They're Like Beans But From The Sea!

I got home from work at 8:20 AM this morning. I slept until 11:05 AM then I had to wake up to move the car so that New York City could not sweep our sweet. I'm on to you, New York City. The past two days in a row I've had to play this ridiculous car game only to hear an eerie silence during the time your noisy street sweepers are supposed to come through and do their thing. At 11:10 AM I returned to bed and slept until 12:45 PM when I had to wake up and move my car.

I was not about to allow any of that to hinder my dinner making tonight. I was home at dinner time, and dinner was going to be made.

There have been sea beans in our fridge for over a week. I've been wanting to make them into a simple salad for a while but I've been continually interrupted by work and other events getting in my way. I had figured they'd be spoiled by now but apparently, since they are naturally brined, they seem to last forever in the fridge. Who knew?



I combined the sea beans with some shredded radicchio, Szechuan pepper, rice vinegar, mirin, sesame oil, sesame seeds, and halved grape tomatoes.



For the main course I made some simple steamed rice and edamame with a small portion of ginger soy marinated salmon. I cheated a little by purchasing the ginger soy salmon already marinated. I did this mostly because it was so cheap and I figured the marinade would work better given that I really didn't have the time (or desire) to marinate anything for too long.

I usually don't cook much pseudo-Asian fare these days. It was extremely trendy in the mid to late 90's when I did the bulk of my restaurant work but I've become extremely bored with this type of cooking at home. There are some restaurants that do an exceptional job of it and I love anything I see made on Iron Chef (the Japanese version, not that travesty they play on the Food Network these days) but overall I've lost my fondness even for Chinese take out.

It's unclear why but New York City has lousy Chinese take out. There are plenty of good places but your run of the mill, lower rung Chinese take out in New York is far inferior to the slightly below average Chinese I could get growing up in Rhode Island. I'm not quite sure why that is.

I guess New York City hasn't quite figured everything out. It's a great place to get sea beans or emu eggs at your local bodega but if you want a crab rangoon you'll have to go out of state to find anything that unusual.

Welcome to New Yawk!