matapa [Angola]

This week I made matapa, which is an Angolan dish. The recipe I found was in Portuguese, so there were probably translation / cultural miscommunications (for example, the photo in the recipe appears to have red peppers and carrots, but the recipe didn't call for that, so I didn't put it in).

The first step was to grind up a bunch of peanuts into powder. I used my new mortar and pestle for it. It was pretty fun but got tiring after a while.

Instead of actual shrimp, I used All Vegetarian vegan shrimp. This was a mistake. I bought 6 packs of it (currently in my freezer) and used two for this dish. Somehow I'm going to have to figure out how to use the rest (or maybe I just overcooked it in this dish) but it was not good.

I used cabbage instead of cassava leaves. Otherwise, I followed the recipe pretty closely and served it with white rice.

It didn't end up looking like the photo in the recipe, like... at all. 

Verdict: unfortunately, I am not going to be able to finish this. I don't think it's the recipe's fault at all; I think it's the fake shrimp I used. It just has the wrong texture and taste. It doesn't help that the recipe itself is quite rich due to the peanuts and coconut milk, and not seasoned much at all (it probably does require seasoning, but it's not called for in the recipe).

重庆辣子鸡 + 私房小面 [Chongqing]

When I was researching cuisine around the world, it was very difficult to find recipes from regions of China outside of, e.g., Sichuan and Cantonese cuisine. I found that by searching in Chinese-language websites, there were tons of recipes. These recipes were my first attempts at cooking from these recipes by using Google Translate. My first takeaway is that I really need to ask some of my Chinese-speaking friends to help with the translations (and potentially also where to get particular ingredients). I thought I could get by with wiktionary and Google Images search when translators failed on ingredients lists, but I think that failed just a little bit.

This week I found two recipes from Chongqing. The first recipe, 重庆辣子鸡, is basically a spicy chicken recipe. The second, 私房小面, is a noodle recipe.

*** 重庆辣子鸡 -- spicy chicken ***

I'm (mostly) vegetarian, so I replaced the chicken with seitan. I used a prepared seitan that was supposed to substitute pork. I used way fewer chilis than I should have. I have a very pretty pepper garland I've been taking peppers -- large dried cayennes -- from, and I only took three of them, because otherwise the entire garland would be gone. That meant I used about a third of the peppers I should have. 

I couldn't find actual Welsh / naganeni long onion, so I just went with plain green onion instead. I'm not sure if Welsh onions should be easy to find in the US. 

I also had a really fun time going with a good friend to Uwajimaya to grab a *bunch* of dark brown liquids. For this recipe, I got shaohsing wine, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce, and peanut oil. 

The recipe was pretty easy to make. It just involved sauteéing. The problem is that partway through, as I'll explain later, my saucier became unavailable and I couldn't cook the chilis/fragrant bits without the seitan. This meant that the minced ginger was undercooked.

Verdict: I should have used more peppers than I did. I actually do have a large pack of dried chilis that I haven't opened yet (and I didn't open them because I don't have another good container to put them in yet...). This turned out... not spicy. I think when cooking with seitan I just have to spice things 2x as much as I would with meat, because the seitan taste was still pretty overpowering compared to the other seasonings (personally, seitan tastes fine to me, but I really wished it was more flavorful).

*** 私房小面 -- Google translate says this is "private room noodles" ***

The first issue with this dish was the noodles. Uwajimaya is a Japanese grocery, and though it's a huge store, the selection of Chinese-specific ingredients appears to be a little slim (maybe I should have tried H-mart?). I had some trouble finding the right kind of noodles, and the store was super busy so I just grabbed 300g of whatever wheat noodles weren't marketed as ramen. 

I replaced the ham with tofurky deli slices. I know I like those, so not really a problem. I also didn't garnish with tomatoes, cucumber, or cilantro... just didn't have it in me after the cooking experience. I also bought more dark brown liquids for this meal: toasted sesame oil, and zhenjiang vinegar.

The biggest problem I had here was cooking the noodles. I don't know why I thought I could cook them in my saucier, rather than in my stock pot. I think I was hoping it would be faster to get the water boiling (which is true), and that I didn't need much water if the cooking time was only 1-2 minutes (this was false). The first problem was that as the water was almost boiling, one of my old dirty rags fell right into the pot. Great. So I had to re-boil the water. Once it got boiling again, I put the dry noodles in, and they did immediately start cooking. But there was a twist in the dry noodles, so that parts of the noodles were still dry (because that part was super dense) and the other parts were getting overcooked. I ended up cooking them for probably like 8-10 minutes... oof... they were extremely overcooked. They were basically congealed once I tried cooling them in the fridge. Oh, and my nice saucier got noodles completely burnt to the bottom.* So that was an absolute failure. 

Verdict: This was edible. The fact that it was only edible was entirely my fault.

*thankfully, after soaking for 48hr, it's sparkling clean again :)

 

 The "spicy chicken" here looks a lot tastier than it was, unfortunately.

marinated feta [California]

This week, I made a simple dish of feta marinated in olive oil, with some bread on the side. This was a very simple dish to make. I used in-brine feta, which I think is necessary for this recipe. 

On the side I also had sliced bread shallow fried in butter. I got the loaf from Sea Wolf bakery in Fremont, which I hadn't been to before. I stopped by only 45min before they closed, so I don't think the bread was very fresh. But shallow frying it in butter made it so tasty, even if it was kind of stale. I'll definitely stop by again this weekend because I've heard they have really good pastries too.

I also got salted Kerrygold butter, which I think was the best the grocery store had in stock. I have gotten kind of picky about my butter, especially when not using it for baking.

Verdict: I didn't have the right dishware for this. The image in the original recipe shows a small shallow bowl where the oil can sit higher up on the feta, but even the smaller plates I have are too shallow for that. So I ended up having a lot of extra oil. I was also not sure if I had to actually marinate the feta in this oil. But it tasted really good! 

To be honest, the bread was even better than the feta, but maybe that's just because you can't go wrong with bread and butter. I'll definitely have to get some honey if I have leftover bread.