Those are a pretty good selection of dried chilies at pretty fair prices on that website, similar to what I can get here in Cali. I imagined it’d be worse. On the verde, you could probably get away with substituting or omitting the Anaheim chili, but there’s no getting around the tomatillos.
Also, finding local substitutes to staples in the homeland that are unavailable in their new locality is a hallmark of immigrants’ ethnic cooking, so I wouldn’t really shy away from doing the best you can. Like, every bowl of pho you get made from the most authentic of Vienamese immigrants in the US is served with sliced jalapeno. I kinda doubt that was the original, but it captures the spirit and yet also becomes a new product of its time and place.
I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with a second generation Vietnamese immigrant about his trip to Norway. Despite mostly eating new Norwegian novelties, he did once spy a Vietnamese restaurant and feel like a bowl of pho. Our conversation about his experience there was about language – they understandably had focused on learning Norwegian, not English, while the guy I was talking with hardly knew any Norwegian so he had to dig back and remember some Vietnamese in order to communicate – but I wish I had asked him if the soup had taken on some Norwegian adaptations.
Red cooked pork belly, admittedly store bought xiao lung bao, and lightly stir fried snap peas and broccolini.
The bao were a bit of a still-delicious failure, as I don’t own a bamboo steamer, so I used one of those metal collapsible ones. They stuck to it badly, so they were mangled when you tried to remove any. Still delicious.
I was a chef for 10 years before getting in to kitchen product development, and I can’t reiterate how true and important this quote is relative to culinary aptitude. I wish more people would prescribe to it.
Understanding concepts and cooking techniques means you’ll never need a recipe again. Sometimes I’ll spend a few minutes on NYT or BA searching for inspiration, but once I have an idea a recipe is not necessary. Easy for me to say I guess - I have tons of training and practice.
BUT - I don’t think it would be that hard for most people to get to the point of only needing inspiration and not needing a rubric to follow.
Homemade fra diavolo tomato sauce from local plum tomatoes with wild caught shrimp over spiraled summer squash with wax beans (at the bottom) and Romano cheese.
Kind of simple compared to some of the stuff posted ITT, but it was tasty and healthy.
Another simple meal: Grilled shiitake mushrooms with local bucheron cheese and onions on a fresh baguette from the local farmers market and some homemade dill spears.
This is very true of brewing beer as well, assuming you know how to stay within the general guidelines of the beer style you’re brewing. Of course, breaking the “rules” may be a valid choice as well.
But 75% of a successful batch comes down to applying proper technique. Then 20% is water treatment (some might argue more) and maybe 5% is the recipe imo. Again, this assumes you’re not completely out of left field with the recipe.
If it’s something I’m not that familiar with: I’ll look at a dozen different recipe versions, pick the 3-5 that I identify with the most, and then make an amalgam of them.
Occasionally I’ll find one and mimic that alone but it’s usually the above.
In addition to salt fat acid heat, Kenji’s “The Food Lab” book is of course top notch and is generally my first resource. With that said I think a lot of the content is reproduced on serious eats for free, so you can decide whether it’s worth it.
I feel like I’ve posted pulled pork photos before on the old site, but I smoked a small pork butt this weekend that turned out pretty nice. Mrs. Catface handled the biscuits and made a vinegar based sauce from the Franklin BBQ book that was a nice tangy compliment.
Mostly got it right, but a few of the thinner spots were more medium than I would have liked. Also had a few flare ups that I wasn’t prepared for. Next time I’ll have a water bottle handy.
Served it with corn, baked delicata squash, and homemade applesauce my wife made after apple picking with my daughter today.
I would like to present a blog that is a couple’s story of cooking decidedly NOT good food. Those of us of a certain age will definitely recall our parents making some of these recipes. Here we are folks, American culinary history:
As a pretty funny illustration of my earlier quote about how techniques are universal but recipes are just opinions, I also took a look at their Boeuf Bourguignon and Hungarian Goulash recipes, and at least I found it amusing:
They’re really all the same recipes with slightly different ingredients. On the one hand, it feels like they’re mailing it in, but on the other, likely more correct hand, they found the best way to stew beef, and the rest just works around that.
Relative to their recipe, I thought it was a bit shy on potatoes, so I doubled them, and I quadrupled the peas to up the vegetable content. I thought it was a bit lacking in acidity and brightness, so I took a note from the Bourguignon and tossed in some parsley, and then a splash of some apple cider vinegar, which worked well. Would recommend for this fall and winter stew season (although every season is stew season in the Wookie household).
In our previous homeland, I documented making pho from scratch. It is hard and time consuming, and hardly worth it if you live in a place where you are 10 minutes from multiple restaurants that can serve you a hot piping bowl for $10-15 whenever you want, but the process was an interesting learning experience nevertheless. The technique is quite different from a basic French-American chicken stock. If you elect to try it out, buy a massive pot and make a shit load to freeze. This batch was at least a year old and still delicious, and it is easy and fast to reheat the broth, reconstitute some noodles, and get the meat and accouterments together.
This meal was inspired in no small part because our local Costco is selling thinly sliced choice rib eye that they bill as being for shabu shabu, but it’s awesome for pho, hot pot, Philly cheesesteaks, or whatever. I don’t know how many Costcos are doing this, as at my closest one, I’m not sure that white bread, native-born American people are even in third place as to the most abundant ethnic group shopping there behind Chinese, Indian, and then potentially other Asian groups like Filipinos and Latino groups like Mexicans. It’s not every Costco that stocks bulk ghee, paneer, and naan. It’s nice to have all these options.
The yellow citrus in the background is indeed lime, and from our tree. It’s a weird yellow variety that I didn’t think existed until we moved into this place and cut one open.
72 hour short ribs straight out of the bath with no sear, served on top of under cooked hash browns and completely drenched with demi glace, with a side of token green something.
