Hello!
Fair warning: a lot of cooking went down this week. I was in a good groove and excited to cook. This isn’t always the case! There have been seasons within the past year where I relied entirely on the freezer section of Trader Joe’s, and others where I couldn’t stand to spend another moment in my kitchen. Go as the spirit moves you.
What I made for dinner
Oyako udon. This one is for the weekend project folks. I wanted to try it after seeing Sonoko Sakai post about a webinar she hosted on how to make oyako soba, a dish of fresh soba noodles served in a dashi broth with greens, soft-boiled and marinated nitamago eggs and soy broiled chicken. I found out about the workshop after it had already passed so I just decided to wing it, using the base recipes from her excellent cookbook, “Japanese Home Cooking.”
Yes, this recipe has four other sub-recipes. Don’t run away! I linked out to each in the ingredient list below. Once you have your dashi (which is a three ingredient recipe) and your shoyu tare (another three ingredient recipe), the rest of the sub-recipes build off of each other — the nitamago eggs are marinated in dashi and shoyu tare and the chicken is basted in the shoyu tare.
I do intend to try making my own soba noodles at some point — a bag of Maine Grains buckwheat flour stares me down every time I open the pantry — but I had frozen Wegmans udon on hand. Hence, oyako udon instead of oyako soba.
Okayo udon
Adapted from Sonoko Sakai’s “Japanese Home Cooking”
Serves 4, generously
8 cups (2 L) bonito and kombu dashi
3/4 cup (180 ml) shoyu tare (shoyu tare recipe is below the chicken recipe)
2 heads of bok choy, chopped
2 scallions, white and light green parts thinly sliced
6 oz. shiitake mushrooms, sliced
16 oz. cooked udon noodles
Bring your dashi to a boil in a large pot over medium-high heat and add the shoyu tare, bok choy, scallions and mushrooms. Reduce the heat to medium and cook for 3-4 minutes, then lower the heat once more to barely a simmer while you get everything else ready.
Divide your cooked udon noodles into individual bowls.
Cut each of the eggs in half and slice your chicken thighs into manageable pieces. Arrange overtop of your noodles in the bowls.
Ladle the hot dashi and vegetables into the bowls and serve immediately.
Other things I made for dinner
Brown sugar tofu and mushroom spring rolls: This recipe is a favorite from Heidi Swanson’s cookbook “Near & Far.” I only had enough spring roll wrappers to cover dinner, so I served everything over rice for lunch the next day with a nitamago egg leftover from the oyako udon.
Seared sous-vide chicken breasts with Caesar-style cabbage wedges and roasted applesauce: The chicken breast recipe was from last week’s newsletter and the Caesar-style cabbage was from Molly Stevens’s book “All About Dinner.” Those were well and good, but what I really want to talk about here is Judy Rogers’s roasted applesauce from “The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.” It comes out chunkier and more caramelized than you’d expect and a tad richer, thanks to the butter that you dot over the apples before you tuck your pan into the oven. It will ruin you for all other applesauces and, as a bonus, make your kitchen smell great while it cooks.
Red wine-braised short ribs with horseradish cheddar mashed potatoes: Much hullabaloo was made about the weather in Buffalo leading up to this weekend. In the end we did get some blizzard-ish conditions and lake effect snow, the perfect antidote to which is an all-day braise. This recipe was plucked at random out of a Google search, a technique that I usually try to avoid in favor of sources with more testing. But this was one of the few recipes I found that called for less than 2 lbs of short ribs (most called for four — in this economy!?) and didn’t include carrots. So I’ll give credit where credit is due — Life As A Strawberry, I know nothing about you but this recipe was great. I added about a half of a tablespoon of horseradish to the mashed potatoes at the end for some zip.
What I made that wasn’t for dinner:
I made and froze a few things for future me to eat for breakfast over the course of the next few weeks. Thank you, past me.
Power pancakes from “Where Cooking Begins” by Carla Lalli Music. These are chock full of things that are good for you and quite filling but still manage to hit the pancake spot. The actually cookbook offers you a bunch of different ways to “spin” the recipe — I used it to sub in yogurt for buttermilk because it was what I had on hand.
Spinach, feta and sweet potato muffins from Heidi Swanson’s blog 101 Cookbooks. I had cubed sweet potatoes leftover from last week’s maple chile-glazed sweet potatoes so I used that instead of pumpkin.
What I’m reading:
Saying Goodbye With Beans: Samin Nosrat ended to her New York Times Magazine column this week (so she can work on her next book!!!) with an ode to beans/treatise against Instant Pots.
The Indoor-Dining Debate Isn’t a Debate at All: “Given where we are right now, in New York and in the country as a whole, “I really want to” doesn’t feel like enough.”
The Absurd Logic of Internet Recipe Hacks: on viral gross-out food videos and why the internet revels in communal disgust.
Other ephemera from this week:
Sruthi Pinnamaneni is doing a deep dive miniseries for Reply-All covering the implosion at Bon Appetit last summer
Another podcast note: Carbface x The French Chef!
File this one under “Jesus Christ, Buffalo”
Alright, see y’all next Sunday.