Beijing Noodle House－－北京面馆

We finally decided to try the Beijing Noodle House in Richmond. This place was especially recommended to us by Raymond Li (李学军) the manager of Regency Toyota, where we take our car for service. Raymond is from Dalian, in Northern China. He said if you want some good wheat-based Northern cuisine, try this place. So we did.

It was nice and clean inside, which almost made up for the bad service. To be fair, I think the staff weren't too sure of their English, and we were the only non-Chinese in the place. [this picture is from the web, so no, it wasn't empty]

This is a signature dish, the beef noodles. I passed, but it looks good for the genre.

We started off with the thick noodles and cabbage. Quite tasty.

Also good was the garlic chives and bean sprouts. Wonderful when mixed with the noodles. I do love garlic chives (韭菜 jiucai).

Our final wheat-based item was steamed veggie dumplings. I know, noodles and dumplings, two kinds of fan, but what the hell. 饭 fan is the filler part of a meal, like rice, noodles, or dumplings. Usually, one picks only one, unless you're a foreign devil.

Chinatown Haircut 唐城理发

Stock Cinese salon photo from Google, but pretty representative.

Well, it was time for my quarterly (and first Vancouver) haircut. I figured, the one place I could get a cheap haircut, considering my modest needs (hair follicle count), was Chinatown. It was a beautiful day, and I was looking for an excuse to ride my bike downtown. Chinatown is on the eastern edge of downtown, next to the historic Gastown. It's pretty bustling and fun for a half-day excursion.

I decided to ride my Truk. It's become my favorite commuter bike.

There is a designated route all the way downtown from our place. About six miles and mostly down hill.

A couple dodgy areas where they haven't figured out the auto-pedestrian-bike interchange, but all-in-all, a fairly safe ride.

Downtown, it's even better, with a whole network of separate facilities for bikes, in addition to regular on-street markings such as sharrows (for shared lanes), and bike lanes.

There were many shops to choose from, all wanting my business on a slow day. They were all roughly the same price ($9.99). I chose the New Kowloon Beauty Salon because they let me park my bike inside.

And, as you can see, I got my money's worth. [Photo by the salon manager.]

Ohm Cookin' (Part 4: Ohm-Cooked Root Vegetable Pie)

It's been chilly and damp lately and we were in need of some comfort food. I used to make a chicken and biscuit casserole back in the carnivore days. I thought I would make up a veggie version. Who needs chicken, eh?


So, here's one take on it. I'll call this root vegetable and mushroom pie, with biscuit topping. If anything can make the sun come out, it's savory pie.


BTW, this recipe really put the old FES to the test. I can't say I'm making much headway learning to cook on it.

Filling 1 (I used the pie plate as a gauge to quantity since this is a made up recipe):

1 cup carrots cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1 cup potatoes, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

1 turnip, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch cubes 

1 parsnip, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

For filling (part 1):

Bring 6 cups water to boil. Add carrots and next 3 ingredients. Simmer until vegetables are tender, about 7 minutes. Drain. Set aside.

Filling (parts 2 & 3) 

3 cups chopped onions or leeks or combination

2 celery stalks chopped

4 large garlic cloves, chopped

5 ounces mushrooms (baby bellas or crimini)

1 cup of frozen peas, thawed 

1 teaspoon fresh thyme, chopped 

1 teaspoon fresh sage, chopped

For filling (part 2):

Sauté mushrooms in olive oil or butter until juices are released. Set aside.

For filling (part 3):

Melt butter in same pot over medium heat. Add onions/leeks; sauté until beginning to brown, about 10 minutes.  Meanwhile, prepare biscuits.

Biscuits:

2 cups flour (1 cup unbleached all purpose, 1 cup whole wheat)

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup chilled unsalted butter, diced (or crisco)

1 1/3 cups (or more) milk

Mix first 3 ingredients in food processor. Add butter. Pulse until mixture resembles coarse meal. Move to a bowl. Gradually add 1 cup of milk, tossing with fork until dough is evenly moistened and adding more milk by tablespoonfuls if dry. Set aside and get back to the gravy, for crying out loud.

Gravy is Groovy

Back to the neglected leeks: mix in garlic, celery, and sage and thyme. Stir 2 minutes. Add flour; stir 1 minute. Gradually whisk in 3 cups of warmed veggie broth. Cook until sauce is thick and reduced, whisking often, about 8 minutes. 

Mix in reserved vegetables, peas, and mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper. Transfer filling to buttered nine-inch deep-dish pie plate (I prefer Emile Henry because they're just better). 

Drop biscuit dough atop hot filling by heaping tablespoonfuls; sprinkle with pepper. 

Bake uncovered in preheated 400º oven, or until tester inserted into center of biscuits comes out clean, about 45 minutes. Cool 10 minutes. Eat.

And Voila: the sun comes out (Patty's iPad pic).

Seattle for a Little R & R

We had to go to the States for 72 hours in order to legally export our car (take the VIN out of US circulation). They were rather strict about this time limit. So, we decided to take a little vacation. We spent the first evening in this little pub on Capitol Hill, the Hopvine. They love their local beers, and so did we.


We stayed at a great place on Capitol Hill that we found through Airbnb, my new favorite travel web site.

I had the Obsidian Stout, from Deschutes Brewery, in Bend, Oregon. Patty had the Golden Hills Lager, from Spokane.

I loved the vintage cop cars downtown. Hopefully, they don't come with vintage attitudes.

I had this amazing eggplant-pepper ravioli dish for lunch at Il Corvo handmade pasta. The sauce was in the pasta—amazingly good. Washed it down with some cheap house red. Patty had the pappardelle, with red wine braised mushroom ragu, also delish.

Special Beer Update

 Hi, Pat and Jeff. Now that I have your attention, you can see there is yet one more reason to take a vacation to Vancouver. I found a source for the product. A legal one. C$5.05. Not bad. With the current exchange rate, that's $4.96. I bought one case, but they had two. I might have to return tomorrow. 


NOTE: We have to go to Seattle until Thursday, a hassle that involves legally exporting our car. So, I am taking the week off from blogging. We do plan to have fun in Seattle, however, so there might be a Seattle blog on Monday. Dai

I'm drinking the lovely stuff while writing today's special blog.

Better than crack, but not as cheap.

Special Beer Update update: I discovered Fuller's ESB in a can. It's cheaper than the bottles, but equally delicious. Yum.

Ohm Cookin' (Part 3: Ohm-Made Soup, Bread, & Dip)

For the third major foray into cooking on the Friggin' Electric Stove, I chose a simple meal of spicy chic pea and kale soup, a French baguette (insert Flight of the Conchords lyrics here), and Tuscan white bean dip. I say simple because it's fairly easy to bake bread and cook beans on any FES. The only subtlety involves cooking the garlic without burning it.


The soup is based on a recipe our friends Pat and Barb introduced us to a few years back, which uses turkey sausage instead of kale. I also amped the peppers, garlic, and cumin for this version.

The baguette is a no-knead recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. There is also a great article in the December 2008 issue of Mother Earth News, which is where I first discovered this great book. It includes the basic method was well as a few recipes. I recommend buying the book, however. 


Basically, one just mixes up a big tub of bread dough (enough for four loaves), lets the dough rise for a couple of hours, and sticks the tub-o'-dough in the fridge until you want to make a loaf. 



Master recipe:  Boule (Artisan Free Form Loaf)


3C lukewarm water
1.5 tbsp granulated yeast (1.5 packets)
1.5 tbsp coarse kosher or sea salt
6.5 C unsifted, unbleached, all-purpose flour
cornmeal, whole wheat or rice flour for peel


Mix it up, plop it in a 5.5 quart fridge container.

For this baguette (text amended from book):

1. Prepare a pizza peel by sprinkling it liberally with whole wheat flour to prevent the loaf from sticking to it when you slide it into the oven. 

2. Sprinkle the surface of the dough in the tub with flour, then cut off a 1-pound (grapefruit-sized) piece with a serrated knife. Hold the mass of dough in your hands and add a little more flour as needed so it won’t stick to your hands. Gently stretch the surface of the dough around to the bottom on four “sides,” rotating the ball a quarter-turn as you go, until the bottom is a collection of four bunched ends. Most of the dusting flour will fall off; it doesn’t need to be incorporated. The bottom of the loaf will flatten out during resting and baking. 

3. Once it's cohesive, begin to stretch and elongate the dough, dusting with additional flour as necessary. Form a cylinder 2 inches in diameter. 

4. Place the cylinder on the pizza peel. Let it rest uncovered for about 20 minutes. Depending on the dough’s age, you may see little rise during this period; more rising will occur during baking. 

5. Twenty minutes before baking, preheat oven to 450 degrees with a baking stone on the bottom rack. Place an empty broiler tray for holding water on the top shelf. 

6. After the dough has rested for 20 minutes, paint water over the surface using a pastry brush, which will allow the slashing, serrated knife to pass without sticking. Slash 1⁄4-inch-deep cuts diagonally across the top of the loaf. 

7. Slide the loaf off the pizza peel and onto the baking stone. Quickly but carefully pour about a cup of hot water into the broiler tray and close the oven door to trap the steam. Bake for about 18 minutes, then take out the broiler tray and move the loaf to the top shelf, and bake another 7 minutes. 

8. Remove the loaf from the oven, it will audibly crackle, or “sing,” when initially exposed to room temperature air. Allow to cool completely, preferably on a wire rack, for best flavor, texture and slicing. The perfect crust may initially soften, but will firm up again when cooled.

The white bean dip is pretty simple. I used dried cannelloni beans (white kidney beans), but any white bean will work. You can also use 1 16 oz. can of beans, in a pinch. Soak the beans overnight. Cook for a couple of hours with a little olive oil. Drain the beans and reserve a little of the water for thinning the dip. Puree the cooled beans, thinning with the cooking water to an agreeable consistency, and flavor with whatever you like. I used roasted garlic, fresh basil that I had frozen this summer in olive oil, salt and pepper, and a sprinkle of garlic powder. 

Roasted garlic: 

Bake a head of garlic wrapped in tin foil for 30 minutes at 400 degrees. Allow garlic to cool. Cut off the top of the head and squeeze into the dip.

The soup begins with cooking 1-1 1/2 cups of dried beans (after soaking for at least three hours) until soft (but not canned-mushy). 

Clean and chop into 1-inch pieces one bunch of lacinato kale (about 5 ounces).

Flavoring for the soup is two or three jalapeño peppers, a teaspoon of fresh rosemary (half a teaspoon of dried), 1 1/2 teaspoons of ground cumin, and 10 [sic] cloves of garlic, smashed with the blade of a knife and coarsely chopped.

In the soup pot of your choice, sauté the garlic in a couple tablespoons of olive oil on medium heat for a couple of minutes. Be careful not to burn it. If using an FES, be prepared to remove the pot from the heat if it's too hot. FES.

To the garlic, add 1 small can of diced tomatoes (or equivalent peeled fresh, if you have it), and the other ingredients.

Add the out-of-focus chopped kale, bring to a simmer, and cook for five minutes.

Add the chickpeas, and about three cups of veggie broth. Bring to a boil, turn the heat down to a simmer, and cook for about ten minutes. Right before serving, add 2 or 3 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice. Pour you and your lovely partner a glass of wine.

Enjoy this meal and the three days of leftovers it will provide (more like three weeks for the dip).

Hockey Night in Canada

We saw our first hockey game early last month. The 59th season of Hockey Night in Canada on CBC opened on Thursday, October 6. The night included a doubleheader of the Toronto Maple Leafs hosting the Montreal Canadiens, followed by the Vancouver Canucks, beginning its quest for another Stanley Cup Final berth, against the Pittsburgh Penguins.

The opening ceremonies were a little different this year from previous years, I suspect.

There was a good half hour of apologies for the riots that accompanied the last Stanley Cup final, which Vancouver lost to the Boston Bruins. Vancouverites were sorry, for sure, but also embarrassed at exposing the underlying rage of a segment of a passive-aggressive population who apparently needed to let off steam. Maybe it's a Vancouver thing, where there seems to be real and increasing income inequality in an expensive city fueled partly by with regressive taxes. Maybe it's something else entirely. And every country has its drunk knuckleheads. But who riots when a team loses?

The organizers trotted out all the "heroes" of that infamous and embarrassing evening: policemen, mounties, medics, and injured "innocents" and passersby.

And then, after the contrition, Vancouver lost to a Pittsburgh team playing without standout star Sidney Crosby. I'm no expert on hockey—in fact, I know little to nothing about it—but it sure seemed to me that Penguin's goalie, Marc-Andre Fleury, was superior in every way but bulk to the imposing but slow Roberto Luongo of the Canucks.