Monday, October 28, 2013

Turmeric vegetarian fried rice - beat the monotony

Hello!

The spotlight ingredient for this week is turmeric! I did a previous post on lemongrass about a month ago, but it's time to branch out and try something new.

MOH and I were walking through our local farmer's market looking for new things to try when we saw a bunch of people crowded around a particular stand with their heads deeply immersed into picking things into their plastic bags. When I stepped closer, I noticed it was fresh turmeric! If your only experience of seeing turmeric is in a spice jar, turmeric in its raw form looks like little tiny nubbins. It normally comes in two flavors, white turmeric and yellow turmeric (the yellow being the one most people are familiar with). Depending on how strong of a turmeric flavor you want, the white turmeric is much more tame.



Turmeric is in the same family as ginger, and is often cited as having beneficial health effects similar to its sister counterpart in promoting wellness and warding off the progression of diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's (try typing in "turmeric health benefits" on Google or the National Institutes of Health website Pubmed and you'll get a wide array of scientific articles). Turmeric is widely used in Indian cooking, where it originated, and is often a main ingredient in curry. What some people don't know is that turmeric is sometimes substituted in place of saffron. What exactly does turmeric taste like? Some would say it has an earthy, spicy mustard-y taste with a subtle heat at the end (similar to what happens when you eat ginger).

I was really excited to see turmeric in its raw form and decided to do something different with it other than make curry. How about FRIED RICE?!?! Who can say no to fried rice? Especially after a long day of doing nothing but veg out in front of the TV (there was an Alien marathon as well as Modern Family, so we couldn't resist).

I like to make kimchi ginger fried rice usually, but decided to branch off and substitute turmeric with ginger instead. The results were a success (at least between MOH and I). The key to this dish is dicing the turmeric such that in every bite of the dish, you get a good helping of turmeric that packs a punch at the end.



Ingredients:
- 1 cup of diced fresh yellow turmeric
- 4 garlic cloves, diced
- 1 yellow onion, diced
- Half a bag of frozen vegetables (alternatively, you can dice 1 cup each of carrots, peas, corn and broccoli)
- 3 eggs
- 3 cups of cooked rice (brown or white, your choice)
- 1 cup of chopped green onions and cilantro
- 1 tbsp of soy sauce (season with fish sauce if you want a saltier bite)
- Salt and pepper to season



Protocol:

1. Heat a wok with 1 tsp of oil
2. Scramble eggs and set aside (can either cut the eggs into cubes or just take a spoon and mash crudely to get several pieces)
3. Add 1 tsp of oil and once hot, sautee the garlic and turmeric until garlic turns light brown
4. Add in vegetables, or if using frozen vegetable pack, first add in onions
5. Once onions translucent, add in frozen vegetables and sautee mixture until frozen vegetables are heated through
6. Add in rice, soy sauce and seasoning - mix thoroughly
7. Add in eggs and fold into the fried rice mixture
8. Garnish with green onions and cilantro
9. Scarf down like a zombie while you enjoy your last few hours of the weekend

A super simple dish that packs quite the punch thanks to the turmeric. If you're into this comfort food, spicing it up with turmeric will definitely lift the predictability of this dish and add a great heat at the end!

Until next time, happy eating all!

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Changing my senses to take the bitterness in stride

I've been upping my consumption of tea and coffee lately - mostly due to the weather changes (it's starting to look like fall here in Orange County!), but also due to looming deadlines that keep on piling up.

Photo courtesy of Onpuichunsen
I used to have to drink my coffee with loads of cream and sugar, and I'd normally take my tea with a generous helping of honey (trust me, green tea and honey > airborne in warding off a cold). Now, I can get away with coffee with some sugar, and even some black tea without honey (though honey's always welcome).

Your body has a great way of adapting to bitter tastes if necessary. Take bittermelon, or even chinese brocolli (Gai Lan) - I used to hate eating these as a kid, but my mom would make me eat a bowl of these veggies in soup form before leaving the dining table. Now, when I see these items at the farmer's market, I try to have these vegetables circulate my kitchen a couple times a month. I mean, who could resist stuffed bittermelon soup?! Most people have had gai lan while out eating dimsum - it's normally generously lathered/masked in this sumptuous oyster sauce and tastes so sweet. Gai lan in its natural form is actually the complete opposite - in the same family as brocolli, this leafy green is packed with a bitter punch. I actually prefer to steam my gai lan, or use it in a very simple shrimp soup broth over rice.

Gai lan as most people enjoy it (photo courtesy of Stu)

While it's been long established that we adapt to eating certain things for the sake of reaping the nutrients of the food, the actual "sciency" rationale behind how our brain allows us to overcome this is something more of a black box of mystery.

Recently, researchers published a cool study in Science that looked at how animals may be adapting to bitter tastes over time using.... FLIES! Okay, don't stop reading from here. Flies are pretty awesome. If you look at early developmental work, there's a ton of crazy stuff that has been discovered using flies as the animal model (such as the discovery of hox genes - these genes are important for determining how to organize body segmentation).


Despite the prevalence of a majority of neuroscience work in mice and rats, flies haven't dropped off just yet (haha, get it?). With regards to sensing food, flies are great to use for taste research since they have multiple receptors on their body that can sense different flavors - they have a ton of tiny hairlike fibers called gustatory sensilla that have different food receptors. In this study, researchers looked at the flys' ability to adapt to consuming camphor, a bitter compound that tastes like a cross between a menthol cough drop and spoonful of cinnamon (yum). What they found was that over time, flies adapted to eating camphor, but it was a result of having less of a receptor that detected that bitter compound, in this case TRPL. So did the receptor disappear forever, go on a temporary hiatus, or what? As it turns out, the amount of receptor present was being controlled - depending on consumption of the bitter compound, there would either be more or less of the receptor present. So depending on your diet, the particular receptors can be ever changing helping you blunt or heighten your responses to detecting a particular taste. This study was only done with camphor, and they found that other bitter compounds had no effect on the receptor levels, suggesting that the actual regulation of flavor detection varies considerably on what receptor you have in the sensing environment.*

This study is fairly new, and not much has been done on the human forefront, but it would be interesting to see if regulation of your tasting environment is as dynamic as the fly's. Whether it's a mind over matter type situation for humans, or if there's actually chemical regulation to control how much bitter, sweet, or salty we can handle, it's still something to keep in mind. MOH can serve as a great example to this - when we first met, he declared a few things that he'd never stand for:

1. Swimming (he'd taken tons of lessons and could never float)
2. Doing high intensity cardiovascular activity
and
3. Eating bittermelon / durian in any form, whether it's soup-ified or in ice cream form

It's been a long journey with him and there's considerable progress on his end - he will eat bittermelon if it's sauteed with some onions and eggs, and enjoys spinning to loud EDM music. I can't say much about the exercise, but I think the gradual acceptance of bittermelon has something potentially to do with a rewiring or remodeling of the chemical environment in his mouth. No status on the durian - he still thinks it smells too much like feet to enjoy.

So much hate for durians - even they need love!


Until next time, happy eating all!


***The actual molecular mechanism behind regulation of the TRPL channel is through a Ube3a mediated ubiquitination and degradation of TRPL.

References:

Zhang YZ et al., 2013. Food experience - induced taste desensitization modulated by the Drosophila TRPL channel. Nature Neuroscience. 1468-1476

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Humanese cuisine, vegan Sunday fun

These past two weeks have been hectic.

The academic quarter has started, meaning there's tons of undergraduates on campus walking everywhere, including in the bike path (thanks cell phone talker for making me veer quickly to the left!). With the fall quarter starting, that also means I'm starting to teach again. I have a love/hate relationship with teaching - I love science education / community outreach, but HATE the grading that it entails.

Needless to say, I fell off the bandwagon of my once a week postings, but I'm back! This weekend was jam packed with going into lab, working on teaching material, blowing and repairing my car battery, heading to the comic shop, to finally, getting to try a great vegan restaurant in Fountain Valley that has been on my "must-eats" for awhile now.

Au Lac is a cozy restaurant that showcases Vietnamese dishes with a vegan flair. They promote "humanese" cuisine, an idea coined by the chef there, which is the idea that humans and animals are all the same deep down. Hence, in order to fully appreciate life, humans need to appreciate others around them (humans, animals, and plants alike). *Note, I'm not advocating veganism to anyone, for what anyone eat is a personal choice, but just wanted to give some background on what "humanese" means.



One thing that really drew me to the restaurant was their specialty item "mam va rau" - an eggplant hot pot or seafood gumbo. This dish is so pungent. I think one reason why the dish isn't showcased in restaurants too often is because of the smell - it is very garlicky and fishy. I think you need an acquired taste to fully appreciate this dish - ask any Vietnamese person and they'll often say how much they like it, and comment on how stanky it can get. Despite the funky smell, it's so delicious. It's a very salty broth that you pour over rice noodles and vegetables and squeeze lime over to top it off - so tasty, and a great contrast of salty/sour in your mouth. The texture difference really plays well too - you have the soft sumptuous eggplant and fish that goes great with soft noodles and a medley of crunchy vegetables to top it.

I was really eager to try Au Lac's rendition of mam va rau and when I tried the dish, it did not disappoint at all. Though tame in the funky smell, the broth was very flavorful and tasted exactly like the traditional mam dish that I grew up eating. Instead of meats and fishes, this dish had faux fish and tofu. The tofu and fish soaked up the broth flavor and had this intense umami taste to them.


Really great food here. I'm sad that I don't live close enough to go here more frequently! Hope everyone's meals this weekend are as good as the one I just had!

Happy eating all!