"Get Off Your High (Sea)Horse" Calamari Challenge: Thai Chili Squid Stir-Fry with Carrots and Arugula

There's something miraculous about a dish made with ridiculously fresh ingredients, stir-fried for mere minutes and coated in a salty, sweet, sour and hot sauce before making the inevitable journey to your mouth. Come on, LOOK at those colours!

I also love that this is a very affordable recipe and so healthy, without feeling like you're depriving yourself. It's seafood, after all, and seafood is a luxury. It looks and tastes deceptively gourmet, but has a much higher intimidation factor than actual level of difficulty. So take a deep breath and go buy some squid. I resent the fact that so many people like deep-fried calamari but refuse to eat un-coated squid. If you don't like the tentacles, just buy the tubes, but know that you're missing out on great mouth texture. One small step at a time, I suppose. Think of this as my calamari challenge, to get off your high horse...or squid horse...or sea horse??
Ingredients:
2 cups jasmine (thai) rice

Sauce for Rice:
1/2 cup chicken or vegetable stock (I happened to have fish stock frozen that I hacked away at until I had 1/2 a cup)
2 Tbsp hoisin sauce
1 tsp sesame oil

1 lb squid (just go to a fish counter and ask for about a pound of squid. The tentacles won't hurt you but the tubes are what you really want since they'll stay more tender)

Stir-Fry Sauce:
1 heaping Tbsp hoisin (the original recipe calls for ground bean sauce but I didn't have that. I realize my version is completely different)
2 tsp. brown sugar
1 Tbsp. fish sauce
1 Tbsp. soy sauce or tamari
1-2 tsp. chili sauce, or 1-2 fresh red or green chilies, minced, OR 1-2 tsp. dried chili flakes (I used a small handful of my pickled chili peppers for the endorphin rush of the sezchuan peppercorns)
5 carrots, cut in thin sticks (the thinner they are the faster they'll cook)
2 cups arugula
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves (I used frozen)
handful of fresh coriander leaves (again, frozen)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 thumb-sized piece galangal or ginger, sliced into matchstick-like pieces
2 tsp oil

1. Cook the rice first. Leave it covered on the stove while you make the sauce.
   
2. Combine the stock, hoisin, and sesame oil sauce for the rice in a pot and heat it until it almost boils. Turn off the heat and leave the sauce on the warm burner until the rice is done. When it is, pour the sauce over the rice. This step is actually meant for glass vermicelli noodles or rice noodles because the noodles will keep absorbing the sauce, but I kind of like how it mushes up the rice and sweetens it. Then the stir-fry sauce on the squid itself doesn't have to do as much work. I'm a big believer in fair distribution of labour.
   
3. In the meantime, while the rice cooks, thaw your squid (if it's frozen) by dunking it in a bowl of warm water. If it's fresh, skip the dunking and get on with the scoring. All these sports terms...I don't even watch basketball. You don't dunk anything in World Junior Hockey, or more recently, the Montreal Canadians games.
   
4. Place the squid on a cutting board. Slide your knife along one side of the squid to open each tube. Lay the pieces of squid flat (leave the tentacles alone. They'll be fine without your knife assistance).
5. Score the squid tubes with diagonal slices. Score first one way, then the other to create diamond-shaped cuts, kind of like grill marks. Apparently you only want to cut through half the thickness. If your scores are too superficial, they won't be apparent when cooked. The cuts will "open up" while cooking and give the squid extra visual interest and texture. All this means is that you don't really need to do this step but it'll look cooler if you do.
   
6. Definitely do this step: Slice the squid into smaller, bite-size pieces (squares or triangles) and reserve. See, now that I don't understand because you just went to all the trouble of scoring and now you're cutting everything up, probably through your carefully scored lines. Any ideas on what's going on, stir-fried squid experts out there?
   
7. Combine the stir-fry sauce of hoisin, brown sugar, fish sauce, soy sauce and chili sauce (or chilies) in a small bowl.
   
8. Place a little bit of oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the garlic, ginger, and carrots (or other vegetables of your choice) and stir-fry 3-5 minutes, or until vegetables are soft. Add a little water to the pan when it becomes too dry instead of more oil. If the carrot is chopped in big pieces it will take a bit longer to soften. If you like it tender-crisp, feel free to err on the side of crisp. It gives great crunch to the resulting meal.
   
9. Now add the squid, arugula, and the stir-fry sauce. Also add the cilantro and basil if they're frozen. If they're fresh add them as a garnish only at the very end when you serve. Stir-fry for about 2 minutes, or until the squid curls up and the meat is tender. My squid didn't really "curl" but it cooked for 2 minutes, which was plenty. I hate, hate, hate rubbery squid, and when you think of how gross squid can be it's probably because you've always had it over-cooked. When it's not over-cooked it's tender and delicious. Ask a Greek. Or a Thai. So, do NOT over-cook, or the squid will become rubbery (3 minutes maximum).
10. Do a taste test for salt, adding 1-2 more Tbsp fish sauce if it's not salty enough. If it's too sour, add a little more brown sugar. If it's not hot enough, add a little more chili. If it's too sweet, add some lime juice. This isn't in the recipe (the lime) but it's the standard way to make Thai dishes more sour. Well, lime or tamarind, but only if tamarind is already called for in the recipe. You can also serve a piece of lime on the side of the plate as garnish and everyone can adjust their own level of sourness by squeezing it over top.
    
11. To serve, scoop the sauced rice onto a serving platter (or individual plates) and top with the stir-fried squid and vegetables. Add sprinklings of fresh basil and coriander, and enjoy!
    

Seasonal Cooking: Spring Spot Prawns with Fiddleheads and Peas

The Atwater Market and Jean Talon have exploded. That means it's Spring. When the flower vendors come in and the fresh fruit and vegetable sections expand to four times their normal size I get really excited. The downside of the new consumer obsession with eating locally and seasonally is that whatever's in season tends to be really expensive when it first hits the market. That's why I avoided buying fiddleheads. They went from an item nobody wanted, and nobody certainly knew how to cook, to a highly prized delicacy. Like wild leeks. Wild leek pesto seems so generic to me now. Soon Martha Stewart will be carrying a line of it, I'm sure.

I meant to wait until the end of each vegetable's season to buy it, so that the prices would reduce, but I caved. This last week I saw fiddleheads at the market and after comparison shopping a few different places, I bought them from Michaca Farms at a decent $5 a bag. I think it was asparagus' fault, since I'd avoided buying those until I found them VERY reasonably priced at the McGill Organic Campus tent on rue McTavish north of Sherbrooke on Tuesday last week. When I tasted them, and compared them to the organic ones I'd actually found fairly reasonably priced at Jean-Talon, I remembered how beautiful it was to eat in Spring. They were sweet and mild and you didn't even need to crack off the bottoms they were so fresh. Once I had fresh Spring produce, I needed more, and that meant fiddleheads.

I planned to make them very simply, using a basic Indian spicing of asafetida, onions, mustard seeds, garlic and cayenne, and salt, but I forgot I'd also bought some pois mange-tout (the kind of peas you where you can eat the whole pea...what's the word in English? It's not sugar-snap), and then I'd seen some sept-iles (local Quebec) spot prawns on for incredibly cheap (less than $6 a pound) and tried to buy a pound but the man gave me 2. That was fine...

The plan was to make quasi-sushi with them since I had leftover sushi rice, but in the end the photo above is what happened: Indian-Spiced Prawns with Fiddleheads and Peas. Somewhere between a shrimp stir-fry and an Indian shrimp saag (since the spicing originally came from a saag recipe) the dish was so, so good, and good for me. The only annoying part was shelling the prawns. You don't get a whole lot of meat off one of those guys, but you get tons of shells for making shrimp stock!!! I now have 4L of stock in my freezer waiting for my next soup or sauce. I love Spring. Did I mention that?

Fiddleheads need to be cooked twice. If you eat them raw they're toxic. So blanch them first and then cook them however you want (boil, steam, blanch again, stir-fry, grill, etc). So I threw them in boiling water for 3 minutes and then drained them and rinsed them under cold water. They have a lot of loose green threads that kind of fall off. It looks like they're pretty dirty, but it's just threads falling everywhere. Give them a good rinse before and after blanching and they'll be fine.

Then stir-fry. I heated a bit of oil (you can use anywhere from a teaspoon to 3 tablespoons. If you use more you won't need to be as diligent about stirring or adding water to keep it from burning, but you up the fat a lot) on high heat (this is a high-heat stir-fry, not medium-high, or medium, so be careful not to use olive oil or another oil that burns).

When the oil got hot in my large pot, I added the grated asafetida and then the mustard seeds "a few seconds later". When they started to pop (another "few seconds"...oh, Madhur Jaffrey) I added the onion that I had sliced finely and some minced garlic.

Stir, stir stir. The onions were going to burn a little, so I added a tiny bit of water to keep that from happening. They get soft this way, not crispy but I still like the flavour. It's more important to cook them through than to undercook them by not adding more liquid. 2 minutes later I added the fiddleheads and peas, and two minutes after that I added a pinch of cayenne, 1/2 cup of water, 1/4 tsp salt, and my spot prawns. They don't need much time at all; 2 minutes, max. If they're over-cooked they taste like rubber. What I didn't realize was that they're salt water prawns, so I didn't need to add any salt to the recipe. Still, the extra didn't make the dish less delicious. Madhur Jaffrey's recipes are often heavy on salt and cutting out a little (except in the lentil and bean dishes) is usually fine.

The picture isn't amazing, I know, and I think the peas were on the end of their shelf life. I'd been saving them for too long probably. That's the thing about fresh, good food - it doesn't last. You need to eat it right away. No holding back or delayed gratification. The food necessitates immediate satisfaction. Long live Spring, though I know, like the produce, it won't, and I will just have to take advantage of it while I can.

Jap Chae Korean Noodles

I used to live next to a Korean church on Bloor Street in Toronto. It was on the edge of Korea Town and my 3 years of living and going to school in the area introduced me to the wonders of pork bone soup, 24 hour amazing (and awful) BBQ, steamed walnut red bean dough balls, and decent (and, again, awful) sushi. It wasn't until my last summer in the area that the church started having weekly yard sales. Besides buying a $1 Disney puzzle of Tokyo, I would often stop by to look at the older ladies cooking omelets and some kind of sesame noodle dish. Fortunately, the convenience store down the road also had take-out noodles that looked about the same, so despite our language differences, my timid inquiries of "Jap chae?" were well-received. Unfortunately by then I'd basically stopped eating pork, and that was one word not in my Korean vocabulary. Without knowing what was in the noodles, I avoided, and avoided...until I caved. Of course I caved. The key to avoidance is 'out of sight, out of mind' and when you walk past the yard sale every week it's hard to put that into practice. Crossing a major intersection with my eyes closed didn't seem like the best idea.

So when the fine people at Food & Drink put out a complimentary magazine through the LCBO (Ontario liquor stores), I was pleasantly surprised to find a large selection of really interesting recipes. This was not the Kraft recipe magazine sponsored by Our Compliments that comes in the mail and you should promptly throw out. They had a full section on "Asian fare" that went far beyond adding soy sauce to rice with chicken. The recipes weren't even that dumbed down. Sure they skimped on the hot sauce, but how many free magazines come with a recipe for pickled carrots and daikon? Kim Chi dumplings (mun doo) or beef bulgogi with 16 ingredients. This was not a "go to a Korean grocery store and buy bulgogi sauce" cop-out.

Jap Chae is really simple, and with a good sesame oil, or, with enough of a good sesame oil and brown sugar, it's addictive. Don't like spicy? Don't add a lot of chili paste. My only complaint is that their recipe didn't call for any rice vinegar. I'm not sure if that's traditional, but I thought the noodles needed a little kick. Fortunately I made them with a marinated Japanese mackerel dish that had more than its fair share of acid. It worked out perfectly, even if the combination was less than authentic than the individual recipes.

Ingredients:
200 grams sweet potato or yam noodles (these are supposed to be a bit sweeter than rice noodles, but they follow the same quick-soaking rice noodle concept seen in a lot of Thai dishes. I substituted rice noodle vermicelli and it worked fine)
2 tbsp vegetable oil (not sure why this is vegetable oil and not sesame oil...)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 onions, thinly sliced
1 cup carrots, cut into matchsticks
1 red pepper, thinly sliced
6 shiitake mushrooms, thinly sliced, stems removed (I didn't have any. Obviously it's better with, but it's a stir-dry so it's not the end of the world to leave things out or substitute, as long as you know that the end result will not be the same, and you're not drastically changing the recipe and expecting the best results. Don't get angry at the recipe when it's not a great meal)
1 bunch (4 cups) fresh spinach, stems removed (I used a container of organic baby spinach. Wasteful packaging, but all that was available)

Sauce:
3 tbsp soy sauce (or tamari)
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp Korean red pepper paste, or 1/2 tsp Asian chili sauce (I used 1/2 tsp of my Guizhou Chili Paste. Not Korean, no, but incendiary)
1 tbsp sesame oil (toasted would be a stronger flavour, I think)

2 tbsp cilantro, chopped
1 tbsp sesame seeds, toasted (I left them out, but they do add a lot to the dish)

Every recipe says to cook yam noodles and rice rice noodles a different way. This one worked well, and I think I'll keep it as my standard. Add the noodles to boiling water and boil 5 minutes. Drain and refresh with cold water. Drain again. Simple. I didn't end up with chewy noodles.

The sugar, chili paste, soy sauce and sesame oil got combined in a small bowl to wait while the vegetable oil got heated in a large frying pan.
Now the stir-frying fun. The garlic got added to the hot oil. 30 seconds later the onion and carrot went in. 1 minute later the red pepper and mushrooms. 2 minutes later the drained noodles and the spinach. 1 minute later the combined sauce from the small bowl. 2 minutes later it was poured into a large platter, topped with cilantro and sesame seeds (not mine, but yours can be) and devoured (both mine and yours). So quick. The nice thing is that if you don't like the final seasonings, you can adjust them. More soy or chile paste. Or serve with a vinegar. Chinese would go with black vinegar probably, but for Korean I wouldn't know what to do. I just knew it needed something. Without it it's just a simple, sweet dish. Some people like that, I hear.