Ari Adventures!!

- Salmon

- Half a lemon

- Butter

- Salt

- Pepper

- Paprika

- Parsley

Super simple! I need super simple recipes like this because being in the kitchen just drives my anxiety up. It’s just going to be one of those ‘you people can’t do anything’ parts of me, if not for life then for a long while yet. The less time I spend prepping the better.

Preheat oven to 375F. Get a chunk of salmon from the grocery store and put it on aluminum foil in the tray. The tip with the seasonings is to use less than usual because salmon has a very nice and distinct flavor to itself already. I lightly sprinkle with salt, and even lighter with pepper and paprika. I keep forgetting parsley so it’s optional I guess but a nice add on! Then put a lil bit of butter on top of the salmon so it cooks in nice and juicy. Then half a lemon. The lemon is the easiest to quantify because half, and because the tip for that one is to use more than I expected to. When we cook together it’s just one lemon for the both of us.

You know what I haven't written in a while? A cooking/food post! Someone asked me something on Twitter which got me thinking and I figured I'd finally write about making food again, so I'm pretty happy to have something to post on here again.

Immediately at the start of writing this I understand why recipes come with a background story, because cooking IS personal and at least, since I'm not a recipe blog, what investment do you really have in this if I'm not saying something about it? But I'll put the extraneous details after the recipe. This is far from a formal recipe and just a musing of what I did. I mostly did it to taste but these are some approximate measurements:

6-8 eggs 4 cups of water 4 bags black tea 3 tablespoons dark soy sauce 2 tablespoons regular soy sauce 1 tablespoon sugar 4 teaspoons salt 2 teaspoons Shaoxing wine 1 teaspoon five spice powder

Important to note: Make as many eggs as you want as long as it'll all fit in the marinade you make - it's gotta cover all of the eggs, no peekin' out. If you need less marinade, i.e. you're putting it in a tight ziplock bag, feel free to halve or otherwise divide the ingredients to fit.

Make the marinade in a saucepan with all the ingredients besides eggs. I started boiling the water and put the ingredients in one by one. I cut open the tea bags and dumped it all in. The five spice powder is out of convenience - if you look up all the spices included in it, like sichuan peppercorn and star anise and cinnamon etc., and have all of those on hand, you can use those as well, but this is a simple recipe for a simple person.

After mixed and boiling, let it cool off to the side.

Soft boil eggs in another pot, put them in an ice bath afterwards or run them under cold water for a few minutes, whatever your jam is.

Gently (GENTLY!!) use the back of a spoon or something to crack the eggshells while leaving them on, but not break through too much of the egg. The marinade is pretty strong so you could theoretically just completely peel them and soak them for a shorter amount of time, but I like to make them traditionally.

Put the eggs into the marinade and simmer/warm them for like, an hour. After that, let the marinade cool down again, cover it, and refrigerate it for up to 24 hours. That's it!

*Notes*

The dark soy sauce is mostly for the marbling/color of it. If you want a darker marbling, you can add more and reduce the salt. Like I mentioned, I did a lot of it kind of by vibes, so I added in a little more soy sauce and salt myself.

I had a test egg after I simmered them for an hour. Simmer? Warm? As long as it's not boiling, you don't actually want to thoroughly cook the eggs unless you're okay with super overboiled eggs. Tasted good, but did taste so much better after soaking for a day. I note soft boiled above because when you simmer them they do cook a bit again, and traditionally it is hard-boiled, but if you want them not overboiled you should do the soft boil initially.

As seen in the picture above, I marinated it in a saucepan overnight and put some clingwrap over it. My first attempt I only made 3 eggs, and they fit in a mason jar so I just put it all in a mason jar and used maybe half of that recipe above. If you don't want a big ole saucepan, you can also put the marinade in a big ziplock bag that'll stay securely tight. As long as the marinade is covering ALL of the egg!

This is what I mean by marbling! OBVIOUSLY these pictures aren't great (I have never claimed to be a photographer) but this is just to show what the end result should look like. Sometimes the marbling doesn't really come through but it still tastes nice!

I grew up with tea eggs always at the grocery store and able to grab 'em any time I wanted. They were usually always warmed in a crock pot as you grabbed them with tongs, but since I'm not running a crock pot for days as I finish eating them all I have them cold and they're still glorious. You can honestly marinade them 8-24 hours or so, I just like marinading for longer so the color really comes through and for more of the taste to soak in. Marinade them too long and I think they'll get too salty. It's a great subtle flavor, and you can reuse the marinade for another batch if you're making more in a short amount of time (refresh ingredients a lil that may have evaporated) or I know you can theoretically cook meat and vegetables in that marinade so you'll have something tasty from it.

I'm (AS USUAL, everyone moans) having culture feels and been wanting to cook more as a result. Most of it has manifested in veggie soup or varying noodle dishes, but tea eggs are near and dear to my heart and honestly I am so glad they were easier to make than I thought. I have a lot of weird vibes and euughh, trauma 🙄 over being in the kitchen just due to weird family stuff I grew up with so cooking is a real chore for me. Ultimately this uses two small pots (saucepans? pots? whatever they're called) and a tablespoon so the dishes to clean afterwards is minimal.

Which may or may not be okay. I used to have three different apps - one for color coding my mood with tags of what I did that day (this was useful in figuring out my period was affecting mood greatly back then), one for three daily things I was grateful for, and then the recordings. I eventually fell off the other two because I no longer needed daily reminders to keep my head up and keep myself going, or to track specific bouts of anxiety.

Maybe this falling off is indicative I have outgrown it. It’s a little anxious in of itself, because it’s the last one left, and I think the most impactful. This coincides with a massive amount of anxiety and stress due to some other life factors, so it’s hard to tell whether a lot of my worries/anxieties could otherwise be soothed through talking it out in my recordings, or because it’s fallen off. I talk often about how I don’t have an internal monologue and how it can be hard to pinpoint what’s got me feeling bad - which is why talking to the recordings helped me so much. I don’t know what the specific answer in this case would be, and that also makes me anxious.

Back when I first started, I would do them as needed. As needed often meant multiple times a day, as I’d get stressed or upset and often vent to a recording or try to talk myself through it. I of course started growing and developed a lot of coping mechanisms so it didn’t have to be as often, and the daily factor was more of a holdover back from when I had to try and restrain myself to just doing one at the end of the night. Maybe it’s as needed, and it’s just less needed now. Though, knowing myself, I’m very avoidant and tend to stonewall things (which is kind of my specific problem and stressor these days). Which is to say, I’ll completely avoid a thing when it is making me worry or I’m bound to be anxious over it. It’s possible the time since I’ve done a recording is just weighing over my head and I’m avoidant to starting again.

Cishet normatives and baby obsession aside (an admittedly big aside), she’s expressed wanting to make sure that I’m taken care of. In our vulnerable moments which are the few times we’re able to communicate a little of the hurt and fear we have for one another, she’s been so afraid that after she and my father pass, I won’t have anyone to watch over me. A part of her will always see me as a child because I will always be her child. And she doesn’t want me to be alone in life. And as an immigrant, she has internalized that the only people who will ever be there for you, understand you 100% are your partner and children.

There’s a lot of asides like I mentioned, like the obsession with passing down the family line, and the narrow view that only romantic relationships can be truly fulfilling, but otherwise - I get it. Spider notices I don’t respond to a question with yes/no and instead with an excuse and gently prods for my true feelings and response. Sarah exclaims ‘FINALLY!’ as I decide to buy muffins for myself (even though they weren’t on sale) because she says I decide to treat myself to something that makes me happy maybe 1 in 50 times she sees it. She sighs in exasperation after she tells me I should see a doctor and I respond ‘I’ll look into it’, because she knows the bad habit about me that means I never will. Spider decides to make dinner for me even after she’s worked all day, because she wants to cook something for me, and for a brief moment there’s just the dim lighting of the kitchen and us switching back and forth between discussion about silly porn game mechanics and our hurtful pasts and our future together. And it’s good. It’s so good. I get why she wants this for me and I know why she’s concerned.

I wish I could give it to her. I wish I could beam all the knowledge and feelings in my head about everything I have here to her so she’d know that I’m okay here. There’s so much to overcome about it it’s laughable. It’d be a difference of cultures. It’d be coming out about sexuality/orientation. It’d be coming out about my partner’s gender identity and it’d be coming out about my gender identity. It’d be having to explain the intricacies of poly and exactly how my relationship works. It’d be so many things that feel like the outright denial of her lifestyle. Sometimes I think about whether it’d be possible. Sometimes she shows a glimmer of understanding and compassion for others, and it makes me wonder if I could have that too.