As long as I can remember, I have loved Vietnamese pate. I also love French pate (of course), but I’ve been eating Vietnamese pate since before I even knew what pate was. It was always a crucial ingredient that makes up the delicious key fixings of banh mi. Banh mi really isn’t quite the same without that creamy, extremely umami component. So I was curious when I was reading Andrea Nguyen’s vegetable-forward, plant-based cookbook called Ever-Green Vietnamese, where she has a very popular recipe for mushroom walnut pate. To start, you have some oil or butter that you heat up in a saute pan. You add chopped cremini mushrooms, chopped walnuts, minced shallots, and you saute until everything is beautifully browned and fragrant. Then, you add a touch of five-spiced powder, some salt and pepper, and a dash of Maggi seasoning; allow the mixture to cool, then blitz it all in a food processor. And in that short time, some real magic happens: the mushroom mixture gets extremely fragrant and umami and creamy to the point where the taste and texture of this mixture truly, truly does mimic real animal-based pate. When I smelled it after pureeing, I knew it had promise. But once I actually put a small spoonful in my mouth, I felt completely floored: this is really a legit substitute for meat pate!! The texture is moussy and meaty with a creamy mouth feel. The flavor is rich and luxurious. It’s what Australians call “moreish.”

Vegetables and legumes have a lot of power and potential, but it’s up to us to find creative ways to use and apply them, especially in a world where obesity and heart disease are on the rise, and a huge part of climate change is due to our unsustainable levels of meat consumption. This mushroom walnut pate is likely one of the most ingenious meat substitutes I’ve ever tasted in my life. If you leave out the butter (I used it this time, but next time, I’ll use olive oil), it’s even 100 percent vegan. I served it for brunch with friends this afternoon, and I will honestly say that it was probably the best thing that was on the table.

I first read about heirloom beans during the height of the pandemic. The sale of dried beans in general had gone up once the pandemic and lockdown were in full force in early 2020. People were looking for pantry items that could not only last a long time, but were also economical. At that time, I never thought much about dried beans or beans in general, though I did eat and cook them. I never thought about how they were grown, dried, or packaged up for selling. I didn’t think about their shelf life since when I thought about dried beans, I just thought they’d last forever in my pantry. Most of the time when I got them, I would buy bags of dried beans (since they’re cheaper, healthier, and taste better), plus the occasional can or two as emergency supplies. Beans in the U.S. have always had an association as “poor people food,” or the food that you eat when you don’t have much money. The saddest thing about that association is that beans are not only one of the tastiest things you can eat, but they are probably one of the healthiest things you can consume. There are endless varieties of beans, from big fat cannellini beans to teeny tiny varieties of lentils (dal) in colors of the rainbow. To say that you don’t like beans at all is like saying you don’t like any pasta, any rice, any fruit, or any vegetable — it’s absurd and likely ignorant. And I found out another fun fact about beans: they are also great candidates to aid in crop rotation, as they are able to replenish nutrients in soil. So, they would be perfect to plant in between seasons for other fruits/veggies!

Rancho Gordo aimed to change the image of beans as a cheap food. They wanted to highlight how rich and complex beans can taste, and also aimed to get dried beans even fresher to you (less than two years from picking). They also wanted you to discover the sheer variety of beans from all over the world and how amazing it all could be. Rancho Gordo even has an heirloom bean club that literally has tens of thousands of people on the wait list (including me, annoyingly enough). I was on the wait list for a while and finally came to terms that I was likely never getting off this stupid wait list, so I finally went on their website last week to order several pounds of different varieties and see what the hype was all about. I just got my order yesterday, and I’ve never been more excited to cook beans. I have Christmas lima beans, “Marcella” white beans (literally named after Marcella Hazen for the cannellini-like beans that she said were her favorite from Italy); I also got these interesting ones called Jacob’s cattle bean, which are a bespeckled white and red bean that would serve well in a baked beans application.

I think beans are our future, so I’m all for looking for new ways to cook with beans, as well as more types of beans to cook with!

I was rummaging through my cupboards to see what random things I’d purchased that I’ve forgotten about over the years, and I found some no-boil lasagne noodles I’d purchased at Trader Joe’s. I still remember when I bought this item, too: it was in autumn 2021 when I was very pregnant, and I thought then that a good dish to make while on maternity leave would be lasagne. Well, little did I know that layering pasta noodles with a long-simmered meat or vegetable sauce and different cheeses would be little priority with a tiny human to constantly care and pump milk for.

So I took out the package and decided that lasagne for our home was long, long overdue. I used my latest Butcherbox ground beef to make a four-hour simmered bolognese sauce on Friday. It even injured me with all the bubbling, as the sauce popped everywhere, including the inside of my right wrist, which still has purple-red bruise marks from the burn marks. Lucky me with my food prep, I already had my parmesan finely grated and stored in the freezer for future use. And today, I spent the late morning layering my lasagne in my much-neglected 13×9 casserole pan. And it felt really fun and satisfying. Lasagne making is almost like therapy. It’s very methodical but doesn’t take too much thinking. Once you know the method: one layer of noodles, one 1-cup layer of bolognese, one 1/2-cup layer of bechamel, and one 1/3-cup layer of grated parmesan — you just keep following it until you run out of noodles. Unfortunately for Trader Joe’s, I only had 3.5 out of five needed layers of pasta, so my pasta layering process got abruptly cut short, so I had to improvise my top layer.

But when it came out of the oven, I was pretty satisfied: forty-five minutes in the oven yielded an evenly browned and bubbly top, with a lid that was very crunchy and satisfying. A small piece really left me feeling satisfied with my efforts from Friday as well as today. It also confirmed something else I’ve always thought: every time I’ve had lasagne that was not homemade, I’ve just never been as happy with it. The meat sauce is rarely as nuanced and flavorful as the one I’ve made, and likely the quality of the meat to the cheese is never as high. Most of them rely too heavily on too much shredded mozzarella to mask anything that the sauce is lacking. So it always feels like a deflating experience ordering it out. Lasagne is really one of those things that I think needs to be homemade, loved, and eaten at home. My next idea is to make spinach lasagne with four cheeses, which I just got an email about from Food & Wine. It’s a doozy in other ways in that it uses four different cheeses and certainly is not for anyone who is watching their waistline, but I still think it’s worth an occasional indulgence… especially since before this, the last time I made a lasagne was when we still lived on the east side — that was over 7 years ago!!

Another bonus: I doubled the bolognese recipe, so I have a full recipe of bolognese meat sauce in my freezer, frozen in large 1/2-C cubes! So less work and more enjoyment in the future await. In that sense, the inner wrist bruising from the sauce burn is more worth it given it was an investment also in future meals and not just this week’s.

At the beginning of this year, I started reading more about Taiwanese cooking. Taiwan has a complicated identity, not just because of its connection to (and arguably, ownership by) China, but also because of its history of colonization by multiple countries. While a lot in Taiwanese and Chinese cuisine overlap, some argue that Taiwanese cuisine is a completely distinct cuisine all in itself because of its native people, plus previous colonizers. Whatever you believe is certainly debatable, but what I think is most definitely true and not debatable is that the cuisine of Taiwan is extremely tasty. And that in itself is enough to appreciate Taiwan and its food.

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed various iterations of Taiwanese fried chicken. Sometimes, they were deep fried cutlets, while other times, they were in the form of bite-sized, “popcorn” pieces that were fried to perfection. The chicken always had a hint of five-spice mix, but it also had an interesting “je ne sais quoi” umami flavor to it that I couldn’t pin down. I’d never had it in all the other variations of fried chicken I’d had previously, whether it was American, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Southern American. I just couldn’t figure out what gave it that distinct Taiwanese flavor that popped.

And then I stumbled across the journalist Clarissa Wei, an American with Taiwanese heritage who now lives in Taiwan. She has co-written a Taiwanese cookbook called Made in Taiwan and also wrote several food pieces for Serious Eats, including a Taiwanese popcorn chicken recipe with a description that explained that umami pop that was distinct to Taiwan’s version of fried chicken. The secret ingredient was furu, or Chinese/Taiwanese fermented bean curd! I never would have guessed it, but after reading her article, it completely made sense. Furu, for those who are not familiar, is a fermented bean curd that has a very, very distinct smell/taste that some might call stinky or funky. It is usually found stir-fried in vegetable dishes like water spinach or Buddha’s Delight / luo han zhai. It gives a strong umami flavor, like a more peculiar version of miso. I used this in the chicken marinade and marinated overnight. Then, I coated the chicken in a flour-baking powder mixture, then in a sweet potato flour mixture, which is supposed to give a lighter “crust” to the fried chicken.

Clarissa’s recipe calls for deep frying, which is traditional for Taiwanese popcorn chicken, but I didn’t want to do this given the mess and oil waste. Instead, I used an “oven fry” method I learned from Amanda Hesser of Food 52, who published her mom’s recipe for oven fried chicken. Instead of deep frying, she would add two tablespoons of butter/oil to a bake pan, put it in the oven at 400 F until it was fully melted and coated on the pan. Then, she would add her coated chicken, skin-faced-down, onto the super hot pan, put it back in the oven, “oven fry” (time depends on your chicken cut type, whether it’s bone-in, size of pieces), then flip over once that face-down side was super brown and crispy. She’d put it back in the oven, roast until fully cooked and the second side was brown. Finally, it would be pulled out of the oven and ready to serve. This merging of two recipes/methods really worked! I was so impressed by the results and kept marveling over how tasty the chicken was. It really did have that nice underlying “funk” to it, and the crispiness was very, very satisfying. While enjoying this chicken, I couldn’t remember the last time I was more impressed with something new I had made. This recipe was most definitely a keeper, and so was the oven frying method for pieces this small!

I guess this just means I’m going to have to read more of her book and maybe even buy it. I’ve always loved Taiwanese food, just never really explored it in depth.

Well, Lunar New Year has come and gone. Although my tang yuan were late, at least I had made them close to the end of Chinese New Year, which is tradition. Tang yuan 湯圓 are small glutinous rice balls usually filled with a sweet, crushed black sesame, peanut, peanut coconut, or red bean paste mixture. They are served steaming hot, usually in a sweet milky broth or brown-sugar ginger soup. They are typically eaten at the end of Lunar New Year during what is called Lantern Festival to symbolize the unity of family and loved ones. The round shape of tang yuan is associated with the full moon, which symbolizes the wholeness of family and a brighter future.

I grew up eating both the sweet and savory versions of tang yuan. Though with my sweet tooth growing up, the black sesame or crushed peanut dessert version was always what I got excited about; this is the version that most people eat and are aware of. You can even find them premade and frozen in most Asian supermarkets; they are easy to prepare, as all you have to do is plop the frozen balls in boiling water, and they’ll be done once they float up to the top. The downside of these, though, is there is often artificial flavors and ingredients in them, and who really wants that?

But what I have more vivid memories of is the savory version of tang yuan, either eaten during Lantern Festival or during the winter solstice. The Cantonese savory tang yuan version is plain glutinous rice balls dunked and cooked in a chicken, pork, and daikon fragrant broth, along with dried shrimp, sliced Chinese sausages, daikon, and sliced Napa cabbage. It was a comforting, soothing bowl of soup, and the umami-rich scent is unmistakable. It always reminded me of home every time my grandma or mom would make it; it’s a very home-style dish, one that you would never see on a restaurant menu. In my adult years, I’ve found out there’s an even more complex version of the savory tang yuan where the savory glutinous rice balls are stuffed with a meat filling – this sounds like even more intense work!

I think the sweet version of tang yuan is easier for those who don’t understand tang yuan or its meaning to get used to. And I love making them, even though they are a total pain given that manipulating glutinous rice flour dough is very challenging. It takes some practice to get the dough just right. Using cold water won’t do; you actually need a mix of boiling hot water and cold water to make the dough workable and pliable enough to form into a firm dough. I remember this from the days when I would make them with my grandma. She would always use boiling hot water to mix the glutinous rice flour dough, and somehow, her hands, which were very tough, could always handle the steaming heat. Once the dough cooled down enough, she’d let me help and cut small pieces of dough and roll them into nice, round balls. Once you have that part right, the next part is not allowing the dough to dry up too much to get crackly. And after THAT part has cleared, you need to make sure that the filling, whether it’s crushed peanut or black sesame, will be solid enough to not fly all over the place and actually properly get inserted into each dough ball, then seal them firmly shut. It’s a lot of finicky steps and finesse that’s required to get these things just right. But when you do get it right, it’s so satisfying: to take a bite into a sweet tang yuan is very luxurious. You know it’s right when you take your first bite into the ball, and the black sesame sugar filling oozes out like hot lava. It’s creamy, buttery, and nutty lusciousness. I made a second batch of tang yuan two days ago given my first dough batch from a couple weeks ago was a total mess, and I would say that the second time was a charm. I hadn’t made this in a few years, so I had gotten a bit rusty.

Tang yuan is a treasured dish, one that I hope Kaia will be able to appreciate soon. I tried to give her one I made the other day, and she kind of pushed the ball around her dinner tray and just thought the texture was fun and squishy. Only time will tell!

After our Lunar New Year lunch, while we certainly had far more leftover food than I initially imagined, we also had some leftover raw ingredients that I needed to use up soon. Some of these things included an extra king oyster mushroom, chives, sweetened condensed milk, and six egg yolks. In the past when I used egg whites in different desserts or soups, I usually used the remaining egg yolks to make a chocolate mousse or something related. But I didn’t have any chocolate or cocoa powder this time, which led me to look at what else I had on hand: brown sugar that was hardening, plus several lemons. I decided to make something I’d always wanted to try out, but never did: lemon curd! Lemon curd is one of those indulgent spreads that is used on scones and muffins, but people rarely think to make at home, though it’s actually quite simple. Lemon curd only requires four ingredients (sugar, fresh lemon juice, egg yolks, and butter), some stirring on the stove, and then straining. The straining will take the longest if you want to be very careful about straining out any egg bits that may have curdled, but once that is done, you will have a decadent spread for toast, muffins, scones, or just to eat straight from a spoon. When I was done making this yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t stop marveling over how delicious and fancy it tasted, yet it took very little time or effort (other than the straining).

I used the remaining king oyster mushroom in a quick and easy sugar snap pea stir fry that Kaia enjoyed as part of her dinner yesterday. And for the sweetened condensed milk, since it has a long refrigerated life, I decided to gradually use it up in some homemade Hong Kong style milk tea. Before yesterday, I actually had no idea how Hong Kong style milk tea was made. You boil water, add your tea leaves, boil again, then simmer/steep for 15-20 minutes, then strain. To finish and serve, you add whole/evaporated milk and a little sweetened condensed milk per cup. If you don’t like strong tea, you will NOT enjoy Hong Kong style milk tea! It uses an insane amount of tea, which is why you get such a caffeine jolt after having a cup, and the tea most typically used is Ceylon tea (that’s right: I used my DILMAH!). While the typical cup of black tea will use one teaspoon of tea to one cup (240ml) of liquid, Hong Kong style milk tea requires FIVE teaspoons per cup of hot water, with about 1/3 cup of milk added. I didn’t have evaporated milk (which is usually used, and far richer than whole milk since it’s literally evaporated down), so I used regular whole cow milk with a teaspoon per cup of sweetened condensed milk. I had just over a cup-size serving, and it’s evening time now, and I am still feeling the effects of this caffeine!

No waste in our house. 🙂