Stuff I've Been Cooking - October 2023

Highs and lows and lots of drama

Since I last gave a “Stuff I’ve Been Cooking” update, late summer has glided into fall, and the season of heavy comfort classics is upon us. But before we turn our clocks back, let me tell you about some of the fun dishes I made to usher in Autumn.

Coconut Cake

Some Watch What Crappens listeners recently descended on a local Viet-Cajun restaurant named My Crab House (née Oh My Crab!) in an effort to keep it in business. Not sure if the effort actually helped (or was needed), but what better way to top off a meal of spicy crab and shrimp than with a big ol’ coconut cake. Ina Garten’s recipe is legendary, and I’ve always wanted to try it, but I thought I’d go hardcore with this doozy from Cheryl Day. I’m glad I did because this gave me a chance to learn about a new ingredient to me: cream of coconut. Not coconut cream, mind you. But cream of coconut. Apparently it’s a) well known, b) commonly stocked in supermarkets, and c) the syrupy coconut stuff that goes into a piña colada and other adult beverages. Who knew? Other than everybody.

Welp, this recipe calls for plenty of coconut cream (Coco Lopez is recommended, but I had to suffice with what I found: Coco Réal) and more sugar and butter than you could ever imagine. Specifically, seven cups of sugar and five sticks of butter. By the time this cake was done and frosted, it must have weighed nearly ten pounds. Not for the faint of heart. This was a monster of a cake, and… it was fantastic. Moist, light, flavorful, decadent — a true showstopper. Shockingly, it didn’t scream “coconut.” If anything, it tasted like a vanilla cake with a strong coconut undercurrent. I really didn’t mind. It was delicious.

But yeah… not a snacking cake. This is a cake for a crowd. No one human should take on those ingredients by themselves.

Sheet-Pan Chicken Thighs With Spicy Corn

My love for corn is well-documented; so I was delighted when my mom sent me this recipe from Melissa Clark in the New York Times. Boneless chicken thighs are slathered with a garlicky, mayonnaise-based marinade and then roasted on a sheet pan with corn. The mayo may sound repulsive to you, but if I had written “egg, oil, and lemon juice,” you probably wouldn’t even wince. Justice for mayo! Anyway, I’m a huge fan of sheet pan dinners, and this one was a delight. Next time I might go a bit more aggressively with the seasoning and the garnishes. And while this feels like a very summery dish perfect for fresh corn, the recipe actually calls for frozen corn, which means it can be a year-round affair.

Grilled eggplant and soba noodle salad with nearly nuóc chấm

I am loving Hetty Lui McKinnon’s vegetarian cookbook Tenderheart, source of the triumphant broccoli loaf I raved about in September. Another successful recipe is this eggplant dish, which recently won many accolades at a friend’s potluck. Batons of roasted eggplant are tossed with soba noodles and a vegan nuóc châm (hence the “nearly” in the recipe name), along with herbs and peanuts and chiles. It’s all very bright and flavor bomb-y, as is often the case with Southeast Asian-inspired dishes. I really loved this dish, despite me not being an eggplant superfan.

A few things to note: first, I doubled the recipe so there would be enough for the entire potluck. This led to soba noodle drama, and I quickly learned the hard way that doubling soba noodles in a pot of hot water is not always wise. Many of them clumped together and cooked unevenly, causing the noodles to adhere together at the uncooked end but also become totally flaccid and limp at the other end. Basically, my soba looked like buckwheat pompoms. I spent some effort pulling the noodles apart one by one, but some were beyond saving. The lesson here is to either boil fewer noodles at a time or be more attentive to clumping when cooking larger batches.

The other lesson learned, which may be an obvious one, is to really try to eat as much of this as possible when it’s fresh. This dish was still lovely a day later, but at the 48 hour mark and beyond, the eggplant headed on a textural odyssey that I wasn’t totally on board for. Hmm… maybe the true takeaway is to just not double this recipe in the first place…

Bean, kale & linguiça skillet

I really enjoy chef Dan “Grossy” Pelosi on the ‘gram, and so I was particularly excited about his debut cookbook, Let’s Eat. The collection focuses on Italian recipes; so one might think I would start with a pasta, but I made a strange pivot to this dish instead, mainly because I loved the idea of all these components swirling together in harmony. Unfortunately, things went awry pretty much from the outset. First, I didn’t do my own shopping, instead relying on a very lovely Instacart lady who could not find the Portuguese linguiça sausage at the supermarket (I swear I’ve seen it there so many times). As a substitute, I opted for Spanish chorizo, which doesn’t quite match the sour bite of linguiça, but works decently well in its place. This led to more confusion, and long story short: I somehow amassed packages of Spanish chorizo, Mexican chorizo, and some sort of other chorizo, which I ultimately decided was Mexican too. Notably, Spanish and Mexican chorizos are entirely different beasts, and none of them are linguiça (but all of them are drama, apparently).

Well, this dish just didn’t work out. I don’t know what went wrong, and I won’t solely blame the sausage. As I cooked the beans and sausage and kale together, it all looked absolutely beautiful and luscious, but in the end, the dish had an unmistakeable bitterness that I couldn’t shake. Had I burned the garlic? Was it the kale? I don’t have the answers. All I know is that I was sad. Very sad. Plus, this was my last meal before my Yom Kippur fast; so, it was particularly devastating to churn out a dud that would have to power me through a High Holiday (notably, I broke my fast eight hours early). I’d like to try this again because there’s just no way these ingredients could lead my astray. Conveniently I documented this harrowing journey on TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8hPXQrk/

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Rounding out the list of dishes I’ve been cooking lately are some items that I enjoyed so much I’ve decided they will all get their own proper entries on NBD Fancy. As a preview, here’s what they are:

• Whole wheat, chocolate, and orange braided bread from Norwegian Baking Through the Seasons

• Log cabin cooking: lasagna, onion soup and other cozy foods

• A late night bean experiment

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What have you been cooking lately?