I try to stay true to my heart, true to the produce available in this country … so whatever comes out is modern Chinese, or Chinese-Australian.”

- Kylie Kwong, Australian chef

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I enjoy watching cooking shows. I always have, since the days when the only ones on were Julia Child’s The French Chef and Graham Kerr’s The Galloping Gourmet (if you never saw the latter, it was always in great fun, he was notable for quips like his response to a woman who declined to taste a dish because of his use of butter and cream in it, “Madame, you could go outside and get run over by a bus and just think what you would have missed!”). There have always been ones that I enjoyed, and always ones I didn’t. Recently, I’ve become mildly enamored of Australian chef Kylie Kwong’s Simply Magic on the Discovery Travel & Living channel. Her cooking, as implied by the quote above, is not the traditional Chinese of her family roots, but rather a modern take on Chinese dishes with Australian ingredients, influences and flavors.

The other day I flipped it on purely by chance (scheduling here is often somewhat at random), and caught her preparing a quick lunch for herself and her brother. I’m not sure that she gave this dish a name, but all I knew as I watched her make it was that I had to try it. Simplicity in itself, and just possibly my new most favorite brunch dish.

A trio of eggs, ready to go – refrigerator cold is recommended, because you’re going to want the yolks to just warm through in the time it takes to cook the whites.

In a wok or similar pan, heat frying oil to basically smoking hot (essential, both for the speed of cooking, and also because if the oil isn’t that hot, the eggs will start absorbing the oil and the dish will end up oily). Then tip the eggs right in and stand back as they’ll start to sputter immediately.

The whites are going to bubble up all over the place, and the underside and edges are going to quickly brown and crisp. When it reaches that point (not much over a minute), remove the eggs to a plate (one of those spiders for scooping things out of a wok or frying pan works best).

Top your eggs with a good drizzle all over of oyster sauce and plenty of chopped fresh chilies and green onion.

Break the yolks with the tips of your chopsticks (or fork or whatever), and let the yolk run all over the rest – mix it up a bit, then dig in.

I believe, had this been time-lapse photography, we wouldn’t have made it to the next shutter click before these were gone.

Them’s some good eggs. I garontee!

 When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”

- Walter Lippmann, Journalist

The writing of a cooking book is a difficult process, especially one which sets out to frame elementary principles. There are, of course, classics, many of which have gone through numerous iterations and revisions over the years. And, there are the new. Some of them worthwhile, others not. I have just meandered my way through one of the newest, a book which is of the worthwhile category, but with caveats. I hate to even have caveats, as the author is someone with whom I’m connected via various social-networking sites, and whose blog I enjoy reading. Yet, I have them.

The book, Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman, subtitled, “The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking”. Now, let’s start with the book itself – I don’t have a physical copy, I bought an electronic copy from Sony’s eBook Library – so it makes it a little hard to judge the aesthetics. Still, Sony purports that it is a straightforward reproduction – if that’s true, there are some problems with it – for one, the font is an odd one – with strange weighting and shading at various points. And, while that may be a simple matter of the electronic reproduction the one thing, pedantic as it may seem, that truly annoyed me throughout the book, is the lack of fractions. Other than ½ and ¼, the rest are composed of a superscripted numeral above the line, then a slash, and then a subscripted numeral below the line – not only does it make a fraction take up three characters, but it also extends them into the lines above and below. If this is indeed the font chosen for the book, it was a poor choice for a tome that’s filled with fractions – pick a font that includes them (or just use straightforward x/y style, 3 characters, but all on the same line). There are also no page numbers, at least in the electronic edition, making references to “see page XX” a crap-shoot. [Edit: I've picked up two other books from Sony's eBook Library and both have the page numbers removed and the typeface seems odd. So I think it's something they're doing to the electronic editions as opposed to the way the books were originally published.]

Now, to the content, which is, of course, far more important. It’s well organized, well thought out, and well written. All great things. I love the introductory parts that lead us deftly into the premise of the book. I particularly like that Ruhlman is careful to iterate and reiterate that the concept of “ratios” as basic cooking formulas (this much flour to this much liquid yields this type of dough) is meant as a guideline and not as an absolute. But after the introductory part, that message gets lost. Certainly there are variations presented on each type of dough, sauce, etc. – though without much in the way of an explanation as to why, and what effect these variations will have – more of, “just try this”. There are several points where the message seems to be contradicted, with assertions that “this will always turn out”, “this is golden”, and the like. Not many, but enough to be noticeable. And then, at the end, he reiterates that really, truly, these are just guidelines.

What’s missing, for me, and it’s probably based on living out of the U.S., is any sort of information that might be usable for someone who is not operating in the ideal kitchen conditions in which he tested out his formulae. There’s no acknowledgement of the differences in amounts of liquids needed at various altitudes above sea level, only one vague reference to “ambient humidity” differences, nor for their being a different absorption rate of different types of flours (something I’ve pointed out in this blog many times, with almost all our wheat here being “soft” wheat rather than “hard”, the quantities of liquids are always different from what I was used to back in New York or Michigan).

As an example, I started with his most basic bread formula. Following his formula exactly produced a dough that had the consistency of a melted marshmallow – something that couldn’t be picked up without oozing through the fingers, that puddled and spread out when set on the countertop, that at best might have been poured into a loaf pan and prayed over. In order to get a texture that was workable, I ended up adding a little more than 8% extra flour – that doesn’t sound like much, but on 4 cups of flour, it’s an extra ⅓ cup, and to someone who bakes regularly, it would be a non-issue to simply adjust, but I think for the average home cook something more was needed – perhaps a description of what the texture should be like (“smooth and elastic” is not communicative for someone new to baking, I know, from teaching classes), with a note that one might need to add more flour, or more liquid, depending, in order to achieve that texture. The bread, for a basic one, turned out rather tasty, though I’m still trying to figure out why one side of it exploded as it baked (see above).

But these are quibbles. Overall, the book is an excellent resource, and if you go into it with the understanding (or pay attention when he announces it) that these are not dogmatic rules, it is an incredibly useful aid in the kitchen.

What say you? And why?

 The question that women casually shopping for perfume ask more than any other is this: “What scent drives men wild?” After years of intense research, we know the definitive answer. It is bacon. Now, on to the far more interesting subject of perfume…”

- Luca Turin, biophysicist

This is just one of those geeky things I run across on my meanderings along the “internets superhighway” as someone once termed it. The video is actually about four years old, though has only been up online about a year now, and presents the development of a theory of how we smell things. It comes from the biophysicist quoted above, who now works in the world of perfumery, but applies to food and wine just as readily. It’s 16 minutes well spent. For those who want, Spanish subtitles are available with the click of a button.

Google:

Divers Alert Network (and several of the next few links were different national chapters of this, so I lumped them together)
Dan Public Transportation Co Ltd (Tel Aviv area public transit company)
Defeat Autism Now! (mission of the Autism Research Institute)
Dan Hibiki (character from Street Fighter Alpha video games)
Dan’s Data (“pc hardware and gadgets independently reviewed”)

Yahoo:

Dana Holding Corporation (Yahoo’s financial information for this company, ticker abbreviation “DAN”)
Divers Alert Network (this time, just the main organization’s site)
Dan (Wikipedia’s page for the name Dan, plus a list of other possibile wikipedia pages)
dan rank (Wikipedia’s page for the Japanese system of martial arts ranks)
Dan Seals (Country Music Television’s artist page)

Bing (MSN):

Dan (MSN’s Encarta encyclopedia listing for the name, in Spanish)
Divers Alert Network (this time, just the main organization’s site, and the only search result in English)
Dnevne Novine (website for Yugoslavian newspaper)
Dan om E-handel (Swedish blogger Dan Nilsson – looks like random commentary on stuff that catches his attention)
el dan (Spanish version of the dan ranking system on Wikipedia)

Dogpile:

The first four are a mix from above – Dana Holding Corp, Divers Alert Network, Defeat Autism Now, and the Wikipedia entry (English) for my name. The fifth:
BrainLog (Blog of software engineer and tech writer Dan Sanderson)

AltaVista:

Same five as Yahoo’s search engine, though in a different order – not surprising since AltaVista is now owned by Yahoo.

Lycos:

Divers Alert Network
Wikipedia listing for my name (English version)
Chinese Opera (Wikipedia listing for the term for female leading roles in Chinese opera)
Dana Holding Corporation
Dan Rather Reports (Yahoo’s online store page for hi-def DVDs of Dan Rather’s news broadcasts)

Ask.com:

Divers Alert Network again
Ticketmaster event schedule for The Dan Band (comedy band specializing in “covers” of all-female band songs)
Defeat Autism Now! again
Dan Dare (Wikipedia page for this British science fiction hero)
Scattered Blog (blog of freelance web developer Dan Cameron)

And, finally, just for kicks, the “computation knowledge engine”, Wolfram Alpha:

Just one listing, for the name Dan, complete with statistics on how common it is and related numbers… though it also has a link to click on to convert it to a “unit” instead of a “name”, which yields up a page on the Chinese dan, a mass roughly equivalent to “the weight of an adult human body”, or ≈ 70kg (thankfully, this Dan weighs in at a bit less than that dan).