Leftover Poke Breakfast

Note:  for those who do not know, poke, pronounced poh-kay, is cubed seafood, usually raw yellowfin tuna (ahi), salmon, or cooked octopus (tako) that is mixed with seasonings, sauces, and/or toppings like chopped onion or seaweed.  Poke in Hawaiian simply means "to slice or cut".

Recently Caroline's cousins Vi and Val were visiting the Big Island with their families, so we popped over for a couple of days.  After Val and her husband Rob picked us up from the airport, Rob offered to make us some quick breakfast with some leftover poke.  He had picked up this easy recipe when buying some poke (which he does every day when he visits the islands) and asked what to do with any leftovers.  He was told to cook in a frying pan for breakfast his leftover poke, leftover rice, and some eggs.  The combination was brilliant.

Shortly afterwards, we were in need of a quick dinner because I had an early hockey game, and so Caroline picked up some poke.  She intentionally got more than we needed, so the next morning we made the dish.  It took all of 5 minutes to cook in the pan, and all I did was toss in the poke and rice, then crack the eggs over the mixture.  While it was cooking, I was mixing the eggs in to make them scrambled.  Even though this is so simple, it is tasty as you mix the eggs and rice with the fish, and the spices and flavorings of the poke mean that you don't need to add anything more.

Close-up of final product.  The ahi did not get over cooked, helping the fantastic taste.

New Year dumplings: A pictorial

I just discovered a neat new cookbook that focuses on dumplings (mostly Chinese and Japanese, but there are a few other flavor profiles in there as well).  We figured we might as well try some of the recipes now while we have easy access to practically any Chinese or Japanese cooking ingredient; plus, each recipe makes more than one meal's worth of dumplings, so we thought it'd be an economical choice as well.  Chinese New Year provided the perfect opportunity to test the book's pork and shrimp dumplings.

We made our dumplings the day before New Year, and got 39 versus the recipe's yield of 45.  Perhaps we put too much filling in each one?  So far we haven't had any problems with broken wrappers or anything.  These are ready to be frozen, then put into a plastic bag to be cooked as needed.  Easy!

These cook pretty quickly with an almost set-it-and-forget-it method.  We are still working out just how long to cook our dumplings though, since we tend to cook fewer at a time than the cookbook author does.  He's usually hosting dumpling parties.  We are lame and thus do not tend to host dumpling parties.

I made a dipping sauce out of hoisin sauce and soy sauce (about a 2:1 ratio), along with a dash of rice wine vinegar.  Kind of a Chinese barbecue sauce of sorts.

The fillings weren't dense, dry, or falling apart.  I might add some cilantro leaves next time for flavor and color contrast, but that's another recipe!

Hey there, dumpling!: 100 recipes for dumplings, buns, noodles, and other Asian treats (2015), p. 41
Writeup background music: Dido, No angel (1999)

Chocolate chip cookies featuring a secret ingredient

The secret ingredient?  Avocado!

No, I am not going vegan.  What happened was that about a week ago, we were given a bag of avocados from our landlady--from the tree in her yard.  There had to have been seven or eight avocados in the bag, and while we gleefully put avocado chunks on our salads each night, we had to do something fast when a few of them ripened at the same time.  And while avocados have a bunch of health benefits, it's probably not so healthy to eat multiple of them in a single day.  So thanks to the little something called the Information Superhighway, we found a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that both used avocado and was not vegan.

As you probably already know by now, I took some liberties with the recipe.

• Cut down on the sugar: instead of ½ c. white sugar and 1 c. brown, I used ¼ c. white and probably about ¾ c. brown.  Seemed to taste just fine.
• Just the all-purpose flour, please: the recipe called for a combination of all-purpose and white whole wheat flour.  There was even a special note for those who might want to omit all of that evil all-purpose flour and just go with white whole wheat; however, there was no corresponding note for those who might want to go all-out unhealthy and omit the white whole wheat flour.  I used 2¼ c. all-purpose flour.  The cookies were just fine.  Rebellious baking!
• Whole eggs: the recipe called for 2 egg yolks, omitting the whites.  No explanation is ever given in the recipe for this decision.  Is it to do with the texture?  Do egg whites not play well with avocados?  Will the combination of egg whites and avocados somehow cause a rift to open in spacetime?  I used 2 whole eggs with seemingly no adverse effects on either the final product or the local universe.  Rebellious baking!
• Baking time: the recipe called for 14-16 minutes; I took the cookies out at 13 minutes, but that's just my preference for how "golden brown" the cookies were at that point.
• Recipe methodology and writing style: these left a bit to be desired.
• First of all, prep time is listed as "n/a".  I suppose for some, gathering ingredients or mixing cookie dough might take the proverbial "no time at all", but for most of us non-professional bakers* those steps are gonna take some time.
• Both the "total time" and the "cook time" listed are 25 minutes.  Does not compute.
• Also, the recipe apparently makes 48 cookies (I got about 35 out of it), with a 14-to-16-minute baking time, and a cook time (for 2 sheets) of 25 minutes.  I'm skeptical that the home baker has access to a large enough oven to accommodate a sheet pan that can hold 24 cookies spaced 2" apart.
• The ingredients are not listed in the order that they are used in the recipe.  This is a pet peeve of mine with regards to recipes.
• The fact that there's that note suggesting that the home baker could omit the all purpose flour, without a corresponding note regarding white whole wheat flour: it's mildly amusing at this point more than anything.  Eyeroll, more than resigned sigh.
• There is a note regarding the amount of avocado used vs. the amount of avocado in, well, one avocado: "Baking is an exact science. [...] Be sure to measure."  The only thing that I can say right now is that this very recipe has inspired me to create a new label for this blog called "inexact kine baking" and apply it to this and past posts where I modify baking recipes without poor results.

It looks like normal cookie dough.  With perhaps a few flecks of green since I probably didn't mix the butter and avocado together for quite long enough.

Verdict: The cookies turned out pretty good (I heard they were popular when Dom took them to work today) and the recipe is probably fine, though if we ever find ourselves with a bumper crop of avocados again I'd want to try something different.  The avocado lent a bit of additional flavor to the cookies, but nothing overpowering: it's not like you're tasting guacamole in a chocolate chip cookie**, more like a faintly nutty richness.  All told, I'd rather have my salad with mounds of avocado cubes on top followed by a dessert of all-butter chocolate chip cookies. 

Finished cookies.  I say, parchment paper has been fantastic in my baking experience: no more using the butter-an-aluminium-foil-lined-cookie-sheet trick, which I always seemed to have problems with.

*Especially those of us who, like me, are recently, again non-professional bakers.

**ew.  Even I have my limits.

Writeup background noise: the soundtrack for The Lego Movie (2014).  Everything Is Awesome!!!...right?

Kitchen experiment: vanilla

At the same time that we purchased our jar of Ceylon cinnamon, we also picked up a bottle of Mexican vanilla extract.  I'd tried a Mexican vanilla ice cream at a shop in San Antonio which delivered a slightly different taste from most vanilla ice creams, so I figured, why not try the Mexican vanilla extract if offered the opportunity?

I used the same method as when we tried the two different types of cinnamon: two batches of 1/3 of a recipe of rice pudding, though this time I was able to do my as-close-as-two-people-can-get-to-a-double-blind-experiment design.  I made the puddings, assigned a number to each extract (1 for Madagascar vanilla, and 2 for Mexican vanilla), then labeled the bowls by number.  After dinner, Dom set the de facto order in which we each tried the puddings.

If I'd read the recipe more carefully, I would have seen that I could have made a single pot of rice pudding, then split the cooked pudding in half before adding the extracts.  Well, what's one more pot to wash, I suppose?

Turns out I tasted Pudding 1 first, and Dom tasted Pudding 2.  After testing each one, we determined that though we liked the pudding we had each tried first, there was not much of a difference in the taste; the taste difference was markedly less than the difference for the two cinnamon varieties that we own.  The following day, we switched it up: Dom tasted Pudding 1 first, and I tasted Pudding 2, though this time we probably introduced bias in that we knew which ones we were tasting first.  Interestingly, we again liked whichever pudding we had tried first.  Our results were more or less inconclusive since the difference between the two vanillas was too subtle for us, but we both agreed that we liked actual the rice pudding better without having cooked the cinnamon in it!  Just a sprinkling of cinnamon on top is all that we might need.

We wondered if by the time a flavoring reaches the extract stage and is then used to flavor something else, most of the nuances of the original flavor are lost, such that Mexican vanilla extract in cooked or baked goods tastes more or less the same as Madagascar or Tahitian vanilla extract in the same situation.  I would think it would be a different matter if, for example, one used the actual vanilla bean to flavor an ice cream or rice pudding.  Perhaps that should be a future experiment!




Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820: once again, we used the "stovetop rice pudding", not the "baked rice pudding".