happy new year, ya filthy animals
cookie overload, peas & squares, and ways to eat a chicken
Happy new year! I’m not one to think the changing of the calendar is going to automatically bring about better times, but in a particularly cursed nightmare of a year, you can’t say it doesn’t feel like a bit of a relief to have 2020 in the rearview. And in a year where the passage of time has felt stranger than ever, the “what day is it? does it matter?” feeling of the time between Christmas and New Year’s felt almost comforting in its familiarity, instead of unsettling the way it has throughout the year when you can’t remember if it’s Thursday or Monday.
As I’m attempting to fit two weeks’ worth of content in here, the email version of this might be cut for length, so please click to read in your browser if that’s the case! I’m writing as it’s currently the afternoon of the 31st, so by the time you read this, I’ll probably have spent my New Year’s Eve playing online games with one group of friends, doing karaoke on Zoom with another, and drinking Okanagan sparkling wine with Jeff (much earlier than midnight, because I can barely stay up until midnight these days, let alone drink alcohol at that time). I hope you all had a safe holiday with whatever was able to bring you joy, peace, and comfort.
I don’t like to use the word ‘hero’, but on the 23rd, I baked four different batches of cookies. I made the snickerdoodles from my previous newsletter, along with the perfect blackstrap molasses ginger cookies, pistachio-almond pinwheels, and chocolate-peppermint crinkle cookies. Usually I bring the snickerdoodles and ginger ones along with one new cookie to my mom’s for Christmas dinner and come home with some of hers (my most loved: butter tarts and lemon bars), but obviously this year was a little different: we both set up individual tins or boxes for each household to pick up or have delivered with their gifts (my brother on the island was relegated to making my mom’s brownie recipe for himself, but he said it turned out great).
I leaned heavily on the New York Times’s holiday cookie collection for ideas, which I recommend if you’re looking to try something new. The pistachio pinwheels were a bit more work than a drop cookie, but they are really lovely looking and the sophisticated flavour is great with a cup of coffee— use blanched almond flour if you can find it for more colour differentiation. I also tried the cast iron crisp toffee bars about a week before Christmas, intending to freeze them and then include them in the tins, but ended up eating most of them while they were fresh. I made mine with the addition of chocolate chips and fleur de sel, and they tasted like a cookie version of a Skor bar… stupendous.
On the 24th, Jeff and I played Santa and drove to my sister’s, my other sister’s, my parents’ place, then back to my sisters to distribute everyone’s cookies and gifts. It felt so strange to just be saying a quick hello outside in the cold, knowing we weren’t going to be in the same place the next day. We got in the car at our house around noon and arrived home at six, so after driving all across the lower mainland, we cobbled together a charcuterie dinner with some leftover beet & citrus salad while we chatted with Jeff’s mom and her partner on Skype (they’re Swiss, so we normally spend Christmas Eve celebrating with them). It was again a little strange to go to bed around my usual time, instead of at 1:30 in the morning after getting wine drunk and eating too much candy with my siblings, laughing as we MST3K the Boris Karloff Grinch cartoon for the 20th year in a row.
Our usual Christmas morning breakfast is eggs benedict with either back bacon or smoked salmon, but since it’s so much work none of us thought it seemed worth it to make it for 2 or 3 people. My mom, in true mom fashion, sent a pan of homemade cinnamon bun dough with our gifts and cookies, so we could each throw them in the oven in the morning and all have the same fresh-baked treat for breakfast. We spent two hours on Zoom on Christmas day, having mimosas (Stoneboat Piano brüt and Loop Morning Glory juice) and breakfast together while we all talked over each other and opened gifts. It wasn’t exactly the same as all cramming into my parents’ living room, but it was much happier than expected, and everyone gave such thoughtful gifts to each other. With such a large immediate family (16 including kids and spouses!) we’ve considered going the secret santa route, but we all just love giving gifts so much that no one wants to limit themselves to only buying for one person, and there is never any expectation that you have to give gifts to everyone or anyone if it’s stressful or you can’t afford it.
Some food-related gifts I received that I’m excited about:
Nordicware bundt pan
ravioli press
Staub garlic keeper and roaster (I’d been storing heads of garlic in a dark brown drinking glass and they kept sprouting)
Seeing as Jeff, my mom, and I are usually at the helm cooking Christmas dinner for upwards of 20 people, to say this year’s dinner was easy in comparison would be an understatement. We made the famous Samin Nosrat buttermilk roast chicken, which involves very little work aside from remembering to marinate it the day before, and the brown butter brussels sprouts salad you may recall me raving about in a previous newsletter. The chicken takes around an hour to roast, during which time we prepped the potatoes and sprouts for roasting, and once they were in the oven, we made the dressing and the prepared the other salad elements. It was a perfect meal, and we also made a quick gravy in the cast iron we used to cook the chicken, which we saved for a lunchtime poutine a couple days later.
To use up the rest of the chicken after we’d enjoyed sandwiches with the leftovers, a simple rustic chicken noodle soup was in order. I used homemade chicken stock from the freezer and all the remaining shreds of meat, and of course the soup trifecta of onion, carrot, and celery. For extra flavour I added some thyme and garlic, and while egg noodles are often used for chicken noodle, I personally like capellini spezzati (cut angel hair) because it cooks quickly and doesn’t absorb too much more liquid after it’s cooked and stored, as larger noodles sometimes do, leaving you with weirdly huge noodles and a shortage of broth. I’d intended to make biscuits to go with this to use up some of my three remaining cups of buttermilk (why is it only sold in litres?), but it completely slipped my mind. I’ll get to it… hopefully before the buttermilk expires…
I had occasion to go to the good grocery store (the Donald’s on Hastings) this past weekend, and I was excited to see that they now carry paneer! I made a variant of saag paneer using feta in the fall, but Priya Krishna’s book Indian-ish also has a recipe for matar paneer that I’d been wanting to try. Fragrant, spicy, and rich, matar paneer— affectionately known as “peas & squares” after a friend who, when we were trying to order takeout while stoned, couldn’t remember what it was called and pulled that out of her mind palace— is one of my favourites. The place we like to order from locally doesn’t make it, so being able to cook a good one at home is definitely going to change my life for the better. Traditionally the paneer for this dish is deep-fried before being added to the sauce, and I appreciate that Priya said “nah” to that in her recipe, because who wants to deep-fry at home?
I was able to get this going pretty quickly because I used two 400ml cans of fire-roasted diced tomatoes instead of fresh romas like the recipe calls for— just omit the water later in the recipe. Plus, the roasted aspect of them adds a nice tandoori-esque flavour that often seems to be missing from home-cooked curries. The other secret-that’s-not-a-secret is ghee: now that I have it, I can’t believe I lived without it for so long. This could be a full meal on its own with rice or flatbread, but it’s nice to have multiple dishes, so I also made “The Most Basic Dal” from the same book, which I’d tried a month or two ago for a weekend lunch: red lentils and spices is all it is, ready in 15 minutes, and way more delicious than anticipated for how simple it is. It’s fairly mild, which was nice alongside the reasonably hot matar paneer (the creaminess of the cheese is complemented by the spicy sauce). With restaurant Indian food, I find it’s impossible to eat the correct amount: you either finish your plate and wish you had a little more, or you eat a little more after your first plate and become uncomfortably full. In that respect, I think this dinner was a success.
Media:
A friend who knows my love of pasta sent me this article: an investigation into the puzzling bucatini shortage, by Rachel Handler. It’s a longer read but I assure you, it is absolutely fascinating. Normally I would talk a bit about the article and maybe share a quote or two, but the whole thing reads like a food-centric true crime and I don’t want to spoil the details for you. I like bucatini as much as any other pasta shape (and a lot more than some of the shitty ones like penne and spaghettini) but after reading this, I am itching to go to the Italian deli where La Molisana is often 3 for $5 and see if I can get some, or if there’s an empty space behind the little label reading ‘bucatini’.
I also had a glance through the New York Times’ most-read food stories of 2020, which includes some hard-hitting articles, some fun articles, and some excellent food guides for quarantimes. I read “The Expiration Dates You Should Actually Follow” back in April and found it pretty informative— I’ve always looked at most of them as more of a guideline than a rule, but I think I might actually get around to tossing that bag of spelt flour I’ve had since like 2012. And I’ve made several of the recipes in “One-Pot Wonders”: I like one-pot meals not because I hate washing dishes, but because I’m a big fan of being able to semi-ignore food once I start making it instead of trying to time multiple things to be ready at once. If you ever catch me making a one-pot pasta, though, you can be sure that it’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type situation, and that I need help.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! Enjoy the long weekend, if you’re lucky enough to have one, and may we all be as blessed as this dog in 2021.