This year's non-traditional Thanksgiving was back to Mexican, because there's no American like Mesoamerican. Last time (2010) was based on Roberto Santabanez's Truly Mexican; this time, we made a menu of the recipes of Pati Jinich. I now have three of Jinich's cookbooks, and we've been watching our way through her PBS series (we're on Season 8: Sinaloa), and between those it was easy to put together a full menu for our small family gathering. Still just the few of us thanks to The Plague.

We always do no-turkey Thanksgiving meals, since none of us like it. Well, not really no-turkey; turkeys were present, it's just that they were eating instead of being eaten.

Since enchiladas were on the menu, and there's a nice little market where I can buy fresh masa, I decided to make my own tortillas. It's not particularly hard, or even time-consuming if you have the right equipment: a tortilla press and a large griddle or comal. I think it took me around 70 minutes to make 3 dozen tortillas. I made some mini-tortillas for making mini-tostadas later.

By coincidence, all three savory dishes featured corn in some form. Well, that's Mexican food for you. It's also coincidentally gluten-free.

Our first course was Jinich's Avocado/Panela Salad. I made some small changes to it, though: I fried the panela cheese, which I strongly recommend for this; and because some people in my family are capsicum wimps, I replaced the pickled jalapeños with pickled banana peppers. These changes worked and the salad was still delicious.

I fried up those mini-tortillas so I could make the mini-tostadas (tostaditas?), putting a spoonful of avocado salad on top. These were big winners.

In keeping with the theme, instead of wine we drank 54'40" Brewing's 1862, a tasty, light Mexican-style lager.

Half the main course was a Thanksgiving standard, green beans. Only these were the Green Beans with Corn Sauce and Pepitas from Treasures of the Mexican Table. This was a surprisingly complicated recipe for a vegetable side dish, requiring a pan, pot, and a blender, but it was completely worth it. These were absolutely delicious and could have easily been a vegan centerpiece on their own.

The other main dish was far from vegan: Crab and Pea Enchiladas in Sour Cream Sauce, this time from Mexican Today. This was another success, rich, decadent and delicious, despite actually being faster to make than the green beans (if you don't make your own tortillas, that is). These are very rich; you really won't need more than two per person. Def a holiday dish. Like the other dishes, I toned down the heat by swapping in milder peppers.

This may look like a light meal but we were stuffed by the time we finished the main course. So we took a two-hour break before re-convening for dessert, prepared by my sweetie. This was hot chocolate and a cajeta custard, this time a Jinich online recipe. Sublime but light and small, which we appreciated at that point in the evening. Tip, though: use a torch to caramelize the sugar for the custards just before service.

So, that's our no-turkey Thanksgiving for 2022. What was yours?

(No recipe in this article; you can find two of the Jinich recipes in the links)

Yes, yes, I realize I'm posting this a full month after Thanksgiving ... bookmark it and save the ideas for next year, OK?

This year's non-traditional Thanksgiving menu was inspired by The Mosquito Supper Club cookbook, which came out this year to broad acclaim. Having eaten Melissa Martin's Cajun cooking in New Orleans, I was eager to reproduce some of the dishes. And Thanksgiving seemed like the only time to do it, given that many of the recipes in the cookbook take 3 or more hours to prepare.

Since it was just the four of us (thanks, Covid!), we kept it relatively simple, with just a single course for dinner.

My sweetie made sweet potato biscuits from Food Wishes. These were interesting as they deliberately include chunks of unblended sweet potato. They were nice and flaky.

Where the three hours of prep came in was the shrimp jambalaya. One big difference between Cajun and Creole cooking is that, while Creole cooking relies heavily on spices and cream, most of the flavor in Cajun cooking comes from long, slow cooking of ingredients, particularly onions and peppers. The jambalaya starts with caramelizing the onions for well over an hour until they are a deep, dark brown; Martin's estimate was 60-90 minutes, but I think it took me around 105.

The result of all of this cooking was rich, dark flavor on the rice without much in the way of spices. That said, it wasn't as flavorful as I was expecting; I don't really feel like I got my 100-minutes-of-caramelizing worth. Not sure what I did wrong.

According to Martin, jambalaya is often served with some kind of homemade pickle, so I made a batch of pickled beets. As a distinctly Cajun touch, the pickles are seasoned with bay leaves and cane vinegar. Since I couldn't find Steen's Cane Vinegar in time, I used Philipino cane vinegar instead, which was a bit sharp; I expect the Steen's would have been better.

The recipe I'm most likely to repeat out of this dinner, though, was the simplest one, for a side dish of peas and potatoes. We wanted some kind of green vegetable with dinner, but were hampered by the fact that Cajuns apparently don't eat a wide variety of green veggies, and most they do eat are "summer" veggies for the rest of us, like zucchini. Hence the peas. These were unexpectedly delightful, so my adaptation of Martin's recipe follows.

Cajun peas-and-potatoes

• 2 Tbs vegetable oil
• 1 large onion, chopped fine, around 1.5 cups
• 1 lbs baby red potatoes
• 1 to 1.5 lbs good quality frozen green peas, or fresh peas in season
• 1/2 to 1 tsp salt, to taste
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1/8 to 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
• 2-3 Tbs butter

Scrub and cut the red potatoes in halves or quarters depending on size. Dump the frozen peas into a collander to thaw while other ingredients cook.

Heat the oil in a large, deep pan over medium heat. Add the chopped onions and saute for 10 minutes, until translucent. Add in the potatoes, and stir around. Reduce heat to medium-low and cover, and cook for another 10 minutes, until the potatoes are partly cooked.

Uncover, and add the peas and seasonings, and stir. If the peas are still frozen, then turn up the heat for 2 minutes to thaw them before turning down to low again. Add a small splash (1-3 Tbs) of water if the mixture seems dry. Cover and cook for another 10-15 minutes, until the potatoes are completely done (check one with a fork).

(For the seasonings, add cayenne pepper according to your taste for spicy things. If adding very little of the cayenne, use the greater amount of black pepper).

Add the butter, and stir in until melted. Serve in a large bowl as a side dish. 4-8 portions, depending.

Believe it or not, one of the things we do when we stay in a small town vacationing is visit the local library. And in exceptionally nice cases -- and the library in Eastsound is exceptionally nice -- the library offers "guest cards" for a fee that let visitors like me check out a few books. The Orcas Island library did, and we did. This is how I got my hands on a cookbook called For Cod and Country.

I'd been looking for a fish cookbook since it's salmon season in the San Juans and I was able to pick up some super-fresh salmon of several varieties. This book wasn't particular to West Coast seafood, but it had an advantage over the other fish cookbooks I looked at: it divides its recipes by season rather than by type of seafood, so I had a bunch of "summer" recipes all in one place. Most of them were for other fish, but I could adapt them to salmon, including this one. Even more importantly, many of he recipes were easy, one-pan meals. Including this one.

The salmon I cooked here is the so-called Ivory Salmon, which is King Salmon with a mutation so that it is white-fleshed rather than orange/red. This mutation only occurs in around 1 in 25 fish, and the Native Americans eat most of them, so you're probably not going to get your hands on any unless you're here in the Island Northwest. It's also milder-flavored than regular salmon, so you're actually looking for a fatty, mild salmon, or even another fish such as lingcod, barrimundi, rocfish, or even halibut. Because of the preparation, it needs to be a skin-on filet between 1/2 inch and 1 inch thick.

Also, the cherry tomatoes must be ripe summer fruit; the recipe will suck if you use those flavorless winter "grape" tomatoes. Once you've sourced your fish and your tomatoes, though, the rest is easy. It's so easy, in fact, that I've written it in Good First Recipe style, so if you're an experienced cook, you can skim the super-detailed directions.

Not that it doesn't require attention! Your total cooking time here is less than 20 minutes, but you should plan to spend that entire time in front of the oven, so that you don't burn anything.

one pan salmon with cherry tomatoes and garlic

• 1lbs to 1.5lbs mild salmon, lingcod, or similar fish (see above), skin-on filet pieces of uniform thickness
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 3-4 large cloves garlic, peeled and sliced thick
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 10-13 oz cherry tomatoes, whole (see note)
• additional salt and pepper for fish and tomatoes
• 10.5" to 12" cast iron pan, or other broiler-proof pan
• apron and oven mitts

Place an oven rack to bring the top of your pan within 3" of the broiler flame/element. Heat the broiler while you prepare the ingredients. Put on an apron.

Cut the salmon into individual portions, and rub each portion with a little of the olive oil, just enough to coat, around 1-2 tsp of the oil. Sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper on both sides. Set aside. Wash, stem, and completely dry the cherry tomatoes.

Pour the rest of the olive oil in the pan. Scatter the garlic slices across the bottom of the pan. Put the pan under the broiler for 3-7 minutes, until the oil is hot and the garlic is starting to brown. You'll probably need to pull it out each minute starting at minute 3, since broilers vary a lot. If the garlic isn't starting to sizzle and brown by minute 5, see if you can turn up the broiler or move the pan closer.

Take the pan out of the oven, place on the stovetop or a trivet, and -- carefully standing back -- dump the cherry tomatoes into the pan. This may spatter a bit, so oven mits wouldn't be a bad idea. Lightly sprinkle with salt and ground pepper. Put the pan back under the broiler for another 2-4 minutes, checking every minute starting a minute 3 like you did with the garlic.

The tomatoes are done when some of them have burst and all of them look slightly blistered on top. Even a little charring is good. When they're done, pull out the pan again and place the salmon portions, skin side up, distributed evenly around the top of the tomatoes. Put the pan back under the broiler for another 5-10 minutes, depending on the thickness of your salmon and how hot it is. The salmon will be done when the skin is browned and starting to blister.

Pull the pan from the oven and put it back on your heatproof surface. Slide a large spatula under the tomatoes beneath a piece of salmon, and invert the whole thing onto a diner's plate, with salmon on the bottom and tomatoes (proably stuck to the salmon) on top. Add a few more tomatoes and spoon over some juice and oil. Do the same for the other diners, distributing any extra tomatoes and juice that are left.

Serve with a salad, or corn, and some bread to mop us extra tomato juice.

You want ripe, summer, small-medium round cherry tomatoes for this, such as sungolds or sweet 100s. You need enough tomatoes to loosely cover the bottom of the pan, so check this before you start cooking, and use more tomatoes or a different size pan.

Since we were having Rosh Hashana on the road, I wanted to cook a themed dinner in our rental cottage. And since we were on Orcas Island, it was gonna involve fish: king salmon, given the season. It helps that fish is a traditional Rosh Hashana food, although you're supposed to have the head on, which would have been a very large meal, so we skipped that part. The king salmon coming in at the market weighed 10lbs or more.

The other thing that was in season -- in fact, growing directly outside the cottage -- was blackberries. So those supply the "seasonal fruit" part of the Yom Tov menu, plus we have apples in the form of cider. I added some rosemary (also growing outside the cottage), and the required new year's honey.

The salmon can be cooked any way you like for this. I broiled it (detailed below), but you could just as easily use it grilled or pan-seared. I probably wouldn't use a different fish, though, as the blackberry sauce is strong-flavored and needs a robust fish to match. Also, no poaching.

salmon with blackberry-honey compote

Compote:

• 1 to 1.5 pints blackberries
• 5-6 tbs salted butter
• 1 tsp chopped fresh rosemary leaves
• 1/2 sweet onion, chopped fine, around 3/4 cup
• 1/2 cup hard cider
• 2 tbs good honey
• salt to taste

Salmon:

• 1 to 1.5lbs skin-on salmon filet, portioned
• salt & pepper
• olive oil

Heat a small pot (1-2 qt) on the stovetop. Melt 2 tbs of the butter in the bottom, followed by the chopped onion. Saute over medium heat until the onion is completely transparent and soft. Add the rosemary leaves and cook for 1-2 minutes more. Add the blackberries, turn the heat down to low, and allow to cook for 5-10 minutes, until the blackberries just start to fall apart.

While the berries are cooking, heat the oven to 250F and place a baking rack 4" from the flame/element if you're planning on broiling the salmon.

When the blackberries are just starting to disintegrate, pour in the cider and the honey, turn up the heat a bit, and bring it to a boil. Turn off the heat and put a lid on to hold while you prepare the salmon.

If you're broiling the salmon, line a baking sheet with foil. Lightly oil the center of the foil with olive oil. Pat the salmon dry on both sides with paper towels, then lightly salt and pepper it, and place it skin-side-down in the middle of the foil. If this is a lean salmon like coho, also rub some olive oil or melted butter into the flesh. Turn on the oven broiler and place the salmon under the broiler. Cook for 6 to 12 minutes, depending on the heat of your broiler and the thickness of the salmon. If the salmon begins to brown on top before the skin side is done, move it to the center of the oven and drop the temperature to 300F (or just turn off the broiler, depending on your oven).

If you're cooking the salmon another way, well, that's up to you.

Now, just before serving the salmon, finish your sauce. Reheat it slightly if it's gone lukewarm, but do not boil it. Turn off the heat and mix in 3-4 tbs of butter, stirring until it's melted, to thicken the sauce. Taste and add salt if necessary; the sauce should be sweet-savory.

Plate a portion for each diner and ladle some sauce on top. Serve with challah to mop up the excess sauce.

We never do traditional American Thanksgiving at our place, but this year particularly called for something a little different. With only the four of us, we really didn't want to have a lot of leftovers, so we wanted a cuisine that encouraged restraint. That's why my sweetie suggested Scandanavian. We hadn't done that before, so I said yes.

Many of the recipes used in this meal came from the cookbook Lagom which was an excellent source for lighter, Swedish-themed dishes. We also relied on The Finnish Cookbook.

To pace ourselves, we divided the meal into 4 courses, starting with some storebought Finnish crispbread and snack foods. The little tastes were herring pickled in wine (of course!), chantrelle mushrooms marinated in oil and herbs, gietost cheese, and lingonberry jam. If you can, I recommend doing this: a taster course while you prepare the later courses of the meal will get folks settled at the table, without making you finish the entrees at 4pm.

The standard libation to go with these kinds of snacks would be aquavit, but with only two of us drinking alcohol, that didn't seem worth the expense. Instead, we washed down the meal with Scandanavian-themed Oregon beers, such as Little Beast's Folkvangr, a very drinkable "dark Norweigan" ale.

The real standout of the evening was this kale salad. Yes, really. Not only was it delicious, it was perhaps the quinessential fall dish, with kale, hazelnuts, cranberries, and apples. The recipe is from Lagom; below is my version with some small variations.

kale-hazelnut-apple salad

based on a recipe from Lagom

1/2 cup pearled spelt (farro) (subs. pearled barley)
10-12 oz kale leaves, stems removed and roughly chopped, around 2 quarts volume, ideally both red and green curly kale
1 lime (about 2 Tbs juice)
1 cup/5oz toasted hazelnuts, roughly chopped
2/3 cup dried cranberries
1 tart apple
1/2 cup mild olive oil
1 Tbs cider vinegar
pinch each of salt and pepper
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves, or 1/2 tsp dried
Equipment: pot, large bowl, blender

Boil 1 quart water with a pinch of salt. Put the spelt/farro into it and simmer for 20-24 minutes, until the grain is tender by still chewy. Drain and let cool.

Place the dried, chopped kale in a large bowl and squeeze the juice out of the lime over it. Massage the juice into the kale but squeezing and turning it with your hands, until it softens. This takes 2-3 minutes, but you'll feel the change in texture.

Split the kale between 4-6 plates. Sprinkle over the spelt, then the hazelnuts, and the cranberries, distributing uniformly.

Now, make the dressing: cut the apple into chunks and put it into a blender or food processor. Pour over the oil and cider vinegar, and add the thyme, salt, and pepper. Puree until smooth.

Drizzle each salad evenly with the dressing. Serve within 20 minutes of making it.

This is a Cuban recipe I got out of a memoir of 1940s Cuba I read a while back. It's really nice for the current quarantine because the only fresh ingredients it requires are lime juice and parsley, and the latter is optional, and the former can be substituted using this stuff. So with a little planning or online shopping it's your perfect self-isolation shrimp dish.

This is part of my Good First Recipe series, so the cooking instructions are extremely detailed. Don't be put off by that; this is really a super-easy dish that works well as a side dish with beans, rice, and other Latin foods.

The oddball ingredient in this dish is "cracker meal", something you'll find in a lot of mid-century Cuban recipes. While you can locate this in some Latin markets, most folks will buy some generic saltine crackers, and blitz them in a blender or food processor until reduced to crumbs. It takes around 10 saltines to produce the quantity required. If you can't find saltines, then just use boxed breadcrumbs.

Like usual, you should vary the amount of hot sauce based on how spicy you like things.

rummy shrimp

1 lbs to 1 1/2 lbs shrimp, shelled and cleaned
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp to 1 tsp Tabasco, Crystal, or similar vinegar hot sauce
1/2 cup light/white rum
Juice of 1-2 limes, about 1/4 cup
1 Tbs Worchestershire sauce
1 tsp cumin
4 Tbs butter and/or olive oil
4-6 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 to 3/4 cup cracker meal or breadcrumbs
3 Tbs minced parsley

Equipment: non-reactive bowl, ovenproof skillet such as 12" cast iron skillet, stovetop, broiler

Mix together the salt, tabasco, rum, lime juice, Worchestershire, and cumin as a marinade. Put the shrimp in a non-reactive bowl, pour over the marinade, toss them to coat, and then cover. Marinate for at least 1/2 hour, or for up to 2 hours in the fridge (but not overnight, the shrimp will "cook" in that time).

Drain the shrimp, reserving the marinade. Make sure the shrimp is fairly dry, using paper towels if necessary.

Heat the butter and/or oil in an ovenproof pan. Turn on the broiler to low/425F to heat it. Fry the garlic in the oil for around 1 minute, or until the smallest pieces just begin to turn brown. Carefully place the shrimp in a single layer so that they all have contact with the bottom of the pan, and fry for around 1 minute. Pour the marinade over the shrimp, bring to a boil, and boil for a full minute. You do not stir the shrimp for any of this, and the pan contents will still be wet when you are done.

Take the pan off the heat. Sprinkle with the cracker meal/breadcrumbs, making an even layer over the shrimp. Put the pan under the broiler for 3-6 minutes, until the crumbs are crisp and golden -- check it each minute after the third because they can burn quickly. Remove it from the oven and sprinkle with the parsley while still hot.

Serve with plain white rice, and optionally black beans, avocado, or other Cuban foods. Offer hot sauce on the side. Feeds four people as part of a multi-dish meal, or two if you're just having it with rice.

Dungeness crab season has started in Oregon! The commission made us wait for an additional month to get our crabs, but that wait was a good thing: crabs are larger, with sweeter meat and thicker shells. You'll have better crab this season than you did for the last several years.

But just because the crab is better out of the pot, doesn't mean you can't improve on nature through creative cooking. In fact, this week I started thinking of one of my favorite San Francisco restaurants, PPQ Dungeness Crab House, and I decided to re-create their famous garlic crab. I didn't, quite, but what I got was maybe even more delicious.

Now, before I get to the recipe, I need to give you some warnings:

1. This recipe requires buying a live crab, meaning you need a source for live Oregon crab, and be OK with killing and cleaning it yourself.
2. It is a saturated fat bomb, not suitable for folks with heart conditions or severe acid reflux. Consult your physician before attempting.
3. After eating crab like this, you may find it hard to enjoy plain cold cracked crab from the fish counter again.

The recipe below is for one large (2.3lbs/1kg) live crab. It will scale up to as much as four crabs fairly well, and you can make it with smaller crabs. I offer cooking time recommendations for small (1lbs-1.5lbs) and medium (1.5lbs-2.0lbs) crabs below, but be warned that I have only actually tested the cooking time for large crabs. If increasing the number of crabs, add +50% ingredients for each additional crab. If your crabs are small, subtract 25% from ingredient quantities.

I'm also going to assume that you have never dealt with a live dungeness crab before, so if you have, you can skip parts of the instructions.

garlic-pepper roasted dungeness crab

• one large live dungeness crab (2lbs+) (see notes for smaller crabs)
• 1 large/2 small lemons, sliced thin
• 1 and 1/2 heads of garlic, about 20 large/40 small cloves
• 1 small to medium yellow or white onion
• 2 Tbs whole peppercorns
• salt
• 3 tbs butter
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 4 tsp fresh, coarsely ground black pepper (yes, really)
• Lots of water
• 1 large stockpot, 1 medium-large ovenproof pan, some big bowls, and one pair of large metal tongs

Time: 70 minutes to 105 minutes, more for multiple crabs

Buy the live crab(s). Keep them somewhere they can breathe, but will be cold (below 50F but above freezing) so that they are dormant. If they do warm up, they should be lively/fighty; if they're not they may not be fresh/healthy. Since crabs need seawater to live, you can only really keep them in your fridge/shed for around 8 hours, so buy them the day you roast them. If the fishmonger put rubber bands on the claws, leave them in place, those claws are nasty.

Peel all the garlic. Whack 1/3 of the cloves with the flat of your knife, so they split but don't smush. Mince the rest of the garlic; it should make around 3/4 cup. Mince the onion small (should be aroud 1 cup), but reserve the ends/peel.

Fill the large stockpot 2/3 of the way up with water. Add enough salt to make it very salty, like 2 Tbs for a 6-qt stockpot. Add half the lemon slices (the small end/mostly peel ones), the onion ends, the smacked cloves of garlic, and the whole peppercorns. Bring to a roiling boil.

Using the tongs, transfer the crab(s) to the pot (this is why you want them cold & sluggish). Cooking time will be 4-6 minutes, but the exact timing is tricky. Smaller crabs require less time (4 min), medium a little more (4.5-5min), larger crabs more (5-5.5min), and multiple crabs might require still more. Also, you want the water to return to at least a simmer after putting the crab in, so if your stove is anemic or your pot very large it might take longer. Your best guide is probably color; as soon as the crab(s) turns orange, you want to take it out. What you're shooting for is "just barely cooked enough to clean it".

If doing more than one crab, you can either do them all at once, or one at a time. Since there's some sitting time, the latter is probably easier.

Once the crab is done, take it out with the tongs, shake the water off, and drop it in a big bowl to let it cool for 30-45min, until just barely warm. Once it's cooled, you will clean/dismantle the crab. This will be unpleasant; since the crab is barely cooked, it's going to be extra-slimy inside. But it's worth it! Consider disposable gloves.

So flip the crab upside down. Find the "apron", a triangular piece of shell on its rear end, pry it up with the tip of a knife, and break it off. Then grab the back edge of the main shell and pry it off the rest of the body like opening a huge Tupperware container. Keep the crab upside-down when you do this! You want the slimy bits to fall into the shell for easy disposal. Lift the body and pry off the lungs/gills, which look like rubbery white feathers, and any dark-colored slime. What remains on the body should be all white or translucent, and a bit gelatinous. Rinsing with cold water is OK, but better skipped if it's not necessary.

Here's a pictorial guide to dismantling a dungeness.

Put all the waste crab bits in a big, heavy plastic bag and seal it shut. You do not want this in your compost bin or open trash.

Now, break the body in half and snap off each of the legs. Then, using a heavy spoon, small mallet, or crab crackers, lightly crack the major leg sections. You're not trying to split the shell, just crack them enough that the sauce can get in. Set aside with the body pieces.

Heat the oven to 450F. Get out a large pan: skillet, baking pan, roasting pan, whatever you want. The key is that it has to be good at 450F, which means no plastic or silicone handles, and no nonstick. You want it just barely large enough to fit the crab pieces.

Put the butter and oil in the pan. Place it in the oven for 4-6 minutes, until the butter melts and starts to foam. Add the minced garlic, onion, and 2 tsp of the ground pepper. Put it back in the oven for about 5 minutes. Pull out, stir up the onion and garlic, and then put back in the oven for another 5 minutes or so. You are looking to get to the point where the onion and garlic just barely starts to brown.

Pull the pan out again, add the crab pieces, and toss them to make sure that all pieces are covered in the onion-garlic-butter mix. Use a spoon to spoon some sauce over big crab pieces; you want stuff coated (this is why you don't want the pan to be too big). When done tossing, sprinkle the crab with the rest of the ground pepper, and place the lemon slices on top of the crab pieces. Put the pan back in the oven to cook.

Cooking times are going to vary by the size/number of crabs, again. My large crab and hot oven took 10 minutes. A small crab might take 7, but if you have several crabs together add a couple minutes. Fortunately, you have some leeway here.

Serve hot, with crab crackers, picks, aprons, a stack of paper towels, and bread to mop up the sauce. Unlike cold cracked crab, you won't need or want any cocktail sauce or drawn butter here; the garlic-pepper sauce has all the flavor you need.

Variation: you can add 1-3 tsp of crushed red pepper, or even 1/4 cup of minced fresh hot peppers, to the garlic/onion mix to make it spicy. You could add ground Sichuan peppercorn and a splash of Shaoxing wine or sake to make it Chinese-style.