Cooking Ideas

cilantro-lime rice with pinto beans, kimchi, romaine, some grilled meat

strawberry ice cream topped with toasted bean powder

Sweet Potato-Coconut Milk-Palm Sugar Sorbet

I'm really lazy. Can you tell? I can't even come up with a good title for this dessert. It's fitting, I suppose, since this dessert was borne of laziness in the first place. I'm a huge fan of Ellie's blog AlmostBourdain. I just love the recipes she features on her site, especially those inspired by Malaysia. She wrote about making cendol, a Southeast Asian dessert of mung bean flour noodles, palm sugar syrup, and coconut milk all topped off with a good portion of shaved ice. She changed up the original by making the palm sugar syrup into a granita to take the place of the shaved ice. Great idea! But I am too lazy to make mung bean noodles, so what can substitute? At first I thought bananas--and this would still be a great substitution and if sauteed a bit...--but the Okinawan sweet potatoes at the Korean market caught my eye. Why not? So I boiled the sweet potatoes until tender, peeled off the skin, and used it as the base for my dessert. Next up, pour a bit of coconut milk to moisten the starchy potatoes and top off with a palm sugar sorbet. You can make a granita like Ellie to get closer to the original shaved ice texture, but again laziness took over and I figured dumping the same proportioned mixture into an ice cream maker would be less hassle. It was a big hit with the family and very easy to make. Yum!

conservative eating and cooking

In the last several years there have been a few articles observing the phenomenon of the rise in media related to food despite the apparent lack of any cooking action. It seems that people are interested in watching cooking but they're not actually cooking in their own homes.
I was a regular reader of Serious Eats until I began to notice the visible presence of sponsor ads interspersed with regular entries. I'm not too happy to see these ads. I recognize that they're a necessary evil--the writers of Serious Eats need income after all!--but I can't help but feel that they detract from the regular content. I'm talking about the entries that introduce readers to new foods. They have Chichi Wang's column, "Nasty Bits," and the Culinary Ambassadors series for example. But then as you scroll down the screen, you are confronted with the occasional sponsor recipe for something like "beef taco skillet." Is this what the readers of Serious Eats really eating at home? When I think back to some of the comments I've read on the site, I recall being surprised at the number of "conservative" eaters--I mean people who turn up their noses at anything that seems gross, foreign, or exotic. I am not the only one surprised to see this ad/recipe, given the comments submitted. I guess Serious Eats attracts a more or less diverse crowd of tastes with a tendency towards those newly exposed to "new" foods.