Burning Seaweed Productions

Dinner with a friend. We made a huge batch of rigatoni with vodka sauce (recipe by Serious Eats), served with chicken sausage and sauteed choy sum/yu choy.

I bought some glutinous sorghum thinking I could cook it like rice, but it came out as more of a porridge. It doesn’t taste like much and it has a strange abrasive texture that reminds me of chewing clay. Not that I’ve ever done that.

I found frozen periwinkles at H Mart and prepared them by boiling. They came out pretty flavorless and rubbery. Maybe they would be better in a stew, or just some garlic butter.

Frozen green beans are pretty good for roasting. This time I used French cut, but I think whole beans give a better texture. I also threw in some scallion kimchi and smashed garlic.

The silkworm pupae were something I randomly found at H-Mart. They’re a little crispy, a little chewy, and decently meaty. I don’t love or hate the taste.

My homemade cranberry sauce turned out fine, but I think I like the canned kind better because you just can cut off a slice and eat it.

Squash is abundant now so I tried roasting several kinds. They were all pretty good, except maybe the white pumpkin which was bland.

Shown here: some kind of white pumpkin, delicata squash, acorn squash, carnival squash, and honeynut squash.

Recipe by Leah Colins at Serious Eats.

Despite its shameful clickbait title (“The Hearty 5-Ingredient Dinner Salad I Make Every Week”), which I choose to blame on Serious Eats’ recent acquisition by media conglomerate People Inc. (or whatever they’re calling themselves this year) rather than on its contributors, this is a pretty good recipe.

I found that steaming, then sauteing the broccoli caused a lot of small broccoli bits to fall off and burn. I wonder if sauteing the broccoli first would avoid this issue. Roasting both the broccoli and the chickpeas would probably also be acceptable and reduce the hands-on prep time.

Recipe by The Woks of Life.

Here’s a salad I thought was worth sharing. The base is radicchio, with its bitterness offset by a dressing of tahini, lime juice, olive brine, and chili paste (very inspired by Anna Ladd’s “tahini and pungent liquid” formula). For toppings I used onions, cheddar, pepitas, chickpeas, sliced cornichons/gherkins, and a piece of salmon that I broiled with mustard.

I made some yogurt using Daniel Gritzer’s recipe at Serious Eats. It worked very well, in the sense that three days after I started, I had homemade yogurt that tasted about the same as the yogurt I started with.

I inoculated half a quart of milk with some Fage and incubated it in a cheap styrofoam cooler with a heating pad inside, which was able to maintain a temperature slightly over 100 °F for the few hours it took the yogurt to set. I strained the yogurt down by about half using cheesecloth, but a large coffee filter probably would have been easier.

The process was interesting but not really practical at such a small scale. It might be fun to try out some of the starter cultures that are available online.