My mom has gone back home but there are still so many yummy recipes she cooked up that we haven’t blogged about. So here is another dish that she cooked up one day that we really enjoyed and is pretty easy to make. She was such a lively inspiration for this blog. We told her that we were looking for more quick and easy Asian recipes and she started to rattle off a bunch that we could do. Here is one of them.
Stir-Fried Green Beans with Savory Tofu and Peanuts
While I was living in a graduate international dorm in Hawaii, I got to taste a lot of different Asian and Pacific cuisines. This dish is inspired by my Indonesian friends, Nina and Jo, who prepared it one evening and invited me to join them for dinner. I did not get a recipe but do remember that I loved the flavors. I also remember that funnily enough, they called this dish their "Westernized" version of sauteed shrimp (because of the Worchestershire Sauce). If you know what it’s called and have the real recipe, please do share with me.
In the meantime, I tried to recreate this dish from my memory of it (which is pretty faulty and it was over 10 years ago). I remember distinctly that it had a sweet and tangy flavor from the "W" sauce and there was garlic and green onions in it.
Growing up in Malaysia, crab was considered a special treat. We hardly ever cooked it at home, preferring to visit a seafood restaurant specializing in cooking crabs and other seafoody things. And the crabs we normally got there were mud crabs. Mud crabs have very big, meaty claws, smaller bodies, and extremely hard shells. They were very sweet but require so much work for very little gain.
Over here, we don’t get mud crabs, but Dungeness crabs are even better. I love that we get so much more meat from the Dungeness, plus the shell is not as hard so it’s easier to get to the meat. I actually love Dungeness so much that I don’t crave or ask for crab as much when I go home to Malaysia.
The Malaysian sweet-sour style of cooking crab, though, that I do miss.
Winter squashes are one of the things I love about this season. Their flavor, color, texture is so "fall-like" and comforting. And they are delicious too! We recently used a squash variety called "Fairy Tale squash" for my mom’s pumpkin noodle soup.
And just the other day, I made butternut squash soup. I have to say, this butternut squash soup is EXTRA special simply because we grew the squash ourselves. And it’s EXTRA, EXTRA special because it was the ONLY butternut we got from that whole vine. Sigh…I’m not meant to grow anything besides tomatoes.
