Chinese Steamed Spareribs

Tonight's dinner was supposed to be pork chops but I was craving some spare ribs so I went off to the store at the last minute to pick up some ribs. It's been more than a year since the first time that I prepared this dish, I used a different recipe then but I don't remember how it tasted.

This time, I found a recipe from SteamyKitchen that had fewer ingredients, was easier to prepare and hopefully, will be more memorable as hubby has already forgotten about the first steamed spareribs that I made but this, we love! I even scooped out the meat juices from the bowl and drenched my rice with it.

1-1/2 lbs pork sparerib (rib tips)
2 tablespoons black bean sauce (I used canned salted black beans)
1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon grated ginger
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon cooking oil
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar

Preparation:

1. Cut the spareribs crosswise into 1″ – 2″ sections.
2. Combine the rest of the ingredients.
3. Transfer spareribs and sauce into a shallow, heatproof pan that will fit inside your wok (a pie plate or 9” cake pan works great.)
4. Let marinate at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Steaming:

1. Set steaming rack inside of wok and fill with water almost up to height of rack.
2. Turn heat to high and when water is boiling, turn heat to medium-high.
3. Set pan with spareribs on top of a steaming rack in wok.
4. Steam on med-high heat for 18-20 minutes until ribs are no longer pink.
5. Make sure that when you are steaming that you don’t run out of water in the wok. Replenish with additional water, if needed.

Eggplant Parmigiana with Alfredo Sauce

Today's lunch is brought to you by the letter "L". L for leftovers.

So we still had some leftover eggplant parmigiana from the last time and I did mention that I ran out of tomato sauce, didn't I ? I rummaged around the refrigerator and found some leftover Alfredo sauce.

Guess what I did next ?

Yep, I made some rotini pasta (not leftovers, haha!) and poured the rest of the Alfredo sauce on it. Poured a little sauce on the eggplant parmigiana too and I liked how it turned out. Somehow, the tartness of the tomato sauce got balanced out by the cream sauce.

Hubby, on the other hand, is still not convinced. He prefers this the classic way - with tomato sauce - rather than my way.

Eggplant Parmigiana

Tonight's dinner was eggplant parmigiana. I've been looking forward to this for a few reasons:

a) because as much as I dislike veggies, eggplant just happens to be one of the ones that I love!

b) because my friend Kay, a very good chef/cook, had recently prepared this for her family and her pictures made me crave this. She kindly shared the recipe in her FB site.

And as a disclaimer, I would like to point out that I did deviate from the original recipe a little because the eggplant has been sitting in our refrigerator for a week now and I was still missing some ingredients. I also wasn't in the mood to fry because we didn't have enough cooking oil. And I had some frozen chopped spinach leaves in the freezer that I wanted to use up.

Ingredients:

- Eggplant

- 2 eggs

- bread crumbs (orig recipe called for flour)

- Traditional pasta sauce (bottled)

- chopped spinach

- parmesan cheese

- mozzarella cheese

Steps:

1. Peel and slice the eggplants, 1/2 cm thick. Sprinkle side with salt and layer it in between paper towels. Leave in the refrigerator overnight. Kay says that this will draw out the excess moisture and will draw out the bitterness of the eggplant.

2. Dip the eggplant slices in beaten egg and dip in breadcrumbs.

3. Oil a baking sheet and arrange the eggplant slices in a single layer. Bake in a 350 degree F oven till tender.

4. In a baking dish, pour a thin layer of tomato sauce on the bottom of the dish. Arrange a layer of eggplant slices, pour another thin layer of sauce, top with the chopped spinach leaves, parmesan and mozzarella.

Repeat step 4 (sauce, eggplant, sauce, spinach, cheeses) until all the eggplant slices are used up.

5. Pop into the oven and bake until the cheeses melt and begin to brown.

Oh, I would've paired this with pasta but I ran out of pasta sauce as well so we paired this with some freshly baked garlic bread instead. Yummy!

This post just reminded me to stock up our pantry again.