A Tiger In The Kitchen

Watercress Soup: A Healthy Beginning

You could say my mother is a rather predictable person.

As soon as she hears a sniffle, a cough or simply looks you in the eye and surmises (usually correctly) that you've been up far too late the night before, mugs and bowls of liquids start appearing around the house. Like many Chinese, she's a big believer in the healing powers of soup, that ingredients such as goji berries, preserved dates, lotus seeds and more have the ability to restore heaty (yang) or cooling (yin) energy to the body when tossed into a pot with pork or chicken and boiled together for hours.

Among her healing soups, my mother is particularly fond of making one for me: Watercress soup.

"You always cough and you have so many late nights -- your body heat builds when you stay up late," she'll often say, pushing a steaming bowl of the stuff toward me. "This will cool you down."

So, when my Let's Lunch friends suggested sharing a recipe for a healthy dish for our first lunchdate of 2011, I immediately thought of watercress soup...

Winter Melon Soup: Comfort, Simple & Clear

Among the many Cantonese-style soups of my Singaporean girlhood, the one I find myself craving once temperatures start heading south in fall is a simple one: Winter melon soup.

This broth, dotted with cubes of soft winter melon and bits of mushroom and pork, isn't an elaborate or fussy soup -- it's what the Chinese call "cheng," or clear. The flavor is subtle; the experience is all about warmth and comfort.

So, when my Let's Lunch friends suggested doing a fall soup for November, I immediately started badgering my mother for her recipe ...

Grilled Cheese Sandwich: Cheddar & Blue With Asian Pears & Rosemary Honey

There's a lovely little bar near my Brooklyn home that serves the most brilliant grilled cheese sandwiches -- the bread is sliced thin and grilled to crisp perfection. And the melted cheddar within is curled around slender slivers of green apples, which lend the sandwich a nice tartness that cuts through the rich cheese.

I think about that sandwich often -- and it came to mind again when my Let's Lunch group, a bunch of far-flung bloggers who gather once a month for a virtual lunch date, decided on creative grilled cheese sandwiches for October.

The version I had in mind had a few twists, however ...

Kong Bak Pau: Braised Pork Belly Sandwiches

 

Picnics have never been my favorite thing. Bugs, heat, grass, dirt -- need I say more?

The picnics of my childhood in Singapore, however, were another thing entirely. The urge to organize one would only occasionally grip my family. But when it did, we'd find ourselves by the beach on a clear Sunday, inhaling the salty breeze as we unpacked plastic bags of food on wooden picnic tables. We'd have sandwiches and fried snacks; an uncle would fire up the beachside grill for the chicken wings we'd marinated.

So when my hungry Let's Lunch group decided on fall picnic food for our monthly virtual lunchdate, I immediately thought of my bygone Singaporean excursions.

The perfect food for this occasion? My mother's kong bak pau -- a sandwich made up of a Chinese mantou bun filled with braised pork belly ...

Lemongrass Frozen Yogurt: The Joys of Cooking Redux

Years ago, I heard a sports writer complain about how he used to love sports -- until he started writing about it.

Once it became a job, he all but stopped watching games on weekends. The thing that he adored had morphed into stress-inducer.

I remember feeling aghast -- you get paid to write about something you love. Isn't that more than many people dream of?

Recently, however, I've started to understand. After spending weeks with my nose buried deep in my book manuscript -- which is all about a journey home to my native Singapore told through food and cooking -- my time in the kitchen has become, simply, work. Meals have been thrown together out of sheer necessity; easy old faithfuls rather than new creative dishes have been making far too many appearances on the dinner table.

The stress of writing and editing my hundreds of pages on food, sadly, had transformed my love for cooking into a source of anxiety.

But I only realized I'd forgotten how to enjoy the act of making food when my Let's Lunch friends nudged me back into the kitchen -- not to put a meal on the table but to whip up something silly and anything but practical: A decadent chilled dessert.

Kitchen-Sink Stir-Fry: Spring Cleaning Your Fridge

 

It's hard to think about spring when there's still snow on the ground in New York. But one must be optimistic -- which we are over here in the Let's Lunch crowd.

Fresh off our breathless postings on aphrodisiac-laced dishes in February, our thoughts immediately turned to warmer times as we debated what to make next for our monthly virtual lunch date.

How about "spring cleaning (the fridge?)" Stephanie over at The Cosmic Cowgirl suggested.

And so, kitchen-sink recipes to help you springclean your fridge it was.

Now, since I have several solid grocers (and one neat butcher) within a 2-minute walk of my Brooklyn apartment, I tend to buy as I cook. (I've never really been one to stock up my fridge like there's no tomorrow, anyhow.)

Nonetheless, there are a few basics that I must always have in my fridge: Bacon, tofu and some sort of ground meat, usually pork or beef.

Bacon is a wonder that must be consumed on its own, in my book. (Or, in a bacon explosion. Or a BLT. Or ... I digress.)

But what to do with tofu and ground pork? The possibilities are endless ...

Oyster Omelette (Or Luak): The Food Of Love

 

Food, love, passion. They've always been intertwined for me.

Sure, diamonds and Louboutins are perfectly nice and all that. But a man who knows how to feed you well? Now that's truly priceless.

I've been thinking about why that is the case ever since my Twitter Let's Lunch bunch, a global group of cooks who have a monthly virtual lunchdate, decided to put together aphrodisiac-laced dishes in honor of Valentine's Day. In a story this week in the New York Times, food researchers say that the powers of aphrodisiacs have been rather exaggerated. Very few of the usual suspects -- asparagus, chocolate -- have proven to be able to boost the libido, apparently.

But how else to explain oyster-induced tinglies or the quickening heartbeat that truffles inevitably seem to cause?

Science be damned. I'd rather carry on believing in the potent sexual powers of food, thank you very much.

For my Let's Lunch afternoon delight, oysters immediately came to mind. They've gotten me into trouble more times than I choose to remember. And, they've also long been regarded as aphrodisiacs perhaps they're filled with zinc, which is a key nutrient for testosterone production.

Besides, there's a Singaporean fried oyster omelette dish that never fails to get my heart racing at the mere thought of it. 

Just like it can be with love (or what comes after love), however, this dish proved to be a little tricky to pull off ...

Chicken Adobo: Baguio Beckoning

 

As we were hunched over the stove, embroiled in some recent kitchen experiment, my Singapore family's maid Erlinda noted in passing that it'd been almost two years since she'd eaten her own home-made adobo.

Two years? This seemed like an interminably long time for a Filipina not to be enjoying her national dish, cooked by her own hand.

My mother doesn't stock vinegar in the kitchen, she explained, which instantly makes brewing a pot of the vinegary pork or chicken stew impossible. And the soy sauce that we Chinese use happens to be just a little too sweet for real adobo, it turns out. 

Now, being a massive lover of the stuff, I immediately decided that Erlinda's adobo drought needed to end. (This had nothing to do, of course, with the fact that my mouth often starts to water the moment I hear the word "adobo.")

So, with some instructions from Erlinda on what she needed for her adobo, off we went.

Top 10: The Memorable Eats Of 2009

 

You know it's been a good year when you are able to say this: 2009 was when I began to eat for a living.

I'd always been a devotee of affairs of the stomach. I may have written about fashion and other lifestyle areas for a living but baking, braising, trying new recipes, eating out -- those were what consumed me when weekends rolled around. 

Luck has its ways of finding you, however. Now, on the precipice of 2010, I'm beginning to close out a lunar calendar year of cooking and eating with my family in Singapore as research for my book, "A Tiger In The Kitchen." 

My journey so far has taken me many places -- France, where I had the loveliest gingery champagne cocktail with friends old and dear; China, where my father and I went in search of my great-grandfather's footprints in the village of his birth. And, of course, Singapore, where my aunties and maternal grandmother have been plying me with meals, recipes and much, much love along the way.

With all that I've packed into 2009, it's hard to decide what the highlights have been. But, inspired by some stellar Top 10 gastronomic lists out there (definitely check out Sam Sifton's list of Top 11 dishes in New York in the New York Times), I decided to give it a go.

Here, in no particular order, are my 10 memorable eats of 2009. 

Enjoy, buon appetito and listen, let's do this again in 2010 ...

Leftover Turkey Hash Brown Quiche: Dieters Beware

As much as I love Thanksgiving, I may adore the days after the holiday even more.

One word: Leftovers.

Sure turkey dinners with stuffing and corn pudding that have been doused in so much gravy that you have a thick, glistening brown moat on your plate are unbeatable. But this is also a great time to rev up your creativity in the kitchen.

What to do with your mounds of leftover turkey? Our Let's Lunch bunch -- a group of far-flung home cooks who have a monthly lunch date on Twitter -- decided to tackle this question for December.

My answer? A garlicky turkey hash brown quiche.