Noodling Around

A few days ago when some friends came over for dinner I decided to try making whole wheat noodles with the four kids old enough to help, ages 2 ½ to 7 years old. I made the dough (the weather was finally perfect and they were playing outside with the chickens, otherwise they would have helped make the dough), and called them to wash up and to help stretch each individual noodle by hand. They had contests to see who could stretch the longest noodles, hanging them on the backs of tea towel covered chairs for comparison. The longest appeared to be slightly over 2 feet long. The two year old had the technique, but not the patience for the task, so he made pretty lumpy noodles, but when he wasn’t looking we thinned them out a bit, so that they would cook evenly. The noodles were cooked and served in 4 cups of chicken broth with a teaspoon of Vietnamese fish sauce, chopped scallions and grated carrots. The kids, beaming, would hold up a noodle from the plate and say,” I made this one! I can tell because…” There were no leftovers.
Last night I made dumplings of my own sort. I started with the recipe for Kazakh noodles in Beyond the Great Wall, I tweaked the dry ingredients.
My goal was to increase the fiber content and to vary the wrappers nutritionally, and just to experiment with the besan flour for the heck of it. I have twice made the regular noodles with the whole wheat flour substitution and they came out well, so I decided to go the next step and try to make dumplings with it.
1 ½ cups of whole wheat flour
1/4 c besan flour (chickpea)
1 ¾ cups of white flour
1 t salt
2 eggs
¾ c water
Mix dry ingredients. Add eggs and water stir until it makes a dough. On a well floured surface. Divide into four balls; flatten each to a long narrow rectangle that is about ½ inch thick. Cover with plastic wrap, and then a towel. Let it rest for 30 minutes.
For me there was no rest, I made the filling.
For filling
10 oz ground turkey
2 slices of apple smoked deli ham, minced
¾ of a cup of leftover cooked carrots, mashed
1 leftover boiled egg, mashed
2T garlic chives from the garden, minced
1 clove of garlic, minced
Salt
Pepper

I cut the rectangles into eighths. My daughter rolled out the wrappers, while I made the sauce. I made a basic white sauce, but substituted 1c of chicken broth for 1 cup of milk, for seasoning my daughter added our favorite garlic/herb seasoning, 2 good shakes.
Then she stirred the sauce while I filled and sealed the wrappers. We boiled them until they floated in a saucepan filled with water and sauced them and added Romano cheese to our taste at the table.
When it was all placed on the table my daughter was resistant to put the sauce on the dumplings, but with encouragement and referral to a movie she once saw, where a rat combined flavors to create new and more complex flavors, she gave it a try. She hesitantly broke off a small piece and dunked it in a small puddle of sauce. Her eyes flew wide open and she dunked it a second time, and made what we call nummy noises. Success!!

Regional Impulses

I went into a Korean market today. I needed both a kimchi fix and a little lunch to tide me over so that I could complete my errands. I filled my basket with cucumber kimchi, rambutans, lychees, spinach and some mung bean sprouts and headed for the register. While waiting my turn I checked out today’s selection of foods that were freshly prepared in their kitchen. Today included chap chae, a dish with transparent sweet potato noodles, spinach and bits of beef, a Korean comfort food; spicy fish cake, which doesn’t taste fishy, and has a neat texture and flavor that my daughter can’t resist (me either), sushi-like rolls with seaweed, rice, eggs, vegetables and “krab”, spicy tofu with scallions, which is very spicy and filling, and a rice cake lightly sprinkled with black beans and shreds of pumpkin. I chose the chap chae and fish cake for my lunch.
After it was all rung up and paid for, I weakened and asked the cashier to ring up the rice cake also. It was my adventure for the day. It wasn’t the type of rice cake that you find in a plastic bag in the cereal aisle. It was a moist, dense, cake-like snack with just a hint of sweetness. It had a very pretty look to it, so I had to give it a try. It was a nice finish for the salty and spicy lunch, very simple. There are enough leftovers of noodles and fish cakes from my lunch to get my daughter fueled up for soccer this evening, so I don’t have to cook if I don’t want to tonight.
I love to check out the food kept by the register in other small markets and convenience stores. Growing up in Southern New England, with its huge Italian population, I thought that all convenience stores had pizza strips next to the register. Pizza strips are rectangles of pizza dough that are about 12 inches long and 3 inches wide, which have a slightly sweet tomato sauce with little puddles of grease, but no cheese, they are utter simplicity and very delectable. They are typically found with a layer of grease soaked waxed paper between the strips.
When I lived in central California the registers all had corn nuts and churros by the register. I haven’t seen corn nuts in many years, so I just did a web search and they still seem to exist, but clearly not in the stores I frequent. Lime & Chile flavor was my favorite. In Pennsylvania I remember baked goods being in that same spot.
Around here in Florida it seems that pickled eggs in bright red brine and boiled peanuts fit the bill for the regional impulse buy treats. I haven’t gotten my courage up yet for the pickled eggs the brine just looks unnatural, but the boiled peanuts’ were less of a leap, their texture and the salt are good for nibbling on the go, if you aren’t the driver.
I just got a book on inter-library loan about dumplings, I may have to read it, test it and write about it in the next couple of weeks.

Leftovers for Breakfast

The high point of my morning is opening the fridge and spotting something delectable leftover from dinner the night before. I do not think that foods have different times of the day in which they are supposed to be served.

The Chinese serve noodles with pickled vegetables and shreds of meat for breakfast and I’m with them on that. The last thing I need as I struggle out of bed in the dark, to keep my daughter on the school schedule that some die-hard morning person created, is a greasy or sweet breakfast. The noodles sound just right to me, warm, moist, salty, sour/tangy, (another one of my favorites) and with a touch of meat, but not too much to be heavy.

So, if I open the fridge and there are noodles or rice or even potatoes packed up from the night before, bits of meat leftover and numerous odds and ends of veggies and my collection of easy flavoring ingredients from Korean chile paste, Vietnamese fish sauce, spice pastes, bean sauces, Siracha, salsa, chutney, jerk, and pickles…I’m equipped with all the ingredients for a yummy breakfast with endless variations. The mornings when I realize that we consumed all of the food the evening before, I have to forage in the cupboards for something to sustain me through the morning. Those are the mornings when my (goat) milky coffee will often keep me going until I can get everyone off to their destinations and I can put together something.
My secondary obsession is history; I know the breakfast foods of today are modern creations. I have seen menus for farm breakfasts, industrial worker breakfasts, etc. and they contain everything from porridge, to fish and Johnny cakes to apple pie (Pie for breakfast! More on that around Thanksgiving.) Not one mentions cold cereal (a historically recent innovation), waffles, English muffins with eggs and bacon, French toast, pop tarts or even orange juice. The food processing/food marketing industry has convinced folks that breakfast requires food that was created or processed in a factory much to their benefit and our expense.
We had a quiche with leftover chicken that I had frozen, broccoli and roasted red peppers with goat’s milk mozzarella from the farmer’s market for dinner tonight, the eggs really didn’t seem to care that it was dinner time.