Warm Asian-Style Rice Salad

From the kitchen of One Perfect Bite...I made a new rice dish to serve with miso chicken tonight. I decided to grill despite the rain, so, if you happened down our stretch of highway this evening, I would be the fool you saw manning the grill beneath that huge red golf umbrella. Miso chicken is delicious, but I'm always puzzled by what to serve with it. Summer is no problem. I make a Japanese potato salad that's a perfect compliment to the chicken. Winter is more problematic. Plain, unflavored rice simply will not do and my winter palate refuses to embrace mayonnaise based salads. So, I decided to combine hot rice with mirin wine and broccoli slaw and see what happened. In Japan, sweet rice would be used to make a dish like this. Despite its name, this rice isn't sweet and it doesn't contain gluten. It is, instead, a very sticky, short-grain rice that's used to make sushi or sweet rice desserts. As you can see, I used basmati rice to make mine. It works well, but would be difficult to eat with chopsticks because the grains do not clump. I made enough rice to feed four, but the ingredients here can easily be doubled. I used mirin, a rice wine, because I think it's less sweet than sake and is more to our taste. The rice must be hot when the mirin and vegetables are folded into it. This is a really, really easy to make and it's quite good. Here's the recipe.

Warm Asian-Style Rice Salad...from the kitchen of One Perfect Bite

Ingredients:
2 cups hot cooked rice
6 tablespoons mirin cooking wine
1-1/2 cups broccoli or cabbage slaw
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Fold mirin and broccoli slaw into hot rice. Mix well. Cover pot and let sit for 15 minutes, or until mirin is absorbed. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Toss. Transfer to rice bowls. Yield: 4 servings.

Hup Toh Sou/Walnut Crisp

These Hup Toh Soh is a cookie but this recipe results a very crisp and crunchy cookie, sort of like a Biscotti.  If you like crisp and crunchy, then give this recipe a try.  Strangely, this cookie is called Walnut Crisp/Cookie (hup Toh is cantonese for walnut) but there is no walnuts in the dough.  I top the crisp with a piece of walnut just to justify the name.  Could it be that the appearance of the baked crisp/cookie, with all the cracks, looked like a walnut????  

 In traditional Chinese medicine, walnuts are associated with the Lung, Large Intestine and Kidney meridians, and have sweet and warm properties. Its functions are to tonify the kidneys, nourish the blood, warm the lungs and moisten the intestines. Typically, walnuts are used to treat pain and weakness in the knees and back, aid in digestion, and relieve asthma. Recent evidence suggests walnuts may play a role in lowering blood cholesterol levels, thus reducing the incidence of some forms of heart disease. Science provides a slightly less mysterious explanation: walnuts have been found to be rich in omega-3 fatty acids, an essential nutrient for the human brain. Incidentally, dont you think that the walnut flesh looks like the brain ?

I believe that a sweet sticky chewy walnut/dates confection was eaten during ancient times in China , in the hope that family bonds will remain as strong as these sweet, sticky candies. How on earth did the ancient Chinese know that????  This recipe i will try to locate, in the meantime, enjoy eating these cookies..


Ingredients:

2 cups bleached all-purpose
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp ammonia powder
1/8 tsp salt
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup lard/shortening
1 large egg (beaten)
Walnut pieces
Egg yolk for glazing


Method:

Put the flour, baking soda, ammonia powder, sugar and salt in the food processor and pulse a couple of times to mix ingredints well.

Add in the lard/shortening and pulse until flour mixture becomes breadcrumb like.

Add in the beaten egg and pulse until a tiny piece of dough can be pressed together to form a dough.(mixture will look crumbly but can be pressed tiogether).

Using a 1 oz ice-cream scoop, scoop dough out and roll dough into balls.

Sprinkle some flour on to baking sheet and place balls on it. Flatten the ball slightly, press a hole in the middle with your thumb, glaze with egg yolk and top with a piece of walnut in the hole.

Bake in preheated oven 250 f for 10 minutes and then increase the oven temperature to 300 f and further bake for another 10 minutes.

Cool cookies on cake rack and when it is cooled, serve or pack into air-tight containers.

Serves