Hey there. We're Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough. Together, we've written three dozen cookbooks (working on #37 right now) and we've sold almost 1.5 million copies of our books.

We're delighted you're joining us for our adventures in food and cooking. In this episode, we offer a simplified version of more traditional Cantonese dish: a spicy pork dipping sauce (almost a ragu) for raw vegetables. We've got a one-minute cooking tip about easy, cheesy dumplings. And we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:

[01:00] Our one minute cooking tip: how to make easy, cheesy dumplings for chilis and stews.

[03:04] We're making warm a coconut curry pork dipping sauce for vegetables. Think of this as our easy take on a traditional Cambodian dish--or better yet, a spicy, Asian-inspired pork ragu that you can drag all sorts of raw vegetables through for a fun and tasty dinner.

[16:42] What’s making us happy in food this week: satsuma oranges and old-school chicken soup.

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Scarborough.

And together with Bruce, we have written three dozen cookbooks, are writing

the three dozen plus one right now.

I can't wait to tell you about that.

But the latest one out on the market is the Look and Cook Air Fryer

Bible with over 700 photographs.

Every single step of every recipe.

is photographed.

Thanks to the folks at voracious on imprint of little brown for

making such a beautiful book for us.

We're very excited that it's out there.

Check it out for your new air fryer and the new year.

But in this podcast, we're not talking about air frying.

Instead, we've got a one minute cookie tip.

We've got a weird recipe that Bruce has.

crafted out of a strange bit of inspiration.

We'll tell you all about that.

It's for a meat sauce that you can drag raw vegetables through.

Very interesting.

And we'll tell you what's making us happy and through this week.

So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip, easy, cheesy dumplings.

You can make them for any stew or chili, and it all starts with store bought.

If possible, not from the can, but from a plastic bag.

Or even from a pizza parlor.

You can go in and ask them to buy a dough.

Do you notice that in, not necessarily, I don't know about chains like Papa

John's, but in, uh, pizza, a lot of pizza parlors, you can go in

and just say, Can I buy a dough?

And they'll look at you weird, and they won't know how to price it, so

they'll charge you like, A couple bucks, but you can, they've got them sitting

right there so you can buy them outside of places like New York or Chicago.

That might not be so easy to do.

Local pizza places, maybe places that sell pizza by the slice is

where you kind of want to go.

And that's, that's a real New York thing.

You know, in New York, if you say to someone, what'd you

have for lunch at a slice?

That means you had pizza.

I know, of course it's a weird New York thing.

Okay, so anyway, go back to the pizza.

So you have your pizza dough, you leave it at room temperature for a few hours

to soften up, and your yeast activates and it rises, and then you gently fold

in some shredded cheese, and if you've seen the episode of Schitt's Creek,

and you don't know how to fold cheese, well, yeah, I don't know, just fold.

I don't know how to fold broken cheese.

If you say fold that cheese one more time.

Right.

Uh, so you fold in the cheese, and then you roll it into balls, and

you drop that dough right on top of your simmering chicken stew or

your chili, cover it, simmer it 20 more minutes, and you're done.

Now we're not talking about, like, enclosing the cheese in the dough,

we're talking about literally sprinkling cheese all over the dough, and then

kind of kneading it all together.

Kneading it in, kneading it in.

And creating, then cutting off little balls And rolling those balls,

yep.

And they steam and they puff and there's something I love about a cheesy pizza

dough dumpling sitting on top of chili.

Oh, my Texas relatives are all coming to kill us right now.

They're, they're getting in their trucks and driving up

here to New England to shoot us.

And in fact, if you use mozzarella cheese, you could even put it on

top of like a bowl of bolognese.

Oh, there you go.

Now, I don't have any Italian relatives but all the Italians from New Jersey

are driving up here to tell us.

There's gonna be a dead horse head in my bed tomorrow, I think.

Oh my gosh.

Um, so, before we get to the next segment of the podcast in which

we're gonna go to the kitchen, let me first apologize for my voice.

I still have this weird respiratory thing that's hanging on.

If you've been listening to the podcast, you know this.

And it's still sitting around.

It's not COVID.

And it's just not going away really fast.

So, I'm sorry my voice is giving out constantly.

But let me also say that we have a newsletter and you can subscribe to it

by going to our website, bruceandmark.

com.

And there's a form there, fill it out.

I do not capture your email.

I do not even know that you've signed up.

And furthermore, I do not.

ever allow anyone to sell it under any circumstances.

You can unsubscribe to that at any time.

It includes the recipes from this podcast and also bits about our

life here in rural New England.

So let's head to the kitchen.

Today I am making a really interesting dish that is made with ground pork and

I'm going to call it a pork dipping sauce.

I want to explain where this came from.

So, we were up in Maine on holiday.

I mean, we'd spent a time up in Maine, trying to get away

after we'd finished a book.

I think we went to Portland and we were eating like crazy in Portland, Maine,

which has an excellent food scene.

And we were on our way back here to our place in New England, and we

passed through Lowell, Massachusetts.

And if you don't know, Lowell has a gigantic gigantic Cambodian population

and we decided we were just going to try a Cambodian restaurant.

So we yelped it in the car.

We found one.

We went to this restaurant and lol, they suggested we try this dish,

which I couldn't possibly pronounce.

I'm going to pronounce it poorly.

The way it's written in Roman letters in the English alphabet is Prahokitis.

Right.

And Prahok, P R A H O K, it's actually the name of this fermented fish, usually

mudfish, that is pounded into a paste.

And this paste is a staple of Cambodian cooking.

It is, but,

but we're not making a Cambodian dish.

So here's what's happened.

This dish of meat sauce came to our table and a big platter of raw vegetables.

And we didn't know what to do.

We had to call the waiter over and she said to us, Oh, you just pick up.

The, I'm not kidding, the slice of eggplant, the carrots, the celery,

the zucchini rounds, you just pick them up and you drag them through

this meat sauce and eat them.

At first I was like, what, wait, raw eggplant, seriously?

But it was one of the most absurdly delicious and comforting

lunches I've had in a long time.

So what happens here?

is that we've come back to our house and Bruce has been playing

around and he's created not anything that is even close to bahakitis,

or however you say it, prahakitis.

I don't even know, I'm sorry, please forgive me.

I do not even know the slightest word in Cambodian.

But he's created something that is like this, that it's a

meat sauce for raw vegetables.

It's really wild.

It is really great.

Start.

So I'm starting by making my own curry paste because you need a

curry paste at the bottom of this.

If you don't want to make your own curry paste, you can go to your age,

local Asian market, and you can buy a.

bottled or jarred red curry paste, but here's the thing, don't buy one that

has red chilies as the first ingredient.

It's going to be way too hot.

Chilies should be in there, but maybe not first.

Maybe you'll want to see shallots.

It should definitely have lemongrass.

It should have macrute leaves.

It should have garlic.

But I'm going to make my own chili paste here.

What I've done already is I had three guajillo chilies.

I scraped out the seeds using my surgical gloves, which you all know I love.

And I broke them into pieces and I soaked them in hot water for 20 minutes.

Guajillo chilies.

This is an interesting bit here.

And some people may not know what they are.

They have a very chocolatey flavor to them.

When they're dried, they get, they're not, I was going to say,

they get very Earthy and chocolatey, but they're also not terribly hot.

They're a little hot, but they're not mind bogglingly hot as guajillos You

can find them in large supermarkets amongst the dried chilies Or there's

a billion online suppliers that will send you guajillo chilies You can keep

them in a cool dark pantry sealed up in a bag for a year a long time They

will eventually start to break down and rot But it takes a long time.

So as Bruce says, he's soaked these in boiling water for 20 minutes.

Well, put boiling water on them and soak them for 20 minutes.

And now we're going to put them in, uh, we're going to use a NutriBullet.

I love my NutriBullet, I'm very excited about it.

Maybe you know this, but if you follow us on social media, but I've been

cooking much more vegan food lately.

And, uh, when I cook and, uh, every vegan chef I follow on TikTok.

And on Instagram reels uses neutral bullet.

So I convinced my chef husband that we needed one and now he loves it.

He, at first he was resistant and now he loves it.

Anyway, you can use a food processor.

It's a little big, a mini food processor might be better.

You can also use a blender, but again, there's not a ton of stuff here.

So it's hard to get it blended.

Other alternative.

is a mortar and pestle.

Yes.

And you can crush it.

You can crush it all up.

Okay.

So we're going to put the chilies, the drained chilies into the Nutribullet.

And then we're going to put three stalks of lemongrass.

And this is just the middle tender part.

You're not going to use the outer dry leaves.

You're going to pull all the outer leaves off.

You're going to use only the tender inner core.

We're going to put four garlic cloves.

And I love this.

piece of fresh turmeric.

There are four makrut lime leaves, and these are fresh.

We got them at a local Asian market.

You can use dried makrut lime leaves.

If you don't know about makrut, M A K R U T lime leaves, look them up online.

Again, a common ingredient in Southeast Asian cooking, a lot of

Asian cooking, and a lot of Indian cooking even, right, at this point.

So, and Malaysian cooking, yeah, very common across the board there.

So again, these are fresh.

Uh, you can use dried and then some

ginger and then I'm going to how much I have another one inch piece.

It's about the same size of turmeric and ginger and I'm

putting in a quarter cup of water.

I might have to add more, but first I'm going to screw on the bottom of this

neutral bullet and I'm going to blend it.

Yeah, and it needs a little bit more water.

So I'm going to put a little bit more water in.

You can go up to a half a cup total.

The pain in the neck about the Nutribullet is to put more water

in, you have to kind of re unscrew it and take the whole thing apart.

I know.

Unlike the Vitamix, which you can just pour it through the top.

But it's, this is really too few ingredients for a good Vitamix.

You can do it, but it's going to be frustrating.

Uh, many food processors are going to let you off and pour right through the top,

but Um, the Nutribullet can be a pain.

Okay, so now we've got the

chili beans.

It's really better

now.

So now we're gonna make the pork dip.

And here's how you're gonna do it.

You're gonna go to the stove, and you're gonna get a wok, and you're

gonna heat it up, get it nice and hot.

Okay, here we go.

Over a high heat.

There we are.

It doesn't take long to heat up.

I have this thing called the Wokman.

It concentrates the flame on the bottom and it's

super You can't use it on an

electric stove.

Use it on a gas stove.

So it really heats it up fast.

And into that I'm putting three tablespoons of oil.

You can use a neutral

flavored oil or peanut oil.

Yep.

And I'm dumping in the chili paste and I'm going to Fry this

until it is very, very fragrant.

This is going to take about 30 seconds.

If you have a vent over your stove, it's a good idea to put it on.

Otherwise you might, uh, disturb other people in your house.

So once that it gets really hot and, uh, uh, also your eyes start to burn,

then you want to crumble in one and a half pounds or 675 grams of ground pork.

If you can find lean ground pork, that's great.

If you can grind your own, you're insane.

Oh my gosh, you're insane.

But you want to do that in and you want to now toss it and stir

fry it Okay, so this pork is going to take very long to get cooked.

I mean it takes a minute or so Like what we're looking for is that We lose that

pink raw color and it starts to brown.

It's going to go a little longer when we add the other aromatics.

So what are some of those other aromatics?

Well, while Mark is stirring that pork up, I have four Anaheim chilies.

I like Anaheim's because they're hot, but they're not too hot.

And I'm going to toss them in while Mark is doing the pork now.

So they just add some of their fragrance to that.

And now we have a thing about sugar.

You can add white sugar, you can add brown sugar.

I'm actually using palm sugar because I love palm sugar.

And it has a little edge of caramel to it already.

That's a tablespoon of that.

And then two tablespoons of shrimp paste.

And if you don't know about shrimp paste, get ready.

It's a little bit stinky.

Uh, it's a, it's a fermented product, right?

And it, what it does is it mellows, just like fish sauce, over the heat

and gives this pork an incredibly deep, complex, savory flavor.

Look for a shrimp paste that has oil floating on top of it.

Don't get one that's dry.

I love the ones that are, that almost look like chili crisp, that

they have oil floating on top.

And we're also adding fish sauce because I want this to be really complex and

really deep and really delicious.

And then what are you putting in now?

Okay, this is one and a half teaspoons of chicken soup powder, bouillon, right?

Bouillon, chicken bouillon powder.

So, what we're doing here is we're adding a lot of salt, of

course, and a lot of savory base.

It's all to balance that sugar.

So, one and a half teaspoons of chicken soup powder or chicken bouillon.

You can crush up a cube and get one and a half teaspoons as you need it.

Finally, here we go, a cup of coconut milk.

Do not use low fat coconut milk by any stretch of your imagination.

You're going to use, you want the full creamy richness.

To cut the spice to balance it all and now we are just going to let this

bubble away for about 10 or 15 minutes to reduce because there's a lot of

liquid that coconut milk We want this to become actually almost the texture of an

Italian meat sauce And so we are going to let this bubble and then we're going

to come back when it is ready to taste

All right.

Now it is ready to taste it's come Off the heat.

It's cooled down a bit.

It's quite thick.

It's kind of like bolognese.

It doesn't smell like bolognese, but it's kind of like bolognese in its texture.

And what we have here, what we have today is a bunch of, of cut up, uh,

zucchini and, uh, pickling cucumbers.

And we can drag these through the sauce.

They're dead raw.

You want dead raw vegetables, tomatoes if you like, onions, sliced onions, yes, if

you like radishes, yes, cabbage is really a wonderful thing too, cabbage is great,

bok choy is great, uh, kale if it's small and digestible is great, believe it or

not, small collard greens that have the stems cut out are great, raw, and believe

it or not, again, I keep saying believe it or not, I had this with eggplant the first

time, with thin slices of raw eggplant.

So what you want is raw vegetables here, and you're gonna drag

it through this meat sauce.

And then you're gonna eat it.

Oh, oh, this is delicious.

I love Asian flavors.

I love the fish sauce.

I love the coconut.

I love the sugar.

I find this so comforting.

There's something about the coconut and the sugar and the chilies

that for me it's a comfort food.

Yeah, it's really wild.

Um, this is really an unusual recipe.

I mean, this is an original creation from Bruce.

It may have been inspired, I'm not sure, but this bears no

resemblance to anything that is authentically Cambodian or anything.

This is kind of his original riff.

Off that, using more accessible ingredients, I know, I know,

um, the lime leaves and it's not terribly accessible, but

But red curry paste is very accessible.

You can

find it and It's so tasty and delicious, and it is really a great contrast

warm against the cold raw vegetables.

I love them cold.

Again, we got this in the restaurant originally with tomatoes, onions.

Just a whole big, giant platter of vegetables to drag through it.

I really like it with cabbage and, uh, and, you know, cord collards, as I say.

I think you nailed that when you said the temperature that's that is, it's that

contrast of the cold vegetables, the warm sauce, the crunchy of the vegetables,

the rich chewiness of the pork.

It's a combination that's unique that.

I had never tried before and I just love this.

Right,

and yes, could you eat this on rice?

Of course you could.

But it's better with the raw vegetables.

Just trust us on this.

It's a very unusual flavor profile.

It is deep, complex, sophisticated.

It's probably not for the third grade set.

But it is really unusual and interesting and it's a wild

way to wake up your palate.

All right.

Before we get to the last segment of our podcast, what's making us happy in food

this week, let me say that it'd be great if you could subscribe to this podcast.

If you could rate it, give it a rating and even a review, even

great podcast as winners, thank you to all of you who have done that.

Uh, we so appreciate it because we are willfully unsupported.

So it is the way that you can not woefully willfully willfully unsupported.

So it is the way you can support us.

Okay.

Off to what's making us happy in food this week.

It's the same thing that makes me happy.

Every February, Satsuma oranges,

oh my goodness, they

are tiny little mandarins that are so intensely orange flavored.

They're a little sour, but still sweet.

They don't have seeds.

You can peel them and eat them in one bite.

bite and they make me so happy and I buy enough that I could even squeeze some

and have juice with a little bit of we

had laughing is because we went to California to see our niece.

She had the lead in her high school musical for her senior year.

She was aerial in a little mermaid.

The Little Mermaid.

All the mermaid.

How about just little mermaid

? Okay.

I don't, don't even know.

Believe it or not, I had never seen, I think it's The Little Mermaid said

Mermaid, so I knew nothing about it.

I didn't know anything about Ursula.

I knew nothing.

So I know I'm a bad gay, but I had never seen any of these things.

So, um, we went and saw her and, uh.

On our way home back to New England, we had to fly through a snowstorm and

through a snowstorm into New England, we landed in a snowstorm, we drove out of

the airport in a snowstorm, and instead of going straight home, being ever now

the intrepid New Englanders that we are, we actually stopped at a Whole Foods so

Bruce could buy said Satsumas because, you know, God forbid we should just

drive home and try to get home safe.

And boy,

I am so happy with my Satsumas.

Yeah,

it's crazy.

So what's made me happy in food this week is something that Bruce

made for me to help me get over this respiratory grossness, and

that is a giant pot of chicken soup.

And he made real chicken soup as we call it in our house, which

by that he means Jewish chicken.

Jewish penicillin.

It's clear.

The way I judge a good chicken soup is not just the flavor.

It has to be

clear.

No, and I am different.

I brown the chicken.

I essentially make chicken stew, so I don't make anything like And what he did

is he took a bunch of chicken wings and put them in an instant pot with water.

And he cooked them in an instant pot until they were dead.

A long time.

And then he took them out.

He took all the meat off the wings.

He saved the meat to the side.

He clarified the juice of any flesh.

I

poured it through my super fine mesh conical strainer.

Right, to get

rid of any impurities.

And then he heated that and reduced it a bit, right?

A little bit.

And cooked noodles separately, egg noodles.

And then ladled the hot soup over the cooked noodles and added back

a little bit of that chicken meat.

It was So delicious.

Play your

cards right and what's left of it, you're going to get kreplach with that chicken.

Kreplach.

All right.

See, I live Jewish dumplings.

I live in a delicatessen.

That's where I live.

Okay.

Thanks for being a part of the show.

We kind of, that was a weird recipe, but we were really excited about it and really

love it with the crunchy vegetables.

Give it a try.

If you want to find that recipe, you can find it on our website, bruceandmark.

com.

You can also see Bruce making this recipe on our TikTok channel,

Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

Or in our Facebook feed, Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

See, it's all Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

We did that on purpose and you can find Bruce making it there

and find the recipe in those places, as well as on our website.

And we'd love to have you back next week.

And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

Tell us what's making you happy in food this week on our Facebook

group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And if it's really fun and exciting, we'll talk about it here on our next episode.