This recipe has many components – slippery, bouncy, rich, tangy, spicy, creamy – working collectively and in balance to support what is ultimately a perfect shrimp wonton. The idea was born out of my desire to eat a bowl of shrimp wontons where the shrimp-ness is celebrated in more ways than one, and to reminisce the time when I was little when I would always try to gather the dark orange oil from my mother’s pan-fried shrimps and spoon it over my rice while sucking on the shrimp heads till my brain hurt. No other person in the family did that. And this is my way of doubling-down on their loss.
As previous recipe preview, I will include the entire intro and instructions exactly as it will appear in the book. Reading back, this one in particular was undoubtedly written on a day of great angst and bitterness (insert lol emoji). Thing is, the way I approached writing a recipe is very different from how it’s done on the blog, mood-swung and uncensored, not all but sometimes landing itself as short outbursts of emotional rhapsodies. Varied from the first cookbook recipe preview, you’ll get a good sampling of the book’s state of mind.
the goat cheese popping untimed and irregular bursts of mild saltiness and cheesy aroma that cuts and balance the sweetness, which then welcomes a current of tangy and floral compote of black cherries and honey
So some of you may already knew from my Instagram that I was forced onto a whiskey distillery tour in Scotland in spite of my lifelong disagreement with this confounding substance. If you didn’t know, I’m probably going to need growthoid.com to reach out to you guys a lot more so you can see me getting into these shenanigans. Although against contrary evidence, I could swear I exercised a generous though painful effort to have fun. But ultimately, on a jam-packed five days excursion dead set on the sole purpose of hunting and gathering overpriced barley water and thus sidelining the other, infinitely more joyous activity of plowing into flocks of free-roaming sheep at every turn, it’s safe to assume that I absolutely did not.
And this brings us to today’s topic, Mary’s Milk Bar. If there was any highlights at all in my five days of being unpaid escort, it had to be this highly acclaimed ice cream shop in Edinburgh, sitting just at the foothill against the backdrop of the magnificent Edinburgh’s Castle. A fine quality creameries aside, what makes Mary’s Milk Bar attractive, to me at least, are her seasonal, unique profiles of unexpected flavors, pistachios and cardamom, orange and almond to name a few. But I’m not going to focus on the flavors that she already perfected, instead, I want to remake one that I felt could improve to my likings, and that was one called goat cheese and honey.
Even through the cold barrier of the glass window, I could feel the strong attraction of this combination in my imagination, but when I actually tasted it, it fell softly on the promise. The flavors of the goat cheese was very subtly blended into the smooth cream-base almost to the point of undetectability, which I guess I could understand, for goat cheese being such a pungent driver of tastes that too dominant of a presence could potentially ruin what is meant to be a sweet summer dessert. But I couldn’t help but reimagining that instead of a smooth blend, the goat cheese should come as frozen bits of surprises scattered throughout a pure and dense cream base, popping untimed and irregular bursts of mild saltiness and cheesy aroma that cuts and balances the sweetness, which would make such an incredibly rich and intense ice cream that welcomes a current of tangy and floral compote of black cherries and honey.
I put my theory to the test. And let me just say that if I had this with me everyday, I wouldn’t mind the fact that I was on a whiskey tour.
overcooking mussels is not a victimless crime. do not engage.
Amongst all the abundant obstacles in between humanity and happiness, I am perhaps most snuggly and intimate with one in particular. Jealousy. I am jealous a lot, both in frequency and of subjects. If you had just crossed my path in a white linen dress resting around a decently shaped neck, chances are, in the privacy of my somber awareness, I hated the shit out of you. I don’t want to. But it doesn’t matter what I want. I am betrothed to my involuntary raid on all signs of missing things.
What does this have to do with mussels or mushrooms, or toasts for that matter? Well, for it stands as a mascot for a particular specimen of humankind – one of many others of course – who consistently requests for my envy in every encounters:
This is an easy, and my first “non-recipe” that I’m leaving you with before heading off to Scotland on a hubby-forced whiskey tour.
What’s a non-recipe you ask. Well, to my understanding, it means it’s a general guideline of techniques that one can use to adapt to a variety of ingredients. In fact, I wasn’t really planning on publishing this as a post, as I was simply putting a random dinner together and mid-way through, thought that this is actually a great way of anxiety-free entertaining so why not share it.
So essentially, blah blah blah, what I’m talking about is this. You take a big hunk of fatty cut of meat, in this case, beef short ribs, but it could be pork belly, whole duck, ox tongue or whatever available in other marvelous circumstances. Then you leave this hunk of meat alone in its marinate for a good 12 hours, in this case, a red wine concoction, but it could be whatever bath of flavors that you could humanly imagine. Then the night before you serve, you wrap it in foil and throw it in utter abandonment inside a low-heat oven and then, you go to sleep. The next morning, it is removed from the oven and left in neglect in room-temperature until two hours before your serve this baby, you take its insanely aromatic fat from the dripping to make a stack of beautiful flour tortilla before you return the meat back into a blazing oven, just briefly, until the exterior of the roast is gloriously caramelized and the interior is warmed through. Chop chop chop with a big scissor and toss loosely and triflingly with mustard and pickled peppercorns, then salsa, hot sauce, nadi-nadi-nah, you know the drill.
I don’t feel like I need to explain to you what happens when a well-marinated fatty protein gets broken down low and slow inside its own rendered fat and dripping, and that liquid roast really, is recycled into the carbohydrate that’s going to be used to wrap the protein as a vehicle into your mouth. I don’t. I really don’t.
So as a token of gratitude, please leave in the comments of places where a pissed wife stuck with a drunk husband can go for a good haggis in Edinburgh.
Not double, not triple, but ten, twenty-times of (salty) browned bits.
You’ve never known browned butter this way. You’ll never want to know it any other way.
The other day, two hours after midnight while I was peeling through the dense jungle of Amazon’s available silicone microwave popcorn makers to be exact, something hit me like a lightening slitting down a tree.
Browned butter.
A glorious thing, absolutely. But what is wrong with browned butter? No, no, let me rephrase. What is missing with browned butter? It’s a beautiful thing that is butter made even more beautiful by letting the remaining traces of milk – an inevitable remnant from the process of making butter from cream – slowly caramelize into speckles of browned bits that, I want to argue, is the unsung hero that truly gives browned butter its celebrated nuttiness and deep, rich aroma.
So here I ask again, as attractive as is, what is missing with browned butter?
I say, not enough browned bits.
Yes, think about it! Think about how sick browned butter could be if it is accompanied by not double, not triple, but ten, twenty-times the amount of browned bits that separates browned butter from being a component to a stand-alone, self-sufficient sauce all on its own.
Because I’m not just talking about browned bits, but salty, salty browned bits. Relentlessly nutty to a point of almost sweet aroma storming your nasal cavity, with the saltiness bringing out all the nuance of depth and flavor that plain fat couldn’t physically carry by itself (salt can’t melt in oil), this is what I am calling Extra Browns, the late-arriving amplification of what browned butter could’ve, should’ve, would’ve been if everyone has been making it this way. You’ve never known browned butter this way. You’ll never want to know it any other way.
Long been a destination on my bucket list – and one that had taken us way too long to fulfill – we finally visited Marrakech in December 2018. I sort of did and didn’t know what to expect. A dancing mirage somewhere in between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, the face of Marrakech carried mysterious, exotic and imaginative beauty in my mind, like a place only in story books, almost unreal.
But of course, in reality, Marrakech is anything but unexposed. We arrived to find an ancient city, like all the others of her kind left only with the pillars of tourism industry, whose beauty, flaws and dignity are laid bare for the world to entertain with. Her plastered skin glowing in pink and orange, her sometimes unequivocal display of chaos and neurosis, and her remedial serenity and reflective pools inside the earthen walls of her beautiful courtyard houses, all of which was once for herself, now all is but a reluctant theme park for foreign passers. This could be a difficult dilemma for any city, especially a poor one like Marrakesh, where her livelihood brings out both the best and worst she has to offer. Within the walls of Medina, it could feel like a pressure cooker of transactions. A request for directions, a photograph, a helpful hand, all of which seemed to need to become an exchange for euros, or worse, extortions. And there she stood in the backdrop, her face blushing in that beautiful gradation of earthy red hues, I wondered, if in sadness or apathy.
That sounded negative. For that I apologize, for who am I to lay judgment in my brief and shallow crossing with a city that is obviously complicated, and made our trip sound unenjoyable which it definitely wasn’t.
If you wish to enjoy Marrakech, in my experience, you have to choose a great riad to stay in. Riad is traditional Moroccan courtyard houses, but nowadays, mainly known as a synonym for Bed & Breakfast. Your riad is where you retreat from the outer disorientation and intensity, where you find conversations beyond bargainings, where it could feel like a temporary family even just for a few days. And most importantly for us, where the foods were great. When it comes to street foods, to be utterly honest with you, I wasn’t too impressed, at least inside the walls of Medina. We tried our best to avoid obvious tourist traps and focused on old establishments favored by mostly locals, but nothing stood up to the promise. On the third day, out of search-fatigue and the promising aroma lurking out of the kitchen every late afternoon that we could no longer ignore, we decided to stay in our riad for dinner at a more than reasonable pricing of 20 euros per person. What was served to us that night, had single-handedly reversed our perception of what Moroccan cuisine could and should be.
The dinner started with a few small bites of cold appetizers, each nicely balanced in texture and flavors that eased our skepticism. Then came a lightly spiced pumpkin soup that held so much more nuances of comfort than its creamed orange appearance suggested. “Is this typical in Moroccan meals?” I asked the manager. “Yes.” He smiled in amusement. “Pumpkin soup.” Of course. At this point we were sufficiently assured to not be surprised by any excellence that was not expected. But the main course, a bubbling tagine of fork-tender beef stewed in gentle spices and dried fruits with the occasional crunch of heart-shaped almonds, blew us away. It isn’t easy, I feel the need to point out, to cook foods that are unmistakably motherly and soft-spoken while standing up to all the required sophistication and depths one would expect from a paid dinning experience. Whoever cooked this meal, has a rare gift, but it wasn’t until the next morning that I decided to find out who she was.
“IN 2012, IN A FORM OF SELF-ABANDONMENT, I STARTED THIS FOOD BLOG. SEVEN YEARS LATER, I AM ABOUT TO PUBLISH A BOOK ABOUT THIS JOURNEY.”
I sat here for hours struggling with how to begin the sentence. Stranger things have happened in this world I’m sure, I mean I could swear I saw a sea creature that looks like a glowing condom on the internet, but from where I stand, it doesn’t get more inexplicable than what I’m feeling right now.
It began in 2012. It was just about two years into our miserable six years-long residence in Beijing. In a form of self-abandonment almost, I started this food blog.
With no enthusiasm or objectives, setting out more to be a concession than a declaration, I did what I thought was throwing the white flag to all my other grander ambitions in life, that I was going to be that person, “a blogger”, a non-job made up by people whom I judged, past tense, to be minimally interesting that they had to put themselves on speaker. It wasn’t brave. It wasn’t inspired. It was never expected to arrive anywhere. I was standing on the edge of a cliff. All these thoughts were running through my mind. Would people even read it? Would I even have enough things to write about? My friends kept telling me to look into companies like Ceres PR, who specializes in food marketing and public relations, to see if they had any advice on how to market my blog and to get it recognized. What a great idea. And I consider it every day, but I just wanted to see for myself if what I did would work. And that’s when I took the extra step.
The least of what I saw coming was that seven years later, I am to publish a book about this journey. I’ve been contacted by several publishing companies over the years and have even considered self-publishing but this is finally it! I’ve done it.
This book is about my time in Beijing, what started it all. If you are kind of new here, then yeah, no, I didn’t enjoy that. This book is an self-reflective examination of how I retreated to my kitchen as a place to evade from my unpleasant realities. What was wrong, what wasn’t, and answers that I am still unsure of today. It’s honest but also contradictory, opinionated but nonetheless a personal truth. An internal monologue, despicably self-serving and personal, almost to a fault. Because for me this is more than a cookbook. It’s therapy. It’s closure. It’s my attempt to draw a conclusion to what was a very difficult time of my life, to put the unsettlement to rest. You may find it funny. You may find it bitter. You may even find it obnoxious at times. But it was what I had to say in the way that I had to say it, screaming and kicking, uncensored, crude, to boil my emotions down to something better than the ingredients of its making, a consommé of the nasty bits of my experience. If you find that it resonates, I’m glad that you know you are not alone. But if you don’t, then there are 80+ really fucking good recipes with it.
The book will be officially published in October but pre-order is available now. Here is a recipe preview, of page 288 if you want to be precise. I formulated the recipe list when I was still living in Beijing, but most of the book and recipes were written and shot after I left. It is spoken in retrospect, a memoir if you will, where I am better equipped to find humor in past tense. I know I have been away from this blog for quite awhile, but from now on I will be posting more regularly again and continue to share sneak peeks.
I know I should be beating the drums right now. But really, I just want to say Thank you. You’ve made a very strange thing possible in my life. Now go buy it, too.
In a few days, we are going to pack our bags and head to Paris then Marrakech for our holiday vacation. I probably won’t see you much on this blog during that time, which is why I’m throwing you a fat-bomb now to sustain your optimal winter-time figure all the way untill a new year comes. What a new year if one can’t make a diet resolution to fail utterly at?
This is what I call, the Crazy Rich Asian Panettone, lubed up with 12 egg yolks, coconut milk, and an ungodly amount unsalted butter and unrefined coconut oil. This indecent level of fat not only keeps the crumbs sinfully moist, but also provides a backdrop of coconuty aroma where it pairs beautifully with speckles of dried mango and persimmons tinged with orange zests. It could serve as an awesome “self-enrichment” during the holiday seasons but also, as we all secretly desire, as an ill-intended gift for our frenemies whom we would like to see de-shaped on that first depressing day back to the office. Either way, we win.
So see you next year, my friend. You’ve been lovely.
