everybody feels the wind blow
pesto pasta ideas, mezze, and ongoing laziness
Hello all. This week Jeff and I received the news that our roommates are moving into their own apartment next month, so that’s been an interesting mental journey while we think about all the things that need to be done. It would be nice if we didn’t need to search for another roommate, but we simply can’t afford to split the rent only two ways indefinitely, so we are looking for one person or potentially another couple to move in with us for June 15 or July 1, or even August 1 if needed. Please let me know if you or someone you know and trust might be interested (if we aren’t already contacts you can reply to this email) and I’ll get you the details.
On another note, I’m happy to report that I, presumably like many of you thirty- and forty-somethings reading this in BC, have booked an appointment for my first dose of the vaccine! Jeff received his this past weekend when they finally categorized restaurant workers as “essential”, so that’s been a bit of a weight off my mind. I personally can’t wait to do the boring adult things I’ve been putting off doing because I felt too anxious: get my eyes checked (my prescription is two years out of date), go to the dentist (I haven’t been since fall of 2019), and so forth. It’s kind of sad the things you find yourself getting excited about since the pandemic has taken so much away from us. I ordered a few pairs of plugs and tunnels from BAF since I haven’t gotten any new ones since my wedding in 2018, and it’s honestly been pretty motivating knowing I have basically a new pair to wear every day for a week. Like yeah, everything is monotonous and exhausting, but at least I’ve got some fresh new earrings on!
This week has felt busy, although it’s actually not been any more busy than usual. But I have still been experiencing an uncharacteristic lack of drive in the kitchen. Once I get in there and start cooking it’s fine, but the desire to think of things to make, and even just to stop doing whatever nonsense I’m doing in order to cook, have been mysteriously absent. I try to remind myself that we can’t be endless wells of creativity and motivation, and that actually plenty of people function just fine doing what I’ve been doing this week: cobbling together quick meals with things out of the freezer and odds and ends in the fridge instead of planning the entire week or tackling elaborate culinary projects. I hope these slapped-together but still tasty meals from my week of laziness provide some inspiration if you, too, have felt the need to do anything except think about and spend valuable time cooking.
The miso no-claypot chicken is a favourite from Lucky Peach’s 101 Easy Asian Recipes, even if it’s not something I make super often because of the meat, but I love how quickly and easily a few ingredients come together to make something incredibly delicious. The recipe in the book is for the rice cooker, but I’ve always made it in the instant pot, which is even faster and just as easy, although you do need a slightly larger amount of rice & water in order to bypass the ‘burn’ error on the instant pot (I use 1½ cups of each). A salty marinade with elements of sweet and sour is used on pieces of chicken and shiitake mushrooms, and in the 15-20 minutes’ marinating time you can get the rice ready and cut up the remaining ingredients. I like to add doubanjiang to the marinade as well for a bit of spice and extra fermented goodness. I also prefer to cut the ginger into matchsticks so that you can actually eat it with the dish, instead of pulling it out after letting it flavour the rice.
I’m a big proponent of using broth in many cases when a recipe calls for “water or broth”, but this is one time where water is totally fine— the chicken and the marinade provide so much flavour that broth is not really necessary. The taste of the chicken and mushrooms is excellent and they always come out perfectly cooked, but by far the best part of this dish is the crust at the bottom, where the soy sauce and sugars in the marinade have sunk to the bottom and caramelized with the rice. If there’s one thing I know about humans, it’s that we simply love eating things that are crispy and caramelized.
The cooking time in the instant pot, if you want to try it, is 9 minutes of pressure cooking on high, followed by a 15-minute natural release. I also keep meaning to try a vegetarian version of this, either with all mushrooms, or a mix of shiitakes and seitan. Either way though, I think a veg version would require broth, plus a little more oil, since you aren’t creating your own broth by cooking the chicken with it.
After last week’s falafel adventure, I couldn’t stop thinking about a potential mezze plate, so I made one. I did in fact buy another cabbage to make more pickled cabbage on the weekend because I was so excited about the possibility. I used this recipe as a guide, halved, and tweaked by using peppercorns instead of ground pepper, adding coriander seeds, and increasing the vinegar to water ratio because I like pickles to be so sour. Frying the falafel from frozen worked quite well (they took about two minutes longer than fresh), and the only other cooked element of this dinner was some grilled romaine in leftover marinade from the tofu we made a couple of weeks ago. I threw it on the barbecue and heated up the pita at the same time, living dangerously by dashing outside to do this while my last batch of falafel was still frying, and then kept everything warm inside the turned-off grill while getting the last bits together.
A good mezze should have plenty of every element so that no one feels like they’re fighting over the last bit of something, and so that when you feel like you’ve had enough of everything, you’re actually a little past being full, and have moved into the ‘mild discomfort’ stage. We succeeded. The hummus pictured is the three-layer hummus made by Royal Gourmet, which is in my opinion the king of grocery store hummus brands (and locally made!), and the toum is the remainder of what we purchased from Jamjar (I found out the hard way that toum separates when frozen, and had to re-emulsify it in the food processor with an egg white). I loved all of it, but if I’m playing favourites, eating a pinch of pickled cabbage with a piece of feta is really a perfect experience. And while making this dinner wasn’t a lot of work, I will say that it made me thankful to have a dishwasher.
On Wednesday, I came home a bit later than usual after making a detour to drop off a couple of things at my sister’s, and realised I’d forgotten to marinate tofu for my planned dinner. So I pushed that dinner to the following day and threw together a pasta. If you’ve been reading these newsletters since the beginning, it won’t surprise you to learn that there are currently three kinds of homemade pesto in my freezer. I took out a couple spoonfuls of the nettle pesto I made last month, and a couple of the garlic scape pesto I made sometime last summer, to thaw while putting on water for the noodles and heating up the cast iron to toast some panko crumbs and char some broccoli.
Starting with a pesto sauce and using panko crumbs as a topping for texture leaves almost limitless possibilities for a straightforward but still elegant bowl of pasta. I used broccoli because that’s what I had, but you could do sautéed mushrooms, roasted cauliflower, cherry tomatoes burst in the frying pan or oven, wilted arugula, a fried egg with a soft yolk, or leftover rotisserie chicken— basically anything you’ve got that might taste nice against some garlic and basil with the added crunch of breadcrumbs. Truly, most things taste nice with garlic and basil and breadcrumbs, so go ahead and experiment.
I liked the mix here of the nettle pesto, which was milder, with the garlic scape pesto, which was good but so intense that we’d taste garlic for several hours after eating it. Adding a little parmesan on top made the salt content of this dish just about perfect. La Cervezeria Astilleros was trying to clear a keg to make room for a new beer they don’t have an extra keg for, so we got a 2L growler fill of the orange safflower ale for $8— a steal, and our first growler fill since the start of the pandemic— its bright flavour went surprisingly well with our meal.
Also this week, we pulled a couple of the beet burger patties out of the freezer and grilled those along with some asparagus. I tossed the asparagus in a simple but shockingly delicious dressing of lemon, olive oil, and tarragon dijon mustard. And we got takeout on Saturday to celebrate Jeff’s first vaccination: Indian food from Vaades, which was delicious and fed us for three days.
Media:
I read this fantastic essay by Jiayang Fan: “The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food Is “Disgusting”. It begins with the Museum of Disgusting Food and covers a lot of ground, like how disgust was likely useful as a survival mechanism so early humans didn’t poison themselves, and how this tendency has evolved to include social aspects as well as just physical revulsion based on taste or smell. The example given is foie gras, which many would agree is not disgusting based on its taste, texture, or smell, but because of how it is made. So it follows, then, that foods which may be disgusting within the norms of one culture would be completely normal within another, and vice versa. I loved reading the author’s experience of trying non-Chinese food for the first time as a child on a flight to the US:
In a tinfoil-covered tray was what looked like a pile of dumplings, except that they were square. I picked one up and took a bite, expecting it to be filled with meat, and discovered a gooey, creamy substance inside. Surely this was a dessert. Why else would the squares be swimming in a thick white sauce? I was grossed out, but ate the whole meal, because I had never been permitted to do otherwise. For weeks afterward, the taste festered in my thoughts, goading my gag reflex. Years later, I learned that those curious squares were called cheese ravioli.
This, as well as the author describing learning to love olives after initially spitting them out, touches on the idea that our initial reactions of disgust can be overcome with repeat exposure, as something previously unknown stops being recognized by your body as potentially dangerous and wrong. I like the idea that a so-called “dulling of the blade” with this particular tool on of your body’s survival Swiss Army knife can lead to foods borne of necessity or poverty becoming delicacies, like the Icelandic hákarl. Or more simply, that trying a food more than once even if you didn’t like it the first time can eventually train your body to recognize that it is, in fact, good. It’s hard to believe now that until I was about 25 I couldn’t touch sushi rolls, and now if I go more than a month without eating sushi it feels wrong.
I really recommend reading the whole article if you’ve got twenty minutes to spare (there is also an audio version linked in the article, if you prefer); I found it absolutely fascinating and wonderfully written.
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. Lastly, I know we have many modern conveniences that make life better and easier, but… I still want one of these.