#15: Kitchen & cookbook club chronicles

+ a Q1 review on my 2024 intentions, Beli, and birthday dinner contenders

Apr 03, 2024

Cooking up a storm!

After going very hard in Puerto Rico last month and paying a very ugly amount of money to the federal government this tax season, I made a pledge to limit my dining out budget. Did I just end up reallocating that saved money towards groceries? Possibly. But the principles of girl math indicate that I’m saving hundreds.

With this new commitment, I have truly been in the lab to figure out how to make dining at home a little more fun (and sometimes more stressful).

My kitchen has been a bit of a nightmare these days. My unfortunate “how hard could it be” trait paired with my inability to thoroughly read directions from start to finish reveal themselves in these times of manic inspiration. Outcomes have ranged from destroying steamed rolls (jump scare below, sorry) with my tiny bamboo steamers that I nearly burnt to a crisp after forgetting to add more water, to dry brining and poaching chicken breasts at 8:30am on a Saturday morning.

The truth is, the only way I can hype myself up to cook on a weeknight is to have friends over and shower them with acts of service. I made a Grossy Pelosi-inspired dinner on Leap Day which I proudly served before 8:00pm with the help of no fuss recipes from his book, Let’s Eat, and pre-made crostinis. I also launched my new party trick of broiling romaine for a charred caesar salad effect with very minimal effort. Very sneaky!

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Desperately craving warm olives that rack up $17 on your local wine bar tab, I have also cracked the code for an at home version that is just as good. As a treat, I give you an at-home aperitif version that will hopefully keep that expensive urge at bay until the next perfect patio day. Don’t consider this a recipe, but a mere suggestion to feel fancy at home. Also, the leftover infused oil makes for a lovely salad dressing.

Ingredients:

1 cup castelvetrano olives (pits included, drained, and measure with your heart)
2-3 lemon peels
2-3 garlic cloves
1 tsp paprika
⅓ cup olive oil

Directions:

In a small skillet, heat olive oil on medium high
Fry garlic cloves until they turn golden brown, add paprika and lemon peel to bloom, and bring to medium low
Add olives to the infused oil until just warmed through and lemon peels start to curl then remove from heat
Eat the entire skillet and call it dinner

Cookbook club starting with Sohla

There’s no better way to shake out the seasonal affective disorder than hosting a cookbook club which is essentially a potluck. I’ve been missing the cookbook club gatherings with some fellow DC food friends last year and decided to bring it back with some friends in mid March.

how it works

The cookbook club is easy peasy. Here’s what you do!

Pick a cookbook for a group of friends. I suggest keeping it to around 10+ but if you have a larger space, the more the merrier!
Once a cookbook is selected, the host sends out the table of contents into a group chat.
Calling dibs on a recipe is based on first come first serve rules. Send pictures of the recipe pages separately after each guest claims their dish.
Keep track of who is making each dish and feel free to suggest dishes that might round out the menu. Everyone picked a dip or a carb? Offer up a veggie side or a protein for those last-minute stragglers who’ve yet to claim a recipe.
For the actual day, encourage people to bring their own dishes and serving utensils if they have them. Have a few dishes ready for anyone who might need to borrow for the day.

I just love how accessible this concept can be. No one has to buy the book, and if your host is nice, you can ask for other recipes to save for later. With 10+ people bringing a dish, you don’t have to ask guests to quadruple a recipe to guarantee a full serving for each person since there’s so many things to try.

Ideally, everyone brings something that can be prepped somewhat ahead and you end up with a lovely spread of different dishes that otherwise wouldn’t have found themselves next to each other. It’s also way less work than hosting a larger dinner party!

We very appropriately started the first gathering with Start Here, Sohla El-Waylly’s first and extremely thorough, user-friendly cookbook that covers foundational techniques.

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cookbook choice: Start Here by Sohla El-Waylly

I really love Sohla’s narrative about her experience as a context-based learner. Her foreward talks about how she struggled in traditional school and culinary training when her lessons lacked the context behind the “why” we teach things a certain way. This is why she developed a book that gives the reader context behind cooking techniques and why they’re important to a home cook’s arsenal.

Knowing the “why” behind tried and true practices aren’t just important as a home cook. It helps us be more curious people and not just settle for the “well, it’s always been done that way” answer. It’s about being curious enough to understand beyond the base level facts, and I think that’s why Sohla has such staying power in the food media industry.

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results!

Not to be biased, but I think everyone nailed their dishes - see the full post here or above. We ended up with a really balanced spread of 15+ dishes to keep us chatting and drinking from noon to nearly 7:00pm thanks to an extra hour of daylight.

Oh, and thank you to all the boys who strictly made baked goods! Here’s to smashing gender norms one lemon bar at a time.

I adopted the curried chicken salad recipe from a guest who couldn’t make it and then made a patatas bravas (mayo-less, gasp!) salad and chilled tahini soba noodles.

I personally cannot emphasize enough how much I love the chilled tahini soba noodles which I crushed for a full week of lunches. The vibrant green and nutty sauce clings to the soba and is broken up with a punch of pickled onions and cashews. It’s also vegan(!) - unless you are like me and need to add a jammy egg to any dish.

The potato salad was also excellent, but I was a fool who doubled my recipe and ended up with 2 quarts of potatoes that I couldn’t put back on my own.

Q1 intentions review

In an effort to try to hold myself accountable - I’m digging up my aspirations set earlier this year. Let’s see how I’m doing.

Trusting myself as a home cook.

Although my steamed chicken rice rolls ended up looking like something leaving one’s body, I’m going to mark that weeknight cooking project as a win. I have the tiniest little steamers that couldn’t fit a plate that would keep the rolls from sticking to each other.

So, in an act of true desperation, I lined them with wet paper towels, seeing that the prepped rolls weren’t sticking while waiting to be dropped in their bamboo homes. And you know what, it actually worked! Until those wrappers immediately stuck to the tongs during the removal process.

Lots to learn for next time, but at the end of the day I fed myself and they actually tasted incredible.

Eating casual in 2024. I’ve been so-so in this section. Here’s a roundup of some recent favorites that were low fuss and high reward:

Red Light Bar and Detroit Pizza - This feels like such an underrated spot on 14th? Yes, it’s always good-busy, but usually you can squeeze into a few bar seats to grab a drink on a busy night. The bar menu is extensive with $14 cocktails and dense Detroit-style pies to line your stomach before a night out.
Your Only Friend - This home for Duke’s mayo evangelists has been killing it since it opened in January. The sandwich pub theme would make for a fun casual date night or catching up with a friend or two. The Sub Club packed with smoked turkey, bacon, fancy pants ranch, pickles, swiss (unheard of for me), Duke’s mayo, onions, shredded lettuce and parmesan was made to be enjoyed with a celery gimlet. Even a Delco girl has to break her hoagie rules once in a while.

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Hiya Izakaya - This weeknight dinner freaking blew me away? The small plates range from $5-$14 which is so lovely of them. We ordered mushroom skewers, chicken skewers, karaage fried chicken, spicy cucumbers, spicy tuna crispy rice bites, and a ridiculous matcha chocolate cake with grapefruit sorbet that altered my brain chemistry. I don’t think a lot about desserts like this and I would like to eat that every day for the rest of my life.

A commitment to cookbooks.

As indicated by the cookbook club section above, this is going swimmingly. I could be doing a little bit better with incorporating this into my meal prep, but I’m proud to say I have been relying a little less on NYT cooking lately.

Coursed cooking!

This is... a work in progress. Something that’s so intimidating to me about coursed cooking is the act of picking one route to go down.

I cook at home a lot, but have yet to feel like I have a specific cooking style that I can run with. I get drawn to so many different flavor combinations that the thought of narrowing down to one menu limited by what can stay warm when sounds, well, limiting.

But! I am working on this and will likely need to test it out with a small guinea pig group this summer. I will report back!

Goodbye spreadsheets, hello Beli

After managing all of my reviews in a giant Excel spreadsheet for many years, I have finally succumbed to the power of Beli, a new restaurant rating app that is actually pretty good.

It’s basically an advanced version of Yelp for people who don’t want to ruin a restaurant’s business with one bad review, but still have opinions to share. The ratings are only visible to the people that follow you, and ratings are averaged based on your friends who have rated the same restaurants.

I’m pretty late to the game and am still catching up on logging where I’ve actually been in DC. The app lets you log the restaurants you’ve visited by adding tags for what kind of occasion the restaurant is good for (will be going in depth for bottomless brunch, fear not), dropping specific notes, adding pictures, and highlighting favorite dishes.

SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT - If you want to follow my lists, follow me @merrysamuel! Disclaimer that I am very much still trying to understand the rankings so please take them with a grain of salt for now.

Birthday reservations cry for help

Help! I’m burdened with having too many friends that I love and a birthday that falls on a Monday this year. Poor me! If anyone has recommendations for DC or NOVA spots that’s good for group dinners (6+) and open on a Monday, please send me a lil note or DM.

Current contenders that I’m considering:

Pascual (Capitol Hill) - Mexico City-inspired menu from the brilliant minds at Lutece. Have been dying to go here since they opened and apparently everyone else has too, according to Resy.
Aventino (Bethesda) - Celebrated Roman Jewish dishes from the same owners of The Red Hen and two All Purpose Pizza storefronts. Any place that makes their own mortadella is a place I want to be.
Casa Teresa (Downtown) - New Spanish restaurant opened by a José Andrés Group alum, highlighting dishes from his grandmother’s kitchen. Also, there’s apparently a rolling jamón leg available for tableside service.

That’s all for this month! See you on Instagram and Beli in the meantime.