thoughts for recipes, recipes for food, and food for thought.
burmese salad
(lahpet thoke)
This salad is a funky, citrusy, sensory bomb. One of our favorite things we ate when backpacking through northern Thailand, this salad reads as crunch on crunch, sour on sour, and feel good on feel, well, better. This one is versatile and craveable, and super substitution-friendly. Ours has sweet and floral meyer lemon in lieu of traditional diced tomato, but pink grapefruit or pomelo would be lovely too. Add any of your favorite nuts and seeds, herbs, or citrus to make this seasonal or personalized.
GREEN PEA AND CUCUMBER ‘GAZPACHO
w/ CASINO SAUCE
In Italian, ‘casino’ means ‘brothel,’ or more colloquially, a hot mess. If it was a wild and crazy night, it was casino. If someone comes into the office utterly disheveled from last night’s casino, they’re a casino. If you can’t get anywhere on the train because there’s a nationwide sciopera (an organized strike), tutto è casino.
You get the point.
The other point is that I’m from Georgia, where everything gets dipped in Ranch. This sauce is a terrific and vibrant riff on buttermilk ranch, so we’ve used it for everything from a spicy wing dip to a snap pea and radish salad dressing to a dip for fried pickles. (Fair warning: keep your straws under lock and key for this one. Actually, don’t use straws; they kill cute baby squids.)
Although we’ve tamed down the ‘casino’ nature of the sauce since its original conception, it’s still crazy wild good.
Also, in Italy, there’s a hand signal for everything. Probably the only unifying language that stretches across the entirety of the boot. ‘But WHY?’ ‘Let’s blow this popsicle stand.’ ‘You may politely go and render unto thyself a profane gesture of your choosing.’ There’s a hand gesture for all of them.
Across restaurants in the States, there’s another catalogue of hand signs for bar and dining guests to expedite their—let’s call a spade a spade here—often pedestrian requests. Of these, one of the most recognizable, often accompanied by a slight wincing, is curling up a thumb and forefinger about an inch apart to signify ‘can I get a side of Ranch’ (to dump over this nicely prepared filet or dunk my pizza crust in)? But as I always say, ‘Live and let Ranch.’
POACHED WHITE ASPARAGUS
w/ SMOKED PARSNIP, MARCONA ALMOND, WATERCRESS & CURED YOLK
The asparagus was perhaps the pièce-de-résistance for our March Supper Club. First of the season white asparagus, peeled and poached in butter, served chilled over a smoked parsnip puree with crushed marcona almonds, cured egg yolk, watercress vinaigrette, dried caper powder, and crispy parsnip chips. You may have noticed we’ve really been into tea-smoking things lately, and this dish seemed like a perfect canvas to utilize this technique. Using jasmine rice and green tea, the parsnips were gently smoked, coaxing a natural sweetness and florality from the parsnips. The smoke gave a layer of depth for a chilled salad, a nice contrast to the bright acidity of the vinaigrette and capers, and the cured yolks lent subtle umami, much like an aged cheese would.
SMOKED WHITEFISH DIP w/ carta di musica crackers
We made this for our first official TXA TXA TXALLENGE, where we accept a challenge submitted by an Instagram follower and make the dish. Smoked Fish was the challenge, and this is what we came up with. Although smoked whitefish is traditionally a lake water fish, we found some cod fillets and decided to go that route.
MUSSEL TOAST—
mussels en escabeche with persimmon, pickled fresno aioli, pink peppercorn, and bitter greens
This dish is great for any occasion. It’s simple, it’s doable, and it’s always a show stopper. Same as with pretty much all our recipes, feel free to substitute whatever you’ve got that makes sense. There’s a thousand variations you can do with the mussels: shaved green apple, dill, sorrel, sunflower seed; orange macha, fresnos, mandarin orange, oregano; whatever. Just look for a balance of fat—in this case the aioli—acidity, something herbaceous, and always think about texture.
Celery & Leek Soup w/ Crab Salad
SUPPER CLUB VOL. 05: CHINESE TAKE-OUT
The first plated course was a spin on crab rangoons, but instead of serving up some crispy wontons stuffed with luscious and creamy crab and cream cheese, we decided to prepare a silky smooth celery soup around a dollop of ricotta and a lump crab salad with shaved fennel, gently tossed with Hachiya persimmon and preserved sweet plums in place of sweet-n-sour sauce, topped with a fried wonton lid.
Hachiya persimmons are shaped like upside down pears, and ripe ones should be tender and doughy to the touch. If it were any other fruit, it would feel rotten. (Fuyu persimmons—the other prevalent persimmon varietal—are shaped like squat tomatoes and have firmer flesh, are less tannic and astringent when not totally ripe, and can be eaten like an apple.) These are both widely available during the winter months.
CHARRED CABBAGE WITH ARTICHOKE TAHINI AND TAMARIND
Cabbage, the most culturally disputed vegetable of southern Europe
Other than coffee, meringues, and soccer, I can’t think of anything more culturally contentious between the French and Italians than their views on cabbage.
For the French, cabbage represents something cute, loveable, endearing. Mon petit chou—“my little cabbage”—is perhaps the most common French term of endearment. The Italians, on the other hand, have quite a different take on the hearty brassica.
Cavolo—“cabbage” in Italian—is also a PG-13 expletive that represents an imbroglio of frustration and annoyance. “Che cavolo!” you might hear someone exclaim at the inconvenient realization of finding their car with a flat tire. But it doesn’t stop there.
“Fare una cavolata” means to make a bunch of cabbage, or more succinctly, to do something incredibly stupid. Well, we’re about to fare una cavolata—literally—and it couldn’t be any further than the phrase’s idiomatic meaning. We’re siding with the French on this one.
With its fibrous, waxy leaves and noxious sulfur-containing compounds that, when handled improperly, are reminiscent of passing by a paper mill on a family road trip, cabbage often gets a bad rap when it comes to vegetable pageantry. But cooked properly, cabbage has a delightful natural sweetness, tender bite, and takes well to other sharp and pungent flavors.
This dish is remarkably simple (four components), and will turn a seemingly unassuming side dish into a show stealer, I promise. Move over, butternut squash!
NAM PRIK PAO
Pronounced “nahm-prick-pahw,” the last part like Laura Ingalls Wilder calling to her Pa in Little House on the Prairie.
I’ve read about a hundred ways to make this versatile chili jam that’s a ubiquitous household staple in Thailand, with variations on pounding before toasting, toasting before smashing, whether to use lard or oil, and what kind of chilis to use. I relied a lot on those by Leela Punyaratabandhu (@shesimmers) and Kris Yenmabroong (Night+Market) and ended up with this version, guided either by what I had on hand or which flavors I wanted to accentuate. Some versions are smokier, some spicier, some stickier. But ultimately, use what you can find, and make it to your own desired taste. I tend to use bacon fat because a) I always have it in the fridge (if you don’t, we should talk about your life choices), and b) it lends a little more smokiness to the jam. “Jam” seems to be pretty standard nomenclature due to its sweetness and the jammy consistency that results from the palm sugar. All in all, it’s smoky, sweet, spicy, and full of umami funk from the shrimp paste and fish sauce. It’s crazy delicious. Serve it alongside steamed jasmine rice, with grilled pork for Moo Nam Tok, or use in place of sambal or any other chili paste.
MOO NAM TOK
Thai Grilled Pork Salad
หมูน้ำตก
I first had a version of this dish at Kris Yenbamroong’s iconic and boisterous NIGHT+MARKET in WeHo while visiting my brother in Los Angeles. I’d had the cookbook on my shelf for a couple years before eating here and, though I was most stoked on having the obligatory Nam Khao Tod (another Txa Txa staple), this dish, which he’s given the charming sobriquet “Moo Sadoong” (“Startled Pig”), was the prize winner.
The dish’s more common iteration, Neua Nam Tok, uses grilled, sliced steak instead of pork. The dish is customary in northeastern Thailand, and is similar to a larb (pronounced “lahb”), but uses grilled meat instead of ground or minced. Nam Tok, literally “waterfall,” is so named because the sizzling sound of the meat searing on the grill supposedly resembles the distant splashing of a waterfall. Here’s our take on the dish.
VADOUVAN ROASTED CAULIFLOWER
labneh, pickled golden raisin, date vinegar, za’atar
Does anyone else remember the Disney segment where Donald Duck goes to Mathmagic Land? A Hemingway-esque Donald Duck enters the screen by way of a small aperture into the dark chasm of a mysterious land. Mighty strange, he says, as he wanders through an umbrous arboretum of cardinal numbers. He encounters a curious cast of characters before being introduced to some kind of ascended master that goes by “The Spirit of Adventure” and serves as a tour guide through time and space throughout Donald’s informative journey.
It’s not long before Donald swaps his safari suit for an ancient Athenian toga and laurel crown, arriving in ancient Greece among the Pythagorians.
Donald goes on to learn about, amongst other mathematical subjects, the golden ratio and the fibonacci sequence, the essential source code found in all of nature. The same code that informs the structuring of fractals. Fractals are an infinite recursion of complex
patterns, much like the cauliflower plant and other members of the brassicas family (which we can explore in greater depth in another episode of recipe non-sequiturs).
You might be wondering. What does Donald Duck have to do with cauliflower? It’s simple math, really.
The intricate and replicating architecture of the cauliflower plant is what gives it its kaleidoscopic appearance, kind of like when John Malkovich goes down his own portal in Being John Malkovich. To the best of my limited knowledge, this has absolutely nothing to do with how the cauliflower tastes. But I do think there’s something important in considering recurrent flavors and textures throughout a meal or a single dish (this is often referred to as layering). Also it’s just cool science.
Anyway, if you want to give it a go…