What I Cooked and Ate This Month: Sukiyaki, Bittersweet Brownies, Buttermilk Biscuits with Jam
A diary of the dishes defining my January
Hello! How are we? January is tough, and so are the headlines right now. If things aren’t feeling easy, know that you’re not alone. If you’re in the mood for some light food writing to break up the news, keep reading! If not, I completely understand.
Today, I’m sharing some notes on things I’ve cooked and baked recently. There will be bittersweet brownies! And buttermilk biscuits! And banchan! And other things that don’t start with “b” but are just as memorable.
Cooking & Eating
Sukiyaki
We live between two Japanese markets, and the proximity has inspired me to experiment more with Japanese cooking — along with, of course, my beloved Imamu Room videos. On a particularly cold day last week, I felt inspired to make sukiyaki, which I first heard about from Imamu. Sukiyaki, I learned, is a Japanese dish that typically consists of meat (most often thinly sliced beef), a variety of vegetables, and noodles in a sweet-and-salty broth of sake, soy sauce, sugar, mirin, and dashi. Since Teo and I have been building a Japanese pantry with each visit to our local markets, I only needed to buy the beef and vegetables to make the dish. (One of my greatest pleasures is already having everything — or almost everything — I need to make a dish I’m craving.)
For the vegetables, I opted for Napa cabbage, enoki mushrooms, yu choy, and scallions. For the protein: thinly sliced beef and a packet of fried tofu. And for the noodles: rice vermicelli. Everything came together quickly, and the result was profoundly soothing — hot broth, silky noodles, all the veg. It won’t be the last time I make sukiyaki, and I’m already scheming to prepare it for friends sometime soon. This recipe from the excellent blog Just One Cookbook was my guide, if you’re interested in making it yourself.
Risotto cakes
We made mushroom risotto for dinner one night, and while I love risotto the night of, I tend to find leftover risotto stodgy and difficult to resuscitate. The obvious answer to this dilemma is, I suppose, arancini, but I’m not always up for deep frying at home. Thus: risotto cakes. I added an egg to the leftover mushroom risotto, mixed it in, formed patties, lightly dredged them in panko, and fried them in a skillet. There was a bunch of parsley on its last legs in the fridge, so I turned it into an Italian salsa verde of sorts, with anchovy, chili flakes, lemon, and olive oil, to drizzle on top. Lunch, sorted.1
Bittersweet brownies
When I want to bake something chocolatey (or anything at all), Alice Medrich is my first point of reference. She’s a prolific cookbook author and baking genius, with a particular expertise in chocolate, and I find her recipes both enticing and trustworthy. I’m currently borrowing her cookbook Pure Dessert on Libby, which is where I found her bittersweet brownie recipe. There’s lots of butter and lots of real melted chocolate in the batter, which gives the brownies a rich taste and a soft, almost mousse-like texture. Medrich suggests baking them off in a round pan and serving wedges with whipped cream — “people will think you made something very fancy indeed.” Inspired! Perhaps that will be my birthday cake this year. Although I baked this batch of brownies as a gift, I couldn’t resist slicing off the crispy edges to enjoy myself.
Buttermilk biscuits and jam
I’ve long admired
Banchan
Olivia and I ate at the new restaurant Sunn’s recently, which I wrote about for
Thank you so much for reading. Tonight, I’m grateful to be safe at home in Brooklyn with a hot water bottle and a mystery novel. Life is hard! You’re doing great!
Love,
Phoebe
I credit
’s The Everlasting Meal Cookbook with my fixation on transforming leftovers into new meals that elicit as much joy as the original meal did. Adler’s book is an encyclopedia of leftovers — bursting with creative ideas to give yesterday’s meal new life. Highly recommend.
can i buy you a ticket to florida so you can cook for me all preseason long 😁
I appreciate the permission to skim. The risotto cakes reminded me of a boarding school memory. If we did not eat all the vegetables at dinner, we found them in our morning fritters! Ha Ha! Smooches to you!