chez pim

Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24: just another Tuesday night chez nous

Every month, Foodbuzz hosts a special dinner series Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24, featuring twenty-four Foodbuzz Featured Publisher bloggers, creating, eating, partaking in twenty-four unique meals occurring around the world during a 24-hour period.  What a fascinating idea, isn't it?  A glimpse into dining rooms and kitchens of home cooks just like us the world over.  Look at this sweet cooking party to stock the pantry for a mom-to-be friend, or this fun make-your-own-Mac&Cheese party.  How awesome are they? 

I've been wanting the play along for a while, the only problem for me has been timing.  The 24 meals are all supposed to happen during the same 24-hr period, and on the most convivial night of the week for most people, a Saturday night.  Well, suffice to say we are not "most people" around here.  David spends his Saturday nights creating convivial meals for his guests at Manresa.  I spend my Saturday nights watching Syfy.  (No, really.)  Around here, the night we let loose and have a little fun is on a Tuesday - Monday and Tuesday being the two days a week Manresa is closed, and after spending Monday night catching up on sleep, Tuesday night is the one in which we get to play.  How, you asked?  Usually with a gathering of also-non-Saturday-night-people that is to say restaurant-industry friends, eating simple food and drinking not-so-simple wines.  Once informed of this, the power-that-be at Foodbuzz graciously agreed to stretch out the 24-hr period a little,  just enough to cover our usual Tuesday night chez nous.  How sweet of them, yeah?

Chocolate-covered peanut & sesame caramel bars

I guess I should just come out and admit it.  My name is Pim, and I just made a vegan an almost-vegan dessert - peanuts/sesame/rice puffs/palm sugar caramel bars, to be precise.  And I dipped them in chocolate - Valrhona Araguani 72%, because there's nothing good that's not made better by a dip in Valrhona Chocolate.  The results?  They are totally crack.  I tell you, they are.

Like many great discoveries in this world - Columbus discovering "India" par example - I came upon these morsels of unworldly deliciousness entirely by accident.  Last weekend being Chinese New Year and Valentines day all rolled into one, I was looking some kind of traditional, celebratory sweets to make for the parties I was attending.  For the New Year celebration in Thailand, we make a sort of caramel we learned from the Portuguese, probably in the 16th century.  We call it ga-la-mae, a telling bastardization of the word caramel.  Galamae was, however, not my favorite dessert, but it got me thinking about another celebratory sweets that is also a caramel base, but this one, called Grayasat in Thai, has added nuts, puffed rices, and sesame seeds.  Crisp, chewy, nutty, darkly sweet, and ever-so-slightly salty, all at the same time, now this would be the perfect dessert to celebrate with this weekend. 

Well, I probably should admit that I'd never once made Grayasat.  I've never even seen it done.  It's one of those things that we would always buy, and usually from merchants that make and sell them in giant quantities.  Recipes I've managed to find on the interwebs have the same problem, they're mostly in massive quantities entirely infeasible in a modern kitchen.  Plus, being a traditional Thai recipe, an imprecise record at the best of times - Thai cooks are notorious for not writing things down - then haphazardly translated into English, the results, shall I say, are as precise as the recipe booklet that came with your EasyBakeOven^tm when you were a kid. 

No matter, I found enough information to go by, and it's basically nuts, puffed rice, and sesame, bind together by caramel made with palm sugar in place of white sugar, and coconut cream as the matériel gras instead of butter.  That sounds easy enough to do.  It also happens to be Vegan and rather "healthy" - with no refined sugar and not even dairy.  The recipes I found also called for glucose syrup, which, oddly enough, is more readily available in Thailand than it is here.  The glucose syrup, which we call Bae-sae, is there to prevent sugar crystals from forming just like in any other caramel.  Frankly, I didn't like the sound of it.  I usually avoid corn syrup or glucose syrup in my recipes anyway, preferring to substitute with honey or other more palatable ingredients such as Lyle's Golden Syrup.  In this case honey would do.

In Thailand, the traditional Grayasat กระยาสารท is made for a Saat สารทไทย festival, which is best described as a harvest festival, celebrating the end of the rainy season and heralding the beginning of harvest.  The ingredient list is telling, two kinds of new rice (one green, not fully ripened rice grains that are flattened and removed from the husked, and the other freshly harvested whole grains of rice, roasted until popped out of the husks like popcorn), nuts, and honey, all signaling a successful and abundant harvest.

In the US, finding those two specific rice is challenging, Thai harvest being thousands of miles (and months) away.  I actually have one kind with me, the flat green rice called Khao Mao, I brought some back with me from the last trip home.  Finding the popped rice Khao Tok was a little more tricky.  I couldn't skip it all together since it's important to have two textures of rice: one slightly soft and puffy, and the other crispy.  Experimenting with four different kinds of brown rice turned out spectacular failures - instead of puffed rice I got burning hot grains of rice so tiny they're practically unseen by naked eyes but for the vapor trails they left as they went projectile in my kitchen.  Final solution?  That'd be a bag of organic puffed rice from the store, no sugar or anything, just plain, hippie puffed rice.  (If you couldn't find the Khao Mao, I'd substitute with a crispy rice cereal, preferably not -or very lightly- sweetened.)