My family’s barbecues tend to be a mash-up of foods. There’s no cohesiveness and usually no one bothers to ask if this dish complements that dish. Our most recent barbecue saw the table covered with chicken wings, turkey sausage, lamb, papaya salad, potato salad, noodle salad and of course, rice. My dad doesn’t think a meal is a meal if it doesn’t include rice. Rice is a staple, hot dogs and burgers are not.

I never touch the rice at barbecues, unless it’s fried rice, which happens more than you think. What I do always help myself to is my mom’s Thai noodles salad. It’s a glass noodle salad slippery with a sweet, spicy, tangy dressing. Sometimes there’s shredded chicken and boiled eggs, sometimes it’s shrimp and ground pork. There’s always cilantro and green onions.

My mom doesn’t really have a recipe for the salad or the dressing. When I ask her how to make it, she tells me to just toss in a bunch of stuff with fish sauce. A little more prodding and she’ll talk about sugar and lime juice. Just this past weekend she told me she puts chicken stock granules in the salad. I skipped out on the chicken granules, but I think this is a pretty good approximation of my mom’s salad. Dare I even say it’s better?!

Thai Noodle Salad Recipe

1 bundle of glass noodles (mung bean noodles)
2 tablespoons pan-fried ground pork
6-8 large shrimp, peeled, boiled and sliced in half
1/4 cup roughly chopped cilantro
1/8 cup sliced green onions
2 teaspoons fish sauce
2 teaspoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons sugar
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 Thai red chili, thinly sliced
crispy fried shallots or peanuts for garnish

Cook the noodles according to the package, drain and cool. Toss the noodles with the cooked pork, shrimp, cilantro, green onions and sliced red chili. Mix the fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar and lime juice in a small bowl until the sugar is dissolved. Toss the dressing with the salad and serve cold with crispy shallots of chopped peanuts on top.

Sometimes leftovers are the best part of a good meal – you can go to sleep happy, knowing that something delicious awaits you the next day. Some leftovers are more versatile than others, but generally, the minimal amount of effort you need to put in to make something new is amazing.

The day after our bo ssäm feast we had rice, kimchi and pork in the fridge. There’s a lot you can do with leftover rice: fried rice, baked rice, omelette-wrapped rice, and the list goes on. I had a craving for crispy rice so I decided to do a bibimbap-ish pizza in a cast iron skillet.

I love the way rice gets super crunchy when toasted over low heat. Top it off with slow roasted pork, roughly chopped kimchi and a fried egg and I’m in heaven. The gooey richness of the egg yolk seeping it’s way in between the rice is, for lack of a better descriptor, so good!

If you don’t have any leftovers on hand, you can still make this with whatever you do have in your fridge, just cook up some rice and top it off with vegetables, deli meat or whatever you crave. Drizzle the whole thing with your favourite sauce and remember to add the fried egg on top, it really makes the dish.

Crispy Rice Pizza Recipe

serves 2

1 to 1 1/2 cups of cooked short grain rice*
1/2 cup pulled pork
1/4 cup kimchi, roughly chopped
2 eggs
oil

Pour enough oil to lightly coat the bottom of a small cast iron skillet** and heat it up over medium high heat. When the oil is hot, add 1/2 to 3/4 cups rice and pat it down so it forms a round rice cake. Turn the heat down to medium-low and let the rice crisp up and form a crust. Be patient, this may take a while. After about 15 minutes, use as small spatula to lift up your rice cake to see if it has a golden brown crust. If it does, turn it over and crisp up the other side. If it doesn’t, give it a few more minutes before flipping. Flipping the cake should be easy; the rice cake should be solid.

Once you flip your rice cake over, go a head and fry up a sunny side egg in another pan. While your egg is cooking to your optimal doneness, top the rice cake with some pork and kimchi. When the egg is cooked, pop it on top of the rice cake and add a couple more pieces of pork and kimchi. Repeat with the remaining ingredients to make another “pizza” and enjoy hot!

* Short grain rice is essential for this dish because other longer rice varieties won’t stick together to form a cake

** If you don’t have a small cast iron skillet, feel free to make this in a regular one. Your “pizzas” might be a little irregularly shaped, but they’ll still taste great and they’ll be easier to flip!

Growing up, there were always dumplings at home. We would eat them for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Even now, if I head over to my parent’s place and take a look in the freezer, I can pretty much guarantee that there are at least two bags of frozen dumplings. My mom’s big on frozen dumplings, mostly because the convenience of store-bought frozen dumplings is too alluring to pass up.

That’s not to say that my mom doesn’t make dumplings, but when she does she makes the filling, but not the wrappers. Fresh dumpling wrappers are available at most Asian grocery stores. You can definitely make your own wrappers, but if you’re short on time and still want fresh, “home made” dumplings, store-bought fresh dumpling wrappers are perfect.

Dumplings are great because you can be as creative or as basic as you want. I kept it simple with a mix of ground pork and diced kimchi. The crispy dumpling skins, the juicy meat and the slight spice of the kimchi were fantastic.

Pork and Kimchi Dumpling Recipe

makes about 40 dumplings, depending on how big you make them

1/2 pound ground pork
1/2 cup kimchi, diced
salt and pepper to taste
store-bought fresh dumpling wrappers
bowl of water

oil for pan frying

Mix together the ground pork and diced kimchi. Make sure you’re not adding too much kimchi “juice,” you don’t want your meat mixture to be too loose.

Take a dumpling wrapper and place about a tablespoon of meat in the middle. Dip your finger into the bowl of water and wet the edges of the dumpling wrapper. You can just fold your wrapper together and press the edges shut or you can pleat it.

When pleating, you only pleat one side of the dumpling wrapper. Bring the edges of the dumpling wrapper together and pinch in the middle. Starting in the middle and working your way to edge, fold the dough over itself to create a pleat. Repeat pleating until you reach the edge, go back to the middle and pleat in the opposite direction so that all your pleats face the centre.

Heat up a generous amount of oil in a non-stick pan on medium heat. When the oil is hot and shimmery, add the dumplings and pan fry on medium or medium low until brown and crispy. Turn and pan-fry on all three sides until all the dumpling sides are crisp. Make sure the filling is cooked by cutting open a dumpling.

Enjoy hot!

I know it sound sacrilegious, but a lot of people I know are disgusted by pork belly. They think the discernible layers of meat and fat are disturbing. On the other hand, I have friends who love pork belly – sometimes it’s the only thing they order.

I stand definitively on the pork belly love side: it has the richness of bacon with the added bonus of meaty heft. When done right, pork belly has that magic ratio of yielding melt and just enough bite. I didn’t always love pork belly though. My mom does this dish with braised taro and pork belly that my dad absolutely loves. She doesn’t make it much, but when she does my dad can inhale the whole plate himself. I on the other hand would only eat plain rice when she made that dish.

It might have been the taro, the fat of the pork belly or the combination, but for some reason, I just didn’t like it. Now though, my tastebuds have grown up and adventurous and I don’t find much that I don’t like anymore. I love taro and pork belly and I think maybe just being exposed to them when I was a stubborn kid opened my eyes a little.

It’s at good thing my eyes are wide open now because if they weren’t, I wouldn’t get to enjoy pork belly as much as I do. The recipe for the pork belly for the Ko kimchi consommé dish is slightly different from the one Chang has for the pork buns and ramen. The belly’s roasted at a constant 270˚F instead of starting out in a hot oven and finishing in a low one. The belly roasted at a constant 270˚ turned out fantastic. After 3 hours in the oven, I pressed the belly between 2 loaf pans to ensure a neat presentation.

Tomorrow: Ko Kimchi Consommé with Pork Belly, Napa Cabbage and Oysters

Like lots of Asian kids, the first thing I learned to “cook” was instant noodles. I felt so grown up putting a pot on the stove, boiling the water, and adding the noodles and flavour package. Instant noodles used to be my standard after-school snack, but if I was feeling extra hungry and I was lucky, I’d make myself a bowl of meat-sauce noodles. The luck had to do with whether or not there was any meat sauce in the fridge.

Meat sauce noodles are incredibly easy to make, especially if you mom keeps extra meat sauce in the fridge. After school I’d boil up some udon, drain it, take the meat sauce out of the fridge and mix it all together. The sweetness of the shallots and the savouriness of the ground pork made for a fast, simple and delicious snack.

The meat sauce noodles I grew up with are loosely based on ko lo mee, a noodle dish my parents ate back when they lived in Brunei. Ko lo mee are egg noodles mixed with ground pork fried with shallots and some sort of mysterious brown sauce. Sometimes the noodles come with barbecue pork and wontons as well. When you get the noodles to-go, they come wrapped up in waxed brown paper.

For fun, I guess you could serve these noodles in wax paper packets as well, but you’ll probably be so tempted by the smell of the meat sauce cooking that you’ll want to eat straight from the pot.

Home Style Meat Sauce Noodle Recipe

serves 4

1/2 pound ground pork
1 shallot, finely diced
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons sweet soy sauce
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
pepper to taste
oil

noodles of your choice

green onions for garnish

Fry the shallots in a tiny bit of oil until fragrant and clear. Add the pork and cook, stirring to break it up. When the pork is cooked through and broken up, add the oyster, and soy sauces. The sauces should cover the pork completely. If they don’t, add a bit of water to cover the pork. Simmer for 1/2 hour to let the flavours meld. Pepper to taste. The meat mixture will be incredibly salty on its own, but remember, you’re mixing it with plain noodles.

Cook your noodles according to the package, drain and top with the meat mixture and green onions.

I’ve never really understood the appeal of ranch dressing. I guess it must be an American thing, but I’ve just never really been wow’ed by it. Sure, it’s tangy and creamy, but ranch has never been at the top of my dressing list. The thing with me and ranch dressing is that I’m not sure what to eat it with. It seems a bit heavy for salad dressing, and like with oysters I prefer raw vegetables naked.

Chang’s Ramp Ranch Dressing recipe calls for ramps. I’ve never seen ramps in Vancouver, and as it usually goes with Momofuku ingredients, my ramp search turned up nothing. Based on my indifference for ranch, I didn’t search too hard, especially since Chang says that if you can’t find ramps you can substitute store-bought picked pearl onions, which is just what I did.

To make the Ramp Ranch Dressing, you combine buttermilk, lemon, ramps (pickled onions), scallions, and kewpie mayo. It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did: the dressing tasted just like ranch! I never knew you could make the signature ranch taste with so few ingredients. It was creamy, tangy and extremely fresh and refreshing. I couldn’t stop dipping my fingers into the dressing for another taste.

The ranch dressing tasted fabulous on the pork shoulder steak. The creamy, tangy, smoothness of the dressing went fantastically with the smoky, charred pork.

The pork in this dish is pork shoulder steak. I’ve never heard of this cut of meat before; basically they’re steaks cut from pork shoulder. They’re supposed to be like pork chops, but better because they have more fat marbled throughout.

They didn’t have any shoulder steaks at the butcher so I bought a chunk of shoulder and cut them into “steaks.” This probably wasn’t what Chang had in mind when he put this recipe in the book. He talks about Bev Eggleston’s pork, which is supposed to be “magic.” My pork wasn’t magic. Though it tasted alright, it wasn’t so fantastic that I’ll be making this again. I ever have the chance, I definitely want to try Eggleston’s magical pork.

Regardless of the pork however, I learned something else. Ranch, I was wrong about you.

When I was a kid, I ate a lot of barbecue pork, or char siu. It was a busy weeknight dinner staple, something we’d have about twice a month. Chinese takeout, as we knew it, was usually char siu, roasted pork, soy sauce chicken or roast duck with some greens and white rice.

Nothing beats hot, steamy white rice with sticky, glistening red char siu and a sunny-side up fried egg. Breaking into the runny yellow yolk of the egg with my chopsticks and mixing it into the rice was my favourite part. Char siu with rice is comfort food at it’s best.

My mom never made char siu at home, much like bánh mi, most people don’t tend to make char siu when they can buy perfectly delicious barbecue pork at a Chinese butcher. Traditionally, char siu, which means “fork roast or fork burn,” is made by roasting marinated pork over a fire. The trademark red colour comes from food colouring.

Char siu is a favourite of Mike’s, so I’ve made quite a bit of it over the years; this is the recipe that works best for me. Unfortunately I don’t have any open flames at home so I’ve created a way to make char siu in the oven. There’s no red food colouring in my recipe so your pork won’t end up the colour of the hanging pieces of pork you see in the roast meat window, but it will be terrifically juicy, tender, sweet and savoury.

Chinese Barbecue Pork/Char Siu Recipe

Ingredients

2 pounds pork butt cut into 4 pieces
3 tablespoons maltose (you can find this at most Asian grocery stores)
3 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons hoisin sauce
3 tablespoons sweet soy sauce
1 teaspoon Chinese five spice powder
1 teaspoon white pepper
2 tablespoons sesame oil
half a head of garlic, peeled and sliced

Directions

1. Combine all the ingredients except the pork in a small sauce pan and simmer on medium heat until the maltose and honey are melted and the sauce is slightly thickened. Cool completely.
2. Marinate the pork in about 3/4 of the sauce overnight in the fridge. Give the pork a couple of turns in the sauce to make sure that all sides have marinade on them. Save the remaining sauce in a container in the fridge in a separate container.
3. The next day, heat the oven to 350 degrees. Shake the excess sauce off the pork and roast the pieces on a rack over a roasting dish that you’ve lined with tin foil.
4. The char siu should be cooked after about 45 minutes depending on the size of your meat. The internal temperature of the pork should be 160˚F.
5. To char your char siu, brush the pork with the remaining reserved marinade and turn the oven up to broil. Turn the pieces to char on all sides. Keep a close eye on your pork, this won’t take long.
6. Slice and enjoy. I love char siu with rice and a fried egg or with some ginger scallion noodles, but you can enjoy it any way you like!

Note: This is step 2 of the multistep Momofuku bánh mi recipe.

The ham terrine, like the chicken liver terrine, is yet another ugly, but tasty offering from the Momofuku cookbook. Sandwich insides are the perfect place for these terrines, because no matter how good they taste, coming up with an appetizing way to plate is a bit of a challenge.

It might lack the looks, but the ham terrine doesn’t fall short on flavour: bay leaves, star anise, cinnamon, and garlic give the pork a fragrant, Vietnamese flavour.

Momofuku ham terrine is “like a ghetto-simplified and lightly Vietnamesed jambon persillé.” The difference: jambon persillé uses gelatine to hold it’s shape while, Chang’s terrine is held together by pork fat.

There’s a lot of pork in Momofuku. My parents don’t eat beef (and haven’t for many years) so growing up, I ate an inordinate amount of pork. Not eating beef in my family meant that instead of beef burgers, we had pork burgers, meat lasange was made with pork ragu, and instead of beef stew, we ate a pork version. You’d think as a result of all that pork eating, I’d be sick of the stuff, but really, I love pork.

Even still, I’ve eaten more pork since starting this cookbook than I have since I first moved out.

The ham terrine starts with fresh ham, which is brought to a simmer on the stove top then put in the oven for two hours. When the meat is super-tender, it’s strained out and then cooled before you separate the meat and fat.

The fat and garlic is then blended in a food processor until it’s a smooth paste. Each chunk of meat is dipped in the fat, put into whatever you’re making your terrine in and then the terrine is weighed down and chilled in the fridge overnight.

The ham terrine is earthy, meaty, and slick with pork fat and garlic. Not like anything I’ve ever had on a bánh mi before, but like Chang says, “the list of things that [can't] be stuffed into a bánh mi is shorter that the list of things that can.”

lemongrass pork sausage

One of the great things about Momofuku is the innovative, creative cooking twists Chang and his crew put on traditional dishes. As far as I can tell, the grilled lemongrass pork sausage is based on nem nuong, a Vietnamese grilled pork patty. Usually, nem nuong is mixed up and grilled raw, but Chang, on the other hand, bakes his sausage in pan for a cleaner presentation; after the the pan of sausage meat is cooled, the sausage is sliced like brownies.

The grilled lemongrass pork sausage ssäm is delicious: crispy pork sausage, sharp lemongrass, and crunchy carrot and daikon pickles are wrapped up in crisp lettuce and then dipped into spicy-sweet fish sauce vinaigrette for the ultimate bite of balanced flavours.

butter lettuce

This is a dish I could see myself making again and again. For once, it was easy to put together and the ingredients were easy to find. The only thing I had to run out and buy last minute was the lettuce. Chang asks for Bibb lettuce, but I bought butter lettuce, which is apparently a common name used for Bibb.

pork sausage, carrot & daikon pickles, butter lettuce, shiso, cilantro

Buying the butter lettuce was fun, just because I had to walk into the throngs of red and white hoodie wearing, red mittened Canadian fans that are wandering the streets of my neighbourhood. No matter what people are saying about the Olympics, it’s fun to see Vancouver alive and filled with people.

So, simply, the pork sausage goes like this: mix ground pork with minced lemongrass, chopped shallots, salt, sugar, fish sauce, sriracha and flour. The flour helps the meat hold together and keeps it firm and easy to slice after baking. The meat mixture is put into a pan and baked for 20 minutes then cooled, sliced, and grilled. I didn’t grill the sausages, even though I think it would have added some delicious smoky char; it is winter, and living in a condo with no balcony means no grilling in the winter.

make your own pork sausage ssäm!

Instead of grilling, I pan-fried which turned out great. Crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside, the pork sausage was good enough to eat like that, but wrapped up in lettuce with rice, pickles, and cilantro, it was brilliant. Biting into a wrap, you’re able to taste every clean, fresh, individual ingredient.

The only downside to the wraps is the mess, but it’s the best kind of stuffing-your-face, licking-your-fingers kind of mess. Eating messy is enjoyable, but not for everyone, and we had so much sausage that we decided to wrap everything up in rice paper like a salad/summer roll. It worked well and was equally delicious, but instead of a clean, harmonious bite, you taste more of the lemongrass sausage. I would be hard pressed to choose a favourite way to eat this dish, the bottom line is: it’s good.

all ready to wrap and eat

pork sausage ssäm on rice paper

cast-iron "stone bowl"

For some reason, when you cook the Momofuku cookbook you have a lot of leftovers in your fridge. I have no idea if it’s an American or David Chang thing, but a lot of his recipes seem to make a crazy amount of food, even after scaling down.

After halving the original spicy pork sausage and rice cakes recipe, I still had a ton of ragu left. I thought it would taste great fried up with rice and topped with a leftover slow-poached egg I had sitting in the fridge, but Mike had an even better idea: a spicy pork sausage stone bowl.

Traditional stone bowl is dolsot bibimbap, a Korean mixed rice dish that’s served in a blazingly hot stone bowl with a raw egg on top. The rice is mixed up and pressed against the sides of the bowl to cook the egg and crisp the rice to a golden brown. The crispy rice bits are the best part. I’ve never made dolsot bibimbap at home, mainly because I don’t have a stone bowl.

rice topped with slow-poached egg

We don’t have stone bowls but we do have cast-iron skillets. Cast-iron skillets and stone bowls are pretty similar: they both get really hot and are excellent at retaining heat. The little cast-iron skillets I have are perfect for makeshift spicy pork sausage stone bowl!

I started by heating up grapeseed oil in the cast-iron skillets on medium heat. While the skillets were heating I fried some white rice with the rest of the spicy pork sausage ragu. The fried rice was scooped into the cast-iron pans when they were hot. I topped one pan with a raw egg and one with a leftover slow-poached egg. The pans stayed on the heat for a while so the rice had time to get crispy. Sliced green onions, seaweed and crispy shallots were thrown on top for good measure.

slow-poached egg being broken

After removing from the heat the eggs were mixed in. Spicy crispy rice, savoury sausage, and eggy creaminess made a dish I’ll make again and again. The raw egg version tasted better than the slow-poached; the slow-poached egg was a tad overcooked while the raw egg was creamy and just right. Crispy rice, you have a special place in my heart!

rice with egg mixed in topped with seaweed and crispy shallots

yum! crispy rice