chez pim

Crab feast and Thai seafood sauce

It took me a good long while before I got over my silly fear and tried dungeness crabs.  No, no I wasn't afraid of eating crabs.  I spent every summer of my childhood in Hua Hin on a diet composed almost entirely of crabs and prawns - in fact I'm rather surprised I haven't developed an exoskeleton by now. 

My fear was of pre-cooked crabs, actually.  In Thailand - ok, perhaps not the entire country but at least my family - we never ate dead crabs.  No, we don't eat crabs while they are alive - I only meant we don't eat crabs that had been dead before they were cooked.  If you go to wet markets in Thailand, you won't find a lot of dead crabs for sale.  You will, on the other hand, find crates of still alive (and sometimes crawling) crabs for shoppers to buy and take home to cook.  This is understandable, I suppose.  Dead crabs deteriorate quickly in the tropical heat, by the time you get them home their flesh have broken down into nothing but fishy, smelly mush - we say it's "gone back to sea" in Thai. 

This proved a bit of a predicament for my buddhist "kitchen mother" (that's how household cooks are referred to in Thai).  I still remember her sitting on the floor over a wooden chopping board with an ill-fated crab on top, her eyes closed, one hand in a half namaste while the other holding a sharp cleaver high over her head, her lips moving, quietly (and rapidly) reciting a pray begging the crab's forgiveness before quickly lowering the heavy cleaver to sever the crab in half.  Saturday Night Live can't make that skit up. 

Anyway, that's a rather long-winded way to explain why it took me a good many years to try one of the Bay Area's local specialties, the Dungeness crabs.  And now, when the season is high and the crabs sweet, they are one of my favorite things to eat, especially when dipped into spicy, garlickyThai seafood sauce.  Every time we have a crab feast, I make this sauce for myself and make sure there's drawn butter and even cocktail sauce for others.  But then everyone ends up stealing my sauce and I have to get back to the mortar and make more.  Luckily it's so easy, you hardly need a recipe.

Happy moo-year!

 

Chocolate-caramel shortbread sandwiches

I've been in a bit of a mad search for the perfect sablé recipe.  I'm completely obsessed with the sandy French butter cookies from the north of France.  The best ones I've had came from a tiny bakery called Grain de Vanille in a little town named Cancale on the rugged Brittany coast.  That-little-bakery-that-could is small in size but not stature, as it is owned and operated by the Michelin-three-star chef Olivier Roellinger.  We haven't been back there in a couple of years, and I'm positively aching for some of those sablés (though chef Roellinger calls them Galettes de Cancale.) 

I'm not quite ready to share the sablé recipe yet, I've got a really good one now, but I'm not sure if it's the ultimate yet.  I'll share it when I get there.  Meanwhile, my mad search resulted in loads of perfectly delicious, buttery sablé cookies - albeit not quite the caliber of le Grain de Vanille yet - and I had to do something with them.  That's when this idea came to me.  Cookie sandwiches!  The obvious choice is chocolate ganache - who doesn't love chocolate ganache?  But I wanted to make something even more special.  Yes, and what about some gooey salted butter caramel - didn't the NY Times just claim that everyone now loves salty caramels?  (As for me, I've loved them for ages thank you very much!)

But filling cookie sandwiches with gooey, salty caramel turned out to be a bit of a design problem.  The caramel oozed out of the cookies before it had enough time to set.  So here's where the ganache came into play again.  I piped the ganache along the edges of the cookie, forming a levy so I could pour the caramel inside.  Topped with another butter piece of cookie, the sandwich is now ready to be devoured.  The caramel will still ooze out once bitten into, but by then I am beyond caring - and so will you, too. 

You can use just about any butter cookie or shortbread recipe you like.  If you need some place to start, Dorie Greenspan's "punitions", as interpreted by Deb of Smitten Kitchen, is a very good one. 

Menu for Hope V, raffle results

So here it is, the list of the lucky winners in our Menu for Hope V raffle.  This campaign raised exactly US$ 62,206.86 in support of the UN World Food Program.  Considering the economic climate we've found ourselves in, this is absolutely amazing.  And for this, I have all of you to thank, the generous donors who came back year after year to lend a hand, and food bloggers all over the world who have adopted this as our communal cause. But I owe a particularly huge thank you to the six local Menu for Hope hosts, Alder of Vinography, Ed of Tomato, Jaden of Steamy Kitchen, Matt of MattBites, Meena of Hooked on Heat, and Sara of Ms.Adventure in Italy.  I wouldn't have been able to pull off this campaign without their help.  Another big thank you goes to Derrick of Obsession with Food, who wrote and administered the program we use to pick the raffle winners for the past three years.

I'm sure you're very eager to see if you've won anything, so I won't hold you up any longer.  The list of winners is at the end of this post.

If you found yourself one of the very lucky winners, please contact the blogger who offered the prize or the local host for the prize if you don't know how to contact the blogger directly.  Please make sure you use the same email address you gave us when you bid to contact them, that's how we can make sure you're actually you! 

Pork Ragu

Sorry to have kept you waiting a while for this recipe.  I've just been a bit busy.  But better late than never, yes?  So, the ragu I made to go with my heretic pasta the other night was made with pork, because, as I said before, why offend only one religion when you can do three at once.  Ha.

The recipe came from Paul Bertoli's amazing book, Cooking by Hand.  This is not a book for the faint of heart, I should warn you.  The Ragù alla Bolognese recipe alone is over 1,500 words--but who am I to complain about long winded treatise on a traditional dish, you've seen my Pad Thai recipe, right?

The recipe calls for beef, ground chuck, skirt, or hanger steak to be precise, but I made it with ground pork butt instead, because my friend Beccy doesn't eat beef.  (Yeah, you can choose your friends but you sure can't choose what they eat!)

So, here's my slightly bastardized version of Paul Bertoli's Ragù alla Bolognese.  Hey, if you want the real thing you could always go buy the book.

Pasta with Pork Ragu; or how to piss off two gods with one bowl, Part I

After the holidays indulgences, I'm sure I'm not the only one craving something homey and comforting.  And after all the religious pomp and circumstances we were exposed to -voluntarily or not- during that time, I guess I'm also not the only one with a hankering for a little rebellion.  That's when an idea struck me.  I knew just what I wanted to eat, Strozzapreti pasta.

Strozzapreti pasta is a traditional pasta shape from the Romagna region of Italy.  The Italian name is literally priest-chokers in English.  Legend has it that this particular shape, sort of resembling a short, twisted bit of rope, signified a religious rebellion in the region long suffered under Papal rule (from the 13th all the way to 19th century).  Romagna housewives would cook this pasta for the local priests, in hope that they would choke to death as they scoffed it down greedily.  A heretic pasta for my very own post-holidays rebellion, how perfect!  To go with this pasta I made a ragu.  You don't have to be Italian to find ragu homey, yes?  This time my ragu would be made of pork, because why offend only one religion when you can easily do two (or three, actually)?