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Nov. 13th, 2016
recipe Friday on Sunday
Nov. 13th, 2016 08:08 pmSomething I've cooked recently: Since the election it's been all about the comfort food. Yesterday I cooked polenta with a creamy mushroom sauce, and today I made a mediterranean-ish soup (beef stock, tomatoes, onion, lots of garlic, a little barley, a little kasha, zucchini, spinach, chickpeas, and small meatballs made of ground beef and grated onion; bay leaf and a bit of Greek oregano for seasoning; a squeeze of lemon and a little crumbled feta cheese to finish). It was very loosely based on a recipe from Jerusalem by Yotami Ottolenghi and Samir Tamimi, and it was yummy.
Something I have concrete plans to cook soon: oden, the Japanese fish and tofu stew. I adore it but don't make it often because the ingredients are costly, even if you cheat like I do and mostly buy the less expensive fish cakes and tofu products manufactured elsewhere in Asia, rather than the authentic Japanese ones. But when I was in Albuquerque on Friday, the siren song of the big international grocery lured me in, and I bought some fried tofu and several kinds of fish balls, and proper Japanese kamaboko (a sort of shaped fish loaf) and konnyaku (a sort of extremely firm flavorless jelly/jello made from taro root--it doesn't taste like much but you can form it into cool looking twists). I'll add in some daikon, some boiled eggs (the eggs are the best part of oden!), and maybe, inauthentically as far as I know, some fresh squid. Normally oden is eaten with rice but I confess that I often eat it with soba noodles instead. I think the earthiness of soba is a great match for oden. Apologies if I have just horrified any Japanese people or connoisseurs of pure Japanese cuisine.
Something I have vague plans to cook eventually: I'm supposed to bring a pie to a friend's house for Thanksgiving, but not a pumpkin pie because the friend's making that one herself. I think I'm going to go for a chocolate and orange marmalade tart that I found in one of my cookbooks. Almost everybody loves chocolate, and the recipe is easy but not uninteresting since it calls for you to make your own marmalde filling.
Something I have concrete plans to cook soon: oden, the Japanese fish and tofu stew. I adore it but don't make it often because the ingredients are costly, even if you cheat like I do and mostly buy the less expensive fish cakes and tofu products manufactured elsewhere in Asia, rather than the authentic Japanese ones. But when I was in Albuquerque on Friday, the siren song of the big international grocery lured me in, and I bought some fried tofu and several kinds of fish balls, and proper Japanese kamaboko (a sort of shaped fish loaf) and konnyaku (a sort of extremely firm flavorless jelly/jello made from taro root--it doesn't taste like much but you can form it into cool looking twists). I'll add in some daikon, some boiled eggs (the eggs are the best part of oden!), and maybe, inauthentically as far as I know, some fresh squid. Normally oden is eaten with rice but I confess that I often eat it with soba noodles instead. I think the earthiness of soba is a great match for oden. Apologies if I have just horrified any Japanese people or connoisseurs of pure Japanese cuisine.
Something I have vague plans to cook eventually: I'm supposed to bring a pie to a friend's house for Thanksgiving, but not a pumpkin pie because the friend's making that one herself. I think I'm going to go for a chocolate and orange marmalade tart that I found in one of my cookbooks. Almost everybody loves chocolate, and the recipe is easy but not uninteresting since it calls for you to make your own marmalde filling.