A tricky week for me in a few ways, and I'm generally quite unsettled at the moment - I hate storms, and having one come in so early has made me deeply unhappy with life. But although my willingness to cook has perked up decently, I'm not ready to make it into soup-and-stews cookery quite yet. (Kate's ahead of me!) What I am ready to do is some more in the way of spice and flavour. When it's properly hot I can't really be bothered: cheese and fruit is about my limit. But Persiana has kept me at least flavourful, and today I managed a fakey banh mi too.
Latest Persiana is the gorgeous pomegranate seared beef salad. I did not use 1/3pint pomegranate molasses for the dressing as per the recipe, but I did use a fair bit (with balsamic, olive oil, mustard), and it was cracking. Rocket, pomegranate seeds, no faffing.
The banh mi is from the mince chapter of New Kitchen Basics, which has suddenly become tempting after a couple of months of uninterest.
Baguette. Hoi sin sauce. Sriracha (whatever that is, I've never used it - afraid it's sweet chilli here). Lettuce leaves. Slaw of carrot, spring onion, lime, coriander, salt. Meatballs of pork mince, spring onion, garlic. Unwieldy, especially if you overcook the baguette.
We have talked a fair bit about yearning for restaurant/takeaway stuff we've missed and re-encountered with joy. We didn't talk about how handy it is to make takeaway stuff yourself and manage to miss out things you don't like. I hate cucumber (see my posts, passim) and banh mi absolutely should have it in. But it's *my* simplified, bastardised banh mi, lacking the liver pate because NKB missed it out, and lacking the cucumber because I don't like it. No picking it out in the dark while balancing a cardboard container on a wobbly stool, which was the last time I had banh mi, at Vault festival, in the Before Times. That was nice, too, but this is darned handy.
Who's been Eating Out to Help Out btw? (Stop snickering at the back) I've done it once, because I felt like I was missing out. So I had a few bits at Wahaca, they were mildly okay but a bit underpowered, I got a discount, I sat closer to other people than for ages, and I didn't especially enjoy any of it. Banh mi a la facon inauthentique it is for a good while longer.
So sorry you're feeling so unsettled at the moment. Storms screw up the barometric pressure so much and I know that screws with how I feel, so my sympathies on feeling discombobulated.
ReplyDeleteThat salad looks wonderful and the Banh Mi also looks very enticing, even without cucumber :)
It's a funny time of year, with the light failing suddenly, and all this unnecessary Weather around is not ideal.
DeleteThey were both very nice meals - not too much faff and loads of flavour. Not quite sure if it would have been a plan to do that full 1/3 pint of the pom molasses, though!
I Lunched with the Chancellor, as I prefer to call it, today (or in fact, when I queried the bill - I thought they'd missed out the second pint - "the discount" as the landlady of the Free Press in Cambridge put it...). An unexpected surprise.
ReplyDeleteI had katsu chicken, because it was on the menu and I've spent *years* walking past branches of Wasabi at stations being made hungry by the smell, and never actually bought any. (That will be remedied at some point). One of the weirdest things was that the small mound of finely sliced, sweet-pickled cucumber which came with it was actually delicious - I usually dislike cucumber intensely...
Ooh, I quite like Lunching with the Chancellor as a phrase. Splendid as a surprise too. Katsu is something I never buy either, but I'm sure it's delicious. I used to end my evenings out with Jo with buying something in Wasabi, but was always sadly inhibited about snarfing hot food on the district line.
DeletePickled cucumber doesn't like me much but it's better than plain. And I can at least see the point of it.