what we had for dinner tonight

[toastykitten]

• Scallion Pancakes with Ginger Dipping Sauce - from Ming Tsai
• Hot and Sour Soup - from Jean-Georges Vongerichten
• Grilled Beef Heart - from Chris Cosentino

It was all very delicious. I'd been complaining that we hadn't really cooked much Chinese food lately - and damn it, I don't have any Chinese cookbooks. The closest thing I have was my Ming Tsai book, and I'd loaned that one to my sister. I collect recipes when I browse, and I just randomly add them to my del.icio.us account for later reference. Last week, while cleaning them up, I just noticed them sitting there. Mark was loathe to change our hot and sour soup recipe, but I insisted on trying something new. I thought that we might be able to get all the ingredients from our local markets, but alas, that was not to be and we made a trip to our local Chinese market.

We hardly ever go there, and every time we do, we sort of smack our foreheads and go, "why don't we come here more?" (Maybe because it's not two blocks away, like the Safeway is. But man, is it so much better.) An entire row full of soy sauces and vinegars! Rice crackers! Live, fresh seafood in the back! We were originally going to do a stir-fry and rice to go with the soup and pancakes, but then Mark spotted the beef heart.

In case you haven't heard, Mark has recently become obsessed with eating offal - the stuff most Americans (including me) don't really eat anymore - brains, organs, tripe, etc. I'd seen a recipe for beef heart in an issue of Common Ground, a free monthly magazine focused on environmentalism and spirituality that I occasionally pick up for reading on the train from Chris Cosentino. Chris Cosentino owns Incanto and was also on The Next Iron Chef. He advocates eating offal because it tastes good, and also thinks that if you eat meat, you should be willing to eat all the animal so as not to let it go to waste. He mentioned that for people who are not used to eating offal, that beef heart is a good way to ease people in, because it has a texture close to that of steak. We said to ourselves, ok, we can do that. We started asking the local markets if they carried any. Nobody had any on hand, but they could order it if you wanted to wait a few days. We sort of forgot about that until we saw the organ at the market. Then a light bulb went off. Duh! Of course the Chinese would carry beef heart! They carried tons of it.

The market we went to has adopted the dubious Japanese practice of wrapping everything in plastic and styrofoam. It's kind of annoying. Anyway, beef heart is really cheap. For a heart that was about a pound in size - it was less than two dollars.

For the hot and sour soup recipe, we left off the shiitake mushrooms. Neither of us is particularly fond of them. We had tons of wood ear mushrooms, though. It cooked faster than our other recipe, and tasted great too. One of the differences was that we used black rice vinegar or as it's called on the label - Chinkiang vinegar. It's good stuff.

The beef heart did taste like steak, except a little spongier in texture. Because it is so lean, you have to be careful not to overcook it. It was pretty good.

The scallion pancakes were good too, but definitely very very unhealthy.