Lynn's Cooking Disaster Day

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

It all started a few days ago when I was leafing through one of Seabourn's luxurious catalogs of the various cruises.  One of the featured destinations was South Korea, and the article included a recipe for "Kimchi".  Bill is an avid fan of kimchi, so I copied the recipe down.

       As luck would have it, when I was buying some veggies at our little Arab greengrocer next door, I was surprised to see what I took to be Bok Choi on the table.  Just what I need for kim chi, thought I, and so I bought two heads.

        Then I had to go downstairs and dig a huge stainless steel pressure cooker out of the storage cupboard to hold all the salt water and bok choi for the first day of soaking.  The following day, I went out and bought some special hot chili paste (Arab style, since the Asian kind wasn't available) rice vinegar, a BIG bottle of soy sauce, daikon radishes and ginger for the rest of the recipe.  After unloading my booty in the kitchen, I drained and rinsed the bok choi, and then tasted it.  It didn't taste like bok choi!!!  I finally figured out that it was young "Blettes"  a vegetable the French are very fond of.  I think it is kind of like Swiss Chard.  The thing is, when I have seen it before It is huge and leafy (about the size of very big rhubarb).  The ones I bought were small and the stalks and leaves were more in  proportion.  

       Although kim chi requires 3 days of fermentation before it is good to eat, I had planned to use some of the ginger, garlic and soy sauce for a Chinese style dinner as well as for the kim chi.  My menu was going to be crispy meatballs glazed in a sweet and sour sauce served over rice noodles prepared with various vegetables.  So when I discovered that my bok choi was really blettes, I decided to cook them in a stir fry dish to go along with my noodles and meatballs.  So setting aside my blettes, I began to prepare the meatballs.  after I had mixed the ingredients and was forming the balls, I noticed that they didn't smell Chinese.  (I was wearing rubber gloves to form the balls, or I would have noticed sooner.)  Then I noticed that they seemed to be oozing red juice.  Why would that be?  I checked the meat package and realized that it had two labels.  

One of them said "ground beef.  100% beef raised in France.  May contain traces of milk."  But the other, which I had not noticed said "ground beef boulanese style", and the ingredients there showed tomatoes and Italian spices.  That'll teach me to really look at packaging and labeling, even in France.  

       So there I was with 34 cute little meatballs oozing tomato sauce, and a bunch of blettes, and dinner due in 40 minutes.  What to do?  Quickly I whipped up my favorite recipe for "sauce Provencal"  and started it simmering.  Since we had just had spaghetti yesterday, I decided to make meatball sandwiches, so I thawed a baguette. I used plenty of garlic in the sauce, and then simmered plenty more along with chopped onion in olive oil and butter.  Added a litttle white wine and some of the blettes (the rest I froze) and let it simmer for about 10 minutes.  They tasted pretty good, kind of sweet and still a bit crunchy, but they needed something.  I tried them with a little Parmesan, but that wasn't good.  Then I tried some more with creme fraiche...Yum!  So I added more cream and simmered it for a couple more minutes while I cut the bagette lengthways into sandwich sized pieces, smeared them with olive oil and broiled them for a minute or two.  And there was our dinner.  Open faced sandwiches with meatballs glazed in sauce provencal along with creamy blettes.  The Parmesan was great on the meatballs.  Not quite what I had planned, but not bad.  I'm still hungry for Chinese, though, and will go looking for some real bok choi, or even that other kind of Chinese cabbage (napa?).  I must make kim chi, and soon!