Even after hosting a small brunch yesterday, we still have an incredible amount of leftover food from the weekend, everything from the dosa batter, potato masala filling, the coconut chutney, and even the roasted chicken and vegetables I made for dinner on Sunday — it’s filled our fridge to the brim, and I can barely see inside without having to move things around. It’s a good “problem” to have, though, as in “too much food.” But given that Chris will be away for a few days this week, it’s a lot of food just for me, and there’s definitely no way we’ll finish it before this week ends. So while it’s nice to have “too much food,” there’s also the other first-world problem of having to eat the same food every single day until it’s gone.

Then, I thought back to a conversation with two colleagues, one who is very like-minded as I am with food, eating every last bit and saving bone and vegetable scraps for homemade stock, and the second… who is our total opposite. When I told our opposite about how we always eat every last bit of everything at home when I cook, or when I roast chickens, I save the bones and any vegetable scraps into my freezer “stock prep” bag, her eyes widened and she laughed hysterically. “You would really hate to live or eat out with me. I hate bringing any type of leftover food home, and I’m notorious for buying a whole roasted chicken from Whole Foods, eating half of it, and then throwing the rest of it away.”

We laughed… but I told her she was a horrible human being and there are literally starving children in this country, and that’s such a spoiled rich-American thing to do. She admitted that all the above was true, but it was just her bad habits. I could actually feel pain in my insides listening to her say that she wastes that much food every single day.

I’m passionate about mental health and children in need, but given that I am also passionate about food, I’m indirectly also passionate about food waste, or rather, the focus on not wasting food. I think a lot about the best way to prepare and eat food so that the minimal amount is wasted. I like the fact that some companies now are focused on food waste and thus starting to sell “ugly” fruits and vegetables that get rejected from mainstream stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, but I think that barely even touches the surface of the issue because that doesn’t even address food waste issues like the ones noted above: perfectly good food that goes to waste.

Although I have made paleo banana bread a few times, including recently for my mother, who is trying to reduce the amount of sugar she’s consuming, I think the overall concept of paleo eating is pretty stupid, that we should return back to the time of cave men to really be eating as healthily as we can. So… cave men had access to eggs? Really? And they used sugar as a sweetener for… baking banana bread?

The biggest gripe I have with the paleo diet is that it demonizes beans and all legumes and puts them on the “unhealthy” food list. As soon as I heard that, I knew this diet was total garbage. The rationale they have is that beans contain lectins, which are supposedly bad for you. The lectins are pretty much destroyed by cooking; that’s why we cook legumes in the first place and to soften them. As long as you are cooking the beans long enough, you will be fine. Beans are high in fiber and likely the most nutrient-dense food on earth. If I were vegetarian or vegan and didn’t have access to beans, I’d probably be massively malnourished.

I thought about this as as I made my Kerala black-eyed pea coconut curry tonight. Over the last year, I’ve been cooking more black-eyed peas, and I’m so impressed by how buttery and creamy they can become. It actually makes you miss meat less when you eat these beans. Just think of what all these crazy paleo followers are missing.

Tonight, we hosted a belated Chinese-Vietnamese New Year dinner, and I made five different dishes, including something I’ve always be interested in making, but was always scared to test out: Vietnamese fried spring rolls. I grew up with my mom making them, although with flour wrappers vs. rice paper wrappers, which are actually the most traditional kind in Vietnam. After seeing how relatively straightforward the process was with frying in a shallow pan at the Vietnamese cooking class Chris got me last month, and how good the rice paper wrappers came out, I decided that I would try this out for our dinner party tonight. If I could do it in the cooking class, I had to be able to do it at home, right? And with a Costco-priced container of canola oil, the oil would not be a huge investment. So I successfully made them tonight. I made the filling out of minced pork, shrimp, mung bean noodles, wood ear and cloud ear mushrooms, carrot, shallot, cilantro, and scallion. I tested out the seasoning by pan frying a little before stuffing and rolling them in rice paper. And I made sure to toggle the heat between medium and medium-low to make sure the oil didn’t burn. They weren’t as evenly golden as they always are in the restaurants, but they came out tasty and how I expected them to look. I was pretty proud of myself in the end. Now, the only thing I regret is not doubling the recipe and storing the second batch in the freezer for quick fried spring rolls in the future.

Whenever I think of Southeast Asian food, I think of the explosive flavors that characterize its dishes. It is rare that you eat anything in countries like Thailand, Malaysia, or Vietnam that you would describe as “subtle.” Most of the time, there are very strong, assertive flavors, or a combination of sweet, salty, sour, and savory that make the dish pop. The most “subtle” dish I can think of is Hainanese chicken rice, of which Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand all have their own variations, but even then, the chicken rice is so filled with the umami chicken fat flavor that even that, I would never call subtle or faint in taste.

After watching a number of videos on YouTube of Mark Wiens discussing Thai cooking, especially that of his mother-in-law at home in Bangkok, as well as reading Thai and Vietnamese food blogs, what I’ve found is that when making sauces and curries, the center of it all is always, always a good and solid mortar and pestle. After taking a Vietnamese street food cooking class that Chris got me last week, I watched the chef instructor make a mango salad dressing and nuoc cham dipping sauce in a mortar and pestle, and when she tossed all the ingredients together, I was definitely surprised. I’ve made all these sauces before, yet somehow, hers tasted far superior to mine, and we were using the exact same ingredients down to the brand of fish sauce! There is something magical that happens when pounding and hand grinding in between rough pieces of granite that brings out all the oils and flavors of each ingredient and mingles it all together that can never quite be achieved by mincing with a knife or blending in a food processor. It just isn’t the same, and Samin Nosrat calls this out in her Salt Acid Fat Heat book/TV series, as well as her pesto article in The New York Times.

So, now I have a very first-world kitchen dilemma: do I get a granite mortar and pestle, or do I not? It is not so much a debate of whether I can afford it. I once had a friend’s wife look at me like I was the cheapest person on earth when I made a comment in her kitchen after she made a beautiful tart for a dinner party: “Oh, it would be fun to own a tart pan!” She wrinkled her nose. “You know they only cost like 10 bucks, right? You can afford it.” My response? “Well, it’s not about the cost as it is the storage of something that I may use about…. once a year max and whether it even makes sense to buy it if the usage is so low.” However, at about $58 for the Thai one that Serious Eats advocates for, it’s certainly not the cheapest kitchen purchase. It’s more an issue of size (its full capacity in cups is about six) and weight (it’s super heavy because it’s STONE!), and thus space. If I dropped something like that, it would most definitely cause damage to our hardwood floors, if not the actual granite counters in our kitchen. Eeek. If I got one, I’d need to have it permanently displayed somewhere in the kitchen… and I’m pretty much at capacity for kitchen display space at this point.

🙁