Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Cooking for others

This era of high food prices is really causing me to rethink about outside food consumption. I don’t see a reason to pay $30 for a simple meal when I can make that same dish at home for cheaper, healthier, and with more meat. (As a consistently lifter of weights, more protein is always good.) The skills I learn cooking for myself and the recipes I keep will last an entire lifetime. The kitchen smells great, too.

The only tradeoff? Time commitment, of course.

Another joy to be found in cooking at home is in sharing the food with others. There’s a great motherly pride when someone eats the food that you’ve made and they absolutely love it. No wonder parents everywhere get their feelings hurt when their kids tell them a particular dish tastes not so great. All that love and attention in making the food, crushed in a moment of child-like honesty.

Is Thanksgiving not the epitome of sharing this kind of love? No one bakes a turkey for themselves (even a high protein eat like me have no need for a 20-pounder); it’s all about doing it for the culinary enjoyment of others. It would be entirely different - and loses its meaning - if an entire Thanksgiving feast is made to order. The time commitment is the point. Though the least the non-cookers could do is clean up afterwards.

This coming Thursday I hope you get the privilege to cook for those close to you.

We have food at home

You know you’ve had a good workout session when you wake up the next morning - after a solid eight hours of slumber - still tired as heck. That, or you’ve overworked yourself. That, or you did not eat enough the previous day to recover from that much output.

It could be all three combined for me today. That’s how tired I was for all of it. Accutane medication has got to be detrimental to recovery from weightlifting. I need a lot of water during normal times; the intense dryness from the acne medication just exacerbates that need. Who knows if the water I am drinking is even contributing towards muscle protein synthesis while I am on Accutane.

I can’t wait to be done with it by the beginning of next year.

With restaurant prices remaining high after the inflation of the past few years, the mantra of “We have food at home” is ever salient. At least it is for me. Even buying ingredients at Whole Foods (read: expensive) to cook is cheaper than eating out. (I can give myself the tip.) What I’ve been doing lately is expanding the repertoire of dishes I make. Trust me, the bar is extremely low. As of this writing, the only seasoning in my cupboard is: salt, pepper, sesame oil, and olive oil.

As you can extrapolate from that, the variety of food I cook for myself has not been very various. I am not a picky eater in the slightest: I’m perfectly fine eating the same damn thing every single day of the week. That said, with outside food being so expensive, if I want fried chicken, I’m incentivized to start making it myself.

And that means getting an air fryer. (I don’t even have a toaster oven.) No way I am frying chicken the traditional vat-of-oil method in a tiny studio apartment. The room would smell of chicken for the next week. Black Friday is coming right around the corner…

Induction is best

Let me get in this great debate in the culture war regarding gas versus induction stoves. I absolutely love my induction stove. This $50 piece of kit from IKEA - at least it was that price back when I bought it about two years ago - continues to serve me splendidly. Induction is perfect for my tiny studio because it only heats the cookware, and not the surrounding air like a gas stove would. It eliminates the risk of gas leak as well; I’m glad my room isn’t even plumbed for it.

Not to mention that on a per unit cost, electricity is far cheaper than natural gas. The latter seems to be even costlier than usual this winter. This is why heating a home cost a ton of money during the wintry months - central heat boilers use natural gas. A friend of mine stopped heating up her entire two bedroom apartment because the bill from December was shockingly high. My studio is tiny enough that a portable electric heater suffices for the truly cold mornings.

I do conceded that a proper gas range can provide far more energy. For certain types of cooking, a high flame is really desirable. Such as getting an iron pan searing hot for a piece of steak, or a blazing stir-fry using a wok. If cooking is your thing, I can see why you would opt for a gas stove instead of induction (my landlord did). And that any legislation towards eliminating gas would seem like an existential threat.

But I think there’s innovation to be had in the induction space, especially in terms of energy release to match a gas stove. There’s a manufacturer adding batteries to an induction stove to act as a rapid-release energy store, vastly improving heating time. Imagine heating up a few cups of water for instant ramen in no time - that would be the dream!

Where's the protein?

I came home today to find that I forgot to defrost the char siu (Chinese BBQ pork). So now as I am writing this I’ve no idea what I am doing for dinner. Typically I would just make rice and that’s about it. The char siu heats up in the microwave, and the all important vegetables is in the form of kimchi. I am a simple man with simple tastes, and I can eat the same thing day after day.

Not that I wouldn’t mind variety. But variety costs time and money. My meager public servant salary definitely does not allow for nightly food orders from DoorDash.

Good news is I live a few blocks from a full-size mall with a proper food court. I’ll probably head over there soon as I finish typing the amount of words here I feel appropriate. Besides, today is the last mild day before a heat wave is suppose to hit all of California throughout the Labor Day weekend. Going to enjoy the mildness while it lasts before my friends with air-conditioning in their homes get to be smug about things.

It is indeed already September. This far into 2022 and I’ve yet to do anything special, really. The only vacations I’ve taken were all of the stay at home type. I am heading to Austin, Texas in two months, so there will be some excitement for that. Other than that it’s just going to continue to be the same old same old. And that’s perfectly fine: life’s treating me quite well these past months. Nothing to complain about, everything is going smoothly and flowingly.

Of course I probably just jinxed myself. Perhaps the forgotten-to-defrost char siu is the harbinger of a downturn!

Induction life

One of the most useful tool for living alone in a small studio apartment is an induction stovetop. A simple single-top unit from IKEA and be had for less than fifty dollars. That is what I bought, and it works magnificently. The best attribute of induction stove compared to a gas stove is that the lack of an open flame. Not only it is safer, it heats up the room less, too.

And it would be super easy to add another, to have two cooking surfaces. However, I haven’t gotten that fancy just yet. For now I am quite okay with cooking one thing at a time.

The pain-point of induction stoves is of course the need to have induction-ready pots and pans. Lucky for me, I had to buy a whole new set for the move anyways, so it was only a matter of bringing a magnet when I went shopping for kitchen stuff. If the magnet sticks to the bottom of a pot, then it is able to be used on an induction top. Best of all, should I ever move to a place with a gas stove, the induction-ready stuff works just as well.

Another quirk is that without a visible flame to look at, it takes a bit of trial and error to get accustomed to what a certain wattage setting means in terms of heating power. What is the correct wattage to perfectly cook an egg to sunny side up? How big is 800 watt, really? The answers will take some time to figure out.

But once you do, I don’t think you’d go back to open-flame gas stoves. The safety and convenience factor is huge in induction’s favor. Cleaning up is ridiculously easy: a few spray of your favorite all-purpose cleaner, then wipe with a towel. That’s it! One flat surface with zero crooks and crannies for food stuff to get stuck in. It’s brilliant.

Mom's cooking

One of the things that comes with being Chinese is that even though you’ve moved out, your parents will still constantly give you food. Of course, that’s provided you didn’t move too far away from the house. The independent-minded you may think this goes against the meaning of truly being on your own, and on principle I’m inclined to agree. However, there are certain days that you are glad there’s food in the fridge ready to go.

I can see why take-out ordering is so popular with my generation. After a particular tough day at work, you really don’t want to spend the half hour or so cooking up dinner. It’s far easier to order something on DoorDash and have it deliveredr while you go on about something else. Or, you know, hang out on twitter until the food arrives. What I’m saying is, I get it: the will to actually cook dinner is inverse to how hard you’ve worked that day.

Which is why some days I am glad to have my mom’s cooking ready to go for the microwave. It’s certainly faster than ordering food, and I save a boatload of money not eating out. I definitely don’t make the level of income to sustain a take-out ordering habit, though I think I would totally do so if I earned more. Good thing there isn’t a Hong Kong style restaurant nearby, because I would totally patronize that for dinner every chance I get.

I don’t know how my friends with kids do it. Cooking for myself after a tiring day is difficult enough. To make enough food for more than one person? Kids that bitch about the variety of dinner deserves to get slapped. You have no idea how hard it is to cook dinner after work on a weekday until you move out on your own, and have to do it yourself.

Time to heat up the food my mom gave me this week.

Instant noodles with bacon

During the work-week I tend to eat the same thing everyday in order to keep down the decision fatigue. For lunch my go-to is instant Korean ramyun, which isn't the healthiest thing in the world but man is it not the greatest comfort food known to man. Anyways, it obviously lacks in protein so to supplement I've been going with the beloved bacon.

Not just any bacon, I buy the thick-cut ones Costco sells as a two-pack. Unlike most people I'm not fond of bacon burnt to the point it resembles jerky: I prefer it cooked just enough with a slight browning to the edges, and the inside parts still soft and juicy.

In the interest of saving time however lately I've forgone pan-frying the bacon and instead dump it into the same pot of water for the noodles. The meat fat and juices really augments the flavor of the broth, and the bacon itself has the consistency of braised meat. Pair it with kimchi and it's fantastic as hell.

It's easy to make, too: bring water to a boil, add everything at once, and when the noodles softens it's ready to eat.