the gathering storm
soup swap, instant pot dal, and more sourdough ventures
I hope everyone enjoyed their bonus Friday that happened on Wednesday, and now here we are at Friday again. After setting the clocks back last weekend, time makes even less sense than usual, so why not have a midweek stat holiday. I almost forgot to finish writing this newsletter, because on Thursday my brain kept telling me it was Saturday and it had already been done.
Last Saturday we went for dinner at my mom’s house, since she and my stepdad are leaving soon for a three-week vacation and we hadn’t seen them since our family dinner at Bodega. My mom always feels the need to apologize when she serves a meal that she feels isn’t as creative as something I would make, but I’ve never had something she cooked that wasn’t excellent. And she deserves so much credit for spending years cooking for my stepdad, who can’t eat a lot of foods due to health issues, and my youngest brother, who can’t eat a lot of foods due to who he is as a person, and still managing to make interesting and healthy meals rather than just salmon and rice every other night.
We had a mini Thanksgiving type of meal, with a rolled turkey breast and gravy, a potato and yam gratin with parmesan, roasted vegetables with button mushrooms, and cornbread, which I always forget how much I like (possibly because it’s like having a little bit of crunchy cake with your food). After dinner we sat around the table drinking wine and playing old board games— we found used score sheets inside the Taboo box that had been there since my sisters and I played it as children. We stayed too late, as we always do, and finally dragged ourselves out to the car at midnight. I’m glad that we won’t have to suffer through another winter like last year, isolated from our friends and family, but it doesn’t yet feel quite normal to be inside of another person’s home. It feels comfortable, and familiar, but there’s still a quiet little alarm going off inside my head, wondering if this is ok.
Last Sunday was the soup swap, which we also did in November of last year. It was a hideously stormy day, but there happened to be a break in the rain just at the time we all met up at the park, which felt like a blessing (never underestimate the power of soup). It was still windy and cold though, so we didn’t stay long after having a quick chat and exchanging our jars and takeout containers and ziploc bags of soups. Jeff made sweet potato red curry with rice and kale, Tim made butternut squash with coconut milk, Liang made mixed mushroom stew with kale and farro, and Amanda made harissa vegetable with quinoa and curry leaves.
My soup was French lentil with tarragon and thyme, something I’ve been making periodically from the Veganomicon for the past ten years. It’s a hearty soup with only a handful of components and nothing too fancy going on, which, when you taste it, will make you wonder what in particular makes it so perfectly delicious and satisfying.
I’m definitely guilty of looking at recipes going, “there’s no way this list of ingredients is going to taste good enough,” and sometimes I’m right, and sometimes, I’ve just had my brain poisoned by the competitive desire to make everything a tiny bit more unique and impressive. Some things are just wonderful when they’re made with a few simple ingredients— I love that this soup can almost always come together with things I have in my fridge and pantry anytime from early fall until spring. The one wildcard is tomatoes, which, as we all know, taste like someone photocopied a tomato if you buy them between November and April, but you can easily use canned! The soup will not mind, and neither will you. This is the best thing to eat with a slice of fresh bread on a cold dark day.
Speaking of bread, a few weeks ago I noticed my sourdough starter, which I’d been keeping at 100% hydration, wasn’t doing too well. The hydration level refers to the weight of water added compared to the weight of flour in feeding, and since what I was doing clearly wasn’t working I decided to try something different: I split it in two and did one at 50% hydration, and the other at 70%. Both seem to be much happier, but unfortunately this means I am now responsible for two starters. So I’ve been making a lot of bread products. This week, I tried out English muffins, the perfect product for making breakfast sandwiches, or simply conveying copious amounts of butter to your mouth.
The dry milk powder in the ingredients list was puzzling, but I just used milk instead of the water, and omitted the powder. I don’t know who keeps powdered milk in their house, but it isn’t me. The dough was satisfyingly puffy and fun to work with, and while I was surprised to find that they’re cooked on the stove instead of in the oven, I enjoyed watching them rise up and brown right there in the pan, like little bread pancakes. I discovered that my cutting round was actually closer to 2.5” instead of 3”, so I ended up with more, but smaller, muffins (17 instead of 12). We tried one with a friend’s homemade apricot jam while they were still warm, and although they didn’t come out quite as craggy as store-bought, they were chewy and sour, with a nice crispy brown crust. And there are worse things than having to have 2 small breakfast sandwiches instead of 1 regular size.
My mom sent me home with a head of cauliflower she wouldn’t have time to use before her vacation, and I planned to make the roasted aloo gobi from Indian-ish. But since I didn’t want to only have cauliflower and potatoes for dinner, I also attempted to throw together something in the instant pot, inspired by dal makhani. In the past I’ve used this recipe in order to get the right flavours, and it’s delicious, but I didn’t have time to mess around with getting the ingredients perfect. I kind of winged it based on what I remembered, and it came out reasonably well, if not quite as rich and deeply flavoured. The recipe also uses a traditional pressure cooker, not an instant pot, so I had no idea what is signified by how many whistles.
I started by cooking onions, garlic, and ginger in the pot after toasting cumin seeds in ghee, and then added more spices: kasoori methi, garam masala, hot paprika, cumin, and coriander (sadly I forgot about the cinnamon and cardamom). To deglaze, I used a small chopped tomato and some juice from a can of tomatoes I’d opened earlier in the week, and then added a bay leaf, the beans, and enough water to cook them and create a sauce. I used whole urad dal and no kidney beans this time because I’ve found that if you don’t soak them first the beans take longer to get tender than the dal. I think in the future I’d cook the kidney beans first and add them in later, or used canned instead.
The dal were cooked nicely after 30 minutes, plus natural release time. I mashed some of them around a little to thicken the sauce, and stirred in big scoop of Greek yogurt for creaminess. Although it wasn’t the exact restaurant-style dal makhani of my dreams, it was still a flavourful and filling curry that came together fairly easily in the time the potatoes and cauliflower were roasting. I’d forgotten that using the instant pot meant I wouldn’t be able to make rice at the same time, so we ate this with pieces of tortilla, the naan of the people who need to use up their leftover bits of groceries.
Also this week I made a variation of the Six Seasons butternut squash risotto, which I’ve previously written about here. I had no leeks this time so subbed in a shallot, and I had some chanterelles, and sautéed them in butter to fold in with the parmesan at the end. It was so perfectly autumnal, and cooking the risotto in the pan after cooking the mushrooms really added to the flavour. And to use the remainder of the delicata squash from last week’s hoisin-braised squash bowl, I made a squash and onion pizza with fresh oregano, inspired again by Erin Alderson (recipe here). When we took the mozza out of the fridge we found it resembled a mossy birch branch, so used a mix of feta and parmesan instead. It wasn’t quite the same level of creaminess, but still pretty nice. I definitely want to try it with some fresh mozzarella.
Media:
A somewhat light read this week was this hilariously biting essay as a response to someone stating, in real life, to a single person shopping at Costco, that single people shouldn’t have Costco memberships. The implication that people who live alone somehow do not know how to properly use food before its expiration, or do not deserve those sweet deals simply because they don’t have children to care for, is outlandish, and the boldness of someone saying it to the face of their acquaintance would have had me beside myself with rage. I’ll save the best gems for you to read yourself, but here’s just one nugget of truth:
“Couples split rent, mortgages, bills, vacations, the cost of gifts, the mental load of running a household (lol I’ve seen these husbands, no they fucking don’t), pet costs, transportation costs, you name it, they’re splitting it or getting a tax advantage for it. Who actually deserves to save a little coin on a multipack of razors, I ask you?”
Plus, we all know that the only people who don’t deserve Costco memberships are the people who stop their cart crosswise in the aisle, and the people who “just run to grab something” when they’re already at checkout.
Unrelated, but ahead of American Thanksgiving, here is a helpful list of what you should and shouldn’t make ahead if you’re hosting a dinner, and how best to go about it. This will also soon be useful for my Canadian friends, as the December holidays always seem to arrive in a flash, although some of the dishes here are definitely particular to American traditions. When we went from having a house where we could use two ovens to just one (the normal amount of ovens to have), some adjustment was necessary, but it’s really just about being smart with your prep time and the dishes you choose to make. And remember, especially after the past 18 months, hosting a dinner is about spending time with the people you care about, so don’t fret if your gravy isn’t ready at the right time or you forgot to take a soup out of the freezer. Chances are, everyone will be so happy to be there that it won’t make a difference.
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. Finally, as fall is coming to a close, we should remind ourselves of the truth about certain fruits.