Paloma with Oleo Saccharum

I recently had my first Paloma cocktail, which was a revelation. Apparently I don't hate grapefruit after all, because this drink made me basically do away with drinking margaritas and switch to these instead. Think of it as a slightly more sweet, more complicated margarita, that's also pink. Palomas can be made with grapefruit soda, or they can be made with fresh grapefruit juice. And since I was trying to figure out why I needed to learn to make an oleo saccharum, once I started thinking through the drink I realized this was the right opportunity to learn.

Serve with a tomato-groundcherry salsa and some chips, and feel no shame in forgetting to make dinner afterwards

Oleo saccharum is a cool trick to extract essential oils from citrus peel, where you put the peels in with sugar and beat them up a bit until they soak into the sugar and create an infused syrup to use in cocktails. I've mostly seen lemon used in this way, and tried this once, but wasn't sure what to do with it other than make limoncello. The grapefruit version makes a really powerful grapefruit-flavor syrup that doesn't have too much extra bitterness, and it really amplifies the grapefruit flavor in the final drink. This can be made in a bowl and left overnight, but if you have a vacuum sealer and just need to have one of these as soon as possible, this can be made in a couple of hours.

The finished oleo saccharum after 2 hours under vacuum

I tried a bunch of variations on this cocktail - mixtures of tequila and mezcal, adding grapefruit bitters, charring the grapefruit on the grill first. In the end, some things helped with flavor, some with color, but a lot was overkill. I'm presenting the version I'm going to be making moving forward.

Completely pointless overkill. But the drink did come out a slightly darker color, with a bit more smoke flavor. I may revise if I oil the grapefruit first and get it over a higher flame.

I'm told by people in the know that the proper garnish on the rim of this drink is Tajin. I went with salt, but the swap certainly wouldn't hurt anything.

• 2 oz tequila, with up to 25% replaced with mezcal
• 1/2 oz fresh squeezed lime juice, from approximately 1/2 of one lime
• 2 oz fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, from approximately 1/2 of one grapefruit
• 2 oz club soda
• 1 tsp grapefruit oleo saccharum, recipe below. Substitute agave, simple syrup, or whatever liquid sweetener your body can cope with
• Coarse kosher salt, for rim of glass

Juice the citrus, saving the spent lime half. Rub this on the rim of your glass and allow to dry slightly, then dip rim in salt.

Into the glass, pour the tequila/mezcal, citrus juices, and oleo saccharum. Stir to combine. Add ice, top with the club soda, lightly stir again, and enjoy.

Oleo Saccharum

• Peels from 2-3 grapefruits
• Equivalent amount of superfine sugar, by weight, compared to the peels

Peel the grapefruit in large strips, being careful not to grab too much of the white pith layer. If you have superfine sugar, put the peels and the sugar into a bowl, or a vacuum sealer bag. If you have regular sugar, consider throwing into a blender for a few seconds, to make into finer sugar - this will help the liquids and oils more thoroughly dissolve the sugar, otherwise there's a crystallized layer of sugar that will form and be less useful. If placing in a bowl, bash up with a spoon or muddler for a while, then leave bowl overnight to extract the oils. If using a vacuum sealer, leave for 2-3 hours, or refrigerate for up to a week, no bashing necessary.

Chao Dan (Omelet with Chinese sausage and snow peas)

I had this dish at a random place in the middle of the Pennsylvania Dutch heartland, as one does when they head into Amish country. It's a riff on an open-faced omelet with influences from throughout Asia, that I have reconfigured in many ways. It's a great way to use up fresh spring greens from the garden - I've used sliced snow peas, fava bean leaves, garlic scapes, and spinach so far, and I'm sure many other possibilities would be fantastic. It has Chinese sausage (lap cheong) in all variations I've made, and is fairly similar to the more common sausage fried rice (chow fan) but with more egg and no rice.

I'm having a hard time pinning down where exactly this dish is from - Thailand, or China. It's also similar to the Vietnamese Bánh Xèo crepe that isn't an omelet at all, in terms of the filling. The name seemingly just translates as "scrambled eggs", the most common of which being the egg-tomato dish popular in China. This disappointing, because I feel like this variant deserves its own name.

Garnish however you like, but I've had it with fried shallot, sliced Thai basil, and a drizzle of a thinned oyster sauce over the top, which brings a lot of big flavors to the table. 

 

 

This recipe makes TWO omelets. Make the whole thing in series - no need to cook all of the filling at once and remove, because these are open-faced and cook quickly.

• 2 Chinese sausages (lap cheong), sliced diagonally 1/8" thick
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup snow peas or fava leaves, cut into strips
• 4-5 garlic scapes chopped, if you have them, or 2 cloves of garlic, chopped
• 1 shallot, chopped
• 2 tbsp neutral oil, divided
• 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• White pepper
• 1/4 cup Thai basil leaves, julienned
• 1/4 cup fried shallots
• 2 tbsp oyster sauce, thinned with 2 tbsp water

Beat eggs with white pepper and dark soy sauce. Gather remaining ingredients and have ready. In large non-stick pan over medium heat, briefly saute half of the garlic scapes and shallot to remove raw flavor. Add half of the sliced snow peas and toss for about a minute. Add half of the Shaoxing wine and cook until evaporated. Add half of the sausage and cook an additional 30 seconds.

Add half of the egg, swirling pan lightly to spread out fully. No need to fold this, just let it cook in a single layer on and around the filling, as in the picture below.

Slide onto a plate and garnish with half of the basil, half of the shallots, and a drizzle of the thinned oyster sauce. Repeat all steps above for second omelet.  

Beef and Bok Choy Over Crispy Air-Fried Noodles

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When I was growing up, there was a Chinese restaurant near me that served a few different stir-fries served in a "bird's nest". Although actual birds' nests are a thing, this is not what they served - it was shredded potatoes shaped into a bowl and then deep fried, usually served with a mix of seafood and vegetables in a rich, light colored but very garlic-heavy sauce. The dish has a lot in common with some versions of chow mein, which in some preparations is a bed of really crispy noodles with a very heavily sauced stir-fry plated over the top. Both are great, and the consistency is what really wins me over - crispy on the edges, but chewy and loaded with flavor as you work your way in, and as the noodles start soaking up the sauce from the outside in.

To try to replicate this, I bought a nest-frying tool, which is a strange contraption of two concentric hemispherical baskets that clamp together, and you load up the volume in between with potato and then deep fry the whole thing. Naturally, I've never used it. Instead, I've tried to make the noodle version of this dish a few times with minimal success, mostly because the crispy noodle cakes that serve as the foundation usually come out both squishy and burnt when trying to get heat into the center of a cake of pre-boiled noodles. On a recent attempt, after having a fit about ruining too many noodles, I gave up in a fit of rage and threw a small quantity of the noodles into my air fryer, which turned out to be the magic step - this turned a disaster of a process into a really easy one. And then today, based on a recent attempt at making a few Thai noodle soups from Serious Eats, I borrowed a technique where you make a garlic-infused oil and then use that as the oil to coat the noodles in, prior to air-frying. The result was better than any version I've had in a restaurant.

The toppings for this crispy noodle cake almost don't matter as long as there's enough of a decent, garlicky sauce to work its way into them at serving time. I tend to lean towards a beef with oyster sauce, so I liked the version that combines beef and bok choy from Omnivore's Cookbook, adapted to what was in the garden, and using some leftover rare rib roast and only lightly stir-fried. It's infinitely adaptable, so long as there's at least a cup of a thickened sauce to go over the noodles. If you get the timing just right, serving over the hot, freshly fried noodles will get them to sizzle audibly, and start soaking up that goodness right before you start eating.

A word on ingredients - use decent stuff. There's a good amount of oyster sauce in this, and Shaoxing wine is used in a couple of steps. Try to get a good quality version of these two things, which both make a difference. Try to find an oyster sauce that's actually got "oyster" as the first ingredient, and look for a wine that's got less salt and might be labeled "hua diao" or has aged a bit. This is going to change the flavor immensely, and took me a long time and many mediocre stir-fries to realize.

These are the versions of the key ingredients that I keep on hand. And yes, that's Japanese soy sauce, not Chinese.

Ham Perloo (Purlow)

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Easter has come and gone. And with that comes the true joy of the season - ridiculously cheap hams. I don't even like ham as a meal, but I somehow like ham if it's *in* something. This dish definitely scratches that itch, so every year we run out and grab a ham, to make this and some split pea soup.

This dish that seems to be common in the south, and has about ten names - pilau, perloo, pirloo, purlow, pilaf, plov - so I'm not going to bother guessing at the right spelling of this. The other fun thing is that recipes online range from incredibly bland (cook some rice in what's basically ham water) to incredibly complicated (something resembling jambalaya). The closest I found to something reasonable was one of Emeril Lagasse's recipes, but it needed a bit of tweaking to squeeze out a bit more flavor and cook things in the right order. The recipe below is therefore modified a bit from his website with a few extra ingredients and steps.

This ham purlow dish is far from fancy, but it is definitely memorable. I recommend it if you have leftover ham or want a more mild version of jambalaya.

Mandarin orange chicken stir-fry

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It's not tangerine chicken, but it's pretty close. We'll save all of the remaining peels from that box to dry and use in future dishes.

You may notice that it's been quite a while since I've posted any new recipes here. Life has been pretty busy, and I've mostly used this recipe blog as a quick resource for myself instead of adding new dishes. If I have a ton of time one of these days, I'll get a few new winners up, though truth be told many of them are very minor tweaks to existing recipes, so they're just a standard repost like most of the internet has these days.

However, I just made a dish that was NOT a repost of any particular recipe, instead being a mix of a few different versions of a popular dish, and wanted to get it posted here, both for myself in the future and for others. Plus, it's a "Costco hack" that uses their frozen chicken bites, which is a great time-saver and somewhat of a compromise between a heavy, deep fried coating (fast-food style) and not being breaded at all (authentic Hunan-style preparation).

The reason I'm making this at all is that we went to Trader Joe's today to try to find a pack of their Mandarin Chicken, which is surprisingly good, but they were out. This ended up being an opportunity instead of a burden, because they had decent fresh mandarin oranges, so we gave ourselves a challenge and tried to make something better. I had recently been researching to try to figure out what this dish originally would have been inspired by, since most Chinese-American food is not authentic - orange chicken in particular, as it was invented by the founder of Panda Express some 30-ish years ago. I love the backstory on this, as I do for other fun facts on "Chinese food" after watching The Search for General Tso (which is really good and very short, highly recommend). With a bit of digging, I found that the actual dish that Mandarin chicken comes from is tangerine peel chicken (which I believe is chen pi ji if an internet search is accurate), and it isn't terribly hard to reproduce with the right ingredients. The dish doesn't use breaded chicken, and it includes prickly ash (sichuan peppercorn), which we like enough to grow in our yard and harvest for use in Sichuan dishes. So we made a kind of mash-up of different cultures and produced a dish that was somewhere in between the American and the Chinese dish from Hunan province. And, naturally, we used lightly breaded chicken, because we had it and it's delicious, and spared us the trouble of firing up the wok this time. I can't rightfully call this tangerine chicken because we couldn't find tangerines, but we did use real California mandarin oranges, both peel and juice, and those seem to be a close second on many websites. Also, mandarins are genetically one of the parent citrus fruits, so I'm going to just claim that this substitution isn't as blasphemous as, say, using pasteurized orange juice.

One point of note, as referenced above - we used Costco's Just Bare lightly breaded chicken, which is routinely cited as a knock-off of Chick-fil-A nuggets, but it also makes a fantastic base for coating in a glaze, be it teriyaki, pineapple, or this mandarin orange sauce. I highly recommend this substitution, which we cooked in our air fryer before tossing in the sauce.

I ended up using a whole bunch of kitchen electrics, as shown in this photo of my kitchen chaos, but you could probably get by with the basics if you have an oven and a clean coffee grinder.

Lots of gadgets involved that helped - air fryer (left), spice grinder (left of oranges), and rice cooker (right)

We'll probably adjust this dish quite a bit, since I plan to make it regularly in both breaded and unbreaded forms. I'll update to the best version we come up with, which may end up including black vinegar and Shaoxing wine in some form, which would be a bit more faithful to the real recipe. And we will try dehydrating mandarin peels instead of using them fresh, to see if this concentrates the flavor further (which I suspect it will).

Mandarin Orange Chicken (with Broccoli)

Created after modifying highly from Woks of Life version and reviewing historical recipes on chen pi ji

• 1 lb lightly breaded chicken bites (we used Just Bare brand, but you could do a cornstarch-battered and fried breast chunk, or just use unbreaded chicken thighs stir fried with a bit of ginger and garlic, which would also be excellent)
• 1 tsp sichuan peppercorns
• 6 dried red chili peppers, whole
• 4 mandarin oranges
• 1 tbsp canola or peanut oil
• 1/4 cup chicken broth
• 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp cornstarch, dissolved in a small bowl with 1 tbsp water
• 1 scallion
• 1/2 lb broccoli florets

First, get all of the pieces ready. Steam the broccoli until par-cooked. Wash and peel the mandarins, reserving the peel of at least 2 (you only need 2 for the peels, possibly 4 to get enough juice). Try to get the peel off in large pieces. Scrape the white pith off of the inside of the peel with a serrated knife to reduce bitterness, and cut the two peels into long strips. Juice enough of the peeled mandarins to gather 1/4 cup of juice. In a large measuring cup, assemble the sauce liquids - the mandarin orange juice, chicken broth, vinegar, sugar, and soy sauce.

Cook the chicken using an appropriate method (for us, this was air-frying the breaded chunks) until done. Once the chicken has about 5 minutes remaining, heat a large frying pan (NOT nonstick, you need it ripping hot) and toast the sichuan peppercorns over high heat for 30 seconds or less, until it begins to release fragrance, and place in a spice grinder to cool for a minute before grinding to a powder. Slice the scallions on an angle, separating the pale white part from the green part.

Back in the empty and hot pan, add the chili peppers and mandarin peel strips for about 15 seconds. Then add the canola oil and the white part of the scallions, and toss all to coat for another 15 seconds. Now carefully add the juice mixture from the measuring cup - this will splatter, so be careful. Cook until this darkens and thickens, at least a minute, possibly more. You want to caramelize the flavor a bit, but not reduce this until it's a syrup.

Now, all within about 10 seconds of each other, add just enough of the cornstarch/water mix to thicken the sauce to a glaze (less is better here, and don't use all of this unless you really need to or else you'll make a paste), then add the cooked chicken and the par-cooked broccoli and toss all to coat. Throw in the green onion tops, toss again, and serve over rice.