Great Summer Fruit Pie!

1 cup plain yogurt or sour cream
2/3 cup sugar
1 egg
2 tbs flour
1 tbs lemon juice or 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
(combine and mix)

2 1/2 cup (fruit/berries)
(mix in)

Pie Crust:
1 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup salad oil
5 tsp cold water
(add mix into pie crust)

Bake in preheated 400 for 25 minutes* or 55 minutes total

* optional topping (I've made it without this and still like it)
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup flour
2 tbs butter
(take pie out of oven after 25 minutes and sprinkle topping on)


recipe from Simply in Season pg. 158

A Perfect Saturday Afternoon

While some call it alcoholism, I call it a damn good time. 

I raise my glass to the Saturday afternoon (ok, post  11 am) Margarita. Need I say more?

1 part Tequila

1 part Triple Sec
1 part lime juice (freshly squeezed please)
Spoonful of simple syrup

Mix and sip.

The Dirty Dozen

A friend from South Africa recently visited me in Seattle, and I spent a lovely week showing her around a bunch of amazing places in and outside of the city. It was great. We went to Pike Place Market one day, and I was surprised that, on a Wednesday afternoon, it was so busy. Food galore. Which got me thinking:

How can I afford to buy local/organic?

I know I'm not poor by any stretch of the imagination, but as a kid raised by bargain-hunter parents (who still won't buy berries in season or meat unless it's "on sale"), 6.99/lb for cherries makes me cringe. Or, then there was the really cute produce guy who offerred me a slice of the most amazing white nectarine I've ever tasted, but I was astonished to see that it would probably cost me ~$2 for one piece of fruit! Blasphemy!

This made me recall an article I read a while ago about the most essential food to buy organic if budget/availability does not allow a fully organic diet. There are a million of these lists, but check out this one from The Daily Green called the Dirty Dozen. In the article, there is also a link to a list of "safe" foods that we don't have to worry about buying organic. Essentially, these categories make sense (thicker, less permeable skin = less serious pesticide build-up threat), but I remember being especially interested in buying strawberries and carrots organically when I first read this.

Anyhow, take a look. I totally have a final I'm supposed to be writing and grading I should be doing, but this is way more fun. I'm hoping to try some actual recipes sometime soon which I will post, pending success!

Peace to you all,

Katie (K)

Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to...

I'm sitting here, surfing the web, enjoying my break, and noshing on the most delicious strawberries.

It amazes me how red and sweet real strawberries can be. So, I felt it imperative to remind everyone that it is strawberry season. Don't miss out!! I encourage you to head to your local farmers market, which should be packed with delectable strawberries (until late morning when they have surely sold out) and pick some up.

Once you've had berries from the FM, you'll wonder what those red seeded things they sell at the grocery store are, because they certainly can't be strawberries. You, after all, have had strawberries. And they're not white in the middle.

*And, in case you couldn't place the title, the next line is "strawberry fields" from Strawberry Fields Forever by the Beatles (my favorite).

Sriracha: Reason #421 Why Asians are the Best

I haven't cooked a proper meal for weeks. Life, visitors, travels have all come between me and my food. But because I can't stop thinking about good food (and because I don't want this blog to die at post 2), here is a little piece of awesome.

Sriracha, the little hot sauce of cycle 23's kitchen that made everything taste better, made it in the New York Times. (Do you think that makes us more hip because, you know, we knew about before it was popular? We're so ahead of the curve.)

From the New York Times:

May 20, 2009

A Chili Sauce to Crow About

By JOHN T. EDGE

ROSEMEAD, Calif.

AFTER-HOURS calls to Huy Fong Foods, here in the suburbs of the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, are intercepted by an answering machine. One recent day, 14 messages were blinking when Donna Lam, the operations manager, hit “play.”

A woman told of smearing Huy Fong’s flagship product, Tuong Ot Sriracha (Sriracha Chili Sauce), on multigrain snack chips. A man proclaimed the purée of fresh red jalapeños, garlic powder, sugar, salt and vinegar to be “the bomb,” and thanked Ms. Lam’s employers for “much joy and pleasure.”

Another caller, hampered by a slight slur, botched the pronunciation of the product name before asking whether discount pricing might be available. Finally, he blurted, “I love rooster sauce!” (A strutting rooster, gleaming white against a backdrop of the bright red sauce, dominates Huy Fong’s trademark green-capped clear plastic squeeze bottles.)

“I guess it goes with alcohol,” deadpanned Ms. Lam, who, like David Tran, the 64-year-old founder of Huy Fong and creator of its sauce, is both proud of the product’s popularity and flummoxed by fans’ devotion.

The lure of Asian authenticity is part of the appeal. Some American consumers believe sriracha (properly pronounced SIR-rotch-ah) to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha, as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods, may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples.

It’s become a sleeve trick for chefs like Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

At the restaurant Perry St., in New York City, Mr. Vongerichten’s rice-cracker-crusted tuna with citrus sauce has always relied on the sweet, garlicky heat of sriracha. More recently, he has honed additional uses. “The other night, I used some of the green-cap stuff with asparagus,” Mr. Vongerichten said. “It’s well balanced, perfect in a hollandaise.”

In Houston, at the restaurant Reef, Bryan Caswell, a veteran of Mr. Vongerichten’s kitchens, stirs sriracha into the egg wash he uses to batter fried foods, from crab cakes to oysters to onion rings. “It’s not heavily fermented, it’s not acidic,” said Mr. Caswell, who has won a devoted following for the sriracha rémoulade he often serves with such fried dishes. “It burns your body, not your tongue.”

Sriracha has proved relevant beyond the epicurean realm. Wal-Mart sells the stuff. So do mom-and-pop stores, from Bristol, Tenn., to Bisbee, Ariz.

Sriracha is a key ingredient in street food: The two Kogi trucks that travel the streets of Los Angeles, vending kimchi-garnished tacos to the young, hip and hungry, provide customers with just one condiment, Huy Fong sriracha.

Recently, Huy Fong’s sriracha found its place in the suburbs. Applebee’s has begun serving fried shrimp with a mix of mayonnaise and Huy Fong sriracha. They followed P. F. Chang’s, another national chain, which began using it in 2000, and now features battered and fried green beans with a sriracha-spiked dipping sauce, as well as a refined riff on what both Applebee’s and P. F. Chang’s call dynamite shrimp.

For Mr. Tran, of Chinese heritage but born in Vietnam, neither sriracha-spiked hollandaise nor sriracha-topped tacos with kimchi translate easily.

“I made this sauce for the Asian community,” Mr. Tran said one recent afternoon, seated at headquarters, near a rooster-shaped crystal sculpture.

“I knew, after the Vietnamese resettled here, that they would want their hot sauce for their pho,” a beef broth and noodle soup that is a de facto national dish of Vietnam. “But I wanted something that I could sell to more than just the Vietnamese,” he continued.

“After I came to America, after I came to Los Angeles, I remember seeing Heinz 57 ketchup and thinking: ‘The 1984 Olympics are coming. How about I come up with a Tran 84, something I can sell to everyone?’ ”

What Mr. Tran developed in Los Angeles in the early 1980s was his own take on a traditional Asian chili sauce. In Sriracha, a town in Chonburi Province, Thailand, where homemade chili pastes are favored, natives do not recognize Mr. Tran’s purée as their own.

Multicultural appeal was engineered into the product: the ingredient list on the back of the bottle is written in Vietnamese, Chinese, English, French and Spanish. And serving suggestions include pizzas, hot dogs, hamburgers and, for French speakers, pâtés.

“I know it’s not a Thai sriracha,” Mr. Tran said. “It’s my sriracha.”

Like many immigrants of his generation, David Tran’s journey from Vietnam to America was epic. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mr. Tran’s travel, and the travel of his family members, was fueled by chili sauces.

From 1975 onward, Mr. Tran made sauces from peppers grown by his older brother on a farm just beyond Long Binh, a village north of what was then Saigon. The most popular was an oil-based sauce, perfumed by galangal, a pungent relative of ginger. (Mr. Tran intended it as a dip for beef plucked from bowls of pho, it was more popular as a sauce for roasted dog.)

Though he never devised a formal name for his products, Mr. Tran decorated each cap with a rooster, his astrological sign. Production was family focused. Mr. Tran ground the peppers. His father-in-law washed the sauce containers, reusing Gerber baby food jars obtained from American servicemen. His brother-in-law filled the jars with sauce. Itinerant jobbers bought the sauces from Mr. Tran, and sold them to shops and other informal restaurants.

By 1979, many of the Tran family’s friends were leaving Vietnam. “I had enough money saved to buy our way out,” he said.

To limit potential losses, Mr. Tran split the family into four groups: One group went to Indonesia, another to Hong Kong. A third went to Malaysia, and a fourth to the Philippines.

David Tran traveled on a freighter, the Huy Fong. Everyone ended up in United Nations refugee camps, before the family finally began to regroup.

“I was in Boston,” Mr. Tran recalled. “My brother-in-law was in Los Angeles. When we talked on the phone, I asked him, ‘Do they have red peppers in Los Angeles?’ He said yes. And we left.”

“I landed the first week of January in 1980,” he added. “By February, I was making sauce.”

Mr. Tran did not anticipate the popularity of his take on sriracha. He believed the sauce to be good. He took pride in the augers and other apparatuses he designed for the plant. He liked to tell people that all he did was grind peppers, add garlic and bottle it.

He figured that immigrants of Vietnamese ancestry would stock his sriracha at pho shops. He hoped that the occasional American consumer might squirt it on hot dogs and hamburgers.

He could never have expected what he found, one recent afternoon, as he trolled the Internet in search of what fans of his sauce have wrought.

Mr. Tran scanned pictures of 20-something women in homemade Halloween costumes designed to resemble the Huy Fong bottle. He navigated to one of two sriracha Facebook pages, the larger of which has more than 120,000 fans.

He retrieved a favorite picture, of Travis Mason, a 36-year-old coffee salesman from Portland, Ore., who commissioned a tattoo of the Huy Fong logo on his left calf. “I’m always interested in what they do,” Mr. Tran said, his voice filled with genuine wonderment.

Over the last decade, a number of imitators have entered the sriracha category. A recent visit to grocery stores in the San Gabriel Valley, near the Huy Fong headquarters, yielded Cock brand sriracha from Thailand, Shark brand from China, Phoenix brand from Vietnam and Unicorn brand, also from Vietnam.

Each brand included its namesake animal at the center of the bottle. Some copied Huy Fong’s signature script. Others employed similar green caps.

The competition has proved no great hindrance to Huy Fong sales. In 1996, the company expanded, adding processing and storage capacity to meet demand. More than 10 million bottles of sriracha now roll off the Rosemead line each year. With the purchase of a nearby warehouse, the company has begun storing its peppers where Wham-O once manufactured those icons of pop culture, Frisbees and Hula-Hoops.

Demand has continued to build. Fleming’s steakhouses now glaze their lobster en fuego entrees with a mix of sriracha and soy sauce. Roly Poly, another national chain, has begun spiking its cashew chicken wraps with squirts of Huy Fong sriracha.

At Good Stuff Eatery, a burger restaurant in Washington, the owner, Evangelos Mendelsohn, uses a condiment blend of mayonnaise, Huy Fong sriracha and condensed milk.

The Tran family has taken it all in stride. “We’re happy to see these chefs use our sriracha,” said Huy Fong’s president, William Tran, the 33-year-old son of its founder. “But we still sell 80 percent of our product to Asian companies, for distribution through Asian channels. That’s the market we know. That’s the market we want to serve.”