Vengeful Cooking

Hi, it's me, @aeolianblues, burner of bread, the lettuce fears me. I suck at cooking, but unfortunately everyone knows this. Which is why Vengeful Cooking. I am here, and I want vengeance. So I'm digging through simple but complicated looking recipes and spamming my poor family with stage-by-stage photo sets and garnishing literally everything with cheese (and bad camera angles) and hoping for the best. Yep, you could say I'm fishing for food compliments from my family, but what I'm really looking for is vengeance, you get

So, many burned fingers later (if you think burned fingers are bad, I managed to puncture my thumb with a scissor while opening a packet. Now this thumb has a knife cut, a scissor cut, and is housed next to a burn. I did say I was not very good at this), here is this blog!

My super stuffed club sandwich!! It’s not much to look at, but I put all the agreeable condiments I had in a bowl (mustard, mayonnaise, garlic powder, bbq sauce, chipotle mayo bc I had a little, sugar, Sriracha and pickle juice), sautéed up some purple cabbage I bought from the Asian store this week bc I was reminded you should think about your iron and apparently cabbage does it, there’s cabbage sautéed with some onions in a garlic and pinch of sugar base, then attempted (badly) to poach an egg. Unsuccessful 2/2 times I’ve ever done it and I’ve been fishing out egg white from the water and my strainer’s a mess. Sticking with soft boiling next time. That’s my protein/ fill-in patty bc I can’t be bothered to make chicken at 11 pm. This is the post-radio show meal. Then on top go some spinach (it’s at the bottom actually, but more iron), tomatoes and chillies. There’s a bit of boiled potato in there too, just so I don’t feel hungry again in four hours. Topped off with more caramelised onions (in addition to the onions I caramelised with the cabbage).

That on a toasted bread with butter. my presentation could be better, I could make this a proper sandwich but I don’t like things between two toasted slices, also no one has to see this but me. So it’s fine.

So what indeed can I do.

When I was 17 I really got into making flavoured coffees. Note that this does not mean I was a coffee connoisseur, there was absolutely no critique on the part of the quality of the coffee. The coffee being used was absolutely fucking dogshit instant espresso from a packet. We did not, and continue not to, have the SPACE needed for a coffee machine at home. Where would the onion basket go, pray tell?

But I lived in a city that was an hour's drive away from a little town that was nationally renown for its fruit farms. And about once a year, dad would load us all in the back of the car and hit the highway, aka the most stressful drives you can possibly make. North Americans love their highways. Americans are literally always on the freeway and the interstates and having to drive 8 miles south or whatever. Ontarians are just always stuck on the 401. That's not their fault. Highway driving in India is a nightmare. You are fighting a duststorm everytime you set foot on those bad boys. Get behind a truck and you will forget you're not in the Sahara. Get behind a truck and THEY will forget you're behind them. It's so much fun. My sister and I, in our mid-twenties* are still forbidden from highway driving. *she is in her early twenties, she will kill me for generalising here. She will also make me point out that she (from my fuzzy memory) probably drove them back home the last year. She is the boss of the house after all.

Anyway, the farms. The have a fuck-tonne of strawberries. They have a lot of other berries too. And they sell a LOT of fruit product: jams, milkshakes (made with hillside farm-fresh milk), syrups, spreads, ice creams, whole strawberries, dried strawberries, chocolate strawberries, and then they got fancy with it and branched into other fruits and flavourings.

And every year or two years that we went, we somehow got hoodwinked into coming home with enough bottles of syrup of different flavours to last us till the next time we went back. How so? Mainly, no one in our house really has sweet stuff. This is purely driven by the panic-greed you have when you're suddenly dreaming up all sorts of fantasies in your head, when you can see waterfalls of glassy, ruby-red sherbets cascading like waterfalls from the heavens; in the bright, summer skies, you see light, fluffy pink clouds of frothy, pillowy, whipped up strawberry shakes, clear white dripping ice cubes, like glacier rocks as a river of yellow-green grapefruit juice comes washing down it. In your mind, you are swimming in a pool of deep red, shiny, crisp and wondrously smelling strawberries. It's a full-production advert inside your head.

It also helps that it's fucking 37º outside near-constantly. You think, ah we'd all like a refreshing, cool drink, wouldn't we?

I also lied a little. There's one member of the family that didn't so much mind sweet stuff.

So back home. To the furnace of our kitchen. (Can you imagine Indian cooking when it's already 35º+ outside?) There are now 4 bottles of various confitures and syrups for drinks sitting on the table. Mum is lamenting how it's been 2 weeks since we got back home and we're still nowhere near finishing these and there's no space in the fridge. (Side note: our fridges are not in the kitchen. That would be the most impractical thing anyone's ever suggested. The kitchen was just mentioned for texture and setting the scene: everything has to go in the fridge in our summers, you can't leave anything out. Not even for an afternoon, it'll go bad in the heat! So fridge space is precious.)

So began The Experiment.

It began with vanilla syrup in coffees (that's not even a fruit!! Hoodwinked again...) I certainly don't drink coffee for the bitter taste of it, I was the sweet tooth of the house! The vanilla expectedly just masked that. So far, so Starbucks. We didn't really do Starbucks in India, it's always watery shit. We're more Costa Coffee Day people. Or whatever. Varies from town to town. So far, on par with your fancy cafetiere. Strawberry was a bit of a miss. You could add a bit of it, but too much clashed with the entirely different direction the taste of coffee beans takes you in. Either that, or the coffee (instant) was shit.

Blueberries had more success in the house. Of course, while I was whipping all these up in the kitchen, it was my poor family that had to be the guinea pigs for these creations. After blueberry was marmalade (not in syrup form, but still very much from those farms). Mum was calling me a "food DJ" as these ambitious "what if"s began to spill into the world of solid food. I would only later discover that mixology is an actual profession. Bartenders go where my mum wouldn't dare. (For someone living in a metro city we were quite boonies-like HUH!!)

Which brings me back to the present. I have not thought about my fledgeling mixology career since 2017. That was now 9 years ago. But old habits die hard. I have a $10 bottle of vermouth to hand. How much damage could I do, realistically.

Well! Working only with what I have in the fridge, here's my devilled creation.

Vermouth in the glass, let's go in with some contrasting sweetness. Options at hand are orange or mango juice (summer, idk. Just happen to have them at hand). Orange juice brings out the sourness of the wine-like vermouth, mango seems to anull it to basically give you back a blank canvas. I get the feeling if you got that and topped it with some vodka it would really cut through. Though if you want it to not taste like nothing, not have that edge dulled, maybe also squeeze some lemon on top? It wouldn't be the worst combination.

That said, I decided to use the mild/blank canvas and add something unexpected and exciting on top. How about some spice? My options here, with the exception of like. Crushed peppercorns, let's not go there; are some kind of hot sauce or some kind of spice powder. I guess it depends on what order you want the tastes to hit your mouth, how you want it to add to the flavour profile.

Add sriracha and it's heavier than either vermouth or the juices, it's a bit thick and won't fully dissolve, no matter how much you stir. Didn't try shaking. So what happens then is, especially in a smaller serving, a shot glass as one is wont to do when fucking around experimentally, you down this mildly sweet thing and then have this slimy burst of spice slide down your throat. It's not the best experience but it is an experience. The element of surprise definitely adds to it. 6/10.

The other option at hand was cayenne powder, which is lighter and sits atop the rest of the drink, so you can dust it on top like you're topping a tiramisu in ground coffee powder. It hits FIRST and so that's spicing up your entire shot. It will also go right up your nose. I have sneezed 4 times. It was great though, 8/10, I recommend it for the experience of drinking it.

Dinner I made today! There's a veggie spread underneath the egg, made of sautéd aubergines, cabbage, red bell peppers and mushrooms, sautéd in tomatos and onions that I really needed to finish (bought them in the discount section meaning these bbs were on last legs). Fried up an egg, tore up some raw spinach leaves on top, added some chipotle sauce and chilli oil on top and yum! All this on a multigrain wrap (opportunistically picked up when I THOUGHT it was on discount only to learn it was full price at the bill encounter. So fuck it, we eating good, I love multigrain breads anyway when I can squeeze them in!)