ediblegarnish: Amy

It's interesting who ends up sticking in your life over the years. We didn't get actually become close until after graduating, and I remember spending my years in grad school talking to her constantly - my most stable long distance relationship as I called it. Amy identifies as Chinese Canadian. I'm sure I met Amy as a one off meeting through my freshman roommate, but I got to know her better the following summer in a research program. Eventually I would learn she was also enjoys analyzing people, and I couldn't tell you how much of that time was regaling each other with miserable dating stories. And now she is getting married *sobbing emoji*.

Beef noodle soup and mian pian (homemade dough that is torn into 1in by 1in squares and cooked into a fragrant broth of peppercorn, ginger, anise, soy with ground beef and daikon) topped her list, so Amy's dumplings obviously had to be comforting and soupy.

And what better way to deliver a bowl of comfort than with wontons - if a hearty bowl of beef noodle soup dressed up like a bowl of brothy wontons for Halloween. I spent an evening braising my beef shank in a mixture of spices as inspired by both Omnivore's Cookbook and Woks of Life [dammit I still have a bad habit of not writing anything down, but if I know myself it was likely peppercorn, anise, clove, cinnamon, licorice root, ginger, garlic, chili].

Meanwhile, I roasted shishito peppers because I couldn't find long peppers at the two Asian grocers I tried or the fancy local Berkeley one. It's really not the same but they're close enough. My family also made tiger skin peppers every so often, and seeing it on Amy's list reminded me how long it had been since I last had it... which is how I am with most pangs of longing for home cooking... I go so long surviving on restaurant leftovers and scavenged snacks that I forget what it's like to grow up Chinese with a spread of dishes (always at least one meat, always at least one veg, always lots of rice) every night. It's just not the same! Oops, sorry, this isn't about me...

But I enjoyed that this variety had some dark purple patches that resembled the singed tiger skin... before I roasted them and ground them up into a paste-y sauce anyways.

Yes so the peppers were lightly roasted, pureed, and cooked with a bit of gelatin to make a gelatinous pepper jelly that would be mixed in with the chunked up braised beef shank in an attempt to hold the bits and bobs together for a filling.

All that was wrapped up in thick, chewy squares of dough. This is contrary to the delicate, paper thin skins you'd normally have on wontons, but I wanted to simulate the bouncy bite you'd get from a good fat noodle, something that stands up to a deep beefy broth.

My special ingredient for Amy though was salted plum. Indiscernible in pictures, you would be able to pick it out immediately if you had a sip of the broth. A common theme from Amy's list was the pairing of salty and sour - truly a girl after my own heart and stomach. Beef noodle soup is often garnished with pickled mustard greens. Tiger skin peppers are seasoned with black vinegar. And salted plums are mouthwateringly salty and sour and sometimes sweet.

So I got a container of dried salted plums, ate about half of it, and used the other half for the wontons. They were not pitted, which required me to boil them in the broth to soften and then painstakingly scrape the flesh off the giant pits to mix in with the beef. And as a pleasant side effect, the broth became tangy and lightly sweet.

There's nothing quite like salted plum to me. I used to bulldoze through a container of the stuff the same way I would inhale Cool Ranch Doritos (my love), holding the pit in my cheek until it was stripped of all flavor like I did with jujubes (my other love), and I'd do it with the same fervor I had when sucking on a tube of sour candy until my tongue bleed (srsly who let this be a child's candy?). Salted plums are exactly what they sound like - plums preserved in salt (and sometimes scented with licorice or orange). One of my favorite candies growing up, they are also a Chinese medicine cure all - anti-nausea, good for digestion, appetite-stimulant, good for your spleen, good for your lungs.

Salted plums aren't just a Chinese delight though - Japanese umeboshi are fermented with salt and then colored pink with shiso leaves. Mexican saladitos are dried, salted, and then sweetened with sugar and anise. In Hawaii, it's sold as li hing mui in powder form. These days you can find them in beverages (michaeladas, alcohol), savory dishes (braised meat, brines, etc), and other candies (gummies, chocolates, caramel hard candy). If it hasn't already reached the Western world as the next new flavor trend (like anything tea related and salted egg yolk), then I'm betting it's next.