I’ve been a bad füddie. I’ve been working too much and being extremely lazy and cooking easy, no-effort-required crap for dinner. Finally, I heard the cries of my angry cookware and downtrodden stomach, begging me to spare them another night of steamed vegetables with yet another baked yam. Admittedly, the lack of yams at the farmers market this week may have helped. So, inviting mystery and the one-armed-bandit of Googling for recipes back in to our hearts, it’s time for another episode of … Adventures in Cooking Random Things I Found at the Farmers Market!
Today’s journey begins with:
2 pink yautia
1 poblano
A large thumb-sized (ok, two thumbs) hunk of fresh ginger
Cream (I think I used about a half cup, but your guess is as good as mine)
Hon-dashi
Fish sauce
Sriracha.
These brave ingredients undoubtedly began life somewhere more picturesque than their end in my cheap crockery, but their destiny was, after all, deliciousness and not beauty. I am absolutely not writing the rest of this recipe like that. Clearly I need to watch less TNT, whose knowledge of Drama seems to be catching.
The professor was basically no help on recipes, except to say that yautia cooks like taro, so I just made this up based on what I had. Here’s the dish:
Slice the poblano and start it caramelizing. Peel and cut the yautia into chunks, and boil it in dashi until soft (about 15-20 minutes). While that’s going, dice about 3/4 of the ginger, adding most of it to the poblanos pan about 2/3 through caramelizing. Toss the rest into the boiling yautia.
When the caramelizing is done – if you’re clever, this will be just as the yautia is done too – add some cream to the pan of poblanos and ginger, removing it from direct heat (you want the cream to get warm and absorb the flavors, not cook or scald). Drain the yautia, reserving maybe a half cup of the liquid. Put the yautia into a bowl and pour the cream-poblano mixture over it. Mash.
It should be a little dry right now, which is why you kept some of your dashi. To said reserved dashi, add a good bit of fish sauce and as much sriracha as you like. Also, mash your remaining ginger into the mix (I used a garlic press – you really want the juice!). Now, stir that into your mash to get the right texture…if it’s still too dry, you should have kept more dashi. Add diluted fish sauce instead. And probably more sriracha.
I will be the first to admit, it kinda looks like cat food, and by itself it’s not all that flavorful – unless you really went overboard on the fish sauce and sriracha. But the nice, subtle taste, served with a fried egg on top and a good sprinkle of soy sauce, is actually quite good. And, more importantly, I think it has real potential. Should I plan ahead at some point, this would be a really fantastic side for something powerfully-sauced, like steak-au-poivre or perhaps even a masaman curry. Or you could deep fry balls of the stuff to dip in spicy sauces…
-MAW
An Aussie friend passed this article on to me, and I really do think it’s an interesting concept to be debated. Basically, Sydney chef Yukako Ichikawa got sick of patrons who didn’t met her standards, particularly those involving the clean-plate club. She posted rules on her restaurant’s door, stating that patrons are required to eat everything on the plate – except a few selected garnishes (for this, I question her commitment to Sparkle Motion) – or be forced to pay extra and/or be banned from returning. She turns people away for any number of a priori violations.
