Thanksgiving is primetime for food-related content and I’m here to acknowledge not only my lack of participation but also my lack of caring. I believe honesty tends to be more interesting and less icky than adhering to standards of content creation and, honestly, the week of Thanksgiving I found myself ordering take out almost everyday.

This year was the second time my partner and I had Thanksgiving on our own and I had aspirations to go overboard with a menu that would feed this (blissfully) childless couple. There would be a whole turkey, potatoes, green bean casserole (for the first time in probably 20 years!), stuffing, gravy, spinach & artichoke dip, homemade rolls, glazed carrots, and of course pie. The fridge would burst at the seams with Thanksgiving leftovers. The freezer to be filled with a fresh onslaught of turkey carcass, a future investment for bone broth promising a months-long soup dividend just on the horizon.

But Monday, Tuesday, then Wednesday came and went and the fridge was a wasteland littered with takeout food containers. Despite my food fantasies, I couldn’t muster the desire to cook a damn thing or find the appetite for anything resembling a Thanksgiving meal. Instead, on the blessed day, we ordered Chinese food and later comforted ourselves with movie theater popcorn and nachos as we cried ourselves into oblivion during Hamnet.

To continue the spirit of honesty, I admit I’m caught between disappointment and detachment. The past version of myself who held grand, perhaps gluttonous aspirations mourns my failure in bringing them to life. My present self orbits an abyss of numbness, unable to connect with this grief but still (and always) tethered to feelings of guilt. But sometimes, even when you love something, the desire to engage with it doesn’t always align with the motivation it takes to follow through. Over the years familial camaraderie and participation in Thanksgiving has dwindled. Family tensions and estrangement, geographic and emotional distance, and the death of loved ones make tectonic shifts in relationship dynamics, permeating the holiday air. This plus the disappointment, guilt, and numbness is a recipe for malaise that we know is more commonly felt this time of year. Content created for us would like to conceal this truth through illusions of normalcy, that of which you can purchase through the link in bio.

Exactly a week later my norm remains that I’m unmotivated to cook, to even get out of bed. I begrudgingly take showers and haven’t been to the gym consistently in over a month. I think about the animals who are winding down, sleeping more, and conserving their energy as it gets colder and darker. As I pull the covers over my head I imagine a huge brown bear stretching and yawning in her cave, rolling over, farting, and going back to sleep. I acknowledge my lack of motivation and I want to offer it an antidote in the form of things I’m grateful for:

My lovely, angelic partner.

My health.

That I get to live in New York City, even though she’s dirty and irritating as hell sometimes.

For friends who are like family.

That Jessie Buckley pursued her dream and became an actor.

For people who work at the movie theater during holidays.

That there are more books in the world than we could read in a lifetime.

My Toto washlet, I don’t know how I lived so long without it.

Women in general.

For those seemingly few people, who against all odds, try to do what’s right in a world bent towards disintegration and corruption.

For you, who continue to read the words I submit in this noisy land of the Internet.

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(Sadly I did not get an image of these short ribs once they came out of the oven, so please enjoy step 3 of this recipe—the browning and sizzling in all its glory)

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INGREDIENTS

• 2 tbsp olive oil

• Salt and pepper

• 2.5 lb bone-in short rib (or about 3 bone-in short rib)

• 4 garlic cloves, grated

• 3 sprigs of thyme

• 2 small yellow onions, sliced

• 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

• 1 cup dry white wine

• 1 cup apple cider

• 3.5 cups beef broth (enough to cover the short ribs) or Better Than Bouillon

METHOD

1. Season the short ribs all over with salt about 30 minutes before cooking.

2. Preheat the oven to 325°F.

3. Over medium-high heat, brown the short ribs on all sides in a dutch oven. A lidded stock pot will also work, but may take more time to braise.

4. Once the short ribs are browned on the outside, remove them from the pot. There should be more fat than what you started with, plus some brown bits from the short rib. Add the sliced onions and grate the garlic into the dutch oven. Season with the brown sugar, and a pinch of salt and pepper.

5. Once the onions are translucent and becoming caramelized add the sprigs of thyme and give a quick stir. (The onions and grated garlic at this point will start to stick to the bottom of the pot.)

6. Add the apple cider vinegar, dry white wine, apple cider and beef broth to the pot. As you add these one at a time, they’ll start loosening the onions and other brown bits from the bottom.

7. Return the short ribs back to the pot, bone side up, and nestle them in so that they’re fully submerged in the liquid.

8. Cover the pot and leave in the oven for about 3 hours, checking at least every 60 minutes to give a stir and test the tenderness of the meat.

9. After 3 hours, turn the oven up to 425°F and let it cook for an additional 25-35 minutes so that the edges of the short ribs become deeply browned.

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Yields 4-6 servings—but I promise how ever much you put out will be gone by the end of the meal.

DRESSING

• 2.5 tbsp dark cherry vinegar

• .24 cup olive oil

• Juice from 1 lemon

• 1 tsp honey

• 1 tsp salt

• pepper to taste

SALAD COMPONENTS

• 1 head of radicchio

• 1 head of baby butter lettuce (or any soft, leafy lettuce you like)

• 1 shallot, quick pickled

• 2-3 tbsp pistachios, chopped

• 2 radishes

Method:

DRESSING

• Add all of the salad dressing ingredients to a jar and shake it all together. You can also use an immersion blender if you have one.

SALAD COMPONENTS

• For the radicchio and lettuce I cut off the stem, take the leaves apart, and let them sit in a white vinegar/water bath for about 5 minutes (a process I talked about in a previous post), jostling every once in a while to shake off any dirt or insects that might have nestled in the crevices. Once rinsed, drain and dry in a salad spinner or with a clean kitchen towel.

• Slice the shallot and “fluff” the slices with a fork to encourage separation of the layers. To a small bowl add about 3 tbsp of sherry vinegar (or enough to cover the shallots), .5 tbsp salt, and .5 tbsp sugar and the shallot slices. Let sit for anywhere from 10-30 minutes.

• In a large bowl toss the clean lettuce and radicchio leaves together with a light drizzle of olive oil (maybe 1 tsp), salt & pepper

• Roughly chop the pistachios

• Slice the radishes in thin circles

• Gently mix all of these components together plus the dressing (easiest to do with your clean hands), in one big bowl and transfer to a serving dish . You may not need all of the dressing this recipe calls for. I used just enough to lightly coat all the leaves and finished with a light drizzle before serving and saved the rest for later.

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The other night some friends came over for dinner and the week leading up to it, I had no idea what I was going to make (exciting!). I thought about making a meatloaf which I’ve never made and don’t think I’ve eaten before. (Side note: I’ve been interested in classic midwestern dishes that are often looked down upon, though they must be classic for a reason!) But then I had a vision for these Roasted Carrots with Orange-Coriander Sour Cream Base.

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The image of a fork spearing an elongated carrot and swiping it across a layer of creamy sauce embedded itself in my brain, et voilà, here was the star of dinner. With the help of an orange-coriander base, these carrots would lean into their natural sweetness contrasted with spiced, oven-crisped chickpeas, and hot chili oil.

As I’ve already mentioned, I wouldn’t recommend a dinner party recipe if you couldn’t make it (or majority of it) ahead of time. For this recipe, the creamy honey-orange-coriander base is a little finicky and does take extra time, but it’s something that can be done the day before. All the better because those flavors get a little more intense the more they settle with each other.

CREAMY ORANGE-CORIANDER BASE

• Juice from 3.5 oranges (1 cup)

• 2 tbsp butter

• 2 tsp whole coriander seeds

• 0.75 of an 8 oz sour cream container

• 0.5 tbsp honey

ROASTED CARROTS

• 5-6 carrots, cut in half cross-wise and quartered lengthwise

• 1-2 tbsp avocado oil

• 0.5 tsp fennel seeds

• 2 tsp salt & pepper

ROASTED CHICKPEAS

• 1 can of chickpeas

• 0.5 tbsp avocado oil

• 2 tsp salt & pepper

• 1 tsp cayenne pepper

• 2 tsp red pepper flakes

FOR ASSEMBLY

• 0.125 cup of chopped parsley

• 2 tsp fresh thyme (reserve for the carrots post-roasting)

• zest of 2 oranges

• 0.5-1 tbsp chili oil (or however much you like)

• ~2 tsp champagne vinegar

Method

CREAMY ORANGE-CORIANDER BASE

1. Start by making the brown butter. In a small pan over medium to medium-high heat, bring the butter to an energetic simmer/light boil until it gets foamy. Start whisking and don’t stop, you should start to see little flecks of milk solids settling at the bottom of the pan, so make sure those bits don’t burn.

2. Bloom coriander seeds. Once you see those milk solids, add the coriander seeds and continue whisking. As the spices start to become more fragrant, turn the heat down to a gentle simmer (low, low-medium heat). You may even need to take the pan off the heat (while whisking) to ensure the spices don’t burn, which can happen quickly.

3. Take off the heat right as the butter becomes a golden honey brown color. Once the butter smells nutty, the color overall will become a light golden brown with the milk solids and coriander seeds becoming slightly darker in color as well. Take the butter off the stove as soon as this happens (it’s easy to go from perfect golden brown to burned). With the residual heat, continue stirring for a couple of minutes. You’ll see the butter and seeds become increasingly rich in color. If not, put the butter back on a low heat and whisk until you 1) smell the coriander more intensely and/or 2) the butter is a rich golden brown.

4. Let the butter cool. Once it’s reached the desired state, take off the heat and let the butter cool, leaving the whole coriander seeds in the butter. This adds another textural layer to the finished dish.

5. Boil & reduce the orange juice. While the butter cools, take the juice of your oranges and, making sure no pulp or rind gets through, pour the orange juice through a fine mesh strainer into another small saucepan over medium-high heat. Let the orange juice come to a boil. The liquid should reduce by at least ¾ or more of the original amount and become a thicker consistency of syrup. This could take about 10-15 minutes or more. (Keep in mind, this will be added to the sour cream and you don’t want it to be too loose, so the more syrup-y, the better.)

6. Combine orange reduction, butter & coriander, honey, and sour cream. Once the orange juice has become syrupy, add this to a bowl along with the butter and bloomed coriander seeds. Add the honey and sour cream and stir until everything is combined. It will be a bit looser now with the orange reduction and butter which is fine. (It’s too loose if it doesn’t hold some shape. If this happens, just drizzle over the carrots instead of using it as a base.)

7. Set in the fridge and move on to the next phase of the recipe.

ROASTED CHICKPEAS

1. Preheat the oven to 450°F.

2. Rinse & strain the chickpeas.

3. Combine chickpeas, oil, and spices. Add the chickpeas to a sheet pan. Drizzle the oil and add the spices and mix with your hands to coat all of the chickpeas.

4. Roast. Put the pan of chickpeas in the oven and let these roast for about 10 minutes, or until you hear lots of little chickpeas popping and sizzling. They should be “frizzled”—sort of fried and roasted with crisped outer shells.

5. Take them out of the oven. There should be a healthy amount of “frizzled” chickpeas upon inspection. You can set these aside, they’ll be fine at room temperature.

ROASTED CARROTS

1. Preheat the oven to 425°F.

2. Prep your carrots. After rinsing, scrubbing, and cutting your carrots in half cross-wise and quartered lengthwise, place them on a sheet pan. (You could add an extra step here, which I like to do, and that is to dry roast the carrots in the oven which lets any excess water cook off that might still be there from rinsing. I find this helps to speed up the process of browning once you add the oil. This shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes in an already heated oven.)

3. Combine ingredients. On the sheet pan, combine the carrots with oil and spices, making sure all sides are coated.

4. Roast. Put them in the oven for about 15-20 minutes, or until they are soft and starting to sizzle. Whack the temperature up to 475°F and roast for another 5-10 minutes or until they’ve started to become brown and crisp around the edges. While they’re roasting, have ready the dish you plan to serve them on. It should be long enough to spread out the carrots (you want to make sure each one makes contact with the creamy base). You should also take your Creamy, Orange-Coriander Base out of the fridge and have the chickpeas nearby.

5. Take the carrots out of the oven & assemble. Once you’ve taken the carrots out of the oven, spoon the Creamy, Orange-Coriander Base directly on your serving dish and spread it around, creating peaks and valleys. (Again, if you find the creamy base has ended up more loose like a sauce, just lay the carrots out first and add the sauce at the end.) Lay the carrots across the dish so that they’re all making contact with the creamy base. Arrange the roasted chickpeas around and in the crevices of the carrots. Sprinkle everything with chopped parsley, thyme leaves, flakey salt and orange zest. Finish by adding the chili oil and a light drizzle of champagne vinegar or a squeeze of lemon juice over everything.

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Enjoy!

Hosting dinner parties is the closest I’ll come to owning a restaurant, and what I love about that is I don’t have to worry about going bankrupt or high employee turnover (hello, I worked back of house at a restaurant for a grand total of 1 week before I realized it was. not. for. me. So, I’m intimate with this latter point). There’s no other way to put this, but hosting dinner parties is simply very fun. I love handing friends a cocktail, getting them water (still or sparkling?), setting out small bites to eat (marinated olives and nuts), having music playing, offering them newly minted slippers since we’re a shoes-off household (sadly, only one person has worn them so far), etc. ‘My Little Apartment Restaurant” will be a series where I’ll talk about everything I’ve made, lessons I’ve learned, and advice I can share.

Starting off, here are three areas that I think might be commonly felt among the dinner party hosting masses:

• The more prep work I can do beforehand, the better! I do love working in the kitchen, but I like hanging out with my friends more. What I consider the main criteria for a dinner party recipe is that it won’t require too much hands-on work/babysitting while your guests are at your house. If you see a dinner party recipe from me, know that the whole dish, or majority components of the dish, can be made ahead of time.

• Everything can sort of pile up at once, even when making things ahead of time. One phrase that I’ll live and die by is “cooking is cleaning”. When prepping for a dinner party the sink will fill up very quickly, dishes will get stacked on free, much needed counter space. Cleaning as you go will help when the hopefully “chaotic good” stress makes its presence known.

• I am absolutely terrible at giving my guests “tasks to do” and have basically nothing to offer you in this arena. It’s extremely hard for me to delegate because 1) I have specific ideas for how things should be done and presented, 2) I feel guilty asking guests to help, and 3) NYC kitchen. If you have advice on how to get better at this, please help me. lol

In the coming weeks I’ll be covering dishes for the dinner party autumn series that include:

I’m sorry to all of my friends who are die-hard summer fans, but you had your fun. Summer is over and it’s finally getting chilly in New York. All of the lovely “fall things” are so much more enjoyable when you have weather to match. Sadly, I made this caramel-apple galette last weekend when it was still 80°F outside, so I didn’t personally get the full effect. But I like to think its creation helped manifest the now 60°F days we’re getting.

If you read my earlier post, ‘A Meditation on the Farmers Market’, you’ll remember we learned “people don’t like concord grapes”—unfortunate because I was going to make Claire Saffitz’s Apple & Concord Grape Crumble Pie for a dinner party and went to the market specifically looking for nice, in-season concord grapes! But, what do we do when things don’t go according to plan? We feel sad, get over it, and come up with a new, perhaps better plan.

The better plan.

If concord grape and apple was a uniquely tart spin on traditional apple pie, then caramel-apple, I decided, would be a tried and true pivot towards autumnal sweetness. And, instead of making pie (my achilles heel/arch nemesis) I decided to make a galette instead—which, in my opinion, is far superior to pie. The ratio of crust to filling in a galette feels more appropriate and akin to a deceptively simple pastry. There’s no need to worry about the crust sliding down a pan during a par bake (and, hello, you don’t even need to par bake galettes!), which leads to the final and most pleasurable point—they don’t need a special pan to bake in. A galette is self-contained, celebrating the best part of pie—the crust—which is both the feature and the function. It belongs in the Venn diagram of things that are casual, utilitarian, and luxurious. (What else would be on this diagram? A slice of F&F pepperoni pizza, fresh bread with butter and salt, apples & peanut butter, a perfectly broken-in pair of jeans, etc.).

And lastly, pie without ice cream (or, in this case, custard) is nonsensical. I love when the scoop of ice cream melts and becomes a creamy, swirling pool, drowning my slice of pie. This time, instead of making or buying ice cream, I wanted to go straight to that “melted ice cream” state by including a vanilla custard.

A recurring theme of mine is to feel a little ashamed of going to the trouble (it’s actually not trouble, I enjoy doing this!) of writing a recipe just to route you to someone else’s recipe. Excuse me while I go down the rabbit hole of, Am I even good at cooking and baking? Am I a hack? Will I ever fill all these knowledge gaps? Am I stealing? A soothing and reasonable conclusion I return to is that cooking, like art, is a recycling of things we’ve learned from each other and pulled from the mysterious place that is our collective unconscious. Besides, we can’t always do everything on our own and I feel very lucky to learn from and recommend so many talented chefs out there. With that said, the idea for this recipe was executed by frankensteining (spooky!) recipes I found online and in Claire Safftiz’s book ‘Dessert Person’.

PIE CRUST

As mentioned, I used Claire Safftiz’s recipe. Something I learned from her technique was the method of integrating butter 2 ways into flour; 1) work the butter with your fingers to get to a sandy consistency, and 2) add chunks of butter which you press into larger, thin “sheets”. These two consistencies really do create a tender, flaky, layered crust, almost like a puff pastry.

APPLE FILLING

Even though I was going to change the flavor and format, I still referred to Claire’s recipe and method for the Apple and Concord Grape Crumble Pie as a guide for the filling. It worked fine!

4 pink lady apples

Lemon juice from 1 lemon

2 tbsp brown sugar

2 tsp kosher salt

Vanilla paste (you can also use extract) poured from the heart (for me that means ~2 tsp)

2 tsp cinnamon

.5 - 1 tsp cardamom (it can be overpowering if you use too much, so start small and build to a level you’re comfortable with)

1 tbsp potato starch

CARAMEL

Caramel is delicious but scary. Maybe danger is part of the appeal. But, for anyone who wants to try making caramel, please be cautious, overly cautious even. It’s much hotter than you think and, because melted sugar is essentially glue, it will stick to whatever it touches. My husband got overly excited to try it when it was still in this lava hot phase and swiped the tip of his finger against a caramel-coated spoon. He was running his scorched finger under cold water for at least 20 minutes and I was overbearingly nervous about the state of his finger for the rest of the day (he’s fine now and the blister has disappeared).

As a non-experienced caramel maker, I failed an attempt with one recipe and decided to find one with the word “easy” in the title. If I hadn’t failed the earlier attempt, and Shane hadn’t burned his finger, this recipe would have fooled me into thinking caramel is actually super easy, what’s all the fuss about? I didn’t use a candy thermometer which was very pleasing because I generally find some gadgets distracting and cumbersome, especially when you can use your eyeballs to determine when the caramel is ready to take off the heat (it will turn a honey golden brown).

VANILLA CUSTARD

I wanted the consistency of a looser “sauce” rather than a thicker cream “filling”. I didn’t know it at the time but I was looking for creme anglaise, part of the cooked custard family. I found the ‘Pastry School 101’ Substack by Anna Ramiz who did a deep dive on custard and creme anglaise. I would love to try her creme anglaise recipe, but found that this one worked quite well. Ah, it’s moments like these when I love the Internet!

TIMING

As far as timing is concerned, I made and chilled the dough the night before and made the caramel that morning. After the caramel I made the apple filling, and while the galette was baking I made the creme anglaise.

Method

I’m only going to cover the method for the apple filling because the other recipes I’ve linked to have it covered and I didn’t deviate from either.

1. Prep apples. Peel, core, and cut your apples into thin slices. (I chose thinness based on the aesthetic, desired mouthfeel, and cooking time, but you could go chunkier if you wanted to try it).

2. Make apple mixture. In a large enough bowl to fit the apple slices, mix together the sugars, cinnamon, cardamom, and vanilla. Let this sit for about 30-40 minutes while the juices settle at the bottom. (While this sits, it would also be a good time to make the creme anglaise).

3. Separate liquid from apple slices. Once liquid has accumulated at the bottom of the bowl (you’ll have to scoot the apple slices out of the way to take a peek), gently squeeze the apple slices and transfer to another similarly-sized bowl (try not to break any of the apple slices during this process. Inevitably some will, but I liked trying to get as much excess liquid out as possible).

4. Reduce liquid. Pour the liquid into a sauce pan on medium high heat and bring to a simmer. Stir occasionally until it becomes syrupy (10-15 minutes). Remove from the heat.

5. Preheat your oven to 350°F and prepare a pan for the crust.

6. Make a potato starch slurry. Put the potato starch in a small bowl with a few spoonfuls of the apple liquid and stir until smooth. Add this slurry to the saucepan that has the apple liquid still in it and simmer until it thickens (don’t let this become too thick, just enough to lightly coat the back of a spoon). Set aside.

7. Roll out the dough. Take your pie dough out of the fridge and roll it out into a large circle shape (or as close to circular as you can get it). I always end up with a dough that cracks around the edges as I’m rolling it out. But with a galette, that’s not really a problem (have I sold you yet?). If this happens, just press the cracks back together without overworking and keep rolling until it’s large enough for your filling. Transfer the dough, laying it flat on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

8. Combine liquid mixture with apple slices. Take the apple liquid mixture and pour over the bowl of apples. Stir with your hands (if the liquid is cool) or a spatula to gently coat all of the apple slices with the syrupy mixture. Scoop the mixture onto the dough. I left about a 3-5 inch margin around the perimeter of the dough so that I had enough to encase the filling. Don’t pile the apple mixture too high or else the dough won’t cook through, and you may get a soggy bottom.

9. Fold the dough on top of the apple mixture.

10. Egg wash. Beat 1 egg and brush on the folded dough and sprinkle demerara sugar all over the dough.

11. Bake. Bake the galette until the crust is deeply golden brown (~1 hour 1 hour, 15 minutes).

12. Cool and serve. Remove from the oven and drizzle however much caramel you want on top while it’s still hot. I did about .25 of the caramel and saved the rest for plating. Let the galette cool for as long as you can stand it.

13. Serve. To plate, spoon some creme anglaise on top of the galette slice and drizzle with more caramel & a sprinkle of flakey salt.

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Last week I went to the farmers market and asked myself, do I actually enjoy this? It’s an activity shrouded in romance and leisure, a time to reflect on the gifts that nature gives. It’s a tote bag filled with fresh parsley, butternut squash and a bouquet of $35 flowers (which will start to wilt in two days flat). It’s an infinity mirror of farm stands that shape a stream of people who travel in unpredictable formations, eliciting, at least in me, a feeling of frozenness.

This week’s trip has given me perfectly textured apples (which went into a caramel apple galette, recipe coming later this week). I also found out that the market’s singular grape farmer doesn’t grow concord grapes because “no one likes concord grapes”. Tell that to the pie recipe I was going to make! Going to and thinking about the market has been a meditation on how much, or not, I’ve grown when it comes to practicing patience and giving others (and myself) grace.

One time I was in a check out line at the market in Union Square. This line had extended into the main pathway, a high-traffic area, where someone bristled past and said to me, “You know this is a walkway right?” I responded with, “You know this is a busy farmers market, right?” I’m not sure if they heard me but it gives me a tingle to imagine they did.

If I’d had more time to engage in a tête-à-tête with this fellow anxious human, I would have made the following point. There’s an implicit social contract whereby we’re all at the farmers market for a little whimsy; to allow ourselves the opportunity to meander, play, and fantasize. We get this in exchange for relinquishing the goal of efficiency, which, for better or worse, is my natural inclination.

Moving to New York unknowingly intensified this predilection in me. For instance, on a crowded sidewalk others become obstacles that you try to avoid in order to maximize speed. “Hey, I’m walking here!”— both a cliché and something I’ve actually heard people say (and maybe have said myself???). Age and countless hours of therapy have mellowed me slightly. It’s a continual process to move towards a state of calm and away from the rigidity of anxiety. I now absolutely hate rushing, or feeling rushed, whereas in the past I didn’t even notice what this was doing to my nervous system (oh, to be young again!). I see strollers, tourists, and absent-minded walkers less as obstacles and more as people who are doing their best in this life. However, being at the farmer’s market is, for me, a boss-level exercise in practicing “chillness”.

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I want to stay in the romance, to fantasize about how these fruits and vegetables want to be transformed, presented and consumed. But I feel a pull towards decisiveness and efficiency which inexplicably seems to hold moral weight. I don’t want to be an added stress to an already chaotic environment. At the farmers market I’m caught between these two desires and end up in, what I suppose is, a freeze state where the only reasonable solution is to panic-buy something I don’t need. Like baby ginger. “You can chew on the stem of this, but don’t cook it. It’s free water,” the farmer says to me as I check out with a single root. “Oh, cool. That’s good to know”, I reply. He repeats his instructions verbatim and I’m not sure if there’s hidden meaning in what he’s telling me to do, so I repeat myself too. We’re caught in this loop until the payment goes through and I say, “Thanks for the tip!”

This sort of strange interaction is a perfect example of why I’ll always go to the farmers market. The cashier at Whole Foods isn’t going to tell me that I should chew on the stem of a baby ginger. I won’t learn that no one likes concord grapes or have a conversation with the only other person buying grapes who, it turns out, has been a loyal patron of this stand since 2015. Can an anxious person enjoy the farmers market? Hell yeah. Just go with the flow and, at the very least, buy some flowers.

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How ever you choose to enjoy pickled peppers, I’m just happy you’re enjoying them. I find the act of pickling and canning very daunting. My mind conjures images of someone (certainly not me, at least not yet) standing in front of a 12qt stock pot, sterilizing glass jars for various preserved fruits and vegetables. Because I’m not a patient woman (working on it) I most often quick-pickle certain items (like sliced red or white onions, carrots, radishes, fennel bulb, and yes, I’ve even done blueberries) to add as an accent to whatever dish I’m making. The most involved I’ll get, pickling-wise, is the recipe below. It’s stupid easy and works perfectly fine for me.

This week I made two batches using two different types of peppers I found at my local farmer’s market. One was a carton of mini sweet peppers and the other were red Korean chili peppers. There isn’t a pepper I won’t pickle!

Next week I’m going to talk about why I still find going to farmer’s markets enjoyable, even though they illicit my flight and freeze response!

This makes a 34oz jar’s worth of pickled peppers. As a rule I only keep these in the refrigerator for about 2 weeks max. And I definitely don’t store them long term at room temperature because this recipe is intended for refrigerated pickles only (sitting a little above the recommended 2.5% acidity level).

• a bag of mini sweet peppers or 3-4 normally sized bell peppers sliced ( I usually stick to yellow, orange, and red)

• 2 cups water

• 1.5 cup white vinegar (5% acidity)

• 1 cup rice vinegar (4.3% acidity)

• 2 tbsp salt

• 1.5 tbsp honey

• For this recipe, I didn’t add peppercorns because I ran out and I didn’t really miss them too much. But feel free to add however many you want (I’d start with at least 1 tbsp).

• I also considered adding a cardamom pod but chickened out. If you’re feeling brave, it would be fun to experiment with different types of whole, dried spices.

Method:

1. place your peppers in the 34oz le parfait jar

2. bring the remaining ingredients above (everything but your peppers) to a simmer in a pot

3. once it’s reached a simmer, pour over the jar of peppers

4. I let mine cool very slightly before closing the air tight lid, and cool almost to room temperature before putting them in the fridge where they’ll live

Next, consider flavor. Thanks to the cultural zeitgeist, you might have an image of what chicken salad looks like (mounds of white, creamy matter) and tastes like (mayonnaise, celery, onion, god-forbid grapes, hard boiled egg). There’s nothing wrong with this (except the grapes…and hard-boiled egg)—what I consider a more “traditional” style of chicken salad. But I believe it can support almost any flavor profile desired. It’s also a perfect template (or accompaniment) for fridge clean-out which is what phase of the week I’m currently in.

Template

When devising chicken salad (and white fish salad, for that matter), I break it down into the following dimensions:

• Base or “Sauce” - The thing(s) that will make it not dry. Typically the base is creamy, but going with a citrus juice or vinegar is equally nice.

• Texture - The degree to which the chicken is broken down either by shredding or mincing is totally up to how you prefer the overall texture of the salad.

• Crunch - Yes, technically could be categorized under texture, but aside from other textural elements, I think chicken salad requires crunch. I think something that can turn people off to any sort of “[meat] salad” is that it can be one-dimensional, soft, or texturally uninteresting. How can we add more textural interest?

• Je ne sais quoi - What’s the underlying “theme” or style that serves as the flavor backdrop?

The chicken salad I present you with today is:

• Base - creamy & citrusy

• Texture - shredded & minced, but not ground to a paste

• Crunch - very crunchy with the help of sliced snap peas

• Je ne sais quoi - lots of pickle-yyyy peppers

Composing the plate

Base: I put the salad on top of crispy green leaf lettuce (but, if I had it, I would have used arugula to make it even more peppery).

Accessories: I’ve noticed that some people have strong opinions about bell peppers. I do not. I’m neither mad when they’re present nor do I miss them in their absence. However, I YEARN for these pickled bell peppers. I’ve been making them in larger batches and adding them to lazy dishes that need a fun, tangy accessory (like this one).

Delivery System: I’m someone who needs a cracker, french fry, crouton, or chip component with a salad. For this, I had the Back to Nature Pink Himalayan Salt crackers which are so, so good.

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• 2 Poached Chicken Breasts

• 2 handfuls of sugar snap peas

• zest of 1 lemon

• lemon juice (.5 lemon)

• .25-.5 jar of pickled pepperoncinis + 2 tsp of the pickle juice

• .25 cup of greek yogurt (I use full fat)

• 1 tsp dijon mustard

• pinch of salt

• 2 tsp pepper

Other ideas using the chicken salad template:

• Curry w/ Orange Juice-Soaked Raisins

  • Base - fresh orange & lemon juice, greek yogurt

  • Texture - shredded, on the softer side

  • Crunch - orange juice-soaked raisins, unsweetened toasted coconut flakes & cooked split peas

  • Je ne sais quoi - curry powder, turmeric, light cumin, paprika

• Loaded Potato

  • Base - sour cream or greek yogurt

  • Texture - shredded, on the chunkier side

  • Crunch - green onion or chives, raw green beans

  • Je ne sais quoi - bacon

There are certain foods that have been deemed “appropriate” and exclusive to breakfast. Eggs, bacon, or sausage. Would you like rye or white toast—with butter and jam? You could have oatmeal, which can be savory (I guess) or sweet. Pancakes, waffles, or french toast. Cereal or yogurt with fruit & granola. Are you very fancy and wish to have a croissant and cappuccino?

All of these options are wonderful gifts to humankind, but there are other options also available during peak breakfast hours. As a typical breakfast-skipper, I’m wondering how often I mistake my lack of appetite in the morning with what is actually a lack of appetite for established “breakfast foods”. Alternatively, why aren’t I having waffles and bacon for dinner? There are no rules!!

This morning I exercised free will and had chicken miso soup for breakfast. It was exactly right and it felt like my body clicked into place on a cellular level, like in Spider-Man when the genetically modified spider bites Tobey Maguire and reconfigures his DNA, giving him special powers.

I made this soup last night and the recipe filled two 1 quart containers. Have it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

• chicken broth (4 cups)

• filtered water (2 cups)

• white miso (2-3 tbsp)

• fresh grated ginger (1 tsp)

• Wakame (1/2 cup)

• juice of 1 lime

• chicken breast (1)

• sushi rice

• soy sauce (1 tsp for serving)

• 1 green onion, light and dark parts (per serving)

Method:

1. Poach the chicken breast. In a pot of water, boil enough salted water (salty like the sea) that will fully submerge the chicken

2. Cook the rice. While the chicken is poaching, make your rice

3. Shred the chicken. Use a meat thermometer to check the temperature is at least 150° or is shreddable (165° is the FDA standard for fully-cooked chicken, but I say 150° here because it’ll continue cooking in the soup)

4. Combine soup ingredients. You can use the same pot as what you poached your chicken in or get a fresh one. On medium high heat, combine the chicken broth, water, white miso, Wakame and 1/2 lime juice.

5. Add the shredded chicken. Once the soup approaches boiling, add the shredded chicken and turn the heat down slightly to prevent boiling bubbles.

6. Serve. Once the soup has had a chance to canoodle with the chicken and is cloudy from the white miso, it’s ready and so are you. Put about .5 cup of your rice in the bowl and ladle your soup on top. Finish with a little soy sauce, green onion, and however much lime juice you want to add as a finisher.

7. ENJOY! This is great with a super light, refreshing lager (although, maybe not in the morning) or seltzer water with a splash of lime.

I hope you’ve had a great year filled with memorable moments punctuated by delicious food.

By chance, I logged into Substack this morning to poke around my account. What are the odds that on this day, August 28, would mark the one-year anniversary of the very last post I made for Food Noise? Remember, I had planned to post once a week—how noble!

Have you ever committed yourself to do something that ultimately falls into the background of your life? I love starting some new creative endeavor—it’s exciting, fresh, and full of possibilities. Even with the best of intentions and a public long-term commitment to keeping the shiny new endeavor alive, it can end up at a standstill. (Honestly, this topic could be devoted to a single, multi-paragraph post.)

So I’m here, not to recommit myself to delivering food content on a strict schedule, but to say, Hello, remember me? I’m still food’s biggest fan. I’ve been cooking almost everyday of the week and for every meal (BRAG), so I’ve got some new recipes in the backlog. I’ll pop by here to check in and share some of those recipes I’ve been working on. Perhaps you’ll even see a cooking video or two.

In the meantime, I hope you have amazing lunch or dinner plans today. I’ll be talking to you soon.

<3 Eva

P.S.

Is there anything you’re curious about or want to hear/see from me? Don’t be shy!

Today I’m here to share a new and somewhat surprising recipe for savory, cheesy shortbread cookies. Surprising because savory cookies aren’t something I’m used to and before the idea emerged this week, I’ve never considered making a savory cookie. On impulse I decided to test it out. I’m not yet sure how they fit into the cookie canon and other than eating them on their own (warning, they’re addicting) I could see these as a nice building block for canapés. I’m envisioning them with a whipped, herby mascarpone and caviar, or cream cheese with smoked salmon. Maybe they could do well in the world of tinned fish. Hell, just throw a slice of tomato on there and that would be super nice too, I think. 

Shortbread cookies are amazing for their versatility and fool-proofness and lend themselves beautifully to experimentation of flavors. Like, you could have an everything shortbread cookie, or sundried tomato cookie, miso sesame scallion, etc. etc.! But for this week, I tried 2 cheesy versions and was going to share the “winner”. But, how can you possibly declare a favorite child? The first I can only describe as an elegantly rustic Cheez-It (Parmesan Corn Flour) and the second I’m calling Cacio E Pepe Shortbread (thanks for the name idea, Aaron!).

You can cut them thin, making the cookie more crisp and cracker-esque (but don’t call them crackers). Or, you can cut into thicker slices, resulting in a more traditional, tender shortbread cookie texture. 

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Parmesan Corn Flour Shortbread Cookies

100g | 7 tbsp Unsalted Butter

22g | 1/8 cup light brown sugar

40g | 2 tbsp white miso

100g | 1 cup parmesan cheese + more for coating the dough

100g  corn flour

75g AP flour

4g | salt

1 egg

1. In a stand or hand mixer, whip the butter, light brown sugar, and white miso together until it’s light and fluffy.

2. To this, add the parmesan cheese, corn flour, AP flour and salt. Mix until everything is combined and large crumbs have formed. It won’t look like dough at this stage.

3. Using your hands work the crumbs together by pressing and kneading until a delicate dough forms. It will be fairly easy for the dough to break apart when handled since this isn’t a wet dough. Don’t worry! The flour will continue to hydrate as it rests.

4. Once you’ve been able to form the dough into a ball, cut off a piece of parchment paper and place it on a clean counter. Place the dough on top of the parchment and using your hands, make the dough into a log first and then wrap it with the parchment. Once the dough is wrapped, you should roll it again on the counter so that it’s more of a cylindrical log shape.

5. Let it rest in the fridge for at least an hour (and up to a few days) where the flours will continue to hydrate and chilling will make it easier to cut and handle.

6. Once it’s chilled, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. 

7. Cover a baking sheet with grated parmesan cheese and set aside

8. While the oven is heating, take the dough out of the fridge and unwrap. Apply the egg wash using either of the following methods you prefer: 1) whisk the egg in a bowl and apply it to the outside of dough log using a brush, or 2) whisk the egg in a large enough dish that allows you to roll the entire log in

9. Once egg wash is applied, roll the log of dough on the baking sheet with parmesan cheese such that the cheese coats the entire outside of the dough.

10. Once it’s coated, use a very sharp knife to cut the log into however thin or thick you want the cookies to be. Thinner will be a more crisp cookie, with less baking time. Thicker will be a more traditional, tender shortbread cookie texture.

11. Place the slices of cookie on a parchment-lined baking sheet (you can reuse the parchment you wrapped the dough in) and sprinkle each with flakey salt.

12. Bake for 12-15 minutes. Depending on how thick/thin your cookies are will affect the time, so be sure to check in after about 10 minutes if they’re thinner. You’ll want them to look darker golden brown around the edges and they should start becoming golden on top, at which point they should be taken out of the oven. As they cool, they will continue to crisp up.

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Cacio e Pepe Shortbread Cookies

125g | 1 stick + 2 tbsp Unsalted Butter

22g | 1/8 cup granulated sugar

100g | 1 cup pecorino cheese 

175g AP flour

4g | 1 tsp salt

5g black pepper | 2 tsp

1. In a stand or hand mixer, whip the butter, and sugar together until it’s light and fluffy.

2. Add the pecorino cheese, flour and salt. Mix until everything is combined and large crumbs have formed. It won’t look like dough at this stage.

3. Using your hands work the crumbs together by pressing and kneading until a delicate dough forms. It will be fairly easy for the dough to break apart when handled since this isn’t a wet dough. Don’t worry! The flour will continue to hydrate as it rests.

4. Once you’ve been able to pull the dough together into a ball, cut off a piece of parchment paper and place it on a clean counter. Place the dough on top of the parchment and using your hands, first make the dough into a log-like shape and then wrap it with the parchment. Once the dough is wrapped, you should roll it again on the counter so that it’s more of a true cylindrical log shape.

5. Let it rest in the fridge for at least an hour (and up to a few days) where the flours will continue to hydrate and chilling will make it easier to cut and handle.

6. Once it’s chilled, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. 

7. Once the oven has heated to 350, use a very sharp knife to cut the log of dough into however thin or thick you want the cookies to be. Thinner will be a more crisp cookie, with less baking time. Thicker will be a more traditional, delicate shortbread cookie texture.

8. Place the slices of cookie on a parchment-lined baking sheet (you can reuse the parchment you wrapped the dough in) and sprinkle each with flakey salt.

9. Bake for 12-15 minutes. Depending on how thick/thin your cookies are will affect the time, so be sure to check in after about 10 minutes if they’re thinner. You’ll want them to look golden brown around the edges and they should start browning on top, at which point they should be taken out of the oven. As they cool, they will continue to crisp up.

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Deciding to take action right now for the sake of your future experience can be chalked up to the role habits play in our lives. I love cooking, but there are times when planning meals, or dragging myself to the store, or trying to responsibly organize my food…AGAIN, feels like I’m running through mud. But when I’m able to quickly cook a meal I don’t thank the gods of habit for what I’m able to accomplish — instead I’m grateful to my past self for having the sense of responsibility to help take care of my future.

Today I’ll cover

• Planning meals

• Saying no to Doordash

• Processing produce/Washing & Storing Methods

• Ethylene Gas

• Non-produce Preparation

Before you continue, I want to start off with a reminder of how lucky a lot of us are to be able to have consistent and convenient access to food. To turn feelings of guilt and anger around this into something productive, I try to have gratitude for the access I get to experience. I also think it’s important to take this opportunity to anyone who’s reading to consider donating to your local food pantry or sending money to World Central Kitchen who help people in catastrophic situations.

I realize how boring this topic might be to a lot of people, but I am constantly adjusting how I decide to organize my fridge and pantry. I won't be coy about the pride I take in the construction of this system because it takes a lot of work and finessing, especially when working in smaller kitchens. Some of what I’ve learned came from watching The Bear and not letting myself tear the masking tape when labeling food, or the 1 week I worked in a restaurant and saw how not to organize a fridge. But mostly it’s been trial and error with an undercurrent of desire to learn more about food and how not to waste it.

There are 2 barriers I experience that I’ve tried to reframe when it comes to the overall goal of reducing my food waste: 1) How can I buy things I’ll actually want to cook and eat, and 2) How can I avoid ordering out?

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Planning meals I’ll actually want to eat.

It feels natural to start with the act of planning, to come up with a list of items to get from the store that will satisfy and nourish. A barrier I used to encounter when coming up with such lists was, How will I know what I want to eat next week? I have no idea what to get?... Now, there are a few questions I ask myself when I’m planning for food:

• What do we already have in the fridge/pantry and will it still be good well into next week? (If it’s gone bad or about to go bad, throw it out or plan to use it that day or the next.)

• What’s in season? Out of those options, what am I craving?

• If I could eat anything right now, what would it be?

• Are there 2-3 recipes (usually side dishes) I’ve been wanting to try?

The answers to these questions fall into a system I’ve come to. I don’t want to make rigid predictions about what I’ll be in the mood for, but I want to create a context in which I’m able to flexibly create meals based on those questions I answered. It’s like deciding what colors will go in my palette and it’s up to me how they’ll work together and in what context once I actually get to painting. 

Based on those questions, I’ll write some initial ideas, perusing cookbooks and writing down whatever’s interesting. Then, I categorize my shopping list by food “type” in the order my grocery store is physically laid out — produce, protein, dairy, baked goods, grains, misc. I’ve tried integrating Chat GPT in this process to help categorize recipe ingredients, but I found the time I was saving (if that’s the goal) was nominal. 

Breaking the stronghold DoorDash has on me

I assume it’s not unique to me that I’ll finish with work for the day, stand in front of the fridge clueless, and unconsciously open the Doordash app. There’s been a load of talk about the solution to this as meal prepping. But still, meal prepping requires a lot of upfront work and you better be okay with last week’s decision as you preheat that chicken and rice for the fourth day in a row.

I’m glad this works for some people, but it really weirds me out. Not just in terms of food safety but also because I’m not a robot who’s unconcerned with variety. To me, ingredient prepping makes so much more sense and guarantees getting a lot more life out of the produce you’ve bought while making it easier to actually cook. Like meal prepping, it does front load a lot of the labor in a larger chunk of time, but later on your cooking time and effort is significantly reduced.

How much easier it is to pull a container of already washed and cut radicchio out of the fridge vs. a much more daunting whole head of radicchio waiting to be prepped. How lovely it is that you made a batch of salad dressing that will be poured into a bowl containing ingredients like green leaf lettuce, dill and sliced cucumber that were already washed, dried and stored in your fridge!

I love preparing ingredients in this way because it provides the constraints I need when cooking (these are the things you have available) while still being creative when I cook (these are the ways you can incorporate them). 

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Processing Produce - How I Do It

After I get my produce, I light a candle, queue up a podcast and lay it all out on the table to see my beautiful, bodacious bounty. 

Usually I’ll start with the biggest, leafiest things to get them out of the way while also looking for opportunities to freeze components that would make good additions to broth, like fennel bulb stalks and leaves from leeks or anything else that makes sense. This week I came to terms with my having x6 1-quart containers filled with frozen chicken parts, so I made a huge batch of broth while I worked through the produce.

Washing & Storing Methods

Separate batches of things like lettuces, kale, grapes, and berries get soaked in a bath with a mix of water and a small pour of distilled white vinegar, then are drained, rinsed, spun, and stored in a 4 or 6 qt container with a tea towel lining the bottom to catch any residual water. I’ve found that stored this way, produce can usually last up to 2 weeks. (When I buy pre-washed lettuce I’ll add a paper or tea towel to the bottom of the container it came in to catch any excess moisture.) 

For herbs like parsley and cilantro I wash them as I do the above, but stored in an upright container filled with water, wrapped in a paper towel and covered with a gallon ziplock back, left open (I also rewash these baggies so they don’t go to waste after 1 use). 

For big bunches of herbs like mint and dill I won’t wash them beforehand and will only store them in the same way as the herbs I’ve already mentioned. I find that if they’re washed beforehand they wilt very quickly and the mint, especially, turns black. For herbs that come in pre-packaged containers, I’ll wrap them in a paper towel and leave in the packaging.

At the end of processing everything this week, I had containers of washed kale, radicchio, red leaf lettuce, grapes, cherries, strawberries, mint, and parsley all ready to be chopped, sliced or eaten throughout the week. These are also the things that tend to wilt, release water and get soggy, grow mold, etc. if they’re left on their own and which I prioritize over more stable produce.

Ethylene Gas

I recently learned about ethylene gas. It gets produced by fruit and vegetables as they ripen and can cause other produce to wilt or go bad prematurely. If an ethylene producer like bananas sits next to an ethylene sensitive product, like potatoes, then that potato will start to sprout earlier than it would if it were sitting on its own or with another non-ethylene producing fruit/vegetable. This is also helpful to know if you want to speed up the ripening of your avocados or bananas for banana bread (because who is honestly eating a banana for the sake of eating a banana?). I don’t think this is as big of a deal with produce in the fridge as with produce on the counter since room temperatures are a perfect environment for bacteria and growth.  With that said, I have a smaller Brooklyn kitchen and my counter space is precious, so sometimes you will see a banana sitting next to a tomato — sue me!

Non-Produce Preparation

If there’s still produce that looks (and smells) like it’s holding up well, I’ll try to use what I can and find that this is also a good way to explore and create with food. This week I made a tangy scallion dressing that I’ve been putting on all different kinds of salads and even roasted corn.

• Buttermilk

• Olive oil

• Lemon juice & white wine vinegar

• 4-5 scallions (white & green parts)

• capers

• 1-2 anchovy filets 

• pepper

I’ve been binge-cooking Kismet’s cookbook and one of my favorite things from it has been their marinated feta. Having this on hand has been a game changer because it tastes great eaten with a spoon or with pretty much anything else.

I always have chicken broth in the freezer because I break down whole chickens almost every week. Every season is soup season!

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Let’s Wrap This Up…

Cooking is one of the most creative things you can do, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be chaotic or unplanned. In fact, having order in your kitchen can only help during those times of creative play. A chef I recently worked with said, “cooking is cleaning.” Hot. But cooking is also staying organized by creating good conditions for yourself now and later.

If you’ve made it this far then we’re probably very compatible. Let’s go grab a drink.

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I say “might be” because I can’t find a strict definition on what makes a chowder… chowder. Some say it’s the added cream or milk, others say it’s started with a roux of flour, fat and cream, or a chowder is chowder because the chopped ingredients are left chunky. I’m definitely not an expert because, admittedly, I haven’t eaten much of any chowder variety before. 

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Through the process of learning about this dish and where it came from, I learned about Fannie Farmer who published one of the first recorded recipes for it in 1896 in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Fannie is notable for bringing a more standardized way of writing recipes in the recognizable format we see in cookbooks today. In the book’s preface she writes, “It is my wish that it may not only be looked upon as a compilation of tried and tested recipes, but that it may awaken an interest through its condensed scientific knowledge which will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat.” 

I’ve learned to appreciate the fact that almost nothing we create is ever truly unique, that there’s rarely a “first” of anything. It sounds like a no-brainer in theory, but cooking has helped me learn this more practically. There is no “first” cookbook, no “first” recipe, no “first” or true definition of corn chowder. To me, creating a corn-based soup with some of my favorite and newfound ingredients was a way to explore what certain things can become in different contexts and how my definition of those things might change. 

For me, this is what cooking is and why I connected to Fannie’s introduction of the book. There are so many things I’ve learned from cooking that have condensed themselves into a moment, leading me to make my own version of what might be recognizable as corn chowder. So, if you make it, I hope you enjoy it. I found it to be creamy but not rich, a little thick but not heavy. And best of all, very corny.

Some of the ingredients in the recipe may not live in everyone’s kitchen. I wouldn’t have had them without recently learning recipes from the book Evergreen Vietnamese by Andrea Nguyen. Shrimp paste, for instance, isn’t something I had used before but it adds such a deep, umami-garlicky component. Mushroom Seasoning is an alternative for MSG (not that there’s anything wrong with MSG) and I’ve found it really effective. For both of these ingredients you don’t need to use much. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is even if you buy these just for this recipe, (wow, what an honor) they should last a while.

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3 ears of corn (or use frozen, ~3-4 cups)

1 tbsp grapeseed oil

.5 yellow onion

1 tbsp olive oil or other fat

2 tsp fish sauce

1 tsp shrimp paste

2 tsp mushroom seasoning

Juice of 1 lemon

3 scallions

~8-10 shrimp, peeled, deveined, and chopped

1 oz can coconut milk

3 cups chicken (or vegetable) broth, or 3 cups of water w/ better than bouillon

1. If you’re using ears of corn, shuck them and slice the corn off the cob. Take the corn (either shucked or frozen) and toss in a bowl with about 1 tbsp of oil (I used grapeseed) and a generous pinch of salt. Roast them in the oven on broil for about 15 minutes, or until you can hear a slight crackling in the oven and it’s become a richer color. 

2. While the corn is roasting, let your onions canoodle with some olive oil (it might be fun to try chicken or duck fat here) in a pot large enough to hold the contents of the chowder since you’ll be putting all subsequent ingredients in here.

3. Once the onions get slightly translucent and smell nice, add the fish sauce, shrimp paste, and mushroom seasoning. Let all this get to know each other for a few minutes while you roughly chop the scallions and juice the lemon.

4. Add the chopped scallions, let them glisten and become a little soft, then add the lemon juice.

5. Add the broth and coconut milk.

6. By this time your corn should be finished from the oven, add it to the soup.

7. Use an immersion blender or regular blender to break everything down. There shouldn’t be any big chunks of scallions once you do this, but fibers from the corn will probably still be present. If you want it chunky, blend a little less.

8. If including, add the shrimp.

9. Serve it with some sour cream, sliced scallions or chives and freshly cracked pepper.

As usual my subconscious simmers with questions about identity. What’s bubbled up this week has been about where I come from, asking myself, Is Texas (where I was born & raised) considered part of the South? Do I have the right to claim Southern cooking as part of my identity? Is making a distinction between what is and is not “Southern” an elitist or colonialist inclination to re-establish the notion of borders? Is “the South” defined by geography, spirit, history, food, accent or something else? The answer I’ve arrived at is: who cares? Let’s just make some biscuits. 

My grandma, who we called “Gans”, used to live in an east Texas town called Gladewater. It was about a 2 hour drive from Dallas, one that we took so often to visit her on the weekends. I think if my brain had a screensaver it would be the blurring of those tall loblolly pine trees in my passenger window, with the occasional fireworks or rose stand sprouting up along the way.

Upon arrival, the usual options for dinner were Bodacious BBQ, Guadalupe’s Mexican Restaurant, or Skipper's Pier: Coastal Cajun Kitchen. Usually she’d have her famous chocolate meringue pie sitting in the laundry closet on top of the washing machine ready for us to devour.

She’d make us biscuits and gravy for breakfast and to this day I can’t make biscuits without thinking of her. I’d wake to find her standing in the kitchen, dusty blue apron tied around her waist, rolling out the dough and cutting it into tidy rounds. She had the smallest, most nimble hands that knew exactly the mechanics required to work with dough. Of course I wanted to be part of the action and help form the biscuits, and she’d let me—keeping an eye that I didn’t spread them too thin or press down too hard, making them uneven. The time I spent with her feels more indicative of where I’ve come from than what the census bureau deems “the South”, which does include Texas.

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The beautiful thing about biscuits is their simplicity—a blank canvas for those who might want something sweet or savory, or both at the same time. A biscuit, more specifically the Southern biscuit, is synonymous with comfort. 

They can be worked like bread, kneaded and rolled out with a pin, training them for a sturdiness appropriate for ladles of white gravy and sausage. Or, they can be flakey and layered, treated with a more precious hand, similar to that of pastry—in a way that delicately encourages the dough to just come together. 

This week, I tested these two biscuit extremes and am happy to say there’s no contest—they’re both totally excellent. However, the recipe I’m sharing falls into the flakey, layered category. The addition of gochujang wasn’t so much planned as it was an impulsive experiment. During a batch of biscuit-making I saw the gochujang in my fridge and wondered, why shouldn’t I add this to biscuits? Whether or not I’m a Southerner, I sure as hell am an American. How often have aspects of our culture been cobbled together by the entitled taking from others? For instance, the roots of Southern cooking.

I’m not sure what to make of this fact while also believing in the importance of food’s evolution through combining efforts to create new, beautiful culinary experiences. I think, like death, food is a great equalizer—a window into each other’s humanity if we’re willing to be mindful of where it came from.

Gochujang has a long history and the stewards of the practice maybe didn’t intend for someone to add it to biscuits. I decided to pursue this recipe with the inclusion of gochujang because it made the biscuits savory, a little spicy and kind of addicting. I hope my recipe does right by the tradition.

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Gochujang Biscuits

For this recipe (for every recipe), I’m standing on the shoulders of giants—combining Alison Roman’s Luckiest Biscuit recipe, Edna Lewis’s Biscuits, and incorporating Claire Saffitz’s method for pie dough.

In one of my tests I accidentally forgot to add the gochujang until I was already shaping the dough on my counter. I decided to add it on top and work it in as a layer between dough folds. This is an excellent example of a problem becoming the solution, because these biscuits turned out to be the best I made. The method of incorporating the butter in two stages already makes these biscuits super tender and flakey, but waiting until the end to add the gochujang creates pockets of flavor which are delightful to eat. However, if you prefer incorporating the gochujang more evenly, you can add it to your buttermilk, and I’ve included this approach at the end of the recipe.

Dry Ingredients

3 cups / 395g flour

1 tbsp / 15g baking powder

½ tsp / 4g baking soda

1 tbsp / 10g Diamond Crystal kosher salt

½ tbsp / 7g sugar

Fat Phase 1

(The butter is added in two phases, so keep these measurements separate.)

¼ cup / 41g lard

⅓ cup /63g cold butter, cubed

Fat phase 2

1 stick / ½ cup / 110g cold butter, cubed or cut into somewhat thin slices

Wet Ingredients

⅔ cup/162g buttermilk + extra for brushing

½ cup/133g gochujang (I used the brand Sempio, but I encourage you to find a brand you like. There’s a pretty decent range of hot, sweet, funky and savory on the market.)

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Whisk the Dry Ingredients together in a large bowl.

3. In the bowl of Dry Ingredients, work the lard and butter from Fat Phase 1 in with your fingertips until it becomes a sandy texture. This will help create a tender biscuit.

4. In the bowl of Dry Ingredients, add the remaining butter from Fat Phase 2, press each cube or slice of butter between your thumb and forefinger so that it squishes into super thin, lacey pieces (~1mm thick). These larger pieces of butter will help create a flakey biscuit. If the butter is soft at this point, put the bowl in the freezer until it’s cold (about 10 minutes) and the butter has firmed up.

5. From the Wet Ingredients, drizzle about ⅓ of the buttermilk at a time over the flour/fat mixture in your bowl and use your hands to lightly “scoop” flour from the sides of the bowl into the middle. Once you’ve added all the buttermilk, it shouldn’t really have formed a dough and that’s to be expected. 

6. At this stage, use your hands to more firmly encourage the ingredients in your bowl to come together at which point it should start shaping up like a dough. I try to be as delicate as I can at this stage—I think of this action as massaging the dough rather than kneading. 

7. Once most of it has come together (there will still be some dry spots and flour-y bits), dump the bowl onto a clean surface. With your hands, not a rolling pin or other tool, gently pat down and shape the dough into a rectangle. You can use your judgment as far as size, but I’d aim for roughly 6”x12”-ish. 

8. Take about half of the gochujang from Wet Ingredients and pour it over the dough, it will feel like too much but it’s not. Use a rubber spatula or spoon to spread it over dough—this doesn’t need to be super precise, just looking for decent coverage. 

9. Similar to a puff pastry, fold ~⅓ of the top rectangle onto itself and the other ⅓ over the top—like a letter fold. You may need to sprinkle some flour over the mixture if it becomes too sticky.

10. Again, pat down the dough and shape it into another rectangle. 

11. Pour the remaining gochujang how you did previously and fold it in thirds again. 

12. Pat and shape into another rectangle. The top should be fairly smooth and this final shape will be however thick you wish your biscuits to be. I shape mine to be pretty thick, maybe 2 inches before I cut them into my final biscuits.

13. Place your biscuits on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet, and don’t forget to brush the tops with buttermilk and add flakey salt.

14. Bake the biscuits for about 15-20 minutes, checking them periodically. Rotate the pan about 7 minutes into baking. Once they are browned on the top and around the edges and have puffed up, take them out of the oven and let them rest for about 20 minutes more.

Alternative Option 

• From the Wet Ingredients, mix the gochujang and buttermilk together before adding to your flour. 

• Follow instructions from step 7

• Skip step 8

• Follow instructions from step 9 & step 12-14

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I was at a party earlier this year talking to a bartender who said this to me after telling him I was tempted to go to culinary school.

How often, I wondered, have people (maybe especially women?) been told they’re too old to do something they’ve expressed interest in? Maybe if you were, like, 18, echoed not only for the rest of the night but in the days that followed. I was caught off guard that a stranger would offer this as advice, but then a voice whispered inside to remind me that often when people tell you you can’t do something for [insert reason] they’re probably talking to themselves. And in this vein, anything they’ve offered under the guise of advice is usually best ignored.

So, what do I tell myself as, a thankfully not 18, but 32 year-old? 

You’re not dead yet. 

A phrase that, to me, is the antidote for “you’re too old to do that thing”.

Death is both inevitable and inconceivable. I know it’s coming someday but I find that impossible to believe. I guess it’s natural, maybe even a safety feature of humanness, to be delulu in our relationship with mortality, assuming we have all the time in the world. Reminding myself that, yes death is coming but it hasn’t happened yet, helps remove layers of constructed reality and allows me to recalibrate, at least for a moment.

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For the past five years my career has been on an unconventional path, trying to incorporate a variety of interests into a way of making a living. For a recovering overachiever it’s difficult to start over, especially when you live in a city where seemingly everyone your age (and younger) is career-driven and actualizing their dreams. The career I chose out of college could have continued on a trajectory that led to moderate success but being on that path felt like I was locking my soul in a box every Sunday night until Friday.

It’s a tale as old as my generation—to seek a life worth living (life, of course, meaning career). Maybe a larger conversation could be had about the enlightened capitalist’s plight of leaning on a career to create meaning for life rather than a job being a means to an end. Perhaps a job or career is not/should not be the gravitational field of one’s life. But for better or worse, I don’t know how to relate to myself or the world I'm in without knowing how I want to toil in it.

At the risk of sounding like I’m bought-in to the trad wife life (I am not), when I toil in my kitchen I find it’s easier to live in my body, to have fun, to make mistakes, to share love and community with friends and, ultimately, to keep myself alive. The alchemical act of marrying ingredients and sometimes meeting them with fire is one of the most magical things human beings have ever stumbled across. 

You’re not dead yet, so enjoy this extravagant meal which was surprisingly one of the easiest, most delicious, hands-off meals I’ve made in a while. 

Lamb Pasta w/ Red Sauce

Lamb

• The queen, Alison Roman’s recipe & method for slow-braised lamb. The only modification I made to her recipe was to add ~2 tsp of nutmeg

I made the lamb the day before because I planned to add the cooked lamb to my pasta.

Sauce

• 4-5 garlic cloves

• 1 diced onion

• Salt & pepper

• Quarter-sized squeeze of tomato paste

• ~1/4-1/2 bottle of red wine

• 1 can whole pomodoro tomatoes (hand-crushed them)

• 1 cup water (could be more or less depending on your preference for sauce’s consistency)

Noodles

• Tagliatelle pasta

In a dutch oven or large pot sauté garlic & onions with salt & pepper until they’re translucent. Add tomato paste and cook with garlic and onions until it all gets a little more rich in color, about 3-5 minutes. Add the wine, let it simmer for about a minute or 2 until it’s reduced slightly. Finally add the tomatoes and water. While this is simmering on medium heat for about 20-30 minutes, add the lamb and boil your pasta in a separate pot so that it’s cooking while your sauce has time to reduce. Once the pasta is al dente, strain most of the water (reserving ~1/8 cup) and add to the sauce. The sauce should coat each noodle but not drown them. Let this all canoodle together for about 5 minutes, until the pasta has finished cooking through. Plate and garnish with things like flat leaf parsley, parmesan, red chili flakes, lemon or orange zest, etc.

Vanilla Bean Panna Cotta with Maple Syrup and Waffle Croutons

I had panna cotta at Brushland Eating House not too long ago and they topped it with local maple syrup. Ahhh maple syrup, the wisest of flavors— earthy, rich, and blessedly nostalgic. One of my favorite things to eat as a child was cold butter mixed with maple syrup, sometimes spread on toast and sometimes eaten with a spoon. I admit this with a healthy dose of both pride and shame.

As I was eating Brushland’s panna cotta I wondered what it might be like to include something with a slight crunchy-ish texture. Just like with ice cream, yogurt, or other silky, creamy, smooth desserts, to me panna cotta needs something with a little more interest and dimension that can provide textural contrast. While caught in the hazy luxury of my maple syrup high I wondered if waffle croutons could work with this dessert and also why I’d never eaten or heard of a waffle crouton.

Vanilla Bean Panna Cotta

• 2 cups heavy whipping cream

• 1 cup whole milk

• ¼ cup granulated sugar

• 3 (or more!) tbsp vanilla bean paste

• 1.5 tbsp gelatin

Combine all of the ingredients together in a pot on low heat. Bbarely let it simmer and certainly don’t let it boil. The heat is just to help melt and integrate the sugar and gelatin. Once there’s no sign of either at the bottom of the pot, pour through a sieve into whatever vessel(s) you want to serve the panna cotta in. (I decided not to attempt removing them after setting because I could care less about removing them cleanly from a ramekin.) Let them set in the fridge for about 3 hours at which point they should be firm, but hopefully not rubbery. 

Waffle Croutons

I’m currently working on a recipe for waffle batter that will crisp up around the edges, which is the essence of “crouton” I’m looking for. I found the recipe I used for my waffles left the texture soft, closer to pancakes.

I made the waffles ahead of time and when I was ready to serve the panna cotta, I crumbled them in a pan of brown butter with cinnamon which helped create a more crispy/crunchy texture. To serve, take the panna cotta from the fridge, pour about 1 tsp of maple syrup (or more if you want) to cover the top and finish with a crumble of croutons.

• Topsy turvy cakes, a physics-defying culinary feat

• Millie 4 life

• Little Debbie Zebra Cakes made me who I am

• My approach to making lemon petit fours

When I was a teenager I was absorbed with decorating elaborate cakes. Sometimes I got paid for it, but mostly I wanted to practice and share it with family and friends. Perfectly piping frosting on a crisp-edged cake helped me channel my need for control and order. The first cake decorating project I gave myself was to create a topsy-turvy Jack Skellington cake for Halloween. Topsy turvy cakes were so. hot. circa 2010. 

At the time, I was about 16 or 17 years-old and worked in the community college I attended. I remember working a shift at my job, spending the entire time planning this cake (it was a slow day). Youtube tutorials on how to construct a topsy turvy cake were studied, sketches were drawn, and plans for the ingredients were made. I remember feeling such intense butterflies in my stomach, wings flapping stronger with every minute that passed. I absolutely could not wait to get home and make this fucking cake.

This should tell you all you need to know about who I was as a teenager, btw. 

The cake had 3 layers, each covered in a fondant I made from scratch (I’ve never used fondant again because this project helped me realize that fondant, even homemade, is very bad in a myriad of ways). The colors were black (again—don’t do it), purple, and white. Each layer had a different pattern—I think one was white and black stripes, another had piped spider webs (spooky!), and the middle was a solid purple. I don’t have a picture of said physics-defying cake marvel, so here’s this excellent drawing. Needless to say it was, to this day, one of my biggest accomplishments.

It’s been forever since I’ve decorated a cake and I thought it would be appropriate to get back into it with a nice, finicky project like Petit Fours. While doing research for this I had an epiphany.

Little Debbie Zebra Cakes are basically Petit Fours! (Claire Saffitz apparently had this same epiphany recently, though before this she’d never eaten a zebra cake in her life???)

Memories of my childhood filled with Zebra Cakes came flooding in and wow did I have sophisticated taste from an early age. There was nothing more glorious than hearing the crackle of that cellophane package as I opened the white and black striped octagonal cake masterpieces. A light, pillowy cream sandwiched between two wonderfully soft cakes encased in a sweet layer of thin icing which held everything together with such delicate strength. They came in a few themed varieties—Christmas trees, hearts for Valentine’s day and ones that were red, white and blue for patriotism, of course. 

It amazes me how memories can be buried for so long, and in this case, brought back to the surface because of a return to something that feels so instinctual, like ambitious cake decorating. In planning my petit fours I felt an excited nervousness bubble up. Like standing at the edge of an impossibly tall platform. There’s a resistance to the fall but an even stronger inclination to jump headfirst. If the cakes turn out unintentionally topsy turvy I’m harnessed in and safe to try again.

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Cake

I used Erin McDowell’s cake recipe and encourage anyone who’s interested to reference it because she’s a cake witch.

• 9x9 cake tin

• 1 cup (2 sticks/226 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature

• 1-1/2 cups (298 grams) granulated sugar

• 3 large (170 grams) eggs, at room temperature

• 1 teaspoon (5 grams) vanilla extract

• 2-1/4 cups (271 grams) all-purpose flour

• 1/2 teaspoon (2 grams) baking powder

• 1/4 teaspoon (1 grams) fine sea salt

• 1/2 cup (121 grams) whole milk, at room temperature

• 1/4 cup (60 grams) rose water (I used lemon juice, and I’m pretty sure this could be replaced with water or maybe even more milk)

Whip butter and sugar in a stand mixer (assuming you don’t want to do this by hand) until it’s become light in color and texture. Add eggs and vanilla. Combine dry ingredients together in a separate bowl. Alternate adding the dry ingredients and milk until everything is combined.

Grease and lightly flour the 9x9 pan, pour cake batter and use an offset spatula to create an even layer. Bake at 350 degrees for about 15-20 minutes until a toothpick check comes out clean. After about 15 minutes of cooling in the pan, flip it out onto a wire rack and let the cake cool completely. Once it’s cooled all the way through, cut it in half horizontally.

Lemon Jelly

• however much juice 10 lemons yield

• 1 tbsp minced preserved lemon

• 1 tsp. gelatin

Heat the lemon juice until it slightly simmers, take it off the heat and add gelatin. With plastic cling wrap, line the pan that was used to bake the cake. Pour the lemon-gelatin mixture and chill in the fridge to set (~1-2 hours).

Candied Lemon

• rinds from the 10 lemons that were juiced

• 3-4 cups of water, or enough to cover the lemon rinds

• 1 cup granulated sugar + more for coating the lemon peels

Julienne the lemon rinds into long strips and boil with water & sugar until they become translucent and soft. Remove the rinds from the water and apply sugar to coat while they’re still hot/sticky. I curled mine around chopsticks so they would be cute.

Russian Buttercream 

Looking back, I wouldn’t have made this style of buttercream. It tasted amazing, but the texture became slightly curdled during chilling the cakes. I would probably go for an Italian or American buttercream in the future.

• 1 14oz. can sweetened condensed milk

• 2 sticks of butter

Combine both ingredients in a stand mixer with the whisk attachment and whip until it’s light, fluffy and becomes a frosting consistency. 

Icing

• 8 cups (2 pounds/907 grams) powdered sugar

• 1/2 cup (165 grams) light corn syrup

• 2/3 cup (161 grams) water

• 1/2 teaspoon (3 grams) vanilla extract

This was the trickiest part in my opinion. Erin explained that the icing should be heated to reach the right consistency. Too thick and there won’t be good coverage of the cake, too thin and it’s going to slip off and not be substantial enough to harden the exterior of the cake. Next time I would probably just add more liquid rather than heating the icing because there’s a fine line between getting the perfect consistency and melting the frosting and heating the cake.

Assembly

The name of the game here is patience and chilllll. Chill the cake, chill the crumb coat on the cake, and most importantly, chill out in body, mind, and spirit. This dessert takes a lot of time and patience, you cannot rush any part of its assembly.

1. First, the cake should be baked, removed from the oven and cooled enough to take out of the pan and cut horizontally to create 2 layers.

2. Lemon jelly gets placed on the bottom layer of the cake. I didn’t put frosting between the cake layers with the jelly because I didn’t want the middle to be slippery, but I did pipe a wall of frosting around the entire perimeter to help keep things in place for when the cake chilled/set. 

3. After placing the top cake layer on the bottom and lemon jelly layer, crumb coat the entire outside of the cake with the buttercream frosting and put in the fridge to chill. The buttercream should be firm to the touch.

4. Make the icing (also referred to as fondant but not the gummy kind) and get it to the right consistency which Erin explains what to look for here.

5. Once the cake has chilled, using a ruler, cut it into 36 equal squares measuring at 1.5” each.

6. Place a cooling wire rack on top of a parchment-lined baking sheet.

7. On the wire rack, place however many cakes you’re comfortable working with—I did about 6 at a time.

8. Let the icing set on the cake before moving on to your next batch.

9. Add candied lemon garnish once the icing is slightly set so it doesn’t fall off.

Hello & welcome to a newsletter that indulges in the sweet, savory sounds of food.

Today I’ll talk about—

• Experiencing ‘food noise’ means you’re a normal human.

• Krinkle Cut Dill Pickle Chips are just as delightful to say as they are to eat.

• Why wouldn’t we want to dip strawberries in whipped sour cream?

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Do you remember last year when the idea of “food noise” emerged? It’s described as an almost constant internal chatter/thought/desire about food. For example, imagine you’re trying to work, but you keep thinking about the sandwich you made yourself for lunch and you just remembered you packed the Kettle Brand Krinkle Cut Dill Pickle chips and oh my god isn’t that the best flavor of chips on the market right now?

We’re motivated to stay alive and therefore have an inclination to think about the thing which keeps us alive. Kate Manne wrote this article which says having food noise probably means you’re hungry or you’re dreaming about those sick ass dill pickle chips, and that’s fine. Food is a constant need, no matter the century or millennia, achieved in different ways as a result of an evolving species. Food’s basic function remains the same but expands its meaning through iteration and experimentation, reflecting ourselves through an accumulation of time. Diet culture says food is for survival, not for enjoyment. In reality, it’s both.

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I’ve always been hyper vigilant in silencing my food noise. For a period of time I excelled at putting it on mute and amplified the voice that said things like, No you can’t eat breakfast or lunch, don’t forget to weigh your dinner, you’re craving a snack because you’re weak, stop thinking about dill pickle chips, a moment on the lips forever on the hips, etc. (I realize there are those who experience “food noise” due to a more complicated relationship with eating which is not something I wish to make light of and certainly don’t think my personal approach to subverting this term is a solution to those experiences.)

Lately I’ve come to realize that food isn’t the enemy, in fact it’s a way to be in tune with an appreciation of the time we’re given. Putting effort, expertise, creativity and caring into something that only lasts moments is, to me, profound. It’s precious because the next meal is never guaranteed. We can control the dish in the moment, to be in service of its preparation, but once it’s consumed our control is relinquished and we can only hope that those receiving it will feel a comfort that reaches through time. It’s taken me a while to understand that my own food noise isn’t chaotic sound ruling my behavior, it’s music that I enjoy listening to, creating new recipes and melodies in my head. Food noise exists and this is how it sounds to me.

In this corner of the Internet every week I’ll share a dish I’ve made plus a side of inner-chatter. I’ll play my food noise for you and I would love to listen to yours too.

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This week the dish that got stuck in my head was strawberries and cream, a classic treat.

I found these sweet little babies at the farmer’s market and luckily I always keep heavy whipping cream and sour cream in the fridge (because I’m older and wiser). I was originally just going to dip the strawberries in sour cream, but then lightning struck, whipped heavy cream and sour cream—OF COURSE!

I’m still learning that measuring ingredients is important when sharing a recipe, so this is all based on estimates.

Ingredients:

• heavy whipping cream (~.5 cup)

• FULL FAT sour cream (~2 tbsp, more if you want it more TaNgY)

• vanilla bean paste (1 tsp, though honestly it could have been more. As Erin McDowell says, vanilla measurement comes from the heart.)

• salt (teensy pinch)

• simple syrup (~.5 tbsp)

Method:

1. Add the heavy cream, vanilla bean paste & salt in a bowl

2. Whip the heavy cream (I’m a little insane and prefer to manually whip the cream even though I have a stand mixer. It feels easier/less prep & clean up until I’m about halfway through and my shoulder is on fire.)

3. When the cream starts to get thicker and a little sturdier, add the syrup

4. Continue whipping until it forms stiff peaks. This time I took it a little further than I usually would because I thought the sour cream might weigh down or deflate the bubbles so I wanted there to be some leeway

5. Fold in the sour cream

6. To serve, put the cream in a cute vessel or leave it in the mixing bowl, sprinkle some flakey salt on top and go to town