comeback kid
British dinner, mushroom cookoff, and pizza nirvana
I hope everyone who got a long weekend last weekend enjoyed it, and everyone who didn’t, I wish you a very happy continuing to fight for a four-day work week. Anyway, my weekend was surprisingly busy, especially for me, a person who barely does anything other than work, cook, and watch tv. On Saturday Jeff and I went to a jam at Chris and Ed’s place, the same friends who hosted a similar event in early March of 2020, when we were all feeling a bit scared and unsure whether we should be doing it at all. But there’s really nothing like the experience of being in a room full of friends playing music together, 3- and 4-part harmonies resonating through your very soul. I don’t consider myself a particularly religious or spiritual type of person, but there’s no denying that music affects the human spirit in ways almost nothing else can.
It was also the vegan cookoff on Sunday, our first one since November. We’d chosen mushrooms for the theme, and all of us ended up making Asian-style dishes, too. I went back and forth between a few options (mushroom ravioli, creamed mushrooms on homemade bread, mushroom soup) before settling on the vegan dan dan-ish noodles I make a lot with crumbled tofu and shiitakes in a chili-sesame sauce with quick pickled cucumber. I always double the sauce for this so it’s a little more soupy, because the sauce is generally the best part of any dish where sauce is involved.
We also had yuzu-marinated mixed mushrooms in an inari pocket, the perfect hot and sour soup, a steamed tofu custard with fried mushrooms and eel sauce (similar to teriyaki, not made of eels), and a truly unique appetizer (pictured at the top of the page— by a first-time attendee!) of homemade quinoa tempeh crackers and fermented mushroom & mustard green chutney served with a creamy shiitake broth. I am always blown away by the level of truly outstanding food we get to eat at cookoffs these days. When we first started doing them, more than ten years ago now, none of us were really very good at cooking and there were definitely some failures. But the competition really helped us improve (or at least, it helped me), and it’s so nice now: we essentially get together to just enjoy a tasting menu and a few drinks with friends.
Cod was on sale recently and I bought it on a whim, conveniently forgetting that I never seem to know what to make with whitefish. So I did the obvious thing and decided to make fish and chips. I used the method in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and it worked quite well despite me overworking the batter a little (it was a bit stiff so I had a hard time getting an even coating) and my deep fry thermometer being broken. The batter is a classic beer batter, but made with vodka rather than milk or water for some science-y reason, probably something to do with temperature. I don’t know if it made much of a difference on that front, but it was a nice crispy shell with a tender interior that probably would have been even better if I’d been able to tell if my oil was hot enough before I started frying. And because fish and chips requires tartar sauce, I added some chopped capers, lemon juice, and black pepper to a bit of mayo. Not perfect, exactly, but it does the job.
I didn’t deep fry the fries, simply because I am too cheap to use that much oil at once, instead using my usual oven fry method: heat a cast iron at 450°, coat the potatoes in plenty of olive oil and salt, then add them to the sizzling hot pan, cooking for 20-25 minutes, turning halfway. Sometimes I turn the temperature down to 425° at the midpoint, depending on how big the pieces are. As long as you eat them right away they’re always nice and crispy. The ideal secondary side would have been coleslaw, but as I didn’t have any cabbage I went for another British pub classic: green peas. I ran out of time to turn them into mushy peas (I like to add mint or dill to them sometimes), but buttery peas are still a nice sweet addition to the plate.
In my years-long adventures in home-baked pizza, I’ve always just accepted that I’ll never achieve the crust result I desire, the one I love so much from restaurants with their high-heat ovens: crispy exterior, soft and chewey interior, maybe even with some nicely charred bubbles. In other words, although we’ve been making pizzas that were very good, they weren’t fulfilling my deepest pizza dreams. But Jeff and I finally tried the home oven method outlined in the book Mastering Pizza, which we’d been afraid to attempt before, and I am pleased to say that we may have finally reached pizza nirvana.
This is really only workable with a pizza stone, or a cast iron pan large enough to hold the pizza once you’ve put on all the toppings, because you need something you can heat up for a bit in a 500° oven, something that will hold onto the heat. Once the pizza’s ready and the oven and the stone are hot, slide the pizza onto it and then immediately switch the oven to broil. The stone and the residual heat are enough to cook the bottom, and the broiler creates a beautifully browned top. You do have to pay a bit more attention to them to make sure they don’t burn, and unless you’ve got multiple stones you can only cook one pizza at a time, but the result was very much worth it. The pizzas here are our usual spicy ham, mushroom, & pineapple but with a basil-arugula pesto base this time, and then a tomato, pancetta, & kale white pizza with garlic mayo (essentially, a BLT pizza). These were a joy to make and to consume.
The BLT pizza also inspired me to make mayo from scratch again, something I’d gotten out of the habit of— I used to just make a new jar every time I ran out. But the hand blender method works really well and, with the price of things at the grocery store these days, is seeming more and more economical. It really does only take a couple of minutes; I was able to get this going while the second pizza was in the oven. I tend to just make a batch of it plain and then scoop some out to add garlic, or sriracha, or teriyaki, or whatever I need at the time.
Also this week I failed at making bread (in that I didn’t make any), but I won at making cake: a blood orange and lemon zest olive oil cake with rosemary. I’m always too lazy to just eat oranges when they aren’t mandarins or satsumas, so I tend to end up baking with them or making cocktails or marinades. I used this recipe by Alicia Kennedy for Tenderly, adding about a tablespoon of chopped rosemary into the dry ingredients. This is an easy, beautifully textured cake that’s a little elegant, and doesn’t feel too sweet, either, which means it’s basically fine to eat any time of day.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! I like providing this to you for free, but it does still involve time and effort, so donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. And here, please enjoy my favourite type of meme: the type that uses a new format to incorporate another older type of meme.