My Comfort Food

Everyone has a comfort food. It's a sense memory thing, I think. For some it's pizza. Others it could be mashed potatoes or chicken soup. For me, it's my mom's cooking, or anything that gets darn near close to it.

Mmmm. Clams in black bean sauce with sweet peppers and onions. I love fresh black bean sauce. It's so savory and pungent. My mom used to cook with it all the time...and I'm not talking about the stuff that comes mashed up in the jar. In my opinion, that lacks the vitality and freshness (if one can use that word with a fermented food) of the whole fermented bean.

She would take some fermented black beans from a jar put them in a rice bowl, fill the bowl halfway with water, pick up and drop the beans a number of times then remove them (into her palm) and pour out the water. Once I asked her why she didn't just leave the beans in the bowl and pour out the water. It's because some of the pebbles (there are sometimes little stones masquerading as beans in the mix) and grit would get held back by all the beans and it wouldn't be clean. Ok. Gotcha. So she'd rinse them a couple more times in that same manner until the water was pretty clear except for the bean skins floating around. Using the back of a Chinese soup spoon, she'd s/mash the beans into a paste. Tah dah, fresh black bean paste--must be cooked with fresh garlic (and sometime ginger) for the right flavor.

Anyway, this is not my recipe for clams so I won't go into that right now. Stay tuned though because I may include that in the future...and it's good.

Instead, Danno and I scouted out this place in "outer" Portland called Wong's King on SE Division St just east of 82nd St. It's fabulously big and located next to some sort of fur revitalizing store (I didn't know the fur business was still so big).

Chef Fu Lai Wong has won a prestigious cooking award in China (there are plaques everywhere) and the restaurant was rated in the top 100 Chinese restaurants in the country according to Chinese Restaurant News (which is written in Chinese so I'll have to wait for my mother to translate before letting you guys in on the other 99).

We also got this steaming plate of King mushrooms with sauteed greens. The King mushroom is a large oyster (or trumpet) mushroom that is tender and also meaty. The green was spinach and the sauce was light and savory.

We went on a week night so the place was pretty empty but the service was excellent. After we paid the bill, our server came by to give us dessert, because we are super nice. Actually, I don't know why they did it but it was a nice touch.

Tapioca soup with taro and coconut milk. It was also piping hot and delicious. That hint of coconut milk really put it over the top. Oh, Wong's King, we'll be back for more...maybe dim sum. And at some point Mama Lee will be the judge of that.