Kale 'n potatoes 'n guacamole

Even with my non-stick pan, I find making home-fries a little tricky. I hate to think how much potato-mass has been transformed under my watch into brown crud stuck to the bottom of the frying pan. Wasted. I've found a way to avoid this, though. The trick is to heat the oil first to a high temperature, and then, as soon as you add the potatoes, start shaking the pan lightly and quickly back and forth. The motion dislodges the potato slivers before they can thoroughly stick to the pan, but it leaves the same surfaces facing down the whole time. This gives the downward-facing potato surfaces time to get crispy and develop their own non-stick surface. After that it's all pretty straightforward; I'll leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.

Ingredients

Potatoes:
- 3 potatoes
- 3 cloves of garlic
- herbes de Provence
- salt
- chili flakes

Avocado:
- 1/2 avocado
- 1 tbsp soy sauce
- cilantro
- salt
- pepper
- 1 piece of sun dried tomato (aka fanciful garnish, not important)

Kale:
- kale
- 1 clove of garlic
- fish sauce

Tips:
- When you add the garlic is crucial. If you add it too early, it'll either burn before the potatoes are done, or there just won't be much garlic flavor left. If you add it too late, you'll be eating raw garlic and your pet emu won't speak to you anymore.

"Spanish rice"

This is basically just fried rice with different spices.

1. Sautée chili pepper, onions, and garlic until the onions turn translucent.
2. Add a spoonful or two of paprika and cumin, and a small spoonful of turmeric.
3. Add diced tomatoes (this time I used sun dried tomatoes because I didn't have any fresh tomatoes).
4. Cook until it's a thick sauce, then add the (pre-cooked) rice. Stir until well-mixed.
5. Add scallions (optional), salt to taste (fish sauce or light soy sauce would also work), balsamic vinegar to taste (optional), and parsley (optional).
6. Grate some cheddar cheese on top (this time I used sliced goat gouda, because I didn't have cheddar and I don't have a coarse cheese grater), and slice some avocado (or make guacamole).

This also goes well with black beans. Here's how I usually make those:

1. Start with some dry black beans. Soak them overnight (at least 8 hours).
2. Drain, put in a pot filled with water, and boil, stirring occasionally to keep the beans from sticking.
3. As the beans boil, foam will start to form at the top of the water. Scoop this foam out and get rid of it.
4. Once the beans start to get soft and resemble something one could eat, add a few cloves of garlic (whole), some dried chili peppers, a few spoonfuls of cumin, and a few spoonfuls of salt (of course, err on the conservative side, since you can always add more).
5. Boil until the beans are no longer crunchy -- if the water starts to get low before this happens, just add more.
6. After step 5, the beans are done, but you can also make refried beans by heating up some vegetable oil in a pan (not olive oil since it'll burn), and frying the beans on high heat, stirring vigorously until they start to turn into a paste.

Big noodles with dry tofu

Failure can also be delicious. This was my attempt at making pulled noodles (AKA beef noodles). To refresh my memory I watched a video (it starts around the second half -- the first half he's making shaved noodles). The kneading process seems to be: 

Pull the dough long, fold it in half, repeat.

The idea, as I understand it, is to align the gluten molecules. Apparently this makes it possible to do the next move:

Pull the dough long, fold it in half, put your finger in the crook of the fold, repeat.

This extra step keeps the two halves you just folded over from sticking back together; this means that every time you repeat this, instead of a better-aligned piece of dough, you get noodles.

Clearly I'm missing something, though. During the alignment phase, my dough didn't seem to want to stretch all that much. It would get to about a foot long, and then start ripping. I wonder if my glutens were already too tangled (I kneaded the dough a lot) or too tough (I let it sit overnight) or not the right composition. Or maybe there's just more of a trick to the stretching process than it appears. Maybe the dough wasn't warm enough? Not the right type of flour? So many mysteries remain unsolved.

At some point I realized eating pulled noodles was not in the cards, and I started thinking about other ways to use this not-quite-stretchy-enough ball of dough on my cutting board. I cut it into sections, then used a rolling pin to roll each one into a long, flat strip, one section at a time. I rolled a strip, then folded it lengthwise, making it thicker (deeper) but not as wide. Then repeated this a few times. The result was a handful of somewhat thick, somewhat uneven, wide flat noodles. Then I dropped them in boiling water for about 5 minutes.

For the tofu, I took a large piece of dry tofu (from Seattle's very own Northwest Tofu Company), sliced it really thin; in a pan, I fried some ginger, a big clove of garlic, and a tablespoon of spicy fermented bean paste (辣豆瓣醬）. Then I added the tofu slices and fried them (煎) on each side until they were crispy. Finally I added a splash of soy sauce and a few green onions.

I actually made the tofu the night before and put it in the fridge, so it was cold when I ate it. I like cold dry tofu, but I'm sure it would be good hot too.