whatever todd's cooking

Eggs, Bacon & Toast

There are only a few things in this world that I prefer to make if I’m going to eat it and scrambled eggs are probably at the top of that list, especially since I moved to Seattle. Pre-pandemic it was difficult to find a place that made scrambled eggs that weren’t just downright overcooked or like, god forbid, fucking bland. I have no clue what people do to make an egg taste bland, but like, it happens. So, most of the time I get them over easy since it’s much harder to fuck that one up. Plus, like who doesn’t love a runny yolk? Since this pandemic started though they’re strictly a make-at-home or at a quarantine friends house — unless they’re wrapped in a burrito, eggs do not travel.

Well, the other morning I entered the Twilight Zone when my son asked me if I could make him eggs, bacon and toast for breakfast because he didn’t want his standard frozen shitty waffle. (No kidding, out of all the food he could eat in the morning, most of the time its a chocolately chip waffle. Note that it’s not a chocolate chip waffle. No, that would be too fucking far since they’d have to actually put, you know, chocolate in the chips.) I was more than happy to oblige this ask, so I made eggs, bacon and toast.

There are a lot of ways to make creamy scrambled eggs, and there are a lot of ways to make fluffy scrambled eggs. This method tends to fall in the middle — creamy and moist eggs, but with some decent curd formation and a bit of lightness in them. Also it really doesn’t work with less than 4 eggs since there’s not enough mass to easily control the heat. So, get your eggs, crack ‘em, add a splash of milk or cream or nothing and a good pinch of salt and beat them until they’re homogenous. These should ideally sit for about 15 minutes, but who the fuck has that amount of time in the morning to wait for eggs? Not this chunky lover, for sure.

So, after you’ve done that, take out a non-stick pan and put it over medium low heat with a good pat of butter in it. (No, really, you’ll need a non-stick pan for this or they get stuck. This is literally the only thing I make in my non-stick pan.) When the butter melts and just starts to foam, add the eggs and let them sit for a minute. With a rubber spatula, drag it through the eggs and gather up somd curds, and then slowly stir the mixture. What we’re trying to do here is get the eggs to start to come up to temp and thicken, but also generate a loose mixture of coagulated proteins and trapped in this thickened egg gel. The first minute or so shouldn’t create any thick curds yet, but every like 20 seconds, swipe through the mixture and gently stir. As it starts to thicken more you’ll start getting more solid curds. This is the key time to start stirring more frequently to keep the curd size small, like every 5-7 seconds. When the mixture is pretty thick, but still shiny (e.g. dragging the spatula through it leaves a distinct trail), it’s time to turn off the heat. Stir them in the hot pan for another 30 seconds or so, and then put them on a plate. They should look a little “too” wet, but be a thick mass that shouldn’t weep any liquid. Depending on your stove, the tempeture of your eggs, if you used milk or cream, this might take a little longer or shorter, so the trick is to use your eyes. Don’t forget to cook your bacon and toast before you make your eggs because if your eggs get cold you might as well just fucking give up and go back to bed.

He liked these so much he asked me to make him bacon and eggs again the next morning. I feel like a real winner.

Saag Paneer & Laacha Paratha

I know, I know, I know I made this on like Sunday and it’s already Florpsday this week I’m so fucking behind I’m an ass.

Get it?

Behind?

Ass?

LOL.

What can I say it’s been a really busy work at week. Week at work. Whatever. It’s been so busy I’ve been punting on making meals which means that post I made about meals this week is utter fucking bullshit. That wedge salad & grilled swordfish left over Roast Beef was fucking awesome. I did make the chili, but it wasn’t nearly what I said it was going to be, so you’ll have to get caught up on that later. This means there’s a few things going in the freezer, a few things being eaten at lunch (not as part of the meal they were intended) and like we had fucking pizza from the pizzeria tonight.

Wait. Is this becoming one of those food blogs where I spend 99% of the time meandering my way though bullshit memories. Fuck no. Mostly because I never give you recipes at the end of my bullshit stories, so like, I guess I’m worse? Anyway, I made some Saag Paneer on Sunday night along with some Laacha Paratha. I’d honeslty never heard of that ever before, but when I was menu planning I was gonna make roti and I was watching the Binging with Babish episode on indian breads and taking notes on what they were doing with roti but was way more intrigued by the third bread they made called Laacha Paratha what with it’s scallion pancake-esque flaky layers with ghee and all cooked so it was spotted and browned like a good pizza crust.

The bread was super simple, watch the video for technique, but like it’s a quantity of whole wheat flour, a smaller quantity of water and then some oil and you make a supple dough. Roll it thin, slather it with some ghee, and then accordion fold it, slap it around, coil it and roll it back out. I did not measure a goddamn thing when I made this. I then cooked it at high heat on a flat cast iron griddle until they looked done.

The main dish though was some Saag Paneer which is my favorite Indian dish ever except for maybe masala dosa but I can’t find a place in Seattle that serves those. I think I said in the menu planning that it would be a mix of the Cook’s Illustrated and the NY Times versions. Having made both I didn’t like either of them by themselves, but figured I could frankenstein that motherfucker. It ended up being 2 bags of spinach (my local store doesn’t sell “mature” spinach so I had to settle for some sass-talkin’, room-not-cleaning, parent ignoring adolescent spinach), and instead of the mustard greens from the Cook’s version, which I found to MUCH too assertive, I used a bunch of collard greens to add some depth.

I grated a bit of ginger and garlic (like a 1/2” finger of ginger and idk, 8 cloves of garlic?), and diced up two serrano chilis and a whole onion. The spices were black cardamom, coriander, cumin, yellow mustard and a touch of caraway seeds, and some ground kashmiri chili and smoked paprika. After browning the paneer (FYI that shit was store bought. WHO THE FUCK IS MAKING CHEESE JUST FOR DINNER? That would be the kind of asshole that would probably make a blog about cooking and never give a goddamn recipe), I added the onion, got it brownish, then the garlic, serrano & ginger, and then the spices so they could cook in the fat. Then I started adding spinach. At first you’re gonna be all “this will never fit” (lol), but surely it’ll start to break down and you’ll eventually get it all in the pot. I added a touch of water to keep it all from burning on the bottom. At this point I realized I forgot to make rice so I threw some in a pot with a knuckle of water (it’ll explain that sometime) and got that started so it would be done opefully by dinner.

While I was contemplating if I had maybe used too much spinach, I threw a handful of cashews, a cup-ish of buttermilk and a good splash of heavy cream into the blender and made it smoother than Kenny G’s jazz. I then added this and the browned cheese back to the pot and cooked it down until it seemed thick enough to be called done. Thankfully this was like 15 minutes later and the rice and the pasta were both cooked too. No, we didn’t eat this with rice AND pasta. My little gremlins wouldn’t touch anything that looked even remotely like this with a ten foot pole so I let them have pasta because fuck it’s Sunday and I just can’t even.

Dinners for the Week of March 29

In rotation this week:

• Ground meat chili with beans
• Pan pizzas and a salad. Not deep dish, but like remember when you were a kid and you’d go to Pizza Hut and they had those tall blue plastic cups and the red and white checkered plastic tablecloths? No? Me neither. My mom would sometimes order in from the Hut, but like going out to dinner was way too rich for us.
• Grilled Swordfish with Iceberg Wedge Salads.
• Peppers stuffed with rice, chickpeas, spinach and chorizo. So fucking continental.
• And I’m certainly not religious in any sense of the word, but goddamn it I love a good ham. So we’re having ham. And I’ll make challah even though it’s chametz, but like, I’m making ham, so…

Roast Beef, Mashed Potatoes, Yorkshire Pudding, Sautéed Corn & Mushroom-Onion Gravy

I forgot to take photos of most of this meal, so like, I dunno, maybe I’m making it all up. But I had two missions for today:

1. Make up for the “Christmas Incident”
2. Convince our friend that mashed potatoes are Actually Good

I accomplished at least one of those goals so in your face “Saint” Nick.

Also who can guess out of all the food I made, what two things did my children eat?

Lets start off with the easiest part: the roast beef. I got a shoulder clod roast from the local butcher (no, seriously) because it’s a ton cheaper than a standing rib roast, tastier and less prone to drying out than a bottom round, and unlike the standing rib roast, makes great sandwiches the next day since there is very little intramuscular fat that just ends up waxy and inedible. Sure, it’s not nearly as instagram worthy, but who the fuck uses instagram?

I covered it in salt and pepper and let it sit on the counter for an hour before putting it in a 225º oven until it hit 130º in the very center. This took about four hours. My roast was like 5.5 lbs. Or “libs” as my kids call it. Why the fuck are we still teaching kids the imperial measuring system anyway.

Oh.

Wait.

School hasn’t happened in a fucking year, so we’re just teaching them how to have remote jobs they hate, do the bare minimum, and not get fired. I guess that’s probably a more valuable lesson than the fact that a team of eight goddamn oxen can plow 6,272,646 square inches in a day, on average. This actually might be useful data when my parent’s generation finally succeeds at riding the planet hard and putting it away wet. Why can’t the boomers just die of dysentery already. (Every loves a good Oregon Trail reference, right?)

Speaking of the British, lets talk about Yorkshire Pudding.

It is in my opinion though that if you’re gonna make a roast you’d better make a Yorkshire Pudding along side it, and then if you’re gonna do that you might as well make gravy too since a Yorkshire Pudding without gravy is like every single non-Jawbreaker Blake Schwartzenbach project — starts off fine, and sure, like, there are some real fucking gems, but ultimately disappointing to the utmost extent.

I used Kenji’s Yorkshire Pudding recipe since it really is the best. There wasn’t enough beef fat (unless you’re doing a standing rib roast there never is) to get all the fat I needed so I used some Low Acid Canadian Oil. (Clever bit of marketing there, Canada, eh?) The gravy was some mushrooms and onions, cooked in butter until they got real nice and soft, some flour to make a roux and then chicken stock and drippings from the beef, along with some worcestershire and soy sauce for complexity and depth. I use 1oz (by weight) of butter and flour each to 2 cups of liquid. If you want it thicker you might be a serial killer.

I also tried to convince my friend that mashed potatoes are more than the sum of their parts, or at least a worthwhile dairy fat delivery mechanism, but I don’t think I was as successful as I intended. I mean if you don’t enjoy boiled, riced potatoes mixed with cream, butter, whole milk, salt and pepper, who I am to judge? Oh wait. I am. And judge I do. Perhaps we should have podded with people who aren’t secretly psychopaths.

So what two things did my kids eat? It was Yorkshire Pudding and the corn. Oh I didn’t mention the corn? That’s because it’s fucking corn. It comes frozen, in a bag. You heat it up and add salt and pepper. I used smoked salt because I am bourgeois as a motherfucker. I think my kids only eat it because it comes out the way it goes in. This way we can make it a game and see who can digest their food the fastest.

Lamb Kabobs, Cauliflower & Hazelnut Salad, Labneh

Well, the downside of the new kitchen is that the hood fan works well enough that I can no longer use the smoke detectors as an alert when the cooking is done. The upside is that the neighbors no longer think I’m a pyromaniac. Which is exactly what a pyromaniac would want them to think. I think we all know where this is fucking going.

Ahem.

That’s far more exposition than any cooking blog deserves so lets get to the meat and cauliflower of tonight’s dish lest I lead you on a Freudian journey through my hazily-faked memories about the first time I ate an oyster or some bullshit. Those verbose motherfuckers.

The real star of tonight’s dinner was the Cauliflower and Hazelnut Salad from Yotom Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem. Well, at least, it’s mostly from there. I couldn’t find any pomegranate at all so like I used golden raisins (did you know that non-golden raisins have been proven to shorten your lifespan because of the amount of time you’ll spend asking yourself “WHY THE FUCK AM I EATING THESE INFERIOR DESSICATED HUSKS OF SADNESS AND DUST”). I also made a dressing out of the olive oil, maple syrup, allspice, cinnamon, sherry vinegar, salt and pepper. Normally cinnamon in anything that isn’t a goddamn cinnamon bun is a strictly “fuck off” type of thing in my mind, but idk, this Ottolenghi fellow seems to be on the level. The rest of the salad is a head of cauliflower broken up into small pieces, roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper at 450º until some pieces are super well browned and it’s all soft, some roasted and chopped hazelnuts, a bit of celery (always cut on the bias because fuck your bias), the aforementioned pomegranate golden raisins and some parsley leaves. BTW the only true parsley is flat-leafed. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably a fucking asshole.

The lamb was marinated in a bit of grated yellow onion & garlic, along side the juice of a lemon, some olive oil, aleppo chili, smoked paprika, kashmiri chili, and some ground caraway, cumin and coriander. I was going for a harrissa-type vibe with it. I let it sit while I made the salad and the labneh, and then skewered it and nearly lit my house on fire putting it under the broiler because despite the fact the weather is pretty Spring-like here, it’s still not Grilling Weather™. It did come out a wonderful medium rare after a few minutes under the broiler, but it still wasn’t nearly charred as much as I would have liked it to be.

I also bought a jar of labneh and put some fucking herbs and spices on it. Colonel Sanders would be a-fucking-titter to find out this secret. This is essentially a full-on goddamn rip off of kenji’s labne and za’atar plate, but like, apparently in Seattle, we put an h on labneh so like it’s totally different. Don’t tell the start of the blog post, but this was the actual favorite part of the meal.

I also forgot to make pita dough and realized this like 20 minutes before dinner, but thankfully I had some store-bought pita in the freezer that I could heat up. This was a great saving grace since like what else would my kids eat? Lamb? Cauliflower? LOL. Why the fuck would they do that?

Nachos and Beer

Tonights dinner is a fucking dose of pfizer, a beer and some goddamn nachos. I’m not making any of this. The kids are getting delivery pizza.

Get vaccinated, wear a mask, be safe.

Pancakes! Pancakes! Pancakes!

Despite one of my lovely children likening eating my pancakes to choking down roadkill this morning, I got cajoled by the other child into making pancakes this morning. (Note: the child that said they have to shove them down and hope they don’t vomit ate two of them without complaint faster than I could cook the rest of the batch.) The ironic part is that I chose the cooktop I have heavily based on the fact that I wanted to be able to use a griddle on it so I wanted burners with symmetrical output so that I wouldn’t have to fuck with the heat too much to get it be even. Jokes on me I guess.

I like buttermilk pancakes best, but I don’t think my kids really notice or give a shit. It’s the thought that counts? I’ll actually give you amounts here because I’m feeling generous this morning, but like when I measure this out nothing is really that precise because it sort of doesn’t matter.

• 2 cups all purpose flour (this might be the only time i don’t bother weighing it)
• 1.5 tsp baking soda
• .5 tsp baking powder
• .5 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 2 eggs
• 4 tbps melted and cooled butter
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 2.5 cups buttermilk

If you use not-buttermilk, you should only use 2 cups, and switch the amounts of the baking soda and baking powder. When you cook them, ensure you’ve got even heat on your cooking surface and wipe it down with some oil. And by wipe it down I mean add a small amount of oil (or as my friends in TN say “erl”) when the surface is hot and then get at it with a towel. You want the surface to be shiny, but you don’t really want to see any oil at all. Then ladle some out, wait for bubbles, flip and OMG IF YOU DON’T WAIT LONG ENOUGH IT’LL BECOME THE AMOEBA THAT ATE CHICAGO. Whatever my kids can’t even cut their own pancakes up so I have to cut them up for them before I give them to them so they could be shaped like raised middle fingers and they wouldn’t even notice.

What about you dad? I had granola.

Potato Salad

I mean potato salad is sort of like one of those things that you don’t really use a recipe for in my mind? It’s potatoes, boiled, cooled and like mayo essentially. Tonight’s was a hard boiled egg, some red onion, celery, carrot and bread & butter pickles diced up and the eponymous potatoes.

In my mind the potatoes should be skin-on, cut into chunks (I used small red onions, so like quartered?) and then boiled in water with a good amount of salt and apple cider vinegar. The vinegar will keep the pectins intact so the potatoes don’t fall apart. Drain them when they’re soft and spread them out on a sheet pan and sprinkle them with a little bit more salt and vinegar. As the potatoes cool they’ll contract and some of that will get sucked inside.

The dressing tonight was celery seed, mayo, sour cream, apple cider vinegar, dijon mustard, pickle brine, salt and pepper. As usual I made too much — you don’t want to drown the potatoes in it. Sometimes it’s mostly yogurt. Sometimes it’s all mayo. Sometimes there’s some fucking crème fraîche in it. Or like do it like the Germans do with bacon and a vinaigrette. But that’s probably a different blog post.

I also heated up some veggie burgers from Costco. They taste like tumeric in a weird way, but, whatever, one of my kids will eat it. The other one pretends like they’re being gagged with a spoon or being waterboarded so they got to eat a slice of cheese in a bun.

Chicken Sofrito & Charred Eggplant

This recipe caught my eye the other day when I was perusing cookbooks to try and figure out what to make for dinner this week: Chicken Sofrito, but like, not? I know sofrito as like the sautéed veggie base in Latinx/Spanish cooking, but like the name of this book is Jerusalem. (Although, the heavy Mediterranean influence on the food of the Levant, coupled with the fact the Muslims ruled Spain for a real long time, and like I can kind of see the cross-cultural influences of Spanish/Middle Eastern/North African cooking…)

ANYWAY, apparently in Israeli cooking (maybe more than Israeli cooking?) sofrito means that you’re cooking meat with a very small amount of fat/liquid. The world is a magical place friends.

The recipe was pretty simple: I removed the backbone from a small chicken (the smallest one I could find was 4.5lbs), and then removed the keel bone from it. You could probably just buy like a halved chicken or thighs or something, but like, a whole chicken is so much cheaper and you get the backbone to freeze and eat like an ice pop! (Mmmmmmm salmonella!) I then slowly browned it in my dutch oven over medium heat with some canola oil until it had gotten a nice toasty brown and most of the fat had rendered out from the skin. I took it out, added a quartered onion, and put the chicken back on, skin side up, rubbed down with some tumeric, paprika, salt, lemon juice and a tiny bit of sugar. Then the lid went on, the heat went to the very lowest my range would go and I went back to work.

After it had been in there for a bit I peeled and cubed up like 2 lbs of yukon gold potatoes. Probably too many potatoes, but like my last name is Kennedy so saying too many potatoes is the kind of thing that would make my grandfather rise from the grave and try to sand me to death with his scratch-ass 5 o’clock shadow. I also got like a head of garlic separated. The recipe said not to peel it, but they’re fucking wrong, so like, peel that fucking garlic or your partner will be pulling fried and braised (spoiler alert?) garlic skin from their mouth and asking you what the fuck is wrong with what you cooked. But like I said, fry the potatoes and garlic until they get some color on them.

Like many things in the kitchen, Kenji Lopez-Alt is right about frying in a wok. It’s the only way to go. There was no splatter to clean up, unlike last night’s katzu, which I did in a cast iron pan like a chump. Don’t be like me. Be smart.

After the garlic and potatoes were fried, I took the chicken out, put in the garlic and potatoes, and then the chicken back on, and then the lid and then let it slowly cook for another 30 minutes or so.

Meanwhile I cut some small skinny eggplants (these were Chinese according to the supermarket, but maybe they’re Italian? Or Japanese?) into thirds, and salted them decently and let them sit for 30 minutes. Then rinsed off the salt and pressed them dry on some kitchen towels. Then rubbed them with olive oil and put them under the broiler until they were black and charred. A little lemon juice, tahini, parsley and Aleppo chili powder sprinkled on top for fun.

When those were done (they were served at room temp), I pulled the chicken out of the pan and let it cook and then picked all the meat off the bones because god fucking forbid that anyone in my family realizes that meat comes on bones and I’m fucking done for. Given that I had shredded the meat, I stirred it back into the potato/garlic/onion sauce, and squeezed in another lemon. Then my kids ate a peanut butter and jelly and the other one had toast with jam and yogurt. At least I made the sandwich bread? Philistines, the whole fucking lot of them.

Ingredients:

• a whole fucking chicken
• ground tumeric
• paprika (smoke ’em if you got ’em)
• white sugar (I bet honey would be good here)
• an onion
• yukon gold potatoes
• garlic
• eggplant
• red onion
• tahini
• parsley
• aleppo pepper
• lemons

Tonkatzu (pork cutlets) & a Fennel, Red Onion & Parsley salad

This is one of my kids favorite meals: thin pounded pork loin, breaded and fried, with rice. They’re not a huge fan of the salad, but you need something to cut through the fat of the katzu and the sweetness of the katzu sauce.

I usually buy an intact loin rather than the boneless chops since it’s cheaper, keeps longer and it’s really pretty easy to divide the loin into four equal pieces, and then butterfly them (or just divide into eight pieces), and then pound them thin. To make that part easier, sprinkle a little water on top of the meat, cover it with plastic wrap, and then sprinkle the smallest amount of water on top of the plastic. Take your meat pounder (lol) and give it some nice even not-too-hard thwacks — when you come down on it, slide the pounder outward to help spread the meat out (lol). This is where the water helps since it makes things a little more slippery. If you need a meat pounder Cook’s Illustrated says the “Norpro Grip EZ Pounder” is the one for you.

Then it’s time to season and bread them. I usually season the meat rather than the breading since it uses way less season and guarantees more even seasoning, but it’s a standard three-way (lol) breading station: flour, egg & milk, panko bread crumbs. Make sure you get the excess bits off in each step and for chrissakes use different hands for wet and dry or you’ll get club hand and frankly that’s your problem to deal with.

I usually refridgerate the cutlets for an hour or so before frying them in 360º-375º canola/peanut/safflower/anything-but-olive-oil-honestly. When they’re brown on both sides they’re done. Let ’em drain.

The salad is pretty simple — a head of fennel and a half a red onion, shaved thin. See that brutality of a kitchen implement? Ask me about the 17 stitches I have in my right pinky. Now ask me about that glove. It’s cool, I see you’re busy, I’ll wait. The dressing is a a standard 1:2 ratio of rice vinegar and half toasted sesame oil and half canola oil, with some dijon mustard, soy sauce and white miso in there for salt and funk.

Ingredients list:

• Pork loin
• Eggs
• Milk
• All-Purpose Flour
• Panko Breadcrumbs
• Canola Oil
• Fennel
• Flat-Leaf (Italian) Parsley
• Small Red Onion
• Miso
• Soy Sauce
• Toasted Sesame Oil
• White Miso Paste
• Rice
• Bulldog Tonkatzu Sauce

Dinners for the Week of March 22

It’s time for weekly meal planning so I can make a shopping list so I can go to the store so we don’t just order in pizza every night. This week’s menu includes:

• Pork Katzu with a Fennel/Apple/Parsley salad
• Chicken Sofrito from Yotom Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem along side Roasted Eggplant with Tahini, inspired by that book.
• Veggie Burgers (Frozen! From Costco!) and Potato Salad
• Lamb Kabobs & Roasted Cauliflower & Hazelnut salad from Jerusalem again and homemade pita
• Saag Panner (a combination of the NYTimes & America’s Test Kitchen recepies since I like neither by themselves) with roti and saffron rice (oh yeah we’re fucking money up in here. saffron)
• Roast Beef, Mashed Potatoes, Corn, Mushroom Gravy, Yorkshire Pudding & Horseradish. I have a friend who says they don’t like mashed potatoes. I’m gonna prove them wrong.

That’s enough cooking for a week. There will be left overs. I’ll make Julie cook one night. We’ll be horrible parents and order pizza for the kids and eat outside in the lovely March Seattle weather?

(I don’t make any money from those book links, but my local bookstore will get a cut of the proceeds!)

Saltine Toffee

Somehow I got roped into making a dessert for our kid’s school’s “dessert dash” for their fundraising auction. I guess when you’re married to a PTA member, you’re unwittingly agreeing to these things, but I digress. Since I’m lazy I made Saltine Toffee.

• 2 sticks of butter
• 2 cups of dark brown sugar
• 1 sleeve of saltines
• Chocolate chips

Melt the butter and sugar together over low heat until it’s boiling, and let it for a few minutes. While you’re waiting (and stirring it), grease up a sheet pan (stir the butter and sugar) and cover the bottom with foil (don’t forget to stir the butter and sugar) and then grease the foil (are you still stirring?) and then lay out the saltines in a single layer as close together as you can get them (oh my god are you stirring?!). When the butter and sugar have boiled for a bit (I dunno, 6 minutes? It’ll be bubbly and stuff), pour it over the saltines and try to spread it out into a thin even layer. You know you can do it. Or not. Gravity really is your friend here, unlike all those other times. Throw on a bunch of chocolate chips and let them sit until they’re melty and then spread them on top into a layer. It ain’t gonna be fucking even so don’t worry about it. If the chocolate isn’t melting, throw on your broiler and put it under for like 30 seconds. DON’T FUCKING BURN THE CHOCOLATE. Let it cool and then put it in the fridge. Or just put it in the fridge. They’re not my groceries that’ll get ruined.

When it’s totally cool, break it apart. It’ll be ugly like a hairless cat, but like, its sugar, chocolate and butter.

Black Bean & Sweet Potato Chili

Some simple “chili”. Whatever. It’s got:

• a sweet potato, peeled and roughly cubed
• some black beans. i made them earlier. maybe you got some in cans? who cares.
• an onion, diced
• a few cloves of garlic, smashed and roughly chopped. i used maybe 6?
• a jalapeño (or a poblano or something else hot or more of them or less of them)
• a few canned chipotles, chopped
• a red bell pepper
• chicken stock or water or beer or something wet
• some chili powder. i made my own, but you can use whatever you like. mine has cumin, corriander, dried oregano, smoked paprika and some ground, dried chilies (tonight was i think aleppo and kashmiri. look i’m international!)

I cooked the onions and peppers and then added everything else and then added liquid until it looked like it was a soup. Then I cooked it until it got thicker. Actually I totally forgot about it while I wrote the software for this blog. Then Julie was all “where’s dinner” and I was all “oh yeah, well it’s done”.

We ate it with some cheese and avocado and scallions and sour cream and chips.

Welcome to whatever I'm cooking.

Hi. I’m Todd. I make dinner for my family almost every night. Here are many of the things I cook. Sometimes they’re from recipes, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes you get the amount of an ingredient, but most of the time it’s just “all of it” or “however much you like in what you’re eating.” If something cannot be omitted or substituted it means it’s probably in the name of the recipe, but like, idk, if you want to use something else go for it. Don’t like cilantro? Leave it out. Maybe you like parsley instead? Sure add that — you’re the one who is eating it

Broccoli & Tofu, Scallion Pancakes, rice

Tonight’s dinner was Broccoli & Tofu with rice and some scallion pancakes. The pancakes are mix-up of The Flakiest Scallion Pancakes from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (the dough & double roll technique) and Alton Brown’s Scallion Pancakes (the scallion oil).

The Broccoli & Tofu was from nowhere specifically; the sauce was black vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, corn starch, water, shaoxing cooking wine and sugar. I cut the tofu in half and let it sit wrapped in a kitchen towel in the fridge with some weight on it to get it drier. Then I lightly dusted it with cornstarch, and cooked it in the wok first, getting it crispy-ish. Then I took it out, added the broccoli and ilet it get some color. Then added some ginger, garlic and onions. Then poured in the sauce, and added the tofu back. Then we ate.

This is how I make rice. I'm lazy.