Do the grind

When Jenny mentioned that she needed to get some black pepper, I seized the chance to pitch for whole over her usual pre-ground.

“Is there a difference?”

“Only a world of it.”

In time

When my father told his guest that I had prepared something special for lunch, I knew I had the osso buco down pat. Pa is so finicky, I had long given up trying to figure out how he comes to decide what it is he likes — little wonder Ma gave up cooking for him a long time ago — making the rare pronouncement like this music to my ears.

On aptness

“Bell pepper,” a friend once lamented. “I see people push it to the side of their plate and I break out in dandruff.”

“Try the California Wonder,” I said.

“Eh, have you been listening? Local is expensive enough.”

Goodness gracious, ginamós!

Wassup?

In bed, I texted back. Watching TV. Bored.

At 2 PM on a Sunday.

Great scapes

Mention garlic and everybody knows what it is: a bulb, with individual cloves, pungent, and oh-so-good (for those into it, anyway, because I know some who can not abide this spice).

References

The problem with working from a recipe is when one lacks a frame of reference, in this case, first-hand experience. From what I had read about scallion pancakes, they are supposed to be flaky. Well, I know scallions, and I know flaky — how hard could it be? After trying three different recipes, none yielding anything near that textural profile, I was about to call it quits when I wondered if Kenji had anything to say on the subject.

Unlike the weather

“Ooooh,” Pa said over my shoulder. “Curry!”

Appearances deceive. The color was from achuete — half a pod’s worth of seeds. I had intended to make mussels in saffron cream, but from the initial substitution of annatto for saffron followed plain water for dry white wine, then coconut cream for heavy cream. At that point I should really have just added curry powder into the pot and justified my father’s excitement.

Annatto rice

White rice is a staple in many parts of the world, indistinguishable from one place to the next. What gets people’s attention is when it is presented differently, as with pusô/ketupat, in which it is cooked in a pouch of woven palm fronds, or, in the case of hineksa’ aga’ga’, the traditional rice dish of the Chamorro of the Mariana Islands, colored with annatto, hence known as “red” rice.

Color it red(dish)

Some two years ago, my mother had cuttings planted that she said bore pods of the most vivid red. Now she insisted we drop by the farm so she could show us. They were hard to miss: a long row of shrubs loaded with what looked from afar like ripe rambutan fruit. It was only when the caretaker mentioned that the pods contained seeds used to color food did it dawn on me that I was looking at annatto.

Cooks just wanna have fun

A cook’s gotta have a sense of humor. You slave over a dish for hours and it is damned with faint praise. Then you cobble something together in under five minutes and people go out of their way to tell you how good it is.