odds and ends

i am currently drinking a cup of hot, honeyed, milky (assam) tea, my break from the editing work i'm doing on a professor's manuscript. mostly, with respect to food, i have an assortment of odds and ends:

xinh xinh / 7 beach street, chinatown / 617-422-0501 / 10am-10pm daily / cheap-entrees $6-10
i just went to a vietnamese restaurant, xinh xinh, at washington and beach that was really excellent. the people are really nice there, and the food is really well spiced for asian fusion food. better than almost all vietnamese or thai restaurants i've been to, in fact - it has average fresh spring rolls, but you can get your green tea hot or cold, and my chicken with ginger, onions, and scallions was truly spectacular. rarely have i had a dish with enough ginger to render it spicy, and this not only used a lot of ginger (not too much), but also fresh ginger. mmm. it's the sort of thing you could eat every day.

salty and sweet
parmesan muffins. parmesan muffins, you ask? yes. decidedly so. because if there were no parmesan in these muffins, they would have no opportunity to develop the delectably golden, crispy exterior that makes these so good. these muffins are salty-sweet, moist yet crusty on the outside. their main ingredients are zucchini, parmesan, and basil. zucchini muffins are one thing. the addition of parmesan is nice, but expected. but the introduction of the basil is spectacular, as is the abnormally high amount of sugar for savory muffins. in fact, i would say that the basil is secondary to the sugar, though ever since i visited shanghai last summer, i get the feeling that my capacity for salty-sweet is much higher than that of the average person. your average person cares a lot about the balance of salt and pepper; i care about the balance of salt, pepper, and sugar.

calzosas
last week carrie and i made calzosas, which we named in honor of the entirely american practice of combining real words into nonsense words. we wanted to make something kind of like a calzone and kind of like a samosa - the filling would be more vegetal like a calzone filling and less potato-y than a samosa filling, but would be the size of a samosa rather than a calzone. this definitely goes back to the pleasure of eating something with your hands. what makes a calzosa a calzosa, however, is that the wrapping is neither calzone nor samosa. instead, it's a phyllo dough. so i suppose these are closer to small bisteeya, huh? well, calzosa is more fun to say. ours had a filling of bacon, onions, apples, a bit of potato, peas, and ricotta cheese. the original idea was bacon, onions, and apples, with the ricotta to act as a binder. then the peas are to balance the heavier flavors, especially the bacon, and the potato was to add a bit of body and texture. we used both storebought and organic farm-raised whole foods bacon, and found that there is a definite and significant upside to the whole foods bacon. i would maybe try slicing it a bit thinner, but the whole foods bacon had a much better, more bacon-y flavor, and did not have any preservatives in it. there was simply more meat, and it was much better than the supermarket thick-cut bacon as well, which tends to be too thickly cut. it does take much longer to cook, though, but i'm willing to wait. luckily for us, the $6.99/lb price will keep us from eating too much of it.

portable barbecue
barbecue is a very summery sort of thing, and we were planning to spend a summer evening out in chelsea to see a free play in the park. i had bought some pork ribs earlier in the week because i had leftover marinade from the last time i made barbecued pork ribs, so i thought i'd do something with them for the play. the last time around, the marinade was too thick, so i thinned it with cider vinegar, and strained it to get rid of the pineapple pulp. i roasted the ribs without steaming them first, brushing them repeatedly until the sugar started burning, for about an hour. then i let them cool, and shredded the meat off the bone. my original idea was to combine the shredded meat with peas and pasta, with some sort of vinaigrette type of dressing, all towards the goal of making the ribs portable and not messy. i made the vinaigrette, but as i pictured it with the other ingredients, i will say that it was not an appetizing picture. what i wanted was something a little piquant and tangy to tie everything together, but i was just getting images of "oily" instead. so what i did was i started by mixing in some yogurt to make it creamy without using mayonnaise. that seemed still a little off, so i added the pan juices that i'd gotten from the ribs - i'd had to suck them off the roasting pan with a turkey baster so the ribs would roast and not steam. and that was it, and it was fantastic - a meaty, somewhat tangy dressing that bound everything together. the mistake that i made, i discovered later, was that i had burned some of the coriander seeds i put into the dressing, and while not wholly unpleasant, it tasted a bit like popcorn. if you make something along these lines, i would recommend using country-style ribs, bone-in. when you shred the meat you'll have to pay close attention so you don't leave bone shards in the meat, but the quality of the meat is much better. we used the curly macaroni with ridges, which worked well.

parmesan-basil-zucchini muffins
2 eggs
3/4c milk (we used buttermilk that was leftover from butter we made last week)
2/3c cooking oil
2 1/2c flour
1/4c sugar
1T baking powder
2t salt
2 cups shredded zucchini
6T minced fresh basil (this means 6T after it has been minced)
1/2c grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for garnish*

1. butter a 12-cup muffin tin (also makes 6 extra-large muffins). preheat the oven to 425F.

2. in a medium bowl, beat eggs, then add milk and oil. in another bowl, mix dry ingredients.

3. add dry ingredients to egg mixture, 1 cup at a time, and stir until it becomes a thick, moist batter.

4. stir in zucchini basil, and parmesan until just combined - do not overbeat.

5. spoon into tins and sprinkle extra cheese on top. bake 20 to 22 minutes, until golden brown.

*It's ok to microplane the parmesan for the batter, but for the garnish, use the finer-grating side of your box grater.

[makes 12 muffins]