For some time now, a suite of afflictions (I omit the very unpleasant details) has prevented me from handling any truly solid food. A couple days ago I prepared a standard comfort sickroom food, plain white rice. My first solid food in a long time. And it was good. I still have no taste for anything more complicated. So I look forward to Thanksgiving (just a few weeks from now), and my now-standard Thanksgiving meal — see below — and it just seems unimaginable to me now, like fantasy food, though I have dreams about it.
Thanksgiving meals. From my 11/23/17 posting “Two Thanksgiving meals”:
From my 11/24/11 posting “Thanksgiving meals”:
For some years, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and I usually had some kind of roast for Thanksgiving (but mostly chicken, lamb, pork, beef, or veal, rather than turkey, which we cooked at other times of the year). Then when it was just Jacques and me, I branched out — a couple years, a smoked turkey by mail, then a variety of experiments, eventually settling on my new favorite, posole (pork and hominy stew…). Then it was just me and cooking was physically very difficult for me, so I took to celebrating the holiday [solo] at the excellent local Hong Kong restaurant, Tai Pan, with its dim sum lunch and substantial menu in addition.
The centerpiece of the Tai Pan meals is always vermicelli Singapore-style, often with crunchy green beans [spicy Sichuan green beans] or crispy fried noodles or dim sum or hot and sour soup. From Wikipedia:
“Singapore”-style noodles … is a dish of stir-fried rice vermicelli seasoned with curry powder, vegetables [especially sweet peppers, in yellow, red, and/or green], scrambled eggs and meat, most commonly “Singapore”-style noodles … is a dish of stir-fried rice vermicelli seasoned with curry powder, vegetables [especially sweet peppers, in yellow, red, and/or green], scrambled eggs and meat, most commonly chicken, beef, char siu pork, or prawns [at Tai Pan it’s shrimp and pork].
(#1) Singapore vermicelliThe standard accompaniment is spicy Sichuan green beans.
(#2) Sichuan green beans
From the Dinner Then Dessert site:
The texture of these green beans [is] different than most steamed green beans you’ll find because they’re sautéed before the rest of the ingredients are added leading to the tender sort of shrunken texture you love but don’t normally get to have when you steam veggies or boil them for a couple of minutes to get them crisp tender.
… The method used for cooking these green beans is called dry-frying but in reality it is just about cooking them in a hot wok until they have the texture of being deep fried. Much less oil is used and wasted and the outcome is absolutely delicious.
ingredients: green beans trimmed, canola oil, chili garlc paste, green onions (white parts only) thinly sliced, garlic thinly sliced, soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar, water, crushed red pepper flakes
The result is entirely vegetarian. However, the standard restaurant dish is accompanied by a sauce of finely ground pork, browned, so it’s very much not vegetarian (or kosher, for that matter).
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