the art of gournet cooking
I know what you’re thinking.
["She misspelled the title of this post. Should I tell her?"]
I meant to put ‘gournet’ in the title–and not because this post concerns the fish of the family Triglidae (though there are fish. Shiny ones.)
A few weeks ago, my friend Dan and I galloped off to Chinatown to see his noodle dealer. I can’t show you the noodle dealer, of course, but perhaps you can ferret out the location with the background clues.
We bought five packets of beautiful, fresh noodles.
Then, a new vegetable enthusiast friend (who sets up shop on the street) gleefully packed mounds of long Chinese greens and baby bok choy for us in lucky red bags, throwing in extra handfuls for good measure–so many that the bags weighed us down as we made our way toward the fish.
I like shiny things. So unsurprisingly, the fish that caught my eye were pink and shimmery.
Scaled and gutted, the pink fish still sparkled in my kitchen a few hours later;
while Dan stirred his wonderful black bean sauce into the noodles, and we sautéed the greens, I whipped egg whites and salt to create a crust that baked around the fish.
By then, our guests had started to arrive: Dan’s sister, who lives in the neighborhood, and then my friends LJ, Sarah, Tricia, David (who lives in Mexico City), Mario, Revaz, and Dean.
Dan, who is a gluten-free chef, made sizzling parsnip cakes with Chinese sausage as everyone shed coats and boots, and we began to celebrate The Year of the Rabbit together.
Looking at our birth years on the Chinese calendar, we read the Engrish predictions for our year ahead as I portioned out pieces of the whole fish.
In years past, my favorite part of Chinese New Year parties has been making fortune cookies with my friend Mica, but this year I decided to finally make tea eggs.
Boiled hard, the eggshells are cracked and the eggs simmered with 5-spice powder and tea bags, then cure for up to a few days, chilled.
Just after the eggs were Dan’s lovely individual chocolate cakes (recipe), Tricia’s pistachio macarons from Michael Allen, and raucous revelry, but before that, the kitchen went silent for a few minutes, as we unpeeled the marbled eggs and considered the possibilities in the months ahead…
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Posted by Kristen Taylor on Thursday, February 24th, 2011, 7:39 am * Filed in brooklyn, Design, Entertaining, Food. * . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 24th, 2011 at 9:17 am
Ah! Missed these posts! And now I’m on the lookout for fish scale inspired sequins. Hey! What’s the status on the mag?
February 24th, 2011 at 9:37 am
It makes me indescribably happy that you made the jump (as I did) from shiny fish to sequins, Emily.
The Culinaesthete launch happens next week if all goes well. Cross your fingers!
March 2nd, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Ah, I do miss our fortune-cookie making tradition, but the tea eggs look particularly…wise.
Did you hit the salt-crust fish with a hammer? I feel like that is an important component of this recipe.
This year, I celebrated with one of my former students who invited me over for a Korean take on Chinese/Lunar New Year. In all cultures, it is delicious.