sure enough
sourdough cake and drunk cooking
It’s been a tough week, hasn’t it? I don’t want to blame the stars, but it sure seems like everyone’s going through it lately. But at least it’s Friday now, and hey, it didn’t rain every day, and also there’s new Star Trek for the first time since June (if you are a Picard hater I understand and support you but I regret to say I will still be watching). So it can’t be all bad.
My workplace had a belated Lunar New Year feast this week at Pelican. I haven’t been for traditional family-style Chinese in awhile, and the enormous menu was sort of overwhelming. But we ordered a nice variety of dishes and left the restaurant very full and happy (and I managed to only bring up Star Trek twice). I particularly liked the cod and tofu hot pot, the gailan with garlic, and the crispy noodle chow mein, but everything was delicious. My boss encouraged me to take home the leftover bones from the crispy skin whole chicken we’d ordered, which I gladly did to add to the mostly-empty bag of bones now in my freezer after making broth the previous weekend.
Last weekend, Jeff and I met up with Amanda to drink a new and delicious IPA at Beere after she happened upon it at the liquor store and decided it would be a good idea for us to get together and enjoy it at its source. It was a beautiful day, if cold, but we sat on the heated patio, watching people and dogs go by as we talked about art and food and the state of capitalist society. The patio got a bit crowded after an hour or so with what appeared to be competing birthday celebrations, so we relinquished our table to one of them (the lesbians with their dogs, not the bros who were yelling over each other) and headed off to Copperpenny instead.
We sat at the bar and deliberated for ages over the drink menu, which had changed since the last time I was there. I don’t remember the name of the one I ordered, but it was delicious— it had a dried orange slice in it and tasted faintly like iced tea. We were enjoying ourselves so much that, against our better judgement, we stayed for a second round: a negroni flight that we all shared, featuring one classic, one coffee-infused, and one smoked. Drinking them along with our truffle chips and warm bowl of castelvetrano olives felt very much like the height of luxury, something you just have to give yourself sometimes.
The thing about drinking two cocktails after having a beer in the middle of the afternoon, as we did on Saturday, is that then you come home with a decent buzz on and have to throw dinner together somehow, which is both defeating and kind of fun. I enjoy impressing myself with the fact that I’m good enough at cooking to make brown butter while half-drunk, haphazardly dicing potatoes before roasting them to perfection, grumbling all the while about how I’d rather order A&W. Anyway, I made one of my favourite winter salads, based on this Earls menu item which I’ve never actually eaten— I just saw someone eating it near me at the bar while I was there once and it looked and smelled so good I became obsessed with it, and had to create it myself. It’s outrageously tasty: brown butter dressing, roasted brussels sprouts and potatoes, with crunchy black kale and toasted nuts.
I make brown butter vinaigrette often enough during fall and winter: for kale salads or panzanella, to drizzle over a side of roasted root veg. The method in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is perfect so I always use that one, browning the butter and mixing it all up in a jar while the vegetables are roasting. Afterwards I toasted almonds in the same pan so they got a little of the buttery flavour, too. This time I cooked some farro in a pot at the same time as everything else, just to bulk up the salad a little (as mentioned, we had been drinking). The main thing to remember about this dressing is to use it on components that are warm or at least room temperature so the butter doesn’t start to re-solidify. Pickled or quick pickled red onion here is excellent to contrast the mild sweetness of the dressing, and a bit of parmesan wouldn’t be bad either.
I am still in my spaghetti squash prison, and look, it’s not that I hate spaghetti squash, it’s just that they’re not as versatile as other squashes, and we had SO. MANY. Nine. Nine! We’ve been making sure to scrape all the seeds into the compost that gets picked up by the city rather than our home compost so we don’t have this problem again next year. Anyway, we’re down to the last three finally, now that I’ve roasted another and put it into a smoked cheddar vegan baked mac again this week.
Even if this were literally the only thing it were possible to make with spaghetti squash, I wouldn’t be too mad about it, because it’s so good and satisfying. Even when I forget to cook the pasta until after I’ve already started the sauce, which I, uh, definitely didn’t do this time, it only takes a little over half an hour from start to finish (excluding roasting the squash). Don’t forget to turn the broiler on to brown the cheese and the breadcrumbs at the end, and try not to burn your mouth.
I made a quick stir-fry to eat with some rice on Monday night, just smoked tofu, eggplant, and some napa cabbage. I have a few sauces I like to make for stuff like this— Eric Kim’s gochujang glaze is one, but I also like hoisin mixed with a little chili oil and black vinegar, or, this time, sweet chili sauce with a spoonful of gochujang and a dash of rice vinegar. I like the little extra heat from the gochujang, and sweet chili can sometimes feel a bit too sweet, so the vinegar balances that out.
Every time I cook eggplant in a frying pan or a wok I get so impatient because it won’t all fit at once, but I do really like the sear on the outside from cooking it at a high temperature. I fry the eggplant first in a batch or two and take it out while I throw the tofu and cabbage in for just a couple of minutes, and then put the eggplant back and add the sauce, letting it caramelize a little. It’s easy and fast, but serving it with some gim on the side of the bowl and a nice arrangement of toasted nuts or sesame seeds on top might make it feel a bit classier.
On Valentine’s Day, a day I don’t really care that much about, I worked from home with cramps, and while browsing recipes for things to make with sourdough discard, found one for a chocolate cake. I started making it right away, obviously. The method had alarms going off for me, because it’s so different from how cake is usually made: you begin with a sort of dough made of the starter, milk, and flour, which you let sit at room temperature for a few hours, at which point the other ingredients get mixed together and added to it. The level of mixing for a cake had me practically shaking in horror, but it came out of the oven risen and soft, not at all the dense puck I’d feared.
The cake doesn’t taste like sourdough, either. It does smell a little malty, but the taste is more akin to using something like yogurt or sour cream in a cake, where the chocolate is still the dominant flavour but it doesn’t feel quite as sweet. I didn’t make icing for it and instead just dusted it with sugar, because over the weekend Jeff had made vegan ice cream with the rest of the syrup leftover from poaching some apples in wine last fall. The ice cream legitimately tastes like eating apple pie with vanilla ice cream, and while you might think that’d be an odd combination with chocolate cake, it really wasn’t! Or maybe I just have bizarre taste. Come over and try it for yourself.
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. Anyway this is the only type of discourse I want to see about those damned balloons.