Okra tastes even better with a sauce

It took me a while to realize that okra tastes better with a liquidy sauce - but of course!  With its penne-like cavity, it's the perfect vegetable to go with a sauce that would squirt on your palette when you bit into the okra.  My favourite sauce is curry with coconut milk and tomatoes.  

Cut up your vegetables.  In this case, I used okra, egg plant, zucchini, red pepper, onion and tomatoes.  Slice the okra ~1.5 inch long at an angle.  Do the same with the other vegetables.  Add curry to hot oil in a pan and get ready for the burst of flavour from the heat.  Quickly add chopped onions.   Then add the other vegetables and a cup of broth.  After simmering for 5 minutes, add coconut milk and cook for another 5 minutes or until vegetables are soft.  Add salt or soy sauce to taste.


 


Another sauce I like is tomato sauce with herbs.  In this case, I used okra, green/red pepper, celery and onion.  Again heat oil in pan, add onions then the other vegetables except tomatoes.  Transfer to a cast iron pot.  Heat more oil in pan, add tomatoes, when it's almost soft, add half a can of tomato paste and a cup of broth.  Add herbes de provence (mix of savory, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, oregano) then pour the sauce onto the vegetables in the pot.  Simmer for 10 - 15 minutes and you've got a tasty vegetable stew with the okra soaking up the tomato sauce and the celery adding the crunch!  

Dim Sum Sunday at Hakkasan London

Mr. A’s friends, A&M, sent him food pictures from London.  The two travelers had the “Dim Sum Sunday” at Hakkasan.

The meal started with a cocktail.  A bottle of Louis Roederer Brut Premier NV Champagne was served with food.  The first course was a crispy duck salad:

which was followed by steamed dim sum -- har gau (shrimp dumpling), shumai (pork dumpling) with scallop and fish roe on top, Chinese chive dumpling (the green ones), duck and yam bean dumpling (the orange ones):

and baked dim sum – (from left to right) golden radish crab meat pastry, smoked duck and pumpkin puff, royal king crab and truffle roll, baked venison puff:

Three main dishes - (clockwise from top) XO seafood and water chestnut lettuce wrap, asparagus, stir-fry black pepper rib eye beef with merlot – were accompanied by ginger and spring onion fried rice:

The meal ended with a selection of dessert and an after dinner cocktail.

All for £58 per person, which was surprisingly reasonable for a high-end London restaurant. 

Creative Vegetarian

In my continued attempt to increase the vegetarian portion of my diet, I have been very inventive with my dishes - basically creating a dish out of anything and everything I have available at home.  Our typical meals have been one meat and one veggie dish.  Now I'm trying to make it 2 veggie dishes and one meat with a smaller portion of meat. 

Last week, I created two "new" dishes by combining ingredients that I have never put together before.  The first one - simple roasted red peppers and kale stir fry, nothing exciting but definitely tasted better than plain kale.  

The second - okra, red pepper, king mushrooms, egg tofu - all cubed, stir fried with half a teaspoon of chili bean paste to spice it up, was a success.  I love the combination of flavours, textures and colours.  The slightly chewy king mushroom went well with the crunchy okra and the soft but firm tofu.  In both dishes, the red pepper added sweet flavour and crisp texture, in addition to colour.  Next time, I might add some dried shitake to enhance the flavour even more, but it takes pre-planning to do dried shitake, since they usually require soaking for a few hours at least.  Fresh shitake isn't as flavourful.

Okra, king mushroom, red pepper and egg tofu stir fry

Kale and red pepper

It's amazing how a bit of red added to the colour of the dishes.  Compare these to the one below, which I did a while back.  This is a stir fry of brown beech mushrooms, enoki, tofu and lotus root - tasty, great textures, but dull-looking.  More greens would have brought up the colour and made the dish more enticing - something to remember for next time.

Brown beech mushrooms, enoki, tofu and lotus root with green onions.

I'm also slowly trying to increase my inventory of vegetarian dishes by exploring "new" ingredients - new to me at least.  More later.

Food experience in Costa Rica

The highlight of our Costa Rican food experience was really the freshness and tastiness of the fruits that seemed to be abundant everywhere we went.  The last time I had a mango as sweet was in Vietnam, and it was not nearly as big as this one, which we bought from a fruit stand on the way back to San Jose from the Pacific coast.  It's not so much just the sweetness as the fragrance of the mango that penetrated the senses and left an indelible stamp on my mental palette.

We also tried something we haven't had before - the camito, or star apple, as you can see from the image below.  It's sweet although the texture is more persimmon than apple.

Our first meal was in downtown San Jose, in a 100 year house turned into a cafe restaurant called Chelles. It was recommended as a local food place by the hotel front desk staff and it was within walking distance.  We got our dinner in spite of language barriers and it was a really good deal, our plates heaped with food enough for two meals.  It was plain grilled beef and chicken with fries and a salad plus the wait staff put a bottle of what looked like pickled chopped vegetables in front of us.  We subsequently found out from our guide that this kind of chopped vegetables is very common in Costa Rica.  Since it was our first day in the country, we didn't eat anything uncooked - very good advice that we had learned from our guide in Peru several years ago.  We have to let our system get used to the local water before we start eating raw vegetables - makes perfect sense to me.

Pickled chopped vegetables

We stopped for lunch in a small town on the way to Arenal.  We followed our guide to a "soda", a typical Costa Rican eatery where they serve "casado", a set lunch Costa Rican style.  I ordered a highly recommended "Olle de Carne" - a beef stew with cassava yams, taro, squash and rice (they only had two left!).  I was so hungry I forgot to take a picture before the meal.  But it was delicious!

Seafood was excellent everywhere we went, not surprising given that the country has access to both the Pacific and the Caribbean.  I had "sea bass" many times in the eleven days that I was in the country and it was certainly not the same kind we had in North America or Europe.  I suspect from the thickness of the cut that it is Chilean sea bass - and not at the exorbitant price that we would have been charged had we been in North America.

"Sea bass"

At our last stop in Manuel Antonio, we had a taste of tapas at Lush Tapas & Lounge recommended by our guide.  We sipped our drinks in the open air restaurant atop the hill overlooking the Pacific as everything around us caught the glow from the sunset - what a great way to end our trip.

Chicken and mango tapas/mini tenderloin in red wine with roasted tomatoes