Juneuary
things to eat when you're ready for summer but summer's still loading
Here in Vancouver we have to make a lot of jokes about Juneuary, because it’s the only way we have to cope with watching most of North America enjoying the start of summer while we’re generally getting pelted with rain at least until the solstice hits. And it does seem like we’re really going through it this year. The humid grey outside feels like the inside of a compost bin, and I’m resentfully turning lights on in the middle of the day because it’s so stormy. I suppose I’d choose this rain over droughts and fires, but I do wish for a world where we never had to hear the term “atmospheric river” again.
We have gotten a few decent moments when the clouds briefly decide to clear, though. On Saturday Jeff and I had a pretty nice errand date in our neighbourhood which involved some walking around in the sun; I was wearing a light sweater and was actually too warm! We topped off our chores with a visit to the thrift store, and ended up finding a bunch of amazing stuff. By the time we finished it was after 2pm, so we picked up some fried chicken at Cream Pony for lunch, which was so good— juicy with super crisp, light batter. Definitely get the Cajun seasoned if you stop by, and if you don’t eat chicken, go anyway for some of the excellent donuts. Having such a wonderful afternoon made me more forgiving when it poured rain all night and the next day (the ramen helped, too).
Throughout the winter, I would buy squash basically every time I saw an interesting-looking variety or they were on sale. Then I’d ignore them while they sat on the counter for weeks until one day I’d notice a spot on one and go, “shit, I better roast that squash,” which usually meant putting at least some of it in the freezer afterwards. So I now have between 3 and 5 containers of roasted squash in there that I never got around to using, and everything you can make with squash feels inappropriate this time of year. But one upside of this atrocious start to June is that cold-weather foods no longer seem so bad. This week, I thawed one of those containers to make a vegan squash alfredo sauce.
This is an Isa Does It recipe I’ve made before, and while it isn’t an exact replica of a traditional alfredo sauce or anything, it’s still really satisfying and delicious with a creamy, tangy quality with only a hint of sweet. The sauce is a savoury cashew cream blended with the squash purée and some miso, lemon, and nutritional yeast, thickened in the pan after frying onions and garlic. There were a couple of shiitakes left in the fridge, so I also made shiitake bacon to put on the top. Again, it’s not that it’s exactly like bacon, but it hits all the right notes— salty, crispy, and smoky. Just slice the mushrooms, toss with oil, soy sauce, and liquid smoke, and bake for about 15 minutes at 425°.
I gave this more of a spring vibe by using thyme and basil in the sauce instead of sage, and adding fresh arugula from the garden to wilt at the end. This plus a bit of chopped fresh oregano for garnish made me slightly less bummed out about the weather, and it tasted great. The sauce makes double what you need for dinner, so the rest is now in the freezer. I’m considering trying it as a base sauce for a broccoli cheese pizza (yes, I’m still chasing the dollar pizza high of my youth).
I was blessed by the perfectly ripe mango gods at the produce store this week, so I knew it was time to make this rice bowl from Half Baked Harvest, featuring flavours from chili crisp, red curry paste, and a cool mango-cucumber salad with herbs and avocado to complement the spice. My sister shared the recipe in the group chat a few weeks ago after trying it with tofu (the recipe uses chicken), and it looked so good. Erin Alderson’s tips here on making crispy tofu are really helpful for getting the most satisfying texture— for this I used torn pieces, shallow fried in a wok, and drained on a rack. Then at the end I warmed the curry paste and soy sauce in a pan, and added the tofu just to coat and reheat. This way it stays as crispy as possible.
The salad is really just a bunch of chopping, which is easy enough to do while the oil is heating or as the tofu is cooking. I used rice vinegar, sesame oil, and lime juice for the dressing, plus a dash of soy sauce. I kept sneaking little slices of mango while I was making it; truly nothing compares when they’re ripe, juicy, and sweet. I didn’t bother with the homemade chili crisp part since we already have a jar of nice chili crisp in the fridge. I’m sure a spicy, garlicky browned butter would make this even more incredible, but this was so delicious I was ready to lick the bowl after, so it definitely didn’t suffer from store-bought.
I finally remembered to get pearl couscous when I was at Bulk Barn, and have been waiting for all the recipes I wanted to try before I had pearl couscous to resurface in my memory. The first one was this Smitten Kitchen classic, a salad with kalamata olives and slow-roasted tomatoes, which I made on a day that was threatening to not be grey for once (but ended up being grey by the time we sat down to eat). Cooking the tomatoes at a low temperature for longer creates a flavour somewhere in between roasted and caramelized at a high temperature, and concentrated sun-dried. It’s fantastic and definitely worth the hour of oven time.
The olives and tomatoes already had this dish seeming vaguely Mediterranean, so I felt pretty good about adding fresh oregano into the herb mix, and crumbling feta on top for a little extra salt and fat. Everything about this salad is excellent: the texture of the couscous, the garlicky, sweetish tomato dressing, the salty bursts of chopped olives… I can see this quickly becoming a warm weather favourite. That is, if we ever get any warm weather.
After making a sandwich on a day I was working from home, I found myself aimlessly poking around the kitchen trying to will a post-lunch treat into existence. Sadly, I did not succeed, but later I made this lovely yogurt cake with jam, which Julia Turshen kindly shared in her newsletter (the recipe is published in her book Now & Again). I chose to halve the recipe and cook it in a smaller pan to avoid using up all my yogurt, and opened my last jar of homemade blueberry jam to swirl into the batter. Cooking it in this half-size loaf pan made it adorably rustic, and it came out of the oven golden and springy with the fruit sunken into the centre, as promised. It’s so easy to make with pantry ingredients, and just sweet enough to feel like a treat, making it a perfect anytime cake.
Media:
This week I’ve been having a hard time focusing and have nothing food-related to share! I’ve been rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in my spare time (other knitters will understand the need to have something familiar to watch while you work on projects). Set on a remote space station, it’s a delightful and at times emotional series that is more about the characters and the human condition than the space adventures, though it’s not not about the space adventures. It’s clear to me now that I almost certainly would have read and written Star Trek fan fiction if I had been more engaged with the show while it was on the air. I recently read a couple of old essays while thinking about the inherent, if not explicit, queerness of the show, and since it’s Pride this month I’m sharing them here for you other queer nerds, along with a few of the things I learned reading them.
Star Trek’s first gay couple that wasn’t — Andrew Robinson played Garak as queer intentionally, and he and Alexander Siddig (Bashir) have done live readings of fanfic about their characters. One showrunner regrets not having Garak’s sexuality stated explicitly within the show.
Star Trek’s queer fluidity has been giving fans the brighter future they deserve — Gene Roddenberry himself intended there to be a gay couple as early as season 5 of The Next Generation, but this was axed by producers.
Deep Space Nine is the gayest Star Trek — along with featuring the show’s first same-gender romantic kiss in 1995 in the episode “Rejoined”, there’s plenty of subtext to choose from with almost every character and this gets into some of the interesting (and problematic!) ways we see this throughout the show.
Star Trek (somewhat deservedly) gets guff for having dragged its feet for so long with overt queer representation in an otherwise reasonably progressive show. But it still deserves some credit for writers and actors, against the wishes of showrunners and advertisers, being able to sneak in subtexts that would speak to the queer people watching, and the show’s overall positive attitudes about queer relationships and identities have made it age better than many other shows of its time.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please smash that like button below, or 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. And lastly, haven’t we all been there?