AAAAASSSIAAN FLAAAAVORS

Can I just say that it irks me to no end when people on Top Chef say that they're going to use "Asian flavors" in their food all the damn time? It makes me slightly nervous that some cannibal is lurking behind the couch ready to pounce and boil me in a giant vat with the Thais, Japanese, Indians, Koreans, Malaysians, and Vietnamese, so that all our pan-ethnic juices (which is just ordinary soy sauce, because that is of course the ultimate essence of Asianness) combine harmoniously to make Asian Flavored Stew.

So yeah.

But ANYWAYS, David & I have a LOT of catching up to do with regards to blogging about cooking projects, and David is insisting that I go first.  So, I'm going to Asian flavor it up hardcore with THREE MEAL ADVENTURES!!

Meal Project #1:
紅燒肉+ 海參
Hong Shau Rou + Hai Shen  ...or however you spell that phonetically in English.
In other words: Red cooked pork + Sea cucumber!

Basically, neither David nor I have ever tried cooking Sea Cucumber before.  But we had a container of pre-soaked sea cucumber to play with!  So we looked up recipes online, and I tried to remember as best as I could how my mom used to cook it, and voila!  It actually turned out pretty decent & tastes the way that I remember it should!

Ingredients:
- 3-4 pre-soaked sea cucumbers
- 1lb ground pork (I think...can't remember the quantity)
- 1 cup water
- crushed garlic
- scallions
- soy sauce
- olive oil
- sesame oil


....and I think that's about it since it's been a long time.

We sliced the sea cucumber, chopped up the scallions, cooked the pork first with the veggie seasonings, added the sea cucumber towards the end, and let it all simmer until the water boiled off.

http://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/981/recipe_eggplant_cooked_in_red_sauce
http://www.reddit.com/r/recipes/comments/ca1hp/hongshao_qiezi_recipe/?sort=old
http://mysaraprecipes.blogspot.com/2010/06/easy-braised-eggplant.html



Meal Project #2:
Chicken Fried Rice

So I basically have no recollection of how we actually made this rice.  Basically we were really hungry and took forever to decide what to make, and eventually decided to make chicken fried rice because we had the ingredients with minimal shopping.

David covered this chicken with adobo & pepper I think:

We combined the chicken with rice, egg, & scallions, and it ended up looking like this:

Meal Project #3:
Korean BBQ

We made an attempt at a classy meal...and since we're such classy people, of course, that turned out to be a great success.

David marinated the beef, because he's the saucemaster.  I'm not sure what it involved though.  You have to ask him.  It was some recipe from the internet that actually didn't turn out that great, so we'll try another one next time.  And then we cooked it:

We washed some lettuce:

We also cooked some rice.  We paired this food with some CLASSY RED WINE:

Can't beat Uncle Red!!

And here was the final result:

We wrapped balls of rice with the meat in the lettuce.  Not bad!

In conclusion, I don't remember the details of a lot of this cooking, so if we (or you, LOL) ever attempt to replicate these results, it is quite possible we won't be that successful.  Oh well!

...more cooking (and other) posts to come!