#108: A Winter Digest
Eating like a picky toddler, and other creature comforts.
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The first two months of the year heaved with rainfall and therefore, opportunity: for stews, for hearty portions, for standing over the steaming stove and stirring.
Below, in no particular order, are the most delicious things I ate in January and February. The throughline is that I’ve been dining both like a petulant child and someone aware of an incoming apocalypse: think sugar, spice, and deceptively simple sides.
Sunday night’s fridge raid dinner of corn, cut off the cob, sweetheart cabbage, frozen peas and orzo in olive oil, butter, lemon and parmesan. A hug in one, then two, bowls, so good I remade it for lunch the next day.
The “chicken schnitzel nuggets” (read: chicken nuggets) ingeniously served at The Twenty Two’s Lynch-chic dining room for their alpine supper club. Daphne and I skewered and submerged them in bubbling fondue cheese. Some pairings can’t not taste good.
A desk lunch suspiciously evocative of springtime: spaghetti, asparagus, and parsley in garlic-infused olive oil. In retrospect, this was my January brain manifesting a kind of mediterranean existence.
The Silk Road trifecta: tomato, egg and pepper noodles; double-cooked pork; cucumber salad on a particularly miserable Sunday, before sour gummy worms on the bus ride home.
The many many Peking duck pancakes Ivan and I washed down with champagne at The Peninsula’s CNY party. The universe truly smiled on me by cancelling my next day’s morning meeting.
A big batch of my favourite meatballs yielded many dividends. After a first dinner over rice, a leftover double bill: stewed with butter beans in green (formerly pasta) sauce—blended cavolo nero, garlic, sad fridge herbs, capers. All draped over a bed of rice.
Then, meatballs 3.0 in an odd congee with spinach, Chinese pickles, plus an egg I cracked in for the last four minutes of heat. With lots of white pepper, which I’ve inherited from how my parents take their congee. When disparate leftovers join forces to make something harmonious it scratches an itch in my brain, and stomach.
