Mom's Braised Asian Ribs, and My 100th Post!

One of my pet peeves is calling a dish "Asian," but I didn't know how else to describe these ribs made with mirin, sake, and fish sauce.  After all, nothing gets labeled as European Salad Dressing or European Spice Rub.  I often call my family's dishes Chinese, Malaysian, or Singaporean, but this one is a mix of Japanese and Southeast Asian flavors.  Mom says she got the idea from some cooking show, probably one of the Taiwanese or Hong Kong shows she watches, and copied the general idea.  So while I was visiting in New York the week before Christmas, I showed her how to make carrot cake while she taught me this recipe.  She's cute -- I think she intends on doing a recipe swap every time I visit.  She says my dad adores these ribs, and after Joe tasted hers he was excited I was making them too.

One thing worth mentioning: In my hurry at the supermarket, I didn't realize I bought boneless country-style ribs.  This resulted in the fattier pieces becoming juicy and fall-apart tender, while the leaner pieces were a bit tough and dry-textured.  Buy spare ribs, not too lean, with bones in them.

Oh, and it's my 100th post!  Yay!

From top-left: The ribs are seared on each side; ginger and garlic are sauteed briefly; the ribs simmer in mirin, sake, water, fish sauce, and ketchup; they are braised until the meat is fall-apart tender.  Think ketchup is a strange ingredient?  The condiment originated in Asia, and some say ketchup comes from a Malaysian word.  The sauce is delicious, lightly infused with ginger and the other flavors, so pour it over.

Stained Glass Cookies

These Stained Glass Cookies are works of art.  Hold them up, and you can see through their candy centers. They can look like red glass ornaments on your cookie trees, and the cutouts in turn can be decorated with colored sugar and adorn another cookie tree.  They were a gorgeous addition to my Christmas cookie baskets.

These ornament cookies look almost too pretty to eat, like they should be hung up on a real tree to catch the light.

And for some variation, a light brushing of water followed by a sprinkling of colorful sugar also makes your cookies festive.

The method couldn't be easier.  After the cookies bake for a few minutes, pull them out and sprinkle crushed hard candy into the cavities, then bake a little longer.  But Joe and I were doubtful, and you should have heard us preparing.

I don't think the oven is hot enough to melt the candy.


Of course it is! ... but if I pile it too high, will it overflow?


Is the the candy going stay in place or flow like a river?

I can tell you that the candy will spread, but only so much.  So you may want to sprinkle a little extra in the points of those stars and snowflakes.  And our little mounds of crushed candy sat taller than the cookies, but did not overflow.  Try it ... I bet people will tell you they've never seen anything like it!

Cookie Mania, and Brown Butter Crispy Rice Treats!

Nothing spells holiday love like these wrapped baskets of cookies.  This year Plum Cherry Crumb Bars, Brown Butter Crispy Rice Treats, and Stained Glass Cookies and Sugared Cookies were added to the Linzer Cookies my sister demands I make every year.  Unlike past years when I stressed and swore over torn and cracked dough or runny royal icing, these were fairly easy-going and fun.  And luckily I finished them and shipped them off before I got hit with this nasty cold.

To make the Plum Cherry Crumb Bars, follow the Raspberry Crumb Bar recipe I made in October and substitute with Sarabeth's Plum Cherry Jam.  Yes, it's pricey, but like we said, "Mmm... No time like the holidays to splurge on $10 jam."  To make the Linzers, follow the Linzer recipe I used last year.  I'll share the recipe and technique next time for the Stained Glass Cookies.  For now, let's talk about Brown Butter Crispy Rice Treats.

These are like your childhood favorites, but browned butter, real vanilla bean, and salt give them subtle grown-up touches.  I thought this was a gluten-free treat, but discovered that Rice Krispies have malt in them!  And a wheat-free cereal I found also had malt, so that means it's wheat-free but not gluten-free.  I intended them as a treat for Joe's sis, but I'll have to continue my hunt for gluten-free cereal.  Also, although I'm a chocolate lover, I don't advocate for the use of chocolate here because it overwhelmed the other flavors.

These are made much like the way you made them as a kid with mom.  The butter is just cooked on low heat a little longer to brown it, and a scraped vanilla bean is added.  Can you see the vanilla specks in the melted marshmallow?  The cereal is added, then the mixture is poured into a pan and smoothed out.  They're more moist than the back-of-the-cereal-box recipe, so I let them sit out overnight.

Sweet Potato Biscuits with Cinnamon Honey Butter

Photo updated November 2012

This post is really late -- I meant to have it up before Thanksgiving!  But then I went to New York and taught Mom how to make the Sweet Potato Biscuits in a recipe swap, and she taught me to make Chinese Shrimp-Stuffed Eggplant.  And right after that was the baby shower for my sis.  Then Thanksgiving happened, and I cooked for two days.  So I'm finally taking a breather to tell you about what are now my most favorite biscuits I've ever made.  And don't skimp on that Cinnamon Honey Butter!  It didn't sound like my thing, but it's dangerously good.  They made another appearance on Thanksgiving morning, and again at the dinner table.

But before that I was exhausted with making these shower lollipops and pink velvet cupcakes.  From top left: The cupcakes are easy enough, if *ahem* your sister would only stock her kitchen with a mixer, whisk, or dry measuring cups; my twin sis with another prego friend; everyone loved the "Bun in the Oven" candles, which came in a box that looked like a stove/oven and smelled good enough to eat; and making these chocolate and pink white chocolate lollipops were easy enough, except making dozens will keep you up til 3 a.m., as we discovered.

Back to the biscuits.  I was getting obsessive about finding the right recipe.  I didn't want a fussy recipe that called for yeast and required waiting for rises.  Drop biscuits would give me misshapen lumps.  I wanted biscuits -- really tall, crisp on the outside, and soft on the inside.  I was drawn to this recipe because the sweet potatoes are flecked throughout the dough, rather than being one dark shade of orangey-brown.  And they smell really darn good.

I didn't have any self-rising flour, so I used a substitution (see the recipe), and it worked perfectly.  The dough will be sticky and have the texture of cottage cheese, but don't overwork it.

I did have reservations about using melted butter when you always hear that the secret to flaky biscuits is cold ingredients.  So I made the recipe as directed, but stashed the cut-out biscuits in the freezer for 20 minutes before baking, for some insurance.  They came out nice and tall.  No flat hockey pucks here.

Mom's Shrimp-Stuffed Eggplant

New photo updated Oct. 2012. 

You might think shrimp and eggplant are an odd combination, unless you've had this dish at dim sum.  I love it.  Mom still finds it weird to have me snapping shots around her and trying to note every little detail, but I got the recipe!  In exchange, I showed her how to make sweet potato biscuits, which I'll be posting soon.

The eggplant is sliced on the diagonal, and then sliced again (but not all the way through) to create a pocket to hold the shrimp.  The slices are then filled with shrimp, and browned in the pan.  Because eggplant sucks up oil like a sponge, eggplant dishes can be greasy.  Mom uses the Chinese method of quickly frying for color and flavor, then steaming the rest of the way through to avoid more oil absorption.  The dish is finished off with the usual oyster sauce, and Mom's addition of mirin adds complexity.  Use Japanese eggplants, which are slender and long, rather than the short and bulbous Italian variety.

Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies

Banana-nut bread and the chocolate chip cookie make a good couple.  These Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies have the flavor and lightness of banana bread, with the taste and chocolate hit of chocolate chip cookies.  They're fun and easy to make, and just what I was looking for after slightly fussier apple crostatas and bar cookies.

I've been doing more, but my baking and cooking projects don't always end up on the blog.  Some I consider too ordinary or ubiquitous.  Sometimes I neglected to take photos.  Sometimes, as in this case, the recipe just didn't work out.  I had been looking for a pumpkin biscotti recipe but they're so few.  This recipe was halfway to a disaster.  The flavor was good, but they didn't get to the correct, hard biscotti consistency and had chewy middles despite repeat stints in the oven.  I finally decided that pumpkin puree must be too wet for proper biscotti, and that the storebought variety I'd tried before probably uses some industrial powdered pumpkin flavoring.

My pumpkin-carving didn't go so great either, since I cleaned it the week before and let it sit, and it grew moldy.  In the end, I carved a simple face in a very thick gourd since stores were sold out of pumpkins.  I had to envy Joe's pumpkin (bottom right), since he did a better job and his pumpkin is still mold-free.

These cookies went waaay easier.  Surprisingly, the recipe called for oats and some whole wheat flour, and I used some white whole wheat flour I had on hand.  Everybody's favorite start to cookie dough is that mixture of butter, white sugar, and brown sugar.  The remaining ingredients are added, and then scooped onto a cookie sheet.  The cookies bake up small, but I had a big yield of over 40.  The recipe calls for cutting up your own chocolate chunks, but I didn't realize and had bought 60% cacao chocolate chips.  But they were perfect, nice and big with a deeper, grown-up flavor.

Raspberry Crumb Bars & Citrus Bars

These raspberry crumb bars got inhaled here at home and will be making a repeat appearance, but those citrus bars?  Never again!  It's not that they weren't good, because what lemon bar isn't good?  Especially one with the addition of lime?  But where the raspberry crumb bars were relatively simple and fun, the citrus bars demanded more elbow grease and then ran into technical issues.

The raspberry crumb bars involved making an almond-y dough that would serve as both the base and topping.  The base gets baked briefly in a cookie sheet lined with parchment, then cooled and spread with jam.  Then the remaining dough is scattered on as a topping and baked.  When cool, a bench scraper works well as a cutter.  They were bagged with the citrus bars as thank-you gifts to volunteers at an event I organized and excitedly received.

The citrus bars?  This one photo speaks to my stress with this recipe.  There were lots of lemons and limes to juice, and the limes took more work.  And then I used a rimmed cookie sheet as directed for the base, but the dough came up to the rim, leaving no room for the pourable fillling!  So I moved and pressed the partially baked dough into this 9x13 pan and the rest into an 8x8 square pan, and poured the filling on top.  It worked, but some dough pieces floated to the top and it wasn't attractive.  But confectioners sugar covers up all sorts of ugly, so I was still able to gift them.

Now I did make this once before, halving the recipe and baking it in this 9x13 pan and it worked out just fine, if you want to try it.  But I'd had enough with this try, plus it's a heart attack special with the 8 eggs, pound of butter, and 4 cups of sugar (which I cut down to 3 cups without a problem).  But I really recommend those raspberry crumb bars!