Welcome to the second installment of Hannah’s New Year’s Resolution: Learning to Cook Chinese Food. I adapted the green bean recipe from a recipe I found on Epicurious; I basically increased the sauce-to-green-bean ratio. I also decided it was finally time to figure out how to cook nice fluffy rice and nice crispy tofu.

First, the ingredients:

• 3/4 pound green beans or Chinese long beans (you can double the recipe, but I found it hard to cook 1.5 pounds of green beans evenly in my wok)
• 1/2 cup unsalted peanuts
• 4 teaspoons soy sauce
• 2-3 fresh chiles, finely chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• peanut oil
• 1 tablespoon chopped garlic
• 1-2 large shallots – this is key!
• fresh lime juice from half a lime

Heat water in a pot and boil the green beans for 3-5 minutes.

Rinse the rice by putting it in a strainer and running water through it, stirring the rice with your hands to make sure it’s fully rinsed. Put it in a small saucepan with two cups water. Cook it, covered, on medium-low heat for about 20 minutes.

Mix marinade ingredients together. Cut the tofu in about 12 pieces – they should be about one-inch thick. Drain it by wrapping the cut pieces in a clean dish towel, and putting something heavy on top. I usually put a cutting board on top of it and then put a few cookbooks on top. Leave it for about 20 minutes.

For the green beans, prepare all the ingredients before you turn on the heat, because the actual cooking happens fast. Grind the peanuts in a blender or mini-prep until some are ground pretty well but there are still some larger pieces. Mix the soy sauce, chiles, and salt.  Chop the garlic, and slice the shallots into thin strips.

Heat a wok or large pan on high heat, until a bead of water evaporates in 1-2 seconds. Add the oil, and let it heat up for a 15-20 seconds. Add the garlic for about 5 seconds, then add the peanuts for 30 seconds. Add green beans and stir fry for 2 minutes. Turn off the heat, and add the soy sauce and shallots, and stir until shallots are wilted. Drizzle lime juice over the top.

I used short ribs, but you could use another cut of meat that’s good for slow-cooking. Make sure it’s bone-in so it makes a delicious broth. Next time, I may try the recipe with chicken thighs.

One note: the soup was good the first night, but it was AMAZING on day two. So I recommend making it a day in advance.

First, the ingredients:

• 2.5 to 3 pounds beef short ribs, or another cut of meat that’s good for slow cooking
• 7 cups water
• 1/3 plus 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup Scotch or medium-dry Sherry
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• juice of one-half lime
• six 1/4-inch-thick diagonal slices fresh ginger
• 8 scallions
• 3 large garlic cloves, chopped
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 3-4 bay leaves
• 1/4 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes
• noodles (you can use regular egg noodles but I got some amazing fresh wonton noodles at the Chinese grocery store)
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• optional veggies to throw in at the end: mushrooms, bean sprouts, bamboo shoots

Heat a little oil in a dutch oven or soup pot on medium-high heat, and brown the short ribs on all sides. Keep the short ribs in the pot and add the water, soy sauce, scotch, and sugar. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to a simmer. Add lime, ginger, the white parts of the scallion (flattened with the side of a knife), garlic, cinnamon sticks, bay leaves, and pepper.

Simmer, covered, until the meat easily falls off the bone — about 3 hours. Let the soup cool for a half hour, then remove the meat from the pot, trim the fat, and take the meat off the bone. Strain the broth and remove the fat (I use a fat-removing pitcher).  Then put it back in the dutch oven and add back the meat.

At this point, I would let the broth cool completely and put it in the fridge until the next day. But if you need to serve it right away, add the mushrooms and cook them until they are tender. Add bamboo shoots or any other vegetables you’d like to add (making sure to cook them if they need to be cooked, of course). At the last minute, add the green parts of the scallion, finely chopped.

Then cook the noodles in a separate pot, and add them only to the portions you’re serving right away (i.e., put noodles into a bowl, and then pour the soup over it). If you’re going to save any of the soup for the next day, ideally you should make fresh noodles.

“The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 19,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

In 2011, there were 19 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 183 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 794kb.

The busiest day of the year was August 17th with 319 views. The most popular post that day was Which grocery store is cheapest, and by how much? A comparison of Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Market Basket.”

Slow-Cooked Pork Tacos
I have made this before, and it’s fantastic. I didn’t follow the recipe to the letter — most of the grocery stores I go to don’t have these kinds of chiles. But I did find the chipotles in adobo sauce, which is key. You can make the same recipe with chicken thighs, which is also amazing. And it’s not hard to make, you just need to have time to let it simmer for a long time on the stove.

Chicken, Sausage, and White Bean Stew

Moroccan Chickpea Stew with Chicken and Lentils

Butternut Squash, Coconut, and Lentil Stew

Beef and Butternut Squash Stew

Tofu Tacos

Lemon-Garlic Shrimp and Grits

Three Bean and Beef Chili

Ancient Grains Risotto-Style

Coq au Vin

Braised Pork Shoulder with Cranberry-Corn Dumplings

1. Cut acorn squash in half, remove seeds, add a little oil, salt, pepper, and brown sugar. Roast at 350-375 for an hour or more, depending on the thickness of the squash.

2. Soak chickpeas overnight, then cook them in broth with salt until they are tender. If you don’t soak them they’ll take over two hours to cook. If you do soak them, it’ll probably take an hour.

3. Cook red rice (or some other really hearty whole grain rice; I like the Lundberg brand) according to package directions.

4. Serve.

But now I’m about to go deep into debt, as I’m going back to school. Plus, I have a lovely TJ’s a few blocks away, which isn’t crowded at all. And I have some time on my hands. So I decided to compare prices on more than 30 products I commonly buy. I went to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Market Basket; I’ll go to Shaw’s and Hannaford’s and add them to the chart if I have time. I’ve created a Google doc with the prices of each item at each store. If anyone would like to contribute and add their own grocery stores, please do! Just contact me via the About Me page.

For the most part, I looked for the lowest price I could find on any given product, with the caveat that it had to be something I would actually buy. I’m not going to buy a gallon jug of balsamic vinegar or 5 pounds of carrots, so I ignored them even though they were cheaper. I also ignored the cheapest ground beef at TJs because it didn’t look very good.

The total bill:

Whole Foods: $150.94
Trader Joe’s: 126.08
Market Basket: $106.99

Whole Foods does well with milk, yogurt, eggs, and basil. Trader Joe’s is good for olive oil, balsamic vinegar, canned tomatoes, frozen food, and a couple produce items. Market Basket pretty much wipes the floor with them everywhere else. In this Google doc, I’ve highlighted the store where each product is cheapest (ties are highlighted in green).

I was amazed by how much the small differences in prices added up. It’s easy to buy something at Whole Foods knowing that it’s $1.19, compared with 99 cents at Trader Joe’s; but it’s a lot harder when all of those small differences are staring you in the face.  Whole Foods is about 20% more expensive than Trader Joe’s and 41% more expensive than Market Basket.*

*A few caveats:

1. Trader Joe’s is frustrating because much of its produce is priced by the item, not the pound, making it very hard to compare. And there are no scales, so it was tough to figure out the per-pound price. I’ve made a note where I had to estimate per-pound prices.
2. It’s possible some of these stores have lower priced versions that I just couldn’t find, though I looked pretty hard for each product.
3. This ignores the question of quality. I’m not sure I can convince my husband to forego the meat at Whole Foods. I prefer to buy meat from well-treated animals, and based on the Whole Foods brand I certainly trust their meat; however, I don’t actually know whether it is better than Market Basket meat. The produce, however, looked perfectly good at Market Basket, so I’m definitely willing to give it a shot.
4. I went to the Whole Foods at 340 River St. and the Trader Joe’s at 748 Memorial Drive on Monday, August 15 and I went to the Market Basket at 400 Somerville Ave on Tuesday, August 16.

Last January, I finally decided to get a Kindle. I had been waiting for the market to play out so I could be confident that I was purchasing the right e-reader for me. And I made my final decision last fall, after I spent four months lugging around hardcover books that were 800+ pages long. (The first was Ron Chernow’s new biography of George Washington, and the second was slightly less intellectual: Towers of Midnight, the 12th book in the Wheel of Time series, if you must know.)

Since then, I’ve noticed that the Kindle has significantly shaped my reading habits, for better and for worse. Here are five side effects of transitioning to the Kindle.

GOOD: I try more books.

The best part of the Kindle is the fact that I can download a sample of any book I want. It’s very hard to stand in a bookstore, spend a couple minutes flipping through pages, and make an accurate assessment of whether you’d like a book. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions using that methodology.

Now, however, I can download a sample and spend 15 minutes reading it at my leisure. I’ve realized that if I’m not compelled by the sample, I will NOT be compelled by the book. On a few occasions, I’ve bought a book after being underwhelmed by the sample, and I’ve regretted it every time (damn you, Six Pixels of Separation).

BAD: It’s hard to reference previous parts of the book.

This is the most frustrating part of using an e-reader, and it’s why I may choose to keep buying some books in print. In many nonfiction books or complicated novels, I frequently refer back to a map or a list of characters while I’m reading (Wolf Hall and the Wheel of Time books come to mind). This is easy to do in a physical book by flipping over a corner of a page. But it’s really annoying to press Menu -> Bookmarks, find the right bookmark, and then press Back three times to return to the page I was on.

Sometimes, you don’t know a page is relevant until later in the book, so you might not Bookmark it at all. With a printed book, I can flip back through the pages, remembering roughly where the relevant passage appeared on the page. With the Kindle, I have to use the Search function or scan dozens of pages to find what I’m looking for.

GOOD: I always have a plethora of reading options.

This is the obvious part of the Kindle’s value proposition: I can carry all my books with me at all times, so I never need to lack good reading material, and I can always download something new if I have a WiFi connection. I didn’t splurge for the 3G device but if you do you can download a book wherever there’s decent 3G service.

BAD: I fail to finish more books.

When a book is sitting on my coffee table, daring me to put it back on the shelf unfinished, I am far more likely to push through to the end whether I want to or not. The Kindle, however, does not taunt me at all. Perhaps it would be better if, instead of the lovely illustrations of famous authors that grace the Kindle’s cover when it’s not in use, Amazon assembled a list of all the books I had abandoned. It could say something like, “You have finished all the romance novels on your device, but you’ve only read an average of 23% of the non-fiction books you’ve downloaded.”

Of course, the reality is that many books — particularly nonfiction — are simply too long. So perhaps it’s a good thing that I no longer feel pressured to waste my time finishing a book if I’ve already gotten what I can from it.

BAD: I can’t use my bookshelf to show off.

We are getting rid of a lot of our physical books in preparation for our move to Boston but we had to keep a few dozen carefully chosen volumes so people who visit our home know that we read Serious Books.

THE OVERALL VERDICT

For me, the Kindle’s benefits outweigh the costs, but people who romanticize the printed word do have a few good arguments in their favor. Are there any other ways that the Kindle has shaped your reading habits?