The Snack Review – Page 3 – Snacks, Reviewed

On Ugly Food

I love beautiful food. I love me a good old fashioned instagrammable meal. I am one of those people who snaps photos of all her food before digging in. Wait, this is a freaking food blog. Of course I do this.

But is only the pretty stuff worth sharing? The NYT recently exhorted people to Instagram their boring meals, a move I endorse, even if their contributor offered the thinnest rationale. “Do a huge favor for culinary historians and offer us a glimpse of the ordinary,” Laura Shapiro wrote. “A hundred years from now (assuming somebody has figured out how to archive this stuff) scholars will be riveted to your images of the everyday, and you — or at least your Instagram handle — will be immortal.”

And honestly–for posterity’s sake? For anthropologists’ benefit in the year 2117? It’s 80F in Los Angeles in late December, Puerto Rico is still without power, the country seems to have already forgotten that mere weeks ago 600 people were shot in one night in Las Vegas, and that’s to say nothing of oh, you know, potentially impending nuclear war and melting Arctic ice sheets. Shapiro has way more confidence in the future of the planet, or even just civilization, than I do.

Do not do it for the historians. I support sharing your leftovers and ugly dishes because real life is more than just late afternoon light dancing across a 15-ingredient salad set upon a Carrara marble countertop. Real life is not a waffle cone with four scoops of ice cream, three different types of sprinkles, and Pocky sticks, chocolate drizzle and matcha charcoal whipped cream popping off it. Real life is not a 24/7 sensory explosion.

Instagram is not a full portrait of actual life. On this, Shapiro and I agree. Instagram is a mediated, curated (barf) reality. Real life is crusty and awkward and poorly lit and tear-stained. It’s looking down and finding dried egg yolk stuck to the crotch of sweatpants you were wearing when you ate lunch on your lap–the day before. It’s the recognition that everyone, even people who seem to “have it all” (more barf), is facing something very hard in their lives. Life is leaning in for the kiss that you know may be the last you share with someone you love. It’s also filled with miracles, like this bowl of yogurt, swimming in a pool of lemon cream.

C gave me a precious jar for my birthday. The most delightful thing about it, besides the fact that she made it, is that it comes from a recipe from the 1700s which was dug up by these zany guys who run a shop which specializes in fashion, furniture, and homegoods from the 18th century. (Are they also the kinds of people who take part in Civil War reenactments? I am not sure I want to know.) Their YouTube channel is a hoot. I urge you to check out their lemon cream video, and witness their commitment to historical accuracy. I don’t want to ruin anything for you, but it’s worth a watch for the whisk alone.

C’s version, made with raw sugar, came out a tarnished ochre color. It sloshes around, and is hardly appetizing to look at. But spoon it over a bowl of yogurt and into your mouth and… transcendence. It’s citrusy but not at all tart, and is more a syrup than a cream but somehow rich enough that I could have sworn there was butter in it. (There isn’t.) I take measured scoops of it from the jar, fighting warring impulses to save and devour it every time.

I share it with you here not because it’s beautiful but because, my God, it’s delicious. And because this jar of ugly lemon cream is one of the sweetest gifts I received in my very real 2017 life.

Eating | My Feelings

Not only have I not been cooking lately–I turned on my stove once in the last month–I haven’t even been eating much. My diet has slowed to only that which can be prepared in under a minute: yogurt and honey, leftovers from meals I’ve picked at, food from bags, lots of stone fruit. (Summer to-do list #12 – check.) It’s summer, sure. And also, there’s a lot of living that’s been happening.

The last year of my life has been full of ups and downs and holy shit I’ve just kicked my life off of a cliff-s. It’s given me plenty of opportunity to observe what happens to my appetite when I’m in different emotional states. Nervousness and fear can disappear my appetite in a second. When I’m feeling insane giddy anticipation I’m not much for food either. Grief does something a little similar, while low-grade, persistent stress makes me just want to stuff myself with boxes of cookies and crackers.

What’s a food and cooking blog maintained by a person who’s neither cooking nor really eating? Who knows. This has been my sustenance lately:

She Was Pretty – This one comes from Lynda, who sold me with one sentence: “Life passes by pretty quickly with a good Korean drama.”
“Don’t you think any pizza can be a personal one if you cry while you eat it?” -Aparna Nancherla, who I would set out on a long train or car ride for just so I could listen to her album along the way.
“How Far I’ll Go” – I know we all feel like Moana, journeying far from our homes to be true to ourselves and do right by our loved ones, but believe me when I tell you. I am Moana.
My Goodreads to-read list. Considering my reading list is like looking at a list of vacations that I want to take. I don’t even have to be reading anything in particular, I can just be thinking about what I want to read. And that’s enough to help me get by.
“My First (and Last) Time Dating a Rice Queen” – Alexander Chee on the power and pain of even the shortest love affairs.
Instructions on Not Giving Up – This poem by Ada Limon comes from Chee’s email newsletter, which I’ve now signed up for thanks to Leonor’s newsletter. These lines I feel in my bones: “a return // to the strange idea of continuous living despite // the mess of us, the hurt, the empty”
I’ve been listening and reading to a lot of stuff about breakups lately. This week’s Modern Love hit a nerve: “The 12 Hour Goodbye That Started Everything”
My podcast life: Nancy; Call Your Girlfriend; Death, Sex, & Money never, ever fail me. That and the fun new interviews about interviewing podcast The Turnaround.

Summer To-Dos

Summer’s here, technically. I snapped this photo from the window seat at East One Coffee in Carroll Gardens yesterday afternoon on what was possibly the most perfect late spring afternoon. It was of course made all the sweeter because it came after a string of crappy grey days.

I’m looking forward to summer. I know that when I’m sweating through my underwear on gloppy 90F days in a few weeks I’m going to be rolling my eyes at myself. But I still have a feeling it’ll be a good season.

Here’s what I can’t wait to do…

1) Make a lot of BLTs. Eat them.

2) Plan and head out on a solo trip.

3) Travel to other parts of the East Coast I’ve never seen. (This is very easy, as I’ve been basically nowhere on the East Coast.)

4) Work my food processor. I love it when I use it, and don’t use it enough. I’ve been collecting a few ideas: Deb’s food processor cookies. Stella Parks’ brilliant dehydrated fruit whipped cream. Or her insane idea for Japanese and bagel-inspired dinner rolls.

5) Make watermelon juice (in my food processor).

6) Use that watermelon juice in a cocktail.

7) Try a new storytelling form. A photo collection, a zine, an audio story.

8) Read five books before Labor Day.

9) Make friends with someone with a roof.

10) Spend a few days in a place where it’s appropriate and maybe even necessary to be in a bathing suit all weekend long.

11) Picnics, more of them, as many of them as possible.

12) Eat as many nectarines and peaches as I can handle when they finally are in season. (California I don’t want to hear about the stone fruit you’ve been enjoying for weeks already.)

Snow Day Jook

As I type this, the snow is whooshing around like mad outside, a pot of jook is bubbling on the stove, and I’m wearing a sweatshirt my brother got me for Christmas that says: BUT FIRST BRUNCH*. In other words, I’ve achieved peak hygge. Since that New York Times piece came out I’ve since read at least half a dozen others about this Danish approach to life, and each article takes care to provide a pronunciation guide. I read it, mouth it to myself, then promptly forget it every. single. time. Doesn’t the word just beg to be pronounced “higgy”?

What I do know is that if hygge is the pursuit of cozy time, then I have been hygge-ing my whole damn life. The first order of business when I come home from a long day is to change into pajamas. On just about any day I would rather be burrowed under a quilt than perched at a bar. When I was about to turn 16, the birthday gift I wanted most desperately was ……. a fleece bathrobe. (I still own the ankle-length duck print one that my mom gave me that year.) A snowstorm just gives me the perfect excuse to live in my default mode, and revel in it.

I’ve been cooking a lot recently, almost all my meals, and I’m usually juggling a running list of recipes I’ve got lined up. Jook wasn’t in this week’s queue until I heard about the storm. But it just made sense.

My recipe is from my mom, who typically uses ham hocks and dried scallops to flavor her jook. My aunties use a whole lot of different things as the base of theirs: turkey bones after Thanksgiving, whatever’s left from a roast pig (whenever my family’s got a new baby or an engagement to celebrate, there’s usually a roast pig, and my Auntie Margie makes sure to claim the head right away), a stripped carcass from a Costco roast chicken. My mom’s default is usually ham hocks though, for whatever reason. And so that’s what I use.

The recipe is so simple:

Put your ham hock in a small pot of water, bring to boil just a minute to get the gunk out, then remove the ham hock and trim off the skin (I forgot this step in mine). Put one cup raw, uncooked rice, 10 cups of liquid (she’ll use a mix of chicken broth and water), ham hock, and rinsed dried scallops into a big pot. Cover, bring to a boil then lower the heat to a simmer. My recipe, transcribed from my mom’s directions over the phone, say: “The fire should be a gentle buh buh buh.” Watch the jook so it doesn’t bubble up and over. Let it simmer for an hour and a half or so and stir gently every once in a while to make sure nothing’s sticking to the bottom. Add more liquid if you want it to be thinner. When it’s nearly cooked, throw in whatever fixings you want. I added in shiitake mushrooms and foo jook, which are thin bean curd sheets.

*The sweatshirt really needs a comma in between the “first” and “brunch,” but it looks so cool I’ve forgiven the makers.

ETA:

Cooking With Kevin’s Mom

Kevin’s mom has taken to spoiling us with meals in when she comes to visit, and it’s absolutely my favorite way to pass a few days when she’s in town. It’s a lot of fun to hang around the kitchen while she’s cooking, trying to absorb bits of cooking wisdom here and there while she casually whips up whole feasts before our eyes. Beyond just being a funny, self-assured woman, she’s also quick, with a razor-sharp mind and buckets of energy. I think of her almost as a force of nature. I often tell Kevin that the two of us together could not do what one of his mom is able to accomplish in an afternoon.

But even though she’s got incredible cooking talent and instincts, she’s not much of a teacher. On one of her visits she made something very special: tang yuan. It’s a filled mochi ball gently boiled in soup, and often served sweet, with red bean paste or sesame paste inside. Except Kevin’s mom made a savory tang yuan filled with pork and greens and mushrooms! Imagine a chewy, glutinous rice cake ball hiding inside a juicy bite of fluffy ground pork, Chinese herbs and mushrooms.

As she was making them we tried to get some lessons out of her but it was hopeless. She took a bag of glutinous rice flour and shook it out into a bowl, then boiled up some water. “How hot should the water be?” we asked. ”100 Chinese degrees, not American degrees!” She then poured the scalding water, volume unknown, into the bowl and first with chopsticks and then with her bare hands whipped the flour and water into a chalky paste, which became a smooth ball. The dough is finicky, too much or too little water and the dough becomes too sticky to handle. Too much pounding and it loses its elasticity. “What are you looking for?” I ventured when she was in the middle of a kneading session. “This!” she said, pointing to her handiwork. Then she cut me off because it was time to move on to the next step: filling the mochi and nestling morsels of meat inside the dough before sending them into a pot of boiling water.

I couldn’t tell you much more about how this goes. But oh my god they’re delicious.

One Year in New York City

We’ve been living in New York City for a whole year! Rodents scare me less. I now understand the phrase “live-in super,” and get what a perk it is to have access to one. I’ve learned not to make eye contact on the subway, and accept it not as rudeness, but as the way New Yorkers give each other privacy in a super crowded city where you’re afforded little solitude. I’m quicker to anger now, and faster with a retort, especially with rude people on the streets, and I don’t see any of that as a bad thing. I see friends more often here than I did in LA, and think it has something to do with the trains, but I’m not quite sure.

Gone are the days of the biannual Costco trips to buy the 48-pack of toilet paper (I miss this more than I thought I would). I don’t blink twice when I see $3.50 tacos on a menu anymore. I have NO idea what a gallon of gas costs today. When we first moved from LA, my tender driving feet ached at the end of every day. These days walking a mile a day is whatever. It’s also known as: getting home from the A train.

The other thing that’s changed in my life is pizza, pizza, and more pizza. If you were to take my weekly taco intake in Los Angeles and swap it out for pizza in New York, you’d have a good sense of its new place in my life. (I should add: I used to eat a lot of tacos when I lived in LA.) K and I don’t discriminate–we love the cheap slices as much as we enjoy the fancypants gourmet pizzas. We’ve liked Lucali, Rubirosa, Sottocasa, Roberta’s. But I don’t have time for any of that Holy Grail of NYC Pizza crap. At a certain point it’s all terrific.

The slices in this photo are from My Little Pizzeria on Court Street, which has a small plastic bucket of fresh basil leaves on the counter for your own taking. Perfect addition to fresh from the oven reheated pizza.

A Vegetarian Chinese Dinner

Tonight I crossed the threshold into what felt like a brand new dimension of Chinese cooking. I made a Chinese dinner, but there was NO MEAT in any of it. I kept repeating it over and over to K, like I’d happened upon some secret portal to Chinese cuisine. We were eating Chinese food but every dish was made entirely of PLANTS! The mere concept was an impossible incongruity, I’d always thought. K kept eating, I kept marveling like I’d managed to squeeze an elephant into the apartment through our front door.

I’m roughly familiar with Chinese vegetarian cuisine, but usually the kind that’s built around gluten and soy-based fake meat products. (Buddha bless the culinary ingenuity of those vegetarian monks.) Fake duck meat and fake chicken meat isn’t really my thing, but intellectually I understood that vegetarian Chinese food exists for some people.

The dinner I made tonight was such a revelation chiefly because of my upbringing in a proudly meat-loving, and more or less vegetable-spurning family. In my family it’s a running joke, but one based very much in reality. My mom’s side just loves their meat. Newcomers come to parties and need both hands to count up all the ways pork appears on the table, but have a hard time finding the vegetables, which my family accommodates as a seeming concession to the social dictates around health, or a begrudging acknowledgement that greenery just makes a dinner spread look nicer. So imagining a Chinese meal without meat is like asking me to eliminate my family’s entire repertoire of Chinese dishes.

Enter Fuschia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice. (Thanks, sister!) “[T]his is primarily a book about how to make vegetables taste divine with very little expense or effort, and how to make a little meat go a long way. … More than two-thirds [of the recipes] are either completely vegetarian or can be adapted to be so, if you choose,” Dunlop writes in the introduction to her cookbook. I read that initially and was like, come again?

Except once I started paging through the recipes it made total sense to me. It wouldn’t have otherwise occurred to me to sauté cucumbers, but I did tonight with mook yee/mu er/wood ear mushrooms, and garlic and red chilies. I saw the photo and was like, oh! I got that. Dunlop’s recipe for Sichuan pepper-infused julienned potato salad, tu dou si, reminded me that I’ve been meaning to make this dish–which is as delicious cold as it is straight from the pan. And while I was at it, why not spoon a rich sauce of caramelized garlic and shallots, dou ban jiang/fermented bean paste, sugar, and soy sauce over thin slices of kabocha squash–and then steam them together! It gave me the perfect excuse to put to use my new kitchen acquisition, a pair of hot plate claws (they look like this). The whole thing turned out great, and opened up a door to another world for me. I’m still not quite over it, if you can’t tell.

Embracing seeming contradictions–there’s a life lesson in there and not just because I love to shoehorn corny wisdom into food stories. This kernel is something I’ve been coming back to over and over again in a year full of scary changes and brand new newness and edges of the earth points of no return. So it is in life as it is in eating.

Sick Food

I initially wrote this when I was recovering from a bad, bad cold last year, and in no shape to be hanging my camera over a steaming dish of poached chicken and rice. I always meant to snap a photo when I made the dish again so I could post this. I’ve made it again many times, but never got around to the photos part. (Poached chicken doesn’t really photograph well.) But then I got insanely sick again this week, cooked this tonight, and remembered this post. And gosh it’s the most restorative dish when you’re coming off of almost 4 days of eating only broth, applesauce and oatmeal. And alas, no photos!

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I’ve been very sick recently, but one still must eat. Enter bak chee gai, which translates, I think, to white cut chicken. It’s delicious all the time, and not just when I’m nursing a bad cold, but for some reason I only think to make it for myself when I’m ill. This is what I made this past weekend when I was very sick and very exhausted and dragging my body around the kitchen to scrounge up some nourishment. I asked my Auntie Margie for her recipe for bak chee gai once, and hers involves plunging a whole chicken in and out of scalding broth a few times. This is not that recipe.

This is usually what happens in my parents’ house, and this is how I make my bak chee gai: Open your freezer that’s practically bursting with rock-hard anvils of frozen beef intestines or joong or small bites of food to be microwaved back to life and enjoyed at a later date. A single bao wrapped in saran wrap, for instance. Or three chicken patties. Six dumplings. The freezer is the place where food can be preserved indefinitely, after all. Locate a couple chicken thighs and drumsticks and wrestle the frozen food bricks back long enough the shut the door.

Thaw chicken and rinse it off. Throw four or five slices of skinned ginger and a couple green onions into a large pot of water, and bring to a boil. You’re not going for ginger tea or anything, and proportions are not important. Salt if you’d like. I never do. (My dad, actually, does not even bother with the ginger and green onions, but that’s just how my dad rolls. Dad recipes: One pot. Hot water. Raw chicken.)

Once your water is boiling, put chicken into the pot, and bring water back up to a boil. Put a lid on. Once you’ve got a nice healthy roiling bubble, shut the fire off and walk away. Don’t open the lid. Don’t touch the chicken. The steam has work to do. Wait 20 minutes, or maybe 30, and only then should you even think about opening the lid.

At this point you should be good to go. You could absolutely stop right there (this, again, is what my dad does) and eat with rice and oyster sauce for the most bare bones meal. On Sunday I used the poaching liquid to cook my rice, and it turned out quite nicely. If you’re feeling extra fancy, you can mince up a little bit of ginger and green onion real fine and put it into a heatproof bowl, then heat a couple tablespoons of oil in a small skillet until it’s just smoking. Pour it over your minced ginger-green onion paste and salt that gently. It’s a great garnish and dipping sauce for the chicken.

You’ll end up with poached chicken that’s fully cooked but silken and tender, and gently suffused with the healing powers of ginger and green onion.

Two Green Tea Desserts

I have somehow managed to successfully avoid matcha mania through the years. I don’t really need matcha bread and matcha horchata and matcha chocolate in my life, but I’ll make two exceptions. And both are desserts I’ve been lucky enough to try in New York.

The sesame and green tea swirl soft serve at Cafe Zaiya. (only at the East 41st location) A smooth soft serve with complementary flavors. They’ve perfected the just barely sweet enough balance. It’s the kind of inviting texture and flavor that makes it way too easy to finish the whole cup.

And the green tea affogato at Cocoron. I’ve eaten there twice and both times this dessert was my favorite part of the meal. Fresh mochi, corn flakes, toasted rice, green tea ice cream, a dollop of red bean paste and a shot of green tea to pour over it. I may have even taken a video of the pour the first time Kevin and I ordered it.

And speaking of frozen desserts, winter is coming. It’s not just a Game of Thrones tagline. It’s this brand new New Yorker’s truth. I was awoken this morning by the clanging and hissing of the radiator, which means that it was under 55F outside. And tonight I had to wear a wool scarf AND a hat to get to the subway. I couldn’t stifle my howls as the cold wind swept through me. It’s as cold outside right now as it gets in LA–and we’re still in October. Oh and it’s supposed to be in the 30s tomorrow night.

Pocky Cookie Review

Hello from my personal inadvertent R&D snack lab. I’ve eaten dozens of boxes of Pocky in my lifetime. And this week something brand new happened. I opened a Chocolate Pocky box, and the uncoated tops of the Pocky sticks broke off like matches with the rest of it hardened into a single chocolate-coated mass. So I did what any snack hungry person would. I opened up the pack and ate it like a cookie.

Verdict: Inadvisable. Pocky is really not meant to be eaten this way.

That’s what’s been going on on the snacking front. There’s also been a whole lot of cooking the last few months. The weekend the New York Times suggested making and freezing up tomato sauce for the frigid winter months ahead Kevin went tomato sauce crazy (Deborah Madison’s tomato concassé is our go-to recipe). I also made my first pot of jook using my mom’s recipe, ham hock, dried scallops and all. It turned out so thick that after one night in the fridge I could have cut into it with a knife. But I do have a little bit of pride about that. Kevin told his mom that I’d made jook and she warned him that Cantonese people make their jook too watery so he should thicken it up. Taken care of, mom!

I also made shakshuka a la Ottolenghi. I was hoping for something sensual and luscious, like those much-circulated cookbook images. My shakshuka was not sensual in any way. I’ve been steadily working on finishing a batch of chocolate banana muffins I made last weekend. Four in a day is my personal record so far. There was also Marian Burros’ NYT fav and food bloggers’ classic plum torte. I’ve been making a lot of fried rice with whatever’s left over in the fridge. And there was one dinner in particular recently that made me feel like I was back in my aunt’s apartment in San Francisco: steamed egg custard; asparagus; rice; and a chicken, shiitake, Chinese sausage stir fry. I even dotted the top of the seui dahn with an oyster sauce smiley face just like my mom used to do when we were kids. Nights like that I take special pride in the fact that I can cook the food that brings me so much comfort, even 3,000 miles from home.