Cheap Bastid's Tempura Night--Kind of Ugly but Really Good

Recently we had a hankering for a “Tempura Night”—you know, tempura battered vegetables and maybe some chicken. So I picked up some rice flour at Frasier’s Farms along with some bell peppers, mushrooms and zucchini (we already had onions).

Now, this is really a simple thing to make and it’s pretty tasty. But, it’s messy with the batter and the deep frying oil. I’m usually reluctant to do much deep frying because of the demands for cooking oil and Cheap Bastid just doesn’t really like to waste a bunch of it on one use. But when you have a “hankering” you’ve just got to honor it.

The photos you’re going to see are mine and they show that the results were just a little bit ugly—but it tasted good and that’s what counts. The batter didn’t coat quite as well as I would have liked, I think for 2 reasons. One is that it might have been a little too runny and the other is that I just used water rather than “soda water” with its carbonation which really does make a difference. (Cheap Bastid didn’t think of it at the store and didn’t want to go back and get some.

Some recipes for tempura batter call for regular flour and some call for rice flour. Some say eggs and some don’t. I’m going to go with TV chef (NPR and FoodTV) Ming Tsai’s recipe which is reproduced in the directions. I figure that he’s as good an expert as you can find, I like his cooking style and I’ve cooked his recipes with great results.

So here’s Tempura Night at our place:

Ingredients:
Batter:
1 ½-2 cups Rice Flour
1 ½-2 cups cold soda water (I think both of these are important. I used just cold water and didn’t care for my results all that much. I’ve used soda water before with great results).

Foods:
½ lb Chicken breast (skinless/boneless)—or shrimp or fish, whatever you’ve got & want
1 red bell pepper
1 jalapeno pepper
1 medium onion
10 1” top fresh white/button mushrooms
1 zucchini

Prep:
Put the rice flour in a bowl then add cold soda water and stir together (don’t add all the water yet). Add water until you have a batter the consistency of pancake batter—not too runny & not too thick but just right.

Cut chicken breast into approximate ¼” x 2” strips. Cut bell pepper, jalapeno and onion into similarly sized strips—about ¼” x 1 ½” strips. (Or you could cut the jalapeno into “rounds” about ¼” thick and leave the seeds inside for just a bit more kick). Cut the onion into small wedges that nest together. Clean the mushrooms with a brush or paper towel to remove the dirt and gunk on the top and bottom. (The reason to do that is that the “dirt” is usually dirt and manure (see you can learn useful stuff from watching “Dirty Jobs”). Trim the stems. Then just toss all the veggies into a medium bowl.

Cooking:
Get out your wok, put it on the stove on medium high and put 2 cups of oil in it. When it’s heated, test it with a little piece of onion dipped in the batter. (If the test piece gets brown immediately, then the oil is too hot and you can drop it down a skosh. Otherwise, you’re good to go).

Put some paper towels down on your platter for draining. Now dip the pieces of veggie and chicken into the batter kind of at random—you know, a piece of chicken, a piece of bell, a mushroom, a piece of zucchini, etc. Don’t get your oil too full of pieces at a time—about 10 or so will do nicely. Settle in, this will take a little while. You can have a second pan/platter that you transfer the food to and pop it into a warm over to keep things warmer.

(This is kind of ugly but it sure tastes good. I forgot to take pics of the veggies until they were half gone and these were from the end when the batter was a bit runny).

When everything’s done, it’s time to eat. You can make a homemade dipping sauce or what we used was some “Lite Asian Sesame with Ginger and Soy” salad dressing by Ken’s Steak House (it’s really good and one of our few “indulgences”).

Now it’s time to enjoy. What we absolutely liked the best were the mushrooms. Man, I could have eaten a bushel of them. Crispy on the outside and then when you’d bite into them it was like they exploded in your mouth with a moist, earthy flavor. The zucchini was really good too. Almost like a “zucchini fry”—and believe me it’s hard to come up with inventive ways to cook zucchini so that it tastes like something. But everything was really, really tasty (it also doesn’t hurt that I put some cayenne into the batter) even if it wasn’t the most beautiful Tempura I’ve ever eaten. And it’s a good, healthy meal. Lots of veggies, just a little meat protein. Give it a try some night.

The Cheap Bastid Test: So does this pass? A large red bell was $.77. The onion about $.50. Zucchini about $.25. Jalapeno about $.10. Chicken was $1.00, mushrooms $.75. The Rice Flour was $1.00 and the oil for the meal was about $.75. Total cost was $5.12. Not real cheap, but it was a treat. Getting this meal in a Japanese restaurant would probably cost about $25 so, yeah, it passes the test (but I have to admit, it barely passes the test because it’s messy, takes a while to prep, cook and clean and uses up 2 cups of oil).

That’s the Cheap Bastid Way: Eat Good. Eat Cheap. Be Grateful!

Cheap Bastid's Chinese Steak

Fall is here and we’re cooking more inside. I’ve always loved cooking in the wok. Wok cooking is simple. Typically the hardest part is the prep and having everything ready to go before cooking. But that’s simply a matter of “slicing and dicing”. Chinese-style cooking is also something that goes well with Cheap Bastid’s love for simple, inexpensive, fresh ingredients. And, proteins like meat especially go further Chinese style making it even better for diet and budget conscious folks.

Here’s one of my all-time favorite Chinese recipes to cook and especially to eat. This dish is pungent and tasty. It combines beef with my favorites of tomatoes and onions along with an aromatic sauce that I’m sure you’ll enjoy.

It’s served over rice, or with rice on the side, whichever you prefer. So first, I’m going to provide my basic rice recipe which I got 25 years ago from “Madame Wong’s Long-Life Chinese Cookbook” which came with my first wok. This is as close to “foolproof” rice as you can get without investing in a rice cooker.

And yes, the rice will stick together when you serve it and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. You can’t eat rice with chopsticks when the grains are all separate and going their own way. And I think this tastes far better than “Minute Rice”. It’s just basic, long-grain rice that I buy in bulk at the grocery store for $.79/lb.

Rice
2/3 cup long grain rice per serving (rice—not Uncle Ben’s
or Minute Rice any other boxed rice—just rice)

Put the rice in a sauce pan. Rinse with cold water about 4 or 5 times to clean it. Rinse by covering it with cold water and swirling it around then draining the water (you don’t need a strainer, just gently pour the water off). After rinsing, cover the rice with water—put enough water in the pan so that when you poke your finger in it to the rice, the water comes up to your first knuckle (about ¾ inch).

Put the pan on the stove UN-covered with the burner turned on high. When the water is boiled off—about 8 minutes—turn the heat as low as it will go, cover the pot and let it steam for about 20 minutes. By the way, the water is “boiled off” when there are “craters” in the rice with bubbles popping out. When you cover and turn the heat down, the remaining water will cook off while the burner cools.

Usually, when you cover the pan is when you can go ahead and start heating your wok to cook the rest of the meal. All your prep for the wok should be done, and you can just start cooking. This will usually mean that the wok cooking is done and the rice is done at about the same time.

Chinese Steak

1-1½ lbs sirloin steak
¼ cup soy sauce
Couple of good splashes sherry or wine
Tbsp Ginger
Tbsp Garlic Powder
Diced onion—about 3 tblspns
2egg whites (give the yolk to the dog)
3tbsp cornstarch
1 cup oil for frying
2 tomatoes cut into wedges—about 8 wedges each
1 cup onion cut into appx. 1” long slices

Sauce: 4 tbsp Worcestershire, 4 tbsp ketchup, 2 tbsp sugar, 2 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp red wine vinegar. Mix all together in advance.

Directions:

Using a meat tenderizer/mallet pound meat on both sides. Cut meat into 1” cubes then put into a non-metal dish or into a 1 gal. freezer bag. Mix the soy sauce, sherry/wine, ginger/garlic powder & diced onion together and pour over meat. Marinate at least 2-4 hours. Add the egg white and cornstarch and mix thoroughly into the meat mixture.

Start the rice. Put wok on burner, burner to high, add 1 cups oil. Heat until water flicked on oil immediately sizzles off. Add meat in small batches (about 1/3 at a time) and fry 2-3 minutes per batch—allow oil to reheat between batches. Drain on a plate or in a pan lined with 2-3 paper towels.

When meat is done, let oil cool then drain all but 2 tblspns of oil from the wok. Reheat the wok. Add onion and cook for 1-2 minutes just until they start to soften. Add the beef and stir fry for a couple of minutes. Add the sauce and and stir all together. Add tomatoes, mix everything and serve over rice. Serves 4.

This smells fantastic during the final cooking when the meat and sauce and onions and tomatoes all get together in the wok. And it tastes just as good. It’s got just a bit of “heat” (enough to make the top of my head sweat a little) and that comes from the worchestershire.

Did this meet the Cheap Bastid test? Well, the sirloin cost $2.00 on special at Stater Bros. And I used about ½ lb of rice for another $.40. Plus, 1 lb of tomatoes for $1 and half an onion for about $.25. Total budget for this great dinner for 2 was $3.65. And there’s left-overs for tomorrow too.

That’s the Cheap Bastid way: Eat Well, Eat Cheap, Be Grateful