Welcome to Year of the Tiger šÆ
With nian gao (mochi cake) thatās crispy on the outside and custardy on the inside, plus some Extra Fancy Dates for Valentineās Day, and more.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we celebrate Lunar New Year and eat what we crave. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.Ā
Dried cherry Basque-style baked nian gao/幓ē³ at home
Adapted from Joy Huang via Food 52
Legend has it that if you eat nian Gao on the first day of spring festival, aka Lunar New Year, youāll have a high (gao) year (nian). Legend also has it that youāre not supposed to wash your hair, or cry, so legends may vary. Although I do approve of the healthy expression of emotion any day of the year, I also like to make some lucky foods just in case. I never knew how much I loved Nian Gao, or mochi cake, until I found this recipe from Joy Huang. Unlike traditional recipes, which are first steamed as a cake, and then cut into strips and fried, this Nian gao is a one-step baked wonder. Itās exceedingly simple to makeā you just stir together glutinous rice flour, eggs, milk, sugar and a few other thingsā pour into a pan, and bake. Something magical happens in the process. Because the batter is so high in liquid, the edges start to caramelize and brown, while the inside is still soft and jiggly (and remains custardy even when cold!). The end result is like a fine basque cheesecake, or a perfect canele, without all the work. Make sure to butter your pan extra well with a high quality butter for extra crisp edges, and if you want extra crunch you can make this Nian Gao in muffin tins, baking for 25-30 minutes. Because the ingredients are so simple, make sure to use the best butter and milk you have. I threw in a handful of dried cherries I rehydrated in boiling water for a splash of good-luck red and extra tang.
Note: I made a second batch with ground black sesame seeds stirred in, and it did not crisp and caramelize nearly as well, although it was delicious.
Vegan Caesar dressing at Trader Joeās
Available at your local Trader Joeās.
Iāve never viewed salad as a āvirtuousā food. In fact, for most of my life, Iāve never viewed salad as much of anything at all. I grew up in a Chinese household where vegetables were always cooked (except maybe the odd cucumber, which was also used in stir-fries), and often the center of the meal. Therefore, my relationship to salad as an adult is best summed up as a Summer fling: Iāll suddenly get the craving to eat raw greens, usually thickly coated in dressing, for weeks on end, and then promptly forget about it for months to come. My favorite lettuce is Romaine, and when Iām on my yearly salad kick, I'll literally eat bags of chopped romaine by the fistful, usually when Iām coding or working late. Lettuce honestly doesnāt feel like a food so much to me as it is a texture, so (non-bag) salad time is always about the dressing to me. I am really enjoying this vegan Caesar dressing from Trader Joeās lately. I love Caesar salad but I actually do not love the taste of dairy (except in milk or ice cream) so the fact that this doesnāt have parm to cloy up the taste, and uses a lot of capers instead of anchovies, makes it more appealing than regular dressing to me.
Stick style surimi at Whole Foods
I am just going to go ahead and say it ā imitation crab sticks slap so hard. This is not a gourmet food blog. This is a list of five things I eat every week, and I eat a lot of crab sticks because you donāt need to cook them, you donāt need to worry about them going bad, and I love how they taste. And I will confess something even more sacrilegious, which is the fact that although I shop at a lot of Asian marts (including my fave, Sunrise Mart, and the freezer section of real-life-Pokemon Department Store TESO Life), my absolute favorite surimi (imitation food) comes from Whole Foods. I know(!!!). Itās so good though. You can get a pack for like $3.99, and I like to make California roll kimbap with it, wrapping freshly made vinegared rice, thinly sliced egg omelette, surimi and avocado in nori (this snack only gets better after a few hours in the fridge), or eat them straight up out of the fridge like string cheese. 10/10 recommend.Ā
Galbi combo at BCD Tofu House
5 W 32nd St, New York, NY 10001
My favorite combo, aside from this Galbi combo, is to work out and then eat an enormous amount of Korean food. There is something about the super salty and sweet kimchi and bbq that hits just right after sweating. Plus, if you go to BCD Tofu House on a random weekday post-gym, you can actually find a seat inside. The Galbi Combo comes with a huge pile of meat, sundubu jjigae, rice, and of course banchan (plus a bowl of barley porridge (?) to cleanse your palette). Usually my biggest beef (ha!) about kbbq is that thereās never enough meat for the price, but you get so much galbi in this combo you could easily share it amongst two people and not order anything else, even though if you do that the server will frown. Unfortunately after you eat this combo you will also face the consequences of my least-favorite combo, which is kbbq and heartburn.
Extra (extra) Fancy Dates (aka Date Snickers) at home
Hereās a TikTok of the recipe.
A few weeks ago I had to forcibly delete the TikTok app from my phone, not because I did not enjoy it, but because I would literally lie in the bathtub for hours on end scrolling through (increasingly) deranged Toks that encouraged me to do things like try new Korean makeup looks but also catfish my friendās boyfriend. After realizing that I had wandered into cursed āPut a Ring on It Bestie!!!ā Woman Tok and that I personally identified more as a Boyfriend, I threw my phone into the cold bathwater and started life anew. But, I did learn one good thing from my time in Tokland, which is how to make these delicious date (the food) Snickers. All you have to do is remove the pits (donāt buy the pre-pitted ones, they are so much less good!!!) from extra fancy Medjool dates, fill the center up with crunchy peanut butter, put it in the freezer, and then dip into melted dark chocolate mixed with a spoonful of coconut oil once frozen (you store these in the freezer and eat them cold). It sounds so simple but the result is so, so good. I am a little embarrassed to admit this because Iām always baking fancy desserts and Iām hoarding several boxes of chocolate in my apartment as we speak, but I almost always want to eat these Date Snickers instead. Ā
Happy Weekend,
Soph
P.S. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being a reader. Please support my writing by buying a paid subscription for yourself (or a friend!) so that I can continue to keep sharing my thoughts. Paid subscribers will have access to bonus longform recipes.