Food Blog Dot Com

FoodBlogDotCom

Food Blog Dot Com is written
by Lin Ennis, a writer passionate
about good food, healthful
food and food as medicine.

( Food Lovers Only )

Year: 2010

5 SPICE POWDER

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Part of my new love affair with Napa Cabbage is learning about 5 Spice Powder. I had not heard of it till I Googled “napa cabbage recipes,” but since I had on hand acceptable ingredients for making it, I did, using this 5 Spice Powder recipe. I didn’t measure exactly, substituted ordinary peppercorns which I did not roast, used regular anise seeds, powdered cinnamon, and pulverized my seeds in a marble mortar with a pestle. But I love it anyway! Imagine how tasty it could be if one used the correct ingredients! My pal Richard said it’s important to use a seed grinder or a coffee mill dedicated to spices (he uses the coffee mill, and never buys preground spices). That encourages me to try again. I have bought more whole spices since getting a mortar and pestle for Christmas last year. Even spices already in small pieces, like crushed red pepper flakes, perk up when pulverized just before adding to a dish (sometimes I add the salt the recipe calls for to whatever I’m crushing in the mortar, especially if the spice is a very small amount). You can buy 5 Spice Powder commercially prepared, but Richard says the flavors of making it from whole ingredients are worth buying the ingredients and making it fresh yourself. One note on the recipe I linked to above that I disagree with is “use sparingly.” I added enough to my stir fry to smell good, but had to sprinkle on a little more as I ate in order to enjoy flavor-fullness. However, the author makes a good point about hitting all the taste buds: “sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, and salty.” I don’t see anything in the 5 spice powder recipe that strikes me as sour, but if you put a little vinegar on your stir fry, I suppose that would do it. For decades I’ve tried to hit “sweet, sour, salt, bitter” in a well-balanced meal. Touching these four (or five) taste points makes a meal more satisfying. That’s one reason I love Indian food so. It’s all there! If five spice powder is new to you, try it. If you know more about it than I do (which probably everyone in the world does), I’d like to hear from you n that, too!

NAPA CABBAGE

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My new favorite vegetable is Napa cabbage, sometimes called Chinese cabbage. I’ve ventured to try it only recently, and it is a delight both to cook and to eat. Napa cabbage is a cultivar of Brassica rapa, a wild mustard. Compared to common head cabbage (Brassica oleracea), it is milder tasting, greener all the way through the head, and less likely to go mushy on the way to being cooked tender. I think of it as sort of a cross between lettuce and cabbage, which of course it isn’t, but it does have lettuce-like qualities, such as being very leafy, unlike common head cabbage that is more dense and has a larger core. I did a quick stir fry with onion, garlic, celery, carrots and 5-spice powder. Five-spice was new to me, too. I’ll do a separate blog on that. Another time, I simmered sliced cabbage leaves and garlic with a can of Mexican style stewed tomatoes and Morningstar Farms burger crumbles–a quick, nurturing and delicious lunch. Napa cabbage seems to produce less waste, because more of the vegetable is edible. Another reason to love Napa cabbage is it doesn’t stink up the kitchen or the refrigerator.