Little plum cakes and other things 🌸
Read on for a Redwall feast.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, anything I can offer to you is really not enough to counter the weight of the world but I hope it helps *shrug*. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Lime Mint Elderflower Italian sparkling mineral water at Whole Foods
For when you want to drop that Bezos $$$.
Hello!! Welcome to another week of the hellscape that is 2020. One of the hardest things about being an adult, I have learned, after spending about a decade being one, is that you think you’ve made it home free once you’ve escaped all the perils of adolescence and teenagehood alive. But then one day something like a global pandemic and the crumbling of democracy occurs, and it dawns on you that every human adult out there is simply a complicated Rube Goldberg machine of coping mechanisms walking around in a meat sack. How do you do, fellow meat sack. Anyways, it turns out everything is bad for you so the best I can offer you as a form of escape is a glass of this Very Fancy Water from Whole Wallet. I am probably spending way too much money on Fancy Water, but this one is maybe the best I’ve ever had, and it’s a small price to pay for sanity, anyways. Enjoy.
Little plum cakes at home
Recipe from Bon Appetit
Welcome to another edition of “baking recipes so foolproof you can make them in a kitchen so small the oven won’t open all the way,” which of course, is a metric I specially test firsthand. This goes in the books alongside the Lemon Raspberry Tea Cake as a miraculously simple, homey, and crowd-pleasing bake… which in this economy, means a crowd of one. Although the recipe calls for a mixer, you can do just fine with very soft butter and a determined fork. To feel especially magical, like I’m a mothafucking badger in Redwall pulling out a tray of bakes in my underground tiny tree-root hut, I like to make these in mini muffin tins (bake for 10 mins, makes 2 dozen), and use pretty purple Italian prune plums. (The slices of plum, sprinkled with sugar (which by the way granulated is totally fine and boy do I love to nest parentheses like I’m coding in Lisp or something) melt into a jammy, sweet-tart perfection.)
Minced chicken with corn soup at Tri Dim Shanghai
467 Columbus Ave, New York, NY 10024
Just between you and me, I’m a huge fan of Chinese restaurant soups -- you know, the cornstarch-y bowls of broth with small bits of floating chunks suspended in it. I’ve never seen it made in a home kitchen (or rather, my home’s kitchen), but I love to order it. They’re all just essentially variations of egg drop soup, but chicken with corn is my favorite kind (unless you can find pork with mustard greens, a rare bird). The slightly bland but salty strips of chicken, definitely canned corn kernels, and silky slips of artificially-yellow dyed egg combine to make a take-out soup so much greater than the sum of its parts.
Braised Soft Bean Curd with Mushroom and Bamboo Shoots at Tri Dim Shanghai
467 Columbus Ave, New York, NY 10024
Braised tofu -- silky smooth inside like 鸡蛋羹, fried on the outside (but softened), and coated perfectly with rich, salty sauce -- is a delight when made well. The version at Tri Dim Shanghai is pretty cravings-worthy; there’s plenty of fat triangles of tofu, even for a tofu-lover like me; the sauce is salty but not unpleasantly so; and best of all, there’s really big thick slices of fresh shiitake mushrooms and thin rectangular reeds of bamboo. Also, there’s lots of frozen green peas floating in the sauce as well, a whimsical touch that charms me and reminds me of my mother’s own disregard for culinary purity.
Lawful pour-over iced coffee at home
Recipe from Just One Cookbook
I recently caved and bought a kitchen scale in an attempt to be my very own Order Muppet. My house (and by house I really mean a studio so small it needs a Murphy bed in order to be rentable) is still a mess but at least I am making very precise iced coffee now! The recipe is from Just One Cookbook, which is one of my favorite food blogs. The ratio I use for one serving is 16g coarsely ground coffee beans (Colombian beans from Zabar’s), 70g ice (plus extra for serving), 170g of hot water for the pour-over. For the rest, read the recipe.
XOXO,
Soph