Red Boat’s new nuoc cham concentrate dresses up most anything, including simple fish.
You know that sweet, briny, and tangy Vietnamese dipping sauce you can’t get enough of for salad rolls, rice noodle bowls, grilled meats, and so many other dishes?
Yes, Fremont’s Cuong Pham, the founder of the artisan Vietnamese fish sauce that’s beloved by the most discriminating chefs, just debuted this new product, of which I recently received a sample.
Buckwheat, which is gluten-free, gives these cookies a dark gray-brown hue.
Now that I’m trying to consolidate and minimize my trips to the grocery store, I have been on a quest to clean out my freezer of miscellaneous flours to create more space for other things.
You know, like tubs of ice cream. Kidding. Sort of.
So when I spied this recipe for “Buckwheat Chocolate Chunk Cookies,” I knew it would help me use up a bag of buckwheat flour languishing in the deep-freeze.
What makes this cookbook especially intriguing is that every recipe has suggested ingredient swaps so you can make it easily gluten-free, dairy-free or vegan, if you prefer.
A heap of yaki soba with pork belly chashu, cabbage, shiitakes, and pickled ginger — from Ozumo.
Ozumo, San Jose and San Francisco
What foods have you missed most during shelter-in-place? French fries, or most any fried foods for that matter, and sushi? That’s the consensus among my friends and family. Understandable, given that those are things most of us rarely prepare for ourselves at home.
Ozumo comes to the rescue on so many of those fronts. Former professional baseball player Jeremy Upland founded the restaurants after falling hard for Japanese cuisine during his time playing in the Japanese Pacific League. Its location in San Jose’s Santana Row is especially convenient because there are plenty of free parking lots just yards away.
To satisfy those fried foods cravings, look no further than karaage ($14) and Ozumo shrimp ($18).
Classic karaaage (front), and Ozumo shrimp (back).
I’m not going to lie — when you get these to-go, their crunchy coatings will suffer a bit by the time you get them home. But the fried white shrimp coated with shichimi can be re-crisped fairly well by just searing them in a hot frying pan on the stovetop. The accompanying yuzu-honey aioli is sweet and creamy like Japanese Kewpie mayo, with a citrusy and spicy edge. Our little plastic container of it got slightly melted when it was tucked inside the to-go container with the straight-from-the-fryer shrimp. But you can always transfer the sauce to your own dipping bowl at home.
A blend of nutritional yeast, seeds and nuts, Parma! is a vegan alternative to Parmesan cheese.
I’m not vegan or even vegetarian, but I admit that I’ve been curious about nutritional yeast after coming across it in recipes or even sprinkled over salads at Manresa Bread in Campbell.
And yes, most often, it’s used as a vegan substitute for Parmesan because it has a similar umami depth as aged cheese.
When I received samples recently of Parma! vegan Parmesan, I was game to try them first on — what else — popcorn, of course.
This inventive recipe immediately caught my eye because it includes popcorn that’s pulverized in a food processor until it becomes popcorn flour. Whatever you do, just don’t sneeze or be near a fan when you make this flour because the particles are so light, that it doesn’t take much for them to go flying everywhere.
(The Countryman Press), of which I received a review copy. It’s by Angela Garbacz, the owner of 
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2019) by award-winning cookbook writer 