midweek gems #12

motherly & neighborly gratitude + Viet shrimp on sugarcane + 1/2 batch cooking + farmer pro-tips + community cookbooks

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

If you’re celebrating the American holiday and need a chuckle or last minute ideas, I’ll be on the Splendid Table’s Turkey Confidential from 11am to 1pm CT TODAY on MPR News and other public radio stations across the country. Show host Francis Lam invited me and other chefs to answer listener questions. Hope I do well.

💎 Gratitude

I have so much to be thankful for, including my still cantankerous mother who at 90, continues to cross reference her written recipes with my books to get the best approach. She may dislike these photos but I think she looks pretty damn good! She can still squat to grab dishes from a low shelf and bust out batches of bánh khúc, spinach sticky rice dumplings filled with mung beans and shallots (her recipe is in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen).

Mom and me plus the food we recently shared.

She remains curious, willing to try Thai food from my cookbook project with Chef Pim and sample Mexican food that I prepare (chicken pibil, pickled red onions, black beans, and guacamole, above).

Holidays can be stressful, but as I recently said to my mom, “You’re not going anywhere soon but after you’re gone, we won’t be able to terrorize you anymore!” She cracked up laughing.

⚡️⚡️⚡️ Subscription discount! Let me sound like an old fashioned commercial: From now until December 5, you can lock in a 20% discount on annual PTFS subscriptions! If you’ve been on the fence, now’s the time to jump.

Paid subscriptions finance the newsletter’s content, which involves a good 2 days of work each week. I appreciate your support at any level.

💎 Recipes: When to cook a 1/2 batch

When people ask about scaling recipes, it’s usually to scale up for a crowd. Evvy was eyeing the sticky rice, chestnut, and shiitake dressing for 2. How should she smartly approach it? I provided guidelines in the recipe comments section but I also want you to know this about many of my recipes: You can often scale down.

In fact, when I recipe develop, I test half batches (why waste ingredients?) and when I’m confident enough, scale them up to standard recipe sizing. In general, most recipes prepared for publishing are written for 4 or 6 serving, once in a while 8 servings.

Nowadays, many of us cook for ourselves or one other person so times have changed. I don’t know how other people develop recipes but now you know that you can often halve mine. Do use a smaller pan so cook times remain somewhat consistent with what’s estimated in the recipe.

💎 ? Frozen Viet Shrimp Sugarcane Lollipops

I did a double take last week at Trader Joe’s in Irvine, CA, when I spotted a new frozen item — Chạo Tôm. It is a southern Vietnamese specialty comprised of ground shrimp paste wrapped around a stick of sugarcane. It’s grilled and eaten with lettuce, herbs, nước chấm dipping sauce and if you like — rice paper and bánh hỏi (fine rice noodles). TJ’s Chạo Tôm is made in Vietnam so props to TJ for sourcing from the motherland.

What are they like? Well, we tried them and they’re pretty good. But I’m still on the fence so I need to retaste them. More on that in another post.

Have you tried TJ’s Chạo Tôm? If there is a Trader Joe’s nearby, look for the boxed item in the frozen section or ask for it, try it out and share your feedback. We can collectively review it.

💎 Seasonal: Butternut pro-tips

I was selecting butternut squash from our local Prevedelli Farm when the farmer interrupted me and bluntly said, “Don’t take that one. Always pick the darker-skinned butternut. It will be sweeter.”

“I was looking for a meaty one with a smaller bulbous end,” I said.

Butternut and honeynut.

“No, always look at the butternut’s color. It doesn’t matter what the shape is,” he emphatically responded. Then he asked if we’d had diminutive Honeynut because they were sweet kind of like Delicata in that you can eat the skin. He sold me three hard squashes today by sharing farm fresh tips. Now you have his intelligence too. (If you live locally in Santa Cruz County, Prevedelli still has splendid Warren pears, which remind me of Harry & David Riviera pears.)

💎 Reads: Community Cookbooks

Making Connections through Community Cookbooks — Thanks to John F. for sending along this essay about the Huntington Museum’s archive of community cookbooks. The essay got me thinking about these from my collection.

The Southern Foodways Alliance’s cookbook shares insider tips from good southern cooks. SFA’s book is where I began my pimento cheese recipe journey! The Junior League of Palo Alto’s captured the 1980s California cooking vibes.

There are online community cookbooks too, such as the ones archived by the Library of Congress. Once in a a while, I happen on a Vietnamese archive of recipes by alums of a particular school or graduating class. As with English language community cookbooks, women author the recipes.

Community cooking builds relationships. We’re doing some of that community building through PTFS as you share your cooking tips and projects.

If you’ve got a favorite community cookbook or recipe from one, snap a photo and share it on the PTFS chat as a new thread. Ditto for dishes that you may think others would be interested in.

And speaking of the chat — I shared a video of me and Rory picking neighbor’s persimmons — in case you wonder how they’re harvested.

Behind the paywall this Sunday is one of my all time sticky rice favorites. Look for it and join us, if you’re interested.