Two weeks of meals to cover here. Mostly I’m just going to recommend a few things. The NYT recipe for “San Francisco-Style” Vietnamese garlic noodles, which is also in J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok? I highly recommend it.
The St. Patrick’s Day corned beef finished its annual visitation by becoming corned beef hash. I actually used a grinder this time, adding poblano peppers, onion, garlic, and potatoes to the mix. I basically nailed my all-time favorite restaurant version of corned beef hash that used to be served at the Wilmette branch of Walker Brothers’ Original Pancake House. (Probably still is, I just haven’t been there in decades.)
If you’re in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia and looking for some quick take-out that’s a cut above the usual, there’s a joint called the Grilliant Greek Rotisserie that we’d recommend.
Heading into this weekend, I banged out some hot-and-sour soup (today’s leftovers lunch as well). I had some old dried lily flower buds whose main purpose is to go in hot-and-sour but I decided they were too old. Thankfully I did have the always amazing dried and compressed cloud ear mushrooms. I’m as giddy as a toddler every single time I open one of these teeny boxes and then see it expand into a bowl full of mushrooms when you put it in water.
Hot-and-sour is also just such a delicate blend of very-not-delicate flavors. I’ve got to get it just right or I really feel sad about it. Fortunately it’s fairly easy to tinker with the vinegar proportion to amp that up if necessary. This batch came out well except that I did the eggs in the wrong order so I didn’t get the great stringy look and instead got a sort of egg-blended final texture.
Roasted some chickens. Despite the fact that there’s a zillion grain or starch preps I like to have alongside roasted chicken, I’m dangerously close to settling on pearl couscous that’s cooked in the roasting pan with the juices and drippings and a bit of broth and wine as the default. I made some artichokes and peas alongside that were strangely bland despite being cooked with lemon juice and mint. I may try to punch them up as hash tonight or tomorrow. Sweet potatoes with a bit of ras-al-hanout and sorghum syrup, on the other hand, were perfect.
For an Easter dinner, though, I decided to try something technically ambitious that I’d been meaning to do for a long time and it was great. The easy part was some lamb chops marinated in balsamic vinegar, garlic, mustard and basil plus some roasted brussel sprouts with curry and yogurt.
The hard part was from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home, which was a potato pave. It goes like this: you cut some big russet potatoes into a single brick-shape and then slice them very thin on a mandoline. The slices go in a bowl full of cream. When you’ve got enough slices, you put then in a loaf pan that’s got parchment paper in it, making one layer at a time, putting a bit of butter on it each four or five layers. Then you fold the parchment paper overhang on the top of the loaf, put foil over that, and cook it for almost two hours at 350F. Then you put some weights on top of it while it cools and refrigerate it for a long time. The goal being to basically make a rich potato loaf that still shows some layering when you cut it into little squares and fry the squares in some oil with garlic and thyme. It sounds involved and it is, but not outrageously so, and the result is really cool-looking. (This is pre-cutting into squares.) I’d do it again for a dinner party—it’s basically a really good scalloped potatoes preparation that looks restaurant-ready.
All that plus some salad and it was a good Easter dinner. We watched about an hour of The Last Temptation of Christ (judging by the quality of the streaming, so did a lot of people) and stopped around the point where one of us was having a hard time believing that the guy playing John the Baptist was also the eponymous character (and actor) in My Dinner With Andre.
Everything was great, but I think the highlights for me were the potatoes, hash and noodles. The hash yuo can get in diners is so uniformly terrible that it's truly a treat to have really good hash.