Fried Carrot Cake

I had to go up to Portland State University yesterday to meet up with a classmate of mine to work on our marketing class presentation for a case analysis. The great thing about taking an MBA program in an urban university is that sometimes you get lecturers who are executives at certain companies who can bring their real-world experiences into the classroom. The instructor for this particular marketing class is the Vice President of Global Marketing for Infocus Corp. I have to say it's quite an interesting class.

During the summer months and early autumn, the farmer's market is held at the university's park blocks every Saturday. I've forgotten to bring my camera this week, but if the weather permits, I'll take some photos next week of the market. At the market there's a plethora of fresh, organic produce on sale that comes straight from the farm. We bought a few vegetables and mushrooms.


Here are some Shitake mushrooms that we bought.



We also got some Chantelle mushrooms.


For dinner, we decided to use the Shitake mushrooms with fried carrot cake. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this dish, the name of this dish is sort of a misnomer, because the main ingredient here is not carrot, but instead Daikon radish. Also, unlike American carrot cakes, this is not a dessert. You often find the fried carrot cake offered for dim sum in Chinese restaurants.



We grinded Daikon radish and little bit of normal carrots and mixed it with rice flour, then steamed it. Once it's done steaming, we let it cool, cut it into cube pieces and stir fried it with bean sprouts, mushrooms, and pickled radish. The texture of the carrot cake was just right, smooth, not too hard and not too soft. There's nothing better than freshly made carrot cake.