It has been a while since my last post. The weather here in New York has been so hot that cooking has suddenly turned into a bit of a chore. Lots of salads and lighter fare, then, like today’s recipe for roasted potatoes with salsa verde.
The other day my friend Pei-San came over for dinner. She’s originally from Taiwan, but lives in Japan and (temporarily) New York. I met her some months ago at a Japanese language meetup and since then she’s been helping me practice that language. That’s how good she is at it! But I digress. The reason I mention her is that she brought over a Taiwanese dish that was so addictively good I simply had to add it to my repertoire. I’ve had Taiwanese food before but not this particular dish. She didn’t know what it was called in English, but Googling the Chinese characters, 胡椒蝦 (hu jiao xia), which literally mean “pepper shrimp”, revealed that this is a dish better known (at least in the US) as “salt and pepper shrimp”.
Lately, I’ve been working through some of Mario Batali’s cookbooks. For those unfamiliar with Chef Batali, he owns some of New York’s iconic Italian restaurants. I haven’t been to any of them (yet!) but if the food is anything like in his cookbooks I now know what I’ve been missing! It is Italian food like I’ve never had before: highly inventive and tasty, yet surprisingly simple to make. And eye-opening, too. I had no idea, for instance, that Italians eat vegetables in such abundance and in such surprising combinations at that. Meat or other proteins, when present, play a small but important supporting role.
I’ve been racking my brains about what to write about this week and the calendar presented a solution: its Memorial Day weekend in this part of the world, the unofficial start of summer. So to kick off the BBQ season here’s a recipe for tsukune (つくね), Japanese-style grilled chicken meatballs. Yakitori – literally grilled chicken – are one of my favorite things to eat, Japanese or otherwise, and I’ve had countless variations over the years. But this rendition – lightly adapted from a recipe in Food and Wine Magazine – is one of the best I’ve ever had.
One of the great things about a melting pot like New York is how it encourages experimentation amongst chefs by bringing together different culinary traditions. But, as I’ve said in a previous post, successfully marrying ingredients from disparate cuisines requires serious talent. And imagination. Thus, while I’ve been eating and making nước chấm, the classic Vietnamese dipping sauce, for many years, the idea of using it to dress roasted or grilled veggies never occurred to me until I saw today’s recipe in David Chang’s Momofuku Cookbook. (Since then I’ve seen variations pop up all over the place.) Once you eaten this dish, however, it will seem – like all the best ideas – completely obvious. And it will make you see Brussels sprouts with fresh eyes.
Hello, I’m Samar. Welcome to Oishii Rasoi, a blog chronicling my culinary adventures. I decided to build this site as a way to catalog and share what I cook and eat, an outlet, if you will, for my primary obsession: food. (more)
