midweek gems #23

beef stir-fry on french fry origin story + meat box + canned tropical fruit tricks

Hello there!

Oh my gosh, last Sunday’s dumpling fest was such a hoot. Thanks to so many of you for signing up. Folks attended the livestream from all over the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. The balance of people were tied up with other activities or located in dumpling challenged time zones, like Europe. Nigella Lawson (yes, the Domestic Goddess) and Jan, couldn’t attend from the U.K. and eastern Europe. Everyone got the recorded playback. Jan dove in and already sent a DIY dumpling photo (top right).

Thank you Drew for inviting friends to join in for a virtual dumpling party. Ben (center right, below) had a dumpling house party with my recipe plus some spicy wontons from NYT Cooking. Ellen shared that Twin Marquis has good wrappers (photo below, top left), despite their edges being dry.

The stars of the 2-hour class were Lauren’s sons, a 9-year-old and his 4-year-old brother. The mother and sons rolled out dumpling wrappers, filled them, then with the aid of their mom, cooked them up and walked off with their dumpling pleasures. Their comments in the Zoom chat made me giggle with dumpling satisfaction.

We steamed some and pan fried some and they are soooooooo good!!! Thank youuuuu! This has been so fun!

💎 How did I get here?

While I was writing up last weekend’s Sunday Special recipe for stir-fried tofu with French fries, this kept bugging me: Where did that dish come from?

I checked the 1940s equivalent of Vietnam’s Joy of Cooking — a cookbook titled Làm Bếp Giỏi by Vân Ðài (1903-1964, born Ðào Thị Nguyệt Minh). She had no mention of the stir-fried beef and fried potatoes in the Vietnamese or the French recipe sections.

So I asked the oldest living cook I know, my mother. She had plenty to say about the versions she grew up with and what she prepared for us in Vietnam and California. The dish had morphed from what what may have been a scrappy Viet version of steak frites into a stir-fry with fries. Maybe Peruvian lomo saltado was involved? My mom had never heard of that dish but she said it sounded very interesting.

It was fun for us to chat about history and food.

Hanoi <=> Machu Picchu

Our conversation and my research yielded a short article about Asian migration, trade and cuisine. Read about “Beef Stir-Fry with French Fries (Thịt Bò Xào Khoai Tây Chiên) -- where did it come from?” on my website. Contribute your insights too!

💎 Meat box

I live in a town with its fair share of tree huggers but I am not one of them. (Many of the trees in Santa Cruz are not native!) However, I do want to reduce my use of plastic and coated paper. We reuse our Ziploc bags so much that I recently discarded one marked 2021!

We shop at markets with butcher and seafood counters — indie grocers, a health food store, and Whole Foods. They’re often double wrapping meat and seafood in a plastic bag and then butcher paper. If it’s just a thin sheath of paper plus butcher paper, the item (like seafood) may leak and become gross.

Once home, there’s a lot of unwrapping and disposing of stuff. I’ve tried washing and reusing the plastic bags but it gets tedious. I came up with a solution that we’ve been testing — a large, lightweight, clear plastic box that I call “the meat box,” though we buy seafood in it too!

Why a large, lightweight, and clear box?

• We walk a lot to do grocery shopping. Glass would get heavy over time.

• The 9.6 cup size recently held 6 big short ribs for the short rib pho, and 4 chicken leg quarters. Fish filets sit in the box nicely without being crushed by other groceries.

• See-though plastic allows the cashier or the self-checkout scanner to zap the price bar code.

What’s it like to use the meat box? Have the meat box ready to present to the butcher because they work fast. Give your order to the butcher then set the box on the counter and request that they put your stuff in the box. They may look at you weird but explain that you want to reduce packaging. They’ll dig it.

The butcher cannot tare the box but they will weigh the protein on thin paper and then place it in the box.

What about the pricing label? Tell the butcher to stick the label on another piece of paper then place the label facing up. The scanner will zap the bar code right through the plastic top. At the worse, remove the lid to allow the scanner to get closer to the bar code.

I know I’m not impacting the use of plastic bags in the world all that much, but at least I’m doing something. And I sometimes forget to bring the box! All that said, the meat box has surprising benefits, like:

• Good for retaining freshness. The short ribs did not oxidize and darken as they sat in the box for several days before I cooked the short rib pho recipe.

• You can see right through the box to know what’s in your fridge or freezer.

• Butchers seem to like it. They get a chuckle out of it. It’s different from all the plastic, paper, and latex gloves they go through each day.

✅ Where did I buy the box? It’s a Rubbermaid Brilliance food storage container with a 9.6 cup capacity. You can find it many places, including Amazon, which as a great 2-fer deal.

💎 Canned tropical fruit tricks

When you open a can of tropical fruit, you basically use the solids and dump out the liquid, which there always seems to be a lot of!

For Ever-Green Vietnamese, I developed a no-churn sorbet recipe that entails freezing the whole can (it does not explode!) and then doctoring and processing it into marvelous sorbet. I became so obsessed with the recipe that the main jackfruit sorbet recipe included variations for soursop, pineapple, mandarin orange and lychee. If you have the book, head to pages 275 and 276.

Another thing you can do with the very flavorful canning liquid is to add it to soda water for a refreshing drink. The Whole Foods ginger fizzy water tastes kind of flat but with a generous splash of canned lychee liquid, the soda turned delicious. The canning liquid lasts a long time in the fridge so make the most of it.

Some housekeeping . . .

Just so you know, Midweek Gems are pausing for about 5 weeks while I work with chef Pim Techamuanvivit to wrap up the Cooking Thai manuscript.

Don’t worry, I’ll still be in your inbox on Sundays. Coming down the pipeline for this weekend is a discussion about Asian ingredient labeling and food safety. It’s a topic I’ve held off on, but what the heck, if not now, when?