Enough for between one to four people, depending on what else is on the table with it.

Enough for between one to four people, depending on what else is on the table with it.
I just dug up this draft I started 3 years ago. I decided to tidy up what text there was, add some notes, and publish it.
I missed my cookbooks when they were in storage for five-plus months. The cookbooks were one of the first things I dug out of boxes when we moved into the bigger new place. Our little place was only big enough for one guest, yet I daydreamed about dinner parties. Now I could fill in the details of my daydreams by perusing recipes.
In the first days at the big place, when we had no internet, I read the cookbooks. Many have introductory and interstitial text that you never encounter if you stick to reading only the index and the recipes. I decided then that I would set out to read such cookbooks from start to end, only skipping through the most mechanical bits. I have started with Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia. I have been reading it a few pages at a time for about a month. [Editorial note from 2017: I did finished it. I don’t recall if I read any other cookbooks after that.]
This post is mostly for my own reference. I made Vietnamese “Beef” Stew twice, though neither time with beef. The recipe below is lightly adapted from Vietnamese Beef Stew (Bò Kho) Recipe #SundaySupper by Thien-Kim Lam.
Continue reading “Vietnamese Beef Stew, but with goat or chicken”
I woke up with a great idea. I went to the local Bioladen (organic grocery) because that is the only thing open near here on a Sunday. I bought what I could i.e. no dill, and green onions instead of chives. When I got home, I spent an hour prepping, cooking and assembling breakfast.
Recap: back in January 2016, I photographed every item in my pantry (excluding spices, teas, and staples). I blogged about the dishes I made with these items. I wrote up a mid-year summary of my progress wherein I concluded that there were 28 items I still had not used.
So, what happened with those 28 items? I’m glad you asked!
A few weeks ago it was the height of blackberry season, and the weather felt cold for the first time, and I felt like something dark and rich. So I Googled “crispy duck blackberry sauce”, scanned the details of the top hit and decided it was exactly what I wanted.
Oh. My god. I just discovered the Thai-style dipping sauce, nam chim, when made with habaneros and a ton of cilantro, is an outrageously good sauce that I could imagine eating on basically any kind of meat or vegetables. It’s a gloriously green, intoxicatingly scented, and richly flavoured fresh sauce with a lot of tang.