"Som Tum"

Traditonal Som Tum, a Thai dish is made with green papaya. Since I didn't have any green papayas handy (plus they are hard to find in groccery store sometimes), I substituted green papaya with shredded zucchini and kohlrabi which I had harvested a couple of days ago from my garden. 

The texture of kohlrabi was very close to green papaya as it was crunchy. Zucchini worked well too, but maybe made the salad just a bit watery. Besides substituting green papaya with zucchini and kohlrabi, I added some mint (from my garden) to the salad.

Roasted cauliflower with carrot top pesto

On the weekend, I have bought some carrots with the greens still intact. I have always wondered why don't we eat the carrot greens. So I googled about it and found some recipes for making carrot top pesto. It's basically chopped carrot greens, olive oil, almonds/walnut, Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper, all processed together in a food processor.

I have been having the pesto with rice pasta in the last couple days. Today, I wanted to try something different. Again, I googled recipes that use pesto, and a found roasted cauliflower tossed with pesto. Roast cauliflower with a bit of olive oil, and salt and pepper. When done, toss them with pesto. It tasted so good!

 

First trial of the food dehydrator

Strawberries, pineapples, apples and banana slices all ready to be dehydrated. 

Homemade Pho Sate

Got up this morning and saw that there's a rainfall warning in effect, all I could think of was a hot bowl of pho sate soup. I had bought some beef soup bones a month ago, and still sitting in the freezer. So, I got it out, and started making the broth. After searching for some Pho Bo recipes online, I decided to go with the one from www.vietworldkitchen.com (http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2008/10/pho-beef-noodle-soup.html), which included spices like star anise, cloves, cinnamon sticks. I skipped the fish sauce, which I know was one of the most important ingredients in Vietnamese cuisine! I substituted with a bit of tamari sauce.

Now the sate part... I looked for sauces at a couple of Asian markets but couldn't find any sate sauce that contained no MSG or peanuts (can't have them due to allergy). So, I decided to make my own. Again, Viet World Kitchen had a recipe for vietnamese style sate chile sauce (http://vietworldkitchen.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/lemongrass-chil.html), so, I just followed it. I used all the ingredients besides peanut oil (substituted with olive oil), red chili (substitued with jalapenos cause I couldn't find any red ones!), and siracha sauce (which has misc preservative that I wasn't sure about).

Voila! 

Despite no fish sauce, the soup turned out good. The broth could be simmered a little longer (I cooked it for only 3 hours).

A Tray of Goodness

I've heard a lot of good health benefits about wheatgrass but had never tried it myself. On the weekend, I saw a beautiful tray of organic wheatgrass at the farmers market, so I decided to give it a try.

I cut a handful of grass everyday to put in my smoothie or squeeze it through my juicer with other fruits and vegetables. It doesn't have much of a strong taste to it, so it was easy to combine wheatgrass into smoothies and juices.

After 6 days, this is what's left. I've been watering and giving the wheatgrass lots of sunshine by placing it outside for a few hours a day. After a few days, the patch that I had cut earlier started to grow taller. The grower of these wheatgrass told me that it will last for about a week. It's hard to tell from the picture, but some tip of the grass has started to turn yellow.

Thai Cabbage Wrap

I have been trying different vegetable leaves for making wraps. I find collard, lettuce, and cabbage leaves worked the best. This dish uses collard and cabbage leaves. Cabbage leaves needed a little more time to get softened in hot water.

For the filling, I stir fried some onions, garlic, peppers, carrots, kohlrabi, mint, and mung bean noodles (aka glass noodles). For the sauce, I mixed together some lime juice, mint, chilli, miso paste, honey, and almond butter.

You can probably use any vegetable-noodles combo for the filling. And use peanut butter instead of almond butter if you want to make it more Thai.

Dissecting a Coconut

I see coconut at the grocery store all the time, but never actually bought one myself. Maybe because I grew up with coconut trees in our yard, and always have fresh coconut in hand. Anyway, I thought I would get one and see what I could do with it. This one turned out to be a bit older, and the flesh was hard. Due to its age, the juice was too sour drink.

 After about 30 minutes prying out the flesh, I decided run the flesh through my juicer and see how much coconut milk I could get out of it. 

In the end, I got some coconut butter, shredded coconut, a small amount of coconut milk, and a glass of sour coconut water. I think I'm going to make some curry with these homemade coconut products.