What's Cooking (Take Four)

Great way to remember Bob.
Love Sichuan smashed cucumber salad, adding shrimp is genius, will do soon

Sichuan smashed cucumber salad is one of my favorite hot weather dishes.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Grear way to remember Bob.
Love Sichuan smashed cucumber salad, adding shrimp is genius, will do soon

I made the cucumbers on Friday so they'd develop more flavor, ditto the shrimp but I marinated them separately with a Chinese red chili oil vinaigrette (though they'd have been great without, too) and combined the two components at service. Really, really good and absolutely gorgeous served straight up in martini glasses. Had not been my original plan but everything changed on Thursday when I found a bag of large "Texas Wild" gulf shrimp at my favorite seafood market. Bob, though not at all proud of his home state, was born and raised in Texas so the shrimp were on theme.

Grilled medium-rare Prime top sirloin, oven fries, pinto beans. Cowboyish, but quite good. I don't get many steaks anymore.

Made a dish that involved shrimp quickly marinated in a dressing, sauteing it, and then tossing it with more dressing, cucumbers, peanuts, basil, and glass noodles. The dressing included ginger, garlic, a Serrano chili, fish sauce, honey, and lime juice. I liked it, although I had a hard time getting everything to mix in with the noodles.

Must be a shrimp-eating week...I've been having a shrimp cocktail for lunch every other day. I love them. On other days I am enjoying an Italian Veggie soup that I found in the back of the freezer, hiding since 2024! I added a little Sherry wine vinegar to brighten it up and a piece of Parmesan rind when heating in the pan. It is delicious.

[Jenise]

Made a dish that involved shrimp quickly marinated in a dressing, sauteing it, and then tossing it with more dressing, cucumbers, peanuts, basil, and glass noodles. The dressing included ginger, garlic, a Serrano chili, fish sauce, honey, and lime juice. I liked it, although I had a hard time getting everything to mix in with the noodles.

Sounds like a great combination. I absolutely adore the texture of glass noodles.

Glass noodles star in one of my favorite Sichuan dishes--ants climbing a tree. This is a stir-fry of minced pork with glass noodles. The bits of pork clinging to the glass noodles as you lift them with chopsticks are thought to resemble ants climbing a tree. There are a lot of Chinese dishes with colorful names. Wonton, for example, is Cantonese for "swallowing clouds". The Sichuanese name for wontons, chaoshou, means "folded arms", referring to the way the dough corners are overlapped.

-Paul W.

Ants climbing a tree is one of my wife's favorite dishes as well, and that's why we always have several packages of glass noodles in the pantry.

Jenise, I totally love Bob's menu!

Paul, I so enjoy all your fun information on the passion you have for cooking. I learn so much. Ants in a tree sounds delicious.

[Jenise]

Tonight I'm having a friend's husband over for dinner. She's in the hinterlands with an ailing sister, so Gary's available for some entertaining conversation. Decades ago Boeing had a secret NASA group of engineers and physicists that reported direct to the CEO--Gary was one of them. A management change resulted in the group quitting en masse, after which Gary decided to temporarily take over his grandparent's restaurant in a small ski town at the base of Mt. Baker. As fun as he was brilliant, Gary waited tables in a bathrobe and staged various events, often involving degrees of undress (nude skiing anyone?) while inventing exercise and rehab equipment on the side. He still does that, and his clientele list is interesting. I know Paul McCartney was one and he just shipped something to Bin Salman's mom in Saudi Arabia.

This is going to be fun! I'm making a Chinese stir fry--shrimp and red-cooked pork, snow peas, and water chestnuts. I'll serve a cold dish of cucumbers marinated with fresh wood-ear mushrooms.

I have never seen the attraction of wood ear mushrooms. They're just kinda limp.

[Jenise]

I like them! More about color and texture than flavor, but great when lightly cooked then marinated as I'm doing tonight.

I really like cloud ear (aka wood ear, black fungus) mushrooms. I keep a big jar of them. I buy them dehydrated and already cut into strips. They take only a few minutes to rehydrate before using in soups (esp. hot and sour), stir fries, etc. I like them for their crunchiness.

Tonight was a spinach and cheese omelet (with no cloud ears).

[Jenise]

Yes, I love them in hot and sour also. I haven't had that soup in 100 years. It's disappeared from my life now that I don't live near a decent Chinese restaurant. Have to make it myself, and I kinda forgot about it. But now that you've reminded me....

No dinner tonight.

Hot and sour is one of my most favorite soups in the world.

Count me in. Hot and sour is a great soup. As is tom yum, another sour-ish soup (though a different sour).

Count me in. Hot and sour is a great soup. As is tom yum, another sour-ish soup (though a different sour).

Yes, it is. I particularly like tom kha gai soup.

Sounds like a fun meal, Jenise, although even the mention of nude skiing made me cringe. With my ski skills, that could be a really painful exercise, with parts that should never get terribly cold getting terribly cold.

We had a real gourmet treat tonight: hot dogs, potato chips, and chard. (OK not so gourmet.) The hot dogs were from the Omaha Steaks box our daughter's roommate sent to us. They were really pretty good; plump, with a nice level of spice to them, although without that nice snap you get from natural casings. The chips were from the Snackachangi group of New Zealand. They come in a variety of flavors, with the package for each flavor showing a different escapade of Great Uncle Kenny and his date. In one, it's rogue sentient potatoes attacking him. In another, it's wild puffer fish. In all of them, Great Uncle Kenny is going all Indiana Jones on them while shielding his date (a different date for each scenario). They're hilarious and the chips are delicious. See https://www.theforagecompany.com/brands/snackachangi/ for an example. The chard was just sauteed with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and finished with a little balsamic and chili flakes.

Quick edit to mention that we picked up the Snackachangi chips in Australia - they're not yet available in the U.S.

Wood ear mushrooms are all about texture and mouth-feel rather than flavor. The Chinese appreciate and value texture a lot more than Westerners do. There are lots of ingredients--wood ears and tendons among them--that are included in dishes mainly for the texture that they impart. A lot of Chinese offal fits in this category. I've got a Western-type palate, myself. Red-cooked beef tendons are about as far down the texture path as I go.

-Paul W.

I tried a pho that had some tendons. Not my cup of tea, either.

Tom Yum soup is delicious. I used to buy it several times a month at a restaurant on the way home. They closed down and moved to another side of town that I never get to. I should search out some other places to see if they have it. We have a lot of Asian, Chinese-type restaurants here.

I love Chinese hot-and-sour soup, although I rarely make it myself. Tom kha gai is my favorite Thai soup. For some reason I've never made tom yum, but I have it on my list.

Tonight I'll be making Cajun chicken jambalaya (Paul Prudhomme recipe). I ran out of tasso so I'll be using andouille instead.

-Paul W.