A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Let Me Introduce Wing Yee Leong

Wing Yee is the son of David Leong, the creator of Springfield-style Cashew Chicken. 

Scott, from work, and Aunt Miranda and I have all been chasing down rumors about the beginnings of cashew chicken for the last week. Aunt Miranda came across the final clue, an article from last year in 417 magazine that mentioned Wing Yee as being the Executive Chef for a newish restaurant called Fire & Ice. I tracked down the web site for the restaurant, he was still shown as the Executive Chef, and it mentioned that Chef Leong has a signature special every Wednesday of, you guessed it, Cashew Chicken from his father's recipe. 

Guess what yesterday was?  WEDNESDAY!!!! 

Aunt Miranda and I hotfooted it across town for a late lunch and our timing was perfect, later in the lunch hours so that there were still diners there but the restaurant was winding down for the slower afternoon shift.  When we asked our server if the Chef was really the son of David Leong, she confirmed it.  When we started firing the rumors at her to confirm she kept saying "I don't know" and then said "You know what?  Wing Yee is here today. Let me send him out to you if he's not busy."

Score!

First off, he's a very nice man, modest, charming, warm, and very easy to talk to.  As bored as you know he must be with telling the story, he did anyway.  He confirmed that there was a Dr. Tsang (not Wong or Fong, but pronounced "song", so it was a close rhyme) who was the first neurosurgeon here but he and David Leong were not related. Dr. Tsang frequented Leong's restaurant in Pensacola Florida and somehow convinced him to pack up his family and move to Springfield Missouri.  David worked at a couple of restaurants before opening his own restaurant, Leong's Tea House and hired his brother, Gee, who later opened Gee's East Wind.  The originator of the Cashew Chicken recipe was, indeed,David Leong himself while he worked at a restaurant called The Grove, before opening the Teah House. The Grove sold mostly American food with a little Asian cuisine thrown in here and there until Chef Leong put together his signature "Southern Fried Cashew Chicken", now known as "Springfield style Cashew Chicken".  The tables turned and The Grove began selling mostly Asian food, or hybrid in this case, and less American food.  It was so popular at The Grove that it was an instant hit at the Tea House. Later, Gee took the dish with him to also be on the menu at East Wind.

Now there is a proliferation of cashew chicken made Leong style everywhere in this city and the small surrounding towns but let me tell you something. We had the original cashew chicken today, as well as bringing the sweet and sour chicken home to Gene, and none of the other restaurants hold a candle next to the orginal.  The sweet and sour, with chicken made in the same battered and fried manner, will break me from ever ordering it from any other restaurant again. The sauce is killer.  Not too sweet, not too sour, and with a tiny bite of hot, it's the perfect accopaniment to the chicken and the fresh pineapple, sweet peppers, and carrots generously garnishing the top. As I said about the crepe torte, this dish is fab-oh-lust.

The restaurant where Wing Yee is Executive Chef, Fire & Ice, is also top notch. Cashew Chicken may be considered fast food in this town but the way Wing Yee prepares and presents it is not, and his entire menu is beautiful.  Aunt Miranda ordered the cashew chicken, I ordered Phad Thai, which was wonderful, and we switched halfway through the meal.  Yum!  Here's a link to the entire menu. I'm not even going to try to quote it back. I'll forget half of the good stuff.  Click here:  Fire & Ice menu.    Rachel, our waitress mentioned that they have a new menu starting next week, bringing out more specialties of the Chef. Most excellent. We can't wait. Aunt Miranda and I already have a date in two weeks to go back (on Wednesday, of course) to check out the new menu.  Chef Leong was also kind enough to say that he'd only told us a fraction of the story and that if we wanted to stop by sometime in the late afternoon he'd be happy to tell us more about his and his father's career. That's a date too. I'll be hanging out for a while on Wednesday in two weeks.  I'm fascinated by the story.

Here are some pics of the restaurant itself:

The entry:

The inside:

By the way, not only were there some sports TV's, Aunt Miranda and I laughed but were really pleased to see the Food Network on one of the TV's. Hey, a little something for everyone.

The bar, separating the dining room from the open kitchen is the first "ice" bar in Springfield.  Curved, it literally has a strip of ice along the back to keep the drinks chilled.  This photo isn't great but you get the idea:

Don't laugh but I forgot to photograph the food! Well, I remembered but not until we'd already tucked in so keep that in mind when you see these pics.  The food WAS very nicely plated:

Miranda's Cashew Chicken and egg roll:

My Phad Thai after I had demolished all the prettiness.  It was attractively arranged with egg in strips across the top:

What a great afternoon spending time with Aunt Miranda and getting to meet Wing Yee.  Some days are just golden.

Fire & Ice is located inside the Oasis Hotel on North Glenstone. Their hours are 11am-10pm Monday thru Thursday, 11am-11pm Fri & Sat.  They are not open on Sunday.  Click HERE for their website.

For more information about David Leong, click HERE for a Springfield News-Leader article from last year.

For a vegan (seriously!) version of Springfield cashew chicken, click HERE, from Noel Green.com blog.

Sweet and Sour Pork for Auntie Miranda

Auntie Miranda had asked for sweet/sour chicken in the comments of my Springfield-style Cashew Chicken post.  This isn't chicken but the sauce is good. Not like our Springfield-style sauce that everyone in the take-out restaurants serves, but very good.  Less sweet and not as thick.  So you could prepare the chicken in the same manner as the cashew chicken recipe and then use this sauce...

This recipe is not authentic by any stretch of the imagination but it is good eats, as Alton Brown might say.  Mom made it for years and I remember sitting at the kitchen table during one of my college breaks at home, copying this down from her recipe box.  Mom died in '87.  One of the things I like most to do to remember her is to thumb through some of the recipe cards she wrote out and sent to me at college, or her notes in a couple of cookbooks and cake decorating books of hers that I own now. I love seeing where she's marked through and changed ingredient measurements.  I guess I come by all my tweakings honestly, right?  She also used to make little notes to herself, simply saying "very good" or "no".  Makes me feel closer to her to see her handwriting. I still make this recipe the same way she did. Okay, well, I added snow peas. I can't help it.  I can't cook inside the box, okay?    But neither could she.  We must have both gotten the "tweaking" gene.

Springfield-Style Cashew Chicken

UPDATE:  Click HERE to be taken to the post made a few days after this one for photos of, and my conversation with, David Leong's son, Wing Yee, who is a chef at the local restaurant Fire & Ice on North Glenstone.

chinese restaurant

Here in my town is such an entity as Springfield-Style Cashew Chicken.  It's something we're (in)famous for but maybe not as proud of as, say, The Hill in St. Louis is of inventing the toasted ravioli. Or maybe we are.  Sit back, my friends, I have a short tale for you that rivals anything in Mayberry, and is about as goofy as Barney Fife.  Most of fills in the blanks came from my friend and co-worker, Scott. I'd heard bits and pieces of this over the years but he's the one who tells it in the most cohesive manner.  And even he admits that he's pretty sure most of this is true but he's not sure of all of the details.  There are always a certain amount of rumors surrounding any urban legend.

Apparently in the 60's, a neuro surgeon was brought to town jointly by the two hospitals here. His name, Scott had heard, was Dr. Fong. Dr. Fong not only brought his own family but two brothers and their families joined him here in Springfield.  Their origins have been assigned to several cities. I've heard San Fransisco, New York City, and Chicago. Personally, I'd be more likely to believe Chicago just because it's already in the Midwest.  Either coast seems like a long distance recruitment for two hospitals that at the time were the largest in southwest Missouri, but not all that large in the big city scheme of things.

So the story goes that Dr. Fong brought his brothers, both of whom opened the first Chinese restaurants in town.  First.  How pathetic and embarrassing is that?  To go along with that hicksville kind of thing I probably should have worded it as they opened the first Chinese restaurants in these here parts.  Well anyway, I'm glad they did. The two restaurants were Springfield landmarks and both only closed down in the last 10 years. That's not bad for starting in the 60's. One was Leong's Tea House and the other was called Gee's East Wind.   

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: From Julia Child to Arkansas

THIS is one of my favorite recipes in the whole world. I first ate it at Dairy Hollow House in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in the 80's.  It's the same country inn I worked for owned by cookbook author Crescent Dragonwagon. This was a fairly common and very beloved appetizer served at the Inn's six course Prix Fixe dinner.  It's called a crepe torte and is designate by how you build it, be it "garden", "Italian", or "Mediterranean" in Crescent's The Dairy Hollow House cookbook, available from DragonZ books. 

Now, I have a bit of a funny story to tell.  I had no idea until Sher of What Did You Eat?  and I were talking about it and she mentioned that it sounded familiar, that this recipe was originally created by Julia Child. With a little research into her Julia cookbooks, Sher found the recipe as Julia created it, after enlisting the help of her assistants, including a young Sara Moulton. The dish was specifically to be vegetarian and Julia was always very generous with giving her assistants credit with its creation. 

Now, how to phrase this correctly?  I'm not saying Crescent didn't give credit where credit was due most times, but I had a good laugh over this one. Not once do I remember it being mentioned the whole time I worked at DHH that this recipe came from Julia Child.  AND, no where in the DHH cookbook is it mentioned that this came from Julia Child, even though the recipe, down to the layers of carrots, mushrooms, and okay, green pea/zucchini instead of Julia's broccoli, are the same.  Unlike Julia, Crescent made hers in a cast iron skillet. That's the one difference I can find. 

It's not a huge thing, but it amuses me. I always thought that Crescent made this up all by her little lonesome.  Hmmm...come to find out the inspiration for this recipe was remarkably well put together...and by someone much more famous than Crescent.  Maybe I should be embarrassed that I don't know every one of Julia's recipes by heart but c'est la vie.  I admit it bothers me a bit that this was not openly acknowledged to be a Julia Child recipe when Julia herself very openly gave credit to her assistants for helping her creat it.  But hey, just one more disappointment in life to find out one of my heroes was made of clay.  The story of my life. :-)

On with the show.

The recipe, whether from Julia or Crescent is fabulous. Fab-oh-lust!  This recipe is sooo good that when I took it into work, one of the gals looked at it and thought it was pretty. Then I told her it was all vegetables and her comment was that she hates most vegetables. Then she tasted it. She loved it.  I happened to have a few extra servings because I'd wanted to share with a couple of foodies at work and she ended up eating one of them. A whole serving. I was so proud of her. That's a big compliment for someone who normally doesn't eat/like many vegetarian or vegetable dishes.  Personally, I think I could eat it every day and never get tired of it, for the taste, the prettiness, and because there are so many fresh vegetables in it that it's got to be good for you, vitamin-wise, even if there is quite a bit of cheese (meaning fat) in it.

I've made this three times in the last week. The first time was basically (as much as I can follow a recipe without my inner Glenna tweaking) Crescent's Italian version. That was wonderful and the version I took to work to share. The second version was an experiment lumping all the veggies and binding cream together inside a top and bottom crust made of egg roll wrappers just to see if it would work. It was okay, but just barely average. I'll never make it that way again. The third time was the winner.  I still used mostly Julia/Crescent's layers and the idea of how the whole thing together, but I left out a good part of the cheese, subbing light tofu, and subbed skim milk for the whole milk or cream of Crescent's version. The results were very good.  The final nutrition counts are a little higher in protein and a lot lower in fat. The protein is important to me, being chronically anemic. I know I've mentioned it before but not being a huge meat eater it's something I constantly must keep on top of so I don't have to go back on the icky iron pills.

Replete with basil, oregano, parsley, and garlic, this is my week's entry in Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen's Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Kate of Thyme for Cooking.  Check in next weekend for her roundup of herbed cooking!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! Cabbage and Potato Bake; Chimichurri Sauce

 

Our St. Paddy's feast consisted of broiled lamb chops with my FAVORITE: chimichurri sauce, and a sort of colcannon recipe by way of Louisiana.  It's an Emeril recipe with all the right ingedients but mixed up a little differently.  My husband likes potatoes, kale (cabbage), and bacon, but not all mixed together in his mashed potatoes.  That's sacriledge in the Church of Gene, who by the way is, like George Carlin, a frisbyterian. He believes that when he dies his soul will go sit on the roof and refuse to come down.  So I'll leave his mashed potatoes chaste and for another day but for tonight we're eating potatoes and cabbage. I found a great Emeril recipe that I will be making again and again, basically it's potato and cabbage quarters roasted with a topping of bacon and onion.  And yes, it is every bit as good as it sounds.  Pork fat does indeed rule, although I admit I just couldn't allow myself to cook a whole 12 oz of bacon for this dish and limited it to 6 slices which is still bad enough. But what the heck. It's a holiday.

The lamb chops are simply broiled to medium and topped with chimichurri sauce. Both the recipe for it and the Emeril recipe are after the jump.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

A Piece Of Cake: Chocolate Spring

It's been warm the last few days and the daffodils and crocus are starting to peek through. Yay spring!  I don't know about the rest of you but I'm ready. Really ready this year. I'm tired of ice storms and but freezing temps. So let's think of spring. This is a cake I made when I had the cake company, for whom I don't remember, nor do I remember if there was an occasion.  Sometimes I got orders simply for nice desserts for dinner parties. I do remember that this one was chocolate cake with a cream cheese fudge filling and then chocolate frosting, of course.  The bouquet on top are made from gumpaste, the tulips formed in and stored in leftover egg cartons, and the calla lilies dried on curved flower formers. The ribbon was something I had on hand that coordinated well. Sometimes I miss those days of wanding the ribbon section of the craft store, buying spools of ribbon just because it struck me as pretty, knowing I would use it "someday".  The cake was simple in terms of the buttercream decoration but I like the double shell border with the dots. It gives a more complex finished look than a more simple plain border.

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: Patchwork Slaw

This is a nice change of pace salad. I've been craving cabbage lately, with it's crunch and heartiness that I haven't been satisfied with in lettuces. Not sure what it means, but I'll ride with it for the time being.

This recipe is from one of my cookbooks, The Dairy Hollow House Cookbook by Crescent Dragonwagon.  Crescent and her late husband, Ned, owned a country in and restaurant in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where I worked as a group event planner for a couple of years in the early 90's.  Gene and I loved the town. I've never lived anywhere like it. The town motto is "where the misfits, fit" and it's true. The population in the town is a hodgepodge of people from various backgrounds. No, really. I mean a REAL hodgepodge.  One 15 minute walk down one of the main streets filled with galleries and the boutiques of artisans will explain what I'm talking about more easily than paragraphs of more writing. The next closest description I can give to explain Eureka is to say it's like flopping Taos, New Mexico down in Wal-mart headquarters country.

This recipe is for the Weekend Cookbook Challenge blogging event, sponsored this month by Tami of Running with Tweezers (love that blog name!) for her theme of salads.    Check in with Tami to see the round-up of cookbook creations.  Patchwork Slaw, one of my favorite dishes at the Inn, the recipe is featured in Crescent's second major cookbook, Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread. I remember how much I liked it but I don't think I've ever made it myself at home so I thought it was time to break it out and enjoy it.

This event was originally created by Sara at I like to Cook.

By the way, if you have this cookbook, look on the second column of the acknowledgement page and you'll find my name.

Hey, I'll take seeing my name in print anywhere I can get it.

Woohoo! No longer a Sushi virgin!

Remember when I posted the photo of my dining room set for sushi and I said the only things missing were friends and a platter of sushi?  Half of that is no longer true as of last night.  The husband was out of town for a while tonight so I had the kitchen to myself with no one expecting anything to come out of it at any certain time so I took this opportunity to break out all those sushi toys Aunt Miranda set me up with and leisurely play. 

I took tons of pics which is a lot harder than it seems when you've got one hand holding on to the bamboo mat and the other hand sliding around the camera trying to get a decent shot.  I had fun.  I think most people who've rolled/formed their own sushi would probably agree with me that it's not hard, exactly, just a little tricky, as in, takes a little practice to get the muscle memory and coordination to get the rolling down for uniformity, an eye for the right amount of rice and middle ingredients, and then a sharp thin-bladed knife and a deft hand.

My entry for Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen's Weekend Herb Blogging, my focus wasn't on a specific herb, but the plant Porphyra, known to us by its Japanese name "nori", the seaweed wraps encasing or wound up into our sushi rolls. It is also the "seaweed" you find small strips of in your miso, or other soup at a Japanese restaurant.  Nori is an edible species of red sea algae that is dried and formed into wraps the size of egg roll wraps in a process very much like papermaking.  Nutritionally, nori is a good source of magnesium, potassium, and iodine, and an even better source for thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, iron, copper, and manganese.
       Kalyn will be posting a round up later tonight at Kalyn's Kitchen with entries from all over.  Check her out!  (That sounds naughty.)

A Piece of Cake: Antique Wedding Cake

I've told you stories about horrible brides and horrible friends and those are all good stories but this one is about good people.  This, out of all the cakes I've made is one of my personal favorites.  If I were to make my own wedding cake it would have gumpaste dogwood branches over it, but this would be a close second. In the photo it looks yellow. In real life the colors were cream accented with a darker cream, the roses all white with edges hand-painted in a warm salmon pink. I love the touch of victorian scrolls on the sides without the whole design being cluttered and visually overwhelming. 

This photo was taken on my kitchen table before transport, but the set up was very nice. The wedding was of a nice couple who were friends of a gal I've known my whole life, she was my little sister's best friend back home.  The wedding was at home on a large farm in a wide open backyard in the country.  It was lovely and personal.  They'd set the dining room table with the leaves to be the fullest possible and then laid the cake out horizontally on different levels of the table and glass footed cake plates, and then after my delivery, a florist was coming in to lay greenery all around and under the cakes.

To me, that wedding was the way a wedding should be. I've always loved smaller, more personal weddings much more than huge formal impersonal events. It's a personal thing, probably because I planned so many of those big impersonal dramatic "be impressed" weddings when I was a convention planner at the hotels where half the guests were business associates of the parents rather than friends of the bride and groom.

I have great memories about this one, from the cake going together just as I saw it in my head to working with a nice couple to seeing my cake set up in a lovely setting.  I hope those folks are still together and living the life they saw in their heads.

Girls' Night (Afternoon) at Fox & Hound

Shared a wonderful afternoon yesterday with three of my favorite gal friends:  (from the left) Kristina, Carrianne, (Me), and Mechelle.  Carrianne and Mechelle went to respiratory school with me and Kristina we stole from one of the guys we went to respiratory school with (the infamous Chris, Sir Apron).  Here's  the deal with our guy friends' girlfriends. If we like 'em, even if they break up, we keep the girl for girls' night.  Hey, you can't bring someone into our lives and make us love her and then expect us to break up with her too.  You know?

There's no huge food tie-in here. As I told Anna of Morsels and Musings when I sent her card for the postcard blogging event,  there is no better symbol of girl friendships than food, especially junk food.  So to that end, we ordered...umm...mostly junk. Well, except that Carrianne who just had to have the beautiful spinach and strawberry salad that looked divine.  Mechelle and I both said so as we crammed fries and nachos in our mouths.  But have no fear, Carrianne came around to the dark side eventually and dug into the cheese fries.  Who can resist cheese fries?

Carrianne and Mechelle got tired of ordering single drinks and got the fishbowl martinis (hey, it's my story, I'll make it up as I go along).  They're the ones with gigantico drinks in front of them. I'm allowed to poke fun.  They were called Kryptonite Margaritas. They said they were okay and when I tried it, I agreed. Not fabulous, just okay.  I can't remember what at was in them beside tequila. I remember midori, pineapple juice, and sweet/sour.  I had an Orange Crush which was orange vodka, cointreau, and a splash of orange juice, like Kool-Aid for adults.  Kristina was a good girl and only tasted our drinks since she had to go back to school for a chemistry (I think) lab.

Enough about food.  The afternoon was great. You know those really great moments with your gal friends where you talk about everything and nothing important all at the same time, there's never a moment of silence, and even when you leave you still think of three more things you forgot to say, even though you just spent four hours together?  It was that kind of wonderful.

We used to see each other every day at school and our class was really special. I hate using that word because it makes us sound retarded...well...in some ways...but really, we were all very lucky.  We had twenty people of completely different ages and backgrounds and we all loved each other and loved being around each other.  I miss seeing them every day.  I like being with them. They make me happy and want to be a better person.