On a Friday night I cooked Madhur Jaffrey's Stir-Fried Kohlrabi, along with some stir-fried tofu and white rice. This was a simple meal... perhaps too simple. Next to the kohlrabi recipe in my cookbook, I wrote "Nothing to write home about. Crunchy." This pretty well sums it up. I cut two enormous kohlrabi into strips, stir-fried them for a few minutes with a really modest amount of chile pepper, garlic, salt and soy sauce, added some sesame oil and a tiny bit of scallion at the end, and that was it. Crunchy. A little salty. Plain rice. At least I seasoned the tofu. I'm not entirely sure why the world needs recipes like this written down.
 |  White food. |
The most exciting part of this dish was my quest to actually purchase some kohlrabi. I had to go to three different stores in order to find any. I ended up at the New Grand Mart, where I also purchased these really cool ice cream bars, Filipino-style red-bean-and-yam flavor. They are purple. I figured "red bean" was just a flavoring or perhaps a puree, but in fact there were whole cooked red beans in the ice cream bar, which tended to fall out and drop on the floor as you ate it. Very different from anything I've had before.
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On Sunday, my husband and I were in Adams Morgan buying a secondhand table, when we happened upon a comic book store. Of course my husband wanted to check it out, so I went upstairs too. And what do you think happened? I instantly saw something I wanted to buy. Me! In a comic store! It is a sort of graphic autobiography/cookbook by Robin Ha called Cook Korean! Brand-new, a really fun concept, and immediately drew me in. Recommend!
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On Sunday, my husband and I were in Adams Morgan buying a secondhand table, when we happened upon a comic book store. Of course my husband wanted to check it out, so I went upstairs too. And what do you think happened? I instantly saw something I wanted to buy. Me! In a comic store! It is a sort of graphic autobiography/cookbook by Robin Ha called Cook Korean! Brand-new, a really fun concept, and immediately drew me in. Recommend!
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Something radical happened this weekend. To my surprise, my husband had mentioned a few weeks ago that he'd like to try learning to cook with me. I'd love for him to be more comfortable in the kitchen, and cooking together can be fun, so I thought maybe there'd be time for it on Saturday or Sunday night. It was a ragingly hot weekend, and our kitchen lacks air conditioning, so circumstances were not ideal for cooking lessons-- especially after a sweltering afternoon of shopping and furniture-moving-- but we still managed to pull off a minor meal. Emphasis on the minor. We investigated our resources, and found a lot of CSA vegetables that needed to be used up, plenty of eggs, a loaf of bread that was starting to go stale before hardly having been touched, and too many mandarin oranges. My husband chopped tomato and onion; I chopped jalapeno pepper and zucchini. We sauteed the onion, pepper, and zucchini, added eggs together with tomato and a tiny bit of feta cheese that had been sitting in the fridge a long time. I scrambled these while my husband made herb bread toast. We put out butter and oranges. That was it. Original plans had involved bacon and home fries also, but I cook both of these in the oven, not having a very good stovetop, and we just couldn't face turning the oven on that night. That was okay. We kept it simple, the food was good, and the cookin' was easy. I think my husband was a little insulted. He said, "I do know how to scramble eggs." But I informed him that real culinary students, at least in legend, always start with learning to make the perfect omelette.
Something radical happened this weekend. To my surprise, my husband had mentioned a few weeks ago that he'd like to try learning to cook with me. I'd love for him to be more comfortable in the kitchen, and cooking together can be fun, so I thought maybe there'd be time for it on Saturday or Sunday night. It was a ragingly hot weekend, and our kitchen lacks air conditioning, so circumstances were not ideal for cooking lessons-- especially after a sweltering afternoon of shopping and furniture-moving-- but we still managed to pull off a minor meal. Emphasis on the minor. We investigated our resources, and found a lot of CSA vegetables that needed to be used up, plenty of eggs, a loaf of bread that was starting to go stale before hardly having been touched, and too many mandarin oranges. My husband chopped tomato and onion; I chopped jalapeno pepper and zucchini. We sauteed the onion, pepper, and zucchini, added eggs together with tomato and a tiny bit of feta cheese that had been sitting in the fridge a long time. I scrambled these while my husband made herb bread toast. We put out butter and oranges. That was it. Original plans had involved bacon and home fries also, but I cook both of these in the oven, not having a very good stovetop, and we just couldn't face turning the oven on that night. That was okay. We kept it simple, the food was good, and the cookin' was easy. I think my husband was a little insulted. He said, "I do know how to scramble eggs." But I informed him that real culinary students, at least in legend, always start with learning to make the perfect omelette.