Author: didyoueatrice

*A jumble of thoughts*

Ribbons of peppered wheat gripped between my chopsticks cascade down into a glistening pile inside the bowl as I lower my arm. This nest of noodles was an endeavor that taught me that gluten is a waiting game. It took me, what, four hours to make fresh homemade noodles for dinner? Crazy.

Always add salt to your dough. It’s what gives the noodles its elasticity, so when you pull the noodles, they are more compliant to move with you and not against you.

The noodles cook really quickly. When you place them in boiling water, you only have to wait until they float and then they’re done. Garnish and serve.

Serve with minced garlic, gochugaru (for that Korean spin), green onions, and soy sauce, and don’t forget to spoon some hot oil on top so that the noodles don’t stick together (when you do, it’ll make a cool searing sound).

I’ve come to the conclusion that I really enjoy making noodle dough. It takes a lot of stress out when you’re pounding a ball of flour until its skin is smooth. After that, you leave it to rest, and when you come back to it, it’s so amazingly supple I felt like I was touching something so fragile even though I was punching the fuck out of it two hours before.

I know how to pull.

HA.

Sorry.

Dear mole recipe,

After many months, I found you again. Full of pumpkin seeds and almonds and spices and Mexican ingredients I’ll have to look up later. You’ve been sitting in my inbox, bruised grey by the click of my cursor that marked you as “read.” I haven’t tested you out yet, and in the time that I’ve had you, I felt guilty knowing you were waiting for me behind that Google Doc invitation, ready whenever I was.

Until recently, I might have forgotten about you entirely. I don’t know why. For a while I had a huge fascination with mole. The decadent idea of chocolate as a savory food rather than a sweet indulgence intrigued me so much that I immediately went and Youtubed a bunch of mole recipes while I was in England. For a while you were intriguing, but you escaped my mind. And here you are again.

I was remembering the person who wrote you, who scripted each step, each ingredient. You were the reason we started talking again, actually, while I was on my study abroad. I asked him about whether his family had mole before, and when he said yes, I wanted to know if he could tell me how to make it (he later told me that when he asked his family, they warned, “no es fácil”). But after he practiced it in the kitchen with his grandma, you were born.

I didn’t read you in your entirety until now. There’s this one part in you that is quoted, yet with no one documented as saying it. I won’t find out who said it now, though. And that’s okay.

The more I read you, the more I’m not sure if I can actually follow you, at least in your original state. I feel like some steps are missing, or some things are confusing. I kind of wish I could get some clarification for these, but I can look them up on YouTube. Before, I felt sad about it—that I’ll never ask—but now I’ve realized how good it feels to figure things out on my own.

It’s funny looking at your previous edits, how he spelled “seseme” instead of “sesame,” “cinimon” instead of “cinnamon.” I wonder how much work he put into making you for me. Maybe not much, or if he did, it’s probably not for me. He must have also written this to share with other people.

It wasn’t just for me, right?

You came before your other friend, “Orange Rice.” Your writer asked me if I wanted that one, “too.” Which makes me think he was writing the recipes for someone else, because Orange Rice wasn’t intended for me to begin with. I don’t know. I had a hard time knowing anything when it came to your author.

I didn’t know recipes could be bittersweet, but somehow they can be. Whatever intent was behind giving you to me, you’re still mine, and I’m glad I have you. And there’s an exciting new journey up ahead. I’ll be making the rough draft he gave me into a final draft that I can call my own.

I might try you out some day. I don’t know when. I don’t know where. Maybe it’ll be two years or ten, in my mom’s house or in my own. But I know you’re a definite that I can always go back to. One day, I’ll be able to say I finally made you into a delicious mole. I’ll try my best, and I’ll see you in the future, okay?

Love,

Elaine

I’ve been enjoying a new snack lately, and it started with almonds clattering on the floor.

My mom accidentally spilled a bunch of almonds that made their escape onto the pale hardwood under our dining table; instead of letting me throw them away, my grandma told me to pick up all the almonds and give them to her so she can toast it on the stovetop (She’s not one to waste food, and heat sanitizes). I didn’t see her make it, but later that day, there they were: sitting in a scalloped-edge, shallow ceramic bowl.

After popping one in my mouth, I can’t quite describe how quickly my opinion went from thinking the almonds were too hard to appreciating the explosion of roasted flavor, because once the almond crumbled onto my tongue, the taste was as warm and red/colorful as a fireplace.

So I tried recreating it thereafter. I tried roasting them the first time, but I did it on a high heat, so I think the almonds became hot and soft and not pleasant. My grandma told me to do it on high heat first and then lowering it for a longer time. I first set it to medium, and once it develops a toasted color, I set it to low and agitated the almonds so they didn’t overdevelop in color and burn. I later discovered that you should wait for the almonds to completely cool so that the moisture that makes the almonds so supple and blegh can evaporate; then, you’ll have crunchy, brittle almonds that are great for snacking.

When I set them on the plate on my family dining table, my sister and I sat opposite each other drinking tea, hers green tea and mine oolong. As we talked, I heard the subtle popping of the almonds as drank. Sometimes I’d lower my ear and hear nothing, but when I lifted my head to continue the conversation, the almonds crackled quietly, as if whispering their pops in secret.

I asked my sister if she could hear the popping too, and in our shared curiosity she lifted the almond and showed me the splits in the little bodies of the browned almonds and said this is probably why they were making the sounds. I think it had to do with how the heat escaping the almonds are causing them to contract, so their toasted bodies are beginning to crack? Even now as I type this on the couch, the almonds forget that I can hear them and revealingly pop once in a while.

Now on rarer occasion I’ll prepare almonds like this, whenever I feel like it, really. I found this post in my drafts today and forgot I had spoken so lovingly of this snack. Maybe I’ll roast some more almonds, soon.

On April 1st, I went on a walk with a friend to come home discovering that my mom bought packs and packs of strawberries. And it was no April Fools joke when my aunt and sister told me that my mom wanted me to make jam. So with the buds of fruit cluttering the white tiles of my mom’s kitchen floor, I had a job with which I’ve been sweetly tasked. I like making things anyway, and my sister reminded me about how I’ve been complaining this entire quarantine that I wanted to make something. So here was my chance (I’ve been making a lot of things since, thanks to this blessèd opportunity).

I think I like jam because my first memories of it would be the fresh batch my grandma would make when I was younger. The sticky smell would coat the air, encasing each of my breaths like caramel bubbles. Back then, I really took for granted how much effort my grandma would put into the foods she made, and jam that tasted best either hot or cold was one of these unacknowledged and overlooked prizes. It was a delicacy slipped into Preggo jars, stolen from the fridge and then returned with spoonfuls missing. The strawberry Jell-O in plastic containers you get at breakfast places and diners that you’d stuff into your mom’s bag never glided and spread in chunky pulp with the same finesse that grandma’s had. Now that I know the effort that goes into it, I can tell you, it takes a whole lotta love.

It takes so much time that my grandma emphasized how much work it was, but instead of heeding her warnings, I told her that once she taught me how to get the process going that she could leave me to do the rest. I didn’t know how to make jam, and even though I didn’t expect the hour of hot spewing caramel pricking my skin and clothes that was awaiting me, I was nonetheless excited to learn. So once we washed and cored all the strawberries (I think there were like five packs of them?), we dumped them into a huge silver pot and then searched for sugar. We had coconut sugar on hand, and it’s a healthier(?) sugar anyway, so both my grandma and I were just like, “Eh, fuck it.” And to my horror, I saw my grandma just DUMP one-and-a-half 16 oz. packs of coconut sugar in. Now, I have a huge love-hate relationship with sugar, and seeing so much of it in one food item made me flabbergasted (I never use this word, but there is no other word that can be more appropriate for my reaction to this). It was here that I learned that jam, yes, needs a shit ton of sugar. And honestly, hers is so goddamn delicious, I’m not going to dictate her recipe.

For my own personal reference, I asked her, “How do you know how much sugar to put in?”

Grandma: “When you do this so many times you just know. People who use tablespoons or teaspoons are amateur cooks.”

Me: “Okay but if I want to learn how to do it how do I know?”

Grandma: (thinking) “When you do it enough, you’ll learn and know.”

I laughed, and honestly I love this style of cooking. I’ve always admired my grandma’s way of not using measurements, because who the fuck has the time to use measuring cups? It really shows how much cooking is based on sense and intuition, and it teaches you to learn more about the food rather than the recipes itself. When you use measuring tools, it’s hard to accommodate for other factors, like weather, humidity, temperature, etc. Things that do affect the food and cooking process. And when masterchef grandma says you know when you know, then you goddamn know when you know.

I like to mix the strawberries and sugar together first and let it sit for 30-ish minutes. I read it in a manga once (What Did You Eat Yesterday?), but it’s not necessary, so you can skip this step and directly put them both into the pot. My grandma taught me that if you cook it on a higher heat, it cooks quicker and the color of the strawberries will maintain a redder hue, but it gets really hot. Like, the pot gets mad at you and spits liquid sugar at you, hot. If you do it on a lower heat, the cooking process is gentler, but you’ll have to sacrifice more time and the redder color since the sugar will caramelize more. This only applies to white sugar, though. Because we were using coconut sugar for this batch, its molasses content turned the color more brown instead of red even with high heat.

At first, the jam glistened beautifully. The transparent glaze on the strawberries looked like healthy candy. Around this time, my grandma and sister left me alone to do the rest of the cooking, and even when I was stirring this furious sweetness bubbling in its cauldron, I stood mesmerized, not minding the time this thing in front of me would consume.

After an hour of me stirring basically a pot of caramel with strawberry flavoring, the strawberries glazed in a chocolate hue meshed into a pulp. When the jam is reduced enough, glide your stirring utensil (I used a wooden paddle, thing. Idk what it’s called) along the bottom of the pot, and if the jam parts like the Red Sea of Moses, then you’re done, so turn off the heat because you’re basically a biblical legend that made a perfect pot of jam.

(Make sure to put your jam in a sterilized vessel! My mom boiled a bunch of mason jars and set them to dry before my sister bottled the jam.)

Edit: Also, at some point, make sure to squeeze a whole lemon into the jam. I’ve done it before cooking and after. If you do it before, the acid from the lemon isn’t as noticeable. If you do it after, maybe use a milder lemon like a meyer lemon so it’s not too acidic.

When in a pandemic, what else could be the perfect project to dedicate your now abundant time to?

I’ve previously pursued the ventures of bearing my own sourdough culture, and it first started off with Pillsberry (#1). I originally named her Pillsbury like the Dough Boy, but if I was going to make her a girl, my mom suggested the “berry” spelling to make it more feminine.

Pillsberry 1 was fine, but I thought I contaminated her with tap water, and after voraciously reading many articles about using the BEST flour, the PROVEN measurements, the PUREST water, I freaked out and threw her out (I know, I know).

Then Pillsberry 2 was born, then 3, and I think there was a fourth? I just remember the last one I tried maintaining was the biggest failure of all, when I opened my fridge and found blue mold spores climbing Pillsberry’s mason jar walls.

Now in my apartment lies a collection of mason jars steeped in the scent of ripely fermented flour, its dusty sweet smell now nestled comfortably in the glasses. I use my mason jars to drink water from, so now my water is sourdough-flavored (I washed these glasses so many times; I don’t know why it’s like that).

I’ve been meaning to return back to my campus apartment to start my sourdough project again, but since I’m probably not returning for a while, I thought, what the hell? I’ll just do it here.

And so, Pillsberry (#??) was born yesterday, in yet another small mason jar, and she’s beautiful.

In the previous projects, I’ve used whole wheat flour to make my sourdough, but here because I took my mom’s supply of whole wheat, I used bread flour to grow my lovely little baby.

When I went to check on her a few hours ago, I noticed the hooch (the excess liquid that forms in sourdough) rose above the flour mixture, and I was planning to dump it out when I fed her later. But when I returned around 5 o’clock for Pillsberry’s feeding time, the hooch actually mixed in by itself, and PILLSBERRY ROSE! With my whole wheat projects, it would take a couple days for the sourdough to bubble and rise, and because I wanted to prevent having hooch, I used less water so it would be more of a thick pancake batter consistency. I guess because using a white flour develops the natural yeasts faster, its height pushed past farther than when I checked it JUST A FEW HOURS AGO!

Oh God, I’m so excited.

I’ve been wanting to make bread for a while, and in my enthusiasm to start a foccaccia project, I found out we had no yeast, and since grocery shopping is a dangerous activity now, I just decided to push my sourdough efforts to the forefront. When my mom went grocery shopping at Costco recently and tried finding yeast, they were all out, anyway.

I can’t wait to fill my days going to my sourdough baby and opening her lid, smelling the aromatic and flavorful scent of fermented flour (colored with a yogurt-y tinge).

And to my beautiful Pillsberry, I’ll be careful not to kill you this time.

Wish me luck!

Update 4/10: Pillsberry outgrew her first jar, so I moved her. She hasn’t been rising, so I fed her 1/3 cup of flour with equal parts water, in addition to the already existing 1/4 plus a few tablespoons our sourdough in the jar.

Update 5/28: Oh, I forgot to update, but she died. Or rather, I dumped her into the sink because she wasn’t rising. I’ve been making a lot more noodles now instead.

Banana cream pie with wooden chopsticks?

Lemme explain.

Banana cream pie is a very nostalgic taste for me. I’ve grown up with that red Baker’s Square box flashing that cream-topped, almond-sliver-sprinkled beauty to me through its plastic window for years. That box acted as both present and storage container for the first and leftover slices that splayed its banana,custard,cream layers diagonally as the piece next to it disappeared. And almost every time I’ve eaten the pie, I’d eaten it with a metal fork.

And it just tasted off. Every. Time. And if I have to point to a culprit to the crime, the suspect for murdered taste, it HAS to be the metal fork. Because what the hell could ever be wrong with a banana cream pie? The beautiful cream? The crunchy almond slices? The CUSTARD? THE BANANAS?

No. It’s gotta be an outside factor.

Whenever I used a metal fork with any other dish like pasta or whatever other dish that necessitated a fork in a chopstick household, I was fine. Albeit using a utensil that was way too heavy in my mouth, I discerned that the affect on taste was undetectable EXCEPT when it came to this pie.

Something tasted sour. Acidic. And the metal fork defined that taste because it would be sourly metallic.

The first thing to know is that almost all elements of a banana cream pie is acidic. Milk is slightly acidic and according to Dairy Food Safety Victoria, it has a pH value between 6.7 and 6.9. Moreover, bananas themselves have a pH range of 4.50-5.20. I Googled whether the acids of food interact with metal utensils, and sure enough, I found the Financial Times article “Spoon fed: how cutlery affects your food” which explains that, yes, they do. My stainless steel fork did have “a faintly metallic flavour that is normally overlooked,” and it didn’t come as a surprise to find out that the weird intermingling of the metal and the pie was because “the acid strips off a little of the surface.”

One Thursday, my dad texted me and my sister in our group chat asking if we wanted banana cream pie, and for the first time in years, I beheld the image of that red box again. Although this time, I had some Pavlovian sourness overcome me when I went to retrieve forks. So instead, I reached for the wooden chopsticks to eat my pie with (my family still used forks), which felt very odd against my functional fixedness. Not gonna lie, I missed my fork.

But to my surprise, the chopsticks lent a clean sweetness to the cream, untainted and actually pronouncing the sugar. To have such a bright and playful taste was so new to me that I’d pick wooden chopsticks over a metal fork any day.

So when it comes to acidic foods, try to use wooden utensils, or any material that won’t ruin your experience of the food. I haven’t looked too much into what type of cutlery is best when it comes to tasting your food, but wooden utensils have always been my trusty companion that hasn’t really failed me. Using the cheap takeout chopsticks do have this weird, sponginess to it, so I’d invest in some nice wooden spoons, forks, and chopsticks for when you taste things. I also like using plastic when it comes to ice cream or something like pie, but plastic isn’t very sustainable and healthy for the environment, so¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Also my dad stopped me from grabbing a plastic fork because of microplastic ingestion that comes with using plastic utensils, which is why I went for the wooden chopsticks instead.

Although if you can, try to keep the fork in the picture when you eat pie. There’s something ritualistic and comforting about eating pie with a fork. I watched my dad with one arm propped onto the mahogany dining table as the side of his fork cut into the soft layers of the cream and the banana and the crust. Seeing him so comfortably positioned, sliding the three layers with one fell swoop of his fork actually made me a little jealous. Yes, I was jealous of my dad over a fork. I know, I know.

It was a nice comforting revelation to taste another side of banana cream pie that I hadn’t experienced before, and I can’t wait for the many pies in my future that will thus be blessed with my wooden utensil.