Fennel farfalle

A lot of times people ask me "Hey, what's fennel farfalle?" I decided to find out.

Ingredients:
- two large cloves of garlic
- half a big fennel bulb
- half a can of diced roasted tomatoes, sans pesticides. Fresh tomatoes would've done if it were summer here.
- 1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
- 2 shakes chili flakes
- salt and pepper

Method:
1. Heat olive oil on low heat, then add the chili flakes and fennel, and cook until the fennel is translucent but not brown -- maybe 15 minutes? Actually, half way through that, add the garlic too.
2. Add the tomatoes and cook on low heat at least another 15 minutes, but longer is fine too.
3. Add the balsamic vinegar and salt. Red wine would work, and according to the top two or three Google results for fennel pasta sauce, ouzo or pastis is good too. But who has those things. Let's stick with balsamic vinegar.

I'm going to keep experimenting with this idea, because it was good, but it could have been better. Also I still have half a bulb of fennel. I think making it a little more sweet, sour, and umami would work. I might add some Chinese black vinegar and miso paste and see what happens (hopefully not throwing up).

Spicy Sichuan noodles

This is sort of a take on the Sichuan cold noodle dish I used to get outside my apartment in Chengdu. Those noodles were more like ramen, they didn't come with bok choy, and they were actually not warm, though, so this is more of a tribute than a successful recreation.

I made the noodles the usual way, but this time I used one egg, and replaced the other one with water. Mainly because I was running out of eggs.

For the sauce, I mixed:

• 3 Tbsp spicy chili oil
• 2 Tbsp soy sauce
• 1/2 Tbsp rice wine vinegar
• 1/2 Tbsp black vinegar
• 1 Tbsp white sugar
• Ground Sichuan pepper (to taste)
• 1 chopped scallion sprig (just the dark green part)

All amounts are totally approximate.

Then I briefly fried the bok choy and garlic in a pan on high heat with a little salt.

Finally, I boiled the noodles for about three minutes, and mixed them in a bowl with the sauce, and put the bok choy on top. 

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.

Winter fettucini

Winter pesto, according to sources, is a kind of pesto that Italian people eat in the winter, when basil is scarce but parsley is plentiful. It has a spiciness and bitterness that stave off the winter chill and fortify the body, and a vibrant green -- brighter than basil pesto's often yellowish hue -- that relieve the color-starved eyes of winter and prevent macular degeneration. This isn't that recipe, though, because I don't have a blender.

What this is, is a close approximation.

First, make some egg noodles as described previously, cutting them into fettucini-sized strips. This time, I don't know what I did differently, but after half an hour in the fridge, the dough was extremely tough. It took about ten minutes of vigorous rolling with a pint glass just to get the whole thing flat enough to cover the cutting board. So the noodles were thicker than previous times, but this turned out to be a happy accident -- they sported a welcoming texture.

Actually, one thing I did for the first time was add black pepper to the eggs before I beat them into dough, but I'm not quite ready to believe that black pepper contains dough-toughening enzymes.

For the sauce, take a bunch of parsley and a couple cloves of garlic, and chop them as finely as you can / have the patience for. Remember, the idea is to approximate a blender.

Take the shredded parsley and garlic, and put them in a bowl with about half a cup of olive oil. Grate a lot of parmesan cheese into it (a third of a cup, maybe), and add salt to taste, mixing vigorously.

When the fettucini is done, mix it with the pesto like so:

Special thanks to Deborah Spenser for teaching me that winter pesto is a thing.

French onion miso soup

Do they actually eat French onion soup in France? Or is it like the Guatemalan yogurt: eaten only in Canada. 

not as dark as I would have liked

The basic idea of French onion soup -- according to me -- is to get a sweet broth by cooking the onions until the sugars caramelize. Then you put some rustic bread on top, add gruyère on that, and broil it until the cheese burns a little bit. Unfortunately, my apartment's oven doesn't have a burner at the top, so the cheese shown here didn't get cooked as dark as I would have liked.

Of course, most French onion soup you'll find in restaurants uses beef for the broth. I didn't have any dead cows or bones lying around, though, so I made a vegetarian version. To make up for the lost umami (whatever that is), I added red miso paste. I also added some crimini mushrooms.

Steps

1. Chop four onions into thin slices. The shape doesn't really matter.
2. Stir-fry the onions for a little while in a pot, then add the mushrooms (also chopped) and a pinch or two of herbes de Provence, stir, and cover.
3. Cook covered for a while on medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until the onions start to turn brown. Once they're brown -- but not burnt -- add water until they are a little more than covered. Simmer for an hour or so.
4. Add white wine vinegar and salt to taste, but go light on the salt since you're going to add miso.
4.5 I forgot to do this, but I think a few ounces of red wine would be good too.

5. Turn off the heat. Put a little broth in a bowl and mix in a tablespoon of miso (more or less depending on the size of the bowl), and then fill to the top with soup.
6. Put a few slices of bread on the bowl, and some grated or sliced gruyère. Broil until the cheese starts to bubble and turn brown on the edges. Be careful taking the bowl out of the oven.