No photos of my Friday night disaster. I had some nice sushi-grade salmon and I decided to try a NYT recipe for a kind of nigiri sushi on crispy rice, with a little bit of avocado laid over it. The crispy rice just did not work out, at all, and I tried a couple of ways of frying or crisping it. There was just something off-putting about the whole thing—I ended up trying to assemble it as a kind of crispy rice bowl with arugula, salmon and avocado and it was just no dice. And then I tried to quickly make some light cauliflower tempura to round it out and that was even worse because I half-assed the batter.
Generally when things go really badly in the kitchen, it’s because I get started too late on something that I haven’t made before. So I don’t have the experience with that particular prep to work around any issues, I don’t have the energy to just back up and try it again. It’s been a while since I ended up with something that I personally thought was just too off-putting, but that’s how I felt this time.
So I was a bit more risk-averse for the rest of the weekend. I stuck some chicken thighs in yogurt and spices for later low-heat grilling, as a kind of approximation of tandoori chicken. (My Weber grill is reliable but it can’t really do what a genuine clay oven can.) I didn’t really have enough Kashmiri chili powder to get the really-red look so I confess I cheated and used a tiny bit of red food coloring, something I suspect a lot of average Indian restaurants also do. (Beet juice will do it too.) This, at least, worked just fine. I still had avocados and arugula to round it out, and I made a version of the gunpowder potatoes from Dishoom’s cookbook. Back to form.
I also made another batch of fermented chile sauce that I think is going to be inedibly hot—there’s a couple of Carolina reapers in it—but I’ll be curious to see because I threw in some plantains and mango, which I’ve never used in one of these sauces before. Will report out on that in a couple of weeks.
I was still thinking about making up for the Friday night disaster on Sunday, so I decided to try an omelette with a teeny bit of lobster meat and some gruyere cheese. My omelette technique is not flawless, and I made the mistake of using my rectangular Japanese omelette pan, which isn’t really intended for a fully stuffed omelette. I feel reluctant to get a new no-stick pan because the technology involved is so horrifically damaging in environmental terms, and most eco-friendly pans I’ve seen aren’t really non-stick in the same way—but at the same time, I have to say that my cast iron pans don’t really work very well for omelettes.
Tasted ok, at any rate. Dinner on Sunday was oven-cooked brisket (I just was not going to try and do the hours of careful monitoring and stoking that it takes to do low-heat brisket on a Weber grill) that I served in blue-corn sopes with some Napa cabbage, celery root, salsa and cheese. The only thing I can say about sopes, little fat corn tortilla cakes where you serve on top of them rather than stuffed inside, as with a gordita, is that I’ve never been clear how the top of the sopes cooks enough that it doesn’t taste mushy. You’re supposed to turn up the sides of a sope so it has a little wall all around it, which means you can’t flip it. I decided this time to fry them for a bit and then to dribble some of the drippings from the brisket on top of them and cook them in a high-temp oven for a bit to crisp up the top. It worked well enough but I feel like I’m probably missing a trick here.
The other complication of my weekend cooking is just that on Monday, especially if it’s a busy Monday (like today), I’m usually not keen on another big food prep. The plan is often to use Friday’s leftovers as the base of a meal, but Friday’s screwup means there’s nothing in that slot. There’s enough chicken and brisket left for something like a sandwich, but I do find that I want two days distance between a meal and the re-serving of that meal in some form if I can. There’s two frozen cod filets that I could have taken out this morning, but I’m not sure what to do with them—the bad tempura from Friday puts me off of the usual option, which is fish-and-chips.
So take-out it is! Probably.
You blame yourself for the failed rice dish, but I wonder if there was a problem with the recipe? I don't mean with the dish itself, but perhaps with the instructions as written?