Trial and ERROR, Some Stuff I've Cooked and How (Shitty) I Felt as a Result

This piece will be about a collection of things I have cooked recently that I deemed - after each one - too shitty to write about individually. It happened so frequently in such a small period of time that it instead inspired a post about cooking all the same. I took a week off of writing in part because of how these experiences made me feel.

I bitched to Allison over and over again, sat with it, then ended up back here. I won't provide any of the exact recipes for these dishes, mostly because I don't see any reason why you should cook them. Instead you will get ideas, approaches, and failures for each dish, followed by some general acknowledgments, acceptance, and thoughts I had along the way.

To properly address where this began, I have to admit that the cookbook recipes were getting a bit boring for me. The food they created was excellent, and they were useful for continuing to get reps in. But I wanted to push myself further, which meant testing my understanding and ability without the training wheels. It also meant allowing myself to be creative, rather than constantly marveling at the creativity of others.

This is just sort of how I am. I have enjoyed cooking since I started getting more interested in it, but I want to actually be good at it. Working from these cookbooks is an incredibly helpful tool, but it also makes you feel quite small. You follow a recipe, and a meal comes out good - sometimes just edible, sometimes so good you admire how thoughtful it was. But before long, you realize all that you did was follow directions. A sixth grader could do the only part that you can take credit for, the direction following, and that isn't all that rewarding.

I am essentially writing about these chronologically, but this would have been a good place to start either way. On its own, this meal wasn't particularly dissatisfying to me, and the process probably ended up being quite useful.

This dish was inspired by two things: (1) the free shrimp that comes with my monthly fish delivery from Sitka, and (2) Tuome's dashi butter snow crab pasta. I was in no way trying to replicate (2), but it served as a reference point for what I ultimately decided I could try to do with the shrimp, which was to make store-bought, cheap ramen noodles with a crustacean / shrimp / umami pasta "bomb."

I started with the shrimp shells. I roasted these until they toasted, tossed them in a bag, mashed them up into tiny little pieces to increase their surface area, combined them with a stick of butter, and cooked them sous vide. I strained the shrimp butter, and reserved the spent shells. I threw the shells back into the oven at a low temp and "dehydrated" them for a good amount of time, then blitzed them with a bunch of salt to make "shrimp salt."

The second phase was our "dashi." I very simply took the packet from the ramen, dumped it into some boiling water with a piece of kombu and infused.

From there, I toasted some panko in a pan with a few of the leftover broken dry ramen pieces that sit in the bottom of the bag using my shrimp butter, butterflied the shrimp and seared them in a pan, scraped up the shrimp fond with my dashi, mounted some whole butter for the "seed" of the beurre monte, then mounted more shrimp butter in this to create an emulsion, cooked the ramen, added the cooked ramen to my butter sauce with a small bit of ramen pasta water, combined it all, then topped the shrimp ramen with the crumbs cooked in shrimp butter and some chive oil I had laying around.

All told, it turned out decent enough for a weeknight dish with cheap ramen as the base. I used all my chives to make the oil and had none lying around, but this obviously needed some type of green element to accompany it in a non-oil form.

This dish frustrating me was a bit more of an accumulation of subsequent cooking activity than as an individual experiment, but it lightly elicited a reaction related to the steps and effort involved for what amounted to a slightly-better-than-just-making-the-ramen experience.

The Sitka delivery that came with free shrimp also came with free scallops. I decided that whatever I did with them wouldn't be enough for a whole meal, so I made a risotto, as well. Since the scallops would be the focus of my pan-based cooking that night, I opted to pressure cook the risotto to save myself from trying to do too much at once. (Apologies to all the risotto traditionalists, obviously).

I wanted to test cooking the scallops a few different ways because that seemed like a useful experiment. The first way would be cold started with the heat turned to medium after oil and scallops were in the pan. The second was a hard and fast sear + cook in a hot pan. The third was sous vide then hard seared.

For the scallop 'sauce,' I could not quite figure how I wanted to do it, constantly going back-and-forth between a roasted carrot-based sauce / foam and something lighter and different. I landed on a green apple "aguachile," if you could call it that. I just juiced some green apples, blanched spinach and tarragon, blended them, clarified them, realized the color had lost all its green, then added some of the separated ingredients back in to give it a bit of color again. I split the sauce - purposefully - with some oil and plated it under the scallops.

For the risotto, I went with a mushroom stock of sorts. I had the kombu from the shrimp cook, so I put something like 30g of dried porcini mushrooms in cold water with some kombu in the fridge overnight. I threw the shallots in for a quick saute, then the rice, then the white wine, followed by my mushroom stock, then I pressure cooked it. I pulled it from the pressure cooker, added butter and some Swiss gruyere, then did the mantecura thing.

The flavor in the risotto was excellent, but I far underestimated how much of my risotto "juice" I would lose during the pressure cook and mantecura, so it ended up far tighter than I had hoped.

The scallops ended up all being cooked just OK, which was probably the fault of doing them three different ways at once. The aguachile was clearly caught between worlds. It neither really acted as an aguachile because the scallops were cooked, I didn't really want them sitting in a larger bath, and it was not really a sauce that the scallops could cling to either. I'm also not sure the flavors really worked, but the cold-hot balance was interesting.

Although probably lower effort than the shrimp dish, between the total time and effort, we now had a second dish in only so many days where the outcome was not justifying the idea nor the effort. At this point, I am fairly annoyed about my recent cooks. I could see the potential in them at times, but sitting down to eat them was not yielding the result that I had hoped, or at least that I had tied to the thought and time that I put into them. I started to open Instagram far less often - where my feeds are littered with cooks making beautiful dishes - as it started to make me feel like I totally sucked.

As a result of the previous cooks, I opted for a few "easy" weeknight cooks. At this time, I was fairly motivated to simplify things without entirely resorting to our standard sazon and adobo rice with salmon cooked most of the way through on the skin side and flipped at the end. I still had a desire to improve and work with new techniques, methods, and flavors, but not with such high variance outcomes.

I had done the miso before, and I enjoyed it, but remember, we were still trying to think and act on our own here. For the first night of salmon, I went with a black garlic based glaze. I actually don't recall all that well what I did here, but I am fairly certain it was about creating a glaze from black garlic and brown butter. I then cooked the salmon in the oven.

I threw some wilted chard underneath it, some raspberries on the plate because we had some in the fridge, and a little bit of the cooked chard stem alongside.

It just wasn't that good. These were nice pieces of king salmon, and nothing about the dish really stood out. But for the fact that - for whatever reason - biting into the raspberries was a pleasant surprise. It really came through well, just the simple bite of a good fruit, and I thought I had something there.

With the potential finding in the raspberry, I opted to cook the other two pieces of king salmon we had with some type of raspberry sauce rather than loose berries. What works well with raspberries, I thought. Feta cheese.

To incorporate the feta, I figured doing a salmon-sized feta "tuile" / "frico" over the top could make for an interesting plate, some contrast in textures between the crunch and the custardy salmon interior.

This one might've ended up worse than the black garlic salmon. It just didn't make sense. The feta "tuile" was an ambitious effort as feta does not have the same protein, fat, or moisture structure as parmesan, which is more commonly used to make these frico-like things.

The feta just doesn't crisp, for the reasons that have been laid out above. At least not in the way that you would need it to provide a contrasting texture to the salmon. Instead, it's sort of just thinly fried feta that tastes pretty good but operates on its own on the plate. The raspberry sauce did not work with the salmon all of a sudden, and it quickly hit me that the enjoyable raspberry bites were almost certainly the ideal contrast to the bitter chard greens - that we no longer had on the plate...

By now, all I can think about is the two pieces of king salmon that were wasted, which I could have just enjoyed alongside our favored sazon and adobo rice. The last four meals that I had cooked were some combination of high thought and effort with relatively underwhelming results and low-ish effort with shitty results. There were not a lot of wins to grasp on to, and I couldn't really figure out what I actually could cook, if anything.

I suppose after the second failed salmon cook, I had already reached acceptance of returning to a life of DoorDash and chicken and rice. I knew that something had to change because the food I was cooking was mostly fine as weeknight meals, but I was not at all fine. I strongly doubted whether I was approaching this correctly, whether I could ever really reach my goals, whether my creativity and execution wouldn't jibe because of an inadequate understanding of food - and taste - chemistry, or if I cared enough to keep going.

How many different attempts was I willing to make to create one dish that I thought lived up to its thought, time, and effort? Is expressing my creativity worth creating uninspiring meals that could be replaced by simple things that I can buy and 'make' from the store? Was the point of adequate knowledge, understanding, and comfortability with ingredients within reach, or was I going to be someone who could understand why and how food works but not apply it?

As one does, I resorted back to the basics. What was I trying to accomplish? Why was I trying to accomplish it? How did I plan on doing so?

In my mind, cooking restaurant-quality meals at home was the idea. It is where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. The effort and time investment practically dictated it. At the same time, I am not totally naive; I know that those same time and effort limitations dictate that I create more simple things. But I want to know - in those instances - that I can do so easily, as a reflex, on a whim, and in a way that overcomes the ease and simplicity of cooking store-bought, already-prepared foods or ordering delivery.

I want to taste my food and know that the juice was worth the squeeze. I want other people to taste it and at worst recognize the difference between what they would have otherwise whipped up for themselves and at best feel inspired to think a little more deeply about food.

The 'why' was fairly easy. I like cooking, it is a thought-filled reprieve from my daily life, it is a way for me to work with my hands that I otherwise do not in almost anything that I do, and I enjoy feeding people. It is also an avenue to express my creativity, another thing that is not common to my day job or other general hobbies.

Conveniently enough, the 'how' brought me back to the 'why,' and it brought me peace again. Like most things, I knew success was a matter of dedication and repetition. Using well-established cooks - on whatever platform - and famous chefs as a target is perfectly fine, but the timeline to get there has to be reasonable. The way to proceed without wanting to quit at every "failure" isn't to set the highest possible expectation over the shortest possible timeline. Instead, it is just to remember why I cook.

The goal is to become unbelievably good, in the ways I have already described, but there is no worthy path to getting there that removes all the joy of cooking. It will take the time it takes because that is the time I have, and rather than measuring every meal as a determination of whether or not it can be achieved, it just has to be measured against what it is. A simple weeknight meal that gives us something different from the same tired stuff. A complicated project from which to dissect the good and the bad. All the while trying not to negate the process - the cooking! - just because of the result.

After all of this, despite being a millennial, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and kept on cooking. The pork chop dish presented here is an idea that I had been stewing on for a while, and though there were multiple failure points, my regained perspective - and frankly some better ideas - made for an entirely different appreciation. This will be a part of my restaurant menu someday in its completed form.

I cold-smoked some pork spare ribs, roasted them in the oven, then pressure cooked them with some aromatics, rye whiskey, and water into a stock. I reduced the stock down to a ~glaze, then mounted some butter and whole grain mustard off heat. The smoke didn't seem to make its way through to the end unless you were really looking for it, but the jus / sauce was good.

I added a mustard seed "caviar" on top of the pork by essentially just pickling some mustard seed with champagne vinegar, honey, and water. This turned out to work incredibly well as a bite and flavor alongside the pork, but it proved to find its way all over the plate somewhat inconveniently. Incorporating this idea and its flavors into the sauce, which needed to be more viscous as it was, is a reasonable next step.

The potatoes were a sad attempt at pomme rosti that were the result of taking a shortcut in the interest of focusing on the other ingredients. They just needed to be prepared correctly.

The second chops image shows what happened to my second favorite ingredient on the plate, the hay-smoked eggs. These were dispensed from a whipping canister in a far-too-liquid form because I didn't let the eggs settle enough during their sous vide. I cold-smoked the eggs in a hotel + perforated pan setup with hay, blended them with milk, butter, and salt, then cooked them sous vide and blended them again. These were to dispense from the whipper more as a foam than a liquid, of course. The smoke was interesting, good, and worked well with the pork chop.

The star of the show was the chop. These double-bone chops were cooked entirely on the Konro under binchotan, alternating between a super hot zone and an indirect heat zone right next door. In the end, I pulled them just a hair too late, and they overcooked by 5-7 degrees. They were incredibly close to great but not quite there.

What differentiated this dish was partially just seeing what it could be, which I couldn't see in most of what I cooked above. But putting aside the pass/fail lens could have changed how I felt about all those shitty dishes, too. Every part of this dish featured its own failure, but I was far more willing to see the idea - and notice how much I enjoyed cooking it - than I had been a few days earlier.