• the quotidian (1.27.20)

    Quotidian: daily, usual or customary; 
    everyday; ordinary; commonplace
    From the photos I find on my camera, it seems the kids eat better 
    when I’m gone than when I’m at home.
    I just may have discovered the formula for perfectly textured biscotti!
    Scallions to make scallion oil: for a noodle recipe we didn’t much like.
    Berry buttercream swirls for the buttermilk lemon berry cake.
    I guess it’s easier to get out a new container than to wash and refill an old one?
    For the thirteen-year-old chili maker: explicit instructions.
    He took the job seriously. 
    Ellie climbs stairs.
    They used to tool around on trikes. Now it’s ambulances.
    His white coat ceremony: in which we attend our first-ever academic event. 
    Don’t leave the coffee maker open. Because if you do, a plant may fall in it.

    This same time, years previous: a new routine, what kind of stove should we buy?, omeletty egg bake, the quotidian (1.25.16), lazy stuffed cabbage rolls, the quotidian (1.27.14), world’s best pancakes, five things, corn tortillas.

  • samin’s soy-braised beef short ribs

    Remember how, after I got that new fridge, I was so excited because I got to put the old one in the basement and have two fridges?

    It was real nifty.

    And, it turned out, it was real good we had that second fridge, too, because shortly after, our little freezer died, the one that was packed to the brim with all our raspberries and strawberries. We’d just loaned our other little freezer-that-was-a-bit-bigger-than-the-small-berry freezer to my brother for him to put his four piggies in (that’s not a euphemism for anything — he really did have four stone-cold dead piggies to put in it), and the other two freezers — the one big chest freezer and the old upright — were pleasantly stuffed. So yay for the fridge freezer! We stuffed it full with all the berries and went about our business.

    And then a few days (weeks?) later I went down to the cellar to get some apples (or a beer or something) from the fridge and noticed that the fridge felt warm and that, upon closer inspection — NONONO OH PLEASE NO — there was a trail of red juice trickling down the back wall of the fridge and all the way into the crisper drawers. I opened the top freezer and, sure enough, it was full of bags and boxes of soggy-boggy berries.

    In a royal snit, I called my husband at work and then, as per his infuriatingly calm instructions, I slammed everything onto trays and stuffed them into the other freezers, and then, when everything wouldn’t fit, I called him back and told him in no uncertain terms to COME HOME AND FIX THIS PROBLEM NOW.

    He did: he came home and then, upon learning that a co-worker had an unused freezer we could have, he went to pick it up.

    But it didn’t work.

    So then I employed my brother’s help (he did have our other freezer, after all) and he poked around in his social circles and emerged victorious with an old upright freezer that we could have for keeps and, better yet, that worked.

    For a few weeks, we were freezer stable. It was nice.

    But then this past week I noticed that the red raspberries from the chest freezer weren’t as rock hard as they should’ve been. My husband put a thermometer in the freezer: 20 degrees. By the next morning it read 29 degrees. It wasn’t a surprise, really — we had gotten the freezer secondhand sixteen years ago after all.

    This time I was the one to head off to work and my husband got stuck with taking everything out of the chest freezer and stuffing it into the two uprights. Everything fit, but just barely. It was time to get a new freezer. My husband began obsessively researching freezers while I played mental tetris with our budget categories, trying to figure out where we’d get the money from, and concentrated on Eating Down the Freezers.

    And then, just this morning while I was in town writing, my husband fixed the freezer!

    “I found the problem,” he announced when I walked in the door. He waved a frayed cord in front of my face and my eyes about popped out of my head because just this Christmas — Christmas Day Night, to be exact — my cousin had had a house fire, thanks to a faulty freezer cord. And here we’d been with freezer with a faulty cord all along, GOOD FREAKING GRIEF.

    When we first got the freezer, the cord had been taped. This photo was taken after the freezer shorted out and my husband peeled back the tape to investigate.

    (My cousin’s family all got out in time — thank goodness for fire alarms! — but their garage and laundry room burned, and the rest of the house had smoke damage. Our family gathering that was to be at their house that weekend got canceled. “Now we know,” I wrote to her in an email, “The extent you’ll go to get out of hosting the family gathering!!!”)

    So it’s been a good day. My husband’s repair saved us hundreds of dollars and our house didn’t burn down, yay.

    But all this freezer talk is just a preamble for: I made short ribs!

    Confused? Here, allow me to connect the dots: With our freezers crash-and-burning right and left, I’d already been constantly thinking about what I could dig out of the freezer and cook next and then, one afternoon while watching an episode of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat with the kids (my older daughter hadn’t seen the series yet so the rest of us are happily doing a re-watch), Samin’s soy-braised short ribs caught my eye.

    Long story short (though it may be too late for that), I made them and they were fantastic and now I know exactly what I’m going to do with the remaining packages of short ribs and I can’t wait, the end.

    Samin’s Soy-Braised Beef Short Ribs 
    Adapted from her Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat Netflix series, and by conferring with the recipe that NPR’s On Point posted.

    Samin says to salt the ribs and then add the marinade thirty minutes later. I salted the ribs and then, thanks to my sloppy reading, waited more than twenty-four hours. Worried they’d be too salty, I skimped on the soy sauce a little, but I shouldn’t have. The ribs were just fine.

    Also, the recipe calls for five pounds of ribs but I didn’t weigh mine, and for dashi, a Japanese stock, but I subbed in chicken broth.

    5 pounds of beef short ribs
    canola oil and salt
    ¼ cup each soy sauce, brown sugar, and mirin
    4 cloves garlic, peeled and roughly mashed
    1 heaping tablespoon grated fresh ginger
    1 teaspoon sesame oil
    ¼ teaspoon cayenne
    about 2 cups chicken broth
    cilantro, chopped
    green onions, chopped

    Salt the ribs and return to the fridge for 30 minutes to 24 hours.

    The night before you plan to cook the ribs, stir together the soy sauce, brown sugar, mirin, garlic, ginger, sesame oil, and cayenne. Place the ribs in a sturdy plastic bag and pour the marinade over, squishing it around so it covers the meat. Place the bag of ribs in the fridge, flipping it over on occasion, if/when you remember.

    About five hours before you want to eat, take the ribs from the fridge. Place a large stock-pot over medium high heat and pour in enough oil to cover the bottom. Working in batches, brown the ribs: about 3 minutes per side.

    Place the ribs, bone side down in a single layer in a large baking dish. Deglaze the pan with a little broth and pour over the meat, along with all the marinade from the bag. Add enough chicken broth to go about three-fourths of an inch up the ribs.

    Cover the pan tightly with foil and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes before lowering the heat to 325 degrees and baking for another three to four hours. Remove the foil, crank the heat up to 450 and bake for another ten minutes, or until the tops are toasty brown (but not burned, like mine were). 

    Sprinkle with lots of fresh cilantro and chopped green onions and serve with rice.

    This same time, years previous: salad dressing: a basic formula, overnight baked oatmeal, doing stupid safely, all the way under, women’s march on Washington, lemon cream cake.

  • pozole

    I’ve been meaning to make pozole, the traditional Mexican stew, for years now, ever since I’d had it at a fund raiser dinner, but what with all the dried chiles and meat and assorted toppings and hominy (hominy? what even is that?), it seemed a bit involved.

    But then David wrote about it and the recipe didn’t look nearly as complicated as I thought it’d be. A month before, I’d gotten over the hominy hump when I’d purchased a whole huge tin of the stuff for a sausage soup (spoiler: there’s nothing tricky or even very exotic about hominy) and now I had the leftover hominy stashed in the freezer. And, once I realized I already had hominy in the freezer, I remembered that I also had leftover Thanksgiving turkey and turkey broth down there as well. And then I checked my stash of dried chiles and, lo and behold, I had the exact ones the recipe called for! 

    The soup came together super fast. Aside from the making of the red sauce — just soak the toasted peppers in water and then blend them into a paste), it was mostly just assembly. And boy, was it good — so nourishing and rich and tasty — and the second day it was even better.

    Half the soup is condiments (chopped lettuce, radishes, avocados, sour cream, hot sauce, lime, tortilla chips, whatever) which means it’s basically soup with a giant salad on top. How fun is that?

    And! In the dead of winter, when we’re craving soup and becoming increasingly desperate for crunchy greens, pozole is the solution. The best of both worlds, it’ll do you good. Promise. 


    Pozole 
    Adapted from David Lebovitz’s blog.

    4 cups cooked, chopped chicken or turkey
    4-6 cups cooked hominy, rinsed and well-drained
    2-3 quarts chicken or turkey broth
    2 dried ancho chiles, stems and seeds removed
    3 dried guajillo chiles, stems and seeds removed
    1 smallish onion, peeled and rough chopped
    6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
    lard or oil
    salt and pepper

    toppings: finely chopped iceberg lettuce or cabbage, sliced radishes, avocado, lime wedges, fresh cilantro, green onions, sour cream, hot sauce, tortilla chips, etc.

    First, make the red sauce. Toast the chiles in a dry skillet over high heat until they are smokey hot and blackened in places. Place the chiles in bowl and add two cups of boiling water. Cover with a plate and soak for 15 minutes. Transfer the now-soggy chiles to a blender, add the onion and garlic, and blend, adding some of the soaking water as needed to make a thick, smooth paste.

    Now, for the soup. Melt a generous scoop of lard (or a couple glugs of oil) in a large, heavy-bottomed kettle over medium-high heat. Add the red sauce and cook, stirring frequently, for about ten minutes — this deepens the sauce’s flavor and removes the bite from the garlic and onion. Whisk in the broth, and add the chicken and hominy. Bring everything to a boil before reducing the heat and simmering  for about 20 minutes. Season as needed.

    To serve, ladle the pozole into bowls and pile on the condiments to high heaven.

    This same time, years previous: the quotidian (1.14.19), no-knead sourdough bread, the quotidian (1.15.18), the quotidian (1.16.17), cranberry bread, on kindness, through the kitchen window, GUATEMALA!!!, crumbs, vanilla cream cheese braids.