Category — Asian Recipes

I am going through another one of those phases where I decide to count calories and eat healthier. They usually pass after a few months, but while in the thick of them I tend to come up with some pretty creative low-calorie recipes. Hence these teriyaki tacos (teriyacos?) with a crunchy snap pea and scallion slaw.

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I like eating edamame as a snack or appetizer, but boiled is just so blah. Since nearly everything is better roasted, I decided to toss some of the whole frozen pods with a couple of flavorful ingredients and roast them in the oven. This yielded a terrific snack that went from freezer to table in about 20 minutes flat.

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Ever since I made the incredible miso butter roast chicken from Use Real Butter, I have been trying to find as many other things as possible to slather with miso butter. In this recipe, I combined asparagus and Brussels sprouts and cooked them with a bit of wine, which gives the dish a tart note that offsets the butter and miso.

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I have talked about why I like kale chips before, but now that I’ve started making them with an Asian twist, I like them even more.

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Do you remember eating sesame candy as a kid? I used to love the sticky little rectangles of sesame seeds suspended in a honey-sweet bar. Great news: it’s actually pretty easy to make at home, and you can add a bit of grated ginger to make it even tastier.

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Hanukkah is just around the corner, which means I have latkes on the brain. Now I am not Jewish, but I can appreciate a good latke. Fried potato anything? Yes please. But when my friend’s annual Hanukkah party rolls around, I don’t make latkes, I make this old family favorite instead: a Korean recipe that’s pretty similar to a latke, but with more variable vegetables and a delicious soy and vinegar dipping sauce.

In my (decidedly non-Korean family) we call them  jijims (pronounced, at least in our personal parlance, JEE-jims) but they are known by other names too, including jeon, jijimgae, buchimgae, and so forth. And it’s probably the most beloved recipe in the entire family.

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You know what’s awesome? TACOS. You know what’s even awesomer? ASIAN TACOS. I love America.

Basically you brown some meat, add some junk to the pot, cook the heck out of it in the oven, put it in a tortilla. Sweet, spicy, salty, porky. What could be easier or more delicious? Practically nothing.

If you are even lazier than me (hard to believe, but possible) I bet you could even skip the browning and just go straight to the junk-in-the-pot part. If you do, let me know if it’s good.

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Can we talk about David Chang for a minute? He kind of seems like a loose cannon, or maybe even a huge jerk, even, but the recipes he magnanimously shares with the public almost always turn out to be among my favorites. For example, his short ribs easily beat Thomas Keller’s. So when I saw his Bo Ssam recipe in the New York Times this week, I knew I had to try it immediately. I was dying to taste this sweet and salty, crackly, crispy, falling apart pork roast. Since I wanted to make it for lunch and it takes 6 hours in the oven, that meant setting an alarm for 5:30 AM to put it in the oven, then going back to bed. But I knew that David wouldn’t let me down–and he didn’t.

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The other night, I got home from work around 5:15 and had dinner guests arriving at 5:30. I had this easy chicken dish planned, but very little in the way of side dishes. I knew I had some half bunches of produce here and there so thought I would quickly invent a salad on the fly based on what was laying around.

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(Note: This happened several months ago, but I couldn’t find the recipes I wrote down, so I hadn’t posted about it. I found them wadded up in the bottom of a drawer recently, so here goes.)

My Dad and I have birthdays a week apart, and often do things together to celebrate. When I turned 6 and he turned 40, I asked my parents if we could eat at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. (We lived in New York at that time.) I guess at that point my parents realized they had a strangely fancy food-obsessed kid on their hands. I don’t remember much about the food, but I do recall going to the bathroom with my sister, who was 10, and being thoroughly confused by the presence of a restroom attendant. When I turned 16 and he 50, we donned our tuxes and prom dresses and got the best seat at Julius’ Castle, a venerated old dining institution with views of San Francisco Bay. Of course neither of those places is still in business, sadly, but we still try to do food-related birthdays together.

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