What's Cooking?

We've been in Chicago for two months now. The weather is flirting with changing; an unseasonably warm October has been great for getting outside and biking to do chores and errands. Seattle gets fall in the sense that things start to change color, the temperature starts to drop and the days get shorter. (Not to mention the insane proliferation of all things pumpkin spice). But it's not really fall, which is easily the best season here precisely because it leans into the transition.

What's weird is I distinctly remember my time in Portland having an excellent autumn, and from a climate standpoint it's not significantly different to Seattle. As far as I can tell, it's due to some combination of:

Portland has more deciduous trees than Seattle, meaning better colors and better smells.

Might not be generally true but I spent most of my time at Reed which was a mini-arboretum. The lawn and quad had the oaks and maples; most of the evergreens ended up in the canyon

I never had a personal milestone to line up with autumn in Seattle. Portland and Chicago both had a new school year lined up with the changing seasons, and this year we moved house. So seasonality was much more salient because I was already receptive to "oh we're doing new things now" and not as caught in a rut.

Human perspective is strange. Fall is the best season. I need more excuses to get out of the house. Take your pick.

Food and alcohol did not make the trip from Seattle to Chicago. We did bring our spices, which packed up nicely and had all their containers spontaneously exploded would have caused exactly zero problems for the rest of our stuff. So we've had to re-buy the staples; I've held off on reassembling a liquor collection until I can figure out what my friends drink. So far, I've got a bottle of bourbon and allspice dram , which has been my twist on an old fashioned picked up from a friend when we were figuring out my wedding cocktails.

Costco has been a massive help on this front; we dropped $1k on a couple of initial trips and have seen our normal grocery bills go down by 15-20% from Seattle. Which is a lot but I expect even that is artificially inflated. Not buying beer every other week and not buying paper products for the next century have yet to show up in the bills. Plus, we haven't yet figured out our grocery routine, so we are making decisions that are sub-optimal just because we haven't quite figured out what works. There have also been a few "specialty ingredients" which would not normally be part of the bill because I've been on a tear making all sorts of things I don't normally.

As a birthday present, my wife bought me Good Things by Samin Nosrat . I can let the blatant self-interest involved slide (yes I know who benefits from my cooking the most) because we both like Samin a lot. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat was the first cookbook that actually clicked with me because it actually explained why you did certain things in the kitchen. Make a Caesar salad literally from scratch that's restaurant quality with a surprisingly minimal amount of effort and you start seeing things differently.

Good Things is a bit different in that it's an actual cookbook full of recipes, not a treatise on culinary axioms with a few samplers in the back. Thematically, it's the "dinner with friends" book, focused on how to do things you would actually do in your kitchen.

In the span of a weekend, I made:

1 qt pickled red onions

1 pt marinated feta

However much chili goes in my instant pot

2 cups simple syrup

2 qts giardiniera

Fried shallots, saving the infused oil for later

Whipped ricotta, don't remember the amount, it got eaten instantly:

I've also started fermenting a batch of cider following the "recipe" of putting yeast in a jar of apple juice and waiting patiently. It's basically the easiest home brewing possible (since it involves $10 of supplies and about 90 seconds to assemble). I'm not a big cider fan but I figure things you make yourself nearly always taste better and it's been a lot of fun to watch it bubbling on my kitchen counter.

Same logic goes for the giardiniera. I generally don't bother because I don't really find the heat adds much to sandwiches. A bad batch can even add crunch or weird textures I'm not a fan of. Making it was fun, novel experience and it tastes pretty good even after only a week of fermenting! I tried it on a frozen pizza; even though it was still heavy on the "salad dressing" vibes it definitely added a kick and dimension to a pretty one-dimensional meal.

Not all of the recipes were from Samin's book. I do my own thing when it comes to chili (mostly because if you use a recipe for chili you're probably doing it wrong), and simple syrup is just sugar + water. I did follow her pickled onions recipe even though I've done that before, mostly because I wasn't super happy with my previous batches—they tasted fine but didn't get that neon pink color you'd expect. Turns out, cramming the jar with as many onions as you can fit and adding just a little bit of sugar completely floods the jar with coloring.

I wasn't particularly impressed with the fried shallots. I've seen them in bougie poke bowls but when I did them myself they were kind of chewy? I'm also not really sure what to put them on. They're supposed to be a textured topper but that assumes you think a bit of texture or shallot flavor could improve your meal, which is a situation I've yet to find myself in. I am excited to use the infused oil in cooking, though I haven't found an opportunity to do that either.

I've got a few more things from the condiments section I'm looking forward to making. There's a fermented Meyer lemon paste (use where you'd use lemon zest) and pickled Thai chilies, both of which will keep forever and seem super useful. They aren't all that fussy to make either, just require a bit of time and some sterile mason jars.

Disregarding the revelation that is fried bread + whipped ricotta, we've benefited from our growing fancy condiments collections a few times. They're most helpful when you're making "slop" bowls at home à la Sweetgreen or Cava. Trader Joe's Falafel, rice, lettuce greens and oil gets the job done but is a bit bland. Adding in leftover olives, feta in infused oil, and some homemade pickled onions and suddenly you're cooking with gas. It makes it so much easier to just "make something" since if you've got all the funky flavors in jars in your fridge, you can make the same boring meal over and over again and it'll taste a bit different each time.

By any stretch of the imagination, these are substantial projects. The funny thing is, it's only after being told over and over again that I did a lot of stuff that it even occurred to me to count this stuff as a "productive" activity. There's something about cooking, even projects going above and beyond making regular meals, which doesn't register as a project. It's a weird bias I've noticed recently around things related to maintaining my general existence. Given that a lot of the stuff I've done over the last three months involve basic homemaking and chores, it feels like I haven't accomplished much. Looked at from a different angle, I'm surprised I haven't dropped dead from exhaustion:

Organized a cross-country move

Packed and unpacked two literal tons of stuff

Crunched on a massive integration project at work

All the cooking stuff above

Hosted 3 guests in the two months we've lived here

Attended protests, a musical, a lake weekend

Got my blitz chess rating back up over 2000

Started a blog

Biked all over my neighborhood

Begun rebuilding my communities through drinks, coffees, etc.

General life stuff: making dinner, doing the shopping, cleaning, visiting my folks, etc.

There are still plenty of things I want to get done. The main trick is sorting out ambitions from lived reality, and giving credit where credit is due for the latter. Hindsight bias is real cognitive devil we all have to deal with, made doubly worse when you do something ephemral or part of the general rythm of life.

I don't maintain any ambitions to be a master chef or anything in that vein. That doesn't mean the projects aren't worthwhile. Making all these tasty treats was a day well spent: we got out of the house to collect ingredients, screens were nowhere to be found, and we ended up with a satisfying, tangible result. I wouldn't have a big cooking day every day but I am looking forward to tackling the last few things from the condiments section, and looking forward to hosting soon so we can deploy all our fancy ingredients (and I can figure out what booze to buy).

In the meantime, I will continue to make other plans, and while I'm busy doing so I will keep on living a good life.