sacha chua living an awesome life

Patricia wanted to know what sort of meals we like preparing in advance. We often make large batches of frozen meals so that we can take them to work or have them as quick, no-fuss dinners. Here are some of our staples:

• Shake’n Bake chicken: well, really, the generic equivalent of it; baked breadcrumb-style chicken with rice and vegetables
• Jerk chicken: mostly W-, as it’s too spicy for me
• Lasagna
• Chicken curry
• Tomato sauce for pasta
• Pesto
• Rotisserie chicken from the supermarket
• Roast turkey
• Soup
• Rice and beans
• Baked beans
• Home-made bagels or biscuits
• Chicken pot pie or turkey pot pie
• Shepherd’s pie

What are yours?

2011-06-15 Wed 20:33

My “Cook or Die” project started when I moved into an apartment-style dormitory shortly after university. My room was equipped with a small kitchen – really, just a hot plate, a microwave, and a toaster oven. Instead of always eating at the nearby KFC, I resolved to prepare at least one of my meals each day. Hence: Cook or Die. (Well, Cook or Starve.)

I’ve come a long way since I discovered that pita pockets were called pita pockets for a reason. I hardly ever eat out now. I’d much rather eat at home, where meals are frugal, tasty, and just the right size for me. The kitchen is well-stocked. The garden’s full of herbs. I’ve got a decent collection of favourite recipes, and I’m always learning more about cooking.

We’re heading into our second month of community-supported agriculture. W- has signed up for a weekly summer half-share from Plan B Organic Farms. Every Thursday, we pick up a box containing an assortment of vegetables, some of which I’ve never tried before. The box arrives every week, a relentless parade of perishables. (You can postpone for vacations and get a credit, but I think that would be cheating on our experiment.) I’m getting pretty creative about how to get through all of this plus the groceries we buy. The nooks of our freezer are filled with pesto in small Nalgene containers and chopped green onions in Ziploc bags.

I’m also discovering new recipes. I’d never made green garlic pesto before, but the Internet thinks it’s good, so I gave it a try. Today I baked kale chips, although I oversalted my first batch; and yes, they do taste oddly like potato chips. We’ll see if I can get W- and J- to try them. We all like seaweed, and the texture’s not far off.

I turned our ripening avocados into guacamole, mixing in my chopped-up frozen green onions from the vegetable box. I still had lots of guacamole after making myself an omelette. Turns out you can freeze guacamole, but I figured it was more useful to just share it with our neighbours, as they were having a small party. So I rubbed the tortillas with olive oil, cut them into eighths, and baked them for about 8 minutes at about 400′F until they were crisp and light brown. After testing a few, I assembled the chips and the guacamole on a plate and carried it over. Win!

Now we just have to finish the parsnip and the lettuce, and we’ll be ready for Thursday’s box. Cook or Die? More like Cook or Get Overwhelmed By Vegetables…

2011-06-14 Tue 19:27

The stove idles as we switch gear to salads. No heat. No cooking. Just the whirl-whirl-whirl of leaves in the salad spinner, a quick whisk-up of salad dressing, and whatever I can grab from the fridge. Today: chicken on top of kale and lettuce tossed with a lemon vinaigrette. Even the chicken was a kitchen shortcut, bought from the supermarket rotisserie.

Salads don’t fill me as much as a warm meal would, except with a certain self-satisfaction. I tell myself that salad is better for me. This helps me ward off the temptations of rice and adobo, pan-fried bangus, spaghetti bolognese. Mmm. If I can eat those in the heat of Manila summer, I can certainly make them during Toronto’s spring. But we still have salad greens in the fridge, and they will go to waste soon enough. We’ve signed up for a summer share of a community-supported farm, so more vegetables will come in. No sense freezing the spinach, then, or saving the beets. May as well eat them. Behavioural economics in the kitchen: the loss-aversion approach to eating well.

So I stock up on slivered almonds, olive oil, and different kinds of vinegar, thumb through recipes for inspiration, and talk myself into enjoying the fruits and vegetables that are harder to get the rest of the year.

In the Philippines, where it’s warm all the time, my meals felt abstracted from the seasons. Here in Canada, nature’s influence is practically inescapable: what to buy at the supermarket, what I feel like eating, how I want to prepare it. Winter is baking season and soup season. Spring brings the first salads. Summer is a burst of colour and flavour, barbecue afternoons and ice-cream treats. Fall winds down with an abundance of root crops and the return to pies. I miss being able to eat whatever I like. No, I miss the constancy of those likes unshifted by the sun. I still like baked lasagna, but it feels odd to make it when the days are so long and the spinach is wilting.

Basic Vinaigrette (adapted from the Joy of Cooking)
About 1 1/2 cups, which is more than enough for two people’s worth of salad as a main dish

1 small clove garlic, peeled
2 – 3 pinches of salt
Mash into a paste; the tines of a sturdy fork will do the trick

1/3 to 1/2 cup red wine vinegar or fresh lemon juice
1 shallot, minced – you can also use part of an onion; I didn’t have any
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard (optional)
Salt and ground black pepper to taste
Whisk with the garlic and salt – use the same fork you used to crush the garlic, to cut down on the washing

Add slowly, streaming it in with one hand while you whisk with the other:
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil – or really, however much oil you need; taste periodically to make sure it still tastes like vinegar or lemon juice instead of being too olive-y.

W- borrowed In Defense of Food from the library. I read it with him, dipping in and out of the book when he read nearby. Now we’re tweaking what and how we eat: buying organic vegetables, checking out a nearby butcher, and preparing lighter summer fare.

We signed up for a local spring share from Plan B Organic Farms. The way that community-supported agriculture works is that you buy a share in a farm’s produce and you get a portion of whatever’s being harvested. Plan B Organic Farms works with several farms, so you can get a good selection of food (and your risk is probably lower, too). We signed up for a bi-weekly regular-sized share to see what it’s like. We’ll probably sign up for a weekly half-share for summer, as the garden will yield fruits and vegetables too.

After much anticipation, we picked up our first box yesterday! It contained:

• lettuce
• baby kale
• living sprouts
• pea tenders
• apples
• shiitake mushrooms
• potatoes
• parsnips
• beets
• apple cider (mmm!)

I rinsed and tossed handfuls of lettuce, baby kale, sprouts, and pea tenders with vinaigrette. I added dandelion leaves from the garden. (Mwahaha! It’s extra-satisfying to pull up weeds for munching.) A sprinkling of pine nuts on the greens, and tada! Salad.

Meanwhile, W- cooked the sausages and prepared pasta with store-bought pesto. (Haven’t started our basil plot yet!) We added some sage, oregano, and thyme from the garden – just a bit, as the plants are still small. Yummy!

Working with a random assortment of fruits and vegetables is a lot more fun now than it was back when I was a student cooking for myself. I used to get the Good Food Box (another organic/local produce subscription service) when I lived on campus. Identifying the vegetables that came and figuring out good recipes for them that wouldn’t result in too much waste – that was quite a challenge! I remember losing the list of the box contents and then flipping through the pages in my full-colour fruit and vegetable identification book (a gift from my family), trying to figure out if I had beets or rutabagas. (Beets, as it turned out.) Now, W- and I can bounce ideas off each other, we have more flexibility and a better-stocked pantry for quick meals, and we have the freezer space to handle odds and ends if needed. Yay!

I’m still looking forward to getting our garden growing. The plants look promising. I’m learning how to pack the garden more densely and to grow more kinds of food. But it’s great to enjoy lettuce and all these other things while the garden gets started, and to get fruits and vegetables we won’t be growing ourselves.

The community-supported agriculture shares will be a great addition to our kitchen, encouraging us to be more creative with our cooking and more diverse in our diet. It’ll be fun – and it will be good eating!

John Grimme, my sister’s fiance, celebrates his birthday tomorrow. (Well, today already, given time in the Netherlands.) He gets this bad pun because of his deep love for lumpiang shanghai, and because I’ve decided to get lots more drawing practice. =) Makes me wish I thought of making birthday illustrations like this earlier! Oh well, I’ll just have to do some drawings for other family members on other occasions.

He probably doesn’t need this recipe, but here it is for other people who are curious.

Lumpiang shanghai

These ingredients can be changed quite a bit. Experiment!

• 500g ground pork (fat is okay)
• 1 large onion, chopped
• a few cloves of garlic, chopped
• 1 medium-sized carrot, grated
• salt and pepper to taste
• spring roll wrappers: look for packages with photos of golden-brown deep-fried delicacies on them if you need to be sure, as rice wrappers don’t work as well as the other kinds do
• egg, beaten (for sealing)
• plum sauce (for serving)

Mix everything but the egg, the wrapper, and the plum sauce in a large mixing bowl. Test the seasoning by frying some of the filling in oil until the pork is cooked, then tasting it. When the filling tastes good, make the spring rolls.

Take a spring roll wrapper and spread it on a plate or saucer. Put a teaspoon of filling slightly below the wrapper center, in a long finger-width line. Leave space on either side of the filling so that you can tuck the ends in. Fold the near corner of the wrapper over the filling. Fold the sides inwards. Moisten the far edges of the wrapper with some of the egg, then roll up your wrapper until you reach the end, rolling it as tightly as you can.

(*Optional: Wash your hands, browse the Internet for a video on how to make it, then get back to making lumpia.)

Make as many as you can until you run out of wrappers or filling. If you run out of wrappers first, you can turn the rest of the filling into meatballs or little patties. If you run out of filling first, you can use the wrappers for other fried goodies.

If you want to freeze any of the lumpia, you can do so now. (When Tita Gay came over for our wedding, we made well over 300 pieces of lumpia. Everyone had all the lumpia they could eat, and we enjoyed the extras for almost a month afterwards.)

When you’ve made a batch of lumpia, heat 1-2 inches of oil in a frying pan until a piece of bread sizzles or until the oil smokes. (This is why we don’t make lumpia often – frying can be  scary!) Fry the lumpia a few at a time, turning or rolling them so that they cook evenly. Avoid overcrowding them, and give the oil time to heat up again between batches. Lumpia is done when it turns crispy and golden brown. Let them drain on paper towels or in a strainer, and break one open to test if it’s cooked inside. If it is, eat the evidence. Stop yourself from eating more. Fry up another batch. Test those for quality, too. Remember to leave some for your guests.

Serve warm, with plum sauce.

As it turns out, ingredient lists are uncopyrightable, so I’ll try to post more of them when I write about our cooking adventures. (I’ve come quite a long way from the beginnings of Cook or Die!) Recipe steps might be copyrighted, particularly those that are creatively expressed, but that should be no problem – I’ll just write my own instructions.

So here are the buns that have just come out of our oven. (Yes, another set of buns. The ones I made just two days ago have vanished. There must be a bun-monster somewhere in the basement…)

After the success of this weekend’s coconut cocktail buns (gai mei bao), W- and J- suggested hotdog bao, Nutella bao, and some more coconut bao to use up the extra filling we had. Result:

You will need a kitchen scale. This is actually good, because volume measurements of flour and other things can vary widely.

Gai Mei Bao – Chinese Cocktail Buns and flexible bun dough recipe
Adapted from David Ko’s Yung Sing Dim Sum Recipes (A Chinese Snackbook):

Bun Dough

David Ko uses this recipe for practically all the buns in his book. It’s a white, slightly sweet bread.

• 12g active dry yeast
• 495ml warm water
  • Dissolve yeast in water.
• 340g sifted all-purpose flour
  • In a large mixing bowl, pour yeast solution into flour. The original recipe says to knead the result for 5 minutes, but this paste results in more of a liquid mix, so just mix it until it’s smooth.
  • Leave in a warm place for 2 hours. Or if you’re like us and baking season (winter) doesn’t leave you with an abundance of warm spots in the house, set the oven to 150′F for thirty seconds, then turn the oven off. Put the yeast mix into the oven and wait until it doubles in volume (around one hour).
• 60ml warm water
• 1 egg
• 225g cake and pastry flour (sifted)
• 560g all-purpose flour (sifted)
• 110g sugar
• 18g salt
• 125ml milk
• 3g lard
• 3g butter
  • Mix all of the above with the yeast mix in a large mixing bowl. Knead until smooth and elastic, adding flour as necessary. Cover with a damp cloth (or cling wrap and a damp cloth; keeps your tea towels cleaner) and leave in a warm place for 2 hours, or until doubled in volume. You can use the oven trick here, too.

Coconut filling

• 175g coconut flakes
• 168g sugar
• 56g melted butter
• 1 egg
• 30ml (2 tbsp) milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (fun to make at home!)
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• a few drops of coconut essence (optional; we didn’t have it in our pantry)
  • Mix well and put in the fridge.

We skipped the toppings because the regular coconut filling is awesome enough.

Assembly

• Divide the dough into 24 portions. I tend to do this by cutting the dough in half three times, then cutting the resulting eight pieces into three pieces each.
• Roll each portion of dough into a round ball. Arrange on a baking sheet, then cover and put in a warm place for 15 minutes.
• Flatten the dough balls. I like using a rolling pin here for a nice, even look, although it does take more time than squishing the dough manually.
• Spoon your filling into each flat piece of dough, wrap it up, and roll it into the shape you like. Try to make sure the buns are pinched closed, as the filling might leak out during baking.
• Set buns aside in a warm place to rise further, covering the buns with a damp cloth or cling wrap. Preheat oven to 375F.
• Do an egg wash or another wash if you want. Brushing the buns with a beaten egg (egg wash) gives them a beautiful golden colour, and also makes it easier for sprinkled things (seeds, etc.) to stick.
• Bake buns in a 375F oven for 15 minutes, or until the buns are golden brown.
• You can brush the freshly-baked buns with melted butter, if you want, but we skipped that step.

Other fillings we’ve tried:

Hotdog

Wrap the flattened dough around a hotdog. Brush dough with beaten egg and sprinkle sesame seeds on top. You can push the sesame seeds into the dough slightly to help them stick.

Nutella

Spoon Nutella hazelnut spread into the middle of the flattened dough and roll it up. Brush dough with beaten egg and sprinkle almond slices on top.

2011-03-14 Mon 23:14

Sometimes making things at home is cheaper than buying them. Sometimes it’s more expensive. For example, the batch lunches we prepare and freeze come out to $1-$3 per meal, labour included. They’re definitely worth it compared to eating out. The coconut cocktail buns (pan de coco?) I spent this weekend learning are cheaper at the store, but they were still very much worth making.

We followed a recipe from an book that W- had bought from a pastry store in Chinatown a long time ago. It was a different way of making dough. The first step was to mix yeast, warm water, and flour. I was a little nervous in the beginning because it was more of a slurry than a paste. Once it rose and I combined it with the rest of the flour, it was beautifully dough-like, made smooth and elastic through kneading. After several rounds of rising, I filled it with the coconut mix, wrapped the dough around it, let it rest some more, then popped it into the oven for 15 minutes. The result:

The buns were scrumptious. Not too sweet. Complex taste. Yummy yummy yummy.

I had a lot of fun making the buns with W-, playing around with the voice and mannerisms we’d picked up from a Julia Child video. I also made some pie crusts for Pi Day (March 14). W- filled the first pie crust with lemon meringue. I sewed up some tea towels from the fabric that W- helped me pick out, and those passed their field test. We salvaged some wool scraps from one of my bins and repurposed an empty paper salt shaker into a dice roller for J-’s math study sessions. It was a great weekend for maing things.

We spend a lot of weekend time doing things ourselves: cooking, baking, sewing, fixing things, even woodworking during the summer months. Some of things cost us more in terms of time and money than we might spend on functionally equivalent alternatives, but we get a surprising amount of value from these activities. For example, baking coconut buns results in yummy coconut buns (for which a reasonable equivalent can be bought for a little more than a dollar each), but the activity is also:

• intrinsically enjoyable for us
• a way to develop skills
• shared relationship time
• an opportunity to create or build on in-jokes
• an opportunity to strengthen other relationships (friends, neighbours)
• a way to reinforce and express our shared values
• a good reason for a blog post =)

So although baking buns takes time, it actually pays off better than many of the other ways I could spend weekend time, such as:

• reading
• watching movies (borrowed from the library, but still passive)
• programming or working (important to invest time into relationships; doing well in programming and working at the moment, I think.)
• writing, even

There’s a reasonable limit to how much time I would spend on baking or making other things at home. I don’t want to mill my own flour (just yet). I think I’ve got a decent balance right now, and I look forward to picking up more as I get better and more efficient.

Am I trading off, say, more brilliance at work, or racking up income through side-hustles, or becoming more famous through writing? Maybe. But this is good, and all of those other aspects of life are pretty okay (even awesome!). Life is good.