random access memories
past & future cocktails, cozy dinners, and many lemons
This past weekend, the hot yoga studio at which I was assistant manager until start of the pandemic was being disassembled and cleared out in preparation for the sale to its new owners. One of my coworkers, who was there cleaning up, started a group chat to post pictures of things people might want to take home, and I found myself absolutely seized by the fear that I might not get to drink out of one of those imperfect ceramic mugs again. I dragged Jeff with me to go pick up one (along with my bin of yoga clothes‚ half of which I threw straight into the garbage). We also came home with a new office chair for Jeff, some picture frames and storage jars, and a set of fitness bands to hopefully motivate us into working out at home more often.
It was hard though, being there and seeing all the custom-made wooden furniture, much of which was built by the owners themselves, either taken apart or in the back of a truck. Seeing the business and community awards we’d received over the years piled up in a milk crate. Seeing the cozy space empty of plants and string lights and cushions and filled instead with boxes and piles of wood and dust. So many businesses, where people have built a life for themselves and their community, have crumbled under the incredible weight the pandemic has placed on everything, and there will likely be more to come. It’s strange to think of all the people I greeted over the years and know that some of them, I’ve already seen for the last time.
When we finished packing up our things and saying goodbye to my coworker, I wanted to go to Chez Christophe, an incredible bakery and chocolatier just up the block that gave staff at the studio a discount. Their almond croissant was a treat I gave myself on what would turn out to be my last day of work there, when everything was just starting to feel overwhelming and ominous, and I thought I’d get another one to bookend my journey. But when we got there, we saw that they’re now closed on Sundays. I know it’s just a croissant, and I can go there and get one another time, but it felt so potent having that small change hit after so much has happened in only a few months. Sometimes you just don’t get the closure you’re looking for. We went back to the car and on the way home, stopped at Cioffi’s cucina to pick up sandwiches to bring home for lunch. Life goes on, and at times you know roughly what that’s going to look like, and other times you don’t have any idea at all.
While digging around in the freezer for another bag of peas, I found some chicken legs that I purchased on sale back in the summer with plans of barbecue, and then put away and promptly forgot about. I put them in the fridge to thaw without really having a plan, and settled on chicken adobo. I referred to the recipe from Lucky Peach’s 101 Easy Asian Recipes, and the NYT version, both of which are by chef Angela Dimayuga. The main difference is that one uses a more subdued Filipino brand of soy sauce, and the other uses coconut vinegar, so I made adjustments for what I had (Braggs and white vinegar) and did my best.
Chicken adobo, if you’ve never had it, is braised meat in a pot of salty, sour, creamy sauce made slightly spicy with dried chilies and whole peppercorns, and cooked until the meat is nearly falling off the bone and the sauce is thick like gravy. While thickening the gravy, we threw the chicken into the oven in a cast iron— an optional step in the Lucky Peach version of the recipe if you want the skin a little crispy, which, who wouldn’t? It was all amazingly flavourful on a fluffy bed of jasmine rice. As a side to balance the salt we made a romaine salad with ginger-carrot dressing (also from the Lucky Peach book), the kind you get on the salad that comes with your bento. A perfect match. I can’t wait to make this dinner again once I get some coconut vinegar and a slightly less intense soy sauce.
Because I was distracted this week getting back into the swing of a work schedule along with *gestures vaguely towards the states*, most of my other meals were pretty basic: fusilli with roasted tomato sauce from the freezer, a vegan shepherd’s pie to use up some leftover tempeh and potatoes that were starting to sprout, carrot & lentil stew. On Thursday, my day off, I made a variation of this baked pasta from Smitten Kitchen. Her zucchini & herb one is a go-to for me in summer and early fall, so I assumed I’d like this one too.
The combination of sausage and broccoli is a bit of an inside joke with my family. When my mom was in midwifery school and away three nights a week, my dad would be frantically trying to feed 6 kids dinner while getting ready for his night shift at the casino, and his meals tended to be one of the same handful of options: spaghetti, eggs & pancakes, BLTs, or breakfast sausages with steamed broccoli and rice cooked in vegetable broth. We all joked about the seemingly random combo, but it was actually a pretty comforting dinner (plus, it was an excuse to eat HP Sauce). While in Italy, I ordered a sausage and broccoli risotto at a restaurant in Florence, surprised to discover this was a fairly common pairing— we all thought our dad had invented it out of desperation.
Anyway, I had a hot Italian fennel sausage from the freezer, and no broccoli rabe but lots of good old regular broccoli. While frying the crumbled sausage, I half-steamed the broccoli over the pasta water before finishing it in the pan, and then set everything aside to make a soy milk béchamel. If you’ve never tried it, this works pretty much the same as with dairy milk, but soy milk does have its own taste, so it won’t be an exact substitute. In the recipe Deb recommends making 1.5 times the amount of sauce if you like a creamier pasta bake, which I’m glad I did; I think it would have been dry otherwise. I had a little bit of smoked vegan cheeze I wanted to use up, which I used in place of the mozzarella, and I also added some fresh basil to brighten it up a little. The smoky flavour of the cheeze was a nice match with the broccoli, and the creamy sauce countered the spicy sausage. I wonder if my dad would like it.
My cake of the month, made on Halloween, was not festive or even really appropriate for the season. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I found the recipe: lemon-almond butter cake. You begin by making way more lemon curd than you actually need for the recipe— I had about half leftover, which is fine because lemon curd is amazing and multi-purpose. If you’ve never made citrus curd before, it’s easier than you might think: butter, eggs, sugar, zest, and juice in a bowl overtop a pot of simmering water, stirring until thickened, then resting it for an hour or two in the fridge. I’ve even made a vegan version before using tofu, coconut water, and cornstarch, and it worked beautifully and did not taste like tofu, because citrus pectin is magic.
The cake itself is a basic yellow butter cake, but with the glorious addition of toasted ground almonds taking place of some of the flour. I toasted sliced almonds and crushed them with a mortar & pestle, since toasting almond flour seemed pretty risky. After pouring the batter into the pan you add evenly spaced blobs of the lemon curd on top, creating a sort of filling that appears on each slice of cake. My cake rose up all around them though, so they weren’t visible once the cake was baked, and in some places had created little caverns with the curd underneath. This was possibly due to having to use a 10” springform instead of a 9” because the set Jeff bought in the mid-2000s has the stupidest sizes— 10”, 7”, and 6”— who makes a 7” cake?!
At any rate, my cake didn’t turn out like the recipe photo, but the flavour and texture didn’t suffer for it. In fact, the recipe comments are full of commenters raving about how forgiving the recipe is, replacing flours, cutting the sugar, changing cooking pans, adding more filling, and so on, and still getting great results. The cake was moist from the almonds and crispy at the edges from the butter, and the flavour combo of toasted almond and tart lemon curd is outstanding. I served it with amaretto whipped cream, which I made in a measuring glass using the hand blender. I also forgot to add the extra toasted sliced almonds before baking the cake, and ended up sprinkling them on at the end.
In further lemon adventures, we bought a big bottle of vodka to try making our own limoncello. Like many of us, I once thought limoncello was sickening and barely drinkable… until I tried it at Cotto Enoteca in Burnaby. They make theirs in-house and it is a delightful post-dinner drink that evokes lemon tarts or sorbetto— nothing like the Pledge-scented abomination that comes in bottles from the big brands. Some of the craft distillers are getting in on this, too; The Woods’ version is lightly spicy and particularly nice. But all you need to make your own is plain vodka, a plethora of lemons (7-10 for 750ml of alcohol), sugar, and time.
To infuse the vodka, you use only the lemon peel, which brings the flavour and sweet scent of lemon without the tartness of the juice or the bitterness of the pith. I peeled some using a vegetable peeler, which worked extremely well— Jeff used a knife on some others and had to go over a bunch of the pieces a second time to get rid of the remaining pith. Then, all the zest pieces go in a jar and the alcohol gets poured overtop, and you just leave it for at least five days and up to a month. It’s currently sitting on our bar, turning a nice shade of yellow. I’ll report back once it’s done and the simple syrup has been added.
A side effect of this is that we were then left with 10 skinless lemons, so I made a growler full of lavender lemonade, another Bryant Terry recipe. The lavender is infused into boiling water like a tea, and then added to the lemon juice and sugar, chilled in the fridge for a few hours. It turned a beautiful pink colour, and its sourness is very nice in a tall glass with a shot of gin and some rosemary.
Media:
Speaking of gin, with the US election this past week… why not a booze essay? I loved this piece for Good Beer Hunting by Alicia Kennedy— whose powerful newsletter inspires me every week— charting her time during the pandemic with different drinks. If you drink, you may or may not have noticed your alcohol consumption increase (no judgement if you did), but you undoubtedly noticed some changes. Maybe you went to make an old fashioned but the bourbon was empty. And you couldn’t justify a trip to the liquor store, so you found yourself doing bar inventory, wondering what you could make with raspberry Sour Puss and Harvey’s Bristol Cream sherry… not that this happened to anyone in my house.
Previously, my Friday tradition would be to stop at one of the breweries for a pint on my way home from the seabus after work. In March and April, we ordered beer for delivery from breweries less than two blocks away, and I held up my ID at the living room window to employees I’d happily chatted with at the bar only weeks ago. Jeff and I looked at our wine rack and felt no qualms about opening the ‘special occasion’ bottles, because who knew when we’d get one of those again? We might as well have a 12-year-old bottle of Similkameen Valley cab sav with our takeout pizza.
As the summer crept in, and all the temporary patios with it, the idea of having a drink somewhere other than my own house was intoxicating, and I allowed myself the previously under-appreciated treat of a beer at one of the brewery’s picnic tables, an Aperol spritz in the herb-filled garden patio of a beloved pasta restaurant. Here, the author’s joy at experiencing one small aspect of a previous life that seemed impossibly far away is vivid:
“…just the sight of my favorite drink sweating in a Nick & Nora glass as I sat on a stool not inside my own apartment felt like some of the most luxurious moments I’d ever had in my life. The world went from black-and-white to Technicolor, and though I knew I would, I wanted to never take any simple pleasure for granted again.”
I wish I could stop writing about the pandemic. If only it could stop affecting literally every aspect of our lives. But for now we can make room for our sadnesses, and revel in our small pleasures… perhaps in the form of a cocktail you learned to make when you could no longer have a bartender do it for you.
Thanks for reading— if you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with someone new! Lastly, I know it’s a bit late (or is it??), but here is the perfect snack for election day.