What's been cooking in the kitchen recently?

[Electrode]

There's few things better than the satisfaction of a good meal on the stove. I recently made khoresh and menudo. What about you?

 

[ppadilha]

does your house smell like tripe for weeks after you make menudo?

 

[Electrode]

I was born without a sense of smell so I don't know but supposedly its offset by vinegar or lime juice then boiling and rinsing twice. Chichi Wang of Serious Eats has lots of good recipes.

 

[ppadilha]

I'm down with the taco places that serve tripe, but they make it crispy and crunchy (Sonoratown in DTLA makes a pretty good one). The times I've had stews/soups made from tripe I needed A LOT of hot sauce to make it go down.

 

[Electrode]

ppadilha said:

I needed A LOT of hot sauce to make it go down.


That's the only way to do it! Bitter, salt and spice are the only things my tongue registers, so I'm used to drowning everything in Dave's Insanity Sauce and such. Guisados and Sun Nong Dan here are worth it. There are various Chinese restaurants which make "husband and wife" plates, sometimes with lung like it should, but they really stick to the stomach!This was a great thread: https://community.soulstrut.com/discussion/31194/bizarre-foods-grub-related/p1

 

[klezmer electro-thug beats]

My experience with tripe is that it smells like sick when it's cooking but can be fine to eat. Not sure that "fine to eat" makes up for stinking up your apartment though.

While my partner and I are in newborn mode we're very much frozen food dinners at the moment, but before it all went down (or came out, as it were) we did do veal and ricotta meatballs in slow cooked tomato sauce and froze'm. Also have a bunch of varieties of basil growing in the kitchen and keep having to trim them and freeze blocks of fresh pesto - lemon, purple, minette, genovese, lettuce leaf... we just mix all the breeds into one pesto though. Then you just toss it in the pan with your cooked pasta and some oven roasted cherry tomatoes, damn.

So like, homemade okonomiyaki is probably as exotic as we regularly do. But I find a lot of satisfaction in developing and perfecting a comfort food - we've worked on a homemade pizza dough raised to be as fat as Amoeba-adjacent Berkeley classic Fat Slice when I'm feeling homesick, my partner has been baking her own sandwich loaves every two weeks or so for many years and has a great recipe that has cooked brown rice in the dough to add some soft density to it, or learning to get the eggs in carbonara just right so they're still saucy and not quite cooked. That kind of thing.