Posts Tagged ‘snap peas’

XO Sauce with Sugar Snap Peas

XO Sauce is one of those quirky, strange Chinese sauces; no one really knows what it’s made of. The seafood-based sauce was created in Hong Kong in the 80s and called XO sauce to make it sound prestigious and exclusive, like XO (extra-old) cognac. Cognac is super popular with Asian people; they love giving it to each other as gifts, but a lot of the time the bottles just end up gathering dust or getting dusted off and re-gifted.

Mike: What’s it stand for?
Me: XO, like cognac, you know?
Mike: Oh, is there cognac in it?
Me: No.
Mike: Does it smell like cognac?
Me: No.
Mike: I’m confused.

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Peas with Horseradish

peas with horseradish

I’ve said it before and I think I have to say it again, I miss the crazy recipes within recipe puzzles of the earlier dishes I’ve made. Not to say that the last few dishes haven’t been satisfying or delicious, they have, there’s just something about effort that makes something taste so much better. The peas with horseradish are simple, fast and chock-full of summer flavour.

Chang came up with the recipe for peas with horseradish while looking at a bag of wasabi peas at his local 24 hour deli. His take on the classic Japanese beer drinking snack tastes nothing like their inspiration. Barely cooked, the peas are coated in butter and soy and finished with freshly grated horseradish.

Horseradish was easy to find, hard to grate. It could’ve been because I bought an old piece (how does one choose horseradish?) or it could be because I don’t have a microplane grater, but grating this stuff was a chore. It tasted good, sharp and slightly spicy, but it didn’t look anything like the fluffy little tendrils pictured in the book.

This was a fast side dish, one that I could see myself making again, if only because I love sugar snap peas. I can dig into a bag of raw sugar snap peas as if they’re a bag of Swedish Fish. Raw sugar snap peas are, well, snappy and sweet, the candy of the vegetable world.

chock-full of sweet snappiness