While in the Curry Hill area of Murray Hill this past Saturday, we stopped by an Indian grocery store and picked up some Indian sweets. I inquired about the sign we saw outside the store advertising Indian mangoes, and the shop keeper said he did not have Alphonso mangoes, the most famous Indian mango, but he did have kesar mangoes. We already had quite a number of Ataulfo mangoes at home, so I didn’t really feel compelled to buy the kesar mangoes, which were $4 each. But after our purchase, the shop owner gave us one kesar mango as a gift. I was really excited by this and could not wait to try it out.

I actually filmed the mango tasting today, and it’s quite a peculiar mango: it’s more round in shape than the Ataulfo mango, and this particular one had a more pale yellow skin color. but once you cut it open, it reveals a more orangey color flesh. And THEN, once you cut into it and eat it, the flesh is juicier than the Ataulfo, which is more firm and velvety. The kesar mango bursts with juice, is not even the slightest bit fibrous. And when you bite into it, it’s extremely complex: citrusy, like an orange or tangerine, but then also rich and a little creamy like an Ataulfo, with hints of pineapple and and maybe even peach. Complex and juicy are the most accurate ways I can sum up the kesar mango flavor.

This taste only made me more wistful for travel to South Asia. Sadly enough, today we were originally scheduled to leave for Sri Lanka and Kerala in Southern India, and now all those plans have been cancelled because of COVID-19. This is even more depressing to eat this mango on this day.

On our last family chat, Chris’s mom said that she’s been seeing all my Instagram posts and stories about what I’ve been tinkering around with in the kitchen, and it all looks really exciting. The sad part about that is that while I am enjoying having more time to cook and experiment on recipes I’ve long wanted to test out, I really have nothing else to do other than cook, create videos, read, and listen to podcasts now outside of work. As much as I look forward to trying out a new recipe, such as today’s spinach and avocado theplas, the more I realize that this is all I have to look forward to since we can’t travel anywhere anytime soon. Cooking and food are all I really have right now.

Going through my bookmarks list of recipes, I found arroz caldo, which literally means “rice soup,” also considered a type of lugaw, or a Filipino-style congee that is rich with bone broth, aromatic with ginger, garlic, and onion, and oftentimes accompanied by toppings such as fried shallots and garlic, soy-cured egg yolks, scallion, and cilantro. The main difference, initially, between Filipino and Chinese style congee, is that the Filipino version has a lot more aromatics that are added in the beginning, whereas the canvas of the rice porridge is much plainer in the Chinese version. Either way, I love it all since I love, love congee/jook/rice porridge. It’s an ultimate comfort food regardless of what spin you take on it.

I made it in my Instant Pot yesterday and we had it for breakfast this morning, and I really loved the richness that the soy-cured egg yolk added to the porridge. It was even creamier and richer than it was before. The egg yolk served the same role that the whole raw cracked egg serves in soondubu jigae, or Korean soft tofu stew. Definitely want to perfect my soy-cured egg yolk method and continue using this method to make future versions of congee even richer and more tasty.

Thanks to quarantine and the last four months of working from home, I’ve had more flexibility and more time to finally get to a lot of recipes I’ve been wanting to try out and have been digging into my recipe bookmarks and Evernotes to see what has been on my list. One of the dishes was spaghetti aglio e olio with shrimp (pasta with garlic, olive oil, and shrimp). It’s a simple, less-than-30-minute meal, and it uses the shrimp shells and infuses their delicious glutamates into the olive oil to reveal an even shrimper, more sea-like flavor in the overall pasta dish. I’m trying to be all about creating less waste, and before this recipe, I’ve been using my shrimp shells as part of making stock in my Instant Pot. But this gave me yet another use for my shrimp shells rather than discarding.

The result was simple, quick, fast, and delicious, and the ingredient list was so, so short. With an extra sprinkling of red pepper flakes and grated parmigianno reggiano, this could easily become a staple in our household.

Last year while in Bay Ridge, I picked up a bottle of pomegranate molasses to use in Middle Eastern and Persian dishes. Pomegranate molasses is essentially pomegranate juice that has been cooked and reduced down into a thick, sugary syrup. Admittedly, I’ve only used it twice outside of salad dressings I’ve whisked up. In an effort to find more things to use it for, I decided to apply it to the Arctic char fillets I purchased a couple days ago. So many broiled/grilled fish recipes use maple syrup or honey as the sweetener, but pomegranate molasses, with its own unique, distinct sweet-and-tart flavor, could easily shine on its own.

I decided to mix it up with olive oil, white miso, salt, pepper, and a touch of sugar, marinated the fish for a few hours in the fridge, and then broiled the fillets for 10 minutes. Fillets are always tricky to cook perfectly unless every part of the fillet is exactly the same thickness, which is oftentimes why center-cuts of fillets are in such high demand and sell out quickly, so I probably should have removed it after eight minutes, but even after 10, the center parts of the Arctic char were moist, juicy, with just the right level of sweet, tart, and savory.

This was a delicious use for pomegranate molasses and definitely one I’d keep on rotation for the future. I cannot say the same of all fish recipes/marinades I’ve previously used.

Over the weekend, I was looking over our pantry items and realizing what a glut we have of so many things: dried pasta, dried beans, frozen vegetables, dried chilies. Oh, and when I say “pantry,” I mean that in the sense of a small New York City apartment, which means that I store my “pantry” items literally everywhere: in the actual cupboards, under my sink, on top of the dryer, in my oven (yes, I’m Asian, and in Asian households, it’s normal to use your oven as storage. This is also the reason I never EVER turn on the oven without opening it up to empty out all the contents, which include several baking sheets, a roasting pan, a lasagna pan, a brownie pan, two cake pans, and different containers of seeds, nuts, spices, and dried chilies). We have so many dried chilies, and the most obvious thing I could think to make with a good handful of them would be mole. So I made a mole, using about 22 different ingredients, and waited for it to be ready. I thought to myself, is it actually going to be worth all this effort again? What if it ends up not tasting as good as it did the first time?

I tasted it after the mole finished simmering, and it seemed… Okay, but not great. Something seemed like it was missing. I added some additional salt, sugar, and pepper, and decided to let it cool and taste it a couple days later. I reheated it today with some chicken and served it with multigrain tortillas, queso fresco, cilantro, avocado, and pickled jalapeño, and it tasted so much better than it did over the weekend. I think it just needed more time to let all the flavors meld. But when I put all the ingredients together and assembled the final dish, I remembered exactly why mole is worth the extra time and effort: it’s like love in the form of a sauce, love from all the toasting, roasting, soaking, straining, blending, charring, simmering. It’s definitely a keeper recipe for when you have some extra time and want to prepare a complex and satisfying dish.

So, I’m a little embarrassed to say that I’ve officially given up on my sourdough starter. It actually ripened after about eight days in April of consistent feedings, but because I didn’t have whole wheat flour at the time, I put the ripened starter in the fridge to “slow down” and become dormant until I got my hands on a bag of whole wheat flour. When I finally did a week later, I took the starter out of the fridge and fed it with whole wheat flour, and for whatever reason, it was NOT pleased. It did not grow or bubble much, and I was at a loss for what to do. But I kept on feeding it anyway, hoping it would miraculously revive itself. It didn’t. It still bubbled and was alive, but it just lacked the activity it used to. Then, it did what I had no idea how to respond to: it started getting watery!

Finally, I asked my colleague, who is an experienced bread head, and he suggested I try to source rye flour, as the increase in protein may be what my starter was lacking. Well, this seemed to do the trick… it grew three times every single day for a week! At this point, the starter was over a month old, but it kept failing the much needed “float” test to prove that it would be strong enough to leaven a real bread loaf. And after eating a lot of discard starter through endless crumpets, pikelets, and pancakes week after week and actually getting a bit bored of eating these, not to mention having used at least 6-8 pounds of flour, I finally decided to throw in the towel and give up. So, I’ve used the discard starter since I am anti-waste, but I have stopped trying to grow my sourdough starter baby anymore.

I realized that I still had one dry-active yeast packet left, so I tested it on Wednesday to see if it was still alive, as the expiration date was last autumn. To my surprise, it WAS alive, as it grew three times in the measuring cup with some warm water and sugar. So I used this along with about a cup of my discard sourdough starter to make a focaccia bread. My starter was likely about 50/50 all-purpose: rye. And I decided to make the dough about 80 percent all-purpose to 20 percent whole wheat (we all need more whole grains, right?). After two nights of proofing in the fridge, I baked it today with the best results ever: it was airy with a beautiful, moist crumb, crunchy on the outside and edges, and had a delicious and addictive sour taste. Topped with olive oil, rosemary, sel de guerande, and eaten with dollops of orange blossom honeyed ricotta, I probably ate way more bread today than I realized, but it was truly that good. I nearly inhaled my first three bites.

I totally get why bread making can be so satisfying, so gratifying, so heart-warming to one’s core. There’s something about making something seemingly so basic and pure that just brings so much joy. I always get excited making bread from dry active yeast, but that’s just basic bread making. Actually making one’s one starter — that is truly back to the basic of the basics…. and for me, most daunting.

So, now the question that still lingers is: if I got this excited and was this proud of my sourdough focaccia, which had a dry active yeast to help it along, what would happen to me and my psyche if I actually succeeded in getting my sourdough starter to fully ripen to the point of being able to get a real sourdough loaf to work…..?!!

Ego boost: you make something for the very first time that is known to be particularly finicky or difficult, like dosa or sourdough bread, and the very first time, it comes out… perfectly.

Ego deflation: you make something the second time knowing that the first time, you totally nailed it, and the second time… it comes out like total garbage.

The latter is what happened when I made Banh Cuon yesterday. I reflected on the first time when I made these delicious ripe crepes in 2017, and being very ambitious, I made it for a dinner party on the day of. I didn’t think they could be that hard, and after the first crepe was a failure, every subsequent one came out perfectly. I was like a Banh Cuon whiz. I still have pictures from that day, and I was so proud of myself. Now, I just feel like a bit of a failure. Was it the pan (yes)? Was it the unevenness of the heat – maybe? Was it the original proportions of the cornstarch to rice flour to tapioca starch – yes. Was it all the above? A little.

These are the trials and errors of shelter-in-place.

I was pretty ambitious today and tried to film two videos for the channel, one on Banh Cuon and one on coffee brewing using a drip coffee maker, a French press, and an Aeropress. The Banh Cuon video did not go as smoothly as I hoped it would… because not only did I mess up the proportions of rice flour/tapioca flour/cornstarch to use, but my nonstick Scanpan suddenly decided to fail, and fail quite miserably. It was so bad that the rice batter started disintegrating into the pan, and there was not even mush left; it just vanished into thin air! It was food filming gone completely awry.

I bought two Scanpans ages ago, one 8-inch and one 10-inch, thinking that maybe if I invested in pans that were more expensive and supposedly healthier (no teflon coating), that these might actually last longer. My 10-inch Scanpan failed a while ago, resulting in my shipping in it to evaluate the damages, and they sent me a new one. I had to pay for the shipping, though, which cost over $20. Nowadays, you can get a new ceramic, non-toxic, nonstick pan for about $25, so the idea of paying that again to replace another faulty product just seems a bit senseless. But the sad thing this shows is that…no, you do not always get what you pay for. Paying more for something doesn’t always mean it will be better or last longer, sadly. And paying for a fancy brand name will definitely not mean you will be in the clear.

Once upon a time, when a specific ingredient that I like to include as an “always there” pantry, freezer, or fridge item would be near running out, I’d make a note on my phone to refresh it the next time I went to whatever market I’d typically get it from, whether it was one of the Chinese, Vietnamese, or Thai markets in Chinatown, the Indian/Pakistani markets in Jackson Heights, and so on. I never really thought much about the inability of attaining these items when I wanted them because I knew they were always available. But now, in a time of shelter-in-place when I cannot just hop on the train to Queens or downtown Manhattan, I find myself feeling some of the more minor pains of the current COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s obviously not detrimental. We have a full fridge, freezer, and pantry. We have fresh fruit and vegetables every single day, and if we didn’t, they’d be easy to access with the markets that are walking distance from us. We have food — that’s what’s important, and a good variety at that. It’s more that now, I realize what a luxury it was to be able to readily get my hands on red-fermented cubed tofu, gai lan vegetables, or frozen grated coconut. I had those choices and could act on those choices extremely easily. And now, I don’t. If I want to order some of these things via Mirchi Market or FreshGoGo, the wait time could be anywhere from a week to over a month. This is one of those times when it’s important to use what you have, improvise, and get creative. Or, really, just put off making a particular dish until… whenever this all ends.