Making muu shu pork - worth the effort?

My old friend Carol came to visit me from Winnipeg and we decided to recreate one of our long standing traditions - starting in 1984, we used to go to the old Szechan Restaurant on Pembina Highway and order the chicken with cashews (with chilis and baby corn) and the muu shuu pork.  If you've never had muu shuu, it's a crunchy stirfry that you mound onto sesame oil infused pancakes, slathered in hoisin sauce and a dab of hot sauce, eat like a mini burrito - sweet! 

Rather than simply finding a restaurant that serves this dish, we decided that we should try and make it ourselves.  I found this Fine Cooking recipe which started with a hunt for unusual ingredients in our local chinese grocery store... cloud ears (dried mushrooms), golden needles (dried lily buds) and bamboo shoots all added interesting flavours and textures to this complex dish.

Unfortunately it was a crazily complicated recipe - lots of chopping and soaking and stir frying... We even went as far as handrolling the mandarin pancakes and making the mandarin sauce - exhausting!

making the pancakes...

Spread on the mandarin sauce

Pile on some of the stir fry

Don't forget the hot sauce!

Roll it up - like a burrito

Enjoy!

  I'd suggest looking for an easier recipe....or just eat out!!  The pancakes were delicious, but super labour intensive. The crunchy texture was there, but sadly, after all of that effort, the flavour of the stir fry was a bit underwhelming... of course if you slather on enough hoisin sauce, anything tastes good!  (Thanks to Donald, the dishwasher....)

Cochon in New Orleans!

                                        

One of our favorite meals on our trip to New Orleans - Cochon, Donald Link's restaurant celebrating cajun food.  Great energy, packed to the gills with locals and tourists like most restaurants we visited here.  As we entered, we met some friends who warned us we were in for quite a meal...

Mmmmm....  soft, sweet rolls - brought back childhood memories of the '70s for some reason...

 The 4 of us shared three appies - the wood-fired oyster roast (served on a bed of rock salt), crawfish pie with a corn salsa, and the fried alligator with chili garlic aioli.  The alligator was particularly delicious - the garlic and spices melded into a salty-savoury-flavour hit...

 Stephen had the grilled redfish "fisherman style", and declared it "the best fish I've ever eaten".  We all had a taste - perfectly cooked, oozing with flavour...  Here's the recipe - so easy, and you will be speechless when you take your first bite.  

Donald had the rabbit stew with dumplings.

 

                                         

Alison and I had the restaurant's signature dish, Louisiana Cochon. Smoky pulled pork formed into a patty, breaded, fried, served with a lovely jus on top of a bed of turnip and cabbage.  Oh, and of course, with a couple of crispy, salty cracklins on top.  Oooooooh baby.......

                                    

We had to have desserts - shared the Black Bottomed Brown Butter Banana Cream Pie and the Upside-down Pineapple Cake with Coconut Lime Sherbet (another '70s throwback). 

All in all a fabulous meal - we rolled out of there happy and full, trying to burn off a few calories walking home down quiet streets in the warm spring air.

Shaken, not stirred....

Just saw Quantum of Solace this week, after a re-viewing of Casino Royale. Ahhhh, Daniel Craig - those impossibly white shirts (often stained in blood) under that perfectly fitted tuxedo, the sculpted, scarred body, those steely blue eyes - and that martini! Named after his dead girlfriend.... not exactly the way one might want to be remembered!

The Vesper martini looks and sounds delicious - the recipe, as written in the original "Casino Royale by Ian Flemming reads:

Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?"

Lillet is a French aperitif from Bordeaux that is available here in Ottawa at the LCBO.