BingoFest

18 October 2025 Saturday

Is it astonishing that, even when we know our own pitfalls and shortcomings, it is impossible to avoid them, at least occasionally? How many times have I told me, how many times have I written basic rules when preparing food that must be adhered to with religious fervor? A lot. And is it not a thorough schooling when you pull a variation of your own character flaws, half baked, out of the oven. A meal that looked much better than it tasted.

The menu-Pumpkin soup, in the pumpkin

-Stuffed cabbage rolls

-Pears poached in red wine

Sounds wonderfully autumnal, doesn’t it? All things I’ve made before. I was not lacking in attention or care. I allowed enough time, and was enthusiastic about the project. Everything was in good order, except for some reason (or maybe none) I had some anxiety which made its way into the food in a number of surprising ways (or maybe none).

The first thing I did, which I knew not to do, I altered the recipes and some of these alterations resulted in cutting corners. Now look, read, and learn, my friends and see how one decision sets off a cascade of regrets.

For the cabbage rolls, I decided that I would make a version with ground beef and a meatless one. It was ok, because everything else in the preparation is vegan. It starts with a tomato sauce, cooked rice, and of course, the cabbage leaves. So, I’m boppin a long, boiling the leaves, poaching the pears, and I go to make the tomato sauce. I open the fridge and notice a package of bacon I had opened earlier in the week with a few strips left in. I grab it, open it, chop the strips us, and toss them in the pan. I later added the tomatoes and seasoning. A first derivation that meant the sauce was no longer vegetarian. Why did I do this? What possessed me to grab that bacon in the first place? Silly, because now, I had to make another tomato sauce entirely for the vegetarian version. No biggie, but my anxiety spiked when I subsequently approached the pumpkin.

Now this pumpkin was enormous, deep orange, and perfectly globular. A perfect specimen for jack-o-lantering. Painful reminder: the perfect looking pumpkin for jack-o-lantering means it was not bred for its flesh, which was very pulpy and and flavorless, and there wasn’t much of it. So, that. Now, I’ve made this soup before, with stock, cream, and sage. Because I felt weirdly guilty about having put bacon in the cabbage roll tomato sauce, I decided I couldn’t put stock in the soup. Also, I was out of cream, but had a little milk. And I was out of sage, so I substituted it with nothing. Why didn’t I just run to the store and get some? I have no excuse to offer. So, I put in the flavorings, put in the milk which didn’t make it one third of the way up the wall of the pumpkin. So I added. I added……water. Yes, I know. A terrible, terrible idea.

After an hour’s baking. this. Because there was little pumpkin flesh and it was only watered down milk on the inside, this soup was so thin, it broke my heart. It also had the flavor of water. Everything about it was truly disappointing to me. I ate only a couple of bites, and let it go.

Behind the soup in the picture above, you can see the cabbage rolls, which turned out much better, though I only ate one bite because I was tortured by the soup. This is an old family favorite, and I just ate some leftovers for lunch, and they taste better today than yesterday. So, there is some happiness there. I won’t do the bacon again because with the seasoning (which included allspice) made it taste a little bit like Worcestershire sauce.

The pears were fine. I poached them in red wine, cinnamon, and sugar. They turned a beautiful red color like this-

but I don’t remember them tasting too much like pears. I reduced the poaching liquid and poured it over them like a glaze, except then it slid off the pears and candied on the bottom of the dish. So, that.

The pear recipe comes from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food which is a classic cookbook if ever there was one. But I remember a piece of advice that was given in a review of the book many years ago. I paraphrase. Just because something is simple doesn’t mean that it is easy. The ingredients are simple, maybe the techniques are simple, and the flavors may be fresh and honest and whatever, but with food of this nature the devil is very much in the details. If the onion isn’t evenly diced, or the proportions are not correct, it can throw the whole dish off. The pears were successful in this case, but the same rule applies to the pumpkin soup.

Maybe these were good lessons to learn again again, before the holidays descend on us. I promise I will not cut corners. I promise I will not add ingredients just because they are in the fridge. I will not be consumed by fleeting feelings of panic when all I need to do is breathe deeply, keep moving, and for the sake of all things holy, stick to the plan. Yes, we’re gonna stick to the plan.

14 May Wednesday

It was an evening much like any other. We were strolling around the grocery store, not knowing what we’d have for dinner. I guess because they were on sale and we were getting tired, we settled on flank steak and broccoli for a stir fry. Beef and Broccoli, Broccoli Beef. We’ve done this before, there is nothing to it. Home we go.

Still in the stage of my Chinese cooking where I need to know the proportions of sauces and flavorings, I hied me to the library and found several recipes. Of course, this is not a really complicated formula, it’s the usual combinations of ginger, garlic, soy sauce, oyster sauce, Shaoxing wine, Sesame oil, and spring onions. The only difference really is how and when the ingredients are added. I decided on the one in The Wok by Kenji Lopez-Alt.

This Broccoli Beef begins with a technique of aggressively rinsing the beef in cold water and squeezing it tightly to get all the water out of it. Then, cornstarch is worked in with the hands, then a marinade is poured over. The water is boiled, the broccoli blanched, the peanut oil swirled into the hot wok, the beef added, then broccoli, then sauce, then serve.

Now there were a few little oversights which didn’t contribute to a great dish but certainly an edible one. Maybe the wok wasn’t quite hot enough and maybe the broccoli was a little crunchy. It was something we got right that I didn’t like. It was the washing the beef and working the cornstarch in. It made the beef tender, disturbingly so. I have had this texture before in Chinese restaurants, and I have to confess, I don’t think I like it. It takes a lot of the flavor out of the beef and it’s too soft. It isn’t slices of steak, like we’d have in a steak salad. That’s tender, it’s just tender for beef. Perhaps it was because the wok was a little cool that the beef ended up being super soft on the outside and super chewy on the inside which made it extra revolting, but I wasn’t happy. We need a redo.

As it happens, I bought enough flank steak to do this again if we wanted. Honestly, I didn’t really want to, I’m a little beefed out, but whatever. I would choose another recipe, I thought, and we can compare.

The photo on top is the first one, the one I didn’t particularly like. The one below is the recipe from Stir Frying to the Sky’s Edge by Grace Young. Her recipe was very much the same as Lopez-Alt’s except with the addition of Black Bean paste and the subtraction of the beef washing and cornstarch. There is cornstarch in Young’s, she uses it as a thickener for the sauce, not to tenderize the meat. I LOVED this one, and it will be my go-to whenever I make Broccoli Beef. The beef was steaky just like I like it, or like we like it. Strangely, it seemed more, well, what’s the word, American?

I began to wonder which of these recipes was more authentic Chinese. Then I wondered why I cared which one was more authentic. Then I wondered what other people would think if I told them that I liked the recipe that was less authentic. Then I wondered why I cared if people thought I was plebian for liking inauthentic Chinese food. And why is it important?

For the last couple of centuries, new cultures and cuisines have made their way to the USA and became part of our national cuisine. Think Chop Suey, Spaghetti and Meatballs, Pizza, Tamales. All these foods have roots in the flavors of the countries they come from, but they were all Americanized, and some of these became “types” of cuisine on their own, think “Jersey Italian” or “Tex-Mex”. After World War II, people began coming more from Non-European countries like India and Japan, there was more access to ingredients from around the world, and eating became more of a pleasurable pastime for more people. Hell, even mom got in on taco night. Thai restaurants and sushi became very popular and that was it, people were interested in food the way it is eaten in the country of origin. It even became a social taboo to like less than authentic versions of dishes. This was particularly true of Chinese food. Who eats Chop Suey or Egg Foo Young now?

So I did a little research, and found that indeed, it is “authentic” to wash the beef, and only beef, by the way, this should NOT be done with chicken apparently. I usually don’t eat beef at Chinese restaurants, and I would be open to cooking it again the washed way, but I must say, as a Westerner, I am accustomed to enjoying my beef a certain way, and I probably will always prefer that chewy, American steak in Chinese flavored sauce.

Now I feel guilty for having written that. Now I feel like everyone will think less of me for not having kept that to myself. Now I feel horrible for writing that I feel horrible because I’m worried what you’ll think of me now that I’ve shared that with you. Now I feel really awkward because I am thinking that you may have been liking this little essay until this part when I started feeling really self-conscious about how i come across in writing and how you may be judging me for coming across that way, which is not my intention. I just wanted to eat dinner.