How to Make Tom Kha Soup When your Mother has Inoperable Stage IV Cancer

This is a recap of an earlier soup recipe for Tom Kha Ghai. But honestly, each time a recipe is created it has a unique situation which calls for individual tweeks. I thought that it might be both educational and useful to document one of these particular situations. 

In this case, I will be making this particular soup while changing the prep and the ingredients to align with a diet recommended by certain holistic practitioners for those battling cancer. That is, I will be creating the recipe without adding any alcohol, sugar,  meat, salt, or chilies. 

Hopefully it does not completely suck. 

This recipe is particularly good when you’ve just prevented your mother from possibly going ballistic on helpful nutrition shop owners who are trying to sell her other options not on her list while she was already sliding past her level of comfortable overwhelm and you are trying to calm yourself down from a future ensuing anxiety attack. 

This recipe will call for drinking more wine, overall, than one would normally. If it isn’t going in the soup, that doesn’t mean it‘s not going to be used. Basically you’re drinking a recipe’s worth. If you don’t drink, be prepared to pour out at least one full bottle of wine onto the ground. Tell yourself that it's for the homies. And by homies I mean that it's to honor people in various homes who also have cancer and can't drink this wine.

This time it's okay for you throw the remaining wine bottle against something hard in order to hear the crash. 

Everything has to be organic and there will be no oil to sauté anything. Also, there will be no chicken. This might be closer to the Martha Stewart recipe I ripped into a few posts back when I initially wrote a blog about this particular soup and highlighted how boring and super New-England-white-person her specific recipe was. But maybe she was writing for her family member who not only had cancer, but also an unusually high ability to process sodium while having said cancer. If so, my apologies Martha. I honestly did not know your sodium deficient mom had cancer when you put that one up. 

Chop the fresh turmeric, onions, ginger, celery, lemon grass, and broccoli into smaller pieces than normal.  I mean seriously small bits. Try to breathe a little more consciously as you do this. Normally I’m all about "health at any size", which includes raggedly mean chunky bits along with some scattered smaller bits and then the occasional small slivers that just happen when I chop. But, since there is no soup base, I’m chopping everything teensy in the hopes that my hand will stop shaking and that it might add more flavor. 

I’m adding one metric fuckton of ginger to see if this will fix the lack of soup base and salt.  Also, because Whole Foods in LA apparently has received a written cease and desist letter from Martha around carrying galangal. It seems that her vicious galangal interaction has caused her to banish all galangal from the area. The woman does need therapy. It's not the galangal's fault. It's the behaviors and habits of those who raise and use galangal who end up causing it to go bad.

After chopping the items, take a slice of frozen pizza recently heated and eat it slowly over a period of 20 minutes while staring out the kitchen window into the yard of your mom’s small condo all while thinking about your sister’s earlier conversation with you where in she tried to talk to you about dividing up your  mom’s stuff and then you hung up on her.

 Continue to chew slowly until you feel sad and vacant

Chop up a larger than normal amount of parsley. It's parsley because partially you're not sure cilantro is on the cancer list of okay to eat items and partially because some people think cilantro tastes like soap. Contemplate if they are just faking this to be assholes and wonder why they have been eating so much soap. Fail to chop it too finely, but throw it in the large bowl of chopped things anyway and then proceed to sit with your head resting in your hands while your elbows rest on the cutting board. Hold this position until you can breathe again or until a relative walks in the room and you have to fake it.

Realize that writing this blog while you are cooking is amplifying your feelings. Try not to cry while chopping the fresh basil. If you fail to prevent this, cry over the sink away from any crucial ingredients. Remember, any added salt is not allowed in this specific diet.

Unlike other times when you put together a recipe for the family and everyone tried to crowd in to either insult you while standing around or pretend to help while not actually helping, no one will actually be in the kitchen. Everyone will just be too overwhelmed with their own shit and will have retreated.

Chop the bok choy and the majority of one of those large containers of basil. 

Nothing can be sautéed because you can't use oil, so nothing needs to be cooked separately. Everything gets thrown into the large bowl once chopped. 

Pour one can of coconut milk and an extra tiny can of coconut cream into a large pot, because you aren't sure how to compensate for the lack of oil and because... Fuck it.

Add more than a reasonably normal amount of garlic cloves which have been finely chopped to the mix. 

 Add the juice of two lemons partially squeezed. Some seeds may have fallen in. Don't worry. When these cook for an hour everyone will think they are some kind of unusual legume.

Heat the coconut milk and add four cups of water in a large pot. When it has reached a rolling boil, turn the heat down to simmer and throw everything you’ve chopped into the water. 

Cover it over and wait since there is really nothing else you can do.

Walk away from it and hope for the best.

How to Cook Marinara Sauce Like an Asshole.

My husband had stolen the other wooden spoon, most of the pre-chopped onions, and the tomato paste for his meaty meat sauce. I was forced to deal with the dregs to help the vegetarians have a consummate meal. No pre-chopped onions and only jars of Safeway sauce. By god, it was like cooking in the paleo age.

But I did have wine. Thank goodness that I had wine. I decided to make a reduction of one cup red wine and one-cup balsamic vinegar. I wasn’t sure what this would actually do for the sauce but I had seen a fair amount of assholes brag about the quantity of wine and vinegars they had reduced. So, in order to compete, I had decided it would be best if I tried to be like one of these assholes.

I reduced the mess to a syrupy blackness that resembled Hershey’s chocolate sauce. 

I remember reading that some people had difficulty reducing balsamic and wine, which I think is confusing. I’m not a physicist, but I think if you boil pretty much any liquid long enough it will reduce, simply because at least part of it will be converted into a gas. My only guess is that, after 10 minutes, it didn’t seem that much smaller to them than when they started and then they got frustrated. In order to be a real gourmet asshole, you cannot get frustrated with your reduction. It’s the patience that gets you the asshole points.

And so that is why instead of dicing the garlic and putting in directly into the oil to sauté, this time I decided to roast the garlic first. Of yes! I was going to be that kind of asshole.

Garlic roasting, wine thingy reduced… what else can I do?

Well since I had to chop the onions myself,  I decided the best option would be to roast fennel seeds in olive oil until they popped and then add the diced onions to the oil.  You heard me right. I took the opportunity to roast those mutherfuckin’ seeds until  they were a light toasty brown and the whole kitchen smelled like Italian sausage but without the penis substitute.

I hit a snafu in my assholeishness. I was dealing with amateur kitchen ingredients. Very little Parmesan, (which was only bought to top some of the meat pasta) and no fresh  herbs.

GASP! you say?

 You heard me right. I was forced to use the goddamned dried Italian mix! And you know there ain’t no Italian alive in all of Italy who cooks with that.  It just doesn’t happen.

Shhhh!

They don’t.

Shhhhhh!

I don’t care what your mother does,.

Shh!

Dd.

Sssss!

SHHhhhhhh!

No.

So, I sent my husband out for more supplies. In specific, fresh rosemary. And yes, this is the stuff that you can pick out of your neighbor's yard most anywhere on the planet, except for the neighborhood that I live in. 

In the meantime, I had a quarter cup left of nutritional yeast flakes that were soon to go bad on me. At least I think they were. Do those damn things ever really go bad? And when they go bad, do they take a baseball bat to all that is dairy? Best not to leave it to chance. I threw that in the pasta for vegan cheesy goodness.

And since there was a little tiny plastic cup of chili flakes, which came from something, but I have no idea what, I threw that in too.

Garlic was roasted now, but too hot to peel. And I have the patience of a cooking asshole, but not  the patience of a GREAT cooking asshole. I know my limits.

 I put the roasted garlic in the freezer.

Magic! Ten minutes later I could actually squeeze the contents out and mash them up so I it would blend into the sauce for that taste of  smoky garlicky goodness.  And then  I notice the whole pot is getting a paste-like consistency, which means…..

Hurrah!

It is time for another wine bottle to be opened! And since the sauce became super thick in the short hour or so it has been bubbling, I really had to throw a third if it in the sauce along with the rest of the chili flakes and a reasonable bunch of salt. I think the reduced balsamic actually acted like sugar and sweetened the sauce a little too much.

Note to all asshole gourmands. Instead of saying you added sugar to your marinara, tell them you reduced an entire vat  of balsamic – some size that you think might  be worthy of Liberace’s kitchen. Remember, size does matter. Like most men, you don’t have to tell the truth.

Pulled "Pork" Vegan Style

Since my husband is cooking pulled pork (the actual pig related stuff) for our trip to Queen Acres I decided to try to make a vegan style of this fine fine dish! I ran across several recipes which all called for Jackfruit. I mainly worked with this one: http://eatingappalachia.com/2012/05/24/vegan-pulled-pork-with-rhubarb-bbq-sauce/#.

In the end I combined several of them to create my own concept before I proceeded to run with it.

I should let you know that it was really really hard to find the jackfruit. There were cans of jackfruit in syrup at the Berkeley Bowl in the "ethnic" section. There were no cans in brine. Since pulled "pork" is savory, syrup will simply not do! I was almost going to just go to an Asian market. I'd gotten everything else I needed and really did not want to make another trip somewhere else. Several clerks looked at Mike like he was crazy when he asked them if there was any jackfruit anywhere. We finally did ask the help desk, which was unmarked as a help desk,  and they said it was in cut melon section. Since I had never seen a whole jackfruit before, it took my smart phone to help me look at picture to indeed confirm that this thing labeled "winter melon" was  actually a Jackfruit after all. I didn't even know that it was a melon. I had creeped this guy out for, like, an hour while staring and stalking the unusual fruit section of Berkeley Bowl that he was camped out in for his own unknown reasons. Who hangs out in a fruit section for an hour anyway? Creepy.....
Just sayin'

Now, the Jackfruit is a thing that seems like it came from a William Burroughs novel. In fact, pulling all the yellow fruits from the center of the melon has the texture and feel of what I imagine it would be like to disembowel a creature from Naked Lunch but without the imagined horrifying smells or possible unearthly screams.

I showed you this already. But here it is again:

I chose fresh Jackfruit because I could not find the item in brine. As a result, I had to brine it myself. I threw a bunch of vinegar on top with a little salt and some water to cover the whole mess. I let it soak overnight so it will be a little salty and acidic instead of just smelling vaguely like a lab created banana.

In the morning I drained the brine and coated it with a dry rub. For dry rubs you could use any combination of things like paprika, crushed pepper, cayenne, cumin, onion flakes, garlic powder, and salt.  Since all of these were already mixed in the Chili 9000 stuff my mother-in-law got me, I used that.  I let the coated thing-a-ma-jigs sit for a few hours in the fridge while I started in on the Rhubarb BBQ sauce. I also chopped some onions, some red bell peppers, and some garlic to keep the jackfruit company.

I pulled from this recipe: http://eatingappalachia.com/2012/05/24/vegan-pulled-pork-with-rhubarb-bbq-sauce/#

But, of course,  I used my own awesome style because I am so awesome!

First off, I don't really understand what constitutes "a bunch" of rhubarb. Berkeley Bowl sells them in individual stalks. I was doubling the recipe. So I used three of the four stalks I had bought.
Another thing different I did was to add half the Adobo chili can's sauce into the mix. It's an awesome sauce! I don't want to throw it out.

I used white onions instead of red ones and I threw in the entire small can of tomato paste since whatever was left would have gone bad anyway. I finished off with a tablespoon-ish of tamarind concentrate.  Then I boiled the hell out of it for about an hour and a half.

I tried to throw all of this into the Cuisine-art to mix it, despite it far exceeding the indicated limit for fluids. As you may have predicted, this did not work and I had to clean some sauce off the floor, which was sad.

Maybe because I threw in the extra adobo sauce, I don't know, but it was very very spicy! Not that I mind. But I have a higher spice threshold than others do, so think about that when you make yours.

I took most, but not all, of this sauce and I added the jackfruit mix that was marinating in the fridge. I threw a little water on top because I wanted it all covered with liquids and I set aside a cup of the BBQ sauce in case I wanted some for something later. It was so tasty, it was! As for the stuff in the pot,  I slow cooked the hell out of this mix for six or so hours. Here is it just starting out:

Wikipedia said that the roasted seeds of the jackfruit is a delicacy, so Mike decided to try it. Finding no real recipes for it, he treated them just like you would regular pumpkin seeds. That is to say, fry them in oil and salt and when they pop they are done.

One thing that is particularly weird about these seeds is that they taste almost exactly like carnitas. Or, rather, like carnitas if carnitas were not that good and had a chalky texture. It is true that they do become more tasty the more regularly you shell them and then pop them in your mouth.  I don't know if they will end up being the next Acai berry. Please don't invest in roasted jackfruit seed stock just yet. It's so untested. I mean, first we have to unlock the secret as to why they taste like carnitas at all.

When it was done I shredded up the remaining solids. Some say that you should roast those shreds to make a pork-ish like product. However, my end result was so tender that it was more like a sloppy joe than pork and there was really no way to dry that out in the oven. I *did* evaporate a fair amount of liquids by cooking on medium without a lid for a few hours.

Last step-   chill that goddamn shit and then reheat it and then put that fucker on a bun with some vinegar based cole slaw and some god damn jalapeno pickled carrots!

 See if you can get *that* at your local Chick-fil-a, motherfucker!

Pickled Carrots with Jalapenos!

I am cooking a mess of food for a gathering of gay men who dress in 80's finery and engage in a Dynasty bitch fight at a lovely scenic pond in the mountains. Because of this, I may do a few more posts than I normally do this month.

Today I made spicy pickled carrots. I also started some pickled watermelon rinds and pulled "pork" made from  Jackfruit. Jackfruit is a creepy melon type fruit that is apparently labeled  "winter melon" instead. I was only able to find it by matching my phone's pictures of jackfruit with the actual fruit. The decimated item looked like this:

More about jackfruit later.

The first thing one does when one starts cooking any tedious and labor intensive item is to open the wine. Todays wine is a Cava that was on special from Berkeley Bowl since my husband was very excited about having mimosas. The other thing that is important is to put in some good music. I chose Electric Six because they are both spicy and ridiculous, like pickled carrots with jalapenos are!

I bought a bag of, what is sometimes termed, horse carrots. This means that they are fat and cheap and just a little old. Just like me. Don't worry about them being tough. You're going to pickle their asses and they will tender right up! If you want to be all cute and fancy you can get those teeny tiny baby carrots and pickle them whole in a charming canning jar and pretend you are Martha f'in Stewert when you serve them to your local senators for tea with tiny cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. But I says, fuck that shit! We got horse carrots! We are ready to roll.

You are going to wash and peel and cut the ends off these carrots just like you would for any other recipe. Now it's your choice after that how you want to slice them. Traditionally they are sliced in round or oval slices all the way up the carrot. Today I chose to slice and quarter them into sticks. They not only go on sandwiches when they are done, but they will be perfect to put in Bloody Mary's in the morning.

 I know. I think of everything.

When they are all sliced how you like them throw those puppies in a bowl and focus on the jalapenos because they are going to need your attention. Gloves, darling. You are going to need gloves.

No. I am not propositioning you for some kinky activity. You need those gloves to protect you from the  acid that leaches from those peppers and stays with you for days. Russ says to put two pair on, but I never have found that I need that much protection unless I am working with habaneros or  some juicy little tart that just loves to be tasted. You know who you are, Esmerelda!

So, you've taken all the seeds out of the peppers and sliced them up into - well, slices. Now is the time to combine the carrots and the peppers with, oh, I don't know... five bay leaves? Five is a good number.
And then you throw in some peppercorns. You don't need me to tell you how many! You are a responsible adult and you can decide for yourself! I trust you.  I mean, kinda.

Here is where it gets tricky. Now listen. I poured in some white balsamic vinegar. It was white. It was vinegar. It did have some funky flakes of some sort floating around in there that I swear were not that there a year ago. The bottle said the vinegar was filtered to be "crystal clear." I tasted it, and it tasted okay. And vinegar is supposed to be a preserving fluid, so..

I just threw the whole bottle into that bowl, yes I did! That way I won't have to worry about how those flakes develop next year. And then I put in some water. Then I put in some apple cider vinegar since there was just a teeny bit left in the bottle. There were flakes in there, too! And then I put in some cumin and a little ground cayenne spice, because you *know* those jalapenos just aren't all that hot. I topped the mix off with a little more water and  bit of regular white vinegar and then I sprinkled salt over the whole top like a fine Christmas snow. Or possibly what a fine Christmas snow looks like to someone who was born in Los Angeles. It did snow there, once. I don't think it was on Christmas. Actually, I was getting my hair cut and the whole damn mess melted before I could get outside to look at it at all. But I *did* see it from the mall's glass top roof. Anyway, the salt should be kind of like the snow that day.

I had these five garlic cloves all smushed and skinned and  ready to go when I found I had forgotten to buy olive oil. I don't really own any other kind of cooking oil normally. But then I remembered I had just bought the coconut oil for the vegan pulled "pork" so I used that to fry up those garlic nubs. When I was satisfied that the garlic was all cooked up I threw everything else in the pot and simmered the whole damn mess for like, I dunno, ten minutes?

You are going to let the whole thing cool before eating some or you might hurt your mouth. Unless you take one carrot out and let that cool . That could be okay. But really the whole thing's got to cool before you put it in the fridge. I don't much care how you store it. That's your business. Just remember, these are not going to last forever like your store bought neon yellow mustard does. You should eat them before they go bad. And if you have a reaction to the funky vinegar that you put in, I will not be held responsible. I ate mine two hours ago and I feel fine.

Happy Fourth of July!!

It's a Wednesday. I have the day off. I got a bottle of some Barefoot sparkling thingy or other for my birthday and I am making mimosas.

That means only one thing!

Cookings of ManyMuch Greatness is about to begin.

I've been wanting to stuff yellow wax peppers with a bunch of shit and wrap bacon around it ever since my vegan sister flipped her lid over the fact that I still eat meat. Okay, I actually wanted to do stuff with it before, but the sister-flipping-lid thing has just made it necessary to follow through. You see, I used to be a vegetarian. I started at 14 and stayed that way until I turned 20 and I went to study medieval and renaissance art in Italy for six months. There people made many "My Mother's Recipe's" for me, and who the hell was I to turn down good hospitality just because it contained pork?  That would be rude.

I did teach a bunch of Italian men how to make vegan sushi in a tiny kitchenette. But that is a story for another blog.

Today I had a mess of yellow wax peppers, a bunch of premium bacon I needed to use, and a dream to follow.

I was sad that I had used up all the rubber gloves for sex. There were no rubber gloves in the house to protect my hands from the spicy chili oils. I would have to be brave and dive in.

(side tip: if your hands are burning from chili juices you should rub them with dry salt. I know it sounds weird but it really really works. All the other shit is just lies they print so they can laugh at you while you futile-y soak your hand in a bowl of pepto-bismal and vaseline)

(Bonus tip: if you *do* soak your hands in a bowl of pepto-bismal and vaseline you will be ready to fist at an all male sex party as long as it is held in 1972! You might even earn the nick-name "Hot Hands." because, you know, you still have chili juice on them.)

So, there was all this bacon and left over corn and wax chili peppers and other things kitchens often have in them. So what I did was this. I drank a Mimosa for my pre-warmup.

Then, I hollowed out all the peppers and rinsed their peppery guts out in the sink.
I stuffed some left over baked chicken that we have on hand to feed to our geriatric cat so he will actually eat his thyroid medication twice a day into the bottom of the peppers. It just seemed like a good idea. I mean, there is chicken there and chicken and bacon seem like a good mix, right? I had to feed some chicken to the cat because he has become spoiled since we started giving him thyroid meds via chicken delivery and feels that all r chicken are belong to him, now. And I'm totally putting my foot down and stopping the spoiling by giving him more chicken when he does his loud meow/scream thing.

This is why I don't have kids.

I cut up the left over corn from my birthday BBQ last Sunday and stuff it in after the chicken. I need something to hold the corn down and also retain spices I throw at it, so I stuff a chunk of butter in after the corn. Butter is a healthy fat. *And* it's yummy. Bacon and butter are probably a really really good food combo idea. I think it is time to find out.

I throw salt, pepper, lemon zest, and garlic on the butter. IT STICKS! Well, that was the point, anyway.

I cap the peppers off with White Welsh Chedder. I'm black Welsh (somewhere back in the family tree), but I don't hold that against the cheese.

So, then the bacon. I wrap all the chili peppers in bacon. I've never done this before, so I wrap them all and try to squish them together to make sure the bacon will not unravel during cooking. It still might unravel anyway, so for a few of them I break the tips off wooden skewers and use them like toothpicks because, despite owning a really cool toothpick holder that looks like a voodoo doll, I don't have any toothpicks.

I set the oven at 350 degrees since that seems like the normal temperature things cook at and I slide them in a glass cook pan along with more bacon and the leftover corn. The result looked something like this:

Mmmm.

And.. all of the cheese in the front melted off onto the center bacon. Some of you may have predicted this. In my prototypes I had wrapped the chili in foil so the cheese stayed. I had forgotten about that whole "gravity" thing. So the only thing to do was to put more cheese on the top and put them back in while the bacon still needed more cooking. There would be a, sort of, cheese/bacon/corn casserole to enjoy in the middle is all.

My ancestors were always in the middle of something. During the revolution they had split and the family fought on both sides! Though mostly they fought for the South because they liked supporting the  Free Labor Party in Maryland.

Oh wait. Sorry. Wrong war.

 But still.....

Anyways, the end result looked something like this:

Happy Fourth of July!