gemini season
birthday pizza, marinated tofu, and the joy of cooking again
It feels like it’s been longer than two weeks since my last newsletter, but the calendar informs me it hasn’t. It also informs me that it’s June in a little over a week, somehow. Man, it would be so cool if it were possible to perceive the passage of time with any consistency.
Jeff’s dad was in town over the long weekend and we all went out to Pier 7 for dinner. It’s a place in the Shipyards I recalled from a few years ago as being nice but fairly forgettable food-wise, but they do have good service, a nice wine list, and a lovely patio. The crab cakes were the one thing I remembered being quite good, so Jeff and I shared those. They were still excellent, and I was also more impressed with the mains this time around. Or maybe I just liked what I ordered this time better, who knows. Afterwards, we went to Earnest to get ice cream so that the vegan and lactose intolerant people would have a few more dessert options to choose from. I know some people who disagree, but their vegan ice creams are some of the best I’ve tried. The strawberry rhubarb ripple (one of my favourites) is back in season, and a few people got that, but I was in the mood for chocolate and opted for the chocolate cupcake one. I tasted the spruce bud (not vegan) and decided it was a bit much on its own, but it probably would have made a nice combo with another flavour. I just eat ice cream too slowly too get anything more than a single scoop.
It’s Jeff’s birthday today (Thursday, as I write this). Since he had a busy work day today I took him out for dinner on Tuesday to Farina a Legna, one of our favourites in the old neighbourhood. They have happy hour all day on Tuesdays, so I allowed myself the indulgence of both a bicicletta and an americano cocktail. The feature pizza sounded great, so that’s what we got— roasted red pepper tomato sauce, mushrooms, grape tomatoes, artichokes, pepperoncini, and hot capocollo— and the cavolo nero salad. Incidentally, I’d eaten pizza from their sister restaurant Pizzeria Farina the week before, when I met up with Liang for drinks at The Boxcar, which adjoins it. We had the funghi, one I never eat when I’m with Jeff because it has a cream sauce.
Even though the weather was decidedly uncooperative, I told Jeff he deserved to have dessert on his birthday, so we went to Dolce Amore for gelato after dinner. Jeff got their vegan peanut butter one, and I got the malted chocolate cookie dough. I’d just been saying a few days before that I was having a craving for Maltesers, but they’re harder to find than Whoppers which are just not as good. We went for a cup of tea at his mom’s afterwards, but hadn’t told her we were getting dessert, and she tried to serve us bread pudding. I think we both valiantly managed two bites.
I recently discovered, via some blood tests I was meant to go for some time ago, that I’m severely B12 deficient! Don’t postpone your bloodwork for several months for no reason, kids! I’ve been getting injections for that for the past two weeks, with two more weeks to go before they drop it to once a month, and I already feel like I have a lot more physical and mental energy. Some of the other physical symptoms I’ve been having could be related, or maybe not; hopefully I’ll know more soon, but either way it’s a relief that at least some of what I’ve been experiencing has a distinct cause and solution. To that end, I’ve been able to accomplish more lately— chores, picking up my knitting, making decent meals. Often in recent times I would be sitting around wondering why I could not bring myself to complete a simple task like cleaning the bathroom mirror or going downstairs to check the mail. So it’s been nice to bake cookies just because, to feed my sourdough starter for the first time in months, to loosely plan dinners instead of staring into the fridge at 6pm every night in a funk.
Anyway, I finally got around to doing one of my favourite tofu marinades, something I’d been meaning to do since I bought the tofu many weeks earlier but simply hadn’t had the energy or forethought for. (It was actually past its best before date when I opened it to do this, but it was fine, because many best before dates are a scam.) It’s a straightforward one of just soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, brown sugar, lime juice, and a bit of something spicy like sriracha or gochujang, but it always hits. I just marinate for a few hours and then bake the tofu for about half an hour at a high temperature, spooning marinade on top of it again when I flip the pieces. Most of the time is hands-off so it’s easy to make whatever else to go with it while it’s baking.
We keep getting russet potatoes in the produce bin, which I don’t tend to cook with as often as the thin-skinned varieties, so I never seem to know what to do with them if I’m not making soup. We made mashed potatoes with chili crisp oil, and they were really good. Jeff discovered that the potato ricer, which we’ve had for over a decade and which I never use because it makes the kind of mess that pisses me off beyond reason, actually comes apart to make it easier to clean. (I’m still not going to use it.) I also made a ginger-carrot dressing for salad, the type you get in bento boxes at sushi restaurants. The recipe I use is in the Lucky Peach book, and I love it. It’s similar to the one here, though I would recommend a neutral oil instead of olive, since that can get bitter if you blend it a lot.
With the other half of the brick of tofu, I crumbled it into pieces to toss with cornstarch and fry in the wok for a rice bowl, and did some green onions and broccoli in the style of this noodle bowl with it. I only had a little of the chili oil left from when I’d made that the first time, because it was so good I kept using it for other stuff (like cucumber salad or the potatoes above), so I tossed in some sweet chili sauce at the end as well when I added the tofu back to the pan to warm up. It was delicious. I will definitely be making another batch of the chili crisp soon, but we have two half-empty jars of chili crisp in the fridge I need to make myself use up first.
Other than that lately, it’s been pastas! I go through phases where sometimes I’m like ‘I am tired of pasta, I need a break’ and other times where I’m like ‘I just had pasta last night but I could eat it again if I make a different one’. When we went to the grocery store for a few staples, and some vegetables to fill the gap between the weekend and when the produce box arrives, I told myself I would choose eggplant or zucchini, and the eggplants looked better. After buying it my intention was to make baba ghanouj but I kept forgetting to grill it, and then I was thinking about eggplant parmesan, but that seemed like a lot of work just to avoid turning on the grill. So I made pasta alla norma using a marinara that I’d made sometime in the winter and stuck in the freezer, so it really only took as long as it took to fry the eggplant in the pan and boil the noodles. I almost forgot how much I love eggplant, and this was a really good marinara, too.
In trying to use up things from the freezer, I found a pound of ground meat from Two Rivers which I fear must have been bought before the move, because I never buy ground meat for anything these days, so I dedicated a couple of hours to making a bolognese sauce. Unfortunately half of it immediately went into the freezer because it makes more than we needed for dinner, so it was kind of a wash in that respect. Bolognese is not a difficult thing to make, it just takes the patience of letting it to cook down to the proper consistency so that the tomatoes are very concentrated and the sauce only sort of just coats the noodles. Extra Virgin is the book whose method I use for this, and they also have a recipe for sugo finto, or ‘fake sauce’, meant to evoke a similar feel and flavour with no meat. We’ve made this before as well and it’s great.
I had some grape tomatoes that needed to be used, and I made the tomato garlic confit outlined in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Often I eat this with fresh bread, but it’s also a good pasta sauce. Just smush the tomatoes up a little bit when you mix it in with the noodles. And there will be more oil than is needed for one night’s worth of pasta, so you can make salad dressing with it, or drizzle it over pan con tomate, or fry an egg in it… or just use it to make more pasta.
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, this post is true and I have always been jealous that I’ll never get to experience it.