countdown

seriously this tostada from Bolita Masa was sooooo good. so fresh, so spring, so balanced.

it inspired me to get more spring things, but the "esquites" from My Friend Fernando didn't hit the same way. it was a bit too salty - maybe it just needed a nice crispy tortilla?

i needed to fill up on some satisfying typical tacos - quesabirrias and chicken mole - from Dos Raices.

and that was first friday at Hammerling for Cinco de Mayo.

I'm currently in countdown mode - sometimes my most fun mode. I fly home five days. Last weekend was Gelly Belly and the week before that was ENDLESS food at work, which bled into leftovers for the next week. That all left me with so many random perishables and a cease fire on grocery shopping since April 25.

Anyways, my first and last weekend in the Bay for May started with a quarter slice of Keki's basque cheesecake. It was luxury, and I needed the calories for studio time. I made it through half before tapping out though.

Audrey survived grad school! And we celebrated from afar with our first cooking date since... before the pandemic. We picked larb burgers from Pepper's book because I had ground meat in the freezer and was relatively certain I could cobble together everything else. Well, lol Audrey's oven was broken so she watched me make some semblance of a crispy rice "salad" out of an excess of basmati rice and that ground freezer pork.

So that week of work lunches? I got catered Indian food one of the days and was totally flabbergasted when the fifty curries came in individual deli containers and their own little box of rice *facepalm.* That day hurt my heart, having to throw away all those oily deli containers, but people (including myself) slowly chipped away at those boxes of basmati. I even made a wok of fried rice at work one day with three of those boxes (and other found scraps and sauces).

Crispy rice salad used two basmati boxes... one egg yolk that was a byproduct of buttercream frosting, the rest of an unlabeled jar of curry paste, makrut lime leaves, mint from the neighborhood, garlic, fish sauce, and the juice of one very very old lime. But, of course, I knew and chose to ignore that basmati rice does not stick together. Enter a half pound of ground pork! Also one shallot for crispy shallots!

And we somehow ended up with a decent tray of [pretttyyyy crunchy because the basmati was so dry] crispy rice salad. Garnished with the remainder mint, some preserved limes (that I preserved also from work leftovers of catered Mexican food), and a mayak egg I made on a whim a couple weeks ago.

This tray was ~five chunked up balls, which means I still have like ten more to go.

Meanwhile, I finished up a cake for Em's pre birthday that also required zero grocery shopping because I had just enough eggs left for one base recipe and powdered milk in my pantry lol. 

Our initial plan to drink orange wines together snowballed because Joyce and I are... ourselves. And we somehow ended up with an orange theme and brunch spread from Lulu that all came together PERFECTLY.

Orange wine from an impulse buy at Minimo waiting for a special occasion.

Orange cheong in my fridge from the time my boss came in with a bag of navels from his tree.

Freezer library of cakes being slowly built up meant I had one more round of tahini cake.

Happily remembered I have orange blossom water.

This Mediterranean vibes checkerboard cake = tahini cake with orange cheong soak, pistachio cake, thin layer of orange blossom cream, tahini + orange buttercream, dried cheong oranges.

Did I take a coma nap at 4p that bled into bedtime? I did.

Monday almost began with cake for breakfast until I remembered I had an eighth of cheesecake left.

Lunch was leftover bacon and egg fried rice (man, seriously, when I tell you how much rice I've been eating for two weeks...).

Dinner was finally not rice. Sweet potato (aka my last piece of "produce") simmered in several freezer mole cubes with caramelized onions and adobo pepper and the last good bits of my propagated scallions.

Twelve more meals to go.