Cookbook Challenge #33: Susan Feniger's Street Food

The Cookbook Challenge is taking it to the streets.  Street food, that is!  For this installment, we cook from the pages of Susan Feniger's Street Food.

Cooking from the streets

Old school viewers of the Food Network will certainly remember Susan Feniger as one of the "Too Hot Tamales."  Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken were some of the early faces on the Food Network, and have also appeared more recently on Bravo's Top Chef Masters.  They are the co-chef/owners of the Border Grill, a pioneering restaurant featuring "modern" Mexican cuisine.

Feniger recently started a new restaurant venture, STREET, which features various "street foods"  - cuisine from food carts and hawker stands around the world.  Her cookbook is an extension of this, providing the home cook and opportunity to make these dishes at home.

There are numerous intriguing recipes calling for many exotic ingredients.  Feniger makes no bones about it and intends for this cookbook to challenge the home cook to seek out such ingredients and try new things.  Recipes requiring ingredients like miso paste, cactus paddles, shiso leaves, and mung bean dal?  Yeah, this is going to require some effort to pull off these dishes!

The recipe I chose to make was the "Waipio Valley Sweet Fried Rice" (recipe can be found here with some scrolling).  True to Feniger's word, there would be some interesting ingredients to track down. 

What is this strange object?

This is a Hawaiian fried rice dish, named for the Waipio Valley on the big island of Hawaii, which has a number of taro farms.  Taro root, a starchy tuber that looks like a hairy kiwi fruit is something I have never purchased or used before.  But I managed to find one for the recipe.

More fun ingredients

There are a couple other slightly unusual ingredients that I needed. There is kimchi (or kimchee), a spicy Korean fermented cabbage. I would need some sweet soy sauce (also known as kecap manis, which I had on hand), a thick, molasses-like soy sauce.  And spicy sesame oil...which, I could not find.  I did not know if this was the same as the generically labeled "hot chili oil" in the Asian food aisle.  Instead, I used some of my pure sesame oil with some crushed red pepper.

The rest of the ingredients were pretty straightforward - brown rice, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, sesame seeds, ginger, green onions - nothing too difficult to find.  And easy to prepare, too.  In a large skillet, brown the carrots and taro root.  Then add the mushrooms.  Then add the kimchi, green onions, and ginger.  Then add the rice and sauce, cooking until everything is heated through and the sauce is absorbed.

Waipio Valley Sweet Fried Rice

This was a very tasty fried rice dish.  The taro root is almost potato-like in texture, but there is some nice sweetness with it that is delicious.  Loved the carrots and the mushrooms for textural contrast.  There's freshness from the green onions, some spice from the ginger and kimchi, and the rice soaks up the soy and sesame-flavored sauce beautifully, giving the dish a deep, dark color.  So, so good.

Feniger made a comment in the book about having fried rice with a fried egg on top.  I couldn't resist.

...with egg.

While Susan Feniger's Street Food is not going to be your go-to book for putting dinner on the table on a busy weeknight, it certainly is a compelling book that will challenge the adventurous home cook.  I had a lot of fun tracking down ingredients for this dish. 

Next up: perhaps Feniger's "Thai Drunken Shrimp with Rice Noodles."  Now, where can I get some Thai green peppercorns?