no counterspace

Okay, not spam. But I’ve been watching a lot of spam appreciation posts, so I decided to try some. But I bought the cheap knockoff version from Aldi’s

I cubed it and fried it. And decided that was too much, so I also pulled about a third of the cooked meat out and refrigerated it for future omelets and quesadillas. I also tasted it, and it mostly tasted like nothing – hot smooth fatty nothing. So I will have to retry with the actual name brand product.

I think cooked some diced onion and carrot in the rendered fat.And then added a pint container of leftover chinese takeout white rice, with all of the clumps worked out. I also have canned shelf stable kimchi because it’s not something I go through fast enough to not waste kimchi with live fermentation. But that also meant I knew it would be mild, so I added a healthy spoonful of gochujang. (Also I drained the liquid off, cut up and added the cabbage first, and then added the gochujang and kimchi liquid – and a teaspoon of soy sauce – toward the end)

And then added a pint container of leftover chinese takeout white rice, with all of the clumps worked out. I also have canned shelf stable kimchi because it’s not something I go through fast enough to not waste kimchi with live fermentation. But that also meant I knew it would be mild, so I added a healthy spoonful of gochujang. (Also I drained the liquid off, cut up and added the cabbage first, and then added the gochujang and kimchi liquid – and a teaspoon of soy sauce – toward the end)

and then I fried an egg and put it on top!

After a long week of several friends visiting and going out to fancy restaurants and eating rich food, it’s a relief to have a pickled salad hanging out in my refrigerator waiting for me.

I call this my beet shred (it has been on this blog before), but what started as misreading/misremembering a recipe is pretty much a simple salad of all the purple things together at once.

Shredded purple cabbage, thinly sliced purple onions, sliced raw beets, and some red wine vinegar.

It’s great as a taco topping or fancy side salad with a vivid presentation. But it’s also just comforting to eat on it’s own (or over rice).

---

Tonight I lit candles for the first night of Hanukkah. The last two years I’ve been using the fancy menorah of my childhood, but I’ve also been missing this small one made out of gears (which move!) that I picked out and bought for myself when I established a household of my own.

So I messed up last weekend and tried to make shakshuka for friends, only to realize I had run out of the good feta cheese. So I came up with a plan and tried to ask the halal grocery store that has meal delivery if when I ordered the turkey bacon and egg platter could they maybe send me the feta (which is about the same price)? And I hoped and I waited, and I got the turkey and egg platter. Alas.

So I but it the bacon for nibbling, but I put the eggs in the refrigerator and poached fresh ones for the shakshuka.

But I had three random fried eggs.  But I also had leftover cooked rice!

Fried rice sounded like the best answer

So we diced carrots, Korean green radish, onion, garlic, ginger, Chinese sausage, and some scallions. And the fried eggs (cut up with some kitchen scissors).

We (and by we, I mean my friend @senorgrouch ) started cooking the hard vegetables first, then most of the other ingredients, and then the rice, and the eggs got added in with a handful of scallion greens.

Finished off with a sauce of 2 teaspoons of soy sauce, 4 teaspoons of shaoxing wine, and a little drizzle of sesame oil.

It still needed more salt, and we added Laoganma at the table.

We wanted a little more protein with dinner, but also wanted something simple, so I made sliced and dressed some soft tofu with Laoganma, soy sauce, black vinegar, bonito flakes, and sliced scallions.

---

And then the next day I made pork rib and lotus root soup for when my friend T also joined us.

Several months ago I made a clear gelatinous stock from pig feet and froze it. So I used two quarts of the stock.

Weee! had 2 pounds of precut pork rib meat with soft bones. I started with rinsing the meat clean in cold water, then I parboiled them in water and rinsed off any foam. Then that went into the stock

This was my first time using fresh lotus roots (instead of the packaged kind), and they were easy to clean and peel.

And then I followed thewoksoflife’s advice to simmer everything for four hours. I put my oven to 220F and let it cook slowly. Their dipping sauce suggestion was also a good choice. And after I had dipped the solids, the broth did benefit from stirring in an extra pinch of salt.

Like a red tomato sandwich only totally different.

I was pulling out the dead tomato plants and putting them out with the trash (because composting them increases the risk of spreading diseases to your future soil), when I decided that a few more of the unripe tomatoes were big enough to harvest and eat. But they’d been out long enough to go through a couple freezes so they needed to be used right away.

I still have no functional oven, so the bread (multigrain) was toasted in a skillet on the stovetop. Then I put mayonnaise. I considered mustard and I’m not sure I made the right choice. At least one of the pieces of bread should have had mustard, I think.

In a separate skillet, I cooked the three pieces of bacon. That’s really just like one slice. When I open a package of bacon, I’ll slice it into thirds and freeze batches of 6-8 of these slices in containers. Because, yes, I have had bacon go bad before I could get through a whole package. Also these shorter pieces are easier to fit into an 8″ skillet.

After I pulled out the cooked bacon to drain on napkins, I cut up a hot pepper (small unripe poblano) into pieces and fried that in the bacon fat. Then those pieces went on a slice of bread and got covered with slices of sharp cheddar.

Then I sliced and fried the green tomatoes in the bacon grease. These are not traditional fries green tomatoes with a milk wash and batter and all. I’m just cooking them to take some of the unripe sharpness out and to soften them.

So the tomatoes go on the cheese (to get the cheese a little melty with the residual heat of the tomatoes), add a grind of black pepper, and don’t forget the bacon slices before closing the sandwich.

Next to the sandwich, I had a bowl of ramen with a lot of vegetables: a but if parsley root I grew in a pot over the summer, some carrot and daikon radish that I had quick pickling in the refrigerator (see recent entries), and three cabbage leaves cut up into sections. And there’s an egg poaching in the soup.