It’s Chinatown

One thing I’ll definitely appreciate after this pandemic ends: restaurants. Turns out, it’s awesome to go somewhere, and have somebody who isn’t you cook the food and clean up after. In our neighborhood, there are a slew of restaurants open for pickup and delivery even now. But, out of an abundance of caution, Jess and I have held off, cooking all of our meals at home instead.

To make meal planning easier, we’ve settled onto a rotating thematic schedule: Italian Sunday, Asian Monday, Taco Tuesday, etc. And then, each week, we choose specific dinner dishes to slot in for given days. Sometimes, we’ll opt for relatively straight-forward options. But, recently, as we’ve increasingly missed restaurant favorites, some menus have become increasingly convoluted.

This past Friday, when we were charting out plans for this week, Jess said that she was craving Han Dynasty’s dry pepper style tofu. So I agreed to make that for her, and a chicken version for me. Plus, I hadn’t had dim sum for months, and so I decided I’d make some pot stickers and siu mai and egg rolls.

As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Fortuitously, about two years back, the Korean grocery chain HMart opened an amazing location on the Upper West Side, about twenty blocks up from us. So, yesterday afternoon, I hoofed it up there, to buy the slew of ingredients needed that aren’t available at our local Whole Foods. Sadly, my work for the day had taken longer than expected, so I didn’t head out until late in the afternoon, and therefore didn’t make it back until 6:30pm or so. At which point, I still had to infuse chili oil, marinate chicken, deep-fry tofu, prep the sauce and ingredients and stir-fry it all up, and make the fillings for and hand-form and steam and fry the dim sum.

Which, not surprisingly, wasn’t exactly quick. By the time we ate, it was nearly 11pm. And though it was delicious, and I even managed to freeze a ton of prepped dumplings for future, speedier use, I was exhausted and overwhelmed by the end of the night. Post-dinner, as I had used pretty much every pot and pan and bowl we own in the cooking process, Jess and I only managed to make it through cleaning half of it, before giving up for the night, and picking up again to finish this morning.

All of which is to say, the next time we get the same meal delivered from Han Dynasty, I’ll be unbelievably thrilled to pay them $60 to do all of that for me while we sit watching TV on the couch. After last night, it would still seem cheap at even two or three times the price.

Undelivered

I suppose it was fortuitous that I was having moral angst about the Shipt grocery order I managed to put in two days ago.  Because, after it was delayed one hour at a time for more than twelve hours running, Shipt eventually just canceled entirely.  So, yesterday, Jess and I strapped on our PPE, and headed to Whole Foods for a gigantic grocery stock-up.  Fortunately, the shelves were surprisingly fully stocked, and we had brought along a rolling grocery cart, my large backpack, and several giant IKEA bags.  The half-mile walk home was a bit of an ordeal, but I’m now at least feeling better about the state of our pantry, and my ability to pull together ‘real’ Passover seders tonight and tomorrow.  The remaining issue, however, is produce: while, each week, we’ve carefully plotted out our menus to waste as little as possible, and to stagger dishes by the shelf-life of ingredients, after five or six days, we’re inevitably down to just potatoes and onions.

So, I was very happy to discover this list on Eater.com, of restaurant suppliers now delivering directly to consumers.  Unlike pre-existing grocery delivery services, all these still seem to have plenty of excess capacity.  And, also unlike pre-existing grocery delivery services, I can actually feel good about ordering from them; doing so would be a great way to support the New York restaurant infrastructure.  Will post with a review / walk-through of my experience if I manage to wedge in an order at the start of next week as hoped.

Cook the Quarantine: Spaghetti with Tomato and Basil

To keep the theme going, another favorite simple pasta: a refined and authentically Italian spaghetti and tomato sauce.

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Spaghetti with Tomato and Basil

Ingredients:

  • 28oz can whole San Marzano tomatoes
  • 1/4 cup, 2 tablespoons, and 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, divided
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano
  • 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • 2 stems of basil, leaves on, and 4-8 leaves cut into chiffonade, divided
  • 6 whole cloves garlic
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1 teaspoon red chili flakes
  • 1# spaghetti

Directions:

  • In a mesh strainer over a bowl, roughly crush tomatoes, removing seeds with your thumb.  Set aside crushed tomatoes, reserve strained juices, discard seeds.
  • Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium heat. When the oil is hot, transfer tomatoes to the pot, add salt, cook 5 minutes, then smash with a potato masher.
  • Add reserved juices to the sautéing tomatoes, reduce heat to medium-low, and cook for 30-45 minutes, smashing and stirring occasionally.
  • While the tomatoes cook, heat the 1/4 cup of olive oil in a small saucepan over low heat. Add garlic cloves, basil stems, and chili flakes. When the garlic is lightly browned, remove from heat, allow to cool 5 minutes, then strain the oil into the tomato mixture, and discard the browned garlic / basil / pepper flakes.
  • Boil a large pot of water, salted enough to taste like the ocean.
  • Cook the spaghetti until just short of al dente.  Reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta (don’t rinse it).
  • Add pasta to the tomato mixture, along with reserved cooking water and final 2 tablespoons of olive oil.  Cook, tossing, until the sauce coats the pasta.
  • Remove from heat, and add butter, cheese, and chiffonaded basil.  Toss, season with salt and pepper, and serve immediately.

Cook the Quarantine: Spring Pasta

Jess and I will often call my parents to check in while we’re cleaning up after dinner. And though my parents are usually jealous of our meal, they have little interest in my passing along a recipe. Like most normal people, they tend to eschew dinners that involve dozens of ingredients and an overflowing sink-full of pots and pans.

Still, last night, I banged out one of my favorite simple spring pastas.  It’s delicious, yet also easy enough that even they’re willing to give it a whirl.  In case you’re similarly looking for something to cook while cooped up at home, voila:

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Spaghetti with Rosemary-Roasted Zucchini & Tomato

Ingredients:

  • 2.5# zucchini, trimmed, quartered, and cut into 1″ pieces
  • 2.5# tomatoes (plum or otherwise), trimmed and cut into 1/2″ pieces
  • 3 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
  • 1/4 cup olive oil, plus 1 tablespoon more separated
  • 1 tablespoon rosemary
  • 2 teaspoons kosher salt
  • 1 teaspoon oregano
  • 1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
  • 1/4 cup grated Parmesan, plus more to garnish
  • 1/4 cup chopped parlsey
  • 1# spaghetti

Directions:

  • Pre-heat the oven to 450°.
  • On a rimmed baking sheet, mix the zucchini, tomatoes, garlic, 1/4 cup olive oil, rosemary, oregano, salt, and pepper.  Spread into a single layer.  Roast 20-25 minutes, until the zucchini has just started to brown
  • While the vegetables are roasting, boil a large pot of salted water.  (It should be salted enough to taste like the ocean.)
  • Cook the spaghetti until al dente.  Reserve 1/2 cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta (don’t rinse it), and return it back to the pot.  Mix in the final tablespoon of olive oil.
  • Pour the reserved pasta water onto the baking sheet of vegetables, and scrape up the browned bits.  Stir the vegetables and juices into the pasta, along with the Parmesan and parlsey, and toss to combine.
  • Serve garnished with the extra Parmesan.

Bon appétit!

This Stinks

For years, Jess thought that she didn’t like fish. Turns out, what she actually doesn’t like is the taste (and, even more so, the smell) of oxidizing fat. Growing up, the primary fish her parents cooked was sautéed salmon. Which, especially when cooked skin-on, is about as oxidized-fat-heavy as food gets.

In more recent years, Jess has discovered that she in fact really likes pretty much all raw fish (sushi!), as well as less fatty fishes (ed. note: the correct plural for multiple species) even when cooked at moderate temperatures – Amelie‘s seared Atlantic cod was a recent hit.

But, at the same time, she’s equally sensitive to a slew of other theoretically inoffensive fats once sufficiently heated. Especially in a small NYC apartment, where kitchen smells quickly suffuse the entire place. Even vegetables pan-seared in olive oil, for example, will sometimes set off her disgust response.

To mask the smell, her fallback is to light a stick of traditional Nag Champa incense, which is strong enough to cover pretty much anything else. The only problems is, I kind of hate Nag Champa in turn.

So, cooking is a bit of a crap shoot. As a culinary nerd, I often spend far more time than reasonable shopping for, prepping, and cheffing up our meals. But I do so with caution. Sure, as the excellent Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat makes clear, fat and heat make up half the secret to tasty food. But, at least in my own home, too much of either is a sure road to pungent mutually-assured scent destruction. Browned butter with a side of ashram is a win for nobody at all.

The Daily Grind

A few years back, mid-apartment-move, I unloaded my kitchen cabinets, and discovered I owned no fewer than a dozen different devices for making coffee. From Nespresso to Aeropress, Chemex to Bialetti, with French Press, vacuum brewer, SoftBrew, and even more obscure options between.

But what I didn’t own was a coffee grinder. Which, as a reluctant coffee snob, was sort of sacrilege. Sure, I knew that coffee ground moments before brewing was far better than a bag ground in-store left to oxidize on the shelf throughout its days of use. But I was also (perhaps penny-wise and pound-foolishly) cheap.

At one point, I purchased an inexpensive blade grinder, but the results were a bit of an abortion. Insert whole beans, pour out an inconsistent mess, a potpourri that ran from large unground chunks to fine silt. A consistent grind required a burr grinder, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to spring the $200 for a Baratza or any of its competitors. So, for years I subsisted on in-store-ground beans.

Until, that is, a few weeks ago, when I stumbled across a fairly excellent review for the Secura 903B. A bit of Googling confirmed: while not anything unusual, it was perfectly capable – an automatic ceramic burr grinder that reliably makes uniform grounds. And at just $40, cheap enough that I almost couldn’t justify not buying it.

The grinder arrived on Friday. Jess and I picked up freshly-roasted beans yesterday afternoon. This morning, I (Chemex) brewed a first test run batch.

The result: why the hell did I wait so long to buy a burr grinder?

If you make coffee daily, there’s no way in the world this sucker isn’t worth the ten cents a day it will cost you to make far better cups through the rest of 2020.

Animal Style

Here’s an interesting thought experiment I kick around a bunch:

When we look back 100 years, we’re inevitably shocked by some of the moral positions that much of society at the time took for granted. (Cf., regarding women, Blacks, Jews, etc.)

And, at the same time, we’re certain to have just as many blind spots ourselves. So, a hundred years from now, why will people of the future be appalled about us?

Though I have a slew of contenders (our handling of global warming, the ways we blithely give up our privacy for scarce little in return), high on my list is the way that we raise animals industrially for food.

And, at the same time, I also strongly believe the healthiest human diet involves eating animals (or, at least, animal-derived foods, like dairy and eggs).

So, as we push into 2020, I’m trying to figure out how to square that circle. I’m thinking carefully about where and how I’m willing to eat animal products, about how I can do so while still feeling good about the food systems I’m supporting in the process.

It’s definitely still a work in progress, and I suspect whatever I come up with will add some amount of inconvenience and expense to my life. But, as I’d really like to be on the right side of history here, I’m not sure I have much choice.

So Sous Me

Years back, I remember seeing a comedian do a bit about how he wanted to open a restaurant called I Don’t Care, You Choose, so he could finally eat at the place his wife kept requesting.

Which, in short, is how my dinner conversations with Jess tend to go. And while that’s sort of an issue on date nights when we’re headed out somewhere fun, it’s even more of a disaster on the majority of nights, when I instead cook at home.

Between Equinox and Composite, my schedule is already pretty nuts, and I often get home later than I’d like. So, frequently, I end up texting with Jess from the subway, then calling her from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, trying to coordinate a high-speed shopping and cooking plan.

Until, that is, two or three weeks ago, when I cribbed an idea from my old friend Helen Jane, and started planning out the entire next week of meals every Saturday afternoon. The secret, I discovered, was catching Jess late on Saturday afternoon. The rest of the time, she didn’t really have strong opinions on food. But sufficiently hungry pre-dinner, she’d suddenly come up with remarkably creative and impassioned ideas.

Mostly, I do the actual cooking in our house. But it turns out that Jess makes an excellent executive chef to my hands-on sous, dreaming up meals I’d never suggest on my own. This past week, she requested scallops with a cream drizzle and summer succotash; tacos al pastor; watermelon gazpacho with fancy grilled cheese; Chic-fil-a style chicken sandwiches; and a steakhouse wedge salad.

None of which I had made before, precisely. But, with her executive chef-ing complete, I could put on my sous chef hat and figure out how to execute. Anal retentive as ever, I could even bang out triaged shopping lists – what to grab at the Sunday UWS farmer’s market; what I could stock on an oversized weekend grocery run; and what I’d need to grab on the way home the day of, though far more quickly than I had previously on my undirected post-work passes.

And I could strategize over the span of the week, rather than just day by day. Tacos al pastor took three days of cooking, and achieving Chic-fil-a juiciness required brining the breasts overnight. By banging out a bunch of fried tenders at the same time as the sandwiches, I could serve the wedge the day after, with chicken as the protein (along with an excellent cucumber dill dressing). And I could put half-used veggies, herbs, and sauces to subsequent-day use, wildly reducing our food waste.

So, in short, there seems to be a partnership-inspired restaurant to be had after all. And all it takes is a little stomach-timing savvy along the way.

Mise

Recently, I was talking to a friend who is trying to improve his cooking skills. Knowing that I attended culinary school, he asked if I had any tips. First and foremost, I told him, he needed to cook using ‘mise en place.’

A French term that roughly means “everything in its place,” mise en place is about setting up all of the ingredients needed before you start to cook. Like on a television cooking show, it’s placing all the prepped ingredients – peeled, chopped, ready to go – in little bowls and containers you can pull from when the time is right.

More than anything else, cooking well is about paying full attention to the food. Watching, listening, and smelling as food cooks, tasting and seasoning along the way.

If you go the route of most home cooks, you toss in the first ingredients right away, slicing and assembling the rest in parallel as you go. And though experienced chefs can make that work in a pinch, it’s far too much distraction for anyone still honing their skills.

Setting up your mise first adds only a few minutes to the total cooking time, but it pays huge dividends in the quality of food you can produce. So if you want to improve your cooking, try it out yourself. Prep first, then cook. Mise en place.

Best Served Cold

First, an admission: I hate iced coffee.

I love – love! – the hot version, whether a lovingly pulled single-origin double espresso or the cheap crap bodegas sling in paper cups.

But, for whatever reason, the cold stuff doesn’t do it for me. Nonetheless, I realize I’m an outlier, and therefore spend the summer watching my friends and family suck it down. In the past few years, the iced coffee trend has been towards cold brew. Yes, it’s smoother and sweeter than hot-brewed coffee, with less than half the acidity, and more caffeine kick. But, at most joints, it’s also upwards of double the cost of a hot coffee.

In part, that’s due to additional expenses on coffee shops’ part: plastic cups, straws, ice machines to crank out ice. But in larger part, it’s also due to the hipster factor; people really want cold brew these days, so shops up the price because they can.

But here’s the dirty secret: cold brew coffee is super-duper easy to make, dirt cheap, right in your own home.

Here’s what to do:

  1. Buy some coffee beans. Go medium or dark roast, and ideally not crap.
  2. Grind them coarsely; fine and medium-fine grinds will end up cloudy and silty.
  3. Find a big pitcher, and add the grounds and water in a 1:5 ratio. I.e, 1 cup grinds, 5 cups water.
  4. Leave the pitcher somewhere out of the sun for 12-24 hours (any less and the beans won’t properly extract), stirring occasionally during the first few hours.
  5. Strain out the grinds. You can use a French press (pour in the mix, affix and press down the top, pour out the cold brew), pass it through cheesecloth (or, if you’re ghetto-fab / in a pinch, a paper towel), or (for the clearest coffee) put it through a coffee filter lining a funnel or the swung-out body of a drip coffee machine. Really, you should probably just get a Chemex, as it’s perfect for this, and makes truly excellent hot coffee, too.

Voila. You now have cold brew concentrate that will last a couple of weeks in your refrigerator (or, thanks to Jess, about 48 hours in mine).

To serve, fill a glass completely with ice (as the concentrate is strong and needs the ice to properly dilute), pour in the coffee (and milk, if you’re weak), and enjoy.

For bonus points, collect the money saved over time, and fill a swimming pool with it a la Scrooge McDuck; the cold brew makes a perfect poolside drink.