noodsletter #.0022
"Inspiration," bag o' links
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Book Bit
Amor puts down her fork.
Are you not going to eat that meat? Astrid wants to know.
She shakes her head, feeling she might kotch. For the past two days she’s been feeling scratchy and nauseous, on the edge of some undefined rebellion. She keeps remembering something she saw at her father’s reptile park recently. Feeding time at the crocodile enclosure, and she’s tried to erase the image, but can’t, of a kindly old uncle in a safari suit, throwing handfuls of white mice to the primitive drifting shapes in the water. Snippety snap. Tails hanging out of a grinning mouth like strands of dental floss. What are we, that we have to eat other bodies to keep going? With disgust, she watches Astrid reach over to her plate, stuffing bits of flesh and fat into her working, glistening mouth.
—From The Promise by Damon Galgut.
“Inspiration”
I’ve been sort of all over the place recently, what with news events and my rapidly approaching book manuscript deadline. I really haven’t had time to write down a recipe for anything I’ve made in the last two weeks. However, one of my Instagram followers recently thanked me for the “inspiration” he receives from my posts there, and I thought that was both very kind and offered me a kind of easy way out this week. Instead, here’s a few things I made or ate, and how to make them or find them.
I pass by a little Colombian restaurant on the way to my daughter’s ballet class every week, and I recently stopped in and got one of everything in the pastry case. A lot of it is very tasty, but far and away the best thing was the buñuelos, the donut type thing you see above. Now I did not know this was a buñuelo, and I posted about it on Instagram and called it a doughnut, and then received a PhD’s worth of information about buñuelos from Colombians and/or fans of Colombian food. It is not a doughnut; it is a buñuelo, I know that now. But, really, a buñuelo is just a texturally superior and more flavorful doughnut.
Rather than being made with yeasted wheat dough, buñuelos are made with yucca flour, and instead of being fried gobs of sweet dough, they are fried gobs of sweet dough that’s been mixed with a mild fresh cheese known as queso costeño. The leavening comes from baking powder, which results in the tiny, even crumb structure you can see in the photo above. Eggs, cheese, and sugar help give the fried exterior its burnished crust, and the result is a crispy on the outside, pillowy and chewy on the inside, slightly savory, slightly sweet fried bread. It is my ideal breakfast food, perfect with coffee. Apparently it’s traditionally served on Christmas, and that makes sense, since its existence is a gift.
The place I get them at is called Cali Tajadas, but my irate Colombian correspondents made it seem like these better-than-doughnuts are almost uniformly delicious. Highly recommend seeking one out in your neighborhood.
I’ve started going back to the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market again, despite the fact that it is quite a ways away. I primarily go to shop just at two vegetable stands: Willow Wisp Organic Farm’s stand and Evolutionary Organics’ stand. The strawberries up top I got from Evolutionary. Evolutionary only sells strawberries for several weeks, and they’re a highlight of the year for me. They aren’t inordinately sweet or anything, but they have a lovely acidity. Even though it was quite hot on the day we bought them, I though it’d be nice to eat them with something rather than just gobbling them up straight, so I made the two-ingredient biscuit in this strawberry shortcake recipe and whipped up some cream with some sugar, vanilla, and a drop or two of rose water.
The rose water is a trick I picked up from my old colleague Stella (she writes about it here); they have complementary aromatic compounds. The strawberries didn’t need it, just as they didn’t need to be macerated with sugar, but if you’ve got rose water around, why not use it?
The next morning we ate the remaining strawberries just with brown sugar whipped cream, which was great. (If you’ve never had brown sugar whipped cream, find some excuse to make it.)
There are a few vegetables that Evolutionary and Willow Wisp just don’t produce, and those include shelling peas, snap peas, and favas, which I get from other farm stands at the market. These aren’t of the best quality, so I mess with them a little more. The peas above I blanched very briefly and shocked immediately in cold water, then drained and seasoned them with dashi, soy sauce, mirin, and a little good extra-virgin olive oil (you can buy that same oil at the very nice fresh pasta spot Un Posto Italiano in Park Slope; if you do go there, buy the jarred marinated artichokes—they’re hideously expensive, but worth every penny). The favas above were just okay in terms of quality, so I pulled them out of their pods, blanched them, shocked them, then hulled them, then tossed them with some good 24-month aged Reggiano (also picked up at Un Posto Italiano) and that good olive oil and black pepper… that’s it. I like cutting the cheese into little cubes because it means you get 1-3 cubes of cheese with every bean. Favas served this way is one of my favorite dishes in the world.
Next we have three shots from the (disgusting) process of making a chicken paitan ramen, that is, ramen with an emulsified chicken stock. I’ve been promising and failing to come through on sending out a new tranche of recipes to cross-testers, and I’m having trouble deciding whether or not to send this one out. The stock recipe is done, but I’m not sure if I want to put in a tare specifically for this stock, nor do I think it needs its own dedicated noodle, but I also feel like I’m a little burnt out and being lazy. As a result, I…have done nothing about it. It’s frustrating! However, if you are a cross-tester, know that I will be getting those recipes out VERY SOON, and you’ll have a choice between a niboshi pork ramen, a duck ramen, and a chicken paitan. (And I’ll throw in the big boi rolled chashu recipe, too.)
There will also be wonton recipes (both for the nibo pork ramen and the duck ramen), which you can also use to just make wonton soup.
Finally, here is a rice bowl I made with some of the leftover 11 lbs of pork belly I cooked in my latest, perhaps final round of chashu testing. Just chunked up belly, stir fried with some tare, oyster sauce, garlic, scallions, and a little vinegar to finish, plopped on rice with kizami nori on top. Hearty, simple, quite delicious.
“News”
“In the back country, ramen reigns supreme.”
I say this as huge, huge NewsHour and Judy Woodruff fan but…what the hell?
Adam Platt’s stepping down from the critic role at New York. End of an era.
“Inside the Rockpool Shrimp There Is a Dying Star”
Sometimes the headline says it all:
Polar bears caught feeding on a whale carcass in breathtaking photos
I like “profiles” of shops a lot, like this one of Meat Market, a, uh, meat market in the East Village. The editor’s note is very odd though… “cool”?
This piece in The New Yorker about a little egg cooker has a bit, very common it seems to me, about trying to cook eggs at home and failing. I don’t understand this! If you have trouble cooking eggs, no matter what kind of egg cookery you’re doing, it will take you literally 1 hour, maybe 2, and less than 10 bucks to get better at it. Can’t make an omelet? Buy 2 dozen eggs and a stick of butter and make 8 3-egg omelets back to back. By the end, you’ll be able to make omelets fine, forever! Do that with scrambled eggs, with fried eggs, whatever, even boiled eggs, which people seem to have a lot of issues with. They’re eggs!
An NYT trend piece about people doing caviar “bumps” in restaurants, anticipated by about a year by this Life Hacker piece. I don’t have any feelings about this other than: if you’re eating caviar, good for you, do it however you like. However, Tammie Teclemariam, in her June 7 “The Year I Ate New York” newsletter thinks that caviar being ubiquitous means nihilism has won: “And of course caviar is on every single menu because it’s easier to highlight a crudely expensive ingredient than to create food that feels worth the money on its own terms.”
I am a very big fan of that newsletter, but I want to note a point of disagreement: She says the mutton chop at Keens is one of the best things she’s eaten. I’ve had that chop, and it’s fine, but I find it annoying because it is not a mutton chop; it is just a very large lamb loin chop. A million best-things-I-ate points deducted for false advertising, I say.
As a sufferer of migraines, I read basically all migraine content, but this essay also has the added image of eyeballs served on a plate.
A brief history of frankincense.
This article about people buying farms upstate and not knowing thing one about farming makes me think all sorts of terrible things about our society.
Chili shortage leads to sambal oelek/sriracha shortage.
How Henry Winkler eats a Katz’s sandwich:
The Ukraine war is messing with the global food supply in crazy ways. Every week there’s a new story about some huge downstream effect.
If the human race does survive without making the oceans too toxic for live, we’re all going to be eating sugar kelp. (And jellyfish, probably.)
Although we will likely depopulate the ocean first!
Learning to eat alone.
If the fine-dining establishments can’t make a no-tipping policy work, there has to be state- or federal-level intervention. Tipping is absurd! Although it seems like in this case the no-tip policy led to servers not getting as much compensation, which made it harder to recruit.
Lol: “Six Baltimore cheesesteaks that are better than almost anything in Philly”