58. Several More Delicious Scalable Recipes for Posterity

Here are a few more delicious and mostly scalable recipes that I’ve made repeatedly with great results which I mostly haven't committed to text. Unfortunately, it's still true that none of them are vegan, though the desserts at least are vegetarian. This is a recipe blog now, I guess. (It’s not. Don’t worry. Or do; I’m not your parent.) No pictures this time, as I'm travelling; maybe I'll add some later.

Roman Showup Stew: An excellent lentil-based stew of the kind that ancient Romans might recognize, except for the part where it's got a bunch of unfamiliar but superior ingredients in it, was cooked using exceptionally fine tools, has a few absurdly expensive (for the time) spices and ingredients in it, and also it'd be too spicy for them to eat. Take that!

• 1 can lentil soup (I favor Progresso)
• 3 large slices of Spam or equivalent mass of bacon (optional but highly recommended)
• 1/2 a large red onion
• 8-12 cloves garlic 
• 1 large russet potato
• (opt) 1 medium carrot
• ~3/4c cooked rice - sushi white, sushi brown, or barley/white admixture; about 1 large paddle
• cream (a large splash, ~1/4c)
• butter (~2 tbs for frying, to taste for stew)
• Worcestershire sauce or other garum (about 12 dashes)
• cumin to taste (~2 tsp)
• black pepper, sea salt (iodized is best) to taste
• 1 large squeeze honey
• wine - ideally white but red is fine (1 large splash, ~1/4c)
• at least 1 tablespoon sambal oelek or 1 tsp scotch bonnet sauce (Sriracha might substitute adequately; habaneros or jalepenos can also serve)
• 6 bay leaves (optional) 

In a (steel or copper) pot, heat up the lentil soup. Add the rice, garum, honey, wine, cream, extra butter, chilli pepper, cumin, salt, black pepper, and bay leaves when ready; that can happen whenever but earlier is slightly better. Dice up the salt pork, if you're using any, and fry it until crispy; add it and the grease to the stew. Peel the vegetables. Peel and cube the potatoes and add them to the pot. Crush and mince the garlic, peel and chop the onions, and peel and dice the carrots; sweat them (fry them lightly) in butter until they smell delicious. Once ready, add the aromatics to the pot. Stir well and boil gently until the potatoes are as soft as you like them. Best served with fresh bread, a ketchup crema, and topped with minced onion.

Grandma Kim's Northern-Style Jangajji: One of Grandma Kim's old family recipes. A last remnant of a now mostly-gone Northern Korean food culture. I transcribed the recipe personally in the interests of archiving and repeatability; I got Grandma Kim to let me measure her handfuls and splashes and pinches and "enough"s. A family favorite; not meant to be eaten alone, but rather as a side dish. Goes well with rice or rice porridge, and almost any Korean food; also goes outstandingly well with many Western foods, most notably anything with cheese in it. I've enjoyed it with the above lentil stew, on pizza, on buttered toast and toasted bagels with cream cheese, with mac and cheese, and as part of charcuterie boards.

 

Per 3.5#/1.6kg dried mu/daikon radish:

Broth:

• 5c water
• 1/2 c dried anchovy
• 1 medium onion, coarsely sliced
• 1 medium ginger root, peeled and cut in 3 (~3 in^3 or 4 thumb-sized peeled pieces)
• 2 sheets dashima (~32 in^2)
• 1/2 a large asian pear, or Fuji/honeycrisp apple

Boil for ~10 minutes, take broth, discard solids.

Rinse the dried mu briskly to avoid its soaking up too much water. Rinse it twice in a basin. First rinse: thorough, with a scrubbing motion, until dried mu begins to soften. Squeeze and collect radish in a colander. Second rinse: quicker. Squeeze & collect again.

Seasonings:

• 2.5c low-sodium soy sauce, 3.5c soba concentrate, or mix
• 1.5c gochugaru (Korean red pepper), finely ground
• 0.5c white wine (not red)
• 0.75c oligosaccharide syrup, light corn syrup, (or maybe honey)

Use a food processor to grind the gochugaru further if needed. Add the soy/soba first and then the gochugaru to the rinsed dried mu, one at a time, mixing and macerating each time; after the soy, wait 30 minutes. Then add the wine and oligo syrup to the broth once cool. (You can also add the gochugaru first - it doesn't hugely matter so long as they're added separately and even that probably doesn't matter.)

Cool the broth. Once at room temperature, add 2 cups of it to the dried mu mixture. Because the dashima and dried anchovy absorb water, this should be basically all of the broth.

Added seasonings: (to taste, strong guidelines)

• 1c garlic, minced
• 1/3c ginger, minced finely, possibly juice only - or equal volume of ground ginger
• 3c pine nuts
• 3c sesame seeds
• 1c korean leek/daepa
• 1c sesame oil
• 5 tbs sugar (or to taste)
• salt to taste
• ~1c(?) pearl onions (optional)

From this point it's pretty freeform, and you can even start adding seasonings before the broth, or to the broth. I recommend using a food processor to mince the garlic. Add the additional seasonings to the seasoned mu mix. If too dry, add ~1c soba concentrate. Pack tightly in a jar, ensuring no air pockets and minimal headspace. Top with sesame seeds for garnish.

If you want to prepare some for someone allergic to pine nuts and/or sesame, replace them with ~4c freshly made crispy bacon bits, beef jerky, or dried squid; Grandma Kim tells me that all of these are reasonably traditional. 

Eigenfruit Pie (Experimental): The idea is this - I want to make a pie that, in rough order of importance: 1) is a delicious pie in its own right, 2) is an intensely fruity pie, and 3) is as hard as possible to figure out which fruits exactly went into the pie, subject to the previous two constraints. This recipe is experimental and represents my current best efforts. I'm also only supplying a recipe for the filling - for pie crust, refer back to "21. Several Delicious Scalable Recipes for Posterity".

 

Filling:

• 2 honeycrisp apples
• 4 red or black plums
• ~1 quart strawberries
• ~1 quart raspberries
• ~1 pint blackberries
• 2c sugar
• lemon juice and vanilla to taste
• corn starch, to thicken
• jam, to thicken (apricot-raspberry was what I used)
• ~4 bay leaves (optional)

 Peel and chop the apples. Slice and pit the plums. Combine all fruits, sugar, lemon, and vanilla and let sit for at least 2 hours and ideally overnight. Prepare pie crust and blind-bake as usual. Strain off liquid from the fruits; reserve some to combine with the corn starch and jam. Once done, return the thickened runoff to the fruit and mix to make filling. When the blind-baking is done, fill the crust with fruit, add the top crust, and bake for at least an hour at 350 *F.

 

For future reference, I recommend using cherries and/or cherry jam, and possibly citrus savor-syrup as well. There's something that feels like it's missing to the recipe as is but I can't figure out what.