Currently Eating & Cooking in Thailand

Hi internet,

I've been in Thailand since December, working on organic farms and learning the secrets of nam prik from Thai aunties. There have been stints in Laos and Myanmar in between, which are in the process of being written about. Everything is over at a new blog I'm co-writing with my partner in crime. Check us out!

Love,
Stephanie

Ooh-La-La Ostrich Burgers

Hello, internet, I've missed you. Might I introduce you to my undergraduate thesis, by way of explanation?  I know it isn't much, but I can offer you 32,000 words of dribble about wild boars, the Stasi, girls' schools, and ball lightning in exchange for the months I've been away. Mostly I've been holed up in my thesis fortress, but a few errant weeks were spent in Vienna and Berlin, chasing down former denizens of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Maybe one day you will be able to read it in bookstores everywhere, assuming there are still bookstores.

While I was thus employed (ha! yes, it's true—my college paid me to go abroad and literally make things up), I had a lot of Austrian food, because I was staying with my aunt, and my aunt makes a mean schnitzel. Naturally the first thing I wanted to do upon my return to school was teach other people how to make a mean schnitzel. Also, as an English major and a terrible person, I felt duty-bound to inflict alliteration on the world, so my classes were called Klimt’s Kitchen: Cooking Kaiserschmarrn & Palatschinken and Vienna With a Vengeance: Wiener Schnitzel Wunderland. Because no matter what Southern California may tell you, Wiener Schnitzel is not a brand of sausage.

Of course, this class turned out to be Driving 101: How to Locate Exotic Meats That Are Not Even That Exotic, Seriously, It's Just Baby Cow. My quest encompassed one thwarted drive up to North Portland, two email chains, five grocery stores, and an infinite number of phone calls. I eventually found humanely-raised veal at a reasonable price from Nicky USA, a Portland retailer that has changed my life.

Because in the process of filling up my $150 minimum order, I was able to purchase a range of exotic meats.

onwards »

How to Have the Best Roadtrip Down to Los Angeles Ever

1. Stay up the night before burning CDs, which they do still sell in those silvery towers. Make sure to include fun themed compilations and the obligatory California playlist. Play them at appropriate times, like when driving through Weed, CA ("Songs About Stones and/or Getting Stoned," of which there are unsurprisingly a lot).
2. Pack hilarious friends, who will keep you in stitches for all ten hours, and make driving through tears of laughter extraordinarily difficult.
3. At rest stops, through some miracle, choose fast food restaurants where the door opens directly into the restroom, and you don't even have to make awkward eye contact with employees from whom you will buy nothing.
4. After ten hours of crazy driving, stop off in San Francisco to walk along Crissy Fields at midnight, see the underbelly of the Golden Gate Bridge, and decide that you're never walking on sand in anything other than boots ever again, because this is the first time you haven't carried a sandcastle back in your shoes.
5. Fall asleep and wake up in a beautiful mansion in Nob Hill with a view of the entire city.
6. Have brunch at Burma Superstar.
7. Die happy.
8. Drive to LA.

More seriously, here is a rundown of two of the best Southeast Asian dishes I've ever had, at a restaurant I've been to three times, once for every time I've been to San Francisco. Actually, I think during one trip, I went twice.

Tea Leaf Salad is presented at the table, like most of the dishes at Burma Superstar, with all of its components separated: Burmese tea leaves, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, dried shrimp, fried garlic, crispy mung beans, peanuts, & sunflower and sesame seeds, all arranged in a square of heartbreaking deliciousness. The server lovingly mixes it at the table and then the salad is inhaled. The tea leaves are from Burma and they're fermented in a secretive way, the secret of which I will discover, and then I will eat nothing but this salad.

We definitely wanted lamb, but we didn't know what kind, but both of our servers recommended the chili lamb. It's Chinese in origin, which is apparent once it comes out doused in fried Szechuan peppers. So good, especially on top of their coconut rice, which puts anything I've had in Portland (and I'm looking at you, Pok Pok) to shame.

Fool's Chocolate Swirl Cake

It comes as no surprise to anyone who has read this blog or heard me rave about my latest chocolate-making experiment that I like to make a lot of crazy things from scratch. Also unsurprising: the first store-bought thing I reconstructed at home was alcoholic. That year for Christmas I handed out bottles of homemade Baileys.

But I am also extraordinarily lazy, and will condense as many bowls as possible into one, and sometimes, if there are dinner parties to be had, I will decide that cocktails work much better if one isn't running around in clouds of flour trying to make a million-dollar dessert an hour before it's supposed to be served. Not that I've done this or anything. Also, it is really difficult to make anything with a cocktail in your hand.

Anything except this cake, that is.

onwards »

Beets Me

Beets, those humble root vegetables, come in a lot of different shapes and colors. There are red beets and white beets, golden beets and rainbow beets, candycane beets and baby beets, and this would all be very Seussian were it not for the existence of an heirloom variety called "Bull's Blood," which is definitely something I want to serve at my next ritual sacrifice.

Then there are what I like to call "Monster Beets."

onwards »

Ferment Me, Baby

On Monday night, I went to see Sandor Katz extol the virtues of fermentation. It wasn't really a lecture and it wasn't really a workshop, since his demonstration consisted of stuffing a pile of already-cut, already-salted vegetables into a mason jar and declaring it sauerkraut. But the man really knows his stuff, and he wants you to know it too! I confess that I might have spent most of the lengthy Q-and-A admiring his impressive arrangement of facial hair, which the internet tells me is called a 'Franz Josef,' but that is only because an anthropology major asked him to expound on the intangible connection between human culture and a culture of bacteria. In any case, I just bought his latest book, The Art of Fermentation, and it's really funny to alternate chapters of this with Faulkner, let me tell you.

All this got me to thinking that my store of kimchi was running tragically low.

onwards »

Chocolate 101: The Trappings of an Addiction

I sat myself down intending to write about one of the dozens of things I've made since school started: kimchi, Burmese eggplant stew, elk and yak short ribs, saffron cookies, a menagerie of canned fruits and vegetables. But the photographs of what I made this weekend overpowered me. I'll get to the rest eventually, maybe when I'm locked in a room with no distractions and my hands tied to the keyboard, well out of reach of the cookie jar.

This Sunday, with no desire to work on my thesis, read Euripidean fiction, or do much of anything else, I decided to make chocolate.

onwards »