Cranmerry (or cranberry many different ways for the many holiday parties you will uh, have to go to)

Merry Christmas! Knowing how slow I am with posting, I probably won’t have a chance to post again until waay after Christmas, so, here we go: Merry Christmas!

How many holiday parties, since before Thanksgiving, have you been to already? How many will you have to go to? “Have to” might be the wrong word for some – yes, talking to you, party-whores. I like to go to parties when I’m not expected to bring anything. Bringing stuff on the train is annoying. Also, thinking about what to make that will please everyone at the party, including those that can’t tell the difference between cat food and pate, is stressful. I take criticism just fine, but I criticize myself a lot if someone doesn’t like my food, and at parties you never know who’s gonna be there.

Don’t take me wrong – I do love cooking for people. But most of my friends, either due to self-selection or their own niceness, often like my food, and I like cooking for them. In fact, I made a Thanksgiving dinner for friends who didn’t go home, and it was great. My own personal favorite dish (that I made, adapting various recipes online) was the cranberry chutney. I always thought the canned cranberry sauce was a bit weird, and since we were having tandoori turkey, cranberry chutney seems appropriate.

Ingredients

Basil panna cotta – writing a blog post while hating the hurricane

Hurricanes – they are annoying. Things are damaged, schools are closed, trains stop running, etc. and of course, everyone freaks out (although most of the time legitimately so). This Sandy thing is admittedly quite legit (look at that New Jersey flood photo!!), but all we feel here in Boston is very strong, ominous sounding winds raging outside. Everyone asks me if I’m prepared, to which I shrug and if possible, show them this photo below:

Fresh vegetables tart with crumbled feta, or why sometimes naked (food) is good

I came back from a party/celebration/event/fundraising last night, stuffed with good food (mostly because I was helping out in the kitchen and you know how it goes…) It’s themove’s summer sol party (http://getoutma.org/summersol/), celebrating local food and people connecting with the land and the farmers that feed them. What’s more appropriate than a recipe celebrating the freshness and local-ness of food? You’re saying I made this random, lazy, Sunday-morning-can’t-bother-to-cook recipe a long time ago and was just waiting for an excuse to post it and wax poetic about it? Nah, I don’t know what you’re talking about…

Ingredients

Red lentil (dal) with a loooot of dairy, and herbs

I went on a cooking spree today – it has been a while since we really cooked anything serious. We did have a Korean feast at one point, and some very good Vietnamese noodles at another, but I’ve been either too lazy, or thought that it’s nothing to document. Korean and Vietnamese food come to me quite easily, I don’t have to think much about it. Vegetarian Indian food, or just vegetarian in general, is a beast, and whenever I make something vegetarian with an Indian flair, I consider it an achievement. Also have to document it, because I will have no idea how to make it later! This is why I gave up after a month of trying to be vegetarian. I learned a ton from my Indian landlord, but if I’m hungry, I want my food NOW. Cooking something you’re ill-equipped for, knowledge and pantry-wise, is like…abstaining from sex when you’re ovulating. It’s hard.

Shrimp Ceviche – summer is here!…?

The weather is super weird these days. Rain, oh wait no rain, SUN!, oh wait fucking CLOUDS. All of my “internal engergy” (kungfu fans, you know what I’m talking about) is focused on, um, praying that June 9th is going to be sunny. If I were a super villain, that’d be my life goal – HOW TO CONTROL THE SUN.

Anyway, on rare sunny days, I do attempt to make salads (salad is not a thing in Vietnam, unfortunately), and this shrimp ceviche feels like the perfect summer salad to me (I know, it’s not technically a salad, but what does a Vietnamese girl know?) Also, computer died a pathetic death, so picture is unedited, and marvelous steamed buns success and failure post has to be delayed. Oh computer, how you hurt me so!!!

Ingredients

1 not-so-ripe avocado, cut into medium chunks right before serving (ripe avocado will mush in your hands and bleed painful green tears…alright, alright.)

Not chilled spring pea soup, the brainchild of laziness

Accidents and laziness can bring great things. Today D and I reached a new low: we were too lazy to cook so we decided to go out and eat, only to decide to stay home and cook 15 minutes later because we were too lazy to get dressed to go out. Figured.

Anyway, because we were lazy, we pretty much threw everything in the fridge together in the quickest, simplest, most delicious combination (ok, this last part is made up. We didn’t know it’d be delicious until later). Soup. The most beautiful thing/brainchild of laziness on a rainy day. Also, no chilled soup. Chilled soup gives me the heebie jeebies.

Ingredients (sounds fancy; really just leftovers from the fridge) 

Sardines pomegranate cucumber salad

First day in a while when I can sit back and relax a little. I like being busy but it’s nice to know that I can also just ditch work once in a while and go for a cup of hot chocolate, or something. We moved into a new place, and the kitchen is oh so awesome. Must keep in mind to always keep it clean! There’s no space for us to display our snazzy array of spices and our magnetic rack of knives (not really a problem since we have a lot of cabinet space), but more counter-top space & window over the sink = almost contentment. Even so, we went out/ordered take-out for a whole week while things were still a mess all over the floor. When the kitchen was finally cleaned up, we were able to make something simple, non-cooked for dinner.

Ingredients

1 can of sardines in olive oil, roasted lightly in the oven

Bò tái chanh – Vietnamese beef carpaccio

When we went to eat sushi once, my friend wondered aloud who the first man that ever ate a raw oyster was. “Did he just open it and think, ooh, look at this, om nom nom?” Live oysters do look kinda weird – messy, and very…um, raw. But then I thought, eating raw things must have come very naturally to our ancestors, who couldn’t always make fire or choose when/where to eat. We cooked things to avoid diseases, but now that we have medicine and all kinds of preventive treatment and processing for the food themselves, eating raw food comes back in vogue (and has always been in vogue in Japan).

I love raw food – it’s amazing to taste how flavorful the protein is just by itself, without seasoning. In Vietnam, because food spoils so quickly in the hot weather, and because of low standards for food hygiene, everything must be cooked. Bò tái chanh is one of the very few things that we eat almost raw, which is funny because it would take a lot to convince a Vietnamese to have a piece of steak cooked medium rare. Usually the beef is left to cook by the acid for a while, but we had no problem with raw beef, we started eating when it was only medium-rare.

Ingredients

Fried shad roe with sesame udon

This is such a late post – shad roe was in season in March, and I’m posting in April. When I first saw it I was like HOLY MOTHER__________ IT LOOKS LIKE A HUGE dick! I’ve never seen roe so big before!

Anyway -the lateness. It’s been hard to find motivation to post when being obsessed with wedding blogs and running experiments. I wonder if it’s the uterus/ovaries in me that can’t pull away from all the pretty (the wedding blogs, not the experiment), or maybe I’m just shallow and materialistic and ordinary like everyone else (sorry everyone else).

Ingredients

Baby Octopus/Squid and Chinese Celery Stir-fry (mực xào rau cần)

This is a classic preparation in Vietnam, except usually we make it with squid. The baby octopus just looked really good at the market that time, so we thought – why not? With squid, you would slice it thin or score criss-cross on a 2×2” piece of squid, to make it cook fast without getting chewy, and absorb the sauce. I took a chance with baby octopus and saute it really fast, and then cut it up when we eat. There is a slight chewy texture, but not in a bad way!!