'Please pack your knives and go......'

Well, it was a great ride while it lasted.......but Orange & Salt did not advance to Round #4 of Project Food Blog. I really want to thank all of you for voting and coming along with me on all of this--I have had so many wonderful comments from so many of you during the last few weeks of the contest, I really appreciated every single one! This moment is kind of bittersweet, I'm not gonna lie to you, readers. On the one hand, it will be nice to get my blog back, so to speak, and to have time to post non-contest-related entries again. But on the other hand, I'm a pretty fiercely competitive person (to my own downfall, sometimes), and my inner Olympian is sobbing like a little girl and clutching her chest. Woe.

When she's done crying her eyes out (soon, I promise!), there will be recipes from the famous Spanish dinner party posted! And I made a kick-ass dinner last night--ask me about it. Go on, ask me about it! Well, there'll be a post about that, too. So stay tuned. :)

Project Food Blog has taken over my life!

Just a reminder, voting for Round 3 of Project Food Blog ends TOMORROW, October 7th, at 6 pm PDT.

Pleeeeeeease, Orange & Salt readers, if you haven't had a chance to already, click this link and vote for me by pressing the little red heart. That's it! Easy. I'm a little nervous with the competition getting steeper this round and am hoping not to be knocked out of the race by someone who has a prettier blog font than me, or who decorated a fancier table than I did. If I lose, I at least want to lose on FOOD. And the food, let me tell you, was pretty spectacular. Oops, may I say so myself? Ha ha.

So, if you want to see more PFB2010 posts in this space, vote vote vote!!!

I'm Laurel Morley and I approve this message. Thank you for your support. ;)

Project Food Blog Entry #3: 'Well I've never been to Spain.....But I kinda like the food there!'

So, 'luxury.'

It is a funny thing, isn’t it?

After all, one man’s seared foie gras is likely another man’s ballpark-dog-with-everything. When asked by Project Food Blog’s Challenge #3 to approach a luxury meal for a dinner party, I decided after some thought that what matters most is the way it makes everyone in the room feel, the elevation from everyday meal status to something higher. Using ingredients you wouldn’t normally use, spending amounts of time you wouldn’t normally spend, all these things contribute to the creation of a truly special meal.

Coco Chanel once declared, famously, that ‘luxury must be comfortable, or else it is not luxury.’ Ol' CC might not have been facing down the prospect of hosting a dinner party, but it's a wise approach. She was talking about ladies’ fashion, of course, and urging women of the early-to-mid 20th century to shed the outdated notions of modern corsets and other binding fashions and step into stylish clothes that truly fit their bodies and their lifestyles. Still, it’s one of my favorite quotes about luxury in general.

After all, what’s a $1,000 dollar meal with white tablecloth service if you don’t enjoy it? What’s luxury if it doesn’t fit your lifestyle?


Around here, chez Orange & Salt, we are emphatically not white tablecloth service people. If you come for a meal in this household, be prepared to put your elbows up on the scarred wooden table, drink from our recycled-glass glassware, and maybe even share footspace with a dog or two. You will, however, be treated like absolute royalty in terms of what comes to you from my kitchen on your plate. Hours will have been spent behind the scenes in a happy, steamy kitchen, crafting each course. Good music emanating from somewhere in the background. People are laughing, eating. Everyone sighing, relaxed, pouring a little more wine and anticipating the next round of plates. You can leave your tie at home.

Sounds like serious luxury to me.

First piece of advice when planning a dinner party of any kind? Have a clear idea in mind of the kind of event you want, and plan your guest list accordingly—sounds a bit simple, but it’s true, and an often-overlooked part of planning. Some folks wouldn't dream of hosting a dinner event without a centerpiece and adorable decorations on the table; I wouldn't dream of having anyone over without some really excellent music playing in the background (another quick dinner party tip: think internet radio! There are a few services that are offered completely free, and will keep a constant soundtrack of the music of your choice playing in the background for hours--because no one should have to fumble around with CDs while she's also trying to sort out her Romesco sauce!) If it should turn out you are a white tablecloth kind of person after all, that’s wonderful. Make sure to invite a group of people who love white tablecloth dining. For my event, I invited a handful of some of my best food friends, the ones I like to think of as my Adventurous Eaters Club. These guys make complicated soups, desserts, and homemade bacon at the drop of a hat, and we're all used to sitting down to dinner together. I knew I could feed them anything, even baby octopus, and no one would so much as blink an eye.

(Click menu to enlarge)

Second piece of advice when planning a dinner party of any kind? Plan the menu, silly. Oh, I know this seems as though it should be obvious, but I really mean it. Do you want to highlight seasonal dishes? Regional cuisine? And how much work do you actually want to do? The commonly held wisdom I was always given on dinner parties is that everything should be more or less ready to go when guests arrive so that you, the gracious hostess, may spend the maximum amount of time sitting down with your guests and presumably charming them all (if you figure out how to actually do this, by the way, please share the secret with me). I knew I wanted to do some serious cooking, and because our kitchen and dining room flow openly right into one another, I felt comfortable 'breaking' this classic rule to spend more time in the kitchen. I'm personally more comfortable holding court from the kitchen than from the table, anyway, chatting with a wooden spoon in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, a dishtowel wrapped around my waist, calling out to the dining room and occasionally delivering steaming hot plates of treats to the gathered guests. Your mileage on this, it goes without saying, will vary. But know yourself.

For this challenge, I opted to go with a Spanish-influenced menu. I’ve never been to Spain, as the classic song goes, but I’ve always loved the dishes, the ingredients, the photos, the food stories and everything else I’ve ever seen relating to their culture. One of my favorite ideas to borrow from Spanish culture is tapas: the serving and sharing of a variety of ‘tiny bites’ courses on many plates, usually with wine. A tapas course seemed the perfect way to kick off my Spanish meal, and I knew I’d have to have one at this casual but luxurious meal, centered around close friends sitting down together and sharing.


It was a great reason to buy up a pile of tiny whole anchovies and lightly dredge in flour and quick-fry them, as I've seen done before but never tried. It's a classic Mediterranean snack, and I'm happy to report that they are delicious. Crispy, paprika-seasoned chickpeas, also a major tapas revelation--they're tiny and easy to share, but they won't last long! Everyone loved these.

Following this was a course of baby octopus simmered in rich, almond-and-tomato-based Romesco sauce and served over a golden bed of crispy roasted potatoes, then a sweet, tangy salad of shaved fennel and carrot, and a dish of braised chicken thighs (heavily adapted from of of the Great Thomas Keller's recipes from the Ad Hoc at Home cookbook) smothered in onions, fennel and olives. The octopus was amazingly tender (recipes for all these courses will be posted separately here on Orange & Salt), a treat for anyone who's ever suffered through a plate of rubbery tentacles, and the sauce was wonderfully nutty and rich. The raw fennel followed by braised fennel thing is a little trick I like to pull every now and again--it's really nice to have two versions of something so close together to contrast the flavors & textures between the raw and the cooked.

And then the dessert, oh my goodness......the dessert! Airy golden brown pillows of pastry, still warm and slightly chewy at the center and scented with cinnamon, soaked with honey, oozily melting together with a scoop of sweet vanilla ice cream and topped with ground pistachios. I think it goes without saying that I'll be making this one again sometime soon. Thank you, Spain, for the inspiration for this wonderful, wonderful meal. I thank you, and my guests thank you. Another borrowed Spanish idea to keep handy, by the way, is the late, late dinner......useful when things don't go quite as planned. When you forget some vital piece of prepwork and dinner is delayed an extra hour (not that this has ever happened to me, of course), you can just tell everyone you're eating at ten o'clock because it's the authentic Spanish way! Better living through cultural awareness.

Dinner parties are tricky, I’ll just throw that out there. In the case of this one, everything seemed to come together at the same time……..but not exactly in that hoped-for, ‘every dish is perfectly timed’ way. It went something more like this: my last-minute grocery shopping, needing to pick my husband up from the train station, still be home to greet early arrivals, and somehow finely dice the onion and the garlic and prep the chicken, well, they all seemed to need to happen simultaneously. What’s a hostess to do? What can you do, except get through it, put on a smile, get someone to pour you a nice glass of red wine, and keep stirring the octopus. Accept help when it's offered! Have someone set out the olive plate for you, designate someone to shred the carrots for you, and just keep going. And when it's all over, leave the dishes, kick off your shoes, and make sure to cozy up with a nice portion of the dessert plate.

Even Coco Chanel couldn't resist luxury like that.

Project Food Blog Entry #2: Just call me Miss Saigon Crepe......

Was it the weather?

It could, I suppose, have been the weather.

It's been unfairly hot and punishingly humid around the Valley all through September. Mosquitoes have been feasting on us, hair has been limp, eyeliner has been running.......but it all seems so very much more romantic if you close your eyes and imagine that instead of sweaty Phoenix you might be in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (once Saigon), clinging to the back of a motor scooter weaving its way through the humidity and the crowded streets, on your way to some fresh, streetside fare like phở.....or perhaps bánh xèo and chao tom?

It might also have been because of the discovery Mike and I made this month of our new favorite Vietnamese soup house, a place so nice we visited it twice......in a single week. 'You--back again??" roared the cheerful female Vietnamese proprietor when I strolled back in just two days after having eaten a lovely meal there and chatting with her and her husband over steaming bowls of beef tendon and tripe in broth. I threw up my hands in an 'I give up' gesture, laughing at the absurdity and admitting to her the cravings that both my husband and I had been suffering for her soup ever since we'd first been. Vietnamese cuisine, as it turns out, can be a highly addictive substance.

Still, when the second challenge for Project Food Blog came along and challenged me to choose 'an ethnic classic that is outside your comfort zone,' Vietnamese didn't immediately spring to mind. After all, there are so many places I've never traveled, not even at the end of a fork, so many cultures I've never visited. I've never had taro in Tahiti or hákarl in Iceland, never known what it's like to sample ajiaco or arepas in Colombia, or sega wat with injera in Ethiopia. I think of myself as a fearless cook, ready to tackle even the most unknown-to-me dishes, but truthfully there are a lot of things that could be said to be 'outside of my comfort zone.' Finally, I remembered that first, ecstatic bowl of phở and my head cleared. I have a lot of enthusiasm for eating Vietnamese food, clearly, but not much experience actually preparing it myself. At home. From scratch. With authentic ingredients. Envisioning a trip to our local pan-Asian megamarket (the venerable LeeLee Market, originator of such previous posts as this one), I excitedly began researching recipes.

Phở was too simple, too obvious. Phở is arguably a food whose time has come, one which has gone mainstream in a major and well-deserved way. Even my non-foodie friends are starting to talk about it, a sure sign of the times. And soup, even divine, sublime soup just didn't seem.......challenging enough for a Project Food Blog challenge. Where's the flash, the drama, the sweat? Where's the oh-my-God-this-might-fail-at-the-last-crucial-moment cooking method? Soup just..........simmers. And then my brain rested on something else, something I've never cooked or eaten, from a country I've never visited. A dish I've never even seen except through others' descriptions and photographs. A street food sizzling-crepe classic known as bánh xèo.

As with any local specialty in the world, there are as many different ways to make bánh xèo as there are local regions where it is made. There may even be as many different ways as there are people in all of Vietnam. Most seem to agree, however, that pork, shrimp and bean sprouts are the preferred filling. I settled on a version that includes turmeric, rice flour and coconut milk in the banh batter. Also, interestingly enough, this particular recipe calls for........beer. Some recipes called only for water, but I reasoned that beer as an ingredient would result in the light, bubbly batter I needed to make the wafer-thin, crispy and ever so slightly chewy pancakes I was after. So, beer* it was.

( *Full disclosure: No Vietnamese beer of any kind being available, even at our beloved LeeLee Market, I reached for a popular Chinese brew instead. Still delicious.)

The name bánh xèo is adorably onomatopoetic, a fancy term meaning that to say the word aloud suggests a sound, in this case the sound of a thin crepe merrily sizzling in hot, splattering oil over a searingly hot skillet. Banh ssssssssssssaaaayyyoww. It's even fun to say!


To accompany our bánh xèo, I chose another popular dish known as chao tom, a juicy little shrimpcake made of finely minced shrimp, sugar, scallion and a little beaten egg, molded kebab-style around a skewer of sugar cane which also imparts its sweetness to the dish. These are then grilled over coals until lightly charred to perfection, then dipped in salty fish sauce and enjoyed. I've had chao tom before, including a fantastic version at a little Vietnamese place on a side street of Hong Kong, and they're amazing as an accompaniment to just about everything. Plus, if you're going to stand at your kitchen counter and peel and devein a pound of shrimp for an hour, you might as well get an extra shrimp dish out of the whole affair, am I right? Right.

Some slight trouble arose when Mike and I realized that the simple-enough-sounding little shrimpcakes, in order to achieve maximum deliciousness and authenticity, would need to be grilled outside over charcoal. We hadn't grilled all summer. We looked at each other and froze in horror, having both just remembered the day we threw out our rusted old Weber grill, several months prior to this moment, in a fit of extreme spring cleaning. True, the thing was on its last aluminum legs, rusted almost completely through the bottom, and had originally been purchased in rough shape by me at a Goodwill, five years earlier. But at that moment I would have given anything to have the old girl back. How on earth were we going to cook the savory-sweet, smokey, juicy morsels of fragrant shrimp paste of my dreams?


In what I like to think of as the true street food vendor spirit, we devised an improvised plan that worked suprisingly well, involving hot coals, an old saucer-shaped metal firepit that was also hanging around the yard (no photos of our yard will be shown, for obvious reasons....the theme song from 'Sanford & Son' is already running through my head), and long, oiled strips of twisted aluminum foil. Mission Grill? Accomplished!

With the chao tom out of the way, I set myself to the task of putting together the bánh xèo, which comes together at very, very high temperature in a short matter of minutes. The batter was whisked together and set aside while I chopped scallions and sliced pork shoulder. The bean sprouts and small brown beech mushrooms were lightly stir-fried in a small amount of vegetable oil and a pinch of salt, then also set aside. Finally, it was time to put everything in the pan, super-heated and shimmering with vegetable oil. First in went the slices of pork, which were swirled briefly until almost cooked, and then the shrimp. The batter I poured directly on top of this and swirled again until it was as thin a crepe as I could possibly make it. The characteristic sizzle was happening here, the desired crispy edges appearing. The bánh xèo cooked from the edges inward, and when the cooking had all but reached the center I spread the rest of the filling of bean sprouts and mushrooms on one side, then lifted the other side of the crepe and gently folded it over--bánh xèo at this point should be hot, oily and crackling but still soft enough to manipulate.

I slid one masterpiece onto a plate and held my breath, feeling like someone on the verge of a new discovery. It smelled amazing. It even sounded amazing. It was sizzling. Sssssssssssssaaaayyyoww!

And then Mike whisked it, and the plate that followed, away for photo-taking and our once-sizzling Saigon crepes eventually became cold bánh xèo that needed to be reheated--gasp!--in the oven. Such is the lot in life of a food blogger, I suppose. We suffer a little so that you may enjoy photographs taken right at the moment our lovely newborn food enters the world, steaming hot and already dying a little every second. And anyway, even rewarmed from the oven they tasted amazing--each bite is wrapped in cooling lettuce leaf and mint leaves, then dipped in your condiment of choice, pickled chili-garlic paste, lime juice, nuoc mam. The fresh, herbal zing of the greens containing the rich sliced meats and crackling pancake, bound together by a splash of salty sauce was true heaven.


So, bánh xèo: the ingredients, the method, the taste, even the pronunciation......it's no longer outside my comfort zone but has become a true comfort food in my mind.

Say it with me again..........baaaanh sssssssssssssssssssaaaayyyoww! It's a good, good thing. A classic, even.

Bánh Xèo - 'Sizzling Saigon Crepe' (serves 2 hungry people comfortably)

1/3 lb. shrimp (I bought 1 lb., the remainder was used in the chao tom)
2 T. beer
splash of fish sauce
sugar
1/2 lb. pork shoulder
1/2 C. bean sprouts
1/4 C. brown beech mushrooms

2/3 C. rice flour
1/2 tsp. turmeric
1/3 C. beer (use something light in color and taste, a pilsner, lager or similar)
1/3 C. coconut milk, unsweetened
2 scallions
6 T. vegetable or canola oil

For serving:

lettuce leaves
mint leaves
dipping condiment of choice (pickled chili-garlic paste, lime juice, nuoc mam, etc)

Peel and devein shrimp (chef's tip: a cold beer helps accomplish this task much more enjoyably), place in bowl and splash lightly with beer, fish sauce and sugar, mix briefly and set aside. Thinly slice pork shoulder, set aside.

Heat skillet to high, add 2 T. oil and quickly stir fry bean sprouts and mushrooms with a pinch of salt until just soft. Remove from pan, set aside, and wipe out pan.

In a large or medium sized mixing bowl, whisk together coconut milk, turmeric and rice flour. Chop scallions and add to batter. Add beer, whisk lightly just to combine, and set aside.

Add 2 T. oil (you will use the last 2 T. to cook the second crepe) to skillet and heat on high until oil is shimmering. Throw pork slices (enough for one serving, serving size is up to you) in pan and swirl in oil for about 20 seconds, add shrimp (again, enough for one serving) and continue to swirl pan until meat is just cooked. Pour half of batter into pan and quickly swirl until batter forms as large and thin a crepe as possible. When crepe has almost fully cooked (the edges should appear slightly drier and more cooked, while only the very center still looks a little raw and batter-y), spread half of the bean sprout and mushroom filling on one side of crepe, then gently fold other side of crepe over this as though making an omelet. Slide onto plate and listen for the sizzle! Make second crepe just the same as the first, using everything you have left.

To assemble, I recommend picking up each bite wrapped in a leaf of lettuce and a few mint, then dipping in sauce of your choice (fish sauce, nuoc mam, is great here).

Chao Tom - Sugar Cane Shrimpcakes (makes about 12 skewers)

2/3 lb. shrimp
1 tsp. cornstarch or rice flour
1 beaten egg
1/4 tsp. five spice powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 scallion, finely chopped

one fresh sugar cane stalk, cut into 12 equal, skewer-sized pieces

Heat charcoal in a grill (or improvised grilling device of your choice!). Peel and devein shrimp, place in bowl of food processor*, pulse until coarsely chopped. Add all other ingredients, process until mixture has become a sticky paste which is not completely smooth (it should hold together as a paste, but there should still be small chunks visible in the mixture, for texture). Form in equal amounts around each sugar cane skewer, refrigerate until coals have reached their optimum temperature.

( *Instead of using a food processor, you can also use a chef's knife to finely mince ingredients, or a traditional mortar and pestle to grind them together into a paste.)

Grill on a well-oiled grate over coals (this is important, or they will stick badly), turning once, until cooked to your desired level of doneness. Enjoy straight off the skewer, or wrapped in mint leaves and dipped in fish sauce. Chewing the cane and squeezing a little sweet juice out with your teeth after each salty bite is a wonderful idea. Enjoy!

Vote now!

Voting is OPEN right now in Project Food Blog, and will remain open until Thursday, September 23rd! Please vote for me if you get the chance--you have to sign up with Foodbuzz, but it's free and it takes about thirty seconds. This first round of eliminations is potentially the scariest, because they are whittling down the number of contestants from nealy 2,000 to 400! The odds scare me.

Here's the link you can follow to vote for me. Please, please, please if you can spare thirty seconds or so, help a poor nervous food blogger out, won't you, ha ha? I'll remember all of you when I win this contest. We'll have a party! :)

Project Food Blog Entry #1: 'Born Hungry'

One of my favorite food writers of all time once wrote that hunger, like love, is a basic human urge, and thus writing about it is intertwined with our very humanity.

Hunger.

It was hunger, unsurprisingly, that drove me to write about food in the first place. An urgent hunger to taste--really taste--more of the world around me, one bite at a time. To share with all those who are reading that sudden and intense pleasure, the rushing flow of blood to the head that accompanies one first transcendent bite of absolutely fresh sashimi, tenderly grilled liver, or a single perfect peach. The pure hunger for more travel, more experiences, more sunsets over more unfamiliar horizons, more new friends and bonds yet to be formed. Hunger. You could say I have it.


I wasn't a picky child, that I can remember. My mother tells me the only thing I wouldn't eat was, for the longest time, fast food hamburgers. Which I think only means it's safe to say I got a good start in life, far from the influence of grinning clowns or rascally hamburger thieves. Raised by globetrotting parents who had traveled half the world before I was even born, there wasn't much that I wasn't exposed to from an early age. Will the baby eat couscous? Will she eat lamb biryani? Water chestnuts? Garlic confit? Steamed mussels? Yes, yes, yes, yes and oh yes. Turns out, I was born hungry.

I have had a passport since I was a baby, thanks to those globetrotting parents. As soon as I was reasonably old enough to be unleashed alone upon the world, I started traveling in earnest. I'm not sure if it was my love of travel that fed my love of eating or the reverse, but to me it's one and the same. After all, what is either but a willingness to open your mind, and on occasion your heart and mouth, to a new way of life? Barbecue in Texas? Yeah. Street noodles and stuffed duck's foot in Hong Kong? I'm there. When you travel, you eat what those around you eat, what is most delicious and freshest and most locally beloved. To really know a new person, I have to share a meal with that person. We can talk about whatever it is you are passionate about, politics or art or racehorses, and we may disagree, but we'll still be breaking the same bread.

I want to make something clear, though: it's not all plane tickets and international food markets around here. Because my husband and I are neither millionaires nor travel show hosts, because we are regular people with a regular budget and regular jobs, we cannot travel nearly as much as our vagabond hearts might desire. Luckily, I have always believed in the concept of cooking as exploration--so I can't afford to visit Vietnam this year? I can learn to make bun mang vit, a Vietnamese duck and noodle soup right in my own kitchen.

So I don't have an Italian grandmother to teach me the right way to roll pasta, or the means to fly to Italy and find one myself? I'll teach myself over and over again until I find the right way. So I can't afford a $500 meal at a certain highbrow, eat-here-before-you-die restaurant run by a certain famous chef? I can purchase the famous chef's cookbook based on the restaurant and enjoy the hilarity of trying to reproduce his famously artful meals in my home kitchen. And so on. And so on. It's all part of my culinary education.

Earlier this year I started this blog, Orange & Salt, as a way of recording past eating adventures and misadventures. In every blog entry, I am telling a story to myself about each special meal that comes out of my kitchen. I am trying to describe to the reader the feeling and texture of every success (and oh yes, the occasional failure) and what went into the pot--both figuratively in terms of feelings or history, and also quite literally in terms of ingredients. To share the experience with my fellow travelers, I almost always include a recipe at the end, because after all, what's travel without a few intrepid partners?

I started a food blog because I love cooking and eating, but I continue it because I love my readers. Do I want to become the next Food Blog Star? Yes, absolutely, because I plan to stick with this food writing thing for a long time, after all. Win or lose, I'll still be here, eating and writing. We're all on some kind of journey together, whether it's to a street market in Southeast Asia or no further away than your own home kitchen.

Eating, cooking, writing, sharing recipes and photos, these all bring us closer together and I'm thankful for the chance to have a blog that allows me to do all those things at once.

Enough talking now.

I'm hungry.

Project Food Blog: What is This?

Readers, I have entered a contest! You can read more about it here, but to sum it up briefly, I'll be competing against 2,000 other food bloggers in an effort to become 'the next Food Blog Star!'



I'll be posting my first official entry in the contest shortly, and I hope you'll all enjoy these themed entries and vote for me when the time comes! The contest consists of ten elimination challenges and lasts, at least provided that I advance in every round, until early December. There will be other, non-contest-related entries on the blog in between, but I'm really looking forward to participating in this and the extra challenge and structure it will bring to Orange & Salt. Oh yes, and the prize! Did I mention there's a fabulous prize? :)