In somewhat typical fashion, the coming of a new year makes you reëvaluate what you’re doing a little bit more, and rescrutinise any previous goals you may have had. Substituting them for more challenging, more trackable, or maybe even more socially acceptable goals. 2016 will be the year of more, more books read, more exciting meals cooked, and more glorious wine drank. I think I’ll leave it at that for now. More is about as trackable as I’d like to get at this interestingly bleak and surprisingly rainy stage of the year.
And so on that note, and with a healthy supply of new cook books from Christmas, I want to jump back into exciting spicy food. Not only did I get the excellent 101 Easy Asian Recipes by Lucky Peach, but also the Mission Chinese Food Cookbook by Danny Bowien. Can you sense a theme here? The Mission Food book follows on from the frankly wonderful Mission Street Food that I’ve been poring over and thoroughly enjoying for the last year. The theme of ‘hey let’s make some fucking tasty-ass food that we want to eat on our days off‘ never gets old. Now that I’ve acquired even more ridiculous levels of kitchen equipment (new gallery pieces include a vitamix and a cast iron skillet…) I’d like to say that there’s no excuse, but then I’m sure I can find some. I have by my feet a bag of exceptionally Asian groceries from New Loon Moon (this bag does primarily consist of different chilli based products (gochugaru, doubiangjiang, ma la chilli oil, chilli crisp)) so I guess something (spicy?) will emerge on the other side of this evening.
And on a vaguely related note to this, it’s great reading some of these books and hearing how I’m not the only one totally obsessed with numbing spice/Szechuan/sansho pepper. See earlier post from a couple years back for more info. Anyway, it’s mystifying stuff. Eat/taste/read/discover it as you will.
Currently reading: 1Q84 by Murakami