March has been a roller coaster. My kitchen project is finally charging ahead. I’ve signed the contract for the work, and, in what must be a first for a construction project (and certainly this construction project), it’s running ahead of schedule. My contractors applied for the permit on a Monday, and they had it two days later, rather than the 30 they were expecting! As I think about it, this is likely the last edition of this from my current kitchen.
If you’d like to follow along on the project, I finally went to the trouble of setting up a tool to send an email update when I make a new post.
This has had the obvious consequence that I’m now scrambling to get myself ready for the construction crew to arrive and trying to use up all the valuable food in my refrigerator.
That project has inspired some fun combinations to make sure I don’t waste any food. I did a Moroccan-style tagine, but perhaps sacrilegiously drew down the vast quantity of frozen shrimp from my freezer. It was also a great way to use up my stash of preserved lemons.
While flour is not necessarily perishable, the less I have to store, the easier, and I had half a bag of 00 flour left over. I suppose I could’ve made fresh pasta, but faced with the choice I decided to do another batch of pizza.
Not to say there was no space for me to experiment.
I did get around to one of the desserts I had been planning to try out. While the mood was not right for photos, I tried the madeleine recipe from my favorite YouTube baking channel. As sacrilegious as it may seem, the flavor wasn’t noticeably affected by the substitution of butter for a neutral oil. I am going to have try the recipe again with some tweaks, though. My madeleines didn’t have the characteristic dome they were supposed to. The recipe is promising enough I’m willing to test out at least a couple of hypotheses. Either French baking powder is more potent, and I need to add more, or I need to up the baking temperature in my fanless circa 1980 oven.
On the savory side, I tried out the Ottolenghi smoky eggplant pasta. It got me closer to using up my cascatelli pasta as well. I was a little skeptical at first, given tahini isn’t something typically used in Italian food. But true to form, it was very good.
Also from the Ottolenghi kitchen: confit chickpeas. I did these for the first time sometime in 2020 or 2021, during the (even more) acute phase of the pandemic. They’re amazingly easy, and completely delicious.
It’s difficult to say what’s coming next month with the construction imminent.
I’ll be spending a week in Nashville in April, which should be reasonably interesting from a food perspective. Beyond that, it’s likely going to be a lot of eating out. Stay tuned for notes on what it feels like to get fashionable bowl food every night for dinner.
If you’re looking for inspiration, I have a bunch of ideas I’m dying to try out once my new kitchen is done. The FT (my favorite newspaper) recently ran a great spring food and drink feature, including a few ideas from favorites like Honey and Co.
One of the most exciting parts of my new kitchen is the amazing Miele induction cooktop I’m planning to install. It can drive 7700 W of power into a single pan. In other words, it’s going to be great for stir fry. And Kenji Lopez-Alt has a great new book out on wok cooking that I’d love to get a copy of and try out on my new system.
Other than that, it’s really a leap into the unknown!