Lingbo Li
An Offal Dinner Party – Project Food Blog Challenge 3
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It was 9pm.
The dinner party, my first ever, should have started one hour ago.
I was expecting 5 guests. 2 had shown up.
Every burner was burning, the microwave was microwaving, and the raw, fetid stink of tripe was stinking.
This week’s blogging challenge was to introduce my guests to a luxury dinner party of “new and exotic flavors.”
What was more new and exotic (and thus, luxurious) than a meal entirely of ox tails, tripe, pork belly, beef hearts, and sweetbreads?
Entertaining tip #1: Make a plan in advance. Far in advance.
In retrospect, my party’s theme was an ambitious but poor choice.
“Do you have testicles? Or brains?” I asked the butcher behind the counter at Savenor’s, blocks from Julia Child’s former home.
The party was in 4 hours.
He looked amused. “We can order them for you.”
A mighty heart.
“I need them tonight,” I pressed, high on my own ambitions dancing with fried testicles and cow brain tacos. “Do you have anything else?”
“I think we’ve got chicken livers. How about pork tongue?”
I thought for a second. “One of my guests is kosher. So no testicles? What about tripe?”
I looked longingly at the gorgeously browned chickens roasting on spits. Why couldn’t I be a normal girl? Would a consulting firm ever hire me? Would judges understand?
He helped me locate a frozen bag of tripe, then rustled up an enormous beef heart and package of sweetbreads. Victory was mine!
But as it turned out, cooking offal is not a task for the faint of heart.
Entertaining tip #2: Keep calm in the face of bloody organ meats.
The good: the oxtails, the only dish prepped beforehand, had stewed for 8 hours. I still had pork belly leftover from the second challenge.
The bad: the tripe needed 4-5 hours of cooking – I had 2. The sweetbreads begged for a longer soak to leech out the excess blood. And let’s not talk about the enormous beef heart in the fridge, bigger than a newborn and about as edible without endless hours of braising. (I know what you’re thinking, you sick, sick person.)
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble
By the time 9pm rolled around, most of the guests still hadn’t shown.
I was still in the throes of kitchen combat. In a green evening gown. Bare footed and wet with tripe juice, brow furrowed and knife in hand. I wasn’t about to be defeated by some pathetic pancreas.
A pile of blobby organs. It’s what’s for dinner. (WHY LINGBO WHY)
I checked on the sweetbreads, which I had soaked for two hours, boiled, then pressed. They’d given up their bloody juice to the baking pan, ready to be egged, floured, and fried in butter with parsley.
They had the oddest texture when raw: just squishy, fragile pink lobes of flesh encased in gossamer-thin elastic.
I hacked the tripe into tiny squares, swearing and sweating as its juice splattered over my dress.
My foodie friend Sam was one of the two guests who’d arrived on time (30 minutes late, in this case) and he bore a gift of rosewater-flavored Turkish delight and a jar of bacon marmalade. He was Kosher, so I was frying up some ground chicken (rather than pork) in peanut oil with rice wine and green beans.
Entertaining tip #3: Cook with with your guests in mind.
“I suck at life,” I intoned in my usual sing song. “A faiillluurree.” I struggled with the dry fried green beans so that he would have something to eat.
Cooking up arborio rice for the croquettes
My better half, used to such self-effacing antics, gave me a rub on the back and told me I was doing a great job.
Rice croquettes made with mozzarella and Parmesean
At least the cheesy rice croquettes – leavened with lemon zest, scallions, and parsley – were now browning in butter. I did do a bang up job of chopping leeks for their bed of greenery.
Leeks in the pan!
Breading them crazy organ meats.
Fried sweetbreads
In a truly miraculous feat, two more guests arrived and all the food was out by 9:30. I don’t really remember how it all happened. I played my La Roux station on Pandora as the background music while Sam helped snap some photos of the happy crew. One guest never arrived and confessed hours later via text he’d been napping instead. My better half’s friend showed up with a case of food poisoning, so he (perhaps wisely) opted out of offal and hit the leather recliner with a mug of water.
Typo intentional on “agree this”. Everyone is thinking, “Oh crap, now we have to actually eat this.”
The sweetbreads had an iron tang and the tripe was still too tripe-y, but the oxtails were a satisfying, savory gnaw. The pork belly turned out even more beautifully, cooked to a state where the fat and melded and melted into the meat and coated in a red, syrupy glaze. The rice croquettes were fried cheesey rice – a no brainer.
Never got around to that beef heart. Damn.
Entertaining tip #4: Have your boyfriend do the dishes.
My better half kindly volunteered to do the dishes, except I was so wound up from cooking that I loaded half the dishwasher anyway.
“You can go relax and enjoy your friends,” he said kindly.
I continued scraping food off with my hands at a furious pace.
This was, after all, my first dinner party and I wanted everything to go absolutely perfect.
Red Braised Pork – Project Food Blog Round 2!
Voting has begun. Vote here now!
Dear readers, thanks so much for voting me into the 2nd round of Project Food Blog! For those of you wondering “WTF is Project Food Blog?”, it’s a hardcore competition where food bloggers cook/photograph/video their way through 10 rounds. If you win, you get a nice 10k. That almost approaches what I make every month on this blog. (Ha. Ha.)
Red braised pork belly, my competition dish.
Anyway, for Challenge 2: The Classics, I was charged with making a “classic dish from another culture” other than French and Italian. It was difficult to pick. I’m honestly not much of a cook – I eat in the college dining hall and burned a peanut butter sandwich recently.
While it may seem antithetical to the prompt of a dish “outside your comfort zone,” I think picking red braised pork was an expression of just how deeply out of sync I feel with Chinese cooking.
The idea of me cooking Chinese food feels almost like a joke. Breaking open my copy of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty feels like a strange facsimile of “cultural” for someone whose childhood featured from LOLcats than red lanterns.
Carving up some pig fat. I was cooking for company, which explains the fancy dress.
There’s nothing more uncomfortably ethnic than your own last wisps of ethnicity, I think.
I picked red braised pork. I’ve never cooked pork belly.
Actually, this was my first time working with pork – I’ve only cooked chicken, shrimp, and hot dogs so far in my 6-month cooking career.
I also never red braised anything in my life. I doubted that my recipe would even work. Since, uh, I missed one essential ingredient.
I also never used star anise in anything. I also rarely make heavy meat dishes.
So off to Allston’s Super 88 Asian supermarket! My Caucasian better half had actually been there several times. This, surprisingly, was actually my first trip.
I found encouragement:
I bought 2 pounds of pork belly, threw in a package of oxtails, then went to the produce section. Bok choy seemed like a good fit.
Hrrm, should I cut my finger open while chopping daikon or flowering chives?
Oh man! I am grinning because there’s mochi in my shopping cart.
Shopping cart full, it was off to unpack.
I began cooking this morning, then realized I didn’t have dark soy sauce. Only light soy sauce. It was ok, I was going to search.
I searched in Trader Joes. Nope.
I searched in Shaw’s. Nope.
I searched in Cherry Mart, an Asian grocery on Newbury Street. The owner, a tired-looking Asian man, looked so sad when he realized he didn’t carry dark soy sauce that I bought a little canister of MSG.
“I can have it tomorrow,” he said in defeat.
“I need it for today,” I responded, equally defeated.
So I tried to account for the flavor difference with some extra sugar and a shot of Worcestshire which, I reasoned, should have more of the mushroomy/molasses flavor of dark soy sauce. But I felt like an ethnic fraud already.
But the show went on.
I got out the pork belly and sliced it into huge chunks. Like little mini heart attacks. I felt my arteries spasming. Charming.
I gave my ginger an angry slap and it split down the middle. I AM ZEUS.
Then I grabbed the scallions. Grr. Don’t lie to me, cooking poster. Yes, I CAN COOK.
In to the pot also went: 2 tablespoons of soy sauce (which should have been dark, not light), three tablespoons brown sugar, 1 tablespoon Shaoxing rice wine, and 3/4 teaspoon salt. They all cooked for two hours. You too, can cook like me.
Then I gave the bok choy a toss in some peanut oil, garlic, and ginger.
Getting there. Sort of. So. Much. Fat.
In my typically anxious manner, I hovered over the pot, fretting about how my pork was not turning particularly red-brown like it should. Were my chunks too big? (I ended up cutting up the pork belly into smaller pieces mid way). Did I cut the scallions the right way? Why did I just get splattered with hot oil? Ow.
I decided to plate it in a more modern way – perhaps to express my cultural disconnect from cooking Chairman Mao’s favorite dish. I also think Chinese food gets a bad wrap for being cheap, and I wanted to present this rustic peasant dish in a more refined light.
Even if I don’t have a lot in common with Mao, he had really good taste in food, as it turns out. The pork belly ended up coated in a thick, sweetened sauce whose scent induced moans of pleasure. Soaked up with rice, it was absurdly rich, the inherent brown sugar sweetness of the sauce complemented by the intense savoriness of pork fat.
My first red braised anything. I can haz cookin skills!
It reminded me that I’m an American (who happens to look Chinese) cooking from a book written by a Brit translating Chinese classics for a Western audience. A reflection of a reflection in a mirror.
I remembered Serious Eats’ Chichi Wang’s reaction when I said I bought the book. “Why don’t you just learn from you mother?” she asked, incredulous.
I never cooked in my mother’s kitchen growing up. Cooking Chinese food, to be honest, feels a lot less natural than making a Thai coconut curry. Did I feel an ethnic rekindling with this strange, foreign cuisine with its exotic ingredients like dark soy sauce?
Not exactly. I did, however, have a full belly.
Voting has begun. Vote here now!
Vote for Me As The Next Food Blog Star!
I promise if I win, I’ll lower taxes and guarantee generations of your offspring admission to Harvard.
But more likely, you’ll just see more videos of me eating bizarre things.
How can you beat that logic?
Vote now by clicking right here.
Thanks, all – you guys rock.
Project Food Blog: Am I The Next Food Blog Star?
Voting has begun! Vote now by clicking right here. Muchos gracias!
Hi all, I’m joining the running for FoodBuzz’s Next Food Blog Star competition. ‘Cause… why not?
Please vote! I may even send you something shiny!
Here’s the prompt: For the very first Project Food Blog Challenge, we’re asking you to create a blog post that defines you as a food blogger and makes it clear why you think you have what it takes to be the next food blog star.
1) I eat crazy stuff.
I’ll pretty much eat everything except for unwashed warthog rectum and large, live insects.
Otherwise, s’all good.
I’m the kind of person who looks for the weirdest thing on the menu, then orders it.
I have rhapsodized about the creamy, slightly knobbly pleasures of calves brains and the “just like chicken” delight that is cow testicles. Icelandic fermented shark meat, which stunk of formaldehyde, was a little less appetizing.
My first video ever, eating brains at KO Prime.
One time, I tried the Pasta From Hell at East Coast Grill. It’s a dish laced with nuclear fission and ghosts of singed digestive tracts. I ate three bites. And cried. On camera. Now it’s on YouTube.
Another time, I saw “bull pizzle” on the menu at a kebab shop in Beijing. So I ate it. It was weird and gluey and flavorless. But man, did I show that bull.
2) I’m hardcore.
I’m an overcommitted, type-A, girl-about-town who’s willing to spear life with her chopsticks. I have somehow hacked my way into a life that involves eating out a lot. I’ve dumped more Sriracha on my food than you can shake a pair of platform wedges at. If you give me an idea, I’ll immediately map out how to make it an empire. I spent two weeks of my life to make a two-part guide to Flushing’s famed food court.
I’m also a bit more technical and nerdy than the average food blogger. I’m fascinated with things like Internet marketing and ecommerce and I’m taking an introduction to Computer Science class this semester. I just wrote my first three programs in C. I laugh at jokes on xkcd. But I’m an anthropology major. Whee.
3) I embarrass myself in public (and on video).
Other than consuming brains, balls, and intestines on video for my fearless readers to see, I also blog about my other questionable pursuits.
Like that time I stumbled down a hotel runway in a turquoise bikini and six inch heels for Miss New York USA. I not only survived, I chronicled the entire ordeal in exhausting, academic, pictorial detail on this blog, including my embarrassing flubs in the process.
I got by on my $45 evening gown from a consignment store, a pair of 6 inch clear heels, and 6 inches of pancake makeup. I have never felt so exhausted from parading around like a well-padded poodle at a dog show before.
Back when I was single, I also decided to drop by a Jewish speed dating event one time. I found that rumors of yellow fever are greatly exaggerated. Also, that MIT math majors got no game – even when they copy pickup artists’ lines.
4) I’m even thoughtful sometimes.
I believe that you can learn a lot about people from what they eat and how they order. Beyond that, you can even listen carefully to what they say to see who they wish they were. Eating out is also an aspirational act. It’s a declaration of what image you’d like to be associated with.
5) I know where to find damn good lamb noodles.
Around here in Flushing.
They look like this:
Damn, they are good.
Lazy Girl Brownies
It was one of those lazy, lazy Sundays when I remembered to bake brownies for Lena‘s back-to-school BBQ. I baked most of the batter in my silicone mini cupcake tin (where half of it remained), but I wanted to give the microwave a whirl.
My mantra has always been work smarter, not harder. (Well, work smarter, then work smarter a whole lot harder.) So I gave Ghirardelli’s double chocolate brownie mix a go in the microwave, which yielded more porous and slightly chewy brownie batter in a bowl. Is it as good the dense, rich baked version? No. But a 30 second cook time just can’t compare to preheating and baking for 45 minutes.
If I were to ever write a cookbook, it’d be about maximum payoff while being really damn lazy. Ask my better half: the only thing I make for dinner is thai chicken curry. ‘Cause it’s just too easy.
Lana Lingbo Li
I'm a world traveler / enthusiastic eater who's now blogging and producing videos over at HelloLana.com. Visit me there!
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