Via Evan Kleiman’s always informative radio show Good Food, (available as a free podcast in the iTunes store), an illustrated walk down the aisles of a Korean grocery store with Debbie Lee. Learn how to make your meals more exciting with pepper paste and save some money while you’re at it!
Author: Mr. Homegrown
Picture Sundays: Bile Beans
ETA: Kelly says: Bile beans on Easter Sunday? Oh, Erik. I’m adding the following photo to this post. It’s really exciting that a Barred Rock is featured in the photo, plus, it illustrates the ambiguous relationship between rabbits and eggs that marks Easter: a persistent ambiguity that leads little kids to believe bunnies lay eggs, or at least the chocolate ones. Here, the bunny seems to have domesticated the hen as both an egg producer and draft animal. It’s unclear what the rabbit is planning to do with his cache of eggs, but he’s in a hellfire hurry to get somewhere with them.
And now back to our regularly scheduled post:
“This represents a healthy life, throughout its various scenes, just such a life as they enjoy, who use the Smith’s bile beans.”
According to an article in the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Medicine, bile beans were,
a very popular proprietary medicine during the twentieth century in the UK. The product consisted of a variety of purgatives, cholagogues and carminatives formulated into a pill and advertised for ‘inner health’. The product was devised in Australia in 1899, survived a damning judgement in a law court in Scotland in 1905, became a brand leader in the 1930s and was on sale until the mid-1980s.
Thanks to Senor W for the photo.
Saturday Linkages: Ginger Grating, Food Poisoning and Williams-Sonoma Chicken Coops
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| Williams-Sonoma’s “Alexandria” Coop. |
Quick Tip: Grate Ginger with a Fork http://www.thekitchn.com/quick-tip-grate-ginger-with-a-fork-168905
How long does food poisoning last?: http://boingboing.net/2012/04/05/how-long-does-food-poisoning-l.html
La Creuset chicken feeders, perhaps? Williams-Sonoma High-End DIY Line
A timeline of American food trends: http://www.foodtimeline.org/fooddecades.html
These, and more linkages, are from the Root Simple twitter feed.
The Secret to Japanese Cooking: Dashi
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| Bonito flakes, available at any Japanese market. |
We conclude our Japanese themed week with the sauce that’s sort of the unified field theory of Japanese cooking: dashi. It’s in everything from noodle dishes to sauces to miso soup and it cooks up in just minutes. Dashi contains two ingredients, kombu (a kind of kelp) and bonito (shaved, fermented fish flakes). It’s the backbone of Japanese cooking, but we think it’s gentle, savory character could adapt well to Western-style cooking if you use it as a substitute for vegetable stock.
Dashi only keeps a few days in the fridge, so the secret to using it regularly is to freeze half of every batch you make.
Next Friday we’ll post a recipe for vegetables simmered in dashi. This is a classic Japanese cooking technique, and we’ve become very fond of it as an alternative to our usual saute/steam/bake repertoire.
Sonoko Sakai, who taught the soba noodle class we described in an earlier post wrote an article on dashi complete with a detailed recipe.
As an aside, I’m really interested in any of you who have foraged your own edible seaweed–if that’s you, please leave a comment.
Introducing the Dehydrated Kimchi Chip
Our focus this week has been all things Japanese, but now we’re taking a detour to Korea…or at least to kimchi:
What would be the fermentation equivalent of finding a new planet in our solar system, cold fusion and a unified field theory all wrapped into one new discovery? That tasty snack breakthrough could very well be the dehydrated kimchi chip. Oghee Choe and Connie Choe-Harikul of Granny Choe’s Kimchi Co.’s just won the Good Food Day LA cabbage cooking contest with their kimchi chip over the weekend. I got to taste one of those kimchi chips and I can say that they deserved the award.
Why make a kimchi chip? In a press release Harikul says, “We always have loads of kimchi at home, on account of the family business, so we started dehydrating our original spicy kimchi to halt fermentation when a batch was about to turn overripe.”
How do you make kimchi chips at home? It’s simple, according to Harikul, “We use an American Harvest Snackmaster dehydrator that was given to us by a fellow Freecycler. Lay the kimchi out on two trays and dry it on high for 12 hours. Easy peasy.”
Harikul and Choe have some suggestions for cooking with kimchi on their website. And they were nice enough to give us a recipe for kimchi that we included in our book Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World.
