I’m making a blog post every Friday about food. This is because I love food. I also love to cook food! So I wanted to share with everybody some of my favorite recipes.
I wasn’t always fond of cooking. Funnily enough, it wasn’t until I started dating an Italian that I started taking the culinary craft seriously. My ex’s father was a chef, so food was incredibly important to their family growing up, as with most traditional Italian families. There was a funny conversation we had that led me to decide that I wanted to sharpen my cooking skills.
We got into some type of kerfuffle about dinner one night. I think he wanted to cook and I felt lazy and wanted to dine in. I'll never forget what he said to me: "Have you ever thought of cooking a meal as a sign love?"
Lol. Huh?
"Have you ever thought of cooking a meal for someone as a sign of showing them love?" He repeated the question but changed the phrasing because he could see that I was shooketh. My neurons were now making connections that they had not made before. I immediately thought of one of our first dates where he cooked boeuf bourguignon and we sipped Veuve Rose champagne. Did I even thank him for cooking that meal? I don’t know if I even acknowledged how special that was. My face turned pink with embarrassment.
Then, it got worse! I thought about my Mother. And how great her cooking is. And all the meals she made for us growing up! And how every birthday she tried to cook our favorite meal for our special day. I think I actually teared up when I thought about Mum roasting lamb every December to celebrate my birthday growing up. Roast lamb was my favorite. An added bonus was making roast lamb sandwiches with mustard the next day!
This was when I made the decision to become better at cooking! I view everything in life as a skill and as an opportunity to learn and grow. When I'm coaching youngsters and giving them drills, I always say to them: "Don't worry if you can't execute it perfectly the first time, everything takes practice."
Some people won't even try new things for fear that they'll be bad at them. The only thing sadder than doing something poorly the first time is not even trying. Why is this sad to me? Because it shows one is more concerned with how they look than with what they're learn. Who cares what you look like??? The human experience is rooted in ignorance and foolishness, just give it a go already! YEESH.
And give it a go I did. I jumped into the deep end and cooked boeuf bourguignon for my ex one random Friday night and I did a pretty good job. Boeuf bourguignon is an extremely advanced recipe so I wouldn’t recommend anybody start with that. However, the fact that I nailed it on my first go showed that I was certainly capable. So when I went home to NZ in 2015 to renew my visa, I told Mum to teach me everything she knew about cooking. And that she did:
The most important thing my Mum taught me was how to create flavor at the beginning of the meal. Glazing onions is an art. Adding ginger next to the hot oil and onions is something I do typically with Asian-infused cuisine, otherwise you can skip the ginger step and go straight to adding garlic for 1 minute. Garlic cooks fast, so to retain the flavor it becomes a skill as to when to add the garlic, and how long to cook garlic for. I try to time it for when the onions are 98.7% glazed, and I’ll add the garlic. The less time you cook the garlic for, the more pronounced the flavor.
Learning what onions to use for which recipes was also fun. Red onions are easier for our bodies to digest but they add a sweet component to the recipe. Yellow onions are the most flavorful and used in almost all Italian recipes. White onions are great for French recipes, IDK why but they just are.
Learning about how fresh spices are always going to be more potent than the dried kind. Learning how different oils burn at different temperatures, and how certain ingredients work better with certain oils than others. Did you know olive oil burns at a much lower temperature than, say, coconut oil? Cutting vegetables and marinating meat was also an important skill I learned.
I learned you want to hear the pan sizzle when you first cook a steak. Well cooked meat is all about sealing it on the outside to create that browning exterior, and then baking it in the oven to make sure the center is brought to temperature and cooked properly.
My Mum learned how to make curries from her Indian next door neighbor in England. So she taught me how to make a curry the way her Indian next door neighbor would growing up. Gotta love multi-culturalism! I also love curry so much, I cooked it for my 30th Birthday. I know! What a nerd. But it was a cold wintry night and I think it was a hit! I got compliments from an Iranian friend.
Cooking adds a whole new dimension to travel too. When traveling the world, pay attention to food! As you experience different cultures, ask questions about their meals. I love asking questions to my waiters and waitresses at restaurants, trying to get the inside scoop on what makes their food so yummy: “Is this soup made with bone broth or stock?” Or “What spices are used in this dish?” There is almost always something new to learn at every dining experience.
SO ANYWAY! The very first "Food Friday" post is going to be about a very nutritious and easy Chinese soup called “Red Bean Barley Soup.”
This soup is incredibly nutritious and perfect for the fall/winter. It is designed to remove "damp heat" from the body. People who understand Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) know what I'm talking about. This recipe calls for a very specific kind of red bean called "vigna umbellata," which holds a lot of medicinal properties. You can find these beans at any Asian foods store or order them on Amazon for safe measure. I've linked it below.
The recipe is easy but time-consuming however the health benefits totally make it worth the time.
Equipment
rice cooker or crockpot
Ingredients
1/2 Cup of vigna umbellata (red beans in traditional Chinese medicine)
2/3 Cup of barley (also called semen coicis)
Red Bean Barley Soup
Instructions
Wash red beans and then immerse in distilled water at least 5 hours or overnight.
Wash barley and then immerse in distilled water for at least 5 hours or overnight.
If we want to clear the “cold thing” from the barley, we should fry barley WITHOUT oil.
Pour the soaked red beans and barley into the rice cooker, then add 2000 ml water into the cooker. Cooking for at least 2 hours.
This soup is rich in fiber, vitamin E, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, selenium and other active ingredients that can help clear heat and detox from our body! It is also said to be great for skin. The soup is also said to promote intestinal peristalsis, which is a fancy word for the series of wave-like muscle contractions that move food through the digestive tract. I definitely feel my stomach loving this soup and I hope you do too!
This soup is great to have as a snack on its own or sometimes I’ll whip up a quick salad and make it a meal. Great as an appetizer before your main meal also.
If you have any leftovers, it’s super easy to store in a Tupperware container to freeze. Then you just thaw and bring to heat on a stove top whenever you feel like it!
The website I got this recipe from is here.