Try the World: Tom Yum Soup (Thailand Box)

When I lived in Tokyo, I bought curry mixes which were little more than a cardboard sleeve filled with plastic packets of spices on a few occasions. I wanted to produce something that was more authentic than Japanese curry, which is more like a spicy beef stew than a true curry. Unfortunately, my results with these mixes were lifeless and thin.

I've since gotten a lot better at making curry thanks to the copious amounts of advice on the internet for doing a better job with Indian cuisine. I am still, however, wary of mixes that are little more than plastic packets of spices. I associate them with the same failures I had in the past, but I also wonder if they are "enough" to produce a dish of complexity and depth. So, it was with no small level of skepticism that I looked at the dry spices and had my doubts.

The instructions say to use mushroom, onion, "lemonade." I interpreted that as "lemon juice" as I believe it's a poor translation. For the meat/seafood portion, I opted to use tilapia fish because I had tons of it in the freezer. I cooked the onion a bit longer than it said (1 minute) because I don't like the sharper flavors of raw onion in soup, but otherwise followed the instructions faithfully.

The soup smelled great and I was very careful not to overcook the fish since that could make it rubbery. The lemongrass was the strongest aroma, followed by the pandan. I did not question the portions of the spices that I used because the end of the recipe said one could add Thai chili paste for more heat. I don't have this item, but I figured I could shape in some red chili flakes if it was bland.

It turned out that this was far from an issue. I'm quite tolerant of heat in my dishes, but this was nuclear hot from the plethora of dried chilies. It would stun me if anyone felt this needed more chili. I had to add in coconut milk and mix the soup with rice to make it tolerate. It was stunningly hot.

Though this was really tasty, I wished I'd been warned about how hot it would be. I think that half the number of chilies would have worked better for my tastes. For people who are even less intolerant, I'd think no more than three would do. The other issue with this was that the spices remained too hard to consume when the soup was done. I had to laboriously pluck them all out each time I ate it.

This was very good and I'm glad that it was included in the box. I wish I had known more about it before I had prepared it so I could have made more adjustments to suit my tastes. I can say that the fish went well with this and I think this is a fantastic way to have seafood in your diet. If you don't care for it, the soup is so flavorful that you can't really taste the fish. 

Salmon Burgers

After last week's disappointing fish recipe, I may have been tempting fate with another. However, I bought three pounds of tilapia fish and Costco has not been carrying the frozen fishburgers that I like so much. These two forces, along with the fact that I am making myself learn to like fish more, encouraged me to try this recipe Mark Bittman's salmon burgers.

Those with good reading comprehension will note that the recipe is for salmon burgers and I have tilapia fish. My feeling is that, if I could afford salmon, I wouldn't need to make it into a burger. I figured that the main difference would be that the tilapia wouldn't have the same flavor profile as the salmon and fish should be fish.

Though many people in the comments talked about adding an egg to the mix, I wanted to give it a chance as it was. I didn't know if the burger would hold together well without an egg, but I figured that worst that could happen would be that I'd end up with scrambled fish and have to eat a fish sloppy Joe. That would be messy, but it probably wouldn't be bad.

Other than using tilapia, I cut the recipe in half because I don't have a regular food processor. I have to use a tiny attachment that goes with my immersion blender. I also doubled the capers (left the amount the same while cutting the rest of the recipe in half) and put in about half a teaspoon of garlic salt. I did this because of the less flavorful nature of tilapia relative to salmon, but also because I love capers.

It turns out that, when you process tilapia into a paste, it gets incredibly sticky. I was glad to have a burger press to form these and lining it with plastic wrap stopped the sticking in the non-stick press. I was stunned at just how "gluey" it was. I had a terrible time getting it off of the little food processor that I used and had to scrub the seams with a brush several times to get fish goo out of them. I should mention that my fish was still partially frozen when I chopped and processed it. I wanted it to be this way so that it wouldn't turn to must. The filets are very thin and fragile and this did stop it from being pulverized. I would repeat this same semi-frozen processing if I do this again.

This made three burgers which was one burger more than it was "supposed" to. The patties were very large and it was more than enough fish. I served it on homemade bread with a very small amount of  mayonnaise and on a bed of red onion, avocado, and tomato. Cooking it in butter yielded a beautiful browned exterior. I was careful not to cook it too long, however, because the burger was thin and I didn't want it to be rubbery or dried out.

The interior was nice and tender and it was flavorful in multiple ways without being overbearingly any one flavor. The fish was present, as were the capers, the scallions, and the garlic. I didn't salt the burger after I cooked it because I salted the mixture very well and it was perfect. I was incredibly impressed with how this turned out in all respects and expect to make it again and again. In fact, this one is likely to get added to my recipe box as I think it can be made with any type of fish and is better than commercially prepared burgers.

Fish Poached in Buttermilk

Since I learned the benefits of poaching fish in milk, I've been researching other recipes which cook it in this fashion. I learned that a lot of them include a second step after cooking the fish in which the poaching liquid is reduced and used as a sauce. Given the magical properties of buttermilk to tenderize meat, I decided to try a recipe that poached the fish in buttermilk.

The recipe was not without it's issues as far as I was concerned. First of all, half of it was prepping vegetables to serve the fish with. I didn't really need guidance on side dishes so I skipped the first part and focused on the fish preparation. I also am not a big fan of dill so I used parsley instead. This is how my dish turned out looking:

It actually looks fine, despite being super pale overall. I used tilapia fish because that was what I had on hand. I'm very careful with the timing on cooking it because I know it can over-cook in a heartbeat. The texture of the fish was very tender and it flaked well.

The problem was with the sauce. I did reduce it a bit despite the recipe not asking me to do so. I wanted something a bit thicker than just plain milk, though I knew adding butter in would add some texture to it at a later stage. Despite my reducing the sauce a bit and adding in butter, it was still very thin. I added in lemon juice and gave it a taste. It seemed tangy and almost cheesy (maybe from the buttermilk) just out of the blender. I made the fish and sauce on the early side of the day because I had other things to do. I put both in the refrigerator for later consumption figuring that the flavors might come together more as time went by.

Unfortunately, what seemed flavorful at that point tasted like little more than mildly flavored slightly condensed milk several hours later. The sauce was just so bland and uninteresting that I threw the rest out. I was very disappointed. The other pieces of fish that I poached were not embellished with the milk sauce. Despite being poached in milk, they carried none of the flavor of it so I folded them into Asian rice dishes with soy sauce, ginger, garlic and chilis.

This recipe was not only a bust for me, but it put me off any sort of recipe that uses the poaching liquid as a sauce. This just did not do it for me and, while I will absolutely continue to poach fish in milk (or buttermilk), I think I'm done sampling this type of recipe. 

Meera Sodha's Chicken Curry

A big part of the purpose of this blog is to motivate myself to try new things. I'll admit that I'm not new to curry in terms of consuming it nor making it. I've been trying to perfect truly good curry and sampling various recipes for the last year or so.

I spent years making curry-like concoctions that were fine, but nothing like the sublime experiences that I had when going to a good Indian restaurant. I've perfected a really fantastic almond curry (murgh badami) recipe that I discovered online. It has become my husband's favorite and it has a good deal of depth of flavor. It's a rare recipe that has no cumin and gets richness from the almonds.

While my husband can't get enough of the murgh badami, I don't want to exclusively focus on it. I've been trying for some time to get a tomato-based recipe that reminds me of the steaming bowls of curry offered at Indian establishments, and I've largely failed. It is for this reason that I decided to try The New York Time's oft-mentioned (on Facebook) recipe for Meera Sodha's chicken curry.

The picture on the Time's recipe is very vibrantly red. I think the picture is color adjusted digitally to look that way given that I followed the recipe fairly closely and mine was brownish orange. My tomatoes were plenty red, and I used good quality tomato paste which was thick and a rich red shade, but mine looked like this:

I think that the turmeric brought out a lot of the orange shades and the yogurt lightened the overall vibrancy. This isn't an important point, but I do wish that pictures weren't manipulated to make them look less realistic than the result. That being said, my curry is definitely less photogenic than the one on the Times.

The alternations I made were based on my experience with previous curries. Instead of adding the yogurt separately near the end, I marinated the chicken in the yogurt overnight with about a half teaspoon of  salt, a teaspoon of garlic powder, and about a half teaspoon of chili powder. I do this because my husband is the main consumer of my curries and he dislikes dry white meat. Marinating the chicken in yogurt for eight hours or more makes sure that it is flavorful and tender.

Beyond marinating in the yogurt with a few extra spices, the only changes I made were to use three small serrano peppers because that was what I had instead of jalepeno or cayenne. I also didn't want the curry to be too hot because my husband can't tolerate too much heat. To that end, I also skipped adding a pinch of cayenne at the end as well. The garam masala was plenty hot enough to make up for these changes.

I also had to cook the onion mixture longer than the recipe said, but it has always been my experience that the amount of time it takes to get onions to the proper "golden" state is longer than recipes assert. I think they don't want to scare people off by listing the real cooking times, which can be intimidating in their length.

The end result was an excellent curry that was richly savory and slightly thick with a hint of heat. The tomato flavor merges and is mellowed by the onion and all of the spices come together with equal power to form an excellent backbone. Usually, it takes an overnight sit in the refrigerator for the flavors to fully merge in curry (at least for me), but this one seemed to pull together very rapidly and tastes great right off the burner. This is one I'd definitely make again with the hopes of repeatinf the same result. 

Arepas With Cheese and Corn

Sometimes, you run across a food that makes you say, "Why isn't this widely available already?" These are usually dishes that are approachable on multiple levels and include familiar ingredients, but come together in a relatively different presentation as compared to the cultural norms. It is one thing to experience yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit with a complex flavor that feels like what you'd get if you mixed the essential qualities of lemon, orange, and grapefruit in the best possible way, and decide it is incredibly palatable, but so unavailable in the U.S. as to not be a mainstream flavor; it is quite another to experience arepas with their easily available ingredients list.

I am a big fan of cornbread and, when I came across the The New York Times recipe for arepas with cheese and corn, it seemed like something that would be easy to love. In the silly video that accompanies the Times recipe, Mark Bittman likens them to a cornmeal English muffin. I think that is based on how it is eaten rather than how it is prepared as it is cooked more like a pancake.

I followed the recipe faithfully except for skipping the chilis. I already had a black bean mixture that I'd made the day before which I'd made with too much chili and I didn't want more heat added to the meal. In the future, I would certainly consider using the chili in the arepas, but not this time. The black beans that I had were so messy that my result resembled a Venezuelan sloppy joe:

When I mixed them up, it came out very wet and didn't really absorb much over time. I should note that I didn't just toss everything together as Bittman did, but rather added the milk and butter to the cornmeal to see how it came together first. I don't know if the wetness of this was because my cornmeal was a little old and had picked up moisture or if I hadn't allowed the milk and butter mixture to get hot enough to partially "cook" the raw cornmeal.

I "fixed" this very well by tossing the milk, butter and cornmeal mixture into the microwave for about 30 seconds to thicken it up. This worked extremely well and I added in the cheese, scallions, corn, and cilantro. Making patties was much easier after cooking the mixture a bit.

Arepas are frankly fantastic eaten on their own. I plan to make them again and just eat them plain with butter. The exterior is pleasantly crispy and the interior moist and tender. Storing the extras overnight in the refrigerator robs the exterior of its snap, but you can restore it easily by re-heating in the toaster oven. As cheap, nutritious, and accessible flavors go, you can't beat this.