This afternoon, since I had some free time, I started making cookie dough for alfajores, those delightfully buttery, flaky South American sandwich cookies that I’m totally obsessed with. I think alfajores are likely one of the most perfect little cookies on the planet, as they are rich, indulgent, flaky, not too sweet, but sweetened with a delicious and sticky caramel filling. The dough is a bit hard to work with, as it’s super delicate and usually made from a mixture of corn or tapioca starch, a tiny bit of regular all purpose flour, and bound with butter and egg yolks, but it’s always so gratifying when the cookie cut outs are made. Alfajores were on my list of things “to make” before the baby came as a small indulgence to myself, both as an activity and as a treat to enjoy.

A lot of people like to make comments that if they had all the money in the world, they would just outsource tasks like cooking certain dishes or baking certain desserts so that they could just enjoy. But to me, it wouldn’t matter if money meant nothing and if I had Jeff Bezos’s wealth because baking and cooking are basically part of my identity and what makes me happy. If you took away cooking and baking from me, I’d probably feel weird and incomplete. I’m partly making these cookies for fun and as a treat for myself before Pookie Bear arrives, but also because I want to share them with my friends who are coming over for brunch this weekend. Food is meant to be eaten and shared and enjoyed, and this will be the very first time we’ve hosted anyone over for a meal since pre-pandemic, so I want to make sure it’s delicious.

While many expectant moms are busy decorating their nurseries and organizing all their future baby’s clothes in the right sizes and categories and textures, I… haven’t really been doing that. Yes, Pookie Bear does have some clothes ready and they have been organized by size, and yes, I do have to wash some of the newborn onesies and sleepers in preparation for her arrival, but honestly, I think I’ve been focusing more on all the things I want to make and bake before she arrives. Some of them will be consumed after her arrival assuming our freezer can make the space.

The scallion milk bread from yesterday was on the list, so that’s been checked off. So was the invisible gateau/apple cake I made last weekend. Today, I made another batch of homemade, toasted garam masala, so that’s been replenished. We also have a jar of chili oil that is ready for dumplings anytime. I have a number of different pumpkin desserts I want to make, including pumpkin apricot bread (more like cake), pumpkin mochi muffins, and maybe even pumpkin streusel muffins. Cream puffs were something I wanted to make, but they are a bit finicky and Chris seemed unenthused by them, so it’s unlikely I will be making them before Pookie arrives. I also want to make the browned butter miso chocolate chip cookies that have long been on my list to make, not to mention finally make use of the tinned passion fruit pulp I have to make a cake, but that will wait until two weekends from now when my friend and her husband come visit. A round cake, at least in our house, seems to only make sense when we have guests to entertain.

Every spring, I look forward to seeing fresh spears of asparagus at the markets, tight, green, waiting to be roasted or stir fried. If I’m not stir frying them Chinese/Vietnamese style with shiitake mushrooms, then I’m usually taking the lazy way out by trimming the woody ends, cutting the spears in half, tossing in olive oil, salt, pepper, and maybe another seasoning or two, and roasting in my oven for 18-20 minutes. Unfortunately, I think I’ve purchased way too much asparagus this season to the point where now, when I see it, I just feel repulsed.

The last time I made it a week ago, even the center parts that are usually nice and meaty felt woody and branch-like in my mouth as I chewed and chewed… for what felt like forever. I ended up spitting out a few mouthfuls of the chewed up spears because I was concerned that they may not actually go down and cause me to choke.

Even with food, yes, you can have too much of a good thing, even if that thing is usually tasty to you and nutritious. Asparagus is “it” for me.

I had two pounds of broccoli that my friend had left for us in our fridge, and while my standard method of cooking broccoli is to roast it in the oven, I was too lazy to empty out all the contents of the oven (I’m Asian, which means the oven is prime storage space!!), so I decided to just do the easier thing and steam them over the stove, then toss them in the Sambal Lady’s lime leaf sambal. Unfortunately, halfway through the steaming process, Chris noted that something smelled off, and I realized he was referring to the broccoli. When you are the one cooking something, sometimes the smells do not affect you in the same way as it does someone who’s not in the kitchen, so I thought nothing of what he said. That is — until I went to take out the trash and came back, and I entered the apartment again. OMG, I thought. That smell is atrocious! It smells like a mix of bad, rotten vegetables and maybe sulfur mixed in. No wonder so many kids hate broccoli, I finally empathized. If I was served broccoli that smelled like THIS, there’s no way I would have enjoyed broccoli growing up!

Well, I am never making that mistake ever again. I am never steaming broccoli ever, ever again. Broccoli needs to be roasted, baked, stir-fried, or even eaten raw in a slaw-form. Steaming broccoli is just pure nastiness.

“I was telling my guys at work that it feels sooooo nice to have someone else cook for me,” my friend gushed while we took a walk outside this afternoon. “It’s nice to feel taken care of for once. It’s also nice to not have to think about what I have in the fridge or what I need to cook to get a meal on the table.”

She has been buying a lot of our raw ingredients for my cooking, and a couple days ago she brought back Persian cucumbers, so I asked if she was planning to use them for something. She said no, so I made a quick Sichuanese-style spicy garlicky cucumber salad — my go-to dish when I have a lot of cucumbers but I don’t really have any creativity to think about something new to do with them. We had them as a side for dinner this evening, and she totally obsessed over them. “What’s in the cucumber salad?” she asked. This is my first hint that she really likes something. Then, she said, “I’m ALL about this salad. I’m definitely having another serving.” She finished her plate, got another serving of the cucumber salad, and inhaled it all. I’ve never seen anyone get so excited about cucumber salad, ever.

I love the feeling of taking care of other people. That’s why I hope this transfer works out so I can have a little one to watch grow and nurture and feed endless delicious things. Hopefully, it will have a good appetite and love a variety of foods.

When cooking brown rice, I always soak it for at least a few hours after rinsing, then I cook it in the rice cooker with a ratio of 2 parts water to one part rice. Unfortunately, I have no idea how I did this, but I was multitasking when I was measuring the water out for the rice, and I somehow added too much water to the rice cooker. So when the rice had finished cooking, it was way, way too soft! I thought that if I dried it out in the fridge overnight that it would help, but the next day, it was still too soft. I did not find it that pleasant to eat, so I decided to make… a mushy fried rice out of it. I figured that if I added cha siu, eggs, seasonings, and scallions to my mushy rice, it would at least be tasty mushy rice. And so, that’s how you save food – add other tasty food to it.

Since getting more involved in the food vlogging/blogging community last summer, I’ve made a number of social media friends who are trying to do the exact same thing I am: share their love of food, culture, and travel. I’ve had a lot of conversations with a number of them over Instagram, YouTube, and even in person/text. It’s been a great experience for me to build a network of like-minded food lovers who want to do something bigger than themselves.

What has also happened, which is not a surprise, is that my bookmarked list of dishes “to make” has only grown exponentially because of this network. Because as we are all wannabe “influencers,” these individuals have also influenced me to want to try to make new dishes or experiment with ingredients I’m not super familiar with. I’ve expanded my knowledge of different regions of India (my latest area of interest is Gujarat), had my interest piqued more in Palestinian and Lebanese dishes, and have started discovering new ingredients I didn’t know much about from Southeast Asia.

One baked good I was recently enamored with was pandan butterscotch mochi. It was posted by a woman who is originally from Taiwan but is living in the United Kingdom now. It’s basically a play on Hawaiian coconut butter mochi, but instead of butter, its fat is coconut oil, and it’s flavored with pandan paste and swirled with a delicious butterscotch made from melted down butter, heavy cream, and the most magical ingredient: gula Melaka, which is a rich, toasty, smokey caramelly sugar made from the coconut trees of Malaysia. Alas, I was not able to find gula Melaka, but I was able to source its next door neighbor from my favorite Vietnamese grocery store, which is gula Jawa from Indonesia. And I know for sure that the product I got is pretty pure because not only was it pricey, but the label said that it’s 95% coconut sugar with only 5% cane sugar. I shaved off some of the gula Jawa from the block I got and put it in my mouth; it was heavenly and incredible. And once made into a butterscotchy caramel, it just sang. I could eat spoonfuls of this and call it a day.