love and rage
caramel birthday cake, asparagus eggs, plus all-encompassing fury
Hello from the bizarre feeling of a Friday stat holiday. The despair I felt last week has morphed, with the recent restrictions announcement, into a constant, simmering fury. It’s honestly inspiring to see how this latest development in government failure has collectively broken everyone’s last remaining strand of decency and we are out for blood. After the announcement on Monday I came home and, while trying to add a pinch of salt to the mushrooms I was cooking for some fried rice, spilled the entire salt cellar all over the stove including inside of the burners. This on top of scapegoating restaurants once again, the suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine for essential workers this month over basically nothing, and John Horgan’s remarks to people age 18-39 not to “blow this for the rest of us”, made my rage powerful enough to fuel the stove to cook the rest of my dinner.
I don’t want to get into it any further— it’s no shock that we, the largest portion of the workforce and particularly in sectors that put us at risk, are fed up with being told to work no matter what and then being blamed when we get sick. I don’t yet know how to channel my anger into something that might actually help, but the knowledge that more and more people are unsatisfied and outraged is a little more motivating and, honestly, helps just the tiniest bit with my feelings of isolation. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to order some takeout from a restaurant that was forced to close its doors and get some beer delivered from a local brewery that doesn’t have a patio, because apparently it is citizens’ responsibility to make sure small businesses are supported during this time!
My mom and sister share a birthday at the end of March, and their celebratory dinner last year having to be cancelled was one of the first things that made the pandemic feel really serious. While we were in the first lockdown and I was unemployed, I made a cake in their honour, which they couldn’t try because we weren’t allowed to see anyone other than the people we lived with. So while it felt pretty rough that this year they faced a second pandemic birthday (incidentally the same day as the new restrictions announcement— ironic considering this time last year we thought we’d be rescheduling our dinner for sometime in May), at least this time I was able to make and deliver a cake to my mom, and have a brief visit on the porch.
She mentioned she loves anything caramel, so despite my recent cookie-related caramel failures, I obliged. This Half-Baked Harvest recipe doesn’t require you to make caramel, exactly— more of a brown sugar syrup you then use to make an icing that evokes a caramel flavour. It’s matched with a deliciously buttery and moist vanilla cake, and a tangy ganache filling made with sour cream, which might sound weird, but the sourness of it balances the sweeter elements of the icing and cake perfectly. I also added some Maldon salt to the top, because salt instantly levels up any type of caramel.
My only notes on making this cake are that the recipe bizarrely has you adding buttermilk after adding flour, so you’re trying to add liquid to a stiff, cookie-dough-like batter, which makes no sense and left me with a bunch of big lumps I had to try to whisk in while I was pouring it into the pans. I think next time I would use the Smitten Kitchen method of adding half the flour, then half the milk with the mixer running, and then repeating with the other halves. I also think the icing amounts are off the chart: I made a full batch of the fudge filling even though it seemed like it’d be too much, and it was, so I halved the caramel icing recipe and it was the perfect amount. My ratios looked pretty similar to the photos on the recipe page, too, so I don’t know what Ms. Gerard did with all that leftover icing. Just goes to show that you can listen to your instincts when you cook (even if you’ve had recent mishaps that make you doubt yourself and decide it’s better to follow the recipe to the letter).
Another one of my pandemic staple recipes has been this pasta with vodka sauce. It may not be super creative or fancy but it is easy, made almost entirely with pantry staples, and incredibly tasty. A creamy, lightly spicy rosé sauce made salty and tangy with parmesan and fragrant with fresh basil, tucked into all the ridges of whatever short noodle you choose. If you don’t have vodka, use gin or wine or broth instead— it’s such a small amount that it doesn’t make much difference, except in the eyes of tradition. I have used a mix of oat and coconut milk in place of cream in this recipe before, but I’ve never made it without parmesan, so if you try a vegan version, let me know how you liked it!
I used rigatoni this time which is a good pasta shape in general, though maybe not my favourite choice for this because it got cold kind of quickly, as this isn’t a particularly thick sauce. Fusilli as listed in the recipe works great, but so does casarecce, shells, or radiatore. And please do not look at the comments saying the recipe calls for too much oil. I assure you, the amount is correct and necessary.
In looking for a type of main dish to make with asparagus because I didn’t have any appropriate side proteins kicking around, I found this recipe for asparagus revuelto, a Spanish scrambled egg dish. I used a chopped Gusta Spanish-style vegan sausage in place of the dry chorizo in the recipe, frying it a bit longer than I might normally in order to give it some of the slightly chewier quality of a cured meat. A good number of people in the comments used chopped sun-dried tomato instead of meat and enjoyed it, which I think would be a nice addition too. I also didn’t have green onions so I used a finely chopped shallot.
I halved all the quantities to make this feed two people instead of four (just say no to cooked egg leftovers). The recipe came together quickly and was very delicious and satisfying, and I’m generally sort of lukewarm on scrambled eggs. But the flavour added from the smoked paprika and the sausage was excellent, and I loved the texture contrast of crisp pieces of asparagus and crunchy (but not crouton-level) pieces of pan-toasted bread with the soft eggs. I also dusted the top with a bit of finely grated manchego. I’ll just be over here fantasizing about eating this for brunch outside in nice weather… with people I love… possibly in Spain…
Also this week: I made the brussels sprouts & brown butter salad, hopefully for the last time until next fall (as good as it is, I am feeling done with such foods). In our fridge is a massive bottle of sweet chili sauce we bought at Costco during a time when we used it a lot, and then seemingly stopped using it altogether, because it’s remained 7/8ths full for as long as we’ve lived here. We had a pound of wings in the freezer, so I mixed some of it with a bit of gochujang and rice vinegar as a sauce for them, and made a radish & cucumber salad in ginger-lime dressing as a side. I loved the little extra sourness and spice from the vinegar and gochujang— in my opinion sweet chili sauce can be a little too sweet on its own.
Media:
I liked this piece, on fatigue with making weekday lunch during this extended period of working from home. I have long been part of the group of people who always bring leftovers to work for lunch, either because I couldn’t afford to eat lunch out, or because a 30-minute break was hardly long enough to go get food and still have time to eat it, or because I worked in a place with very few options nearby. So I don’t feel like the change has been as noticeable for me (though I do have to go to the warehouse three days a week). But the truth is that if you’ve been working from home, lunch can feel like less of a “break": either because you have to think of something to make, then make it and clean up, or because you don’t feel much respite when you’re working and eating in the same space, and there’s very little to look forward to about a lunch foraged from a fridge of unexciting leftovers or assorted bits of veggies and cheese.
Of course, not everyone was taking a real lunch break pre-pandemic; we know the desk lunch was all too common, as people were expected to get more and more done in a day. And with many ‘open plan’ offices it could be difficult to separate your break time from your work time— if you were still at your station, people deemed it okay to ask you things about work, even if your computer’s screensaver was on and you were eating a sandwich. But it seems the things we miss about office lunch breaks are the same things we miss about everything else we’ve lost during the pandemic: a sense of freedom and community. Clocking out and physically leaving the building to maybe try that new bao place down the street, or going into the lunchroom and discovering that it’s someone’s birthday, and there’s a cake from T&T to share.
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 donations I can use towards cookbooks or future treats are much appreciated. Finally, there is only one correct answer to this query (it’s crinkle).