Author: Livia N

I spent all summer growing 1 cauliflower, and I didn’t even take a fashion picture of the final product.

It’s a pity because I don’t think I ever want to devote garden space (at least not while I have limited space with a porch garden) to they again. I tried eating the leaves like collard greens as it was growing, and my body did not like that. I’ve successfully done that in the past with broccoli, so it could just be that I’m getting more sensitive to large quantities of green leafy vegetables over the years. But it wasn’t a plant – for me – that provided any food through the summer while it grew and took up space.

Also it was very hard to keep pest free. I washed the leaves every night, but toward the end of August on I kept seeing white butterflies near there so I knew they were laying eggs, and I kept searching the leaves and not finding eggs or caterpillars. So I just washed the leaves as well as I could and was puzzled. All summer I managed to find and pick off maybe three caterpillars.

But when I harvested, I found that it was just that the leaf spacing was perfect for them to hide out by the stem between the leaves where it was really hard to get to. So points off for being hard to manage pests without insecticide.

But I did get one lovely head of cauliflower. And I put it in a big pot of water and pulled tiny caterpillars off of it as they came out. After about three hours of (intermittent!) cleaning, I nibbled on a floret and it was significantly more flavorful fresh than store bought! But I still put it in plastic and let it sit in my refrigerator for a day before more cleaning before actually using it in a recipe.

So I started with (purple) onions and (orange) peppers and then added the cauliflower florets. And then I pondered whether I wanted to make it vegetarian or add a protein.

I grew up in a household that didn’t cook seafood because my father didn’t like the smell, but I’ve been trying to experiment and learn how to cook it, so I’d bought some salmon portions at Aldi’s with some fairly unimpressive results. I think that’s because starting with thinner steaks was increasing the level of difficulty. So this was the last of that package, and it being thinner meant I could quickly get it just thawed enough that I could cut it with a cleaver into pasta appropriate chunks!

I don’t remember if I set aside all of the vegetables on a plate while I cooked the salmon or if I started a second skillet, but I did cook the salmon separately too make sure I could see that so the frozen pieces behaved properly and got a little sear on all sides.

I also boiled some penne.

Then I put the salmon and the cauliflower together and added alfredo sauce from a jar. And some of the pasta cooking water to loosen it up. And then I decided I also wanted the taste of a bit of tomato pasta sauce, so I also added about a quarter cup from an already open jar in the fridge.

It all came together very satisfactorily!

Don’t try this at home! This was a calculated risk that I took when I was cooking food only for my own consumption.

But I had the ingredients, so I decided to make one of Apicius’ recipes as close to the original as possible.

Just to get it over with quickly, the two poisonous ingredients are pennyroyal and rue. Pennyroyal is in the mint family and can be pretty easily substituted with similar herbs to get the same taste. Rue, however, tastes like nothing else and is  good at sharpening and brightening foods that would otherwise be rich and heavy.

So I started off with the lentils and some water – boiling them and skimming off the scum.

I added green onions, instead of leeks because I didn’t grow leeks in my tiny porch container garden. It also isn’t the season for fresh cilantro, so while I had some frozen and used it, I also supplemented with parsley (which is abundant in my garden).

Then I mixed together ground coriander, pennyroyal, asafetida, mint, rue, a little vinegar, honey, and fish sauce. (See picture above) And then I slowly added defrutum and more vinegar to thin it out.

I also sifted in (while the lentils were boiling) some toasted wheat flour to thicken – this is how my southern relatives thicken stews at the end of cooking if the roux ended up not quite thick enough using a product called Wondra. It’s basically precooked flour – both for food safety and because that helps it clump less. I today my flour until it’s caramel colored because that also makes the process of making a roux for a dark gravy go significantly faster.

After serving in the bowl, I dressed it with some olive oil (which you can’t really see in the picture) and freshly ground black pepper. And I did like it with some added salt as well.

I usually make this thicker and next to a chestnut paste, because those two recipes are often considered together, and serve it as a dip. It’s also very good as a soup. I think I could go even lighter on the lentils to make a thinner soup… but then I might also cheat and try making it with a lamb broth instead of plain water. That would make it closer to the delicious lentil soup at a local Yemeni restaurant.

Good news – I did not die (or have horrible cramps or anything more than one would with regular high fiber dinner)

I’ve been delighted to get a dumpling steaming situation figured out, so now I can have dumplings fresh from my freezer any time I feel my house is too dry or cold. Or just wherever.

I used to have line 6″ streaming baskets and would put them in a 5qt soup pot up on canning rings. But I was always terrified I’d run out of water, and would keep the water high enough that I couldn’t use the bottom basket. And still ruined a pot once!

But now I’ve learned about the adapter ring that lets you bridge the diameter of a pot and your baskets. So now I have a 3-4qt pot that I fill like 2/3 full of water and never have to worry about it running dry or boiling over out teaching my dumplings!

I like lining the baskets with cabbage leaves, instead of paper, because you can then eat the leaves at the end! And here’s the two baskets with soup dumplings and fluffy bao with greens and mushroom filling

I make my own dippng sauce with sliced ginger, soy sauce, black vinegar, and then maybe a tiny splash of sesame oil, some sugar or mirin, some chili crisp (not in this one because I was thinking I’d have them separately and then I just forgot to grab it), and some scallion greens (didn’t put in this one).

this is a glamour shot of the vegetable bun because I am planning to write a (positive) review on @sayweee_official (where I bought them).

And then I thought I’d give steamed eggs a shot, but I forgot to cover them to keep condensation from the lid getting in then, and they turned out more fluffy than custardy. Next time I’ll review directions right before instead of assuming I’ve watched enough videos that I can remember what to do.

Tonight’s dinner was steak and potatoes.

The potatoes are small yellow ones from Aldi’s that I cut in half. I start off boiling/poaching them because otherwise I always get the outside too cooked before the inside is cooked, and this both slows me down to give them more time and provides more even heat.

Once the water cooks off (or I get impatient and pour the water out), I add fat. This time I added a chunk (1tsp?) of bacon grease from my freezer. Then I let the potatoes cook and color for about five minutes before adding diced onions and peppers (a poblano from my garden ). Stir it enough that nothing burns and sticks to the skillet. Once the onion is soft, I can add minced garlic. I also added dried thyme (from my garden) and paprika, black pepper, salt, and Penzey’s Spices’s Turkish Seasoning.

The steak was cooked in a hot cast iron skillet starting about when the garlic went into the potatoes.

It’s actually half a steak. I cut off some strips with ambitions toward making a stir fry later in the week

As someone who lives alone and enjoys making food for myself almost every day, I thought I might talk about how that works

A few months ago, someone on twitter was asking – as someone new to trying to cook regularly, how do people enjoy that whole process. It seems very frustrating and stressful. What if you aren’t good yet and it’s terrible and then you’ve put all this energy in and are still hungry?

And that is stressful! And the advice I’m giving here is not aimed toward poverty and subsistence living. There is a lot of reassurance in knowing that if you end up making something absolutely inedible (yes, I’ve done it, too) that you can order last minute delivery or make a meal out of other food in your pantry.

After the covid lockdown, when I started going back to working in person, everything took more effort and energy. One of the habits I picked up then, which I’ve recommended to several people since, was ordering 4 or 5 soups (wanton, hot & sour, egg drop – the ones that are extremely cheap ($2-4/pint) from Chinese restaurants) on delivery at the start of the work week. And then when I came home too tired and hungry to plan dinner, I would have a soup and that would give me space to figure the rest out.

But there are also other ways to make the daily dinner making engine go.

Grocery shopping – Grocery shopping is stressful and has become more expensive and there are so many people. You can do delivery. But this tip isn’t about how you shop, but what you shop for. Because it’s stressful, it’s easy to fall into a pattern where you buy the exact same things every time and you have the exact same resources every week. I fully believe in keeping regular stocks of breads and grains and beans and sauces and the components that let you build a variety of meals. But for produce (and meat?) I recommend letting some things run out and letting some things be seasonal and trying one thing new. And let the change in produce drive variety and experimentation.

Freezer shopping – I have a chest freezer (again, these are not subsistence living tips). That’s why I put a question mark by the meats – Since lockdown, I mostly get meat delivered, and that makes it harder to build in experimentation. But I also make and freeze stocks, soup, shredded braised meat, and I have a collection of frozen items I inherited from my parents’ freezer when my mother died: vegetable soup, terrible chili, tomato puree, and marinara sauces. And I almost always have a meat pulled out to thaw (and have a bowl the meat will fit in just in case it leaks as it thaws). When I first use a meat: if it’s a pound of ground beef, I’ll use a quarter of it in that day’s dish and then either right away make hamburger patties of the other 3 quarters to freeze again or keep working through the pound, one quarter at a time; if it’s a steak, I’ll often cut it in half or thirds and slice the part I won’t use that day to freeze in bags for the future. So the cycle of having a meat thawed and available narrows down and targets the creativity from the vegetable choices.

And then I’ll also pull out one of those miscellaneous items: stock or soup or a thing from my mother’s freezer once every week or two. So that can also be either an easy dinner or a randomly generated challenge to do something different than usual. But it’s all supports that are planned ahead to make the process of choosing what to make more interesting.

Gifts for your future self: You can build in supports while you are already cooking and have the energy. If I make rice, I make double the amount, so in the next few days I can also have a rice dish, but I only have to wash the pot once. If I’ve got plenty of the base of whatever I’m cooking, I might pull out half a cup or so and just stick it in a container in the refrigerator. I won’t necessarily have a plan for it, but it will be a fun addition to a future dinner or a tasty side dish – maybe the sweet potato curry will get added to meat to make a hash as dinner, or maybe it will be a taco filling, or an omelet, or I’ll shred a quarter of a cabbage and add some canned tomatoes and have a whole additional meal with 2 fairly stable ingredients and spices. And you can make these gifts outside of your meal prep – if the mushrooms are going to go bad and you don’t feel like eating them tonight, but you have the energy to just cook them – then they will last longer and you have a gift for future you.

Leveling up – cascading meal prep: Here’s how I deal with making larger quantities of food – because sometime large cuts of meat or 5 pounds of potatoes are on sale, and I am still but one person. So first you cook the big quantity of food – and you look for something that will be fairly versatile and keep it mostly one thing. Roast the meat or braise/stew it. Then you eat a portion for your meal. Instead of freezing the leftovers whole, portion them into future meal sizes. If it’s a roast, maybe freeze some as slices, some as big chunks for soups or curries, and some diced for hash or other quick cooking meal. If it’s stew or braised and shredded, then freeze it in both pint and half pint containers. And then when you turn those leftovers into a meal, don’t forget to pull out some of that deliciousness to pop back in the refrigerator as a gift for future you!

[I’ve mentioned hash twice – for those who are unfamiliar, it’s a dish where any variety of meat and potatoes is cut into the same size dice and then they are cooked together (maybe with minimal vegetables) to make a hot filling, not super visually attractive, meal. (Example)]

So anyway – those are some tips. Have fun, good luck, and don’t despair.