Is there anything more delicious than crispy pork, eggs, pasta and cheese? Carbonara just may be my favourite way to eat breakfast foods at dinner. The very first time I heard about carbonara, I was in my late teens. I was working at a deli/bakery, and my manager was a super-sweet Italian woman who would chat with me about all the delicious Italian dishes she would cook for her husband, two sons and daughter.

One day, she told me she made carbonara for dinner. I told her I’d never heard of it and put her in some major shock. I know now that carbonara is a classic Italian dish, but at the time, I hadn’t really explored Italian cuisine. Sheri, my manager, took it upon herself to teach me the ways of carbonara.

“It’s simple,” she said, “put the spaghetti on the stove, and while that’s cooking, fry up some bacon in a pan until crispy. Crack an egg or two into a bowl and add some romano and lots of black pepper. When the spaghetti’s done, drain it, and toss the hot pasta with the eggs and cheese then add the bacon.”

It sounded easy enough and to a bacon and egg lover like me, I had to try it immediately. What Sheri didn’t mention was the fact that carbonara making is a lesson in timing. My first attempt was sort of a bacon and scrambled egg pasta. Delicious, but nothing like the creamy sauce I’d heard about. It took me a while, but I managed to figure it out.

This Marcella Hazan carbonara recipe is pretty good. I love the flavour you get from the garlic and deglazing with white wine.

Marcella Hazan’s Carbonara Recipe from labellecuisine.com

1/4 pound pancetta
2 garlic cloves
1.5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons dry white wine
1 large egg
2 tablespoons freshly grated Romano cheese
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
fresh ground black pepper
1 tablespoon chopped flat-leaf parsley
280 grams spaghetti

Start by boiling a pot of water and then cooking your pasta according to the package. Time it so that everything else is prepared by the time the pasta is cooked.

Cut the pancetta into strips not quite 1/4 inch wide. Lightly crush the garlic with a knife handle, enough to split it and loosen the skin, which you will discard. Put the garlic and olive oil into a small sauté pan and turn on the heat to medium high. Sauté until the garlic becomes coloured a deep gold and remove. Fry the pancetta until it starts to crisp at the edges. Add the wine and let it bubble for a minute or two and then turn off the heat.

Break the egg into big enough to toss the pasta in. Beat it lightly with a fork, then add the two grated cheeses, a liberal grinding of pepper, and the chopped parsley. Mix thoroughly. Add cooked drained spaghetti to the bowl, and toss rapidly,
coating the strands well. Add the entire contents of the bacon pan into the bowl, toss thoroughly again, and enjoy at once.

When I was young and first heard about carbonara, I was enthralled. Bacon, eggs and pasta? I was sold. Carbonara is one of my favourite pastas to both make and eat, though it took me a while before I figured out how to make it without my eggs curdling. Carbonara is all about timing.

You want your bacon to be finished cooking just as your udon finishes. This isn’t a true carbonara as there’s no cheese in it and there’s cream, but then again, the udon makes it quite untraditional. Udon pairs really well with bacon and eggs and the green onions add a bit of freshness and bite.

Udon Carbonara Recipe

4 slices of bacon
1 egg
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 brick udon
sliced green onions for garnish

Put a pot of water on the stove for your udon. While it’s coming to a boil, cut the bacon into 1-inch pieces and pan fry on medium heat until crispy.
While the bacon is cooking, whisk the egg, cream and pepper together in a bowl and set it aside.
When the bacon looks like it’s about half-way done, put your udon in the boiling water and cook according to the instructions. When the udon is cooked, drain well and add the hot pasta and bacon to the egg and cream mixture and toss. Sprinkle on some green onions and enjoy!

After making the mashed potato spring rolls, I had a bit of leftover mashed potatoes so I decided to improvise and create a Vietnamese-flavoured croquette. I’m in love with what I like to think of as Vietnamese meat loaf: ground pork studded with wood ear mushrooms and shallots, flavoured with fish sauce, sugar, soy, white pepper and five spice.

I could eat this meat in anything: Vietnamese-inspired lasagne, Vietnamese-inspired shepherd’s pie, Vietnamese-inspired sausage rolls, Vietnamese-inspired ravioli, and the list keeps going on. I love the juicy savouriness of the ground pork, the subtle crunch of the wood ear mushrooms, the sweetness of the shallots and the tang of the fish sauce.

The flavours tasted great with the mashed potatoes and if you’re not inclined to deep-fry, you can just eat the potatoes with the meat mixed in. Mike and I ate almost half of the potatoes straight out of the bowl.

Pork and Potato Croquette Recipe

2 cups mashed potatoes
5 ounces ground pork
1/2 shallot diced
2 tablespoons wood ear mushrooms, re-hydrated and sliced
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons fish sauce
2 teaspoons soy
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
dash of five spice
salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons flour
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup panko crumbs

oil for frying

Mix the ground pork with the shallots, wood ear mushrooms, sugar, fish sauce, soy, white pepper and five spice. Heat a splash of oil in a medium sauce pan over medium high-heat and pan fry the pork until cooked and crumbly. Cool.

Mix the ground pork into the mashed potatoes and taste. Season accordingly with salt and pepper.

Using your hands, or a small ice cream scoop, shape the mashed potato mixture into balls. Dip in the flour, then the egg then the panko. Heat about 2 1/2 inches of oil in a deep sided pot to 350˚F. Deep-fry the croquette until crisp and golden brown. Drain on paper towels, serve with sriracha, mint and Thai basil leaves. Enjoy!

When I’m out for dinner I like checking out what other people are eating. I tend to do it unobtrusively – although Mike begs to differ – but when something really catches my eye, I’ll ask the staff what the dish was. Mochi-iso was one of those dishes for me. I only saw it for a second, but seeing those pale-golden puffs drizzled with sauce sitting on top of seaweed strips made me want it instantly.

I can’t say I’ve eaten a lot of savoury mochi in my life, but trust me, savoury, deep-fried mochi is where it’s at. Due to the lack of moisture in the rice cakes, deep-frying mochi is mostly stress free. Generally, the mochi don’t splatter, but don’t leave them in the hot oil for too long, because you don’t want them to puff up and explode.

Crispy on the outsides and soft and gooey on the inside, mochi iso are a perfect mid-morning, afternoon, midnight or anytime snack!

Mochi Iso Recipe

mochi, cut into cubes or strips
oil for deep frying
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 tablespoon mirin
nori

Heat up the oil to 375˚F in a small deep-sided pot. Make the dipping sauce by mixing together the soy and mirin. Carefully add the mochi to the hot oil. The mochi will puff up quickly. After the mochi are puffy, remove them from the oil and drain on a rack. Serve with nori and dipping sauce. Be careful, the mochi will be hot!

When you’re feeling peckish and your have old rice in the fridge, fried rice is the way to go. It’s fast to make and even faster to eat. If you’re lacking fresh ingredients, just take a look at what leftovers you have languishing away. I’ve made fried rice with leftover barbecue meat, deli meat leftovers, and even just eggs and rice.

Yesterday, I had a fierce craving for fried rice, but I didn’t have any rice or suitable fried rice ingredients in the fridge, so I did the cardinal sin: I made fried rice with fresh rice. If you’ve ever made fried rice with fresh rice you know that it usually turns into a wet mess. The best thing you can do is spread your rice out to let it cool down. Once it’s cold and therefore more dry, you can usually fry it up just fine.

I didn’t have any meat in the fridge, so I just fried my rice with eggs and a bit of XO sauce. The XO sauce has been hanging out in the fridge for a while, just begging to be used in fried rice.

A friend once told me how some young thugs tried to make fun of him:

Thugs: You Chinese, you eat flied lice!
My Friend: Yeah, I do eat fried rice, you have a problem with that?

I guess the thugs didn’t have anything else to say because they just left.

XO Fried Rice Recipe

2 cups of day-old cooked rice
3 tablespoons of XO sauce
1/4 cup sliced green onions
2 eggs, lightly beaten
oil
salt and pepper to taste

Heat your wok or frying pan over high heat and add a tiny bit of oil and scramble your lightly beaten eggs until mostly set, but not over cooked. The eggs will cook a bit more when you fry all the ingredients together. Remove the eggs from the wok and set aside.

Add a tiny bit more oil to the wok and add the fry and fry it, stirring occasionally until all the clumps are broken down and the rice is heated, about five minutes.

Add the XO sauce and continue frying until it mixed completely. Put the eggs back in the wok along with the green onions. Stir to mix, season to taste and serve immediately.

Shepherd’s pie was my most favourite thing ever to eat when I was a kid. I know I say a lot of things are my favourite ever, but Shepherd’s pie really was. I first tasted shepherd’s pie at the Heritage Festival in Edmonton, where I grew up. The Heritage Festival was an outdoor showcase of multiculturalism with performances, crafts and most importantly, food.

The food at the Heritage Festival would showcase specialties from all over the world. My mom would buy food tickets and my brother and I would get to pick out whatever we wanted. I wasn’t much of an eater then and I never wanted to to eat anything so my mom picked out the shepherd’s pie. Being the ever-so picky eater I didn’t want to even touch it, but my mom and brother looked like they were enjoying it so much that I ventured a taste. After that my mom had to buy me another pie, I liked it that much.

Shepherd’s pie won me over so much that I begged my mom again and again to make it for me, so she did. She made it so much that she was known for her shepherd’s pie around the neighbourhood. She even brought one, fancied up with piped potato rosettes, to our elementary school potluck.

Traditional shepherd’s pie is made from lamb, but my mom isn’t fond of lamb, and my parents don’t eat beef so growing up, home-style shepherd’s pie was made with ground pork. My mom’s shepherd’s pie is pretty simple: ground pork, diced onions and corn topped with mashed potatoes. When she had the time she’d make the mashed potatoes from scratch, but as we grew older and instant mashed potatoes became more common, she switched to those. I love home made mashed potatoes and I hate instant, so I always make my own.

Shepherd’s pie is excellent sick people food. You don’t have to chew it much so it goes down easy. I love the taste of savoury meat, crisp, sweet corn and smooth butter creamy mashed potatoes.

Shepherd’s Pie Recipe

1 lb of lean ground beef
1 onion, diced
1 11 oz can of corn nibblets
3 large potatoes, peeled and chopped into 1 inch pieces
1 1/2 cups chicken stock divided into 1/2 cup and 1 cup
3 tablespoons of butter
1 1/2 tablespoons of flour
2 teaspoons of oil
salt and pepper to taste

Heat your oven to 400˚F.

Put the peeled and chopped potatoes in a pot and cover them with water. Bring the water to a boil over high heat and then turn the heat down medium so the water is at a simmer. Boil the potatoes until fork-tender, about 15-20 minutes.

While the potatoes are cooking, heat the oil over medium high heat in a pot or sauté pan. When the oil is hot, add the diced onions and brown. When the onions are brown, remove from the pan and reserve.

In the same pan, cook the ground beef over high heat until the meat is no longer pink, about 5-8 minutes. Sprinkle the flour over the meat and stir for 2 minutes. Stir in the cooked onions and corn. Turn the heat down to medium and pour 1/2 cup of chicken stock into the pan and mix well. Let the chicken stock reduce and thicken up, about 2-3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. When done, remove the pan from the heat and transfer the meat mixture to a oven-safe casserole dish.

When your potatoes are tender, drain and mash with 2 tablespoons of butter. When the potatoes are no longer lumpy, stir in the 1 cup of chicken stock. Season the potatoes to taste.

Top the meat mixture with the mashed potatoes. Cut the last tablespoon of butter up into tiny pieces and dot the potatoes with it. Put the pie in the oven and bake until it has a delicious golden brown potato crust, about 30 minutes. You may want to broil the pie for the last 5 minutes if you really like potato crust.

Remove from the oven, let the pie rest for at least 10 minutes and enjoy!

Note: Feel free to make your mashed potatoes your favourite way or with cream or milk; I just used chicken stock because when I’m sick, dairy irritates my throat.

I’ve never eaten grits before, but I always imagined that they’d be like a corn-y sort of congee (rice porridge). Seeing as I love congee and I love corn, it would only be logical that I would love grits too. Chang’s shrimp and grits photo is amazing: the grits look creamy like a super thick soup.

Making grits is a lot like making risotto; there’s a lot of stirring involved. Unlike risotto, grits are added to the liquid at the beginning. I felt like there wasn’t enough liquid in the grits, but I figured I should follow the recipe the first time around. Instead of using just water to cook the grits, the recipe calls for ramen broth, which I found made my grits quite a lot darker than the light golden brown colour I was expecting.

Chang recommends you soak your girls overnight, which I didn’t do, but I should have. Soaked grits cook in about 10 minutes, but un-soaked take 20-25. My grits ended up much too thick. Mixed with a slow-poached egg, crispy bacon and shrimp, the grits we tasty, but I think I have to perfect them before I can really love the taste. Mike, on the other hand, devoured two bowls.

I might not have loved the shrimp and grits, but I’m willing to bet that it’s partially due to my lack of grit cooking skills. Still, I love the idea of this dish: taking something so iconically Southern and tweaking it until it’s your own.

Note: If you’ve never made grits before, don’t make the same mistake that I did: make them in a non-stick pot. If you don’t and you end up with a burnt corn crust on the bottom of your pot, just soak it with some dish washer detergent and leave over night. The next day, the corn crust will lift right off in one convenient piece.

Mike: Why do you have to poke them with a fork to separate them?
Me: It’s just the traditional way you separate English Muffins.
Mike: The English don’t have knives they can use? If they have forks, they have knives.
Me: I have no idea. English muffins are not my friends.

These English Muffins were supposed to be “loaded with nooks and crannies,” but somehow I ended up with flat, dense, hockey-puck shaped muffins. To be fair, they were loaded with nooks and crannies, but they weren’t the light, fluffy affair I was hoping for.

The dense muffins happened not once, but twice. I’m pretty methodical about following instructions, but somehow these didn’t turn out the way I thought they would. The muffins rose, but they weren’t cooked thoroughly in the middle.

These muffins have been made successfully, so I know it can be done! I was pretty hopeful the muffins would turn out the second time, but I still ended up with a noticeable raw spot of dough in the middle of the muffin. I think it has something to do with the griddle cooking and heat. Luckily, I still have some uncooked muffins from my second batch in the fridge, so I’m going to give cooking them a try again tomorrow.

To cook the muffins, you slow-griddle them in a super-low cast iron pan for 5 minutes before flipping, cooking, flipping, cooking, flipping and cooking again. It’s a long process designed to create a fluffy, light-as-air muffin. Unfortunately, my muffins weren’t fluffy, light or airy.

As unsuccessful as the English muffins were, the Bay Leaf Butter was decidedly a success. My “fresh” bay leaves were not as fresh as when I bought them a few weeks ago, but they gave the butter-lard mixture a big boost of flavour. The bay leaf butter is subtle, glossy and delicious.

Other bloggers who have successfully made Momofuku English Muffins:

Asian Jewish Deli
Food People Want
Corner Loaf

banh mi on ficelle

I have a love for hand-held food, and of course, sandwiches fit nicely into the handheld category. One of my favourite sandwiches is the Vietnamese sub, or bánh mi. Once colonized by France, Vietnamese cuisine has various French culinary influences, but one of the best is the humble sandwich.

A light, crackley baguette with soft fluffy insides is the canvas for savoury Vietnamese meat fillings, sweet and sour pickled carrot and daikon, fresh cilantro and spicy peppers. The combination of ingredients has flavour and textural contrasts that make most who try it instant converts to the Vietnamese sub.

kewpie mayo squirts

I was excited to try Momofuku’s version of bánh mi because I’ve been meaning to make these sandwiches at home, even though they’re cheap, plentiful and damn good here in Vancouver. Tasting the terrines on their own, I could easily imagine eating many meaty delicious sandwiches. Unfortunately for me, I tried to make those Vietnamese baguettes, which didn’t turn out anything like I wanted.

Me: I told you we should have gotten back up baguettes.
Mike: I told you we should get back up baguettes.
Me: No, I asked you, what if they don’t work out, should we get back up baguettes?
Mike: I said we should get them.
Me: No you didn’t!

It was a trivial tiff, especially when back up baguettes needed to be found, so we headed out in to the Olympic fevered streets in search of fresh Vietnamese baguettes. There’s only one Vietnamese sub shop in our walking vicinity and with Olympic road closures basically surrounding our building, walking was our only option.

After fighting our way through the throngs of drunken red and white celebrators, we reached the sub shop. We asked the counter girl if she could sell us some plain baguettes and she turned to her mom to ask, “how much?” but her mom just shook her head no. Usually sub places will sell you plain baguettes, but based on the amount of walking traffic, I guess they thought they could make more money selling bánh mi than plain baguettes.

Rejected, Mike and I headed over to Urban Fare for a regular baguette, which is a worthy substitute, but nothing like the real thing. Of course, when we got there, there were no baguettes to be found. Ok, there was a multigrain baguette, but multigrain and bánh mi don’t mix.

I asked the Bread Dude behind the counter if they had any baguettes and he gestured towards the baskets.

Bread Dude: Of course we have some baguettes, over there.
Me: Oh really? I didn’t see any.
Bread Dude: There (pointing at a basket of ficelle).
Me: Those are ficelle. Do you have any traditional baguettes?
Bread Dude: Hold on, I have some here behind the counter.

I waited patiently while I watched him bag up a loaf of ficelle. Did this man not understand what a baguette was? I was about to open my mouth to say something when he handed me the bag. The loaf was hot and heavenly and I’m not one to argue with fresh, hot bread. Vietnamese sandwiches on ficelle it was!

The resulting sandwich was bold, juicy and delicious. Kewpie mayonnaise, smeared chicken liver terrine, and layered ham terrine slices, were topped off with pickles, cilantro and hot peppers to combine into bites of meaty goodness balanced with crisp freshness. The sandwiches were so good we easily finished of the loaf of ficelle.

momofuku banh mi on store bought vietnamese baguettes

With the fridge full of terrine, a couple of days later I visited a Vietnamese baguette shop to buy half a dozen fresh baguettes for home style Momofuku bánh mi. The Vietnamese baguettes made all the difference. I thought the terrines tasted good on the ficelle, but they were brilliant on the Vietnamese baguettes.

Were my home made Momofuku bánh mi the best bánh mi I’ve ever eaten? Probably not; it was fun to make them at home, but I think I’ll leave bánh mi making up to the professionals and just buy them for a few bucks a pop.

momofuku banh mi on store bought vietnamese baguettes

attempts 2, 3, & 4

Note: This is step 3 of the multistep Momofuku bánh mi recipe

The last, and arguably, most important part of making bánh mi is the Vietnamese Baguettes.

Vietnamese baguettes are light airy loaves of bread that have a paper-thin crackley crust that will flake into a million pieces and cover you in crumbs the moment you pick one up. They’re almost not like bread at all. Eating a Vietnamese baguette is like biting into an impossibly soft, fluffy chunk of air surrounded by a crisp thin crust.

If you’ve never eaten a Vietnamese baguette, you’re missing out. Find yourself a Vietnamese sub shop and buy yourself a loaf right now. It’ll probably set you back about 50¢ and if you’re really lucky, it’ll be hot and fresh out of the oven. Even if it’s not, it’ll still be one of the most delectable loaves of bread you’ve ever eaten in your life.

flour, rice flour, salt, yeast, baking powder, sugar

Chang doesn’t have a recipe for making Vietnamese baguettes for his bánh mi and I probably know why:

1) he probably couldn’t find a solid recipe or;
2) it’s ridiculously hard to make Vietnamese baguettes.

I did some extensive googling to find a recipe and all I could come up with were the same two that float around: Andrea Nguyen’s recipe and myfoodaffair’s recipe.

dough

Although many people have reported trying Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for baguettes with successful results, I didn’t because it doesn’t contain rice flour. According to reports, Ms. Nguyen’s recipe makes a baguette with a crumb that is “soft and chewy, but not light and airy like the super cheap [baguettes] that quickly go stale.”

I wanted to make those light and airy super cheap baguettes. Those are the ones I salivate over at Vietnamese bánh mi shops. Its true they do go stale quickly, but the point is, you eat them before they ever get a chance to go stale.

dough before rise

With dreams of a crisp, light baguette in mind, I tackled the second most common recipe on the internet, from myfoodaffair. I followed the recipe to the letter, but my loaves came out heavy, dense, thick-skinned and ugly. They were so bad, Mike refused to take photos of them. Even so, as ugly as they were, they still had to be tasted:

Mike: YUM!
Me: Oh, shut up.
Mike: No really, they’re good. [CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH CHEW CHEW]
Me:  They’re not supposed to sound like that!

Needless to say, I abandoned that recipe and went in search for yet another.

dough doubled

According to Mike, Vietnamese baguette recipes are highly obscure and hard to find because most Vietnamese people don’t bake their own baguettes; why spend hours baking when you can buy a perfect baguette for 50¢? Still, I wanted, no, needed to bake my own Vietnamese baguettes so Mike humoured me by searching the internet in Vietnamese (who knew Google works in vietnamese?). Although Mike is fluent in Vietnamese, the recipe he eventually found had strange technical terms that neither he, nor Google translate, could make out.

We ended up asking his dad for some linguistic help. I’m pretty sure that my father-in-law now thinks I’m crazy for wanting to bake Vietnamese baguettes, and I have a feeling that during his next visit, he’ll have a dozen fresh store-bought baguettes with him. Still, he translated the recipe and I was as good as gold. Eagerly, I gave it a try. And then another. And then another, for a total of three times.

attempts

Interestingly enough, the “authentic” Vietnamese recipe doesn’t contain rice flour. There were, however, a lot of notations about the correct temperature to let the dough rise (22º-25ºc) and differences in rising time in the Winter and Summer (30min and 1hr respectively).

I was really excited to give the Vietnamese recipe a go, but the first loaves ended up too brown and the slashes I made didn’t expand. They also didn’t rise much and so were pretty dense. The bottoms were all burnt, and generally, I’d call try #1 a complete and utter failure.

For try #2, the second time around, I made the slashes deeper and let the dough rise longer. This time the slashes I made expanded a bit more. Instead of using parchment paper (as the recipe suggested) I used a higher temperature rated silpat and stacked a second baking sheet underneath to reduce the temperature on the bottom of the loaf. I also switched to making(ruining?) only one loaf at a time. No burning on the bottom! But the loaf was still way too dense for my taste.

For try #3, I switched to bread flour and changed the way I was shaping the loaves. On the previous two loaves I shaped the baguettes the traditional French way. This time, I got smarter (and hungrier) and bought a store bought loaf. Close inspection showed that I should be rolling the loaf instead of pinching it. Success! Sort of. The slashes expanded and the loaves doubled in volume, but they still didn’t have the crackley paper skin or the soft, moist, fluffy insides of a store-bought loaf.

how a vietnamese baguette should look

At the same time, the store-bought loaves showed me just how far off I was from the real thing. And also, just how good the real thing can be. Two recipes, four variations and many, many, dense loaves of bread later, I’m ready to admit defeat, for now. But it’s not over yet, Vietnamese Baguettes. I’ll figure you out! In the meantime, I’ll have to hope my father-in-law shows up with those baguettes or I’m not going to be eating any Momofuku bánh mi anytime soon!