equinox
balance, change, and making things with your hands
If you’re here on the west coast, you’re probably both comforted and saddened by the heavy rains coinciding with the autumnal equinox this week. The smoke has cleared, the reservoirs are filling up, the air smells nice again… and simultaneously the sun is setting earlier and rising later, and we all know there are more grey days ahead in what’s promising to be a tough fall and winter. But most of us right now are still enjoying the nice cozy feeling we associate with the beginning of fall: bringing out the sweaters, actually wanting to turn the stove on, listening to the rain. I’ve been happily making comfort foods this week: soup, cookies, grilled cheese, fried rice. Embrace it!
Before getting married in 2018, I joked that I’d do it just so I could get a Le Creuset dutch oven (because I could obviously never afford one on my own). But when we actually got engaged and started planning our wedding, we felt a bit guilty setting up a registry: we’ve already lived together for almost ten years! We have most of the things we need! But we were encouraged by other married friends: people love buying shit for weddings. So we let loose and allowed ourselves to wish for all the fancy and esoteric things we could never seem to justify buying: the KitchenAid ice cream maker, Royal Doulton dessert plates, and yes, the teal Le Creuset of my dreams.
My mom got us the KitchenAid pasta maker attachment, and since then we have used it exactly three times despite how fun and satisfying it is to create and eat homemade pasta, so I’m making it a goal to do so more often. If you look up directions on making fresh pasta, food bloggers love tell you it’s easy! you can have noodles in 20 minutes! They are full of lies. There’s a reason restaurants that serve fresh pasta usually only make a few different types of noodles: it is a fairly significant amount of work! It isn’t difficult once you get into the swing of it (especially with the KitchenAid roller, which allows you both hands free to process the dough), but there are multiple steps and plenty of patience required if you’re not a seasoned pro, and it’s definitely much faster and easier to make with more than one set of hands.
I also make the dough in the food processor which isn’t very traditional, but the one time I tried it countertop-style, raw eggs slithered all over the place and I had a very difficult time getting the crumbs of dough to stick together. So if you don’t have a food processor and you want to try making fresh pasta… I recommend using a bowl. Rolling the dough is pretty fun, but it’s also the place that’s easiest to mess up— I once painstakingly rolled out a dozen lasagna noodles and didn’t flour them enough when I laid them out to rest on the counter. It was over two years ago and I’m sure Jeff still remembers my scream of rage as I found them all stuck together and had to crumple everything back into a ball and start over. Better to flour everything within an inch of its life, even if it does mean I end up with semolina all over my kitchen.
Anyway, after making the dough and letting it rest, it actually did only take us about 20 or 30 minutes to make the noodles. We had more than we needed for just the two of us for dinner, so I made little nests (also very fun) and froze them for future use. Before making the pasta dough, I’d started on a Bolognese sauce based on a recipe in the book Extra Virgin by Gabriele Corcos & Debi Mazar, a collection of traditional and modern Tuscan recipes. I have never once made the full batch recipe in this book, because it calls for three pounds of ground meat and makes enough for two 9”x13” lasagne, which is just. a lot. A 1/3 batch means plenty of sauce for dinner and usually leftovers as well, and uses a more standard one pound of ground meat plus a little bacon or pancetta. I don’t buy ground meat too often, but every once in awhile if I see something grass-fed on sale, I’ll stash it in the freezer for my future self to find.
The ‘spaghetti Bolognese’ we all know of (which I cringed to overhear a full table of American tourists ordering at a seafood restaurant in Burano) is a westernized dish that is really more similar to a Napoletana ragú: a tomato-based sauce with ground meat. True Bolognese sauce gets most of its robust flavour from soffritto, meat fat, and tomatoes that have been reduced almost to paste, and so is traditionally served not with spaghetti but a thicker, flat noodle like tagliatelle or in the aforementioned lasagne. I only have 2 pasta cutters, so we made fettuccine, and opened a 2009 Similkameen valley meritage to go with it. It was a perfect dinner.
If you can believe it (if you’ve ever had a zucchini plant this will not be a surprise), I still have garden zucchini to use up. My “use up this zucchini” default is a baked pasta with béchamel and parmesan, but I felt like something a little lighter and not too summery, so I tried a variation of this zucchini & feta pie with dill, mint, & parsley from Martha Rose Shulman. I didn’t have phyllo pastry in the freezer so I took her suggestion of a yeasted olive oil crust, using a 3:1 ratio of white to whole wheat flour. I added an extra egg to the filling and left the top semi-open so it was kind of a quiche/galette hybrid— I thought it might be too dense with a yeasted crust on both the bottom and the top, like a weird calzone.
I also felt it needed a little something extra and couldn’t decide what, but I ended up mixing a bit of dill and horseradish into some sour cream to top it with after it came out of the oven. I’ve never made this type of pastry crust before— it was kind of like a pie crust with a softer, chewier inner texture, similar to breadsticks. This recipe was a bit out of my wheelhouse, but it was tasty and fun to make, even if I’m not 100% sold on the yeasted crust. I’d like to try with the phyllo pastry one day for more crispiness.
The reason so many of the cookies and baked goods I make are vegan is simply this: unless I’m planning a big project, I am just not going to wait for butter and eggs to come to room temperature. The inspiration to bake, at least for me, is usually fleeting, so I have to seize it when it comes. By the time that 250g chunk of butter is softened enough to cream with sugar, I will have mentally moved on to something else. So the other day when I wanted a treat, I flipped through Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, a wonderful book kindly sent to me as a birthday gift last year, and settled on peanut butter oatmeal.
If you’ve never made vegan cookies, try it! In addition to not having to wait for butter to soften, there’s a magical element to watching the oil and sugar come together to form what feels like a completely new substance, almost molasses-like. Unfortunately I had to stir the new tub of natural peanut butter before I could get started, a task that seems to take so long that you can actually feel yourself aging, so I put on Dirty Dancing for some distraction while I prepared. I fully recommend rewatching old favourites while you cook, just in general, and this movie is particularly great because you can enjoy the music even when you can’t look at the screen. (Side note, I am haunted by the scene with the weirdly long and skinny watermelons.)
I decided to skip the final step of rolling the dough balls in salted peanuts before baking since I was already using salted, chunky peanut butter, and it was the right call. They were a perfect mix of crisp at the edges, chewy on the inside, salty and sweet.
Media:
I was happy to hear that Sohla El-Waylly is getting her own show as a part of the wildly popular Binging With Babish! You might remember earlier this year, she made headlines when she left the famed Bon Appétit Test Kitchen channel amid various claims of the company’s issues with racism and pay inequity, and it was revealed that she and other contributors of colour were paid significantly less or offered insufficient contracts compared to white contributors doing similar work. In Sohla’s case, she was not even paid for her appearances on the channel, while other staff were given paid compensation for each appearance on top of their regular writing salaries.
Another complaint voiced by Sohla and the other nonwhite staffers who departed the BA Test Kitchen was that they felt employed for the sake of ‘diversity’ and were not given the opportunities afforded to their white counterparts. This is upsettingly common in the food world— and the media world more broadly. Similarly to how often you’ll see a person of colour in the ‘best friend’ role in a blockbuster romantic comedy or teen movie, but how rarely you see a nonwhite person as the lead: Bon Appétit wanted to be able to check the diversity box without actually making the effort to take the spotlight off whiteness, or allowing chefs of colour the creative freedom and compensation their talent deserves. So it’s rewarding to see Sohla— after making the difficult choice to speak out and leave a prominent role— being given space and recognition for her skills within a fun format that doesn’t feel tokenized. Considering she can cook circles around most of the white stars of the BA Test Kitchen, she deserves it.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with someone who would appreciate it! Lastly, in honour of Canadian treasure Schitt’s Creek’s historic Emmy wins, please give yourself the gift of watching this (no context needed, spoiler-free) scene of pure unadulterated comedy from Catherine O’Hara.