Category Archives: Cooking

Farmed fish

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For a long time, I wouldn’t buy fish to cook at home unless it was wild. Wild fish is the healthiest, most news articles touted, since these fish are eating what they are supposed to eat and we know they aren’t being fed grain and getting pumped chemicals that fish aren’t supposed to have. I told a friend of mine this a while ago, and he responded to me, “Wild isn’t as important as sustainable.” I thought about it a long while, and I realized he was probably right. Just because farmed fish in the U.S. may be questionable, or especially the farmed fish in China (the video images I’ve seen of this are by far enough to make anyone go off of eating farmed fish forever), doesn’t mean that farmed fish in countries with sustainable and environmentally friendly fish farming practices like New Zealand or Iceland are bad or unhealthy. The demand for fish is high, and only relying on fish in the wild isn’t a sustainable practice (plus, wild fish is generally very expensive). So I bought farmed arctic char raised in Iceland and roasted it for dinner tonight. I’m getting over my farmed fish fears little by little.

And as if all the fish I’ve eaten in restaurants in this country were wild!

Broiler miseducation

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Now that the weather is warming up with spring here (well, it actually isn’t warming up, but the idea is comforting that it should be getting warmer), I’ve been looking at a lot of different recipes that require grilling. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to an outdoor grill with our apartment, so the next best thing we can do is broil. It’s the same, right, just that the heat is coming from the top rather than the bottom?

I told Chris I wanted to broil Vietnamese lemongrass beef for dinner tonight, and he whined and insisted it would be bland and boring. “Broiling is so bland,” he said. “Why can’t you do something else?”

When did anything marinated in Vietnamese fish sauce, among other Asian ingredients, become boring? What a silly goose.

White chicken chili

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Yesterday, I made a very time and energy intensive white bean chicken chili. Most people use powdered spices for their chili peppers, but I used three types of fresh chilies and one dried type, a couple of onions, and a handful of garlic gloves and broiled these in the oven until blackened. After making a paste with them, the smell was undeniably fresh and good. I knew this was going to be a finger-licking good chili. And it was. I’ll be sad on the day later this week when I am enjoying the very last bowl.

I realized that since we’ve come back from Australia and Asia, I haven’t really spent much time cooking at all. Wedding planning has taken over my January and February, and so it was very relaxing to stand at the counter and cut my vegetables and dice my chicken thighs and forget about all my to-do’s. This is like my own therapy.

Maille mustard in Melbourne

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After arriving in Melbourne and having lunch with Chris’s family, Chris and I took a long drive to nowhere and found ourselves at the Woolworth’s supermarket near his parents’ house. I always like to visit grocery stores and supermarkets when we are traveling, even if I have been in the same exact ones in Melbourne multiple times. It just makes me happy to see the variety of food, how it differs in terms of food type, place of origin, and types of readily available ingredients. This time, after a trip to France, I am more cognizant of the French brand mustard Maille, which recently opened a glamorous, high-end store on the Upper West Side in Manhattan (and where I got ripped off into buying a small $9 jar of their basil flavored whole grain mustard). So I was shocked when I saw a shelf of just Maille brand mustard imported from France, and everything was $4 AUD or under! That’s less than $3 USD! I immediately bought one large jar of whole grain Maille mustard and rejoiced in my purchase.

Given how strong the U.S. dollar is in Australia now and how stronger it’s gotten every subsequent visit here, I have a feeling I may be making more food and maybe clothing purchases while I am in town. 🙂

Quick Indian cooking

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I’ve really been getting into the Food52 blog for all of their creative cooking ideas and ways to make cooking more approachable and realistic for people who work full time. One article that really piqued my interest was about how to create quick Indian meals. “Quick” and “Indian” for food rarely is heard in the same sentence because most Indian dishes demand 20-plus ingredients and/or 10-plus steps that could take days and days. And if not days and days, then a dish would require at least a full afternoon of cooking. This recipe I found for a simple Indian tomato curry base is pretty genius. It takes all the prep work of the tomatoes, aromatics and curry base and allows you to have them pre-prepared, if that makes sense, kind of the way you have jarred sauces in your fridge. You can store them in individual portions in your fridge or freezer depending on when you want to use them, and then when you take them out to use, you can have a meal on the table in less than 30 minutes. Tonight, I used the curry base, after defrosting from the freezer, to make chicken jalfrezi in less than 30 minutes. I had a really proud moment tonight looking at the pot when I finished cooking, and then I glanced at the clock to see that not even half an hour had passed since I heated the pan.

Vegetarian

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This Sunday, we’re inviting Chris’s cousin’s friend over for dinner. She recently moved to New York City from Melbourne to do a masters in journalism at NYU, and I’ve seen her twice since she has moved here. She’s very friendly and we’ve gotten along quite well, but the one thing that is a bit different that we have to deal with in hosting her for dinner is that she is vegetarian. She’s not pescatarian — she really is vegetarian. So she won’t eat any seafood or meat, or their products (so fish sauce, oyster sauce, and kimchi are all out). At least she can eat eggs and have milk. So yesterday, I was trying to brainstorm things to make in the Thai and Vietnamese categories, and I realized that everything I could think up would violate one of her food restrictions (hello, fish sauce everywhere!). I eventually settled on a chickpea spinach curry (channa saag) with rice. I told Chris this, and he was very displeased.

“Why can’t you just give her a head of iceberg lettuce to eat while we eat the real food?” he whined.

It’s not a big deal to me if we have a chickpea curry. I really like channa masala and all forms of vegetarian Indian curries I’ve had in the past.

“I’m not eating bullshit food,” Chris insists. “I will get fried rice.” That is, fried rice with some meat in it via delivery.com. There is no way I’m letting him order a side of fried rice while the rest of us eat food I have cooked. No way.

So the compromise is that I’ll make another curry with chicken in it. This is what happens when you have a meat-eating and stubborn life partner and a vegetarian house guest.

Chopped up turkey

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I went to the Whole Foods in the Upper East Side after work tonight to pick up an 11.15-pound free-range whole turkey in preparation for my early Thanksgiving feast this weekend. My oven is a sad, small Manhattan oven, so there’s no way I’d be able to roast the bird whole. So the last few years, I’ve asked the butcher at the meat counter to cut it up for me. This year, I came to request it to be chopped up, and the meat guys behind the counter said the butcher had already left, but they’d cut it up as best as they could. But they warned me that they’d never cut up a turkey before, so to not be too disappointed if the pieces didn’t turn out too pretty.

“Isn’t a turkey really just an over-sized chicken?” I asked the meat guys quizzically. “You guys cut up chickens all day, right?” Yes, they do.

It came out fine. I also made sure they cut up the back bone and put it back in the bag. “You want the back bone, too?” Damn right, I do. I’m not paying for a whole turkey to then have them take away the freaking back bone. That’s for my future stock.

Then, I lugged my big bird all the way home along with a pint of eggnog ice cream on sale. I only walked about ten blocks back to my apartment, but I already felt strained carrying this bird, along with a five-pound bag of flour and a two-pound bag of sugar. As I walked down to my street, I remembered all those years when I prepared Thanksgiving feasts at my Elmhurst apartment, and I went all over Manhattan to multiple stores (because of my food quality anality) and brought all my foodstuff supplies back to my Queens apartment. I never thought much about the inconvenience of buying things in one borough and carrying them back to another. I just did it because it had to be done. Now, I’m spoiled for convenience and dislike carrying weight in general.

It’s interesting how times have changed in my life. And in the next stage of my life, I may have a car and drive groceries instead of carrying a grocery bag even one block.

Dead yeast

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I love making bread. There are few things more amazing to me than the smell of fresh bread being baked in my oven at home, especially when that bread is either eggy, buttery, or a delicious combination of both. Unfortunately, since I’ve moved into this apartment over three years ago, I haven’t made a real yeast bread. The closest I’ve come to using yeast in this apartment was using it for appam earlier this year, and that, while edible, was a disaster in terms of how long it took to cook.

So for whatever reason, I bought instant yeast years ago, and I had no idea whether it was still alive or even how to test it. I know how to test dry active yeast, but I had no clue on how to test instant. So I did what anyone might do and just proceeded to use it in the challah recipe I wanted to use for my early Thanksgiving celebration this weekend, and I convinced myself it would work.

And then after two “risings,” I took photos and compared the before and after. I wasn’t sure if the dough had really risen, or if it was just my eyes trying to make me believe it did. It seemed too stiff and not airy at all… And the final verdict? The dough baked into a hard long brick. And I had a big mess to clean up after and no edible bread to eat.

I’m never buying instant yeast ever again. And the remaining instant yeast packet, which I bought around the same time a few years ago, also went into the trash with my sad dead yeast dough.

Meatballs

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I spent the early afternoon making meatballs for dinner since Chris was finally coming back from Australia after two weeks of being away for work and family. For the first time, I made gelatin out of leftover homemade stock, minced it up, and added it to my meatball “dough.” I formed each meatball, about 3.5 ounces each, and laid them out neatly on a foiled baking sheet to pop into the broiler before dumpling them into the tomato sauce I made.

As I formed each ball and gently placed each on the baking sheet, I thought about Ed and how much he liked meat. He rarely cooked. The few times he did, he never got praised for what he made. I guess I praised him once when he made chocolate chip cookies. He was so excited about finally making something himself… until they came out of the oven and didn’t seem that brown. He asked me why they didn’t brown as well as the cookies I’ve made, and I asked him if he remembered to use brown sugar. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed, disappointed. “I forgot to use brown sugar!” It was okay. They still tasted fine. Another time, he splurged and bought filet mignon when I wasn’t home, and he cooked and ate it himself. I think our mom ate a little bit, but my dad declined to eat any. He would have loved these meatballs, but I know he would have thought this recipe was way too complex.

I always look back and wonder if we should have spent more time doing things together. Maybe I could have asked him to cook with me, to share in some task that I found fun, instead of just asking him to help me wash the dishes afterwards, which was never fun for him or me. But the realistic side of me knows I would have been a control freak, and it may not have ended very well for either of us. I feel like we didn’t spend enough time together when I was around at home, and I feel bad about it now when I look back. It’s terrible to even think about this now because it’s clear the reason I think this way is because he is gone now. It makes me feel really crappy.

Butter chicken

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I spent the later afternoon and early evening making butter chicken, or murgh makhani, from scratch. It involved trimming excess fat and skin off the bone-in chicken thighs, marinating the meat in a yogurt-lemon juice-spice mixture, chopping up tomatoes, onions, garlic, and ginger, and assembling even more spices for the actual cooking. Even though the marinating time was not as long as I wanted it, the chicken curry came out really well.

I get antsy when I don’t cook for a while. I certainly can’t complain about not cooking because it’s not like I’ve been leading on a miserable life the last several weeks. We’ve been traveling through Japan, socializing with friends, and last Sunday, went to a free U2 concert. That’s when you know that you really love cooking — when even when you are enjoying great things and activities and moments in your life, in the back of your head, you still want to be cooking, even if just for a few hours. And even when those few hours are in the tiniest Manhattan kitchen, it still makes you really happy.