rain (I don't mind)
noodles all the way down, good tofu, and reworking routines
Hello again, friends. Are the rest of you lower mainlanders as happy about the rain as I am? Lately I’ve been feeling like that Reductress post titled “how to say ‘the weather is so warm and nice today’ with the appropriate level of concern”. May weather in March. June weather in April. It ain’t right. But this is more the way I expect April to be. Drought and fire are already a big concern due to our abnormally dry winter, so I will gladly take a ten-day forecast with rain on all of those days. And I have been happily cozying up inside lately anyway, watching new episodes of X-Men ‘97 and the final season of Star Trek: Discovery, and now, the first round of the playoffs. Being a sports fan is certainly my most embarrassing trait (much worse than my rabid Trekkie-ism), but it has been many long years of not watching my team in the playoffs and I am ready to be hurt again.
I apologise for the unexplained absence last week. I was going through a period where it felt like I forgot how to cook, because nothing I could think of to make seemed like the thing I actually wanted to eat, and it basically resulted in a week of noodles all the way down. I made this in a hurry and overheated the peanut butter so it got pasty instead of creamy, but it tasted good and I look forward to trying it again when I’m paying more attention. I forgot to marinate tofu and instead cooked an okay pot of lemon & parmesan casarecce loosely inspired by this orzo dish, when all I really wanted was a corn dog. I made vodka sauce for the other half of the packet of casarecce which was delicious as always (I used coconut milk instead of cream), but still, somehow, not what I wanted. Jeff went to the Italian deli and bought fancy hand-rolled pasta, and we pulled some of the pesto I made last fall out of the freezer for it, along with some peas, serving it with extra parmesan and more fresh basil.
On Sunday, after I yet again failed to remember to marinate the tofu I kept meaning to cook and Jeff came back upstairs from washing the car and said, “It’s ten after six?!” we went to the pub instead. It was a beautiful evening and the first Canucks game of the series, so it was a fun atmosphere; people were wearing jerseys and the staff handed out little playoff towels to wave if (when) a goal got scored. And I finally got to have a corn dog.
I know that I function best when I have sort of a vague idea of the things I want to make rather than a full and exact meal plan before I shop, and then I can let what looks fresh or is on sale determine what I cook, rather than saying, “I need broccoli for this dish, and zucchini for that one, so I’m going to the store to get broccoli and zucchini.” This was easy enough at the old house because the Spud bin would get delivered on Sunday and show me what I’d have to use up that week, and one of us could go to the store to fill in what else we needed, but I suspended the bin deliveries sometime before the move and haven’t yet reactivated it. For one, the quality of Spud’s produce seemed to decline after the company got sold and they changed warehouses, and for another, it’s a bit more complicated to set up a bin delivery when you’re in an apartment without external access to the individual suite.
Maybe I’ll start it up again at some point, but for now I’m still getting comfortable with finding my new routine, and trying not to be too mean to myself about the fact that I’m not at 100% of my food-making functionality in our new place yet just because it feels like I should be after almost three months. Cooking is always necessary, but it’s more difficult to find comfort and ease in it when you’re still getting used to how it’s different for you now. In my old kitchen, where I baked and marinated and sautéed and pickled and simmered and chopped and seasoned for almost seven years, I could operate practically by muscle memory. I had all my routines down to a science. Here, even though a lot hasn’t changed, a lot has changed. I’ll open the wrong cupboard because that’s the space where the bay leaves were at the old house. I’ll turn on the back burner instead of the front one because that’s the one I used to use for boiling water. I’ll look in my bright, spacious, mildew-free fridge and wonder why the produce drawers are so empty.
Anyway, all this to say that I dragged myself to the store on Monday with a list, and ended up buying a handful of different or additional things because they didn’t have what I wanted, or something else looked better, or was a better deal, or whatever. When people talk about cooking intuition, this is the sort of thing that tends to come up— how you can alter dishes based on what’s in season and things like that. And for people who aren’t yet that confident in knowing how to make those choices, recipes like this one for green curry glazed tofu are nice because they offer a few different alternatives to the suggested vegetables and explain how they’d fit in the recipe. I was using green beans instead of the suggested broccoli, and I meant to add some frozen corn too, but forgot (I’d come from the gym and was cooking while very hungry).
The method here is a bit different from how I’d normally make a coconut curry, and I’ll definitely revisit this in the future, since I bet it would work with any curry paste. It was so easy and fast and the tofu turned out amazing. Usually I fry it in a cast iron separately from my pot of curry, and add it in at the end. I halved this recipe and did everything in a wok, and using a little of the curry paste mixed with the coconut milk to cook the tofu pieces gets them nicely crisp without a lot of work: some of the elements of the curry paste will caramelize or toast against the surface of the tofu, and the coconut milk adds fat. I did choose to cut my tofu into cubes like I generally would instead of larger slabs though; they’re easier to eat this way and you get more crispy surface area. This would have been even better with an additional vegetable, as I’d intended, but I still finished my bowl down to the last grain of rice.
I finally, eventually, got around to marinating the remainder of this brick of tofu like I’d intended to do the week before, to eat with a warm potato salad made with grainy mustard. This is an Isa Does It recipe I couldn’t find online, but it’s easy enough: chop and boil potatoes like you would for any other potato salad, and meanwhile, cook some sliced onion in a large pan, add garlic, and then equal amounts of mayo, mustard, and vegetable broth (a quarter cup for each pound of potatoes). Add the potatoes and salt and pepper, and more broth if it looks dry. I love it because grainy mustard is delicious, and the leftovers are just as good cold as they are reheated. A potato tip: warm water binds their starch, so give the strainer and the pot you used to drain and cook them in a quick scrub under cold water before trying to wash them with soap and warm water as normal. Any potato gloop stuck to the dishes will come right off.
The tofu marinade, to complement the salad, was just a little tomato paste, garlic powder, broth, and dijon mustard with tarragon. I roasted it for about half an hour at 425°F, flipping once to spoon some extra marinade overtop. It always comes out really nice. And finally, before doing the sauce for the potato salad, I cooked the rest of the green beans in a little butter, and then tossed them with a little garlic and lemon in a bowl, keeping them warm until the rest of the food was ready. This was delicious all together, and felt extra satisfying because I was the only one home and I’d made a really nice dinner for myself when it would have been easier to just do a grilled cheese or something. (It certainly had nothing to do with the fact I’d already had grilled cheese for lunch.)
I’d also been craving a crunchy lacinato kale caesar salad, only to be crushed to find that the store was out of lacinato kale when I went. They had romaine hearts on sale— not my preferred choice, but if I’m already compromising by using either lettuce or green kale, may as well choose the one that saves me money. Croutons are, of course, also the preferred choice for this salad, but toasted panko crumbs work in a pinch, too. I usually make my own mayo for caesar dressing using this hand blender method, which always comes out perfect, and I got to use it a few times this week: for the caesar, the tuna salad sandwich I made to eat with it, and the potato salad the following day. It doesn’t last as long in the fridge as a store-bought mayo, but it’s so cheap and easy to make, and doesn’t make so much that it’s a struggle to use it up, so it tends to work out just fine.
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, especially while I’m still looking for work, are greatly appreciated. Anyway, because I mentioned X-Men earlier, here, have one of my all-time favourite tweets.
How do I know you are far superior to me at the art of cooking? And writing? Your description of the marinated tofu had my mouth watering and had me thinking...maybe I should try tofu. This has previously never happened to me, and it's all your fault!