Category Archives: Recipes

Goan Pork Curry Tacos: Crossing Two Cultures

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It could be said that I have never looked forward to a cookbook launch more than I have  “Cowgirl Chef: Texas Cooking with a French Accent.”

No, it isn’t the fact that it’s the very first book I’ve ever blurbed. (“A charming tale of moving to Paris for love—and staying for food. Ellise Pierce’s delicious accounts of weaving together Texas and French cuisines will leave you hungry. But what truly satisfies are the lovely stories that bind them all together.” — Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family)

Or the fact that I’m mentioned in it. (Hello, page 189!)

Rather, it’s that in the close to three years in which I’ve been cooking along with Ellise over at Cowgirl Chef in our monthly Let’s Lunch Twitter lunchdate, I’ve been thinking: Why isn’t this woman writing a cookbook?

I’ve salivated over her black pepper strawberry scones, sundried tomato pesto palmiers and far more, thinking all of these need to be compiled in a book somewhere. Well, that time has come — Ellise’s cookbook hits bookstores May 15 and I couldn’t be happier for her.

To celebrate the occasion, the Let’s Lunchers decided on a virtual toast. In honor of Ellise’s blending of Texas and French cuisines, we’re each offering up a dish that melds two cultures. (Extra points if one of the two cuisines has roots in Texas or France.)

And so I’m thrilled to present: Goan pork curry tacos …

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Wordless Wednesday: Roasted Beet Risotto

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Alright, so this is not quite a Wordless Wednesday — but I couldn’t very well have shown you this picture of risotto that looks like candy and not share the recipe now, could I?

There isn’t much of a story here — I had leftover roasted beets; I made risotto. Because it was tasty, I took a picture.

So here is the recipe below … buon appetito and enjoy!

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Chai Poh Scramble: Easter, Singapore-Style

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Breakfast in this household includes many of your standard brunchy dishes — eggs and bacon, egg-soaked casseroles, eggs a dozen ways and more.

What’s less typical is when I wake up craving Chinese porridge — and the eggy accoutrements that go with a hot bowl of the stuff that I get at my mother’s kitchen table in Singapore. The eggs she serves with porridge are large bowls of beaten eggs, steamed with minced pork and white pepper. Or, savory scrambles packed with ketchup, shallots and sometimes shrimp.

Of the egg dishes I love in Singapore — one remained untested in my own Brooklyn kitchen: Chai poh omelet, a scramble peppered with deliciously salty chunks of preserved radish.

The reason was simple — I’d simply never bought chai poh before. But when my chef friend Simpson recently gave me an extra packet he had in his larder, I decided to give it a shot. After all, Easter was around the corner and my Let’s Lunch bunch had decided to share egg dishes for April …

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Bacon-Kimchi Fried Rice: Smoky, Fiery, Sweet & Salty

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Among the amazing food discoveries of my recent life, this one is certainly up there: A little grocery store very near me in Brooklyn sells kimchi. Lots of it.

It’s the good stuff, too –pungent, spicy, tart and tangy. But what this means is that the sous chef and I have been eating a fair bit of the stuff.

What to do with kimchi? We ran through the obvious in the first several meals — kimchi omelets, scrambles, kimchi with rice, porridge. You name the easy, we tried it.

Kimchi fried rice, however, was daunting to me. Fried rice was the very first Asian dish I tried to make — and if you’ve read A Tiger in the Kitchen, well, you might recall the outcome of my first attempt.

When I read about New York chef David Chang’s fervent belief in bacon and kimchi being made for each other, though — and how he uses it in fried rice — I was sold.

The past was the past, I decided. With a little research into kimchi fried rice, out came my wok and I was ready to give this a try …

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Turmeric-Sambal Chicken: A Singapore-New York Stir-Fry

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Anyone who’s attended an A Tiger in the Kitchen event or reading in the last year knows: The big thing I learned from cooking with my aunties in their Singapore kitchens was the importance of “Agak-Agak.”

The Malay phrase, which means “Guess-Guess,” encapsulates their method of cooking. They don’t rely on recipes or cookbooks — ingredients are tossed into a wok by sheer estimation, one that’s based on powerful instinct honed from years of very good cookery.

Since my year of cooking with them, I’ve found myself inspired to do the agak-agak thing more in my kitchen. Where I once was terrified of simply peeking in the fridge and throwing dinner together, with my busy book travels recently, that’s become rather the norm. Out of this new practice, however, has emerged interesting stir-fries, stews and more.

Just this week, as I was trying to recall how I’d made a dish I liked a few months back, I realized with great chagrin that like my aunties, I’ve not written any of these inventions down.

Well, that’s going to be fixed.

Starting with this stir-fry, we’re going to start recording it all. If you love turmeric and sambal, then definitely read on …

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Green Tea Butter Cookies: Dragon Year Treats

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Chinese new year, for me, has always been about my late grandmother’s pineapple tarts.

The buttery cookies topped with sweet home-made pineapple jam are so firmly connected with the holiday that all other cookies simply cease to exist whenever the lunar new year rolls around.

As much as I love them, I don’t quite have the equipment at hand to make them this year, alas. One must still celebrate, nonetheless. So, in a pinch, I whipped together a batch of buttery shortbread cookies flavored with green tea powder I’d picked up in Singapore and had never used in baking before.

The result? A delicious springtime treat that I may just have to include in my new year cookie rotation in years to come…

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Easy Chicken Noodle Soup: A Speedy Remedy

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It is never fun when one’s sous chef falls ill.

The chopping, the peeling, the dicing — it becomes too clear how distant a memory all that had become when the sous chef suddenly is too sniffly to wield a knife and dinner is suddenly before you.

And so it was that I went on a soup-making binge recently. If that’s what it was going to take to get the assistant back in commission, then by god, pots of healing soups simply had to be made.

Of the soups that filled our apartment recently, one stuck out …

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Keema Chili: Texas, Meet India

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If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a monthly eruption of messages with the hashtag #LetsLunch.

It happens the first Friday of every month, when a motley group of bloggers from around the world get together to break bread over Twitter. This virtual monthly lunchdate began almost three years ago when three women in three cities who had never met found themselves wishing (on Twitter) at the very same moment that they had a BLT before them. Well, the Parisian, the New Yorker and the San Diego baker made a lunchdate for a BLT. This turned into a monthly affair, which grew larger than we anticipated. Now, we have bloggers in Australia, Paris, London, Canada and all over the United States gathering once a month to share a meal.

It’s been very sweet and genteel so far — we’ve sipped high tea together and shared age-old family holiday recipes. But that was all before someone brought up chili — that’s when the oven mitts came off and a smackdown began …

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Cheese & Onion Sarnie: A Working Man’s High Tea

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If you’ve never had high tea in Singapore, add it to your bucket list.

These feasts, often buffets,  typically unfold over a few hours in posh hotels — all the better if they’re of the colonial variety such as the country’s fabled Raffles — and feature heaping tables of sweets (scones, clotted cream, jam, tiny tarts) as well as hearty servings of local savory dishes such as curry, noodles, steamed Chinese buns and more.

I always look forward to the scones, cakes and tarts — what proper post-Colonial Anglophile wouldn’t? But it’s often the dainty finger sandwiches that I covet first. Cucumber, sweet curried chicken — I can never get enough.

So when my monthly virtual lunch-group, the Let’s Lunch bunch, decided on doing high tea for October,  little sandwiches immediately went on my docket …

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Spicy Sichuan Sesame Noodles: Chilled Lunch With A Kick

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If Achilles had ever cooked, I’m convinced noodles would have been his heel.

Getting noodles — especially Asian-style noodles — just right has always been a bit of a mystery to me. In fact, nailing the consistency of noodles — just a smidge over al dente — is so daunting that I tend to avoid making pad thais and Southeast Asian mee gorengs at home. (My first pad thai attempt years ago, after all, resulted in me using chopsticks to pull apart gummy ropes of noodles that had been welded together into a mound. I’ve never tried to make this dish again.)

After a recent lunch at a Sichuan restaurant in New York where I had a fiery and ginger-speckled dish of spicy chilled sesame noodles, however, I simply couldn’t stop thinking about them.

So when my Let’s Lunch group of bloggers around the world who gather for a monthly lunch date suggested making cold entrees for August, I decided to get back on that horse …

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