it's been a change

equinox chaos, brown butter cookies, and glazed chickpeas

This winter has felt unusually long and cold, so it felt like a relief to celebrate the vernal equinox this past weekend. I spent an unexpectedly sunny Saturday afternoon wandering around downtown with a friend, more walking than I’ve done in awhile! It honestly feels like such a scam that it’s actually energizing to be out in the sun, doing physical activity. Like, you’re telling me I can feel good, for free, just by taking my body outside of my house? No thank you. I don’t have much cause to go downtown these days, and it’s jarring to see how much it has changed, and how many of my old haunts have changed ownership and aren’t as good anymore, or closed completely. We actually ended up on the Speakeasy’s cramped patio, because we couldn’t seem to think of a single interesting place to go for a drink around Granville Street.

Jeff and I went for dinner at Queens Cross Pub with my mom and stepdad in the evening, which was nice— having a few drinks and talking about music and family and food. I thought about not ordering the fish and chips this time, but I just couldn’t resist. We also tried the fried pickles, which were great: unlike a lot of places, they fry them as chips instead of spears, which makes for a better texture in my opinion. The evening was chilly, but we were lucky enough to get the prime table right in front of the fireplace. I can appreciate the food quality at modern gastropubs, but couldn’t they make their spaces a bit more cozy? If I go into a place and have to sit on one of those horribly ubiquitous metal chairs, I’m not going to want to stay for another round after I finish my meal.

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I’ve been busy this past week, which I’m not used to, and it’s tiring! I can’t believe that there was a time in my life when I would work 40- or 45-hour weeks and still cook, work out, and have a social life. The past couple years have shown me that I seemingly need to spend approximately 40% of my waking hours doing my little hobbies, watching my little shows, and making a mess in my kitchen. But the past few days trying to gather the motivation to cook, or even to figure out what to make, has been like the scene from Wet Hot American Summer with Paul Rudd in the cafeteria.

I was already used to cooking at home most days so I didn’t hit the same wall then, but a lot of people probably felt this way after the first few months of the pandemic, once they exhausted their will to be creative after cooking for themselves continuously for weeks and coming to the realization that they would have to keep doing it. I could jokingly blame it on the chaos of Aries season, but for me right now I think it’s that it’s not quite spring produce season yet, but I am 350% done with winter. So I’ve been making things with little enthusiasm and only moderate success just to use up the carrots, beets, and potatoes that I can’t seem to stop finding in my kitchen.

Since we had so many stew-appropriate vegetables, I figured I could handle one more winter stew. I was mistaken. By all accounts, it should have been delicious: vegan Italian sausage, mushrooms, and potatoes, seasoned with thyme and paprika, in a beer broth made thick and robust with a roux. I think my mistake was in using the bottom 300mL or so of a bottle of Jeff’s home brewed pale ale: if you’ve ever had bottle-conditioned beer (or one of Jeff’s home brews), you know that at the bottom can be a sediment known as lees, made up mostly of residual yeast. It’s fine to drink and is in fact full of B vitamins! But, it can also be bitter. I assumed this would mellow with cooking but in fact it created a broth with an unsettlingly bitter aftertaste. Stirring in some honey and wine vinegar balanced it out a little, but it was still there in the background. So by all means, make a beer stew, but use a filtered beer… or leave the lees in the bottle.

luckily, the bitterness doesn’t show up in photos.

I made the mustard-roasted potatoes again, as a side for a spicy tempeh BLT. I make this sandwich often when I have a fresh loaf of bread to use, and it’s even more enticing now that lettuce and tomatoes at the store are starting to look less sad! I love this sandwich with sprouts too for extra crunch. I know I’ve written about this one before: the tempeh marinade is just hot sauce thinned with a little water, soy sauce, and liquid smoke, and has a flavour similar to a buffalo sauce. It’s simple but great, and you can use any leftovers to make a spicy mayo to put on the sandwiches. This time I also added the little bit of leftover mustard coating from the potatoes.

I’ve now somehow become a person who runs out of mayo and thinks, “time to make some more” instead of adding it to my grocery list, so calling the two-minute mayonnaise method life-changing isn’t an exaggeration. We already buy neutral oil by the jug at Costco, and Jeff and I actually did the math on what it costs to make a 500mL jar of mayo and it’s only about $3! I wouldn’t say it’s leagues better than store-bought or anything (though it’s definitely better than some), but it’s worth making for how easy and cheap it is. You can also sub in white wine vinegar for the lemon juice; it won’t change the flavour much.

Speaking of life-changing recipes, I used the Eric Kim gochujang glaze this week on some chickpeas I’d crisped up a bit in the oven using another recipe of his as a guide. (This recipe includes a similar glaze, but I didn’t have any jam, so instead I used the other glaze and mostly followed the method in the second recipe, adding honey at the end.) They were phenomenal— spicy-sweet and crunchy, much like Korean fried chicken, the inspiration for the recipe. Fluffy white rice is the perfect backdrop here. As a side I made an endive salad with shredded carrot and beet, and the carrot-ginger sesame dressing from Lucky Peach’s 101 Easy Asian Recipes. This is the dressing you always see on the iceberg salad that comes with lunch bentos, and I love its vibrant colour and taste.

In our quest to use things that have been hidden in the deepest recesses of the freezer, Jeff and I pulled out a Daiya New York style cheesecake that had been in there for who knows how long, propping up ice cube trays. We poked around in the fridge for something to use as a sauce for it, and settled on an almost-empty jar of chocolate caramel, but I also found the remainder of some dulce de leche I’d made for a cake some time ago. The label said September 18th, but of what year? Once we’d eaten the cake (which was extremely… fine) I started searching for something to make with the dulce de leche, and found this stuffed cookie recipe with brown butter, which sounded amazing.

Unfortunately, it appears that you can’t just let a half-empty jar of dulce de leche live in your fridge indefinitely, because it was not ok. But I’d already taken out everything to make cookies, and by god I was going to make cookies. Instead I used chocolate hazelnut spread, and added a little cinnamon to the cookie batter. These were really fun to make, and I think they could even have held a little more filling than what the recipe specifies. I love the taste of brown butter in cookies, and the texture of these was so good with the little chocolate layer in the centre (and flaked salt on top, of course). I couldn’t help thinking about what they would be like with dulce de leche, though, and I hope I don’t convince myself that making another jar of it is a good idea.

Also this week I made two pizzas that I didn’t think were worthy of being photographed because I accidentally cooked the first one at too low a temperature so it came out disappointingly flat. But they were still tasty: pesto with kale, feta, and sun-dried tomato, and a red sauce base with mushrooms, olives, and capers. And I made a curry noodle stir fry, using an assortment of veggies and the Japanese-style curry roux in the Veganomicon. This time I made tofu in the oven, tossing it in corn starch and soy sauce like in this method to make it extra crispy. You can cook it this way in the frying pan, too, but I like being able to cook the tofu while prepping the rest of the dish.

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Media:
I liked this by Gan Chin Lin for Wordloaf, an in-depth look at milk bread and how to categorize the softer Asian styles of bread and baked goods, as well as the author’s attempts at creating vegan versions. It examines some of the cultural connection to shokupan and other Asian breads, along with the bizarre sense of morality and purity people can have about bread, which, as you might imagine, often just stems from plain old racism, classism, and fatphobia.

The second part includes a lovely-looking recipe and a general guide on how to approach vegan milk bread, including how not to replace eggs (already the toughest thing to replace in vegan baking) for bread-making purposes. I made vegan coconut buns long ago for a cookoff, and while everyone was impressed with the novelty, they were nowhere near as soft and fluffy as the kind you get at a Chinese bakery, because in replacing the eggs, I hadn’t thought enough about what the eggs were being used for.

Also a reminder that I’ve created a master post where you can find all my own recipes from past newsletters! The post will be updated continuously as new ones are published, and the link can be found on my about page.

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