.: evil jungle prince :.

I'm marking this year as my final attempt at growing Korean radishes. For whatever reason, they just don't like the climate here in the southern California desert -- I imagine it gets too hot during the day for them, even in the middle of our winters (usually 70F at around mid-day). Sigh! How I would love to grow my own for kimchi and other purposes, but it's just not in the cards. I have such a fetish for Korean radishes: those beautiful, globular canon-balls of the vegetable world with their gorgeous green skull-caps. I can barely contain myself when I see them in a Korean grocery store, always with an overwhelming desire to put them all in my cart and take the whole lot home. (I know -- this doesn't sound healthy at all and I'm the first to admit it.) But as to my own radish cultivation efforts, it's the same thing every year -- for a while the seedlings do wonderfully and then... nothing else, with no establishment of an actual radish root.

So this year I decided to eat my mistakes and make sure the radish leaves did not go to waste. As I pulled out the failed seedlings I at once heard a fellow blogger's voice (KT) say: "Don't you dare throw out those radish leaves!" I abided by her trans-continental advice and prepared them according to her recipe, creating a tasty banchan to accompany rice.

1. First I chopped the radish leaves roughly.

2. Next I sauteed them in a little sesame oil briefly, adding just a bit of sugar, soy sauce, and sesame seeds.

So simple and so tasty. Now I feel rather silly for having wasted so many radish leaves in my lifetime.

But since we're talking radishes, here's a North Korean video on my favorite kimchi, kkaktugi. I'm sure you'll want to get up and dance all around just like I did. Kim Jong Il is just the hippest video-director ever, isn't he?

Posted by Evil Jungle Prince at 08:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

After yesterday's breakfast and a similarly fattening Afghani dinner (including deep fried vegetables dipped yogurt -- oh so delicious and yet so very hard on the stomach), I swore off oil completely today and opted for a macro vegetarian lunch.

Here's my first attempt at o-hitashi (compressed spinach roll). My recipe book notes that this side dish has been prepared with Japanese meals for centuries.

These are prepared by briefly boiling fresh spinach, squeezing out the liquid, adding a little soy sauce, again squeezing out the liquid, creating a roll shape, and then cutting the roll into bite-sized pieces. They are then topped with roasted sesame seeds and a little salt.

Next time I will try harder to get them into a more perfect cylindrical shape.

Another dish I made was Thai cucumber salad. Mine came out a little sour. Next time, I will try using less vinegar. The remaining tastes were wonderful though, particularly the fresh taste of the jalapeno peppers straight from the garden.

I ate these two dishes with a bowl of rice and miso soup. In a more formal setting, the Thai pickles wouldn't have worked here, but for me the combination of foods really helped to settle my stomach, without being bland or boring.

It's a strange thing, but when it comes to fats and oils, my stomach is prone to distemper. But when it comes to spicy tastes or alcohol, I seem to have a stomach of iron. Throw the most firey, most acidic of foods at me and my stomach won't even flinch. Strange, isn't it? It seems the person handing out the internals has given me just the right stomach for the type of cuisine I love. Lucky me.

"Pickle A"

3 c cucumbers; thinly sliced
1/3 c onion; chopped
1/2 c red wine vinegar
2 ts sugar
1/4 ts salt
4 red chili peppers; seeded
1 tb cilantro leaves

"Pickle B"

3 c cucumbers; sliced thinly
1/2 sm onion; sliced thinly

"Mixture A"

2 red chili peppers; seeded
2 ts garlic; chopped
2 ts cilantro root; chopped
2 ts peppercorns; whole or ground

"Mixture B"

1/2 c vinegar
2 tb soy sauce
1 1/2 ts sugar
1 tb cilantro leaves; chopped
1/2 c peanuts; crushed

Instructions

PICKLE A: Combine all ingredients. PICKLE B: Place cucumber and onion in a bowl and toss. Place A MIXTURE in a blender or food processor and blend to make a rough paste. Blend the B MIXTURE, then mix together A and B. Immediately pour over the cucumbers and sliced onion. Place in a serving dish and sprinkle with the cilantro leaves and crushed peanuts. Serve immediately. To make it hotter add more red pepper or a shake or two of cayenne.

Posted by Evil Jungle Prince at 08:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lunch today was gammodoki, or deep fried tofu balls filled with carrot, shitake mushroom, black sesame seeds, green beans, egg, and a little salt, soy sauce, and mirin. These are pressed into a palm-shaped ball and fried in oil. To my surprise (it was my first time making them), the taste turned out really well even if my gammodoki-sculpting skills still need some work.

I couldn't decide which type of dipping sauce would work better, Korean (with chili, sesame oil, sesame seeds) or a simple soy sauce infused with some fresh lemon juice from the garden. So, I made both. The clear winner was the lemon-soy sauce dip because it helped cut through the grease so well and also did not distract from the gammodoki tastes. (Sorry Fishy, you didn't win.)

Last night I made ube and haupia pie, so I broke that out for dessert. (My version uses ube instead of Okinawan sweet potatoes like Reid's original recipe, but I'm sure the taste is relatively the same. I use Filipino sweet potatoes instead as the Okinawan type cannot be purchased locally.) I enjoyed this with a cup of mango flavored black tea with honey and cream. A nice way to spend the afternoon before returning to work tomorrow...

Note to self: must remember to take photos before eating the food!

Posted by Evil Jungle Prince at 07:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)