Working in the Kitchen on the Weekend

Cooking anything good this weekend?

Massaman Curry and another batch of egg/spring rolls. Before I launch into the meals of the near future, I want to give some love to steak sandwiches. 

I am not sure sandwiches count as cooking, more of an assembly but they were 4 of my last 6 meals and damn they were good. I cooked both sirloin and flank steak rare with a little salt and pepper, sliced it thin, piled up on chewy bread, the inside covered in a thin layer of horseradish. A good sandwich can just hit the spot, occasionally a sandwich elevates itself to a transcendental experience – where the sandwichee wonders how such quotidian ingredients combine to turn themselves into something that can change a mood.   Music and food are apt metaphors, sandwich and song can be so uninspiring; be it bread, spread, cheese and meat or bass, drums, guitar & voice doing verse, verse, chorus, verse. When they are good, either/both can demand your absolute attention and alter the way you exist in your conscious day. This sandwichee stands awestruck.

Back to the weekend cooking – I recently upgraded to a large mortar & pestle. Well, not upgrade so much but super-sized. My older, smaller mortar & pestle is now dedicated to smashing spices. The big one was purchased with the intent of making aioli and Thai style curries. Cans of curry are good - the ones you add fish sauce, lime juice and coconut milk, actually they are pretty great when you only have 20 minutes to cook a meal. But the curry you make yourself is better.

Since I discovered the superior taste of fresh ground curries, I am a bit concerned I will soon feel the need to make my own coconut milk - just like I started making fresh cheeses. Well, except the cheese thing wasn’t an ‘I can make it better myself’ issue; making ricotta and mascarpone is cheaper than buying it – so until 4 coconuts are cheaper than an 89¢ can of coconut milk, I should be okay.

Smashing stuff is fun albeit time consuming. It’s also somewhat precious, the more rustic the dish or the preparation, the less willing I am to use equipment. My food processor is great but not so much for aioli or curry where the ingredients get overworked and lose some of their nuance.

However, I would take a commercial grade deep fryer and a professionally designed exhaust system for the batches of egg rolls. I’ve had some troubles getting the egg rolls right: The lack of recipes, not that I’d meticulously follow instructions and ingredients but recipes are good for proportions; I have been adding to many bean thread noodles, in fairness it doesn’t look like you are adding all that many noodles when they are dried, but by the time they are reconstituted and added to the filling, it gets to be pretty noodle-centic. I tried to adjust my recipe by asking coworkers for feedback but everyone has an opinion on how they should be different, texture was the only complaint for my last batch. After getting really close last time, I am going to try 2 different things, only partially cook them, so they can be heated up later and instead of ground pork and mushroom, I am going with seafood egg rolls. We’ll see how it works out. For the rest of the cooking I think it is leftovers and going out.

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