Do you have things that you tried and tried and tried making, and it. Just. Doesn't. Work? In the kitchen, I call them my culinary nemesis, and they can be summed up by two words, "chewy" and "layers". You whisper these words to my ears in the middle of the night
Let's all be honest here. Yes. Including those of us who say we love to cook, and would ferociously defend the legitimacy of home-making Turkish kofta platter, Taiwanese gua bao, or even Italian duck prosciutto, once in a blue moon at least, let's not kid ourselves. In practicality, the song and dance of travelling to exotic and exhilarating corners of the world through a dialogue in our own kitchen is, most of the time, only romantic in theory. At the end of the day, if you are any lucky, the flaming urge for such adventures mostly gets put out by a take-out menu amidst a stack of its own kind, that quietly settles in a kitchen drawer with can-openers and plumber-contacts. Authentic, or not authentic. Good, or no good. Doesn't matter. That's what normal people do. I used to be normal. Yes. I used to be normal in the sense that I too, raised healthy curiosity for all things exotic and delicious, which perhaps could even develop into a moderate ambition to dissect and tackle in my own kitchen. Perfectly normal and harmless because ultimately, just like any other sanity-abiding citizens,
Yesterday, I spent a good deal of effort in the kitchen, not just on the usual manual labor I do driven by unknown impulses, but on trying to draw the very blurred line on practicality/doability when it comes to home-cooking, which I have slowly come to realize to having a very different definition than the general public. Well, I suspect not having a day-job has something to do with it, but really though, what do people consider worth-the-effort when the grunt work is to be done by their own hands in their own kitchen? Since I have proclaimed to be an extremely biased and unrepresentative judge on such matters, you can understand my mental struggle while I was putting this together yesterday. I mean, there's a reason why the corner of this recipe in Thomas Keller's French Laundry Cookbook has been folded for years without due until yesterday when I was struck by temporary insanity. I thought, who else in their right state of mind would want to do this? The same amount of time and effort spent on slicing potatoes super thin, laminating it with a sprig of herb then baked until golden brown and crispy, is only publicly
I thought I was going to forfeit the ticket to this year's Thanksgiving recipe frenzy. I thought, for some strange reason, that this year's Thanksgiving is sitting (impossibly
I recently landed in a couple of situations where I had to articulate the idea of my blog, a sales-pitch so to speak. The effort quickly brought brightened realizations to myself that whatever effort I made to explain the original vision or benchmark that I set out for when I started doing this, is now tainted with contradictions. A derailment, so to speak. As an Asian with a defining family food-culture to grow up on, who then spent her life 50/50 in North America and Asia, it was easy
Ahum
The wee-light of early morning started seeping in through the curtain, adding to my sense of unease particular to someone who knew she had done wrong and was most certainly about to get caught. Jason's morning-siren promptly started barking at 6:30 (no, really, the alarm is a dog barking