[Sca-cooks] Exotic but Tasty?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Bill Fisher:

>Yeah, they have a lot of interesting places to eat in NYC - I didn't
>get to look around
>much when I lived there briefly 17 years ago, and I haven't been back
>into the city
>since a few months after 9/11.

There are scads of great restaurants, and new ones every day. I just 
wish I could afford to go to more of them.

>I may have to make something similar for supper now.  I don't eat a 
>lot of rice
>these days, and I need to find something constructive to do besides digging up
>rat recipes off the internet this morning. 
>
>I actually got to go to sleep when it was dark out, and I need 
>considerably less
>sleep when I can manage to pull this off (I work grave shift these 
>days) so I am
>thinking on making a pantry re-stocking run to Harry's and to the
>Dekalb Farmer's
>market, not necessarily in that order.  I know I can get good fish and
>rice at Harry's

Standard Stuff-Steamed-Over-Rice dishes at our house can be as simple 
as lop cheung (Chinese sausages, usually pork, but there are various 
liver versions as well) steamed whole or in slices on top of the rice 
in the pot (you boil the rice until the water is gone and the rice 
just starts to make that Rice Krispies sound -- snap, crackle, pop, 
don't leave it too long or it'll burn -- lower the heat to absolute 
minimum, stir the rice to sort of pre-fluff it, add your topping of 
choice, cover, and let sit for 20 minutes to 1/2 hour). Other 
possibilities include salted chicken or duck legs, salted pork chops, 
salt fish, sliced seasoned pork or sliced raw Smithfield Ham, or 
salted duck eggs (which are not the same thing as those ash-preserved 
"1000-year-old" eggs). You can also get, very inexpensively, fish 
that have been fried to an almost jerky-like consistency, canned with 
a little soy oil, sometimes with soy sauce, with or without fermented 
black beans. These you'd put in a little dish like a deep saucer and 
place right on top of the cooking rice. Decadent types like myself 
put lop cheung on top of the rice, then the saucer of canned fish and 
black beans on top of that ;-).

What the restaurant in question seems to have done is steam what 
amounted to a patty of seasoned, raw minced pork and chopped salt 
fish (with salted duck slices -- evidently just a single thigh, 
sliced right through the bone) right on top of the rice. My 
mother-in-law, and my lady wife, would normally steam this 
separately, because when you're serving a family these items tend to 
be large, and you get into the whole economy of scale question.

Another standard at our house which is another variant of these 
"potted rice" dishes is ngow ngok fan (in Cantonese it'd be something 
like gnow yoke fan), which just translates as something like "beef 
meat rice". I'm sure there are a million variants, but at our house 
this tends to be about a half a pound of flank steak, shredded along 
the grain, six or eight black mushrooms, soaked, shredded and diced 
small, and a similar amount to the mushrooms of chopped, salted 
radish, turnip, or mustard knobs). The beef gets seasoned as it 
usually does for stir-frying, with about a half-teaspoon of 
cornstarch, a sprinkle of white pepper, a slice or two of minced 
ginger, a clove of minced garlic, (when I'm stir-frying I leave these 
out and add them to the oil before sauteeing the meat), a dash of 
dark soy sauce, and just a touch of peanut oil to give it a shine. 
When my wife is not home I add a pinch of sugar. Literally a pinch.

This, along with the mushrooms and the radish/turnip/mustard knobs, 
gets stirred and thoroughly mixed into the rice pot at the end of the 
boiling stage and the beginning of the steaming stage.

Adamantius

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