keep searchin'
spice quests, and the loss of Thanksgiving
Hello from the storm. Thursday changed drastically from the t-shirt weather we’d enjoyed early in the week to dark clouds and threatening winds, and now here we are with hundreds of millimetres of rain at our door. I’m having a lot of emotions this week, too, as you will see. But on the plus side, it’s decorative gourd season, motherfuckers. Strap in and get ready to get seasonal!
In a non-pandemic world, this week I would be calculatedly planning and preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Jeff and I have been hosting it, along with our housemates, for almost as long as we’ve been together, and it’s a lot of work but we love it. Everything is vegan except the turkey (obviously) and the pie (because I believe in the power of a butter crust). We’ve gotten better at both the cooking and the planning over time, though we have had to scale back from the days at our old house, when we had friends living in the other suite and could make use of their fridge and oven. I think our record was 23 people— Jeff used to say whenever he invited someone, “we can promise you food; we can’t promise you a chair.”
The past couple years it’s been between 8 and 12 people cozied into our little home, and we’ve had to farm out a couple of side dishes without a second fridge or oven to use, but we still have the organized chaos of spending 2 solid days cooking, and evenings of prepping soups and sauces throughout the week ahead. So of course, although it is a relief to not have enormous grocery shopping lists and food schedules and fridge/freezer tetris taking up space in my brain, it is painful to know that we’ll be having dinner by ourselves this weekend instead of with our closest friends who all love food as much as we do. The irony is that this year would have been so easy with so much extra time while I’m unemployed due to the pandemic. We haven’t even decided yet if we’re going to get a small turkey or do something else, and because I’m normally so busy this week I’ve been listless and out of sorts: feeling alternately too dejected to cook anything interesting, and panicked like I’ve forgotten something important.
I’ve been trying to distract myself from the loss of it with impulsively cleaning, and the promise of something new and exciting. I don’t know if this happens to everyone or just food-obsessed home cooks like me, but this a fairly common occurrence in my life: I find a recipe I want to try, but it has a “specialized” ingredient or two which my local store doesn’t carry. And instead of making something else and forgetting about it, it takes over my brain. THE SPICE MUST FLOW. My attempt to find said ingredient approaches mythical quest levels, trying further away and more expensive stores, poring over websites wondering what a fair price is for this item I have never purchased before.
Years ago it was smoked paprika. It always seemed to be sold out at the deli, and the grocery stores where I normally bought spices didn’t have it. But as it grew in popularity, it became easier to find, and I’m now working my way through my third or fourth container of it. More recently, I went all over the North Shore and Vancouver in search of black garlic, that complex, fermented taste I first experienced at a ramen bar in the West End. I even contemplated making it myself, but all the forum conversations I read on the topic warned that it will make your house smell of garlic for months. That was not a sacrifice I was willing to make, so I eventually gave up and bought it on amazon. It’s so potent that I’m only a little more than halfway through a $15 jar I bought late last year, and I think it was worth it.
This past weekend, we harvested the first of our brussels sprouts from the garden (the plants are falling over under the weight of the leaves at the top). The lower leaves got trimmed a bit early so most of the sprouts aren’t as big as you’d get from a produce stand or farmer’s market, but they roasted up nicely all the same. I made one of my favourite sprouts dishes, from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Simple: browned butter with crushed caraway, thyme, and black garlic, and a scattering of toasted pumpkin seeds. You need only mention everything bagels in a group setting to know that caraway can be pretty polarizing, but in my opinion it adds the perfect herbal quality to the rich, toasty butter and tangy-sweet— think aged balsamic vinegar— garlic. The recipe doesn’t include pomegranate seeds, but I like to add them for a tart, juicy crunch. Normally there’s also a drizzle of tahini, but I didn’t think it would go with the rest of our meal (roasted potatoes and cod) so I left it off.
I’d also been meaning to make a trip to an Indian grocery store for ghee, and some seasonings I’d been having trouble sourcing (outside of amazon, where the costs seemed exorbitant): black mustard seeds, chaat masala, amchur (dried mango powder). Sadly the shop I went to on Fraser Street was sold out of amchur, but I got everything else plus some whole dried chilies for about $15, and was finally ready to try a couple new recipes from Priya Krishna’s Indian-ish. I’d had my eye on the lime dosa potatoes for a bit, so I picked up some yellow potatoes at the farmers’ market. I also wanted to try her signature dal, which you can make in the instant pot (helpful for me, since only one of my stove’s large burners works properly).
I also tried making roti from scratch for the first time, using a recipe with half chickpea flour. I didn’t have chapati flour, so I used a mix of whole wheat and 00, which worked all right, though I suppose I have no real frame of reference for it. When you’re making a dinner with multiple components (as opposed to a one-pot meal), the timing is the most difficult part to get right. I made the dough for the roti, then set up the water to boil the potatoes. While the potatoes were cooking, I got the lentils ready in the instant pot. Then, I got the rest of the spices set out for both the chhonk to add to the finished lentils, and for the potatoes. The dough had rested long enough at this point so I heated a cast iron to cook the roti, and divided up the dough.
Making them was pretty fun: press the ball between your hand to form a smallish disc, roll out on a floured surface to about 7” diameter, and toss in the pan. I messed up a bit here by oiling the pan for each one, which the recipe didn’t say to do, but I was concerned they’d stick without oil (if you use enough flour, they shouldn’t). Apparently roti should have oil or butter added after cooking and not before, because they came out pretty crispy, more like papadum in texture (not bad! but not what I intended). It’s also possible I cooked them longer than was necessary. Live and learn. While one is cooking, you roll out the next one, and it all moves along quite nicely.
Once the roti were done, I kept them warm in the oven and returned to the potatoes, which had been cooling in a colander. While those were cooking in the pan with onions and spices I made a small salad of cucumber (the last one from the garden!), lime, and chaat masala. By this time the lentils were also ready for the chhonk to be added. We piled everything on plates and scooped lentils and potatoes onto our crackery rotis. The potatoes were fantastic: salty and acidic, bright with turmeric, and rich with the flavour and texture of the mustard seeds and crispy potato bits that stuck to the pan. The lentils were buttery and spicy, with crunchy cumin seeds flecked throughout. Both these dishes included asefoetida, which there is really no replacement for, and while it’s pungent and even a little off-putting on its own, it adds so much to savoury dishes. (After a short search last year, I found it at Famous Foods on Kingsway.)
Media:
I’m still working my way through all the pieces in Eater’s “The Future of Restaurants” collection, and I wanted to share this dystopian short story: The Memory Chaser, by Megan McCarron, about a chef trying to get her new girlfriend to appreciate good food in a post-pandemic future in which chain restaurants have all but taken over. As the warm weather ends and the patios that thrived all summer seem less inviting, and as we now know that the virus can spread more easily in indoor, poorly ventilated environments, it feels timely— we are almost sure to see restaurants that were able to weather the storm through spring and summer struggling, and possibly closing. Another forced shutdown of dine-in service is a possibility, and places whose nature doesn’t translate well to takeout— cocktail bars, tapas, fine dining— will be hit hard.
Reading the story, it’s easy to feel in our souls that we want a world full of creative, non-corporate restaurants, but it may be harder to pinpoint why that is. Back in April, we were trying to get takeout once a week from a different local restaurant. We kept it to things that would still be good after journeying home with it: ramen, pizza, curry. It felt good to support these places, but I’d never been a big takeout person to begin with— for me, getting restaurant food isn’t just about not having to cook. It’s more about being in a different environment, seeing what’s on special and trying something exciting, making microconnections with your server, or someone at the table beside you when you overhear they’re considering ordering the same dish you just finished eating. I feel chain restaurants (even ones where the food is decent) don’t usually provide the same level of this experience.
With chains, there is a sense of familiarity that can be comforting: people know what they want to eat before they arrive, because the menu is pretty static, whether you’re at the location you usually go to or not. At independent restaurants, people go to eat, of course, but we also go for the sense of community. The feeling of supporting something created by someone whose dream was to share their love of food with others, and being in that space with other people who might feel the same way. Many chains began this way too, sure, but with the growth over time the business aspect of maintaining a unified, profitable brand can deflate a lot of the creativity and experimentation. Anyway, this weekend we’re trying a new food truck that’s opened up down the road from here serving fresh-made pasta— thanks, instagram targeted advertisements! I may not be takeout’s biggest fan, but if a city full of Boston Pizzas and Tim Hortons is the alternative for our future, I’m happy to do my part.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, please share it with a friend! Finally, I think we can all agree that if you make a viral video so chill and inspiring that Mick Fleetwood himself makes his own version, you definitely deserve a kickback from the brand you happened to feature. Come on, Ocean Spray, give this man his money!