Cafe Liz

These green beans have no one dominant flavor. Rather, everything blends together — sherry, garlic, basil and Romano cheese. It simply tastes good. The beans have a special, wrinkly texture from being fried — not pan-fried, but really fried, in lots of oil. I was inspired by this recipe for Chinese-style green beans on Rasa Malaysia. Anyway, nothing Chinese here — freshly grated Romano cheese, which we bought on our last trip to Italy; a few spoonfuls of sherry from [...]

Most recipes for rhubarb involve turning it into mush, without taking advantage of the beautiful, red stalks’ appearance. Thai food often involves a mix of tart, lemony flavors. Hmm, I know! I’ll use the rhubarb in a stir-fry, with Thai seasonings! I was inspired to make a savory rhubarb recipe by the New York Times, which put the vegetable into an Indian-inspired curry. Meanwhile, as I was planning dinner, I had this idea of making rice noodles in a coconut [...]

When I discovered the Thai House‘s recipe for pad thai, I felt like I was discovering the dish anew — with a sauce of only soy sauce and sugar, this recipe was amazingly simple, produced way better results than any other pad thai I had ever made in the past, and tasted great. In fact, the pad thai I was making at home was so good that I didn’t even bother to order the dish on my first few days [...]

Here’s a nice combination of stir-fried cauliflower (mine happened to be purple) with an Asian-inspired sauce. The miso adds a little more depth to this dish than just plain soy sauce.

I like it when my tofu has a crunch. In this dish, I fried the tofu separately first, so that the outsides would be crispy while the insides stayed soft. The maple sugar, which I picked up in the U.S., added a nice roundness to the mixture of wine and soy sauce.

Last week I bought an iron wok, and I decided to try it out today with Singapore-style noodles. I get a craving for them sometimes, so fortunately they’re easy to make.

OK, I admit that I consider any recipe that involves ketchup to be cheating, but the results here are so good, that you could say the ends justify the means. This recipe for sweet and sour tempeh takes its sauce from a recipe I learned in Thailand (yes, it turns out that Thai cooks use ketchup), while tempeh is a fermented soybean product from Indonesia with a rich, almost meaty (or mushroomy) taste. It’s a nice alternative to tofu, and [...]

Here’s another simple dish — pan-fried green beans with soy sauce and sesame seeds. I used super-fresh green beans we’d bought earlier that day at the market, and seared them on high heat so they’d be slightly blistered on the outside but still crispy and bright green (when they’re so fresh, you don’t want to overcook them).