, I can create a totally satisfying meal with the most absurd ingredients.

For example, we had a hot pot dish one night. The following night, I made a risotto with the rice and soup we had left over. This second meal was relatively predictable. But then I pureed this and made a dip out of it by adding spices for a third 'serving'. The third incarnation was as far as I got this time around, but a co-worker of mine had an exceptionally wonderful fourth step to add to this: return to the soup after the puree. What great way to go full circle! Soup (hot pot) to rice dish to dip to soup! This is so Zen in the strangest sense, I love it!

The Papa Bear refuses to eat left-overs (although he claims it is unintentional), so I find myself getting creative on ways to not throw away food. One of my most creative recycling projects was a kabocha pumpkin stew (savory) turned into a pumpkin brownie/pudding (sweet). I took out the mushrooms and the konyaku (to be described in a different post), added some eggs and spices, adjusted the sweetness to taste with some maple syrup, baked it in a cookie sheet, and cut out cookie-cutter shapes. No one who ate this creation would have ever guessed that it was a recycling project! :)

The key to my recycling is to find out what is in the dish, feeling the potential of what it could be, and rebuilding flavors and scents as a new dish in my mind. It shares something very fundamental with my love for making sauces. The process of creating something new by combining all sorts of building blocks - that is the best of part of being in the kitchen!

Breakfast Treats: French Toast

Weekend breakfasts were always a treat I looked forward to in college and grad school. In fact, it was often the highlight of the weekend. Mo's Diner in Hartford, Eggs N' Things in Honolulu, and Elmo's Diner and Mama Dip's Kitchen in Chapel Hill - just seeing the names of these places bring a smile to my face. Standing in line for sometimes hours at a time, the wait was part of the fun too. Powered by the free-flowing coffee and giggles over the happenings of the night before, weekend breakfasts were really an integral ritual for me back then.

I've tried to recreate a breakfast ritual here in San Jose too, but I guess times have changed. No one calls me at 10 AM to wake me up to go to breakfast anymore - instead, I am up by 8 AM, either furiously finishing up my work from the night before or heading out for a long run or my pick-up rugby game. In place of the gossip from the night before are talks of what to make for dinner and which grocery store I need to go before the crowd gets there too. But once in a while, I crave that breakfast scent of cinnamon and nutmeg, eggs and batter, and pots after pots of coffee. And when I felt that way this weekend, I opened up the fridge to find all the necessary ingredients for one of my favorites from those days waiting in line for the perfect start of the day...

French Toast:
2 eggs
1/4 cup Vanilla Soy Milk
A healthy amount of nutmeg (fresh ground is sooo much better!)
A generous portion of cinammon

Trader Joe's Sprouted Whole Wheat Bread (this was key for the aboslutely wonderful nutty flavor and chewy texture.)

Beat eggs well and add remaining ingredients. Soak bread in batter thoroughly. Spray heated skillet with canola oil (I tried it without any oil at first and the bread lost its nice egg layer...). Cook on one side until the face-up side starts to look less wet. Flip, cook about the same amount of time (I like my French Toast mostly dry with just a touch of wetness left in the middle).

I ate my French Toast with a kiwi-mango-papaya fruit salad, which was very satisfyingly good, despite my missing the rest of breakfast ritual...

Wa-saucy!

OK, OK, so the title was a really bad play on words...

I am a big fan of making sauces of all sorts. It is actually what I love the most about cooking - mixing different ingredients to see what comes out at the end. I match different textures, flavors, and scents, while imagining what the sauce will do to the saucee - the saucee being the object of affection with which the sauce will be consumed. It is truly one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen.

It is a misconception that sauces need to be high in fat to be creamy. I used to buy into the mayonnaise-as-base fundamentals of making creamy sauces. I recently learned that Fat-Free European-style yogurt works better than mayonnaise with 1/3 of the calorie. I basically substitute yogurt for all my mayo-based sauces and dips now.

Here's one my stand-bys. This is great with steamed vegetables or other crudites.

1 tbs wasabi from a tube
1 tsp soba/udon sauce (I have this as a home-made sauce, frozen; however this can be bought in bottles at most grocery stores these days.)
3 tbs yogurt (I go fat-free, and it's plenty creamy)

Mix well.

And that's it! This is great as a dipping sauce, but it can also be used as salad dressing. As salad dressing, though, the wasabi might be ultra-potent, so I'd go a bit easy on the wasabi. This is also great with grilled scallops; it can even work with grilled chicken if you add a touch more salt to it.

It's so easy, I almost feel silly writing it. But I am hoping that this blog can help The Papa Bear gain independence in the kitchen, which means I must write down even the most simplest of recipes...

Resurrecting MED

I am coming out of retirement!

I have been wondering what to do with MED, even considering deleting it all together. I just haven't been eating out very much, which left me without anything to write about here. But recently, some of my friends and I decided to learn a new dish a month to cook at home - what perfect way to ressurect MED! I will log what we all make and associated recipes! I'll call these The Dish of the Month.

In between The Dish of the Month posts, I'll try to post what I can about my recently discovered healthful eating recipes. I have been on a judo-motivated weight loss program for the last few months and I seem to be onto something. I have managed to lose 10+ lbs since September, which is pretty good, considering that was about a 8% loss in total weight for me. :)

I'll also try to collect all the basic recipes for Japanese cooking under the Basics category... I have been requested to do this so many times, and I kept promising that I will... This time, I really will!