Cooking With BA: Learning Family Recipes - Bun Rieu

We've been learning to cook some of my favorite Vietnamese dishes with my parents, which really reminded us of this great Japanese cooking series on Youtube titled "Cooking with Dog". If you ever want to learn how to cook wonderful Japanese food, this web series is the best.

The picture above is a really good example of what cooking with my dad is like, casual, meticulous and with lots of beer for when we're waiting for the stock to come to a boil. We recently asked to learn how to cook a soupy noodle dish called Bun Rieu (a pork broth, crab/egg, tomato noodle soup that's not spicy, but tart and sour). Sounds good huh? Cooking with BA (Vietnamese for Dad) isn't like a typical cooking class. Mike was poised and ready to prep cook and help, but soon realize when you learn family recipes you simply sit back and watch because these recipes aren't ever written down, they are tinkered with and you learn simply by observing.

We started off by boiling two small racks of pork short ribs, cut into individual ribs (for easy snacking later).

After the initial boil, we discarded the scummy water and put the ribs back into clean water where we got a clear broth without all the impurities. Next we sat back, drank our beers and watch as BA casually and skillfully cut up the tofu, tomatoes, onions, green onions, leeks and garlic.

Next he cracked 5 eggs into a bowl and added a crab paste with bean oil, which will eventually turn into the steam crab/egg mixture in the soup.

Then we got to cooking, starting with sauteing garlic, onions and shallots in a pot with enough oil to coat the bottom of the pot.

Once the garlic/onion/shallots were tender and translucent we added a whole bunch of paprika until it was combined and starting to stick to the bottom of the pot. Then the magic happened and we deglazed with broth from the spare ribs and then just added all the broth and spare ribs to the pot, which turned into this rich red soup base.

Next we seasoned with salt, sugar, tamarind soup base (for sourness) and a fermented shrimp paste (for muskiness). Once the soup was at a flavor we liked we added the garnishes of tofu, tomatoes and green onions (which BA expertly split at the ends of the whites so they'd bloom in the soup).

At this point we thought the soup was good enough to eat, but then comes the best part and what puts the "Rieu" in the "Bun Rieu", the egg/crab-in-bean-oil mixture was gently laid on top of the soup, covered to steam and become cake-like.

That's basically it, now all that's left is to set up the bowls with garnishes and ladle in the soup. But we had to wait until later to eat our bowls because we already had dinner plans and had to wait until the next day.

Traditionally Bun Rieu is served with rice noodles, morning glory greens (that have been split and curled) and lemon balm herbs for a citrus aroma. Morning glory isn't in season so none of the Asian food markets had any so we improvised and used the greens from our hot pot dinner. BA kept saying Bun Rieu is a very personal dish to each person's tastes and preference. Initially I thought yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's delicious, but once we dug into our first bowl we realized we would have used less of the crab mixture and less of the fermented bean paste (it was muskier than we would have preferred). But at least now we know how to make one of the most quintessential soups in Vietnam and we're armed with a written recipe so we can start tinkering on our own. Thanks BA, again another awesome dish to add to our cooking repertoire.

More Winter Comfort Food: BBQ Chicken

We had some BBQ sauce left after our triumphant slow cooked BBQ Brisket. We rummaged through the freezer and found a package of chicken thigh meat and decided to use the leftover BBQ sauce to make a simple BBQ chicken dinner, this time we used our cast iron skillet and roasted the chicken in the oven. 

After the BBQ Brisket, Mike thought ahead and skimmed the fat off the remaining sauce and let it solidify in the fridge, which turned into the magic ingredient that turned our simple-left-over-let's-eat-what-we-have-around chicken dinner into another memorable winter (dreaming of summer) BBQ feast. This was another ridiculously-easy, delicious, stick-to-your-cold-bones winter meal. Hopefully with more dinners like this to come, we may just survive this recent cold snap Portland has been experiencing.

{Mike utilized the last of the buns}

{I had mine on sour dough bread - so good}

Memorable Meals: Hot Pot Comfort Food

Anne: When I say winter comfort food, what do you think of?
Mike: Soup.
Anne: Really? Soup? Isn't soup an all year round thing?
Mike: It's what I think of as comfort food.

Soup is Mike's comfort-go-to-food. All kinds. He's got mad soup making skills too. One of his favorite things to do is look at what's in the fridge and make a soup. Soup, to me is a several hours, mega-pot, steamy window, Sunday morning, all-in-one-meal kind of thing. So when we were invited to a Thai-Style Sate Hot Pot Dinner at my parents' house on a cold winter night, I knew this would be a meal Mike would turn to me and say "why haven't we eaten this yet?" 

Hot Pot is a group/individual build-your-own feast with a variety of proteins and lots of vegetables. The "Hot Pot" is a simmering pot of broth in the middle of the table where everyone just adds what proteins/vegetables they want, then when done to whatever consistency you prefer, scoop up your proteins/veggies into your individual bowl, add egg noodles if you like, more broth if you like and slurp away to your heart's content. Each bite/bowl can be as different or same as you like. It's a casually paced meal where we can chat/laugh/monitor each others' preferences (this time Mike really enjoyed shrimp, which isn't typical for him). There are many versions/broths of hot pot and this Thai-style sate hot pot absolutely hit the spot on this particular cold January night. The rich gravy like spicy broth was terrific with the seafood, beef, bitter frissee greens, bok choy and enoki mushrooms.

As the broth got less and less and became better and better from all the flavors building up with each additional piece of seafood or vegetable, we sat in awe as Mike finished up what seemed to be his 20th bowl. My dad on the other hand ate more greens than I have seen him eat in a long time.  And before we knew it we were slurping up the last of the broth and rubbing our bellies with delight. This was seriously a memorable winter meal. 

We were each given a fondu pick so we'd know who's addition to the hot pot was whose.

You better believe I took great pains to scoop up that piece of bok choy with the sate broth suspended inside.

These ladles were a score for only $1.50! Purchased at awesome Japanese $1.50 store Daiso during a visit to Seattle when my sis was still in college! The base keeps the ladles upright and caught all the drips of broth.

As I look back on these pictures I can literally feel the meal in my mouth, throat and belly. Thanks again ME & BA for another memorable meal.

Thanksgiving Weekend Eats

Thanks to Mike's beautifully smoked bourbon-orange-brined turkey, we had hardly any turkey left after Thanksgiving. In previous years we've turned the leftovers into pot pies, hot browns and many sandwiches. This year we had a few turkey bite-size snacks and that was it. But that didn't mean we didn't eat decadently the rest of Thanksgiving weekend.

Mike fortuitously took home albacore tuna, scallops and crab from the sushi bar and we feasted like royalty. With the flaked crab meat Mike made a snack of crab dip that was incredibly delicious due to the copious amounts of fresh dungenous crab. You could have spread this on an old shoe and I would have eaten it up!

Dinner consisted of making use of a bag of tomatoes, also rescued from being tossed out at the restaurant, albacore tuna steaks and scallops. Mike turned this into a Mediterranean feast utilizing leftover olives from our trip to the beach back in August!

The following night, after rummaging through the fridge for 5 minutes, Mike came up with the brilliant idea of using the chunk crab meat for Vietnamese banh canh cua, reminiscent of the bowl we had in Rach Gia, Vietnam a few years back. We had everything we needed and within a few hours Mike rocked out the most delicious bowl of this Vietnamese soup. I was very impressed.

Mission Figs

Our new favorite fall fruit is mission figs! These little suckers are addictive. Get out and get some before they skyrocket in price! We drizzled ours with blackberry & ginger vinegar, agave, and olive oil; roasted them for 15 minutes and placed them on top of the yummiest ciabatta baguette and the creamiest stilton cheese. Seriously delicious.

Easy and Delicious Berry Cobbler

Contrary to popular belief we do cook at home. Granted our meals have become simplified as of late, and are at times spread apart in between way too many meals eaten out. With the abundance of summer vegetables we tend to cook foods that are available seasonally (cheap) and try to make dishes containing what we've grown ourselves. And because I have been completely lazy with chopping vegetables I tend to lean towards making sweets as my main contribution to a meal (especially since Mike doesn't bake sweets much). We'll leave the savory cooking to him.

So one lazy weekend afternoon I decided to use up the tubs of frozen pitted cherries and raspberries we've been keeping in the freezer for over a year now and make one of our favorite desserts, a berry cobbler. I'm not a big fan of fruit crumbles (I don't like oats as a topping), but immediately fell in love with this cookie topped fruit cobbler and have been making it ever since. I've modified the recipe to make it as fuss free and easy as possible.

Living in the Pacific NW, it is easy to get your hands on buckets of berries for super cheap, if not free, such as with our raspberries, which our small patch provided an incredible abundance this year. The cherries came from our annual Hood River picking trip. This year's blueberries went to jam and we completely ran out of time to pick what was probably a stellar blackberry year. Start with a bunch of fresh berries.

Rinse and combine 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup of granulated tapioca. Basically you're making a pie filling (follow those directions if they are on the box). I added half the amount of sugar because the cookie topping adds a lot of sugar and I like my fruit to remain tart. Combine and set aside to allow it to thicken.

Next make a batch of your favorite snickerdoodle or sugar cookie recipe. I like the one out of my handy dandy Better Homes and Garden New Cook Book. The recipe is for their snickerdoodle cookie and includes all the basic ingredients I always have around, flour, sugar, butter, baking soda, cinnamon, an egg and vanilla extract.

I combine the cinnamon into the dough and skip the part about rolling into small ball sizes and rolling in a cinnamon/sugar mixture before baking. I do place the dough in the fridge for up to an hour to firm up.

In the meantime the fruit should be firming up and become jelly like. If still runny just toss in the fridge until it is a semi-soft giggly consistency like pie filling. Then place in a round tall baking dish

When the sugar cookie dough is hard enough to handle without sticking to your hands break off large chunks on top of the fruit in large hap-hazard pieces. What makes this so good is some of the half baked pieces of dough act like a gooey cookie mixed in with fully baked ones.

Bake at 350° F until the fruit starts to bubble out in between the cookie pieces or until the top is baked through.

When you cut into this and scoop out a bowl full the cinnamon sugar cookie top mixed in with the sweet tart fruit makes for such a delicious combo. We like to top ours with tart homemade yogurt, but ice cream works well too. The yogurt brings a creamy tangy flavor that just works perfectly with the cookie and berries. The best part is with almost too many berries to eat at one time there's plenty of reason to keep picking well after you've picked enough for a pie or two just so you can freeze them and make this in the middle of winter. Enjoy!

Insanely Good Catfish Dinner

The night before we thought we had a really good ginger halibut dish at Thai Restaurant Red Onion. That was until we had my parent's broiled catfish. This meal was insanely good. Light, refreshing, healthy, leisurely and utterly memorable. Mike quickly declared this meal one of his top 5 favorite all time meals we've had at my parents' house and that list grows each time we eat there.

The whole catfish was rubbed in garlic, covered in foil, baked for 40 minutes, then uncovered and lightly dressed with oyster sauce, soy sauce, salt and pepper and fresh ginger. Back in the oven for 15 minutes, then topped with green onions and more fresh ginger right before serving. Eaten rolled in rice paper with lettuce, an abundance of herbs (purple perilla, mint, fish mint and sorrel), cucumber, tart green apples and rice noodles. And if that wasn't enough there was a pungent dipping sauce made of salty anchovies and pineapples. This meal hit all the spots that make summer so great! Eaten out on the patio under a unseasonable warm late summer evening, we biked home so happy. It's amazing how an incredible homecooked meal can elevate your whole existence.