Can You say “Pheonix Feet”?

Lately I’ve been craving Chinese food, specifically Dim Sum food. I know, I know, I’m Chinese but I don’t always cook Chinese food and rarely do I crave Chinese food. So, this past Monday I bought some chicken feet. Its one of those dim sum dishes that you either LOVE or you don’t. My sons and I happen to fall into the LOVE category. Anyways, for those of you who are also in the “LOVE” category, Here is how to make them yourself. For the others, browse my other recipes, I’m sure there is something there that you’ll like.

Be forewarned, its not an instant gratification kind of recipe. But the reward is well worth the wait!

Dim Sum Style Pheonix Feet

1 lb chicken feet
oil for deep frying

3 slices of ginger
a handful of Cilantro with stems and/or roots (optional)
2 pieces of star anise

1 tsp black bean
1 tbsp cooking wine (or sherry)
2 cloves garlic, finely minced

Marinade:
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp dark soy (for colour)
1 chile serano sliced (optional)
1/2 tsp white pepper
1/2 teaspoon sesame seed oil

1 tbsp corn starch
1 tbsp water

Wash the chicken feet, chop off the nails if your butcher haven’t already done this for you. Thoroughly dry the feet. Meanwhile, pour a couple of inches of oil into a dutch oven or pot with high sides or in your wok. Heat the oil to about 350 to 375. Carefully and slowly add your chicken feet into the hot oil. Using tongs or long wooden chopsticks, give the feet a slow stir to ensure that they are not sticking together. Fry the feet for about 5 minutes, giving them an occasional stir. Turn of heat and remove the feet into a metal strainer. Then soak chicken feet in cold water for 30 minutes.

Put the chicken feet into a pressure cooker and add enough water to cover the chicken feet. Add the ginger, star anise and cilantro root. Close and secure the pressure cooker, bring the cooker to pressure (when the regulator on top starts whistling and twirling), reduce heat and cook for 20 minutes. At the end of the 20 minutes, let the pressure cooker cool and depressurize. You can also do this step in a regular pot, but cover the chicken feet with at least a couple of inches of water, bring to boil then simmer on medium-low for 1 hour.

Remove chicken feet from the boiling water and let cool 10 – 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, soak your black beans in a little water for about 5 minutes then drain. Add the minced garlic and cooking wine (sherry) and mash the beans with the garlic with the back of a teaspoon. Add the marinade ingredients to the black bean paste stir to incorporate.

Put the boiled chicken feet into a ziplock bag (or plastic container) add the marinade and zip close. Turn and massage the bag to distribute the marinade. Let the Chicken feet marinade for a minimum of 4 hours, better if left overnight in the refrigerator.

Bring a pot of water to boil (I have a large pot with a double steamer that I use. If you don’t have such a pot, you can use your wok and place an upside down bowl to elevate the plate. If you don’t have a wok, go out and buy one!). Meanwhile, remove the chicken feet from the ziplock bag and arrange onto a plate that can go into the steamer. Make a slurry with the corn starch and water. Add to the marinade liquid in the bag, mix thoroughly then add to the chicken feet.

Place plate into the steamer and let steam for 15 – 20 minutes.

Carefully remove from steamer and enjoy!

 

Making Spring Roll Wrappers

My friend at the Chinese take out makes his own spring roll wrappers for their restaurant. I’ve watched him do it many times and I’ve been wanting to try it forever. Well, I got to do it today and it was so much fun! Messy but yummy fun.

Update: The wrappers made above were turned into these delicious Vietnamese Spring Rolls for comida the next day.

The differences in colour was due to me testing various cooking times to get them to the right crispiness.

 

Little Jars of Yumminess

Living in Mexico, the boys can pick mangoes, bananas and papayas from our garden but not apples.  Since we’re in Toronto visiting family, we decided that we would take our boys on an apple picking adventure.

The weather was beautiful and we had a lot of fun.   After an hour, we had ourselves 20lbs of apples.

The problem begins after this point. These are baking apples. The in-laws don’t bake. I have two weeks to use up these apples. What to do? What to do? Well, its the end of summer and beginning of fall. All the stores are displaying their canning supplies. There appears to be a huge comeback to putting up your own food. I wasn’t prepared to can all these apples but I stumbled upon this site that made little apple pies in mason jars that you can freeze. So, here is my interpretation of it since I wasn’t able to make pie crust in someone else’s home without all my kitchen toys.

Individual Apple Crumbles AKA Little Jars of Yumminess

(makes 9 half pint jars)

9 cups of apples peeled, cored and diced into 1/2″ pieces
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup corn starch
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups of water

Crumble Topping

1/2 cup butter softened
2/3 cup flour (I used all whole wheat)
2/3 cup rolled oats
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

1. Toss apples and lemon juice together in a large bowl, set aside.

2. In a large pot, bring water, sugars, corn starch, cinnamon and salt to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil for a couple of minutes.

3. Add half the apples into the pot and cook for about 5 minutes stirring constantly. Add the remaining apples to the pot, stir to combine and cook for another 2 minutes.

4. Remove from heat and let cool for 30 minutes.

5. While the apples are cooling, make crumble topping. In a medium bowl and using a fork combine all the ingredients until it resembles coarse crumbs. You can’t really mess this up so don’t worry about what coarse crumbs look like. Just make sure you don’t have large chunks of butter.

6. Spoon apple filling into 1/2 pint (250ml) mason jars to just below the ridge of the jars

We need room for our crumble and also if you fill it with too much apples, well, it will boil over and make a mess. Tasty mess but a mess no less! I learned this from experience.

7. Cover the top apple filling with the crumble topping.

8. At this point, you can put the lids on the mason jars and refrigerate or freeze for later consumption.

9. To bake, preheat oven to 375F. Line a baking sheet with foil or parchment paper. Place your jars onto the baking tray and bake for 20 minutes if defrosted and 30-45 minutes if frozen.

10. Place a jar on a plate and top with whipped cream or, my personal favourite, vanilla ice-cream. Be warned, the pots are hot and the filling even hotter!

 

Its Onion Soup Karma

I’ve only made French Onion Soup once in my lifetime, a long time ago.  I don’t even remember if it was good.  Well, today that’s what we had for lunch, made from scratch no less.  It’s karma.  I was at the butchers on Wednesday to pick up bacon for our traditional weekend breakfast, when I spotted some beef leg bones.  Instantly, “Roasted Bone Marrow” popped into my head.  My boys and my man love bone marrow.  So, I picked some up and roasted them up for a tasty treat.  After the marrow was gone, I didn’t want to waste the bones so I threw them back into the oven along with some carrots, onions and celery stalks for another half hour.  Then tossed all the roasted goodies into my stock pot along with some peppercorn, bay leaves and coriander seeds.  Covered everything with water and let it simmer for five to six hours.  Beautiful pot of beef stock was made.

Why is this karma?  Well, on Tuesday, Soriana had white onions on special.  I bought a lot.  Can’t resist a good sale.   So I had a pantry full of onions, a giant pot of beef stock, freshly baked bread and cheese.  The path was predetermined and I must follow.  French Onion Soup it shall be!

French Onion Soup (makes 6 – 8 servings)

5 medium onions thinly sliced (food processor makes this job fast and easy)
2 tbsp unsalted butter
1 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
3 tbsp cooking sherry
1/2 cup white wine
8 cups beef stock
2 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
salt and pepper to taste
french bread thinly sliced (about 1/4 inch thick) and toasted you’ll want 2 slices per bowl
cheese, lots and lots of grated cheese (about 3/4 cups per bowl) I used a combination of Gouda and Sharp Cheddar

1. In a large dutch oven, heat butter and olive oil on medium high heat.  When most of the butter has melted, add in the onions.  Stir coat all the onion in the butter and oil.  Continue to cook the onion until you get a nice pale brown colouring.  You’re not trying to caramelize the onion, just to give them a slight tan.  This took me about 10 minutes
2. Add in the garlic and thyme and stir to combine.  Add in the sherry and stir.  Add the white wine and let it simmer for a minute then throw in the eight cups of stock.  Stir and cover.  When the stock comes to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer and continue to cook for another 20 minutes.  Season with salt and pepper.
3. Preheat your oven to 400°.  Arrange your oven safe soup bowls onto an aluminum foil lined tray.  Place a slice of toasted bread on the bottom.  Ladle onion and soup over the toast slowly.  Continue to fill the bowls with the onion soup until it reaches the top.  Place another slice of toast on top of the soup.  Do not press down.  Generously cover each bowl with the shredded cheese, making sure that the cheese covers the entire surface of the soup and toast with a little over hanging from the edge.
4. Place tray of soup into the oven and broil for 15 – 20 minutes or until the cheese on top is nicely melted and browned.
5. Serve your family with the warnings that the bowl is HOT and the cheese is HOT and soggy toast in the soup is HOT and the soup is HOT.  Because this soup must be eaten HOT!

Enjoy!!!

 

How Do You Like Your Squid?

“Anyway that Mom makes them!” says Son #1.

My son loves calamari or squid and seriously, he’ll eat a plateful all by himself if I let him. Usually, he gets his calamari fix at a restaurant either in Toronto or at the beach in Tecoman. But lucky for him, Mom bought some frozen squid and decided to make them this week. Well, let me tell you, after all the time I spent cleaning the little suckers (pun intended), he’ll be eating them only at a restaurant. I spent a good hour and a half removing their guts, eyes and spine! Now my fingers hurt.

Onto the mouth watering part. Yesterday, I served only the tentacles. I tossed them in with a beaten egg, added a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, a dash of white pepper and about 1/4 cup of flour. Heated up some oil and deep fried them. I told the kids we were eating deep fried spiders because that’s what they looked like. Sorry, no pictures, you’ll have to take my word for it.

Today, after another half hour prepping them, I made squid two ways. First, I split the body open so that its a flat piece then marinated them in chopped garlic, lime rind, sea salt and olive oil. These went on the grill for a couple of minutes each side and viola, Mediterranean Grilled Squid. Serve them with a side salad and fresh crusty bread, yummy!

Marinading.

Grilled. Note to self, next time don’t cut them open because they curl when grilled!

Second way was to cut the squid into rings, saute in a pan with some olive oil, garlic, chopped tomatoes and finish off with about 1/2 cup of white wine. Simmer a couple of minutes for the alcohol to dissipate. Toss with spaghetti and grated parmesan cheese. Delicious, fast and easy.

So tell me, how do you like your squid?

 

You Can’t Go Wrong with Bacon

Its been pretty crazy around here these past three weeks. I haven’t had a minute to myself and even less time to blog. I’ve been jotting down ideas and taking photos but just wasn’t able to sit down and write or type.

Picture this, its 6:00pm and I’m sitting at the dinner table with my family.

“Sorry boys, I didn’t have time to bake bread today so what should we do about your school lunch tomorrow?”

“I can buy lunch at the cafeteria!” suggested son #1.

“No.” I replied.

“How about chocolate cake?” asked son #2.

“No. First of all, we don’t have chocolate cake and second, you can’t eat chocolate cake for lunch.”

“But sometimes, Dulce brings cake for lunch.”

“Well, you are not Dulce and you can’t have cake for lunch.”

This conversation went on for another 15 minutes with the conclusion that my boys will starve tomorrow.

It’s 6:50pm and the boys are having their bath. I’m on the computer searching for ideas for their lunch. What do I have in my refrigerator? Let’s see, I have bacon, cheese, eggs and that’s when I stopped. What about a savory muffin? So back to the computer and I found this recipe.

It’s 7:45, the muffins are cooling on the counter, the house smells like bacon and the boys are having a hard time keeping their hands and teeth off of these things.

Savory Bacon Cheese Muffins
makes 12 medium muffins

2 cups all purpose flour sifted
8 strips bacon cooked until crisp then crumbled
1 cup shredded cheddar
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp garlic powder
1/8 tsp tejin (mexican lemon chile mix)
1 cup milk
1 egg
1/4 reserved bacon fat or vegetable oil

Preheat oven 400°F

1. Combine all dry ingredients in a medium bowl.

2. Mix together the milk, egg and cooled bacon fat.

3. Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and stir with a fork until moistened. There should be no visible flour remaining, but do not over mix.

4. Line a muffin tin with paper liner or grease and flour each individual cup.

5. Fill each muffin cup 2/3 full.

6. Bake for 15 – 20 minutes or when a toothpick comes out clean from the center of the muffin.

7. Let cool on a rack.

 

Bread That’s Almost Too Cute To Eat

So, my niece posted on her Facebook wall this photo.

We’re on our semi-annual visit to the grandparents in Toronto, so I’m not doing too much cooking or baking. Just lots of eating. However, I will definitely give this a try when I’m home. If you want to try making your own Panda Bread, here is the link to the original recipe. Unfortunately its in Japanese. Someone was kind enough to give a translation, here.

Go ahead, you know you want to!