Week 3 - Let's Do Happy Hour

For those just tuning in: every day, while sheltering in place, I have been cooking something I've never cooked before. This is a blog not really about the food but kind of about the food. It's really just me talking.

Day 13 - Monday, March 23rd: Cauliflower Pizza

So we survived our first full week of sheltering in place, and are now starting the second. Friendships intact, relationship still existing, family on the other side of the country. After that first week, where everything in the country was changing daily, I was ready to take it easy, settle on a routine of waking up, doing some work, getting some exercise, eating some food, watching some tv, and going to bed. Unfortunately, that isn’t what the universe had in mind.

The second week was busy. And when I say busy, I mean B-U-S-Y. Busier than juniors in high school like to proclaim themselves to be every time you ask them how they are doing. Busier than Sandra Bullock at the start of The Proposal when she was so engulfed in work that she didn’t renew her green card and had to marry Ryan Reynolds to get citizenship in America (seriously one of the best Rom-coms of our generation. You can @ me. I stand by it.). It was the week that everyone decided it was completely original to gather the old gang together over zoom. It was time to catch up with your friends from college, friends from camp, friends from childhood, and friends that you haven't talked to in years and will probably never talk to again. It is also the week that businesses decided the way to boost company morale was by planning a Happy Hour and giving workers a reason to start drinking at 4:30 pm even though they had all obviously started drinking at 2. It is also the week that families decided it was time to get the whole extended family together on Zoom without realizing that you would spend the entire call trying to virtually help the grandparents connect both video and audio at the same time without their video showing just the ceiling. I was the one who planned a few of these zoom calls, so I am also to blame. But this was the week that somehow, almost simultaneously, the entire country decided that they should download zoom and that Joe Biden was going to become the democratic nominee. Thus, it was busy.

Given that last week’s cooking was made up almost exclusively of bread items, I thought I would start the

week with something different. So I made Pizza. Cauliflower pizza to be exact. Having grown up in a house with someone gluten free, and as a person who somehow thinks food looks three times as attractive when it is on someone else’s plate, I’ve tasted my fair share of gluten free pizza and it's pretty good.

Unfortunately for me, I did not have all the ingredients I needed. While I obviously had mozzarella cheese and cauliflower, I needed some sort of cheese for the crust to help bind it. Since I couldn't find any, I decided Iwould be fine without. Who cares that the recipe I read online explicitly said, “Cannot be vegan. Sorry” at the top? How much could Olena, mother to 2 boys and wife to Alex, really know? So I made it anyway, without the cheese in the crust. I’ll tell you, it looked pretty good, and the flavor was pretty solid (I mean, it really tasted like tomato sauce and cheese, so how could you go wrong?). That said, Olena was right. I needed the cheese in the crust because eating this was like trying to eat that last pancake at the bottom of the stack that had been sitting in maple syrup (read: flavored corn syrup) for the entirety of the meal; you might as well just call it mush and shovel it into your mouth. And as tough as it was to eat this the day of, I had stacked a few of the leftover pieces into some Tupperware and when I went back to eat it 3 days later, it resembled cauliflower lasagna more than it did pizza.

On the bright side, I had decided Wednesday was going to be falafel and pita day, and what goes better with that than pickles? So, on Monday, I also jarred some pickles. At the time, it felt pretty original to me. The 6 messages from friends (responding to my instagram story) sharing with me their own recent attempts at making pickles told me otherwise. And here I was, thinking the sourdough was my last cliche part of quarantine.

Day 14 - Tuesday, March 24th: Hot Chocolate Water

When I was in Belize at the end of February, we paid this nice family in San Ignacio to teach us about the chocolate making process and to make our own chocolate from cacao beans. While explaining the whole process to us, they took turns grinding the beans on a grinding stone, also giving each of us a turn. When we were done, we had made some beautiful chocolate that we mixed with hot water to make tea. As a person who loves chocolate, making my own chocolate seemed like a point of pride. So I went home, bought some cocoa nibs at the local market, and saved them for a rainy day. Well, Tuesday, March 24 was a rainy day. (It was actually Sunny with a high in the 60’s, but it's a saying, so don’t get too caught up in it.)

Anyway, from deep in her basement, Savyon pulled out a mortar and pestle and handed it to me, still lined with acorn dust that had been used for some sort of agricultural ritual months earlier by her roommate who self-identifies as a Witch. I filled it up with the nibs, sat down in the kitchen, put the water on the stove, and went to work. Within 15 minutes, however, I realized that I had made basically no progress, and my hand was cramping up. So, I poured about ⅔ of the nibs back in the bag from where they came, and went back to grinding what would (hopefully) make one cup.

Let me tell you, this was not easy. And by not easy, I mean extremely difficult. When people say something wasn’t easy, it implies that the process wasn’t easy but they were still ultimately successful. As you can probably now tell, I was not. After an hour and a half, my hot water had long turned cold, and rather than a beautiful chocolate paste, my chocolate was seemed like that hershey’s bar you bring camping but don’t eat, so when you check your back pack 5 months later, you find it and get excited to eat it, only to open it up and have the discolored chocolate bar fall apart like Voldemort at the end of Harry Potter (in the movies, not the book). I was doing everything we did in Belize and everything it said to online, but for some reason it just wasn’t working. It felt like that scene in The Half-Blood Prince when even though the directions say to cut the Sopophorous beans, the key is really to crush them with the blade.

I’m not a person who gives up easily, but it felt like I was doing a 1,000 piece puzzle that had a piece missing. As much as I check under the ottoman and behind the couch, it will all be for naught because I unknowingly threw it out a couple weeks prior. So, I took the crumbly chocolate mixture and mixed it with warm water, honey, and cayenne pepper like I had originally planned. While it wasn’t as successful as I would have hoped, the tea still tasted good, and it took a pretty picture. (The one above. The one below looks like a sub-par photo of store brand hot chocolate you found at the back of the cabinet and drank even though it was months past the expiration date.)

Day 15 - Wednesday, March 25th: Cornbread

Now, as previously stated, Wednesday was falafel and pita day. Savyon also planned on making hummus to go with it. That is why we soaked the chickpeas overnight, so they could expand like one of those magic towels that, as a kid, really proves to you that magic is real because it just seems so impossible, and, as an adult, you care so little about the magic towel that you don’t actually think about how it is clearly just a very compressed towel. Regardless, we woke up with bloated chickpeas, ready to be cut into a million pieces and fried.

Now, for the hummus, Savyon had to slow cook the chickpeas for many hours. In the morning, she said to me, “I’m going to put all the chickpeas in the crockpot” to which I responded, “ok.” What Savyon was really saying was, “Am I going to put all the chickpeas in the crockpot?” Essentially asking if I need them cooked for the falafel as well. I heard it as “I’m going to put all the chickpeas in the crockpot because I’m Israeli and I know how to make falafel and that is how you do it.” Obviously, we heard different things - both legitimate, of course. Fun fact, if you cook the chickpeas, they will be too soft to use for falafel. When did I find this out? That afternoon. I probably should have looked up a recipe first. That was how we realized that we had settled into domestic life: we were arguing about chickpeas.

Now that my entire plan to make falafel had gone out the window (and nearly my relationship with it), I needed to find an alternative - I could NOT let my social media followers down (more like, the second I stop posting people will realize that my content doesn’t really add anything to their lives and me posting pictures is actually actively annoying because it means there is one more instagram story people have to click through in order to remove the notification from their homepage). I looked around the kitchen trying to find something to make, and my eyes settled on some corn flour. Yum! I will make some cornbread. So, as Savyon sat in the kitchen, petty me decided to make cornbread on the counter with just a bit of extra sighing for dramatic effect.

I simply used the recipe on the back of the corn flour container. I mean, except for the fact that I didn’t have enough gluten free flour so I just added more cornflour. And I didn’t have milk so I added water instead. And I just estimated the amount of butter because it is quite difficult to measure amounts of earth balance that come out of those plastic containers. I have to say, for someone that really took liberties with the recipe, I was weirdly surprised by how not-good it was. I mean, the flavor was solid, as it just tasted like corn. And eating it was still a pleasant experience, I just covered it in butter. But the texture was not good. Again: I. Was. Shocked. I guess I should start actually following recipes? Yeah. From here on out, I was going to look up the entire recipe beforehand and really follow instructions (spoiler alert: it didn’t last long).

Day 16 - Thursday, March 26th: Samosas

Remember when I had a deep resolve to read recipes carefully? I did NOT follow the recipe at all on Thursday. It’s similar to what happens every time I go out to eat. I look at the menu just long enough to struggle to choose between 4 different dishes I want, but a bit too hastily to realize that the dish I actually settled on has cilantro in it, so the second it comes and I take my first bite, I realize I’m about to be tasting soap for the entire rest of the meal… all because I never learned my lesson to read the menu or ask the server if anything has cilantro. I decided to make gluten free samosas with almond flour and a mix of sweet and normal potato for the center filling. At first glance, the recipe seemed to be clear and accessible, and making the filling was quite easy.

Then, it came time to make the dough. The instructions very clearly state that you’re supposed to mix the oil with the flour and salt BEFORE adding the water, being very careful to mix it together so that the oil and flour mix well. So, of course, I just mix in the flour, oil, salt, and water all at the same time, only to be confused why it wasn't turning into a dough. I just assumed it would all turn out the same, as many recipes state an order which is not actually necessary. As much as I mixed it, kneaded it, and sang it songs of praise, it just wouldn’t come together. It was like me and my brothers as children, no matter how much you locked us in a room together and tried to bribe us, we weren't going to get along.

Thus, I called my father to brainstorm. The phone call went like this:

“How important is it to mix the flour and oil together before adding the oil?”

“Very important. The oil will really need to be integrated with the flour before adding the water.”

“Ok. Cool.”

“Why?”

“I might have mixed the flour and oil and water together at the same time.”

“Might have, or did?”

“Definitely did do that.”

Sometimes I like to ease people into conversations where I’ve done something I wasn’t supposed to as a way to lighten the mood a little bit. Things are far less serious when there is some ambiguity of their existence. Like the time I was 16 and called my parents to tell them that I might have placed my laptop on top of my father’s laptop and when the dog ran by, she pulled one of the chords attached to one of our laptops and pulled them both off the desk straight onto the hardwood floor. The fact that I so nonchalantly start the conversation by saying it might have happened helped curb some of the shock that comes along with telling your father you may have broken both your and his laptop at the same time. This would later on help me when they inevitably processed what I said and responded, “Wait, what do you mean you may or may not?” I believe they were far less angry at me answering, “I mean, it definitely did happen. There’s a hole in my laptop screen,” than if I straight up just said I broke our laptops.

Regardless, with the help of a food processor, and a bit of hot water, we had dough!

When it came time to make the samosas, I read the top half of the internet page that explained how to shape them:

1. Roll ball to oval shape.

2. Cut it to two.

3. Smear water on the straight edge. Join the edges to make a cone. Press gently to seal the cone from the inside as well.

4. Fill the cone with potato masala and press down.

5. Bring the edges together and make a pleat on one side. Bring back the pleat and seal it.

At the time I was like, what does this even mean? So many words that didn’t really make sense to me. I felt like I was taking one of my math exams in college where the first page of the exam is a breeze but then I turned to the second page and it started mentioning eigenvalues and I didn't even know what that meant, so I would just sit there rereading the questions, as if all of a sudden I was going to know what an eigenvalue was and how to solve the system of equations, or that somehow I would realize that I was just reading the question incorrectly and that was the cause of my confusion.

But, then, I had an epiphany, and miraculously saw the light that guided me to making the perfect samosa. I was wrong to think this was like math class. I then spent the next 15 minutes assembling 10 beautiful samosas, ready to be cooked. Only, once I finished, I realized that this definitely was still like math class and instead of a samosa, I made a bunch of giant potato triangles. Even worse, though, is that as I went back to the website to write this, I realized the bottom of the page contains step by step instructions with pictures to show you what they are supposed to look like.

I guess, to some extent, these are more like indian-inspired bourekas than they are samosas. But, like almost all oil-covered, potato-filled bread products, they tasted like heaven. Especially with some ranch dressing (or mango chutney).

Day 17 - Friday, March 27th: Apple Swan

For some reason, when I had planned the whole week out, I didn’t plan Friday. Is it because time is just a social construct that is thrown off by the lack of any real schedule? Or is it because after a Thursday night of back to back to back zoom calls, I just didn’t get around to figuring out what the next day was going to look like? Definitely the latter. But also the former.

Regardless, Friday afternoon came and I realized that I hadn’t made anything, and didn’t really have the time or motivation to go searching. I was finishing work around 3 and I had a college reunion happy hour at 3:45, so it was going to have to be something small.

I walked into the kitchen, saw an apple, and, kind of like how I imagine Da Vinci when he decided to paint the Mona Lisa, I decided to make apple swans. It seemed pretty easy - I like to think I have good knife skills - and would definitely impress the crowd. 3 apples later, I got something that looked more like a pegasus that accidentally got hit by a bus than a swan. On the bright side, I had definitely eaten my daily source of fruit. And, as the famous saying goes, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and since we can’t really go to the doctor anymore for fear of spreading a super contagious and deadly disease, we def gotta keep eating those fruits.