Raspberry Transparency

Raspberry Transparency

As some of you may recall, one of my motives in creating this blog was to chronicle my experimentation with molecular gastronomy, mostly cooking bits and pieces from the beautiful Alinea cookbook. A few of my early posts, such as the one-bite caramel apple, reflected this goal.

Pectin NH, among the other chemicals

Since then, though, most of my posts have reflected more conventional ingredients. There are many reasons for this, but they mostly center around molecular gastronomy recipes taking a TON of time, being very finicky, and having results that are cool, but sort of gimmicky and repetitive. It is, after all, the sensation of an alginate sphere bursting as you bite it that's cool, not the fact that the sphere tastes of beet or ginger or apple.  That's not to say these things aren't worth playing with, just that doing so requires many free hours or a small army of sous chefs and interns. I have neither.

Straining raspberries

Occasionally, though, it's still fun to dabble. And with a little extra time this week, I decided to make Achatz's raspberry transparency once more. By Alinea standards, this is a simple recipe. Ingredient-wise it just requires some raspberries, sugar, rose water and a particular type of pectin labeled 'NH'. Equipment-wise one just needs some food-grade acetate sheets (I bought a case a couple years ago) and a dehydrator (check). Time-wise it takes a couple hours over about 2 days. Easy.

Oh, yeah, Achatz makes these with candied rose petals and sprays them with a freeze-dried yogurt powder. I don't have easy access to edible rose petals, yogurt powder or a food-safe paint sprayer, so skipped those parts.

Raspberry juice

Since the last time I had tried this one, though, I like to think that I've gotten better at pulling stuff off of acetate (trickier than it sounds), partly because I'm using better acetate (I think). So I thought I'd see how it'd work a second time.

The recipe basically involves making and then twice-dehydrating a raspberry gel. First step: make raspberry juice (when life deals you raspberries...). To do so, I cooked a pint or so (300g) of raspberries with a bit of sugar and water, mashing until they were thoroughly crushed. Then I strained it through a fine-mesh strainer in the fridge overnight.

Dehydration, Round 1

Next step: make the juice into a gel. I cooked the resulting juice with a bit (7g) of kewra water (like rose water, but better because I already had some in the kitchen) and blended with a few grams of pectin NH using an immersion blender. This mix was then cooled, allowed to gel, and then gently heated again until just liquid. As far as I can tell from some Googling, the unique trait of pectin NH is that it can gel, reheat to liquid, and gel again.

Third step: Dehydration, round 1. The gel is spread very thin on sheets of acetate, which are then dehydrated for about 4 hours at 105 F. The result of this first dehydration step is sort of a very thin, somewhat leathery fruit roll-up. These are then removed from the acetate, trying to keep them in large chunks, and placed back on the dehydrator trays for round 2: four more hours of dehydrating, this time at 125 F until they are crisp.

Dehydration, Round 2

The result is exactly what it sounds like: raspberry transparency. Very thin, crisp bits of raspberry sheets that feel and look like plastic transparencies. The taste is subtle, but the flavor of raspberry is quite evident. The texture is unique. First it feels like you're eating flavored plastic, and then it quickly dissolves on the tongue.

The Soda Project - Part 1: Ginger Ale

I know that sugary (or high-fructose corn syrupy) drinks are evil these days. I get that a can of Coke has something like 7 teaspoons of sweetener, and agree that's ridiculous.  I get that it has a ton of empty calories, and I'm fairly conscious of nutrition and what I eat. And yet I confess...I really like sugary drinks sometimes.

I'm not advocating habitual consumption (though I was once a habitual consumer), but the occasional Coke really is (to quote one of the company's earliest slogans) delicious and refreshing. A corned beef sandwich in a Detroit-area deli doesn't taste the same without a Faygo Red Pop (note how they don't even attempt to associate it with a real food or flavor; merely redness), as I've had in that setting for as long as I can remember.

When I swore off sugary drinks for a couple years about a decade ago, I missed them a little. Beyond nostalgia, there are also some outstanding lesser-known sodas out there: Blenheim's ginger ale (sold at Zingerman's, where the staff inevitably warn you at the cash register about how spicy it is), Virgil's root beer, and others. 

I've thought for a while about making my own sodas, and hearing about the Homemade Soda cookbook (from which some of you may recall that I used a recipe for tonic a few weeks ago) put me over the edge. It's a fascinating book -- filled with historic sodas you mostly hear about in songs, old movies, or just never hear about at all (sarsparilla, anyone? how about a chocolate egg cream? did you even know that shrubs were a beverage?).

The author helpfully includes recipes for carbonating simply by mixing with seltzer water, using a soda siphon, or carbonating 'naturally' via champagne yeast fermentation. This latter technique was rather too intriguing to pass up. I decided to start with ginger-szechuan peppercorn ale, which sounded right up my alley (in that I love both of those tastes). 

And so I then ventured to a winemaking shop the other day to pick up a couple packets of EC118 yeast, and then to Chinatown for ginger and szechuan peppercorns.

I should also now mention the generosity of my colleagues and students in providing a bunch of empty plastic soda bottles that I sanitized for re-use. After brewing the ginger (1/4 lb, chopped) and szechuan peppercorns (1 TBSP) with some rice vinegar (not sure why) in a sugar (a POUND of sugar for a gallon of ginger ale...) solution for an hour or so, I stirred in the yeast and filled the bottles.

At first I was worried that they might not be fermenting. Since then, the bottles have gotten progressively firmer. I don't know the chemistry (anyone?) here, but the book says that means they're fermenting. Once fermentation is complete, I have to refrigerate for a week (!) to taste it.

I'll post more when I've tried it. Stay tuned!

Just a 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne...

Mary Poppins famously and lyrically observed that a teaspoon of sugar facilitates the ingestion of medication. But what if you're making something that's not medication and is already plenty sweet?

In that case, don't underestimate the power of chiles. Mexico discovered long ago that chocolate and spices play extremely nicely together. Mexican hot chocolate is a wonderful blend of chocolate, cinnamon (or canela) and other spices. Mole sauce is used in savory dishes but blends a trace of chocolate with chiles and various flavors. And the last few years have seen a slew of delicious chile-infused chocolate bars.

It was with this in mind that I decided on a whim to make a tiny addition to a Chocolate Truffle Tart last night. My initial plan was to make it as specified in the book, but I thought a bit of cayenne powder might make it slightly more interesting. I mixed in 1/4 teaspoon of it when I added the salt, figuring people wouldn't even notice such a tiny quantity but that it would add a tiny zip.

Don't underestimate the power of chiles. When I tasted the un-baked filling, the chile added a little tingle. And when I fed it to my colleagues today, a few of them noted that "it almost tastes a little bit spicy." They thought this was a positive trait, and so did I. That tiny bit of cayenne took what was already a very rich and flavorful tart, and added just a bit of intrigue.

Regrettably, I didn't take any photos of the tart. Suffice it to say that it looked like, well, a chocolate tart.  Here's the recipe. Make one yourself and you'll know what it looked like :)

Chocolate Chile Tart
(adapted from Joanne Chang's Flour cookbook)

Crust (Pate Sucree)
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature, cut into 8 pieces
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup (140 g) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 egg yolk

1. With stand mixer, cream together butter, sugar and salt on medium speed for 2-3 mins. Add the flour and beat on low speed until combined (30 seconds). Add the egg yolk and mix until the dough comes together (30 seconds).

2. Wrap dough in plastic and refrigerate 1 hour, then warm to room temperature for 30 mins.

3. Roll out the dough so it is about 11" in diameter, lift and press into a 10" tart pan

4. Refrigerate 30 minutes.

5. Bake crust @ 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes until golden. Remove and cool.


Filling
8 oz bittersweet chocolate (>70% cacao)
3/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk
2 egg yolks
2 TBSP butter at room temp
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cayenne chile powder
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder


1. Pre-heat oven to 350.

2. Place chocolate in medium bowl. Combine milk and cream in a saucepan and scald (heat to 150 degrees; do not boil) over medium-high heat. Pour the milk and cream over the chocolate and let sit 1 minute. Then whisk until smooth. Whisk in the egg yolks one at a time, then the butter, salt and cayenne. Whisk until butter is incorporated completely.

3. Put the crust on a baking sheet (for ease of handling) and pour the filling into the crust.

4. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until the edges begin to set and the middle is still jiggly. Cool on a wire rack for at least 2 hours. Refrigerate, but let warm to room temperature for several hours before serving.

5. Dust the top with the cocoa using a fine-mesh sieve.

What I'm Cooking: A Weekend in Ithaca

Many of my posts are about adventures in ingredients and cooking. This post is not adventurous at all. 

 I've mentioned that I live in Ithaca, but visit Toronto frequently. I may not have made the frequency of these visits clear, but some already know that I'm usually in Ithaca for most weekdays and about one weekend per month. Most of the rest of the weekends I spend in Toronto, which is great for recharging, exploring and hanging out with friends there.

Weekends in Ithaca are scarce and have become special. They're an opportunity to see my friends here, which is great; but also a time for some quiet and not spending hours in the car. And I usually try to spend lots of my quiet time on cooking and food prep. This past weekend was no exception, so I thought I'd tell you about the things I made.

Saturday I had plans to watch football with friends and promised to bring dessert. I'd been craving ginger ice cream. When steeped with fresh ginger it has a wonderful burn that is tempered by the richness of the custard. I was definitely planning to make that.  Wegman's also taunted me with Meyer lemons that I couldn't resist, though. So I picked up a bag and made some sherbet as well. I took all of the ice cream to my friends, but saved some sherbet for myself.  Recipes for both of these came from David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop, which I've said before is a fabulous ice cream book.

While the ice cream was steeping , I also threw together some peanut butter cookie dough. I like to have cookies on hand to take to work for dessert with lunch, and had another party on Saturday night to which I'd promised to bring baked goods.  I had actually never made peanut butter cookies, so this seemed like as good an opportunity as any. I used the recipe from the Flour book; they're quite simple: cream butter and sugar for a long time, add eggs, add peanut butter, add flour. Rest dough. Bake. Tastiness.

I also have a habit of making foods for myself for lunch and dinner a week at a time. Most weeks lunch is just assembling ingredients for sandwiches. This week I had seen a recipe in Bon Appetit for a roasted carrot and beet salad with feta and parsley in a cumin/lemon vinaigrette. It sounded delicious, but the presentation was a little over the top for my tastes (it had everything nearly whole and artfully arranged on a platter). I wanted something I could eat out of tupperware with a plastic fork.  So I chopped everything a bit smaller prior to roasting. And I also added the beet greens to the roasting pan because it seemed a shame to throw them away. And had some walnuts so I tossed those in too. 

For the week's dinners, I made soup. This will come as a shock to some of you, as I have historically not been a soup eater. I still am not a broth-y soup fan, but love purees of various sorts. In this case, I made a fennel-leek soup; starting with a stock from fennel, leek greens and potatoes, combined with more fennel, sauteed with more leeks, carrots, potatoes, spinach, dill and lemon. I've been eating it with some nice bread and fennel fronds.

In addition to hanging out with friends and a great walk on Sunday afternoon, that was my weekend.

Making Tonic

21 grams of cinchona bark

Since I was 19 or so, my drink of choice has been the gin and tonic. This long-term love affair began with what I initially thought was a pretty horrible-tasting, room-temperature concoction (sorry, Tim…).  With that concoction, though, I joined my friends' summer tradition of sitting on the porch by the lake, enjoying a refreshing beverage (the taste grew on me), and then tossing our lime wedges into the woods in the hope that a lime tree might grow there next year (never mind that we were in northern Michigan…).

A few years later, I discovered that spending a bit more on gin yielded appreciably tastier results. Bombay Sapphire is my favorite, but I've done a fair bit of tasting. And I've also converted a few friends along the way (you know who you are…).

4 grams hawthorn berries

What about the tonic, though?  I mean, what is tonic?  Most people don't know. I didn't either. We all know it contains quinine, because that's usually printed on the bottle. What's quinine? I now know that it's an anti-malarial agent derived from the bark of the cinchona plant.  The word 'tonic' also connotes a primitive medicinal function that might be good for ailments, bad humors and such.

If you look at the ingredients on a bottle of mass-produced tonic, however, you'll see that it's really just sugar water with quinine and maybe some other flavors. More accurately, high-fructose corn syrup water. People (or at least I) tend to group tonic in a sort of benign category with club soda, but it really doesn't belong there.

12 grams dried bitter orange peel

That hasn't always been true, however, and recent years have seen the introduction of many micro-batch tonics that use more traditional recipes. I decided to make my own. I'd thought about this for a while, but the real inspiration came from Andrew Schloss's great homemade soda cookbook.

He points out in the book that the effort involved is nontrivial, but I was game for the challenge. First step was to track down a bunch of obscure ingredients (including cinchona bark), which required a bit of Googling. This led me to Herbie's Herbs in Toronto, a fascinating store full of things I never knew existed. Returning home, my kitchen table felt a bit like an apothecary. The ingredients I had are in the scattered photos.

18 grams blueberry leaves

These all got combined in a mini-chopper along with a cinnamon stick, a star anise and a few cloves to create a coarse powder (which may have actually been ground too fine). I then put the powder in tea baskets that I simmered in a pot of water, along with some salt and citric acid. After a bit of simmering, I added lemon grass, and zest plus juice from two limes and a lemon. This was then simmered for about an hour and added to some agave syrup.

8 grams sumac berries

Ok, lots of work. How does it taste? Well, how does it look would actually be a better first question. Unlike most tonic, mine isn't clear at all. It has the color of dark apple cider, and the consistency of a thick syrup. I suspect I could strain it with cheesecloth to remove some of this and might try that next time. The taste is extremely acidic, but delicious. I don't (yet) have a soda siphon, so I think I will add it to a bit of club soda along with gin to make a drink.  It's sufficiently citrus-y, though, that there definitely won't be a need for limes. I guess a tree isn't going to grow anyhow…  

2 grams cassia bark

Lemon Bars With Dill

School has started and I'm back from a bunch of travel . This means that weekly lunch with my junior faculty colleagues has resumed in full force. I'm telling you this because it also means I now have a weekly audience of guinea pigs for food experiments and cause to be in one place long enough to actually spend time making stuff for them. Pearwise entries should appear regularly again over the next few months.

This week I tried a couple things I've been meaning to do for a while. The first, and perhaps more interesting, was to combine lemon and dill in a dessert. They're a classic pairing, of course, but mostly served with things like salmon or crab cakes (try googling 'lemon dill' -- you'll get about 50 salmon recipes). A lemon dill sorbet could arguably make a nice palate cleanser, so why not try the same combination in a lemon bar?  Could be tasty.

The second was to try David Lebovitz's recipe for whole lemon bars. These are exactly what they sound like; you actually chop up a whole lemon -- peel, pith and all (minus the seeds) -- and spin it in the food processor with the other filling ingredients. I might have tried these without dill, but that would be dangerously close to a  repeat dessert, something that hasn't happened yet in the 2.5 or so years I've been baking for our lunches. Dill adds sufficient diversity.

To add the dill flavor, I made a dill sugar and used it in both the crust and the custard. This just involved chopping up some dill (maybe 1/8 cup?), and putting it in the food processor with about 1 cup of sugar. This turned it a delightful shade of green and it had a clear dill scent.

Then I just used that sugar in place of regular sugar in the recipe. As you can see, the result has a neat looking green color. The taste is very lemon-y, a bit bitter from including the pith, and there's a clear taste of dill on the finish. It's possibly too strong, but i'm not sure. We'll see what the others say…

Tomato Basil Frozen Yogurt

A couple weeks ago, I was preparing to leave for a 10-day trip, and realized that I had a couple extra tomatoes and yogurt in the fridge. I also had one of those supermarket basil plants growing in the window and I was pretty sure it would die while I was gone. What to do… why not frozen yogurt?

Well, one can actually think of a lot of reasons. "You could have made tomato sauce," said a colleague. True, but I just had two tomatoes. Not really enough for much sauce. There were other reasons not to do it too. Tomatoes aren't usually dessert. The idea sounds sort of odd. And it could all just wind up being a waste.

And yet it seemed like it might work. Basil ice cream is delicious. Pizza sauce is often sweetened with sugar. And tomatoes could easily play nicely with the tangy-ness of yogurt. So I tried it, and the results were surprisingly good. Rich with tomato, a hint of basil, and the tang of yogurt. Most of my colleagues (who are patient guinea pigs, but also not afraid to say what they don't like) liked it. One person didn't.

To make it, I started with a strawberry frozen yogurt recipe. I coarsely chopped two tomatoes and 8-10 basil leaves, and let those macerate with 1 cup of sugar for about 3 hours. The tomatoes released a lot of juice, so I cooked this down a bit until the juice thickened to the consistency of a light syrup (maybe 15-20 minutes?).

I then put the tomato mix into the blender with 1.5 cups plain full-fat yogurt, a little (1/4 tsp or so) salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and some lemon juice. After pureeing, the flavor was good but not very rich. I added a little bit of vanilla extract for richness and a couple pinches of citric acid powder to boost the lemon juice.

The result was rich (though I might cut the vanilla a bit next time) and tart at the same time, with the background of the basil. It was pretty interesting; kind of like a frozen and sweet gazpacho.

Ingredients:

2 big tomatoes

1 cup sugar

8-10 chopped basil leaves

1.5 cups plain yogurt

1/4 tsp salt

1/8 tsp citric acid

1 tsp or so lemon juice

1/8 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Improvising: Mango Banana Bread

As many of you already know, I have a bit of a tradition of making dessert for a group of my colleagues that gets together for lunch each week. Most of the time this is a chance to explore and try new recipes, and it forces me to work my way through that to-do list of stuff I'm wanting to try. Other times it forces me to be creative or to improvise to come up with something that I can do easily and quickly. I actually really appreciate both types of constraint; this almost never feels like a burden.

This week was an example of the latter. I knew that I had to make something for Tuesday, but the time available meant that I needed to do something pretty simple. I've been working my way through Joanne Chang's Flour cookbook, and have been eyeing her banana bread recipe. I love banana bread because it's tasty and easy; and I pretty much always have bananas in both the refrigerator and the freezer.

In this case, though, I got home from the supermarket and realized I didn't have enough bananas. I did, however, have some leftover canned Indian mango puree. And her recipe calls for a little bit of sour cream, but I didn't want to buy a whole container of sour cream (which I don't really use for anything else) just for 2 tablespoons. I did, however, have some plain yogurt.

The recipe called for 1 1/3 cups of mashed bananas. I took the 2 bananas I had and mashed them in my large glass measuring cup, which worked out to about 2/3 of a cup or so. The bananas were still slightly firm, so they didn't mash perfectly, but well enough. I then poured mango puree into the bananas until I reached 1 1/3 cups. I figured the extra liquid from the mango might compensate for the firmness of the bananas. For the sour cream, I directly substituted yogurt. And I substituted ginger for cinnamon (in ground form). Otherwise I made it exactly as specified.

The result was very, very moist -- thanks to a generous amount of vegetable oil and probably in part to the extra moisture from the mango. While the kitchen smelled clearly of mango while it was baking, the taste was primarily banana. The mango possibly contributed some extra sweetness, though.

Special thanks to Lee Humphreys and Jeff Niederdeppe for this week's photo, taken immediately prior to consumption.

The Tastiness:Time Ratio

It goes without saying that nobody wants to spend time in the kitchen making food that's not delicious. We want to spend scarce cooking time making things that will be tasty for ourselves and others. It's also true, though, that effort and and tastiness don't always correlate. That is, it's often the case that making a more difficult or time-consuming recipe doesn't necessarily result in food that is tastier. Difficult recipes may be more rewarding, sophisticated, or any number of other things; but the food's not always going to be better.

I've always tried to have a few recipes that are particularly good investments; those that aren't very hard but result in a lot of tastiness. For me, key properties of these recipes include: ingredients that store well, so I'm likely to have them on hand already (no shopping), minimal prep (no more than a couple minutes chopping or dicing; no rolling out dough, etc.), and relatively short cooking time.

I wish sometimes that cookbooks would take this into account and give some indicator of time vs. tastiness.

Here are a couple of my favorite examples of very easy, very tasty recipes:

Key Lime Pie: A good key lime pie is always a great dessert, and they're easy as, well, pie to make. Make a crust out of graham crackers, sugar and cinnamon. Then put egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk and key lime juice (bottled juice results in a delicious pie; freshly squeezed is better, but not hugely so) in the food processor. Pour in the crust. Bake until set. Uber-tastiness.

Eggs and Curry Leaves: For a quick and wonderful brunch dish, throw a bit of oil in a pan and saute some diced onion, 1 minced thai chili, a bit of ginger paste, and 5-8 curry leaves. Then add 3 or so eggs and cook until the eggs are done. Apart from the onion, all of this stuff can be kept in the fridge or freezer for a while. Again, uber tasty and super quick.

Other examples?

Homemade Pop-Tarts

Ok, I admit it. I used to love Pop-Tarts. Frosted cherry were my favorite flavor. I also really liked brown sugar/cinnamon, and the ones with vanilla creme and chocolate filling. They were one of the few things I would eat at lunch in elementary school (historical note: I refused to eat anything at all at school for all of first grade; I'm not sure why), so I think that's why my mom was willing to buy them. And, finding them tasty, I also ate Pop-Tarts for breakfast pretty regularly as an undergrad who lived in dorms for four years. I'm pretty sure I haven't had one since then.

That's why I was pretty excited by Joanne Chang's recipe (in her Flour bakery cookbook, which I adore for many other reasons too) for homemade Pop-Tarts. I love the idea of a fruit-filled pastry and there was an element of nostalgia that I suspected would resonate with others as well.

To be fair, the concept behind these (fruit, pastry) is similar but Chang's recipe is remarkably unlike the Pop-Tarts I somehow managed to enjoy as a child. Kellogg's describes its blueberry product as: "Nothing too fancy. Just a simple golden crust filled with the most amazing blueberry flavor you've ever known." They then list among the top ingredients two types of corn syrup (high and ordinary fructose), dextrose, and corn/soybean oils (with THBQ, whatever that might be) . The product contains less than 2% blueberries and/or blueberry flavor. Yum?

Chang's recipe, on the other hand, starts with making a pate brisee dough with a cup of butter, some flour, a couple egg yolks, milk and a little bit of sugar. What could possibly be bad there?

Making these wasn't difficult, per se, but I don't have a lot of experience with pastry dough. I've made pie crusts before, and I confess that I'm just not good at getting them to roll out in a nice shape. I'm getting better at this the more I play with them, but I'm still pretty awful at it. Chang somehow believed, however, that I'd be able to create two identically sized 11" x 14" rectangles; and that I'd just be able to easily lift up one of those rectangles and put it on top of the other (effectively assembling all of the individual Pop Tarts at once). Not so easy.

I'm pretty sure the weather and my table were working against me -- both were fairly warm, so the dough was _very_ soft. I improvised a bit. I made one approximate rectangle, cut it into 8 small rectangles and put some raspberry jam on top of each one. I then cut up the other rectangle and built the pop-tarts one by one. Lifting each one was tricky. In the future I might fill them on the cookie sheet instead. It took a lot of spatula work and a couple minor repairs.

In the end, the pastries weren't all perfectly shaped, but they did taste really good. They were delightfully flaky and rich, with the taste of good quality raspberry jam inside. And a simple sugary glaze on top. It was like being a kid, but with much better taste.

I'd like to play with these again in the future, maybe with some more interesting flavors. Perhaps some herb-infused citrus curds or spiced chocolate. Stay tuned!

Pandan Leaf Pound Cake

I've been meaning to bake with pandan leaves (see photo) for a while. Pandan is a popular flavoring in Asian desserts (used much like vanilla) and has a difficult-to-describe flavor that's both unique and delicious. The mere scent of it reminds me of travel or of kaya spread (a very tasty Singaporean concoction of egg yolks, sugar, coconut and pandan) on toast. The astute among you will note that pandan leaves come from the same plant as the kewra water I blogged about a few months ago. Kewra water comes from the flowers, however, not the leaves.

There were a couple obstacles in the way of my baking objective, however. First, I had to figure out what pandan leaves looked like and who carried them. I knew their taste and scent, but had never bought one before. Finding them in Toronto wasn't really a problem with a little olfaction at my favorite Indian/Sri Lankan grocery store on Parliament (Ambal Trading Co.). I saw them there a month or so ago and made a mental note of where they were for when I needed them.

This past weekend, I went back to the store and walked over to where the leaves had been. Lo and behold, they weren't there this time. That brings me to obstacle #2: pandan is the Chinese term for the leaves (I think), but I had no idea what they were called in India or Sri Lanka. The man behind the counter at Ambal is usually very friendly (which is good, because just about nothing in this store is labeled -- I often ask questions), so I asked him if he had pandan leaves. He stared back blankly. I tried to describe them and pointed to where I had seen them. He said "Oh, you mean [unintelligible] leaves?" I said, "maybe." We walked over to the refrigerator and realized we were indeed talking about the same leaf. I bought some.

As a quick side note, Ambal is a great store not just for their selection of spices, lentils, rice and fresh produce (with the notable and odd consistent exception of cucumbers), but also because just about every sort of leaf you could want for Indian cooking costs $1 per bag.

Ok, back to my project. I learned via some reading that pandan is usually steeped in liquid (like water and/or coconut milk), sometimes blending the leaf directly in, to create a bright green pandan "juice." I had also heard recently that another good way to get a flavor into something is to blend the flavor with the sugar for the recipe. Given the nature of the recipe I was using as my basis (Pichet Ong's sweetened condensed milk and vanilla pound cake), I adopted the latter approach.

To make pandan sugar, I tore up 2 pandan leaves and put them in the food processor with some sugar. I let it spin for quite a while (several minutes) until the leaf was completely broken up and the sugar was a delightful shade of green. The leaves had a bit of liquid in them, so the sugar got a little wet…but this didn't seem to have a huge effect. I then processed the sugar with some butter. In the photo you can see the contrast of the green sugar/butter and the sweetened condensed milk added next. Then I added some flour/baking powder and 3 eggs, and baked it for about an hour.


The resulting cake is shown in the next photo. The top cracked a bit, but this lets you see that the interior stayed green and looked kind of cool. It was pretty tasty -- very sweet and rich, as you'd expect. I could very clearly taste pandan (with a very slight hint of a bitter aftertaste that may have come from including the whole leaves). A couple friends who tried it, however, said they couldn't pick out the pandan taste. They liked the cake, though. I guess maybe it's just a subtle flavor or one people just aren't good at picking out (especially if not used to it).

I put the unused pandan leaves in the freezer, so stay tuned. I'm thinking about possibly using them to infuse vodka. Or maybe something else entirely.

Making Grapefruit Almond Frangipane

I was unoriginal again. While this means that I don't get to tell you about one of my own creations, it does give me the opportunity to tell you about yet another one of my favorite cookbook authors - Pichet Ong. Ong's book, The Sweet Spot, is a unique treat that contains the recipes for even more unique treats.

Ong specializes in desserts (he ran a dessert-only restaurant in New York called P*Ong), but brings an a creative Asian sensibility to them. His book is all about taking traditional Asian flavors (mango, various teas, yuzu, almonds, coconut, etc.) and working them into western desserts like cookies, cakes, pies and ice cream. If you know me at all (or have even read this blog a couple times), you likely understand that I think this is a fabulous approach.

I've worked my way through much of his book, and recently noticed his blog. And especially this recipe for a Grapefruit Almond Frangipane tart. I love grapefruit, but had never thought to use it in baking. And it seemed like it could go well with almonds. It was a fascinating idea, if nothing else; so I tried it.

This was not an easy recipe. Blog recipes aren't explained quite the way cookbook recipes are, so I had to Google to learn about browning butter (no, I'd never done this before). It also had a number of steps -- making and rolling out the grapefruit-flavored (via zest) tart pastry, which is not my strongsuit (mine cracked quite a bit). Making the frangipane cream without burning the butter. Locating almond flour at the grocery store (in the organic area of Wegman's, it turns out). And getting it all assembled.

In the end, I'm pleased with how it came out. Definitely one of the prettier things I've ever made. I think I used a tart ring that was too big, as I'd want more grapefruit coverage if I did it again. People seemed to like it a lot, though I noticed that the crust came out a bit underbaked despite being in the oven for quite a while.

Chrysanthemum Ice Cream

Ice cream is like an artist's blank canvas, in an alternate world where canvas is richly delicious. Like real canvas, though, ice cream can be a base for a tremendous variety of creations -- basically any flavor you can steep in milk and/or puree and mix with a custard, and then freeze. Once you have a few basic recipes, you can try just about anything.

Somewhat surprisingly given the ease of steeping-based ice creams (like mint, ginger, etc.), we don't often see ice creams based on tea. Yes, green tea ice cream is pretty easy to get -- but I'm excluding it because it is usually made with matcha powder, and not steeped with leaves or flowers. And yet, people have been mixing tea with milk and sugar for years -- Asian milk teas, Indian Chai with milk, yummy Thai tea with sweetened condensed milk, European teas with milk, the American 'tea latte,' etc. etc.

To be fair, Googling and thumbing through books does yield a few recipes. My favorite ice cream cookbook is David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop. He's got a huge range of recipes from vanilla and chocolate standards to creative (and delicious) forays like black pepper or goat cheese. And most of them can be pretty easily tweaked to incorporate other ingredients. He includes a recipe for a steeped Black Currant Tea ice cream.

This was the basis for my experiment with chrysanthemum ice cream. I picked up a few packages of chrysanthemum tea (really just a packet of dried flowers) on a recent trip to Hangzhou, China for the CSCW conference. This is one of the areas where the tea is produced. It's typically brewed by putting a few flowers in hot water for a few minutes.

Instead, I put a handful of flowers, some milk, and a bit of sugar in a saucepan on the stove. I warmed these to about 170 degrees (to avoid filmy boiled milk), and then turned off the heat and let the leaves do their thing for about an hour. This was then stirred into some egg yolks, and cooked to form a thick yellow custard that I then mixed with some heavy cream.

Then I froze it in my nifty new(ish) ice cream maker (yes, those keeping score at home will note that i now have two ice cream makers; don't ask), and tasted it. The ice cream was richly (but not cloyingly) sweet, with just a hint of clearly identifiable chrysanthemum taste. Some more flowers or longer steeping might help get a stronger flavor, but I actually liked the subtlety of it on the end of each bite. I might try this with some other teas, too…perhaps hibiscus or jasmine.

Stay tuned for more experiments, and please let me know if you've had other experience with steeped tea-based ice creams.

Why I love Toronto's Chinatown

When I'm in Toronto and I need more than a couple dollars worth of groceries, I get on my bike (or sometimes my car) and head to Chinatown on Spadina. Many of my friends think I'm crazy for doing this, and they have some good arguments:

It's inconvenient: why bike a mile or so when there are at least 15-20 grocery stores within 5 blocks of my apartment (did you hear that, Ithaca? 15-20 grocery stores!)? It's dirty: you never quite know what you're stepping on, there are dead animals hanging in windows, and it's important to check berries for signs of mold. It's crowded and off-putting: stores are tightly packed and few people speak English.

And still others say that it's a relic of a bygone era that wasn't very nice to begin with: many immigrants with the means to do so shop at T&T (a Canadian chain that's sort of an Asian version of Whole Foods) or Pacific Mall in the suburbs, and there aren't even many markets like this left in China.

And yet, I still love it. Here's why:

It's efficient. The goal is here not to be polite, provide great service, conform to corporate policy, or work as slowly as possible until the end of one's shift. The goal, which somehow appears to be shared by everybody, is to sell a lot of stuff as quickly as possible. Classic example: if you're just buying one or two things and have exact change, just hold it up and make eye contact with a cashier who is processing somebody else's order. They'll take your money and you can go. No problem. The cash register software even supports this (they can shift between multiple simultaneous orders) at the larger stores. Ditto if the person in front of you is taking a while to pay; the cashier will start on your order and then return to the other person's. Amazing.

It's resourceful, with a refreshing sensibility that pervades everything. Nothing is wasted, and I don't feel like I'm paying for a show (note to Wegman's: the Irish music for selling St. Patrick's day beer was cute, but I'm still talking to you here).
Signs are often handwritten on cardboard. The produce isn't shiny. Stuff isn't unnecessarily refrigerated, periodically sprayed with water, or thrown away. Stuff that's ripe or very ripe is cheaper than stuff that isn't ripe yet. And they make good use of the weather: foods displayed on the sidewalk vary every day as the temperature changes (and are sometimes rotated inside to keep from freezing), and very cold days mean that all of the produce is inside, and frozen seafood is on the sidewalk. I respect that, and I'm pretty sure it saves me money too. It almost hearkens back to an era when refrigeration wasn't cheaper than labor, and energy cost real money.

Speaking of saving money, stuff in Chinatown is dirt cheap. Without getting into stereotypes, I may be genetically predisposed to enjoy a bargain (and I certainly like it a lot, even if it's not hereditary). Chinatown is very much a caveat emptor sort of world, but cheaper produce cannot be found in very many developed places on the planet. I find that I typically pay between 10 and 50% (I don't mean 10% less, I mean 10% of the price) of what similar items cost in supermarkets. Recent examples: Bean sprouts @ $.29/lb ($3.98 per lb @ Wegman's), quarts of strawberries @ 2 for $2, tomatoes @ $.59/lb, carrots @ $.39/lb, limes @ 5 for $1, atulfo mangoes @ 6 for $5, etc. It goes on and on.

It's educational. When stuff isn't clearly labeled and staff don't speak English, you very quickly learn to tell the difference between things like galangal, ginger and turmeric root (just ask anybody who tried the turmeric sorbet I accidentally made a few years ago-- oops!); thai basil, mint, rau ram and pandan leaves; etc. Yes, it's frustrating sometimes. But a bit of trial and error means sampling new foods and being better equipped for travel. I find it endlessly fascinating and there are still lots of things I haven't tried.

You can find just about anything. Durian? Sure. Rambutans? Yup. Mangosteens? Absolutely. With a little digging (and possibly some online research beforehand to find photos), it's possible to find just about anything in Chinatown.

And finally, it's fun. When I lived in Toronto, part of my routine for weekend visitors was to take them grocery shopping with me in Chinatown (and Kensington). They almost invariably loved this. Try taking your visiting friends to the supermarket with you and see what they say.

Dabbling in Mexican Candy

I don't believe that I have yet given a Pearwise shout-out to Lynne Rosetto-Kasper and The Splendid Table, her fabulous NPR show. It's one of the staples in the set of podcasts that keeps me company on my frequent treks between Toronto and Ithaca. One of the things I love about the show is her knack for identifying great new cookbooks, which I wind up purchasing more often than perhaps I should.

It's one of these interviews that is the reason I'm writing about Mexican candy today. It's not something I had ever really thought much about, at least since the occasional treat in middle school Spanish class or the spicy Pixy Stix-like candy that kids from Mexico used to get in care packages at camp.

Yet…Lynne's interview with Fany Gerson about her book -- My Sweet Mexico -- really intrigued me. She talked about coconut and limes; about candies that had origins in convents; about candied tropical fruits like tamarind and others. And this was suddenly an arena I wanted to play in.

The book is beautiful and fascinating. I've now made a few recipes from it, and they've been very unlike anything I've ever done before. This makes for some fun time in the kitchen, but also makes the book occasionally difficult to cook from. I can deal with some vagueness in a cookie recipe because I've made hundreds (thousands?) of cookies and know roughly what's going to happen. I know less about what "thick" means as a time to stop heating a mixture of coconut and sugar (um…how thick should it be?). The book assumes a bit of expertise I don't always have, and the suggested timings seem to be a bit off. But the results have been tasty.

A couple candies so far. First, I tried a lime 'jamoncillo' or milk fudge. This basically is the product of slowly cooking down sweetened condensed milk, condensed milk, and butter, flavored with lots of lime zest. It was a lot of stirring (though much less than if one had started with sugar and non-condensed milk; this is a shortcut), but the result was rich and flavorful. Many other flavors are possible.

I also made cocada -- a coconut caramel candy. These were not all that pretty, so no photo. Here you basically make a caramel syrup using coconut water, then stir in grated coconut (I used frozen) and cook it until quite thick (defined here as being able to see the bottom of the pot when stirring), and then add some lime zest. The resulting product is then formed into little balls. These were extremely sweet, but tasty. Mine came out a bit soupier than the ones in the cookbook pictures. I think this may have been because I used frozen coconut.

With that in mind, I bought a fresh coconut when I made limones rellenos de coco -- coconut-stuffed limes. These had fascinated me from the start; whole limes cooked, hollowed out, sweetened with sugar syrup and then filled with sweet fresh coconut. They were a lot of work, especially given the amount of new techniques I had to figure out. I had never cracked a coconut shell and grated the meat, nor had I ever hollowed out a lime. I'm still not sure I did either of these things correctly. The result, however, is pretty cool looking, I have to say. These are for my colleagues on Wednesday, so I'll withhold judgment until they've tasted them.

Some interesting things here. I'm wanting to learn more about candy, and to keep playing with this book. I'll keep you posted and would love to hear about your experiences.

Carrot Cupcakes With Rau Ram Icing

This cupcake began with that papaya salad in Cambodia. It was unique among the papaya salads I've had because it had a hefty dose of rau ram. Rau ram, a southeast Asian herb (aka Vietnamese coriander), has a vaguely citrus-y taste that is strong, but doesn't overpower. (I find it very unlike coriander/cilantro, so I'm not sure where the alternate name came from.) It gave the papaya salad a lovely fresh sweetness that contrasted with the salty fish sauce, sour lime and green tomato, and hot chilies. (Image of rau ram borrowed from Kitchentoworld.com).

I had not tasted or thought much about rau ram in a while, but that papaya salad was a jarring reminder that it might be a fun flavor to play with in a cupcake. Its sweetness and citrusiness might play nicely with sugar, and could be used like basil or sage. So I spent some time thinking about this.

First idea was to see if I could come up with a cupcake based directly on the papaya salad. No fish sauce or dried shrimp, but a similar combination of hot, sour, salty and sweet (the four key flavors in Thai cooking). Green papayas and mangoes are not unlike apples or carrots in consistency, so I probably could have used them directly. The problem is that they don't have a lot of flavor; they're really more of a delivery device in the salad. I might try this later, but wasn't sure how they'd stand up in baking. So I decided to use carrots. They're sweet and have a similar texture; and carrot cake recipes are abundant.

The problem was that carrot cake recipes are loaded with cinnamon and nutmeg, flavors you'd never find within miles of a good papaya salad. That wasn't going to work. So I started to think about substitutes. I started with a carrot cupcake recipe from Epicurious.

Papaya salads start by mixing garlic cloves, fresh chilies, and salt with a mortar and pestle. Garlic seemed inappropriate for a cupcake, but there's no harm in chilies and salt. Ginger, however, is a taste that makes its way into both sweet and savory dishes. It can plausibly be substituted for either garlic or cinnamon in the right context. So by the transitive property, so I used a teaspoon of ground ginger in place of cinnamon, along with some cayenne powder instead of the nutmeg.

I still needed tartness, so I threw in the finely grated zest of a lime just before baking.

And I haven't forgotten about the rau ram, which is pretty easy to find in Toronto's Spadina Chinatown (but you have to recognize it -- nothing is labeled). It was, well, the icing on the cake. Borrowing another technique from Vanilla Garlic, I chopped up the leaves and cooked them with sugar and water to form a thick syrup. I then mixed this with cream cheese (from Mendel's Creamery), butter, and powdered sugar to get a rich icing with little flecks of rau ram.

We'll see what people think of these...

Update after eating: The cake was moist, delicious and gingery. If I do it again, I'd like to add a bit more chili so it burns more. The rau ram, unfortunately, got a bit lost. I'm going to think about ways to possibly make it stronger, and also incorporate it into other ingredients. Considering some herbal candies if I can come up with a way to do it...

Cooking Internationally in Ithaca

I really like cooking south and southeast Asian food. These areas feature some of my favorite combinations of flavors, and have food that's just generally tasty. When I have folks over for dinner, these are generally my foods of choice.

I also like to be as authentic as I can in capturing the key elements of those flavors. This often requires a bit of scrambling to find ingredients. In Ithaca, this can be a non-trivial challenge. Wegman's is pretty good, but they don't have everything. In this entry I will walk you through a recent Thai-style dinner I hosted, and explain where I was able to find the ingredients in Ithaca.

I was working mostly from a cookbook I got when taking a cooking class at the (fabulous) Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School in Thailand. The recipes have probably been adapted slightly for a western palate (half the chilies, anyone?), but they're pretty close to real. I also wanted to make my own curry paste. I've not done this before, and it seemed a worthy endeavor.

I decided to make: mieng kum (leaf wraps), green papaya salad (but only if I could find a green papaya), pad thai with tofu, coconut curry with chicken, and some sort of lemongrass ice cream (ice cream not really Thai at all, but this seemed like it would fit and it was a good excuse to play with my new ice cream maker).

Ok…so I won't bore you with a full list of ingredients, but here are the more unusual things (read: stuff not usually in US supermarkets) that would be required for this: green papaya, lemongrass (for ice cream and curry paste), shrimp paste (for curry paste), lime leaves (for curry), Thai basil (for curry), galangal (for a few things), dried shrimp, and Asian eggplant.

First stop was Wegman's. They have an impressive Asian dry goods department and a decent selection of Asian produce. Lesson #1: Their Thai dry goods are not well suited to making stuff from scratch. They had lots of prepared Thai curry pastes, but no shrimp paste or dried shrimp, which are key constituent ingredients. They did, impressively, have fresh galangal however. They also had lemongrass, but it was very expensive and didn't look very good. Pass.

Next stop: Ithaca Tofu, which is a little Asian market buried behind the Triphammer Mall. I knew I was on the right track when I ran into several Asian graduate students from my department there, and this place was impressive. Thai basil? Check. Asian eggplants? check. Dried shrimp? check. Lime leaves? Needed to ask the guy behind the counter to dig them out of the freezer, but…yes, they were there. Check. Green papaya? Not so much, but I guess they sometimes have them.

Final stop: Win Li, which is an Asian market on the other end of Ithaca, almost at Home Depot. Green papaya? Yes! They had many of the other things here too (though no lime leaves or thai basil), but it was interesting to note that their prices were a lot higher than Ithaca Tofu. They also had some really nice (if slightly overpriced) Atulfo mangoes, which were pretty outstanding for this time of year.

So here are a couple shots of dinner. Making my own curry paste was somewhat stinky (if you've ever opened a jar of shrimp paste, you know what I mean), but rewarding. Some effort, yes, but really tasty. The only hitch in this was that none of the stores had red Thai chilies (only green), so my 'red' curry paste was a bit on the brown side.

The curry itself was interesting because it relied on separating (i.e., thick and thin) coconut milk, with the thick milk added first and used as a cooking fat. This also browns and thickens the coconut milk, which adds depth to the curry. It's unfortunately not possible to get the tiny (pea-sized) Thai eggplants in Ithaca (or most places in the US, as far as I can tell), but purple Asian eggplants fill in ok (though with a much less bitter taste). And it was totally worth chasing down those lime leaves; they add such a nice finish to coconut curry that just can't be had otherwise.

The mieng kum (above) were enjoyed by everybody, though not as beautiful as the ones I had in Singapore last month (I didn't even attempt to look for betel leaves, which are way cooler than Boston lettuce). Pad thai was pretty standard, perhaps slightly enhanced by the palm sugar I bought from a farmer in Cambodia (see photo). Papaya salad was tasty. And the ice cream came out nicely as well.


One other ingredient note. This isn't Thai at all, but it's also possible to find fresh curry leaves in Ithaca. The "Universal Deli" (actually a convenience store) on Eddy St. in Collegetown gets them on the first Wednesday of the month. It's $2 for a small packet (which is really pricey, for curry leaves) and you have to ask the cashier to fetch them for you.

Next post: Mexican candy.

Screw Pine Shortbread: Lessons from an Experiment

As I think I've made clear, I like experimenting with flavors. I'm constantly scanning for products that sound interesting, particularly when traveling in new parts of the world. It was with this in mind that I was incapable of not purchasing a bottle reading "Kewra Essence: Screw Pine" at the sprawling Mustafa Centre in Singapore a few weeks ago. I had no idea what kewra or screw pine were, but they sounded intriguing. And $1 or so seemed a reasonable investment in curiosity.

I opened the bottle later; it smells a bit like rose water (which smells like, well, roses), but perhaps a bit earthier. Some Googling revealed that screw pine is another term for Pandanus, the leaves of which are often used to flavor southeast asian sweets (like kaya) and other dishes. Kewra essence, though, comes from the flower of this plant and has a quite different taste.

Ok…so what to do with my newfound bottle of rose-like liquid? I'm still not sure. It felt like it might go well with almonds in a dessert. Or maybe make an interesting cupcake or sorbet. I decided to experiment a bit by incorporating it into shortbread.

I find that rich, sweet desserts like shortbread or ice cream are good ways to see how a flavor will stand up, what it might work with, and how it is affected by sugar. I discovered this when making Thai basil ice cream a few years ago; revelation: sugar does magical things to basil. So I made some screw pine shortbread last night (lovers of word play will note that this name can also be interpreted as an imperative).

Outcome? Not very good shortbread, but some lessons. The kewra really is an "essence" and was not strengthened very much by the sugar at all. I had to add quite a bit (3 tablespoons!) to the dough to get any scent of it before baking, and the finished product only has the vaguest hint of the taste, mostly at the end. Making matters worse, an extra 3 TBSP of liquid means that the shortbread is sort of soggy, even with the top browned.

I think this is a flavor best combined with others, and it's not well-suited to being the focus of attention. I might try to use it as an enhancer for something nutty (as I suggested before), or maybe as part of a sorbet or syrup with berries or other sweet fruit. Stay tuned!

Street Food in Cambodia

I'm writing this back in Singapore after spending this past week in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The real reason for the trip was to join the throngs of tourists wanting to see Angkor Wat and its neighboring temples. I was able to combine this with a bit of (guided) mountain biking through the area and, of course, tasty Cambodian food.

This being a blog dedicated to interesting foods, I will tell you what I did (and did not) eat while I was there. I'm happy to tell you about the rest of the trip too -- just ask.


First, a bit on what I did not eat. Before I left home, I told the tour organizer I wanted to eat interesting local foods. As things worked out, I was the only person on this tour, so that didn't seem like too hard a request to comply with. I did get to eat delicious food, but there were a few things I didn't even want to attempt. The woman in the center photo, for example, runs a stand that apparently specializes in things I did not want to eat: watersnakes, frogs, crickets and other bugs. These were also common on roadside stands. Ditto chicken feet, also pictured here.

Ok, so what did I eat? Tasty stuff. Cambodia is, not surprisingly, a fairly poor country. It's possible to eat extraordinarily cheaply there, even when paying a tourist premium. Dishes at typical restaurants go for about US$3, with pricey places (cloth napkins, wine glasses, attentive service) closer to $6 or $7. Oddly, they use US dollars there (but only paper notes; change is made using riels, of which there are 4000 per dollar). My first night I had a fish curry (amok) with coconut milk and lots of lemongrass. It was good, but clearly not seasoned for even a weak Cambodian palate. I asked for some fresh chillies, which helped a bit. I also decided to eat more street food.

Street food is a bit elusive. It's sold by pushcart vendors who travel around. You never quite know what you're going to get or where. You have to jump at an opportunity to grab, say, a papaya salad or baguette, because you don't know when the next vendor will appear. And the prices start to escalate as you get closer to the city center.

I first went off in search of a baguette sandwich. Like Vietnam, Cambodia was a French protectorate for a while. And like in Vietnam, the ubiquitous rice flour baguette is the fortunate residue of this relationship. The sandwiches here are slightly different than in Vietnam. The baguettes are narrower, there is less meat (just a bit of pork), and a wider variety of pickled vegetables. This is the woman that sold me my first of a few baguette sandwiches, and she is the recipient of the only 100% tip I have ever given. She charged 1000 riels (25 cents) for the sandwich. I gave her 2000. It was worth it.

Next, time for a papaya salad. I had spotted a vendor earlier in the day, but didn't realize quite how elusive these guys could be. I vowed that I'd buy a salad from the next vendor I saw, and that's who is pictured here. He first took a chili, some salt and garlic and mashed them in a giant mortar and pestle. He then added green papaya, long beans, peanuts, green tomato, lime juice, some crawly things (shrimp, crab, etc.), an herb blend (Thai basil, rau ram, maybe others), and some fish sauce. Somehow he fit all of these things in his tiny cart, and produced a delicious salad that I enjoyed on a nearby park bench. Cost? 75 cents.

For dessert, a banana pancake. Perhaps another legacy of the French (they're similar to crepes, but made a bit differently), these are thin pancakes cooked with lots of butter (actually probably margarine, but we'll skip that detail), then rolled up with sweetened condensed milk and sliced baby bananas. Good, but not fabulous. Another 75 cents.

I did eat other meals in Cambodia, of course, but these were some of my favorites. I also picked up my share of street fruit -- one of my favorite features of Southeast Asia (see my guest blog entry on this topic from several years ago).

Eating in Singapore - Part 1

As many of you know, my sister, brother-in-law and (perhaps most notably these days) 3-month-old niece live in Singapore. After a few months of video chatting in which she probably wasn't aware of my presence, I finally got to meet her earlier this week. It's really been a ton of fun to interact with her this week, and hang out with my sister in her new 'mom' role.

This isn't my first trip to Singapore, but it's my first since the birth of Pearwise (just for the record, I'm referring to the blog; my niece's name is Samara). So I will take this opportunity to share with you some of my favo[u]rite foods I've been eating in Singapore.

First on the list are laksa and ota. These are both Peranakan dishes that are particularly good at neighbo[u]ring restaurants on Katong St. in Singapore. Ota is sort of like SE Asian gefilte fish. It's a ground fish pate that is heavily spiced and then grilled inside a banana leaf. After unwrapping the leaf, it is eaten with the toothpick that holds the bundle together. Laksa is a noodle dish served in a spicy coconut-y fish broth with bits of seafood. Laksa and Ota are best enjoyed whilst sitting on a tiny plastic stool on the sidewalk, and sipping on lime juice.

We also had some great Thai food the other night. We started with one of my favo[u]rite Thai appetizers -- mieng kum. Whole betel leaves are wrapped around a mini-salad of peanuts, diced lime, chillies and various other tasty bits. We also had a really nice green curry (made with the little tiny Thai eggplants that are available here), a delicious papaya salad, fried chicken, and olive rice. For dessert: mango and sticky rice, one with a candle for Mel's birthday.

More on some of the other foods later.