This is somewhat of a scaled-down, cheaters' version. I'll soon post the street vendors' version with both the marinade and the grilling sauce which would be more appropriate for pork or beef satay. I hope this will tide you over until then. It's a quick recipe, but delicious nonetheless.
This chunky blend of dried fruits, nuts, and wine is a delicious excuse to use the Turkish dried figs in the freezer. It makes a fabulous topping for plain vanilla génoise, dessert crêpes, rice pudding, or, if you don't mind some booze for breakfast, oatmeal or Greek-style yogurt.
In keeping with the simplicity of this ingredient, I'm going to skip my usual rambling and go straight to the instructions on how to make toasted rice powder (ข้าวคั่ว ).
I'm blogging about another failure yet again. Can you believe it? But hold on. This failure is a good failure.
Amy Tan tells a story of a swan that was once a duck in The Joy Luck Club: The old woman remembered a swan she bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look! -- it is too beautiful to eat. Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: "In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan -- a creature that became more than what was hoped for."*
(All photographs in this post are courtesy of Connie Fairbanks.)
Fall has and will always be my favorite season, but there's something about spring that makes me wake up with a grin on my face despite the fact that the weather during this weird cusp between winter and summer is incredibly unpredictable in Chicago. The tulips lining Michigan avenue and the daffodils in front of Victorian homes in Hyde Park are nice. The ability to go outside without a cumbersome down jacket is nice too. But those are just icing on the cake. What's the cake? Farmers' markets.
Rejoice. Rejoice. Rejoice.
The title may be hesitant in tone, but I am saying this with no ambivalence: if you would cook from only one of my recipes, be sure it's this one.
My maternal grandmother made this stew for us quite often. Back then, all I cared about, sadly, was eating it, not learning how to make it. In contrast to my mother who wrote down more than she should have, Grandma never wrote down any recipes anywhere and, unless I was there when she made certain dishes, I never learned what went into them. My attempt to get a written-down recipe from Grandma would have been futile anyway given the way she cooked. I can imagine how our conversation would have gone:
I wish I had a more interesting story to tell you about how I came up with this fruit-based yogurt mousse, but I don't. It's just one of those times when you stand in front of an opened refrigerator staring at what you have and all of a sudden an idea just leaps out at you. Or perhaps I had mango lassi, the famous Indian mango yogurt drink, in the back of my mind at the time and wondered, in a subconscious level, what I would get if I thickened up the thing to a mousse consistency.
I didn't even start out with a recipe; I was just winging it. Ripe mangoes. Cream. Yogurt. Sugar. Gelatin. I mean, seriously, even if this thing turned out to be a runny mess, I figured it would still taste pretty darn delicious.
Boy, am I glad I wrote down everything as I was dumping stuff into the blender. This was a success in all departments: taste, appearance, texture. In fact, the creamy, light, and fluffy texture of this mousse is exactly like that of the commercial yogurt mousse marketed as Dannon La Crème in the US and Danone Danissimo in Canada.
The only exception is that this accidental clone of Dannon La Crème is fresher-tasting and proudly made by your own two hands.
Fresh Mango Yogurt Mousse
(Makes one quart)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Flesh of 4 ripe good mangoes (You should get approximately 4 cups or 1 lb of mango flesh.)
1 cup heavy cream, chilled
1 cup yogurt or kefir, chilled
1 envelope unflavored gelatin powder
1/2 cup sugar (more or less depending on the sweetness of your mangoes or lack thereof.)
1 pinch salt
Experimentation is fun and educational. It is also exhilarating when great results are achieved. But when I tallied up my grocery bills last week and realized almost a quarter of my weekly food budget had gone into experimenting with different recipes for a sweet custard filling for the Chinese buns, I became a bit melancholic.
But hey, I had fun. And isn't this what food blogs are for -- other people test out recipes for you, so you won't have to? Besides, what do you know, my 7th try turned out pretty well! It's all good.
Roger, a regular reader (read: captive audience) and one of my first subscribers, has gladdened my heart by graciously writing a guest post for me. Roger is a writer, avid bird-watcher, budding photographer, and a bit of a theologian. You can enjoy his beautiful photographs, witty remarks about things in general, and random thoughts on the world as he marches to the beat of an indifferent drummer here.
Though I’m quite sure all five of my regular readers know that I am not originally from the United States, based on a recent incident, I have good reasons to believe that some visitors don't check out my profile and, consequently, miss out on the information that should have clued them in on why I sometimes mess up the tenses or fail to assign the proper pluralized form to a plural noun. If the fact that me speak English not so good hasn’t been obvious to you already, stick around for a while and it will be.
How clueless am I? More than you think. After years of living in the US, I still make stupid mistakes. For example, everyone knows "taut" rhymes with "caught" not "sauerkraut." I didn't, until last week. And that state, Connecticut? I just learned last year that the second C was there for decorative purposes and not to be pronounced. My tendency to mess up the prepositions (or drop them altogether) doesn't help either as sometimes the absence of the proper preposition in a phrasal verb construction can entirely change the meaning of the verb, e.g. Do I tinkle the recipe? Tinkle with? I know I tweak recipes, but do I tinkle in the kitchen? I'm a tinkler? A tinkler wither? (Why not? There's such a thing as a fixer-upper. Even Bounty is a quicker picker-upper.) Wait, is it 'tinker' or 'tinkle'? Never mind.
You can imagine how many more mistakes I made when I first came here, as familiar with the American culture and fluent in English as I was at that time. To make matters more complicated, I was taught to speak English the British way. Even though Siam has enjoyed warm diplomatic ties with the United States for 175 years, we had first been greatly influenced by the British and there are still traces of that everywhere even though we've never been colonized. For a long time, regardless of how limited my English was, my accent and terminology were decidedly British. It’s a full stop, not a period. It’s a torch, not a flashlight. You study accountancy, not accounting. And dropping the "u" from colour or flavour is not an honourable behaviour.
Imagine me as a foreign student, fresh off the boat, in an American university. You should have seen the look on my classmates' faces when I, realizing I didn’t have an eraser on me, asked out loud during an exam if any of them had a rubber I could borrow.During the first few weeks in the States, I went to a public library hoping to check out my favorite foreign film of all time, Babette's Feast and some other movie DVDs. I somehow got lost in a labyrinth of the youth section and all the movies on the shelves featured either talking puppets or a singing purple dinosaur. Movies for people over the age of five were nowhere to be found.
Set on finding non-juvenile movies, I approached the information desk and politely asked the bespectacled older lady clerk where I could find adult movies. Instead of directions, I was given a series of nervous blinks and a request to repeat what I'd said. "Could you please tell me where they keep the adult movies?" I said, enunciating every word. "We, uh, don't have any of those, miss," said the lady. "How come?" I cocked my head to one side and squinted. "Well, we just, uh, don't," she looked very uncomfortable -- almost frightened, actually. I told her about another public library in the same city that had a huge collection, but she refused to believe me. I finally thanked the clerk, but her staring me up and down compelled me to make a politely-worded pre-departure comment.
And the comment was that I thought every public library should have adult movies as tax-paying grown-ups need their equivalents of Teletubbies too. Pointing to the kids nearby, I told the clerk that soon these children would outgrow Barney and Bob the Builder and be disappointed to find out their public library did not have adult movies to accommodate their educational needs beyond the juvenile years.
I had no idea what those stunned-looking women and their children standing within earshot thought of me as I made the speech. But I left the library feeling the kind of pride that could only come from having put up a good fight for a worthy cause.
But that wasn't the first time I had that kind of self-righteous incredulity. That same year, I went to a diner in a small town in Texas and ordered a piece of coffee cake. One of my aunts used to make coffee-flavored pound cake that was out of this world and I hoped I would get something similar at that diner. Imagine how miffed I was when I found out there was no trace of coffee in my coffee cake.
How dare they dupe innocent immigrants like that?Cardamom Walnut Espresso Streusel Coffee Cake: A Cake to Be Eaten with Coffee That Actually Contains Coffee and Causes No Cultural Misunderstanding among the Hapless Souls
(Makes 0ne 9x13 pan of mildly-spiced, very moist, and delicious coffee-flavored coffee cake)
Printable Version
Streusel: Crumble together with your hands 1/2 coarsely-chopped walnuts, 6 tablespoons softened butter, 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom, and 1 1/2 teaspoons instant espresso powder. Mix until the mixture resemble coarse crumbs; set aside.
Coffee Cake: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and grease a 9x13 pan. In a mixing bowl, dissolve 1 1/2 tablespoons of instant espresso powder in 1 1/2 cup kefir or buttermilk. Whisk in 2 large eggs, 1 1/4 cups sugar, 1/3 cup vegetable oil, 2 teaspoons vanilla, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Add 3 cups all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1 teaspoon baking soda; mix until homogenous. Pour the batter into prepared pan and sprinkle the streusel on top. Bake for 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool completely before serving.
I hope I'm not betraying my own culture when I say that the number of Thai desserts which I don't care for far exceeds the number of those I like. For one thing, as much as I like coconut, I can only take so much of the let's-float-some-fruits-or-tubers-in-coconut-milk-sweetened-with-palm-sugar-and-call-it-dessert stuff. Though I do not by any means hate candied taro roots, bananas in coconut cream, or sweet black bean "soup" or others that fall into the aforementioned category of dessert, there are other Thai sweets on which I'd rather spend my daily caloric allowance.
One of them is Kleeb Lamduan shortbread cookies. I love them so.
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