I’m building up a big head of steam reading the news over the last week, so hopefully I can keep my cool as I contemplate what to say about it all.
I did my best to kick back over the weekend on the cooking and eating front by making some risotto with lamb sausage and mushrooms. Risotto is one of the great “I have stuff, let me just toss it in the risotto” dishes, so that’s what I did.
Back when I first learned to cook it, the idea that you had to stir the risotto in the pan in order to release the starch just seemed kind of mystical to me. It was a thing you did because the cookbook said to do it. And then I got kind of lazy and figured it was just a sort of theatrics. So I tried making risotto where you just dumped all the broth in with the rice and the other things and let it cook like it was a jambalaya.
It turns out it’s not theatrics. You get a genuinely different and better outcome if you stir it and just add a bit of broth at a time. Same for a paella. So the only thing that holds me back sometimes is I know I’m gonna be stirring for a while. Gotta be in the mood.
When the time is right, it’s a soothing, meditative thing to do. Just zone out and stir. Right when it’s just ready, you dump the other things in.
I was still in a “I need something to put things in” frame of mind the next night, so I made ramen from scratch broth. This was the first time I didn’t go full Momofuku on ramen, though, and just improvised—I used a smoked pork hock I had in the freezer along with the zillions of chicken wing tips I freeze for a broth base, and then made a pretty standard shoyu tare—the ‘sauce’ you add to a ramen broth—in this case, soy sauce, mirin, sesame oil, sake, lime juice, rice vinegar and a bit of grated ginger.
The goal here was also to cook and use some of the pork belly I had in the fridge, some red Napa cabbage, and some bell peppers. I decided to roast some pineapple in the pork belly fat and add those, which worked really well.
The rest of the pork belly went into a hash the next morning along with some dried pork salami I had that needed using up. Every time I make hash, I always kick myself and wonder why I don’t do it more often. It’s a bit time-consuming because I really like it to get crusty throughout—a soft hash is vaguely repellant on a weekend morning. If I were ever going to open a restaurant, I think I’d just call it Crunch—I like almost everything with the texture and flavor that browning, toasting, broiling, etc. makes.
We’ve been making coffee with an Oxo drip maker and we finally gave up on it because of a bad design flaw—if even a few grains of ground coffee escaped the filter, they’d clog the carafe, which had a kind of rubber cross-hatch at the point where it received the drip, and when it clogged, it would overflow. You know how it is when you’ve got an appliance that malfunctions in a consistent way and you’ve developed a work-around (in this case using a toothpick to be sure the carafe entrance wasn’t clogged) and then one day you just say BASTA! and out it goes. So now we’re back on doing the Chemex pour-over and really it’s not that big a pain. Plus better coffee.
Then I finished up with something simple but that also was about using up what was in the fridge—I had a big block of good mozzarella and I decided to make grilled mozzarella cheese sandwiches with some thin-sliced country ham, chicken, and pesto.
Now back to stewing about the world beyond these walls.