US Beef is back!

One of the main grouses about our modern day urbanized kids is that the bulk of them have never had close contact with chickens (not a bad thing, looking at the spread of bird flu) and I remember that Ben had this mental hurdle trying to connect the neat little cling-wrapped packages of beef with a real live cow.

A conversation with my brother also revealed that most people don't even know what cut of beef should be used for grilling, frying, roasting, stewing and braising. This blog entry is to educate people like him whose main encounter with beef is via BBQ sausages (sigh). Also, I am celebrating the return of US beef, the flavour of which we have missed for the past 2 years. I have some qualms about the safety of the beef still, as I am not too sure if they still butcher "downers" (cattle that fall down are butchered immediately; they don't specifically test them for any signs of BSE). But given the global worries about poultry, I figure that beef is a reasonable alternative (cost benefit ratio!).


Anyway, the quality of beef is dependent on the maturity, marbling, firmness, colour and texture. Beef from young cattle is labelled "prime" (best), "choice", "select" or "standard" based on these qualities. Older cattle >42 months old are usually canned or used for other nefarious purposes. Then there is dry and wet aging - methods where beef is allowed to age 10 - 14 days to improve on the tenderness and flavour of the cut.

The 4 major primal cuts are chuck, rib, loin and round, and the "thin" meats are foreshank, brisket, short plate and flank. Rib roasts can be taken from the chuck to the loin end, depending on the kind of roast you want to make. The loin is where one gets porterhouse and T-bone steaks (bone in) and sirloin, tenderloin and other lovely cuts like fillet mignon and chateaubriand. Beef chuck can be used for steaks as well as for stews. Beef round is good for roasts, minute steaks and even sandwiches. The "thin" meats are good for fajitas, fillets and Philadelphia steaks. Leftover bits usually go into ground beef, diced beef and chunks for stewing.
An aside - since it was reported in the NY times today - meat sellers in the US are treating the meat with carbon monoxide so that it will retain the rosy red colour of freshly cut meat. So people buying may end up with a product that is no longer fresh, but you wouldn't know unless you smelt it. Apparently solid cuts that are treated can be sold up to 35 days after leaving the plant. Eww to that...

Anyway, finished with the burbling. Here is my recipe for standing rib roast. My mother had a friend who hand carried the meat back from the US and generously shared half of it with us. The meat turned out moist and flavourful, because of the Dijon mustard marinade, and the gravy is to die for...

Standing rib roast (4 rib recipe)

Ingredients
4 rib roast, chined and fat trimmed
1 cup of Dijon mustard
2 tbsp finely chopped thyme
2 tbsp finely chopped rosemary
1 tsp Sea salt
1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

Method
1. Sprinkle sea salt and black pepper over the whole roast and rub in.
2. Mix thyme and rosemary with the mustard, and coat whole of the roast. Leave overnight in fridge.
3. Preheat oven to 225 deg C, roast meat rib side down in a roasting pan for 15 minutes, then bring temperature down to 160 deg C. Continue roasting for approximately 1 1/2 - 2 hours. Check temperature of roast with meat thermometer - the roast should be about 55 - 60 deg C for medium rare center.
4. Remove roast from oven, cover with foil and allow to stand for 1/2 hour before serving.

Standing rib roast gravy
Ingredients
2 beef stock cubes
1 cup of red wine (Bordeaux)
3 L water
1 cup coarsely chopped carrots
1 cup coarsely chopped celery
2 cups coarsely chopped onions
4 sprigs of thyme
4 sprigs of parsley
1/4 tsp peppercorns
1 tbsp butter

3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour

Method
1. Saute the carrots, celery and onions in 1 tbsp butter for about 10 - 15 minutes until the vegetables look brown and caramelized.
2. Add red wine, then beef stock cubes, thyme, parsley, peppercorns and water. Bring to boil, then turn down heat and simmer for 2 hours until the amount of fluid is reduced to about 3 - 4 cups.
3. Strain stock and refridgerate for several hours. Skim off fat when taking out of fridge.
4. When roast is done, pour away drippings from pan, then place pan on stove over 2 burners.
5. Add butter to pan, and when melted, add flour, whisking carefully to ensure that gravy is smooth for about 5 minutes.
6. Add beef stock. Whisk continuously for about 10 minutes.
6. Add salt and pepper to taste. Strain gravy and serve immediately with roast.

This and That

Here's Steffi, with her new hair-do. She insisted she wanted to cut her hair to look just like her cousin Eunice (her bosom buddy). Last night she was prancing round the house, flicking her hair with her hands. Her current ambition is to be a hamster with blue ribbons (you'll know which if you watch that ridiculous Japanese cartoon "Hamtaro").

BTW, all our tadpoles and shrimpies died. We got distracted and forget to refresh the water one day and that was it...most upsetting. Haven't quite had the time to go and get some more.

Chap Goh Meh cooking

Chap Goh Meh, also known to the Chinese as Yuan Xiao, is the 15th day of Chinese New Year. This is, as usual, an excuse to engage in yet another session of eating and celebrating. This year, thanks to Chap Goh Meh falling on a Sunday, my non-traditional family got together with some relatives from my mother's side to have a meal. Also, having a horrendously extended family meant that we weren't able to fit everybody into the hectic 3 day visiting schedule, and so had to arrange a time to meet up after the initial rush of visiting. The menu for dinner - an excuse for me to visit my Chinese cooking roots - was as follows:

1. Fried Seafood Tang Hoon
2. Lor Bak (braised pork belly) with steamed buns
3. Chap Chye (vegetable stew)
4. Chicken Curry with Peranakan Rempah
5. Hee Peow (Fish Maw) Soup
6. Fish balls and broccoli (ostensibly for the kids)
7. Tang Yuan (glutinous rice dumplings stuffed with sesame paste) in soybean milk

The piece de resistance was supposed to be my Nonya chicken curry, survived that ordeal with 1 burnt pot (my fault for trying to jagah 2 monkeys, cook the curry and shepherd's pie at the same time for the kids' lunch). Poor maid had lots of washing up to do.



The Lor Bak turned out better - used Terry Tan's recipe which sears the pork belly in caramelized sugar, then braised in soy sauce and galangal. A very piquant flavour for a rather heavy dish.



The chap chye was an exercise in mish-mash - I know significant other was very happy with the Fatt Choy I threw in the dish (mainly because he loves it exiting from the other end - sorry folks!). Added Pacific clams as a twist, turned out okay, but in future I think I will use dried scallops.

The real fun I had was in making the Hee Peow soup, which probably had the most accolades. I had used my biggest pot, but even then I couldn't find any leftovers in my usual late night forage last night. Here is the Hee Peow recipe that I will probably make a staple for future celebrations (with the Lor Bak and Chap Chye)!

Hee Peow Soup Ingredients
Hee Peow (1 packet of medium sized fish maw about 300g)
1 abalone (canned) thinly sliced
meat balls (150 g minced pork, 150 g minced prawn, 1/2 tsp salt, mixed and rolled into 1.5 cm diameter balls)
10 fuzhou fish balls (available in wet market)
1/2 cabbage cut into large pieces
White fungus (1 head, soaked and hard yellow part removed. Remaining fronds chopped into 1 inch chunks)
Chicken stock

Method:
1. Bring chicken stock to boil.
2. Add in the meat balls. Stir gently.
3. Add in fuzhou fish balls and white fungus. Boil for 5 minutes.
4. Add in cabbage, hee peow (cut into 3 - 4 cm lengths) and boil for 10 - 15 minutes.
5. Add in abalone and turn off fire and cover the pot tightly.

Aunt commented that this was more ingredients than soup, probably because I didn't stinge on the hee peow - love it!

Caught! Confessions of a Nonya in New York

The lengths one will go for art...one of my friends, a redoubtable cook, who has been putting her mother's recipes together for a Nonya cookbook has been testing recipes for the past year. Her recent visit to Singapore ended climactically at Newark Airport when her precious stash of buah keluak was impounded by the customs officers. To add insult to injury, she has been blacklisted by the customs and her bag accidentally handed over to another incoming Indian family.

The taste of Buah Keluak (Pangium edule) is an acquired one, and afficionados cannot get enough of the complex bittersweet flavour of this unpreposessing nut. Ayam Buah Keluak is one of the prized dishes of a Nonya's repertoire at Chinese New Year. The preparation is tedious, and entails soaking the nut for 3 - 4 days, extracting the dark shiny meat, pounding it with spices and putting it back into the shell to be cooked together in a delectable curry.

My encounters with cooking this nut have not exactly been Nonya in origin (although I am in the process of cooking through Terry Tan and Dorothy Ng's recipes), but I was taught to make Ayam Buah Keluak by my mother and grandmother from Kuching. The flavour is different from the classical Nonya variety, perhaps a little more bitter and less "lemak" or coconutty in flavour.

Here is the recipe (more or less)

AYAM BUAH KELUAK (Kuching Style)
(Serves 8 people)

Ingredients:

1 chicken, weighing about 1½ kg, cut into 16 pieces
20 Buah Keluak, soaked overnight and thoroughly scrubbed with a brush (Soak the nuts for 3 nights, changing the water daily)
50 g minced pork
2 egg whites
4 rounded tbsp of assam soaked in 1 cup of water and squeezed till pulp has dissolved. Strain and keep liquid aside for use. Discard the pulp and seeds
12 slices of galangal with skin scraped off. (1 Inch diameter and 1/2 inch length)
4 cm or ½ thumb length of kunyit (tumeric). (1 thumb length)
2 tbsp of sugar.
1 tsp of salt.
½ cup of oil.

Rempah ingredients
6 buah keras (candlenuts) (3 whole nuts – 6 halved nuts, lends a creamy taste )
30 shallots.
10 fresh red chillies (or 3 tablespoons chilli paste)
1½ tbsp of belachan.
3 stalks of serai (lemongrass)
1 small white onion
4 cloves garlic.

Method:
1. Chip off smooth part of buah keluak at the thicker end and dig out the pulp of the nut. Put aside the empty shell.
2. Clean the pestle and mortar and pound the nut pulp till it is all mashed up. Add the minced pork, 2 tsp of sugar and ¼ tsp salt. Pound again till well mixed. Add the egg whites to bind the mixture together.
3. Fill the shells with buah keluak mixture and keep aside.
4. Peel the shallots and chop finely
5. Slice the red chillies.
6. Clean the serai of any dead fibers and chop coarsely in preparation for pounding later.
7. Pound the buah keras, lengkuas, lemongrass, kunyit, chillies, shallots, onion, garlic adding each ingredient in that order. (I usually use my electric chopper first, then pound with the old-fashioned mortar). Then add the shallots and pound to bind the ingredients. (Add the belachan at the very end after all the others as it makes the mixture turgid and so difficult to mix) The rempah should be as fine as possible.
8. Add ½ cup of oil to the wok. When the oil is hot (after about 30 seconds), add the rempah and fry over moderate heat.
9. Stir fry vigorously for about 2 – 4 minutes. The rempah is cooked if there is an added fragrance, and the mixture changes in colour.
10. Add the chicken pieces and stir fry until the outside is cooked. Then add the buah keluak nuts. Add sufficient water to cover the mixture, bring to a boil and then lower the fire, cover and simmer. The simmering will allow the flavour of the rempah to get into the nuts and the chicken as well as allow some of the nutty flavour to get out into the gravy. Sometimes, you can add some of the pulp straight into the gravy. Add the tamarind/assam, salt and sugar at the very end)
11. Bring to the boil before lowering the heat, and simmer for ½ hour or until the chicken is tender. Look at the wing and if the bone has broken through the skin at the joint, then the chicken is done.

Rearing Tadpoles and Shrimpies

The fun thing about rearing this bunch of tadpoles and little shrimp-like creatures that we scooped up in the Bukit Batok Nature Reserve is that it is highly therapeutic. The first few days were a tad traumatic as I coudn't figure out what to feed them. Fish food was rejected and clouded up the tank too fast. Thanks to the power of Google, I discovered that boiled cabbage was the diet of choice. Unfortunately, the other tadpole carers dumped at least a ladleful of cabbage into the tank instead of the requisite 1 pinch, and we ended up with a foul smelling tank and the few remaining tadpoles gasping at the surface.

Anyway, things have pretty much settled down and the tank water has been changed (courtesy to goldfish tank next door) and a judicious pinch of cabbage every other day introduced. The picture shows the tadpoles and shrimp struggling over the bare skeleton of a tiny chunk of cabbage.

I remember rearing tadpoles growing up, especially the time we reared about 168 little toads in a giant fish tank and set them loose in the garden after that. I remember when my brother and I were little tikes, and left very much to our own devices, there was a day when my brother was indulging in his usual activity of freak out the tadpoles by blowing on them with a straw. Of course, he ended up laughing, then inhaling one of them up the straw into his mouth, an event neither of us has forgotten to this day.

Which brings me to another question - why are there such weird sounding foods out there? Toad in the hole is an English classic that would probably gross anyone out except the phlegmatic Britisher. According to Wikipedia, "Toad in the hole is a traditional British dish. It consists of sausages in Yorkshire pudding mix, usually served with vegetables and gravy. Badly made toad in the hole is sometimes described as "frog in a bog"."