Bi Bim Bap with Beef Bulgogi

This is the recipe we made for New Year's Eve. It's really delicious! There are a few steps, but nothing too scary! You can find Asian pear and daikon radish at some grocery stores, and definitely at Whole Foods.

You marinate the meet for about 2 hours before cooking, so you do need to prep a little beforehand.

Sesame oil, sesame seeds and spinach

Quick cooked zucchini and carrots

Beef cooking in the marinade

Bean sprouts, sesame and soy

All the ingredients combined with a fried egg on top

The fried egg really adds something special to the dish. I love the combination of all the items together. The use of soy and sesame in several places really ties everything together. Enjoy!

Thai Beef with Chiles and Basil Over Coconut Rice

I found this recipe online -- and after seeing "coconut rice," immediately added the ingredients to the grocery list. It looked easy enough to make, and we usually have items like soy sauce, coconut milk and basil in the house. To make the coconut rice, combine the jasmine rice, coconut milk and water in a saucepan. Cook like you would regular rice (bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and leave, covered for about 25 minutes).

Getting ready...

While the rice is cooking, we prepped the other ingredients. We purchased long, banana peppers instead of jalepenos, and clipped some basil from our plant.

The banana peppers aren't hot like jalepenos. 

We seeded and sliced the peppers into matchsticks. Heat up the wok/skillet to a high heat, adding the oil. Once the oil is warmed, add the garlic  (we used minced instead of chopping fresh garlic) and half the sliced peppers.


Cook, stirring constantly for about 15 seconds. Add the beef, and cook until browned (about 4 minutes). Make sure the meat is broken up so it can cook evenly.

Mmmm...e coli. Just kidding. 

Prep the sauce by mixing the fish sauce, soy sauce and sugar. 

FYI, if you haven't cooked with fish sauce before -- it smells bad. But it's a necessary ingredient in a lot of Asian dishes, so just try not to sniff it directly. 

Add the soy mixture to the beef, and cook for about 30 seconds. Add in the remaining peppers and the basil leaves.

I like cooking some of the peppers at the beginning and then adding in the others at the end, so there is a mixture of soft and crunchy. 

Serve the Thai beef over the coconut rice, and with lime slices on the side.

Ding! Dinner. 

The dinner was easy to make, and quick to cook (another advantage of stir-frying). It was tasty, but using the banana peppers definitely made it more mild that (I think) the recipe suggested. Paul and I added a little Sriracha just to perk it up a bit. Now the coconut rice, on the other hand, needs nothing. It is awesome. I pretty much have decided that I'm going to make coconut rice with our Asian dishes from now on. It's seriously delicious, and it's easy to kick up white rice a notch. Enjoy!

April 28: Grilled Chicken, Rosemary Polenta and Salad with Ginger-Shallot Dressing

For a quick Thursday dinner, Paul and I decided to grill some chicken (marinated in an Asian-peanut type dressing), alongside the final pieces of the rosemary polenta (I know, from like 2 weeks ago. I do not like to throw things out -- especially yummy things!). We had ingredients to make a salad, and to pair with the chicken -- we decided to make it "Asian-inspired" as well. How very Top Chef of me...just kidding.

I chopped up some shallots and ginger.

The shallots, ginger and minced garlic all went into the food processor to be blended. I added olive oil and some rice wine vinegar. I also added a tablespoon of water, based on the suggestion from one of our cookbooks. That was a great idea -- I would normally just dump in more olive oil to thin the dressing out, which may end up making it more oily than it needs to be.

About 3/4 of the way there -- I ran it through a few more times to get it smooth.

It took a few minutes to get it to the right consistency -- I had to stop and scrape down the sides of the bowl in order to get everything blended together and not lumpy.

Crunchy! Just realizing now that the radishes may have contributed to the bitterness of the salad as well.

We added some thinly sliced radishes and carrots to the lettuce. I did think the shallot flavor came through too strongly in the dressing. You put them in raw, which is what the book suggested, but I think I will pan fried them to soften the flavor up a little bit next time. There was some nice onion breath happening in our apartment. Glad you guys couldn't smell us through the blog.

We had the salad with the grilled chicken and the leftover polenta. The gingery dressing did help compliment the Asian flavors of the chicken, though they were very mild. 

'Til next time... :) 

April 24: Tofu Stir Fry with Ginger-Scallion Sauce

On Easter night, we cooked up a tofu stir fry with some leftover veggies and a ginger-scallion sauce taken from "How to Cook Everything: Vegetarian." We typically cube the tofu, but Paul tried a new technique. Meet "domino-sized" tofu.

The "dominoes" are a lot easier to move around without burning the heck out of yourself.

The cubes can be tough to cook, especially if you're concerned with cooking them on all six sides evenly. The "dominoes" are a welcome change for my slightly anxious (but happily, not burned) self.
 

I'm so relaxed right now only cooking two sides.  

We pan fried the tofu in some olive oil until they were crisped up. We had a bunch of vegetables to use from the produce box. In the bowl below are snap peas, broccoli, carrots and some dandelion.*

I am not so good with the estimating. Need a bigger bowl.

Based on the notes in the cookbook for the sauce, we decided to make the stir fry with some egg noodles rather than rice.

While the egg noodles were cooking, we stirred up all the vegetables in our rarely-used wok.

It's a nice wok, but really heavy. I have tiny chick muscles and have a hard time getting it all the way out of the back of the cabinet, OKAY?

I prepped the ingredients for the sauce -- chopped some scallions and ginger. I have used our peeler in the past to get the skin off the ginger root -- but Naveen from our Indian cooking class just used a knife to scrape it off, so I tried that. It actually works well, especially if you use a small paring knife, because you can get into the little crevices and not waste the smaller pieces of ginger. 

It's chopped scallion and ginger, in case you can't tell by the poor lighting.

We added the sauce to the vegetables and tofu, and mixed everything together -- then added the mixture to bowls of the egg noodles. 

In the wok...



...and in the bowl. Yum.

Overall, I think it turned out pretty good. We thought between the oil used to stir fry the vegetables (not that much) and then the oil used to make the sauce (a LOT), it ended up being a little oily. The ginger-scallion sauce was tasty though - you definitely tasted both ingredients with every bite. Both Paul and I ended up adding a dash of Sriracha sauce, which helped spice it up a little. The Sriracha was thinned out and coated the noodles because of the extra oil.

We also struggled with what constitutes a "heat proof bowl." We ended up putting the other ingredients right into the hot oil, which sort of backfired creating a hot boiling oil mix that we weren't sure how to manage. I was also afraid everything would become deep fried, which thankfully -- it didn't.

*DISCLAIMER: I have determined that I just don't like dandelion. I have tried it three times, and have yet to make it work in a way where I don't think it's bitter. We are getting it again this week. I'll have to figure out something else to do with it. I did read a recipe where you mix it with a bacon vinaigrette. Since bacon makes pretty much everything awesome, I think that may be the only option I have left besides putting it directly in the trash.