Family Dinner

Cleaned squid, blanched shrimp, and clams

Howdy,

Sorry if this is a bit late, i got hit with a sudden and unexpected 24 hr bug, maybe I ate too much roast duck last night, something I thought impossible… Seems like I’m doing better now.

Friday night we had family dinner. There are 12 fulbrighters all together, so a potluck style meal ended up being the way to feed all of us. For my contribution, I made “taro seafood.” It jumped out at me because Yakima isn’t the best place for taro cultivation and has been absent from my cooking repertoire in the past, even though I’ve enjoyed trying it throughout my travels.

One of the best parts about preparing this was purchasing the seafood (shrimp, squid and clams) from the daily traditional market. It’s only a 10 min. walk from the apartments. Kaohsiung has fabulous fresh seafood, and purchasing this the day of was pretty exciting.

Ingredients: a little bit of your choice of oil few clothes garlic and shallot, diced 1 medium taro peeled and chopped into smaller pieces 1 tbs salt, a dash of chicken stock concentrate cleaned seafood 1/2 can coconut milk equal part regular milk

Cooking the taro and seafood

Steam the taro until soft, this takes a fair while. (If using shrimp, blanch them.) In a separate pan, sauté the garlic and shallot until fragrant. At this point add the steamed taro and prepped seafood and cook over low heat until the taro begins to mash down and become smooth.

At this point add the salt and chicken stock concentrate along with the milk. Turn up the heat and let it come to a boil, then reduce it as much as you want to, or add more coconut milk, because it’s awesome.

The other dishes prepared for dinner were a vegetable curry, white rice, green onion omelet and stir fried baby bok choy. It was a great meal, then we got a taste for the local culture and headed out for a karaoke session.

Take care,

check back for some upcoming topics:

MaPo Tofu

Night Markets

Traditional Markets

Hot and Noisy

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