It doesn’t happen often. In fact, it happens so rarely that I can’t remember the last time. I see a recipe in a food magazine, and something about it tells me the author is my kind of cook, and that a relationship of some kind will soon be formed, virtually or otherwise.
The only other time I can remember anything even remotely similar was back when Gourmet was still happening. I was writing the first Jam Today book at the time, and to my amusement, I started noticing that every time I clipped a recipe from Gourmet, it was always by the same editor, Maggie Ruggerio. (Yo, Maggie!) I doublechecked just to make sure it wasn’t that she wrote every recipe, and no, yes, it was just her recipes I was drawn to. Why? Having thought about it for years, and having in the meantime met Maggie and consider her one of my dearest friends and most valued dinner partners, I have narrowed it down to the fact that everything about a person tells you about that person. How they cook, how they eat, how they write, how they live tells you so much that isn’t directly stated. This was how I realized that Anthony Bourdain was not the hard livin’, hard druggin’, White Boy Rebel Without a Cause as portrayed in Kitchen Confidential, a book I found so distasteful that I sent my copy off to Goodwill. By accident, I picked up his cookbook for his NYC restaurant at the library. Once started, I couldn’t put it down. Every single recipe shouted humane, thoughtful, loving person who cared about his family, his workplace, and his world. I realized with a jolt that the other book had been about making a splash and establishing himself in a world less kind than he wanted it to be. If he lost his way once he got a little too famous, that is really sad. He was a real person, and better I cannot say about anyone.
It was clear Maggie was a real person. An imaginative, flexible, thrifty, hilarious person. Anyway, an admirable one. So I sent her a pdf of Jam Today, and got an almost immediate answer. I had to come to NYC for a publisher’s sales conference, so we made plans to meet. She said she’d come get me at the venue. I said, “I’ll be the one in the flat black shoes and the round black glasses.” She said, “This is an indie publishers meeting, right? Isn’t that a description of everyone there?” (In fact, I checked out everyone’s shoes that meeting, and yes, Gloria, publisher then of Feminist Press was wearing flat black etc.)
I was busy talking to my distributor’s marketing director, when I saw someone come in at the top of the hall. We recognized each other immediately. And that was the start of my friendship with Maggie.
That’s a bit of a detour, since the book I want to tell you about, and the hacks therein, are by a woman I haven’t met or corresponded with, but who I am still eternally in the debt thereof. Andrea Nguyen, of Vietnamese Food Any Day. It started slowly, with her recipe for Any Day Viet Pickle, a recipe so simple, so savory, so useful that my eyes narrowed thoughtfully as I tasted the result in my mind’s palate. Then I started noticing a similar thing to my experience with Maggie. In any cooking magazine (and I get all of them), if I was drawn to a recipe and wanted to keep the magazine rather than send it off to magazine-less friends, it was invariably by her.
So I got the book. Hardcover. New. Without taking it out of the library first. Proof I’m getting older, but also proof of how interested I was in this particular book.
It really is ravishing. She learned to cook from her mother, after the whole family was refugee from Viet Nam (we remember why, don’t we? Even you young ‘uns, yes? And yet history keeps repeating itself, damn). Her mother, obviously a flexible and ingenious cook, dove in to learning how to make Vietnamese style food with what resources were available in a small, Central California town. Or, as Andrea says in the book, “Keeping our feet in two worlds was an adventure, not a challenge. We were thrifty, but well fed.”
I fell in love at that point. And the rest of the book did not disappoint.
Here is another hint as to how important a cookbook this is: I have yet to make a recipe exactly as Andrea writes it. Each recipe of hers is a cascade of suggestions of what to do, and what to do it with. Since getting the book, I’ve learned how to make brown Jasmine rice (every single other recipe said do it a different way, and, no surprise, her way is the only way to get it perfectly done), how to use Maggi seasoning, how to add Brewer’s yeast at will to Asian themed foods, how to use fish sauce combined with oyster sauce, how to add butter to Asian noodles, how to, how to, how to…
She’s the real deal. As if that wasn’t enough, she has taught me the SINGLE GREATEST GARLIC HACK OF ALL TIME. I mean, me, who thought she knew every single garlic hack ever devised. This was not just a new one on me, but the garlic hack of my dreams, the one that, as Escoffier says, the invention of rivals the discovery of a brand new star.
It’s in her recipe for Umami Garlic Noodles with Shiitake Mushroom, which she tells us is a ‘cult favorite among Viet Americans.’ It calls for ‘4 large garlic cloves, minced or put through a garlic press,’ and then—this is the amazaballs part—she suggests you put the garlic into a small dish and add about a tablespoon of water, just to barely cover. ‘Set aside and expect the garlic to absorb most of the water; there is no need to drain it before adding later.’
This, she says with some understatement later in the recipe, keeps the garlic from burning when you add it to the pan.
Now, she suggests adding it to a pan off the heat, with the butter and shallot, and gently cooking them all. But I am here to tell you that if you add the garlic to a hot pan, it will turn a beautiful gold color and not do that awful burning thing as you turn back to retrieve the other items meant to go in after.
It’s a wonderful way to get a lot of garlic flavor into a dish of any kind, and if that isn’t something to celebrate as much as the discovery of a new star, I’m sure I don’t know what is.
I used that trick for a noodle dish of my own, that used some elements of her Umami Garlic Noodles (love that name), and some of a couple of other udon recipes I had saved, or found on the Internet. For one thing, I had frozen udon noodles to work with, and I doubted very much all the recipes that said to cook them for 5 to 8 minutes—but I suppose that was always for dried udon.
Finally, I found another trick in another recipe—just add a bunch of boiling water to the noodles in a bowl, let sit for a minute, and drain. Spread on a towel to dry. These are terrific for stir frying, since I like my noodles fried and browned in patches.
I loved the idea of using mushrooms the way Andrea does in her recipe, but I generally have white mushrooms, rather than the more expensive shitake, in my fridge. I did love the sauce she suggested: oyster sauce, fish sauce, cornstarch, MSG or Brewer’s yeast, sugar, and reserved cooking water. Of course, I didn’t have any reserved cooking water, so I took some of the soaking water for the udon and added a generous splot of dried mushroom powder, made from chanterelles foraged by my remarkable neighbor Cindy Warzyn. That should do the trick, I figured. (As it turned out, I figured correctly.)
Also, I had a lovely half head of farmers market radicchio. I wanted to use that.
So. I made a lovely lunch for two of Stir Fried Udon noodles with Umami Mushrooms and Radicchio. And Alex gave a sigh of pure pleasure, and said, “Why have our meals been getting better and better lately?” I blame Andrea, I said.
Here’s how:
Stir Fried Udon Noodles with Umami Mushrooms and Radicchio (for Two)
8 ounces fresh udon noodles
4 to 6 large garlic cloves, minced
¾ cup noodle soaking water for sauce plus 1 tablespoon for the garlic
1 tablespoon dried mushroom powder (opt.)
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
2 teaspoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch
2 tablespoons Brewer’s yeast
½ teaspoon sugar.
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
4 tablespoons butter
8 – 10 fresh thickly sliced mushrooms of any kind
half a head of radicchio, shredded
1 minced shallot
Black pepper
–Put the noodles in a bowl, cover with boiling water, let stand one minute, drain, spread the noodles on a towel to dry
–Measure out ¾ cup of the soaking water, add a little salt and optional mushroom powder, or same amount chicken bouillon granules
–Add oyster sauce, fish sauce, cornstarch, Brewer’s yeast, sugar to the soaking water
–Mince the garlic cloves. Put in a tablespoon of the soaking water, set aside.
–Slice the mushrooms thickly, shred the radicchio, mince the shallot, set aside.
–Heat the tablespoon of oil in a wok or large skillet, stir fry the noodles till done to your taste. Remove the noodles, set aside.
–Wipe out the wok with a paper towel.
–Heat the wok again on medium till a drop of water sizzles. Add the butter. Add the garlic. Add the mushrooms. Cook till mushrooms are browned, done, and enticing looking. Add the minced shallot and the shredded radicchio. Give a stir to mix.
–Add the sauce. Increase the heat slightly. Stir.
–When sauce bubbles and everything is unctuous and smelling terrific, turn off the heat, give a few twists to a peppermill above, and let it rest for a minute.
Serve in pasta bowls.
Inhale. Thank your lucky stars you have this for a meal. Fresh figs are a nice dessert. Thank Andrea Nguyen, and if you can, head out and buy her book. Which is the best way to thank an author, cookbook or otherwise, after all.