so much depends upon papaya salad glazed with fish sauce lime juice and some other stuff

Papaya salad, som tum, is probably my favorite Thai dish. It's made with green (unripe) papaya, which is the number one key - it just wouldn't be the same thing with ripe papaya. Unripe mango would work if for some reason that's easier for you to find than unripe papaya.

The tricky thing is shredding it. I've tried a cheese grater in the past and wasn't happy with the results, so I tried the Thai method - making lots of cuts all over the peeled papaya with a sharp knife and then slicing them into shreds. It's trickier than it looks on youtube - unripe papaya is a lot firmer than ripe papaya, for one thing, but there's also the cavity in the center, so your slices may suddenly come detached before you intend them to.


My papaya came out coarser than you'll find in a Thai restaurant. The texture/taste difference is noticeable, unfortunately!  (Or unforts, as the kids say.)  I "fixed" this by taking the largest pieces and putting them aside to make green papaya kimchi.

Traditionally you serve papaya salad with raw tomato and long beans. I don't have any long beans and I'm not about to buy fresh tomatoes in Februfuckinary, so. The dressing is simple - sugar, lime juice, fish sauce/dried shrimp/salted crab/something along those lines, garlic, and Thai chiles. Somehow I don't have any fresh chiles, so I used pickled green peppercorns instead, mainly because I'd been looking for an excuse to use them in something.

And this past weekend ... my last meal out before Lent ... one of the specials at Flat Patties, a cheeseburger with gruyere and caramelized onions (photo by Caitlin!):



So good.  I love that place.  (And those pickles in the foreground are house-made and fantastic.)

Yesterday was a typical first day of Lent for me: bagel with belly lox, cheese pizza. Stuff that doesn't feel like you're leaving anything out.

Today is not yesterday.


(I'm sure you're going to have to click through there.)

There are so many kinds of beans! People don't tend to realize this, but think about even the difference between a field pea (like black-eyed peas) and the beans in your chili - it's huge.

Thank god for bean variety, or Lent might get a little monotonous. From the black beans at eleven o'clock, I've got: ayocote negro (black runners), bolita, black calypso, arikara yellow, vallarta, and field peas.  Look at the size difference between the field peas and the black runners!

I cooked some of the black runners up with carrot, celery, and garlic, along with a scoop of the greens I mentioned yesterday, some salsa Caitlin's mother made, and a boiled egg.


(The egg was cooked all day in a slow-cooker - rather than being rubbery like an overcooked hard-boiled egg, it's soft and creamy, and browned from the long cooking.)

It begins again! Today is the first day of Lent. Once again, what that means for me:

1: Meat only one day a week (traditionally this is Sunday, but spending weekends with Caitlin often means Saturday makes more sense.)

2: Seafood doesn't count as meat.

3: Animal fats and stock don't count as meat, sort of. The idea here is just that it would be silly to let stock I already have on hand go to waste, or to empty my deep fryer and replace it with vegetable oil instead of the lard-tallow mix.

Yesterday's Lenten prep included soaking beans, soaking chickpeas for falafel, starting a new batch of kimchi, and starting a big pot of mixed southern greens (collards, mustard, carrot, dandelion, spinach, watercress) which continues to simmer as we speak.

Because Lent is somewhat early this year (it will be even earlier next year), it follows right on the heels of Maine shrimp season, which is nice - I have a few pounds of shelled shrimp frozen, and a couple batches of shrimp stock.

has he lost his mind

I am not capable of knowing such a thing as a blood taco exists without proceeding to make it my lunch, that's the thing.

There are a lot of ways to cook with blood. There are soups thickened with it - it congeals when cooked - or with cubes of blood floating in it. There are sausages made with it. I'm not a big fan of boudin noir, the French version - feel free to change my mind with free samples, French sausage makers! - but I love morcilla, the Spanish version, and black pudding, the English version. (I've never had boudin rouge, the Cajun version.)

A blood taco is just what it sounds like: cooked blood in a taco. In this case, blood added to diced skin-off pork belly, with some shaved pork, salsa, and turnip greens sauteed with garlic. Added a little hot sauce, a little lime juice.

(Blood has a lot of iron in it, duh. Alternate entry title: ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.)
(Alternate "duh": uh-doy.)



This is a very tame blood taco. I've seen them made with mostly blood and a few bits of innards, a sort of stone soup taco. Here, the blood makes the meat flavor richer and very juicy. Honest, you would not be bothered by it at all if I didn't tell you it was a blood taco. Maybe I'll make blood chili sometime. Maybe I already have and didn't tell you. Maybe you ate some of that chili without even knowing, you filthy gross blood-eater. You don't know.

Sometime during Lent I should do a long post on the various seafood-derived Asian condiments - total flavor superheroes, wildly underused outside of the slight bump in fish sauce's popularity. One reason for the post? Reminding myself not to underuse them, and when using them, to think beyond fish sauce.

In the meantime, something I will not be having during Lent:



Poorly-lit spareribs and carrots with rice.

The spareribs were rubbed with shrimp paste, gochujang (Korean chile paste), and ginger, laid on top of sliced carrots, covered in foil, and slow-cooked at 225 for 7 1/2 hours, before being drizzled with coconut treacle and baked at 350 for another 20 minutes (while the rice cooked).

Shrimp paste has a deep, complex flavor - everything else just rounds it out.  And carrots, I just like carrots and had some to use up.

caramel tangelo buttermilk pie

I was only going to brown the butter and caramelize the sugar and then make a standard buttermilk pie apart from those tweaks. But while waiting for the caramelized sugar to dissolve in 2/3 of the buttermilk, I decided to substitute tangelo juice (and some of the zest) for the remaining buttermilk. (The buttermilk and tangelo juice almost seem to have separated into two separate layers.)



The result hasn't got much buttermilk flavor - no surprise, since one reason I leave out the lemon juice some people add to buttermilk pie is to keep it from covering up the much more subtle flavor of buttermilk. But it is sweet, tangy, tangelo-y, caramelly, certainly a success.