Dim Sum at Din Tai Fung and Ginger Chicken with Sushi Rice at Home

Today started out as a really bad day. I had an important business meeting, but it...canceled. I was supposed to meet a friend for lunch, but he...rescheduled. A day that looked incredibly full was now...completely empty.

I checked the TiVo in the bedroom and watched the Chocolate Battle on Iron Chef America (Bobby Flay v. Graham Bowles). Since I had nothing better to do, it seemed as if it was time to finally clean off my desk. That's when I found a review I'd cut out from the Los Angeles Times by Susan LaTempa about Din Tai Fung, in Arcadia. She made their dumplings sound amazing, but Arcadia?

That's miles away from where we live. Besides which, how accurate a review is depends on the taste of the writer. I hadn't read her reviews before, so she was an unknown quantity. But I love dumplings and, if they were as good as she said they were, maybe it was worth the drive.

From where we live near the beach in Pacific Palisades, Arcadia is on the far, eastern edge of LA, a good 40+ miles by freeway, taking me east across the LA Basin, north through Downtown, then across Pasadena, and finally east again into the San Gabriel Valley.

The review had predicted there'd be a long line out in front. She was certainly accurate about that. I joined the queue and waited 45 minutes before I got a table. With some friendly advice from the waitress and guided by the review, I spent the next hour enjoying the highlights of the menu: a mound of sautéed garlic-string beans, 10 pork/crab dim dumplings, a large steamer filled with pork shumai topped with whole shrimp, and stir fried noodles with shrimp and spinach. One of the condiments that came with the lunch was a small bowl of finely shredded fresh ginger. Adding soy sauce into the bowl with the ginger made a dipping sauce that added the right amount of edge to the sweet dumplings.

Susan LaTempa's review accurately reported about the special qualities of dishes like the pork/crab dumplings: usually a Chinese dumpling has a stuffing of meat and some vegetables, but here the dumplings had an added "spoonful of fragrant broth in each".

Happily, the meal put me in a very different frame of mind. More than an enjoyable lunch, Din Tai Fung's dumplings made me want to go home and cook. The julienned ginger and soy sauce combination had given me an idea.

Passing through Downtown, I made a quick stop in Chinatown to pick up ingredients. An odd fact about Chinatown is that virtually all the large Chinese supermarkets are gone. What's left are mom-and-pop style stores like the Far East Supermarket at 758 new High Street. Although small, the market has a good collection of Chinese vegetables, fresh fish, and meats. I decided on deboned chicken legs, a nice piece of fresh ginger, baby bok choy, and some shiitake mushrooms.

Ginger Chicken with Italian Sausage and Bok Choy

You can use breast meat, but dark meat holds up better and won't dry out as easily. Asian markets sell deboned leg meat very inexpensively. If you're buying chicken legs from the local supermarket, cutting the meat off the bone isn't difficult. Combining the chicken and Italian sausage with the ginger and soy sauce puts an edge on the sweet and savory meats. You can serve plain, steamed rice, but using sushi rice adds another layer of tartness. The generous amount of broth holds all the flavors together.

Yield: 4 servings

Time: 60 minutes.

Ingredients

2 pounds deboned, skinned, chicken leg meat, washed, cut into 1" pieces
4 garlic cloves, peeled, finely chopped
1" piece of ginger, peeled, julienned
2 Italian sweet sausages, cut into 1" rounds
1 bunch baby bok choy, ends trimmed, quartered length-wise
6 shiitake mushrooms, washed, thinly sliced
2 cups chicken stock
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 cups Japanese rice
2 ½ cups water
2 tablespoons Japanese rice vinegar
1 teaspoon white sugar
1 tablespoon olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper

Method

In a wok or chef's pan, brown the sausage rounds in the olive oil then remove, drain on a paper towel, and set aside. Sauté the chicken meat, shiitake mushrooms, ginger, and garlic until lightly browned. Add the chicken stock, soy sauce, and the sausage. Simmer for 20 minutes, then add the bok choy, lightly cover with a sheet of tin foil, and simmer for another 15 minutes.

Making the rice: I have to confess I have used a rice cooker for so many years, I couldn't begin to tell you how to make Japanese rice without it. With the rice cooker, add the rice and water, cover, push the button, wait for the button to pop up, use chop sticks to fluff the rice, put the cover back on, and leave alone for 5 minutes. Put the cooked rice into a large metal bowl, add the Japanese rice vinegar and sugar and toss well. Cover the rice to keep it hot.

Put a large spoonful of the sushi rice in the middle of a bowl. Ladle the chicken, sausage, and bok choy with plenty of liquid over the rice.

Phở, Cupcakes, Coffee, and More in Silver Lake and Then Home to Make a Bread Pudding with Chocolate and Almonds

The routine of daily life makes me really jumpy. The repetition of wake up-work-errands-go to bed-and start all over again is depressing. What breaks the bad mood? My favorite food magazine, Saveur, can help, because I lose myself in its personalized, travel narratives.

One article takes me to Austria, another to Spain, then Texas, Tokyo, Vietnam, France... I'd love to experience the pleasure of eating skewers of grilled meats from sidewalk vendors in Hanoi, oysters on the Gulf Coast, tapas in Barcelona, desserts in Paris... Reading Saveur stimulates my ideas about cooking, showing me how different cultures use familiar ingredients and introducing me to new spices, fruits, and vegetables.

Short of an unexpected windfall though, I'm not going to travel to far-away places. Luckily I've discovered that it's possible to take day-trips in LA and rethink the ordinary.

Take same-ole-same-ole soup, for instance. West of Downtown LA and south of Dodger Stadium, Silver Lake mixes up the neighborhoods, taking the best from them all: Salvadorian, Vietnamese, Thai, Mexican, French, Bohemian coffee shops, and New Age Vegetarian.

My producing partner, Dean, and I had made plans to have lunch and talk about tv series ideas. We are in such a lousy mood that we can't even figure out where to eat, then Dean remembers the Phở Café in Silver Lake. Normally, in miserable, grid-locked LA traffic, Silver Lake is half-a-world away. But, for some reason, today we make it in 20 minutes, barely enough time to finish complaining about how lousy our lives are.

Phở Café is a narrow hallway of a restaurant that specializes in Vietnamese comfort food: phở (pronounced 'fuh'), a deeply flavored, fragrant beef broth with thin slices of flank steak and soothing, hot vermicelli noodles. The large bowl of phở calms us down. Maybe life isn't so bad after all.

Even though we are stuffed, we start to talk about dessert. At the next table, a young woman on her lunch break overhears us and says she knows the perfect place for coffee. Sharlene's husband works at Intelligentsia, a hip, Direct Trade coffee shop. And near Intelligentsia is Pazzo Gelato where, she says, they serve the best gelato in LA.

Energized by phở , armed with Sharlene's tips, now we're on a mission. But we don't get far. Easily distracted by good-looking pastry, how can we pass by the glass case at Lark, with its rows of cup cakes and perfectly formed cakes?

A vision of dessert heaven, Lark takes itself seriously enough to have a lot of fun with perfectly flavored classics: carrot cake, red velvet cupcakes, brownies, ice box cakes, and a dozen varieties of cookies from the familiar (chocolate chip) to the odd (Earl Grey tea cookie). Eating a Chocolate Brownie, a Spring Fair Pecan Bar, and a Vanilla Cupcake with Italian butter cream icing gives us a sugar rush that powers us back on our search for Sharlene's perfect coffee.

Getting closer to Intelligentsia, we stumble across the Casbah Cafe, a North Beach style Bohemian cafe that is part clothing store and part French-Moroccan coffee shop, with, incongruously, the most incredibly fresh-looking tomatoes I've ever seen.

Across the street we find Pazzo Gelato, with a dozen freshly made sorbets and gelatos in its glass case. Dean happily eats a cup of the white chocolate with raspberry swirls.

We take a minute to enjoy the heady smells of The Cheese Store of Silverlake, where the rich display of French and California cheese would rival any in Paris, and finally we reach Intelligentsia and join the queue stretching out the door. Amazingly, we run into Sharlene again. Luckily she helps us navigate through the dozens of coffee choices. She orders for us: a cup of Direct Trade coffee made in the Clover brewing machine and another with a 60's style Chemex brewer. The flavors are as different as night and day.

Sitting at the marble coffee bar, we're in no rush to leave, so we sip our 2 cups of coffee and start talking about work. We're so productive, we lose track of time, until Dean realizes he has to pick up his daughter. We quickly leave and race cross-town only to get trapped in a horrible traffic jam that materializes out of nowhere. We are very slowly carried back into LA. Luckily Dean makes it to 'Bella's school just in time.

At home I'm not ready to get back to work, besides which it's time to start dinner. Something simple: an arugula-avocado salad with an entrée of Japanese rice and grilled chicken marinated with ginger, sesame oil, garlic, onions, cayenne, and black pepper.

Seeing all those great looking cakes at Lark, I want to make a nice dessert, but I don't want to put the time in to make anything complicated. I decide to make a Bread Pudding with Chocolate and Roasted Almonds, a comfort-food dessert, incredibly easy to make, plus it's a good way to use up the loaf of day-old bread that's in the back of the refrigerator.

Bread Pudding with Chocolate and Roasted Almonds

Yield: 6-8 Servings

Time: 2 hours

Ingredients

6 slices, white bread
3 eggs
3/4 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups, heavy cream
1 tablespoon sweet butter, melted
1/2 cup, grated dark chocolate
1/2 cup, toasted almond slivers, baked in a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes

Method

Unlike traditional bread puddings, this dessert is designed to come out of the pan.

Pre-heat the oven to 350. Toast the bread in the oven for 5 minutes. Set aside and make the custard-base by using a fork to beat together the eggs and sugar. Add the cream and stir well.

Put water into a small bowl. Taking one slice at a time, dip the bread in the water for 5 seconds, then carefully squeeze out the water and tear the now soggy bread into pieces and drop into the custard. Mix well.

Instead of using a standard baking pan, use a 9" round take-out container. Why? Because the thin, aluminum-sided take-out container is flexible and that makes removing the bread pudding easy.

Paint the inside of the take-out container with melted butter. Pour in the custard-bread mixture. Sprinkle the grated chocolate over the top. Using a fork, push the chocolate down into the custard. Top with the toasted almonds and put into a water bath (1" of water in a pan larger than the take-out container).

Bake for 30 minutes, then turn it around in the oven to insure even baking and cook another 15 minutes. Check to see that the custard has set by pressing lightly on the top. If it is firm, it's done. If not, bake another 15 minutes, then remove and let cool on a wire rack.

The custard will shrink, making it easy to flip over on your hand, while the other hand slowly peels off the take-out container. Carefully place the serving platter on the bottom of the bread pudding and turn over, so the top is, well, on the top. This sounds way-more complicated than it is.

It's not necessary, but your guests will be happy if you dust the top of the bread pudding with powdered sugar. That's the simple presentation. For a special occasion, surround the platter with bowls of fresh berries, ice cream, and homemade whipped cream. In either case, you definitely need to serve the bread pudding with a good pot of tea or freshly brewed coffee.

Appreciation Makes the Cooking Worth All the Effort

If lonely J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, for me, the measure has been in roasting, sautéing, and grilling, making meals for my family. As a parent, what your kids really think about you, is pretty much a mystery.

Today is my birthday and my sons, Frank (23) and Michael (17), decided I didn't need another pot or a kitchen gadget, because I pretty much have every kitchen tool imaginable. They decided instead to write me a memory about my cooking.

From Michael:
Every Thursday night when I was younger, doing homework, I would wait in my room for my dad to come home. He would bring home a whole chicken that he would marinate with rosemary and olive oil. My brother and I could tell when he put the chicken into the oven, because it made the whole house smell amazing.

When the chicken was finally cooked, my dad called all of us into the dining room. The table was covered with the finest dishes: roasted potatoes, flour-less chocolate cake, and, my favorite of all, the golden, baked rosemary chicken. I was always the first one in the room and the first one to grab a piece of chicken from the dish. It was crispy on the outside and tender and juicy on the inside. The breast meat was my favorite, but I wasn't the only one in the family that loved it. Each member of the family had their favorite part. My mom loved the wings, my brother loved the legs and thighs and dad loved the dark meat.

From Franklin:
At an early age I was introduced to cooking. My father, when he wasn't working on a set or writing, was either in the garden or in the kitchen. I didn't realize it then, but cooking made him happy. It let him experiment and test the boundaries of his own creations. I was always there to fill my stomach with some of my favorites: roasted chicken, grilled carrots, banana bread, roasted beets, and steamed artichokes. I could count on there being food in the fridge, and, with a little asking, dad would whip something tasty together in a heartbeat.

As much as I dreaded the start of another school year, it did mean one great thing: dad's homemade, signature lunches. Every day at school, I had a lunch that no one else had. Some days it was a bbq NY strip-steak sandwich, salad with homemade dressing, and sliced apples. Other days, it would be a roasted chicken with avocado sandwich, carrot sticks, and a piece of pound cake. With each lunch came a napkin, a plastic fork, and each item on the menu was individually wrapped in Saran Wrap or packaged in a deli pint container. In my eyes, my father had mastered the art of gourmet brown paper bag lunches and there wasn't anyone at school who didn't know it.

When I left for college at 17, I had my dad write me a recipe book of all my favorites, so I could impress my new friends as well as have a little taste of home away at school. Some of my favorites: NY Steak, Chicken with Dumplings, Chicken Soup with Vegetables, Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing. Today I'm 23 and still call my dad for recipes when I'm in a cooking jam. I always have some of his homemade salad dressing in the fridge, some pound cake in the freezer, and a few other of his latest creations that I'm dying to try.

In the next couple of days, I’ll write up the recipes for their favorite dishes. Right now, I just want to enjoy the realization that my cooking made a difference to them. I couldn't imagine a better gift.

Tapenade, the Frugal Cook's Secret Weapon

I'm always looking for easy-to-make, affordable ways of creating unexpected flavor. I remember eating at a French restaurant when I was growing up in LA and the bread basket always came with 2 ramekins: one with delicious sweet butter, the other with tapenade. To my kid-taste buds, the French food wasn't that great--I never knew what to order--so I'd eat all the bread the waiter would bring. To that, my mother always admonished me, "Don't fill up on the bread," but, of course, that was the point.

It wasn't difficult to learn how to make tapenade. The only specialized tool you need is a blender, like the Cuisinart Mini-Food Processor. A little bit of tapenade adds a special flavor to sandwiches and appetizers. Use it as a topping on sliced hardboiled or deviled eggs. Try it spread on a good slice of buttered bread, a hot, crispy piece of grilled lavash, or a turkey breast sandwich.

2 cups, pitted olives, black oil cured or cracked green
1 cup Italian parsley, washed, finely chopped
2 tablespoon capers
1 garlic clove, peeled, chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
¼ freshly ground black pepper
Cayenne, a light dusting
2 anchovies (optional)

Put all the ingredients into a blender and pulse until the olives, capers, and parsley have combined into a paste. I'd add anchovies, but my wife doesn't care for them, so I put them in when I'm making myself a special treat.

Makes ½ pint.

Preparation Time: 30 minutes.

Bing Cherry Sauce Makes Everything OK

When we lived in Banning, a small crummy town two hours' drive east of LA, my mother loved to go to Cherry Valley when the cherries were ripe. The window for the picking season was only a couple of weeks. The cherries had to be picked quickly before the birds pecked them apart or a freeze made them inedible. After the trees had been picked by the farmer and the crop sent to the markets, for $5.00, you were given a bucket and a ladder and sent into the rows of trees to pick whatever was left, which was a lot. My memory was that you had a time limit for your $5.00. An hour, I think, to pick all you could, and, of course, to eat 'till you were sick of cherries.

Maybe it's that memories are often better than reality, but since then I've only had fresh cherries that tasted that good a couple of times. Fat, dark red Bing cherries, warm from the sun, sweet, juicy--they were the best.

Bing cherries make great sauce. Without the sugar, they make a savory sauce with roast pork or duck. With sugar, the way I like them, they're delicious on ice cream, yogurt, or even a slice of a quality cheddar, like Neal's Yard.

2 cups Bing cherries, washed, halved, pitted
1 cup water
1 tablespoon raw sugar
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

Put everything into a small saucepan and simmer on a low flame for 45-60 minutes, stirring frequently. After 30 minutes, taste and adjust the flavor if not sweet enough by adding a sprinkling of raw sugar. The liquid part of the sauce should thicken as it reduces.

Makes ½ pint. Serves 6.

If you do go cherry picking or find yourself with a bucket of cherries, after you've eaten your fill, try canning them so you have them in the off-season. All you need are Ball or Kerr glass canning jars and lids. Submerge the jars in boiling water for 30 minutes, remove, empty out the water, then fill to 1" below the rim on the top of the jar. Put the lids into the boiling water for 30 seconds to soften the rubber, then seal the jars snuggly not super tight. Put the filled, sealed jars back into the boiling water for 10 minutes. Remove, cool, dry, and store in a cupboard. In the winter, a jar of cherry sauce is the perfect treat and it makes a great gift for someone you really like.

Preparation Time: 20 minutes. Cooking Time: 45-60 minutes.

Second Life: Ginger Pork and Rice Turns into a Delicious Soup

"Never waste food." When my grandmother showed me how to cook scrambled eggs, she ran her finger inside the shell to get out all the egg. Waste made her crazy. My mother was the same way. When we'd go to a restaurant, what we didn't eat, came home, much to my father's embarrassment.

To my mother, the prime rib my father didn't eat at Lawry's, reheated at home, made a great snack, and it was free. The gigantic baked potato with sour cream and chives I couldn't finish, turned into the best breakfast potatoes. I learned that the food we brought home from the restaurant had a second life...if you know a couple of tricks

Yesterday I was doing an errand and stopped at Mitsuwa Marketplace, a Japanese supermarket, that always has great sales on high quality meats and produce. The food court inside doesn't make allowances for Western tastes. Mitsuwa has the feeling of a Tokyo-style market.

From Misasa, one of the half-dozen food stands, I bought a bento box lunch with ginger pork, miso soup, a small piece of tofu with bonito flakes, steamed Japanese rice, and pickled daikon. Everything was delicious but I couldn't finish the ginger pork or the steamed rice, so I packed them up and took them home.

In the morning I turned the left-over ginger pork and steamed rice into a hot soup with rice, pork, carrots, and broccoli. The flavors from the bento box lived on, reconstituted into a nourishing soup, perfect for the rainy day. Which made me happy, because it tasted great and because I didn't waste any food.

Creating a hearty soup, using a cooked meat and rice, fresh vegetables, and a stock, is really very easy. All it takes is remembering to bring home the left-overs.

3 cups homemade chicken stock
1 cup ginger pork, cooked, sliced
1 shallot, peeled, sliced
1 carrot, washed peeled, cut into 1" long batons
1 small broccoli florette, washed, sliced into bite-sized pieces
1 cup steamed rice, cooked

Heat the chicken stock on a medium flame. Add the pork, shallot, carrot, and broccoli. Simmer for 10 minutes. Add the cooked rice and cook another 5 minutes.

Serves 1. Preparation Time: 5 minutes. Cooking Time: 15 minutes.

Snack Food Good Enough for a Super Bowl Party

Having friends over to watch a game or just hang out means I'll make a lot of different kinds of finger food. Lavash pizza with a dozen different toppings. Grilled bacon-wrapped shrimp. And my absolute favorite: prosciutto wrapped mozzarella and avocado.

The recipes I like the best are ones that are easy to make and have a lot of flavor, even though they use very few ingredients. What gives this simple dish it's rich flavor is dredging the mozzarella and avocado in olive oil that's been seasoned with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper before they're wrapped in the proscuitto. Sandwiching that layer of seasoning between the clean tasting mozzarella/avocado and the salty proscuitto, makes all the difference.

The mozzarella can be wrapped by itself, so can the avocado, or you can put them together. It's entirely your call.

10 sheets of proscuitto, paper thin
2 large pieces of fresh mozzarella
1 medium avocado, ripe, skin and pit removed, thin sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

When you buy the proscuitto, ask to have the fat cut off and the slices cut paper thin. That means you only want one layer of proscuitto between the paper sheets, with very little overlap. Thin proscuitto will stick together, so ask the deli man to minimize the overlap.

Clean off the counter so you have room for several large plates. Take the mozzarella out of the water and gently pat dry. Put one slice of proscuitto on the cutting board and cut 4 equal pieces. Use a chef's knife and cut a ¼" thick slice off the mozarella. Cut that slice into 4 strips.

Slice the avocado into ¼" strips.

Pour the olive oil onto a small plate and season with the sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. How much is up to you.

Dredge each piece of mozzarella through the seasoned olive oil on both sides, then lay it on one of the proscuitto sections. Carefully roll the proscuitto around the mozzarella so it overlaps the cheese. The olive oil should allow you to stick the proscuitto to itself. Add a slice of avocado if you want, or wrap the avocado by itself.

Serve the proscuitto-mozzarella-avocado wraps with napkins and ice cold beer or white wine.

Serves 6. Preparation Time: 30 minutes.