I feel like that commercial for Beggin’ Strips…

baconbaconbaconbacon…BACON!

It’s a recipe I’ve adapted from Marcus Samuelsson’s brand new book, New American Table….recipe for Pasta, Bacon and Peas at Steamy Kitchen on TLC.

This is one of those perfect perfect fall-winter recipes that you must make for Thanksgiving. Because it’s super-simple. If you’ve never made gnocchi before, please trust me that it’s easier than you think…please don’t be intimidated by the “gn”

Two throaty letters THAT close together sometimes scare me too.

But I promise you, it’s not bad at all. Here, let me hold your hand and walk you through it.

1. Mix together some canned pumpkin, lemon zest, salt, ricotta cheese, egg yolk and grated parmesan. In a separate bowl, add the flour. Now, here’s a secret shortcut. The recipe calls for “sifted flour” but I’m lazy. I don’t like to sift. I use a whisky-thingy to briskly whisk through the flour which breaks up any clumps. Does the same job. Plus, I like saying “briskly whisk.”

2. Add some of the flour (not all) You’re gonna mix with a spatula until the flour disappears.

3. Now add the rest of the flour and use your fingertips and lightly mix/knead. It’s a wet, sticky dough, but you’ll only do this for a minute. You can add more flour if it’s too sticky.

4. How do you know when you’ve added enough flour? Press your finger into the dough. It should be slightly tacky but clean. Then divide that dough ball into 4…and roll out with your hands one of the sections into a 1-inch diameter, long snake.

5. Cut into 1-inch pieces with a knife. Then you can use your fingers to lightly roll each piece to get them evenly sized. But seriously, this step is not necessary at all – you’ll be pan frying the gnocchi and any fancy handwork or groovy fork-marks will disappear anyways.

6. Heat a pan with some butter, add gnocchi pieces, fry until both sides golden.

7. After you fry all batches, clean the pan. Add new butter and olive oil. Fry the sage until fragrant. Remove and discard the sage. Then whisk in balsamic vinegar. Pour over the gnocchi. THAT’S IT!

8. Shave some parmesan and serve.

See, I told you gnocchi was gneasy.

It’s not everyday that you get an email from a reader asking to be an intern.

A free intern.

Hell yeah!

*eyes sparkling* rubbing hands together…Will she do dishes? Laundry? Scrub the floors?

Uh…yeah…prob not. She said “intern” not “housecleaner.”

Well, okay, but STILL! Someone to go through my spam, read comments, correct my spelling, ghost comment on other blogs. SCORE!

Oh sheesh! I’m just kiddin’ ya! But I know that’s what y’all were thinking!

Seriously, having an intern is a serious commitment on my part, to me it means mentoring, sharing, supporting. It means unzipping the day-to-day details of my career and REALLY analyzing why and how because *snicker* some days the why’s are simply “just cuz” and the how’s are “staggering blindly,” which really…doesn’t…sound…too…mentor-like.

But it also means creating space in my life each week to flick the switch on Skype and talk with Jess, going through photog tips, blogging advice, how to write recipes, how to do the SEO dance and just general advice. In return, Jess will be researching, writing and photographing for my Ingredients section and post a handful of delicious recipes like this one, her family recipe for Hainanese Chicken Rice.

I think this will be a great adventure for all of us!

Jess’s blog is Jess’s Many Mini Adventures in Food and Farming. She’s an amazing, passionate gal who loves food as much as I do. Please welcome Jess to Steamy Kitchen!

-Jaden

p.s. have you ever considered asking one of your favorite veteran bloggers to intern?

Hey all,

Jess here, Steamy Kitchen’s new intern. That’s me chewing on a mango in my tiny kitchen preparing for a meal at Synergy Farm (a farm on an island!) where I intern at. I’m actually in my kitchen right now on my lunch break, looking out at the barn and the carrots in the north garden, munching on a quesadilla with beet greens and feeling amazed all over again at how I ended up here, on a farm, writing to all of you wonderful readers!

I’ve been here since late March, just after my 24th birthday. Before that, I was living in Cambodia helping girls get an education; before Cambodia, I was working at Google, and waaaaaay back before then (well not so long ago, actually) I ran an afterschool program in the bay area. I love adventure, and I love to consider the small ways I can change the world for the better, and over the past few years, I’ve become convinced that my way of making my world better is through food.

Growing up in Orange County, California, I never thought much about where my In-N-Out Burger or spicy tuna roll came from. Every since I was 4 years old perched on a kitchen stool, stirring up Betty Crocker, I’ve always been in love with food: cooking it, eating it, playing with it. I love cooking with friends; chopping veggies gives me a high like no other; but it was only recently that I’ve become fascinated with how our food is grown, processed and distributed to us and also how it affects our health, our environment and our communities. I figured it made sense to get down in the dirt and learn more about these issues firsthand, so I became an apprentice on a small organic farm in the beautiful San Juan Islands.

So what’s all this got to do with blogging? The food blogging community has been a way for me to connect with other people who think and care about food as much as I do. I’m completely inspired by all the amazing folks out there sharing their recipes and opinions and lives. Jaden’s agreed to transmit some of her samurai skills in cooking and food writing to me so I can join in the fun.

All this food love had to come from somewhere, and I tend to attribute a lot of it to good genes. My mum’s side of the family is Singaporean and I grew up in a whirlwind of popiah, freshly baked curry puffs, and beef rendang. Though I’m open to all kinds of cuisines, I hold a special place in my heart for a good plate of chili crab or chicken satay.

When I was small my family made many trips to my grandparents’ house back in Singapore. Early in the mornings, before it got unbearably hot, my grandpa would head down to the local hawker center (a food court with lots of different stalls) to pick up breakfast. He would come back to the house with a bag full of packets wrapped in banana leaves, still hot, shiny with oil, and intensely fragrant. We’d each carefully unwrap our packet, uncover the pieces of tender, perfectly steamed chicken on top of savory rice. We’d tuck in to the fragrant ginger-garlic-chickeny heaven, topped in our favorite combinations of magical sauces and eat till we were ready to face the sticky tropical day.

These days you can still find Hainanese chicken rice in hawker centers across the island for a couple of dollars a plate, and also in high-end restaurants serving up authentic cuisine. This is what a hawker center looks like — like a mall food court, only with mee goreng and peanut soup instead of Sbarro!

It’s often called Singapore’s national dish. When I was a kid and my family would go back to visit Singapore, I had three loves: fried bananas, paratha, and chicken rice. When I was visiting family last November, it was one of the first things they took me to eat — the carcasses in the stall beckoned to me with the promise of super-fresh tender chicken — some things just don’t change.

Though it gets its name from its origins in Hainan, China, it was really when overseas Chinese brought the dish to Singapore that it got a new personality and became famous.

According to my mom, this recipe is really only authentic when made with a “kampong” chicken, which means basically, a chicken from the village: the kind that roam around in the sun and eat whatever grubs and grass and scraps of rice are available. These kinds of chickens look pretty skinny by our standards, but they have an amazing flavor that I can only describe as “extremely chickeny.”

Here on the farm, we raise the closest equivalent to a “kampong” chicken that you’ll likely find in the US — not as scrawny, but pretty much as delicious. Our chickens are organically fed and pasture-raised, which means they get to spend their days outside, hanging out in the sun, roam in the grass, pecking at greens and grubs. We raise about 120 in each batch and they take about 8 weeks to go from chick to chicken rice. As my mentor, Farmer Susan likes to say, these chickens live a really really good life and then have one really bad day. They are ridiculously good just boiled plain in a pot of water and salted slightly.

All that good care makes these chickens more pricey than your average bird and on a farmer’s salary, it’s tough to afford them, but thankfully in our chicken processing just a couple weeks ago, I was able to snag a couple of tiny 2-pounders that we wouldn’t be able to sell, that were just perfect for chicken rice.

Hello guys and gals, it’s Jaden back again – Jess gave me her recipe for Hainanese Chicken Rice and I made it to show you step by step instructions! It’s a multi-step recipe, with 4 components:

1) Chicken
2) Rice
3) Chili Dipping Sauce

oh yes, the soup too, but you don’t really have to do much other ladle into the bowls.

So, let’s start with the CHICKEN.

Hainanese Chicken

This is an organic supermarket chicken (I wish we were all as lucky as Jess to be able to have fresh chicken!) Here’s the deal about the chicken. You gotta buy the best. Because this Hainanese Chicken Rice dish is all about the pure taste of the chicken, you really want to go with organic. It’s worth the money for your health, the environment and taste buds.

When you buy a whole chicken and are cooking it skin-on, and ESPECIALLY if you’re steaming or poaching the thing, you want to make sure you get the “nasties” off.

I’m sure by looking at this photo you know what I mean. What I’m after is smooth, unblemished skin.

So I give my guy a facial.

Yes, I’m totally serious!

I exfoliate my chicken.

Wow, I can’t believe I just confessed to you that I give my chickens a spa treatment. Please don’t think I’m strange! Please tell me that you do this too!??????

Start with a small handful of kosher salt. Regular table salt is too fine to use to exfoliate. Sea salt too expensive. Just use kosher salt. Oh and even if you don’t have that loose skin on your chicken, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to exfoliate — there’s still hidden guck and yuck that is trapped in that chicken skin. TRUST ME. Your chicken will look and taste better this way.

Now RUB RUB RUB!!

Be gone wrinkles!

Be gone trapped guck!

Be gone dead skin! <- yes, I know that sounded ridiculous on so many levels.

Work those pores!

Rinse, pat dry and ta-da!!!

Glistening.

Glowing.

Soft.

Smooth.

Taut.

Chicken.

Check those lovely pores.

Season the inside and outside the chicken with salt and stuff the bird with ginger and green onions. Remember, you are not only seasoning the chicken, but also the poaching water too, so be generous with the salt. I generally double the amount of salt that I would normally use on a chicken. I’ll show you how much water we’re adding in a sec.

Put it in a big pot and fill with water to just cover by 1 inch. Note that some of the stuffing might fall out. Which is totally okay. Don’t worry.

Bring that baby to a boil and then immediately turn the heat to low to keep a simmer. You’ll begin to see some of that scum. Now hey, if we didn’t exfoliate our chicken, I bet that scum would be a lot browner. I have a handy dandy scum skimmer. If you don’t have a scum skimmer, buy one, it’s only $2!

After simmering on the lowest heat (just enough for little tiny bubbles to break surface) and your chicken reaches the correct temp (take the chicken temperature at the thickest part of the thigh that’s not touching bone, it should read 170F). This is is done!

Prepare an ice bath and immediately lift the chicken out of the pot with 2 big slotted spoons or 2 big fat spatulas.

Here’s a tip. Don’t try to grab the chicken legs to pull the chicken out. You’ll end up tearing the skin and heh, maybe even tearing the drumsticks outta the chicken which results in you standing there holding two drumsticks and the rest of the chicken plopping back into the boiling hot broth which then splashes back on your arms and face. Speaking from experience, of course.

Oh, and don’t even THINK about pouring that clean, delicious broth down the sink! We’ll be using that to cook the rice, prepare the sauce and to drink as soup! So, remember, gently lift the chicken out from under and try not to disturb its delicate (and exfoliated!) skin.

My pot of ice water wasn’t big enough, but it worked, I just turned the chicken over a few times to make sure both sides were cooled. Why are we doing this, you ask!? Ha! I thought you’d never ask. Well let me tell ya. Plunging in an ice bath stops the cooking process immediately AND tightens the skin, making it springy and firm. The quality of the chicken skin is important in this dish! It’s all about the skin texture.

See here? That’s your soup! Season with salt if necessary.

Hainanese Rice

I use Jasmine rice, or long grained rice. Of course, feel free to sub with whatever rice you want, but I prefer Jasmine white rice. I’m using 2 cups of rice. Rinse the rice grains several times in water to get rid of excess starch and other rice cling-ons. Then let the rice soak in water for 10 minutes.

Drain the rice completely, as much as possible.

Grab a pot and saute the garlic and the ginger. Mmmm…can you smell that??

Add the drained rice to the pot.

Fry the rice grains for a couple of minutes…this gives the rice SO much flavor! I like to add a bit of salt to the rice if the broth isn’t already salted.

Remember that broth? Well, pour 2 cups of this into the pot. Normally when cooking rice, I’d go with a ratio of 1 cup rice : 1.25 cups water/broth. But since we’ve already soaked the rice and the rice has absorbed some of the water, I’m going with 1:1. Bring the rice to a boil, then immediately turn the heat to low, cover tightly and cook for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let rest (still covered! no peeking!) for 5-10 more minutes. Done.

Oh, if you have a rice cooker, even better! After sauteing the garlic, ginger, rice – just add that into your rice cooker with the broth.

Perfect rice.

Chili Sauce for Hainanese Chicken Rice

If you’re a fan of sriracha chili sauce, this will knock your socks off. Jess puts sriracha, lime, sugar, salt, couple tablespoons of that lovely chicken broth, garlic and ginger into a blender and wheeeeeee:

Voila….Jess’s Hainanese Chicken Rice

It’s week 3 of the Summer Fest! Last week we all made recipes using fruit from trees, and this week it’s all about Beans and Greens. If you haven’t yet heard about Summer Fest, it’s a four-week celebration of fresh-from-the-garden food: recipes, growing tips, even tricks for storing and preserving summer’s best with my co-hosts White on Rice, Away to Garden, Gluten-Free Girl and Matt Bites. Of course, It’s not a party without your participation! And I’ll tell you how in just a bit.

My choice in the greens category is Chinese Broccoli or Gai-Lan (guy-LAHN) my favorite Asian vegetable. Earlier this year, I grew gai-lan in our garden….and failed. The failure had nothing to do with the vegetable itself, it was just me traveling too much and giving very little garden love to poor gai-lan.

So, I’m going to give you step-by-step photo instructions on how to make this “most flavorful noodle dish in the world” recipe from Corrine Trang’s new book called Noodles Every Day.

Chinese Broccoli (Gai-Lan)

I have a modest garden, and there are some vegetables that my boys have laid claim to. One of them was regular broccoli and the other Chinese broccoli. They wanted to see how big the broccoli could get and refused to let me even touch them!

You have no idea the patience and willpower it took for me to NOT cut the broccoli! I had nightmares about this thing.

While the broccoli still tasted great, even after being plucked a bit past its prime…but unfortunately, that’s not how Chinese broccoli works. Once the Chinese broccoli stem starts shooting up, and before it begins flowering, that’s the time to pick and enjoy them.

If you wait too long and the flowers open up, the Chinese broccoli becomes bitter. You can also tell from the cut stems if the Chinese broccoli will be perfect or too old. See the bottoms of these cut stems? It’s milky-transluscent and smooth.

If the bottoms of the stem have a hard white circle in the middle (instead of smooth, milky and translucent) it will probably be past its prime and taste tough and bitter. Well, our home-grown Chinese broccoli grew VERY TALL and bloomed with small white flowers…but tasted so bitter. boo.

Photo below is store-bought Chinese Broccoli…see the beautiful stem-bottoms?

So, the lesson learned — I’m putting the kids in charge of a different vegetable this year…maybe something that grows super-fast and tall…corn?

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For this Broccoli Beef Noodle Stir Fry recipe, you can use ANY type of noodles. Really, spaghetti noodles are fantastic in this dish. I happened to have Japanese style egg-noodles, so that’s what I used! Cook your noodles according to package directions.

While the noodles are cooking, marinate the beef slices in soy sauce, cornstarch, sugar, oyster sauce and rice wine. If you don’t have rice wine, use dry sherry or any dry white wine will do. The sugar and the oyster sauce will help the meat caramelize.

You want beautiful, carmelized meat in your stir fry?

Here’s the secret. DO NOT CROWD THE MEAT! Single layer, ladies and gents!

Once you add it to the wok or frying pan, LEAVE THE THING ALONE. Resist the temptation to shake, move it around or flip…until the first side has a chance to caramelize. Then flip.

See the nicely caramelized bits?

Once the meat finishes cooking, remove to a plate. Now it’s time for Chinese Broccoli (Gai Lan).

Stir fry for a minute, scooping up the oils at the bottom of the wok all over the Chinese Broccoli. Bathe the oil over the Chinese Broccoli.

Now turn heat down, add 1/4 cup of water or browth and cover to let steam.

A couple of minutes later…test the Chinese Broccoli to see if done! A knife should pierce easily into the steam.

Now its the cooked noodles turn to take a bath in the sauce.

See it absorb all the juicy bits?

Now return the beef and broccoli to the wok and serve!!

Yum.

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How you can join Summer Fest

Summer Fest 2009 is a four-week, cross-blog celebration co-created (alphabetically listed) by A Way to Garden, Matt Armendariz of Mattbites, Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen, and Todd and Diane of White on Rice Couple, with guest appearances from Shauna and Daniel Ahern of Gluten-Free Girl, Simmer Till Done’s Marilyn Pollack Naron, and Paige Smith Orloff of The Sister Project. And from you -that’s critical. Your contributions are desired, and needed.

Will you play along? Have a recipe or tip that fits any of our weekly themes? Starting today, with the subject of herbs, you can contribute in various ways, big or small. Contribute a whole post, or a comment -whatever you wish. It’s meant to be fun, viral, fluid. No pressure, just delicious. The possibilities:

Simply leave your tip or recipe or favorite links in the comments below a Summer Fest post on my blog, and then go visit my collaborators and do the same.

The cross-blog event idea works best when you leave your recipe or favorite links (whether to your own blog or someone else’s) at all the host blogs. That way, they are likely to be seen by the widest audience. Everyone benefits, and some pretty great dialog starts simmering.

Or think bigger: Publish entire entire posts of your own, if you wish, and grab the juicy Summer Fest 2009 tomato badge (illustrated by Matt of Mattbites).

Summer Fest 2009 Schedule:

• Tuesday, July 28: HERBS. Any and all.

• Tuesday, August 4: FRUITS FROM TREES (also known as stone fruits, but we won’t scream if you toss in a berry or another fruit, promise).

• Tuesday, August 11: BEANS-AND-GREENS WEEK (either or both, your choice).

• Tuesday, August 18: TOMATO WEEK. How do you like them love apples?

What did my co-hosts make for the Summer Fest Party?

Diane and Todd make a salad with the TOPS of radishes, beets and carrots!

A beautiful Kale Frittata from Margaret of Away to Garden

Shauna joins us this week with her very first home=grown salad ever!

Simply gorgeous – Matt Armendariz shares one of his top 5 fav recipes of all time.

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I’m a bad, bad blogger. One who eats crumbly chocolate chip cookies while editing photos on a very expensive laptop with nose 2 inches from screen, thinking out loud “is this shade of green more greener than that shade of green?” I never take the time to back up even now I’m a subscriber of multiple backup websites. And I read your very funny blog posts while drinking wine which sometimes results in a spontaneous spew of red, staining liquid that lands on my keyboard.

I’m a bad blogger because Chef Robert Danhi it took the time to chat with me on the phone a couple of weeks ago and I have yet to post the podcast. In fact, I don’t even know where the damn audio file is. It could be because of my upload-then-delete-on-harddrive-without-checking-upload habit that I accidentally slingshot (slingshotted? slingshoot? slungshot?) our recorded phone convo into a gazillion cyber-bytes, each zipping in separate directions.

I’m praying that Google will somehow come across the files, scoop it up and just stick it in his shirt pocket, at least just until I can figure a way to harness that “beam me up” technology to come claim my podcast.

-Jaden

p.s. I have some winners to announce! The winners of the Club Med vacation and the $50 Sur La Table Gift Card will be announced as soon as my jet lag decides it’s had enough (hopefully tomorrow)

But I still have one more giveaway going on – Dr. BBQ Cookbook Giveaway (ends June 21st 12pm EST)

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Southeast Asian Flavors Cookbook

This morning we returned from a week in California, and all I wanted to eat was Chef Danhi’s Malaysian Chicken Noodle Soup. Warm, rich broth with silky-juicy chicken. Slippery fresh rice noodles and snappy shrimp. So I thought I might as well post this recipe without the podcast, before I lose this recipe and the photos too.

While the recipe is from Robert’s new book Southeast Asian Flavors Cookbook, the photos above are mine when I had made his recipe two weeks prior. It’s a stellar recipe that I know you will absolutely enjoy. The James Beard Foundation nominated Southeast Asian Flavors among the finalists for a 2009 Book Award in the international category and it contains over 100 authentic recipes from Southeast Asia and over 700 color photographs that Robert Danhi took himself.

Southeast Asian Flavors Cookbook is a must-have in your Asian cookbook collection, because not only are the recipes authentic (Danhi has been traveling and studying Southeast Asian cooking for over 20 years) but the book also incudes anecdotes about the culture and history of Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. Also make sure to visit Danhi’s website for this book – tons more photos.

This particular recipe for Malaysian Chicken Noodle Soup is virtually fool proof and one of the best recipes I’ve seen for an Asian noodle soup. The reason is because the chicken is slowly poached, resulting in meat that is tender and never overcooked. This is also the same technique that I use for Hainanese Chicken (recipe is in my upcoming cookbook)

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A few notes for Malaysian Chicken Noodle Soup Recipe

A few notes on the ingredients and techniques:

• This method of poaching involves bringing the pot to a boil and then turning off the heat (keep the lid on!) and let the chicken slowly, gently poach in the very hot water until cooked through. It’s almost impossible to overcook the chicken this way, and you’ll get a very silky texture. Once the chicken is cooked through, immediately plunge it in ice-water to stop the cooking process and firm up the skin. Once the chicken is cool enough to handle, you’ll use your hands to shred/pull the meat. Whether you keep or discard the skin is up to you (I personally love the skin.) You won’t be using the entire chicken for this Malaysian Chicken Noodle Soup Recipe – reserve the rest for another meal.
• Try to get a small chicken, if your chicken is larger than 3.5 pounds, you will have to increase your poaching time. If your chicken is over 4 pounds – once you’ve finished your 45 gentle poach, return the pot to a boil and immediately turn off the heat. Let the pot sit for another 5 minutes, then check for doneness.
• If you don’t have white peppercorns, just use whole black peppercorns
• I love using fresh rice noodles that you can find in the Asian markets (refrigerated section). If they are super-fresh they don’t need to be boiled…just soak them in warm water until softened. If they are still a bit hard, try soaking them in hot water for a few seconds. If you don’t have access to fresh rice noodles, then use dried, wide rice noodles and follow the instructions on the package for soaking/cooking times.

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