what's cooking? part 5: 2017-2027

Peaches are insanely good this year. Just polished off a carrot/cabbage/onion/peach slaw dressed with just lime juice and salt. Delicious!

Yeah, I had a peach yesterday that I thought was past prime and it was incredible.

i got 7 apples from 3 different varieties at the farmers' market sunday so i have a not yet baked apple crisp in the fridge. tomorrow i am making an eggplant parm with the sauce i made from the 14 lbs of tomatoes i bought before the 50 lbs. i have turned 25 lbs into crushed tomatoes and will make canned whole tomatoes from the other 25.

I just caramelized 12 onions again (that I mostly freeze in blocks) and used the remnants of a jar of marmite with hot water to do the multiple deglazing. I don't know if it actually added much but I felt resourceful.

harbl, sounds awesome! Also, now I am hungry.

Last night I made roasted carrots with cilantro in a yogurt sauce with harissa.

i made a salad with grilled peach, grilled corn, tomatoes, basil, feta, some olive oil and some shallots macerated in lemon juice, was pretty decent

^^^ i keep thinking about making something like this with a grilled mango instead of peach (and minus corn but + hot pepper). I should just do it.

I can't stop making pickles lately. I made giardiniera a couple weeks ago and escabeche last week. Such a nice thing to have in the fridge, and so easy to throw together.

https://youtu.be/b3Ie-p84zNc

whats happening

(still gonna use recipe for tomorrow tho)

I made enchiladas verdes this week and was kind of amazed at how good they turned out

this is the best black beans i've ever made https://www.camelliabrand.com/recipes/instant-pot-black-beans/
maybe the salt helps them stay together. not a single mushy bean.

also added like 2 teaspoons of cumin

I’m back in japan and cooked my first meal last night. Yuba tofu with salmon roe and fresh wasabi, myoga and shishito amasu, plus some bought nimame and cucumber pickles.

Cooking is maybe a strong word given only the amasu involved heating anything, but delicious nonetheless.

I did a big shop for staples in Kuze Fuku and I have some seriously fancy basics to cook from.

I made the best version of a pasta sauce I’ve been making for years: it is tomato, with rosemary, garlic, and pancetta, finished with a little cream. Similar to a vodka sauce without the vodka. What made it so good this time was fresh plum tomatoes, but I was lazy and didn’t want to peel them, so I left the peel on. Then when the sauce was done, but before I added the cream, I puréed it with an immersion blender, which emulsified the olive oil and pancetta so I needed very little cream. It was so good! Definitely doing it this way in the future.

wait you pureed meat?

Yes, but there wasn’t that much pancetta and it was already finely diced. Maybe the equivalent of 2-3 slices of bacon for over a pound of pasta.

I’ve been doing some interesting one ring cookery in my Sapporo AirBnB. Best so far has been a riff on a local speciality, Chanchan Yaki. This is a bunch of things fried up, normally on a table top tepan and then finished in Sake, miso and butter. Normal ingredient are salmon, cabbage, mushrooms, tofu but anything goes. Mine was a hotchpoth of everything left in the fridge. Pork, green peppers, myoga, tofu, some local boo Choi like greens; all done in a frying pan. It worked really well.

Also been enjoying the late summer produce. I’ve had some of the best tomatoes I’ve had in my life here and must make a gazpacho next week. (Peppers and cumcimbers are next level as well.)

Japan’s largest food fest starts today so I’m set.

I was reading a menu for relaxation yesterday and came across miso mustard pickles. So I think that is what I will be making this weekend.

An amazing arepa/cachapa place opened directly across the street from me and they also sell all the ingredients separately (to include 5 different venezuelan cheeses). I might have to lurk in their kitchen window and figure out how they make them so good.

butter! when you add hot water to the masa, add butter too. that is what i learned from a student at least.

!!!

everything is better with butter

oh! miso mustard pickles sound good. imma do that as well. will def pick up some farmer's market radishes (and whatever else i can find tomorrow). wonder if mushrooms would be good pickled like this

I was trying to find a recipe to use because on the menu they have something about an egg (do they also pickle a hardboiled egg???) anyway, this one is said to be related to the restaurant. I, of course, will be skipping the bay leaf.

Produce
2 Bay leaves
Condiments
1/2 cup Dijon mustard
2 tbsp Horseradish, prepared
2 tbsp White miso paste
Baking & spices
1 tbsp Peppercorns, whole black
1/2 cup Sugar
Oils & vinegars
1 cup Red wine vinegar
1/2 cup Rice vinegar
Liquids
1 cup Water

that looks exactly like the recipe from F&W i found and was planning on using. wish i had access to fresh wasabi, would sub that for horsey. oh well. i used to buy ground bay leaves and use in soups and stocks - was a nice savory product. and fresh bay is nice if you can find 'em. but i don't really think dried bay have much, if any, value

I might also skip the sugar and add mirin instead. And good call on the wasabi.

hmm, yeah, 1/2 cup seems like too much sugar. i'll probably go with a dash of maple syrup

was going to make an instant pot chicken curry to use up some expiring chicken and aging potatoes. my cuisinart food processor blade broke off while it was running. as i result i found out that 3 years ago this blade attachment was recalled. what a relief.

that sucks--can the manufacturer still help with a replacement or something?

tonight i made ricotta gnocchi which i finished with maitake mushrooms, sage brown butter, shallots, corn kernels, parsley, and toasted breadcrumbs. not exactly a classic combination but also not totally wild. recipe is from an interesting, apparently obscure cookbook called "sunday suppers at lucques" which has a lot of similarly off-center ideas for the ambitious home cook. it's organized by season, and i have always said i'll buy and use just about any cookbook that follows that structure. there is a recipe for highly-seasoned pork burgers served with both romesco and aioli that i really need to try while the grill is still out.

That sounds great!

i enjoyed it. reflecting further on the dish--it's not exactly a flavor bomb, no meat, no hit of vinegar or citrus, and the aromatics are cooked quickly. it's the contrasting textures--soft gnocchi to corn to breadcrumbs to fresh parsley leaves--that make it interesting.

yes, they're sending me a new one, the recall website still works

I made 13 quarts of tomato sauce with fresh tomatoes from our CSA. Gave away 4 of them. Gonna be great to pull these out of the freezer for the next few months.

excellent work. I made about 1 qt from the full yield of our garden tower.

Garden tower!!! Aeroponic?

I just made "new mexican style chile crisp" with dried chimayo reds (allegedly) and local pine nuts

seems...pretty good?? flaves still need to mind meld in the fridge for a day or two

Chile crisp looks v interesting. I'm having trouble finding examples. Tower is not aeroponic. It is the kind with worm compost in a tube at the center with soil surrounding.

actual Chinese / Sichuan chili crisp ("chile" is the preferred new mex spelling) is fantastic

Is it the sauce I am seeing? Or is there also a particular dish associated with it in New Mexico?

No I just made a version with new mexican ingredients / flavors

I cook a lot

This summer I decided I was going to do it properly, and I bought 25 pounds of tomatoes and a food mill and made enough basic tomato sauce to last me a year (although I'm already half-way through it). I followed this amazing recipe that requires that you speed-dry in a warm oven 10 pounds of milled tomatoes, to create your own paste (and approximate the traditional sun-drying process). The result was spectacular, probably the best tomato paste I've ever tasted. The remaining 15 pounds I milled and stewed, did the Hazan "halved onion" trick, bathed a couple of bunches of basil in it at the end, there was garlic in there too. Threw in a litre of reserved un-cooked tomato as well at the end to keep a note of freshness.

I can post the recipe I followed. Here it is. https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/08/the-best-fresh-tomato-sauce-for-pasta-recipe.html I made some minor adjustments. I love my food mill.

I was cooking a lot from Hazan and I think my boyfriend got a little tetchy about how... basic all the great Italian dishes are, not a lot of bells and whistles, really. He likes surprises and garnishes and secret oils and so forth. He was unimpressed with my tomato sauce achievement (although any late night guests are blown away when I just pull out a perfect pasta in the time it takes to boil the water, roll out the spaghetti, heat up the sauce, about 15 minutes really all told, and it's really delicious). So boyfriend decided to get me Fergus Henderson, so I'd change up the tastes of our meals.

I have been too busy to cook much this past month, but I have been reading the Henderson-- I've made a few of his things over the years, and actually quite a few Margot Henderson recipes, I really love her book a great deal. Last night I made a plan to speak to my nearby butcher and tell him I was going to be doing a lot of that bullshit, and ask him to save me calf bones and pig's heads and trotters and livers and so on. (I planned to make the bone marrow salad, the brawn, and do a home-cured liver).

While I was reading about Fergus and his patterns last night, I googled and found that he, too, thought Italian cooking was really the best of the best, and that his favourite recipe was... tomato pasta. "My children's bodies are 80% tomato pasta," he said. I was delighted to read this and reported it back to my boyfriend this morning with vindictive relish.

As I told him my plans for boiling heads and curing livers he asked me to stop folding the corners on the recipe book, that it was ruining the book, and he reminded me that I have tour in two months and I should probably be eating healthier and thinking of "tour body". I got really grouchy about that and told him to hush up, sweetie, as I served him some peaches stewed in custard that I whipped up this morning over oatmeal.

Love this ^^^^.

Sounds to me like your boyfriend needs to chill out and stuff his face with homemade pasta.

I made the whole roasted rabbit wrapped in bacon and fennel from Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast. Pretty nice and actually very easy.

fgti you are a beast!
just reading about the tomato paste alone stresses me out

i mean i love to cook & i love scratch making stuff but O_O

i bow down

The tomato sauce took about seven hours all told, but I made it when the tomatoes were cheap as chips, and now I have gallons of it in my freezer. Tastes amazing when reheated. I'd urge anyone to get a food mill, wait until it's Tomato Day, and take the plunge-- I always hated parboiling and skinning tomatoes for a fresh sauce, and for years just kept the $5 cans of San Marzanos in the pantry for my needs, but the food mill made it easy. Not difficult, either, as long as you're prepared to have to clean and rinse the strainer on the food mill about eight times.

I am also really interested in the Ham In Hay recipe that Fergus offers. It's such an interesting cookbook! Old news for most, I guess.

There is a bizarre method of clarifying a broth that Fergus recommends. I'm not going to type it now. It's bizarre.

food mills are very cool, i don't use mine much but it's an underrated gadget.

i'm bad at bulk cooking/storage but did make and freeze a couple quarts of michael anthony's fresh tomato sauce from "v is for vegetable" which is basically a little garlic, red onion, basil, and chili flake plus a bunch of rough chopped tomatoes. cook down until just soft, then puree in a blender until smooth. it's quick and easy and works well. i would like to try that seriouseats recipe but didn't have time this year.

I was cooking a lot from Hazan and I think my boyfriend got a little tetchy about how... basic all the great Italian dishes are, not a lot of bells and whistles, really.

can't argue taste but yeesh

He likes Ottolenghi style stuff. Marcella would have me run a fennel through a mandolin, rinse and wring it four times, dress lightly and serve. Yotam wants spices toasted, pestled, nuts dry roasted, seven herbs and minced preserved lemon with three perfect olives on two designer lettuces.

i would love ottolenghi style stuff everyday too if it just magically appeared in front of me. I look at those recipes a lot but it's just too much.

the humble pleasures of european food are quite entry-level compared to a lot of asian cuisines, we accept this, we are still in some ways a barbarous ppl

google news recommended i make this https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019772-spiced-chickpea-stew-with-coconut-and-turmeric
i was amused to see that almost all the commenters loved it...after they made changes to the recipe. because it's bland. as for me, it was great after i used just one can of coconut milk, added a load of curry powder, extra cumin, and cayenne pepper, then lime juice before eating

no, i misremembered, it was youtube. i didn't know who alison roman was but i hate her.

"If you type "the stew" into Google, you'll get Alison Roman's Spiced Chickpea Stew With Coconut and Turmeric as the first result. It's so popular that it even has its own hashtag across social media, #thestew." seriously? it's just chickpeas, and turmeric is not enough! i should be in the new york times