bear

The horrors persist, so I have a pot of jambalaya bubbling away on the stove. We actually had chicken and shrimp and sausages in the fridge all at the same time, even if the sausages were technically brats instead of andouille, and the Bay Area's under some kind of historic extreme cold weather warning; a nice big warm pot of comfort food seemed called for. (Realfeel when I left the house this morning for coffee ride was 31F; I actually needed my full-finger gloves for biking.)

Re our jambalaya: red bell peppers, not green, I know that's blasphemy against the holy trinity. Celery, yeah yeah, I hear you and your passionate defenses of said aromatic, kallmir2000 and heathers. ;) But we did have some to use up from our produce box. And instead of chicken broth this time, we took advantage of having a bunch of crab and shrimp shells in the freezer and made shrimp broth instead.

I have so many things I want to make this year, as evidenced by my last post (artichoke cupcakes, Dubai chocolate ensaymada my way, sourdough starter, ricotta?!). And YouTube steered us the way of the pavé potato again this week, which we haven't yet made, so that is currently in progress as well.

But we're also, as a bigger project, going to try to cook our way through Pasta Friday this year as well, albeit as a weekend thing. We riffed on last week's "crispy chickpeas with cencioni and sausage" based on what we had in the pantry after being away the previous weeks, and ended up with "not-crispy white beans with strozzapreti and sausage." hyounpark thinks it's because white beans have thinner skins than chickpeas that they didn't crisp up in the pan, but aside from that texture mismatch, the flavor profile of Italian sausage, a dry white wine (chardonnay my dad had brought over), butter, sage, and rosemary felt cozy for the endlessly rainy nights we've had lately. We also had to substitute parsley for arugula, but overall the results weren't bad considering what we had at hand, and we got a couple of actual vegetables in, go us.

Somehow, I have accumulated multiple pounds of strozzapreti (and cavatappi, probably my fave pasta shape), but have zero boxes of small shells on hand despite it being what we consider a baseline pasta for us to stock? (Our pasta pantry baseline: cappellini because it's fast, orecchiette or conchiglie because their shell shapes hold chunky sauces better than cappellini; anything beyond that is gravy. Other loved pasta shapes: bucatini (hyounpark: "Italians finally figured out an udon counterpart!"), pappardelle (me: "pasta ribbons!"), cannelloni/manicotti for stuffing.)

Looking forward to next week's "garlicky conchiglioni with spinach and cheese." Though there will, again, probably be some swaps (see our current lack of shell-shaped pastas of any size, but more than enough pasta in general to make acquiring additional pasta feel greedy). But I appreciate Allison Arevalo offering alternate pasta shape suggestions that would go well with the sauce (in this case, paccheri, fusilli giganti, or rigatoni), even if ... yeah, once again we don't have any of those on hand. 99% certain I'll be using the cavatappi here. And I also appreciate her wine suggestions for both red and white each week, even if we may not necessarily keep up with them. (I don't even know what a barbera wine is besides it being red and Italian, but we probably have a pinot grigio around, and thankfully my recipe database has plenty of suggestions calling for a cup of the likely leftover wine!)

Just so you don't get the idea it's all cooking successes around here, I tried to bake a hazelnut-frangipane galette des rois for choir this week, and it was a massive fail; my puff pastry never decided to behave, and then when I baked it up, the whole thing smelled like cheese - in a bad way - despite zero cheese in the ingredients. Alas! I will try again, hopefully before Mardi Gras, probably when it's the sopranos' turn to supply snacks at break.

Sitting in the most beautiful Apple Store (really! I'm staring at all sorts of historical facade detail work right now) with some downtime; popping in to say hello. :)

Since my last update:

- ( chocolate green curry birthday cake! )

- ( holiday concert, where I'm still belting out Whitney Houston arias two weeks later )

- ( all of my cookbooks are shelved now! )

- ( Paso Robles: actually intriguing wines and a cozy book nook )

Interlude: the reason I'm at the Apple Store right now is because my phone reinstall went rogue. Le sigh. At least things are progressing well, but on a four-year-old phone with some newly-discovered physical damage, I know it's probably new phone time sooner rather than later.

- ( Hearst Castle, Morro Bay, the most extravagant cinnamon roll, and one night of Santa Barbara gems )

- And then we knew the storm was coming, so we finished our drive down to LA the next day. Of course there was traffic two days before Christmas, but at least we were coming down the coast and from barely 100 miles away. Leonard and Sara took the valley road, which is faster, but they were driving the whole distance from the Bay in one day, and had to go over the Grapevine, and there were literal tumbleweeds causing crashes. But everyone made it safely; Jane and Uhmuhni's flights came in without too much delay, and we celebrated with curry plates at CoCo Ichibanya, followed up by rolled ice cream at Holy Roly.

Still feeling like I want to send out New Year's cards, re-establish contact with those I've lost touch with. Still need to see whether my reach exceeds my grasp here. Still have LA and San Diego to write up. Still aspiring to be in better touch with people, as always, and trying to navigate how to best do that in 2026 with the shifting sands of everything. Miss you all, and here's to getting to hug you in the new year.

Dad: "You look much more chill this year. Fewer rebellious menu elements?"
Me: "AHAHAHAHAHA."
Mom: "I still remember the year you did the Peking duck. That was stressful."
Me: "We learned our lesson. Outsource cooking the bird.*"

* unless it's roasting a chicken, something either of us could do in our sleep

Happy Asian American Thanksgiving, year ... uh, whatever it is since we've been doing this formally, composing our Thanksgiving banquet menus to be primarily if not entirely recipes by Asian American cooks and chefs. Year 8? But we've been perfectly happy to give up on the turkey and just eat something yummy and celebratory, along with a bounty of sides.

- Main: Knowing both that Leonard and Sara were doing their own experimental turkey roast and planning on sharing if it worked out, and that there would be at least one additional meat sauce option on the table, we went with pork belly again. This time, we did Kristina Cho's Chop Shop Pork Belly, from her Chinese Enough cookbook. Lovely crispy skin on top, succulent meaty bottom, served over jade pearl rice (which was pretty and interesting and just a little sweet to balance; I'd be curious about making a horchata out of it!), and it paired incredibly well with ...

- Cranberry Sauce: Kay Chun's Cranberry-Asian Pear Chutney, always and forever. (Forgot to pick up mandarins to make another version I've been meaning to try, but I'll probably do that later this week.) This year's amusing highlight, though, was that the last time I bought raisins, they were "giant" ones from the bulk bin at Berkeley Bowl. Leonard: "Um, Lynne, are those grapes in your cranberry sauce?" Me: "No, they're raisins, I swear!" Said giant raisins rehydrated enough in the cranberry sauce to look like full-on grapes.

- Stuffing: Mandy Lee's Red Hot Oyster Kimchi Dressing has been on my bucket list bakes forever, and now I'm mad at myself for waiting so long. "Oh, but I have to get oysters, and I really want to do it with the gochujang bread, and what if some people think it's too spicy?" Everybody loved it. We will be repeating this before next Thanksgiving, maybe as soon as Christmas. Maybe even with oyster kimchi to make it extra oyster-y. If you haven't had oyster dressing/stuffing, with or without kimchi, this recipe has completely convinced me of its deliciousness. Even the Chron had an oyster stuffing recipe this year. Time to bring it back!

- Orange Veg: After several years in a row of squash soups, it was time to shake things up; we called on our old fave, kaddo bourani. Sweet pumpkin echoing the sweet potato casseroles of our younger days, tempered with a meat sauce full of warming spices and a garlic-mint-yogurt topper.

- Potatoes: Likewise, with the potatoes, I wanted "not cheesy scallion, not maple miso, make something up, we're both Asian American, it'll still count for Asian American Thanksgiving!" hyounpark took that decision off my plate, thank you dear, and made mashed potatoes with toasted ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, soy sauce, and sesame oil. It tasted good, but note to our future selves: when you run out of regular soy sauce, substituting dark soy sauce is going to result in mashed potatoes the color of gravy, just be warned. :)

- Green Veg, Cooked: Made Andrea Nguyen's Sesame Salt Greens again (from her cookbook Ever Green Vietnamese). This time, with collard greens; probably should've cooked them a little longer, but that's okay.

- Green Veg, Raw: Leonard and Sara brought a salad with pomegranates and persimmons from their tree and it was exactly the right balance to all the other heavy stuff on the table.

- Dessert: the triumphant return of Alana Kysar's Liliko'i Chiffon Pie (from her cookbook Aloha Kitchen) to the table. We get our arm workout in every year making the passionfruit curd, but the results are well worth it. Even when yours truly realizes at 3:30 pm Thanksgiving Eve that actually, we *are* out of gelatin powder, and I'm going to have to go Brave The Grocery Store. Didn't find gelatin powder, but did find gelatin sheets, and learned a new thing, so it worked out!

*

Things that did not make it to the table this year, but hopefully will next year:

- Cornbread. I really did want to solve the custard cornbread problem. I was trying to de-dairify the custard-filled cornbread that used to be on our Thanksgiving table every year until our collective lactose intolerance got to be too much for even Lactaid to help with. But having talked to ladyjax's professional chef spouse, there may not be an alternative milk out there that's going to behave the same way heavy cream does from a chemistry perspective, alas.

I made two batches and both were big enough fails we weren't going to inflict the results on anyone. One used coconut cream, the other used A2 cow milk cream. In both cases, the cream that was supposed to sink below the top layer chocoflan/impossible cake style, forming its own transverse plane surrounded by two layers of cornbread in the vertical center of the cake? Pooled in the center of the pan like creamy lava in the horizontal center of the cake, with a ring of perfectly normal cornbread around the outside. It tasted fine, but the texture was obviously wrong.

I'm going to go back to basics and try making the original recipe with bog-standard commercial heavy cream to make sure even the original still works, sigh. Maybe in a few weeks. When I can stand to look at cornbread again.

The cornbread part itself came out just fine, though! I've wanted to make a cornbread with the same flavors as Betty Liu's lemongrass corn soup; I added lemongrass and shallots and scallions and used coconut milk as a base for our cornbread, and that part was great.

- Deviled eggs. I forgot I was going to use up most of the eggs on the chiffon pie, so didn't follow through. But I want to put chicharones on my deviled eggs the next time I make them! Just trying to decide what else should go into the filling or as a topping.

- Cheesecake. Following up on my successes with burnt Basque cheesecakes, I wanted to try to make one with the truffle cream cheese from one of our local bagel bakeries. I will in fact do that, and probably bring it to coffee ride this week! But the pie was enough for everybody.

*

Ten days out from Break Bread, trying to cram the Bach Magnificat into my brain, somehow having never performed any part of it before in four decades of choral singing. This is a CRAPTON of trills, peeps. At least I already have one of the Whitney Houston songs we're singing down flat (I can absolutely get up on stage right now and sing I Wanna Dance With Somebody from memory, and could have done so any time from 1987 on), and the same with the Hallelujah Chorus. Which leaves three other newer songs to learn quickly. Tis the season!

(We survived Verdi, but that's another post entirely!)

I know, two baking entries in a row, but I really do need to write down my riffs and recipes when I make them so that I actually remember what I did! Especially when I use up the tail end of things I don't always keep in stock. So playing a little bit of catch-up here.

For choir baking this week, I started with Nik Sharma's Spicy Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies, and King Arthur's recommendations for making drop cookies into bars.

( the process of riffage )

( spicy hazelnut ginger bars )

*

I also made Smitten Kitchen's Chocolate Toffee Cookies for the first time in awhile.

( everything is riffs )

( chocolate toffee cookies, modernized )

*

I had a glut of carrots, so I tweaked Serious Eats' Brazilian Carrot Cake recipe to fit a 9x9 pan.

( riff notes )

( carrot cake in a blender )

*

Cramming one last recipe riff in here while I'm thinking about it: yet another choir bake, furikake marshmallow bars. Basically crispy rice cereal treats with added furikake, black sesame, and a little sesame oil.

( furikake marshmallow bars )

hyounpark pinged me from BART this morning with the sad news that Fugakyu is closing, after 27 years.

It feels like I've been going there forever, even though honestly the last time I went there was probably when we still lived in Boston. But I'm like 80% certain I've gone on dates there with all of my major boyfriends (if I dated you for at least a year, that's the defining line in my headcanon). A bazillion times with hyounpark during our Boston era. Plenty of times with noghri, both while we were dating and then when we became friends. I thought I'd brought kallmir2000 there, but I double-checked and it was Ginza I was thinking of. (Which makes sense because Ginza was within walking distance of my old Fenway apartment). Where, admittedly, I'd also eaten sushi at with even more of the people I've dated, hahaha, including both Punsterboy and Choirboy! 😁 (Even though Ginza's been gone for well over a decade now.) And theconvictor and I had our Valentines' Day 2000 dinner at Fugakyu when we spent the weekend in Boston on a romantic getaway from campus, feeling ever so grownup, removing our shoes to sit at one of the traditional low tables in the fancy embedded booths.

Fugakyu was even where I introduced multiple friends to sushi (fes42, jennifer, david_grana, Adam); where my girlfriends took me after devastating breakups and meh second dates, because sushi would be followed up by ice cream at JP Licks, and then a visit to a certain little shop down the way (also long gone, alas; I'm hoping this recent rise in romance-specific bookstores brings an appropriate replacement to the neighborhood) because that was definitely better than moping over guys!

And now it's closing, for "personal reasons."

Damn, am I gonna miss their pinetato (pineapple and sweet potato) maki. And the kinuta. And the hotate hokkayaki. And the giant boats of sushi that I would split with my friends. I know where to get sushi; honestly I may just pop down to our neighborhood sushi joint before the trick-or-treaters start arriving. But mostly, finding out that Fugakyu is closing next week is just making me miss everyone in Boston. Even knowing that many of the friends I mentioned don't live there anymore, like us.

The algorithm sent me this ATK recipe (paywalled, but linked for posterity, and pretty easy to extrapolate the basic idea) for a peanut butter chocolate quesadilla yesterday, and my instant reaction as a Massachusetts expat: "But where's the Marshmallow Fluff?! How can it be a Fluffernutter quesadilla without the Fluff? This is all Jarrett Barrios' fault, isn't it!"

Though of course, out here on the West Coast, getting ahold of actual Fluff is more difficult; when supermarkets have jarred marshmallow product, it's usually Kraft's Jet-Puffed Marshmallow Creme, which is more liquidy. ... hold on, I can get a two-pack of Marshmallow Fluff from my local Cost Plus?! As in the same Cost Plus where my mom used to buy us Botan candy to keep us occupied while she looked at household decor? ROFL.

Of course I ended up down the merch wormhole with my search results; I'd rather have it as a long-sleeve tee, but I love the logo on this What the Fluff sweatshirt from the Fluff Festival. 20th annual this year! Pairs well with this Ice Cream Weather hoodie from Gracie's just across the square that I've been meaning to pick up for years now. As well as my What a Cluster! tee. And now I want Goo Goo Clusters and Marshmallow Fluff. At least Moon Pies have made their way to the Bay? I can get those at my local CVS sometimes now.

Cherry on top of all this internet wormholing: while trying to figure out if Fluff was sold in any grocery stores local to me (besides Walmart, ugh), I stumbled across their recipe section, and amusingly enough, one of their most popular recipes is Lynne's Cheesecake. I swear I didn't submit it - the recipe looks like a New York cheesecake recipe, and I strongly prefer my cheesecakes burnt Basque or Japanese cotton style. But now I'm thinking, maybe I should tackle a burnt Basque Fluff cheesecake. Though admittedly, on my cheesecake back burner, I also want to make a cheesecake with Poppy Bagels' truffle schmear, Wikipedia has just informed me of the existence of a smoked salmon cheesecake, and Kat Lieu just posted a SPAM Basque cheesecake. Time to reup our Lactaid stock!

And now, of course, I'm earwormed with the old-timey Fluffernutter jingle.



(Yeah, I know, an original Fluffernutter has no chocolate, but sprinkling some chocolate chips on top of one side and melting before assembly is pretty standard. Though IME hagelslag or vlokken work better, and of course you can also get hagelslag at Cost Plus, 😂.)

I have found THE WAY to make crispy firm tofu that I will now do forever more (or until I get bored and wander off to my next food obsession): brining it. It takes no longer than pressing it, is less messy, and the results are unbelievably crispy, even still a little crunchy after overnight refrigeration of the leftovers and then microwaving it, neither process designed to encourage that. And far more successful than any baking or cornstarch-dredging that I've tried before; will never go back. Noting here for my memories:

- Bring 4 cups water with 1/4 cup of salt (or, ratiowise, 1T salt for every 1 cup water needed to cover your tofu) to a boil, then turn off the heat
- Plop your cut-up tofu into the brine - the video did sliced planks, I did cubes so I didn't have two separate cutting steps, it came out fine
- Let it sit for 10-15 minutes
- Pan-fry the tofu in a little oil, flipping around the 3-4 minute mark; repeat until tofu is crispy enough to satisfy you.

As for silken tofu, for quick breakfasts/solo dinners, I've been nuking it with butter and soy sauce and a little bit of chili crisp, then topping it with a scallion that I chopped while waiting for the microwave. Maybe grating a little ginger over if I'm feeling fancy, or now that the lemons are slowly starting to come back, squeezing a little lemon over. It's like a hot hiyayakko, and might be more so if I ever remembered to pick up katsuobushi at Yaoya-San, heh.

*

In the meantime, our neighbors had been texting us while we were away about the annual plumpocalypse, and we came home to a carpet of purple underneath said plum tree, despite the neighbors coming by and picking up the excess while we were gone. Right now, we have enough to fill our entire dutch oven, with dozens hundreds more dropping daily. I really need to set up some kind of net situation to catch them before they hit the ground, I have made refrigerator jam literally every day for the last week and a half, and we are not keeping up. (Right now, our total jam despite our attempts to chip away at it fills my second-largest glass storage pan - 11 cups!)

But because my method so far looks like:

* sweep plums into a pile
* scoop plums of various softness into our largest kitchen bowl
* fill plum bowl with water and let it sit (hyounpark says in case there are worms?!)
* sort plums - only the intact ones make it through
* cook plums until just soft enough to pit
* pit
* weigh the puree, add 40% sugar
* cook, skimming off scum, until it passes the spoon test
* cool
* find a storage container to put the jam in in the fridge
* put on yogurt and toast ad nauseum because I have not committed to buying the whole kit for Proper Jam Making that would let the jam last longer than a few weeks in the fridge

At least our neighbors are equally meh about Proper Jamming so I feel less bad about not doing it, LOL. Still, I did take a cup and a half of yesterday's puree and turned it into a plum version of my favorite roasted applesauce cake for yesterday's block party, and it went smashingly; I was barely able to snag a piece for H and I to split!

( roasted plum cake )

*

Between the cake success and the tofu triumph and lovely August tomatoes marinating in a pool of olive oil and mint and salt and their own juices, I'm proud of these recent food feats. Now to figure out what I'm doing with the pork belly (for dinner tonight). Probably something that can get topped with some of the plum jam, heh.

Update: threw it in the pressure cooker with ginger and scallions and shaoxing wine and toyomansi (and water), served with rice and plum jam, heh. Worked well.

hyounpark and I wrapped up our extremely concert-filled June last weekend with two shows in Wine Country, backing up Andrea Bocelli and friends. Three rehearsals in ten days with almost entirely new-to-me repertoire - it felt good to have that kind of intensity of practice again. It's different from regular rehearsal, where we have a month, two, sometimes even three to slowly, steadily polish a single piece. Harder to cram into daily life, but always worth it.

Saturday was also Hyoun's birthday, so I was highly amused when the sound check opened with La donna è mobile from Rigoletto. Because I originally learned that melody in fourth grade as a birthday song!

( Archiving the lyrics here because I know I was able to find it on the internet at some point in the past, but no longer. )

( the rest of the Bocelli concert experience )

And now, my Wednesday nights are free for a (very) few weeks! (Summersings start July 23, and then after that we're right into rehearsals for Verdi; I hope I'll be able to cram in one or two Wednesday night Friends With Bikes rides during the time off, but we'll need to see.)

In August, it's going to have been six years since we moved to California.

I've whined before about the lack of actual proper apple cider donuts in the Bay Area, that we'd apparently have to drive 120 miles out to freaking Placerville to get them. Because of this, I've developed an annual habit of loading up the Atkins Farm website every October on the first day cool enough to feel like fall, checking on the cost of overnighting a dozen apple cider donuts from western Mass to the Bay Area. In 2024, it was $145, or $12.08 per donut. In 2022, it was $133.50 ($11 for the donuts, $122.50 for shipping). I swear I wrote down what it cost in 2023 somewhere but I can't find it now. But at least it's consistently been $11 for the donuts themselves the last few years, it's the shipping that makes it prohibitive.

(As much as I miss apple cider donuts, the tradeoff is that I'm now back in the land of reliably good, reasonably sized $2 crullers and old fashioneds, instead of Dunkies' donut mediocrity.)

I've also been researching clam chowder recipes; I'm back on my quest to replicate the clam chowder that Oga's used to serve in Natick until they closed last summer.

Which means that when I stumbled across the following quote this weekend in Yankee Magazine, I FELT KINSHIP ACROSS THE CENTURIES:

"Common cracker love was a deep and loyal love that sometimes refused to be denied. In 1927 the Miami News reported that a woman from Maine that had moved to California missed her common crackers so much that “she ordered 34 cents worth of old-fashioned common crackers for her chowder and is having it shipped airmail, special delivery, at a cost of $15.76.” How’s that for looking the other way when it comes to Yankee thrift?"

(In modern terms, that's $6.21 worth of common crackers with a shipping cost of $288.00. Also note their recipe for clam chowder calls for common crackers.)

*

( clam chowder musings, New England-Japanese-specific )

*

In the meantime, H and I ( continue to be 900% ourselves )

Me, paging through an internet food forum: "Oh. My."
hyounpark: "What's up?"
Me: "Er. That's a ... very interestingly shaped challah."
H: *peers at the picture* "Is that like one of those airline neck pillows?"
Me: "That was ... not my first thought, though I can see how you'd get there."
H: "What did you think it was?"
Me: "Clearly a dong and balls. See how the one side is long and a little skinnier, and the other side has multiple lumps?"
H: "YES DEAR."

Me: "... Ticketmaster decided it was necessary to send me a notification about A Flock of Seagulls tickets going on sale?"
H: "And you ran. You ran so far away."
Me: "Seagulls are evil!"

( cut for mention of calories but the main point is a pun it took me 23 years to get )