Cooking on Orange Street: Chinese Beef Stir-Fry

For dinner with mom, Chef K and I thought it would be nice to cook for her -- a first! As she napped on the couch, we schemed what would be easy yet delicious. In end, what else but Chef K's famed beef stir-fry! We've had it a bunch of times, and considering how easy it is, it's perfect for last-minute meals, whether you're by yourself or expecting guests.

For this dish, you basically need 1-1.25 pounds of beef sirloin, plus any of your favorite veggies. This particular time we used about 10 small mushrooms, one red pepper, a handful of snap peas and half an onion, plus garlic, ginger and one jalapeno for seasoning and scallions to garnish.

First, cut all the veggies. Then, cut sections of meat and pound them thin before cutting them into shreds. Marinate the shredded meat with soy sauce, cornstarch, rice wine vinegar, rice wine and a touch of sesame oil -- just enough so all the meat is coated. (The cornstarch here is key because it will keep the meat moist in the pan.) Stir-fry the veggies until almost done, then remove from the pan and replace with the beef. When the beef is almost done, put the veggies back in and add final seasonings such as the scallion and a touch of salt, lime juice and sambal (for an extra little kick in case the jalapeno wasn't enough, which that night, it wasn't). Result: deliciousness!

Atlantic Art Walk & Lebanese Food Festival 2010

Last weekend, Mom was in town. Luckily, there was a ton happening right in the neighborhood so we didn't have to go far for things to do.

First stop was the annual Brooklyn Heights Lebanese Food Festival. Every year I seem to pass by as they're packing up, and every year I swear that next year I'll try to find out the dates beforehand so I can taste the yummy food and support the local community. Well I finally made it happen, although once again I found out the festival was going on by accident, when I happened to walk by on the way home from the gym on Friday and ordered a combo meal as a kind of preview. Delicious!!

On Saturday, I brought the momster and Chef K back for lunch. (Chef K is a huge fan of Lebanese food, especially after spending a month in Beirut.) Although the live music was kind of loud (DJed by two Lebanese teenagers dressed like the Jersey Shore kids), we enjoyed the chicken shawarma, grape leaves with lamb, green beans in tomato sauce, buttery rice pilaf, tabbouli and fattoush (tomato and cucumber salad garnished with fried pita chips). Nobody even made it to the baklava for dessert. So glad I was finally able to partake in this neighborhood tradition.

Afterward, my mom wanted to check out the Atlantic Art Walk on Atlantic Ave, something she had read about in the paper. Unfortunately, it wasn't the hustling and bustling street fair we were hoping for, but we did get to pop into a few galleries, the highlight being a print studio. There was some really beautiful work out - I wish I remembered the name of this place!

My favorite print was this one on the far wall of the staircase. You can't see it so much here, but there are white outlines of some kind of architectural structure running throughout the red color blocks. Again, wish I remember the name of the artist -- I wrote it down on a scrap of paper but seem to have thrown it away.

Later we stopped into Blue Marble. Mom had a cinnamon ice cream (her fave), and I had a blueberry pomegranate sorbet, which came with this shovel-like spoon (I'll be blogging more about eating utensils sometime soon...). A fun time was had by all!

Subway Signs: Out-of-Order Patterns

As many people who know me know, I am obsessed with patterns. Patterns! I love them. There is something so satisfying about repetition, about the tension between the simplicity of a single unit or motif on the one hand, and the complexity that occurs when that single unit is repeated. There is a deep, epistemological basis for why patterns are so fascinating, too, I believe -- after all, meaning itself is based on repetition, on one thing standing next to another. No one thing can mean anything without another to which it can be compared.

Anyway, the other night coming home from class, I was very much struck by this out-of-order sign on the Manhattan-bound G train. Totally wacky!! I would love to design some kind of fabric based on these seemingly random grid patterns.

On Materialism, and the Meaning of Home

A few weeks ago, I had the bittersweet experience of helping one of my best friends, Priya, and her husband move out of their apartment. Well, by help, I mean I watched the truck and organized some of the boxes inside. While I sat there on a slightly foggy, muggy weekday morning, attempting to read some long-neglected design book (being too cheap to buy anything new and too lazy to borrow anything), I had the opportunity to reflect on what it really means to pack up your life's belongings and transport them to a new place. In Priya and Josh's case, they were driving everything they owned up to Priya's family's house near Boston before embarking on a grand, one-year round-the-world tour.

Load after load, familiar belongings paraded into the truck. There were the paintings, all neatly wrapped in bubble wrap; there was the couch, deconstructed, with upholstery nails sticking out like thorns; there was the Saarinen womb chair in nubby red boucle, the one I had petitioned them to get, lovingly shrouded in plastic. One by one these objects were leaving Priya and Josh's beautiful two-story loft, and I imagined the space empty and forlorn -- or perhaps, once again free, free to receive the imprimatur of a new couple.

It made me quite sad. I was sad, first and foremost, because these dearest of friends were leaving. But in another way, I was sad that all the things that made their home theirs had been taken apart and surrendered to the brown anonymity of boxes, to languish in some basement. I thought about my own apartment, so beloved, and what it will feel like when I inevitably move back to California one day. Could I bear it? What a home means cannot possibly be quantified, not even by the moving consultant who comes by to say everything you own will fit into 42 book boxes, two wardrobe, three dish, plus five rolls of packing tape.

Perhaps you've been wondering why I called this blog what I did. Well, it's because I'm an unabashed and unapologetic materialist. The objects we surround ourselves with are the very building blocks of our life, totems of our memories and of our history. Without them, who are we?

Cooking on Orange Street: Papaya, Mango and Peach Salsa

Here is another recent winner: fruit salsa. It all started when my aunt Josephine gave us two papayas at dinner. "What should we do with these things?" I wondered. I'm generally not a fan of sweet things with salty, but trust me, the fruit work perfectly with the avocado here, and nicely offset any type of lighter meat you might get.

Here is the salsa with some blackened chicken and chicken broth-infused rice pilaf...

...and here it is again with snapper a few days later. (The snapper is pan-fried with just olive oil, salt, pepper and a little oregano.)

Yum! As we made a lot of salsa, we even had it huevos-rancheros style with black beans, sunny-side up eggs, turkey sausages and English muffins for breakfast one morning. A very versatile side.

Cooking on Orange Street: Salmon and Shrimp Papardelle with Spring Vegetable Medley

So... I've been toying with the idea of launching a brand-new blog JUST about cooking. After all, I've amassed a ton of photos over the last few years and have always wanted to share them.

But, somewhat fearing the effects of splitting my attention between two blogs, I've decided to keep the cooking stuff here with everything else, at least for the time being. If there is enough interest (and I have enough time), "Cooking on Orange Street" will become its own blog at some point.

Anyway, for my inaugural cooking post, I wanted to share not only one of the most delicious home-cooked meals I've had in recent memory, but also some of the home-cooking philosophy I've come to adopt through years of cooking on my own and, most recently, cooking with my BF, a professional chef. (The BF will hereby be known as "Chef K" -- hee hee!)

In the past, my cooking experience consisted mainly of what my wonderful grandmother taught me. As she was Buddhist, we would always make vegetarian food together. Even now, years later, I remember the days we would slowly make our way to Chinatown with the granny cart (ha ha, literally!) and pick up supplies. Later, in the Bronx kitchen with no AC, she would sit at the enamel-topped table as I stood by the stove, cooking from the blackened wok with no handle, and ever-so-gently give me directives like, "eggplants like oil" and "not so much salt for me!" In those days -- and for the frugal years afterward -- my repertory consisted of things like sauteed spinach with garlic, sauteed mushrooms, egg with scallion (a special treat), curry cauliflower with tomato, seasoned tofu with chives.

Then came a number of years when I expanded the repertory in a by-the-book manner, cooking primarily out of Everyday Food magazine. It was a definite change from the traditionalist "pinch of this, pinch of that" school of cooking I'd been raised in. In a strange way, I found a kind of freedom in measuring cups and tablespoons in set recipes, as if it represented independence from my childhood. It also represented a literal independence -- I was living by myself for the first time, cooking in a kitchen I had gutted and custom-designed.

Since meeting Chef K, things have changed once again, and I've come full circle back to instinctual cooking -- keeping it loose, never cooking from a recipe, working creatively with whatever happens to be in the fridge and cupboard. At the same time, I've picked up a pro's snippets of wisdom. Things like, you generally shouldn't wash mushrooms, because they will soak up the moisture and then go badly more quickly (a damp paper towel is fine, in case you were wondering). Maybe this is stuff that everyone knows, but I didn't. Chef K has taught me about different cuts of meat (always pointing out when the butchers mislabel them), how to debone chicken and fish (I almost fainted one time), how to cut vegetables "properly," how to plate things up so they look nice.

I probably won't be posting a whole lot of recipes (unless anyone asks), but I do hope you'll enjoy the photos and commentary...

Here is the salmon and shrimp papardelle with spring vegetables that we made recently. SO yummy!!! I highly recommend this dish. Five stars.

We bought a half pound of Alaskan wild salmon (Chef K is very particular about his salmon and detests the Atlantic variety because it's blander than the West Coast kind) and cut it into quarters. The salmon was seasoned with salt and pepper, then seared on each side for a few minutes before being popped into the oven at about 325 for a few more minutes. Same for the shrimp. For the veggies, we sauteed fresh peas (shelled), shiitake mushrooms, asparagus (Chef K cuts off the bottom third of all the stalks and runs the peeler over any particularly large stalks to ensure tenderness) and fava beans for a very short time, with salt, pepper and olive oil.

At the very end, add a little sambal and rice wine to taste, just to bring out the flavors. (I would go so far as to call sambal and rice wine Chef K's secret weapons, as he uses them just as frequently as salt and pepper!) The papardelle we got at Fairway. Voila, a delicious, healthy and beautiful meal.

Subway Signs: Hacked!

Found this rather curious sign above the downtown C/E track at 14th Street the other day: "Brooklyn" papered over with a "Breuckelen" sticker meticulously matched in font and color. Marketing stunt for an as-yet unnamed product or event? Hipster prank? Urban guerrilla art a la Poster Boy? Who knows...