Porkchops fresh off my so-called outdoor grill.

Now that I am working out a lot, I am eating more food while trying to be a bit more conscious as to what I’m putting in my body.  I’ll write a proper blog entry on that later, but here’s a quick rundown of the staples of my diet:

• non-fat yogurt with fruit on the bottom
• low-carb yogurt with fruit
• low-fat or non-fat hormones-free milk
• bacon
• Healthy Choice or Lean Cuisine frozen dinners (for snacks)
• a variety of regular teas and herbal teas
• eggs
• white rice
• whole wheat or multigrain pasta
• honey
• coffee
• meat
  I buy whatever meats are on sale that week at Ralphs.  This saves me money and keeps my diet interesting.  Sometimes it’s pork spareribs, sometimes it’s Argentine scallops or top sirloin steaks or chicken drumsticks. I’m not very picky when it comes to meat. I love meat and I don’t really discriminate!  Not a big fan of offal, lamb or turkey though.

I am trying to add more vegetables into my diet. I like vegetables, I really do, they’re just a bit more work to prepare than a steak.  I love eating and cooking meat because I usually just prefer my meats deep-fried. Though I don’t deep-fry my steaks, I love browning ground beef til crispy and eating with a bowl of jasmine rice and a splash of fish and chili sauce. Easy and satisfying!

Today however, I had some pork chops that I decided to grill instead of fry.  I marinaded them for a few hours in this Pork Chop Marinade recipe from About.com. I had all the ingredients on hand and it was very easy to throw together.  Then I fired up my “grill” which is actually an oversized and stylized George Foreman grill that has been designed for both indoor and outdoor use.  I could use it inside, but I worry about the smoke setting off the alarms so I use it on my little balcony instead. It’s a small space but it works wonderfully!

My rinky-dink grilling setup

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Shrimp and Tofu Stir Fry

Tim was working late last night and I wanted to make him something for dinner.  He tries to avoid carbs at night and also watches his sodium and fat intake. These are things that aren’t important in my own diet so I had to put extra thought into what I would make.  If I was the only one eating, I would just salt, lightly batter and deep fry the shrimp to have with jasmine rice.  That wasn’t an option in this case.

I rummaged through my fridge and saw that we had a lot of raw shrimp and tofu left.  Tim always stocks up on tofu and I decided to do something with a block.  I put together this simple dish after skimming through some recipes online. I had looked on Google for shrimp tofu stir fry and wasn’t happy with any of the results. Most required a lot of ingredients I didn’t have (carrots, snowpeas, bean sprouts) and called for an hour of marinating. I didn’t have enough time to let things marinate.

I found a rather simple recipe called Japanese Mom’s Tofu Stir-Fry which is very different from what I ended up making. However, I used the basic idea of soy sauce, sugar and mirin for my dish.  If I had other vegetables lying around, I would have thrown them in too but I only had broccoli.  Also, I love garlic and used a lot but you may want to use less depending on your tastes.  The amount of ginger I used also added a nice bite.

Shrimp and Tofu Stir-Fry with Garlic, Ginger, Thai Chilies in Mirin and Soy Sauce

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon cooking oil - I use canola
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 inches ginger, peeled and julienned
• 14 - 18 large shrimp, peeled and deveined, tails attached (some shrimp have a sodium solution added; soak for about 5 - 10 minutes in cold water to lower sodium content)
• 1 package (15 oz) extra firm tofu, cubed
• chopped vegetables (optional)
• 1 tablespoon mirin (I didn’t have mirin so I mixed 2 tablespoon hot sake with 1 tablespoon sugar per instructions I had found online)
• 1/4 cup low-sodium soy sauce (or more to taste)
• 2 Thai chilies, minced (optional)
• black pepper

In a large skillet or wok, heat 1 tablespoon oil with a tablespoon sugar. Once the sugar begins to just caramelize, add in the minced garlic and stir fry. Once the garlic starts cooking, it will smell very fragrant and delicious. This is your cue to throw in the the ginger.  The rest is pretty easy: just stir in the other ingredients beginning with the shrimp, tofu, and veggies. Stir in the soy sauce and mirin mix.  Mix together until shrimp is cooked through. Add black pepper and Thai chilies to taste.

I made 2 packets of instant ramen noodles without the seasoning, drained.  Normally, I would have mixed the noodles in with the stir fry but with Tim avoiding carbs, I just put it off to the side and mixed it into my own plate.

If I do say so myself, the dish was easy and quite delicious. I experimented with what I had on hand and I think this recipe is pretty open to adaptation.  I think it would work great with eggs and onions also.  Eating healthy isn’t so hard at all.

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A 34 OZ bottle of Valentina Salsa Picante Extra Hot

We have a lot of hot sauces. One of them is a Mexican hot sauce called Valentina Salsa Picante. We have the Extra Hot version. It’s very cheap and easy to find in our local supermarket, Ralphs.

Tim uses it every day on his eggs.  Until recently, I had never used it. Now I use it nearly every day.

We have discovered that the Valentina is great as a pasta sauce. It’s absolutely perfect! I always have a lot of pasta in my cupboards, but rarely prepare it because I don’t feel like making a sauce.  Sometimes I just toss with olive oil, garlic and a few spices, but I really prefer a red sauce with my pasta.  Even though tomatoes aren’t an ingredient, the Valentina reminds us of a tomato-based sauce with its thickness and goes really well on pasta.  I’ve had it with spaghetti and whole wheat rotini so far and found it delicious. Sometimes I sprinkle grated cheese and a bit of seasoning on top (lemon pepper seasoning or red pepper flakes or a bit of garlic powder), but it’s also great by itself.  I have a feeling I’ll be eating a lot more pasta which is a good thing. I’ve been trying to cut back on the white rice and eat more whole wheat pasta.

On a different note, I created a new photo album with pictures of dishes I’ve prepared. Some of them I have blogged about and many of them need an entry. I hope to get to them soon.  An embedded version of the gallery is below.

[View Slideshow] [Back to Main Gallery]

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Was the well-intentioned, 1st Annual Los Angeles Street Food Fest a disappointment?  According to Twitter, the answer is yes.

A Twitpic of the massive lines at the LA Street Food Fest from seeson

I actually first heard about the Street Food Fest on Twitter.  A few days ago, one of the food trucks I follow mentioned that they might be at the fest.  I had forgotten all about it until I realized this morning that today was event day.  I went to the official website for more information and my mouth started to water.

Many of the city’s popular and trendy food trucks were gathering for the day.  They were offering special menus of small bites and keeping prices low so foodies could sample a bit of everything.  All that separated me from street food heaven was a short subway ride downtown and a $5 entrance fee.

Or so I thought.

One of the great things about Twitter, if not the best thing, is the search function.  Where else can one find real-time answers and opinions?  I was confident that there would be at least a few people who would be tweeting from the fest.  I entered a search for “street food fest” so I could get a sense of what the scene was like downtown.

The results started pouring in. Some were only a few seconds old. My eyes widen and my mouth got dry.

People were comparing the lines to lines at Disneyland. LinLorienelen said they were like Depression-era food lines.  Others had waited 40 minutes just to gain entrance to the fest, plus another 30 minutes waiting in line to order and then another 30 minutes to get their order.  What happened to being able to float from vendor to vendor and sample everything?  I was discouraged, to say the least, and then I saw this video from mochipark who tweeted, “If you’re not already at the street food fest, stay away. Way away.”

That was all I need to see (I had to laugh at the person saying “I’m still hungry!”).  I’m not a very patient person, even less so when it comes to food.  As the day progressed, I kept checking Twitter to see if the situation was changing.  It only got worse.  Several tweets talked of waiting over an hour and a half for entry only to be turned away. Yes, turned away! (Why bother waiting that long in the first place?!) The organizers had to nip the problem in the bud, although it was way too late by then. The turnout and demand was overwhelming. Many vendors rain out of food by 2 PM, even though the festival was scheduled to go until 5.  It was difficult for most to try more than one vendor, and the waiting, great Jebus, the waiting!

I hope that next year (if there is a next year), the venue will be larger and the event more organized. Though really, I don’t know what they could have done differently this year and I don’t blame the organizers.  This is the power of the internet and of social media. News of the street fest spread across the web like wildfire and everyone and their uncle showed up.  In my search results, I saw that tons of people were on their way downtown. Did they not know what was going on? Did they not care? I wonder how many people actually use the Twitter search function like I do.  I felt bad for those who tweeted, “On my way to the L.A. Street Food Fest. So hungry!”  Yeah, good luck satisfying that hunger in the next 2 hours. I’m sure it didn’t help that today was gorgeous, sunny and warm.  Strangely, the official Twitter account for the fest was silent today.  I’d like to imagine that those behind the account were too busy spending the day going “Oh. Shit.”

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A couple weeks ago, Tim found a very old, barely used meat grinder at the thrift store down the street.  It has a manual crank and is 100% metal with quality construction that’s hard to find nowadays.  He bought it right away and though we’ve already made our own ground beef burgers and chicken patties, he’s really looking forward to making his own sausages.

It got me thinking about my mom’s homemade sausages.  She would make them now and then, stuffing the casing with a plastic funnel and chopstick. It was long, tedious work, but boy, those sausages were delicious!  I flipped through my Cambodian cookbook, The Elephant Walk, and was delighted to see that it had a recipe for saik krok khmer but the ingredient list was quite long and the entire process intimidating.  I went online to search for more Cambodian sausage recipes and to see if they were all similar. Instead, I stumbled upon a site that was selling homemade saik krok! Actually, she called them kwah ko and I’m not quite sure what that means.  In Khmer, saik means meat so saik chrouk = pig meat (pork), saik mouan = chicken meat, and saik ko = cow meat (beef). I think kwah ko might mean “beef sausage” (she was selling beef sausages whereas the recipe in my book was for pork), and kwah may just be a word I don’t know.  I’ve always known saik krok to mean “sausage meat” and beef sausage would be specified as saik krok ko while pork would be saik krok chrouk but enough with the language lesson!

Anyway, I placed the minimum order which was for 50 links at 2/$1.  Shipping was another $10.  I received my order a couple days later and the smell and color brought back childhood memories.  However, the links were smaller than I expected, about the size of a fat baby dill pickle; I was just used to the larger links my mother made.  Also, each link wasn’t really tied off or twisted tightly, just loosely separated by string.

Cambodian Sausage Links

No matter, I simply cut them up at the ties, removed the string, and placed them on my electric grill:

Getty ready to feel the burn!

They cook up pretty quickly:

The smell was mouth-watering.

Now, I expected some grease to come out and drain off, but I didn’t realize so much would come off!  Normally, if these were twisted off and tied as oppose to having cut ends, all that grease would be trapped inside the casing.  That’s how most people eat them!  You can’t really tell from this picture, but the drip tray collected an insane amount of grease:

That's about 3/4 inch of grease!

Tim was put off by the grease and didn’t really eat any of the sausages.  He eats a lot healthier than I do, and while I prefer fattier cuts of meat (especially pork), he’s lean and trim all the way.  Oh well, more for Vuthy!

I had the sausages (6 links total) with white jasmine rice.  They were pretty similar to my mother’s homemade sausages: meaty, a bit oily, and citrus-y.  I don’t quite know how to describe the taste.   Some say sour but that’s not quite it.  Tart, perhaps? They are suppose to get more so as days go by.  I believe it’s the combination of lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, and other herbs and spices that go into the mix.  It’s not a taste everyone will like, but I love ‘em and finished off the other 6 links the next day.

A simple, delicious meal in my book!.

I’ll be buying more once I go through the other 40 or so links. Hopefully, that will take a while.

The next picture is not of the sausages but is an example of another simple Cambodian meal.  When we were tight on time or money, my parents would make us fried eggs with dipping sauce.  The fried eggs are simply eggs cracked onto a very hot, oiled skillet. The hot oil ensured that the whites would get thin and crispy.  I always pop my yolks to make sure they are fully cooked because I don’t like runny yolks. The fried eggs would then be served with white rice and a dipping sauce of minced garlic, fish sauce, and tamarind.  It’s fast, easy, cheap and delicious. I don’t often need more than that.

Simple, crispy fried eggs.

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White rice with water spinach and chilies in oyster sauce.

I’m a big carnivore.  I don’t find a meal to be very satisfying unless it has meat in it, so it’s quite rare for me to enjoy the dish pictured above.

I was in the Asian market the other day and noticed that they had water spinach for sale.  It’s not something that’s always available so I grabbed a bunch.  In Khmer, it’s called tha guon.  It has various other names but you’ll most commonly see it referred to as water spinach or morning glory because it’s part of the same family.  It’s quite popular in Cambodian dishes as part of a sour soup and is often paired with pork or fish.

A lovely bunch of raw water spinach.

It was sitting in my fridge for 2 days before I finally decided to do something with it. I didn’t have the patience or ingredients for a soup, so I wanted to find something simple.  After browsing a few of my favorite Asian food blogs, I decided to just simply stir fry it in oyster sauce.  A popular Thai restaurant near me has that on the menu as a side dish though I have never ordered it.

So after washing, trimming and snapping the longer stems in half, I stir fried the tha guon in a bit of oil and minced garlic before adding some oyster sauce and chopped Thai chilies.  It was quick and easy, with the end result being so yummy that I didn’t miss the meat at all.  Water spinach is very “meaty” in itself, with hollow stems that retain their crunchiness when cooked and chewy leaves that soak up the sauce.  Maybe one day I’ll cook it up proper and make a Cambodian soup with it.

Speaking of meat, though I don’t know if I would call it that, today I bought a big, thick slice of beef liver that was on special at Ralphs since it was going to be past the sell-by date tomorrow.  The piece was huge and looked almost like a juicy steak, but it was nothing of the sort.  I took it out of the packaging and it was slippery and floppy.  It makes me shudder just thinking about the texture.

I pan fried it whole and then sliced it up.  My entire apartment ended up smelling like liver which is not a good thing!  I do not like the smell, texture or taste of liver at all.  So why did I buy it in the first place?

Freshly sliced liver ready to be wolfed down in less than a minute.

My dogs will eat almost anything, not that I think they even taste it to begin with.  Penny inhales her food like a Dirt Devil vacuum.  In fact, I only sliced up the liver because if I gave her one big piece, she’ll just try and swallow it whole.  It’s unbelievable how they will whine and drool for things that aren’t normal dog food, and yet once they get it, it’s just GULP GONE.  Jesse actually took her time and chewed, but once she noticed that Penny had finished, she started eating faster and gulping down 3 or 4 pieces at once.  I guess my dogs love their meat almost as much as I do.

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