One of the many, many challenges with a project like this, as the numerous other bloggers who’ve tried it can attest, is picking recipes.  Picking recipes, and sourcing ingredients.  Picking recipes, sourcing ingredients, and avoiding cultural insensitivity. Picking recipes, sourcing ingredients, avoiding cultural insensitivity, and an almost fanatical devotion to the…

Oh, come in again.

Seriously, though, with SMALL countries, the trick is to pick something distinctive.  What really makes Macedonia different from Albania? With BIG countries, on the other hand, well, how do you narrow it down? And today’s country probably has among the most diverse food cultures on the planet. I say today, but the headline kind of spoils it – we’re going to slice this Gordian knot by making not one, not seven, but five different Chinese meals.

Why five? Glad you, the imaginary person who reads this blog, asked!  Historically there is a taxonomy of Chinese food where it’s divided into “The Four Great Cuisines”, Shandong, Huaiyang, Sichuan, and Guangdong.  There’s another one where it’s divided into eight, adding, Hunan, Fujian, Anhui, and Zhejiang to the prior four.  However, we’ve decided to follow the model adopted by Carolyn Phillips in “All Under Heaven: Recipes From the 35 Cuisines of China”, and make 35 different meals.

Just kidding.  Phillips makes the case that the “great eight” actually leave out a lot of the country, and you’re better off making a broad set of groupings by geography and cultural influence than just picking eight provinces and saying “Those are the good ones!.”  Obviously, there are a MILLION guides we could have picked, but we picked this one. So the plan is to make a meal each from Phillips’ five broad groupings consisting of: The North and Northeast, The Yangtze River Environs, The Coastal Southeast, The Central Highlands, and The Arid Lands.  (Map in the link.)

So for THIS meal, we’re starting with the northeast, including the capital, Beijing, and the provinces bordering Russia and Korea. Our menu included an appetizer of spinach and peanuts, scallion flatbreads, and a lamb stew.

First up, shopping!  I’ve said it before, but shopping for specialty ingredients in Vancouver is AMAZING.  Although the ethnically Asian population is so high, it could be argued that Asian ingredients technically aren’t specialty items.

At any rate, ingredients required for this meal that we didn’t already have included Chinese flour (lower gluten than Western), Sweet Wheat Paste (which is confusingly frequently labeled as “Sweet Bean Paste” even when it’s still made of wheat.), and ginger juice.

Turns out you don’t buy that last one, you just squish a lot of ginger.

We also went to a super fancy tea shop and asked for a tea that would go well with lamb.  We can’t read this, but it was really good. (It’s also not from the northeast, since they don’t grow much tea there.)

So to work though the dishes from least to most complex, let’s start with our appetizer, spinach and peanuts.  Roast some peanuts, blanch some spinach, toss with dressing, done. The dressing consisted of garlic, black vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, and sesame oil.  It was delicious, and not as salty as the equivalent Korean salad we sometimes make with miso, because I never remember to buy doenjang.

Next up, the lamb.  The dish, called “Tasimi” (literally, “It’s Like Honey”) was the main entrée, but was relatively simple to prepare – the lamb is marinated in ginger juice, corn starch, soy sauce, rice wine, and black vinegar.  Once it’s ready, you flash fry it  and then toss in sugar and wheat paste.  The wheat paste is a little sweet, but mostly just a blast of concentrated umami.

The result is a hearty, lamb stew that while being a little sweet and a little sticky, is MUCH less overpowering than the goopy stuff you get at somewhere like Panda Express. Much, much tastier, too.

Finally, let’s talk about the flatbreads.  Since the process was somewhat fussy, we didn’t get as many pictures as we would have liked.  The basic dough is just Chinese flour and water.  Combined with that you make a paste of shortening (or lard), salt, flour, and toasted Sichuan peppercorns.

Toasted Sichuan peppercorns. Oh lawd, why didn’t I think of toasting these things before?  They’re even BETTER that way.

Dough made, scallions chopped, and paste, um, pasted, it’s time to make bread!  The dough is divided into several pieces, which are rolled into long strips. (no picture of this part, sorry)  You smear paste and scallion on the inside of the strip, roll it up into a rope, and then roll the rope into a bun, as seen upper right in this picture.

You then roll the bun flat and the whole thing then gets fried in oil.

And here’s a picture of our final spread, including the tea:

The meal was really excellent.  The lamb dish was something I could easily see making again, in particular, and spinach and peanuts turns out to be a great combination. No recipes for the next few entries, because we didn’t poach them from the internet, but if you’d like to follow along at home, here’s the cookbook.

“All Under Heaven,” by Carolyn Phillips

Next up, China! Then China, China, and also China!

On average, we’ve been doing one of these meals every few months because of all the work involved. So the idea of doing a second one four days later to… use up leftovers?? was a bit unusual.

But there you are.  We made WAY too much cassava starch to go with Cabo Verde, and it’s a more or less ubiquitous item in African recipes, so we decided to see if we could get the Central African Republic done quickly enough to use it as a side dish.

Which leads into something I want to be very up front about: We are aware that this blog is somewhat problematic.  We do not pretend to be experts on other cultures or their cuisines, nor are we amplifying the voices of those who are.  We are a middle aged, north American white couple who likes to cook and eat, and are documenting our experiences with one way of systematically trying new things.

But some of those new things are from parts of the world which have been treated so poorly for so long that their local foodways have either been completely undocumented in any sort of authentic way, or worse, have been actively suppressed.  It’s difficult enough for someone in Vancouver to determine what makes Macedonian food different from Croatian, and that’s just because research is hard; neither of those cultures were subject to the sorts of racism or colonialism screening us from a reasonably local description of what separates food in the Republic of the Congo from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And that’s not even ADDRESSING the fact that most of those country borders were imposed by Europeans in the first place.

So, yeah.

We’re going to keep making meals and writing it up here, but it is what it is – a chronicle of us having a loose rule for determining new things to cook.  We are not presuming to speak for the peoples whose food we are attempting to approximate.

For a much more eloquent and detailed description of the issues this raises for CAR in particular we will, as always, refer you to the fabulous “Cooked Earth” entry for this country.

All that said, here’s some food.  One of the reasons we decided doing a second country on the heels of Cabo Verde would be doable is that the recipes we selected used relatively easily available ingredients.  (Except red palm oil, which we haven’t sourced yet in Vancover, so we let that one go.)  Two stews, one with beef, which would be considered a special occasion luxury in much of CAR, and another with spinach and peanuts.

The beef stew was pretty straightforward.  Simmer beef, onions, and tomato paste for several hours until tender.

Add okra and a habanero (standing in for a Scotch bonnet pepper, which I have never been able to find ANYWHERE, including Vancouver) and cook until thick.

We are very happy the Dutch oven made it with us to Canada – it’s already gotten more than enough use to justify the weight and storage space.

The other recipe called for natural peanut butter, which we didn’t have any of.  What we DID have was raw peanuts, and it turns out you can turn one into the other pretty easily.  Roast peanuts in the oven for 15 – 20 minutes, throw into Cuisinart, done!

That done, the final stew was pretty simple – saute onions, then add spinach, tomatoes, peanut butter, and another habanero.

The finished dishes were delicious!  The beef stew was thick and hearty from the okra, and the spinach stew was spicy and filling.  Both went well with the cassava starch, but didn’t come CLOSE to using it up.  Seriously, we need to start making quarter batches of these cassava starch recipes, because they always make way more than we use.

These dishes were both so tasty, and used such easily acquired ingredients, that they’ll probably both make it into regular use in the future.  Regardless of the issues with how we got here, we acknowledge that this is some pretty good food, and appreciate all the folks who brought it to us.

Recipes here. Next up, Chad! (And then the unthinkable happens – we’ll pass “Cooked Earth” guy and have to go back to ripping off less meticulously researched sources.)

Happy shelter in place, everyone!

Part of the fun of this project has been visiting lots of random grocery stores, and hunting for exotic ingredients.  Since that’s not really a possibility during quarantine, it looked like we were going to have to postpone our sojourn to far off, exotic… (checks notes)

Oh wait.  No, we can do this.

We actually made so many different Canadian dishes that this one is going to be formatted a little differently than the others.  Instead of one big meal, this is broken up into two desserts and two main dishes, which will be presented in a culinarily logical sequence rather than the order we actually made them.

So first up – the dish that everyone EXPECTS us to do: Poutine!

There’s a million degrees of fancy that can be attempted here.  One of our usual reference sites (cookedearth.com) was so sarcastic about poutine that they actually used a stock photo to accompany a recipe that included the step, “Feel ashamed that you didn’t try harder.”

However, we felt no shame.  We made french fries from scratch, including the proper double fry technique. (Low temperature to cook, high temperature to crisp.) We made a delicious gravy, also from scratch.  And we opened a 30 year old bottle of champagne to go with!

A word about the champagne. For the first 9 years of our marriage, I didn’t drink alcohol at all, so Leigh didn’t open many bottles of wine, as she’d be drinking them by herself.  I’m still more of a beer drinker, but I do now enjoy a glass of wine very occasionally.  What that means is that we have a small collection of bottles that Leigh has had with her for a very long time, all of which are of highly uncertain degrees of preservation.

We call it “Heisenbooze.”

And poutine DEFINITELY called for Heisenbooze, because… we’re moving to Canada! Appropriately enough, we’re celebrating the food of our soon to be adopted homeland.

The champagne was actually pretty good.  I don’t drink enough to be a good evaluator, but it tasted like champagne and still had some fizz to it.  I used the rest to make a cream sauce to put over shrimp and pasta the next day.

And the poutine was delicious! To heck with you, Cooked Earth Guy who has done 95% of our research for us and provided us with lots of good recipes and basically made this entire thing possible… On second thought, we just won’t tell him.

On to the main event, food wise. There’s a traditional Canadian holiday meat pie called a Tourtière.  I checked with a number of my friends from north of the border, and they all had things to say about this.  We went with a recipe from Food Network – Canada as a reasonably good choice.

First – scratch pie crust!  We’ve been doing a lot of baking from “Sally’s Baking Addiction” during this shelter in place, including an excellent lemon meringue pie. Since the recipe didn’t specify the exact pie crust recipe, we used that one again.

Next, the filling – there’s a million different variants for this pie, but the most common elements are ground meat, potatoes, and warming spices.  This particular version used ground beef, grated potatoes, allspice, and Worcestershire sauce.

Also a bay leaf, but I think that’s there for religious significance, since I’ve never figured out what they actually do.  Still, I continue to use them to appease the bay leaf gods, who are quick to anger if you don’t make the appropriate sacrifice.

Assembling the pie:

Once assembled, the top is brushed with egg yolk, and then into the oven it goes.  The result is as pretty as one could hope:

And the result was delicious!  Sadly, the lighting wasn’t as good for the photo of the final product, but trust us – it was great.

So – two entrees down.  What’s up next?  Dessert, of course!  If you ask Canadian people what the most quintessentially Canadian dessert is, they’ll probably tell you “butter tarts.”  At least, that’s what they told us. So more pie crust it is!

Butter tarts are actually really simple – they’re little pies with a filing that, at minimum, consists of butter, sugar, maple syrup, and eggs.  And that’s it.  There are, of course, a million variants, including raisins, nuts, and other additions, but we went for the dead simple version.  No “in process” pictures, but here’s what we ended up with:

Note: Butter tarts are really hot when they first come out of the oven.  Wait longer than we did to try them. (Narrator: “They didn’t.”)

And then one final dessert, which is my absolute favorite Canadian contribution to world cuisine: the Nanaimo bar. (Edit: Here’s a great video on the history of the bars.) These things are really, really dangerous.  They’re a multilayer no-bake cookie bar.  The bottom layer is chocolate, graham cracker, coconut, and nuts.  Middle layer is vanilla custard.  Top layer is a hard chocolate shell.  We weren’t thinking about the blog when we made these, so no process pictures here either.

Which is a shame, because the process is actually kinda interesting.  You have to make and chill each layer one at a time as you assemble the dish, including tempering chocolate.  It’s all very fussy.  But then once it’s assembled, all you do is shove them in the fridge.

And then try not to eat them all at once.  That’s the hard part.

And that’s Canada!  Still a foreign country, but not for very long!

Next up, a country we SHOULD have done sooner, but we didn’t notice it had changed its name… Cabo Verde.

Recipes:
Poutine
Tourtière (Pie Crust)
Butter Tarts
Nanaimo Bars

We return to Africa this week, for a dish that seems to be universally acknowledged as the national dish of Cameroon – Ndolé, or bitterleaf stew.  Like most of these dishes (or, for that matter ALL dishes everywhere) there are a variety of recipes, but the key ingredient in this is… wait for it… bitterleaf.

Bitterleaf, or Vernonia amygdalina, is a member of the daisy family. It smells more like tea than anything else. Also, it is absolutely not to be found in Lansing, but fortunately isn’t too expensive on Amazon.

Other specialty ingredients this go-round include dried crayfish, slaked limestone, and a package which took pains to specify that the contents were not intended for people with fish allergies. Can you guess which ingredient in this picture is probably a poor choice for the poisson averse?

Clockwise from upper left – Bitterleaf, Dried Crayfish, Slaked Lime, and some sort of fish.

(hint – it’s the fish)

Fortunately, neither Leigh or I are allergic to fish, so into the pan our (checks package) milkfish would be going. So what if it’s not native to Cameroon – it’s a dried smoked fish. Close enough!

To start the process, three different things had to be soaked overnight, the leaves, the fish, and a quarter cup or so of peanuts. To start the cooking process on the day of, the leaves get boiled for an hour or so in a big pot with the limestone.  A word on the limestone – this is calcium hydroxide, and it’s the same ingredient used to make Mexican hominy, Chinese century eggs, and a number of other food processes.  I suspect we may need to come back to this bag later, and I doubt it’s going to go bad.

Once the leaves are boiled and drained, the next step is to to start onions and sliced beef cooking in one pot and the fish cooking in another.

Top: sliced beef and onions. Bottom: Chiles and peanuts.

Fishie!

The third pot visible in the pictures is for the seasoning that goes into the stew, which consists of red palm oil (ubiquitous in our African meals thus far), ground peanuts, and habanero peppers. And the only reason we used habaneros is that their even deadlier cousin, the Scotch Bonnet, couldn’t be located. The resulting oily, spicy, peanut sauce was screamingly hot, but very tasty.

From here, the recipe just consisted of adding the various things into the stew at the right times for them to cook. So first the sauce, fish, and crayfish, then the leaves, and finally shrimp, which had the shortest cooking time. Incidentally, the English name for Cameroon comes from the Portuguese colonial occupiers’ word for “shrimp,” camarones.

In addition to the stew itself, we also made yet another cornmeal mush variant, and a delightful condiment called pepe. And by “delightful”, I mean “let’s toss in about 5 more habaneros to the mix.”  It’s super tasty, and I’ve been spreading it on sandwiches ever since… but only in very small quantities.

And here’s the final spread:

From left – ndolé, baked plantains, and fufu.

The picture shows some baked plantains, but I don’t really want to talk about those – they were pretty scorched.

The stew, on the other hand, was delicious. Spicy, bitter, nutty, and hearty, with the bitterness of the leaves offsetting the richness of the beef and shrimp, and the spicy peanut sauce pulling everything together. I would absolutely make this again. (And we have two more fish in the freezer so it may be a necessity.)

Once more, the recipes come from the excellent “Cooked Earth” blog. Next up – far off, exotic… Canada.

Recipes: Cooked Earth: Cameroon

Cambodia was our second or third foray to southeast Asia, depending on how you count Bangladesh.  As always, the question was, “What makes this country different from the one next to it?  What will make this a Cambodian meal rather than a Vietnamese or Thai one?”  And the answer in this case seems to be prahok. What is prahok, you ask?

Mud fish sauce.

If you’re familiar with standard Asian fish sauce, such as Oyster brand, this is not that.  Rather it is a thick paste, and is VERY aromatic.  For the big pot of stew we were going to make, only two tablespoons were going in, and that was plenty. But everywhere I read agreed – THIS is what makes a dish uniquely Cambodian.

That, and a spice blend called kroeung. Spice pastes are common in southeast Asian cuisine.  I’ve made any number for Thai dishes.  This one, however, called for an ingredient I’d never encountered before: fingerroot.  Fingerroot is a rhizome, like ginger or tumeric.  In fact, the package I found (at an Asian grocer over an hour away), was only labelled “rhizome.”  I had to google the Thai characters to verify that I was, in fact, holding the correct product.

From top to bottom – Garlic, Fingerroot, Gallangal, Lemongrass, Kaffir Lime Leaves, and Tumeric.

In addition to fingerroot, the paste called for a number of other ingredients familiar from Thai cuisine, including gallangal, lemon grass, and keffir lime leaves.  (If you’ve not tried using these leaves in cooking, they are amazingly potent, and worth seeking out.)

One of these days, we really MUST get a larger mortar and pestle, as our little one took a WHILE to reduce everything seen here to a mush:

So, now that we have our kroeung and our prahok, what’s for dinner?

A leading contender for “national dish of Cambodia” turns out to be a veggie stew called (with a MILLION different possible spellings) Somlor Kor Ko, which literally means “stirring soup.”  There are also as many different ways to MAKE it as there are to SPELL it.  I finally settled on a recipe (linked below) which had the advantages of a) using actual quantities, instead of phrases like “use a mix of vegetables” and b) NOT using random herbs that I can’t even figure out the English translation for, let alone figure out where to acquire them. (“Angkeadei?” “Mrum?”)

Instead, our vegetables are going to be eggplants, small Thai ones and large Chinese ones, green beans, and shredded green papaya, and our protein will be pork and tilapia. (Catfish would be ideal, but the store was out.)

First though, we have to toast some rice:

This is glutinous or “sticky” rice. Not so sticky when dry, but when roasted and ground, it becomes a thickening agent common to many southeast Asian cuisines.  It’s not hard to do, but it takes a while, and you have to stir the whole time so it doesn’t scorch.

After all this preparation of ingredients, the actual cooking was pretty anticlimactic.  It’s a stew, so you just throw everything into the pot and let it cook.  The only complication is that you pull the fish out as soon as it’s cooked through and then add it again at the end so it doesn’t overcook.

And the final result:

Our version won’t win any beauty contests, but…

… it was really good.  The spice blend, while full of amazing aromatics, notably DIDN’T contain any chilies.  That just let all of the other flavors come to the fore and perfectly balance the incredible density of the fish sauce.  The toasted rice and eggplant thickened the broth to the point where is was more of a gumbo than a liquid.  The pork, fish, and vegetables soaked up all the flavors beautifully.

For desert, we made a traditional Cambodian wedding desert made with more sticky rice, red beans, tiny bananas, and coconut milk: (The chronology is a little misleading here – we started these things HOURS before the stew.)

The rice and beans are soaked overnight, then blended with the coconut milk.  The mixture is then combined with bananas, wrapped in a banana leaf, and steamed.

It was… fine.  I didn’t take any pictures of the final product, sadly.  We steamed them for four hours, and it still seemed like we probably hadn’t cooked them long enough.  I suspect we may have made the individual packages too large, preventing them from cooking as thoroughly as one might hope.  They weren’t terrible, but I feel like had the rice and beans been cooked a bit more, or if there had been more coconut milk flavor, I would have liked it more.

Or I may just be a heathen American.

Pleasantly, we did have company, which is always nice for these adventures.  Sadly, we once again forgot to take a group photo, but one of Leigh’s colleagues joined us, and a good time was had by all.

Next up – Cameroon, and a chance to get that jar of red palm oil off the shelf again!

Recipes:

• Samlor Kar Ko – Stirring Soup
• Num Ansom Chek – Banana, rice, and red beans