This is another promotional post about the anthology about recipes and cooking called Feeding the Muse, edited by Leona Wisoker. I’ll get the promotional stuff out of the way under the fold (the 2nd chapter), then go on to the writing about this section of my chapter.

I contributed the last chapter to an anthology of writers writing about cooking. I think my entry’s one of the longest, and it’s about a tidy comfort food menu built around some of my father’s (and mine) favorite Chinese dishes. The book’s called Feeding The Muse: Recipes For Authors, Recipes By Authors. You can buy it in eBook form at Barnes & Noble (for $1.99), SmashWords (for $1.99), Blio (for $1.99 – epub format – blio format), or Kobo (for $1.99). Other contributors: Danny Birt, Elektra Hammond, Jonah Knight, Gail Z Martin, Steven Savage, Edward Morris, Leona R Wisoker, & Allen L Wold. If you like any of us, please consider throwing a couple of dollars our way – we hope you find something in the anthology that you like.

Anyhow, this post is about Wok Hei Lettuce with Chopped Salted Chiles. I give two recipes in this section, one for the Chopped Salted Chiles, which are a freezer held pantry item – i make a few pints at a time, and use a tablespoon at a time. The other recipe is for the Wok Hei Lettuce with the chiles.

As I say in the book, the chopped salted chiles are a lacto-fermentation, which you ferment on the counter, and then store in the freezer (where it keeps, essentially, forever). Because the book doesn’t come with pictures or illustrations, I thought I should put some in here. You wouldn’t believe how many pictures there are of multicolored Hunan style chopped salted chiles/ies/is. That’s right. Zero. I guess one must proudly only make their chopped salted chiles out of red chiles (I’m going to go with the “e” spelling because I’m quirky).

Anyhow, this is what my chopped salted chiles from a little over 2 years ago look like, coming out of the freezer:

I guess you ought to watch this space for what my wok hei lettuce with chopped salted chiles looks like, but here are some versions of others’ (with pictures on their sites – I’m not hot linking others’ copyrighted pictures here, but it’s just a click away!):

• Grace Young does a nice mild recipe without chiles (but with garlic and scallions, and iceberg lettuce) at Food52.
• PatriCa Bb has a recipe using fresh bird eye chili and preserved bean curd, at My Wok Life.
• And of course, from the book, I linked to Tigers and Strawberries’ post about making the chopped salted chiles.

I, geekily, want to give you the whole cow here in the blog, but that would be silly. Do me a favor and drop a couple of bucks on the eBook somehow and read the recipe and commentary (and the other cool recipes from the other contributors) in the anthology itself! And enjoy yourself, if you can, in that kitchen of yours.