Thai Beef Salad, AKA I Get Heat Stroke and Forget to Follow Rules

What an eventful long weekend.


I accidentally bought 3 more little chickens from the feed store – on two separate occasions, just to ensure you of my complete lack of self-control – to add to our existing 4, bringing the grand total of our multiclucktural brood to 7. I'm pretty excited because we spend a solid chunk of our expendable income on eggs. We each eat at least two a day – I have thus far perfected hard- and soft-boiled, and can definitely poach my way around an egg or two as well. As of this weekend, I learned how to cook them sunny-side up! How beautiful is this??

The combination of the crispy egg whites and perfect creamy yolk was a revelation. You can cook eggs a zillion different ways, but they all tend to be soft in one fashion or another. Crispy was absolute perfection.


Anyways – while my 7 chickens got to know each other and their new outdoor pen, I weeded our three huge plots, planted a few dozen vegetables, and almost cut my thumb off with my Wusthof knife. Luckily this time I didn't entirely cut through my nail, like I did LAST time I pulled off such a stunt. Today, I had an aspiration to check off another recipe from The Food Lab. I was thinking chicken with a pan sauce, and then Portland did that thing where it's schizophrenic. After a week of unseasonably chilly weather, today was absolutely hot as balls. My house was an oven when I got home, and I ended up sitting in my garage amongst the smell of gasoline and coolant because it was the coolest room in the house, flipping through my cookbook.


The thought of cooking over a hot stove, for once, had absolutely no appeal. I wanted something light and refreshing, so I deviated from my cookbook journey and decided to make Thai beef salad. With lemongrass, mint, and cilantro with a citrusy lime dressing and grilled steak, it really is the perfect salad for a hot day.


I've been obsessed with this dish for several years, as a Thai restaurant two blocks from my office serves up a divine rendition. I made it once a few months ago, and liked it even better than the one I regularly spent $12 on. Perhaps the heat had made me batty, but I decided to kind of wing it from memory rather than follow a recipe.


I started by marinating a slab of beef in lime juice, yuzu, fish sauce, scallions, and aminos. You know what's awesome when you have a deep, fresh cut on your finger from your fancy-pants German knife? Tossing beef in all of those things and forgetting to keep your sliced-open finger out of the mix. AGONY.


The dressing was made with minced garlic, a diced tiny little red pepper which is apparently a “fresca” pepper(?), two juiced limes, about a tablespoon of fish sauce, and a couple tablespoons of minced lemongrass – which is arguably one of the most refreshing flavors EVER. Tossed in a bit of sugar and a smidge of the Korean red pepper flakes I use in my kimchi – which is a recipe for another day – it smelled too spicy and not quite refreshing enough, so I grated about half a cucumber into it. Like magic, it added just enough crisp moisture to bring down the spice. Dressing done – on to the meat.

I took it out of the fridge and became distracted by the fact that I have 7 adorable chickens running around my backyard. After thoroughly torturing them with my presence and insistence upon holding them as means to show my deep ocean of affection and to “socialize them”, they were horrified and I was covered in chicken shit. Perhaps parenthood isn't for me, but after a thorough cleaning I was back in the kitchen where I apparently belong, with meat that is no longer of the living variety.


At this point, I am vaguely pretending to know what I'm doing, and failing. I tossed about 2 pounds of London broil into the cast iron pan before I realized that I have no idea why, and that people follow recipes for a good reason. The outside of the meat is browning beautifully, but the cut is so thick that I'm already foreseeing a raw center. I turned down the heat and started cooking the meat on all sides while I crank up the heat in the oven to 450 to engage Plan B.


Oh! That's cool. The outside of my meat is perfectly browned and it's clocking in at an internal temperature of less that 90 degrees, which means it's probably still technically alive according to Texas state law. Why do I ever do things without a plan? That was the ENTIRE focus of this blog – to follow recipes. I have already failed, on entry #3.


The steak went into the oven (I turned it down to 350, then back up to 400 because I'm spastic when I don't know what to do), and I did the cooking version of a Hail Mary which means I poured a fat-ass glass of wine and started forcing myself to feel hopeful by constantly sniffing my quite delicious-smelling dressing which may or may not be adorned by $12 worth of beef.


Finally, the steak appeared to be edible. After resting and slicing, I tossed it with minced lemongrass, shallot, and toasted rice. I quickly tossed some greens with minced cilantro and mint, a bit of the dressing that had been my sanity through the “I can't randomly just cook beef however” debacle, and topped with the rest of the dressing. I mean, look at that beef. Perfection.

While I don't entirely recommend building without blueprints, sometimes it's exciting – in the same way that having to pee with no restroom in sight is exciting (I'm talking from a female standpoint here folks – that ain't easy). Desperation may inspire, but sometimes you just pee your pants and live with the shame of not being able to figure your shit out.


Fortunately, today, I figured my shit out. I went off-recipe and pulled it together, and it was DELICIOUS. Every bit of the refreshing meal I was hoping for. Please, go off-recipe every now and then. You might pee your pants a couple times, but you also might cook a delicious meal that you enjoy in the sanctuary of your finally-cooled-down yard, with a glass of wine, watching your chickens be chickens. It was a good evening.

Why Am I Doing This?

I suppose I should have kicked off this blog with an explanation, but that white chicken chili was the shit and I really wanted to post it, so... here you go. Better late than never.


The last couple years have been interesting to say the least. To kick it off, in 2014 my now-husband and I had separated after four years together which was devastating but thankfully brief. Then right as things were getting better, we were in a serious motorcycle accident that demolished my shoulder, required surgery, and a 2-month long absence from work. I couldn't move very well on my own and I was in a sling the whole time, so I survived on a diet of Easy Mac and Hot Pockets in the room my (now-)husband was renting which was conveniently right across the street from the hospital which I frequented in my state of disrepair. Right around the time I was feeling more or less recovered, we got married at the courthouse and shortly after, moved back in together - into an awesome studio in downtown Portland.


The new chapter begins.


I'm a hummingbird when it comes to hobbies – I get super-hyper-jazzed and throw myself headfirst into them – paper art, knitting, reupholstery, the list goes on. Then I move on to the next when I get bored which is astonishingly quickly. At the beginning of this new chapter, I was freshly due for a new hobby. I had been eating nothing but microwaved garbage for months and I felt crappy. How convenient that our studio was located directly above a Safeway. Cooking it is.


There is a website that I've followed obsessively for the last few years, Serious Eats. In particular, they have one contributor who is now a managing editor, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who writes passionately about not only food and cooking, but the science behind it. His writing and recipes are very fascinating and he finally published a cookbook last year, The Food Lab. My loving husband Jan had pre-ordered it for me and all 900+ pages arrived and changed my life. So there I was - with an amazing cookbook, a kitchen surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking downtown Portland, and an elevator ride away from a grocery store. I would soon live in my kitchen.


I started working my way through the cookbook. First, I perfected all the elements of my absolute favorite dish on the planet Earth – Eggs Benedict. After like two dozen eggs that died sad deaths, I could poach like a mo-fo, and still can. I could probably poach a perfect egg while drunk and half-asleep, so I suppose the deaths of all of those eggs were not entirely in vain. Then I tackled Hollandaise sauce, which I had only ever previously prepared from a cheap packet of dust from the store. When I combined the two for the first time on top of toasted and buttered English muffins and grilled ham, it was better than any Benny I'd ever ordered from a restaurant. And I realized - after eating every bite - that I was not only satiated, but I felt... accomplished. For $10 worth of ingredients, I made two servings of restaurant-quality Eggs Benedict which would typically cost three times that much. Holy shit, I can do this. I can cook.


I find cooking to be incredibly therapeutic. During a time of transition in my life, standing in a kitchen full of amazing smells – THAT I TOTALLY MADE HAPPEN, YO – and then eating a delicious dish of food that I prepared is unexplainable. Everything involved in cooking helped heal me better than any surgery ever could – quietly mincing vegetables, searing meat, stirring eggs into cohesive perfection, bringing it all together... there's so much more to it than that, but every step of the way brings my anxiety down and my happiness up. It's like magic.


I now overlook a burgeoning garden and coop full of 6 happy hens while I cook in my kitchen, as opposed to the beautiful Portland downtown skyline I enjoyed last year. I tend to prefer the former, in all honesty – knowing that all of the plants I'm babysitting will one day end up on my plate is pretty satisfying.


So I suppose I will finally get to the point – why I'm doing this. Much like Julie & Julia – one of my favorite movies – I am going to cook every recipe and technique in The Food Lab. As a hobby hummingbird, I need something to keep me focused. That cookbook is just the thing.


I hope you'll join me on this journey as I make my way through 900 pages of cooking. We all need something or someone to keep us centered, because sometimes life feels like you're stuck in a centrifuge. I've found the one thing that centers me amidst all the chaos, much like a poached egg when it finally settles into a cohesive package at the bottom of the pan after flying around like a lunatic in the boiling water.


Let's do this. Bon appetit.

White Chicken Chili With An Awkwardly Large Tortilla Chip

A year ago today, we lived in a studio apartment in the middle of downtown Portland. It was awesome save for the fact that we paid the equivalent of two mortgages to live there, and we eventually ended up renting an amazing house owned by a good friend, for more space and less money. This house is great, and/but it has an offensively huge yard – a yard that obligates you to do garden-y things to it. After several weekends of tilling, weeding, mowing, etc, I planted a cubic shit-ton of seeds and starters and kicked my feet up in smug satisfaction, awaiting a bountiful crop from which I would jar and pickle and fuck some shit up with salads. Unfortunately, there is little difference between Weeds and Not Weeds – so I was hesitant to pull the bad stuff out of the ground, lest it be a beautiful head of Vivian lettuce. The result was a quite spectacular weed garden, with edible vegetables sprinkled throughout.


After some solid foot-dragging, I finally agreed that we should cut our losses, and weed out everywhere there wasn't a successful plant growing. We had about a dozen tomato plants, a dozen cucumber plants, onions, cabbage, spinach and kale, which were all doing well. My mother-in-law came over with a witchcraft weeding tool that changed my life forever, and we tore shit up. Did I mention we also moved our six chickens into their outdoor coop for the first time? So we're now responsible for the lives of both salad ingredients and feathered dinosaurs.


After an entire day gardening, my hands were ripped to shit and I had tons of cuts that were full of dirt and I would have gone for a manicure if it were not for my phobia of the judgment of nail technicians (I have a delicate soul). So I went back out to the garden, where I found entire bushels worth of cilantro, which I've never planted before so apparently came to my yard via osmosis. That's it, kids! I'm making white chicken chili.


2 poblanos, 4 Anaheims, 2 jalepenos, some onion and garlic under the broiler got the kitchen smelling delicious. I went out to my Weed Garden and pulled up a ton of cilantro while my peppers charred and made our house smell like a tacqueria. After the peppers charred, I placed them in a bowl of chicken broth to rest, after which I would peel and seed them in the broth, because I am not a smart woman and have little care for my personal well-being.


Peeling and seeding PEPPERS in a bowl full of PEPPER JUICE with hands that are splintered from two days of yard work is arguably the dumbest fucking thing you could ever do. Have you ever felt your heartbeat, through a cut on your ring finger, for two hours? Because I have, and that shit sucks. But I soldiered through and tossed some chicken breasts in my pepper puree to simmer, along with a quart of chicken broth, cumin, and ground coriander.


At this point, my husband is starving to death because I measure cooking times in intervals of “pretty soon” and “almost done”, both of which roughly translate to “watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy and then I'll feed you”. After applying ointment to my horrifically demolished hands, it finally all came together. A half pound of Jack cheese never hurt anyone, so into the pot it went – along with a tablespoon of jalepeno pickling liquid. A couple cups of the beans went into the blender, then added back in, to cream it up without adding cream. It was delicious, not to toot my own horn. But beep-beep. After topping with some fresh cilantro and a freshly fried tortilla chip, I inhaled it.


Hopefully my new garden grows, and my chickens lay me boatloads of eggs. In the meantime, despite all of my missteps and fuck ups, I ate a delicious bowl of white chicken chili tonight. I'll give it a thumbs up when my hand stops throbbing from pepper poisoning.


Cheers y'all!