Viet World Kitchen

Kohlrabi Stir-fried with Garlic and Egg Recipe (Su Hao Xao Toi)

Many thanks to those of you who contributed ideas on how to cook kohlrabi Asian style. Your thoughts fed my imagination over the weekend. I’d come home from a grueling week-long business trip out of town and was spent. Plus, I pulled my Achilles tendon on Thursday. Hobbling was the best I could do.

The nearly empty fridge had a bag of farmer’s root vegetables – carrots, watermelon radishes, and kohlrabi – half a red onion and some eggs. Recalling your comments and a conversation with my mother about kohlrabi, I whipped up this simple stir-fry to go with a bowl of rice and a watermelon radish salad.

The hardest part of it was peeling away all the tough kohlrabi skin. Trimming the root and stem ends first makes using the vegetable peeler to remove the skin easier. After an initial pass of the peeler, I did it again. Kohlrabi shines brighter once its thick exterior is gone.

Then it was simply a matter of cutting up the kohlrabi into thick julienne, about 1/4-inch wide. You can add carrot to this stir-fry too but that would rob kohlrabi of its stardom. Next time, I may throw a teaspoon or so of finely chopped dried shrimp into the skillet with the garlic and red onion.

Feeling much better after the meal, I hobbled with a much lighter step.

Serves 2 or 3

2 kohlrabi, each about the size of a large orange
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons fish sauce
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1/2 small red onion, sliced vertically into thin wedges
Salt

1. Peel the kohlrabi and cut into thick julienne. Set aside.

2. Beat the eggs with the fish sauce and black pepper. Set aside.

3. Heat the canola oil in skillet over medium high heat. Add the garlic and onion and cook for about 1 minute until just softened.

4. Add the kohlrabi and cook for 3 to 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until softened. It should weep some liquid. However, feel free to splash in water and/or lower the heat if the skillet looks dry.

Give the egg one last gentle beat then pour over the kohlrabi. Stir to combine and cook for another 30 seconds, until the egg has set. Remove from the heat, season with salt and pepper. Transfer to a plate and serve with rice.

Related post:  Asian Ideas for Kohlrabi? (includes tips on selecting good ones!)

Low-Cal Hmong Spicy Eggplant Recipe

I love eggplant but don’t always want all the calories that go with eating it. It’s a vegetable that’s often times cooked into rich foods, fried in oil or simmered in rich sauces. Even when I grill whole ones, either for Vietnamese eggplant with scallions or Indian bhaigan bharta, there’s some oil involved to enhance the vegetables plush qualities.

Giving into all the fatty eggplant pleasures -- deep-fried eggplant tempura, stir-fried eggplant in garlic sauce, baked eggplant parmesan -- seems inevitable. A low-calorie eggplant dish? Nah!

Never would have I thought of boiling eggplant. That sounded nasty when a Hmong farmer suggested it to me. It’s a common way for us to prepare eggplant, John Xiong assured me. He harvested some Chinese eggplant from his Fresno field and we went back to his home to prepare this dish, among others that hot afternoon in 2006.

The Hmong eggplant mash (called lws kubtshis tuav, don’t ask me for a pronunciation!) was enlightening. John and his wife, Bee, boiled their eggplants whole so they would not get water logged. When soft, they peeled them, then mixed the flesh into a fiery chile, scallion, and cilantro mixture that had just been pounded in their mortar.

The result was full of heat and herbal pungency. It was great scooped from the mortar onto balls of steamed sticky rice, but John said that it was rather lean. If you want to take it another step, he revealed, cooking it with some oil and add extra scallion. He did and it was richer tasting.

Grilled Okra Recipe

If people dislike okra, it's usually because of its mucilaginous (read: slimy) nature.  I know okra as a bright addition to tart-sweet Vietnamese seafood soups and an earthy fried Indian side dish. In those Asian preparations, okra doesn’t reveal its gummy nature. Rather, you savor its ridged skin and little round seeds. You marvel at its lovely spoke structure and graceful appearance.

Okra is native to Africa but traveled to India at some very early point in time; no one is sure when that happened. In the 19th century, okra found itself in Southeast Asia and it moved on to China after that.

The pod has a mild flavor and plays well with other ingredients. It’s also a relatively expensive vegetable most of the year. For those reasons, it rarely has a starring role and is often cooked with other ingredients.

Summer is okra season as the warmer months coax their tropical nature and foster growth. The quality of the pods during summer is spectacular. Last week, at the India Cash and Carry market in San Jose, CA, a group of women huddled around a particularly fresh box of unblemished okra, picking their purchase one pod at a time. My husband noticed the group and jumped right in. He ended up with 1 1/2 pounds of gorgeous okra.

Pea Tips Stir-fried with Garlic Recipe (Qing Chao Dou Miao)

Spring is the harbinger for many good things to eat. I plant and eagerly wait for seedlings to sprout in my garden. I shop at markets to look for the new season’s crop of Asian vegetables. One of my favorite spring-time Asian vegetables is the little pea tip. Around now is when they’re just about right for farmers to harvest.

Pea tips (aka pea sprouts, snow pea shoots) are called dou miao in Mandarin. They are full of pea goodness, the embodiment of snap peas. Look for pea tips at Chinese markets in plastic bags. You’ll pay about $3 a pound as they are time consuming to individually pick by hand. Use within several days of purchase to enjoy this vegetable delicacy at its peak.

In the above photo, note the cutie tendrils. Tender tendrils are edible whereas older ones are akin to dental floss. I pluck them all off, for good measure. The occasional white pea bud is edible. Keep them, if you like, when prepping the pea tips for cooking.

Easy Asparagus with Soy Sauce and Sesame Recipe

If you're concerned about timing issues when it comes to cooking or if you just want to quickly put something healthy and good on the table, this simple recipe is for you. I purchased and prepped way too much food for our Tet feast on Tuesday night, and among the leftovers was a pound of asparagus. Not knowing what to do, I parboiled them in lots of salted water and kept them refrigerated. Why? Because prepping asparagus up to that point allows you to do whatever you want to them at the last moment. For example, you can add them to an omelet, toss them in a salad, stir-fry them with a little oyster sauce or coat the green spears in a little rich and savory-sweet dressing. 

For lunch today, I took the last approach for this recipe, which is from Shandong province in northern China. The dressing is seriously fast and easy. I have no qualms about admitting that I borrowed this idea from The Seventh Daughter, an engaging and informative cookbook by legendary San Francisco restaurateur Cecilia Chiang of the Mandarin.

How to Cook Dried Bamboo Shoot (Mang Kho)

Several people have emailed asking about how to cook dried bamboo shoot. I looked up the familiar Asian ingredient in all my books but for some reason, dried bamboo shoot is seldom mentioned in Asian cookbooks. It is a terrific and standard ingredient sold at Chinese and Vietnamese markets. Dried bamboo shoot is shelved at Asian grocery stores alongside other dried foodstuffs, such as dried mushroom, seaweed, turnip, squid, beans, etc. In Vietnam, the shoots are simmered along with pork, duck, or chicken for a classic rice noodle soup called bun mang. Such preparations are traditionally saved for special occasions, such as the Lunar New Year – Tet Nguyen Dan. Since Tet is coming up (in 2010, it falls on Valentine's Day!), I cooked up a bunch of dried bamboo shoot today in preparation for the holiday cooking ahead.

What is the difference between fresh and dried bamboo shoot? Fresh has a crispness whereas dried has a meaty quality. Both have that musty bamboo funk but since bamboo shoot has to be cooked for a long time, the funk disappears. Bamboo shoot is called mang (“mahng”) in Vietnamese and dried bamboo shoot is mang kho (“mahng koh”). Dried bamboo shoots are not hard, but rather leathery. Once reconstituted and boiled until chewy-tender, dried bamboo shoots have a chewy-tenderness and pleasant sweetness that’s not found in fresh or canned bamboo. Whenever I cook dried bamboo shoot, I marvel at how it transforms its cooking broth into a perfumy brew. If you’ve had Japanese ramen noodle soup, chances are that you’ve had dried bamboo shoot (called menma) as a topping. 

Brussels Sprouts with Chinese Sweet Sausage Recipe

Brussels sprouts are the ‘in’ vegetable of the moment. If you’re paying attention to the food media and the sweeping tide of Chef David Chang, it seems like you can barely hide from them these days.  Chang and his Momofuku restaurants in New York made them sexy, edgy and hip. Gourmet magazine featured his roasted Brussels sprouts recipe in 2007 and GQ recently praised the new Momofuku cookbook as if it were the best thing since sliced bread and offered a Chang Brussels sprouts recipe with bacon. Bacon and brussel sprouts are a classic pairing as the richness of the bacon offsets the bitter, texturally tight quality of the sprouts. After reading GQ’s piece and in reviewing the Momofuku cookbook, I was inspired to buy bunch of bacon and a bag of sprouts yesterday. Brussels sprouts are one of the main crops of California’s Monterey Bay where I live so we have access to super fresh ones. Walking home from my local market with a bag of sprouts and bacon, I decided to take another route.

Instead of bacon, why not use Chinese sweet sausage (lap xuong, lop cheung), the sweet rich dried sausage that’s a fixture in the Chinese and Vietnamese kitchen? The sausage’s sweetness would contrast well with the sprouts’ bitterness.

Green Papaya Salad with Beef Jerky Recipe (Goi Du Du Bo Kho)

 

Vietnamese green papaya salad comes in two guises and one of them features earthy beef jerky and heady Thai basil (hung que). The other version of green papaya salad is southern Viet and has shrimp, pork and rau ram herb; the recipe is in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. A northern Viet favorite, green papaya salad made with beef jerky includes slivers of smoked liver and on occasion, lung too. In Hanoi's Old Quarter, I recall a little street full of green papaya salad vendors. I’ve never had the lung in salads in the U.S. Both the jerky and liver are a tad chewy, the liver adding a slight minerally quality to the salad. It’s no great shakes. If you lived in Little Saigon, you’d go to the Vietnamese-Chinese jerky store for the beef and the liver. Or you make beef jerky at home, like I did last week. In my kitchen, I omit the liver and the salad is just fine. 

To dress Vietnamese green papaya salad, you have two options. One is a fish sauce and lime dressing. The other features soy sauce and vinegar. The former yields a salad that is lighter in taste and appearance that the latter. At places like the Asian Garden Mall food court in Orange County’s Little Saigon, it’s common to see the soy dressing. If you watched the movie, Scent of Green Papaya, the dressing is the fish sauce one. Regardless of your dressing, you can serve the salad pre-dressed or with the dressing on the side. Because the soy dressing turns the pale celadon green papaya a sad brown color, I like to let guests dress their own salad. The recipe below employs the soy sauce dressing.