About the Fresh Ingredients
Since dim sum is so labor intensive, I will need to have all the ingredients on hand a couple of days ahead of time so that I can do the majority of the prep work well in advance. Fortunately, none of the ingredients are so delicate that they won't last a couple of days in the fridge. I may freeze the meats just to be safe, but the rest will surely keep.
01:54 PM PST Permalink |

Designing the Menu, Beverages, My Shopping List, and Tracking Sown Exotic Ingredients

I usually divide the contents of this weblog into several separate ones. But since I'm going to be making my 'Road Home' dim sum dinner on Valentine's Day and will be heading off to the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas soon thereafter, I thought I would economize on time and space and include my comments about designing the menu, deciding on the dishes, beverages to go with, my shopping list, and tracking down exotic ingredients all in a single entry. I hope it's not too much to digest at one time. Here goes...

For my 'Road Home' Dinner & a Movie, and my first attempt at homemade dim sum, I want to make sure I include all the classic favorites. Even with my limited dim sum experience, I know which ones those are. And there's a reason why they're the classic favorites: Because they're all so beautiful and delicious, if a little labor intensive. No doubt, I will have to be very organized this time, and plan to do much of the prep work a day or two before. I'm also going to cheat a little and use commercially prepared wrappers instead of making my own from scratch. With all the tasty treasures I have in mind, I'm definitely going to take all the shortcuts I can think of.

The Dim Sum Dishes I've chosen for my 'Road Home' Dinner & a Movie are:

Pork Shu Mai
Spring Rolls
Shrimp Toast
Spare Ribs
Barbeque Pork Buns
Paper Wrapped Chicken
Crispy Duck
Wontons
Pinwheel Shrimp
Seafood in Rice Paper Wraps
Bacon Wrapped Water Chestnuts
Lettuce Wraps

Beverages To Go With

The beverages to go with my 'Road Home' Dim Sum dinner are a no-brainer: Tea, Tsing Tao Beer, and Plum Wine. The same things one might order in a dim sum restaurant, and all are available locally.

My Shopping List:

Specialty Ingredients: White Pepper, Nori, Panko, Rice Wine, Rice Wine Vinegar, Rice Paper Wrappers, Gyoza Wrappers, Wonton Wrappers, Spring Roll Wrappers, Sesame Oil, Water Chestnuts, Soy Sauce, Chinese Black Mushrooms, Oyster Sauce, Nam Pla, Hoisin, Chinese Mustard, Plum Wine, TsingTao Beer

Fresh Ingredients: Shrimp, Scallops, Pork Ribs, Chicken Breasts, Duck, Bacon, Ground Pork, Green Onion, Ginger Root, White Bread, Napa Cabbage, Garlic, Honey, Red ell Pepper, Celery, Carrots,

Basics: Eggs, Flour, Cornstarch, Vegetable Oil, Sugar, Brown Sugar

Tracking Down Exotic Ingredients:

Having already prepared nine Asian dinners for my ThingsAsian Dinner & a Movie project, my pantry is fully stocked with enough specialty ingredients to prepare most any kind of Asian meal. I've even gone through my first jar, bottle or package of some things and am already well into a second. Things like Nam Pla fish sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, etc. In the local vicinity, there's Cost Plus and Trader Joe's, and even our supermarkets now stock a growing inventory of Asian ingredients, but often at dear prices. So, to economize, I like to stock up on those kinds of staples on my excursions to San Francisco. But when I'm too busy to play hooky for such a big outing, and can't find them here in town, I order Asian ingredients from AsianFoodGrocer.com. In the righthand column of this page, there's a link to their excellent online emporium.

12:12 AM PST Permalink |

Getting Acquainted with Dim Sum

One of my favorite sayings, the origin of which I can no longer remember, goes something like this: For one who has had the experience, no explanation is necessary. For one who has not, no explanation is possible. Words of wisdom that somehow seem to apply to dim sum. For those of you who know the joy of an afternoon spent indulging in these edible treasures in a bustling dim sum restaurant, no explanation is necessary. And for you bereft souls who have never had the pleasure, no explanation is possible. But I will try.

The term dim sum literally means 'to touch the heart', and a typical dim sum repertoire usually consists of, but is not limited to, an array of steamed and deep fried dishes, including dumplings, croquettes, spring rolls, and meat filled buns. There are also more exotic items like savory sausages, delicate seafood creations, and even chicken feet, a common dim sum standard.

According to convention, dim sum is usually, although not exclusively, served at lunch; and in a traditional dim sum establishment, there is no menu. Each type of dim sum is prepared in large batches in the kitchen, and then loaded onto rolling carts in stacked bamboo baskets. The dim sum waiter then rolls the cart into the dining room past all the tables, lifting the lids of the steamer baskets for the customers to peek inside to see if it looks appetizing enough to partake. Although there are no fixed rules, the order in which dim sum is traditionally eaten is the lighter steamed items first, followed by specialties such as paper wrapped chicken, spare ribs, sausages, meatballs and chicken feet, and finally the more filling deep fried dishes. And for dessert, delicate egg custards, and mango pudding are two favorites.

When you've tried enough of the dishes that you can't possibly eat another bite...well...maybe just a teensy bit more...the waiter counts the plates and beverage containers on your table and tallies up the bill. In his Asia cookbook, Martin Yan tells an amusing anecdote of a time in his youth when he and his buddies went for dim sum, and thought it would be clever to hide half their dishes under the table to economize on the bill. But it's an old trick, and the waiter was not that easily fooled. Moreover, to their horror, when the waiter looked under the table for their missing dishes, there were also lots of others left behind by the previous party, and they ended up paying the tab for those as well.

As a cuisine, dim sum originated in the province of Canton during the Sung Dynasty (960-1279 A.D.), where the royal chefs created these tiny edible works of art to delight the emperor and members of his imperial court at tea time. This delightful new pleasure soon spread beyond the palace walls, and by the time that trade along the Silk Road had reached its peak, the route was dotted with cozy tea houses that served dim sum to weary travelers. Before long, dim sum houses spread to the villages, where field workers and tradesmen could enjoy a light afternoon repast after a hard day's work. Today, dim sum restaurants are ubiquitous in every metropolis in China, and are frequented by people of every nationality in the Chinatown sectors of cosmopolitan cities throughout the world.

01:02 AM PST Permalink |

My Cookbooks

For my 'Road Home' Dinner & a Movie, I will be using recipes from both the Internet and my cookbooks, including selections from Corinne Trang's Essentials of Asian Cuisine and Martin Yan's Asia. And no doubt, I will be spending a few fascinating hours poring through countless recipes on websites such as Wok Wiz, Asian Online Recipes, and About.com. Of course, as always, I will synthesize, modify and adapt them to make them my own.

12:04 AM PST Permalink |

Looking for Dim Sum Recipes

Today I combed the Internet looking for dim sum recipes and found a bountiful yield. With so many different choices, I could have stopped there, but I also thumbed through my cookbooks and found even more. Corinne Trang's Essentials of Asian Cuisine contained several, as did Martin Yan's Asia, and even the Joy of Cooking had a few. So, that was the easy part. Now the hard part will be choosing from among the multitudes and not getting too carried away.

12:12 AM PST Permalink |

My Dim Sum Experience

The first time I had dim sum was years ago in San Francisco's Chinatown. I've forgotten the name of the restaurant, if ever I knew it, but I still know where to find it. It's upstairs, with huge windows overlooking Chinatown's main thoroughfare. My first dim sum experience was a delight, with all those tasty little treasures brought right to your table on rolling carts, steaming hot from the kitchen in stacked bamboo baskets. That day, we tried everything that rolled by, including an order of chicken feet! I had no idea they were standard fare, and I watched in horror as my intrepid dining companion deconstructed them joint by joint, gnawing the scant morsels of meat from each knuckle. But as I pictured that chicken walking around in a poopy barnyard, I just couldn't bring myself to eat them. Nonetheless, to this day, that order of chicken feet remains one of my most amusing dining anecdotes.

Fast-forward ten years or so, to the time I introduced Rene to his first taste of dim sum in that very same restaurant. This time we tried everything that rolled by EXCEPT the chicken feet. Although Rene was far less horrified than I at the notion of eating them. Having grown up in Mexico, where every scrap of food is put to use without waste, he thought it quite natural that the feet of the chicken would be considered perfectly edible as well.

Since that time, I've only eaten commercially packaged dim sum that I found in the freezer section of my local supermarket. For about $12, you can buy a box of 40 assorted pieces, including spring rolls, dumplings, meat-filled buns, and croquettes. When my son Will was first enrolled in Tae Kwon Do, I used to pick up a box of frozen dim sum as a special dinner treat on Friday evenings after his class. But I haven't seen them for sale lately, and have missed them terribly.

So, for my 'Road Home' Dinner & a Movie, I'm going to try my hand at the ambitious task of making dim sum from scratch.

01:58 AM PST Permalink |

Welcome to Dinner & a Movie for the Month of February

It's February, the month in which we celebrate both the Chinese New Year, and Romantic Love, and what better way than with Chinese dim sum, a name that literally means 'to touch the heart', and a lovely little Chinese film called The Road Home, directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Zhang Ziyi and Sun Honglei.

12:15 AM PST Permalink |

Looking Ahead...

Next month's Dinner & a Movie will be a challenge as I'm off for a two-week vacation to the Grand Canyon on the 17th, and then to Las Vegas for Rene's annual caricature convention. So I have to squeeze my whole Dinner & a Movie project into the next two weeks. But I will be uploading my daily blogs as usual via laptop throughout the remainder of the month. No doubt I will have lots to report in addition to my adventures in Asian cuisine.

12:06 AM PST Permalink |

Seven Years in Tibet

After I complete my Dinner & a Movie event each month, I usually post my film review in this very spot. However, upon researching the adventures of Heinrich Harrer and the film Seven Years in Tibet, I decided upon a whim to read the book as well. I haven't done any 'fun' reading in quite a while and thought it might be a nice departure from my daily routine.

So...once I'm done, I will write a comparative review of both the film and the book and post it to the ThingsAsian website as a regular article rather than as a blog entry. So mark your calendar and check back here in a week or so for a link to my Seven Years in Tibet review.

Addendum March 10: As promised, here is a link to my review of Seven Years in Tibet.
11:50 PM PST Permalink |

Recipes & Photos for My 'Seven Years in Tibet' Dinner

For my 'Seven Years in Tibet' Dinner I served MoMo Dumplings filled with meat and herbs; Churu, a tomato-bleu cheese soup (because bleu cheese is the closest thing we have to fermented yak's milk); Then Thuk, lamb and bits of torn up pasta dough in a savory broth; Mar Jasha, a chicken dish in a mild curry cashew sauce. Although all the dishes turned out exactly as I'd expected, the MoMo dumplings and Then Thuk stew were by far the best dishes on the table.

Here is a link to all the Recipes and Photos.

10:51 AM PST Permalink |

All About My 'Seven Years in Tibet' Dinner...How Everything Turned Out

Last night's Tibetan Dinner & a Movie extravaganza was an interesting culinary adventure, although not my best or favorite. The rustic fare was a little disappointing, although there were two dishes that I absolutely loved:

Then Thuk, a lamb stew with onions, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, spinach, and bits of torn up pasta dough in a simmering broth, was delightful. The broth was savory and warming, the bits of lamb were melt-in-your-mouth-like-butter tender, and the bits of thinly rolled pasta were by far the best part. As I enjoyed each spoonful, I kept thinking, 'I should have put in more pasta'.

And...MoMo dumplings filled with ground beef, kale, garlic, ginger, and onion. I steamed them for half an hour and served them with a dipping sauce of soy, vinegar, chili paste and ginger. And omigod! ...they were by far the best dish on the table. I still have a batch of uncooked ones in the fridge to steam up for a tasty reprise of last night's dinner for a simple supper tonight.

Among the less-than-rave-worthy dishes were Churu, a tomato- bleu cheese soup that was tasty but not something I would make twice; and a sort of creamy, curried chicken dish called Mar Jasha, but I didn't love the influence of the garam masala in the spices; plus a green bean and potato medley called Tema that turned out so awful I didn't even bother serving it.

Nonetheless, on the balance of things, it was a fun and tasty evening, and the movie 'Seven Years in Tibet' was far more enjoyable the second time around, now that I'm informed on the subject of Tibetan history and the life of Heinrich Harrer.

12:28 AM PST Permalink |

The Cost of 'My Seven Years in Tibet Dinner' (in US$)

The cost of the ingredients for my 'Seven Years in Tibet' Dinner are listed below. Keep in mind that the prices are based on buying everything new rather than using ingredients that I already had in my pantry. Of course there were lots of things left over for future meals, so the actual cost of the dinner based on the quantities of the ingredients used to make the dishes will be much lower than the grand total of stocking a pantry from scratch for preparing Tibetan cuisine.

Specialty Ingredients:

Soy Sauce - 3.49
Curry Powder - .99
Chili Paste - 2.49
Sherry or Brandy - 4.99
Bleu Cheese - 3.49
Turmeric - .99
Sechuan Pepper - .99
Cashew Nuts - 3.50

Fresh Ingredients:

Chicken - 3.01
Lamb - 3.35
Ground Beef - 2.22
Kale - 1.50
Onion - 2.61
Garlic - .49
Ginger - 1.67
Potatoes - 2.49
Red Bell Pepper - 1.52
Yogurt- .50
Limes - .99
Tomatoes - 4.56
Daikon - .51
Spinach - 1.44
Green Beans - 1.87
Apples - 1.70
Cream - 1.49
Pinot Noir - 3.33

Basics:

Butter - 2.50
Flour - 1.99
Cornstarch - 1.49

Total - $62.16 (US$)
10:00 AM PST Permalink |

To Market, to Market...

Today was shopping day for my 'Seven Years in Tibet' Dinner. The weather was dreary with a steady drizzle all afternoon, and I'd much rather have stayed in, but I was nonetheless propelled out into the world by my excitement at preparing tomorrow's Tibetan menu.

I started my quest at one of our local thrift shops where I found an amusing assortment of rustic dishes for serving all the various courses I have planned. And while my son Will was at his Tae Kwon Do class, I went to the grocery store for all the fresh ingredients I will need. My shopping list was short and simple this time, so I was done just in time to pick up Will and ferry him down to his Dad's.

And since the Tibetan recipes appear to be so simple and straightforward, I didn't feel the need to do a lot of prep the night before. Instead, I'm just going to start around noon to give myself plenty of time to set the table and make all the dipping sauces, marinades and dough ahead of time.

With the winter holidays and my big move to a new house, it seems like forever since I made my Filipino dinner last month. So I'm definitely looking forward to rolling up my sleeves, donning my apron and getting busy in the kitchen tomorrow.

11:35 PM PST Permalink |

Revisiting the Tibetan Recipes

This afternoon, I delved into my 'ThingsAsian Dinner & a Movie' file and fished out all the pages with the Tibetan recipes I gathered a few weeks ago. Since none of my cookbooks had any Tibetan recipes, I had to rely on what I could find on the Internet, of which there were plenty. I've narrowed them down to the basics: MoMo Dumplings filled with meat and herbs, a tomato-bleu cheese soup called Churu, a lamb stew called Then Thuk, a buttery chicken dish called Mar Jasha, and a side dish of green beans and potatoes called Tema. I will also be making a simple flatbread called Balep Korkun, and for dessert, a Winter Apple and Prune Crisp served with Po Cha, Tibetan Butter Tea.

The ingredients for this dinner are remarkably simple and common, most of which are already in my pantry, so my shopping list is short and easy this time. After I get my shopping done, I'll be spending the remainder of the day tomorrow getting my kitchen organized to prepare and photograph a five-course Tibetan meal.

The weather here in the Napa Valley is almost Spring-like, while the rest of the country and much of the Northern Hemisphere is in deep freeze. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to all those savory, warming Tibetan dishes.

03:26 PM PST Permalink |

Dandelion Wine...In Grandmother's Kitchen

One of my favorite works of literature is Ray Bradbury's magical coming-of-age story, Dandelion Wine. First published in 1957, the story focuses on the life of a boy named Douglas Spaulding in the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illinois. His world is filled with a cast of lively characters, including his younger brother Tom, his parents and grandparents, a pair of spinster sisters named Miss Fern and Miss Roberta who have a misadventure with a car nicknamed 'The Green Machine', a pipe-dreaming inventor named Mr. Jonas, and a dreadful phantom known only as 'The Lonely One' who lurks in the ravine.

Why, you may ask, would I mention Dandelion Wine in a weblog on Asian food and film? Well...my favorite chapter is the one that describes his Grandmother's kitchen. Having recently deconstructed my own kitchen for the move to our new home, amid the process of restoring order once again, I am fondly reminded of many passages from that chapter of Dandelion Wine.

In the first few paragraphs, Douglas muses, "Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple."

But pediment to the temple though it be, Grandmother's kitchen is the epitome of chaos; her failing eyesight is dubiously enhanced by a badly chipped and smudged pair of spectacles; and what's more, Grandmother Spaulding never uses a cookbook.

"In all the years not one single dish resembled another. Was this one from the deep green sea? Had that one been shot from blue summer air? Was it a swimming food or a flying food, had it pumped blood or chlorophyll, had it walked or leaned after the sun? No one knew. No one asked. No one cared.

...The food was self-explanatory, wasn't it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. Wasn't it enough that your blood and your body asked no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense?"

Each evening, Grandmother laid a out a sumptuous banquet for the Spaulding family, a half-dozen boarders who rented the rooms upstairs, and Aunt Rose, who had come for an extended visit.

"Trailing veils of steam, Grandma came and went and came again with covered dishes from kitchen to table while the assembled company waited in silence. No one lifted the lids to peer in at the hidden victuals. At last Grandma sat down. Grandpa said grace, and immediately thereafter the silverware flew up like a plague of locusts on the air. When everyone's mouths were absolutely crammed full of miracles, Grandmother sat back and said, 'Well, how do you like it?'

And the relatives, including Aunt Rose, and the boarders, their teeth deliciously mortared together at this moment, faced a terrible dilemma. Speak and break the spell, or continue allowing this honey-syrup food of the gods to dissolve and melt away to glory in their mouths? They looked as if they might sit there forever, untouched by fire or earthquake, a shooting in the street, a massacre of innocents in the yard, overwhelmed with effluviums and promises of immortality. All villians were innocent in this moment of tender herbs, sweet celeries, luscious roots. The eye sped over a snow field where lay fricassees, salmagundis, gumbos, freshly invented succotashes, chowders, ragouts. The only sound was a primeval bubbling from the kitchen and the clocklike chiming of fork-on-plate announcing the seconds instead of the hours."

One afternoon, Aunt Rose made the well-meaning mistake of suggesting that she help Grandmother clean and organize her kitchen.

"Grandma," said Aunt Rose, down again. "Oh what a kitchen you keep. It's really a mess, now, you must admit. Bottles and dishes and boxes all over, the labels off most everything, so how do you tell what you're using? I'd feel guilty if you didn't let me help you set things to rights while I'm visiting here. Let me roll up my sleeves."

Aunt Rose would not be denied, and before it was all over, the kitchen had been overhauled and organized from top to bottom, including a larder of fresh groceries, new glasses and a hairdo for Grandmother, and...much to her horror...a cookbook! But despite Aunt Rose's best intentions, suppertime that evening was a joyless occasion.

"Smiling people stopped smiling. Douglas chewed one bit of food for three minutes, and then, pretending to wipe his mouth, lumped it in his napkin. He saw Tom and Dad do the same. People swashed the food together, making roads and patterns, drawing pictures in the gravy, forming castles of the potatoes, secretly passing meat chunks to the dog. Grandfather excused himself early. 'I'm full,' he said."

The following afternoon, Grandfather took up a collection from the boarders to buy a train ticket for Aunt Rose, and had Douglas distract her while they packed her bags. When they returned to find Aunt Rose's luggage on the steps of the front porch, Grandfather announced, 'Rose,' 'I have something to say to you...Goodbye.'

That evening, with Aunt Rose out of the picture, Douglas crept downstairs at midnight and restored Grandmother's kitchen to its original state of chaos.

"He took the baking powder out of its fine new tin and put it in an old flour sack the way it had always been. He dusted the white flour into an old cookie crock. He removed the sugar from the metal bin marked sugar and sifted it into a familiar series of smaller bins marked spices, cutlery, string. He put the cloves where they had lain for years, littering the bottom of a half a dozen drawers. He brought the dishes and the knives and forks and spoons back out on top of the tables.

He found Grandma's new eyeglasses on the parlor mantel and hid them in the cellar. He kindled a great fire in the old wood-burning stove, using pages from the new cookbook. By one o'clock in the still morning a huge husking roar shot up in the black stovepipe, such a wild roar that the house, if it had ever slept at all, awoke. He heard the rustle of Grandma's slippers down the hall stairs. She stood in the kitchen, blinking at the chaos. Douglas was hidden behind the pantry door.

At one-thirty in the deep dark summer morning, the cooking odors blew up through the windy corridors of the house. Down the stairs, one by one, came women in curlers, men in bathrobes, to tiptoe and peer into the kitchen -- lit only by fitful gusts of red fire from the hissing stove. And there in the black kitchen at two of a warm summer morning, Grandma floated like an apparition, amidst bangings and clatterings, half blind once more, her fingers groping instinctively in the dimness, shaking out spice clouds over bubbling pots and simmering kettles, her face in the firelight red, magical, and enchanted as she seized and stirred and poured the sublime foods.

Quiet, quiet, the boarders laid the best linens and gleaming silver and lit candles rather than switch on electric lights and snap the spell. Grandfather, arriving home from a late evening's work at the printing office, was startled to hear grace being said in the candlelit dining room.

As for the food? The meats were devilled, the sauces curried, the greens mounded with sweet butter, the biscuits splashed with jeweled honey; everything toothsome, luscious, and so miraculously refreshing that a gentle lowing broke out as from a pasturage of beasts gone wild in clover. One and all cried out their gratitude for their loose-fitting night clothes."

Of course, by the time I prepare my 'Seven Years in Tibet' dinner, I hope to have achieved a somewhat more orderly arrangement than Grandma Spaulding's in my new kitchen, which is still a work in progress. But even in the most orderly kitchen, I will always subscribe to her philosophy of food, asking no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense.

04:52 PM PST Permalink |