noodsletter #.0013
"Gremolata" and rice cakes
Hello! Happy Lunar New Year!
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*Rice cakes
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“Gremolata”
Maybe I’m letting the broccolistronkalypse get to my head, but I have another vegetal tip for you all. In a different time, I imagine I might have written this up as a blog post, with a recipe, and while this is basically a basic blog that shows up in your email account, I didn’t think this tip really warranted a recipe, or beautiful photos of me pantomiming putting together the thing in question, because it is exceedingly simple. Here we go:
It’s stew season, yes? We all are busy stewing things because of the weather—beans, meats, I’m sure a few of you have stewed a fish or two—and while everyone loves a good stew, eating stew can become a bit of a drag, especially when you’re eating leftovers. So the next time you’re heating up some stew for lunch or dinner, or breakfast if you’re brave, I suggest making a kind of gremolata to make your leftovers less blah. If your knife skills are decent, it shouldn’t take any longer than the time it takes to warm up your stew in the microwave or on the hob, and it isn’t too much of an imposition in terms of dishes; you just need a nub of garlic, a lemon, some parsley, and salt (and pepper, if you like). If you’re the type that needs a recipe, this one works fine (I would add salt).
I want to say “I’ve been doing this for years!” But, honestly, I have not. I just started doing it! I used to have a hatred for lemon zest, which I’ve only recently shed, one that was born out of my general dislike for sweet things (mint is another ingredient that sweet things made me dislike, but, like lemon zest, I’ve belatedly come around to how amazing it is in savory things—the Romans, they’re on to something). So if this tip seems like a no-brainer to you, as you’ve been whipping up gremolatas for your leftover stews since you were a child, all I have to say is good for you, you’ve lived a good life, and some of us are late bloomers.
Of course not all stews are the same; will a gremolata work as well on some leftover osso bucco as it will on the study in brown I know as American beef stew? Yes. I generally do this with tomato-based braised meats, like the stewed pork shanks from the last noodsletter, but roux-based stews also benefit from it. I don’t do it with something like a nimono, but now that I’m thinking of it, why not? It would probably be good, if a little weird.
This last point brings up another virtue of this practice, which is you can use stuff up. Have some limp scallions that you’re about to throw away? Chop them up and throw them in. Celery leaves, which people really don’t seem to use enough, are excellent in a gremolata-type thing, but so are the fresh herbs in variety that you paid a fair amount of money for and yet are drying to dust in your fridge. I also like to add a couple of chopped fresh Thai chilies to gremolata, for zing. Here’s an inspired example of this kind of waste reduction, from my colleague Sasha, and I know it will appeal to you all because it uses up broccoli stalks.
Book
‘You know something, Tadek, I think you’re a nice boy,’ he said unexpectedly, ‘but you haven’t really known hunger, have you?’
‘That depends on what you mean by hunger.’
‘Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat. I have been hungry like that, you see.’ Since I said nothing but only banged the wrench against the rails from time to time, mechanically looking left and right to see if the Kapo was around, he continued: ‘Our camp, over there, was small … Right next to a road. Many people walked along that road, well-dressed men, women too. They passed on their way to church on Sundays, for instance. Or there were couples out for a stroll. And a little farther on was a village, just an ordinary village. There, people had everything, only half a mile from us. And we had turnips … good God, our people were ready to eat each other! So, you see, wasn’t I to kill the cooks who bought vodka with our butter, and cigarettes with our bread? My son stole, so I killed him, too. I am a porter, I know life.’
From This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, translated by Barbara Vedder. (Mine is a slightly older edition than the one linked, which accounts for the translation credit discrepancy.)
Sort of timely time to read this book, what with the push to ban Maus in schools. My only thought, quite banal, of course, is that we don’t just read these accounts to understand the enormity of the horrors Jewish people were subjected to. We also read them to see how perilously close we all are to being the well-dressed men and women going to church and taking long romantic walks right next to a concentration camp, where the imprisoned have been so dehumanized they’re considering eating each other and murdering their children for a lack of food.
“News”
Very sad that Look! By Plant Love House (I think it used to have an exclamation point?) has closed. I loved their noodle soups (you had to ask for less sugar), and their crispy watercress salad was a truly memorable dish. My wife and I ate there every day after we hit our due date for our kid; spicy soups are said to kick-start labor. It didn’t really work, but that was an amazing time, for me, personally. I might try to approximate that watercress salad in the near future.
Nice bit of grocery store anxiety fiction:
Love this grocery. You can’t go wrong here. And also, you’re here with a bunch of humans, more or less, and they all have their own troubles, their own night terrors, their own abject losses and memories, and what happens: you’re all taking in the same smells of fresh produce and of freon and of the meat and fish section, the chicken and the baked goods and the section that just has household items, the bandages and salves and pre-detritus of exhausted, wasted life a hall of mirrors, that honeycomb understructure of each moment now.
The history of the end of the ladies’ menu.
How to Order a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese At A Bodega During a Snowstorm:
I am all for trying to find alternatives to single-use plastics, but the beeswax stuff? I tried, I really did; I hate it.
As much as I love a gas stove, it’s clear they’ll be like cigarettes in 10 years; we’ll all wonder what the hell we were thinking.
I liked this description, “murderously fizzy”:
This is an old article about eating a lot for breakfast and less as the day goes on. I came across it because I was trying to understand why my daughter eats like this; her desire for breakfast is formidable, and she’s mostly disinterested in dinner, unless it’s chicken cutlets.
Apparently Victoria Beckham only eats grilled fish and steamed vegetables? Which, add some (white) rice and pickles to that and I’d be happy as a clam.
So sushi obviously deserves to be on the chopping block since it’s indefensibly unsustainable as it’s practiced, but I wonder about this “sustainable” sushi place that sources American fish from across the continent? Is that sustainable? I order beautiful mackerel from Maine and I suppose that’s more local than Japan, but I wouldn’t say it’s sustainable at all.
I’ve been enjoying Tammie Teclemariam’s The Year I Ate New York newsletter. I had initially thought the job would be a terrible drag, in the same way I imagine the NYT’s 52 Places job as being an incredible drag, but so far it seems kind of pleasant and I envy her.
Recipe
Rice Cakes*
I’m really going to lean into the “see how I let you see me flail here,” because these rice cakes weren’t the best I’ve made, but I wanted to do rice cakes today because of Lunar New Year; they’re often consumed as part of New Year’s celebrations.
I want to point out that not every Asian celebrates Lunar New Year; Japanese, notably, do not, since they decided in the 1800s they wanted to be Western, which led to all sorts of things, like Japanese people drinking milk, like Japanese people eating meat, like Japanese people abandoning a lunisolar calendar, and, of course, like Japanese people trying to conquer the entire world as brutally and evilly as possible. I bring this up not to say that Japanese people are bad, just that, as a half-Japanese person, Lunar New Year is not something I observe. Even other Asians get this mixed up.
However, in the spirit of pan-Asian solidarity, I figured I’d do a rice cake recipe. Unfortunately, this recipe isn’t great, which isn’t a knock on the Lunar New Year or those who celebrate it, it’s just a knock on me, and the fact that I wasn’t organized enough to make the rice cakes as I normally do, which is with Chinese celery, flowering garlic chives, long beans, and bitter gourd, in addition to the other stuff here. Instead, I made do with stuff my grocery store has: cabbage, celery, broccolini.
These rice cakes are a riff on a riff of a riff on the Missions Chinese rice cakes with bacon and bitter gourd, which once were amazing, but now I can’t enjoy because of all the messed up stuff associated with that restaurant. (Also, I basically haven’t been to non-noodle restaurant in years because of COVID.) SE has a recipe from the inimitable Chichi Wang that is an approximation. Hers uses lapcheong, but one of the best parts of the Mission Chinese version was that it used thick cut, smoky bacon. The problem with the recipe I made is I used bad slab bacon from the grocery store. Remember in the 2000s when it was fashionable to think liking bacon constituted a personality? Well, that was a travesty, and a lot of bacon out there is bad. I like Schaller & Webber’s smoked slab bacon, I don’t really like some of those fancy bacons like Benton’s (I like their ham) because I find the smoke overpowering, but if you like them, use them. Using bad bacon here is just not good, the stuff that’s just all salt and fat and no flavor, like Boar’s Head, or Oscar Mayer, or Smithfield, ugh. However, as Ina Garten says, it’s fine.
As with any stir fry, the key is to get everything prepped before hand, and to fry in batches, until the end where everything gets tossed together. You’ll want to separate the rice cakes by hand (particularly the flat oval ones) before tossing them in; you can also dunk them briefly in boiling water to get them warmed up, and then strain them before adding them to the wok, which really helps, but you don’t have to do that; they’ll soften up in the sauce, but you may need to add a little water to keep things from sticking.
Ingredients:
2 tsp oyster sauce
2 tsp Chinese light soy sauce
1 tsp fish sauce
1 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorns (more if you have dusty ones)
5 slices thick cut bacon, cut into batons
5 ribs of celery, sliced on bias
One small bunch of broccolini, cut up into ~1-inch chunks
1/5 of a big cabbage, cut into ~1-inch squares
2 green chilies, sliced
2-inch piece ginger, minced or grated
3 garlic cloves, minced
2 tsp fermented black beans or fermented black bean sauce
2 tsp doubanjiang
1 lb rice cakes
6 scallions, sliced
Small handful of cilantro, chopped
In a small ramekin, mix together oyster sauce, light soy sauce, and fish sauce. Set aside.
Place peppercorns in a wok and toast over medium high heat until fragrant; take care not to burn. Transfer to mortar and pestle or a spice grinder; once cool, grind to a powder and set aside. (For less numbing flavor, just leave them whole.)
Add bacon to wok and cook over medium heat until fat has completely rendered and bacon bits are crisp, about 8 minutes. Transfer bacon bits to ramekin or bowl; transfer fat to separate ramekin or bowl.
Add about 1 tablespoon of bacon fat to wok and set over high heat until smoking. Add celery and cook, tossing constantly, until it’s crisp-tender, about 2 minutes. Transfer to plate and set aside.
Add 1 tablespoon of bacon fat to wok and set over high heat until smoking. Add broccolini and cook, tossing constantly, until it’s crisp tender, about 3 minutes. Transfer to same plate as celery and set aside.
Add 1 tablespoon of bacon fat to wok and set over high heat until smoking. Add cabbage and cook, tossing constantly, until slightly charred and limp, about 2 minutes. Transfer to same plate as celery and broccolini and set aside.
Add remaining bacon fat to wok and set over low heat. Add ginger, garlic, chilies, peppercorns, fermented black beans, and doubanjiang and cook until it smells delicious, taking care not to let the garlic burn, about 2 minutes. Add all the vegetable and the rice cakes back to wok, along with 2 teaspoons of the oyster sauce, soy sauce, and fish sauce mixture, and increase heat to medium high, tossing and stirring contents of wok to mix thoroughly, until rice cakes are soft and giving and liquid has reduced to not even a puddle. If at any point the mixture looks too dry and the contents start sticking, add a couple tablespoons of water.
Taste rice cakes for seasoning; depending on the brand of bacon, they could be quite salty already. Add more of seasoning sauce as needed. Turn off heat and add scallions and cilantro and toss to combine. Serve immediately.
Looking at this now, I’m pretty sure it’s missing white pepper… if you have the whole peppercorns, toss them in with the Sichuan ones. Happy Lunar New Year!