~Pork and kimchi soon dubu
When I started this blog, I was posting fast and furiously, drunk on the notion that every stray cooking thought coming out of my head could find a home in writing. I was also drunk on the rediscovery of cooking as therapy, stress reduction, self care and sharing. It began to feel like the various parts of my lifetime as a cook — from the obsessed kid, through cooking school and professional restaurant work, through raising kids and writing about food for a newspaper — was there in front of me, time flattened so that I could choose the flavors and obsessions from different periods and integrate them into a singular approach. I was also in love with the new routine: mix a proper cocktail or smoke a little weed, peer into the fridge that I had stocked with quality meat and produce, and let the spirit of the moment determine the direction, the Zen of the moment determine the outcome.
This was working. My food had not been so good in a long time. It felt purposeful, correct to the weird timeless time of that never ending now of quarantine. I was practicing what I had long preached: all good things in moderation, animal protein moved from the center of the plate, variety and color as a pathway to satiety. I had my fling with a certain junky stoner treat, but I was mostly cooking very clean. The pantry got organized for the first time, and long stashed grains and beans got used or chucked.
I rediscovered some things about how I really like to eat. I really like having a salad every night, like I did when growing up, and I whipped up massive batches of both French vinaigrette and Japanese ginger-carrot dressing. I’ve never been someone to keep a lot of meat in the freezer (or the house), but with vacuum sealed cuts of meat from local farms that last a week or longer in the fridge, I could choose it to complement the rest of the meal, not vice versa. The first CSA box I received at home was such a great treat I started dancing around the kitchen to Stevie Wonder and shoving spinach in my mouth. Yes, I’m weird, I know it.
Most of my spices were too old, but the thing is I don’t like to cook with a lot of spice. I do like to cook with a lot of onions, olive oil, fresh thyme, garlic, shallot, black pepper, white pepper, red pepper. I was using more fish sauce and mirin in non-traditional ways, and I bombed through so many bottles of yuzu juice.
I experience my first freak-out for ramps because I now get them. Here, it’s the really the only marker of spring, one of the few fresh things you can cook with that tastes of the season and only the season, of that nonending now that was then. Ramps in everything!
Maybe I was feeling my mojo coming back. I was tasting more than just shoving food in, thinking about it as I cooked and making the right adjustments on the fly. I wasn’t making overly large amounts, and I wasn’t letting “simple” come out as one dimensional, underseasoned, unlayered. Building flavor starts the minute the onion hits the oil, and if I didn’t know what to cook, I’d start with an onion.
I had some thoughts about what I was cooking that I wanted to share here, but it hasn’t been the time in this country. I’m very fortunate to have access to such good ingredients and to be able to take pleasure in them and share that pleasure. But this has been the time to engage the world in a different way, to listen to some hard truths that I know but maybe don’t feel as much as I should. I need to be made uncomfortable, to see that the benefits of my life may and should be taken from me.
Now, this new now, I want to share. Sharing with anyone who makes it this far into my blather. If you are reading this, you are witness to my notes to self, and I thank and appreciate you.
I was thinking of sharing a number of pictures of food here, but this feels like a good place to stop. I think we’ll have pork belly and kimchi soon dubu for dinner with a little brown rice on the side.