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All is well in this world, I'm finally in possession of 豆瓣酱 again. Never shall I take you for granted again, no other flavour of braised meat taste as good.

But since I just made a pot of pork should ragu, here's some 麻婆豆腐 instead to celebrate this occasion:

jam

Things I've been feeding myself:

saag paneer with quinoa rice

I'm still trying to figure out what's the best way to use frozen spinach. The paneer I bought taste really bland...not surprisingly. I'd make this again for when I feel like making my own cheese, or maybe substitute with tofu or eggs.

 pork shoulder ragu

I'd worship at the temple of pork shoulder, such a cheap cut of meat is so so delicious. There's pretty much a many braised pork shoulder dishes in every cuisine that eats pork.

One problem is that the smallest pork shoulder sold at Sainsbury juuuuust fits in this pot, so I have no room to stir the sauce which resulted in a thick layer of burnt sludge at the bottom of my pot. The sludge that would've been super soft onion and carrots ;_; Next time I might take out the pork every time I turn it so I can properly stir the sauce. This dish also conveniently used up the small bottle of wine that I bought for sardines but didn't use.

Many glorious bowls pots of pasta to come hnnng

but first I gotta remember to not pour out all the pasta water, a lot is needed to emulsify cheese.

rear view

Coldplay's "A Head Full of Dreams" wins as the most therapeutic album I have, but this ain't bad either:

This song sorta reminds me of Bad Habits, which is probably the MVP of studying music in forth year. I wish more artists would include longer descriptions like this.

late night phone calls

CNY potluck was fun, but back to working today :(

vinegar

Chocolates are hands down best Valentine's gift

Ahhhhhhhhh William Curley chocolates are so yummy. I'm rationing one column per day. Today I had green tea, piedmont hazelnut, coconut, amedei chuao, and the upper left corner one I couldn't identify (and didn't match any on the accompanying legend). There was a hint of sourness in the filling.

days go and i'm fine

Soundtrack for making hourly hot water / electricity load data for SAM...8760 rows to copy and paste 168 cells at a time "orz Why can't we model an office or condo with less variable occupancy?

all

I've found the perfect pasta combination from The Art of the Larder, paraphrased from its description: salty ham and cheese, bitter radicchio, sweet onion and creamy sauce. It's so good that I accidentally cooked two portions worth and ate it all. Gonna regret it later, but very much enjoying it right now.

A couple changes I made / would make for the next iteration:

• Use a thinner pasta, probably linguine 
• Up the other ingredients to pasta ratio: at least a full radicchio per 2 portions (photo shows half) 
• Used creme fraiche instead, increased amount to 50ml per 2 portion (recipe states 75ml per 4 portions). This is going to be my cheat for cream sauces from now on, just dollop it in with the pasta
• Not to slice the onion too thinly, I overdid it this time and instead of nice soft onions I had some dried up charred pieces. 

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Made sardine in vinegar after finding sardines in Sainsbury with help of the people behind the seafood/meat counter. I've rarely interacted with those staff since most of what I buy comes pre-packaged. 

Cleaning these buggers gave me a big shallow cut on my palm and a deep gorge on my fingertips "orz That makes 4 scars in the process of healing on my left hand, I'm great at taking care of myself smh. I naively thought the sardines were deboned and fully descaled, it was definitely not the case so I mistakenly was rubbing my hand along the fish under the tap, which is the perfect opportunity for the rows of bones sticking out along the belly cut to stab my hand. On second thought, for myself whose very picky with fish (prefer to pick out bones on plate and dislike fish skin), there is very little meat for me to consume on each sardine. Too bad they taste yummy. Next time I'll try with mackerel instead.

served with crisps

End result turned out bit too vinegar-y, should've cut the vinegar with some wine. The extra onion and vinegar would make a good pasta dressing.

could've said

Excessively snacking because there's too many input variables to find "orz this project smh

Dinner for the past couple of days, it's really just a dark brown blob of root veg and sausage (too much dark soy sauce, opps) but looks decent garnished with pickled radish and green onion:

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Also blasting various songs on repeat one in attempts to concentrate:


I know the two songs sound nothing alike, but the main line in the lyrics really reminds me of Swallowed in the Sea.

Polpo

This is the best case of placing an image across the spline I've ever seen:

The curvature of the pages accentuates the ripples in the reflection.

pile

Attempt #2 at ricotta using Serious Eat's recipe, this time with pea sott'olio via Art of the Larder:

These two recipes work well together in terms of preparation order too. Start heating the milk for the ricotta and then chop the aromatics for the peas and set those cooking. By now the milk is probably at the right temperature to coagulate, so do that and set the curds to drain. Now add the peas to the pot and prepare the mint & lemon while the peas cook. Then everything's done and ready to assemble.

The ricotta turned out more moist this time, which is what I prefer, although still very mild tasting, which I guess is just what ricotta taste like? Not sure what's the relative effect of lowering the temperature (165F vs 200F) and changing the ratio of milk to vinegar (500:30ml). The yield is pretty low, two slices of bread used up half the batch or 250ml worth of milk. But then again it's so darn easy to prepare that not much time or effort is saved by buying it.

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The best part of finally upgrading to macOS High Sierra is Handoff, insanely useful.

rumble

Stuff I've been feeding myself:

 quick "roasted" carrots / "aleppo" carrot salad / ice cream with hot honeycomb candy

I'm a little proud of this shortcut I've come up with for mimicking roasted carrots. Start by microwaving covered carrots with some water to steam them until starting to become soft, then sautéing with generous amount of oil until charred. Finally toss with some powdered spices (cumin and coriander is very good, garam masala and turmeric is nice too).

I've been eating a lot of carrots since they're super cheap and I suppose nutritious? Never been a fan of them raw (unless shaved into thin ribbons) so trying to expand my repertoire beyond braising and other time consuming ways to make them sweet and soft. The carrot salad is not bad, good enough to eat again for sure, but not amazing. I do very much like the spice mixture of smoked paprika, chilli powder (both to substitute for the namesake aleppo pepper), lemon zest, ground cumin and sugar; the mix is good for dipping bread in with some olive oil.

The hot honeycomb candy was pretty much a failure since I didn't mix in the baking soda very well. The texture was not as airy / crunchy as it could've been, and storing it for a week in UK's humidity just killed it even more. But mixing it into ice cream did help revive the crunch (not sure why).

Dad's meatball soup / more quick roasted carrots with daal / homemade ricotta

My dad's been boasting to me about his meatball soup for a while now, so I've faithfully followed his (vague) instructions to recreate it. The meatballs do turn out light and airy.

For 1lb meat, add:
~50ml oil
minced ginger and some liaojiu /shaoxin wine
2 big spoon (a regular eating sized spoon) corn starch
season with proportion of ⅓ salt ⅓ soy sauce
enough water to make half dry half wet consistency
Stir all together until air has been whipped into the meat mixture

Cook (a lot of) tomato in water over medium low heat until fallen apart
Add meatballs, turn heat to high and check for doneness after 5 mins
Add in chopped green onion and serve

I've taken the liberties of sauteing some leeks at the beginning of making the soup and adding some iceberg lettuce (it's unexpectedly wonderful in soup as it retains some crunch) at the end.

Same carrots again, the daal makes a nice dip for the carrots.

So I've tried making cheese, although ricotta which is the easiest cheese to make. I scaled down the recipe by 10 since I didn't want to risk messing up a whole batch. For my specific milk (whole milk from co-op) and vinegar (apple cider, 5% acetic acid), the amount of vinegar was too much, just a tablespoon was enough to coagulate the curds. Might try a ratio of 1000:25ml milk to vinegar for my next batch. My cheese was also very dry and crumbly without much draining, it was never really a spreadable texture. To be honest the taste is not intensely milky as I expected, but not sure if that's because of unrealistic expectations or poor execution. Going to try Sainsbury's ricotta (and mascarpone) to see if homemade is actually better.

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I've started on my second pu-er sample: 2009 Nan Mu Chun "Wu Liang Mountain Blue Label" raw pu-erh tea and it's a good drink. Very reasonably priced too. But then again I've actually liked all of the wu liang samples I've tried from YS...am I uncritical or got lucky and found my favourite region? 

Nicole

Excuse the silence for the time being, it's currently feeling like midterms level of work.

New shoes and some ice cream to mark the end of a hectic week.

I need to stock up on block heel shoes and forest green everything while they're still trendy.