The Snack Review

Last night Deni and I made a freezer dinner. Frozen udon, various frozen fish cakes, bok choy, and a hard-boiled egg in a dashi broth made from a sachet. We’d been careful with each other through the evening, standing in front of the stove side by side, leaning in to each other while waiting for the various small pots to come to a boil. We brought our overflowing bowls to the table, sat down, and the dinner was so quiet, even the cooking of it lacked the hurried handling of fire and need for precise timing I’m used to when I cook Chinese food. The broth was pared down, stripped of the usual tongue-grabbing flavors in my favorite packaged ramen.

And when I finally picked up my chopsticks to eat, I was overcome. After the first chubby tear pushed its way through I let the rest fall. Big drops that didn’t seem to roll down my face so much as they leapt out of me. Deni could have turned away from me but instead put their hand on my back. We talked about how everything was delicious. Everything is changing so quickly. A soft meal for us now means more than cozy nourishment. It feels like relinquishment, acceptance.

A few years ago after overcoming a life-defining schism, I had the hubris to think I was done. I’d figured out everything I needed, big questions had all been sorted, my only task left was to live and breathe and enjoy. And maybe it still is. But not without some more change first.

My job is also ending, and total strangers seem to have as many feelings about the change as might I, a person who’s about to lose my income and health insurance and my professional home and nourishing daily community. I understand that everyone has their own relationship to everything and for five days a week it’s my job to make room for theirs–to receive others’ feelings, comfort the givers, and, an expectation I put on myself, send the person off with at least a little bit of kindness.

“Think of it as the seasons changing,” I told Carol today. She’s a longtime customer and had only just heard the news. “No one called me!” she only half-joked as she walked straight to me in from the sidewalk. “This is such upsetting news.”

I’d the benefit of being able to reference autumn’s actual arrival in town after this deadening summer. “The leaves turn, they’ll fall from the branches, winter will be hard, but something new will come,” I offered. I’d gone swimming before work, and credit it with giving me either the equanimity or lightheadedness to respond this way.

Later, George, one of my favorites, stopped in. He’d been exposed to someone who turned out to have received a false-positive Covid test and even with his own negative Covid test was not allowed to return to work. He was attempting to enjoy a forced day off but his job, which hadn’t been able to update their records in time, was also going to dock him a sick day. I chided him for being too good a capitalist, being unable to relish a day not in service of work, but then also wagered that with the calendar year nearly done he’d probably had some sick days to spare. Ah, but no, his funding is tied to the fiscal year, so he’s actually got to make his sick days last until next summer. We teased each other, cowed as we both were and still trying to resist capitalism, and then I sent him off. He’ll be back soon though, we’ll get to chat.

Last week he and I exchanged contact info with each other, something I’ve been doing with customers more and more in the last few weeks. As it is I’ve run in to favorite customers out in the world on my off days, I’ve introduced them to my non-shop friends. Several people I now count among my dearest loves started out first as customers; we’re close enough now that I think of them as friends first, part of the shop constellation second.

If we’re lucky, which is to say, if we work hard enough at it, we’ll get a chance to know each other in a new and different way. George and me and my work and New York and Deni and my family and and and and.

When I host people I’ve always got a little too much on my mind. Did I remember to chill the glasses? How am I going to chop this whole head of garlic in the next seven minutes? Did I scrub the toilet well enough? I’ve learned not to put myself through the flurry of hosting AND trying to expand my cooking muscles in front of others. It’s become a personal rule of mine: never try a brand new main course recipe or take huge risks for the first time in front of a crowd on a big day.

Except there’s gotta be room for fun too, right? Like this past Thursday, when Danielle and I put together a Lunar New Year Dinner just two days before the holiday. “Won’t most Chinese restaurants be closed?” I said to her over the phone, which she used to make plans with me like we were 70-year-olds.

“Let’s just go over to your place then,” she responded nonchalantly. “Cool, yeah, sounds good,” I must have responded. We assembled a plan, hung up. No problem, I thought. Me, the person who has definitely threaded my way up and down the streets of Chinatown for hours looking for my preferred brand of fried gluten puffs went from having no plans to committing myself to cooking dinner for five in two days.

But I’m getting smarter. I didn’t try to wrangle the moon. I didn’t even try to fit in the usual compulsory elements of a Chinese Lunar New Year dinner. No noodles. No whole fish. No dumplings. Just get a tasty Chinese dinner on the table, I told myself. And I think I did. I even managed not to make the big schlep to Sunset Park. (The Coop on the other hand…)

The menu was simple: poached chicken which is really just a vehicle for scalded ginger scallion oil, zucchini stir-fried with dried shrimp, and vegetarian mapo tofu. I’ve made all those so many times that getting them on the table at the same time was more about logistics than anything else. But for the last dish I wanted to stretch myself a little, and tried a riff on a recipe from Irene Kuo’s cookbook: stir-fried velveted shrimp, edamame, and lap cherng.

I love shrimp–sweet, crunchy, juicy shrimp. But I’ve had terrible results cooking it at home. Too often it comes out overcooked, and I chew it like I’m making my way through a roast. Definitely not Lunar New Year dinner material. With her velveting process the shrimp would be cooked AND light and crunchy, Kuo assured. Classic recipes for velveting require an off-putting amount of oil though, and I was ready to move on to something else until I read Kuo’s side suggestion to velvet with water! (Serious Eats writer Shao Z. has covered the technique nicely.) We were in business.

Velveting with water turned out fantastic. The process was straightforward. I pressed ahead through my uncertainties. And in the end the subtle nuttiness of edamame and the sweetness of the sausage against the savory, undoubtedly crispy shrimp were all so tasty.

And best of all, dinner was happy. Kevin and Danielle brought homemade mango sticky rice and enough green beans to feed the whole floor. Ali and RJ came through was drinks and also oranges, a LNY must. We sat around and laughed about fitness subcultures and theater and obscene wealth and late stage capitalism and Chinese people’s favorite pastime–getting a good discount. It was extra special to be with family from home on the holiday. And don’t tell my mom but it was my first Lunar New Year dinner where I felt like I had a glimpse of what New York City could be for me. Home.

The end of the year, the end of the decade! It’s been a big year for me. Very little in my life is the same as it was this time last year. I’m most proud that I strengthened friendships and began making amends with an important person in my life. I’m learning to accept the limitations of some relationships. Also this year, actually like this month, okay in this very blog post, I resolved to stop shit-talking my exes.

It was a conversation with Jacky that did it. She and I were with D and I offhandedly commented on a woman I dated. The remark was quick, off the cuff, an expedient way to avoid delving into the specifics, namely my own culpability. If I focus only on the fact that the other person transgressed some boundary I don’t have to say that I fucked up too. That I’d hurt someone. That it was messy, confusing, drawn out. Jacky, in her boundless magnanimity, responded to my flippant remark with a moving ten-minute personal story that probably began in the year 1943 and ended in the present day with her saying, and here I paraphrase: After long, often loving relationships, we shouldn’t judge our exes by our very worst moments with them.

I don’t think everyone is owed this kind of generosity, but the people I’ve been with do, and that’s how I want to carry myself and my memories of them. So there’s that big lesson of this year. Thank you Jacky.

Then there are the things I really ought to be saying more often. There are things that it’s taken me a long time to accept, that I’m still a little ashamed of, that I still find creative, roundabout ways to share with people. Things like: For the last ten years I’ve pursued a career that I may be ready to turn away from. I don’t want to be a political reporter anymore. If I write at all I want to write about different things.

Also … I DON’T LIKE BAKING.

As a person who lives alone and who has, at most, like six people I’m interested in seeing (read: feeding) with any regularity here in New York, baking is so rarely worth it. The recipe tracking, the ingredient collecting, the two extra trips to the grocery store for forgotten ingredients, the focusing my eyes on the recipe only to lose my place and have to start the recipe all over again, then the dishwashing, the re-finding of storage spots for the weird dishes, the scraping dried egg white off the countertops. Groan.

It’s liberating to see and accept this about myself. When I’ve got a crowd to feed, and my mother’s expansive kitchen counters to work with, I can be more easily persuaded. But in New York? For me? Nah. Leave the cakes and trifles and meringues to someone else. And that’s okay.

So please know how big a deal it is when I say these are my new favorite cookies to bake. All of seven ingredients, no fancy doing, and clear instructions from Stella Parks who has never let me down. Simple and delicious, light, crunchy cookie times.

This recipe was a double whammy: my nieceypoo can’t eat eggs, and my mother loves thin, crispy cookies. These satisfied both of them! Baby P took a fistful into her chubby little paws after trying them, as hearty a sign of approval as I could hope for. And my mother’s reaction after her first bite was, “Hm, there’s quite a bit of sugar here,” which I promise is high praise in Asian motherspeak. (For the record I do not find them overly sweet at all.)

I loved making them so much I’m, eep, going to haul out my bakeware this week to make them in New York. I even bought my first bag of flour in years.

I’m a member of a snack club! Now, maybe you’re unimpressed, but I’m overjoyed, and not a little surprised, about this life development.

The surprise here moves in a few directions: such an association exists? But, also, after six years of having a SNACK blog, it’s only now I’ve found my people?? Yes and yes, apparently.

The snack club is a loose affiliation of people who gather for altogether separate reasons (we gather because we’re gathering at work, where we already are to do non-snack business). People bring things to share, and then we eat them. That’s what a snack club is right?

Just off the top of my head, there are a few special treats I’ve been introduced to via snack club: hot cocoa-flavored Hershey’s kisses, white peach AND strawberry flavored Pocky straight from Japan, and white cheddar-flavored cheeseballs which are the Official Salty Snack of the MLB(!!). We loved them so much, that sticky cheesy dust over the airy foam crunch, that C bought an entire 12-bag case of them.

I’ve brought lard-fried chips from the Pennsylvania Amish markets to snack club. I’ve tried a few of the classic brands from across the state and am happy to report that Goods is my favorite. Their chips have a definite pork fat undertone but are neither too salty nor too heavy. Some of the Pennsylvania lard-fried chips taste like they were dipped in more bacon grease post-fry, and I’ll be practically clutching my heart as I stagger around the house after having a handful. These, though, are lighter, with a confident crunch. Goods showed restraint with them, and I enjoy that.

I bring snacks to work so often that C has called me Snack Queen more than once, a title I’d never give myself but which I also have not rejected. I’ve brought egg tarts and red bean paste-filled sesame balls from the Chinese bakery, and the Texas chocolates and peanuts I wrote about last month. But my most recent offering is the one I’m most excited about.

I recently found something I’ve been casually looking for in every Chinese grocery store I’ve entered for about a year and a half. I first tried Magic Chili with an ex. The relationship, memories of it, even mention of it here, are an uncomfortable thing for me. So I’m going to focus on the snack, which is crunchy mild chili bliss. Imagine a long red chili (I couldn’t say what kind) cut into one-inch pieces, seeds kept intact, then deep fried and covered with a savory chili powder. (MSG is incredible.)

The bag also includes crunchy fried peanuts which are a nice addition but in my opinion are mainly there to catch whatever extraneous pulverized flavor granules fall upon them. As is key for any savory snack, there are plenty of cast off crumbs of deep fried goodness scattered around to lick off your fingers when you’re done snacking. What’s more, the whole thing is not even particularly spicy. The real snacking revelation comes from the ridiculousness of an idea pulled off so well. Crispy chili! Who’d think up such a delicious thing? Those crazy Chinese snackers is who.

So where’d D and I find them? Stashed in the corner of a snack stall at Pacific Mall in … Toronto, Ontario, CANADA. D and I got two bags, one went with me to work, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the second. To share or to hoard? Please go find yourself a bag so you can be saddled with the same dilemma.

Last week I was sitting at a restaurant bar with C, both of us hovered over a plate of the most decadent grilled prawns, when it hit me that there was nothing in my life I wanted to run away from. It was one of those exchanges where I spoke the words and only realized their weight after they’d left my mouth.

This was a huge realization for a person (that’s me) who at times in the last few years has thought my body and soul might vacate the skin-container I inhabit out of panic and plain old misery.

As of last week I am in my mid-30s. There is no more plausibly hanging on to my “early 30s.” On one hand, oh my dear god. On the other, I hold my small life and all my minute victories up like Olympic medals. I am proud of the wisps of wisdom I can claim, and all the more because I am evidently so slow a learner. Abstraction and nonsense is all I have for you, the Internet, my fellow snack fiends. Can you trust me when I say it could have turned out very differently? And yet here I am living a life that is all mine? That I got to where I am now without ever cracking open any Eckhart Tolle or finishing the Brene Brown Netflix special feels like a separate, not insignificant victory.

Other victories: except for this past week when I got spoiled by friends for my birthday I’ve been cooking a fair amount. Lots of Chinese food, even lots of vegetarian Chinese food. I was nearly moved to make dumplings a few weeks ago but am honing my ability to listen to my deeper, knowing self instead of my vain, greedy self while I roam grocery store aisles. My gut said I had enough energy for Chinese chives with scrambled eggs and NOT enough energy for Chinese chives in dumplings. I shudder thinking about all the wasted groceries I’ve bought in an aspirational leap when I’d have been better served by keeping my feet on the damn ground.

I also tried steaming eggplant for the first time. It was melty in a very good way, and tasty too. When I closed my eyes I could imagine I was eating steamed fish. The recipe for that, a real winner, came from Fuschia Dunlop. I’d consulted my Irene Kuo but I kid you not just about every single one of her several dozen vegetable recipes called for dried Chinese ham, dried shrimp, oyster sauce, or ground pork to provide the base of the dish’s flavor. Vegetarian food for meat eaters!

Another fun surprise from my veg spree? Cold blanched lotus root with vinegar and blazing hot tiny chilies makes a terrific snack.

I’m getting better at it. I’ve got two or three trusty menus for vegetarian Chinese dinners (meaning: three to four dishes served family style), but I’d like to make that a solid half dozen menus. A hearty, satisfying vegetarian Chinese feast is possible, I know it is. More soon, I hope.

That’s all from your mid-30s snack reviewer.

Fall made it to New York, finally, mercifully. For at least the next seven days, according to the weather report, the temperatures will not crack 75F. Sad that that’s what passes for fall around here, but these are end days. So let’s get on with it.

D and I were in Austin recently with some of their comics friends and we had a great time. H and I swam in Barton Springs, we ate plenty of tacos, saw some of the most delightful neon signage ever, and survived a donut-eating spree during which I scarfed down three donuts in rapid succession from Mrs. Johnson’s. The shop has been open since 1948 and run since 1984 by, no surprise, a South Asian family. The first time we went was on a Sunday morning, and they were, get this, sold OUT of donuts. The floured worn wooden work tables, the conveyer belts, the tray racks were all empty. But the woman who helped us was very sweet. She told me the donut schedule so I could best time my next visit, and while D and I were outside trying to snap a photo even called out to us from the drive-thru window to offer to take a proper one for us. The donuts were out of this world fresh, super light, kissed with the perfect amount icing.

I also shopped at three different H-E-Bs. H-E-B, this Texas institution, definitely deserves its own blog post. (Did you know the “B” stands for Butt? (Thanks Timbo.)) These snacks are from there, and I brought them home to share with friends.

The chocolate in the bars is not special. You are, after all, reading the words of a person spoiled by the chic $4, $6, $10(!) a bar stuff. But it was TASTY. The heat in the Hatch chile bar built nice and slowly, and was more a quiet smolder than a smack in the face. The Kitchen sink bar was just plain fun.

And those, erm, Japanese-style peanuts? (“Wait, I need to look this up. Is this racist?” A asked very responsibly when I shared the peanuts with her.) Those were also very good. The peanuts had a light crisp shell, nothing that would break your jaw, and a full coating of electric orange spicy, fruity, even possibly cheesy dust. I was surprised at that positively Starburst-ian flavor that showed up in the peanuts. What’s all this candy sweetness doing here? was a prominent thought. But I enjoyed it. I ate enough till my tongue burned and my fingers were all stained.

Top marks for all of it. Thank you, Texas!

Hello from inside my brand spanking new blog. Built by me and only me over the course of several hours, mainly through impatient, furious clicking around! My new place feels airy and tidy, has got room to grow, and that fresh new paint smell, too.

The new name is me being silly. I do take a special interest in snacks, obviously. But also, why not treat snacking with the same kind of serious regard I normally reserve for literary arts? Who says only Paris and Threepenny and Gettysburg can be reviewed? Why not snacks?

So now may not be the best time to admit that indulgent foods and snacks, especially those of the bagged, processed variety, have been giving me increasing trouble over the last year. I’ve been facing the unavoidable reality that my body just feels WAY better when I eat a lot of simply prepared vegetables and whole grains and things like poached freaking chicken. My body punishes me for the ice cream benders, the spicy noodle jaunts, all those meals cobbled together from cookies and chips. I can’t just make a dinner of popcorn anymore–a real tragedy. In the last month I’ve passed by Jack in the Boxes in Arizona, California, and Texas, and somehow quieted deep yearnings for their crunchy slick tacos in all three places. I don’t quite understand the me I’m becoming.

But I’m still here, and still very much me, which means I’ve got an open bag of Loacker hazelnut-flavored Quadratinis–perfect with strong black tea–on the desk, and I just polished off two packets of my favorite Bin Bin crackers (don’t be fooled by the brand’s many imitators). I’ve also got loads of blog posts I’ve been ready to get out into the world.

Happy snacking.

The dishes are still in the sink, the nuttiness from the hot olive oil is still hanging in the air, the smoke detector is still sitting on the table. I ripped it, screeching, from the ceiling mid-fry. Just had to sit down and share this right now.

This braised tofu is knock your socks off good. For something so simple the rewards seem undeserved. Harumi Kurihara calls it “salty-sweet” in her cookbook (which I’ve written about before).  But those words seem insufficient, the flavors here are far more special. There’s salty and there’s sweet, sure, but the flavors become a totally different third entity instead of just the combination of those opposites. If I’d have known this tofu would have been so good I’d have made two blocks of tofu like she calls for in the recipe. 

You’re to flatten and press out the liquid from a block of soft tofu, then cut it into cubes and fry each side of every cube in oil. In a separate pot you bring dashi (key, I think), mirin, soy sauce, sake (I used Chinese shaoxing cooking wine), and sugar to a boil then pour that liquid over the tofu (which are still sitting in their pan) and turn that fire back on again. Once it all starts bubbling again, bring the tofu and sauce down to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes. 

I made some quick pickles to have on the side, and with rice the tofu was so good I kept walking back to the stove to dip bites into the pan’s sauce and get seconds and thirds. At some point I just gave up and stood in the kitchen scarfing it all down. Solo cooking and eating perks! And home cooking bliss.

That kind of good. 

This was meant to be a consolation meal. Back when I thought I’d miss a big party with D where the invite said the dinner menu would include shrimp and grits, I was feeling pretty mopey. It’s one thing to be 3,000 miles from your honey, and another to be 3,000 miles from your honey AND the most perfect food combination that humans ever invented.

Grits are one of my favorite mushy carbs, and mushy carbs happen to be my favorite category of food. Rice, porridge, oats, polenta, risotto, I love the cozy embrace of all of them. A spoonful of hot cheesy grits is like taking off your bra and putting on your fluffiest pair of sweats after a long day, or if it’s an East Coast summer where you are right now, like taking off your bra and firing up the ac after a long day. And is there anything better than the sweet crunch of a first bite into a big prawn? No, is the answer to that! Shrimp made well is both crispy on that first bite and then juicy and tender on every subsequent one. The combination of those two contrasting ingredients together is an actual love story.

But as much as I love shrimp and grits, I actually try to avoid it. I’ve been trying to return shrimp to its status as a special occasion food, and discourage myself from thinking of it as the everyday item it’s seemed to become in food media over the years. Having a tiny understanding of the environmental impact of overfishing influenced my feelings, as did this vital AP investigation on the actual slave labor which powered, and very likely still props up, the industry. So I try (and regularly fail, let’s be clear) to avoid shrimp. I usually do okay, or whatever, just fine enough not to hide under my bed all day though what kind of metric is that? But then again, I’m still eating plenty of meat, buying bagged snacks, using single use plastic for produce at the grocery store, and generally clogging up the oceans with the detritus of my convenience-focused life. Sometimes I’ll see people going nuts on gourmet sushi dinners and I’ll think fuck, if THEY can happily gorge on the last of the planet’s edible seafood, why can’t I? And it’s usually only after 10 minutes of that kind of stewing that I check myself and realize I need to log off. 

I’m pretty sure this environmental guilt and gourmet food jealousy and my uneven attempts at seafood asceticism have only ratcheted up the mystical allure of shrimp and grits in my food imagination. The thing is saddling oneself with personal environmental guilt feels like both a scam–what we need are huge structural changes from corporations and governments–and also, truly overdue. What if we DID unite to turn away from single use plastic? From our cars? From keeping the office thermostat at 65F? From eating so much goddamn delicious shrimp? It’s not everything, certainly, but it’d be something. 

So what’d I do a few weeks ago? I slowly went about acquiring the necessary ingredients for this dish. The grits were already in my cupboard, the shrimp and the bacon weren’t. Bacon! I haven’t even gotten to bacon guilt. And then I made this dish. And you know what the funny thing is? D ended up changing my ticket so I could stay and I made it to the party after all. I had my shrimp and grits twice, and you know what? Both versions were just okay. (I overcooked my shrimp! They were as chewy as chicken hearts!!) The brisket they served at the party was even better. And I felt so much sorrow for our planet with every single bite I took.