Well, tonight is the night when I finally face one of my biggest kitchen challenges and fears: making my own sourdough starter. I’d read about this from Michael Pollan during college, that I could actually make my own starter just from filtered water and all-purpose flour given that there are all kinds of wild yeasts in everything from flour to our hands, but the thought of it kind of scared me. This would actually be a living thing, in my apartment, that would require daily and/or weekly feedings. It seemed like too much maintenance, so I pushed it off “to another time,” I thought then.

Well, “another time” has come, and I’ve started the process tonight. I didn’t have a scale like my bread-making colleagues advised me to get (I mean, Amazon isn’t really prioritizing scale orders now, right, nor is Sur La Table three blocks away considered an “essential business”), but I decided to wing it with my cup measures. If all goes well, I may be giving birth tonight to a new member of our family that will require a weekly feeding and a permanent spot in our refrigerator.

What I really want to make, though, is whole wheat sourdough, and I don’t actually have whole wheat flour. Buying flour online seems to be difficult since most places have seen a surge of demand and many are low in stock. I guess that challenge will need to wait until at least another week once this starter has (fingers crossed) ripened, and I won’t have to wait a ridiculous amount of time at Whole Foods to get whole wheat flour (the other markets around us do not seem to carry it!).

After visiting Vancouver for the second time in August 2018 for a friend’s wedding, I was inspired by the plant-based food scene that Vancouver offers and was particularly impressed with a place near my hotel called the Juice Truck. It was a little cafe, and without even realizing it when I walked it, was 100 percent plant-based. I ordered a toasted chickpea Caesar salad (which I still think about to this day because it was that well put together and delicious) and a slice of their vegan lemon coconut loaf, made by a vegan food company owned by Erin Ireland, a vegan chef in the area. With one bite of that loaf, I was completely in love and shocked that there were zero eggs and no butter in it. It was packed with flavor, super moist, and just delicious all around.

Erin Ireland doesn’t make her recipes publicly known, so based on the ingredients list on the packet, I took a photo of it to remember what she used and was determined to recreate a version of this at home. Well, a year and a half later, I finally tried this out today, and I’m proud to say that I’ve come quite close to replicating it. The crumb is not as firm as I’d like, but I hope it will firm up overnight, but the flavor is almost what I remember it to be. Plant-based cooking and baking definitely requires a bit more thought, but it has lots of promise when you have fresh, vibrant ingredients like fresh lemons, coconut milk, coconut oil, millet, and poppy seeds.

Given our entire company is working from home, we’ve started some new “work from home water cooler” Slack channels to keep ourselves amused and still social with each other. One of the ones I’ve recently joined is on recipes, where we share recipes of things we’re cooking given our sudden extra time at home. At least four of my colleagues have used this opportunity to make their own sourdough starter. I’ve always thought about doing this, but never actually did it. And reading through the guides they have shared, it’s actually much easier than I thought (or so it sounds!).

So while making vegan banana bread today (with a new twist I’ve never done: using all purpose flour, semolina flour, and buckwheat flour, with a few tablespoons of millet!), I bookmarked a link to teach myself how to do this. Who could say no to 100 percent homemade bread, with not even commercial yeast used?!

I’ve never really been into St. Patrick’s Day. It just seems like an annual excuse to drink more alcohol and particularly consume more Guinness beer. While I appreciate dishes like corned beef and cabbage, I found out that they actually are more Irish American and not actually Irish, so there goes that. And Irish soda bread — well, that’s actually Native American, so all the foods we typically associate with St. Patrick’s Day are not actually Irish!

Nevertheless, a few years ago, a colleague had brought his mother’s Irish soda bread in, and I was really blown away by the texture and the taste, especially knowing that no yeast is used, and the only leavener is baking soda. So, I attempted to make it myself today. It uses only four ingredients: buttermilk, flour, salt, and baking soda. It was really simple, likely the easiest bread I’ve ever made. The crumb was dense as it usually is, and oddly enough, mine came out more moist than the different versions I’ve eaten. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but to me, it tasted good. It also came out with a really crackly, crunchy crust that I loved.

More jam, butter, and avocado toasts will be made with this for the remainder of this week at home!

After discovering the glory and and authentic flavor that dried methi leaves can give to saag, I decided to make it again today. I got a bit too blender-happy, though, and ended up blending all of the spinach and mustard greens that I pressure cooked in the Instant Pot instead of half of it. When I put all the blended greens into a glass dish with the chicken on top, Chris remarked, “That looks like chicken in a spinach bath. That’s what I would say that is if you didn’t tell me it was supposed to be chicken saag!”

Well, maybe it is chicken in a spinach bath…. I’ll tweak my method next time so that we don’t have to rename the recipe. That’s what this is all about… testing recipes and iterating on them.

This past Christmas, Chris gifted me a cheesemaking cooking class at Home Cooking NY on Grand Street in lower Manhattan that took place yesterday. It was the second time I’ve taken a class here, as the first one was on Vietnamese cooking that I did last year after returning from Vietnam. I didn’t really love the Vietnamese cooking class last year, as I felt that the main instructor kept talking over and interrupting her Vietnamese guest instructor too much to the point that it seemed condescending. But during this cheesemaking course, the instructor seemed far more in her own element, going through facts on the cheese industry both in the U.S. and abroad while also making wise cracks and sarcastic comments about the U.S. federal and state level government regulations on raw milk and cheese (“Here in New York state, it’s illegal to sell raw milk, so you have to go to the border of Pennsylvania to buy it … the state is trying to protect you from absolutely nothing, so…” and also about the poor state of education here in the U.S. (“when I used to teach real culinary school, you wouldn’t believe how dumb my students were… they didn’t know what terms like ‘opaque’ or ‘translucent’ meant. I said to them, ‘do you know what ‘see-through’ means? Well, that is what ‘translucent’ means. And the opposite of that — what you CANNOT see through, that is ‘opaque’! Got it?!” It was a bit hilarious and unexpected, and at times could be tiring to see how jaded she was, but it definitely was entertaining at times.

We made mozzarella, paneer, ricotta, cashew “ricotta,” saag paneer, and caprese sandwiches during class. I enjoyed it and learned a good amount, and I’m now feeling more interested in prioritizing making ricotta and paneer myself sometime soon, as both had already been on my to-make list for a while (isn’t everything?). But, I will say that the instructor’s saag paneer was not to my liking; everyone else raved about it (some of these people claimed to eat Indian food regularly but had never heard of saag paneer or palak paneer — how can you claim to eat Indian food in this country and never have eaten or even seen this at a restaurant?!), but I found it too heavy on the tomatoes and a bit westernized. I realize that dried methi leaves are not easily sourced, but if you really want to make authentic tasting saag paneer, you absolutely need to have these, and all it takes is one or two tiny pinches of it to make a world’s difference. They can be bought at any Indian grocery store or on Amazon. I wasn’t going to be the smart ass in class to say it to the instructor or any other white person raving about this dish in class (even though my instructor was a self-professed “smart ass” and likely could have handled it), so I said nothing instead, preferring to keep the peace with 10 people I’d likely never see again.

I’ve never been into the low-carb, anti-carb dieting (well, I’m not really into the concept of “dieting,” but that’s another story). But what I really could not stand that became trendy years ago was people who were trying to cut down on carbs in the form of pasta by replacing their spaghetti noodles with spaghetti squash “noodles.”Spaghetti squash is an interesting type of autumn squash in that when it’s roasted properly, its liquids evaporated and when you pierce through it with a fork, the squash fibers come apart like tiny little noodles that resemble very thin angel-hair pasta. One cup of spaghetti squash “noodles” contain about 7 grams of carbohydrates, whereas one cup of actual wheat-based spaghetti noodles contain about 43 grams.

None of the above is necessarily “bad,” but squash is squash, meaning that it’s mostly water. So, if you were to douse a bunch of squash “noodles” with a thick tomato-y sauce, it would immediately become soggy unless you were quick and ate it right away. That is just terrible to me. Why would you do this? Enjoy your spaghetti squash as a vegetable or grain/wheat substitute, but NOT as a replacement for noodles. Just don’t do it!

I feel the same way about “zoodles” or zucchini noodles. Just throw them in a salad. Stop using them as noodles, please.

After several months of studying and practicing video editing about once a week, shooting videos both in my kitchen and on the road, today, I’m finally launching my YouTube channel Yvonne meets Food, which as of today, has 10 videos fully edited and uploaded. Most of them are cooking videos which are focused on basic recipes that have just a handful of ingredients; others are more complex, like the red mole recipe. And then I have one travel video posted where I filmed in Chengdu while eating mapo doufu (tofu). Not all of this was very well planned, and there aren’t always smooth transitions or the best use of color overlays since I’m still in the process of figuring things out, but it’s coming along, and I’m enjoying the process a lot more now that I have a semi-hang of things.

In the beginning, video editing was extremely painful, but now, it’s almost like a fun, interesting creative release, a far departure from the everyday expected ups and downs of office and customer life. I can experiment with color, angles, and music. Even though I’m not much of a music person, testing out different types of music to set moods for different shots has probably been the most interesting for me. The music site I’ve been using for music has really great tutorials on how to edit videos to the beat, which I plan on using more when I shoot travel and field pieces.

In some ways, it feels like a second job, and in other ways, it feels like a creative outlet that just requires a bit more time and intense focus. But I hope something interesting will come of this. Life is short.