Dairy-Free
Coconut Corn Samosas
As someone who runs in horror from any recipe featuring the word “pastry,” I decided that the best way to confront this fear was simply to refer to anything with dough AND a filling as “a samosa.” (Apologies in advance, to anyone who knows enough about samosas and Indian cuisine to find the glaring flaws in this recipe / logic.) I decided to try these “samosas” out for Thanksgiving dinner, serving dozens of them with a few different fillings (curried cabbage, cumin-flavored carrots & peas, and a coconut-creamed corn). The...
read moreChinese Cucumber Salad
I’m not sure why, but people seem very judgmental and ill-informed about the whole business of pickling. I mean, when you get down to it, “a pickled vegetable” is really just a vegetable that someone has poured vinegar over and then walked away from for a few minutes. Yeh, that’s all. It was only in a recent conversation with my mother, during which her reaction to pickling was “oh, that’s gonna take FOREVER,” that I became aware of the misconception. As if pickling is a task that is culturally united with basket...
read moreSichuan Beef Noodle Soup with Pickled Mustard Greens and Cucumber Salad
Admittedly, for years, I’ve been a half-assed recipe follower. Let me clarify. I’ve always over-reached in my experimentations (yes, I’ve made some very eccentric dishes in my life), yet have only really read recipes to steal their essence and work things out in my own head, accordingly. So, if a recipe called for some rare type of purple pepper, it was probably going to inherit whatever color and derivation of pepper was on sale when I got to the grocery store. Part of this was because I’ve always lived and cooked on a strict...
read moreCurried Squid Salad with Cucumber Relish
Put plainly, this dish rocks. It has it all: crisp, spicy, fishy (ok, that’s not really a flavor profile), salty, sweet, creamy, chewy, and on and on. It’s so great that it’s beyond categorization, although it’s probably closest to Thai or Malaysian, if I were really pressed to pigeonhole it (please don’t make me!) Admittedly, I mostly made this recipe because I was convinced that in some way, the flavors wouldn’t work together. But, they were brilliant. Everything was exceptionally colorful on the plate, and though I...
read more