Cooking For One

You know how when you learn a new word, you suddenly hear it everywhere–in books, articles, and coming out of people’s mouths? Or how, when you make new friends, you don’t know what you spent your Saturdays doing before you met them? When I was in school, I loved the convergence of different subjects, how what you were learning in math could somehow become relevant in history class.

Since I’ve been exploring Middle Eastern food, I’ve noticed newly learned techniques pop up everywhere and flavor combinations that first seemed improbable appear completely sensical. Had I missed the fact that you could temper yogurt with egg or flour and use it to make a creamy soup? Is sumac the new smoked paprika?

Yet the more I read, taste, and cook, the more I notice continuity between what I already enjoy and what’s eaten in Lebanon, Turkey, Armenia, and Egypt. In fact, the third time I read about that yogurt soup in Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, I realized it bore a similarity to one of the first dishes I ever got in the habit of cooking for myself, a pasta dish I wrote about in In the Small Kitchen, which uses egg, yogurt, and pasta water to create a creamy, slightly tangy, no-cook sauce for pasta. In fact, one version of the soup actually has vermicelli noodles in it.

Taking inspiration from the convergence of an old favorite and a new-to-me technique, I made a 2013 version of my old favorite yogurt pasta. I cut down on the Parmesan cheese, three tablespoons of which has always seemed so comforting, and ramped up the flavor with herbs–mint and thyme–and scallions. I used fresh versions but you could use dried.

As much as I love eating chocolate, cooking spaghetti, and sharing cookies with friends, I don’t love reading about food. I haven’t read Anthony Bourdain or Feeding a Yen or anything by Julia Child. My foodie reading taps out after recipe intros and exposes about processed food (which, okay, I could read about a million of. Also love reading about nutrition. Anyway.)

A few weeks ago an article about salad in the New York Times Magazine changed my feelings about pure and simple food writing. The piece was about Canlis, a top restaurant in Seattle I’ve never been to, and it was practically a hagiography–to salad. The salad uses the best steakhouse standards, writes Sam Sifton, beginning with romaine lettuce, bacon, croutons, cherry tomatoes.

Rapt, I kept reading. The salad had more to offer. Mint, oregano, scallions. And a dressing made from lemon, olive oil, and a single coddled egg which emulsifies and enriches the dressing without killing off the citrus’s tanginess or becoming heavy, like some vinaigrettes. The salad sounded good, but I knew it was the dressing I would make first. I couldn’t get it out of my head. Seriously.

In the five weeks since I read that ode to Canlis’s salad, I’ve made the dressing half a dozen times. I use different vegetables as a vehicle for conveying it to my mouth, but this combination of crunchy romaine, sweet fennel, and slightly bitter radicchio is my favorite. Don’t skimp on the cheese here, which adds saltiness and makes the salad reminiscent of good old-fashioned caesar.

P.S. Here’s another of my favorite salad dressings and a video about whisking together vinaigrettes.

The other day, I accidentally went to Flushing, Queens.

From Bayside, Queens, which is really far away from Prospect Heights, I got on a Q27 bus in the wrong direction. Twenty-four years of life in New York is apparently not enough to inoculate against public transit mishaps.

In Flushing sits one of the city’s three Chinatowns. I had long wanted to visit. But as I already said, it’s far from home. Now that I was here, albeit accidentally, I decided to make the most of my afternoon, despite it being snowy and there being work waiting for me back in Brooklyn. First stop: enormous supermarket.

In addition to the inexpensive produce, my favorite shelves were these two: curry mixes and hundreds of ramen in a million flavors.

In the end, I bought a big pack of soba noodles, another pack of rice noodles, and a beautiful Napa cabbage that cost 99 cents. Before I boarded the 7 train, I also bought some pork and chive dumplings at Zhu Ji, on Serious Eats’ recommendation.

Then I went home and I put my Flushing booty in my vegetable drawer and messier-by-the-day pantry and forgot about the noodles and the cabbage. Luckily, Napa cabbage is hearty. This is how it looked a week in, when I finally decided to stir-fry it with onion and soba and douse the rich sautéed cabbage in my favorite noodle sauce made from soy sauce, sesame oil, and rice wine vinegar.

Last week, I’d finally had it with the old, super-tiny photo of me that I’d been using as my internet avatar and in the about section of this site. In the image, I’m not even looking at the camera, and my poor cropping job has severed my lower arms. Call me vain, but as someone who uses the word “I” about fifty times in every post, I can’t blame a reader for wanting to see an image, to figure out who that “I” person is. I certainly do when I visit other blogs.

Rima Campbell, photographer and founder of bkstyled - a site she started with the lovable mantra “because I believe in Brooklyn” – was kind enough to come by and take some new photos of me in my small kitchen, and that shoot has become this post, because I love how the images came out.

I decided to pose in front of my overstuffed bookshelf, a piece of furniture emblematic of the small kitchen’s perpetual war with clutter. The shelves once held actual books but now bear the weight of jars of flour and beans, my two LeCreuset pots, my cake stand, and my old-fashioned analog kitchen scale, plus my substantial napkin and dish towel collection–both clean and dirty.

For the shoot, I decided to prepare two simple open-faced sandwiches. One, with avocado and radish, is an old favorite. The second, a newer combo, is made up of two condiments easily whipped up in the food processor: white bean spread and arugula-walnut pesto. That pairing was really delightful, light, almost springy, like a vacation from gloomy February. It reminded me how much I love white bean spread, which is insanely simple to make. (I don’t need to be reminded of my affection for pesto.)

Since the tartines turned out more exciting than I expected and because Rima shot gorgeous photos of the food, I decided to celebrate the arrival of my new about photo, which’ll be appearing as well on a slightly revamped sidebar soon, by sharing the recipe for them with you.

So. We’re off to Thailand on Friday. I have a new striped maxi dress, a hat with SPF50 fabric that somehow still manages to look stylish, a plan to see Chiang Mai, Angkor Wat, Bangkok, and Krabi, and Not Derby Pie‘s recommendations for eating khao soi, pad kee mau, lard na talay, and kai jiew pu. I can’t wait for the food (and everything else, too. . . like the beach and the ancient temples).

I’ve scheduled a bunch of new content to go live while we’re gone – round-ups and some yummy recipes – but the posts won’t exactly be newsy. I’ll report back on the trip, the noodles, and the curries when I’m back, of course. In the meantime, you can probably follow along on instgram. I’ll aim to take some pictures on my phone, since, for a change, I’m leaving my dSLR at home and aiming not to open a laptop. Wish me luck, and don’t have too much fun on the web without me.

Before I go, I’m sharing this easy one-pot dish I often make for breakfast, lunch, or dinner when it’s just me at the table. I crank the oven up and toss potatoes with olive oil, then get them crispy for a while. Before long, I crack a couple of eggs on top and cook them. In this version, I made a lightened pesto dip to dollop on top. You could also use salsa or your favorite chutney. This dish of Baked Eggs with Tomatoes and Smoky Potatoes is another awesome variation.

Sometimes, when I walk into our apartment building, I can smell someone else’s broccoli cooking. This does not bode well for my own appetite. Broccoli, let’s not forget, is cruciferous, and cooking the vegetable can evoke cabbage in the least flattering way. But the scent of other people’s broccoli–as well as other people’s delicious, delicious bacon–is the price of crowded city living, the indignity we suffer to dwell on a cute corner in a beloved neighborhood in everyone’s favorite borough.

Ever since I read this no-nonsense tip from Reading My Tea Leaves, I’ve worried less about preventing pervasive food scents, for my neighbors or myself. (Alex does have a system of opening windows and plugging in fans for when I’m going to get the kitchen really smoky.) Cook something a little stinky, then cook something wonderful. Caramelize onions (I despise their after-smell), then bake a batch of granola (the finest way to make an apartment smell like home).

The preparation for this pasta starts with roasting broccoli. It’s not that strong a smell–I don’t want to turn you off. But then right after you take the broccoli out of the oven, you brown butter on the stove. And I always want the scent of brown butter, nutty and rich, to linger. Mixed together with spaghetti, these few fragrant ingredients become a rich, homey weeknight dinner that leaves the place smelling great.

Continuing on in my journey to celebrate four years of blogging by posting fantastic old Big Girls, Small Kitchen recipes that have less-than-awesome photos, we come to this incredibly easy, immensely satisfying Sweet and Sour Tofu, formerly known simply as New Favorite Tofu. Yes, along with an understanding of light and dSLR lenses, I have become acquainted with search engine optimization and the art of choosing at least mildly descriptive names for the food I cook.

Am I allowed to call myself adorable? Because if so, then I’d like to admit that the post that originally accompanied this recipe is really cute. In my introduction to New Favorite Tofu, I detail the email exchanges between my friend Marc’s Aunt Sara and me. Sara sent me this recipe with notes of praise so actionable that I made the tofu within a few days of getting her email. I couldn’t believe how good the tofu was, but I was also awed at the power of the internet to connect two people who liked to cook vegetarian food and let them share good recipes.

“I know this is going to make me sound like a naive 86 year-old,” I wrote, “but I think the Internet is really amazing.”

It is, isn’t it?

But the internet runs at high speed, and in the whirl of creating and posting new recipes, I haven’t returned to this sweet-and-sour tofu as often as I’ve craved it–just like the Creamy Squash Rigatoni I posted on Monday.