Kitchen Chick

Que Huong, Madison Heights — the best $2.50 lunch around!

Banh Mi Tay with grilled pork

Along John R road in Madison Heights, near 13 mile, you might think that you've found Metro Detroit's Little Vietnam. Several Vietnamese restaurants, plus Saigon Market, a Vietnamese grocery, are tucked into the strip malls that line the road. (There's also a Filipino take-out place, as well as a Chinese bakery and a Chinese take-out BBQ place. It's a great neighborhood for Asian food generally.)

Que Huong is a small family run "hole in the wall" featuring great Vietnamese food at really low prices. The bulletin board just inside the door is covered in announcements written in Vietnamese, surely a good sign. The dinning room is clean and spare, and a TV plays a Vietnamese travel program in the background. For a shocking $2.50 you can get a delicious banh mi tay ("French bread") sandwich with Vietnamese prepared meats stuffed in a French-style baguette with julienned vegetables: a relic of colonialism. Fusion food, but good fusion food. One of these sandwiches is enough for me for lunch. Big appetites might want to order two, or get cold rolls to go along with it (the fried spring rolls were okay, but the cold rolls with shrimp and pork were better).

Or... if sandwiches aren't your thing, for just a bit more you can enjoy a large bowl of rice noodles with that same tasty grilled pork topped with chopped peanuts. Mmmmm...  Note that in both cases, they're using barbecued pork, which is unusual for Vietnamese restaurants in our limited experience, but tasty.

We spent the weekend in Troy, so Que Huong was only a few short miles away.  Between us both, we visited five times, trying a good range of the menu. I bought take-out pho. Delicious! And they put it in a wide  styrofoam container that works reasonably well as a soup bowl if you are without one. (I tore off small bunches of noodles and dropped them in the broth, adding more when there was room.) They give a generous bunch of basil, even in the winter when basil is so much harder to find around here!

Joe gave their bun bo hue a try: rice vermicelli soup with beef, Hue-style. (Picture in the extended post.)  It has a different flavor from pho; sweeter and spicy, even before adding hot sauce or hoisin.

Chocolate Report

I like nothing more than a bar of good dark chocolate. I can be perfectly happy with a single square (or perhaps two squares) a day, savored after a long day at work. Joe brought home a number of interesting bars lately...

Malagasy

Mora Mora
Origin: Madagascar
72% cacao

Dark chocolate with cherry notes. Very smooth. Nice and easy on the tongue. Definitely an approachable dark chocolate for someone who is looking to push past the 60% cacao level. The Mora Mora bar took a silver medal at the World Chocolate Awards in 2006.

Sambriano
Origin: Madagascar
75% cacao

A serious dark chocolate for serious dark chocolate lovers. I thought it had an earthy, almost slightly smoky, flavor, whereas Joe detected a faint burnt caramel edge to it. I really really liked this one and will be looking to buy it again.

Michel Cluizel
Noir au Grué de Cacao
Origin: Santo Domingo
60% cacao minimum

Deep dark chocolate flavor with cacao nibs embedded in the bar. It tastes darker than its 60% would suggest, probably primarily due to the unsweetened crunchy nibs. I think the nibs also give it a bit of a chalky texture. (But then, nibs are a bit chalky.) I generally like Michel Cluizel chocolate bars, and I love nibs, so this is a nice addition to their collection.

Vosges
Barcelona Bar
hickory smoked almonds, grey sea salt, "deep milk chocolate" (41%)

My friends know that I really, really dislike milk chocolate. Semi-sweet chocolate chips are fine in cookies. But plain milk chocolate for eating? Not for me. But Joe said that I had to try this one. I had some doubts -- one, it's milk chocolate and two, I'm not a big fan of Vosges -- but then he said the magic words, "it has sea salt" and I was intrigued. Would the sea salt would balance the too-sweet chocolate?

Yes.  Yes, it does. The Barcelona Bar is a fabulous mix of salt and chocolate and almond, with the salt contrasting nicely against the chocolate. I liked the salt so much that I started sprinkling more sea salt on pieces of Barcelona bar. This is a bar I'd definitely buy again, and that's saying something given that it's a mere 41%.

Mo's Bacon Bar
Mmmmmm.... bacon!  This bar features applewood smoked bacon, alderwood smoked salt, and more of that "deep milk chocolate" (41%).  It's really good; you wouldn't normally think of combining bacon and chocolate (well, normal people wouldn't) but it works surprisingly well. The bacon is rich and salty, and also brings a nice umami touch of its own. If we'd had this bar on its own, or alongside more conventional chocolate bars, I think we'd be raving about it. But we had it alongside the Barcelona bar, and it paled by comparison because they're doing some of the same kinds of things and the Barcelona bar is doing them better.

Don't let that stop you, though, because it's worth trying in its own right.  Just don't do it as part of a tasting flight with the Barcelona or something.

 

All these chocolates are available locally at Zingerman's.

Braised Beef with Rice Noodles

Click on photo for a larger and tastier image!

Winter and soup go together, and there's nothing quite like a bowl of hot Asian noodle soup. Pho gets all the attention these days, but Chinese cuisine also has a wide variety of tasty noodle soups that go beyond the standard restaurant offerings. (Ann Arbor locals: check out the noodle soup offerings at Great Lake Chinese Seafood for some tasty examples.)

Fuchsia Dunlop became one of my favorite cookbook authors when her Sichuan cookbook first came out. She followed that up with the Hunanese Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, its name recalling Mao Zedong, who was born in Hunan province. It's a little flashier than her first book, but filled with interesting bits of the history of Hunan cuisine, culture, and cooking techniques. I've been wanting to try this soup since I first got this book, but it takes a few hours for the beef to cook up right so I had put it off for "some day when I had the time." Recently, when paging through for something to cook, I realized that that evening I did have the time.

And it was worth every minute.

And it's winter! Just perfect is that?

Red-Braised Beef (jin shi niu rou)
Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuchsia Dunlop

This beef dish could be served with rice instead of as a soup. In that case, depending on the number of people you're feeding, you may want to use more than 1lb of beef (and adjust the seasonings appropriately).

Serves 4 to 6

1 lb. braising beef steak (I used stew meat)
2 Tbs peanut oil or beef drippings
2.5 Tbs chili bean paste
a few slices of unpeeled ginger
2 pieces cassia bark (or cinnamon stick, but not ceylon stick)
1 star anise
1 Tbs shaoxing wine (you can substitute sherry)
1 Tbs dark soy sauce
1 scallion
1/4 tsp whole sichuan peppercorns
1 cai gao (i.e. black cardamom pod) or substitute 3 green cardamom pods

Cut beef into bite-sized chunks. Place in a sauce pan with cold water to cover and bring to a boil. Skim the scum/froth off the surface. Remove beef with slotted spoon and set aside. Skim the cooking liquid again if necessary, strain, and set aside.

Heat dripping or oil in a clean pan or wok over medium flame. Add chili bean paste and stir-fry until oil is fragrant and red. Add ginger, cassia, and star anise and continue to stir-fry until fragrant.

Tip in beef and toss to coat. Add enough of the cooking liquid to cover the beef generously, and add remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and cover. Simmer for 2 - 3 hours, until tender.

The water will gradually reduce, and at the end you should have tender beef bites coated in a red sauce. If the water cooks off before it's done, add some more.

The making of noodle soups is a whole 'nother process described on its own two page spread in Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. In brief, to serve this as a soup you need: Chinese rice or wheat noodles, a flavorful stock, and soup seasonings. If you're using dried rice noodles, boil water and pour over the noodles and soak until soft. For each bowl of soup add: a dash of soy sauce, a dash of peanut or olive oil, some chopped scallions, chopped coriander, salt and pepper to taste.) The chili sauce clinging to the beef will also flavor the broth and color it a beautiful red. I served chopped pickled greens as a condiment.  It worked out very well.

Cranberry-Maple Pudding Cake

Just because the holidays are over doesn't mean that it's time to give up cranberries!

I was browsing the January edition of bon appétit (yeah, it's really lower case now) and spotted a lovely and simple "cranberry-maple pudding cake". One of my favorite fruits, plus maple syrup? How could I resist? So when our friend M offered to come over and cook us this lovely lentil soup from 101 Cookbooks, I knew what dessert I wanted to try. Joe whipped up a batch of maple-walnut ice cream from the Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream Cookbook to pair with it.

It cooks up quickly. The bread topping is a mix of flour and cornmeal, which is a great combo for creating a moist bread with some depth of flavor and crisp edges. (I use some cornmeal in my wheat pancakes for the same reason.) As it cooks, the biscuit-like topping absorbs the liquid, creating a rich moist bread pudding on top of a layer of cranberries. Joe's maple-walnut ice cream was a great match for it.

All three of us agreed that the basic recipe just didn't quite suit our tastes. It was too sweet, and the flavor a little too... one dimensional, and we wanted more cranberries. So I tweaked the recipe last night — a touch less maple syrup, a touch more salt, added some cinnamon, and more cranberries — and gave it another try. There may be more tweaking yet to do, but I think this is a good start.

Cranberry-Maple Pudding Bread
based on a recipe from the January 2008 issue of bon appetit.

Cranberries
3 C fresh cranberries
3/4 C real maple syrup (preferably Grade B, or Grade A dark amber; slightly stronger flavor that way)
2/3 C heavy whipping cream
1 tsp orange zest
1/4 salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon (I may up it to a full teaspoon next time)

Topping
2/3 C all purpose flour
1/3 C yellow cornmeal
1.5 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
3 Tbs sugar
1/2 C whole milk
1/2 C melted unsalted butter (1 stick or 4 oz.), cooled a bit
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 400 F.

Mix cranberries, maple syrup, whipping cream, the 1/4 tsp salt, and cinnamon in a sauce pan and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for a minute. (The cranberries may begin to pop, so watch out.) Remove from heat and pour into baking dish. I used a 10 inch pie dish, but it'd also fit into an 8x8x2-inch baking dish or an 11x7x2-inch dish.

Whisk flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt together. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg and sugar. Add milk, butter, and vanilla extract to the egg mixture. Add the flour mixture to the egg mixture and whisk to blend. Pour/drop (depending on batter thickness) batter over the cranberries.  Don't worry if you have gaps. The batter will expand to fill the dish.

Bake until golden and the cranberries bubble at the edges — about 28 minutes. Cool 15 minutes. Serve warm with ice cream (maple walnut is a really good choice as it turns out), whipped cream, or crème fraîche. 

New Year's Recommendations

2007 has come and gone, and I have a hard disk of food pics and recipes I haven't posted yet, virtual posts still sitting in my head, and restaurant reviews. So now it's 2008 and with 11.5 more months to go, I've made some resolutions for 2008 — and I'm not normally a resolution kind of person — that include:

• finish posting about our trip to Spain & Morocco. I'll be interspersing write-ups of our adventures between recipes and restaurant reviews.
• review some of my favorite restaurants that I have yet to cover, some of which are new and others which have been around for years!
• post more frequently (that's a perennial one!)
• eat more puy lentils, because puy lentils are awesome!

Doing all of these in one post would be... "odd" to say the least (especially as I didn't eat any puy lentils in Spain or Morocco), so let me start with just one. Here are three restaurants which I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet, but which Joe and I think are the "best in class" for Ann Arbor. You'll be seeing writeups (with yummy photos!) soon:

Middle Eastern
Don't get seduced by the fresh bread at Charlie's (ex La Shish). And don't get us wrong, Charlie's has some good food, but... La Zamaan Cafe, on State Street in the former Pilar's location, has the best Lebanese food in town bar none. Everything's just more flavorful there, from the ambrosial Karnabeet (cauliflower) appetizer, with lightly fried cauliflower dressed with tahini, sumac, and pomegranate seeds, to standards like shawarma and even baba ghannouj. (Seriously. I just used "ambrosial" and "cauliflower" in the same sentence without batting an eye. I mean it.) The eggplant main dishes are also standouts, making this a great place for vegetarians too — they won't feel like they're losing out to the omnivores if they eat here. The latest restaurant venture of Ali Hijazi, who used to run Shahrayar on Maynard, La Zamaan is excellent.  2285 S State, Ann Arbor, MI  48108 - (734) 761-5800.  (Note: their online menu doesn't list everything that their paper menu does.  It also doesn't say they're open on Sundays, but they are.)

Japanese
If you want the most authentic Japanese food around, head for Kerrytown and Yamato. This is a mom-and-pop place, where pop honed his skills on the Ginza in Tokyo, before moving to New York (he has an autograph from Madonna on the wall), and then getting recruited to Ann Arbor to be the chef at Godaiko.  When that didn't work out, he and his wife decided to stay and open their own place on the Kerrytown courtyard. As you might expect, the food is great. He doesn't have the huge array of funky sushi rolls that some places do, but he executes the ones he does have perfectly — his tamago is divine. And it's not just sushi — Joe loves the Katsudon. He's a Katsudon addict and says this is the best he's had. I often order the seasonal lunch set. With large windows looking out on the Kerrytown courtyard with its lovely Japanese maple, the ambiance is tranquil and at certain times of the year I feel like I've been transported to Japan. It's a small place, so it's best not to take a huge group.  403 N 5th Ave, Ann Arbor, 48104 - (734) 998-3484.

Lunch.  Every day.
I've mentioned everyday lunch before, but still haven't managed to turn up there with a camera, so I'll say it again: these talented chefs are doing amazing work. Because they don't have a standard menu — selections are decided every morning, and go on their website by 10:30 am — they can take advantage of what's in season, what's available, and what's on special to come up with menus that are seasonal, tasty, and sometimes shockingly cheap (huge slabs of seared tuna or Delmonico steaks for $13 including tax and a non-alcoholic beverage?!) You need to check it out. Lunch only (obviously) and only Tuesday-Saturday from 11-2 (less obviously). The menu for the day can be found either on their website, or on chalkboards all over Kerrytown. Second floor of Kerrytown, (734) 827-2665.

Happy New Year! Bonne Année!

Nature gifted us with a white New Years to make up for the mostly green Christmas we had. My fire bushes are now snow bushes!

Joe and I wish you a joyous New Year filled with good food, friends, and family. We'll be back with a review of what we loved about 2007, what we hope for 2008!

I started off 2008 food season with an epsidoe of a public television show of Jacque Pépin making puff pastry from scratch. He makes it look so simple! I know I'll have to try it myself.