365 Days of Food

We went out to the B Too Belgian restaurant for dinner. It was the same place where we’d spent New Year’s Eve last year, but this time there were no top hats provided by the waitstaff and the people in the restaurant were quieter and talked about real estate. I ordered a salmon in a…

Sausage McMuffin with Egg. I ran out to get supplies for a contractor who was fixing up our house, grabbed breakfast on the way back, then came home and laid straw on the remaining bare patches in the garden. I bought a jar of soil at Home Depot to grow cilantro by the window, since…

We had breakfast at Nick’s Diner, the place by our house where you can always go up to the counter and see a friendly face provided that you wake up in time to get in, as we continued our week of sticking around at home and not doing much of anything. Later we went to…

Cranberry pudding. I had wanted to make plum pudding for a Christmas dessert but first I needed to find suet, an old-fashioned British type of beef fat, and like citron candies I found it impossible to locate in stores. The recipe told me that for plum pudding there is no acceptable substitute, so instead I…

Lebkuchen. This is my mom’s recipe, and after I had prepared the dough I received a box of them for Christmas, so I froze what I’d already made and ate these instead. They are German Christmas cookies that taste like honey cakes spiced with cardamom and citron, using honey to structure the dough in much…

We went to a friend’s house for a leftovers party and someone gave me a cup of Puerto Rican eggnog, which had cinnamon woven into the milk and sprinkled on top. They also made a shrimp soup that tasted like a version of gumbo (asopao de camarones, I believe), and roasted pork and a cold…

This is first time we’ve stayed in D.C. for Christmas, which I suppose means our home here is finally complete. It’s been a tradition in my family to make Pillsbury cinnamon rolls with orange icing for breakfast, and after that we went to see the Rogue One Star Wars movie, though I skipped the first…

I made a Vietnamese chicken soup for Christmas Eve, using a recipe which manages to out-Iowa the Iowans by making a broth out of corn. I started out boiling chicken thighs in stock and then shredding the chicken with my fingers, which is how it’s done. Add two cans of corn, puréed in the food…

An apple muffin at Panera, as I occupied myself with a full day of shopping for presents and groceries. The traffic in our neighborhood was such that there were lines of cars waiting to get out to the freeway, lines to get home from work, lines to get home from the mall. We walked through…

Vietnamese spaghetti bolognese. The recipe, as I’ve written here before, combines tomatoes with nước mắm, tomato paste, and a lot of garlic. Separately, you sauté ground pork with a little nước mắm and sugar and fold it into the sauce. We didn’t have a clean bowl for the rice cooker so I made bún, except…

I wanted to make beef patties that reminded me of meatloaf, so I poured in a good amount of paprika ketchup for the flavoring; however, I also made rice and I wanted to preserve some idea of Middle Eastern lamb patties, so I used a little cumin and allspice too. I added an egg and…

I found the presents Viet hid from me out of the misguided belief that Christmas was Easter, and now we have plenty of material splendor under our tree. Over the years we have slowly increased the amount of decoration in our house to include a Nutcracker in an artist’s smock, an ornament-sized snow globe, a…