One thing I don’t mind about working from home full-time is the ability to cook food on the weekdays. Pre pandemic, I mostly did most of our cooking on Sundays, but given the flexibility of work, time between meetings, and a lack of commute, now I have more time to cook on the weekdays. Oftentimes, with just a little prep work, I can toss things into my Instant Pot or oven, and food will be ready for dinner time. One thing you never think you can make on a weeknight would be bolognese, a rich, meaty, Italian sauce that usually takes hours and hours to braise over a low flame on the stove. I tried finding recipes to allow it to be made in the Instant Pot, but they seemed too tomato forward. My favorite Bolognese has always been the ones that use tomato paste vs. several cups of canned whole tomatoes. In that sense, it’s more of a hearty meaty sauce with tomato flavor rather than a tomato sauce with meat in it.

So I decided to use a bolognese recipe that uses white wine, two small cans of tomato paste, and for the beef, I used the remaining two pounds of wagyu minced beef I picked up from Costco. During lunch time at around noon yesterday, I got the base of the sauce made while eating lunch (with all the mirepoix prep the night before). Then, between meetings and work tasks, I would take a little time to stir the mixture occasionally and replenish the water when needed. By the time 5:15 rolled around, the bolognese had already been stewing for over four hours, and all that was needed was the pasta to get cooked.

Four-hour-plus braised homemade tagliatelle bolognese on a weeknight. That is definitely a pandemic-era meal.

So, I’m on the market for a new everyday knife. While washing dishes the other day, I dropped the santoku style knife I usually use for everyday cutting/chopping, and the blade detached from the handle. Clearly, this was a glue issue, and while I’m sure there is a way to fix it, Chris reminded me that he’s had these knives for nearly 11 years now. He got a crazy good deal on Amazon for them (A 4-knife set plus a block.. for $25???????!!!!!), and so maybe it is finally time to invest in a new knife set or at least one new all-purpose knife. I don’t have any love, attachment, or hate for any of these knives; they have served their purpose, and I use them because I am practical and will use what we have. I don’t consider them remarkable or incredible in any sense. But if I am going to buy a new knife, I want to make sure it’s a really, really good knife.

Since maybe five years ago, I started reading about different Japanese knives, and I knew I wanted Global knives since they would be light weight (hollow handled), super sharp, relatively easy to maintain (some Japanese knives are impossible to maintain without constant professional sharpening), and they weren’t insanely expensive. As an added bonus, I read an article where Anthony Bourdain lamented how insanely expensive (and thus stupid) so many knife brands on the market are, and that that’s why he appreciated and loved Global knives so much because the price point was just right, and they were excellent quality. I was sold.

So now, the debate is… do we invest in a whole new set of 4-5, or just get a Global santoku? But apparently, the debate has been made even more colorful because Chris doesn’t understand why I am stuck on Global brand knives and insists I should consider the Amazon basics line of knives or other Japanese knife brands he quickly glanced at on Amazon. My whole thing is… I am rarely, rarely brand-devoted to ANYTHING outside of airlines and hotels (and that’s because I benefit from loyalty). I even gave up my obsession with Le Creuset and Staub dutch ovens and enameled cast iron because I appreciate and get so much use out of my Amazon Basics dutch oven, which only cost $30 courtesy of his aunt and uncle. Can’t I just be allowed one thing to have brand love for, and if that one thing is KNIVES, then that seems pretty damn practical, right?

Lunar New Year is right around the corner. This Friday will officially mark the new year on the Lunar calendar, and this year, it’s Year of the Ox we’re welcoming in. Year of the Ox is actually my year. It may not initially appear that way because based on my birth year on the Gregorian calendar, it looks like I am a Tiger. But because Lunar New Year tends to fall in late January/early February, in reality, I’m actually an Ox. So, it’s MY year this year, so hoping for some good things to happen in my life to shake things up in a positive way!

In previous years, we’d hosted lunar new year dinner parties, and I always made a whole fish to welcome the new year. Given it’s COVID and we’re still supposed to be socially distancing, this actually made me a little sad. I’m still making some traditional dishes ranging from the radish cake to Buddha’s Delight to steaming up some Vietnamese banh chung I purchased, but it’s not really going to be that festive. And it made me wistful of the times when I was young at home with my grandma, where she ALWAYS made a big fuss and pulled out all the stops for Chinese New Year, from the foods to the decorations to the superstitions that were followed (ummm, yeah, I will still be washing my hair if I feel like it before the new year begins). I will likely never have that level of awareness or celebrate in a traditional way like that unless one day, we end up living somewhere in Asia.

In a day and age of TikTok, many food/cooking trends have come about, including the famous one-pan feta pasta (seems too indulgent, and I rarely would have feta at home) as well as the single cut tortilla quesadilla hack. With the quesadilla, my interest was definitely piqued, as I do enjoy having wheat flour or corn tortillas at home occasionally, and a new way to use them was definitely welcome. The idea is that you take a tortilla and cut it halfway down the center. Then, on each of the “quarter” sections, you place a different topping: avocado, cheese, tomatoes, vegetables, etc., along with something to “stick” them together (cheese to melt!), then you fold each quarter on top of each other, then put it on a hot pan, flatten it with a spatula to press it down and heat it through. And TADA! Quick and easy, packed, neat little quesadilla!

So… in theory this was a great idea. In practice? I failed miserably. I attempted to make this today, and my quesadilla was overly packed (this is a very ME thing to do) and completely fell apart. Welp… I still have six more tortillas, so I have six more tries to go!

My company, in an effort to be equitable to all, is giving “Wellness Days” throughout the year as days off for everyone, likely to support us and acknowledge that “life is not normal” in a time of a global pandemic. This Friday is a Wellness Day, and given that Monday is President’s Day here in the US, that means everyone who works in the U.S. for my company will have a 4-day weekend, which will be much welcomed. It’s a really nice gesture, but it’s one that makes me realize that to date, I have not taken a single vacation in the last year, AT ALL. At most, I’ve taken only one day off here or there outside of national holidays or these Wellness Days. And that was just a really depressing thought in my head. Outside of COVID, I always only took time off to travel, and now we cannot really safely (or unselfishly) travel anywhere. It made me further wonder when the heck I’d ever be able to travel for leisure at all… this year or in 2022. That thought is just so sad. We all have so many lost experiences, lost time, lost adventures to mourn. Even if you take out global travel for fun, there’s lost time with our loved ones around the globe, whether that’s in Melbourne or in San Francisco. Each day that passes is another day we could not spend together at all.

I was looking up some recipes to make for another episode of Tastes of Asia, and I decided that Korean kimchi mung bean pancakes would be a relatively easy and straightforward recipe to film, as I already had all the ingredients available at home. What I actually did not realize, though, as I was researching mung bean pancakes, is that this dish is a very common dish that is served during Korean New Year during the Lunar New Year period in Korea, as it’s considered auspicious to eat mung beans to welcome in the new year. I had no idea about this, as while mung beans are certainly eaten in China and in Vietnam, they’ve never really been on a “list” of things that you “must” eat during the new year period in either of my native cultures. But that actually makes it even more timely to film and upload because this can be considered a new year’s dish to make!

I filmed part of another video for my channel today that will be part of the Grandma’s Recipes series. In this episode, we’re making Chinese turnip cake, or Luo bai gao in Mandarin. It’s a common dim sum dish in dim sum/yum cha houses around the globe, and it’s a dish my grandma used to make for us around Chinese New Year growing up. I haven’t really been in the mood to do any videos until today. Lunar New Year is in just two weeks, and I wanted to post a video for the Year of the Ox ahead of schedule.

I think part of the reason I was excited and eager to film this video today is because somehow, even to this day, even when I feel upset or annoyed or just not in the mood to do anything, thinking about the comfort food of my childhood still uplifts me. It’s remembering a simpler, more naive time when my worries about the world were far fewer and less significant, and I somehow was sheltered from most of the ill in the world by family. Those were the days when I could just be excited about food and that was really it. And that was totally fine.

Years ago, when I used to work at a digital agency, I became friends with someone here in New York who eventually moved to Seattle and still resides there now. A generous soul, she would always come back to New York to visit family and friends, and she’d pack bags and bags of Chukar Cherries — these delicious, chocolate/cocoa-covered dried cherries that were locally grown in Washington state. There were the Black Forest cherries, the truffle cherries, the alcoholic chocolate cherries; she wanted to spread the love and deliciousness of this small business in Washington state and all the glory of chocolate covered cherries.

Chris immediately liked these when I brought these home when my friend gave them to us seven years ago, and every time I’d see this friend, he’d inquire about “cherry girl,” or just ask, “Cherries?” So given they were having a Black Friday/Cyber Monday special, I decided to indulge (because, what else is there to spend money on during COVID other than food?!) and buy a box of these cherries. We indulged in them this evening after they arrived, and they tasted just as good as we remember them. It’s my Seattle friend’s lasting legacy with us.

After visiting Ayat NYC yesterday in Bay Ridge, I wanted to attempt to make their baby eggplant dish at home. While in Bay Ridge, I picked up some baby eggplants as well as some Lebanese tahini imported from Lebanon while visiting Falahi Farms market, also owned by the same family that runs Ayat NYC. I’ve always loved tahini, but given we’ve always had limited pantry and fridge storage space, I didn’t want to buy it until I had specific things in mind that I wanted to use it for. And now that I cook more with the current pandemic, it made sense to buy this ingredient, as I’d have more time and opportunities to use it.

But the more I thought about tahini, and the more I spoke with the woman who worked at Falahi Farms, the more I realized that tahini is as versatile as you want it to be. For the Falahi cashier, she shared that she has tahini every single morning on her toast with honey. It’s almost like her peanut butter. But it’s also great in sauces with meat, as well as in salad and vegetable dressings. In the eggplant dish, all you need to do is literally drizzle the tahini over the eggplants, and you’re done. The tahini just needs to be mixed since it tends to get thick on the bottom of the jar.

I posted on Instagram stories that I bought this Lebanese tahini, and someone direct messaged me, insisting I mix the tahini with some olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and parsley to make “the best salad dressing ever.” That’s the beauty of food: it unites people everywhere.