See below for our recent and past cooking adventures!
We started cooking together during Summer 2018, and these blog posts serve as a log of our projects. We're really proud of some, and others will hopefully give you a good laugh.
Itadakimasu!
So the first thing you might notice is that we’ve missed a week (or maybe not). You’re right! We were in Luxembourg, eating chocolate cake, an overpriced (and underwhelming) sushi buffet, and some pretty awesome traditional Lux food. (Shoutout to Six’s friend, ICMindTheCrap.)
After last week , we needed an easy, satisfying project as a break (you can see how much it traumatized us). So this week, we faced the salmon again…but in a much better context. We got a nice whole fillet and some beans for a wholesome, healthy meal: miso-marinated salmon bake, sautéed beans, and white rice with peas.
To wash out the strange taste of yesterday’s cooking project, and after facing the temptation of the market’s crepe stand, we found a savory and sweet solution to get rid of some of our excess flour from our bing project: Crepes!
This week, we tackled something a little out of our comfort range: trope-y Japanese food. In particular, neither of us actually knew how to make this stuff: salmon head miso soup, omurice, and sushi. The inspiration for this was actually a new all-you-can-eat sushi place by Jesus Green (shoutout to Yamato II), which we decided was too expensive but made us crave some Japanese stuff. Of course, if we did some Japanese food project, we had to include omurice (for the aesthetics, Fish insisted).
Following the Asian theme from last week, we made something with our own dough: Chinese beef pies and chive boxes. Actually, part of the reason we decided to make the chive boxes was because the rip-off Asian store happened to have chives, which we had been looking for the entire week. But this pairing actually turned out pretty well. Fish’s mom recently started making her own beef pies, which was the inspiration for that part, and Six’s family makes their own chive boxes, so we both knew what the end product should be…except neither of us had actually made them alone from scratch.
For this week’s cooking expedition, it’s going back to our roots: dumplings! Six’s family makes their own dumplings often, so this was more his expertise. (Fish doesn’t really know how to make dumplings, even though her parents are pretty good at wontons.) We decided on a classic flavor: pork and cabbage. Dumplings are great, we thought, so we should make a lot and freeze some for later! Our goal was about 80 dumplings, or maybe a little less. Little did we know the messes to follow.
Even though we just had a full day of cooking yesterday, we decided to go at it again today. This time: steak, with a side of sweet potatoes, bell peppers and onions, and zoodles. We look far and wide for a cow to slaughter, but alas, none could be found. Thankfully, we had already anticipated this when we bought and age-dried a nice cut of bone-in steak the day before from a butcher stand at the Town Center market. This was an expensive steak. As such, we treated it as royalty by giving it a nice reverse sear. Step 1, bake at 275F for half an hour.
Out of a whole (deconstructed) chicken, we decided to make both a stir fry and a soup!