Seafood deliciousness

I'm a big seafood guy. Growing up, seafoods, fish in particular, was a part of my everyday diet. Maybe that's why I try to seek out seafood dishes every chance I get, but seafood is so expensive around this area for some reason. Luckily, I travel to Virginia Beach about twice a month to visit my parents, and the markets there have very reasonable prices for seafood ($4 per/lb shrimp, $2 per/lb fishes). I think it has to do with competition, and being closer to the source that makes the prices so affordable.

When I was searching online for a good Italian seafood recipe, I was not happy with the results. Some requires too many ingredients, while others suggest expensive types of fish; none of them really offers what I wanted to make. The only thing that was left for me to do was to create a dish of my own that hopefully captures the spirit of an Italian meal, while cooking what I want to eat. The result, delicious. You can check out the rest of the photos for this dish and other dishes on my Flickr account.

Ingredients:

• Fish fillet (I used Rock fish), garlic, onion, salt, black peppers, flour, fresh roma tomatoes, white wine (pretty much any white wine that you would drink; I chose a chardonnay for its fruity aroma which lends itself nicely with fish ), pasta.

Cooking Directions:

• Start off seasoning the fish with salt and pepper, then coating it with a little bit of flour so that it'll be crispy when you fry it.
• With medium-high heat, add olive oil and fry the fish until both sides are golden brown.
• On a separate pan, you'll make your sauce by adding butter, garlic, and onions, and cook them until they're soft.
• Reduce the heat to medium-low and add the wine. 
• Add freshly chopped tomatoes to the pan, and stir occasionally. 
• Season with salt and pepper to taste. 
• Reduce the sauce until you get a saucy consistency. 
• Sprinkle dry parsley and oregano into the sauce and you're ready to serve.

To Serve: 

Pour sauce over pasta and fish to enjoy with a nice glass of wine.

When you can find good seafood at a decent price, you should definitely try this dish as it only cost me about $14 to make ($7 of it was for 2 Rock fish, and we're not counting the wine).

Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner (Chicken Marsala)

Italian foods. We’ve all had it before, most of us like it … a lot, and more often than not, we’ve all over-paid for it.

Looking back at all the Italian places that I’ve been to, I can only recalled a couple of places that actually does a decent job of cooking authentic Italian foods. So why are we paying so much for Italian foods? I have no idea.  All I know is that most restaurants tried so hard to make their food sounds better than it actually is; a “touch of” this, a “dash of” that, and you’re well on your way to a disappointing-overpriced meal. To me, the simplest ingredients are usually the best way to go about cooking and eating your food; just give me something fresh and recognizable, with simple names, and simple means of eating it, and I’m good.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Italian foods; I think it’s one of those types of foods where less is more, and simplicities doesn’t mean you’re giving up complexities.  Chicken Marsala is a perfect example of this train of thoughts. You can make it relatively quickly, and it doesn’t cost a lot in terms of ingredients; Chicken Marsala when done right, can be a beautiful thing… and yummy as well.

So let’s get to it! Here are some things that you’ll need:

• Chicken (most people use chicken breast for this, but I like the chicken thighs. You just have to butterfly it to get it to be flat; easy enough.)
• All purpose flour
• Marsala wine
• Black pepper
• Salt
• Mushroom (optional)
• Garlic
• Onion
• Butter
• Olive oil

 Cooking instructions:

This dish requires a little bit of prep-cooking since you'll have to flatten the chicken breast/thighs a bit in order to get an even coating of flour to it. As mentioned above, I used chicken thighs for this dish since I found it more flavorful. I also added a little bit of salt and pepper before I coated the chicken; it helps bring out the flavor this way.

• With a pan over medium-high heat, add olive oil and place chopped garlic and onion; cook them until they're soft, but not brown.
•  Add a teaspoon of butter to the pan, then add the chicken. Sear both sides until they're golden brown. 
• Remove the chicken and place on the side for now. I don't like to cook mine in the sauce since I like them crispy, it's a personal preference.
• Add a little bit of butter to the pan and reduce the heat to medium-low.
• Add the rest of the chopped garlic and onions, along with sliced mushrooms. You should cook this for about 2 mins. 
• Add marsala wine and a tiny teaspoon of flour to help thicken the sauce.
• Season with salt and pepper to taste.

To Serve:

• With a plate of pasta, add a bit of the marsala sauce that you've just made over it.
• Place your cooked chicken on top, and add more sauce over the chicken. 
• Garnish with something green (I used cilantro since that's what I like with my chicken). 

This dish is about $12 to make, and you can make enough for two so I hope you guys make it and let me know how it turns out. Enjoy!

Bip Bim Bap

As my tour of “all things Asian” continues this week, I just had the urged to make “Bip Bim Bap”. With a name like that, it has be to really good or really funny tasting; I’m just glad that it’s not the latter. Many years ago when I worked as an international telephone operator, my Korean co-workers introduced me to Bip Bim Bap for the first time. Although they never told me what Bip Bim Bap meant; they explained to me it was a combination of thinly sliced meat, assorted veggies, red chili peppers, and different kinds of pickled vegetables (Kimchi is a popular choice); mix all together to form an explosion of flavors. ¬You can find the same dish in Korean restaurants where they would often placed a sunny side up egg on top; you would break the yolk and continue with your mixing of all the ingredients.

It’s been years since I had this wonderful dish, so what better time to make it than this week? Staying true to my budget and now …a healthy diet (with great foods come great responsibilities, or something like that), I set out to make my own version of Bip Bim Bap. In this version, I will make Korean style BBQ to go with vegetable sauté. Simple and delicious. Notice that I left out the fried egg and Kimchi; I’m cutting back on those.

Below are a list of stuff that you’ll need, how much of it will depends on how many servings you intend to have:

• beef
• green onions
• cabbage (sliced)
• garlic (chopped)
• hoisin sauce (pho sauce for my American friends)
• chili pepper or sriracha sauce
• sugar
• black pepper
• rice wine vinegar
• bean sprout
• soy sauce
• rice (I won’t go over how to make rice)
• sesame oil

Although this is technically one dish, there are multiple components, so first thing first.

Directions to make Korean BBQ

• slice beef into very thin slices (the thinner the better) and set that aside
• using a large bowl, add hoisin sauce, sugar (the ratio of sugar to hoisin sauce should be 1 ½ to 1), black pepper, sriracha sauce, garlic, a little bit of rice vinegar, green onions, and a bit of sesame oil. You might want to add a little bit of hot water to help dissolve everything as you mix all ingredients until they are uniform in texture. It should taste sweet, spicy, and tangy, with a bit of saltiness.
• On a very hot grill or flat pan place the sliced beef and cook evenly or until you think it’s done (for me, 2 mins on each side)
• Add the BBQ sauce that you’ve just made to the meat while it’s still hot so that it could soak up all the flavors

Directions for vegetable sauté

• with a hot wok, add oil and cook the garlic until golden brown
• add sliced cabbage and cook for about 4-5 mins (you want to make sure that it’s still crunchy)
• add the bean sprouts
• add a little bit of sugar and soy sauce to taste
• finish off with some black peppers

To serve:

With a large bowl of rice, add the sauté veggies and BBQ to it. Mix everything up and you’re ready to enjoy! This is a very simple dish and there are tons of ways that you can make it your own by incorporating different vegetables and sides. The trick is to experiment and figure out if one dish will complement the next and so on.

Vietnamese Soul Food part II (ca kho to)

I don’t normally have a lot of time to blog what I’m cooking right after I cook it, since I’m either too tire or stuffing my face, so I find it helpful to break up my blogs into different postings and write them on a different day.  I tend to write all my stuff on Word, then copy and paste them onto here; I’m paranoid that way. So if you see a ton of postings on one day, that’s the reason behind that, I’m really not that diligent.

Anyways, this post is neither about this nor that, this is about caramelized fish, and when it’s done right, it’s a beautiful thing. Now, before you picture some yucky fish sticks on a candy-apple-like contraption, rest assure that it’s nothing like that (I think).  I learned this dish from my mother (like all the other Vietnamese dishes that I cooked), but could never make it as well as she did. She got too many years of experience on me. Nevertheless, I will try my best to show you how I went about making caramelized fish.

Conceptually, this is an extremely easy dish to make. All you’ll need is a fish that can stand up to very slow cooking over a long period of time (I suggest catfish because it’s a little tougher than other fishes), sugar, salt, black pepper, and green onions; it’s the “I’ll try my best not to burn the sugar”… that’s the bitch part.

Before you start cooking: 

• Cut your fish into even slices and place into a decent side bowl for marinating
• Add the following to the bowl: about 4-5 spoon of sugar (depends on how many fish you have, I’m using 1 large catfish), 1-2 spoon of salt, black pepper, diced garlic, chopped green onions, and a little bit of water to dissolve everything. You’ll want to marinate this for about 2 hours.

Cooking Directions:

• On a medium to large pan, add a little bit of water (no oil is needed please, it doesn’t go well with water) over medium-low heat.

• Add all the components from the marinated fish bowl to the pan and wait for the sauce to reduce while cooking your fish. 

• On a separate pot, make a simple sirup (3-1 ratio of sugar to water) by mixing sugar and water together over heat until it becomes a “syrup”. The trick here is that you want to cook this syrup until it become reddish-brown (very important!) so that the sugar will dissolve completely, leaving just the unsweetened syrup. If you cook it too long, it will become bitter; not long enough, it’ll still be sweet. You can add a little bit of warm water to the mixture if your syrup is too thick.

• Ok. Now that we have our syrup and our fish is still being cooked over medium-low heat, add the syrup to the fish pan and simmer over low heat. You don’t have to mess with it much after this point, just let it cook evenly on both sides while the sauce reduce.

The final product should taste sweet, slightly salty, and spicy; your fish should look like it’s been caramelized in the rich-thick sauce (reddish color). This cooking method may seem complicated at first, but after a few tries, it’ll be worth the effort. It took me 2 tries just to get it right. It’s also good to know that this might not be the best dish to make when you’re really hungry, since the total cooking time is around 1 and a half hour.

To serve: sprinkle some chopped green onions on top and you’re ready to eat.

Vietnamese Soul Food part I (canh chua)

I always found it interesting how the definition of “Soul Food” could have a different resonance to different people, depending on who they are, and where they grew up. For me, I tend to enjoy the combination of something soupy and savory, regardless of weather or time of day. Lucky for me, Vietnamese cuisines feature a wide variety of “soul” foods.

A couple of nights ago, I’ve decided to make Vietnamese “sweet and sour” soup (or canh chua in Vietnamese) to pair with caramelized catfish (ca kho to) to be served with rice. To me, this is the equivalent to fried chicken and mash potatoes; this is what I grew up eating, this is also considered as a very traditional Vietnamese meal. Like all great dishes, its origins typically came from necessity and what’s readily available to a given region. In most of Asia, fish and vegetables were considered cheap and in abundance, while meat and dairy products were expensive and often exported to the more “privileged” crowd. It’s funny how things are flipped here with seafood prices marked up so high.

I’ll show you how to make sweet and sour soup now, and save the caramelized fish for next time. To make the soup, here are some things that you’ll need:

• Tamarind (you can get the paste or the powder; this is the sour component)
• 2-3 fresh chili pepper (chopped finely)
• 1 pineapple (chopped into cubes)
• 3 small cups of okra
• 2 handful of bean sprouts
• Thai Basil
• Rice paddy herbs
• Fish sauce (to taste)
• 2-3 roma tomatoes (chopped into even cubes)
• Sugar (to taste)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 onion
• 2-3 catfish cut into even cubes (head is optional, but not really good eats in this case)
• Freshly chopped celery (optional)

Directions:

1. Finely chop garlic and onions and place them into a large pot with pre-heated oil. I’ve found that everything that’s good starts with garlic and onion (except for desert, that would be weird).
2. Add the catfish and sear all sides until golden brown and remove from pot. Pre-cooking the fish this way will eliminate the fishy smell in the soup, and will allow the fish to hold better in the cooking process; skipping this step will be very bad.
3. Add water to the pot. I usually filled the pot almost half way with water at this stage. You’ll find that the soup has a brownish color to it, this is what you want since you’re extracting the flavors from the garlic and onions at the bottom of the pot.
4. Add the tomatoes and cook until they’re soft.
5. Add the pineapple and okras and cook for about 5-7 mins.
6. Add the fish, bean sprouts, chilly peppers, and celery.
7. Season with sugar, fish sauce, and tamarind to taste. You want to add a little of each elements at first since fish sauce is really salty and tamarind is really sour. What you’re trying to achieve here is a balance between the sweet and sour, with a hint of saltiness. I like mine more on the sour side, but that’s just me.

To serve: Place the soup into a large bowl and add chopped basil, chili peppers, chopped rice paddy herbs on top.  This is great with plain rice and you can place a side of fish sauce with some chili pepper (I like it spicy) on the side to dip your veggies from the soup.

Cooking time should be no more than 30 mins so that all your ingredients are fresh and crunchy. A good note to add is that this is not really a good dish to re-heat more than 2x, since you’ll loose that initial freshness.