Kome is my favorite sushi restaurant in Austin, and I love that they have specials so that I can continue to support them while also trying something new. In March, they offered a fermentation special. On the left is hama-toro (yellowtail belly) topped with a soy koji. Imagine a very fresh and rich dollop of miso on top of an equally unctuous fish. To the right are two wedges of miso-marinated cream cheese. The waiter and I agreed that this cheese was incredible—salty and soft with layers of flavor you don’t normally find in cream cheese. I have long wanted to make a similar miso-marinated tofu, and this might actually spur me to it. After those two, we have two lighter items. Tomato and cucumber are topped with a simple shio koji, showing a different side of the condiment than we saw with the thicker soy koji on the fish. The cucumber was sliced in a manner I had never seen before. At first glance it looked like normal half moons, but it’s actually sliced extremely thinly into fans, increasing the lightness of this bite. Last, as a palate cleanser, was a bit of crispy mountain yam. I have only ever had yamaimo as a gooey binder, so I learned something new about the humble yam.
I have a slight knee injury, so I can’t ride my bike, which means I can’t go anywhere. Stuck at home, I decided to deep clean my kitchen in preparation for CSA season. My friend Heidi single-handedly farms at The Farm at Caracara and her vegetables are deserving of a beautiful, clean kitchen. The most disgusting thing I found while cleaning so far was actually in the living room. We have an area rug under the coffee table, and under the area rug is an anti-slip mat that has small perforation. Dust accumulates in those cracks so even if you lifted up an edge and vacuumed under the rug, you wouldn’t necessarily full get out all of the debris tucked inside the mat.
While I was at it, I fried some red onions to make an onion paste. I don’t think there’s any other meal prep that’s worth doing today. I already have quite a number of ingredients in my fridge that are ready to go. Here’s my current “bowl supplies” list. My partner works from home and makes his own tacos or salads for lunch every day. I keep a running list of things we have in the fridge that he might consider using.
The cat thinks I am never home, so she’s been happy to have me puttering around the house today.
Here’s a beautiful dead moth that blew across my doorstep. It was about 4 inches across.
I think the last thing I need to do is use some lemon peel to make a scented-spray so that the room smells fresh instead of like caramelized onion.
This weekend, First Light bookstore hosted a release party for the new Fishwife cookbook. Steph Steele of neighboring Tiny Grocer interviewed Fishwife founder Becca Millstein and Fly By Jing founder Jing Gao. Guests who RSVPed and bought a cookbook were also treated to snacks made with their products and delicious NA cocktails. I have never seen the inside of First Light so packed, although trivia night is so popular that quizzers will be sitting on the ground outside. Getting food required a litany of “I’m sorry!”s and even throwing away your trash meant elbowing perfectly innocent cafe customers waiting in line for wine. I’ve never been to a cookbook event at the bookstore before so I don’t know if they are all like this or if this one was particularly large because of SXSW. I showed up two minutes before the start time and I felt like I was the last to arrive. Luckily, I was still able to grab one of the swag bags available to early RSVPs.
The snacks were a panzanella and two different onigiri stuffed with Fishwife salmon or trout. The salad was my favorite though and I was eating it with my fingers. Fishwife is all about paying a premium for amazing illustrations that convince you that you want to eat tinned fish. Before Fishwife, I had grown up eating canned tuna but otherwise associated canned fish with Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats eating out of cans at the city dump. Eating this classy panzanella out of a fish can combined the two worlds of gourmet products and feeling like a cat having a snack on the street. The NA martini was sweeter than a normal martini and I hope that they add it to their normal cafe menu.
The founders discussed their origins, cultural connections, and challenges. I learned a lot about the logistics of packaging and shipping a small product! The entire audience gasped when Gao mentioned glass jars being shipped out in manila envelopes, but then she added, “wait, that’s not even the horror story I wanted to tell you about.” While Fishwife had to overcome the American aversion to tinned fish, Gao had to grapple with the “low-key and high-key racism” that Chinese food faces in the market. She was asked, “how can Chinese food be premium?” I am glad that they both persevered because the variety and quality of foods we have access to in our homes now is the best part of the 21st century.
Since I’ve started weightlifting, I’ve been trying to make and eat more seitan because it has “good macros,” i.e. a lot of protein compared to other elements. Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s book Fake Meat has been a useful companion because it’s taught me many seitan tricks. There’s seitan made with beans, seitan made with tofu, seitan made with TVP, crumbly seitan, firm seitan—you name it. Today I made the “Roast Turki” which creates two small logs of what is basically tofurkey.
First you have to prepare TVP. This is the second seitan I made with TVP and the first one, a meatloaf, was too moist. It would have been great for a different meal, but honestly you want meatloaf to be kind of dry. This recipe explains what I did wrong in the last one. “If you don’t squeeze enough [water from the cooked TVP] it will mess up the water/gluten ratio and the world will end.” I’m sorry, my too-moist meatloaf might be responsible for what’s going on in the US government right now.
Next I had to blend up some secret ingredients including agar powder. I only had agar flakes, so I searched the Internet to see what the conversion ratio is. I found “it’s 1:1 as long as you grind the flakes,” 3:1, 4:1, and “it’s impossible to switch between the two.” I split the difference and added 3.5x as much flakes as the powder called for. I combined the TVP, secret slurry, and seasoned vital wheat gluten to make the dough. The texture was pleasant to knead; moist, but not worryingly so. Then I shaped it into two logs to bake.
Anxiously waiting for the TVP to cool down enough to squeeze.You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.One day maybe I’ll experiment with shaping.
The finished loaves were juicier than expected, certainly juicier than Tofurkey. The taste was very Tofurkey-esque though. I think my agar conversion worked out ok, but I may still have had too much liquid in my dough.
I used one loaf in a recipe for Turki Tetrazzini from the same book. I vaguely remember seeing turkey tetrazzini in women’s magazines in the 80s; it’s one of those cream of mushroom soup casseroles. The weird part is that it uses whole spaghetti noodles in the casserole. The flavoring was more or less the same as the turki, giving it a bit too much sameness. The creaminess makes it comforting, though, so I think I will be looking forward to the leftovers when I’m tired from work.
After many years, I am back on the hunt for amazing chilaquiles. If you are interested in chilaquiles, the Fois Gras Hot Dog blog has been tracking the dish in my absence.
6534 Burnet Road (near Yard Bar, Bufalina Due, and Jewboy Subs)
Arandinas was suggested on Reddit as a great spot for chilaquiles, but by the time I actually got around to visiting, it was now Taqueria Guadalajara. I don’t know if it’s the same owners as the other Arandinas locations around town, so I may have to stop by one of those as well.
Overall, these were classic chilaquiles and I was very satisfied. If I compare them to my all time favorites at Los Altos, they are missing the sour cream and absolutely perfect cheese that Los Altos uses. The cheese at Guadalajara was not melted until I mixed it into my chilaquiles. However, Guadalajara gets extra points for having onions and green chiles in the salsa. The onions have enough tooth in them to provide additional texture, so that you feel like you are eating a composed dish and not just salsa and chips. Unlike some chilaquiles, this one feels like more than the sum of its parts.
Guadalajara allows you to choose from several options including roja or verde and different proteins. Just for fun, here’s a picture of the Migas Supremas.
Cheesecake Factory
10000 Research Blvd Suite 4602 (The Arboretum)
One of my friends was given $200 worth of gift cards to the Cheesecake Factory so she took us for her birthday. The Cheesecake Factory is the Texas of restaurants. Everything is much larger and ostentatious than it needs to be. The ceilings are huge, the booths are huge, and the drinks are huge. I apologize in advance that I don’t remember very much about these chilaquiles as a result.
They were better than you would think but as far as chilaquiles go… they were interesting. Most of the dish was an egg and carnitas scramble. This scramble sat in a soup of tomatillo salsa along with seven chips, so it didn’t quite meet the definition of chilaquiles. There was also no cheese, but I do love a big blog of sour cream. The combination would have been flavorful, if it had a bit more salt. Unfortunately the watery salsa gave it an unpleasant texture that could have been remedied with more chips.
Taco Joint
2809 San Jacinto Blvd (North Campus)
(Sorry, I didn’t get a photo! It was after going to the gym, so my brain was mush.)
Taco Joint is my favorite place in town to get tacos. Every single one of their salsas would be in the running for my top ten salsa list. Their pecan iced coffee is so good I always manage to shotgun it before I’m done eating instead of nursing it all day long to prevent over-caffeination. Their prices are unrealistically low. I love, love, love Taco Joint.
Their chilaquiles, however, are terrible. Sorry. They don’t use tortilla chips but instead use what appear to be fried wontons. Maybe they are made from their flour tortillas. I don’t recommend them, but maybe that’s a good thing. It means the struggle over what to order is slightly easier.
Lazarus Brewing
4803 Airport Blvd
Fois Gras Hot Dog ranked Lazarus as one of their top chilaquiles in the city, whereas I am ranking it much lower. It’s a matter of taste; I prefer a big sloppy plate of melty cheese and beans. Lazarus chilaquiles are in the “fancy chilaquiles” category. They have avocado and pickled red onion and black beans, all foods that I love independently. Unfortunately, the portion size is small, the cheese is unmelted, and the chilaquiles themselves are quite dry. Notice that you can’t even see salsa in this photo, as beautiful as the bowl is.
This is a post in my series ranking all of the chilaquiles in Austin. It is not a serious endeavor because they’re all good chilaquiles, Brent.
What are chilaquiles? They are a Mexican “use up all the leftovers” dish usually served for breakfast in Tex-Mex restaurants. Tortilla chips are cooked in salsa and topped with cheese and eggs.
These are the chilaquiles that started it all for me. They weren’t the first I ever fell in love with, but they were so good they set me on the quest to see if there could possibly be any better in Austin. The salsa roja is just spicy enough and it douses the chips in just the right quantity. The refried beans are not a requirement of chilaquiles, but they are my favorite accompaniment. At Los Altos, they give you plenty of rich refried pintos. The whole plate is topped off with a large dollop of sour cream that provides the tartness needed to cut through the rich beans. What really earns these chilaquiles top rank, however, is the cheese. Los Altos uses a creamy Oaxacan that melts completely onto the chips. It’s chilaquiles perfection.
Eldorado Cafe veers slightly from traditional Tex-Mex in order to be a little more hip. Usually that solicits a side-eye, but here it really works. Like Los Altos, they have creamy melty cheese and sour cream. Their salsas here are amazing so whichever you choose for your chilaquiles will be delicious. You can pick your sides according to the menu, but I seem to remember them just giving me beans and potatoes without asking. That’s fine; I love beans! Usually I can do without breakfast potatoes, but these were “three potato hash,” with tiny bites of sweet potato and rajas mixed in. Every component on the plate shows attention to detail and flavor.
I had the chilaquiles at Veracruz’s brick-and-mortar location off of Research. Publications like Texas Monthly have called Veracruz tacos “best of Austin,” so I was disappointed with the chilaquiles. They make their own corn tortillas and fry them for the chilaquiles, which actully works against them here. Chips made from tortilla tend to be than the chips that usually add the crunch to chilaquiles in restaurants. There were are also several inconsistencies and service errors that prevented us from fully enjoying our chilaquiles. We ordered two plates and one was drenched in salsa while the ther had barely enough to even distinguish the dish from a pile of chips. The eggs were cooked differently in each dish too, with one dish having eggs that were well overcooked. Maybe it was an off day; we were sharing a table with strangers because the restaurant was packed and our companions complained about their dishes too. As for sides, it came topped with steak and sides of beans and maduros. I LOVE maduros–sweet plantains–so my eyes turned heart-shaped when I saw them on the menu. The steak however… I don’t really eat meat, so I ordered the chilaquiles vegetarian but still had to pay the same price. When I finally got my plate after a long wait, sure enough, there it was.
Of all of the chilaquiles I’ve tried in Austin, these were the most fast food-like but I really enjoyed them Full disclosure: I was absolutely ravenous so my judgement was impaired by the sheer pleasure of eating. The chips were crunchy, and the beans were basic in a good way. With beans, you don’t need to get fancy. The potatoes were basic in what I would consider a bad way. They were potatoes, that’s the best that could be said for them. One unique element was the eggs. These were the only chilaquiles I’ve had in Austin where the egg was scrambled. This is the more traditional Mexican way, but given a choice, I always ask for my eggs fried or over easy. Maybe the traditional Mexican way is better though; the scrambled eggs interlace with the chips, giving a good proportion of each item per bite. The only cheese was cotija, though, which is my least favorite cheese. Overall, a solid offering.
Last week I wrote about the things I didn’t know how I lived without. This week is less dramatic. I could certainly live without these things, but I am going to recommend them anyway because they have made my life marginally better.
As an example of how frivolous but great some of these things are, the first thing I’m going to recommend is a bag of sugar cubes. Not only sugar cubes but ~*~fancy~*~ sugar cubes. I popped into our local Whole Foods competitor for some item I could only get there and, like always, I ended up walking away with a handful of unnecessary things like jade rice and a bag of fancy sugar cubes. I think I mostly wanted to see what made a fancy sugar cube fancy (spoiler: I am still not sure). That was over a year ago, and despite using them pretty regularly, I still have a lot. What I’ve discovered is that they can be used to turn a bottle of Andre’ into champagne cocktails. Put a fancy sugar cube in a champagne flute. Sprinkle on some bitters. When you pour in the champagne, the sugar cube fizzes up like a science experiment. Guests find it delightful and it requires no mixing skills. Also think how hard core you look when you make your guests an Old Fashioned. It’s like you just morphed from one of the non-David Beckham-banging Spices into Posh Spice.
My next suggestion is decidedly un-Posh, though. (Bye-bye, David Beckham). I think everyone should have a supply of paper plates. You don’t want to have a reason to hesitate about having your friends over. If you’re worried about the environment, let me put it this way: if you have so many friends over for dinner that it actually affects climate change, you are probably also bringing a great amount of joy into the world.
Speaking of joy, let me introduce you to my salt pig.
Anything that makes it easier to properly salt your food is worth it. I’m not going to lie and pretend that I would like this as much if it didn’t look like a cute little pig. In programming, we have a concept called “rubber duck debugging”. The idea is that you can talk your problem through with anyone, even an actual rubber duckie like the one I have on my desk, and the process of talking it through helps you solve it. In my kitchen, instead of a rubber duck, I have Salt Pig. I complain to him about how my dish just doesn’t taste right and I’m worried. He always suggests the same solution: “add more salt.”
My last life recommendation is to buy a knife sharpener. We’ve all heard that a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. I’m personally a little skeptical, but I will heartily agree that a dull knife is less enjoyable. Even when I barely cooked for myself at all, I understood the value of a knife sharpener, I just grew up poor and was not a person who was in the habit of buying things. See my entry on pot holders if you need further proof of the lengths I go to to avoid buying things. In addition to it costing money, adding a knife sharpener had an difficulty level because you had to know how to use it, I thought. Turns out that I was confusing a knife sharpener with a honing steel, which is used to straighten the blade. A knife sharpener, instead, is generally simple to use and you can even get automatic ones. The one I had cost $5 and was worth it for the sheer amount of frustration it removed from my life.
Alright, comments are open. What item did you put off buying for a ridiculously long time only to discover what a fool you were?
I finally visited the new El Tacorrido that popped up in Brentwood. It’s way better than I expected for a fast food taco spot. The best part is that they have a drink called El Equinox that’s horchata with a shot of espresso.
Sparkled Ginger Cookies
We just returned from a trip to the U.K. and I bought myself an adorable tea towel and wanted to have a legit afternoon tea just so I could incorporate it somehow. This meant having a tea snack, so I made cookies, specifically the Sparkled Ginger Cookies from Vegan With a Vengeance. They were easy to make, but my dough ended up too wet so I had to add extra flour and keep my hands floured to shape the cookies. They ended up being the perfect cookies to have with tea.
Bulgogi tots and dumplings
We finally tried out 101 by Teahaus and it was fantastic. I got a rice bowl with fried basil tofu and the house sauce. It’s basically a fresher version of bibimbap. The house sauce is similar to the gochujang that’s usually served with bibimbap, but a bit sweeter and thinner. The toppings, except for the tofu, are all raw, and I added avocado, so it had a rather Southern California-feel to it. German got the bulgogi tots which looked amazing, like Chilantro’s kimchi fries but with tots instead of fries. He also got dumplings, which were pretty basic dumplings, but even a basic dumpling is a good dumpling!
I found some frozen crawfish tails at HEB that actually looked o.k. for frozen crawfish that’s imported from China, so I’m going to make a crawfish etouffee for dinner tonight. If all goes well, I’ll post the recipe to this blog soon.
My boyfriend and I live what some would term a “bachelor lifestyle”. Or if you are a millennial, if you looked at our apartment you might say we are having problems “adulting”. This is mostly because we are childless and can live our lives in any ridiculous manner we choose, not because we are irresponsible. Our living room may be decorated with month-old party decorations and our towels don’t match, but trust me, we have our shit together where it matters. And that includes kitchen tools.
Every now and then something new enters your life and you wonder how the heck you lived without it. I have several of those items in the kitchen, and today I would like to share my years of experience with them in case they haven’t entered your life yet. The best part is that each of these alone is pretty cheap. Cheap in the way that if you put them on your wedding registry, these are the items all your underpaid millennial friends will rush to buy.
I just realized I am wearing the same dress in the only other photo of me on this blog. I swear I have more than one outfit.
The first is a potholder, and preferably an oven mitt. Although I cut my crafting teeth as a child sewing and crocheting potholders, as a young adult they seemed frivolous. Why was I wearing a shirt if not to use for any task that required fabric, such as wiping my nose or grabbing burning items from an oven? I wish I had been self-aware enough to write down a list of all of the extremely dangerous ways I have moved hot objects in the kitchen, but if I were that self-aware, I would have just bought a damned potholder. Suffice it to say, my attempts were both creative and terrible in an America’s Funniest Home Videos-type of way.
In my family, most Christmas gifts come with the label “as seen on tv,” so I have also used an Ove Glove and a silicone oven mitt. I still prefer the traditional quilted oven mitts that you can get for $3 new or .50 from Goodwill, lightly singed. The Ove Glove has individual fingers, which feels weirdly unsafe to me, despite what the label says. Silicone oven mitts have the opposite problem; it feels like you’re trying to perform a delicate task in a Stay Puft suit. Nope, nothing beats a good old-fashioned fabric potholder, not even your shirt.
The next item I’m going to recommend is a bag clip, preferably a million of them. If you can see your photos under all of the magnetic clips on your fridge, you are doing it wrong. Similar to not owning a potholder, not having bag clips handy forces you to use up all of your creativity in useless places. You could be the next Picasso, dammit, if it weren’t for your ill-equipped kitchen.
Neither of these count as bag clips.
The most expensive item on my must-own list is a Magic Bullet. Remember how I said that all of my Christmas presents come from infomercials? This is the only infomercial product I’ve ever owned that does exactly what it says it does. I actually own its slightly higher-end cousin the Nutribullet, which is what I would recommend for vegans who are chopping lots of cashews. The Vitamix is always described as the vegan holy grail, but I’ve never encountered a recipe in which my Nutribullet didn’t perform the task at least well-enough. I use it any time a recipe calls for a blender, a food processor, or a grinder. I am going to have to write an entire other series about how I use my Nutribullet because I could talk about it all day.
Ok, just one more example. My ultimate quick dinner is to boil some pasta, and while it’s boiling, I throw whatever is laying around into the Nutribullet to make a sauce. Peppers and miso, cashews and nutritional yeast, avocado and basil, microwave-steamed cauliflower and practically anything. Drain the pasta and toss with the sauce. Done.
My last suggestion for must-have kitchen tool is an electric tea kettle. Yes my fellow apple-pie-blooded, baseball cap saluting Americans, I am talking to you. You don’t realize how much hot water you really need in the kitchen until it’s easily available to you. Think of all the times you’ve let the tap run just to get your water slightly warmer than tepid. You can do better.
Well that’s it for now. I’m going to see if I can do a hypnosis session and get back to you with my repressed memories of kitchen tragedies that happened from using forks to remove hot items from the oven.
I found some frozen crawfish tails at HEB that actually looked o.k. for frozen crawfish that’s imported from China, so I’m going to make a crawfish etouffee for dinner tonight. If all goes well, I’ll post the recipe to this blog soon.
