superborb | Entries tagged with food

It was soooo helpful to be able to look back at notes from last time, so here are my NYE party notes for 2025! Now that I have recovered a bit from the sleep deprivation of being in a noisy house with a toddler...

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Overall, I thought the food was pretty successful! Even though I was very sleep deprived, having the schedule did keep everything on task. I guess the real concerns for next time are trying to time hot food better (not really sure if that's possible with this style of food), and maybe I should consider more complicated dishes? I think it would've been easy to do a red braised pork, since that reheats well. I always want to have lots of little snacks before because that was My Job for ages, but it might be too much and detract from the meal...

Context: we always have a Big Party (~30 people attending) for NYE, and this year I unilaterally decided to be the main chef. I wrote up reflections on each dish for next year's reference, so I thought I might post them here. I'd add pictures, but then my chances of actually posting this would decrease, so perhaps not.

( This is a lot of words )

The farmstand on the bike ride home from work: incredible heirloom tomatoes nestled on a little lawn deep in the shade of old trees. (Also other farmstand produce, but I only have eyes for the tomatoes.)
Crabapple shrubs: the most apple-y shrub using fruit that would otherwise go to waste. Must taste all the crabapples to find the most delicious ones.
Biking to my favorite bakery, with the most delicious bread and the best croissants in town. Okay, part of the bike ride is NOT idyllic fall, but then you bike over to the lake and eat sandwiches and pastries on a bench while gazing at the dogs. The dogs gaze back and occasionally look for crumbs.
The new watch party show (Mysterious Lotus Casebook) is one I'm enjoying a lot and looking forward to every week. I'm so tempted to watch ahead-- (This is in the Qi Hun server, which anyone is welcome to join btw.)
Despite grumping at return to office, the exercise has been good and frankly, it does satisfy some socialization needs that were going unmet. (Internet pocket friends do require more effort to cultivate in some ways...)
Discovered the library has so many cake pans available for borrowing... Maybe cake...
I'm looking at these cheeses warming up on the counter. Must resist until they've reached peak deliciousness, but why does it take so long?

theladyscribe prompted: What's your go-to low spoons/bad day food? The kind of thing you can make on autopilot.

I'll do three because that seems like a good number. Note that my 'low spoons' tends towards forgetting/procrastinating prepping food, so all the prep for these happens immediately before cooking and eating. Like, I WILL forget to put rice in a mere 40 mins in advance of dinner.

1. Rao's pasta sauce + pasta + frozen veg. This is my default, because it is all pantry or freezer staples, you just chuck everything in a pot and boil for a while (so minimal attention needed), and the Rao's is good enough to make it tasty without any effort. The main drawback is that Rao's is on the pricey side for pasta sauce; for the convenience though, I tend to stock up when it's on sale. I haven't found a miss from them yet, but their arrabbiata is my current favorite.

2. Panfried dumplings (from frozen). A little more effort is needed to make sure it doesn't burn, but it's still pretty low effort. Just fry, add some water and cover for ~10 min, then fry again. Then serve with some Chinkiang vinegar! Requires some forethought to either make or buy dumplings, but it's from the freezer, so I usually always have a bag or two for backup.

3. Asian wheat noodles with canned dace and bok choy. There's a variety of 'topping' like sauces you can put on carbs to immediately make them delicious, but I especially like canned dance with black beans because the fish makes it feel more meal-like. The noodles cook faster than any other carb, only needing a few minutes of boiling. And for the final component, stir frying just takes so much less time to heat up the cooking vessel, then the food cooks quickly. I like a lot of Chinese veg because you can so quickly stir fry and have it ready in 5 min. (Plus time to wash and prep as necessary.) Bok choy is the tastiest in this combo IMO, but napa cabbage has longer fridge life. Just stir fry the veg, add a little salt at the end, then serve with noodles and dace.

+1. Just drain and serve silken tofu with some sliced century egg (optional), soy sauce, and sesame oil. Tofu has a long refrigerator life, but this feels much nicer to serve in the summer when the coolness of the tofu is appreciated.

I'd be especially interested in other people's quick meals too!

(Unrelated: is anyone else having trouble getting DW comment notification emails? I lost a few earlier today.)

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forestofglory prompted: A favorite food from your childhood?

One of my favorite foods as a child was black sesame tangyuan. They're black sesame paste surrounded by a sticky rice wrapper (like mochi, but boiled), and my grandma served them with osmanthus flowers in the hot, slightly thickened water used to boil them.

Today is the Lantern Festival, when traditionally, tangyuan are eaten. (Date chosen on purpose, obviously.) In Chinese, one of the names for the holiday is Yuanxiao Jie; while technically yuanxiao are not the same as tangyuan, they're pretty similar. (Yuanxiao are formed by shaking the filling in the sweet rice flour to form layers of the outside; tangyuan are formed by wrapping the dough around the filling.)

As a small child, I didn't know what tangyuan were called, but I DID know the insides and outsides were distinct and the inside especially was delicious. So I called it 东西里的东西 'the stuff inside stuff'. (I also didn't know what nori was called, so I called it 绿的辣辣 'the green spicy'. I do not know why I thought nori was spicy?)

TBH, after several homemade batches--where objectively the elements are better than storebought, the sesame paste more roasty toasty, the wrapper more delicately tender--I've decided that I should probably just buy storebought because I think that's what I actually want. Possibly if I use the Nice Lard my mom renders, that would tip the scales? But I’m using butter in lieu of mediocre storebought lard, and it’s just so... buttery. I made the fillings here around half the size they ought to be to compensate.

( Pics of today's tangyuan )

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shati prompted: Any new/recent (however you want to define recent) favorite foods? To eat, to make, whatever

I have three for you!

1. Okara / soy pulp pancakes. I loooooove fresh soy milk; if you've only had the boxed stuff, it's a totally different flavor! But none of the grocery stores near me sell the fresh stuff, so I have to make it myself. While you can make it with just a pot and a blender, it likes boiling over; a soy milk maker is a set-and-forget. Combined with the beans being pretty shelf stable and wanting to reduce dairy consumption, it would seem a no-brainer to make it all the time, BUT it always felt so wasteful to have all the soy pulp left over! There's only so much stir-fried okara and hiding it in breads that can be done before I'm totally bored with it. It's also very perishable unless you freeze or dry it.

Enter: okara pancakes. To one batch of okara (~3 cups, not particularly well drained of the soy milk), add 1 c flour, 1 heaping spoonful cornstarch, and whatever diced vegetables and flavorings suits your mood. I usually default to Thai red curry paste with onions since it's super convenient. Then in a well-oiled pan, fry them on both sides until browned, and drain on paper towels.

They're satisfyingly hearty and flavorful. I don't think I'd make soy milk just to have them, but at this moment in time, they're by far my favorite way to use up the leftover okara. And now I can have salty soy milk for breakfast without any guilt about letting the soy pulp go to waste!

2. King Arthur's Easiest Loaf of Bread. My current favorite bread recipe! This recipe creates finer bubbles in the bread, with just enough of a crust for textural contrast without being tough. I'm sure my Bread Opinions will change with time, but this is the current champion! It unseated the KA no knead bread, which kept coming out with bubbles of uneven size and ever so slightly sour in a bad way. This one is more consistent in texture.

3. Serious Eats' Tomato Soup. The baking soda trick is a GAME CHANGER. Cooking it down for hours is pretty annoying, but I regret to inform that it really does make it more delicious as the tomato flavor develops. Actually I feel that way about the ingredients too-- I'm usually a 'whatever, just substitute something else' kind of cook, but all the perturbations I've tried for this recipe have ranged from 'meh' to 'not quite as good'. An energetically stable point on the food landscape.

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Dealing with not being able to go home by cooking too much! But that's practically required anyway, for proper auspiciousness!

( Two food pics under the cut )

Tallest Giraffe
The original problem was that bf is 11 inches taller than me, so bf would preferentially eat the lower shelf, tastier snacks and then later all the snacks would be out of my reach. However, this meaning extends to any case where one person may have metaphorical access to a wider range of foods. For instance, I like my bananas slightly less ripe than bf, so I will often eat all the bananas before they're ripe enough for him. (I now buy two bunches and any leftovers get frozen.)

Hungriest Hippo
However, if there isn't an access problem, but one person is merely hungrier and faster at eating the snack, it falls in this category. I will eat the cheese for breakfast and therefore end up consuming most of it and consume ice cream at a higher rate. We are at parity for flaming hot Cheetos; no one entering our household should expect to out hungriest hippo those.

Fittest Finch
If the problem isn't wider access, but a complete inability to get at the food, it's not tallest giraffing. For example, I cannot get ice out of our detested ice cube tray OR separate the frozen bananas that have merged into one big block. I am not the fittest finch.

Originally written for a friend about to embark on setting up her kitchen for the first time, this is a list of "consumable pantry" type items (i.e. stuff that lasts ages) grouped by how often I use things and how important I think each item is. This list is obviously heavily biased towards the stuff I cook: primarily Zhejiang Chinese, easy Western dishes, and forays into other cuisines for particular flavors that appeal to my tastes.

Mostly posting for posterity, but I WOULD be interested if people disagreed on priorities or had things I don't use! In other words, I am always interested in going way too in depth on the topics I'm interested in.

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I was wondering if Other People who have not had some silly amount of training in math/science perceive figuring out a recipe this way. Because I cannot help but think about this every time I cook and of course my bf has the same training so instead of like, discussing if this is normal we just fall into discussions of why he thinks cooking is more like active learning (iterative supervised learning, aka machine learning nonsense) than steepest descent, which is what /I/ think of it as.

OK so: steepest descent. Imagine salt is an axis on which you can move (by adjusting the amount used). The curve created by how tasty the food is at each level of salt is the energy landscape. Let's call it the tasty landscape. The steepest descent algorithm would say, at this point on the tasty landscape, which direction (more or less salt) would be tastier (the gradient). Therefore the next time we make the recipe we will update in that direction (the direction of steepest descent). Now extrapolate to all the various ingredients / methods of preparation as the axes, and you get a full tasty landscape upon which you can use the steepest descent algorithm.

(It's a descent bc usually the lower energy / more stable form is desired. I guess if you think of higher numbers as tastier, it would be a steepest ascent.)

For example, in my chili recipe, there's lots of spices etc, so I'm varying the quantities and ... existence of spices and enacting the steepest descent algorithm when I go: oh, the direction to make this tastier is more bay leaf and less star anise. But this tasty landscape is multidimensional, so it's a difficult problem for me to assess the gradient of!

Anyway, I'm a nerd, is anyone the same kind of nerd as me?