Chinese Scallion Pancakes and Google Reader

I love my google reader page. It gives me the warm fuzzies. I want to curl up with it on the couch, a steamy cup of genmaicha tea in one hand and my browsing finger on the other. For the uninitiated, it is a web-based organizer of RSS feeds. In my line of hobbying, I follow a lot of food blogs as well as pop-culture and some educational feeds. My close friend Google Reader consolidates and organizes all of these feeds into one pleasant-looking interface. You can also share items on google reader with your google contacts. It is the mf bomb, people. I am telling you.

On a completely different note, a couple weeks ago I inspected a restaurant near Chateau Elan owned by this nice Korean couple. Seeing pounds of marinated galbi in her fridge, I asked if she would give me her galbi recipe. Of course she would! I am the health inspector, and restaurant owners are terrified of me. So I grabbed some short ribs from the local Super H and had a barbecue with some friends. As one of the banchan for the barbecue, I whipped up some Chinese scallion pancakes. My boyfriend and I had eaten these at Chef Liu's off Buford Hwy. Chef Liu's also has decent soup dumplings, but I don't have the time or patience for making soup dumplings at this point in my life.

The pancakes are super easy to make and the ingredients are simple. Some recipes use yeast, but I am not a baker and should not be encouraged to buy anything that is going to sit longer than a month in my little pantry.

Chinese Scallion Pancakes

2 cups flour

1 cup hot water

Green onions, sliced into thin rings

Sesame seeds

Kosher salt

Extra virgin olive oil

Sambal oelek chili paste to spread over pancake

Mix your 2 cups flour and 1 cup hot water until the dough is fully mixed and slightly sticky. Flour your rolling surface and your hands. Scoop a small handful of dough onto the floured surface and press flat into a circle. It doesn't have to be perfect, people, any circular shape will do.

Place a small handle of slice green onion and a sprinkling of sesame seeds onto the flat dough and press the ingredients gently into the dough so they will stick. Now roll the dough into a tube like a taquito, lengthening and forming it into a cylinder. Take the cylinder and curl it around itself like a snail shell. Press the rolled up dough flat. The snail shell you created should ensure that the pancake is relatively circular once you press it out.

Brown the pancake in a skillet on medium heat in about 1/3 tbsp of olive oil. For heat, spread a small amount of chili paste on the pancakes. The pancakes can by somewhat dry, so serve them with a moist food like scrambled eggs or soup.

Please Save Me! Roasted Pumpkins

It is 4 o'clock in the morning here in Hazlehurst, GA. Hazlehurst is a tiny little town 30 minutes south of Vidalia. I am holed up at the cleanest hotel I could find for on-site sewage management systems (or septic system) training. I work as an environmentalist, and one of my responsibilities is inspecting septic tanks and helping people get the most out of their septic system. It isn't glamorous, but I love fiddling around outside with a hand-held auger and playing in the mud.

Hazlehurst is a typical south Georgia city. Beautiful flatwood pine forests, heat-worn buildings, and good ol' boy politics. The most apparent problem I have with this place is that I can count the number of restaurants in this town with both hands. Burger King, McDonald's, Krystal, and Dairy Queen. There's a small pizza buffet place that didn't make me sick. The last two nights I've been eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with yogurt and fruit from my hotel fridge. We had a "cookout" one night with fried quail, venison sausage, and an assortment of carbohydrates including french fries, biscuits, gravy, grits, and coconut cake. Needless to say, I was starved for anything that wasn't fast food, so I chomped into that little quail like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately, on the second bite I crunched down into a piece of birdshot. I just sat staring at the small metal ball in my hand, wondering what I had done to deserve this punishment.

Last night my boyfriend told me he was eating Peking duck and Chinese broccoli. A part of me died.

I am starved for wholesome, nutritious, and appealing provisions, and that is why I am up at 4:30 am writing about pumpkins. Here we go.

Roasting a pumpkin is very easy, and it is an excellent way to eat pumpkin in its unsweetened, unprocessed form. (Plus, you get to roast the seeds for extra credit.)

Roasted Pumpkin

1 small sugar pumpkin (or pie pumpkin)

1 tbsp butter, melted

Enough water to cover the bottom of your roasting pan

Slice the pumpkin in half, being careful not to dismember yourself. Gently remove the seeds from the pulp with a gentle pinching action. The less pulp you pull off with the seeds, the better. Scrape the stringy pulp out of the pumpkin with a large spoon. (Note: I was doing this all outside. It can get messy and dried pulp is hard to scrub off the kitchen counter.)

Baste the inside of the pumpkin with the melted butter. Turn the pumpkin upside down on a roasting pan so the rind is facing up. Fill the pan with water so that the entire bottom is covered. Preheat oven to 350 and roast for 45-55 minutes.

I used a mixture of roast pumpkin and roast acorn squash to make Thai-Spiced Pumpkin Soup from 101 Cookbooks. I went a little crazy on the red thai paste and the sambal oelek chili paste, but it was delcious. My boyfriend was drinking it up. I would also recommend trying any of these pumpkin dishes from Pinch My Salt.