At week 4 of the project, ramen was bound to make an appearance. But instead of defaulting to Nissin, or worse, Mr. Noodle, I wanted to do some freezer carcass-clearing and attempt a tonkatsu broth without spending 60 hours cooking by using a few weekend tricks. Trick 1: Be a bonehead I didn’t want… Continue reading Food Hoard Intervention Challenge #6: “Ramen”
I dislike most canned fish. I also don’t love cooked salmon. (Yes, that is practically blasphemy growing up in BC.) But in some well-intentioned yet misguided attempt to eat more ω-3 fatty acids on a budget, I came to own a club pack of canned salmon sometime before the free world went belly up… Continue reading Food Hoard Intervention Challenge #4: The Double Citrus Fish Cake-Yaki Onigiri Bastard
As the youngest of 9 siblings growing up on a small post-war farm in Asia, my dad’s version of “I walked to school in the snow, uphill, both ways” stories often involved eating parts of plants or animals that I would haughtily congratulate myself for composting rather than discarding. In my privileged world, pomelo is… Continue reading Food Hoard Intervention Challenge #2: Oyster Sauce Braised Pomelo Skin with Tobiko
Friends have long joked that there is a supermarket in my kitchen. While I generally used up perishables before each trip out of town, the first grocery run after every return home has fed my inner food hoarding monster more and more as time passed. Coming home this week after being out of town, I… Continue reading Food Hoard Intervention Challenge #1: Instant Pot Butter Chicken
I’m celebrating Valentine’s Day with someone who understands my twisted sense of humour and who is the master of the un-romance. Our first February 14th together, he took me to dinner at an esteemed restaurant with over 6 decades of history and educated me on the virtues of the McGangbang. For another year, he got me this beautiful flower: So this year,… Continue reading Does this make you hot, baby?
On a whim last week, I made grapefruit blood orange ginger marshmallows. I had seen the confection being made from scratch perhaps a decade ago, but it looked like a lot of effort for a treat that I had long perceived as cloyingly, flatly sweet. At the start of the year I stumbled upon the notion of using fruit juice… Continue reading Fluffy, sweet, delayed gratification
Recently I made crispy roast pork belly, a classic Cantonese dish, for a potluck. There have been a few requests for the recipe, which I will include below, but first I would like to talk about animal welfare in meat farming. I went to the local Asian market for this dish’s ingredients. Interestingly, there is now a sizable selection of… Continue reading Not just lipstick on a pig
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