What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?

I made homemade vegetable soup from a ham bone last night for the first time ever alongside some cornbread. Someone very close to me passed away recently and this was the comfort meal she would serve my husband and I. It was always served as a bowl of her love for us and I tried my best last night to make it from memory.

I nailed the soup and it's a near identical match to her own. I don't know how I pulled it off, but I tasted it frequently and added items slowly as I got closer to the final taste. The cornbread not so much, but I think she would laugh at my mistake. It was the last recipe she taught me and it was a very much "by feel" one. I had a rough idea of the proportions and steps, but fortunately had a copy of her mother's Bell's Cookbook from which the recipe may have been influenced from. I got the flavor profile perfectly, but it didn't rise. She would be so tickled that someone like me would fail to catch the difference in all purpose and self-rising flour.

I'm going to try again tonight after getting the right flour! There's so much soup that I am even able to freeze and share some with her family who grew up on it.

I mentioned this in another thread but something I've been drinking recently is yujacha or honey citron tea. It's not really a tea in the traditional sense since its not made with tea leaves but it's made using a marmalade made with yuzu citrus, called yuja in Korean. You simply mix a spoonful of the yuja marmalade with some hot water and you've got yujacha. I first tried it when I went to Korea back in December and I immediately knew I had to try to make it when I got back home. Originally tried making it with some orange marmalade from the grocery store but was disappointed. You definitely need the real thing to make it. Luckily, it's not too hard to find in Asian grocery stores and on Amazon. Prices on Amazon are a bit high (last I checked, it was around $20 for a 1L jar) but you can find it for much cheaper in the Asian grocery stores. Highly recommend trying this, especially if you're in a super cold region of the world.

Fitting for the whole "Veganuary" theme I've been cooking less vegetarian and more vegan recently, but it's not exactly by "choice", meaning "I wan't to cook vegan", but more because I cooked a lot more Asian style food recently. Right now I'm on the hunt for the perfect yet easy Udon or Tofu sauce. I experimented a lot with dark and light soy sauce and rice vinegar, mirin, maple sirup, peanut butter and stuff, but I've yet to find one that really blows me away. So if anyone has a good recipe for that, let me know.

Other than that I finally got myself a Tofu press and it's actually a lot more noticeable than I thought. I'm also crazy about adding a bit of Cornstarch to Tofu before frying it, it really makes it a lot more chewy.

All that experimenting also made me notice that most of the typical "healthy and quick" Instagram recipes are just shit. I don't wanna use sweeteners and protein powders right now, so 60% of the recipes I can't do anyway, and the rest of the recipes I've found interesting so far were really, really bad and I don't know how anyone actually enjoys them other because of their caloric and macro value lol Especially sweets and baked goods often taste extremely bland and / or have a really weird consistency. Guess I'm a lot more "Foodie" than "Fittie".

I found out that the brand Miyoko’s makes a line of vegan cheeses made of cultured cashew and miso. They taste so damn good! It may not be a replacement for specific cheeses - especially if you want something melty - but it is amazing on toast or a cracker.

Also finally tracked down a jar of Marmite. It’s good but I have no idea how British people put it on toast; it’s way too strongly flavored.

We've been making large batch soups, stews, and chilis each weekend to have during the week. So far we've made beef barley stew, chicken tortilla soup, split pea soup, and tonight was a turkey chili. The split pea has for sure been my favorite so far, it's such a simple, cheap, but flavorful dish. It's straight up peasant food, but idk I love it. It goes really well over rice and it's become one of my top dishes lately for sure.

I made some stifado (Greek stew) this weekend. I cook 98% of my meals, but don't enjoy spending a lot of time doing it and I'm not great at coming up with culinary delights. But stifado is something I've wanted to do myself so I found a couple recipes that seemed interesting and decided to cut and paste things until I got two recipes that I could work with for two batches of stew.

The first batch I did with beef cubes browned in a pan. The sauce was made from a little bit of tomato paste along with equal parts red cooking wine, a merlot, and chicken broth (didn't have any beef broth). I also sauted some onions in the pan I browned the meat in. I don't know that the chicken broth added anything to the process because the sauce was kinda thin. Also wasn't enough of it for the portion of meat I had going. Per the spliced recipes I added allspice, nutmeg, salt, pepper, a couple of bay leaves, and some turbinado sugar, so the sauce came out okay but not perfect. I put the meat into the pan, added the lid, and let it simmer for 2 hours. I over-did browning the meat, but overall the stew came out pretty decent.

The second batch I did with beef cubes marinated for 3 days in an A1 marinade (basically liquid Montreal steak seasoning) that I paid $2 for. Since the sauce in the previous batch was decent but not enough, I decided to do 2x the merlot, 1x the chicken broth, and go ham with the tomato paste. Like before I added allspice, nutmeg, salt, pepper, and a bit of turbinado sugar (which I forgot to put in until I had poured the sauce over the meat). The meat was rinsed of the marinade, then cooked in the sauce at around 400F for 30 minutes then like 275F for 2 hours. It came out incredible. The sauce was a great consistency and flavor, though I wonder if traditional Mediterranean people are shaking their heads at me. The meat was super tender and was "fork perfect" and very spicy. The kind of spicy that leaves your mouth tingling and your tongue lusty like an Argonian maid. Fortunately, I have many cold nights ahead of me to enjoy this stew!

For my next cooking attempt, I have a wine and venison (sub'd for beef) recipe that involves bacon!