flailing in my kitchen v3.1
How can I be sad when I have breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Hello! You probably noticed that my blog looks different! About a year ago, I asked my friend bogo if he could make some fan art for the blog. I didn't really give him any guidelines, except that I wanted eggs in it, and I think he did an amazing job!
I wanted to incorporate this art on the website, but it also felt like the whole site needed a facelift. Recently, I've grown to really dislike the color green. A few people know why, and if you don't, feel free to ask me about it. It's just the type of thing that I don't want to air on the public internet 😬 But the old design had lots of green, and I wanted something very not-green.
Speaking of eggs, one of my friends told me that if I have some heavy cream, that I could use it to fry eggs, and he told me to look up Kenji's video on fried eggs. Well, for some reason I had leftover heavy cream, and I decided it was time to fry up some eggs.
I don't really have much to say about this, but I love eggs, especially for breakfast, and I love it when I find a new way to cook them. This was no exception. I don't think I would ever go out of my way to make heavy cream eggs because they're well, heavy, but it's great when I need to use up extra cream.
I paired the eggs with a slice of seedy, Bistro Multigrain Bread from Aldi. I'm usually not a fan of bread with all the extra seeds and grains in it, but I really like this bread from Aldi! Sometimes I just toast it and drizzle some extra virgin olive oil and salt on it.
I keep telling myself I need to stop staring at my phone so much, so I've been trying to read during breakfast. This was from February and I was in the middle of reading The Three Body Problem. It was...alright. Tune in next time to see the book I'm currently reading!
Back in March, I had attended a wedding, and one of the appetizers were these cute little veggie spring rolls. I thought they were delicious, and it made me want to make some spring rolls of my own.
I remember telling my aunt I made some chen nem生ណែម - fresh spring roll, and she said something like
leu jiah chen nem汝食生ណែម - you eat fresh spring roll?! in the winter?!
And I had to tell her, it's spring! It literally became spring that week!
Well, maybe it was technically spring, but it was actually still so cold for the next month and a half, so I guess Soy Go細姑 - small aunt was right to call me out on that.
When my family makes spring rolls, we typically add both pork and shrimp, but I was a bit tired right after that wedding trip, and I didn't want to make things too gang kou艱苦 - difficult for myself, so I opted to just include shrimp. (Yes, shrimp is the easier of the two!)
But after I finished all my shrimp, I still had more spring roll wrappers left, and I didn't want to make even more shrimp spring rolls, so I decided that it was time to cook some pork.
I often will go the easy route and just boil and slice some pork belly, but Soy Go has a special pork recipe that involves toasted rice. Remember when I had spring rolls every day for pre-dinner snack? Well, I did learn how to make the pork! When Soy Go first explained it to me, she made it sound like it was sooo easy.
It's not. Spring rolls themselves are already a lot of work, and this pork makes it a whole day affair for me. And I was actually feeling kind of sick recently and I did not want to make cooking more of a hassle. Buuut I guess my desire to eat this pork took over, and because of that, now YOU can learn how to make this pork too!
Anyway, I grabbed about a 3 lb chunk of pork butt from Aldi and I got started. In order to get more flavor into the pork, I cut it up into large chunks and then I salted the chunks for at least a few hours before I cooked them. But I'm still not sure if this extra step makes that much of a difference.
Next I needed to make the toasted rice. I would say that if you have sticky/sweet rice, definitely use it! But most of the time, I only have a big bag of Jasmine rice so that's what I used. For this amount of pork, I scooped out about 1/4 of a rice cooker cup, washed that, and then cha炒 - stir fry on a dry pan on medium heat.
Then I toasted it until it was chiah chiah sek赤赤色 - golden brown! Once that cooled a little, I threw it into my Nutribullet and blitzed it up into little pieces.
And then it was time to cook the pork. I boiled 2.5 quarts of water and added a healthy pinch of salt and sugar. I ended up using 1 tbsp of salt and 1.5 tbsp of sugar, but honestly I think it could have used more of both. I plopped in the pieces of pork and let it boil for 5 minutes before turning the heat down to medium low, and then I let it simmer for 30-45 minutes, occasionally skimming out the impurities that float to the top.
To see if the pork is done cooking, you can take a chopstick and poke at it and see if blood comes out. That's what Soy Go told me, but I just kind of cut into it to see if it looks cooked. If it's still a bit tough, you can also cook it for longer. Once it was at my desired tenderness, I sliced it up into bite sized pieces.
And finally, I seasoned it with the toasted rice, salt, sugar, and goi jeng雞精 - chicken bouillon to taste.
I like to put these in my spring rolls! The toasted rice bits make it so fun to eat. My aunt also told me to save the water that the pork cooked in, to bu beung煲飯 - cook rice in it or something. I decided to make some soup with it. I made this Napa cabbage and tofu soup recipe, but I used my pork broth instead of chicken broth. It was very good!
Speaking of slowly cooking, I spent a couple of hours making udon noodle soup a few nights ago. I think it was 11pm by the time I actually produced this bowl of soup.
Worth it. So worth it.
I wanted to make some udon noodle soup because I had gone to an udon restaurant a couple of months ago, and at the time I didn't think I really wanted noodle soup so I got a rice bowl. But everyone else was ordering the udon noodles, and by the end of dinner, I really wanted those noodles.
It was also a little more appropriate a couple of months ago because it was colder. Now we're hitting 90° outside and it is definitely not soup weather anymore. But I don't care. I made the noodle soup and ate it three times and will eat it again twice more because I still have leftover noodles.
I don't know if this is normal or not, but whenever I eat noodle soup, I like to make a nice little spoonful for every single bite. A little bit of noodle, some soup, a couple of other garnishes on top, and a wonderfully flavorful experience for my mouth.
I actually don't think I've ever had udon noodles from a restaurant before so I have no idea how they're supposed to taste, and the Woks of Life recipe I used even explicitly stated that it's not really authentic. But it is delicious.
I do know that restaurants often put soft boiled eggs in their noodle soup, so I wanted to do the same thing. I've been using this ramen egg recipe from Just One Cookbook for a while and it's always been great. I figured it would be really easy to make a few eggs to throw in my bowls of soup.
But I figured wrong. Holy crap I have never struggled so much in my life to peel boiled eggs. The ramen egg recipe calls for putting the eggs directly in boiling water, but I thought it would work just fine if I put the eggs in cold water and brought it to a boil. When I stopped cooking them and tried to peel one, it all broke apart and every piece of shell I tried to remove just ended up removing more of the egg white. I don't think I initially cooked them for long enough so I boiled more water and tried to cook them longer, but that was still a fail.
I can't end on a fail though, so I did some googling and was determined to make better soft boiled eggs. I made a few adjustments for the second attempt:
And it was a success! It peeled so easily! Incredible.
After I had read a few pages of Salt Fat Acid Heat, I told myself that I would try to read the whole thing once I got back to my apartment. That was May, and I waited til September to take the book out from the library, and after that it just sat on the shelf for month. (I'm really bad at returning library books in a timely manner. It takes me months, sometimes over a year.) But I finally started reading it again in earnest last week.
There is a lot of information in the book just about salt, but I figured the next place where I would try to incorporate another lesson is pasta. The author, Samin Nosrat, says this about boiling your pasta water:
season your cooking water as salty as the sea. [...] You might flinch upon seeing just how much salt this takes, but remember, most of the salt ends up going down the drain.
I filled up my pot with some water, started boiling it, threw two clumps of (table) salt in, and tasted a spoonful of the water. Not even close. I did this probably four or five more times, and wow this takes a lot of salt to get to what seems like "sea salt water". I'm not flinching because I'm worried about my salt intake, I'm just thinking about how much more salt I'll need to have on hand.
And now it has suddenly dawned on me how I kept running out of salt when my sister was staying with me.
Hey! I actually tasted the saltiness of the pasta! It was good! But yeah, this is a lot of salt. I think I'll keep trying to make properly salted pasta, but I'll stick to table salt in my cooking water.
I ended up making Creamy Chicken Fajita Pasta because I had a nub of cream cheese, along with a bell pepper and an onion sitting in my fridge. It was delicious. You can never go wrong with creamy pasta.
I might try and make a less saucy pasta next, one where the flavor in the pasta itself is much more apparent.
For now, I think I need to restock on salt again.
