what's cooking? part 5: 2017-2027

Lucky Peach book is a bit frustrating. The pictures are funny, and the intro matter seems good. But the recipes themselves feel oversimplified at times. The feedback loop of finding a recipe that excites you, making it, and loving the results feels unbalanced because the book does a good job getting you excited for recipes that are more like jumping off points to something good. I've had better luck finding a recipe in the book, researching alternatives online, and making a hybrid recipe. In the end, the process feels less simple than using a more prescriptive book with slightly more complex recipes where you consistently love the results.

I can see that. Economy noodles are now a standby but yeah it’s more a riff than a recipe

Was it Jacques Pepin? that says one should only use cooking recipes as guidelines and not to the letter? Because produce and fruit that you select will always have different ripenesses/sugars/starches, everyone has different cooking facilities, nothing can ever be controlled enough to make the perfect recipe. When I make noodles/dumpling dough from scratch, I never measure anymore but instead go by feel.

I’m kinda obsessed with this nyc dish I’ve read about called curry lamb noodles, I think lucky peach has a recipe? (Nb I have never had the dish but it sounds amazing). But I’m always too lazy to make noodles from scratch. I need to get over that.

xp I guess "a riff" feels more like "cooking" and would have been great for me had I acquired an interest in cooking while younger. But, for example, a scallion pancake dipping sauce recommendation of 1:1 soy sauce and dark rice vinegar is such a bad riff for something that can be so much better with just a bit more if you throw away your book's ethos of simplicity.

but I agree that you can't blindly trust a recipe. I definitely had to go way outside of the annoying volumetric measures for dough given in the recipe for said scallion pancakes. But my complaint is more about "this recipe is missing something" that makes cooking it not worthwhile and not just balancing the flavors presented in the recipe.

Oh, the lamb curry noodles is a big thing at Xi'an Famous Foods (used to be a basement stall in Flushing, bourdain visited, now they are a chain). Their noodles are delicious.

I didn't really get into cooking until the last 5 years or so. Mostly because my partner was vegan for so long I was kind of over it and so we made boring stuff (ha!) I also can't really cook meat well because of this.

The key to noodle/dumpling dough, and this may be obvious, but you really need to use warm water. It literally takes me under 4 minutes to make dough and then I let it sit and kneed it more later.

All of our soy type of dipping sauce is the same. 1/2 vinegar (it doesn't matter what kind to us), 1/2 soy sauce (but if the soy sauce is super salty we might do more vinegar), slivers of a clove of garlic, and sometimes a dash of hot chili oil if we have it.

i'm gonna be a little sad to move away from my vegan housemates that have caused me to experiment in that realm more than i otherwise would have, BUT i am pretty chuffed to be able to use fish sauce, shrimp paste, and whatever the heck i want to when cooking.

It literally takes me under 4 minutes to make dough and then I let it sit and kneed it more later.

This made the think (aside from the fact that i'd like to try my hand @ dim sum-type doughs) that: "i have a pasta roller, why don't i use it more?!" the machine does the kneading as dough goes through it ffs making the process so damn simple

and oyster sauce! (I'm sure the mushroom stuff is also good)

xpost. My parents bought me one of those automatic pasta machines when I was younger. I would make pasta in it every day during the summer just for myself. I made bagels twice in it too. I love those things.

made a simple red sauce this morning with tomatoes from a friend's garden roasted with garlic, onion and some dried herbs, then pureed. just now finished rolling out some fettuccine to go with it. the semolina dough was so easy to work with (Isa Chandra recipe) it only needed a dusting of flour after it was cut into shape.
https://i.imgur.com/6DwSqM4.jpg

Ohhhh, I should look up the Isa Chandra recipe. That looks good from what I can see.

i've been wondering about how good/easy homemade vegan pasta was -- the only recipe i know (which is ruhlman's from 'ratio' and pretty idiot proof) involves eggs, obv

i unintentionally misled. SRY! was looking @ something or other that had Isa's name on it yesterday. but the recipe i used was in actual fact this:
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/12044/eggless-pasta/

it was EASY. made dough in kitchen aid (which isn't necessary for this but i figured what the heck). took literally a minute to come together. the roll out took another 15 (for half a batch)
the resulting noodles were fantastic

have probably watched this video 50 times over the last year. something's so relaxing about this guy's approach to sandwich making. I'm sure he is also very annoying to some people:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbDDTnV-WS4&sns=em

a generous colleague brought in the ingredients to make us all the fried bologna sandwich today. v good, though I'm sure the meat sourcing/making is likely the most important part of the endeavor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbDDTnV-WS4

other personal sandwich revelation has been dutch crunch bread, which I'm sure most bay area ilxors will roll their eyes at

I will take Dutch crunch over fucking sour dough any day of the week (I’m a Bay Area ilxor) but I would put all American bread in the trash for any kind of New Zealand bread

dutch crunch is a torture device masquerading as bread imo

That's tiger bread isn't it?

It is, yes.

We are having an academic group/late housewarming thing tomorrow around lunch. Is it a cop out to just order a bunch of pizzas and make a salad, hummus, put out fruit? I have a terrible time of knowing what to cook for a larger group of people, especially of many backgrounds. Everyone is happy with pizza right?

Pizza’s great. Order at least one plain cheese for the hard to please and anxious types, try to find out if vegan or gluten-free or both will be in demand, get some sweets too.

Spouse doesn't eat cheese/meat so we totally have the vegan thing covered. Ugh dessert. I have an open bag of spicy haribo.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bonappetit.com/recipe/iceberg-salad-with-italian-dressing/amp

Salad is great if you love generic italian house salad like me. Add tomatoes and/or olives.

I love generic italian salad. It's the type of thing I would love for people to just put in front of me. Oddly enough I don't think I have bought iceberg lettuce since college.

We're making hummus right now. Whipping up the tahini, lemon juice, garlic beforehand makes a big difference.

Speaking of pizza I just moved and new neighbor has a beautiful outdoor pizza oven in shared space and invited us to help ourselves to it. It's been over 100 degrees basically since I've been here so this is supercool. Roasted some salmon n yams/spuds in it last night. Gonna start making pizza in it soon.

picked up some mole base in LA last weekend so making mushroom/tempeh mole tacos. haven't done this in about a year so am excited. But that's tempered a little bit cuz i can't wait to make this, which looks like something i could enjoy daily while it continues to be 100 **cking degrees for the next couple months or whatever: https://mykoreankitchen.com/spicy-cold-kimchi-noodles/

That looks delicious. I should try to find some somen noodles and somen sauce.

I am going to try to make orecchiette from scratch tonight. I was going to make it two nights ago and then realized the dough I made wasn't right for it (supposed to just use semolina and water for it, who knew?!)

i want to play w/ pasta making but a few things i owned didn't make my recent move - one of those being my pasta roller. i have a torn rotator cuff so ain't abt to roll out noodles by hand. anyways, that recipe i posted up a ways from allrecipes was sublime semolina dough recipe if you're needing one

there are lots of shapes that don’t require major-league rolling, orecchiette definitely being one.

see, if i had the roller i could manage the rolling part with one hand. i cld deal with that.
but i'm talking kinda serious shoulder damage though (like lifting 5 pounds w/ right arm will cause pain so bad that it's hard to sleep). not sure if it's from 30 years of playing hockey and working in kitchens and all the stress that both of those entail, but when i had left shoulder operated on a few years back (been perfect ever since) the surgeon called what i had going on in my rotator cuff "crab meat" cuz that's what it looked like. not good. i'm afraid i now have similar issue on the other side so have to be mostly one-armed for awhile and hope it clears up at least somewhat.

I am debating whether to get a roller or not (or just getting a 20+inch rolling pin/dowel) because I thought I could get frustration out with rolling pasta, but that has not been the case. It is a lot of work when the dough isn't near perfect. I was getting pissed the other night when my dough kept shrinking back when rolling it out. I let it rest for a couple of hours so I am not sure what the deal was.

hmm, one thing that may or may not help is to not go back and forth over the dough. if possible just roll out in one direction to help avoid working gluten (that's how i approach pie dough and things like that). semolina is surprisingly high-gluten. imo that's why the roller machines completly rule - one just needs to bring the dough together, let it rest 1/2 hour, the machine kneads as it rolls. winnerwinner

Yeah, I have been doing different proportions of eggs, water, semolina to AP flour. I need to get some oo flour next time. One thing I just figured out is to not to rely on measuring anymore. I am really good with dumpling dough so I should just go by feel, like I normally do. The Pasta Grannies really made me realize different pasta shapes do better with different types of dough.

But it was probably overworked. All the videos have people kneading a lot longer than I would normally do it.

Orecchiette turned out really well even if slightly too thick. My hands hurt a little from being clumsy about the rolling out of the shape. It took a while to figure out where to position the board, myself, the back of the knife and no flour on the board so I could get the drag. Going away for while in 2 days and using up groceries so did a kale, carmelized onion, garlic, lemon zest, weird leftover tomatoes, banana pepper thingey for it.

the first time i did it they were a little too thick as well. getting each piece to that perfect point where the center is thin but doesn't break is the hard part.

FFS, I finally got motivated to make one of my favourite dishes last night (first time since I had my baby) and made enough for two nights but today I got a cold and can't taste any of it

kept coming across recipes that call for liquid smoke so picked some up the other day. made tempeh bacon that was pretty tasty on a baconlettuceavocadotempheh sando. and just prepped "tomato lox" which has kelp powder for "oceanic" qualities, smoke, soy sauce, and that's about it. gonna make some pasta with cashew cream sauce and lay some "tomato lox" slices on top and see if it puts me in the mind of salmon in cream sauce. i love salmon but hate to support the farmed salmon industry and the good stuff is a little beyond my student budget these days i reckon.

I love this recipe for tempeh bacon:
http://www.yourveganmom.com/your_vegan_mom/2008/08/the-b.html

tomato lox sounds pretty good! where'd you find the recipe??

i just stumbled upon it randomly here: https://www.carrotsandflowers.com/vegan-ny-bagels-tomato-lox-recipe/
it was the second vegan lox recipe i looked at, the first one involved roasting carrots then shaving thin slices, but i opted going with the former.

xpost: i'll try that one next time, ty. looks like it might be better than the one i used. do you bother steaming the tempeh ahead of time when you make it, just1n3?

I always have in the past but I don’t know how much it matters with such a heavy marinade?

I’m really sensitive to bitterness though, so I probably wouldn’t risk not steaming it

tha tomato lox was deece, not sure if i'll make that again though

Culurgiones look freakin' sweet! def. gonna (try and) make these tomorrow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjGcUI4CS0E

Yeah, I am going to make these ^^^ at some point when I am back home in my kitchen.