Have a soothing tea break 🍵
It's only a two-day, multi-step process.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we present a formula for a soothing tea time, and how to make quick Thai food at home. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Little butter cookies with matcha tea at home
Butter cookie recipe from Preppy Kitchen
This is a recipe for an afternoon tea break that is several days long. In the Year of Our Lord and/or Satan 2021, I want you to treat yourself slowly and with respect, as if the world was not burning down around you; as if you yourself were a luxury good that takes several days to arrive (you are). First, you must place an order for good matcha tea, preferably this smooth and nutty variety from Ippodo tea. Buy a little whisk or frother, if you don’t already have one, and a tiny sieve. Meanwhile, as you wait for your matcha to come in the mail, buy the finest butter you can afford (Kerrygold is king, but I buy Whole Foods store brand). You will make tiny butter cookies, from scratch, in your tiny kitchen; you can play this Youtube playlist that transports you from your mice-infested basement studio to somewhere, anywhere, else. The recipe for butter cookies, which are rich and crumbly like shortbread, can be found here; if you want visuals and to be entertained by thirsty Youtube comments, there’s also a video version. Refrigerate the cookie dough, tightly wrapped and hidden away from strong flavors, for as long as it takes for the tea to arrive, as this will help the cookies keep their shape. Bake until just a bit golden brown. Finally, set a pot of water to boil, sit down. Whisk your matcha with hot water (off the boil for a minute or two), and nothing else. Place two butter cookies on a tiny plate. Marvel at the contrast of sweet butterfat cutting the bitterness of the matcha. Be proud that you accomplished something, anything, nice for yourself in this new year. Store leftover cookies in an airtight empty tea tin, for future use on a dark day.
Buttered, salted, and griddled banana bread at home
The base recipe is from NYT Cooking, but if you Google around you can find it for free.
This is a periodic reminder that for the World’s Best Weekend Breakfast™️ , please, please fry a thick slice of banana bread on a skillet with a generous little pat of creamy butter spread on each side (flip once). What happens next is no less than magic. Your kitchen will be filled with the scent of freshly baked banana bread, the outsides will brown and caramelize and get sugary-crispy, and when you take it off of the heat (re-apply butter and top with a sprinkling of flaky salt) and bite into it the center will almost be gooey. In fact, you should bake a loaf of banana bread (just pour this recipe into a loaf pan and bake for 45 min or so -- I also love to add milk chocolate chips to both the batter and the streusel), let it cool, slice it up into fat slices, stick them in the freezer and have freshly griddled banana bread at the ready whenever your little heart desires.
Thousand-year egg and tofu rolls at Birds of a Feather
191 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211, outdoor dining (heated and non-heated), plus takeout and delivery available
I literally do not know what kind of plague-less, coup-less high I was riding back in 2019 when I went to Birds of a Feather for the first time, but the thousand-year egg and tofu rolls I belittled as needing “more bang for the buck” are in fact so powerfully spicy I could only eat one of the tiny bites. The delicate circles of tofu wrapped in paper-thin cucumber with a sliver of thousand-year egg are blanketed in a thick layer of a sauce of what I think is pure fresh chili peppers… and málà oil? Anyways I still think it’s worth ordering, just to take yourself on a little journey and temporarily distract you from the pain of 2021 life.
Thai basil eggplant with ground pork at home
Recipe from Extra Petite.
Way back in the Olden Days, before Instagram influencers and TikTok and all that jazz, people used to show off outfits on blogs dedicated to fashion like some kind of goddamn internet dinosaur. It turns out that these blogs were actually very good and maye way better than Instagram accounts, because they were focused on writing and not just tagging 50 fashion brands in one tiny square photo, and my favorite among them was called Extra Petite. (The reason I liked that blog is explained by its two-word title.) Anyways, this blog is still up and running and has one of my favorite easy dinner recipes, for a Thai basil eggplant that quenches my thirst for Seamless. I like to use ground pork instead of turkey, but I’ve also made it with chicken and tofu before -- it all comes out delicious.
Tobagi country style sliced cabbage kimchi at H Mart
Available at H Mart.
I don’t often buy kimchi -- not because I don’t like it, but because I find that it’s one of the most addictive foods on earth and if I buy a tub it quickly becomes financially unsustainable for me to support my gallon-a-week kimchi diet. Name a better combo than kimchi and fluffy short-grain white rice, I’ll wait -- and in the meantime Google how to ferment my own. Have you made kimchi before? Can you hook me up with a bulk kimchi supplier? Let me know! You can reply directly to this email.
Happy weekend,
Soph
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