lay it on the line
dips and sauces and doing your best
Anyone else feel like we need a weekend, but like… for the months? It simply does not seem right that April ended and then May just automatically happened right after. We should get a little break in between where no stuff happens! We need a rest from the relentless passage of time! Just one woman’s opinion.
I’ve been having some bodily woes the past little while— hopefully it’s nothing too serious, but I have not been able to do much cooking this past week in particular. And in combination with Jeff’s schedule and all the playoff hockey we’ve been watching, we’ve been relying a lot on freezer leftovers and pub food. I gave up and ordered pizza on Monday. There is something so freeing in the moment you just decide to order a pizza, and even though it’s a bit more expensive, Panago is my preferred choice from the local delivery chains because it has interesting veggie choices, a solid crust, and doesn’t leave me feeling weighed down by cheese afterwards. My beloved veggie korma pizza is no longer on their menu, but I was happy with the elote-inspired one that’s appeared instead. And both got me thinking about things I could cook (things that aren’t pizza, I mean).
Tuesday I met up with my sister Maddie, who’d made me some potions for my ills. (It’s just an herb blend but it’s fun to think of her as an old-timey apothecary.) We got a macchiato at Propaganda; Maddie always knows where the best coffees are and this was so nice. It was warm out, so we sat outside talking while we drank them and waited for Jeff to finish work. By then it was pretty late to go home and make dinner, and Jeff suggested we try Genji, the other Japanese place up the road from us, since we were kind of lukewarm on the first place we tried, but seemingly every time we’ve considered going to this place it’s been a Sunday, the one day they’re closed. We went with the intention of trying the ramen, actually, but after seeing the sushi menu we changed our minds and got a couple of rolls and two pieces tuna aburi. It was delicious. And I still have the ramen to look forward to trying another time.
Jeff and I went to Beva Brewing again recently for a lunch date. Since our first visit there we’ve learned that the sandwiches are large enough that we can split one, so long as we also get a side of chips & French onion dip (Jeff isn’t as much of a chip devotee as I am, but we both love the dip). There were also quite a few beers that sounded good, so we each got a flight for the first time. Their flights are three 8oz pours, which for me is a lot of beer, and we ended up sitting there talking so long while drinking them that the nearby thrift store we had intended to go to had closed for the day. But we stopped at a different one on the way home instead, so it was all in all a great afternoon.
I bought mint on a whim at the grocery store, waiting for the fates to tell me what to make with it, and then this Alicia Kennedy cilantro-mint sauce came up in conversation. It was perfect, because I’d also just received a huge bunch of cilantro in the produce box for the week. As a lover of chimichurri, pesto, and mint chutney, it’s no surprise that I really liked this, too.
I also had cauliflower to use and I thought they’d be a nice match, so I roasted the cauliflower while making the sauce and boiling water for pasta, and made kind of a pasta salad based on a pantry recipe from Milk Street: Tuesday Nights that I really like. It’s just noodles tossed with herbs, lemon, and yogurt with some brown butter that has garlic, sumac, and tomato paste added to it right as you take it off the burner, so they just toast very lightly. In assembling the salad I added a nice big spoonful of the sauce, skipped the majority of the herbs and the lemon since the sauce already has lime, and folded in a chopped fresh tomato. It was warm enough to eat dinner out on the balcony, which feels good for the soul after so much cold and rain in the early part of the spring.
My family and I are always sharing pictures of our food in the group chat, which we started doing in the early days of the pandemic when we all missed being able to eat meals together, and kept doing because we all love food. (My mom joked recently that if any of us ever wrote a travelogue, it would have to be titled ‘But What Did You Eat?’) Anyway, my mom is used to cooking for a crowd, and although she’s managed to (mostly) adjust to cooking for fewer people, she still makes many of the dishes I remember from when I was younger, and she chose things that were very easy to spread around a table of eight or ten people. Recently she posted a picture of their table: a dutch oven of stroganoff, with garlic bread and asparagus on the side, and it looked so good and made me so nostalgic. I never really buy beef so I haven’t had stroganoff in a long time. I tried the vegan one in Isa Does It and found it a little lacklustre; I might’ve enjoyed it more had I marinated the tofu before cooking, but it felt pasty and bland in combination with the sauce. I didn’t make it again.
However, I had egg noodles, a bunch of sour cream, and some leftover white beans I’d cooked for something else, so I said what the hell, figuring the worst that could happen is I make something I don’t ever make again. I fried onions and mushrooms in butter to start, coated them in flour, and the sauce comes together really quickly after that. Deglaze with red or white wine, add broth (mushroom or vegetarian beef bouillon), dijon mustard, and sour cream. I didn’t use a recipe, but I did glance through this before starting so I could remember what goes in. Also worth noting that I was using navy beans— I don’t know if I’d like it as much with a larger one like butter beans or the gigante type. I worry they would have the same problem as the sautéed tofu not have enough flavour of their own to work with the sauce. I wilted some kale leaves (I’ll be honest, they were already pretty wilted from sitting forgotten in my fridge) just before adding the noodles and the beans, and I really enjoyed this.
Since I feel guilty that I was rude about Isa Does It, one of my most-used cookbooks, I’ll mention that I revisited another fave from there this week: the queso blanco bowl. The queso recipe is very similar to her recipe here, and I absolutely love it. It’s evocative of the experience of one of those terrifying nacho cheeses like you get at the movie theatre or 7-11, only it doesn’t taste like you’re gambling with your digestive system when you eat it. The inspiration for the bowl, as she says in the book, is nachos, which makes this so satisfying to eat. It’s served over beans and brown rice, so the crunch comes from kale chips, which can bake while making the sauce and cutting up some tomato and avocado for the other toppings. I am always scraping the leftover sauce out of my bowl at the end, so it’s great that the queso recipe will make more than you need just for dinner, because then I get to use it to make actual nachos another night.
It’s become a bit of a sports-watching tradition now for me to make this buffalo cauliflower dip. I probably don’t need to sell you on it. It’s buffalo sauce. It’s cauliflower. It’s cheese. Just try it. I’m not a blue cheese fan so I usually crumble some feta on in its place, but I was a bit short on ingredients this week, and it was still good without. Make sure you have good tortilla chips to eat it with. Any crunchy vegetable will be good, but I like carrots in particular for the little bit of sweetness, and celery because it works almost as well as chips for scooping.
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, congratulations on your new pope, Chicago.