Spicy Toasted Cheese and Tofu Sandwiches

I was never a fan of tofu back home. In fact, every time I think of tofu, I still think of this song.

However, that was back in America, where the tofu was gritty and glumpy and oh-so-foreign. We never ate tofu as a part of our daily diet. The only time I ever ate tofu was at Chinese restaurants. I'll never forget the slimy texture and the flavorlessness of the probably-from-a-can-hot-and-sour-soup I had once when I was ten years old.

However, the texture and variability of tofu has grown on me. I have had good tofu that is silky soft and mixes well with savory or spicy flavors - perhaps sour was not the best way to enjoy it in my youth. My favorite way to eat it, of course, is cubed and rolled in a little bit of flour, salt and pepper and fried to golden crispy goodness - the outside is crunchy, but the inside is soft and delectable.

Additionally, tofu in Korea is cheap. I pay less than 800 won for a block of tofu. At the current exchange rate, that's less than $0.72 for a block of soybean goodness that would cost me probably $3 or more back home. So when I find a protein source that I kind of like that comes as cheaply as tofu, I take advantage of it! The fact that TheFry doesn't mind tofu at all helps a lot, too.

Last night I made spicy toasted cheese and tofu sandwiches. I prepared the pan as I usually would for making a toasted cheese sandwich - I melted a tablespoon of margarine over low heat and then added a slice of bread. I had already prepped a few thin slices of tofu for the sandwich. I layered the tofu between two thin layers of cheese and toasted the sandwich as usual (although I recommend adding a pinch of salt on top of the tofu before the next layer of cheese). After the sandwich was done, I added some hot & sour sauce given to us by our local pizza restaurant (but tabasco sauce would do wonderfully, as well).

I must say it was a success. Even PapaFish didn't mind it so much. I'll definitely be keeping this experience in mind for the future when I run out of cheese but need a melty toasted sandwich treat. ^_^ Sorry there's no pictures to share!

A Toddler's Breakfast

(excuse the crappy resolution...these were taken with my webcam; it's all I've got for now)

As I type this blog post, TheFry is shoving bites of breakfast in his mouth one right after the other.

He is eating a scrambled egg and a piece of bread smeared with persimmon jam.

He does not wait until chewing up one bite to cram more in.

If it's in front of him, he will undoubtedly reach for it and shove it in his little face.

That cute little face! (yes, that IS a washing machine under the gas range [it's a two-top, ugh...] in our kitchen)

This season--the end of summer, that is--is the season for all kinds of ripe fruit. Persimmons are some of the cheapest fruits to come by, with a pack of 6 costing 3,000 won (or less, depending on which neighborhood you live in. We live in a fairly wealthy part of town, thus the more expensive...everything!).

You can usually choose between ripe-enough-to-eat persimmons and ripe-enough-to-be-disgusting persimmons. We bought a pack of the latter.

(thank you Google Image Search)

These persimmons can barely be eaten. They cannot be sliced. Once you peel them, a few clumps of fruit fall apart in a stringy, gooey mess.

Furthermore, the persimmon is not the sweet, tart fruit that spoils us in North America. They are barely sweet (even though they are very ripe), and their flavor is reminiscent of pumpkin.

So what do you do with a fruit that you can't eat straight-up? You make jam, of course!Our big challenge was to find some kind of thickener. I believed that Pectin would be impossible to track down in any location within walking distance from us, and I was correct! I even joked with PapaFish that we might just have to boil a chicken and scrape off the gelatin if we couldn't find anything else. (eww)

We did find gelatin in with the German food at our local HomePlus. However, gelatin does not behave like pectin exactly. Even when the jam cooled, it still seemed runny, so we added more gelatin. In the end, the jam hardened, and it was as stiff as jelly candy.

So we added more persimmons!

At last, we had wonderful persimmon jam, and now that the fruit is sweet and able to be smeared on the most delicious dainties, we can rest well.

On a side note: PapaFish has been working like a madman in the kitchen the past couple of weeks. He single-handedly made the persimmon jam. Additionally, he has prepared kimchi with both radish and cabbage.

Next week, for TheFry's first birthday, we will be making spaghetti and probably having another cake adventure. More details to come!

Baking a Cake without an oven...

...or a rice cooker, toaster oven, microwave, crock pot, etc...

Whether you use a cake mix or you make the recipe yourself, here is what I did:

1. Take a pot and pour in a little bit of water (1~2 cups).

2. Insert a metal steamer (one of those ones that folds up really small and then expands). It should be expanded as far as it can go. You are going to do this double-boiler style.

3. Grease and flour a cake pan that is small enough to fit in the pot. I used one of those disposable foil pans that you usually make banana bread or poundcake in.

4. After greasing/flouring the pan and pouring in the batter, cover the pan with aluminum foil, shiny-side-down.

5. Place the covered pan in the pot and cover the pot. Cook on high for the first 5 minutes, then turn the heat to low so that the water keeps simmering. Cook until done (it took me about 45~50 minutes) - when a toothpick (or a chopstick!) inserted in the middle comes out clean.

6. Remove from the pot, cool, and remove the cake.

As for a recipe? Well, I kind of winged it so the ingredients aren't exactly right, but here's what I did:

1. In a mixing bowl, combine 1.5 cups cake flour, 1/2 cup sugar (or more if you like a sweeter cake), 2 teaspoons baking powder, and a dash of salt.

2. In a separate, smaller bowl, beat 2 eggs, 1/2 cups milk, 1/4 cups vegetable oil (or margarine or butter), and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (we didn't have this, but it was definitely missing in the flavor of the cake later on).

3. Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture all at once and mix just until it is moist. If the batter is too thick and doughy, add a little more milk.

4. Pour in a greased and floured cake pan and cook as above!

We hope to try a chocolate cake for TheFry's first birthday next week. I also want to try and make some frosting or some kind of filling. This week, PapaFish made persimmon jam, but it is still a work in progress as it got a little too...hard. Maybe when that problem is fixed, I will make a layer cake with persimmon jam and chocolate frosting.

Until then, eat and enjoy!

Milestones

Milestones, away!

TheFry is reaching milestone after milestone.

Two weeks ago, we started putting him in his Pack N’ Play to sleep. He sleeps most of the way through the night. Sometimes he wakes up early in the morning (5am-ish) if he hasn’t eaten very well before bed, but other than that, he’s good. The screamfest is somewhat unpredictable—sometimes he goes to sleep in less than 5 minutes, sometimes he screams for nearly an hour—but things are gradually getting better. It’s not a smooth incline of improvement (it’s more like stairs), but the overall trend is that things are getting better.

Just this week, he has learned to crawl “army style” and how to pull himself up on objects. Mostly he pulls himself up on short objects—like small boxes that are piled up in the living room, or on MamaFish when she’s sitting down, for example—but he nearly always falls straight back and hits his head, ending in catastrophe.

He is getting more and more adventurous with his crawling. Because he moves so fast, he can move from one room to the other in a blink of an eye. If I turn away for two seconds, he is halfway across the room, making a beeline for a power cord, electrical outlet, dead bugs on the baseboard heaters, a loose bit of string that no one noticed before, and other such potentially harmful objects. I’ve taken to scouring the carpet in the room for tiny shreds of yarn (left over from crochet projects) and little bits of shredded paper before I put him down to play.

Just yesterday I caught him in a “first”—the “first bug he tried to eat”. It was a ladybug. Good thing I was able to fish it out of his mouth. It was a funny moment, but PapaFish was none too pleased, as ladybugs are poisonous. I’m not sure how poisonous they are to humans, so I suppose I should look that up.

TheFry had his 9-month checkup yesterday, also. He is far below the weight curve. He has gained only a few ounces in the last couple of weeks but has grown several centimeters. In short, his weight gain is not keeping up with his height. The doctor was very encouraging, giving us some pretty simple (and cheap) advice about his eczema. I’m so sick of trying so many different things and finding that nothing really works very well at all. The decrease of redness and itching is very, very minimal, no matter what we do. I wouldn’t be concerned except I get so many questions about it by everyone I meet, and it puts me on the defensive, as if I am a neglectful mother. The kid’s got eczema, he’s not a burn victim, and he’s not going to die from it—end of story. I know people mean well and that they’re just trying to make conversation, but sometimes I get a little tired of answering the same questions over and over again. Maybe I should put the following on a T-shirt:

He is a boy.

He is 9 months old.

He has eczema. It’s better than it used to be, and we are doing everything we can to treat it, so don’t worry about it. He’ll be fine.

Yes, he is an extrovert. We have no idea where he got that from. Just be thankful that he’s smiling at you and not screaming.

One of the biggest milestones he’s reached that I am super happy about is that he can start eating finger foods and we can quit the purees. I am so sick of purees. They sit in the fridge and go bad because he never manages to eat that much of them anymore. It takes hours to make, and I have to do it once every 5 days. Now I can just feed him what I’m eating, which [I hope] will cause me to eat better. No more McDonald’s! I’m going to have to give that up soon enough, anyway.

So last night, I wanted restaurant food so bad, but didn’t want to eat out (because of the aforesaid reason), so I made my own restaurant food at home:

This is a plate just like you’d get at a Mexican Restaurant in any town in America. Beef enchiladas with refried beans, Spanish rice and a little bit of salad on the side. The recipe was super easy and I made it up out of the blue.

Materials:

13x9” (or bigger) cake pan

enough aluminum foil to cover the pan

2-3 cans enchilada sauce

¼ lb ground beef

1 cans diced green chiles (about half the size of the enchilada sauce per can)

4 scallions

1 onion, diced

1 pkg Mexican-blend or Colby jack cheese

1 can refried beans

some romaine lettuce, spinach, or other kind of lettuce—whatever you like.

2 C long-grain white rice

3C water

1¼ C pureed tomato

1 pkg. corn tortillas

salt and pepper

For the rice:

Put 2C rice, 1C tomato puree and 3C water in a rice cooker with ½ t salt, ¼ diced onion, and ½ can green chiles. Stir and cook until done. Add more salt and crushed black pepper until it reaches the desired taste.

For the enchiladas:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Brown the beef in a pan with ½ of the diced onion, one can of green chiles, ¼ C tomato puree, and salt and pepper to taste until the beef is just done. Remove from heat.

3. Pour ½ can of enchilada sauce on the bottom of the cake pan.

4. Assemble enchiladas as follows: scoop two table spoons (or more or less—depending on how you like them) of the beef mix onto a corn tortilla. Sprinkle some cheese on top. Roll the corn tortilla and place crease-side-down in the pan. Squeeze the enchiladas in the pan and fit as many as you like. You will probably have tortillas left over and you might need another pan depending on how full you fill your enchiladas.

5. When the pan is full, pour the rest of the enchilada sauce on top of the enchiladas, using a spatula to spread around if necessary. Sprinkle the rest of the cheese on top of the sauce as liberally as you like it.

6. Cover the pan with the foil, shiny side up. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes.

For the beans:

Empty the refried beans in a pan with what’s left of the diced onion and green chiles. Heat until the beans are a little more soupy, stirring constantly. Immediately remove from heat and place in a serving dish before the beans get stuck to the pan and become dry from overheating. You can try and add some chicken stock to see if that makes the beans more soupy (if you like it that way).

For salad:

Cut up lettuce greens in fine shreds and serve on the side of the plate in desired amount. Top with salsa if you wish.

Some people like to eat Tex-Mex with a dollop of sour cream, but that’s just not my style. Go ahead and do what you like!

TheFry enjoys carrots and enchiladas. The recipe is not too spicy. For a spicier recipe, add chili powder to the beef as it cooks (taste as you go!). He also really enjoyed the refried beans and Spanish rice, which I was able to form into little bite-sized balls for him to pick up and eat off of his tray. In this picture, I believe he is mashing a ball of beans in his fist.