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Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Obsessed: Spicy-Sour Edamame

I can see that this won't make your mouth water, what with it being a bowl of hairy green pods, but it should.
Oh, you guys, I so loved your comments on that last post. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you for treating me like your wayward but beloved cousin who is finally making good, and I love you for wanting to pre-order a book that is two years from existing, and I love you for being so. . . loving is really the word that comes to mind. Thank you.


But you are here for a recipe, I know. And I have one.


Do you live nearby? If you do, and you haven’t been to The Quarters yet, you are missing out. It’s all retro pinball and arcade games (everything 25-cents a pop), and then there’s great beer and excellent bar food: deep-friend Brussels sprouts with spicy mayo, perfect sweet-potato fries, mini hotdogs (veggie dogs, if you prefer) with toppings like kimchi and mac and cheese. 


I love it all, but the thing that surprised me the first time, because there was so much deep-fried deliciousness that was inherently more exciting to me, was the edamame. I could not stop eating it—even when there was a basket of fries literally next to it on the table.
This is meant to be more inspiringly simple-looking than unappealingly ruined-seeming.
 I wrote The Quarters guys beggingly for the recipe, and got this back: “It's a mix of lime juice, sriracha, water, salt n pepper. Glad you enjoy!” So this is my interpretation, below. I confess (heresy, I know) to not loving sriracha typically, even though I love almost every other hot sauce. But I love it here. And don’t be dismayed by the amount of salt: you’re seasoning the pods heavily, so that when you bite the beans out of them, they’re seasoned too, if that makes sense.

Trader Joe's.
I cannot enough recommend that you try this. 


The edamame are sensational, in the sense of crazy good and in the sense of there being a lot of sensation: they’re too sour and too spicy in a way that everyone in my family loves. You’ll have to see if you do too. Thank you for everything, Quarters.
All gone. 
The Quarters’ Spicy-Sour Edamame
For this recipe, you want the Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers kind of edamame that’s still got the pods.

1 (1-pound) bag frozen edamame
1 tablespoon sriracha
Freshly squeezed juice of 1 lime
2 teaspoons kosher salt (or half as much table salt)
Lots of freshly ground black pepper

Steam the edamame until they are tender. I do this in one of those UFO steamers, the kind that’s always weirdly missing one of its hinged segments, over an inch of boiling water, for about 10 minutes, even though the bag says “5.” (Then again, I don’t really like my pasta al dente either, so use your judgment.)

Meanwhile, whisk together the remaining ingredients in a large bowl. Add the hot edamame and toss well to coat. Eat.
 

15 comments:

  1. Thanks for the recipe and Quarters recommendation. I'll be in Northampton this summer (fingers crossed) and can't wait to check out the area.

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  2. KyCat7:04 PM

    OK, you show the discarded pods. Dumb question - do you season them in the pods and then pop them out with your fingers, OR do you season the pods and then put the pod in your mouth and just scootch them out with your teeth OR do you pop them out of the pods and then season the beans themselves?? I don't think the last one is correct based on your salt information but that seems the most logical to me. I am clearly an edamame virgin and need more specific guidance. Thank you for your help. :-)

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    1. kycat, we scootch them out with our teeth, the way you would scrape the bottoms off of artichoke leaves. But fingers are fine too! xo

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    2. Thanks! Now I can proceed to make these and go get artichokes because now I want those too! :-)

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  3. Mmm.

    If it is raining again, I might take my kids to Quarters TOMORROW so the will think I am nice.

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  4. Sounds good! Yay for you and your recipes. We had your pork sliders and miso-lime cole slaw tonight and I thought, for the thousandth time, "what the hell would we be eating without Catherine Newman?"

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  5. We eat edamame all the time. Seasonings other than salt never occurred to me! This sounds great.

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  6. NO, I'm not here for a recipe (though I do enjoy them immensely), I'm here for the WRITING!! and for you and for your family and for the fun with the recipes, the advice, the comment section, etc, etc, etc. :)

    I've known edamame for years... (like upwards of 30), although I didn't know what it was called. I first had it in my childhood because I grew up in a boarding academy in Brazil located in a rural area where they planted wheat, corn and... soybeans! And the next town over had a sizable population of Japanese immigrants (Brazil is the country with the most Japanese immigrants in the world) and my parents heard from someone that we could eat the green soybean pods after cooking them and we did! After that I moved to the huge city of São Paulo and only had edamame again here in the U.S. when it became all the rage years ago. :) Ha, maybe I should go write a blog post about this little childhood experience! ;-)
    L -- Mama(e) in Translation (long time reader whose children were born in the very same hospital as yours ;-)

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  7. So good! We're big edamame fans but I always just season them with salt. I made your spicy-sour version to have with supper last night and the kids devoured them.

    I also wanted to tell you that my 11-year-old very much enjoyed "Wonder" and wanted to pass on some book recommendations to Birdy: "Elsewhere" by Gabrielle Zevin, and "The Humming Room" by Ellen Potter.

    Thanks!

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  8. My Sriracha-loving 11 year old will thank you. His brother, not so much LOL He will think we've ruined the edamame ;)

    We once hid Sriracha in a slice of angel food cake, just for him. He says he needs therapy, because "you all SUCK!"

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  9. (And also, can we open a wormhole so we can come hang out at Quarters? Because, awesome . . . )

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  10. I live in Japan, land of edamame. And I've never heard of seasoning them this way. Very excited to try it! Sounds like they would go very well with beer. (Good beer food is always a plus in my book.)

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  11. Rebecca B10:10 PM

    Wait...you only mentioned it a little bit...but CAN we really pre-order your book? Before I had kids, I would have said two years is an eternity to wait for something, but now, in the blink of an eye, my tiny baby is 8, and I think I could wait two years for a book I ordered without much noticing the time whizzing by.

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  12. Anonymous11:45 PM

    Thank you, Catherine, for recommending books (and games and crafts) in your blog. I really enjoyed The Grief of Others and Life After Life which I would have never read without your referral, so was eager to buy Home Away a couple of weeks ago. Got it right away and couldn't put it down. Launa is a wonderful writer, and I really appreciated her honesty about her family's 10-month stay in France... In our social media age with so many temptations to photoshop-ify our families and careers and manage the PR story of our lifestyles on FaceBook and Pinterest, Launa explored the depth and complexity of raising a family and trying to do what's best for everyone when that's impossible.

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  13. Becky Mathers10:16 PM

    A belated thank you. I live in Eastern Mass now, but my husband made sure we included our first stop (of many to come!) at The Quarters as part of our Mother's Day back 'home' in Northampton/Goshen. The kids and I got games and edamame, he and I got bahn mi pups, and he got a beer so all were happy! We made the edamame tonight (and started pickling for bahn mi soon.) Thanks again for more recommendations and inspirations!

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