Pasta Day, one pot udon

Hey all,

I'm still around just very, very busy these days.

Family is taking top priority and most of our time.  But there is also the rush to get the garden ready and seeds in the ground growing.  Sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, alpacas and llamas all have their demands, and we love them all.  Last of all, there's the bit where we have to make the farm earn it's keep.  This involves marketing and selling, plus adding value where we can - for example preparing and spinning the wool into yarn.  This marketing part takes the most energy out of us - I grow and cook things, I find self promotion exhausting, but if I want to make this work, I need to at least try.

With all this going on, it's tempting to cancel the internet subscription for a few months while we try to catch up.  The internet is full of so much temptation  - what if I just spend a moment and look up this thing... and hours later all the conflicting opinions leave one more confused and unsure than when we started.  The internet is the tool of procrastination.  ... maybe just transfer to dial up agian... but then I would have even less impulse to blog... but is blogging simply procrastination or another form of marketing?  The former I think, otherwise I would go out and find readers for my blogs.

Lately I've had a huge craving for fresh vegetables and small fish.  Just simple meals that can be made quickly while I try to tend to other things.  I've been using spicy rooster sauce with dashi (broth made from tiny fish or seaweed) to make a really tasty broth for one pot meals.  Toss some fresh veg in the pot with half a block of udon or other noodle, then cook on medium till I remember it's there or it boils over, and it's done.  The little fish on the left are quick fried till crunchy.  They are oily and full of tiny bones, but oh so good.  If it's fried right, the bones are the same texture as the rest of the fish and it feels like eating an exhotic potato chip in your mouth, only worlds better.  Not certain what they are, but I suspect they are like sprats or maybe huge anchovies.  If you get a girl fish, they are full of thousands of eggs, the boy fish taste a little bit bitter but fry up chruncier.

I like this little Korean ceramic pot, it's the perfect size for making one person meals.  Oven and stove safe, makes it really flexible.  I eat the meal right out of the pot because the pot retains the heat and keeps the food warm - I'm a slow eater so it's nice not having to eat cold food - and it has a little lid that I can put on top of the food if I get called away in the middle of a meal, which is more often than you would think.

The only thing with these ceramic pots is not to change the temperature too drastically.  So one should really wait for the pot to cool before rinsing it in water.

Affordable, yep.  One only needs a small amount for this kind of meal to fill up on, and it will accommodate whatever is in the fridge or garden at that time.  Between 1 to 4 dollars depending on what goes in the pot, a lot less (as in under 50 cents) if I use homegrown veg and a more simple starch like rice instead of pasta.

Fast Food: as in it takes very little actual prep time to toss everything in the pot, yes I think it qualifies.  Though, because I'm using a ceramic pot, I don't like to start it on high, so it takes a while to heat up, but also because it's not on high, I don't need to wait around and stir it.  It's very forgiving.  Start to finish, 4 or 5 min of prep and 10 to 20 min of cooking, depending on what you put in the pot.

Great for an Emergency meal, you know the kind when you are dizzy with hunger and need something healthy and satisfying in a hurry.

This is one heck of a lot healthier than may of my goto emergency foodstuff.  It satisfies my need for veg, warm meal, and starch.  The only thing it needs with it is some added protein, thus the fish or a hunk of cheese.  Very accommodating to what veg are in season at the time.

I know, I know pasta day was yesterday, but we can fudge it a bit, this is the internet after all.  We can pretend that my timezone hasn't caught up to the rest of the world yet.

Sam gae tang - or Korean chicken soup

I found this nifty looking packet in a Korean grocery store the other day, and I just knew I needed to find out what it was for and cook it.

Okay, maybe it looks a bit messy here, but trust me on this one, it was delicious. The dish is something like a cross between pottage and chicken soup.  The soup itself is quite mild, with garlic, dates and chestnuts providing splashes of texture and taste sensations.  The kimchi (home made by the way) is necessary in my opinion.

In the packet is roughly 1 cup of sweet rice, one chunk of dry ginseng, 5 dates and 5 chestnuts.

Traditionally it is washed and mixed together and stuffed into gamecocks, put in a pot with water and cooked on the stove till done, adding more water as needed.

First I washed the package ingredients and put them to soak while I dealt with the chicken.

I didn't have a single serving chicken, so I used a regular size fryer.  I used the neck, wings, legs and breasts, in nice big chunks, bone in (the carcass became stock later on), put the pottage ingredients in the bottom of the pan with half a dozen cloves of garlic (peeled), lay the chicken bits on top, then added water to cover everything.  I brought to boil and then simmered on very low till it was done (stirring frequently).  Took about an hour and twenty minutes, but would make a nice slow cooker meal I think.

You can serve the chicken with the bone in, but I don't like to think too much while I'm eating, so I removed the chicken, skinned it (I left some of the skin on for flavour while cooking), shredded it with a fork, then placed it on top of the soup.

Tastes good, reheated the second day too.

Apparently this is a traditional summer meal in Korea and is good for keeping one cool during a heatwave.

Allergies: the ingredients were simple enough, no extra stuff like soy in this package.  Should be fine for most diets.

Affordable?:  Chicken is going up in price here the last five years or so, and the quality is going down.  The affordable chicken in the supermarket is repulsive to me, too fatty, too chemically, too much added water injected into the meat after it's been processed...  I use to eat two or three chicken a week, but now I maybe eat one or two a month, because the poultry I like, is a bit expensive.

To save money, instead of just buying chicken pieces, I bought a whole chicken and cut it up.  The link I just gave you is from the handsome boys at Sorted Foods.  It's the video that gave me the confidence to actually cut up a chicken.  I must have watched it at least 10 times before trying it on my own.

Note - did you know that when you cut up a cooked chicken, you don't carve it, you spoil (not unlace like I first wrote, that's what you do to rabbit) the chicken - English has so many beautiful and specific words that are dieing out, it makes me sad.

Locally a whole chicken costs a little under what two breasts cost in the store.   But with a whole chicken, I get the wings, the neck, the drumsticks, the thighs, the carcass and the breasts... With the price of poultry on the rise, I can no longer justify buying just chicken pieces.

After all that long rant, is it an affordable dish to cook?  $15 for a chicken, another four for the filling, another dollar for the kimchi as it was homemade, makes it $20 for the whole dish.  It made 8 bowls full of yummy, yummy soup that's not bad.  Roughly 2.50 per plate, but keep in mind, it is yummy and most people will want seconds and thirds.

Harvest and making random things

Time time of year my focus is more on outside the house than inside the kitchen.  The garden needs constant attention, the animals and...well everything.  But I still get a bit of time to cook what we harvest.

Calendula and sage for the dehydrator.  The sage is for tea and cooking, whereas I hope to have enough flowers by fall to make a dye bath for some fabric.  

Also in the photo are garlic scapes.  I never brought these into the kitchen before, so I really had no idea what to do with them.

I decided to try (a slightly altered) version of these cucumber pickles.  The ingredients are almost the same, but I used a different method for fermenting them.  Although it's going to be difficult improving on this already fantastic recipe, I plan to spend much of the summer attempting variations.

With a proper cellar I could see this being a great way to preserve cucumbers and other veg.  It was magical as the taste of the cumber went from salty to sour in just a few days.


I've also been harvesting several wild plants (aka weeds, of which we have many this year) for eating and medicinal use.  This is chickweed:

I used it to make a hand salve for a friend with some rather impressive skin troubles.  Chickweed has worked in the past for him, so I'm curious if my standard salve preparation would do the trick as well.

And finally, what would summer be without a pot of Kimchi on the go?

Daikon, carrots and su choi make up the bulk of this batch.  I chopped up some garlic scapes extra fine and tossed them in as well.  Very tasty.  Used the recipe from the book, Wild Fermentation - well more or less.

Kim Bop for dinner

This is one of my favourite Korean foods.  It's a bit like Japanese Sushi roles, but it's distinctly Korean.  Just about everything in it is cooked before rolling.

Takes a lot of prep time, but well worth the effort.

Today's lunch, imitation crab, cucumbers  cheese, carrots, and chard - hmmm... all starting with a C.  that's a strange turn of events.

Because everything is cooked prior to rolling up, this makes a great bento food.  It's affordable and also a good party dish, where each person can make exactly what they want.  Allergy friendly, and a healthy balance of ingredients.

Dolsot cooking adventure continues - cooking in a Korean stone pot

We have enjoyed lunch cooked in our new stone pot almost every day this week.  I love how easy it is to cook rice from scratch in the pot.  It's almost as easy as my electric rice cooker.

Clockwise from the top: Leeks lightly fried then cooked in sake, chard namuru, bacon fried with chard stems and carrots, nuka pickles cucumber, carrots and daikon, and dry fried canned tuna.

Hiding underneath all this is a bed of chestnut rice.   I actually found the toppings to be a bit of a draw back as they hid the delicious taste of the rice, so the next day I made...

Much simpler toppings today: leftover shio koji chicken breast  and carrots fried with bacon (because everything is better with bacon), all on top of chestnut rice.

These are also perfect flavours for the changing season.  There is a cold nip in the air, fall is approaching  the body wants to eat more fats and root veg.  I think I need to dig up the last of the gobo tomorrow and make something extra special for myself.



Here are some things I've learned about cooking with stone:

• It's surprisingly easy to burn food in this dish.  Medium heat is the absolute maximum temperature needed for this.
• Scrubbing the pot with coarse salt takes very little effort to get the burnt crap off the bottom of the pot.
• This is a very low fuss way to make rice.  It's right on par with my electric rice cooker for ease of making - so long as I keep the temperature low.  It isn't as fussy with the amount of liquid or cooking time as my electric cooker and I find myself experimenting more by adding different stuff to the rice.  But when it comes to cooking simple old white rice, the electric cooker wins hands down.
• It gets hot enough to burn through one cotton heat pad, and to heat up one cork ceramic trivet enough to damage the table underneath!

How to Cook Rice in a Korean Stone Pot (and how to season it)

A dolsot or Korean stone pot is the latest addition to my kitchen.  A Korean friend of mine taught me how to cook rice in it (from scratch - instead of just adding cooked rice and heating like most people do) and after hearing her passionate description of how delicious it is, I just had to have one.

The pot is made of a single piece of stone, hand turned on a massive lathe.  It's a heavy blighter so you don't want to be dropping it on your finger like I did.

Before the first use, it needs to be seasoned.  You only need to do this the first time or if it's been sitting for a year or more.

How to season your Dolsot

Wash the pot with water and half fill with tepid water.  Add a couple of tablespoons of sea salt to the water and swish around with your fingers until all the salt is dissolved   Leave for a few minutes so that the temperature of the water and the pot can even out, than bring to boil on medium heat.  When the water is boiling vigorously, take the pot off the heat and carefully poor off the water.

When it has cooled a bit, poor some sesame oil on a cloth or paper towel and rub the inside of the pot and lid.  Lave it to cool completely and the oil to seep in.

How to Cook Rice in a Dolsot

1 cup rice
water
salt
Kombu (kelp) - optional

• Coat the inside of the pot with sesame (or any cooking) oil.  Do this every time, just before you cook in this pot.
• Wash the rice really well.
• You can add other grains with the rice.  I often replace one Tbs of rice with  Naked Oats.
• Once it's well washed, add the water.  You can follow the amount of water on the back of the rice package or you can put the washed rice in the pot and cover with water so it's about 1.5cm above the level of the rice.  Or, you can do what I did, and measure the water in the rice-cooker then poor it into the stone pot.
• Add a pinch of salt to the rice (swish it around to dissolve) and if you like, add some kombu.  
• Let the pot stand for about five minutes before you start cooking, this allows the temperature to even out and reduces the chance of the bowl splitting or cracking.

• Bring the rice pot to a roiling boil on MEDIUM HEAT!  

• I repeat: MEDIUM HEAT!
• Once the pot heats up, you can increase the temperature, but the important thing with these pots is not to change the temperature too rapidly one way or another. 
• When the water boils, turn down the heat.  You can tell when it boils as some steam will escape through the lid.  You can even check it from time to time and stir it if you like, but I didn't bother.

• When it's finished cooking (how long this takes depends on your stove and rice/grain - but basically it's when there isn't much steam escaping any more), you can eat it as is or put toppings on the rice, increase the heat until the rice starts to make a crackling sound and goes all crunchy and brown around the edges.  The latter is called Bibimbap in Korea and is extremely yummy.

Clockwise from the top:
 Leaks lightly fried and then simmered in Sake,
Salted Salmon, Cucumber nukazuke pickles, and Kim Chi.  

Of course, mine isn't real Bibimbap, I don't have the correct ingredients or sauces.  Basically I put a collection of things I like to eat on top of the rice.




After you finish eating the rice (toppings or no) there will probably be a layer of crunchy rice around the edge.  Before the pot cools down too much, add some HOT broth, hot water, or dashi.  NOTE: Please try and keep the liquid as close to the temperature of the pot as possible when you poor it in, when it doubt err on the hot side.

Adding the liquid makes a really nice soup (and makes it easier to clean later on).

Tips for Caring for your Dolsot

• Do NOT use soap to clean this pot.  If you are having trouble getting it clean either scrub with coarse salt and water or boil up some water in the pot then allow to cool completely before cleaning.
• Always allow to cool completely before cleaning.  Even though you may be able to handle the outside, the stone retains a lot of heat inside.
• Always coat the inside with cooking oil prior to using (this includes the lid)
• Do NOT change the temperature too rapidly   This includes putting cold water in a hot pot, or hot water in a cold pot, or cooking on too high a heat.  Sudden changes in temperature will crack or even shatter the bowl, and that's the last thing we want.

Some useful dolsot links
Korean Stone Pot Care and Seasoning
Dolsot Problems?
Yeongyang dolsotbap Dolsot Bibimbap recipe