Tuesday Dinner: Udon Shrimp Noodles (And a Semi-Accurate Science Lesson)

Here’s how I decide what’s for dinner:

1. I think of a main ingredient I want to cook (in this case, the pound of shrimp in my freezer).
2. I think of a secondary ingredient I want to use (in this case, Asian noodles).
3. I do a preliminary Google search for ideas.
4. I check Pinterest for ideas.
5. I vomit when I see how someone put all of the ingredients in a crockpot and deemed it a “great meal.”
6. I pick a recipe or recipes to adapt or come up with a basic idea of my own.

With shrimp and udon on my mind, I came across a recipe from Cooking In Sens that utilized hot peppers (which were not missed), but looked easy enough to assemble. Until I went grocery shopping and looked for something called kecap manis.

What the hell is kecap manis? Let’s see what Wikipedia says:

Sweet soy sauce, which has a thick, almost syrupy consistency and a unique, pronounced, sweet somewhat treacle-like flavor due to generous addition of palm sugar. In cooking, it could be replaced by molasses with a little vegetable stock stirred in. However this is different than the smooth and mild sweetness of palm sugar and the strong flavor of fermented soy, as molasses can tend to have bitter flavors.

Huh. Surely Wegmans must stock it in its Asian foods section, right? Right? Wrong. As it turns out, Indonesian kecaps are not among the thousands of sauces stocked by Wegmans. It didn’t even muster a mention when I searched for it at their website. So, my options were to visit one of the local Asian groceries or make my own. I opted for the latter. So, in what aisle does Wegmans stock palm sugar? I’ll let you look for that the next time you hit the store.

Tuesday dinner: Negi Miso Chicken Thighs

There’s a half-used tub of red miso paste in my refrigerator that I have moved eight or nine times. I bought it for…actually, I’m not sure why I bought it. But, it has been a nuisance of late, taking up space in a fridge where I could use more.

During my recent pawing of Pinterest to find a recipe for dinner, I came across a recipe for negimiso, a Japanese paste made with miso (usually a blend of red and white), onion and mirin. Negi itself is a special Japanese onion that, like a leek, does not form a bulb at the bottom. The native version is a little difficult to find here in the Northeastern U.S., so leeks would have to do.

Killing Them Softly: Meat Cabbage Casserole

EDITOR’S NOTE: My recent discovery of our families’ collection of 1970s era church cookbooks has been nothing short of a conversation piece around Al Dente HQ. The kind-hearted and well-intentioned women behind these recipes set cooking back years, all the while trying to kill their families with butter, shortening and lard. Not wanting to hog the glory and splendor for myself, it is my pleasure to share these classic culinary gems with you. These are the original recipes with very little editing. If you have one of these around your house or find one at your parent’s home, please contact me. I would love to get my hands on it.

RECIPE: Meat Cabbage Casserole
AUTHOR: Phyllis Orsino
COOKBOOK: Our Lady of Pompeii’s Society of St. Therese Cookbook
APPROXIMATE YEAR: 1973

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS? This embodies everything I could hope for from a church cookbook. I think about my the men of my own family. These were men that often did not care what dinner tasted like. They worked 8, 10, 12 hours each day, came home and expected dinner on the table at 5, 5:30 or 6 p.m.

The only thing they loved to do more than come home from dinner and tell everyone about their hard day of work was to sit in their chair after dinner and expel every cubic inch of gas in their bodies while reading the evening paper. They would burp so much, the paper would sway in the breeze. The farting would drown out Brokaw or Rather in the background.

They were men. They were also miserable. Their wives were slowly poisoning them with sticks of butter, gallons of oil, and cups of shortening. What wasn’t killing him was mangling their tastebuds. Of course, telling his wife that they wanted something else for dinner would require him to actually speak to her. So, better to look miserable and choke down meat and cabbage casserole.

Meat Cabbage Casserole

• 1 large solid head of cabbage (about 2 lbs.)
• 3 tbsp. margarine
• 2 tbsp. soy sauce
• 1/2 tsp. sugar
• 1 tsp. salt (half goes in cabbage)
• 1 lb. each beef, pork and veal, ground
• 1 tbsp. flour
• 1 egg
• dash of black pepper
• 1 tsp. instant onion soup mix
• 1 cup milk

Shred cabbage (there will be about 3 quarts). Melt margarine in large skillet or Dutch oven, and add cabbage, cook, stirring until wilted. Add soy sauce, sugar and 1/2 tsp. salt. In a bowl, mix remaining salt and meat, and next 4 ingredients. Gradually stir in milk, and alternate layers of cabbage and meat mixture in shallow 2 quart baking dish, beginning and ending with cabbage. Dot with margarine and bake uncovered, in a 350-degree oven, about one hour. Makes six servings.

Tuesday dinner: Dashi beef and mushrooms

The Wife usually reads the food magazines that we get in the mail — Bon Appétit and Wegmans‘ Menu — before I do. And, almost always, the following conversation takes place:

Her: Hmm. That sounds good.
Me: What?
Her: (insert recipe name here). What exactly is (obscure ingredient or title)?

Most of the time I have an answer, but the word dashi caught me off guard. I had never heard of the Japanese stock prior to this month’s issue of Menu. Wegmans sells it as a simmering sauce, processed with mushrooms and presented almost like a gravy. Based on what I’ve found online, it’s not a true dashi. According to Japanese food manufacturer FUTABA, dashi “is Japanese name for ‘broth’ or soup made by cooking seafood or vegetables. There are many types of fish and other ingredients used as dashi.” Wegmans’ dashi contains milled kombu, or dried kelp, tahini paste and roasted soybeans, but substitutes shitake mushrooms for the traditional bonito, or tuna flakes.

Tuesday dinner: Honey-lime chicken breasts

We’re going to try a new format for the recipes. We’ll start with a little bit of babbling, touch on what worked and what doesn’t, and then drop in the recipe. This way, we can cut back on the stream of consciousness that kicks off so many of these pieces and focus a little more on the food.

My hope is that this focuses me a little more on the topic at hand. I’ve noticed that I wander a little bit (okay, a lot). It adds some personality and color to an otherwise boring recipe, but holy hell, even I get sick of hearing myself talk after a while.

So, let’s call this the end of the babbling and move on to…

Monday dinner: Soba noodles with sweet ginger scallion sauce

Food bigotry cuts both ways. Much like I don’t think others should peddle their culinary madness, I’m reticent to share my dalliances into other ethnic cuisines. But, as with most bigots, hypocrisy often times supersedes one’s core beliefs. During the winter months, I’ll stir-fry chicken and some vegetables and toss it with udon. We’re soup people, so it’s also not unheard of for me to over-broth dinner and turn it into something slurpable. Udon is made from rice wheat, while soba is made from buckwheat. I don’t know the difference between the two, so I’ll let the geniuses at The Kitchn explain.

The original recipe at Simply Reem called for a couple of more distinct flavors, namely chili oil. I substituted traditional chili oil for a chipotle-infused olive oil from F. Oliver’s in Canandaigua (a Christmas present from the boss). In search of protein, I added about 3/4 of a pound of sliced sirloin that I marinated in shiro miso and soy sauce, and stir fried.

Saturday Dinner: Miso Salmon

It took some time to get The Wife into sushi. Like vegetables and salad, it was a process where I had to start bland and small to get her comfortable, then slowly introduce the more complex. She started with California roll and other cooked rolls, before moving on to raw tuna, crab and other tasty morsels of raw goodness. While we would wait for sushi to be delivered, she would house bowls of miso soup. It’s to the point where she buys the packets of instant soup to make at work.

I don’t venture too far into Asian cooking, simply because I don’t know much about it. That said, I was looking for a new way to prep fish fillets and flank steaks. While shopping a couple of weeks back for Niku Udon, I picked up a package of miso just in case my foray into Japanese noodles went awry. It didn’t, so tonight I cracked into the package for the first time to prep some salmon fillets. Nothing special here, really. The miso, mixed with mirin and white wine, made for a very flavorful marinade. I pan-seared the filets and served them with a citrus soy sauce. The miso knocked out that fishy flavor that turns some people away from the orange fish.

And, I have a bunch of miso leftover for The Wife to make soup.

Monday Dinner: Niku Udon

For a while, I taught evening graphic design and English courses at a local junior college. Dinner on those evenings varied from leftovers to salad to soup. For a while, I went through an udon streak. Wegmans carries instant udon soup in about four or five different flavors, much like ramen. After a while of watching me eat it, The Wife got curious and fired up a bowl of it for dinner before I got home one night. The result was my buying twice as many packages each week. I think its the texture that I like best in this noodle. The thick rice udon is a little gummier than typical pasta, but not in a gluey, sticky sort of way.

Always on the look out for something new, I ran across this recipe from Serious Eats. I was immediately intrigued. Sadly, Wegmans’ robust Asian grocery section failed me. No kombu. No katsuobushi. No watercress. No tofu. And, the Asian grocery on the east side is closed on Sundays, so my choices were limited. Rather than make my own dashi for this soup, I bought the powdered dashi mix sold at the store. In the interest of full disclosure, I had no idea what dried bonito flakes were until I looked it up online. Naturally, I was skeptical how dried tuna would translate into soup. You should know that smell that comes from the jar of dashi is vile; there is no question that fish, or some sort of fish product, is inside. I swapped out the kombu for some dried wakame to add a little color and flavor to the broth. Speaking of the broth, the mirin and soy provides a phenomenal contrast to the salty, fishy flavor. The Wife already packed the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.