What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?

First, What's Eating Dan? videos from America's Test Kitchen are must-watches for the aspiring home chef. He really breaks down cooking techniques and principles. Today's recommendation is The Science of Ginger: Why and How it Burns and Its Impact on Cooking. Interesting tidbits:

• The compound gingerol fits in our spicy-detecting receptors but not perfectly, which produces a mild spicy sensation that's less intense than capsaicin from peppers.
• In dried ginger, gingerol loses its water molecule and becomes another compound, shogaol, which fits in those receptors better, producing a more intense spiciness (but still less than capsaicin).
• When you cook ginger, some of the gingerol breaks down to zingerone which fits in those same receptors more poorly than the original gingerol, producing an even less intense spiciness!

So, in short, how you prepare ginger fundamentally changes its properties!

Anyway, I have a confession: I love fancy bougie salads from Mixt, Sweetgreens, and their verdant ilk. But what I don't love is shelling out $20+ a salad.

So I've been working on making my own salad clones! I've been working on cloning Mixt's Mandarin salad: spring greens, chopped romaine lettuce, candied pecans, sesame, julienned carrots, all dressed with a miso-ginger sauce, and topped with juicy mandarin orange slices and warm sliced chicken. I've done two iterations and it's about 70% as good as Mixt's. A few more iterations and it'll get there. 😉

豆干 (pronounced "dough gan") gets translated as "dried bean curd" which is an awful unmarketable name. It's basically tofu that's firmer than "firm" tofu - it's had more water pressed out and is denser and slightly chewy. It's very common here in Taiwan, and I think it would be way more popular than tofu in the United States - it fits the role of chicken breast in many dishes, imo. Lately I've been cutting it up into strips, then cutting onion and bell pepper into strips of a similar size and stir frying it similar to fajitas. At the end, though, I add salt, pepper, tons of cilantro (with the stems finely diced), and a big dollop of 豆瓣醬, but not a Taiwanese brand - theirs is less intense flavor. Instead, I recommend this Chinese brand: 鵑城牌. Not sure how hard it is to find in other countries. It's the same flavor that is used in (some) Mapo Tofus.

It's a healthy, fast, cheap meal. Sometimes I serve it on rice or noodles but I often just eat a big plate of it by itself.

Anyways, I have an iron deficiency and I'm vegetarian. I looked at my diet and think I'm getting enough iron, but I might not be getting enough Vitamin C to absorb the iron (I added more iron-rich food to my diet for 2-3 months and my number went down), so I'm trying to add more of that, and bell pepper is loaded with it (plus tofu/豆干 has iron), so I'm hoping this plus supplements helps without forcing me into eating more meat. Another possibility that there's mixed research on is that the polyphenols in coffee prevent you from absorbing iron too, which would be... devastating.