Noms: Brie & Prosciutto Flatbread

I'm going to go with another totally out-of-character post and talk about food.  I've already catalogued some of my feelings about cooking here; but in short, my relationship with cooking is an ambivalent one.  I love good food, and I also love making things.  But for some reason, these two interests have never quite come together.

It's also funny because I've had this particular disconnect in my life before: when I was a chemistry major for a hot minute back in college, I loved the chemistry on paper, but not in the lab.  It was fascinating how you could write out a reaction with two or three or five different chemicals - often toxic in their natural states - snap off a functional group there, form a double bond here, and boom: life-saving drug.  Simple, finite.  On paper.

But the realities of the lab aren't as elegant.  Waste compounds couldn't be ignored, they had to be taken to the giant brown flask that looked like something out of a horror movie villain's lab.  Reactions that should have worked, didn't; particles that should have gone into solution stubbornly sank to the bottom of their solvents.  Things that were so reasonable on paper got complicated in practice, and in the end, I wasn't cut out to be a chemistry major, no matter how much I liked those neat little reactions on the page.

So think I have similar feelings about cooking.  Whenever I try, I start with good ingredients and get excited and have this picture in my mind of what it should end up like, but I never really have fun with the process and the finished product falls short.  So I eat my disappointing casserole, or stir-fry, or whatever the hell it is that I thought was a good idea until I turned it into radioactive goop, and I make a mental note never to cook again.

Lumberjack's been trying to help me through this cooking fail of mine.  (The geniuses at Trader Joe's have been a great help in this department so far.)  I know from knitting that you just have to keep on practicing, but I also know through knitting that life's too short to voluntarily do things you don't like doing.  So I have a lot of mental arguments about the merits of Perseverance In The Face Of A Challenge versus Honoring Thine Own Inner Stubbornness, Which Is Pretty Well Entrenched And Doesn't Like To Be Poked.

And then, every so often, we make something together that is so simple and almost stupidly delicious that I feel a distant, faint shine of hope that someday I will not hate cooking.

This is that something.  We did leave off the pear - the pear we bought went rotten unusually fast - but the rest was spot-on.  I had to take pictures of it because it was so pretty.  Who knew I liked arugula?  Who knew brie melted and bubbled in such a cute way?  Why are you so delicious, oh little flatbread pizza?!

Okay, cooking, I'll consider going on a second date.  But I'm not promising anything.

I Don't Cook, But When I Do...

 

If you ever asked any of my friends about me and cooking, you'd probably get a moment of blank stare and then a fit of laughter. I'm the kind of person prone to saying thing like, "Knitting is the limit of my domesticity," and "Cooking.......?" with an accompanying grimace.

It's not that I don't like cooking... it's just that, well, I don't like cooking.  My brain is already occupied with things like how will I get glue off of a vintage corset I'm fixing for a friend, and do I have enough cashmere to finish the last repeat of that shawl, and will I have to jump my car's battery this morning (the answer is usually yes).

 

Which is why it is with a sheepish heart that I tell you that Lumberjack and I cooked (gulp) the most delicious scrambled eggs I've ever eaten on Sunday morning.

We've been going to Trader Joe's for groceries for the past few weeks, which takes a little more planning than our usual grocery store, but the results so far have been delicious.  So the other day we were there, and I saw a bag of kimchi.  And I love and adore kimchi, to the point that my dorm room smelled like fermented cabbagey goodness for a straight month right around my birthday one year (sorry, old roomie!).  My Japanese host family teased me all the time because I'd get super excited when there was kimchi in our evening stew or on the side to eat with rice.  When a Korean market opened up in Oberlin my senior year, I just about died of happiness.

Store-bought kimchi isn't always the greatest, but I always hold out hope.  Sometimes it hasn't aged enough that I like it, and the vinegar hasn't yet been overcome by deep, delicious smokiness.  I have to say, I sampled some of the Trader Joe's kimchi before it went in the pan, and it was super delicious: just the right balance of tang and spiciness and crunch.  Mmm.

And the recipe we used was the kind I could get used to, which is to say that it was ridiculously, insanely, comically easy.  To whit:

Kimchi Scrambled Eggs

10-12 ounces kimchi
6 large eggs
butter
milk
salt

In a glass mixing bowl, crack eggs and add a generous splash of milk.  Whisk.  Add salt to taste.

Drain kimchi in colander or strainer.  Set aside.

Heat large frying pan to about medium heat.  When pan is hot, cut small slab of butter and put in pan to prevent sticking.

When butter has melted, pour in eggs.  Mix in kimchi.  Cook as for scrambled eggs, removing from heat when eggs have reached desired texture.

Nom - with gusto!

Saturday Brunch

These pictures are from a few Saturdays ago, when Lumberjack and I decided to venture out into the city for some lunch, which ended up being brunch at a restaurant in Bellevue called Z'Tejas.  Lumberjack had Chicken and Potato Hash (with a fried egg on top!) and I had a breakfast quesadilla with bacon and tomatillo sauce, both of which were extremely delicious.

I recently developed an allergy to avocados (which is perhaps the saddest allergy ever) and I have to be pretty careful at Mexican-style restaurants, because avocado is on everything!  I didn't have any trouble the day we went for brunch, but we ended up going back later that week, and I had to send back a sandwich because it had avocado that wasn't listed on the menu.  I usually check when I order, but didn't this time - that'll teach me!

We also shared a frozen margarita that had layers of blue Curaçao, melon, and black raspberry syrups - it was almost too pretty to drink.  (Almost.)

These last couple of weeks have been crazy - I finished my grant from Oberlin last Wednesday, then had a crazy weekend out with Lumberjack and my brother, then went to see Lumberjack's grandmother on Monday.  Is it bad that I'm already ready for the weekend again?

Om Nom Nom: Chirashizushi and Warabimochi Edition

Today a bunch of study abroad and Japanese students got together and made some tasty food: chirashizushi and warabimochi. Chirashizushi is sort of like deconstructed sushi - the base layer is sushi rice, and for the toppings we used maguro (tuna), snap peas, ikura (salmon roe), egg and nori, although from what I can tell, there's a wide variety of toppings that could be used instead. Warabimochi is a dessert made of bracken starch (although ours was more likely a tapioca-bracken-starch-sweet-potato-starch combo) and dusted with sugared toasted soybean powder, akin to mochi in texture but not in taste. We made both in a tiny kitchen in what I think was a teacher's dormitory.


It was great fun - there were too many people to be working in one small space, so we all took turns. While some of us worked on stirring warabimochiko into water, heating it to translucency, and plopping spoonfuls into ice water to cool, those of us taking a break chatted about music, boyfriends, and our small town college lives. Less confusing was the chirashizushi preparation - wash some rice, throw it in the rice cooker, make some eggs, cut some tuna, mix things together. Done. Lots of jokes were made, and many of us had were still recovering from a late Friday night, so the general atmosphere was one of tired multicultural silliness.


I have to admit I didn't try my hand at making the omelette, because I have a track record of messing up super-thin egg-type concoctions. My housemates and I made tamago nigiri a couple of times this summer, and every time I made the eggs, they ended up either incredibly ugly (but delicious) or burnt and ugly. I keep away from anything that involves flipping hot objects, save grilled cheese. After everything was prepared, we put it all together on the table. Someone commented at this point that it looked sort of like pizza.


I'd say that it's like a weird but amazing combination of fried rice and sushi. The warabimochi was also delicious - a little gelatinous, but especially when coated in the soybean powder, a lovely combination of soft, sweet and savory in one bite. I'm a somewhat reluctant eater when I'm in the States - I don't like berries, I find the concept of eating raw meat sort of strange and unappealing, and in general I'm not the biggest fan of yogurt, a lot of fruit, or meat that doesn't begin with b and end with acon. (Blatantly not true. I like your basic chicken, turkey, tuna, whatever. But I do have a fondness for bacon that my arteries would like to sue me for.) For some reason, though, since I got to Japan, I've eaten and enjoyed maguro (where have you been all my life, delicious raw tuna??), salmon, salmon roe, sticky roe/kombu/sea urchin salad, what I think was chicken intestine, Japanese pear, giant Concord grapes, peaches, sake-soaked pickles, kabocha (pumpkin)... the list goes on. I've eaten and not enjoyed so much raw liver, strongly fishy sashimi, natto, and a few other things. I've been pleasantly surprised by most everything, which is nice, since I'm ordinarily pretty timid about trying foods whose origins I don't necessarily know. I think the key for me is quality, since all of the food I've been eating here is from nice restaurants and choosy groceries - apparently I'm just a picky jerk. Perhaps I'll have to test that theory when I return.


I also went to karaoke last night with four friends, and we ate omuraisu and sang 90's songs, Disney songs, and Lady Gaga until we were hoarse. Then I took the train from Hirakata-shi to Gotenyama, which is a 5-minute walk from my host family's house - and it only took about 20 minutes between when I left the karaoke place and when I got home, and it was absolutely beautiful out while I was walking home in the dark. In any case, hopefully all of these shenanigans will leave me satisfied enough to buckle down and get some studying done tomorrow. Hahah. We'll see about that.

Winter comes around

This week, I knit a stocking in four days on commission from a woman from knitting group. I knit the other one over vacation and really wasn't motivated to make the second, but it ended up going really fast. The pattern is from Spring/Summer VK, the aptly (and originally!) named #31 Lace Stocking. The charts didn't really match up with the written instructions, and I would make them a lot longer if I were to make them again - they were just barely past knee length, and they're supposed to be a true thigh-high. It was probably my row gauge, but now I know for when I make a pair for myself. 'Cause really, who doesn't need thigh high lace stockings?

Also, the yardage required was something like 645 and I ended up using something like 450. This perhaps should have indicated to me that my row gauge was off, hah.


Also happening: cooking! A friend (also from knitting group) gave me a ride to the IGA, and I picked up some veggies and general food to keep around the house. This is steamed collard greens with red peppers, garlic, and pepper. Kind of a weird combination, and I actually liked the collard greens a lot more than I expected to. I guess that's good, since there's another 3/4 of a bag in the fridge!

On a last note, I got my grades back for the semester, and got the first A+ of my college career, in Japanese. Take that, semester from hell!