A random view of a gamelan-playing, food-loving linguist from sunny Southern California.
A terrible tragedy... Supposedly it was the largest earthquake in the past forty years or so. I'm actually surprised that coastal areas west of the epicenter received the brunt of the fury - also by statements that Sumatra moved 100 km to the southwest.
A mind-numbing, extremely humbling reminder that our sometimes grandiose human selves can easily get our sorry asses kicked by Mother Nature... Please remember that.
And I really don't enjoy it. After being born and raised here for 18 years, one can get tired of the seemingly endless sunshine. It just doesn't do much for me anymore. I guess it would be different if Igrew up next to the beach or something, but nah, that didn't happen. Anyway, now I'm sort of proud of telling people where I grew up - at the time, it was sort of a rough neighborhood in San Diego, right next to the border of National City... Anyhow, I hate it when these Santa Ana winds blow over - makes my skin and lips itch - I hate it! I also hate it when people announce, "Isn'tit such a beautiful day?" I wanna say to them, "NO, IT'S NOT! IT'SF***ING GLOBAL WARMING - IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WARM AROUND THISTIME OF YEAR!" That's why I loved the weather two weeks ago - I thinkit was the coldest it's ever been in SoCal. Aduh, SoCal is turning outmore like Australia year after year, weatherwise.
BTW, I recently opened a bottle of Korean raspberry wine called bokbunja-ju. "Ju" is the part that means alcohol. It was quite nice - it might even work with a heavy meat stew - a sort of liquified, alcoholic version of cranberry sauce. Just drink between each mouthful.
Trust me, anybody can tell you it's not an easy thing to do. Last night I went to a friend's place, where she wanted my help in de-obfuscating some English idioms - she's translating some texts into Mandarin. The toughest one was "almost by default" - we wracked our brains for at least five minutes trying to unravel that one. I had to squeeze my brain for a couple of seconds (OK, so it looked like I was just covering up my ears in a really weird fashion)! Anyway, tonight I'm going to show one of Peter Greenaway's twisted films - his most notorious one. I'll just leave it at that. Talking about things twisted, for the occassion, I'll be making my twisted take on chicken adobo. For starters, it's got red wine and chestnuts...
But not as disgusting-sounding ;) Anyway, I had some leftover baozi filling (see my post on baozi to find out what goes in the filling), so I needed a way to use the remainder without reverting to preparing a new batch of dough for the skins. I remembered I had a bag of lumpia (spring roll, not egg roll) wrappers in my freezer. I don't know how this next part happened, but I also remembered that traditional vegetarian Chinese cuisine had some dishes that were supposed to emulate particular meats, such as mock duck, goose, and squab. This time, I decided to create a dish that emulated (somewhat) the skin of a roasted pig. So, here it is - "Mock Pork Skin"!
Prepare the soy reduction first:
1/4 C Shaoxing wine
1 T dark soy sauce
1 T rice vinegar
1 1/2 T oyster sauce
1 T sugar
1/2 t sesame oil
Cracked white pepper to taste
Combine all the glaze ingredients in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil over low heat. Cover and simmer, until the mixture turns into a dark brown glaze. Take off heat and let cool.
Next, take the filling from the baozi recipe and add the following before the initial stir-frying:
1/2" piece of ginger, peeled and chopped
2 cloves of garlic
Stir-fry with a couple tablespoons of peanut oil and cook until heated. Once cooked, add the following:
1/2 lb scallops, chopped into a paste
4 dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in hot water for at least 30-45 min., then chopped finely
2 pieces of dried wood ear, soaked in hot water for 30 min., then thinly julienned
Mix well and let cool. Meanwhile separate lumpia/spring roll wrappers (important: NOT egg roll wrappers) and prepare a flour-water paste for the seal. The paste should be thick enough to leave a thin layer on the back of a spoon.
Once the paste and the wrappers have been prepared, put the filling on the lower half of the lumpia wrapper, making sure that you get the thinnest layer possible. Wrap up from the bottom twice, making sure that the filling stays flat. Put flour-water paste on remaining portion of the wrapper. Then, fold the wrapper up to create an extremely flat roll. When all the rolls have been prepared, cut each roll in half. Heat up a frying pan with a couple tablespoons of peanut oil. Shallow-fry pieces until quite brown and crispy on both sides. Drain to get rid of excess oil.
Take each piece and brush a thin layer of the glaze on one side only. Then cut each piece cross-wise about 1/2" width. You should get 4-5 slices out of each piece. Discard ends without filling. Voila - "mock pork skin".
The finished mock roast pork skin. To be frank, it doesn't taste like pork meat, but the wrapper is crispy like roasted skin, and the glaze is reminiscent of the soy sauce base that is rubbed on the pig before roasting. 
Well, finally, I've gotten everything done for the quarter, so I'm mostly relaxing at this moment. Anyway, last Wednesday I made my own version of kimchi jeon, a Korean-style pancake with (cabbage) kimchi. Jeon is almost a cooking "genre" (for lack of a better term) in Korean cuisine - it's basically a fritter or cake that has a flour-egg-water base and is fried with a little oil, just like the way you would prepare pancakes. However, unlike pancakes, these are supposed to be savory. Anyhow, here's the recipe I used:
Batter:
1 C all-purpose flour
1 egg
Water (I hesitate to say how much since the batter really depends on how much moisture is in the air and in the flour, but I would start at 1/2 C.)
Put the ingredients for the batter in a large non-metallic bowl (glass is best). Mix until well-blended. Add more water, if necessary. The batter should be thick enough to thinly coat the back of a spoon and yet not be runny.
The rest of the ingredients:
1 C t'ong kimchi (napa cabbage kimchi), roughly chopped
1/2 cabbage, shredded
1 C chopped garlic chives
7-8 medium shrimp, chopped
1 T peanut oil
1 t kosher salt
1/2 t sesame oil
Heat a wok over high heat. When hot, put in peanut oil, wait a couple of seconds, and then put in shrimp. Cook until barely pink (which is not long at all). Add cabbage and garlic chives and cook until wilted, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and sesame oil. Let cool.
When cool enough, mix kimchi and the cabbage mixture into the batter and mix well. Heat a frying pan (nonstick is preferable, but a regular one works as well) over medium-high heat and add about 1/2 t peanut or vegetable oil. You may want to use a paper towel or napkin to evenly grease the pan. When hot, add batter in portions to make fritters that are approximately 3 1/2-4 " in diameter. Fry until golden brown on both sides. Cut into bite-sized portions. Serve hot or cold.
The kimchijeon in the frying pan.
The finished kimchijeon.
I noticed that I haven't been putting up many gamelan photos lately, so here goes. On Wednesday evenings I usually go to my friend Richard North's house/rehearsal space to play some West Javanese (Sunda, not Sudan, so it's Sundanese)/Malaysian/Cirebonese gamelan, which have completely different aesthetics from Central Javanese and Balinese gamelan. The group is called "Sinar Surya", The Rays of the Sun, which seems appropos for the Santa Barbara environment, except for the past couple of days, when it's actually been raining ;)
Richard North and Donn Howell playing the saron degung. Degung is an extremely calm genre of music from Sunda that features metallophones, an impressive set of gongs called jengglung, various horizontal gong-chimes, and of course a huge goong. (Yes, that's how you spell it in Sundanese.)
Here is Gamelan Sinar Surya in performance at the Santa Barbara Women's Club, Spring 2004. Interesting venue - the stage was small, but we got to have tea with the sponsors after the performance.
Felicia North (Richard's wife) dancing the Rumyang role from Topeng Cirebon, the masked dance tradition from Cirebon, on the northern coast of Java. This character is supposed to portray a rather flirtatious young adult, emerging from adolescence and yet not knowing exactly how to properly behave as an adult.
There's a glimpse of a rather enigmatic person - someone who likes gamelan and cooking. Luckily, you won't find it here - all you get is the story of a big goofball... who just so happens to like gamelan and cooking. Hence, "Gongs and Tongs". This goofball also happens to be a grad student in linguistics.
