"steaming" news and stories

Yesterday afternoon, I was talking to my mom on the phone as she wandered around her vegetable garden. As we chatted, she discovered a hidden zucchini, tucked behind a pumpkin leaf, that had grown to the size of an adult cat. We quickly decided that this was a stuffer, not a steamer.

Since I live so far away from my parents, I won't be able to get a taste of that stuffed zucchini. However, I do have the next best thing, which is my mom's recipe for it, which she has fine-tuned over the years as a delicious and sure-fire way of utilizing giant zucchini. Full instructions, after the jump.

Photo via Cookthinker

One of the things I love best about summer is the abundance of fresh, flavorful vegetables (I realize I sound a little like an ad for the Vegetable Council of America, but bear with me). Often, I'll make an entire meal out of a big plate of grilled zucchini, roasted asparagus or even just sliced tomatoes, sprinkled with salt. Yesterday, I steamed up a pound of green beans for lunch and ate the whole thing. I let them cook until they were tender, but had just a little bit of crispness left and then drained them. Keeping them in the pot in which I had done the cooking, I added a small pat of butter (no more than I could in good conscience eat in one sitting), and a sprinkling of salt, pepper and garlic powder (sometimes it just hits the spot).

The thing I love about have a big plate of veg for lunch is that it feels so indulgent. I love that I can eat as much as I want and not have to share them with anyone. In the matter of full disclosure, I should probably say that I come from a family in which the leftovers we battle over after Thanksgiving and Christmas are the green beans with toasted almonds and the roasted brussel sprouts with toasted walnuts (we like our veggies with nuts around the holidays). Oh, and I am not a vegetarian. I can and do go for the animal protein almost daily. I just like my veggies too.

I write this to find out, are there others of you out there like me? Those who eat their salads out of serving bowls and get defensive when someone enters the room with a fork and a hungry look in their eye. Who think nothing of sauteeing a pound of spinach and calling it dinner. Who make the grilled veggies their main course and don't understand when friends invite them over for dinner and serve nothing but meat and starches. Vegetable lovers of the world, unite!

There are many foods that are traditionally served during the Chinese New Year, all of which have some symbolic meaning, sometimes because of the ingredients, sometimes because of their physical characteristics, and sometimes because of the way they affect health. One of the most common things that we'll see this weekend during the celebration is the dumpling.

Dumplings are served because they represent good luck, fortune, and family togetherness. Often, families get together to make dumplings, which makes it a family affair. If you have it in you to make dumplings from scratch rather than stopping at the local Chinese restaurant to pick up a take-out order, food blog Plate of the Day has a recipe for jiaozi, made with pork (perfect for the year of the pig!) and leek. The most helpful part of the post is, of course, the pictures, which show how to fold and close the dumplings.

There's going to be a lot of rice cooking going on in the kitchen this weekend for Chinese New Year, and unless you've got the technique down to steam rice in a regular pot, you're better off using an electric rice cooker.

Rice cookers range from low to high-end, with prices going anywhere from $20 to over $100 for cookers that can be described with terms like "fuzzy logic," a technology by which the rice cooker can gauge temperature and type of rice to cook rice perfectly. However, the most sophisticated, luxurious rice cooker I have come across yet -- the Ferrari of rice cookers, if you will -- is the NJ-WS10 by Mitsubishi.

The machine is sleek and black, but it's not the design that makes it the ultimate rice cooking machine. The inner pot is 100% rock solid carbon, and though I have no idea what that means, I do know that it makes this rice cooker almost $1,000.

Quite a lump of change for the perfect bowl of rice!