This year, I’ve made a goal to make use of seasonal produce that I’m not familiar with to challenge myself to be more creative in my cooking. A few fruit and vegetables that are on this list include rhubarb, figs, beets, summer squash, and artichokes. Some of these are clearly higher maintenance, like artichokes, while others, like rhubarb, are just foreign to me. The only way I’ve ever had rhubarb was in a strawberry rhubarb pie a friend’s dad made when I came over to her house. So I figured the easiest way for me to use it for my very first time would be by making a strawberry rhubarb syrup I’d then use for homemade soda.

I don’t drink soda at all unless it’s made from a small or local company that doesn’t use high fructose corn syrup. I stopped drinking soda after the second time I had braces when I was in 7th grade, and it was a great thing that I did it then. Because of this, it’s even more gratifying when I made a syrup for soda myself because I know exactly what I put into it, and I know that there’s nothing artificial about what I’ve made. And it’s pure sugar, for better or for worse. It’s a lot of effort, but it makes me really happy at the end, and it makes me even happier to share it with other people who can appreciate pure ingredients and the taste of real fruit flavors.

I hate roasting turkey. It’s one of those things I think I never really get quite right. The one time I did it and the dark meat came out incredibly moist and tender, the breast still ended up a bit dry. It’s saved quite easily with some good gravy, but it still drives me crazy. And that was when I had the turkey cut into parts because I can’t roast a whole turkey in our tiny oven.

I tried roasting just drumsticks and thighs yesterday afternoon, and the meat was every kind of “bad” there is: some pieces were rubbery, others were tough, and some were just so hard that I had to throw them out. There were a few small morsels of moist pieces, but I felt like my entire afternoon was wasted on this meat. I eventually salvaged most of it and made a curry for it, but I still felt like a failure. I’m determined to try a brine to get this right the next time… which will probably be for early Thanksgiving in November.

Some people think cooking comes naturally to people. I think those some people are lazy asses who have no idea how much concentration and work and effort and tweaking goes into these things. Yes, some people have more of a natural interest in cooking, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good. This is one of my cooking fails, along with my attempts at Korean pajeon, Cuban rice and beans, and Portuguese bread (that was so bad that my mom banned me from using her kitchen to re-attempt making it ever again).

A friend gave me butternut squash, sweet potato, and apple flours (non-GMO-certified, of course) as a birthday gift. It was certainly a unique present, as I had no idea that fruit and vegetable “flours” were even being made. I’ve made my own almond flour, but fruit flour is so novel to me. Then again, I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised with all the crazy food movements for gluten-free, soy-free, nut-free, paleo, etc.

I spent some time on anti-grain.com looking at recipes for my new flours. I found an interesting cheese bread, and even pastas. i can make my own sweet potato pasta noodles! It’s a new culinary area for me to explore. I love my regular wheat flour, but this will just add variety to my pantry and perhaps make me realize that a gluten-free diet really could be feasible (and tasty) in today’s world.

I’m still not giving up my wheat, though.

Today, a friend gifted me an Indian cookbook. It’s a bit different this time because he actually got it through a Kickstarter project that he funded, which I really appreciate.

I think that as someone who cooks, I am seen as someone who would appreciate cookbooks, and so as a result, I have received an endless number of cookbooks from everyone from my own relatives to even colleagues. A number of them are cookbooks that are better as coffee table cookbooks (i.e. you wouldn’t ever really cook using their recipes, but damn, the photos are great), and some of them are kind of dumbed down versions of the authentic cuisine that I am after when I am preparing food at home.

I’m hoping this cookbook is better than my other Indian cookbook, which was also a gift and written by a reputable Indian chef. In this cookbook, every time I used any of the recipes, I always had to either double or triple the amount of spices she recommended or add additional spices to make the dish taste “more Indian.” When this happens, you know that your source isn’t reliable… when you feel more Indian than the Indian chef you are trying to imitate.

I woke up this morning to find out that our cooking prep for Christmas day had to be delayed due to a supposed gas leak in the kitchen. I was originally concerned because I knew I was the last person to use the stove, and I was pretty certain I checked the stove to make sure everything was fully off before we went to bed this morning at 2am. I went on with my mincing of all the dumpling ingredients and just stayed away from the stove and oven for a few hours.

As I am mincing up the shiitake mushroom caps, Chris’s mom is standing across the counter from me, watching me do my prep work, and asking if I could smell the gas. I told her I couldn’t smell anything gas-like, and maybe it was because my nose was slightly stuffed. I had left the mushrooms out on the counter to re-hydrate and soak overnight. She then puts her nose closer to the mushrooms for a sniff and exclaims, “I think these mushrooms are emitting that smell!” She calls Tony over, and Tony runs up to the mushrooms, takes a whiff, and declares these silly mushrooms to be the culprit. He calls the gas company to let them know it was a false alarm, but they let him know that someone is already on the way, and it’s better to be safe and check anyway. A dispatcher comes, does his thorough check, and declares the mushrooms as the cause of the smell. I never would have guessed that these little mushrooms could cause so much drama. Who would have ever thought that these shiitakes could be thought to be gaseous?

It’s been one of my goals this year to expand my cooking horizons cuisine-wise, so I’ve been adding a lot of different spices and sauces to my pantry that span from around the world. This isn’t just an Asian/Western kitchen anymore, but it’s also South Asian, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and African. I’d been perusing multiple dosa (South Indian style rice and lentil-based crepe) recipes, and I finally stumbled upon one that seemed very authentic and doable… with a three-day process. And we can’t have dosa without having an accompanying potato filling, sambar, and coconut chutney, so I’m making those from scratch, too.

Today is day two of the process, and I’m already exhausted. I was thinking about this today while grinding lentils and rice with water in my blender: how the heck did Indians suddenly decide to start grinding rice or lentils with water and make them into a batter for a crepe, to then fill with potato? How would they have learned that rice and beans could be fermented? Dosa is actually a fermented food, which I never would have guessed while eating it in a restaurant. When I look back at the history of different foods and how they came to be, it makes me think that maybe way back when, people were extremely smart and inventive, and now, people like me aren’t that creative and we just rely on finding “new” things via the internet. There are pluses and minuses to everything, especially the internet.

While Chris is away for work this week, I decided to indulge my doughy side and try to make my own seitan. I was inspired by a vegan friend, who had taken me to multiple vegetarian restaurants that served seitan as the “mock meat.” I realized after doing some research that seitan is actually something I ate quite often as a child growing up, yet I didn’t realize it had an English name. It was made in vegetarian stir-fries and eaten during periods when you weren’t supposed to have meat, as my grandma was a Buddhist. In Chinese, it’s called “kaofu.”

Store-bought seitan looked to be quite pricey, so I went to buy some vital wheat gluten flour and make my own. The process is actually pretty simple, and as usual, I found the kneading of the dough very therapeutic. However, this dough was remarkably different than bread dough, as the dough was squishier and even squeaked a lot from the air pockets as I kneaded.

The finished product looked pretty impressive, and I’m looking forward to cooking with it in a stir-fry tomorrow. 🙂

I spent most of today cooking, which made me really happy. I spent the morning and early afternoon making banh bao, Vietnamese steamed buns filled with a pork mixture, slivers of hard boiled egg, and pieces of Chinese sausage. I love the feeling of dough in my fingers, of kneading and lightly adding in more flour, and of testing the springiness of the dough to see if it’s ready or not. I’m not terribly good at shaping and pleating the buns; in fact, they ended up looking pretty sub par even after I intently studied these Chinese women and their hands pleating over and over in bao YouTube videos.

Marcus Buckingham, in his books, likes to talk about how we all have “strong moments,” but we just need to identify them and maximize them in our lives to be happy and fulfilled. Maybe one of my strong moments is when I have dough in my hands.