Some thoughts on cooking and a brand-new project
I’ve been cooking occasionally over the eight months since I moved here: Stir fries mostly, the occasional noodle-bowl, a staggering number of foods involving eggs (they’re truly life-savers when you cannot be arsed to make literally anything else, I’m fully convinced), pastas (I once made pasta salad once and possibly reached Peak White), a couple of times when I did a tadka-less take on batatyachi bhaji.
It was a long way off, definitely from back home when I was such an incredibly lazy fuck, the idea of making an omelette was borderline traumatic for me. I had felt such a staggering sense of accomplishment, bygod, those few times I made pithale and that one day when I made egg curry was basically grand enough an achievement for me to eat out on for a few months. I admire the crap out of people who are good at cooking, who keep trying to learn new techniques and recipes. As someone who is supremely disorganised and hyperactive, acquiring that skill is something that I associate with acquiring some measure of control over at least some part of your life. I associate it with being grown and being responsible and also, a certain kind of richness of personality — this desire to make something beautiful and take pleasure and pride in it. I’ve wanted to be one of those people for a very long time but never quite actually wanted to do anything about it. Literally nothing like moving thousands of miles away from your safety-net and the comfort of mum’s cooking
It’s been a bit different since I moved here
One of my happiest discoveries over the past few months is that cooking is an activity I enjoy very much. For me to now come home starving and tired and still take the time to chop, blanch, saute, just because I want to make what I want to make, is big. It’s obviously not something I do all the time and these last few weeks I’ve been doing less of it and more of takeout because work and various anxieties have been piling up (more on those later sometime) but even so, there’s something about even the rep work for a dish — all the chopping and grating and slicing that I find kinda … soothing. And calming. Some times when I’m feeling stressed, I actually draw out the process as opposed to trying to wrap it up as quickly as possible. By the time I’ve assembled the various components, I’m less on edge, I’ve had some time to (and yes, I use this word entirely without irony) centre.
Like, the other day, when I had anxiety. I was wound up and jittery and had thoughts spinning around in my head that were urging me to do something, anything and generally, this particular source of advice never leads me to particularly productive results. But this time, I got home and made an elaborate meal. I chopped up mushrooms and a yellow pepper and onion really fine as music played, then sauteed the onion in oil and garlic bits, and the mushroom and the pepper and then I added eggs and masalas and came up with something that floated somewhere between bhurji and shakshuka. I then toasted well-buttered bread on a pan(must remember to buy toaster) and by the time I had eaten and done the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, I felt better.
It’s a very happy-making thing for me — this rising confidence about cooking. Perfectly flipping my first omelette, nailing a lotus root stir-fry, even frying sausages for the first time (I grew up in a vegetarian household so had never cooked any kind of meat before). All of these are little victories.
Also, shopping for food. So much fun. I like how my food supplies were a great marker of how I was settling in. My first week in Beijing, when I was still looking for an apartment and crashing at an AirBnb, there were mostly packaged foods from home. The second week, when I had moved into my current home, the fridge had basics like eggs and bread and veggies and salt. Then came Doritos and salsa and wine (the cheapest, but still), a Toblerone bar and two Kitkats and bread from the nicer supermarket. As I felt more at home in my new city, I made more and more room for the little luxuries.
I’ve been meaning to get around to this thing where I buy one unfamiliar piece of produce or ingredient from my grocery store every week and use it in a dish but thanks to this new cooking project I began last weekend, that’s been happily kinda taken care of.
And this rather inelegant segue, reader bbz, brings me to my very ambitious cooking project thing which I’m going to make part of #YearOfMaking that my friend Malathi started on social media, and it will be a year from the date I started okay that still counts .
I’m planning to cook at least one new dish each week. Last weekend I made two: pai huang gua (literally, “smashed cucumbers” in Chinese, served cold, drizzled with a sauce that includes sesame oil and soy sauce). soy sauce and sesame oil and dan dan mian (dan dan noodles, aka, one of the most-best things about China, truly).
Dan dan mian are among the better-known dishes from China’s Sichuan province. They’re a relatively drier kind as opposed to the la mian or handpulled beef noodles, often found swimming in a bowlful of broth. They’re a spicy, sesame-and-peanut-y, slathered with chilli oil kind of noodle dish, with ground pork added (though the recipe I used skipped it and I didn’t mind) and topped with scallions and sesame seeds. I used a recipe from the amazing NYT Cooking guys, and realised while I was in the middle of making it that in my hurried skimming of it, I had missed out the bit where it said the sauce had to be made in a fucking food processor.
Note: I do not own a food processor. Fuuuuck.
Well, I had a dish to make and a starving friend I had invited for lunch, waiting so the only way was forward. I settled for chopping everything — garlic, onion, ginger — really fine and then kinda trying to smash it with the blunt end of a bigass ladle. Ah well, it helped. A bit.
And guess what? In the end I was actually glad I hadn’t put it through a food processor because then I wouldn’t have achieved the grainy texture I’m used to while eating dan dan mian here. The NYT recipe called for a smooth, pourable texture and nope, that would not have worked well. It’d look and mouth-feel kinda boring then, to be honest.
(Yes, I did use the term “mouth-feel”. Moving on...)
It turned out pretty nice. So did the smashed cucumbers dish. Once you have the ingredients — most of which I already had, like sesame oil and soy sauce — you can actually make it in less than ten minutes. You actually ‘smash’ or de-seed the cucumbers by chopping them crosswise (newly learnt term, this), then length-wise and then turning them over, seed-side down and gently pressing the flat side of your knife on them until they seeds split away under the pressure.
Next weekend, as of now, I plan to make Hunan chicken. I actually had to google what chicken thighs look like so I can hunt for them at the supermarket so clearly we’re off to a promising start…
