SUMMER GRILLING

It’s summer, it’s July 4th, and it’s grilling time. In old days, grilling meant a metal box, some charcoal, a grill rack and some liquid fluids, you were in business. Today, grilling is a serious business, you can call it the “Pride of the King of the House”, since it’s mostly a man’s world. You can practically have an outdoor kitchen with all the apparatus they sell at the stores nearby. You still can go with charcoal, as a purist, or the convenient and fast gas, or both. Also, smokers are very popular. I am not talking just about the cylinder shape Brinkman type. They come in all sizes and shapes, extra heat and smoke control. Grilling has become an exact science that you can control time and preferred doneness. The day that your guests look at your piece of burned roast with disappointment is over, since nowadays you have all kinds of gadgets that digitally tell you when your foods are done.
I have a gas grill and a Brinkman cylinder type charcoal grill. The feature that I like most about my gas grill is the quick sear elements. It’s a new grill technology that will sear the meat quickly with both gas and infra-red heat. You have to be fast with this thing, since it burns the meats very quickly. The purpose of this element is to give the meats the charcoal look and taste. After, the meats are caramelized on all sides; you move them to the side and finish cooking them with indirect heat. As a matter of fact, no matter what type of grill you have, you should cook the meats on direct heat part time, then finish them up with indirect heat to prevent burning or overcooking. I use the Brinkman to grill a whole chicken or duck by hanging them inside the grill. The cylinder shape is perfect for this method of grilling. I found vertical grilling is the most effective way to cook a bird or a big roast, if you don’t have a rotisserie on your grill. Grilling the meats with a rotisserie or vertically, you don’t have to worry about turning the meat every few minutes. “Just set it and forget it!”, like they always say. Now a day, a beer can is very popular for vertical grilling. A metal trash can or a tall plant clay pot is also perfect for vertical grilling, either by hanging or with a stick.
You don’t have to limit yourself to just slap pieces of meats on the grill and watch them burn. Grilled hot dogs and burgers are still some of the best cook out foods. However, if you like some alternatives, there are plenty of them. Step outside of the border and suddenly you find a whole new world of grilling and bbqueuing.
Way down south, we find Argentinean and Brazilian’s Gaucho with pieces of meats skewed into a long metal stick and cooked vertically on the side of a fire pit. Closer, we have Mexican fajitas, and we can’t forget the jerk chicken from Jamaica, Cuban roasted pig. Across the Pacific Ocean, we have Japan’s Teriyaki, Korea’s Bulgogi, Chinese Chasiu, and Vietnamese’s Chả Cá, grilled fish marinated with turmeric and galangal.
No matter what your preferable style of grilling is, I found some good reasons for cooking outdoor: less cleaning, saving air conditioning bill, and your foods cannot be cooked healthier by any other way.

CHICKEN IN PORT WINE

When people think French, “Coq au Vin” probably would be the first thing that pops up in their head. However, come to think of it, everything is “au vin” in France! Coq au vin requires rather intensive time and labor. Besides, it is not easy to find a rooster in our supermarkets. If you made the dish with a chicken then your dish would be “Poulet au vin”, not “Coq au vin”. What’s the difference? The rooster holds up better in a stew than a chicken. Few years back, my sister Tam, who is living in France, showed me another chicken “au vin” dish, “Poulet au Porto”(Chicken cooked in Port wine). This dish is quick and a lot simpler to make than the classic “Coq au Vin”. First, you season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper, then dredge them in flour and fry in a mixture of oil and butter to crisp both sides. Remove the chicken and set aside. You might want to remove some of the fat also. Add some chopped onions and garlic to the pan, sauté briefly then add a teaspoon of flour to make a roux(a thick paste of flour and butter). Deglaze the pan with a cup of port wine and some chicken stock. Stir until the roux is all dissolved. The result would be a lightly thick sauce. If the sauce turned out too thick, feel free to add more wine or some chicken stock. Add back the chicken into the pan, add some mushrooms (sliced, cut in half or left whole, up to your preference). Turn the heat down to low, cover the pan with lid and simmer the chicken until tender, about 20 minutes. If you found the sauce a little thin when you put the chicken back into the pan, this simmering process would thicken up the sauce. Check the seasoning before serving.
You can serve this dish with rice or some baguette.

DUCK THREE WAYS

Where I live, the grocery stores only sell ducks during the holiday season, around October through December. As a reason, every year around that time, I bought 6 to 8 of them and  stored them in a freezer. That would give us a good supply of ducks to eat throughout the year. I always cut a duck into three parts: legs&thighs, breasts, back bones&wings. I froze some of the ducks cut up and some whole. I used legs for confit, a l'orange, or grilling with p some kind of a sweet and sour sauce on top i.e. cherry, mango, peach etc...I basically used the breasts the same way as I used the legs, except confit, for the reason that you would not stew duck breasts, as much as you would not stew fillet mignon You just simply ruined a good and expensive piece of meat . Finally, the bones were obviously for soup. When I had duck bones, the first dish that came to my mind was "Mì Vịt Tiềm Thuốc Bắc"( Duck Stewed in Chinese Medicine). Do not let the name scares you. First of all, most Chinese medicines come from herbs anyway, secondly, the best way to create the flavor for this dish is to buy the bouillon mixed that are made for this soup. If you never tried to make curry powder from scratch, then I wouldn't bother with this soup either.  This is a Chinese noodle soup dish with a rather complex flavor. However, thanks to the soup mix, the process of cooking this dish is rather simple which is not much different from any other noodle soups. Besides the soup mix, I also throw in some shiitake mushrooms, lotus seeds, Chinese dried prune, onions, garlic and soy sauce to taste. I am a fan of pressure cookers.I stew everything in it, including "Phở ". If you used a pressure cooker to cook this dish, you wouldn't   need to presoak the dried lotus seeds and dried prunes. Usually, the bones would give you enough scrapped meat, but you can also add pieces of  Chines BBQ  duck breasts or legs or thigh to make this bowl of noodle soup more wholesome. Before serving, make sure to check for seasoning, soy sauce can be added if necessary, and sesame oil is optional.
This week, after the duck was thawed out, I cut off the two legs and thighs to use for duck confit. The backbone and the wings were used for Chinese Noodle Duck Soup, and the breasts were for Chinese BBQ Duck.
There is a difference between Chinese BBQ and Chinese Roast. Roast are generally cooked in the oven and bbqs are cooked on a pit. Chicken, pork or duck can be cooked either way. Roasts are marinated with five spice powder, soy sauce, garlic onions, some sugar or honey. The roasts usually have a bright yellow color when they come out of the oven. The main ingredient for Chinese BBQ is hoisin sauce. I found the best way to do Chinese BBQ is to use premixed powder or paste. After marinating the meat according to instruction of the package, I hung the chicken or duck inside a Brinkman type smoker. When cooked, a Chinese BBQ duck, chicken or pork would have a distintive bright red color  

SEAFOODS.

When the Vietnamese talk about seafoods, they do not mean "sea" foods, they actually mean "river" foods. Vietnam landscape is made up of a narrow strip of land in the middle and  capped by two deltas at both ends. In the North is the Red River delta and in the South is the Mekong delta. The two rivers, not only function as superhighway for the people in the regions, they also provide a bountiful source of fish, shrimps, crabs and other "sea" foods. Riverfoods were preferred over seafoods because the meats taste sweeter and more moist. It was told that some people living in the country side in the South do not necessary have to have a job, they can get by with picking up the rice grains falling on the ground and fish at the creeks and rivers.
There are many ways to cook the seafoods, but I like to mention here two popular grilled fish dishes, one from the North and one from the South. To  prepare the Northern grilled fish, you cut the fish fillet into 2" pieces, marinate them with turmeric, ginger, galangal, shrimp paste, a little lemon juice and sugar. If I remembered it right, in the streets of Saigon, people broiled the fish over charcoal fire. However, in a TV show I saw recently, the fish was stir fried in a skillet with lots of oil and served on the same skillet at the table. I have tried this method and  it did not bother me. It was certainly a lot easy and convenient to prepare the dish this way, besides, the fish was very moist. However, for the purists, you would miss the smell and the taste of charbroil. It is simpler to prepare Southern grilled fish. Catfish is the preferred for this dish. They just seasoned the whole fish, from head to tail, with salt and pepper, wrap it in banana leaves then buried it in hot charcoal.  Here in the US, I saw some people wrapped the fish in aluminum foil and cook it in the oven. I use frozen catfish fillets, brush both sides with a solution of soy sauce, sesame oil, cherry wine, ginger, black pepper and put them in a hot oven until fork tender.  Both Northern and Southern grilled fish are served with sort rice noodle, leaf lettuce, cucumber, basil, cilantro, green onions heated up in oil. Prepared fish sauce, "nước mắm pha", are used for dipping sauce in both cases. The North Vietnamese would prefer to use a mix of shrimp paste, lemon juice, sugar for dipping sauce.


 




CÁ NƯỚNG TRUI(Southern style grilled fish)                           CHẢ CÁ (Northern style "grilled" fish)                                                         

DUCK CONFIT.

Besides the usuals, Orange duck, Civet de Lapin, Coq au Vin etc..., Duck Confit is a very traditional frenchy dish. If you had a French guest and you fixed him this dish, he absolutely would be impressed. He would say to himself:"This guy is deep!". To some people who knew a little bit about French cuisine, this dish sounded pretty intimidating.

The word "confit" in french means "preserved". The pieces of duck meats( in this case, legs and thighs are used almost exclusively) are heavily seasoned with coarse salt( sometime herbs like thyme or rosemary are added, but not necessary) and let set in the refrigerator for 24 hours. The tricky part of this dish is to collect enough duck fat to cook them which make it special, "the duck cooked in its own fat"! When you prepare this dish for the first time, you will have to render as much fat as possible from the fat that you collected when you cut up the duck, then you have to add some olive oil, enough to cover the duck pieces. Cook them in low heat(about 160F), covered, for 2 hrs. They are fork tender when they are done and you will see the meat pulled up from the legs. Make sure to wash the marinated duck pieces thoroughly under water and pat them real dry before submerging them in the duck fat. After 24hrs of marinating in the salt, the meats would be very salty if you did not washed them. Now you can let them cool down and put the whole thing in the refrigerator until you are ready. Be sure to filter the duck fat to rid of the solids. That is the beauty of this dish, you can prepare and "preserved" them days ot before you need it.

Now, part Deux, on the day of, remove the duck pieces from the fat and fry them in a non-stick pan on medium heat, covered, skin side down, until the skin very crisp, about 15 to 20 min. Make sure to keep an eye on the skillet, not to let the duck burn. I don't think any side dish that goes with duck confit better than just plain boiled potatoes with a little salt and some butter.

At first look, this dish seemed to be rather complicated to prepare. Not really! If you think about it, it does not need any fancy seasoning and the first part is simply stewing the duck legs, in their own fat, and the second part is pan fry them. Think pan fried chicken, but with very little shortening. Finally, there is nothing that can be more simple than boiled potatoes. You can prepare the first part days before, then when the day you have guests, you just whip the duck pieces out and fry them in the skillet as you do burger!

I'M ON A ROLL WITH BÚN(Vietnamese soft vermicelli)

Bún is Vietnamese style vermicelli ~ a rice noodle which has an opaque white color and a soft texture when cooked. This is not an al dante type of noodle. The Japanese have a very similar noodle that can be used as a substitution, if you cannot find the Vietnamese one. Bún is an extremely versatile product, it can be used in salads, soups, appetizers, or in main meals in place of rice. You can fry, boil, grill or however you prepare the meats and vegetable, bún will go along very comfortably. Below are the pictures of some typical uses of bún.

BÚN CHẢ THỊT NƯỚNG(Vermicelli with grilled pork tenderloin)

BÚN TÔM THỊT LUỘC(Vermicelli with boiled shrimps and pork belly)

BÚN NEM NUỚNG(Vermicelli with grilled pork paté)

BÚN VỚI CÁ NƯỚNG

ASIAN NOODLES

If you think the Italians have their ways with noodles, you have not seen everything yet. Between China, Vietnam, Thai, Cambodia, Malaysia, there are endless ways to fix noodles into a meal. There are egg noodles, no-egg noodles, wheat, rice, tapioca, combination of flours, thin, thick, clear, opaque noodles and the list just go on and on... Then there are many different ways to prepare them with many different varieties of ingredients. It would take a book to list all the possible ways to prepare Asian noodle dishes. Here I will try to describe some of the popular ones that pop in my head.

BÚN THANG.(North Vietnamese three way rice noodle soup, with ham, egg and chicken))

The rice noodle used in this dish is called "Bún" which is about the size of Italian's thin noodle. It is made with rice flour and has an opaque white color when cooked. The texture of the cooked noodle would be soft, not al dente. A small size Somen Japanese noodle can be substituted.

It would be meaningless to try to translate the name of the dish, as a reason, I gave it an English description for the name. I called it "three ways noodle" because it has three main ingredients: fried eggs, chicken and Ham.

The dish is served in a bowl as a soup noodle and it looks rather complicated when the bowl is set down in front of you. However it is rather easy to make. The broth is a simple chicken broth, cooked with chicken parts, onion, garlic, fish sauce and a little black pepper, shiitetake mushrooms are optional. The toppings are included with thin plain egg omelet sliced into thin strips, cooked ham sliced into thin strips, shredded boiled chicken meats. To assemble the dish, you put some noodle, first into a bowl. Arrange egg, chicken, ham into three corners of the bowl, on top of the noodle, put shiitake mushrooms in between the meats and egg, then pour the broth on top. Garnish with some cilantro. There are two special condiments needed to make it authentic: Shrimp paste and an ether essence*. If you do not have the last two elements, you would not find the dish less desirable.

Note:* Ether essence is an extract from the gland of a field cricket. Now a day, it is mass produced in labs. The smell of the essence is very similar to Ether. Only a drop or two are needed for each use.

BÚN RIÊU CUA/TÔM (Crab/Shrimp Noodle Soup with Tomatoes)

Another "must have" traditional North Vietnamese noodle soup called "Bún Riêu". In order to be authentic, this soup has to be made with live crabs. I remember, as a kid in Vietnam,I watched the cook pounded the whole crab with shell and all in a mortar, then she drained the juice through a piece of cloth and made the broth with it. What made this soup distinctive from other soups was the floating islands, made with crab eggs, which had the texture of a mousse, crab mousse. It would be almost impractical to buy live crabs, if you lived in the heart of the US continent, like in the Midwest. As a reason, we had to improvise and used shrimps instead. Every time I cooked shrimps, I always saved the shells which became very handy for any seafood soup or sauce. You can make the base for this soup with chicken bones or chicken bouillon cubes and the shrimp shells. I also added garlic, onions, pepper and seasoned it with fish sauce. I used can diced tomatoes which I found them more flavorful than the fresh ones. Be careful with the seasoning if you used can tomatoes because they were pretty salty. I would cook the soup with the shrimp shells for about an hour then I fished out the shells. To make the floating islands, I just run some shelled shrimps with an egg in a food processor or blender to a paste consistency. You can adjust the thickness to your liking, by using more or less shrimps. Wait until just before serving, pour the shrimp/egg paste by table spoonfuls into the boiling broth. It only took few seconds for them to get cooked. Make sure to flip them over to make sure they got cooked on both sides. Serve the soup with thin rice noodle, use cilantro and green onions as garnishes.

I go ahead and post these two dishes. It would take me moths if I tried to include all the noodle dishes in one post. Promise, I will get to most of them sooner or later.

MOST IMPORTQANT KITCHEN EQUIPMENTS

Cooking is no different from any other trade. In order to do it right, you have to have proper equipments. Two of the most essential and also most ignored gadgets in the kitchen are: the thermometer and the timer. People wonder why their foods are dry, burned, overcooked, undercooked, chewy, mushy etc...The solution for all those problems is to use a thermometer and a timer. Most households have at least one or more timers laying around. They also come with the coffee maker, the oven, , the microwave etc... Unfortunately, their presence are quite often forgotten, and the timers in people's heads are used instead. Most recipes will tell you to cook your foods in 10 min, 20 min, 1 hr and so on... However, each cook's stoves or ovens heat up differently. That is why a thermometer is a life saver. One should use a thermometer with an alarm which beeps when the meat is cooked to the desired doneness. A pocket thermometer is handy to make a quick check, but it does you no good if you forget to check the temperature on time. A timer and a pocket thermometer will make a good pair, but if you have a thermometer with a beeper, sometime, you do not even need a timer.

Making Foods at Home

Nowadays, we all are too busy to work and forget how to live. One of the good way to enjoy life is to eat foods, and no restaurant can prepare foods as good as you can at home. It takes a little learning(to cook), but you would get there if you put your heart in it. I found cooking to be a good hobby to have. The sky is the limit for your creativity, and yet you do not trash your house, because you consume and enjoy your creativity to the belly.

People do not know how much they miss when they do not cook at home. First, during a hard economy like we are having right now, one can save a lot of money preparing foods at home. Just think, a restaurant would charge you $5.00 for a bowl of "Polenta", you can make a bowl of "Grits" for less than 25c, same ingredients. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have time to prepare our meals everyday. When we craved for something, we made it. We saw something good on the food shows on TV, we made it. We eat 4 stars, 5 stars restaurant foods just about everyday at the fraction of the costs. Secondly, cooking at home put one in total control of what he/she would consume, in quality as well as quantity. When you ate out in a restaurant, if you noticed, they always gave you a bigger portion than you could or wanted to eat. It was not because they were nice to you, but because they forced you to buy more than you really intended. Unless you paid an arm and a leg at a high price "upscale" restaurant, most of the foods you ate usually came out of different cans that were mixed together at the premise.

We have been baking breads at home for a while now. Besides the costs saving factor, the smell and the taste of a loaf of freshly baked bread was truly the smell of heaven. We also started to grow our own herbs and vegetable indoor, thanks to the Aerogarden system. We eat a lot of different kinds of herbs as salad and they are hard to find at local grocery store. Now we have them.

All in all, we really have a kick out of making foods at home. We let our creativity run wild, we have fun, and best of all, we can really enjoy our craft to the heart,

Chicken w/Herbes de Provence

Weekly Menu

Every week we make a weekly menu. It serves two purposes, one is that it helps the shopping list and two is that we don't have to worry about what to eat for the day. For a while, we had problems with buying foods and they went bad in the refrigerator, especially vegetables. Thanks to the weekly menu, we just bought the vegetables that we would use for the week.

Our weekly menu varied week to week. We could go Chinese one week, then Vietnamese in another week, American, Mexican and so on. The weekly menu could also be sandwich week, pasta week, stew week, "bad" week(fast food type foods), etc...

This week, we decided that we would go French:

Tues: Chicken breast in Herbes de Provence.

Weds: Pot au feu

Thurs: Coq au Vin

Fri: Salmon w/ Mustard_Herb Butter

Sat: Roast pork tenderloin

Every country has certain generic ingredients that would be used in most of its dishes. For Vienamese, they are salt, pepper, onion, garlic, fish sauce. For Chinese, soy sauce, ginger, onion, garlic, sesame oil. For Mexican, chili, onion, garlic, oregano, cumin, salt, pepper.For French, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, thyme, parsley, wine, butter(don't dare to ignore it).

Today, We chopped up bunch of carrots, celery, onion, garlic and divided them into two bowls. In one of the bowl, we added fish sauce, white wine, herbes de provence to marinate some chicken breasts that we will cook tonight. In the other bowl, we added red wine, oregano, thyme, again, fish sauce, to marinade a cut-up chicken for coq au vin which we would cook the next day.

People tend to be intimidated by French cooking. But if you sit back, take a deep breath and look at the whole picture, you will find that the French cooks do not use any cooking methods that are different from what we are using everyday. Ooo!La!La!, you have to make the sauce! No big deal. Sometime, they just simply added some butter then cook down the cooking liquid to few tablespoons, the sauce would thicken somewhat. It's not necessary that all sauces have to be thick. If you want to make a thick sauce, you always first make a "roux, cook a roughly equal part of butter and flour in a sauce pan for few minutes, then add the liquid a little bit at a time to achieve your thickness preference. The amount of time that you cook the flour/butter mixture, depends on the color of the roux you want( the darker the color, the longer the time). The liquid that you add to the roux could be wine, stock or just plain water.

The procedure for the chicken in Herbes de Provence is pretty straight forward. First, we take the chicken pieces out of the marinate and brown them in all sides. Remove the chicken,

then add the vegetables(and mushroom, optional) and the marinade liquid into the pan and cook down the liquid somewhat. Drain the liquid through a sieve. Start a roux with about one tablespoon of butter and equal part of flour. We only want to cook the roux for a minute or two, because this is a light color sauce, then add the marinate liquid, a little butter and taste for seasoning. If needed, ad some salt and pepper. Put the chicken pieces, mushrooms back into the pan, cook for about 10/15 minutes until they are tender.