How to Eat (71 page)

Serves 1.

I like to eat this, perhaps even more in its seaweedless state, with plain mackerel fillets, blistered under a hot broiler, then sprinkled with coriander. I love the contrast between hot, crisp-skinned oily fish and cold, slippery noodles.

Salmon teriyaki is better known (and by all means substitute a salmon steak or thick chunk of fillet), but I love the preposterously underrated mackerel.

MACKEREL TERIYAKI

I like this with plain boiled rice or just a huge pile of greens, Chinese or otherwise.

2 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons sake

1 tablespoon mirin

1 teaspoon sugar

2 mackerel fillets, about 6 ounces each, skinned and halved

Put all the ingredients except the mackerel in a saucepan and bring to the boil to dissolve the sugar. Set aside.

Let a nonstick pan get very hot, then put the mackerel fillets in and cook for 2 minutes. After 2 minutes, turn the mackerel over and add the teriyaki marinade to the pan. Baste the fish and turn once again before removing it with a slotted spatula. Leave the sauce to bubble up in the pan until it’s dark and syrupy and thick, but keep an eye on it, as you don’t want it to burn stickily dry. Pour this reduced teriyaki marinade over the fish.

Serves 2.

BLACK COD MARINATED IN DEN MISO

At Nobu in New York I had the most fabulous black cod in miso; the flesh was soft and dense, the crust charred black and sweet with grill-caramelized sake. If you can’t find black cod—more properly known as sablefish—substitute any fatty fish, such as salmon. The miso permeates the fish, but not intrusively. The fact that the preparation needs to be done in advance means you need to plan ahead, but the cooking itself is undemanding.

I’ve specified quantities for 2. For 1, halve quantities of the marinade only if you’ve got a dish small enough to fit the one piece of fish snugly, or the amount of marinade won’t cover it.

½ cup white miso

2 tablespoons sugar

2 tablespoons sake

2 tablespoons mirin

2 chunky pieces of black cod (sablefish) fillet, about 5 ounces each

Combine all the ingredients except the fish, put into a heavy-bottomed pan over moderate heat, and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring often. You mustn’t let the sugar burn and stick at the bottom. Set aside and let this den miso cool.

Put the sablefish pieces in a shallow dish with the den miso, making sure they are thoroughly covered. Cover with plastic film and marinate for 2–3 days in the fridge.

When you want to eat, preheat the broiler. When it’s hot, take the fish out of the marinade and broil on each side until brown and slightly caramelized. This is wonderful served, not entirely Japanese-style, with a bowl of broccoli suffused with lemon or just a huge wigwammed mound of snow peas. Serves 2.

CAMBODIAN HOT-AND-SOUR BEEF SALAD

I first ate this at one of Vatchcharin Bhumichitr’s London restaurants, Southeast W9, and found it spectacular. It’s again an example of how the best low-fat food comes from recipes that are not specially adapted to make them so. My version is a slightly anglicized take on the recipe for the beef salad called
plea saj go
as gratefully found in Vatch’s wonderful
South-East Asian Cookbook.
I have reduced the number of chilies, used shallots in preference to onion, and, as Vatch himself suggests, substituted mint for the stipulated chili leaves. But sometimes, when I can’t find mint in the stores and there’s none in the garden, I use arugula or a handful of watercress and baby spinach instead. In short, I don’t set about doing this as if I were expecting a Cambodian delegation for dinner; I just cook it as I like it.

Although this amount serves 2 if you’re eating other things—a dreamy and mild noodle soup to start, a ripe mango for dessert—I often make it just for me. I don’t alter quantities; I just don’t eat anything else, except perhaps for a sweet, salving banana after.

lettuce leaves, for covering a serving dish

8 ounces sirloin steak

2 tablespoons fish sauce

2 tablespoons lime juice

1 teaspoon sugar

1–2 red or green chilies (depending on size and heat desired), seeded and minced

1 shallot, sliced finely

handful mint

Preheat the broiler.

Cover a serving dish with the lettuce leaves and set aside. Broil the steak; it should be rare, really, but obviously, cook it as you prefer. When it’s done, remove to a board on which to carve it and pour any juices in the broiler pan into a bowl. Cut the steak into very thin slices across and put these with any more juices that run out into the bowl as well. In another bowl, mix the fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, chilies, and shallot, stirring well. Then mix the contents of the 2 bowls, adding the mint leaves; quickly turn out on the lettuce and serve while still warm.

Serves 2.

THAI-FLAVORED MUSSELS

I have called these Thai-flavored rather than Thai because they emanate directly from my kitchen, and I am not Thai and have never even been to Thailand. So this dish is authentic, but in the sense that it is authentically how I cook it. It takes about 2 minutes, and as mussels come cleaned now, there isn’t even any bearding or barnacling to do over the kitchen sink. I use kaffir lime leaves, as I keep a stash of them in my freezer, but you can substitute lemon grass. And frankly, it’s still worth doing even if you can get neither.

Use whatever stock you want here: vegetable, chicken, fish, dashi, from the pot, freezer, tub, or packet. Whether you use red or green chili here is immaterial in terms of flavor; the red one, I think, just looks a little better.

½ cup light stock (see headnote)

1 shallot, minced

2 garlic cloves, sliced or minced

3 kaffir lime leaves, chopped or shredded, or one 4-inch-long piece of lemon grass, minced

½-inch piece ginger, minced

20 mussels (about 12 ounces), preferably cultivated, or cleaned and bearded

1 fresh chili pepper, seeded and chopped or sliced finely

1 tablespoon lime juice

1 tablespoon mirin

1 tablespoon fish sauce

½ cup chopped coriander

Bring 2 cups of water to the boil. Put the stock, shallot, garlic, lime leaves, and ginger in a saucepan, cover, and let it bubble away at a moderate to high heat for 3–5 minutes or until you have a thickish, softish mess at the bottom of the pan. Check to make sure it isn’t either burning or just getting too dry for comfort, and add a bit of boiling water if it is. Meanwhile, put the mussels in a sinkful of ice-cold water. Chuck away any that don’t sink and then, as you remove them, make doubly sure by chucking away any that don’t shut when you tap them sharply. I wouldn’t expect you to have to throw many away, so don’t worry unduly.

Add the chili to the mixture in the pan. After about 30 seconds, or just long enough to get them out of the sink, add the mussels and then throw over them ½ cup boiling water, and the lime juice, mirin, and fish sauce mixed together. Cover, give the pan a shake, and leave on a high heat for about 3 minutes, by which time the mussels should have steamed open. Add half the coriander, shake again, and pour into a noodle bowl. Sprinkle over the remaining coriander and eat. It’s probably just as well this is enough for one, as you will have to spit out the shreds of kaffir lime leaves—or lemon grass if you used that—as you come upon them.

Serves 1.

THAI CLAM POT

This recipe comes by way of a book that I have to force myself not to cook my way through
—Asian Noodles
by Nina Symonds—and, I should own up, is barely scaled down, although its specifications are for six people and mine are for two. I like a lot of liquid—I want an aromatic broth with the noodles and clams submerged in it, and enough of it to drink from the bowl or slurp from a spoon once the noodles and clams have been greedily eaten. But then, I like a lot of noodles, too. And this still works wonderfully with half the amount of noodles, if you’re in super-virtuous mode.

Getting the Thai basil may be a problem. If you can’t find any—I go to a Thai shop near me, indeed I practically live in it—beg and plead with your supermarket to stock it; otherwise settle instead for some fresh coriander. I would make a fuss—nicely, of course, because it wasn’t that long ago that coriander would have been available only in specialty markets—and Thai basil really is extraordinarily wonderful, as aromatic as licorice. For that reason, I wouldn’t substitute ordinary Mediterranean basil, wonderful as it is; they may share the same name, but the celestial pungency, the almost medicinal herbalness of the Thai basil, is not at all the same as the summery and gorgeous scentedness of the Mediterranean plant. Coriander, again, is different, but the quality of pungency is there.

The shells hold up the very gratifying wolfing-down, so I remove most of them before ladling the clams into waiting bowls.

1¾ pounds small clams, well washed

salt

8 ounces fresh or 4 ounces dried somen or angel hair pasta

1 scant teaspoon oil

3 garlic cloves, crushed with the flat of a knife and sliced finely

2 scallions (white and green parts), cut into ¼-inch lengths and crushed with the flat of a knife

1 dried red chili pepper

½ cup sake or Chinese rice wine

good handful Thai basil, shredded finely

2 tablespoons fish sauce, or to taste

Fill the sink with cold water, add 1 teaspoon baking soda, and leave the clams to soak for an hour. Drain and chuck out any that haven’t opened.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil; add salt and then the noodles. Cook as instructed on the package or by the shopkeeper (my fresh somen take 1 minute) and then drain, rinse, and set aside.

Put a large, heavy pot (big enough to take everything later) on a high flame, add the oil, and heat until hot, about 30 seconds. Add the garlic and scallions, crumble in the chili, and stir-fry for about 10 seconds or until fragrant. Add 1¼ cups water and the rice wine, cover, and bring to the boil. Add the clams, cover, and bring back to the boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook, shaking the pot from time to time so that the clams steam evenly, for 2–3 minutes or just until the clams open.

Add the basil, stir gently, cover, and cook for 30 seconds, then stir in the fish sauce. Divide the noodles between a pair of capacious bowls, ladle the clams and broth over, and eat immediately. Serves 2.

VEGETABLE MISO BROTH

This is essential to my low-fat eating moments. I cook it more than I cook anything else and every time I do it, I make it differently. Basically, I just boil, in salted water, various vegetables, any that I feel like, putting them in the pan in the order they’ll take to cook (thus turnips first, watercress last) and then draining them into a bowl. Over this bowl I pour over about 2 cups of salty soup made out of some vegetable bouillion cubes and 1 tablespoon miso. Sometimes I add ginger to the broth and stir in some pickled ginger while I’m eating it. But mostly it’s just plain vegetables, chunked and still crunchy, with that almost creaturely, emphatically aromatic, miso-thickened broth.

The quantities I give below are to be viewed as sketchy; ignore or add to them as you wish.

2 medium turnips, peeled and quartered

1 medium carrot, peeled and cut into large chunks

1½ cups broccoli florets

1 medium zucchini, halved lengthways and across

handful of sugar-snap peas, each chopped into 2–3 pieces

handful watercress

1 vegetable bouillon cube

1 heaping tablespoon miso, or more to taste

2 tablespoons chopped parsley or coriander (optional)

Put a large pot of water on to boil, and when boiling, add salt. Then add the turnips. After about 5 minutes, add the carrot. After another 7 or so minutes, add the broccoli. Give this 2–3 minutes, then chuck in the zucchini, and after another minute the sugar-snaps, which only need to blanch to be cooked. Throw in the watercress and then empty the entire contents into a colander in the sink.

Meanwhile, make the broth. Pour 2 cups boiling water into a large measuring cup and stir in the bouillon cube. Add the miso; taste and add more, if you wish. Put the drained vegetables into a noodle bowl, then pour over the miso broth. Add the parsley or coriander, if using. Eat. Serves 1.

LACQUERED QUAIL

Food that is fiddly, or takes time—artichokes, unshelled lobster—is worth considering when you’re trying to eat less. It’s a variation of the old trick of eating off smaller plates, but piled high, so that you’re conned, somehow, into thinking you’re eating more.

In this, the lacquer effect is brought about by brushing the quail with pomegranate molasses (which you can get in Middle Eastern and specialty food stores) mixed with soy sauce, much the same way as the Chinese use maltose to help along that beautiful burnished glow on their roast ducks. You can butterfly the quails yourself, following instructions on
page 134
, or just ask your butcher to do it for you.