Udon noodles with mushroom and egg

January 14, 2025 1:10 PM

Ever since I got back to Pittsburgh after the holidays, I've been wanting to make udon noodle soup, because noodle soup is really good when you're sick. But because I was feeling sick and because it's been so cold outside, I haven't been able to actually make it out to the Asian store. I have four grocery stores that are a 10 minute walk or less from my apartment, but none of them are Asian stores.

Well this past Sunday, it finally went up to a balmy 33°F, and I seemed to be feeling a little better. Plus I ran out of rice, so I really needed to restock that too.

When I've made this soup in the past, I've always included chicken, but the chicken is always my least favorite part of this, so I decided to replace the chicken with a soft boiled egg and also double the mushrooms. I wanted to marinate the eggs so I needed to start that the night before. And since I was boiling eggs, I kept some of them boiling for a couple minutes longer so I could put them in a salad!

I mostly followed this recipe for poppyseed salad dressing, but I cut the sugar a little, and I used white vinegar because that's what I had. It was delicious. I was able to use up leftover mushrooms from a meal that a friend made, and that fit perfectly in the salad. The egg yolks also added some nice extra creaminess.

So the next morning, I had some marinated eggs, and I just needed to prepare the veggies and the broth. I actually ended up buying ginger and shiitake mushrooms from Giant Eagle because the Asian store sells them in much larger quantities than I ever need. In fact, I grabbed such a small piece of ginger that it registered as .01 lb on the scale and I wasn't able to actually check it out! The machine kept saying "We are unable to process your item. Please keep scanning. Help is on the way". Except help was NOT on the way. I stood there at the self check-out wondering what to do, but the store was way too busy. I tried to scan the ginger again, but it just gave me the same error. I really didn't want to steal it, but I didn't know what to do!

Well, after I stood there for a minute, I just decided to pay for my mushrooms and I walked away with the tiny piece of ginger in my bag. At least now I know what's considered too small.

Preparing this dish was way easier without having to make the chicken, so I think I'm going to keep making it like this from now on. I didn't adjust the amount of soy sauce or mirin, but I think the mushrooms could have used a tad more. It was still very tasty like this though!

Most ramen places will only give you half an egg in your single bowl of soup, which is ridiculous. Eggs should always be given in whole quantities. Of course when I put both egg halves in my bowl, it starts to get way too filled up, so I should really get larger soup bowls. But it's okay, I just filled it up with more soup after I ate half of it.

My pizza keeps sticking

January 17, 2025 11:20 AM

I really want to get better at making pizza. I love pizza. I extra love leftover pizza. But I'm not very good at making it, and by making it, I mean I'm still buying pizza dough from the store.

So what I've started trying recently is to let the pizza dough sit out on the counter for a bit, until it's about room temperature. After I've done that, then I start pulling it into pizza shape. It seems to be working out well! I'm getting lots of nice bubbles in my pizza, and I love the bubbles.

Unfortunately, it looks like my pizza pan is becoming less and less non-stick. I could not get this pizza off the pan. I was trying to use my spatula to scrape it, but that pizza dough just would not budge, and I ended up with this mess at the end:

Okay, I probably need a new pan. So I ate whatever I could scrape up from two slices of pizza, and then I just let the rest of the pizza sit there on the counter while I started playing video games with my sister. About an hour later, I started hearing noises. It had a crackling quality to it, and it sounded like pieces of the wall were coming apart and falling down. It honestly kind of freaked me out a little bit.

I walked over to where the noise was coming from, and it turns out that it was from my pizza! The stuck bits of pizza crust were popping right off the pan! After a few more minutes, almost all of the pizza crust was loose! I don't really understand the science behind any of this, but it made me think, "maybe I can still use this pizza pan."

So, against my better judgment, I tried to make another pizza a few weeks later. Maybe I just needed to use way more flour. So I dumped a huge pile of flour on the pan and the dough and my hands. I did the same thing where I let my dough sit out for a bit, and this time, a huge bubble formed before it even started cooking.

I poked at the bubble a little bit, but I didn't want to pop it, so I just worked around it and added the toppings right on top of it. I threw it in the oven and once it started cooking, that bubble just got bigger and it was crazy looking. I wish I could have gotten a photo while it was still in the oven, but you're just going to have to settle for this:

It deflated pretty fast once I pulled it out of the oven. And even though it was kind of weird looking, I actually thought the giant bubble was pretty tasty. But I know what you're thinking, did it stick???

Yeah, it did. Not as badly as the first time, but enough for me to conclude that I need a new pizza pan. (Okay, I know I determined this a few weeks ago) The pieces that didn't stick were completely covered in flour, and I was standing over a trash can trying to remove as much excess flour as I could before I ate it.

That pizza pan has now been thrown out, and I think I'm going to take a little break from making more pizzas. (There was another pizza attempt in the past month that is not represented in this post) But I do still have a lot of pizza sauce left 🤔

Scallion pancakes and shumai

January 21, 2025 5:36 PM

One of my friends got me The Woks of Life cookbook for Christmas, and I've been wanting to try something from it. I decided to start with something really simple: a dipping sauce. Not just any dipping sauce, an ultimate dipping sauce.

I don't know what makes it so ultimate, but it is a pretty tasty dipping sauce.

I actually bought some frozen scallion pancakes the other day, and I thought it would be a good breakfast. When I've cooked scallion pancakes in the past, I would just cut it up into little triangles (kind of like a pizza or a quesadilla), but I've heard that people like eating it with eggs so I made some scrambled eggs to go on top.

I wasn't really sure of the best way to eat this. Do I wrap it up like it's a tortilla? That seemed too cumbersome, so I grabbed a fork and a knife and cut a piece and dipped it in the sauce. It was delicious, but after the first bite I switched to ripping pieces with my hands. Very good breakfast.

For lunch, I went with something that was a bit more challenging, pork and shrimp siu mai. This is the first recipe in the cookbook, and while the author claims that it's really easy, I'd say it's still on the more difficult end of things that I make. I did make shumai a few years ago, but I used a completely different (much simpler) recipe. I did say I wanted to try the Woks of Life recipe, so here I am doing that.

I had everything I needed for this except for white pepper. It happens to be the coldest day of the year, and it's something like 10 degrees outside, but I decided that I would walk the half mile to the Japanese store (and back) just for white pepper. I bundled up and the walk itself wasn't too bad, but they didn't even have white pepper! So I just ended up using black pepper instead.

This recipe has you mixing the filling for a very very long time (that or use a stand mixer, but I don't have one of those). And you have to mix in stages. I tried, I really did, but my hands were getting tired. It also didn't help that I forgot about the pork in my freezer and didn't thaw it overnight. So it was still a little frozen when I was mixing.

I honestly feel like I did a better job at wrapping these when I made them years ago. I also realized halfway through wrapping that I completely forgot to add cornstarch to this! At that point it was too late. Oh well.

Steaming the shumai was probably the easiest part of this whole process. I added some water to a large pan, brought it to a boil, and then added the bamboo steamer and cooked the shumai for about 10 minutes. Taking the steamer basket out of the pan was a bit harder (do people use tongs for this?), but I just picked it up using oven mitts.

And then when I tried to pick up an individual piece, I noticed that it had extra liquid and the wrapper was not sticking to the filling at all. Apparently this is a pretty common problem and it sounds like...I just needed to mix this more and squeeze it more while wrapping it. (Or maybe it was the lack of cornstarch) But I don't think I had this problem when I made shumai years ago. Maybe I'm just out of practice when it comes to dumplings.

Okay, so I need to leave myself notes for the next time I make this:

• Mix mix mix, mix a lot, and make sure all the meat is actually thawed before starting
• Maybe try to spread out the filling all over the wrapper before forming it into the shumai shape (like you're spreading peanut butter on a piece of toast. a commenter on the Woks of Life post mentioned this and it sounds like something I should try!)
• Really squeeze the filling to the wrapper so there aren't any gaps
• Don't overstuff them. A rounded tablespoon of filling per dumpling is probably enough
• I still think some dark soy sauce would be good in this

Yes, this was a lot of work. But it did taste good, especially when I dipped it in chili oil! I gotta try making it again and see if I can make it better next time.

Rigatoni with sausage and zucchini

January 22, 2025 2:09 PM

Last year was a really busy year, and I often got stressed out over what to cook. One of my friends was regularly ordering from HelloFresh, and I also got a box every once in a while. It was nice to not have to think about what I was going to cook, but man was it expensive. And that's even after I had 50% off and I wasn't paying for shipping. It also came with way too much packaging.

But I did really enjoy one of the recipes so much that it's become one of my go tos: Pork Sausage Rigatoni Rosa. I think that name makes it sound way fancier than it is. It's basically another one of those tomato-y cream cheese pastas, and if you've been following this blog you know that I love putting cream cheese in pasta.

If you click on the recipe link, you'll notice that there are certain ingredients that don't exactly have a real measurement. The recipe calls for "1 unit" of zucchini, tomato paste, and chicken stock concentrate. Okay, the zucchini is simple enough, it's literally one zucchini, but what is 1 unit of tomato paste?!

Well, I've made this enough times and I've written down all the real measurements on my paper version of this. I've also modified this recipe to my own tastes. I find that HelloFresh usually includes more meat than I care for, and not enough of anything else.

• I use 8 oz (rather than 6 oz) of pasta
• I also use two zucchinis because I can't buy a single zucchini from Aldi. But also because it's good to eat a lot of veggies!
• I lower the amount of sausage to half a pound
• 1.5 oz (or ~3 tablespoons) of tomato paste and 1 tsp of Better than Bouillon chicken stock concentrate

I also found that I get a little flail-y when I've made this in the past. There's one step when it tells you to add cream cheese, stock concentrate, pasta water, butter, sugar, and chili flakes all at once and I am never ready for that. I always ended up running around my kitchen grabbing each item--meanwhile, my tomato paste is starting to burn in the pan. So this time I measured and put every ingredient out before I started cooking.

I was much less flail-y today! I think I made the pasta a little too al dente, but that's alright, that means the leftovers will still taste good.

Carrot cake muffins

January 26, 2025 9:29 PM

Every once in a while I get an urge to make some carrot cake muffins. It's usually when I have some cream cheese in my fridge, and I'm craving something sweet. And it's one of the only things that I make that uses ground ginger, and I'm still trying to go through my container of ginger that expired in 2017.

My go-to recipe is Budget Bytes' Carrot Cake (for two), except I usually double it (because I'm not going to use a partial egg). This time however, I quadrupled the recipe (two eggs!).

I honestly was only planning on making four muffins, but I realized that I had a really big carrot in my fridge, and I also didn't want to be left with a partial carrot.

What I didn't quadruple was the frosting though. I made that exactly as the original recipe stated. And I still had enough frosting for ten muffins! (I intentionally left two unfrosted because my boyfriend prefers it that way) People must really like to dump lots of frosting on their cakes. I actually really do like cream cheese frosting, but I only need a tiny fraction of what the recipes calls for.

I suppose that when you actually follow the recipe as written and only make enough for two servings, it's a pretty easy recipe. But I found this to be a lot of work on my hands. So much grating and mixing and holding the bowl up to pour the batter into each of the muffin tins. There's probably a better technique than what I did. Maybe I should try using a spoon.

But I think it was all worth it. These muffins are delicious. And now I have a nice snack for every single day of the week.

Well...we'll see if they last all week!