Sear-iously Good Tuna

The items in this week's share really inspired this quick and easy dinner of sesame crusted seared tuna over bok choy and daikon.  It didn't hurt that tuna was on sale at the grocery store either.

Start by mixing up a marinade for your tuna.  We used soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, and some fresh ginger. Toss everything together, add your tuna, and let it sit while you prep everything else.

For the salad, we just chopped up some baby bok choy, sugar snap peas, and daikon.  If you have a mandoline, that would be ideal for slicing the daikon.  But if you're like us and don't have one, just try to slice the daikon as thin as possible.

For the dressing, we threw together some sesame oil, Chinese cooking wine, black vinegar, and a touch of honey.  You could also use rice wine vinegar in place of the Chinese cooking wine and black vinegar, we just didn't have any on hand.  So we improvised.

Now, back to the tuna.  Once marinated, we seasoned it with some wasabi salt & pepper that we'd picked up from the Asian market, to add a little spice.  But if you don't have any, you can season with salt and pepper.  Then just roll it in your sesame seeds.  We used a combo of black and regular.  Place your tuna in a hot pan and sear it for a couple minutes on each side.  We like it raw in the middle, so we didn't leave our tuna in the pan very long.

Then just slice up your tuna and arrange it on top of your salad.  We topped ours with some freshly sliced scallions.  It paired nicely with the Flying Dog green tea imperial stout that I happened to find at the grocery store that morning.  Restaurant quality food in a matter of minutes.  What more could you ask for?

Homemade Kimchi

You've heard us talk about our homemade kimchi a few times (here and here), and we're finally spilling the beans on how we made it.

We used this recipe, given to us by my cousin, that came from The Lucky Peach.

We just had a head of regular green cabbage on hand, rather than the suggested napa cabbage, but from our previous experience, the green cabbage worked just as well.  Start by chopping your cabbage into big hunks.  You'll season liberally with salt and sugar, and let it sit in the fridge overnight.


Next, you'll want to whip up the seasonings.  In a food processor, puree the garlic, ginger, soy sauce, Korean chili flake, fish sauce, and brine shrimp.

Once that's formed a nice paste/sauce, dump it over your cabbage, carrots and green onion.  We also added some daikon to the mix.  Here's where you'll want to get in there with your hands to make sure the spice mixture gets into all the nooks and crannies of the cabbage.

Once everything is good and mixed, you'll want to stuff everything into a clean glass jar that can be sealed air tight.  We used the jars we picked up from Ikea, that we've also used for our sauerkraut.  Stuff as much of the cabbage as you can into the jar.  If you don't have a jar, you can also use a plastic container with a lid.  In our first attempt at making kimchi, we went this route, and it came out great!  The key is to make sure that the cabbage is packed in as tightly as possible, and no air can get in.

Then you just place it in the fridge and let it ferment.  After a week or so, it'll be ready to go!

Banh Who? Banh Mi!

Justin's been dying to cook something out of his Eat With Your Hands cookbook that I gave him for Christmas.  So when we got oysters in our share again this week, he jumped at the opportunity to make oyster banh mi.  If you're not familiar with this delicious Vietnamese sandwich, I'll break it down for you.  You start with a nice, crusty baguette, some kind of meat in the middle, pickled vegetables, and pate.  The baguette and the pate harken back to the French influence that once reigned over Vietnam.

So here's our version, ala Zakary Pelaccio...

We started by making a sambal aioli.  We toasted up some shrimp paste (belecan) to take some of the stinkiness out of it.  If you haven't experienced it, you can smell it from across the room, and its a pretty pungent smell.  But it adds a great flavor to dishes.  This was mixed with some chili garlic sauce and our homemade aioli.

For the pickled vegetables, we stuck with carrots and daikon, marinated in a bit of vinegar, fish sauce, honey and cayenne.  This added a bit of acidity, sweetness, and crunch to the sandwich.

The oysters were tossed in a bit of flour, cornstarch, salt and white pepper.  Then we dropped them into the hot oil to fry up.  They were ready in a matter of minutes.

Then it was time to build the sandwich!  We toasted up the buns, and just like we did for our po' boys, I pulled out some of the bread from each side to make little troughs for everything to sit in.  The sambal aioli went on both sides of the bread.  On top of the oysters we laid a few slices of mortadella.  This replaced the traditional pate.  Then some fresh cilantro and some of the pickled veggies topped things off.  To drink, Zak recommended Asahi, but none of our local beer suppliers had bombers of it, and we forgot to pick one up at H-Mart, so we had to come up with an alternate drink pairing. We went with a Vietnamese-style iced coffee.  Since we only had regular coffee, we brewed some up, let it cool, and added it to some sweetened condensed milk.  It wasn't as strong as your typical Vietnamese iced coffee, but it did the trick!

Even though there were so many elements in one sandwich, the individual flavors came through, and played off each other nicely.  The oysters were sweet, the mortadella added a little saltiness, there was some spice from the aioli, acidity and crunch from the pickled vegetables, and freshness from the cilantro.  Not to mention the crusty, toasty bread.  It's definitely the best banh mi we've had in DC!