Mixed Plate: The Wrath of Congee

Yo, all my Asian brothahs and sistahs from other mistahs -- are you ready to rumble?? Tiger Moms everywhere are ready to judge meals all over the world, and cast tired looks and furrowed eyebrows across tables at what's going to be served up for CNY! Chinese tradition would dictate you're busy fretting away over a traditional Lunar New Year meal coming up at the end of January, where we say farewell to the Year of the Snake and howdy to the Year of the Horse for 2014. It's a big deal, and it's an important time to gather with loved ones and welcome the new year properly, but I also get that it's stressful like any other holiday fraught with family and drama. I say... to hell with tradition -- invite all your non-judgy friends over, who love you just the way you are, not how many hours of piano practice you shirked as a kid, and serve up the new hotness that I am naming as the Next Big/Annoying Food Trend for 2014: Congee Brunch.

My submission to Food Fads of 2014: Congee Brunch - Photo by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: The Misanthropic Cook

I know it's a new year, full of promise, potential and hope... but holy $%*&, there are days where you don't want to leave the house. You're sick with the flu, it's been a crazy work week, or more likely, it's cold outside and the effort it would take to get your lazy butt off the couch feels like a request to summit Mt. Everest while wearing deep-sea diving gear. Seasonal Affective Disorder to the Tenth Power with a side of Sad Horns. The post-holiday hangover doesn't help things when you're staring at those Christmas lights you know you're just going to leave up until sometime mid-March. And then it hits you... damn. You're hungry.

Emergency Taco Button - hit it and don't stop! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Yes, you could go grab a burger. Or order a pizza -- those show up right to your door. I hit the Pizza Button already over the holidays when I was sick and couldn't leave the bed. Even as miserable as I was, I knew I could not live off takeout food. Therefore, in times of illness or just not wanting to deal with the world, I rely on a cache of goods stashed in our freezer/fridge and pantry.

Just call me the Misanthropic Cook. Be it benefit or detriment, since I work from home, a full week can go by where I can get away with not leaving the house except for picking up the mail and the occasional trip to the grocery store -- but even that's optional. Having produce delivered to the house is a bonus -- we're still living La Vida Kale with Full Circle Farm's CSA every other week. But it always ensures you have some fresh produce to combine with whatever you've hoarded in the freezer. My go-to is always soup. I try to always have frozen poultry stock in quart-sized yogurt containers and I'll defrost two if I'm making soup. What goes in the soup? Whatever the heck I have, veggies, meat and all. If I have a lot of starchy things like potatoes, I'll use the hand blender to buzz that down into a creamy, thick consistency, but if I have a random mix of vegetables, I cut them small and keep the soup looking "rustic" so that you can see everything that got put into it. The flavoring is typically salt, pepper and some dried herbs like oregano and thyme, but the soup can easily get a Southwest flair with cumin and chili powder. This is why Whatever Soup is top on my list when I can't or just plain won't leave the comfort of my abode.

Soup and tacos are a hermit's best friend - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I discovered that tacos are the Misanthropic Cook's new BFF. Corn tortillas freeze like a boss. And you can buy them in staggering bulk amounts, which you can separate into handfuls, wrap in plastic and foil to protect against freezer burn, and store until needed. I've also taken to buying up chorizo and freezing that as well. It's funny to say you have a collection of frozen meat tubes, but hey, it is what it is. I prefer the pork chorizo, but you can find beef just as easily. That marvelous mix of ground up, well-seasoned mystery meat (it does say stuff like "lungs and intestine" on the packaging, if you don't want to live in mystery), gets fried up with some finely chopped onion and in the last couple minutes of cooking, crack in a few eggs. It tightens up the mix and it's easily spoonable onto a warmed corn tortilla. It's fine on its own. Or you can add fresh sliced avocado. Or a dollop of sour cream -- plain, unsweetened yogurt in my case. Maybe a sprinkle of cilantro and a squeeze of lime if they're handy. If you're lucky, you have some roasted tomatillo and fresh herb salsa verde sitting in the freezer that can easily be defrosted. Yes, I'm a bit of a freezer nerd, but it's so nice knowing you have a surplus of homemade stocks, dips and sauces in your personal freezer aisle. Hungry Man dinners, this ain't! Even without all the accoutrements, a basic chorizo and egg taco meal is quick to make, and it's incredibly satisfying.

The 2012 Holiday that Was - Photos by Wasabi Prime

After a whirlwind holiday of overly decorated baked brie (our grocery store is so weird) and new cookbooks that are inspiring, but daunting at the same time, just kick back in your new Lebowski Dude t-shirt, start scrapbooking with meat stickers and have a chorizo-egg taco without the concern of facing the rest of 2013 quite yet. Happy days to all, my fellow Post-Holiday Hobbits.

UnRecipe: A-Team Montage Meal

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team. (courtesy Wikipedia)

*Cue awesome opening theme music, totally rad all-black van with red stripe along the side, and lots of 1980s controlled pyrotechnic explosions*

I had a refrigerator full of random leftover ingredients from various meals. Something needed to happen, lest mass spoilage take over. And I had not the awesome manpower of Hannibal, Face, B.A. Barracus, nor their uncanny ability to break out "Howling Mad" Murdoch from the psych ward for yet another weekly hour-long episode. I took matters into my own hands. By the Power of MacGyver cooking, inspired by several seasons' worth of A-Team montages where the team inexplicably built a fully loaded armored vehicle out of some bailing wire and an old beater Volvo, I set to work, creating new meals of scraps and spare parts.

I pity the fool who doesn't like this blue cheese and tomato tart - Photo by Wasabi Prime

There was a bit of pie dough remaining from the goat cheese and roasted plum tart. I also still had a handful of fresh Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes from blog buddy, Picket Fence, as well as chunks of leftover blue cheese. It wasn't an armored tank miraculously pieced together to raise hell on some vigilante baddies, but a rustic blue cheese and tomato tart was certainly disarming on an edible level. I flattened the spare bit of dough into a rough circle, put a thin layer of fig jam (yes, I realize I'm addicted) on the bottom, crumbled the cheese over that, and dotted the whole tomatoes over the surface. I folded the edges in, so it created a low wall, and drizzled a bit of olive oil and lemon thyme over the top before popping it into the oven to bake itself to roasted cheesy goodness. Delicious results that would convince even the ill-tempered B.A. to agree to get on a plane.

The broiler hides all manner of odd-shaped vegetable scrap sins - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Waste not, want not, even if that includes melon-baller shaped scraps of vegetable innards that were saved from hollowing out several yellow table squash for the Meatless in Seattle post. I know, it's weird that I kept them, but there was enough to take up a big plastic yogurt container and it felt like a terrible waste to simply toss them. I was hell-bent with the conviction of Col. John "Hannibal" Smith, to use up those odd-shaped scraps. Sauteeing the squash with more refugees from the vegetarian meal like homemade pesto, and tossing with cooked penne pasta, I put the creamy mix into a baking dish, covered with leftover fresh mozzarella and parmesan cheese, and placed it under the blazing coils of the broiler to get browned and crispy. Sure, it wasn't fancy, but this impromptu baked pasta had delicious flavor of summer pesto with the rich creamy texture of melted cheese, and no remainders of the Meatless in Seattle meal went to waste.

Chorizo is just another way of convincing us that pork truly is a magical animal - Photos by Wasabi Prime

A-Team, meet the Protein Team. A cryogenically-preserved bit of chorizo from the Way-Back Machine of stuffed pattypan squash yielded two egg-themed dishes. The leftover savory custard from the goat cheese and plum tart filled a spare ramekin, which was partially filled with the chorizo, and a mighty meaty quiche was created. The remainder of the chorizo was mixed with some defrosted mashed sweet potato. I had a little container of roasted, mashed sweet potato also in the freezer, no lie. I made pan-fried croquettes from this mixture, browning the outsides and then serving them up with a fried egg over the top. Not quite sure what kind of dish that would be, other than simply saying it was tasty and filled with comfort food delight.

At the end of several weeks' worth of meal leftovers and wayward ingredients, everything found a way to be incorporated into a new meal. As Hannibal would say during each A-Team episode, I love it when a plan comes together. Amen, to that. *Freeze frame, then let credits roll *

UnRecipe: One Nation, Under Gastronomy

Mother of Exiles -- a memorable phrase in Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus, referring to the Statue of Liberty and her role as a sentinel for the New World. It's the same familiar poem about the tired, poor masses yearning to breathe free that's engraved on a plaque, sitting at the base of our émigré watchtower. I remember seeing this plaque as a gradeschooler on the dreaded family vacation, the poem not holding any meaning beyond a perfunctory history lesson. Many years later, the words start to resonate as I wander through local markets and putter through recipes and restaurants all offering pan-fusion-insert buzzword here-cuisine. I start to think about what it means if we have to answer the question: What is American food?

American as apple pie... sort of - Photo by Wasabi Prime

It seems like a simple enough question, right? One immediately thinks of drive-thru cheeseburgers, milkshakes, and other industrialized forms of cuisine that is less about food and more inherent of industrial revolution and our Manifest Destiny of I Want it NOW. But I don't think it's fair to characterize our nation's home cooking by conveyor belt quickness and Conehead-like mass quantities. I should think the food we eat in this country is a byproduct of the drive of necessity, ingenuity, and the notion that there's still room for good flavor amongst those moving parts.

Unidentified Foodie Objects - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Inspired by our crucible of cultures, I threw together a hodgepodge of ingredients to make roasted pattypan squash stuffed with chorizo. This sounds fussy and obscure, but it's surprisingly basic. From our backyard garden, we had tender baby scallions and a couple of carrots (including one scary claw-shaped one - RAWR), a spare onion in the pantry, and several snowy-white pattypan squash from fellow bloggers, Mr. and Mrs. Picket Fence. The name of the mothership-like squash is French in origin, referring to a pâtisson, a cake pan having a similar shape. For the filling, I used a soft Mexican pork chorizo, but the spice-laden sausage has origins throughout both Spain and Portugal.

It's hard to associate this meal with any single ethnic cuisine, and so I think it's simpler to just say it's American. Many of the key ingredients were home-grown, and the final result was inspired by the variety of flavors we're lucky to experience here.

It doesn't seem as all-American as apple pie, but I think a sundry dish like this speaks a bit of our own disparate origins, a melting pot that is stirred by the children of exiles, eager to make something new and bring a part of the old country back for seat at the dinner table.

Home-grown garden bounty included scary claw carrot - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Post-Script: Big THANKS to Tastespotting, Serious Eats' Photograzing and FoodGawker for choosing photos from this post. Much appreciated and happy eating!!