Kitchen Chick

Sichuan — Land of Plenty Good Food

Dry Fried Beef Slivers

One night a week or so back Joe said to me, "Can we please have Chinese?"

When I started teaching myself how to cook, it was Chinese food I turned to. I cooked Chinese for years and years before branching out to other cuisines. Then I stopped cooking Chinese. I guess I got tired of it. How someone can get tired of a cuisine as vast and every changing as Chinese, I have no idea. More like, I got tired of the recipes I used.

So I turned to what I think is one of the most exciting Chinese cookbooks to be published in the past few years is Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop. I've been able to find recipes in this book for Sichuan dishes that I ate in China — dishes I've never seen on the menu at a Sichuan restaurant in the States.

Icy Blueberry Heaven

We went to Big George's to acquire a new microwave.  Yes, in the name of energy efficiency we decided that it was finally time to replace our old faithful microwave.

And we walked out with a Cuisinart Compressor Ice Cream Maker.

(Oh, and a new microwave.)

We've already tried vanilla, chocolate, and peanut butter ice cream. I had a bunch of frozen blueberries and decided to make blueberry sorbet. You make a sugar syrup, mix it with pureed blueberries, and let the ice cream maker do its thing. Et voila! Blueberry sorbet.

Sounds easy until you have to push 2.5 pounds of pureed blueberries through a metal strainer. I made my sugar syrup and pureed my blueberries with some lime juice. Then I made a huge mess mashing the puree through the strainer. I had to bleach my sink when I was finally done. (We have an old-fashioned white porcelain sink. Blueberry anything stains it instantly blue.) It felt like it was taking forever. I thought to myself, "Fun experiment, but I'm never doing this again." Eventually -- after all the mashing and stirring and pressing -- only a thick mass of blueberry skins and seeds remained.