now's the only time I know
nutella brownies and other foods for staring into the abyss
Happy Lunar New Year, especially to those of you born under the sign of the Ox! (I was born in the year of the Rat, last year’s sign.) I wasn’t feeling too great this week, so I didn’t have the foresight this week to make any traditional foods for it, but I might get around to some long noodles on the weekend. Or I might just buy a few oranges and call it a day.
A lot of us have been hitting a wall lately, and keeping up with even the bare minimum can be really hard. I don’t have much to say on this that hasn’t already been said before and better, but I’ll just remind you that sometimes taking care of yourself is doing meal prep and cleaning the bathroom, and sometimes it’s eating an edible, ordering two pizzas, and watching Road House. We’ve been trying to deal with an untenable level of stress for almost a year now, and if 90 minutes of guys trying to knife fight Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott helps to alleviate it for a little while, so be it.
After six months of writing these, it was bound to happen: I had a week where I cooked almost exclusively things I’d already talked about in previous newsletters. Linguine with puttanesca sauce, fried rice with mango, roasted aloo gobi with dal… I was a bit worried about what I might include. But as it turns out, I can talk a lot, so even with only a couple new things to share, this won’t be much shorter than usual. (Sorry!)
Wild sockeye was on sale, so I excitedly bought some to make the jerk salmon with mango slaw I’ve been thinking about ever since it was on the NYT Cooking home page. The vaguely listed ‘jerk paste’ in the ingredients and the broiling time of 10-12 minutes made me use the salmon recipe as more just inspiration instead of instruction. I made my preferred jerk spice blend and added ginger, garlic, and oil when I was ready to cook. It is somewhat different from most standard oven-cooked fish recipes, even ones with broiling, because you cook it skin side up so that it will blacken and the meat underneath will remain tender. I broiled for 6 to 7 minutes and it was perfectly cooked; you might get a better char using the original broiling time, but I also think the fish could come out a bit dry, especially if the pieces are on the thinner side.
I always love a new way to eat mango, a top-tier fruit, so I was happy to discover that this slaw is excellent. The recipe comments are a war between the bagged coleslaw supporters and the anti-waste people, because apparently the people who use NYT recipes are simply allergic to just minding their own business. Use slaw mix if you want to, and use the individual ingredients if you like that better, this isn’t difficult! Anyway, I already had carrots, so I bought a red cabbage and shredded them both in the food processor. (Aside: why aren’t there any cabbages smaller than my head? Please tell me your favourite things to make with red cabbage.)
Getting the mango sliced thin enough was a bit more work, but I just peeled the skin off first, cut the flesh from the pit, and then placed the pieces flat side down on the cutting board for slicing. Due to Jeff getting stuck at work on Saturday and me eating leftover pizza instead, the slaw spent the night in the fridge and was still really good on Sunday, even if the colours weren’t as appealing once the cabbage had turned everything else purple. The combo of the tangy-sweet slaw and spicy, charred salmon was so delicious, I kept saying, “this is so good!” and “I wish more things could have jerk seasoning,” between bites.
The last time we went to Costco I bought a two-pack of Nutella— or rather, because I love a bargain, Kirkland brand hazelnut spread. I admit two 1kg jars is a lot, but I’d seen some baking recipes I was interested in call for it and I didn’t want to feel like I was rationing it. My first test was the five-ingredient hazelnut brownies from Half-Baked Harvest: Super Simple. I’ve always been fairly skeptical of those ‘unreasonably low number of ingredients’ recipes that are purported to involve less time and effort than the original. I recall seeing a two-ingredient cake where the two ingredients were vanilla ice cream and self-rising flour, two things I would definitely have to make a trip to the store to buy, so how is that easier than a regular cake? But if you do already have hazelnut spread, this recipe is remarkably quick and easy: I mixed everything with a fork, in a single bowl, in less time than it took the oven to preheat.
Brownies are a nice treat to make on a whim, because they usually call for melted butter instead of 'softened’ like in cakes or cookies, so you can get them together without having to wait, and you can also sub coconut oil if you don’t have or don’t want to use butter. I added butterscotch chips instead of chocolate for a bit of contrast, and because I love the way they caramelize at the edges of the pan. The brownies came out cakier than the photo and description led me to believe, but I’m willing to admit that my eyeballing 1 cup of hazelnut spread so that I didn’t have to scrape it out of a measuring cup was possibly to blame. Still, this by no means made them inedible— they have the nostalgic flavour of a cherished childhood snack: a piece of hot buttered toast with Nutella. Next time, though, I’ll definitely use the measuring cup.
I’m about to bring up a holiday that we are almost as far away from as it is possible to be, but I promise it’s relevant. Each Halloween (obviously excluding last year), my friend Malloreigh, who lives in a popular trick-or-treating neighbourhood, invites a few friends over for a costumes-encouraged evening of movies, treats, and handing out candy to adorable children. The exchange is that everyone brings some Halloween candy (so she doesn’t run out early or go broke buying 7 bags of it herself), and she makes us all dinner. This dinner was usually her legendary vegan mac & cheese: crispy breadcrumb topping, melty cheesy sauce, and the unexpected, but not unwelcome, curry-esque seasoning. The recipe was published on her old food blog, which has sadly since been lost to domain squatters (an archived version exists here). Luckily, I’d long ago written it down on a recipe card with the ingredients I normally use, which are a bit different from her version. And the nice thing about making a friend’s recipe is that you think of them every time you make it!
Everyone has their own opinions on what makes a good baked mac, so a recipe for it is more of a guideline (as are most recipes, really). Vegan stovetop mac & cheeses often use a nut-based cream or vegan bechamel as a base for the sauce, and I find these don’t really do well when you transfer them to the oven: cashew cream gets pasty and dry, and vegan bechamel often remains stubbornly thin. So for this mac a can of coconut milk and a full brick of vegan cheese are the key to a thick, creamy sauce. Any 200-300g block will work— Chao, Sheese, and Earth Island are all pretty good (I’m not a big fan of the taste of Daiya, although it does melt very well). I like some vegetables to break up the texture a little, usually some broccoli and mushrooms browned in the pan. A couple teaspoons of curry powder, some mustard, and a bit of fenugreek give it a uniquely satisfying flavour that will make you go back for a little more, no matter how much was in your bowl to begin with.
Media:
Reading this piece in the Sun about two siblings taking over and revamping their retiring parents’ business in Chinatown, Kam Wai Dim Sum, felt so heartening after last year’s sad news of the closure of Gold Stone Cafe. The work of William and Susan Liu to keep their family business alive while adapting to the needs of the community is being lauded by city officials who pushed for a project to address both the cultural and affordability needs of people who live in the area.
“How they changed tack has been cited by Vancouver city staff as an example of what can be done with funding a five-year city pilot project to address commercial vacancies and the retaining of heritage businesses.”
It’s easy to imagine how an initiative like this could have benefitted someplace like Gold Stone, so it’s a hopeful prospect to have on the horizon.
On the off chance you’re not already a reader of Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter, I wanted to share her piece this week on peanut butter. I really encourage you to read it, especially if you don’t know much about palm oil, or how peanuts are grown and harvested, or that you can incorporate the oil into a jar of natural peanut butter by putting it upside down in the fridge overnight. You can hate if you want, but I think she is 100% correct, especially in this respect:
“We should be demanding fair wages, much more than a minimum wage of $15 in more than five years, and fair benefits, fair time off, fair rest so that the idea of stirring a jar of peanut butter isn’t looked upon as a miserable, onerous task.”
Capitalism has taken so much from us, and is constantly attempting to make us buy it back from ourselves under the label of “convenience”. We, and the earth, deserve so much better.
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. To close out the week, here is a meme about how easy it is to make people around you believe you’re good at cooking.