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!

Izakaya Alice: Ramen

Last night, Izakaya Alice was in full swing!!

On the menu earlier was a Smoked Turkey, two Nappa Cabbage salads, and the wakame salad. We also served some Five-Grain rice. This was just an ordinary dinner menu, though. It wasn't Izakaya Alice...

...until 12 AM!

Izakaya Alice opened up shop as a Ramen Joint! I made some shoyu (soy sauce) ramen and shio (salt) ramen using the same recipe as before. Unfortunately, I only had lame-o dried ramen noodles, but the soup was creamy and rich without being oily. I was pretty happy with it!

We didn't close shop 'til close to 3 AM. Needless to say, my Sunday morning hiking plans were diverted, but I hadn't had that much fun in a LOOOOOOOOONG time! I laughed so much for the entire evening that my face muscled hurt all day today!


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By the way, I don't know if my wakame salad is the same wakame salad that Angeline asked for earlier, but mine is so super simple, I don't even know if it can be really called a recipe...

Wakame Salad:
1. Bring dried-wakame to life by soaking in water, ~5+ min.
2. Blanch pea sprouts and chill in ice water.
3. Slice cucumbers.
4. Arrange wakame, pea sprouts, and cucumbers in a nice glass bowl.
5. Mix ponzu with a touch of sesame oil and ginger; pour over salad.
6. Sprinkle toasted sesame seeds.
7. Add tomatoes if you like, and you're done!

Izakaya Alice: Not quite sold out tonight

Hmmm, tonight's Izakaya Alice menu didn't fare too well...

Any hints as to why? Maybe the sauce just was too heavy?

Baked Sockeye Salmon with Mustard Dill Sauce:

1. Mix 1/4 cup mustard (Dijon), lots of dried dill, dash of curry powder and ponzu.
2. Slather mustard mixture on 1 lbs sockeye salmon.
3. Bake.

Yah, it was easy to prepare in the typical Izakaya Alice way, but it just didn't get consumed at the usual rate. I wonder if I needed more lemon/citrus/vinegar to cut the grease of the sockeye salmon. Or maybe I should have washed the salmon in wine to get the fishiness out.

This recipe had so much potential, yet it just didn't get loved by my diners as much. I wonder what I could do better next time...

Izakaya Alice: Late night soups

This entire holiday weekend, we've sort of been off-schedule at the Bear Family household. The Papa Bear doesn't get up before 10 AM unless prodded, and the Baby Bear has been catching up on her celebrity gossip in the morning hours while the Papa Bear is sleeping away. The problem with starting the day late is that our hunger level is off-schedule...

For example, we had a huuuuuuge lunch-inner at 3 PM in San Francisco on Sunday (a somewhat non-memorable tapas place, except for the fact that the owner was SUPPPPPER nice). This made us not hungry until... 10 PM? Who wants to cook a major dinner at 10 PM? Surely not this Baby Bear.

Luckily, we had some ground chicken and eggs - which is all I need in addition to my usual pantry items (which is probably worth a post of its own - the Japanese staples entry!). I threw together an Izakaya Alice specialty - 10 min dishes that is satisfying enough to be a menu item on the Izakaya Alice line-up:

Chicken-tsukune soup:

1. Make tsukune (chicken meatballs) by combining and massaging together 1 lbs ground chicken, 2 eggs, 1 tbp (eye-balled) ponzu, a bunch of sesame seeds, and enough panko (JP bread curmbs) to give it enough consistency to make balls.

2. Make dashi enough to act as soup (~1.5 cups per person is more than enough; and yes, yes, I will do a dashi post when I have enough energy... You see, it's because I keep thinking the dashi post will be best with pictures and pictures take a long time to process...><). Flavor dashi with soy sauce for a touch of saltiness.

3. Add tsukune balls to dashi. I am so lazy, I don't bother making the balls. I scoop some of the tsukune material and drop it directly into the soup. It looks like an ellipical blob, but it works just fine. No mess!

4. Cook until all tsukune balls float (about 5-8 min). Chop one in half just to make sure it's cooked in the middle.

5. Add dried wakame (the kind that expands) and turn off heat. While you get all of the dishes ready for plating the soup and setting the table, the wakame will be ready!

6. I served the entire pot on the table with some grated yamaimo to top the soup (yamaimo also deserves a post of its own - my current obsession!). Add ponzu as desired while eating the soup!

This was sooooo super satisfying and it took literally 15-20 min to make. It was the epitome of Izakaya Alice - quick, healthy, and satisfying!

Artichokes, Koo-style

I didn't get to describe in detail some of the deliciousness I experienced recently at Koo (San Francisco) with The Gourmand and Yamo, but there were three dishes in particular that I was really excited about. These three dishes, I have since then replicated at home with moderate success. Today's post is just a quick recipe post:

Koo-inspired artichokes...

1. Fill pressure cooker with 1 cup of katsuo-dashi (bonito broth, which I keep promising to share my recipe... I promise, I promise!)
2. Throw in artichokes to the pressure cooker (my pressure cooker fits 4)
3. Cook on high heat until the pressure cooker starts to make that pressure-cooking noise.
4. Turn heat to low and cook 2 min.
5. Turn off pressure cooker heat and let pressure come back to normal.
6. In the mean time, make the dipping sauce.

Dipping Sauce:
1. Heat extra-virgin olive oil and sautee a handful of chopped garlic cloves.
2. Once the garlic is fragrant, add salt and generous amounts of dried rosemary, thyme, oregano, and sage.
3. Turn off heat and let oil cool.
4. Add vinegar, mirin, and more salt (if needed) to taste until a slightly tangy, subtly sweet, fragrant taste is acheived.

In Koo's version, the artichokes were soaked in the sauce, but I decided to season it with a dipping sauce. It's less messy at home because your fingers don't get sticky with the sauce, since you're just dipping the tips of the artichoke leaves. If you don't have garlic allergies like I do (I can't eat raw garlic - it makes me throw up), this sauce can probably be made without sauteeing the garlic, but the frying gave it a really nice toasty scent.

A Noodle Lover's Favorite

I love noodles.

I can easily live without another grain of rice in my life, but if I were to swear off noodles, I'd be in some serious dietary stress.

Just to give you an example of my noodle-y obsession, I had at least one noodle meal for six out of the seven days for the past week:

Friday: Pho at Beef Noodle #1, San Jose.
Saturday: Stir-fried noodles at a mediocre Vietnamese restaurant.
Sunday: Noodle break!
Monday: Pho at Pho Binh.
Tuesday: Ramen at Kahoo, San Jose (soon-to-be-reviewed).
Wednesday: Ramen at Himawari - my favorite ramen shop in the Bay Area. Despite all the new shops opening, Himawari is my #1 favorite.
Thursday: Mixed so-men and udon in dashi soup.

My aunt and uncle who were visiting me from Japan reminded me that I always loved noodles. My poor aunt, who is not a big fan of ramen, told me that the last time she ate ramen was when she was in San Francisco last year!

The reason why I love noodles so much is because of its texture. I love feeling it flip and flop inside of my mouth, resisting my bite while dancing on my tongue. Soggy noodles are the biggest sin; even the best broth cannot rescue over-cooked noodles. As a noodle-texture lover, my favorite noodle dishes play up to the texture-aspect of noodle-y goodness...

Whenever I am making noodles at home, I try to add different noodles into one dish - spaghetti and parpadelle, so-men and udon, bo(stick)-ramen with pseudo-hand-pulled ramen. I love how fun noodles are when you mix more than one width, girth, or chewiness into one bite. Of course I have to stagger when I put the quicker cooking noodles into the pot, but the trouble is only 1/10 of the deleciousness.

...

......I might have to go make a bowl of mis-matched thickness noodles now!

The Best Recycled Turkey - Ramen

I had a belated Thanksgiving meal last night (Saturday) with some friends at my place. It was a pretty eclectic menu, consisting of a roast turkey with basil-cilantro-garlic shoved under the skin (best way to get the flavors into the bird!), brown and wild rice stuffing with raisins and a variety of Asian mushrooms, soymilk turkey broth gravy, pumpkin Israeli couscous, soy milk mashed potatoes, and pomegranate molasses carrots. Appetizers were sliced grilled steak that the Papa Bear and I call 'Bobby's Beef'(more on this on later this week) and home-shucked Kumamoto oysters with homemade daikon gratings and ponzu sauce. Heh, not your typical Thanksgiving meal, but the spirit was definitely there...


Surprisingly, we didn't end up with a whole lot of leftovers besides the turkey carcass. But the bird carcass is actually my favorite part of cooking an entire animal. I am too much of a cheap-o to make stock with an entire bird, but a carcass with most of its meat picked off? Perfect. I take this as my special opportunity to create delicious broth by cooking the leftover body for hours on end. I had a few left over beef bones as well, so I threw those into the soup to add some more iosine monophosphate umami into the mix to counter act the predominantly glutamate-powered broth.



I usually turn this bird broth into risotto or some other Western dish, but as I was dancing around the kitchen celebrating the fragrant turkey aroma my broth was emitting, the Papa Bear came downstairs (our rooms are upstairs) to see if I wanted to go out for pho+?. As I was still in my PJs and planned to stay in my PJs for most of the day today, I suggested that I make turkey-pho for us instead. To this, he asked me if we had any pho noodles at home...which we didn't have. So I quickly replaced my suggestion with ramen. The broth I had made was so rich and so deeply complex with cilantro, basil, garlic, and some left over rice stuffing floating around, I was certain it would rival most ramen broths in the Bay Area. We agreed that ramen for lunch sounded good, so I decided to do a little experiment.


As most ramen fans know, most stores have a big pot of stock that has no seasoning in it, and ramen soup is made from stock and seasoning individually in each bowl. What that meant was that I could try a few different combinations of seasoning to go with my rich turkey broth. I assembled a simple old-school shoyu broth (extra-strong bonito broth with soy sauce), a tomato-powered salt broth (because tomatoes have the same molecular umami composition as bonito broth and soy sauce), and nuoc mam (Vietnamese fish sauce) with counter-balancing ginger.


I added just enough turkey stock to the three seasonings to create a trinity of choices. Each of them was so individually different, I was totally amazed. Utterly taken back. I mean, theoretically, of course all three soups ought to taste different, but boy, this was an unique experience. All three of them had the same background flavor of that almost gamey turkey smell, but the top note - the first taste - was so drastically different. The shoyu was buttery and powerful in a delightful way, the tomato-salt was gentle and nourishing, and the nouc mam... that just didn't work. The nuoc mam-ginger was just too edgy and harsh; it didn't envelope the stock to bring anything out of it.


The Papa Bear was immediately smitten with the shoyu while I preferred the tomato-salt (which is to be expected, since the Papa Bear likes rich ramen, while I gravitate towards the lighter, delicate ramen broth). Once the soup seasoning was decided upon, I made more of the seasoning we liked (the first batch was tester-sizes), prepared some boiled eggs for toppings, cooked up some frozen, ex-'fresh' ramen noodles (did you know that if you freeze 'fresh' noodles, they get chewier?), and voila - shoyu and shio ramen was created from our Thanksgiving leftovers! What was also very amazing was that this dish, even though there wasn't a piece of turkey meat in the end, was very deserving of being called 'turkey ramen'. The broth mingled beautifully with the noodles, such that each bite was full of turkey essence and fragrance. I will definitely do this again next year!

PS:
The Papa Bear preferred my seasoning over the store-bought packaged seasoning...