During our Saturday outing yesterday (which was HOT – it was over 90 degrees F outside here in New York City!), we went to Sunnyside, Queens. We had some Bolivian and Mexican food, along with some interesting pastries and coffee. One new place we went to was Taiyo Foods, which was actually a staple of the Sunnyside area. A few years ago, their original location had to close due to a fire, but luckily enough, with the support of a Kickstarter and a lot of loyal customers, they were able to reopen and renovate at a new spot just a few blocks away. I got reminded while perusing the aisles here that one thing I did want to do this year was to finally make my own dashi with dried kombu seaweed and bonito flakes. For the longest time, I researched quality of kombu and bonito and felt very confused, as I wasn’t sure how to judge quality and why the price points where so high vs. low. But while at Taiyo, I figured I would just buy the basic, seemingly affordable versions of both and see how they turned out.

The process of making dashi is quite simple, assuming you are not growing/harvesting your own kombu seaweed or drying and shaving your own bonito fish. In a nutshell, this how to make dashi, the basis of all Japanese cooking: you take a pot of water (about two liters) with 30 grams of kombu (wiped, not rinsed!), and bring both to a near simmer — you want to see bubbles appear in the water. Then, you immediately shut the heat off and add 30 grams of bonito flakes. Cover the pot and let the bonito flakes steep for five minutes. Then, strain the liquid, and there you have it: your own fresh, homemade dashi! This would be called ichiban dashi because it is “first brew” dashi. You can choose to do another steep with the same process, same amount of new water, and the same kombu piece and bonito flakes; this will yield niban dashi, or second brew dashi. It will be weaker than the first brew, but still tasty in dishes where a strong dashi is not the first flavor you get.

As long as you have kombu and bonito flakes (plus a pot, access to clean water, and a stovetop), you can have homemade dashi in the time it takes to (nearly) boil water, plus five additional minutes (to steep the bonito). After making ichiban dashi and niban dashi, I was really blown away by how quick and easy the entire process was, plus how fresh and sea-like the stock tasted. This afternoon, I used part of it to make homemade miso soup, and will be using the rest to make oyakodon and freezing some cubes for future cooking. It’s funny how doing something so quick and easy can make you feel so accomplished. I got so many comments on these Instagram Stories I did on this about how impressive it was that I did this, but it was really easy, and not that expensive, either!

When I originally thought about making dashi from scratch, and regularly, about a year ago, it was really for Kaia’s sake because she’s definitely a soup baby. Since her very first soup experience when she was about 8-9 months old (it was a Cuban black bean soup!), she’s always loved her liquidy soups and her thicker bean-based soups. Dashi would be an easy base for soups for her. And she definitely gobbled up all this miso soup today, much to my delight. She happily ate all the wakame seaweed I added, which was no surprise since she adores seaweed. Plus, for the very first time since she was a baby, Pookster even devoured all the silken tofu cubes and kept asking for more. As a toddler, she’s been rejecting soft tofu in favor of firm or extra firm tofu. Tonight, she ended up having three generous helpings of tofu and seaweed miso soup. I had to add more silken tofu to the soup just to appease her and her belly!

Well, that does it: dashi is going to be on rotation in our household now. And I’ll also need to find some other creative ways to incorporate dashi into our diet.

There’s always a lot of debate about the best way to brew coffee: French press, Aero Press, or Chemex? Pour-over vs. drip? Espresso machine? So many options exist, and so many opinions exist. Since I’m a daily tea drinker, coffee is always like a “treat” drink to me, one that I would enjoy with the occasional coffee break with a colleague while at the office, or out and about on a Saturday with Chris. It’s also a “treat” drink to me because it doesn’t seem to matter how much tea I drink, but I rarely get a buzz from it; then, I’ll have one latte late morning and feel a bit wired all the way until dinner time. It’s an interesting feeling, but not one that I necessarily want every day.

When summer time comes around, while I do think about different versions of iced tea, I also look forward to more iced coffee drinks and all the delicious variations of it, with flavor additions and all. And I was excited to see some articles talking about “magic coffee,” which is essentially cold brew coffee, steeped overnight with two magic ingredients: your choice of a sweet spice like ground cinnamon or cardamom (of course, cardamom for me!), and a bit of brown sugar. I halved the amount of sugar (3 Tbsp down to 1.5 Tbsp) but used the recommended one teaspoon of cardamom for 2/3 cup coarsely ground coffee to three cups of water, and once the coffee is strained, poured over ice cubes, and topped with a quick pour of oat milk, it really did taste like magic. Cold brew is delicious, but with these two additional ingredients, this iced coffee really was like magic. I could get used to this all summer long.

A neighbor of ours who had their first child about six months after Kaia was born just had her second child a few weeks ago. We bonded over the last few years since we used to go to the gym at the same time and were obsessive about exercise. Plus, we later found out that we both went through IVF to conceive our children. She and her husband had tried naturally to conceive for eight years with no result (I cannot imagine how excruciating that was since every month for a year, I felt annoyed every time I got my period). They took endless tests, and no abnormalities were detected. In year nine, they finally did IVF and were lucky enough to get four genetically tested embryos via one IVF cycle. The first did not “stick,” the second became their first child, a girl; the third also did not stick, and the fourth… is now their newborn son.

I wanted to do something nice for them, so I decided to offer to make them dinner one night. When you are in the newborn fog, and especially with two kids, I’m sure it can be extremely rough. You don’t have the time or energy to cook, so you end up relying on takeout and delivery a bit too much for sustenance. But a home cooked meal is always appreciated and probably healthier for you. So since my friend was already coming over for dinner, I gave my neighbors individual portions of what I made: vegan dal makhani, butter chickpeas, black pepper mushroom fry, pea pulao (rice), corn masala, beet raita with cashew yogurt, mixed green salad with homemade French-style vinaigrette, and vegan lemon olive oil cake. I also gave her a mug of Chinese red date ginger tea and advised her to drink it warm or hot to aid in postpartum recovery. They marveled over the two cookie-sheets worth of food I brought and said how grateful they were for this gesture. “You said you were bringing over dinner, not an entire restaurant!! HOW CAN THERE BE MORE FOOD THAN THIS?” she had exclaimed, when I came with a second tray of food. And surprisingly, our neighbor said she really enjoyed the tea and would like more, which I still have half a jug left of.

When I was younger, I always imagined myself making meals and bringing them over to friends after giving birth as a birthing gift, if you want to call it that. But then I never had any friends who gave birth who lived that close by, so it never happened. I guess this is as close as it’s going to get for me to do something like this for someone, and I’m happy it was well received.

I was looking at different ways to make our daily weekday toasts more interesting, and one way was to use Indian flavors (of course). Whenever you have Indian or Thai flavors, it’s pretty much impossible to have a boring meal. There is something about South and Southeast Asian cooking that always seems to get the right balance of sweet, salty, sour, and savory where things are just finger-licking good.

In the last couple of weeks, occasionally I’d make “masala grilled cheese,” where I’d take a white cheddar and sandwich it between chaat masala or garlic chutney-spiced mayo, some freshly made cilantro chutney, and sandwich them between two buttered pieces of bread on a hot pan. But then I got another idea, which is to make the sandwich a bit more like a chaat snack or samosa, so today, I added masala potatoes (first boiled, then sauteed), plus an additional layer of homemade tamarind-date chutney (made in my Instant Pot for the very first time this week – it was so quick!). I forgot how good the sweet-sourness of the tamarind date chutney really compliments all the savory and spicy of the cilantro chutney, gruyere cheese, and the potatoes. I made a decent-sized batch of the tamarind date chutney and froze half of it into cubes for future use.

I thought about my absolute favorite sandwich on earth, the classic mixed banh mi (banh mi thit nguoi), and how it also achieves the perfect balance of salty, savory, sweet, sour, and spicy, in the same way that this “samosa grilled cheese” sandwich does. While the bread on this grilled cheese provides crunch, in a banh mi, the crunchy raw pickled carrots and daikon also add crunch. Our family is lucky to identify with such delicious cultures!

My planning for the mango tiramisu did not go exactly as expected when I realized I would need the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of ripe mango puree, and I had barely 1.5 pounds with my ripe ataulfo mangoes. So in the end, I went with my plan B recipe, which was to make Maialino’s orange olive oil cake. I made a couple changes, such as slightly reducing the sugar, olive oil (this cake requires high quality olive oil since it’s the main flavor, so I used a grassy Australian olive oil that was just pressed last year), and replacing the Grand Marnier with more orange juice. I also topped it with a mascarpone based frosting, which came out nice and light.

For breakfast this morning, I made blueberry buttermilk pancakes, whose batter I allowed to rest for just over an hour. I was recently listening to a cooking podcast where a baker was talking about tips to increase flavor in baked goods without much effort. And this was the number 1 tip she had for pancakes: simply let the batter rest on the counter for anywhere from 1-4 hours, and you’ll immediately taste the difference vs. using batter that was just mixed. This small change has resulted in far more flavor than in my previous pancakes. So now when we have pancakes, I usually pre measure all the dry ingredients the night before and add to a bowl, and the morning of, I add in all the wet ingredients and mix as soon as I wake up. Then, while getting everything else ready, an hour-plus will quickly pass, and the pancake batter will “age” enough to garner a more complex flavor. I only wish I knew this tip sooner! We enjoyed these pancakes with maple syrup, plus a kimchi-spinach egg scramble with avocado on the side.

The nice thing about having Chris’s parents here is that they always enjoy and appreciate the food I make, so I have more excuses to make more things I wouldn’t always make. It’s nice to be around people who actually appreciate what you spend time and effort in doing for them and show it.

Years ago when I was still living at home, I attempted to make a raspberry charlotte cake. It was quite the undertaking: it is basically a layered sponge cake with a fruit puree filling, lined along its circumference with lady fingers, which are like miniature sponge cakes that are shaped like fingers. I was hell bent on making the lady fingers from scratch, so I actually made the batter, added it to a ziplock bag, then piped them onto parchment paper and baked them. And.. it was a complete and total mess. The lady fingers didn’t have the right texture or firmness, and in the end, I made an emergency trip to a grocery store to buy already-made lady fingers for my cake. From that point onward, I vowed to never make lady fingers ever again.

So I’ve made tiramisu once since then, and I used lady fingers purchased at an Italian grocery store and ones made from Whole Foods, both of which were quite pure in its ingredients for store-bought. I tried to go to Whole Foods to buy some more, but I found out that the Columbus Circle location had stopped selling Whole Foods-made lady fingers for whatever reason. I ended up having to go to Brooklyn Fare to buy a pack. They only had Goya brand, which was also surprisingly short in its ingredient list (and only $3 for a full pack!), so it was hard to complain.

I’m planning to layer these with mango puree and mascarpone and heavy cream for a mango tiramisu tomorrow. I’m so excited about my no-bake dessert project!