In an effort to do something to mark the passing of days during covid times, we've implemented a number of themed days.
- Monday - board game night
- Tuesday - No tech Tuesday (at all, zero, not even podcasts or music or phone calls or texting)
- Wednesday - craft night
- Thursday - A-Z Food
- Friday through Sunday - YOLO
This gist is to document Thursday's activities, A-Z food. The idea going in was "cook something on Thursday that is related to that week's letter", but so far we've stuck with each letter representing a country, and choosing a popular dish from a country to cook.
We aren't giving ourselves any hard and fast rules (e.g. "dim sum" is probably not the absolute best choice to represent the Canton region of China, but we wanted to make dim sum so we went with it!), and we might at some point make a choice based on something other than a country (e.g. Mushrooms instead of Malawi).
I'm recording these in case we want to go back and make a recipe we made previously, but also in case any friends want to cook along with us.
For the pastry we used this BBC Good Food recipe (I try to use BBC Good Food for as much as possible because I like their recipes and I like that they use mass measurements). Again, ONLY for the pastry though.
For the filling we modified this recipe slightly and used smoked paprika instead of sweet / regular. We used generious measurements for spices, and also added a bit (~ 1/2 - 1 teaspoon) of cayenne because we like to have at least a LITTLE spice. We also used (strangly?) manzanilla olives stuffed with pimento (for cocktails) instead of "normal" green olives because we had easy access to them and felt like the extra flavor would be good. I would do the same again.
I feel seasoning is really important - honestly I don't normally love empanadas because it seems a lot of them I've had in the past are fairly bland. We thought the recipe combo described above made very very good food. We froze the emanadas we didn't eat the first night and had them for lunch for a week, which was amazing (just wrapped them in cling film and microwaved).
(oh, Lindsay had planned to make chimichurri but somehow I forget to buy parsly and so she ended up making "salsa golf" or "salsa rosa". P.s. why does this recipe have so many words, I don't understand. I've noticed this trend though, and I have to believe it's an SEO thing or something? Actually this is interesting IMO, I honestly don't WANT all of those words all the time, but maybe just having a short recipe doens't cut it these days if you want to rank well?)
10/10
Making a shrimp stock sounded fun, which was a big part of the reason we decided on this recipe. Also "Bobó" starts with a B, and that's double Bs, so seemed like a good choice. Also we love shrimp.
This is the recipe we went with, but we used a different recipe for makign the stock, honestly we sort of just made it up but roughtly used this set of ingredients - with the exception of thyme.
Overall, I would not make this recipe again to be honest. Just a bit too bland / gluey for us.... The best part of the entire dish was the stock in my opinion, which would have better used on a different dish I think.
I also used taro instead of manioc aka yucca aka cassava - I had counted on Oakland China town having cassava, but apparently they don't at this point in the season, so I was stuck with taro, which is absolutley not the same thing or even a great substitute for cassava... still I think it didn't have a huge impact on the final dish.
6/10
OK, this might be a bit of a stretch, I actually had "bao" in my head and we sort of worked backwards and justified the Canton region of China.
We decided to make dim sum we should make at least two different types, and we ended on char siu bao and shu mai.
I've made bao a few times in the past (one of my favorite things I ever made was something I semi-made up, a ramen inspired pork belly chashu filling bao) and in my opinion it's surprisingly easy and great way to make something interesting / fun to eat. Possibly not that super healthy, but YOLO.
One of the things I've been most shocked by so far was how amazing the char siu (a sub-recipe - plan accordingly!) was. Normally when I buy pork shoulder / pork but, it's for making pulled pork, and normally I do a lot of trimming and sorting through the cooked meat to make sure it's "clean" (I'm weird about meat) without too much fat or any weird connective tissue.... but this char siu recipe I followed to the letter and it just made some unbelievably great meat. The Chinese 5 spice really makes things smell / taste amazing.
Speaking of pork shoulder, we bought 3.5lbs of bone in pork shoulder which I cut off to make ~2" diameter lenths. I also marinated the pork for a full 3 days in the fridge in a plastic bag, making sure to move the pork around every morning and evening to make sure the marinade penetrated evenly.
One note bout the shu mai (shumai? 烧卖?) is that the recipe we used (linked above) was not what I've had before at dim sum places... the lemon grass was too Thai testing IMO. Also, Lindsay, whome I love deeply, but (sorry!) added a Thai chili for some reason ((┛ಠ_ಠ)┛彡┻━┻), which did not help. Overall I'd probably look for a shrimpier / simplier shrimp shu mai recipe if we did it again. Which we will.
8.75/10
A big part of the motivation for us choosing Djibouti was the laxoox. To be clear, we don't know ANYTHING about laxoox, but after googling and reading it seems it's similar (or maybe the same?) to Ethiopian injera, which again we don't know a ton about but enjoy and thought it would be interesting to try to make.
We didn't spent a TON of time googling and went with low hanging fruit in terms of recipe choices (sometimes I like ot use google translate to search for the recipe in the native language to have a better chance at finding more "real" recipes as somebody living in a region might find, e.g. 肉じゃが instead of nikujaga... but we didn't do that here, so 🤷!), but came up with this for the laxoox (though we might make this sourdough version as well because we have Captain Tom, our sourdough starter, ready).
Another note: as mentioned above I did some pretty lazy googling to come up with these recipes, and it seems some recipes have crossover between food from Djibouti and Somalia and to a lesser extent Ethiopia. I think I'd have to do more work to better understand some of the differences. One thing I think (maybe?) I pick up is that one big difference between laxoox (lahooh?) and injera is that injera seems to be sour / fermented. Maybe we'll make injera when we get to E and compare... but really the ingredients seem basically the same (and what's more, depending on the recipe we've read for injera and laxoox and lahooh, there is normally a mix and match of the same ingredients, teff / semolina / weat flour / rice flour / etc).
For the lamb dish (Skoudehkaris) we are going to use this recipe. To be honest I'm not super hopeful this is going to be my favorite food, mainly because I feel like this looks like it's going to be somewhat bland. We went to a halala butcher in Berkeley to buy the lamb, and it looks amazing, so even if the food is bland hopefully the lamb is great.
...pending...