The lockdown cookbook

pot roast beef as previewed in our ilx chatz

pasta with parsnips and pancetta, which wasn't bad, needed something else though

made big batch of sri lankan curry that makes SO much sauce it made whole new second dinner with different meat & a lots more veg added

yesterday was some chicken and eggplant thai curry. today was corned beef hash, this is the only time of year you can actually get corned beef around here. we also made some baba ganoush with the rest of the eggplant, it's super good.

Made red curry beef stew tonight for the first time, a big hit.

kimchi brussels sprouts with broken rice

I just made okonomiyaki on the griddle on my roof. Barely made a dent in the enormous cabbage I hoarded at the weekend.

Finally dug out the slow cooker i bought in 2010 and have never used. A good red-lentil dal yesterday and have an eight-hour leek and potato soup on the go.

The biggest change is likely to be making much more bread from scratch. If i'm going to be making a lot of dal, i need to dust off my tawa and get some buss-up-shut going.

Sourdough flatbread

200% hydration rye leaven
Starter: 5g
Water: 50g
Wholemeal rye flour: 25g

Aim for a leaven that's about 27 degrees C. Mix the above ingredients and leave covered 8-12 hours at room temperature. Leaven is very wet so might not rise a lot but when ready should look very bubbly and smell v sour.

Final dough
200% WM rye leaven: 75g
Water (or milk): 125g
Oil: 12g
Strong white bread flour: 125g
Stoneground white flour: 100g
Salt: 5g
Sugar: 5g
Total: 447g

Mix the leaven, water and oil and then mix in the dry ingredients. Dough temp should be about 26 C.

Bulk ferment for about 3 hours, giving 3 sets of stretch and folds during the bulk.
Divide into 95-100g pieces, pre-shape and let rest for 1 hour
Preheat oven as high as it will go with a baking stone.
Roll each piece out to about 3 to 5mm thickness, place on semolina sprinkled peel or parchment and load onto the stone
Take out as soon as it puffs up and gets just a bit of colour
Let cool a bit but when still hot pack in a plastick bag so it holds the moisture and stays soft

Update! we did not use the radiatore pasta and used fusilli instead.

wildly overestimated how many parsnips I'd need for the pasta so I'm probably going to make this parsnip-date muffin recipe I found online (they have enormous tubs of dates on sale sometimes, before all this escalated was one of the sometimes)

Radiatori!!!

There is a bougie/hipster BK pasta company that makes hemp radiatori that are so good. The hemp gives them a gritty texture that is really strange the first time you try it, but I am so into it now.

I dethawed some of my tomato sauce I made last fall and mixed in a little burrata (just a little) that melted into the sauce at the end for a really great body. Added some parsley/almond pesto on top. It was the shit

I am going to make a quick store run today for some more green veg. Making and freezing a bunch of pesto is my plan, since you can put it on almost anything.

you mean 'thawed'? :)

the day I discover radiatori pasta when my roommate used it in mac and cheese was the day I realized the universe had been holding out on me.

i need a pasta only pornhub channel.

The only flour left at the store was semolina so pasta it is

i had to dig up my favorite twitter thread

In honour of #WORLDPASTADAY, I present the following scientific thread that constitutes definitive ranking of Non-Primary-Canon pasta shapes

— ཊལབསརངཧ (@David_Rudnick) October 25, 2017

"just a disc" someone clearly has not had rice cakes

he has a point but i'd probably like that disc pasta. i like the edges of ravioli, the part with no stuffing. i like the soft starchiness of it.

I mostly agree with that list. My favorite is bucatini but mostly because malfadine is not often around. I spent too much time trying to figure out the difference between campanale and gigli.

aren't there shells in this picture, correct me if i'm wrong https://www.haaretz.com/food/.premium-yotam-ottolenghi-s-gigli-with-chickpeas-and-za-atar-1.5467081

yes, those are big-ass shells

i'm really not inclined to post in covid-19 threads b/c i don't think my experiences will be particularly notable but i did make a couple things this week designed to have lots of leftovers and now i'm preoccupied with my inventory of useful containers and freezer space : /

I acquired a bag of rice and some tofu. Big day.

I had hiyadofu with ginger and wasabi and pickles for lunch.

Made my favorite Cooks Illustrated chilli recipe tonight. Lots more cooking to come.

still experimenting with bubble-and-squeaked breakfast daal

(viz shallow fried in butter and oil with onions, or this morning MUSHROOMS as they were looking a bit mummified)

basically it's too wet to caramelise much at all but it does a little, and it's cheery (i have made a fvckton for just one self-isolated person, so difft ways of serving it = U&K)

My ex is a better cook than me-- really a culinary prodigy tbh, never trained or anything but just makes miracles-- and yet I did 80% of the cooking when we were together. Either out of spite or out of post-breakup-reinvention, he's trying his hand at being a Domestic King post-breakup and posting photos of shit he's been whipping up for him and his new roommate, @'ing Alison Roman, and just generally making me feel confused and rueful but also very hungry and wishing he'd invite me over to eat some of that shit.

Anyway we been on good terms and he's been trying to convince me to get on the Alison Roman train. I kind of skeptically made a couple of things from her book and they were fine, I get it, her plating ideas are really interesting sometimes. That said, a couple nights ago I made something of hers so spectacular and amazing that I'm gonna make it every couple of weeks for the rest of my life, for sure. I sent photos of the results to my ex and he replied "I've overdone it with shrimp" and "you eat too much pasta" lol.

Here's the wonderful recipe, with some edits:

Sungold Pasta with Lemony Shellfish, Garlic, and Pistachios

1/3 cup olive oil
8 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1 large fennel bulb, thinly sliced
1 T fennel seeds, crushed
1 t crushed red pepper flakes
1 lb grape tomatoes
12 oz linguini (I made mine fresh)
1/2 c dry white wine
1.5 lb clams (I used 3/4 lb frozen clam meat, defrosted)
1.5 lb med. shrimp (I used 1.5 lb frozen, defrosted, and peeled them)
1/2 c shelled pistachios, coarsely ground (I throw em in a coffee grinder for a few seconds) (expensive to purchase w/out shells, but Ottolenghi uses them so much that I always have them in my pantry; they're very nice in this recipe but not 100% necessary)
1 lemon

Heat water
Heat oil in enormous pot with lid, med high
Put in garlic and fennel and stir 'til starting to caramelize, 8-10 min, season
Add seeds and flakes, stir
Add tomatoes-- I halved the grapes but you don't need to, season
Cook 10-12 min, breaking down the tomatoes with a spatula
Cook the pasta
Add wine to the sauce, reduce for 4-5 min
In go the clams and the shrimp (if you're using fresh clams, put them in before the shrimp, add shrimp when the clams start to open)
Shrimp should be cooked through but I always err on the rawer side
Throw pasta with a little pasta water and the sauce in a huge salad bowl and toss
Check seasoning, sprinkle with pistachios and finely chopped fennel fronds, additional pepper flakes and Maldon if you like
Serve with a lemon wedge

Alison Roman likes to use the word "jammy" to describe reduced tomatoes and I like that

Also this is one of several of her recipes where she essentially replaces a typical mirepoix with sautéed garlic + thinly sliced fennel. I'm a big fan of this. (Fennel is my favourite veg to put through my mandolin because there's no fingerdanger)

pics when you get a chance.

I think mirepoix is bullshit so I am very pro this substitution.

I use jammy to describe some wines.

I love "beginning a dish by sautéing a lily and a stalk" but agree that standard mirepoix opening moves lead to repetitious dining

that looks good. my wife hates fennel so i'm not sure i could get away with making it for her....maybe in the summer when we have good tomatoes from our CSA.

i have also been trying to figure out if alison roman is anything more than a decent recipe developer who got a high-profile gig? her stuff never looks bad to me but i'm not sure i need an entire book of it.

Using winter-available grape or cherry tomatoes is a cool $7 for the dish but it works fine. The fennel taste is not overwhelming at all, I would try it. Roman seems to be popular because of her winning personality and also the fact that she's made-mainstream certain mid-level plating tricks. (Smear some buttermilk sauce on the plate, arrange beets over top layered with quick-pickled onions, i.e.) There's an extra step of "assembly" added to her recipes that I think people really find appealing. Ottolenghi's newest cookbook "Simple" seems, in my eyes, to be a response to Roman's popularity-- or a reflection of more holistic cooking trends-- every recipe is the same trad cuisine with an added plating trick, the prep times are reduced (my big complaint about Ottolenghi is that there is a lot of prep involved, I could've rewatched half of The Sopranos in the amount of time I've spent making Etti's Herb Salad over the years).

I love that Roman's book is called "Nothing Fancy" and Ottolenghi's new book is called "Simple" lolol. We're living through a particular zeitgeist rn

that's a good point about plating. i wish i were better/more artful at it but honestly by the time everything is done i don't have much remaining energy for making it look nice

i rarely reach for my ottolenghi books these days because of the prep and some of the truly insane ingredient lists. i have a very well-stocked pantry and he will still challenge it with like nine spices, 4 different fresh herbs in large quantities, etc.

If I had a cookbook it would be called "I Am Making this Up As I Go Along As a Vehicle to Drink More Wine".

and it's a little sad that I am not really drinking at all right now, in order to keep my immunity up within however many days after I've last been outside.

if you join the ilx slack that ed started, some pics of cooking have started.

Yerac I feel like that’s most cookbooks, I do love Fergus Henderson’s assertion that “white wine exists only to make you wish you were drinking red wine”

Actually almost every Fergus recipe uses words like “restorative” suggesting that he traffics entirely in hangoverfood

Novice!

Almost everyone who hangs out with me slowly grows to love white wine more than red. It's so much more flexible with food.

yeah, we started out with heavy reds and transitioned to lighter reds and now mostly whites as we started cooking more. use-everything-in-lockdown mode has turned me on to Italian salsa verde. so simple and cheap to throw some tasty stuff together. made some with carrot tops and parsley and it's brightened up fried eggs, vegetables, and sandwiches the past few days.

Tonight: white crabmeat mixed with lemon and parsley on rye bread, bottle of godello. Might have an egg if I'm still hungry.

Just got a load of kilner jars in the post so I'll be lacto-fermeting the shit out of all the veg I can get my hands om this weekend. Consulted my Noma guide to fermentation the other day and will be attempting some fake miso made from yellow split peas, as a months-long project to eat up some time.

Almost out of red wine but got some Mee Godard Morgon and some Envinate reds arriving soon.

Four cases of wine just added to the basement and I cleaned out an 8-shelf pantry yesterday, washed it all down, and am using all the Mason jars from last summer to hold flours, pastas, etc to thwart the pantry moths that haven't quite been eradicated. Wish C had bought a chest freezer when he started saying, "Maybe I should get a chest freezer" because then I could put so much more in it.

i've def been thinking about buying a chest freezer

looks like that won't happen for a couple weeks though

I just read something about a P.C. Richard & Son in the hamptons getting 700 orders last weekend for chest freezers.

My wife has been making various pickled things to last us a month or two, so I put a post up here.

https://haonowshaokao.com/2020/03/21/in-a-pickle/

Nice. Seems like a very sensible approach.

If I may jump in after a week of home cooking, almost all done by tt...well, I stepped in to do one thing and it was AMAZING haha, not to blow my own horn here - I will give credit where it's due:

https://veganonboard.com/creamy-wild-garlic-soup/

Hard to get hold of wild garlic now alas so probably no chance of a repeat. I also made croutons with some leftover seed-bread and they brought things up even more, probably the best meal I've made idk