Another installment of food on a stick, thanks to inspiration from buddies Matt & Adam and their book titled…uh…On a Stick…which is always more fun to eat than food on a fork. Plus you get to play sword fight with the sticks after you eat (you do that too, right!???)

Grilled Chicken Satay is super easy to make – 1 bowl, 1 knife and 1 cutting board. Oh, and don’t forget the sticks too.

Instead of making a peanut dipping sauce, I decided to include the sauce flavor in the marinade and top with chopped peanuts. So imagine this: salty (peanut, soy sauce), sweet (brown sugar), garlicky and gingery, crunchy and a hit of tang (rice vinegar). You can also include a spoonful of hot chili sauce if you’d like.

How to make Chicken Satay

The ingredients for the chicken satay marinade are

If you’ve never used rice vinegar before, it’s one of my must-have pantry items for Asian foods. Look for “rice vinegar” on the label – it’s easy to confuse it with “rice wine,” but they are very different products. One is a tangy vinegar, and the other is cooking wine. 

There are two kinds of rice vinegar: regular and seasoned (or sweetened). You can use either in this recipe, but I prefer the regular, since we’re using brown sugar in the marinade. You’ll have to read the label carefully or just look for the color differences on the label. Mitsukan (a client of moi) uses BLUE for unsweetened or regular rice vinegar and RED for sweetened or seasoned.

And as for the peanut butter – chunky or smooth, it’s up to you! I’m a chunky gal myself. And I don’t mean the size of my thighs.

Start by slicing your chicken into long, thin strips. You can use either chicken breast or thighs (I prefer dark meat, but it’s totally up to you!). Try to get the chicken strips all similar in thickness (uh, actually thinness) so that they’ll cook evenly. See how thin I like to slice? 

If they’re not quite thin enough, smash ‘em with your chef’s knife. Lay your chef’s knife flat on the chicken and use the heel of your hand to pound the strip flat.

Mix your marinade and let the chicken marinate from 30 minutes to overnight in the refrigerator. 

While the chicken is marinating, soak the bamboo skewers in water to prevent burning. If bamboo sticks burn, they’ll break. Then you’ll have food on a broken stick.

Just before you’re ready to cook the chicken satay, you’ll thread the strips on bamboo skewers just like this:

Continue reading Chicken Satay...

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2011. | Permalink | 34 comments

There aren’t very many recipes that can boast “2 ingredients” and taste better than fall off the bone baby back ribs smothered in sweet, sticky Thai chili sauce, which by the way, isn’t really all that spicy despite the name.

5-minutes hands-on and two ingredients: ribs and 1/2 cup of the sweet chili sauce. Salt and pepper don’t count, but even if you did count it, it’s still will be the best 4 ingredient-dish you can ever make.

Just a word on the ribs – there are 2 camps of rib-lovers:
a) meat fall off the bone camp
b) I want to gnaw and tear meat off the bone camp

I’m part of the first group, I enjoy tender, juicy, succulent meat that requires very little effort to pry from the bone. If you’re like me, you’ll love this recipe and I bet you’d never order ribs at a restaurant again.

Also, I’ve got a trick for you that will make the ribs even more tender.
Continue reading Fall off the Bone Baby Back Ribs with Sweet Chili Sauce...

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2010. | Permalink | 116 comments

When all else fails, there’s always curry to fall back on. Despite all the beautiful food you see on this blog, I do have my share of kitchen disasters (that blob of charcoal was supposed to be fried chicken).

Thai curry is my “break in case of emergency” meal – as I always have a can of coconut milk, a can of curry paste, shrimp in the freezer and miscellaneous vegetables in the refrigerator. Rice is only a one-finger trigger button away or already cooked, stored in the freezer.

Here’s what I used:

Fresh mushrooms: I love the meatiness of large King Trumpet mushrooms, but you can use fresh shiitake or even regular white mushrooms. By the way, there are quite a few mushroom recipes on Hokto’s site that I’ve developed for them…their mushrooms are organic and grown in California)

Thai curry: Comes in a can (like above), a plastic tub or envelope packet. If you buy a big tub of it, you can store unused portion in refrigerator for a few months. But I prefer to get the small cans.

Coconut milk: Which is not coco-loco (used for cocktails). Look in the Asian aisle of supermarket. If there are many different brands, shake the cans. The ones that sounds watery will be…well…watery and tasteless. Go for the cans that sounds like its full of thick liquid.

Shrimp: Tail on or off, up to you.

Vegetables: Bell peppers and fresh basil leaves (not pictured) – you can use Thai basil if you have, or just regular sweet basil is fine too.

Step 1: You’ll want to cook the curry paste just a bit, just to release the oils and the flavors. The amount of curry paste you use is totally up to you (and you can always add more in later after tasting the curry).

Step 2: Now pour in the coconut milk and whisk to incorporate the curry. This helps the curry paste break down and become smooth.

Step 3: add in the vegetables to cook for a couple of minutes. At this point, taste the curry, and if you want it more spicy, then whisk in additional curry paste.

Step 4: Now for the shrimp. cook until shrimp is cooked through.

Step 5: Throw in the basil leaves, stir and you’re done.

Serve over cooked rice.

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2010. | Permalink | 79 comments

Hi there! Please welcome guest writer (and Steamy Kitchen intern) Jess from  Jess’s Many Mini Adventures in Food and Farming. She’s an amazing, passionate gal who loves food as much as I do. She’s here to share her family recipe for Hainanese Chicken Rice.

-Jaden

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:

Enjoy!

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2009. | Permalink | 175 comments

Crock Pot Vietnamese Pho

It’s no secret that good Pho broth requires a gazillion hours of simmering time. Time that I just don’t have. Tony, a boyfriend from a lifetime ago, told me his Dad used to simmer giant vats of pho broth overnight for his little pho restaurant in Houston. So, one day, I thought it would be really genius to do the same. Dump a bunch of beefy, tendony, knuckley, marrowey bones into the largest stockpot that I have and let it simmer away while I slept.

It didn’t quite work out as I had intended:

11:30pm Initial hard boil of the bones to get all the yuck, guck and scum off. Char ginger and onion.

11:38pm Dumped out water, added clean water, the clean bones, spices, ginger and onion. Let the dance begin.

11:45pm Nighty-night

12:35am Is the flame low enough? Maybe I need to check to see.

1:23am Hmmm…I smell something funny. Go check.

2:41am What if it boiled over? Go check.

3:24am What if there’s a gas bubble in the pipe and the the stove spontaneously bursts out in big flames? Maybe I should sleep on the couch closer to the kitchen.

4:45am Gosh I’m hungry. Sneak a big spoonful of Ben & Jerry’s Pistachio Ice Cream.

4:51am Did I forget to put ice cream back in freezer? What if the gas bubble really does happen and stove spontaneously bursts out in flames? Then sleeping on couch is a dumbass idea. Crawl back to bed.

6:00am Kids wake up. Jumps up and down on my belly trying to wake me up.

6:15am PHO-KING TIRED

Enter the Slow Cooker

A few weeks later, I was contacted by the peeps at Crock-Pot® The Original Slow Cooker <- yes, they are insanely paranoid about me using their correct trademarked name, so much that they’ve given me very specific instructions 4 separate times on how to properly spell/mark their product names.) They sent me their new eLume Crock-Pot® Programmable Slow Cooker with Touch Screen Technology to test.

<- shiny, pretty and fancy. Oh crap, I forgot the ™ after eLume™.

It’s the perfect size (6.5 quarts) for a big mean mama pot of PHO!!!

Oh yeah, baby! It solves my problem of paranoia when leaving stove on all night.

What I love about the eLume™ Crock Pot® is© its™ lighted™© touchscreen®™©. Just a light tap is all that you need and it’s totally programmable from 30 minutes to 20 hours of cooking time. You can also set it to start cooking at a certain time, but when making my Crock Pot Pho Recipe, I don’t recommend a delayed start time since we are working with raw meat bones.

How to make Crock Pot Pho

Whether you use the Crock Pot Pho method or the traditional stove top method, there are a couple of steps that you’ll need to do before throwing it all in the Crock Pot or slow cooker. Namely, toasting the spices, grilling the onion/ginger and pre-boiling the bones. These aren’t absolutely necessary steps…you’ll still make great pho…BUT these extra steps will make the difference between good pho and pho-bulous pho.

Toasting the Vietnamese Pho Spices

You can buy Pho spices at most Asian supermarkets – you can buy the spices separately (coriander seeds, cloves, cinnamon, star anise, fennel and cardamom pod) or purchase them already mixed up in a package (which also includes a small mesh bag). The quality of these pre-mixed spices are just okay – but sometimes it’s just convenient to pick up a bag, not to mention much cheaper if you don’t already have many of these spices. A Pho spice pack will typically sell for $1-$3.

This day that I made the Crock Pot Pho, I used individual spices. I didn’t have cardamom pod. So yes, if you are missing one of couple of the spices, it’s okay. To get the best flavor from these spices, you’ll toast them in a dry skillet.

Grilling Ginger and Onion

This is a totally optional step, but it really gives the ginger and the onion a deep, sweet, mellow flavor. When I’m making Pho the traditional stovetop way, I’ll char them in the broiler. But with the crock pot method, I didn’t want to use the oven at all. After toasting the spices (above) in a frying pan, I add a bit of oil and grilled the onion half and thick ginger slices.

Pre-Boiling the Bones

Knuckles, leg bones with lots of marrow are the best for making soup. The marrow will also make the soup rich and thick. The bones are pre-boiled for a few minutes on high heat to clean the bones and get rid of the nasty scum.

You’ll bring a big stockpot of water to a boil on high heat. Add the bones and boil hard for 10 minutes. You’ll see brownish scum rise to the surface. If you hadn’t taken the time to pre-boil the bones, all that scummy stuff ends up in your soup.

<– nasty pho-reaky scum

Drain, discard the scummy water and briefly rinse the bones.

Now you’ll add the spices, ginger, onion and bones to the slow cooker.

Fill with fresh, clean, cool water about 1-1/2 inches below the surface. Set your slow cooker on low for 8 hours. I haven’t tried this method on high, but I’m sure it would be just fine.

So let this cook during all day while you’re at work or at night while you sleep and you’ll be rewarded with the cleanest, best tasting pho soups ever. Because the slow cooker doesn’t let the stock boil hard, it’s safe, easy and convenient.

Here’s what the stock looks like when it’s been cooking for 8 hours on low. Notice that the level of the liquid is still pretty high. The low, even setting doesn’t evaporate the precious liquid as much as a stove top can. The stock is strained before serving.

Other Pho Ingredients

I used different ingredients than my previous version of traditional Vietnamese Pho and I wanted to highlight them. Instead of using dried rice noodles, I used fresh rice noodles found at Asian markets, in the refrigerated section because all these need is a quick dip in boiling water. Very fast!

I also bought a package of Vietnamese Beef Balls (called Bo Vien Dan). There are all sorts of balls – beef, pork, chicken, fish, crab, and my favorite – beef tendon. They come frozen in a package and they are pre-cooked, so all you need to do is throw the frozen balls into the same pot of boiling water as you cooked your noodles in. Just boil for a couple of minutes until the beef balls are heated through. I like cutting these beef balls in half, so make them easier to eat. It’s not so pretty trying to stick an entire beef ball in your mouth. Unless…you’re like really into that.

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Vietnamese Pho Recipe (cooked the traditional, long, slow, stovetop method)

Vietnamese Chicken Pho Recipe (Pho Ga)

©Steamy Kitchen Recipes, 2009. | Permalink | 152 comments