Whenever I return home from college there are many foods that I miss but there is one dish I know will be waiting for me when I get there-bihun. It is such a simple dish with easily attainable ingredients, little preparation that can be eaten hot or cold. Whenever my cousin Yiwen returns to the States for a visit, or my cousin Hsin-Yi comes home from Milwaukee, or if my A-ma and A-Kong pick my family up from the Airport or basically whenever I get together for a home-cooked meal at either my A-Ma or Kim-Po’s house there is always plenty enough to eat then and two days later. This dish means home and family and holds a special place in my heart.
Bihun is relatively easy to make and even I have been able to make it although it does not taste the same as Kim-Po’s cooking. When I first consulted my mom the first time that I prepared it she didn’t really have an exact recipe for me to follow. It’s just one of those things that you just know how to make it. The ingredients can vary but we usually make it in one particular way.
The recipe looks like this:
1-package rice stick noodles
1-2 green onions
1 handful Chinese chives
< ½ cup (about 5-6) dried black (shitake) mushrooms
½ cup chopped cabbage
1 cup of shredded carrots
¼ pound minced pork
1 handful of dried shrimps
Soy sauce
White pepper
Water
Oil
The rice stick noodles, dried shrimp and dried mushrooms are all soaked in separate containers with enough water for them to moisten. The Chinese chives and green onions are finely chopped and sautéed with the dried shrimps in a wok. The shitake mushrooms are chopped and added to the wok along with shredded carrots chopped cabbage and minced pork. After these ingredients have been cooked for a while the rice stick noodles are added and the mixture is cooked. Soy sauce and white pepper are added to taste. The noodles have now become a very light brown.
The process involved in preparing bihun is nothing out of the ordinary nor is there any elaborate ritual that is performed before eating it. Typically the experience and memories that I have eating this dish are sitting at the large, plastic tablecloth covered dinning table at Ku-Kong and Kim-Po’s house along with several other members of my mom’s family. My A-Kong or my father offers to say grace. Then everyone closes their eyes with their hands in their laps and we say amen in unison. Another male in the family says, “cha pong” (let’s eat) and passes around beer for all the adults. The bihun is usually served in a very large bowl and people dish it out themselves onto their own plate. We eat with long, slippery, plastic chopsticks. You can tell who needs another serving when you hear the plastic chopsticks scrape against the plastic plates when someone is trying to get the last bit of noodles and vegetables off of their plate and into their mouth. No one at the table spares anyone bad manners. People talk with their mouth open, put plates up to their face to scoop food into their mouths, and talk loudly. There is no doubt that this is my family and everyone is comfortable around each other.
When my mother and I take home leftovers we have a different ritual. Typically it is two or four in the afternoon on a Saturday and my mom and I haven’t eaten lunch yet. All we do is pull the food out of the refrigerator, put it on small plates, grab chopsticks and sit on the couch watching television and talking.
It’s true that this dish is nothing particularly special in presentation, preparation or ingredients but that is precisely what I love about it and why it holds such a dear place in my heat. It’s a dish that is comforting and whenever it is made it means that my family is getting together for dinner. Bihun makes me think of talking with family, watching Asian television, eating fruit with salt sprinkled on it, and drinking fresh brewed, hot oolong tea.
Often the most simplest and humblest dishes are the ones that are truly made from the heart and hold special meaning. Bihun is made to welcome someone home when they are too tired to make their own dinner, if you are just stopping by or made to be accompanied by other dishes at a larger dinner. For me bihun means seeing my cousins who now live far away. Even though I go for long periods of time when I don’t see different members of my family I know what’s in store when my mom calls me and says A-Ma’s making bihun.
31 January 2008
potstickers!
I think that a person's relationship to the production and consumption of food says a great deal about them. At the very least, it will tell you where they came from.
A good friend of mine is a notoriously slow eater. When we go out together, it is not uncommon for me to be completely finished with my meal only to notice that she has barely begun to eat. This is especially apparent if we're eating food that comes in measurable portions, like pizza, because in those situations, I can't just claim that I got a smaller serving than she did. I comment on this from time to time and she will usually respond with a shrug followed by a laugh and then, "I don't know... It's just how I grew up."
Knowing her family, that makes a lot of sense. In her house, dinner was a complete event. Her family talks about what they want to eat, sitting around the table flipping through old copies of Gourmet and Bon Appetit, recipe cards, and the latest Barefoot Contessa publication. Then they cook together. No single one person is responsible for feeding the whole family. Rather, the cooking process is creative, collective, and joyous. And eating is not an activity that is primarily a function of necessity but a way they could spend time together. Food, then, to her, was a form of intimacy, a way of forming one's relationships with other people. That could not have been farther from the way my family eats meals.
Neither of my parents especially love to cook. But not only is my mom wholly disinterested in cooking, she's also pretty disinterested in eating. By that I mean she will eat just about anything. If it was left up to her, we'd eat beans and rice all day long. My dad is fairly good at cooking but that is more about wanting to eat real food - if he wasn't cooking, my mom would be, and I use the word "cooking" loosely - than any love of the act. Meals in my family are not a social or collective process. Eating is just what you do when you're hungry. I think that way of thinking about food has been largely shaped by the hours my parents keep. Up until I was in middle school, there was always one parent that worked late at night. We couldn't eat together because by the time that the second parent came home, the first parent had already gone to bed. And I would eat two meals - one with each of them. Towards the end of middle school, my parents, because of their jobs, were living in separate cities. My dad would commute for an hour and a half to Portland, where my mom and I lived, from Corvallis where he stayed during the week. When my dad wasn't at home, my mom and I didn't make a big deal about meals. She didn't care one way or the other and I was perfectly happy having sandwiches and microwavable meals. They live in the same house now, but my mom gets up early to go to work and my dad stays late. We're not often in the same physical space when we need or want to eat.
There is, though, one dish that we make together: potstickers. My dad does all the prep work which for potstickers is the trickiest part. He takes the meat out of the freezer several hours in advance and lets it defrost in a bowl of cold water on the kitchen counter. As the meat defrosts, he chops vegetables - onions, cilantro, green onions, and other ingredients I don't know about. He haphazardly pulls bottles of soy sauce, sesame oil, and vegetable oil out of the cabinets. Then, minced garlic, whole peppercorns, and a small handful of dried anchilo chillies are deep fried in a shallow layer of oil. A minute or two later, everything, oil included, is poured into the mixed bowl along with the vegetables and ground meat.
My mom assembles all the pieces together. She breaks up the dough into golf-ball size pieces. They are dusted with flour and rolled out to a disk that's about 2 inches x 2 inches and then filled with the meat and vegetable mixture. Their edges are deftly pinched shut with a little bit of flour and they are set on a large, circular bamboo mat. The whole process lasts about 15 seconds. Those steps are repeated until the mat is completely full.
Once they're done cooking, my dad will eat first. He likes them when they're hot and my mom is busy cooking the other batches. She doesn't mind if they're a little bit cold - again, she'll eat anything. I don't mind either so I eat whenever I pass through the kitchen, or when I get hungry.
For the most part, the kitchen to my family is a transitory point - the place we go when we're on our way to somewhere else.
Yumyum Pa Jeon!During the summer time, my whole family finds relief on the tiled floor of our kitchen. Grandma loves to visit because her apartment becomes a sauna during that time of the year. And we grandkids love it when Grandma visits. She comes bearing all these wholesale packages of ingredients and two portable fryers. It’s time to make haemul pa jeon.
Before anything begins, Mom makes us all sit on cushions taken from the dining chairs. Ever since she had children, her rear end has been in a constant state of frigidity. She blames it on the epidural. So for us, sitting on cold tiles is out of the question. Once we’re all warmly perched on the cushions, the oil starts to flow and Grandma ladles large helpings of her crazy mix into the fryers. To this day, I have never seen her make this mix of green onions, squid, pa jeon mix, bell peppers, onions. There are no measurements; all are added by eyeballing or preference.
The oil gives off a crackle and pop every now and then, slightly burning my arms but Grandma’s wrinkly, leathered hands don’t react. It’s calming to watch her. She’s this short and delightfully pudgy woman, enthroned on a flower-print cushion with frills, surrounded by frying pans and large platters of finished pa jeon. 예프게해야돼, 예프게. 응, 이러케.
It’s my job to make the gahng-jang: soy sauce, vinegar, chili powder, green onions. No measurements. No matter how many times I’ve been told, I still mix up the Korean names of soy sauce and vinegar. The pancakes are still hot but once you dip tham into the gahng-jang, the sauce takes the burn out and adds a full, seasoned flavor. It’s hard to think about what it is that you’re eating; just have to let all the flavors play out in your mouth, a different surprise every time. My brother and I love the browned, crispy edges of the pancakes. My parents don’t mind so it all works out.
family dish assignment...now I'm hungry =(
The Beans of Sunday Supper
Justin Royal
Nutritionally, beans of any variety have been acclaimed praised as great sources of fiber, protein, antioxidants, iron, and a variety of vitamins. Dry beans are cheap and store well, and can be easily prepared with little skill (if need be).
Probably not by chance, I’ve never heard a member of my family glorify my grandmother’s “Sunday supper white beans” for their nutritional content. Like many other Southern chefs, she has succeeded in the art of transforming relatively healthy foods, from chicken to okra to sweet potatoes, into not-so-good-for-you but oh-so-delicious creations such as fried chicken, fried okra, and sweet potato casserole. Her white beans are no exception: while their method of preparation may be the subject of nutritionists’ nightmares, the time-honored tradition of consuming them every Sunday will likely continue until the next (or first?) Great Bean Famine.
Sundays in my family have always been synonymous with eating. Actually, every day in my family is usually synonymous with eating, but especially Sundays. Because of my family’s increasingly hectic schedule, Sunday has always been set aside for visiting with (and of course, eating with) each other. Regardless of the previous night’s activities, the aroma wafting from my grandmother’s kitchen on Sunday mornings has long been a more reliable means of waking me up than any alarm clock. The whole family stumbles into her kitchen in half-awake states (from just waking up), and leaves in a similar fashion (from being in food comas). A typical Sunday breakfast consists of homemade biscuits with sausage and country gravy, homemade cinnamon rolls with icing so creamy and gooey that each person should receive a moist towelette along with their plate, fluffy buttermilk pancakes soaked in melted butter and pure maple syrup, fried eggs, grits with grape jelly (gotta get those 5 fruits a day somehow), and most importantly, country ham. “Country” ham refers to the fact that it is cured in more salt than a normal person consumes in one calendar year, and seems to have triple the fat content of other types of ham I’ve seen at the grocery store.
Eating country ham is especially crucial on Sunday mornings: it is the key ingredient in Grandma’s famed white beans that we eat on Sunday nights. Shockingly, my family actually doesn’t consume all of the country ham that she fixes for Sunday breakfast. The night before serving us breakfast, she begins “soaking” her white beans for later that day. After breakfast, the leftover country ham is cooked just until part of the fat renders. The soaking beans are then transferred to a “crock pot” and cooked along with the ham hock for about 3-4 hours, and the fat that has been drained from the partially-cooked ham. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a “crock pot” is a cooking appliance that uses low amounts of heat to cook things over longer periods of time.
Unfortunately, I’m not able to provide the exact recipe for these beans. While the basic ingredients and methods used can be more or less guessed, the exact timing, special combination of spices, and precise measurements remain a mystery. Although her cooking isn’t the ONLY reason why my family loves going to her house, she’s afraid that sharing the recipe with any average Joe will detract from the magical experience of eating at her house. I’ve scoured the internet for a recipe that sounds somewhat similar to how I imagine hers, and I’ve included what seems to be the best bet.
1 lb dried navy beans
6 cups cold water, for soaking
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 onions, chopped well
1 carrot, chopped well
2 cloves garlic, minced
6 cups cold water, for cooking
1 bay leaf
1 meaty ham bone, from baked ham
salt and pepper
1. Wash and pick over the beans.
2. Place in a large stockpot and cover with the soaking water.
3. Let stand overnight.
4. (you can speed this up by using your crock pot on high and watch the water. It takes around 3 hours) Drain the beans, rinse and drain again.
5. Heat the oil in the pot over medium high.
6. Add the onions, carrot and garlic.
7. Cook, stirring often until the onions are tender, around 3 or 4 minutes.
8. Add the beans, cooking water and the bay leaf.
9. Slowly bring to a full boil.
10. Reduce the heat to a simer, cover and cook for 1 hour.
11. Add the ham bone to the pot.
12. Re-cover and simmer 2 hours longer-watch the water level.
13. Remove the bay leaf and discard.
14. Remove the ham bone and cut away the meat.
15. Chop into bite sized pieces and return to the pot.
16. Add salt and pepper to taste.
17. Serve with corn bread.
While the last step in this recipe may seem extraneous to novices, it is perhaps the most crucial. Nothing acts as a better accompaniment to white beans than beautiful, golden corn bread served fresh out of Grandma’s ancient cast-iron skillet. TRUE corn bread is always made in a cast-iron skillet that’s been well-greased and aged over time. This particular skillet has been in our family for at least 50 years, and while the utensil itself is not a particularly beautiful sight to behold, I’ve never heard a single complaint (from family or friend alike) about the corn bread it produces.
Of course, beans and corn bread aren’t enough to satiate my family’s appetite, and a typical Sunday supper spread would also include chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, macaroni n’ cheese, fried apples, and just about anything else that’s been featured on Paula Deen’s show. However, the white beans have become particularly meaningful, since they require the most preparation and rely on our eating country ham in the morning to yield the final creation at supper. Over the years, I’ve realized that making us fall in love with this dish has helped Grandma ensure that she’ll be able to feed us twice in the same day.We’ve all heard the expression that beans are a ‘magical fruit.’ In my family, my Grandma’s white beans really are magical (just not for the stereotypical reason you’re probably thinking of).
Justin Royal
Nutritionally, beans of any variety have been acclaimed praised as great sources of fiber, protein, antioxidants, iron, and a variety of vitamins. Dry beans are cheap and store well, and can be easily prepared with little skill (if need be).
Probably not by chance, I’ve never heard a member of my family glorify my grandmother’s “Sunday supper white beans” for their nutritional content. Like many other Southern chefs, she has succeeded in the art of transforming relatively healthy foods, from chicken to okra to sweet potatoes, into not-so-good-for-you but oh-so-delicious creations such as fried chicken, fried okra, and sweet potato casserole. Her white beans are no exception: while their method of preparation may be the subject of nutritionists’ nightmares, the time-honored tradition of consuming them every Sunday will likely continue until the next (or first?) Great Bean Famine.
Sundays in my family have always been synonymous with eating. Actually, every day in my family is usually synonymous with eating, but especially Sundays. Because of my family’s increasingly hectic schedule, Sunday has always been set aside for visiting with (and of course, eating with) each other. Regardless of the previous night’s activities, the aroma wafting from my grandmother’s kitchen on Sunday mornings has long been a more reliable means of waking me up than any alarm clock. The whole family stumbles into her kitchen in half-awake states (from just waking up), and leaves in a similar fashion (from being in food comas). A typical Sunday breakfast consists of homemade biscuits with sausage and country gravy, homemade cinnamon rolls with icing so creamy and gooey that each person should receive a moist towelette along with their plate, fluffy buttermilk pancakes soaked in melted butter and pure maple syrup, fried eggs, grits with grape jelly (gotta get those 5 fruits a day somehow), and most importantly, country ham. “Country” ham refers to the fact that it is cured in more salt than a normal person consumes in one calendar year, and seems to have triple the fat content of other types of ham I’ve seen at the grocery store.
Eating country ham is especially crucial on Sunday mornings: it is the key ingredient in Grandma’s famed white beans that we eat on Sunday nights. Shockingly, my family actually doesn’t consume all of the country ham that she fixes for Sunday breakfast. The night before serving us breakfast, she begins “soaking” her white beans for later that day. After breakfast, the leftover country ham is cooked just until part of the fat renders. The soaking beans are then transferred to a “crock pot” and cooked along with the ham hock for about 3-4 hours, and the fat that has been drained from the partially-cooked ham. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a “crock pot” is a cooking appliance that uses low amounts of heat to cook things over longer periods of time.
Unfortunately, I’m not able to provide the exact recipe for these beans. While the basic ingredients and methods used can be more or less guessed, the exact timing, special combination of spices, and precise measurements remain a mystery. Although her cooking isn’t the ONLY reason why my family loves going to her house, she’s afraid that sharing the recipe with any average Joe will detract from the magical experience of eating at her house. I’ve scoured the internet for a recipe that sounds somewhat similar to how I imagine hers, and I’ve included what seems to be the best bet.
1 lb dried navy beans
6 cups cold water, for soaking
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
2 onions, chopped well
1 carrot, chopped well
2 cloves garlic, minced
6 cups cold water, for cooking
1 bay leaf
1 meaty ham bone, from baked ham
salt and pepper
1. Wash and pick over the beans.
2. Place in a large stockpot and cover with the soaking water.
3. Let stand overnight.
4. (you can speed this up by using your crock pot on high and watch the water. It takes around 3 hours) Drain the beans, rinse and drain again.
5. Heat the oil in the pot over medium high.
6. Add the onions, carrot and garlic.
7. Cook, stirring often until the onions are tender, around 3 or 4 minutes.
8. Add the beans, cooking water and the bay leaf.
9. Slowly bring to a full boil.
10. Reduce the heat to a simer, cover and cook for 1 hour.
11. Add the ham bone to the pot.
12. Re-cover and simmer 2 hours longer-watch the water level.
13. Remove the bay leaf and discard.
14. Remove the ham bone and cut away the meat.
15. Chop into bite sized pieces and return to the pot.
16. Add salt and pepper to taste.
17. Serve with corn bread.
While the last step in this recipe may seem extraneous to novices, it is perhaps the most crucial. Nothing acts as a better accompaniment to white beans than beautiful, golden corn bread served fresh out of Grandma’s ancient cast-iron skillet. TRUE corn bread is always made in a cast-iron skillet that’s been well-greased and aged over time. This particular skillet has been in our family for at least 50 years, and while the utensil itself is not a particularly beautiful sight to behold, I’ve never heard a single complaint (from family or friend alike) about the corn bread it produces.
Of course, beans and corn bread aren’t enough to satiate my family’s appetite, and a typical Sunday supper spread would also include chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, macaroni n’ cheese, fried apples, and just about anything else that’s been featured on Paula Deen’s show. However, the white beans have become particularly meaningful, since they require the most preparation and rely on our eating country ham in the morning to yield the final creation at supper. Over the years, I’ve realized that making us fall in love with this dish has helped Grandma ensure that she’ll be able to feed us twice in the same day.We’ve all heard the expression that beans are a ‘magical fruit.’ In my family, my Grandma’s white beans really are magical (just not for the stereotypical reason you’re probably thinking of).
30 January 2008
depth?
That second class session of ours was probably the most fast-paced discussion I've ever had. People seemed really eager to share about their experiences and I thought it was really cool that we could learn from each other in that respect.
Something I want to bring up before the next class session though...I think it might be interesting to focus the direction of our discussion a bit more intentionally. We brought up a lot of great and intriguing ideas, but there were so many of them and a bit all over the place. I feel like if we want to gain a comprehensive understanding of food politics, developing the reading or interesting issues in depth would be an important thing to keep in mind.
Another thing, what do we want to purpose of this blog to be (also in light of this being openly read by other viewers)? Something to talk about next class~
29 January 2008
all in the spirit of the super bowl
snack trays
crockpots and grills in the shape of a football.
football serving plates.
and my personal favorite...
the beer cheese cupcake.
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