Category: Writing

Winter is more or less here, now. The skies are gloomy and grey, and the chill cuts straight to your bones as soon as you walk outside your door. But I’ve always taken pleasure in the colder seasons. In my opinion, the warmth of California sunshine is only as good as what you feel when you’ve got fuzzy slippers on and are sitting next to a space heater, watching through the apartment window as leaves fall on the ground outside and the streets get pelted with frigid rain.

To me, it’s the best time of the year to bake loaves and crusty bread and theorycraft soups. My GF who is more partial to confections, boiled some adzuki beans and mashed them up to make Anko.

90% (exact percentage) of beans in the world are used for savory dishes, but because of their mellow and nutty flavor, adzuki beans are reserved in East Asian cuisines for treats and desserts, like Taiyaki, Jjinbang, or Hong Dou Tang.

While I was at the market, I saw a cast iron grill pan for making Takoyaki and thought it could be used to make Taiyaki in the shape of Takoyaki.

Both Taiyaki and Takoyaki are made by pouring batter into a heated mold and adding fillings, but while Takoyaki is a savory street snack in the shape of balls, Taiyaki is a waffle-type dessert that’s made in the shape of sea bream.

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It took some adaptation to get used to flipping the balls while they were in the mold. You have to use two small prongs so as not to eviscerate the balls while turning them, and you have to wait just long enough (not too long, or they’ll burn) so that they’re solid enough to be rotated upside down.

The papery thin edges were crisp, the batter got a lightly toasted crust, and a taper of sweet steam rose from the ball when I split it open. In Japan Taiyaki are fish shaped because they’re supposed to confer good luck, but I make my own so it’s all good.

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My sister married a guy from Munich, and they’re coming up here for Thanksgiving. It’s the first marriage in the generation-tier I belong to, so it’s pretty big. A week or so ago I was at my cousin’s house watching election proceedings (orange man is back) and my aunt knocked on the door. Her house and my cousin’s are on the same lot and she came over to say hello. Aunt said she was planning on baking pretzel buns (laugenbrötchen) for my new brother-in-law but wouldn’t have any oven space on the actual day. She asked me to do it. I said sure.

I don’t know much about German cuisine but I do know that authentic pretzels get their dank amber hue from being dunked in a 4% lye solution before they’re baked. Lye (sodium hydroxide) is a highly caustic alkaline substance that’s used to make soap, clear drains, and decompose road kill. It also causes severe chemical burns if it gets on your skin or eyes. I like Extreme Cooking™ so I made some.

Traditionally, pretzels are made with an enriched dough with low hydration, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 percent. They have about 3-4 percent (baker’s percentage) butter or lard (lard more traditional) cut into the dough. You take that dough and roll it into a long snake-like rope (about the thickness of a corn snake, or maybe a garter snake) lift, twist, and then toss it in the lye bath for 30 seconds.

I decided to ignore tradition and make my laugenbrezel with a 75% hydration dough and no butter. I didn’t have any particular reason for doing that; I just felt like it. However, I learned why pretzels are enriched and why they’re made with lower hydration dough.

First, lower hydration makes the pretzels easier to shape. Due to the dough’s wetness, trying to press it into a long enough rope that it could be twisted into a pretzel that looked like a pretzel and not a dog turd was very difficult. Pretzels have butter in them and less water in the dough so that they’re softer and more pliable, easier to roll out into a long rope and less likely to spring back once shaped.

Second, the richness provided by butter helps give pretzels their softness. Without it, the pretzels were at bagel levels of toothsome.

Finally, I believe that the lower hydration causes them to bake through and internally dry far more quickly when they’re placed in the oven.

I shaped my pretzels more in the Bavarian way because Munich is in Bavaria, but the Swabian style looks a lot more interesting to me. That type has more variation in the pretzel’s thickness and the top is scored.

Anyways, that’s a lot of detail that I’m not sure you’re interested in. The end result was that they were pretty good, but could’ve been better. This is good, though! With enough practice runs, I hope that on Thanksgiving Day my sister’s husband will take a bite of a pretzel I’ve proffered to him and leap out of his chair, exclaiming “Verdammt, dieser Scheiß ist gut!!”

I asked my GF to generate an image of a pretzel man, so here:

I have a GF. I won’t tell you her name, that isn’t relevant right now, but I will tell you about her three alter egos. The first is the moon maiden. The second is Mooma. The third is Liof. It takes special circumstances to see any of these three personalities, but I’ve seen them all. That’s why I think I’m maybe the luckiest guy in the entire world. Is that an exaggeration. It may very well be. But to me, she’s pretty great.

She has wavy hair that’s black or light brown depending on the light you see it in. She has big round eyes and long eyelashes, and long legs. She has a soft voice and is very wise. She also works hard. I met her at a pinball barcade for our first date. We matched with one another because she had a question. In my profile, I wrote that my idea of a good time was “sitting on a bench by the lake in fall wearing a warm coat with a box of wine chuffing a fat dart”, but my profile also said that I didn’t smoke, so she was confused.

Anyways, things since then have been really cool. We’ve been dating a little more than a year now, and I’m really happy.

War and Peace is the kind of book that’s more of a prop, shown in TV or movies as a placeholder for “big old book”. It’s ~1200 pages long, it’s got a ton of characters, it’s about a huge and “important” historical occurrence (the War of 1812), and the author tries, during its length, to “say things” about life, and love, and death, and war and… peace. It’s on many lists of “best book of all time” and is the first thing that comes to mind when you say “classic book”, but is it actually any good? Is it interesting? Is it fun? Is it compelling?

War and Peace is very compelling and fun to me, especially compared to other classic novels I’ve read like Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, or Moby Dick. Moby Dick is crafted with beautiful imagery and language, and expert use of symbolism, rhetoric, and metaphor, but its characters are by and large, old, and sweaty sailors who chew hunks of salt pork and are riddled with an insatiable desire to murder a whale. War and Peace is much more relatable. It’s got war and sweaty old people, but it also has romance and society and wealth and politics and intrigue. And younger people that walk around in military uniforms and ball gowns, get jealous of each other, kiss, shoot each other, engage in relationships…

What makes War and Peace a Classic?

Most books now, being overseen by market-astute editors, dig themselves into one niche or objective. You read a science fiction novel like The Martian to get a tight adventure story about a guy lost in space with a lot of good scientific details. Or you read a Janet Evanovich novel because you want to immerse yourself in the twists and turns of a rocky romantic affair. Or you read the memoirs of ulysses s. grant in order to get a realistic and gritty picture of a war that shaped the world you live in. A lot of books serve a single purpose. They’re refined and sharpened to accomplish the tasks of the role they fill, like accountants or surgeons that only perform lap band procedures. 

But War and Peace has it all. It’s got human drama, philosophy, history.. It’s great. Read it, if you want I guess

Anyone who attended the University of Washington has probably eaten some, if not many meals at restaurants along the Ave, a street parallel to the university’s campus that is mostly lined with homely joints offering large and cheap meals for college students. One of my favorites among these is Mee Sum Cafe, a Taiwanese spot. The place has a small selection of baked goods, and dispenses boba tea, and has shelves stocked with 90s shonen manga translated to Chinese.

The most popular order there and my favorite choice is the number 2, the Popcorn Chicken Meal. It’s got chunks of chicken thigh fried the Taiwanese way, with a heaping mound of rice, some delicate steamed cabbage, and dakuan (yellow pickled radish). On top of the rice is a little spoonful of braised pork. It’s a lot of food for how much it costs (15 bones), and the tapioca starch they bread the chicken with makes it really light and crispy. It seems like the perfect breading for the msg-laced seasoning they throw on it, and the bit of pork they ladle onto the rice gives every kernel texture and savory juiciness.

So I made my own. I braised some pork in the style of lu rou fan, and as sides I made a blanched yu choy with oyster sauce, as well as pan roasted green peppers with pork belly fried in garlic ginger and soy sauce. It was all very good but the pan roasted green peppers burned a hole through my tongue. And my stomach.

7.5 out of 10.

Carbonara is an Italian noodle dish consisting of pasta noodles cooked in a thick viscous sauce made of eggs, pecorino romano, and rendered guanciale (cured pork jowl). I like how creamy the sauce is but I wanted to make it without cheese. So I made a “chinese” version of it.

 

The guanciale was replaced by lap cheong, the pecorino was replaced by a block of soft tofu blended with the eggs and rendered lap cheong, and I added garlic, ginger, white pepper (instead of black pepper because chinese), and garnished with green onion and cilantro. The end result was really quite good. It was very creamy. The only thing I would change is adjusting how salty it is and how much tofu to add to the sauce for the noodles.

 

I rate a 7.5/10

 

Japanese curry with rice, AKA “Kare Raisu” (カレライス) is a strange dish. It’s served with rice, is seasoned with a spice blend that features turmeric and coriander, and usually has some amount of ginger and garlic cooked into it. These are fundamental characteristics of many Indian curries (which is the land of curry). However, it also gets thickened with a flour-based roux and is based on meat, potatoes, carrots, and onions, which sounds an awful lot like an English stew or a French Bourguignon. It is a Japanese dish that claims to be Indian but is secretly kind of European. And I’m an alien that pretends to be a Korean that was born in America. And I sometimes claim to be Venezuelan. Thus I like curry because it is existentially confused and so am I.

Today I made a chicken curry.

The Solids

-a small Carrot

-Yukon Yellow Potato

-the White part of a Leek

-Chicken Breast

-2 minced Garlic Cloves (No Ginger(!))

The Liquids

–a tablespoon of Kikkoman soy sauce

-a tablespoon Lee Kum Kee Oyster sauce

-splash of Shaoxing cooking wine

-a teaspoon of Heinz Ketchup

-cup of water

The Roux

-At the beginning, three tablespoons of flour

-A couple tablespoons of canola Oil

-Tablespoon of Random Japanese Lady’s Homemade Spice Mix

Cooked in a nonstick wok on a burner stove at 4:30PM

 

Texture wise it was more or less right. I felt that it was a bit grainy because I didn’t liquify the roux properly. However, the thickness was right- the thickness of melted ice cream.

The chunks of potato were cut in a slightly large way, “rustic” was my intention. I liked that I could eat each piece of potato and really taste it. The leeks and carrot were small enough I didn’t notice their texture at all.

Taste was slightly bland. There was enough umami because the oyster sauce was working double time. However, it also gave the dish a very.. “chinese” umami that fought with the spice for control of the curry’s nationality.

The spices I didn’t toast or fry before adding. I wanted a very simple taste. The problem was that the spices had a slightly unpleasant “raw” taste to them, due to not being prepared.

Sweetness was not that noticeable, there was enough, there could have been more without the curry becoming a “sweet curry”.

Overall a very mid curry. It didn’t take me on a honeymoon to flavor town, the recipe is about as basic of a curry one can make without using actual curry blocks. That being said it was a good first attempt.

4.5/10

This morning, I woke up with cool hands and feet, and lightly sore legs. I dressed with the lights off and my eyes half closed, had to fumble around under the bed for my belt. I packed my things, got into the Minicooper, and drove north. I passed the commuters on their way to Bellevue, and got over the Mercer Island bridge into Seattle. I filed into the queue of cars merging onto I-5 in the shadow of the convention center and then drove up along the highway until I turned off into Northgate. I got a bottle of tea at a gas station and headed off again. At first I thought I’d drive up to Lynnwood, but I found myself hanging onto the perimeter of the lake instead. I didn’t have any destination in mind. I placed a new CD I ordered online (Tennis’ Pollen) in the load tray and turned up the volume. I took whatever road would get me farther away from where I’d once been.

It’s a liberating feeling when you’re on the road and you have nowhere to go. The lines of the road, the street poles, the shopfronts and the trees whip and blur past and it seems like the past and present are obliviated away leaving only pure and untrod future living.

Thousands of desperate men are fighting to the death in Eastern Europe, a wholly new form of intelligent life is being borne in by semiconductors and processors, and the earth is raging at our transgressions against it. But for a short time I’m not there at all. I’m beside the flowing, the rapid current of the entire world and yet I’m not of it or in it.