I live on the third floor and my apartment was shaking with the amount of wind blowing. This morning on the walk to the T, we encountered a surprise. Mr. Bookdwarf is standing in front of it so you can see how big it is:
Fuschia Dunop (I feel like I should call her by her first name alone with the amount I writer about her, but I digress) has an article about the food stalls of Singapore in the Financial Times.
There is a stall with the famous Hainan chicken rice, where the brusque proprietor doles out plastic platefuls of poached chicken on aromatic rice to a long queue of customers; sweet mung bean soup with a tarragon-like medicinal herb; and warm, porcelain-white almond milk.
Yum!
Fuchsia Dunlop has done some pretty great travel and food pieces over the years, so when we got Land of Plenty we did a good deal of oohing and aahing over the pictures and recipes. But it wasn’t until this weekend that we actually cooked anything from it. We’ve finally gotten the range hood installed in our kitchen, so it’s only recently that we have enough ventilation to take full advantage of the big 18,000 BTU burners on the new stove. So, flat-bottomed wok pan in hand, we went to Sichuan.
We figured we’d try the Gong Bao – that is, Kung Pow – chicken and go for a slightly more authentic take on an often-disappointing westernized classic. And to go with it, we’d make a bunch of different veggie sides. We already had the sichuan peppercorn and tsien tsien peppers, and it didn’t take much more to get the ingredients together. We made a special trip to Super 88 in Malden to make sure we had both light and dark soy sauce. We’d already been over to Russo’s in Watertown and grabbed fresh water chestnuts, cauliflower, and chinese broccoli. (It was our first trip to Russo’s, and it was both wonderland and madhouse, exactly as we’d been promised and warned. We wound up with a pint of strawberries, too even though they didn’t go with our theme.)
Fresh water chestnuts were a revelation. I feel almost angry that I’m now going to realize what I’m missing when I eat the canned kind.
Everything turned out very well, and we were pleasantly surprised that the different vegetables we cooked, all from the same basic stir-fry recipe, came out so differently: The thin-sliced potatoes we deglazed with rice vinegar were tangy and gingery; the chinese broccoli played beautifully against the sichuan peppers, the cauliflower browned up well in the wok, and the Gong Bao chicken came out exactly right.
Plus, now that we have that fan, nobody choked when Mr. Bookdwarf started frying the chiles. We even took some (sideways, for some reason) video – and yes, that’s Mr. B dropping cauliflower on the floor, and then eating it.
If the rest of the recipes are as good as the ones we made last night, Fuchsia Dunlop is definitely going to be a frequent presence at our dinner table.
I’ve been reading faster than I can post! Here are a few quick reviews of things I highly recommend:
PS You should also read Hessler’s previous books River Town and Oracle Bones! I’ve long been a fan of Hessler. You don’t have to read these in any particular order. They’re all fantastic.
One of the books getting the most buzz at the Winter Institute last week (basically camp for booksellers) was Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, a novel about Vietnam. Morgan Entrekin, founder of Grove Atlantic, loved it so much that he struck a deal with Marlantes’ current publisher to put out a more widely distributed edition.
I finished Matterhorn last night. Vietnam was fucked up. I doubt any movie or book can really make me understand quite what it was like to fight on the front lines of Vietnam. This book got me one step closer. It’s gritty, dirty, perhaps overwritten in a few places, but overall a scary claustrophobic book on a nasty war.
Bookdwarf 