This dish is on regular rotation in my house, especially on nights when we don’t think we have much on hand to prepare and eat. It relies heavily on pantry staples, with the chard being the only fresh ingredient needed. Feel free to substitute the chard with cooked nettles, beet greens, mustard greens, turnip or kohlrabi greens, or a mixture of any and all.
Kimchi is deeply ingrained in Korean cooking and usually appears in a few different guises. I love the deep red colour that this pancake takes on from the kimchi and its liquid.
The combination of textures from the crispy outside and soft, gooey inside adds dimension and interest to any meal. You can make a few smaller, individual pancakes or two or three larger ones as you wish, depending on how much batter you add to the pan at a time.
Char siu, the strips of barbecued roast pork with their signature crimson exterior, is a treasured Cantonese meat, and the most popular siu mei dish. Siu mei is a term that refers to the roasted meats popular in Hong Kong, but also commonly found in Chinatown windows around the world. Most city-dwelling Cantonese kids grew up eating siu mei—during my carnivorous youth, as my mother arrived home from the store, I would sidle up with my best good-daughter-face and charm a few slices of warm, juicy char siu and crispy pork crackling before dinnertime. In this recipe, eggplant is marinated, char siu style, in a fragrant, fruity barbecue sauce. Eggplant, a renowned carrier of flavor, greedily absorbs the sauce before it is roasted at high heat, emerging sweet and silky, imbued with lots of dark, caramelized notes. A note for gluten intolerant cooks: make sure your hoisin sauce is gluten-free or use the homemade version on page 151. This marinade is incredibly versatile and can be used to marinate and roast firm tofu and other vegetables in the exact same way. This is best eaten with rice, of course, but it’s also good stuffed into a crusty roll with cilantro, mint and salad greens, or used to make eggplant char siu bao (there’s a bao recipe in To Asia, With Love).
This is truly one of my favorite vinegars. You immediately think of the sea when you taste it, and it’s so easy to make. This recipe uses wakame and kombu, which can be wildcrafted from the coastlines of California or pur- chased at Asian food stores. If you’re a seaweed forager, feel free to experiment with your local seaweed.
Bondage. Leather. Eggplant. Those were the notes I made for myself about this recipe. Not exactly cryptic. When you grill eggplant, it looks like it’s wrapped in a leathery, tight casing. There’s something kinky about it. Or is it just me? You’ll notice that I am going to ask you to get up close and personal with your eggplant by making slits into its flesh. That’s not only for a cool patterned effect. Eggplant is like a sponge and you want the flesh exposed so that the hot, sticky, vinegary glaze can sneak into all the spots and make the eggplant glisten under the spotlights.
When I lived in Peterborough, N.H., in the early 1990s, I had two obsessions: One was the lettuce mix from organic farming pioneer Rosaly Bass, who charmed me so much I signed up for a subscription that let me and a handful of others pick what we wanted off her land all season long. (I tended to swing by at midnight after a long day as editor of the weekly Monadnock Ledger and shovel up carrots by moonlight.) The other was this addictively pungent salad dressing, made by chef Hiroshi Hayashi at his elegant, health-minded Japanese restaurant, Latacarta. While Rosaly's farm is still going strong (it’s the state’s oldest certified organic farm), Hayashi long ago closed the restaurant and started the Monadnock School of Natural Cooking and Philosophy, where he continued making this vegan dressing for many years. He died in 2012. I use the concoction to dress simple salads of butter lettuce with cherry tomatoes and carrots, taking care to slice them into perfect julienne the way I remember Hayashi did, and I have since learned that you can substitute in any herb you like, any vinegar, any oil, and have played around with many a combination. This also makes an excellent dip for crudites.
For this recipe, we prefer the steady, even heat of a cast-iron skillet. A heavy stainless-steel skillet may be used, but you may have to increase the heat slightly.
I knew I loved Scotch eggs long before I even tasted one, when they were nothing but a character starring in my British snack dreams. There is objectively nothing not to love about a Scotch egg. It’s eggie, meaty, and fried. Done. Get me seven.
[Ed. note: You can find the kimchi recipe Robin references below here.]
These keep in their marinade for about two weeks in the refrigerator, but are best within a couple of hours of pickling.