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.

Apple smosh pancake

I am in no way a pancake expert, much less a pancake champion or pancake evangelist. So I humbly submit myself to the pancake geists, fully conceding that my impetus for pancaking was a bowl of apple smosh™ (which, as everyone knows, is what you get when you cook pieces of apple with sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg, covered and on low heat, for the better part of an hour) that was left over from making an apple shrub. 

Here's the result:

And what it looks like, half-eaten:

Anyway, as I said, my pancake recipe is far from professional. But this one came out pretty well, so here's what I did:

1. Mix an egg in a bowl with about 2/3 cup of hazelnut milk.

2. Add flour, stirring vigorously, until you get to the texture of batter.

3. Heat some grape seed oil (or some other oil) in a pan on medium heat. When it's hot, pour half the batter into the pan.

4. Wait until the pancake starts to form tiny bubbles on top, then, instead of flipping it, put it on a plate (wet side up).

5. Add the rest of the better, and again wait for the tiny bubbles. Then add the apple smosh (depicted), and a piece of butter.

6. Put the first pancake on top of this (wet side down). Press the edges so the two pancakes seal together.

7. Cook like this on low heat until you think the insides are cooked enough. That might be 10 minutes? Flipping is also permitted.

Here's what the bottom looked like:

Egg and eggplant udon

This recipe also has lots of variations, but the key ingredients are noodles, eggs, soy sauce, ginger, and scallions. Hmm...this is starting to sound familiar. 

To make the serving shown here (enough for three, though maybe not three ravenously hungry), you'll need:

- 2 East Asian type eggplants (the long thin kind)

- 2 eggs

- 2 cloves of garlic, diced

- 1 thumb of ginger, diced

- scallions, chopped

- 2 or 3 servings of dry udon

- soy sauce and chili flakes to taste

- (optional) sugar to taste

1. Fry the eggplant and ginger on medium heat until the eggplant starts to get crispy on the outside. Meanwhile, boil a pot of water for the noodles.

2. When the water starts to boil, add the noodles to the water, and add the garlic to the pan (the one with the eggplant and ginger).

3. When the noodles are done (this should take about 3 minutes), move them from the pot to the pan, and add soy sauce. Then fill the pan with hot water (you can use the water from cooking the noodles). Stir in case the noodles have stuck to the pan in the meantime.

4. The water should quickly start to boil, since it was boiling in the pot before. Taste to make sure there's enough salt, and if not, add more soy sauce. Now beat the eggs and add them, stirring slowly so they spread out into long strands.

5. Turn off the heat, and add the scallions. Stir for 20 or 30 seconds, and serve.

Actually, I usually use tomatoes instead of eggplant, and then it's sort of like a soup version of tomato fried eggs (番茄炒蛋). You can use other noodles too, of course, like ramen and soba.

Dill winter soup

It's not pretty, but I like it.

Like drinking the brine in a jar of dill pickles, except not disgusting. There is absolutely no oil in this soup, so if you don't have any oil, you can still make this.

1. Boil maybe six cups of water
2. Add a thumb of ginger (smashed & peeled), a clove of garlic (whole), and about a tablespoon of fish sauce.
3. Add some Japanese mountain potato, sliced small.
4. Add a red potato, chopped into cubes. Cook for 20 minutes. If it looks like there's too much water, leave it uncovered. If the amount of water is just enough, cover and turn the heat lower.
5. Add some dinosaur kale, chopped.
6. Add half a red onion, sliced. Cook for another 15 minutes or so.
7. Add some white wine vinegar, maybe a tablespoon or two, and a pinch of salt. Cook for five more minutes.
8. Add a handful of fresh dill, chopped fine. Cook for a minute.
9. Pour some broth in a bowl, and dissolve a tablespoon of red miso paste.
10. Add the soup to this bowl, mix, and eat!

Fried rice log

A cuisine unto itself. A form of art subtler than electronica and louder than oil painting. A way of salvaging leftovers.

As anyone with any sense will attest, this is the best thing to do with leftover rice. I usually use basmati rice, which apart from having a nice flavor seems well suited for turning into fried rice because the grains tend not to stick together as much as other varieties, and they hold their texture pretty well when cooked multiple times.

Let's start with the archetypal fried rice. If you get this one down, you can make any kind of fried rice and it'll be amazing.

Archetype

Rice, garlic, ginger, eggs, onions, scallions, rice vinegar, soy sauce, high heat vegetable oil

No proportions since that wouldn't be in the spirit of fried rice. Add everything to taste, or according to how much you have.

1. Heat a pan and add the oil.

2. Beat the eggs, and cook this briefly, then set aside. I like to not disturb them so they'll turn into a pancake shape that I can cut into even pieces, but it's not a big deal if you just want to scramble them.

3. Before doing anything else, if necessary, remove stuck spots on the pan and add more oil.

4. Add the ginger and onions, cook until the onions are translucent, or longer if you want them to be sweeter.

5. Add the garlic and cook for another minute, or until it's fragrant but not yet turning brown.

6. Add the rice, and soy sauce. I find pouring the soy sauce onto the rice blobs (assuming the rice is stuck together) works best. For quantity, err on the conservative side. If the rice is really dry, you might also add some water (hot is better), but don't add too much or the rice will turn into mush. It's also easy for the rice to stick, especially if there's not enough liquid or oil. Break up the rice quickly and stir it so it all gets coated in oil. To do the breakage, crushing the blobs with a spatula is effective. 

7. Add a dash of vinegar, and the eggs (optional: add a bit of sesame oil). Cook for another half minute, or until the vinegar stops overwhelming all the other smells.

8. Add the scallions, and cook for 20 seconds or until they're fragrant. 

This archetype is a helpful way of thinking about the roles of ingredients, and figuring out when to add them and how long to cook them. These roles are roughly as follows:

Egg: Needs to be cooked beforehand, then set aside to be added later. Similar: tempeh, eggplant.

Onions: Source of sweet. Long cooking time, lots of surface area and water. Similar: peppers, zucchini, mushrooms.

Garlic: Medium cooking time, loses fragrance if cooked too long.

Ginger: Long cooking time, high heat. Added directly to hot oil at the beginning. Similar: chili pepper / flakes.

Scallions: Very short cooking time, added right before serving. Similar: basil, cilantro.

Soy sauce: The main source of salt and liquid. Joins the flavors of all the other ingredients and gets absorbed by the rice. Similar: fish sauce, saltwater. 

Rice vinegar: Source of sour. Burns if cooked too much. Similar: black vinegar.
Tomato: This isn't in the archetype, but I think it's in its own category. These add lots of water and balance out the other flavors, but they shouldn't be cooked as long as onions. Usually you would add them either right before or right after the rice. Other examples: enoki mushrooms, spinach and other greens.

Almost anything else you can add takes the place of one of these.

Catalog

Ingredient roles in parentheses.

1. Dill (scallions), zucchini (onions), enoki mushrooms (tomatoes), the white part of the scallions (garlic), rice, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, rice vinegar.
2. Tempeh (eggs), poblano pepper (onions), garlic, shungiku (春菊) (tomatoes), soy sauce, black vinegar.

var. 2                                                     

The cooking secret they don't want you to know!

Italian and Chinese chefs hate him! Make your own fresh noodles with this one weird trick!

A few weeks ago a took a class on handmade pasta. We made ravioli with goat cheese and edamame, ravioli with squash, and fettucini carbonara with shiitake mushrooms instead of bacon. What I took away from the class is that making pasta by hand is simpler than I had imagined.

This recipe was my first attempt since then to make some on my own, without adult supervision. In the class, we had pasta machines to roll the dough uniformly flat and slice it into noodle shapes (for the ravioli, we used stencils). I don't have a pasta machine at home, so this time I rolled it and cut it by hand.

Instead of sauce, I fried some vegetables and tomatoes, and then added the noodles to that. Sort of like the sauce I used to have with Lanzhou noodles (蘭州拉麵) in Chengdu. 

NOODLES

1. Put two cups of flour in a mixing bowl. Make a well in the middle of the flour, and add two eggs.

Actually I forgot the proportions, so in the picture below I had only added one cup of flour -- hence the egg overflow. But the texture wasn't right until I added a full second cup. 

Two eggs' worth is just about enough for one very hungry person. I'm sure you can adjust the amount according to how much you actually want to make.

2. Beat the eggs inside the well.

As you mix, the flour should start to get pulled into the egg mixture, making it thicker.

Keep mixing this way until most of the flour is absorbed, and it starts to look like dough, i.e. it's too thick to mix with a fork. Then switch to using your hands. 

3. Knead the dough.

Use a floured surface, and press the dough until it has a uniform consistency, and isn't too dry or too sticky. Then knead some more.

Here's how you can tell if it's done: Form the dough into a ball. Make an indentation with your finger. If it returns to its original shape, you're good.

4. Wrap the dough in plastic or parchment, and let it sit for about half an hour. 

Apparently, this lets the proteins and starches bind together better. You might be able to get away with a shorter wait time.

5. Roll the dough flat.

Also on a floured surface. I don't have a rolling pin, so I used a pint glass. A bottle would also work.

Try to make it as flat as you can, ideally in a rectangular shape.

6. Slice the noodles.

7. Bring water to a roiling burl. Add noodles. Burl for three minutes.

SAUCE

1. Slice four cloves of garlic, half a red bell pepper, two Roma tomatoes, a couple stalks of king oyster mushroom, and a few scallion sprigs.

2. Add olive oil to a heated pan. Add chili flakes, then the garlic, then the mushrooms. Cook for a minute on medium heat.

3. Add the tomatoes and peppers. Continue cooking for a few minutes.

4. Add a tablespoon or two of oyster sauce (I used a vegetarian, mushroom-based version), and a small splash of soy sauce.

6. Turn heat to low and wait until the noodles are done. Then add the scallions.

7. Now add the noodles. You can strain them first, or just pick them out of the pot with chopsticks or your hands. Just kidding about the hands.

8. Stir-fry for about 10 seconds, until the sauce and pasta are well combined. I fried them for about a minute, but I think this made the noodles too soft, since they had already been boiled long enough.

I actually used only half the noodles for this, so the other half I dipped in flour to keep from sticking, and put in a plastic container in the fridge. That was a couple days ago, and I haven't looked at them again since, so if there are any problems with this storage method I'll update this.