Category Archives: Cooking

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.

Mustard

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Chris just came back from his work trip to Cannes today, and unfortunately, it looks like the security at Heathrow en route back to New York caught him with the Dijon mustard he got for me that was over 100 ml. I was so bummed when I woke up this morning to see that text from him. No French mustard will be coming back to our apartment today.

I’ve been reading about brands like Maille and Amora mustard and how superior they are to the mustards here in the U.S. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really started developing a taste for mustard, especially the really spicy, complex ones, and the whole-grain, seedy ones (these require flossing after enjoying). These brands are just everyday brands in France, yet they make our everyday mustard brands look sad, pathetic and lacking real mustard flavor. They are supposed to be extremely strong to the point of clearing your blocked nose and also far spicier than the average mustards here.

It’s on my list of things to buy when we travel to France this October for Chris’s cousin’s wedding. When other people travel to Paris, they get excited for the fashion and make lists of clothing pieces or handbags they wish to purchase that would be cheaper in France than back home in the U.S. When I go to Paris, I start salivating over all things edible. Mmmmm, French mustard and butter and croissants and baguettes and macarons.

Mom’s complaints are love

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My mom is always touched when I make her food even though she tends to complain about it. She tells me that she didn’t raise me to cook food and “do manual labor.” To her, it’s like a low class job or activity even though she grew up extremely poor in a rural part of central Vietnam. She says cooking is hard work and that I should just “lie down and relax” when I’m not at work. This is slightly comical to me, though. If I work a 40-hour work week, she’s essentially telling me that she wants me to “lie down” 128 hours. That would get really boring, wouldn’t it?

Before I left home, I humored her and made her beloved and requested boxed brownie mixes. She doesn’t like baking since she really hates measuring anything when making food, so when it comes to even boxed mixes, she’d prefer someone else do it despite how simple it is. She knows how much I can’t stand mixes (I prefer to bake from scratch, which to this day, still befuddles her to no end), so she’s fully aware that I do this only because I love her and nothing else.

I talked to her on the phone today, and she thanks me profusely for making “such delicious brownies – so chewy!” Mom, I said, it was from a box! “I don’t care — it still tastes good, and you know I love it!” She exclaims in response. That’s what moms do. They complain about the things you do even though they absolutely love it at the same time and then go and tell all their friends about it.

 

Fish

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This weekend, we went to Whole Foods so that I could pick out some wild fish to prepare for dinner tonight. We ended up picking out some bluefish fillets that were priced at $9.99/lb. At Whole Foods, this sounds fairly affordable, but after paying almost $19 for four fillets, it seemed like quite a lot of money to spend on just a handful of meals. And considering that bluefish was once considered the fish that fisherman tossed back into the sea and fed to other fish, it’s quite a markup. Once upon a time at a local grocery store in Cambridge, MA, you could get great and fresh bluefish fillets for less than $4/lb.

It’s a decent amount of money to spend, but I rather spend money on a fish that’s rich and fatty like this than a boring, bland white fish. I don’t understand people who want to eat fish but don’t like the actual taste or smell of a real fish. Fish like halibut and tilapia have no real, distinct flavor. There’s little way to tell one white fish from another in terms of flavor because they have none. Like articles I’ve read about bluefish have said, bluefish is for people who want to know they are eating fish, not people who want to eat fish but don’t want to taste fish.

Recipe for love

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Yesterday, I was reading one of my favorite food blogs, Smitten Kitchen, and Deb, the blogger, says in one of her posts that the sour cream coffee cake she makes could be the dish that made her now husband realize she was The One. She said that after she made this cake for him, shortly after, he asked her to marry him. And so began their journey cooking and photographing together in their tiny Manhattan kitchen. The coffee cake became the reason he married her, or so she wants to believe.

I thought about this in the context of me and Chris. Since we have moved in together about three years ago now, I’ve made so many different things that I can’t really keep track of what has been his favorite. I’ve made more use of this teeny tiny kitchen than probably anyone else in the history of this building even existing. This kitchen has seen some crazy three-day process dishes, as well as complex pastries like croissant. I asked him if he could name a dish I’ve made for him that he’d say was the one he’d name as the The Dish, and he said that I rarely make the same thing twice, so it was hard to name. Now that I think about it, the only real repeats this apartment has seen are banh xeo, appam, Kerala chicken stew, banana bread, pumpkin bread, pad thai, and different versions of oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies and fried rice. Nothing else has ever been a repeat.

It’s hard to repeat a dish when there are infinite recipes out there on the internet that I’ve bookmarked, as well as too many cookbooks here in the apartment that I neglect as a result. I guess Chris can’t name a favorite dish because they’re all his favorite dishes since I made them. 🙂

Appam and yeast

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The first time I made appam, otherwise known as a South Indian coconut and rice based pancake that is fermented, I did it the very un-traditional way and used baking soda instead of yeast or hot toddy. It came out almost perfectly; it probably would have been better if I had thinned out the batter a bit and also had a real appam chetty pan to get the correct shape. Today, for a small dinner party at home, I attempted to use a supposedly more “authentic” recipe that uses yeast, and the texture was all wrong — spongy instead of light, airy, and fluffy. The taste also seemed to have more of that fermented taste that I wasn’t so sure about. That’s not how I remember it tasting when Chris’s mum made it or the last time I made it a year and a half ago.

I was so irritated about how I had failed that I mentioned it a few times to my friends when they came over. They couldn’t tell the difference since this was their first time having it, and they insisted I was being overly critical. It’s true. I was being overly critical, but I tend to be this way about things that I am passionate about, and cooking is clearly in this area. I hate messing up and disappointing myself. We are all perfectionists about some aspects of our lives; that’s how we encourage ourselves to become better versions of ourselves and constantly improve. At least, that’s what I believe.