In my past, when I encountered people on a more regular basis, people were often surprised that I wasn’t a vegetarian. I think this is mostly because they were doing the classic “I think this person is a lesbian” thing. It always felt sort of flattering (“wow! you think I look gay?!”) and sort of annoying (because explaining what I do and don’t eat is much more complicated than “vegetarian” for a lot of reasons).
I’m not a vegetarian, due, mostly, to my own personal weaknesses, and a desire not to make dinner with noah too complicated, but I prefer, mostly, not to eat meat. (I ate pork dumplings at a LNY gathering and had diarrhea for a day, so.) This is partly a feeling bad for animals that die thing, and partly an environmental thing. (The part that feels bad about animals is the part of me that feels perfectly fine eating fish, the part that is worried about the environment is the part that won’t eat beef.) (Please don’t ask me about cheese and dairy cows, listen, we are all full of contradictions.)
Despite eating meat, I still feel a deep annoyance at recipe websites that present recipe aggregations around the theme of “here’s a meat.” Like, I think we’ve all accepted by now that even if we do eat meat it’s not like, a great thing to do, and that probably eating less meat is desirable.
If you go to look up a recipe on Bon Appetit (always a mistake imo) they present you with three options right to begin with:
Serious Eats (pre redesign) had their recipe suggestions as like “pizza, hamburgers, pasta” which is insane for a number of reasons like, who, seriously who is looking up hamburger recipes regularly?
The Kitchn is a classic of this genre: “a week of plant based slow cooker dinners” vs “40 slow cooker chicken dinners to have tonight” or “14 chicken sheet pan dinners” “18 chicken skillet dinners.” I didn’t make those up! Those are all on their front page right now!
These are the same publications that once or twice a year write about the environment, and like, using compostable forks or whatever the fuck, and it’s like, obviously they don’t care, but also… couldn’t they try to? Couldn’t they try to make it easier for the rest of us? But they don’t, so I will, I guess. On the theme of “14 chicken sheet pan dinners” here is, more or less, my menus for the last few weeks.
Saturday (if someone is coming over): When people come over I tend to go all out. I can’t recommend myself with my personality so I try to make up for it with my cooking. Recently I’ve done dinners from The Korean Vegan (elaborate), as well as vegan pigs in a blanket with cole slaw (lazy).
Sunday: Usually we go grocery shopping on Sundays, so if there is a day that we eat fish it’s usually Sunday night. I like the Samin Nosrat slow cooked salmon with her citrus avocado salad (less a salad and more a pile). I’ve also made this recipe for salmon bulgogi a few times recently and like it a lot. It’s great with seasoned bean sprouts or a spicier banchan. This past sunday we went to a friend’s house for LNY and I made these dumplings with this filling as well as candied kumquats (recipe is on my IG) and braised winter melon in the style of dongpo pork. (I undercooked the melon AND didn’t peel it enough, but the first time I did this recipe it was honestly transcendent) this isn’t the recipe that I used, but it’s similar
Monday: On Monday nights for the past… oh my god two years… we’ve watched wrestling on Kast with a few friends, so we try to have dinner cooked on the earlier side. This week though we watched the Royal Rumble (a huge mistake) on Saturday, so we had Monday off. It was Lunar New Year, and I made Buddha’s delight a recipe that is convenient and easy to make if you cook Chinese food semi-regularly, because you’ll have most of the stuff on hand already, and it just uses a little bit of everything. The only things I needed to buy special for this were the red fermented tofu, the tofu puffs, and a leek.
When Noah cooks on Mondays he often makes Maangchi’s red tofu, he’s a lot better at frying it than I am.
Weekday lunch: A grim situation. I hate thinking about lunch. Often it’s a quesedilla, or leftover rice with an egg mixed in it (hot short grain rice, pinch of hondashi, splash of mirin, splash of soy sauce, lots of furikake, mix aggressively and eat quickly).
On a weekday when I didn’t really eat breakfast and I happen to have beansprouts in the refrigerator I make kongnamul guk (sometimes with ramen). I have some random banchans that noah doesn’t particularly like (braised black soybean and dried squid) and I’ll eat those with rice. To make soup during lunch especially easy I keep a anchovy stock just kinda going in the fridge, to do that I use: 10 small anchovies, 3 small dried shitakes, 1 strip dashi. I keep it in a jar with water for a day or two. You could do it with no anchovies and just dashi. I use this for soup so I don’t have to go to the mess and effort of boiling anchovies.
Tuesday: Well today I’m having pan fried tofu (slice firm tofu, dust with potato starch, fry in a few tbs of oil) with an omsom yuzu sauce that a friend gave me, with rice and marinated yu choy (1/2 cup anchovy dashi described above mixed with 1 tbs mirin and 1.5 tbs soy sauce). I boiled and gently squeezed the yu choy in the morning on a break from work, so I’ll have very little to do tonight. Last week I made vegan mixed rice and one of the worst meat substitutes I’ve ever tried.
Wednesday: Last week (and also the three weeks before that) pesto pizza with sugar snap peas and gochujang dressing (or some other random vegetable). Caputo’s, a Very Italian store near us sells everything necessary for pizza (frozen dough, good pesto, aged mozerella, many olives). This requires no effort and no thought. The hardest part is remembering to thaw the pizza dough. I keep gochujang dressing in the refrigerator, the recipe is from the Korean Vegan, and it’s really good. This week I’ll be making one of my favorite foods of all time: pan fried noodles with stir fried garlic chives and spiced tofu, because I have those left over from making dumplings this weekend and need to use them before they turn.
Thursday: usually Noah cooks or we get takeout, it depends. Noah is the primary meat cook in our house, so when we eat meat it’s usually his perogative. Last week we had a quick soup-like thing with frozen tofu and a bit of pork belly and this week I think he’s doing carbonara because we have guanciale that we got from Caputo’s.
Friday: On any given Friday or Monday, I make steamed tofu with a scallion ginger and cilantro sauce. I eat this like, every other week? I like this recipe both because it is so delicious, and because if I use a lot of extra cilantro then I feel like I don’t need to make a separate vegetable.
I keep soft or silken tofu in my refrigerator all the time (depends on what the store has tbh) and I’ll use it either to steam, or to make a gentle soup with quickly stir fried pickled mustard greens and vegetable stock (to make: chop two leaves of pickled mustard greens, stir fry until fragrant, add a little garlic (optional, it’s a mild soup), add a cup or so of vegetable broth, bring to a boil, scoop silken tofu in, add 1/2 tsp potato starch mixed with 1 tbs water, cook gently until thick, serve with ground white pepper, scallions, salt as needed over rice).
Anyway, I think like… at least half of these are really easy recipes, so I’m basically a recipe aggregator now. Related, this is also why I’m not posting these days, I’m just making a lot of stuff that other people wrote the recipes for.