Jon Favreau taught me how to make grilled cheese. (Roy Choi if we’re being technical.) We were in Idyllwild on a hike (a “nature walk” if we’re being technical) throwing around dinner ideas, and grilled cheese came up. As luck would have it Aaron and Erika had brought up to the cabin their New Year’s Eve party leftovers, which included a wheel of brie and cubes upon cubes of smoked gouda and sharp cheddar. A dinner menu was born. That night we watched this clip from ‘Chef’ (really the most memorable scene in the movie) a handful of times and then got to work.
As I gather from the clip, grilled cheese success comes down to whether or not a slice through the sandwich produces that crackling crunch, and also how much oozy cheese you get on that first bite. The only musts here seem to be butter (or mayonnaise!), slathered generously on both sides of the bread, and after that, vigilance and a medium-low heat. Expert butter slathering by Nancy and plating artistry courtesy of Eli and Anton.
When we were kids, my folks used to take us up to the snow for skiing weekends. I never much looked forward to those cold days–to socializing in mandatory kids’ activities, to the pinching in my feet from rigid ski boots, and worst of all, to the bitter chill. Why would anyone submit themselves to the cold? I always wondered from underneath my bundled layers.
My favorite part of those trips came at the end of the day, when my parents collected us from the mountain. Nighttime meant a merciful break from wobbling down the slopes and having to pass the day with other swaddled up strangers. Nighttime also meant cozytime. Before heading back to the motel for the evening, my folks would stop off at a 7-Eleven and let us each pick out a microwave dinner of our choice before we all returned to the room to feast together. Eating a steaming burrito or Salisbury steak TV dinner in my lap was always the best part of the trip.
A few days ago we headed up to Idyllwild for what turned out to be the grownup equivalent of relishing that microwaved chicken burrito over and over again, for an entire weekend.
If you’re going to go to the cold–spoken like a true Californian, I realize–cozy is the way to go. I know now the key to snowy retreats is to spend just enough time outdoors before the chill hits your bones, and then get back indoors to warm up. Socks, layered sweaters, breakfast potatoes, crisper drawers full of beer, lovely company, long candlelit dinners, music playing all weekend long, glasses of riesling by the fireplace, and oxtail stew. Oxtail stew!
Kevin and I cooked Friday night–stew, polenta, roasted cauliflower and a bright green salad. Thank goodness for a patient and generous crowd of eaters. And I think I’ve got my mom’s recipe down well enough to share. What follows is a blend of my mom’s words with my notes, which is to say, with some attempt at actual measurements. As with all stews, the leftovers just get better and better in the following days. I have also preserved her immortal line. You’ll know it when you get to it.
My Mom’s Tomato Curry Oxtail Stew Serves 3-4. Best with steamed white rice or polenta.
2 pounds oxtail ½ cup of flour 1 onion, roughly chopped 1 14.5 oz. can of diced tomatoes Japanese curry blocks, at your desired spice level Ketchup 2 bay leaves 3 carrots, chopped into 1-inch pieces 1 russet potato, washed and chopped in 1-inch pieces
1. Rinse the oxtails and pat dry with a paper towel. Dust lightly with flour and shake off excess. 2. Heat oil in a large heavy-bottomed pot and brown the meat on all sides at medium heat. Salt and pepper. Throw in chopped onion to sweat alongside the meat. 3. Once meat is browned, about 4-5 minutes later, throw in 1-3 cubed blocks of curry depending on how much meat you use and how intensely flavored you like your curry. Add diced tomatoes and a cup or two of water or broth. At this point I squeeze in an unknown amount of ketchup. Add in bay leaves. 4. Let the broth come to a boil, and cook on medium-low heat for 45 minutes, then reduce to a simmer and cook for 2-3 hours. Stir occasionally, in particular to make sure that nothing is sticking to the bottom of the pot. If so, lower heat. 5. In the last half hour of cooking, throw in potatoes and carrots. Serve when the vegetables are fork tender.
This is not so much a how-to as a list of lessons I learn and forget and steadily re-learn every time another wedding shower comes ‘round. This is a list of guidelines I had to reacquaint myself with when my brother, sister-in-law and I recently hosted the biggest party I’ve ever thrown: a bridal shower for my sister. This is a list of rules I flagrantly ignored.
In my family, my very large family, my family which without fail dwarfs the other side at every. single. wedding., we do things big. I read blog posts and see Pinterest boards featuring showers for 15, 25 people, and gaze in awe at those parties. My family will never know such intimacy.
See, in my family, wedding showers tend to be large–as in, with an average of 45 women and very little in the way of age restrictions. Everyone from 21 on up is invited to squeeze into a living room for an afternoon. And even then those cutoffs are mere suggestions. For my sister’s party, a preteen, a couple toddler babes and a newborn were in the mix too. Bridal showers are less dainty parties and more mass gatherings for all female-identified members of the family.
In keeping with the gourmet standards set by my grand aunties, by and large everything is homemade. This is probably the most perplexing of all the unspoken dictates. We never hire caterers, but neither do we spring for Costco veggie platters. I suppose this family food tradition is derived from a mix of deeply ingrained frugality and a devotion to elevated home cooking. Even when it’s make-it-yourself sandwiches on the menu, my Auntie Margie will roast her own hams and turkeys for the spread (“It’s cheaper,” is her first response, when I ask why she goes to the trouble, followed by, “It tastes better,” and “It doesn’t go green like lunch meat does when you put it out in the sun.”). It’s as simple as that for her.
For my sister’s shower, we made a citrus salad with poached cranberries in a spiced simple syrup; a persimmon and spinach salad with candied pecans and blue cheese; and for the vegetarians, roasted cauliflower and mushrooms with quinoa, spinach, pumpkin seeds. But the piece de resistance, made by my brother and sister-in-law, was 45 individual pot pies, half chicken and the other half salmon. They were absolute showstoppers, as beautiful as they were delicious. My dad made his famous pumpkin pies and I made chocolate-dipped cinnamon-spiced rice krispies treats. My sister’s shower was a lovely, happy event filled with joy, great laughs, good food and best of all, so many of the most important women in my sister’s life.
THAT SAID, I was a harried mess for the bulk of the party.
The night before, as I was cleaning the house and putting it in party order, I had flashbacks to one of the first showers that my sister and I were ever involved in hosting years ago. I have this distinct memory of being up at 3am the night before the shower, cooking alongside my sister, and both of us promising each other we’d never put the other through the hell of hosting a bridal shower should one of us get married. We were unpracticed in the ways of party prep and advance planning, and somehow decided to make 90 mini frittata. While following through on our plans that evening we discovered that flaming hell called The Hosting Neophyte’s Final Night Before the Party.
I’ve learned a lot since then. This is some of my hard-won wisdom:
1) Do not make 90 mini frittata. I don’t care how cute they look, or how theoretically feasible they are. Cut them from your list. For some reason the cultural mores of the day define shower food as mini food, but when hosting a crowd, it’s time to rethink the call of the mini. (For the record, and for the above reason, the individual pot pies were not my idea. I have so much respect for my bro and sister-in-law for pulling them off so gorgeously.)
2) Plan a menu that offers make-ahead options. And then plan out day-of, day before, three days before, one week out to-do lists. Write out each dish and every single one of its steps, and do anything that can be done ahead of time as early as possible. Pad time estimates generously. (I’m always inspired by Rachel’s spreadsheets.)
3) Know your limits. I’m continually lulled into some false belief that I am a crafty person when in fact, I don’t get much joy from working with glue sticks and hole punches and crepe paper. Yet I only remember this when it’s 2am two nights before the party and Kevin–at my behest–is gently waving curled up sugar cone cornucopia back and forth to dry them off while I dash back and forth from the microwave to my curling station. I call this the seduction, and tyranny, of Pinterest.
4) Ask for help. I suppose recruiting your guests only really works when it’s family. My cousin Ivy RSVP’ed for the party with an offer to come by early to help, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask for a hand. I took her up on it and little would have gotten to the table on time without her amazing help. Also, in the desperation that came in the final hour’s countdown to the party I may or may not have asked the guest of honor to make a crucial Trader Joe’s run.
5) Remember why you’re doing all of it in the first place. I love my sister with a nutty fierceness that’s developed over a lifetime and comes from having shared a bedroom well into adulthood. The party was a gift from my brother, sister-in-law, and me to her. We are not touchy-feely types, and in the place of open expressions of affection, we seem to have poured our love into the food we cook for each other.
And actually, one of my favorite parts of these showers is seeing my grand aunties, who are always on their feet working at family gatherings, kicking back and enjoying other people cooking for them for once. That, I love that part.
Pictured: Alisa’s contribution to the gift cards we asked guests to bring for my sister’s shower.
I am not inventing anything here, just following the lead of other, more experienced snackers. Popcorn, a couple shakes of furikake sprinkled over it while it’s still hot, and a handful of torn up nori over that. Eat with chopsticks, so you can keep your fingers clean.
I first fell in love with jian bing 煎饼 almost ten years ago on my first trip to Shanghai. A light eggy pancake, with chili paste, sometimes pickled greens, green onions, and a crispy cracker folded in it, it’s the very definition of everything that’s good about Chinese street food. Fresh off the griddle and folded up into a thin plastic bag, it’s also the perfect handheld meal. The prospect of eating another made it maybe the number three, number two reason I went to China this fall.
Alas, we never got to jian bing, but Kevin did find us its close cousin when we were in Shanghai last month. We’d been having lavish home-cooked and banquet-style restaurant meals with his family in Suzhou, and by the time we got to Shanghai, were ready for more casual fare. Kevin found this spot via the Chinese version of Yelp, and as we walked down the street counting down the building numbers, we were looking for a cafe of some sort.
It turned out to be a business the size of a coat closet, with barely enough room for a worktable, a griddle, and two workers–one to roll out the dough and another to fry each ball up into the flaky fried discs they’d eventually become. The two women who worked there that morning stood side by side in a space so narrow they had to file in one at a time to get into position. We ordered two cong you bing with egg in it. Neither a classic cong you bing nor the street food favorite jian bing, this one was a green onion pancake with an egg cracked over it. It was delicious.
And this week, Kevin figured out how to fake it at home. I’d long ago resigned myself to never being able to eat this outside of China, and so tasting even a vague approximation of it filled me with such happiness, and revived all my longing to go back.
Here are the directions: Take one frozen cong you bing 葱油饼. We’re fond of this brand (and we’ve tried a lot of frozen cong you bing). Cook according to the directions–with a dip of oil over medium low heat. After 3-4 minutes on both sides, pour a scrambled egg or two over the pancake and cook, then flip again. Serve with a dab or two of hoisin and chili paste or sriracha.
It’s a little bit Sandra Lee, and I loved it. (We were using up a different brand of frozen pancake–yours will look better than this.)
Looking back, it all started for me in July with a visit to Honeymee, the new milk and honey soft serve shop in K-town. Either it put honey ice cream on my radar, or honey ice cream is on the minds of all the ice cream shops in town. Fresh, simple “true milk”–not vanilla–ice cream with honey drizzled over it, Honeymee’s is a really lovely treat. In Seoul last month, Kevin and I passed by a whole bunch of shops that Honeymee seems to have modeled itself on. Ice cream and honey in various vessels, and that’s the entirety of the shop, just like Honeymee’s model.
Without much realizing it then, a mini obsession was born.
The Sunday we got back from Asia, we took a ride over to Three Twins in Santa Monica, where I got a scoop of their honey ice cream, which was good. It had a few ice crystals in it here and there, but I didn’t mind. I’ve got a soft spot for Three Twins because it’s from SF, and because Kevin and Teddy always kept at least a pint or two of Three Twins (or Strauss!) ice cream from Berkeley Bowl in their freezer. Alas, no photos.
A few weeks ago, after a fancy pants dinner on the west side, we ended up at Coolhaus, where Dawn treated us all to crazy ice cream times. (Thanks Dawn!) Did you know Coolhaus offers a “two-story” ice cream sandwich? I still haven’t decided if that’s clever marketing or silly architectural gimmickry. I got the scraped bottoms of their day’s batch of honey ice cream sandwiched between olive oil pine nut rosemary cookies. Delicious, and super rich. Photos!
Then last Friday, on a quick stop at Gelson’s (which doesn’t sell buttermilk, if you were ever wondering) I remembered that the best part of a Gelson’s visit is a glide through their incredible ice cream aisle.
I finally got the hint I’d been sending myself the last few months and sprung for this honeycomb ice cream from L.A. Creamery. The container says to let it thaw for five minutes before digging in, at which point it becomes a creamy, pliant block of cream. Dig a spoon in and rivers of dark honey ooze out.
So good. I’m a-okay with this honey spree. Who else’s should I try next?
After several hectic months that left me with little kitchen energy, I found vast reserves of it last night. I’ve been out of sorts and no good for more than fried eggs and sauteed greens lately. Last night as I was moving around the kitchen I felt myself coming back to life.
First up was an attempt at making my mom’s tomato curry oxtail stew. I thought it’d take somewhere along the lines of an hour and a half, based on my mom’s hazy emailed recipe (which included the line: “At this point I squeeze in an unknown amount of ketchup.”) Hers is a perfectly composed affair–fall off the bone meat in a cozy curry sauce that absolutely demands rice to soak up that gravy. Mine turned out fine, though I burned, er caramelized, the bottom of the stew a few times in my impatience. Low and slow are my mother’s eternal cooking directions. Next time I know: three hours.
In that waiting time I got to try out a crab meat, cucumber, vermicelli salad. The dressing is super light: rice wine vinegar, sugar, lime juice, fish sauce, a few drops of sesame oil. (That’s basically the entire recipe.) I found it in one of my favorite cookbooks, a series of slim 5×7 bilingual cookbooks by Harumi Kurihara (the “Martha Stewart of Japan”) I picked up at Kinokuniya. Light, refreshing, with a gentle brightness and no pungent tang. Please excuse the fish sauce-stained kitchen table.
And after all the cleanup was done, we turned on Sleepless in Seattle–Kevin lasted all of 18 minutes before he begged off it–and I made this pound cake via xobreakfast with yams I’d roasted earlier in the day. Bridal shower soon means it’s recipe testing time, plus I was just plain curious. It was 1:30am by the time I got that glaze on, and collapsed into bed a sweaty, sore, very alive mess.
Here’s the breakfast shot (that large hole thanks to my improvised chopstick-cake tester). It’s a true pound cake, but moist and not too sweet, and just about requires a cup of tea or coffee on the side. Perfect to share with book club tonight.
We spent 14 days in Asia, six of them eating around the clock with Kevin’s family. Three hours after stepping off the plane in Shanghai I was at Kevin’s grandparents’ house in Suzhou. They welcomed me into their home, sent me to wash up and then promptly sat us down to a decadent lunch, all of it cooked by Kevin’s grandmother. Hongshaorou (red cooked pork); baiyejie (tofu knots) with winter melon and chicken in a light broth; cold eggplant; greens. Just as we sat down to eat Kevin’s grandma fired up a small pot of oil to deep fry stuffed slices of lotus root. (An attempt on that lotus root coming very soon.) It was delicious, all of it. Most of these dishes were new to me, a Suzhou/Shanghainese style of Chinese cooking I never had access to in Cantonese-centric San Francisco. But more striking than the culinary novelty of it was the warmth of Kevin’s family–a warmth that transcended my inability to verbally communicate with them. My family is rather different; newcomers to my family must prove themselves and their worth. That’s my clan. I had no right to expect such warm-hearted openness from Kevin’s family, and they collected me into their embrace immediately.
When we got to back to the States, Kevin’s mom picked us up from the airport and brought us back home, where she immediately sat us down for lunch. She’d spent the morning cooking. Chili and black bean-steamed prawns; tofu and pidan (thousand year old eggs); cold pickled cucumber salad; and sliced pressed tofu and bean sprouts. And just as we were assembling around the table she pulled out a batch of freshly made pork and chicken wonton, rows and rows of plump dumplings. As we ate she moved back and forth from the table to the kitchen to fold up more wonton and pop them in a pot of boiling water, forbidding us to stop eating and help her.
Kevin’s mom’s delicious lunch certainly eased the pain of being back in the States, and there was a sweet symmetry to being welcomed back to California with the same treatment we’d received in Asia.
We met up with friends and family in every city we stopped in on our trip, and experienced something akin to this everywhere. I’d describe it as an almost aggressive hospitality (woe to the guest who dares pause eating in front of Kevin’s grandma). Unparalleled, mind-boggling generosity. I don’t know any other way to describe it.
Food thoughts on hold for a bit. Recent events have stolen my appetite.
What a summer of devastation it’s been. July seemed to stretch on in an unending string of carnage and tragedy. August has been little better.
This weekend Michael Brown, another, yet another, young black man was shot and killed by the police. He was 18, a young one still new to the world set to start college this week. Knowing that tiny detail about him, and his moves toward the future, and his mother’s wishes for him, made him come alive in my mind, even as I was reading about his death. I have a good sense what the official response will be, once the investigation is done, and there is no version of the events that will add up in my mind such that Michael Brown had to be killed on Saturday night.
There’s senseless tragedy, and then there’s injustice borne of conscious, violent disregard for the value of other people’s lives. Both are wretched, but the latter is beyond my knowing how to tolerate. The ability to see other human beings as just as human as we ourselves seems like elementary work, but it’s where we are.
Where has summer gone? I’m not quite sure the answer myself. What I do know is I’ve been on the road a bunch, and sweating a lot in our 92F degree a/c-less apartment when I am in LA, and looking for delicious, straightforward recipes to get into my repertoire. This cauliflower is one of them. I brought it to Taz’s iftar last week, and five days later made it again for me and Appu.
Taz invited me over to break fast at her place and I said yes without thinking much in the moment about what a generous invitation it was. (All I knew was that I wanted to see Taz, who I get together with too rarely.) Taz is perhaps the most multifaceted artist I know. She paints, writes prose and poetry, organizes music projects, and I know there’s more I just can’t remember at the moment. If it turned out that she made her own pottery and also danced I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. She’s also got a wonderful, open spirit, and at her apartment, where more than 20 crammed in to share a loud, chatty dinner together after the sun went down, I could really see all of that in a new way. After people broke their fast, and some folks prayed, we all dug into the potluck dinner. It was my first iftar, but it was also the first time in a little while that I’d been around a gathering of so many creative, politically-minded folks. It was a treat in so many ways.
If you’re looking for something bright and spicy and South Asian-inspired, I recommend this dish. Veg-friendly, a snap to throw together, and so worth turning on the oven for even when your apartment is already scorching. The recipe calls for the spice mix to be shared among four heads of cauliflower. I used the same amounts (minus salt of course) with just two heads of cauliflower. Really, really good.
