Meal Planning - The Getting My Groove Back Edition

Wherein having nothing in your brain is a good thing

I got back from a work-related trip to New York City last Friday and while I ate some pretty nice things in the city I also found myself positively pining for my own kitchen and my own food. That’s a good sign, right? I’m sure a lot of people would love to eat at a restaurant for every meal but I am not one of those people. Cooking is not easy and it can be stressful and is a lot of work no matter how you slice it, but I get a lot out of the experience.

For one, now that I know how to prepare a lot of basic things without consulting a recipe I can just go into my kitchen and cook. I rummage around in the fridge and the pantry and the freezer and think my little thoughts and then start putting things together. It doesn’t always turn into a masterpiece but it’s usually edible if not solidly tasty.

For another, since I don’t have to think too hard about cooking anymore, my brain can be “out to lunch.” I can daydream about completely unrelated things, and some glorious times I manage not to think about anything at all. We all subconsciously gravitate toward activities that allow us to fully check out. Some people get that from running ultra marathons or from meditation. I get it from cooking. I realize that this is not the case for most people! Lucky for me that cooking is when I can really groove. 

I’m going to spend more time thinking about this phenomenon and how to help others get to that magic land of no thoughts while cooking. But this week my homework assignment for all of you is to spend some time doing the thing that, for you, lets you escape from your monkey mind even for a few minutes. But if you can’t quite get there, daydreaming is pretty good too.

While I have your attention, please check out the latest Cooking Issues podcast, where John and I were thrilled to be featured last week. We’ve been listening to this very nerdy podcast for at least 10 years, and we were really happy with how the host, Dave Arnold, had clearly done a decent amount of research before the episode. He asked some pretty deep cut-type questions that were fun for us to answer (when we were on book tour, everyone, and I mean everyone, asked the same questions, which is great for being on autopilot but not very fun or interesting).

Monday

Herb-Filled Grilled Fish, Grilled Eggplant Salad, jasmine rice

If you’ve paid attention to food blogs for any length of time you have probably come across She Simmers (sadly not available for browsing at the moment), a Thai cuisine-focused blog by Leela Punyaratabandhu. Leela is a wildly talented cook and recipe developer who also happens to be a linguist and illustrator. When writing about Thai food she sometimes veers into the ways that Thai dishes are translated (or mis-translated) into English, both in their names and preparation. I know a lot of people claim to despise the writing that precedes the recipe on food blogs (boy do I have THOUGHTS about that but I’ll save that for another time), and I myself often click that “Jump to Recipe” button, but I always read Leela’s blogs start to finish because I learned things in the process.

As Leela has moved towards writing cookbooks we have bought them without hesitation. Her latest is Flavors of the Southeast Asian Grill, which came out in 2020 but we didn’t purchase until this past winter (the past couple years have been a time warp, okay?). We’ve been looking forward to cooking from it ever since, and while we are aware that you can grill in the wintertime, where we live that usually means grilling in the rain and also in the dark and I guess we’re just not that hardcore. This winter and spring have been particularly soggy, to the point that this is the first week of consistent sunshine we’ve had. But now we get to break out Leela’s book and go wild.

The herb-filled grilled fish is quite simple. She uses striped bass, but we will probably use trout because that’s readily available. The trout is stuffed to the gills (ha) with a mixture of fresh herbs (we’ll use cilantro, mint, and dill) and is served with a spicy tamarind sauce. The eggplant dish consists of slender eggplants grilled until extremely tender, a tangy coconut sauce, fresh herbs, fried shallots, and cashews. 

Tuesday

Gochujang-smothered tofu, mock seaweed salad, rice

Smothered tofu was in the last meal planning newsletter but, obviously, we can’t get enough. This one is a recipe I’m working on for a potential future project. There is frying involved, and I know that puts people off, but let me share a tip that has made frying a bit more manageable and less messy. Use a wok! A flat-bottomed wok requires less oil than a pot or a big saucepan, and the high sides mean fewer splatters on your stovetop. Yeah, you still have to deal with the oil but there’s less of it (after it cools, strain it well and save it in a jar for more frying–unless your landlord is raising the rent. Just kidding! Please do not do that.). I am also going to test the recipe in an air fryer at some point to see if I can get decent results that way.

The “mock seaweed salad” is another recipe I’m developing. The first time I made it, John took one bite and said “So does this have seaweed in it or what?” It does not in fact have any seaweed in it, but the flavors are reminiscent of a good seaweed salad and it only has six ingredients.

Wednesday

Peperoncini chicken, grilled corn and zucchini salad

Sometimes I try other people’s recipes and decide I could make it better, which is a manifestation of hubris very specific to being a recipe developer. It usually starts when I’m reading through the recipe and at some point am like, no, I am not doing that. Or hmmm that doesn’t sound like enough of this or that. Or wow this is overcomplicated. That is the story of this recipe in particular, which I first saw on Bon Appétit. 

I love the rating systems that you find on this kind of website, where the recipe has very good ratings but then you read the reviews to find that almost everyone has modified the recipe. And here’s the thing about that. While modifying a recipe and then leaving a bad review is really in poor taste (if you strike out on your own and it’s bad that’s on you and you should own it), I appreciate it when someone has modified the recipe and really loves it. Especially when that modification involves doubling the peperoncini, which is exactly what I’m going to do. Beyond that, I’ll nix the raw onion and celery and create more of a concentrated sauce in the pan with plenty of peperoncini brine and chicken stock.

Thursday

Pinto bean stew, elotes, cornbread

I am going all in on the corn this week because nothing says summer to me like grilled corn, especially elotes. But let’s talk about cornbread for a minute. There is no right or wrong way to make cornbread. People should make things the way they like them. But in my house, cornbread and sugar do not belong together. Those are just the rules.

In spite of having a family full of cornbread-makers, I developed my own recipe for the 2019 Joy (page 631). I talk about it in the podcast episode I linked to above, but the short version is that I make a cornmeal soaker with fine and medium cornmeal and boiling water. The soaker sits all day, which allows the medium cornmeal to soften enough so that the resulting cornbread won’t hurt your teeth but still gives you a nice hearty texture. The soaker also gives the cornbread an almost custardy center, which may sound strange but you just have to trust me–it’s nice. It’s not spoonbread-level custardy either. Just nice and tender. And of course you need to give the leftover cornbread the southern treatment by toasting it, crumbling it up in a bowl, and pouring buttermilk over it. I affectionately think of it as redneck cereal, and sometimes I drizzle mine with sorghum syrup though salt and pepper is nice too.

Friday

Pomegranate-glazed salmon, quinoa with broccoli and feta

When you develop recipes for a living you sometimes like to challenge yourself with pet projects. My latest one is creating super flavorful recipes with as few ingredients as possible, which is where the salmon comes in. It uses pomegranate molasses and brown sugar for a glaze, which caramelizes under the broiler. I recommend chinook, also called king salmon, for this preparation because it is luxuriously fatty and holds up to broiling extremely well. You could also use this treatment for black cod (aka sablefish).

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Featured Food From Last Week:

I didn’t cook anything at all last week due to travel, so I am sharing two things. One, some ridiculously perfect strawberries (red all the way through). Strawberry season is a sacred time in the Pacific Northwest, and this year it has been delayed by record-breaking rain so it was especially thrilling to bite into one of these beauties.

Two, miso-glazed eggplant (page 238). This is about as perfect as a dish can be because it is simple (five ingredients), incredibly delicious, and easy to make, requiring no expertise at all. Please try it, especially if you think you don’t enjoy eggplant, and let me know what you think.

Click here to buy the 2019 edition of Joy of Cooking.