day to day
applications for leftovers, lemon cookie cravings, and gochujang potatoes
Hi everyone. Sorry I missed last week— I really try to keep to a solid schedule but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. My dad has been in the hospital and I’ve been going back and forth between throwing myself into distracting writing and cooking projects, or bailing on pretty much any task outside of work, putting on my comfort episodes of Star Trek and The X-Files, and just yanking random soups and things from the freezer because it’s too much to think of something to make and then have to still cook it and eat it and clean up. It feels unfair, when everything is hard and you’re worried and trying to hold it together, to still have all those little duties of your life to deal with: washing the dishes and grinding the coffee and remembering to use those mini cucumbers in the fridge before they turn into a slimy puddle (oops). But it is kind of grounding, isn’t it? Life is horrible and wonderful and difficult and surprising, and still we are Sisyphus, always pushing that rock up the hill when the goddamned laundry bin is full again.
Last weekend Jeff and I had to cross the border briefly to visit his cousins in Bellingham. His uncle passed away in January and we’d planned this visit before he died, so it turned into a sort of informal celebration of life (as well as an invitation to look through some of the items that got cleared out of the storage locker). Justin and Deanna picked up tamales from a local place, the same place they got them from when we visited last summer, and they were amazing— I only know of one or maybe two places in Vancouver that do tamales, so it was a nice treat. I liked the black bean and yam one the best. It was just after St Patrick’s Day, and Deanna had also made a big chocolate Guinness cake with cream cheese icing. We all managed to eat at least a small slice despite being incredibly full of tamales and chips and pico de gallo.
People who wear dresses know that when you put one on and go out, someone will always exclaim over how nice you look, and the great thing about it is that it’s actually less effort than choosing multiple pieces and making sure they all match. Sometimes it’s more comfortable, too. Anyway, roasting a chicken is kind of like that, in that it’s generally easier and more forgiving than cooking individual pieces, and people are really impressed that you’re the kind of person who has it together enough to know how to roast a whole chicken.
As you know from reading this newsletter, I don’t cook a lot of meat, so when I do I like to make it worth my while. Recently I made this lovely slow-roasted recipe with tomatoes, oregano, garlic, and plenty of olive oil (the recipe actually uses butter, but I just love olive oil with tomatoes so much). Slow-roasting doesn’t give you the beautiful crispy-brown skin of a slightly more hands-on recipe like Samin Nosrat’s buttermilk chicken, but I love how low-effort and delicious it is. It’s somewhat evocative of a grocery store rotisserie chicken, only much nicer, because I know it hasn’t been sitting under a heat lamp for an unknown amount of time, and I don’t have ethical concerns about where that chicken came from, because I know it was a free-range chicken from a farm in Langley, and it’s been sitting in my freezer for several months.
I find the chicken is usually done after about two hours, so I’ll take it out and let it rest for 15 minutes while letting the tomatoes cook a bit longer. I also roast the garlic whole and squeeze the cloves out after, because it feels less fussy to me that way, but everything else is pretty great the way it is. In a household of two, this dish gave us several meals. Of course the day it was roasted we ate it with crusty bread to scoop up all the juicy, lovely tomatoes and soft garlic as in the recipe. The next day for lunch we had slices of the meat in sandwiches with soft cheese, cucumbers, fresh tomato, and lots of lettuce, and I made chicken noodle soup with peas & corn & carrots for dinner using the remaining bits of meat I’d pulled off the bones. Finally, the next night I made a pasta sauce from the leftover tomatoes, just reheating everything in a pan to break the tomatoes down a little more while the pasta boiled, adding some kale to wilt, and then some pasta water and grated parmesan at the end to toss everything together.
One of my produce drawers is full of lemons (metaphor? I don’t know her) and I’d been meaning to make a lemon cookie of some kind. My mom sent me this recipe for lemon sugar cookie bars. It’s a pretty standard cookie dough— I had a hard time spreading it in the pan with a spatula and ended up using my fingers— so it was easy enough to make, and they came out soft and crumbly like you’d expect. I also didn’t have lemon extract, so I went hard on the zest and threw in a dash of vanilla, and some cardamom just because. I’m not saying don’t make these, because they were tasty and we definitely finished the whole pan. But I think what I was craving was like, a snickerdoodle, but lemon? I might try my lavender snickerdoodles with lemon zest instead of the lavender, and maybe lemon zested sugar for the outside instead of cinnamon sugar. I’ll report back if I do.
It’s crazy to me that there was once a time that I didn’t know what to make with cabbage other than borscht or coleslaw, when there are so many things I love to do with it now! One of those things is this fabulous gilgeori toast, a Korean street food-style sandwich with egg and vegetables, great to make on a weeknight when I’m very busy and hungry, because it only takes about fifteen minutes to put together. Maybe slightly longer if you have to shred the carrot and cabbage by hand rather than in the food processor, but do it while your pan is heating up and it will all be fine. This is so filling and satisfying, and if eggs are astronomically expensive right now where you live… well, at least the recipe only uses one egg per person.
Some giant brussels sprouts showed up in our produce bin, so I made this classic salad with brown butter dressing again (using lettuce instead of kale— as long as you choose a firm enough leaf, it holds up under the warm dressing). Ignore the part of the recipe that says to blanch the sprouts and potatoes first; I’ve never once done this. 25 minutes will cook everything nicely; just check on the sprouts and take some/all of them out if they start to look crispy before the potatoes are cooked through. I often use toasted pumpkin seeds in place of the almonds, but I didn’t have either, so I used chopped pistachios, which was absolutely decadent and goes wonderfully with the cranberry. Highly recommended.
I still have a lot of potatoes left, so I was searching for a thing to make with some other than the same 5-6 things I keep defaulting to, and found a recipe for gochujang-glazed potatoes in Milk Street: Tuesday Nights. I hadn’t tried it before because for some reason cooking potatoes in a frying pan on the stove rather than in the oven kind of intimidates me, but it sounded amazing so I had to try it. It’s based on gamja jorim, which is potatoes braised in a sweet soy glaze, and I love the addition of gochujang to make them spicy-sweet. This was both easier and faster than I’d expected, and a pound of potatoes fit nicely in a 10-inch cast iron pan (you’d definitely need a 12-inch for the full 2 pounds in the recipe). When the potatoes were done, I put them into a serving dish and threw some bok choi into the pan with a splash of water to pull up whatever was left of the glaze, then tossed tofu puffs in with them to warm up when they were almost done. This was so, so good and I’ll definitely be making it again.
Media:
I was taking a walk not too long ago, during a brief window of good weather, and I always like to visit the little free library that’s in between the three buildings in our complex. It’s not as picked-through as the one in our old neighbourhood, and periodically someone will go through and donate anything that’s been there awhile, so I actually occasionally find decent stuff in there rather than just people’s discarded textbooks and Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul or whatever. Anyway, on this day I picked up a copy of Ruth Reichl’s memoir Tender At the Bone. The chapter about her mother’s questionable cooking alone would be worth the read, but I’m really enjoying all of it so far. It’s hilarious and the writing is so engaging because she always is; I love that I’m reading about a lot of things that are unfamiliar to me due to class and location and generational differences but that are written in a way so that they feel familiar.
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 any donations are greatly appreciated. Anyway… mood.