shapes of things

tasty stew & sweet loaves, and getting humbled by my oven

I’m obsessed with this espresso mug I found in the garbage

Hello again, my friends. I know I’ve been talking a lot about the move, and I hope I can stop soon, but it really does make you evaluate the way you’ve been living and all the things you have. We’ve gotten our new home to a fairly functional level, which makes it even more difficult to care about the boxes and things we still need to deal with. We aren’t hoarders, but nor are we minimalists— we just… have a lot of stuff we like, that’s all. So, of course the last thing I need right now is to be bringing more things into our apartment, but sometimes the perfect thing happens to finds you, and you simply accept it.

We got rid of our martini glasses after our last move because we never used them, but a few years went by and I started to get tired of drinking martinis and cocktails out of rocks or collins glasses, so I was sort of vaguely looking for a pair of coupe or Nick & Nora glasses. It wasn’t a huge priority, just something I’d keep my eyes open for at the thrift store and whatnot. Anyway, our building doesn’t have an official ‘free shelf’, but people tend to leave those sorts of things beneath the bulletin board in the recycling & garbage room, where they’ll sit for a few days for people to take before they get thrown in the trash bin. And one day someone appeared to have dropped off their entire collection of 1980s glassware, some of which was that heavy crystal I hate, but some of which was a little more interesting. I spotted a cute one with little etched pineapples, and after a minute, managed to find its mate. It’s a small thing, but it brought us a lot of joy, especially for something that cost us nothing at all. Now my mission is to make cocktails that will use up some of the liquors we don’t want to keep around anymore, and drink them out of these.

this was Drambuie with orange, lemon, and bitters. it was… fine.

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We finally managed to get to Ikea in order to solve our main pantry situation, and I’ve been getting more into the swing of things in the kitchen now that I don’t have to dig around in Rubbermaid bins to find a bag of pasta or whatever type of dried bean or flour I’m looking for. (Please don’t ask about the baking cupboard or spices.) On the morning we were getting ready to put the new shelf together, Liang texted me to say that she’d accidentally locked herself out of her building while out with the car, and asked if she could come hang out for awhile. She brought orange juice so we could make mimosas with the leftover sparkling I’d opened the night before, and humoured me by watching Star Trek Beyond with me while Jeff built the shelf.

It was also Superbowl Sunday. None of us care about football, but Jeff tends to like being part of Events so we put that on afterwards. We have a Macguyvered tv antenna built out of some coat hangers and a 2x4, which means we’re kind of at the mercy of whatever we can pick up, and for whatever reason we get a lot more US channels than Canadian ones at this apartment. Anyway, the first channel we found showing the game was a Spanish-language one, and I highly, highly recommend watching any sport with Spanish commentators. Some of the ads were in Spanish, too, even the celebrity ones, and it made me wonder if they’d recorded multiple versions of them, or if they were overdubbed.

The football game was boring, but I do appreciate having an excuse to eat weird dips, and I made this buffalo cauliflower thing I’ve had on my radar for awhile— I love buffalo sauce but don’t like to eat wings very often. It was easy to make and really, really good. Same feel as wings but vegetarian, and not as messy. It has a lot of dairy, but I was able to use lactose-free versions of most things, and because I’m not a huge fan of blue cheese I used goat feta, which is still nicely pungent and creamy. We ate this with tortilla chips and celery sticks, which was the perfect mix: the crunch of both is great with the soft dip, and the celery sticks are nice and cool to contrast the spiciness of the cauliflower and the saltiness of the chips. I won’t be waiting for another football game to make this again.

We let some bananas go liquid accidentally, so one evening while I was getting nachos ready for dinner Jeff came into the kitchen to make dough for banana bread at the same time. I know two people making different things in the same kitchen at once might sound like a nightmare to some of you, but our kitchen has a decent layout and we’re pretty good at navigating around each other, so it works pretty well, and then the loaf could go in the oven while we were eating! The recipe he’s been using for years is based on this one, and you can still make it without a food processor; you just get a more uniform texture and finer crumb by blending the liquid parts first. We used chocolate chips this time instead of nuts, and I like to sprinkle shredded coconut on top so it toasts while baking to add a little crunch.

It seems like everyone has been making this Smitten Kitchen French onion lentils & farro lately, and I had to try it too. I am loving how much easier it is to do things in my largest pans now that I have an adjustable burner at the front of the stove so it actually heats a 12” pan all the way to the edge. I was pleasantly surprised by how fast the onions caramelized, even at a very low temperature. I halved the recipe so it was fine in a 12” sauté pan with a lid, but for the full recipe I probably would have gone with a dutch oven.

Resist the urge to add other seasonings to this— it’s rich and lovely as it is, and tastes very much like French onion soup, as advertised. For a gluten-free option, Deb suggests short-grain brown rice, as you’ll want something that won’t cook too much faster or slower than the lentils. I’m pretty new to cooking farro, and was really happy with the flavour and texture I got with this dish. And I appreciated that so much of the time involved in making this was hands-off; I could set timers and return to my computer to write my gay little stories in the meantime. I mean, you can do whatever you want, which is maybe not that.

It’s also important that, as I familiarize myself with my new kitchen and its appliances that were actually made in the last two decades, I remain humble. While Jeff was still at work, I was putting together a little sheet pan roast of some fennel sausage, potatoes, carrots, and cabbage, and lost my grip on it as I was putting it in the oven. Most of the food, covered in oil and potato starch, landed directly in the bottom of the oven, and I of course cursed loudly enough that the birds roosting in the trees outside could probably hear me. I then shut the oven off and started trying to scrape everything back onto the pan with a spatula while screaming autistically with my mouth closed. Some had fallen into the gap between the door and the oven, landing in the drawer, necessitating cleaning of a bunch of stuff inside as well as the bottom of the drawer.

Jeff came home while I was standing in the kitchen with my pan of stuff on top of the stove, trying to overcome my agonies and figure out what to do, because I was of course catastrophically hungry by this point, too. He helped me wipe out the oven, and because it’s a convection with a flat bottom and had barely been used since we moved in, we decided the food was okay to still cook and eat. We did set off the smoke alarm while the oven was heating up again, but only once, and the food came out as delicious as usual… just forty-five minutes later than intended. The sauce I used was a grainy honey mustard with a little wine vinegar, because vinegar is always nice with cabbage, and I put a little dill on top to serve. No picture (this dinner knows what it did).

While packing to move, I found a jar of Nutella I’d completely forgotten I had, and I knew I had to make the chocolate babka again. I finally did it this week after much forgetting and procrastinating, because it really is kind of a project, even when you have the filling ready-made. But it’s pretty similar to making cinnamon buns, in that most of the time involved is just waiting for dough to ferment and rise in a few phases. I always need a little more flour than the recipe calls for, probably because of the humidity here, but the dough is easy to work with. The most intimidating part is twisting the dough pieces together after spreading the filling, in order to form that fun shape, but even for someone as impatient and clumsy as me, it’s pretty straightforward. And even if you fuck it up a little, it’ll still come out of the oven looking great.

I was out of chocolate chips for the streusel topping, so I used chopped bittersweet chocolate for a nice balance with the sweetness in the filling. You can definitely halve the recipe if you only want to make one loaf, but why do that when you can make two and put one in the freezer for when the craving strikes next? It freezes well and there is something so special about eating a treat that is too labour-intensive to make very often— especially when you already did the labour some time ago.

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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. Finally, I have never been much of a Seinfeld guy, but it’s impossible to make chocolate babka and not think about this.