another summer blog

So Hei said to me, let's cook but not anything fried. Apparently, earlier that Sunday afternoon we went to Green Tea Cafe on Mott Street and had deep fried chicken strips, deep fried squid, scallion pancake and Portuguese Chicken on rice. I had some pork loin I defrosted the night before and we went to a Chinese supermarket and got a salmon fillet (boneless) and did something with it. I did make a simple asparagus dish with onions and chicken broth but it didn't make the cut (no pun intended).

So I put on some soy sauce and salt and pepper with some cajun seasoning to this pork loin. One of the things I learned when cooking is.....DON'T trim the FAT. Now I don't say this because I like fatty stuff (partially true) but the fat keeps the meat tender and moist. You can trim it later if you want. Since this is a fried free dinner (partially broken in the next entree), I broiled the pork loin. I really wanted that browning on the pork. Unless you put something sweet on it, it will not burn the outside. It tasted delicious.





The next dish is a salmon that I've made before but didn't get a chance to blog. I patted the salmon nice and dry and seasoned with salt and pepper and SUGAR(!?!) Yea, sugar cuts down a little bit of the acid of the salt and pepper but still retains the saltyness. It's a great thing to add to seafood. Anyways, I did fry the skin side first. Like I said, it's almost a fried free meal. But after attempting to crisp the skin a little, I turned it over and threw the salmon in a 400 degree oven. In the meantime, I had some soy sauce marinade garlic and onions with some sugar and sauteed it till the soy sauce was reduced and concentrated. There was an issue with this dish though. I used onions when I should have used shallots. Chunks of shallots tend to keep shape and texture better than the onion. Other than that, a delicious tasting salmon with a wonderful sauce.

New experiments in the summer!!

Here's another post of the food blog. I know it's been a while but I guess we haven't had or made much that was really worth posting.

The first dish I made was a sugar and red wine marinated pork chop. I hope to experiment with wine a lot more in the future. So I took some red wine, some sugar and some salt and marinated it with some thin center cut pork chops. The end product was really delicious. As you see in the picture below, some are darker than others. The first batch didn't have as much of the sugar and wine when it was cooked on the frying pan. I was also afraid of overcooking it and essentially drying it out. So it didn't get the same color. In the second batch, I dumped all the pork juice and wine and got the eye pleasing golden brown but a little bit over charred.




The second dish is the traditional shrimp and eggs. Hei knows I love eggs so this was a special treat for me. She took this recipe out of a cook book she got from Hong Kong. The book isn't bad though because the recipes are in English and Chinese but the title and the author's bio is in Chinese only (so yea, don't ask me what the name of the book is). So when you go to Chinatown and order this dish, it's usually a very dry scrambled egg with shrimp and oyster sauce. However, this dish is different. The eggs weren't cooked as a flat dry omelete and there's no ho-yau. So the recipe included some other spices to give life to the eggs and it did not disappoint. It was very well done.




This last dish, Hei wanted to try to cook meatloaf. We all know most homemade meatloafs are much better than restaurant meatloafs. Probably because the ones at the restaurants sit for a while and the ones at home are freshly made and very moist. So Hei consulted another one of our cookbooks written by none other than Tyler Florence. It's called Dad's meatloaf with tomato relish. We tried to follow it by the letter but we didn't have all the ingredients. Besides that, we didn't have the right size baking dish. We made due with what we had. There's one catch to this recipe though. It's not in the title. It's the secret ingredient to this dish. Unlike the movie Kung Fu Panda, there really is a secret ingredient. The secret ingredient is BACON. You've got to be kidding me. This is a bacon meatloaf? Indeed it is. It was moist (probably from all the grease) but most importantly, it tasted great. Till next time!!

ko