It's the Most Wonderful (Smelling) Time of the Year, Savory Edition
Executive summary: “Decembake” is not just about the sweets – the savory dishes arguably create even more cozy (and lingering) scents that I am reveling in this holiday season.
Yesterday, I wrote about the sweet treats I’ve been testing out in the month of Decembake (see it here), in my pursuit of extreme coziness. But what is possibly even more cozy-smelling to my holiday-addled brain than cookies or cake is a savory dish bubbling away in the oven or stove, sending the scents of meat, veggies, and aromatics mixing and swirling through our home for hours. And the good news about savory dishes (to a minimalist like me) is that they don’t require any additional kitchen tools, with one exception which I’ll mention below. It’s just a question of acquiring an extra ingredient here or there during my shopping trips to try a new recipe, but otherwise built entirely from my regular capsule pantry (see it here). My goal this Decembake is still to opt for the simplest recipes I can find while approximating the smells and tastes achieved by a more committed cook. I run my life by the consulting 80-20 rule, remember?
I’ve also been reading up on the science behind cooking and baking, to better understand why ingredients (re)act the way they do – I’m working my way through The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt, and while I shudder at the heap of kitchen gadgets and dozen knives he possesses as a professional chef/food writer, I deeply appreciate his application of the scientific method to cooking. (Yay MIT! Go … Beavers?) So I’ve been experimenting a bit in the kitchen myself, with recipes like:
Roast beef over tomatoes and garlic
Pork tenderloin with apples and onions, with a maple syrup mustard marinade
Roasted sausages and grapes with a balsamic glaze (thanks, Ina Garten)
Various simmering stovetop stews, including a tomato paste-based meatball and chickpea stew, and a red wine-based sausage and potato stew
TBH, some recipes have been more successful than others, but the scientific method is all about trial and error, isn’t it? My errors don’t taste as good as I’d hoped, but they do smell as good, which is what had originally sparked my Decembake mania. Undeterred, I try them again (higher/lower temperature, longer/shorter cooking time, etc.) or modify them to use more foolproof ingredients (e.g., making a stew with sausage instead of beef when I couldn’t figure out why the beef was still tough after 4 hours in the oven). My husband has gamely agreed to consume my creations with me, in the name of science, but he’s not hard to please. He’s the kind of guy who could (and has) eat(en) the same thing every day for a week and not blink(ed).
Now, I mentioned above that I did acquire one new tool to aid my Decembake efforts: a digital meat thermometer. My MIL has the Lavatools Javelin Pro, which I borrowed every time I made pork tenderloin. When she moved away and I could no longer run downstairs to borrow it, I decided that it was a tool I used often enough to justify taking up 3 square inches in my kitchen drawer, since tenderloin has been on a bi-weekly rotation around here. A Google search shows that the “best” meat thermometer on the market is the Thermapen, but no way was I going to shell out $100! It’s not like I’m a BBQ pitmaster or professional cook and need state-of-the-art tools. Even my MIL’s Javelin Pro is ~$50, more than I want to spend on a gadget I use once every other week. Luckily, Lavatools makes a smaller version called the Javelin that is half the price at ~$25. Sold!
The newest addition to our kitchen drawers, after the double-ended measuring spoon I talked about in my previous post.
Meanwhile, our home is a sanctuary of savory smells, and that’s as “holiday” as we’re going to get in our apartment, as we’re leaving shortly to spend a couple of weeks with my parents. There, my efforts may come to an end, as they command complete control of the kitchen, turning out feast after feast of homemade Chinese food for every meal that we have together. (Talk about the amazing aromas! They even carry down the street on the breeze … I won’t ask what the neighbors think.) I often can’t even squeeze in to wash out a baby bottle or bowl – I get shunted to the bathroom or laundry room sink for such lowly and interfering tasks. Besides, my parents’ hoarding tendencies make it challenging to find any open space on their kitchen counters to work on (the apple fell extremely far from the tree in this regard), so I (very happily) take a break from feeding my family whenever my parents are around to nourish us. And who can say if I’ll still be in the grip of the madness of Decembake once we return home in January? Only time (and my tummy) will tell. Happy holidays!