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!

When I had read on the Rancho Gordo website that they encourage you to use the bean stock for future soups and stews in cooking, I was a bit confused. When they say “bean stock,” did they mean the liquid leftover from initially cooking the beans? Because previously whenever I cooked beans (other than dal, which would usually disintegrate into the water and would become the main dish itself), I’d just discard the cooking water; it never really tasted like anything and just seemed like discard itself. So I figured this time, I’d try it to see how flavorful it was after simmering my Marcella beans for just over three hours over the stove. I did exactly what the recipe suggested for the roasted leek and white bean soup: I soaked the beans for about five hours, then I simmered them simply, with just water and a single rind of parmesan for three hours. I didn’t even add any salt or pepper until after my first taste. But when I took that first spoonful, I couldn’t believe it: it really WAS a flavorful, rich bean stock all in itself! It tasted like something slightly umami, a bit vegetabley, and rich. And once I added the salt and pepper, that bean stock easily could have been its own soup!

So I ended up reserving every last drop of that bean stock for my roasted leek and white bean soup. And it was another hit at brunch yesterday: our friends had second helpings, and I was just extremely impressed by how flavorful such a simple soup with so few ingredients could be. Rancho Gordo heirloom beans are definitely a hit!