Cupboard Chaat

Jen did this just now and it totally worked:

Dried chickpeas (those snacky things you see)
Mayonnaise
Ketchup
Wasabi powder
Lime juice
Curry powder
Mint
Oregano

Be Your Own Chinese Takeout

Wanting to undo cooking ruts, I circled back to the two Chinese cookbooks I’ve liked using. The first, Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, is encyclopedic; you can easily get lost in it. The other is Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes From Hunan Province by Fuchsia Dunlop.

I was going through Mastering to get some ideas for Friday night and ended up finding this simple cauliflower recipe for XO Cauliflower (page 334). I had a head of cauliflower and a jar of XO sauce that I hadn’t opened yet, so it seemed obvious. She has you blanch the cauliflower for 30 seconds, which is a nice trick to par-cook it — part of me never thought of that before but another part has stubbornly held on to this notion that you somehow “lose vitamins” when you boil vegetables . . . [googling] . . . the consensus seems to be that sometimes you sort of lose nutrients but it kind of doesn’t matter (glad I looked that up; and yes, we immunize our children). She also has you put baking soda in the water, which is this scent you immediately recognize from Chinese restaurants but could never place (somewhat related, this spaghetti-ramen-baking-soda hack is intriguing). The XO, I realized, is basically the same umami as anchovies — illuminating/demystifying. She adds ginger, too; the whole dish is really good.

For some reason I was craving beef, like the crispy orange beef in the cheap takeout places. I got “some beef that isn’t ridiculously expensive for a stir fry” from the butcher; not sure what he gave me, but it worked. The Beef with Cumin in Revolutionary (page 102) looked like a winner: the dishes in northern China using cumin are so refreshing and interesting and we’ve enjoyed them the few times we’ve eaten them around town. This was super easy, too: marinate the meat with wine, soy sauce and potato flour, fry (or in my case “fry”) the beef in peanut oil, then pull it out, add ginger, garlic, chili and cumin to a small portion of the oil, then add back in the meat, along with scallions and sesame oil. Nice flavor, and obviously much nicer than normal takeout.

Going For Pickle, Or Hot Dog

We eat a chicken a week around here. It’s easy to buy in advance, and the one- to three-day salting technique provides flexibility.

Whole chickens usually come with that baggy of parts, which is when my OCD tendencies kick in and I feel compelled to use them somehow. The neck thingy is good for lunchtime gruel. I use the [googling to see what the fuck the thing is — oh, right that’s what I thought it was called] gizzard in gruel, too, but I’m not sure what flavor it imparts. Occasionally there are hearts. There were two in this chicken. And then of course there is the liver (or livers, if you’re lucky).

The liver is kind of a robust flavor to add to gruel, so I usually don’t use it in there, but then it ends up not ever being used, so I’ve been determined to use it. Lately I’ve been doing a quasi pate.

Today I had in my head “pickle” or “hot dog,” so I tried this:

Ground coriander
Dill
Mustard
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Salt
Pepper
Chicken liver sauteed in butter with hooch brandy flambe.
Greek yogurt

It was all good. The yogurt and coriander gave it a tart taste which made it taste light. We had leftover bread that we used to dip in the sauce.

Brassica Oleracea

I’ve been making this Alton Brown broccoli recipe a lot lately, probably because it ranks high in searches for “roasted broccoli” or something.

Actually, I should clarify that I use this recipe for the temperature (425 degrees) and time (10 minutes). A lot of it I ignore, omit or change. For example, I don’t ever use cheese, mostly because I have this idea that it “takes a lot of effort” to unwrap cheese and grate it. This is strange because I already have the microplane out, but for some reason it’s “a lot of extra effort” to unwrap cheese. I also don’t use bread crumbs, mostly because I don’t understand why. So we’re left with broccoli, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper.

The one tip I appreciated from this recipe was to mix the stuff by hand in a bowl before spreading it on a baking sheet (or cake pan, as specified in the recipe). It’s better to do this than mix it in the pan; better coverage.

Anyhow, so starting with the base of oil, garlic, salt and pepper you can then add other elements; this is what I’ve been goofing with. I’ve looked at The Flavor Thesaurus to get ideas. The other day I mixed some anchovies in with the garlic/oil/salt/pepper stuff; this worked well. Today I goofed with the broccoli and garlic recommendations in the book, adding ginger and oyster (flavored) sauce. I think it was good.

On Lamb

This Melissa Clark recipe for Lamb-and-White-Bean Chili was good. Full disclosure: I omitted the two poblano peppers (and two small green peppers substitute for the two poblano peppers), the cilantro (both the finely chopped stems and the leaves for garnish) and the two small jalapenos. Also, I switched the white beans for some very old white tepary beans I had in the cupboard and had been meaning to get rid of. I skipped the lime, as well, but we added dried mint afterward. So I sort of made this recipe.

How many recipes does this happen with? For me, it’s probably 90 to 95 percent of them.

Jen has been wanting to eat more lamb, so we tried chili with lamb. I think it’s kind of great: beans love fat, or more accurately, people love beans that commingle with fat. Speaking of oozing lamb fat, there was a good tip in this recipe, which was to brown the meat and let it rest on a paper towel on a plate, which soaked up a lot of fat.

For a cocktail, we tried a Jack Rose, which Jen read about in the new, improved Sunday Motherfucking Times Magazine. The hook in this particular piece in the new, improved Motherfucking Magazine was “the classic cocktail that never got invited to the oldies reunion.” It was OK. To be fair, we used the Applejack on hand and not the Laird 100-proof straight apple brandy in the recipe. But as they say, don’t let the accurate be the enemy of the available.