Category: Cooking and Recipes

Black Pepper Crab

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Dungeness crab is a Bay Area holiday tradition, and for my family, that means every year I make saucy, spicy, and deliciously messy Singaporean chili crab. Crab season should have begun a month ago in the Bay Area, but this year, our Dungeness crab are munching on neurotoxins and are off limits. If I were to be getting my hands on some crab, though, I’d be cooking this black pepper crab. It’s also Singaporean and has become my other go-to crab dish during Bay Area crab season. This one is deep-fried in the shell and it’s also saucy, spicy, and deliciously messy.

Honestly, I have a hard time choosing my favorite between the two. All I know is that both renditions elicit smiles on everyone’s face.

Black pepper crab

Ingredients:

1 Dungeness crab
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
cooking oil for deep-frying
cornstarch for dusting
1 tablespoon butter
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 slices ginger, each quarter sized, minced
2 red jalapeno chiles, seeded and minced
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 green onion, minced

1. In a pot of boiling water, parboil crab for 2 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water. Remove and discard the gills and spongy parts under the shell. Twist off the claws and legs and crack them open with a mallet. Cut body into 4 pieces.

2. In a small bowl, combine oyster sauce, soy sauce, and sugar.

3. In a wok, heat oil for shallow deep frying to 365 degrees. Dust crab pieces with cornstarch. Deep-fry crab until shells change color and cornstarch crust is slightly golden, about 3 minutes. Lift out crab and drain. Remove all but 1 tablespoon of oil from wok.

4. Add butter to oil in wok and place over medium heat. Add garlic, ginger, and chiles. Cook, stirring, until fragrant, 1 to 2 minutes. Add pepper and oyster sauce mixture; mix well. Add crab and stir to coat. Simmer over low heat until crab is cooked, 6 to 7 minutes. (If crab was already cooked through when deep-fried, then crab needs to simmer for only 4 minutes.)

5. Arrange crab and sauce on a serving platter and garnish with green onion.

Chicken Chow Fun

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I’m trying to cut down on pasta lately, but I’d like to think that this dish doesn’t count because it uses rice noodles as opposed to flour-based noodles. Rice doesn’t count, right? At least that’s what the Iranian in me says.

Carb delirium aside, this chicken chow fun dish is a much healthier (and delicious!) version of the restaurant classic. The meat is lean, the oil is minimal, and the vegetables are plentiful.

Chicken chow fun

Ingredients:

1 pound fresh or dried flat rice noodles, about 1/2 inch wide
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon Chinese rice wine
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 pound boneless, skinless chicken, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon chili garlic sauce
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 yellow onion, thinly sliced
3 green onions, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 teaspoon minced ginger
1 cup bean sprouts
1/4 cup roasted peanuts

1. If using dried rice noodles, pour enough warm water over them in a large bowl to cover completely. Let soak until softened, about 30 minutes. Drain thoroughly. If using fresh rice noodles, run under warm water and separate strands.

2. Marinate the chicken: Stir 1 tablespoon of the soy sauce, rice wine, garlic, cornstarch, and pepper together in a bowl until the cornstarch is dissolved. Toss the chicken gently in the marinade until coated. Let stand for 20 minutes.

3. Prepare the seasonings: stir the remaining soy sauce, chili garlic sauce, and sugar together in a bowl until the sugar is dissolved.

4. Heat a wok over high heat until hot. Add oil and swirl to coat the sides. Add the noodles and stir-fry until the noodles are lightly browned along the edges, about 2 minutes. Place the noodles onto a plate and set aside.

5. Add the chicken to the wok and stir-fry until no longer pink, about 3 minutes. Add both onions and the ginger and stir-fry until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Slide the noodles into the wok, scatter the bean sprouts over them, and pour in the seasonings. Toss until the mixture is heated through and the chicken is coated evenly with the seasonings, about 4 minutes.

6. Stir in the peanuts, place the contents of the wok onto a serving plate, and serve.

Blistered Shishito Peppers with Miso

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Sometimes I don’t have time to cook, but the desire to create something delicious wins so I end up turning on the stove and thinking to myself, okay, I have twenty minutes. Let’s do this.

Adapted from a simple Food and Wine recipe, I made these salty, earthy peppers one afternoon when I wanted to bring something to a family picnic but was short on time. Fresh peppers aside, you probably already have most of these ingredients in your pantry. These little bites are perfect with a cold drink or even as a side dish.

Blistered shishito peppers with miso

Ingredients:

1 1/2 tablespoons white miso
1 1/2 tablespoons sake
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 small dried red chile
3/4 pound shishito peppers
1 tablespoon minced peeled fresh ginger

1. In a small bowl, stir the miso and sake until smooth.

2. In a large skillet, heat the oil with the chile until shimmering. Add the shishitos and ginger and cook over high heat, tossing, until tender and blistered in spots, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat, add the miso sake mixture and toss well. Transfer to a plate and serve.

Khiar Shoor (Pickled Cucumbers)

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Khiar shoor literally translates from Persian to English as “salty cucumbers,” but it is so much more than that. Shoor are a category of Iranian pickled vegetables, be they cucumbers or cauliflower or carrots or nearly any other vegetable. There’s also torshi, but that’s a whole other classification of pickled vegetables that we’ll save for another post.

Every summer while I was growing up, my mom and all the Iranian aunties would gather in someone’s home and spend the day peeling vegetables and peppers and onions, making the next year’s batch of shoor and torshi. The air would be ripe with the smell of vinegar and garlic and the kids would be enlisted to help. The shoor would be ready to eat a few weeks later; the torshi would need to wait months, sometimes even years.

Nowadays you can buy shoor or torshi at any Middle Eastern market but nothing comes close to the homemade version. I made this version when I found myself with too many Armenian cucumbers from my parents’ garden. Once ready, these cucumbers go wonderfully with sandwiches or kotlet.

Pickled Armenian cucumbers

Ingredients:

2 red or green chili peppers
2 pounds Persian or Armenian cucumbers
5 cloves garlic, peeled
7 sprigs tarragon
4 bay leaves
1 tablespoon peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup white vinegar
kosher salt

1. Wash, clean and drain the vegetables and herbs. Sterilize canning jars, drain and dry thoroughly.

2. Fill each jar almost to the top with cucumbers, garlic, tarragon, and bay leaves.

3. Bring 6 tablespoons salt, 12 cups water, peppercorns, sugar, vinegar, and chili peppers to a boil. Remove from heat and fill each jar within 1/2 inch of the top with this hot liquid. Let cool and seal jars. Store the jars in the refrigerator for at least 10 days before using.

Seafood and Garlic Chive Lo Mein

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I work near San Francisco’s Chinatown and every day is an uphill (literally and figuratively) battle to resist the delicious noodle dishes beckoning at every corner. My favorite are the bustling Hong Kong-style shops that line Chinatown’s alleyways, serving chewy egg noodles tossed with fresh vegetables and seafood.

This dish is an homage to those restaurants that I adore so much. It’s worth it to seek out garlic chives as they impart a uniquely herbaceous flavor, although a combination of regular chives and minced garlic can be substituted. I use scallops and squid here, but any shellfish will work just fine.

Seafood and garlic chive lo mein

Ingredients:

1 pound fresh thin Chinese egg noodles
3 teaspoons sesame oil
6 squid (about 4 ounces), cleaned
3/4 pound sea scallops, halved
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup chicken broth
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon oyster-flavored sauce
4 dried shiitake mushrooms
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1/2 pound yellow garlic chives, cut into 2-inch lengths
4 green onions, cut into 2-inch lengths

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add noodles and cook according to package directions. Drain, rinse with cold water, and drain again. Add 2 teaspoons sesame oil and toss to coat.

2. Cut off squid tentacles. Cut squid bodies in half lengthwise with a knife and score the inside diagonally in a cross-hatch pattern. Combine squid tentacles and bodies, scallops, cornstarch, and salt in a bowl. Stir to coat; let stand for 10 minutes. Combine chicken broth, soy sauce, oyster-flavored sauce, and remaining teaspoon sesame oil in another bowl to form sauce.

3. Soak dried mushrooms in warm water to cover until softened, about 20 minutes; drain. Discard stems and thinly slice caps.

4 Place a wok over medium-high heat until hot. Add vegetable oil, swirling to coat sides. Add mushrooms, ginger, garlic chives, and green onions; stir-fry for 3 minutes. Add scallops and squid; stir-fry for 3 minutes. Add sauce, stirring, until it boils and thickens. Toss in noodles, mix well, remove from heat, and serve.