Burning Seaweed Productions

I tried making a savory steel cut oatmeal with dashi and miso. The flavors actually worked well together, but the miso ate the oatmeal, leaving me with a very watery porridge. It’s possible that ignoring the standard miso advice and boiling the miso, instead of adding it at the end, would have saved me from this textural disaster.

My main goal with the shrimp was to avoid overcooking them. Starting with frozen shrimp, I let them thaw and dry out in the fridge, and then seared them in a skillet until they looked done. They were delicious.

I roasted the broccoli and cauliflower at a low temperature while figuring out the rest of the meal. The vegetables shrank quite a bit, concentrating their flavor. Ella Quittner at Food52 has an article comparing different ways to cook broccoli that I found helpful.

Recipe by Bob’s Red Mill. It’s good with yogurt and fresh fruit.

I’ve started making my own seitan from vital wheat gluten. There’s plenty of room for experimenting with seasoning and cooking methods. This batch was pretty dense and Tofurky-like.

I discovered that my grocery store has microwaveable bags of fingerling potatoes. They cook in a few minutes, which is handy if you need unseasoned cooked potatoes for something.

Zucchini Salad, Chinese-Style by The Woks of Life.

This was a good way to eat a whole zucchini. It tastes like sesame noodles, but the noodles are zucchini.

Recipe by Pailin Chongchitnant (Hot Thai Kitchen).

This is a time-consuming dish with several parts, but it’s delicious and every ingredient makes a noticeable difference.

Cheesy Sun-Dried Tomato Pizza Bar by Fannetastic Food.

I know oats can work in savory recipes but I don’t have much experience making them work. These bars were pretty good.

I used Kenji’s mayonnaise recipe. Even without an immersion blender, it’s pretty easy. You just need a bowl, a whisk, and something you can slowly pour oil out of without making a mess. The garlic should probably be listed as an optional ingredient. I turned some of the mayo into a decent Caesar dressing by adding anchovies, Parmesan, and more lemon juice.

The egg white makes a big difference in holding the dry ingredients together without adding a dramatic amount of sugar.

I cooked some steak tips to celebrate having a new cast iron pan. Since I don’t have any experience cooking steak, they were fairly tough and flavorless, so I turned them into a grilled steak and cheese sandwich.

I tried the frozen tofu trick probably a decade ago and didn’t like the result, for whatever reason. Thanks to Anna Ladd, a.k.a. sincere on main, who got my attention and many others’ with her recent salad video and then followed it with a tofu video, I was inspired to try it again. The drained tofu pieces crisp up surprisingly well in the oven and aren’t a million miles from the fried tofu I’ve had at restaurants. I think they would work best in a dish with a lot of sauce, since tofu with most of its water expelled turns out to be pretty dry.