The CSA is great…ish.

A few weeks in a row they’ve sent me home with a huge head of cabbage.

My fridge is filling up with cabbages.

So, today I put together a nice little miso ramen for lunch on a whim, based mostly on stuff I had sitting around:

this was so good and so easy!

I’m a capable bartender, but almost all of that knowledge has instead found its way into my true vice: a potent homemade iced tea lemonade that I can drink gallons of.

you know what, I think it’s time

So, it’s an open-secret that Phnom Penh has the best chicken wings in Vancouver.

so, through a weird twist of fate, I ended up with a bunch of chicken wings

and I thought “might as well give this recipe a try”

YouTube helped:

My version is somewhere between these two’s takes on the famous recipe and:

I used too much seasoning on the outside: the garlic oil let too much salt, sugar, and MSG adhere to the crust making the wings a little overpoweringly seasoned.

otherwise it was DELICIOUS.

I figured this would be an insanely difficult recipe to get right because, like, if Phnom Penh is so legendary for these wings, why doesn’t every restaurant do them?

But, actually, if you do all of the steps - the long fish-saucy marinade, the thin crispy batter, the twirl in garlic butter and then sweet-salty-and-msg seasoning: it’s actually very close and very good. It’s just labor intensive, and these guys need to hit the table still very hot from the fryer.

Anyways, if you’ve got a bit of time on your hands, highly recommend.

The New York Times’ elevation of Marcella Hazan’s quick marinara to viral status was, uh, very useful for me, so I trust their taste at least a little.

Of course, they’ve paywalled most of these recipes but … they’re viral recipes, so you can’t stop me, NYT.

Our 50 Greatest Hits, According to You

On Sept. 17, 2014, an ambitious new app made its debut: New York Times Cooking, which collected thousands of archival Times recipes in one elegantly designed, easy-to-use place.

In the 10 years since, Cooking has grown into a whole universe of food, videos, personalities, newsletters, cookbooks and comments — with you at its center. You’ve invited us into your kitchens and made us part of your lives.

To mark the anniversary, here are 50 of our best recipes according to you, our community, with reader comments threaded throughout. It’s not a ranked list of our most popular recipes by traffic numbers alone, but a wider, more curated view of Cooking.

These are dishes that have emerged as classics and racked up five-star ratings, recipes that became popular just about immediately after we hit publish, went viral on social media and inspired the most memorable comments. But we easily could’ve filled this list with 500 more. There are so many you’ve loved, in so many ways.

This gin was overpriced but it was worth it to become my best olive oil bottle for multiple consecutive years.

i mean, it’s not wrong

so, I was sitting here thinking that both Mexico and Korea have really pioneered adding cheese to corn in clever, delicious ways like “elote” and that the USA is way behind in strategic corn-cheesing technology, and then I remembered where they took the same concept:

doritos

A while back I didn’t believe a friend when they said they had the same meal pretty much every day for lunch.

Then I started working from home and now I have poached eggs on toast, like, at least a few times a week.

okay but actually what the hell am I, a person who doesn’t like going outside, supposed to do in Canada on vacation

this whole country is boring as shit, it’s like if someone were to take 26 Montanas, line them up one after the other and freeze the whole thing half of the year

there’s Montreal I guess

everybody’s like “such natural beauty, so many mountains, wild and untamed outdoors, pacific northwest, snow sports” but I’m allergic to literally every part of that

my face will get puffy and I will get a nosebleed, that is enough majesty of the outdoors for me thank you

for the love of god, give me a walking food tour in a major metropolitan where there’s nothing but concrete, or an open-sourcy tech conference

wine touring in the Okanagan is pretty nice but honestly after about three tastings I can’t differentiate one wine from another at all any more

also the horrible growing conditions and constant fires of the past few years have left the wineries grimmer and sadder than ever before, they’re either barely willing to run tastings or they’ve turned tastings into an expensive activity

as a practical consideration, you also need someone to drive you from tasting to tasting OR you need to really, really pace yourself

This may not seem so classy, but actually an older red wine probably has a bunch of nasty sediment and old cork floating around in it and a quick pass through a coffee filter clears that right up.

people get real triggered about the idea of eating bugs, but I eat a lot of shrimp, which are delicious, and it’s hard to describe what’s different between shrimps and bugs

So, uh, Melitta is probably the least well-respected of the common pourover brands but let me tell you, you can get a Melitta pourover for $12 CDN and a 100-pack of new filters at any grocery store for $5, which is maybe 1/3 of the cost of the other two.

A gooseneck kettle, hario v60 and a baratza burr grinder will set you back $300.

But a $20 blade grinder, a $20 kettle and a $12 plastic pour-over with $5 filters can get you a coffee setup that’s 80% as good for a tiny fraction of the price.

I remember on a trip to San Francisco in the 10s, I was a little startled, they offered a crazy new thing called “pourover” and charged exorbitantly for it, and I, out of curiosity, paid, only to watch them make coffee

… the exact way I made coffee at home, just with more pomp.

“my mom showed me how to do that when I was just out of high school, it’s actually just the best way for a person to make a single cup of coffee”

I’m a little obsessed with finding that point in the price/quality curve where you’re actually getting the absolute best bang for your buck and I feel like for coffee this is it.

@apike having tried burr and blade grinders, I’m gonna say it: coffee enthusiasts over-value a perfectly consistent and predictable grind

with only a little practice a blade grinder reliably produces a good cup of coffee, you just need to time it right

although admittedly I did splurge on a nice, reasonably priced OXO burr grinder, so

I believe that professionals tend towards techniques that produce consistency and homogeneity - like neutrally flavored broths, perfectly diced vegetables, and very precise measurements.

Amateurs who ape these techniques without having to meet the same demands are cargo culting needlessly: perfect consistency is rarely as important a goal for home cooks, so go ahead: USE a boldly flavored stock or rough chop your vegetables: it will be FINE.

The same goes for coffee grind consistency.

:(

the secret to good Italian food is to loudly announce “MAMMA MIA” every time you add garlic to a pan. if you don’t do this, the garlic will sense your fear and burn immediately. this is science.

olive oil. if your recipe says “2 tablespoons,” ignore it. pour until your ancestors whisper “basta” in your ear. then pour a little more. then discard the pasta and begin drinking the olive oil straight. loudly announce “MAMMA MIA”. you have done it. now you are the chef. kiss your fingers and wink.

a lot of the science of nutrition seems to be backed by shrugging and emulating the eating habits of people in “blue zones” but as far as I can tell the actual way to live an “extremely long life” is to live in a country with generous retirement checks and nobody who bothers to check if the people who collect them are still alive

“people in blue zones manage to live to the age of 110 on a diet of fish and beans”

meanwhile, people in blue zones:

I eat a lot of cabbage. One five dollar head of cabbage has been vegetables with dinner all week, it’s cheap, nutritious, and I have a handful of good cabbage recipes.

unrelatedly, someone who lives in my office has been unleashing a truly rancid series of unstoppable eye-watering farts all week and I can’t figure out why

You, a child: I will have the chicken nuggets, plural, please

Me, a sophisticate: one huge nugget

I love breakfasts. One of the things I could not get enough of in Montreal was that they had a breakfast restaurant on seemingly every corner and they all executed at a level utterly unheard of in BC. Hell, even a Smittys does a better breakfast than you’re likely to find in the lower mainland.

In my new place I live near a Cora, an IHOP and a De Dutch, all staffed by bored, laconic teenagers. Trying to get food in any of them on a weekend is a fool’s errand and a 2 hour project at least.

I’m a not incompetent chef and at least a few times when guests have offered to take us to breakfast I’ve simply made an elaborate breakfast because it’s a more efficient use of my time. It’s not a perfect system because not everybody can order exactly what they like: you’re getting a full English and you’re going to LIKE IT darn it - but it’s absolutely faster.

But there are some good spots (also: if you’ve got great BC breakfast restaurant tips let me know), one of which is the New Westminster IHOP.

Unlike most IHOPs it’s actually - and this is weird - run well, by people who seem to like what they’re doing? Maybe it pays well enough not to suffer massive turnover. I can hope, at least.

The difference is night and day. They’re always busy, even on weekdays, and they turn over tables with mechanical efficiency.

All of us have hit a Denny’s at a weird hour, been one of only two tables in the entire restaurant, and sat 75 minutes waiting for our order to slowly roll out, cold, from the kitchen, or been at that same Dennys when they’re busy and had breakfast take an eternity because they’re swamped and don’t know what to do.

This IHOP is reliably full and even with every table packed your meal hits your table in under 15 minutes.

That is a short order chef firing on all cylinders.

I am hungry and impatient, and fascinated with restaurant efficiency. I love it in restaurants high and low end.

I particularly like peering into the bowels of a McDonalds, it’s hardly a restaurant at all, it feels like watching a food operating system in motion.

Aw yeah that is movie theatre smooth cheese sauce

If you’re in #canada and you’re curious about how to forge a closer relationship with local food supply, consider looking for Community Supported Agriculture programs in your area.

You pay in advance and get vegetables all year at their respective harvest times.

It’s more expensive, inconvenient, and fussy than just buying your vegetables from Loblaw’s, and you still need to buy vegetables from the store when you need Specific Vegetables, BUT big plastic tubs full of fresh veggies.

Lots of downsides to getting food from an actual farm, like: instead of getting the same 8 vegetables you get on repeat from the local store, the availability and supply of different vegetables changes a lot month after month, and I’ve had to pull some tradwife farm-ass shit like “dealing with an absolute mountain of plums” and “learning to pickle”.

Also sometimes they will attempt to send you radicchio, which I think should be considered a war crime.

However: a couple of years of being forced to get creative with a hyper-local bounty of unpredictable farm fresh vegetables have, I think, forged me into a much more capable and resilient home chef.

It’s really funny because every now and again I will go to Savio Volpe, which is one of the hot ticket local restaurants, and I’ll see the same vegetables I’m dealing with on their endlessly rotating menu, because they’re pulling a version of the same vegetable swindle I am, trying to get their mitts on the freshest and most local veg.

They, uh, reliably do a much better job with these vegetables than I do.

I’m not actually 100% convinced that there’s much, if any, of a flavor or health benefit to these locally sourced vegetables compared to the actually reliably excellent bounty from a local vegetable store like Kin’s - expensive vegetables are mostly just vegetables.

The health benefit is more, I think, being forced to cook a large plastic tub full of vegetables on the regular.

anyways, I’ve been a member of the metro vancouver Glen Valley CSA for 2 years, now, and it’s also quite a bit more well run than the last CSA I was a member of.

also, and this is only a bonus if you’re an idiot like me and lack long-term object permanence, paying a lot up front makes it feel like you’re getting free vegetables from a genie

so I’m lactose intolerant and prone to acid reflux, but still, sometimes we’ll order pizza and with some cheese pills I will still attempt to eat as much of that damn thing as I can

Those Sunny D kids were idiots, purple stuff is amazing!

if you learn about how fiber works, like, “it moves things through your intestine faster so there’s less of a chance to metabolize all that fat in there” you start to think

“wow, I could hack the whole thing and eat a load of fiber so that the fat barely has a chance to settle”

which, uh, it turns out is not some amazing hack, that is just what vegetables is

it’s still a good idea though: yes, you should eat lots of vegetables

So there’s this italian dish, pasta alla zozzona, which is where you take sausage and guanciale, fry ’em up, and serve them with a mix of grated cheese, egg, and tomato paste (using a cacio e pepe or carbonara like technique to get things nice and smooth)

you can’t fool me, ITALY, that’s just kraft dinner with hot dogs and ketchup

compare:

a while back I discovered that the popular roman dish “cacio e pepe” is just cheese and pepper and pasta and butter and I swear to god that’s just a classier, much more difficult Kraft Dinner. Now I call Kraft Dinner with too much black pepper cracked in to it “trashio e pepe”.

me most of the time: nationalism is stupid

me, defending the cheapest, shittiest food you have ever heard of:

When I was new to cooking I read a book by Tamar Adler that was openly critical of the kitchen microwave and I’m pleased to now be old enough to know that that was total horseshit

I’ve been working on a wake-up aperitif called “The Sun Will Come Up Amaro”

This waffle iron has been in continuous use feeding the various members of my family since the 1950s

i don’t know why people keep telling me that their food is art is anal

Some of my family members have a touch of the wine snob about them, so I always decant nice red wine when I serve it to them - although the $2 plastic sterilite jug fails to impress

the whole Dungeons and Dragons community seems to be angry about the idea of fudging dice, but I for one think that it should be encouraged

the absolute king of lazy night recipes was something I attribute to my mom:

hot rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, hand-shredded and served in dinner rolls, with mayonnaise, tomato slices, salt, and pepper

these roast chicken sliders are perfect

you can’t monkey with them at all without making them worse: don’t add cheese, don’t fancy them up, no gravy, no hot sauce, it’s perfect

i guess it finally happened but it actually isn’t as funny as the premise would lead you to believe

they sent the host in to stop the chefs from using roasted red peppers because they’re icky and I nearly yelled at the TV

on the other hand, there’s a bit where Brennan keeps hauling out the very large, heavy food from the first challenge and snacking on it and that is extremely funny so 🤷

“So, I told you to leave that”

PLONK

i don’t know why I feel such weird pride when people enjoy something from Canada but I do

A&W and Triple O’s are top tier burger chains dammit

Okay, so, this is a fairly spicy take, but I think that these burger chains have a burger that is at least in the same postal code as the highly venerated In-n-Out and Five Guys burger options

whenever I eat peanut butter and jelly, I think to myself that a hundred and fifty years ago, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were the apex of fancy high-society food and lobster was gutter-trash for poors

and now I’m eating a pb&j it in my boxer shorts at midnight

duh, it’s “chicken” and “dumplings”

uh, I can see, like, at least several visible ingredients in that dish, what gives?

o_o

this article advocates pouring canned biscuits into a can of cream of chicken soup

wow, I was just joking, I guess it literally is just chicken soup and dumplings.

that’s… I guess that’s one way to make “2 ingredient” meals.

anyways, uh, check out my ground-breaking “1 ingredient” soup recipe:

(the one ingredient is “can of soup”)

Oh man, Culinary Class Wars is so good I immediately love it, it’s Squid Game Iron Chef

i tried to make rogan josh from scratch but i ended up making rogan joe and now my curry tastes like creatine and weed

i don’t think that this joke deserved -5 points, costco canada subreddit

it was hot pot time

some of the simplest and most satisfying dishes I know are ones where salt and pepper do almost all of the heavy lifting

poached eggs on toast? that’s a salt and pepper dish

kraft dinner? nope, that’s a cracked black pepper pasta with a hint of cheez flavor

back when I could eat cheese, sometimes I’d just crack a mountain of black pepper into some goat cheese and that’s it, that’s all you need to do, it’s amazing

This Radicchio recipe will knock your socks off!

1. Fill a bowl with clean water

2. Cut the radicchio in half and place it in the cold water

3. Get good, extra virgin olive oil

4. Head out to the grill

5. Keep going. Keep going until you get to a farmer’s market.

6. Practice this phrase: “I will trade you this radicchio and this olive oil for a vegetable that doesn’t taste like cabbage’s weird divorced uncle”

One of the problems with maintaining your own personal cookbook is that you just memorize how to cook most things, so mostly your recipe book just needs to be a handful of ratios, instructions for more complex and easy-to-forget recipes, and just a list of the things you know how to cook to remind you of all of them when you’re looking for inspiration.

the compressed form of a lot of #cooking recipes just calls for the ratio of the primary ingredients: all I need to know to make fried fish or tempura is “1 cup flour, 1 egg, 1 1/3 cup beer” because I can scale and season as necessary and remember that if I want a lighter batter I can swap the beer for club soda

that is to say, my whole personal cookbook is about 4 pages long and contains just under 60 recipes, many of them just single-word descriptions like “caldo verde”

the recipe for “caldo verde” is just the words “caldo verde”, there to remind me that I like to cook that thing, the rest is just Draw The Rest of the Owl

current version:

BRINE

• 1 cup vinegar
• 1 cup water
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1/2 tbsp sugar

PONZU

1/2 cup soy 1/2 cup citrus 1/2 cup white wine (mirin) 2 tbsp rice vinegar lil bit of dat fish powder

LEMON CURD

3 lemons: zest & juice 1/2 cup sugar 3 eggs 6 tbsp butter (3/8 of a block?)

whisk it all together under low heat or in a double boiler, until thiccc, then chill for at least 1 hour

WAFFLE

• 2 cups white flour (240g)
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 500mL buttermilk

whisk drys whisk wets add wets to drys

OVERNIGHT BREAD (+~5 hrs)

NIGHT:

• Mix the poolish:
• 500g flour
• 0.4g (1/8 tsp) yeast
• 500g water, 80F
• wait 12-14 hours (bubbly, triple volume)

DAY: (5 hrs)

• add 500g flour
• 21g salt
• 3g ( 3/4tsp ) yeast
• (you can mix dry ingredients separately first)
• 250g water, 105F
• mix
• timer: 3 hrs (2 folds)
• divide & proof: 1 hr
• oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

SAME DAY BREAD (~7-8 hrs)

TOTAL:

AUTOLYSE

• 1000g flour
• 720g water at 90-95F
• mix, rest for 30 minutes

THEN

• 21g salt
• 4g (1 tsp) yeast
• mix
• timer: 5 hrs (2 folds)
• divide & proof: 1hr 15m
• oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

SHOKUPAN (~5-6 HRS)

Roux - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

• 125g water (250g water)
• 25g flour (50g flour)

1. roux: in a warm pan, 125g water, 25g flour, cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly for about 3 minutes, until 150-175F

2. cool the roux for 10 minutes+ off the heat (<110 degrees F so it doesn’t kill the yeast) while you measure out the rest of the ingredients

Dough - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

• 400g flour (800g flour)
• 215g milk (430g milk)
• 30g sugar (60g sugar)
• 4g salt (8g salt)
• 8g instant yeast (16g instant yeast)
• 60g salted butter (120g salted butter)

3. measure out 215g milk + 8g yeast into mixing bowl, let rest for 2 minutes.

4. add 400g flour, then the roux, mix with dough hook at lowest speed until incorporated, then for another 3 minutes.

5. add 30g sugar and 4g salt, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes

6. cut in cold butter, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes

7. fold it until it’s a nice tight ball and plop it into a bowl to rise for ~2 hours (doubled in size)

8. load them into the (lightly greased) bread pans and let them rise for 90 minutes (until they’re almost touchin’ the lid)

9. 45 minutes into the previous step, start preheating the oven at 375 F

10. bake: 40 minutes

CRISP (NOT CRUMBLE)

(a crisp is the one with oats)

Apple/Fruit Mix: 6 apples (or equivalent) 2 Tbsp sugar 3/4 Tbsp cinnamon 1 lemon juiced (optional tbsp water, tbsp flour)

Toppins: 1 cup brown sugar 3/4-1 cup oats 3/4-1 cup flour 1 tsp cinnamon

(optional 1/4 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking soda to decrease the pH for better browning)

1/2 cup cold cubed butter

350F for 45-60 mins

ICE CREAM

1L half & half (mix in some whipping cream if’n you dare)

1/2 cup granulated sugar (the original recipe calls for 1 cup, take from that what you will, also i hear corn syrup can help the texture in small amounts)

generous pinch o’ salt

throw in steepables (coffee! cardamom! mint! probably not rosemary again!) and get to 170-175F (no higher, don’t want curdlin')

let it sit for 45 minutes (or as long as seems appropriate, given the steepables)

separate 6 eggs, keep the yolks only add to 1/2 cup of sugar, (optional: 1/4tsp guar gum) whisk, whisk in a few splooshes of hot milk to temper

add the egg glop back to the milk, get it to 170-175F and stir until spoon-coatingly thick

strain out the steepables chill overnight churn next day

DUTCH BABY

• warm eggs, warm milk (let them sit, measured, on the table for a bit)

(the reference recipe here was for 2 eggs:)

• 2 egg

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 2 tsp sugar

• vanilla

• beat until loose and frothy

• 1/3 cup flour (40g)

• 1/3 cup cornstarch (40g)

• 2/3 cup milk

• a spoonful of mascarpone or cream cheese wouldn’t hurt

• let batter sit for 20 minutes

pan in a 425F oven, hot hot hot

quickly butter the pan, get the batter in before the butter burns 20 minutes in the oven

top with lemon, powdered sugar, whipped cream

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE

1 1/2 sticks (170g) butter 2/3 cup (142g) brown sugar 2/3 cup (132g) granulated sugar 2 tbsp (39g) light corn syrup 1 tbsp cider or white vinegar 2 large eggs 1 tbsp vanilla extract 1/2 tsp salt (omit, using salted butter) 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp baking soda 2 1/4 cups (270g) all-purpose flour 3 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Note: this one is a pretty sweet dough and it really benefits from a bitterer chocolate and maybe a little flaked sea salt

• cream together butter, sugars, corn syrup, vinegar
• beat in eggs, vanilla, salt, baking powder, baking soda
• stir in flour, chocolate chips
• store in fridge overnight or freeze
• 375 oven
• drop tablespoons of dough on to baking sheets
• 10 minutes, with a half rotation at 5 minutes (ed: 12 minutes with my oven)
• let sit on the pan for a few moments after removing from the oven
• rack to cool

WONTON SOUP BROTH

chicken stock garlic ginger 2tbsp soy 2tbsp wine 1tbsp sugar 1tsp sesame oil

Beer Batter

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1 egg
• 1 1/3 cup beer

What Should I Make For Dinner?

Beefs

• Burgers
• Spaghetti & Meatballs
• Tacos/Burritos
• Beef Bourgeoignon
• English Beef Stew
• Braised Short Rib & Polenta
• Steak (money’s too tight for steak)
• Shepherd’s Pie

Chickens

• Roast Chicken & Mashed Potatoes / Dinner Rolls & Mayo
• Caldo Verde
• Potato Leek Soup
• Butter Chicken
• Thai Curry Chicken
• Weeknight Biryani
• Chicken Parmigiana
• Chicken Soup

Fishes

• Baked Fish with Citrus
• Stinky Tinned Fish Rice Bowl w/ Egg
• Beer-Battered Cod
• Clam Chowder
• California Roll Rice Bowl

Porks

• Fried Rice
• Pork Tenderloin
• Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork
• Carnitas Tacos/Burritos
• Pork Chop Stir Fry
• Classic BLT/Club
• Sausages & Potatoes & Veg
• Ribs
• Breaded Fried Pork Cutlet

Breakfasts

• The Big Breakfast
• Eggs Benedict
• Waffles
• Potato Latkes

Misc

• Nachos
• Cabbage, Vinegar & Chile Stir Fry
• Cucumber Salad
• Coleslaw
• Caesar Salad
• Greek Salad
• Stankpaste Salad (roasted garlic, anchovy, vinegar, beans, cherry tomatoes)
• Fried Tofu
• Slow-cooked Beans
• Borscht

I have eaten

the leftovers

that were in

the icebox

you probably

missed them

because

they weren’t

frozen mozzarella sticks

I usually try to make dinner look good but for some reason tonight I made a grimy poo hut out of tofu and beans

Option A: buy a deli slicer for hundreds of dollars

Option B: get gud noob

(yeah, okay, it’s still a little thicker than what I could get with a deli slicer, I know)

this is a homemade corned beef, but made with an inside round rather than a proper brisket, which is to say it’s bone dry

it’s still a darned sight better than, like, a plastic packet of grocery roast beef, but it’s nowhere near as good as full-brisket corned beef

apparently “raw milk influencer” is a thing and they’re out there trying to give listeria a fighting chance against Americans

nobody who’s used to buying coffee ever expects how much tea is in a pound of tea

there’s a thought that starts to come to mind when you’ve been cooking for a long time, which is “i could make that, cheaper, at home” , which is a rewarding thread to pull on, it turns out

pandemic forced me to learn to cook a bunch of stuff that I only ever ate at restaurants - butter chicken, pad thai, sushi, fried chicken, onion rings - and, like, it turns out, while I still eat out periodically, being excited about your own cooking is So Good

I’m not devoted enough to press my own california rolls, but just making a bowl of sushi rice and topping it with some shredded imitation crab, mayo, sesame seeds, cucumber and avocado is a delicious california donburi and so easy

this is a challenge.

you: reading this: what’s the take-out meal you love most in the world? What is the restaurant you wish you were at this very moment?

I swear to you, you CAN learn to make something at home that’s almost as good, you can eat it once a week for the rest of your life for a tiny fraction of the cost, why not do that?

I’m going to put a little star next to a few things like “puff pastry”, though, you should not make that at home

“I shall call it the cabbage softball”

• Jonathan Kohlrabi, 1856, spitballing name ideas for his new vegetable

When I’m at home, the cocktail of choice is a Gin & Tonic with waaaay too much lime because they’re easy and dumb and refreshing.

When I’m at a restaurant and nothing on their special cocktail menu appeals, the drink of choice is a Whiskey Sour. They’re just a touch too fussy to make (often) at home, which is why they feel special to order when you’re out: but they’re reliably very good.

the game is to post five star reviews of recipes where it becomes increasingly clear that you just made a sloppy joe rather than their recipe

bonus: the world’s worst french toast

… tortilla shells soaked in bean water, with cumin!

It’s officially summer, which sucks, because I like baking bread and I basically have to take a 3 month break from homemade bread because running the oven at 450 for an hour when it’s 35C out is checks notes bad

“why don’t you use the barbecue”

I don’t want to go outside it’s like 35 degrees out there

why did Babish (Andrew Rea) hate Canadian Kraft Dinner in his boxed macaroni and cheese rankings?

well, it’s the confluence of two effects:

• first of all, in order to preserve neutrality, Andrew made all macaronis using exact box instructions
• second: in order to appear healthy, the Canadian KD is prepared using the utterly insane combination of “mostly skim milk with a scant tablespoon of margarine”, even though nobody has ever prepared it this way

A “prepared” box of Canadian KD has 120 less calories than the identical box of American KD, and the difference there is in the ingredients.

My guess is a loophole in the different Nutrition Facts packaging laws in both countries allows for Canadian KD to claim its nutritional facts with the lowest calorie milk and essentially no butter at all, which produces More Impressive Looking Health Numbers than the American equivalent, despite being functionally the same product.

The only time this fails them is if someone happens to follow Box Instructions to the letter, producing probably the worst KD anybody has ever prepared.

Like, obviously anybody is just going to use whatever milk they have on hand, and the only people who buy skim milk are either puritans, schizophrenics, or people who have grown tired of just putting water on their cereal, and also the correct amount of margarine is “a chunk of butter”

look I have spent 2 months thinking about this, fuming, how DARE you rank Canadian KD below DAIYA

but doing anything else would require breaking the method, and a show like this doesn’t WORK without a consistent method, even if that method screws poor Canadian KD to a wall

this isn’t on Andrew Rea, it’s on Kraft, for trying to game the nutrition facts with ingredients that no sane human would ever use

it’s like when sugary cereals used to be “part of a balanced breakfast” and then they had to show you a tiny bowl of cereal next to two bananas, three bran muffins, a whole glass of milk, a bowl of blueberries, and a whole jar of multivitamins because that was the only way to make that claim, they could just omit “a very small part of a very large balanced breakfast for four or five people”

Oh, there’s a TVTropes page for this, called “Adjacent to this Complete Breakfast”.

so my CSA dropped off some garlic scapes and I’m obsessed with the idea of a doing a long braise with the scapes and some goat meat

and if it turns out to be bad, I will blame it on somebody else

I don’t regard Tiff as particularly fond of tinned tuna, hard boiled eggs or olives and yet she has been asking me to make a Pan Bagnat for multiple years after encountering the concept on social media somewhere.

Today, I brave the sando.

(verdict: it was fine)

good sandwiches are an art

for lunch i am going to eat this whole family

lot of people out there making songs about love and heartbreak and rejection but nobody making songs about stuff I care about, like AUTHENTICATION or INSANELY SOFT SUPERMARKET FRENCH BREAD or THE WAY THAT COFFEE SMELLS

this person rightfully gets absolutely pilloried in the comments for failing to understand what constitutes a lot of garlic

A lot of people recommend roasted garlic, but I’m gonna say it:

garlic confit is equivalent

and the small amount of extra effort to peel the garlic up front makes it 100% easier to not have to extract your roasted garlic from hot sticky garlic paper, resulting in less effort overall AND increased yield of both garlic and oil.

Garlic Confit Recipe

1. Peel 2-3 heads of garlic into a ramekin.
2. Cover with a neutral oil. (Vegetable, cheap olive oil). Don’t go expensive with the oil here, subtle flavors gonna get obliterated by garlic.
3. Put in the oven at 375°F for 45 minutes or until the garlic is golden brown.

the first google image search result for garlic confit

now you have delicious garlic AND delicious oil!

Toum

3 bulbs is not ENOUGH, even, to justify making toum, but toum is so delicious, so sharply garlicky, that serious garlic lovers will eat it and shed a single tear

“why did nobody tell me about this, earlier” they will say

Serious Eats: Traditional Toum Recipe

Toum is essentially a mayonnaise, but it’s stabilized with garlic instead of egg. Just like mayo, toum is an emulsion of oil into water, made possible with the help of a third-party emulsifier.

my new hobby is going to be releasing unofficial tie-in cookbooks for games that have no conceivable cooking angle

ARMORED CORE VI: FIRES OF KITCHEN

it’s not quite green curry yet but we’re close

it’s kinda “mise en place” if you just en place everything kinda next to each other on a cutting board, right?

Did you know that (at least where I live, in Canada) Subway briefly stopped carrying MUSTARD?

that is a CORE SANDWICH CONDIMENT

conspiracy theory: it’s part of an ongoing raft of changes intended to make Subway higher-calorie and more expensive, like gradually hiding the “ham sandwich” ($8) behind the “kia sorrento steak supremo megasubwich” ($14)

I’m glad that before long they caved and brought basic ballpark mustard back

2025 Editor’s Note: Honestly, for all I know this one Subway just ran out of mustard one time, going straight to conspiratorial thinking may not have been the right move.

apparently this is called a “waiter’s friend”, or “wine key”, although all of this time I’ve been calling it a “french army knife”

The term “wine key” came into existence due to the German inventor’s last name, Wienke, which is difficult for English speakers to pronounce. When ordering the product from catalogs, the meaning and origins of the new Wienke Corkscrew gradually became lost and it was simply referred to as a “Winekey” or wine key. Patent number 283,731, August 21, 1883, simply refers to it as “C.F.A. WIENKE LEVER CORKSCREW.”

Box graters are nice for a wide variety of miscellaneous kitchen tasks

Radial graters are not for that.

Radial graters are for people who are about to create a heaping, snowy mountain of parmesan on their food.

Radial graters are for people who never tell their waiter to stop.

They just make eye contact and wait.

Surely they will crack before you do.

when I make bread I save some dough in the fridge and use it to fry up little pan foccacias, like this:

to make a point in a slack channel, I looked up “utensil crock” on google image search

most of the crocks look like the first image, which is IMO an utter waste of utensil crock. “oh, wherever will I keep my three spoons”

I’m going to give all of my points to this second crock where they mocked it up with a much more convincing simulation of what you would actually cram in there: absolutely everything

Although, okay, point of order, I count six whisks, that may be too many whisks. I’m not a baker, though.

anyways, this has been a talk about well-stocked stock photo crocks chock-a-block with mocks.

i don’t know what happened at this Taco Bell but it sounds GRIM

This online “game experience” is very funny.

A Proper Cup of Tea

a big cup of boiling hot water

tea doesn’t get any better than this

tea score: 5.0/5.0 - S RANK

OVERNIGHT BREAD (+~5 hrs)

NIGHT:

• Mix the poolish:
• 500g flour
• 0.4g (1/8 tsp) yeast
• 500g water, 80F
• wait 12-14 hours (bubbly, triple volume)

DAY: (5 hrs)

• add 500g flour
• 21g salt
• 3g ( 3/4tsp ) yeast
• (you can mix dry ingredients separately first)
• 250g water, 105F
• mix
• timer: 3 hrs (2 folds)
• divide & proof: 1 hr
• oven: 475F, 30 minutes lid on, 15 minutes lid off

They’re called no. 2 coffee filters because coffee makes you poop

I’ve tried so many different ways to quickly steam things and this is actually one of the places where the microwave steps up to the bat and knocks it out of the park. For anything small, this is way more convenient than digging out a steamer basket and a tray of boiling water.

Need to steam a hot dog bun or a barbeque bao? Just… plate with an upside-down bowl on top.

get a little water in there too, like, a damp paper towel

this half and half mix of jasmine rice and quinoa smells absolutely amazing while it’s cooking, it’s like buttered toast

seriously, try it, add quinoa and jasmine rice to your rice cooker, at the same time. do it.

Editor’s Note: (My friend Jenn maintains that she participated in the Cupcake Roulette, not me, which… is probably true)

so, I regret to inform you that the “C-Lovers” is not a tech meet-up, in fact, they are a local fish & chip shop

actually

i don’t regret to inform you that

these fish and chips are delicious

imagine being the exec at subway who was looking at their demographics

“it seems like the average consumer of our sandwiches is sad and exhausted”

“we should lean into that”

There’s this old cartoon joke where a hobo slices a single bean very thinly like it is a tiny roast beef, but I just used that exact technique to make some BLT sandwiches when I had nothing but two cherry tomatoes.

This agedashi tofu looked good, and the broth was tasty, and it was crispy, it was almost a nice dinner, but it was that dense health store tofu instead of silken tofu and so the texture of it was kind of beefy and unappetizing rather than creamy and delicious.

used alcohol bottles make fabulous oil pours, and then you can buy big honking oil containers for very reasonable prices

These yellow fried dace cans (available at most asian markets) are absolutely quick-meal MVPs and if you’ve never tried one you should

I think it’s great that in 1940, a maitre’d, Ignacio Anaya, at a club near Fort Duncan in Mexico panicked when a bunch of army wives showed up - he couldn’t find a chef and he had nothing to feed them - so he threw a bunch of corn tortillas in the deep fryer and threw some shit on there.

“Nacho” is just a nickname for “Ignacio”.

So when they asked him what it was, he just said “it’s the ’nacho special” and NACHOS WERE BORN, BABY.

I like to think of nachos as a thing that has always existed, like air or gravity or pizza, but actually they’re just Nacho’s.

a bout of winter COVID stole my christmas and my sense of smell and now I can’t taste anything

which I’m pretty unhappy about

I made a coconut and squash curry soup for dinner and all I could taste was “creamy paste, light salt”

JJ Goode’s “Taste” articles on cooking are so well written and funny that I sent him an honest-to-god unit of fan mail.

How to Roast a Chicken? The Answers Are Horrifying.

Between the wet briners and dry briners, spatchcockers and trussers, stuffers and tuckers, who are you to trust?

I hate roasting chicken. There, I said it.

more from this author

There are few dinners that outperform “roasted chicken on soft dinner rolls with mayonnaise and tomato and salt and pepper”

It’s good with a supermarket rotisserie chicken, or roast your own, whatever

editor’s note: this was the last thing I was able to taste before COVID stole away my sense of taste for the holidays. Fortunately, it came back in a week or so.

editor’s note 2: rotisserie chickens from the store are also called “bachelor’s handbags” because single men buying a purse full of hot chicken for dinner is such a common thing

look, I want to try the Rancho Gordo heirloom beans that all the food bloggers are talking about but if you factor in S&H to Canada and the exchange rate, I’d be paying in the realm of $15/lb for them and that is just too much money for dried beans.

Like, I pay $11/lb for pretty good coffee beans and those are the Most Special Beans

(If you’re american they come in at ~$7/lb which is still exorbitant for dried beans, but less so)

I have done nothing but teleport bread for three days

SHOKUPAN (~5-6 HRS)

Roux - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

• 125g water (250g water)
• 25g flour (50g flour)

1. roux: in a warm pan, 125g water, 25g flour, cooking over medium heat, stirring constantly for about 3 minutes, until 150-175F

2. cool the roux for 10 minutes+ off the heat (<110 degrees F so it doesn’t kill the yeast) while you measure out the rest of the ingredients

Dough - (Double Recipe for 2 Loaves):

• 400g flour (800g flour)
• 215g milk (430g milk)
• 30g sugar (60g sugar)
• 4g salt (8g salt)
• 8g instant yeast (16g instant yeast)
• 60g salted butter (120g salted butter)

3. measure out 215g milk + 8g yeast into mixing bowl, let rest for 2 minutes.

4. add 400g flour, then the roux, mix with dough hook at lowest speed until incorporated, then for another 3 minutes.

5. add 30g sugar and 4g salt, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes

6. cut in cold butter, mix on lowest speed for 5 minutes

7. fold it until it’s a nice tight ball and plop it into a bowl to rise for ~2 hours (doubled in size)

8. load them into the (lightly greased) bread pans and let them rise for 90 minutes (until they’re almost touchin’ the lid)

9. 45 minutes into the previous step, start preheating the oven at 375 F

10. bake: 40 minutes

“let bread rise in a warm place”

ok

When I get time off I invariably spend some time sharpening my knives, which is probably a metaphor or something.

Homemade Filet o Fish Time

I’ve been getting over my fear of frying: with a big cast iron pot, a candy thermometer, and old pickle jars to discard used oil into, it’s actually very easy and rewarding.

see also: this chicken parmigiana:

A lot of cooking lore comes out of modern commercial kitchens and actually doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re not running a restaurant.

Restaurants value turning out the same exact dish, every single time, like clockwork, as efficiently as possible.

Home chefs just want to make something delicious and actually prefer if their meal is a little different each time.

Restaurants like chicken stock - because it’s lightly flavored, versatile, and clockwork-reliable. You can trust that the stock is going to be basically identical every time you use it.

Home chefs like broth - when you’re pulling flavor out of that chicken, toss some spices and onion chunks and whatever vegetable scraps you want in there: it’s more efficient and much more delicious, and it doesn’t matter if it tastes a little different every time.

Restaurant knife skills focus on efficiency and homogeneity: if the onions are always the same size, they always take the exact same amount of time to cook and taste the exact same.

Home knife skills focus on safety and ease: your goals are simply to make food smaller and not hurt yourself: however you accomplish this is fine.

Many, many home recipes are just adapted restaurant recipes and it’s important to be able to learn which parts of the recipe are vital to the flavor of the dish and which parts are simply there for the sake of reliable, prep-friendly industrial-scale production.

Home chefs are adept with substitutions (you rarely need to DO a substitution in a restaurant and you OFTEN need to do it at home) and the measure of a good home cook is more “versatility” than “scale”.

Speed is important, of course, in both, but what “speed” means in a restaurant and at home are totally different: speed in a restaurant means executing a complicated, complicated dish as quickly as possible with a production line of people helping and prepping, whereas speed at home mostly comes from simplifying.

Adam Ragusea and Internet Shaquille, on YouTube, are a few personalities out there preaching the word of de-complicating home recipes, and it’s good stuff.

A restaurant might have a guy who’s job it is is to make 500 radish florets a night, which he gets extremely fast at by virtue of doing it 10,000 times a month.

A home chef might achieve a similar efficiency by simply not bothering to add an extraneous radish floret.

One huge example of this in particular is how many recipes call for unsalted butter, and then just add more salt back in by hand. That’s a total “commercial kitchen” move.

But: buying just salted butter is simpler, and it lasts longer in your fridge (thanks to the preservative qualities of: salt).

If you can remember that there’s about 1tsp/lb of salt in salted butter, you can only ever buy just the one butter, it’ll last longer in your fridge, and it’s good for all of your butter use-cases - even if you don’t remember to remove an eighth of a teaspoon of salt from your recipe if it called for 1/4cup of unsalted butter.

Some parallels might be drawn between this and “small vs. large software development organizations” but they’d be pretty tortured analogies.

my wife, entering the kitchen, will be faced with two opposing theories: either her husband purchased half a pie, an amount that you can buy at the supermarket and a totally reasonable size of pie to purchase for two people for dessert, brought it home, and placed it on a nice plate in advance of dinner - OR, said husband purchased an entire pie, brought it home, precisely and quickly bisected it, consumed fully half of it, and then discarded the container it came in and placed it on a plate to hide any evidence of his transgression

said husband is not available for comment because he needed a nap for some reason

my wife made this beef stroganoff with an opened chicken broth she had been keeping in the pantry

anyways, if I need to be hospitalized this right here is why

(editor’s note: I was fine)

As a quick guideline, here are things you can keep safely outside of the fridge after opening:

• vinegars
• oils
• dry goods
• rice, pasta
• breads, pastries
• cookies, biscuits
• (unopened) tins, jars
• jerky
• the UNNATURAL peanut butters (you know, the good ones)
• cookies, crackers
• most alcohol - excepting cream-based ones and low-proof, low-sugar ones (vermouth) which should be refrigerated

basically, if it has no liquid, lots of alcohol, lots of sugar, or lots of acid you’re usually in the clear.

Jury’s kind of out on hot-sauces, ketchup and HP sauce which have a medium-high amount of sugar and acid in them: sometimes you’ll see them in someone’s pantry and go “ick”, but it’s probably fine.

Chicken broth, on the other hand, even with its high salt content, is basically just ‘warm, nourishing liquid’, you might as well put your bacteria in that agar gel that biologists use to feed it.

I like my beef the way I like my coffee…

Things in a kitchen that means business:

• Loads of little bowls
• A spice grinder
• Knives on a magnetic block
• Hanging pans
• Cast iron
• A bunch of spatulas and tongs in a caddy
• Oil pours
• A pot full of salt

If you see a little Bluetooth speaker in someone’s kitchen, they either have ADHD, a bangin’ bread recipe, or both.

Of course you can cook great with 0/8 of these things, cooking is no place for gatekeepers.

you haven’t even touched your mega man of crackers

Every time I burn myself (and it’s pretty often, I cook and am clumsy) I run cold water on the burn, which is what you’re supposed to do for not terribly serious burns to keep any further damage from setting in. It also feels nice.

Thing is, that mostly stops it from hurting until the hand dries completely.

This will keep working for hours, if you want it to. If you want to avoid feeling the pain from the burn, you can just keep your hand wet for, like, 8 solid hours. But if you ever stop with the cold water, it starts to hurt again. If you just tough it out through that phase for, like, five minutes, it won’t be so bad, but… well, when do you want to do that?

I love Taco Time.

It is a Pacific Northwestern tex-mex fast food restaurant, and it is old enough that it largely predates things like “flavor”.

Taco Time food is not good food, not in my opinion.

It’s reliably a little disappointing, but - not …bad.

That’s hard to put words to: that combination of microwaved beef and super mild hot sauce is exactly the right thing, sometimes. I think it just hits a nostalgic note with me. I like it because I liked it when I was a kid.

I do also think that it has always, always been better than Taco Bell, although that is the worlds lowest bar.

So, crumbling or dicing butter for a recipe can be a bit of a pain, but did you know you can just grate it, like cheese?!?

hot chicken sandwiches are good and easy

I know that is is only possible because meat production is subsidized and scaled up in a way that meat substitute production can not be, but I think the mystery of why these companies are not doing so well is not so mysterious.

Like - I understand in my heart of hearts that it’s probably better for humanity to gradually wean ourselves off of beef. Less beef for everyone would be good. But it’s not economically sound to pay three or four times as much for a product that’s subtly worse.

I’m just unusually proud of this nice long weekend breakfast I made.

I went to the jam convention but they oversold the seats

everyone was really pectin

Cabbage Roll Soup Recipe

• Prep Time 125 minutes minutes

• Cook Time 250 minutes minutes

• Total Time 500 minutes minutes

• Servings 80 servings

• Author Holly Jolly Cabbage, beef, pork, lamb, sausage, chicken, forcemeats, cheese and rice are simmered in a flavorful tomato broth for the penultimate bowl of comfort food.

yom! lookin’ forward to the food

Ingredients

• 1 large onion diced
• 1 large onion diced
• 1 large onion diced
• 1 large onion diced
• 3 cloves garlic minced
• 1 pound lean ground beef
• 1 kilogram fatty ground beef
• ¾ cup uncooked long grain rice
• 1 medium head cheese, chopped (core removed), about 8 cups
• 383 oz canned diced tomatoes with juices
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• 2 tablespoons toothpaste
• 4 cups beef
• 1 ½ cups V8 or other motor fluid
• 1 teaspoon smoked parpooka
• 1 teaspoon
• 1 tablespoon Borcestershire sauce
• 100 bay leaf
• cinnamon to taste

Instructions

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

if you live in Canada, you generally assume that ranchers

• can’t spell champagne, “CAMPAGNE”, what?
• make incredibly gross, wierdly creamy champagne
• put champagne on their vegetables

also they have NO SANS

also, am I the only one who thinks that “Rancher’s Choice” sounds like a dime store romance novel?

i have precisely engineered

the perfect sandwich

crisp air,

freshly showered

steam rising from my coffee

looking out the window

in my new home

at the tree

there’s even a tree

an imperious chirrup from my cat

thick-cut bacon on cast iron pan

fresh tomatoes on hardwood

toasted bun, mayonnaise

lettuce, also there

it’s good lettuce

let’s not get too held up on the lettuce

what a coincidence that is also happening in my air fryer

I can’t imagine how hard it was for the Sterilite graphic designer not to put the same sticker on the jug in the image, creating an infinite jugloop.

Upon the jug, a picture of a jug, an action shot. Look at this jug go! What are you doing with it? Boring old water? You have nothing on the excitement of this jug’s pinkish liquid.

I’m a big believer in the healing power of flowers and crystals.

not these, though

but by “healing” I mean “healing my hunger” and by flowers I mean “sunflowers, specifically the oil from sunflowers”, and by “crystals” I mean “one very specific kind of crystal” and by “one very specific kind of crystal” I mean “salt”

also potatoes are involved

okay, I’m just gonna say it, I’m a big believer in the power of potato chips

me while watching sports: i have no idea what’s happening

me while watching competition format cooking shows:

I’ve honestly been thinking of running an event for me and my friends, like a sports draft but for competitors on a season of Top Chef or something.

Tinned tuna? Dry. Tinned salmon? Bony.

I can see why you’ve been sleeping on tinned fishies if those are the only ones you’ve been introduced to.

No, the real money is in tinned anchovies, tinned smoked mackerel, tinned smoked herring, and of course, fried dace with black bean.

Small, oily tinned fish are more sustainable to fish, more efficient to ship (no refrigeration required), shelf stable for a long time, omega oil rich, filling, inexpensive, and most importantly: delicious.

One time I invited my friends over for steamed clams, a meal that I actually prepared for them.

and I absolutely spent some time wondering if it would be worth it to head out and pick up a little bit of fast food to disguise as my own cooking

Ultimately I decided against it because the meal itself was already fairly labor intensive and the joke, while funny, probably wasn’t worth the 20 minutes, $5-10, and possible ruination of people’s actual appetites; it would have been a wasteful throwaway joke on account of how I’d actually made steamed clams.

But I want you to know exactly how long and hard I struggled with that conclusion, because we honestly only really invite our friends over for steamed clams, like, a few times ever.

The best I could do was to ask them, when they arrived, if they were prepared for an unforgettable luncheon.

“We’re here for dinner.”

On one hand, sushi that’s any bigger than bite-sized is a tell-tale sign that you are not in a classy sushi restaurant.

On the other hand, there’s a certain visceral pleasure to be had opening your mouth real wide and packing a softball sized california roll in there, presumably impressing your date.

Hah, I made a bread! BREAD HOOOOOO