Neo-Thai Peanut+Ginger Beef Dinner

There is a certain swell in amateur cooking blogs on the internet as of late, and I, for one, fucking love most of them. I'm certainly no top-grade chef, but I must admit to being an accomplished cook. Today, I cooked up something that really doesn't have a name-- it's just another dish that I made up in my head. Suffice it to say that the influence is neo-Thai, with some "gecko" blended in. Here's the recipe, for those who might be interested (and please forgive my awful kitchen, I work with what I've got):


Basic Ingredients:

• Creamy Peanut-butter- I used Jif, and it worked perfectly- but you can use whatever you'd like. One caveat: don't use organic peanut butter. The oils will break down the reduction you're about to make, and you want some of that sweetness that non-organic stuff provides.

• Unsalted, roasted peanuts- Pretty simple. Trust me, you don't want to use salted ones.

• One large green bell pepper- I know I've pictured two, but I decided to go with one in the end. It added just the right consistency to the whole mix. You don't have to use green, but I like green the most for their color.

• Swanson's Beef Broth- I went with the low sodium kind, since I didn't want the saltiness to ruin the delicate flavor of the peanuts. Just like anything else, it's up to you. But I definitely recommend the Swanson brand.

• Deli Mustard- You know the stuff. Don't go with anything too strong, you just want that tangy-ness in the background.

Ingredients not pictured above:

• House of Tsang Bangkok Padang Peanut Sauce- This stuff is awesome. It is what inspired this dish. It's not as sweet as I'd like it to be, but it's got a lot of wonderful flavor. I don't recommend trying anything else, because you can never go wrong with pretty much anything from House of Tsang. You can find it in the International Aisle in your local Meijer, Farmer Jacks, etc. Trust me, it's pretty popular stuff.

• House of Tsang Wok Oil- Every time I use this stuff, I commit a mortal sin. It's just that good. I can't explain it. Imagine having a threesome with some delicious, light vegetable oil and some fresh ginger root. You're getting there. There might be a replacement/alternative to this stuff, but I don't really give a damn. Use it, and you'll be one happy cook.

• Ground ginger- A lot of it. Just use the stuff off the spice rack, you elitist bitch.

• Grade A Top Round cut steak- Try and get something not too thick, unless you want to butterfly it. I ended up cutting mine into about 1-1.5 cm cubes, which was a good idea in the end because they weren't too big to pick up with a spoon along with some peanuts. You want a bit of awesomeness in every bite, and that means smaller ingredients sometimes. You'll want about a pound and a half steak. Mine was 1.42 pounds, and it was a little too much, but I was working with smaller pans. If I had something larger to work with, it would have been perfect. And dude, stick with the boneless.
  

I do not use exact measurements. Cooking (dinner) is not an exact art.

Begin by warming a medium saucepan. Once warm, add a healthy amount of stock. I used a little less than half of the bottle I bought, and it was the perfect amount. Keep in mind that a lot of this is going to disappear. Add a good spoonful of deli mustard, and about 3/4 of a cup of peanut butter. Stir and break up the peanut butter to help it dissolve. Add about 1/4 cup of of the Padang sauce, and start stirring. Don't try and make it all dissolve at once, just let it happen. Stir for a minute or so, then cover. Don't forget to come back and stir it every few minutes, to make sure you don't get any chunks.

Now the secret to that sauce is to not let it get too hot. If you burn it, it'll taste pretty damn gross. Keep your burner on nothing more than a medium setting. You'll want to see light, bubbling, but not a roaring boil.

After about 10 minutes, it's time to add the unsalted peanuts to the sauce. Peanuts have a wonderful ability to soak up anything they're placed in (I learned this in Beijing, where they eat boiled, salted peanuts all the time, and damn are they good when soft) so you're going to infuse the peanut sauce into the actual peanuts. I used about half of the jar I bought. You want to add as many peanuts as you can while they're all still able to be completely submerged in the sauce without any coaxing. Here's a pretty good picture that might give you a sense of what you're trying to accomplish:


Lookin good. Start your rice. I used 1.5 cups of dry rice. This recipe made enough for probably 3-4 people, so you might want to use 2 cups of dry rice at the most.

Check the sauce. Any chunks? Make sure it's a nice brown color like above. If it looks iffy, try adding a little more peanut butter. It was at this point that I wished I had some corn starch to thicken the sauce a little. I didn't have any on hand, so I winged it. You can cheat and use corn starch, or go traditional and just allow the sauce to cook at a nice low temperature for as long as possible. In the end, I probably had it cooking for one hour. At this point, you also will want to add a nice amount of ground ginger to the sauce, stirring it in. I used about 2 Tsp. of it and stirred it in slowly.

Cut your beef and peppers. Cut your peppers normally, then in half. Trust me, this was the perfect size. I'll demonstrate:


不太大，不太小。You know what I mean. Now warm up a frying pan, we're going to add some ginger kick to the beef and peppers.

We're going to make a nice frying oil out of my three favorite ingredients: the Tsang twins and the ground ginger. Here's a picture if you still can't find any of that House of Tsang sauce. If you can't find it at your local market, ask to speak to a manager. They have the ability to special order it for you. Trust me, they do. I worked in a locally owned grocery store for over two years. Make sure you have the name and spelling right, and this picture might help too. A worker who spends all day facing those shelves you shop off of might be able to recognize it. Here's the picture:


Add enough wok oil to cover the frying pan. You're going to want to use a large one, trust me. You'll see. Add a dash of the Padang sauce. Not too much, just for some peanut flavor. Now add a good amount of ground ginger. Don't be stingy: ginger is one of the most amazing flavors out there, and you deserve to taste it. Get the oil nice and hot, and then throw a little more than half of your beef in. Cook thoroughly. You'll notice that you have more juice in the end than you started with. Drain this juice. Do not add it to your sauce. You'll be sorry. It'll weaken the thickness of the sauce, and add a gross oily, fatty, beefy taste to it. Not what you want at all. I recommend using a turkey baster (like a large syringe) to suck the juice from the pan before dumping the beef into the sauce.

A warning: Make sure your sauce is ready for the final ingredients. Is it thick enough? Did it reduce enough to concentrate those flavors you want so badly? Do your peanuts look like this?


A little see-through. Getting soft on the outside. Oh yeah, that's how I like it. They should easily crumble into halves.

If you think your sauce is ready, then add the beef to the mix. If not, set it aside, it'll get warmed back up later.

Make another batch of the cooking oil, same as before. The second time around I opted not to add any Padang sauce to the mix, just on a whim. It's really up to you.

This time, you're going to cook the rest of the beef and your peppers together. Add the beef first and let it brown up a little bit, then add the peppers. Again, cook thoroughly, and don't forget to drain any oil from the pan before you add the peppers and remaining beef to the sauce.

When your sauce is ready, and everything's in there, cover it. You've probably adjusted the heat on the sauce a few times, so make sure it's back on medium. Right in the center. Stir occasionally. We're going to all the beef to soak up that sauce. Cook the whole deal for another 10-15 minutes, keep covered, and stir occasionally. At this point, things should look very uniform together. Not too much of one thing or another.

The rice was probably done a while ago. Hope you didn't fuck it up.

Put a pad of rice on a plate, and spoon a nice helping of the mixture on top. Serve immediately. I recommend some warm soy milk, or a nice cold Tsingtao. Whatever tickles your fancy really, but a nice cold Tsingtao (Qingdao) really does hit the spot with this stuff.

Voilá, Neo-Thai Peanut+Ginger Beef Dinner for you and your stars!



Eat well, and good luck in the kitchen.

Lights...

I love doing stage crew.

Yeah, it's a short one today. Just thought I'd relay that.

Are you preparing for the future? You should be. Until now, the world has been at little more than a standstill. I mean it. Things are bad now, but they will get worse. As grim as it may sound, ask yourself when you get up tomorrow, "Where do I want to be when the bomb drops? Who are the good guys? What side do I want to be on?"

Yeah, those are some pretty dark questions to ask yourself early in the morning, but the truth is more than clear. Something must change, and you don't know that the "good guys" are going to be the ones to make the first move.

Paranoid? Yes. Cynical? Damn straight. But this is your world, and you're stuck in it.

I swallowed a rainbow...

I just wanted to share this amazing bit of poetry with you. A simple presentation may be misleading when it comes to the deep messages found on each page of this "book." Give it a browse. Read. Think. And most of all, enjoy.

The title is the link.

On a side note, I love transparent backgrounds in images. Unfortunately, I'm too lazy to upload the version of this image I made that has a nice transparent background, and Blogger apparently doesn't appreciate the alpha channel in PNGs. So be it- ugly as sin, but the function is still there.

Zero

No post today. Well, this is one of those self-negating posts. Sometimes you've got to destroy something to create something new. Thus, this post, through its destruction, creates a brand new art form of both existance and non-existance. That's right. What you're looking at is an intangible representation of the idea of "zero." Thank god I didn't invoke the part that makes your eyes explode in your head. You should thank me.

四十四死老虎石

Some people will spend years studying a language in a classroom. Day in and day out they memorize vocabulary and do their homework. All those years amount to very little in a real-life conversation. If you want to learn a language, stick yourself in the country where it is natively spoken and become immersed in it! A classroom education is a good basis, but full immersion is the only key to a solid acquisition of a foreign language.

Mobile Blogging

This is a picture of my computer. Share the love. What do you spend most of your time sitting on? Some people say I type really fast on my phone and I thought I'd try mobile blogging for a change. It's kind of hard to do this, but I'll have to give it a try another time...

CNN: The Layman's Gateway to the World

So I'm watching CNN. That's my first mistake. As of late, I've taken to turning on this awfully conservative news channel once in a while for a good laugh. I can't help but laugh at every headline I see, and the report that follows it usually makes my day.

Allow me to make a few examples out of the headlines as they scroll by:

• The Google Phone. What a load of crap. This reminds me of the rumors that were going around about two years ago about Google secretly designing an operating system that would kill Windows, OS X, and *nix in one fell swoop. I had quite a time posting in the comments of the reports I read about it, trying to explain why Google has no interest in writing an operating system. That's another story altogether, but the point is the same. Why would Google every have any interest in actually releasing their own phone? They're not a phone company. They're a services industry. Google has never released a tangible piece of commercial hardware to date (though they did have a spam filter for businesses that flopped due to its price), and the idea that they'd make their breakthrough with a mobile phone gives me a headache. What is this report really? Well, in the report just made, they associated the "Google Phone" with Apple's iPhone. The reporter said, "[in comparison to] the Apple iPhone, June, $500." That's right. This isn't a report about a Google Phone, this is just more word-of-mouth advertising for the iPhone. This report can't just come out of left field though, so what could Google possibly be cooking up that spawned this buzz? My guess is as good as anyone else's, but here's a stab: a JAVA application to be run natively on cell phones that utilizes their services (e.g. Google Maps, Google Base) in its own environment, outside of the limited WAP browser that most cell phones sport nowadays. This sounds like a gem. But a phone? Come on!
  

• Mandatory Ultrasounds for Potential Abortion Patients in South Carolina. Yes, you read that correctly. Someone, somewhere in South Carolina thought it would be a good idea to tack on yet another requirement for a woman who is already making a hard enough decision to have an abortion. Now, I may be biased for this one. I'm Pro-Choice (or Anti-Life, as I like to say), and think that if a woman decides not to go through with a pregnancy, she should have the full right to do so. Its her choice, its her body. But someone thinks that its their right to toy with her emotions even more, and force her to watch and ultrasound of her unborn fetus. Scare-tactics galore. Also, there's one more question that needs to be asked: "What do we do about pregnant women who are blind? They can't see the ultrasound. Will they be unable to get an ultrasound within the state of South Carolina?"
  

• (From the ticker at the bottom of the screen) Internet attackers are increasingly using targeted emails to swipe credit card information, an Internet survey released today says. More fear mongering for your grandparents. First of all, I'd like to call the studio and ask them one question: "Can I get a source? Or will that Internet survey's producer remain anonymous, forever buried beneath the mile-a-minute headline ticker at the bottom of your feed?" This is a practice called phishing, and has been around since people realized just how dumb other people are when they start using a computer. Honestly, this problem isn't on the rise anymore. Email service providers are wising up. People themselves are slowly realizing to look at who sent the email, something that can stop 75% of all phish mails in their tracks. This sort of social engineering based attack is on the decline, and while it may never fully disappear, is not on the top of the list of problems we should be focusing on.

Do you see what I mean? CNN is guilty of so much fear-mongering and omission of the truth that I'm surprised they're still operational. The problem is that the majority of people (oh yes, THAT majority) lack the basic thinking skills to question what's being fed to them as they sit in front of the screen. They perpetuate this filth by tuning in for hours, boosting the ratings and jacking up the prices of advertising on the channel.

Television makes you stupid. It's been scientifically proven that the brain shuts down when someone sits in front of a TV. Books have been written about it, one of my favorites being Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. Let's face it. Television should be the last place you go to learn facts about the world around you.

The REAL First Post

I wanted to make my first post an introduction to what you, my beloved reader, can expect to find in future posts. I had a whole post written out in my head that went greatly into detail about why I chose this moniker, among other things. But I changed my mind.

I'll give you the short for the moniker. A gecko is a small reptile known primarily for its ability to scale walls and trees as well as its ability to change colors on a whim. So where's the importance in this? Because I've always been fascinated with them. They're beautiful creatures. They're ever changing, and quick to adapt. They're myself, animal-fied. I am adaptable to nearly any situation, and find it effortless to disguise myself, in words, in appearance, and in expression.

The random part? Well, I'm a very random person. I may make a post about kittens one day, and then come back kicking and screaming about the piss-poor conditions the IEEE has set up for mobile devices the next day. I suppose it serves more as a warning than anything else.

Now, the fluff is out of the way. I've explained myself. The reasons behind me feeling as if I needed to do so, I cannot describe. Perhaps it stems from a fear of criticism-- but then what the hell am I doing writing and posting on the internet? I've chosen to remain anonymous for many reasons, but largely because the current conditions don't exactly allow me to reveal who I am behind the opinions I hold. Sure, I've shared this URL with friends, but only those I trust most. Any comments made about my identity will be promptly deleted, and the IP banned. I don't choose to stay anonymous out of lightness. I do so out of necessity. I think I've made myself clear.

Now, why did I make this blog? I needed a place to simply exist in raw form. But there are, of course, more reasons than that. I want this blog to be a challenge to you, dear reader. I want to force you to think, to feel, and to listen. Too often have I remained silent about the injustices I see in the world with my clear view. That will cease to happen. I desire logical, rational debate and discussion. Sure, there are countless blogs out there about the war, technology, and bitchy software developers complaining about the big MS. I am not a soldier. I am not a designer. I am not a developer. I am a jack of all trades, ace of none. But I feel that I can stand out from the rest because of a desire to cut out the fluff and get down to finding real solutions.

Another objective I have for this blog is to allow people to simply explore another person's life from the inside. Yes, I could have made a LiveJournal to do that. But the format does not fit properly as a means for what I am trying to achieve. Perhaps I will discuss this more in a future post if readers don't understand what I'm talking about.

If I have inspired you, good. If I have bored you, go back to playing Halo 2. But the challenge remains. Let the world hear you cry. Let the world hear you laugh. Let the world hear you scream.

Just make sure they're listening.