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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2611 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 3, 2026

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So in the spirit of small scale, what's for dinner tonight?

My wife was up tonight and made the following:

Regular onigiri with white rice

Pork-wrapped julienned carrots and green peppers with some sort of sour plum paste seasoned with salt and pepper. Sautéed so it was like a little roll of meat with vegetables inside

Some sort of kimchee vegetables that included celery sections. Was surprisingly good

miso soup (tofu, green onions, spinach)

tofu (kinugoshi or soft) in squares topped with thin sliced onions, sesame oil, and her family's soy sauce, which I'm told is noticeably different than that you can buy in stores

cucumber medallions and daikon radish and carrots pickled in some way

udon noodles topped with some meat and baby leaf lettuce seasoned in some way (I think the noodles were the main?)

I had all this with two very cold beers.

I imagine @Tretiak eating pizza topped in butter, how about the rest of you?

I was able to justify a big dinner after a 2 hour long bike ride.

  • Cajun Corn - a semi-proprietary cajun and taco seasoning blend suspended in olive oil and drizzled over whole ears. Wrapped in foil, and set on the grill right after dumping the charchoal from the chimney. Turned once every 8 minutes or so.
  • Jalapeno Cheddar Burgers - Along with the corn, I seared tomatoes, onion, and Jalapenos to prepare fresh salsa for Cinco De Mayo this week. In America at least Jalapenos are absolute wildcards when you get them from the grocery store. These were screamers, and I have a fairly high heat tolerance. 3 slices of Boar's Head yellow cheddar and the freshly ground prime 80/20 from the supermarket cooled things off a bit, but I actually also leveraged my BBQ slaw from 2 days ago to really tie the room together...
  • BBQ Slaw - I use a variant of Rodney Scott's BBQ Sauce, an eastern NC condiment, modified to have more smoke via chipotle chile powder and higher-quality vinegar as a base. Greek Yogurt, a touch of mayo, brown sugar, and brown deli mustard round it out. I've learned that trying to eliminate sugar in slaw is a fool's errand, despite my hating it as an ingredient in industrialized food.

I originally planned to do some roasted potatoes, but after 3 IPAs, I decided to crack open a bag of chips now that Frito-Lay has dropped the prices back to human levels.

Inspiring! Sounds great.

Yesterday's dinner menu: kotlety, vinegret, cabbage-and-bell-pepper salad, hummus, cherry tomatoes, pickled cucumbers. The links are just visual examples, I don't know the exact recipe - my wife makes it, and she varies it all the time. My wife is a great cook, I am truly blessed in this regard (as in many others when it concerns my wife).

Also had a can of stout with that, since it was a busy weekend and I wanted to relax.

looks great

Some leftover Japanese-style chicken curry and rice. I use the premade roux cubes but add a lot of additional spices, and my family recipe includes okra and coconut milk. Afterwards I'll prepare a big pot of black-eyed peas with ham hocks and collard greens for the week.

Meal wise, nothing fancy. I might make a sandwich. But I am currently working on some banana bread, which ought to be quite delicious.

Smothered chicken thighs with(what else!) long grain rice.

I ate leftover ham and green beans. Boring, but easy. The ham was extra from when I made Ham and Cheese Calzones, which we already ate half of and froze the other half and don't want to thaw just yet because that defeats the purpose. The green beans were free/leftover from my wife's job. My wife and I both don't like cooking very much, so we typically make large batches of good stuff (like soup or calzones) every once in a while to eat when we get tired of free work food.

Ham and green beans are solid. Green beans and purple -hull field peas were staple sides at lunch and dinner growing up

Just a quick snack at the moment. Lots of butter of course!.

That was before the two bags of Doritos I just ate, along with two Mountain Dews; :/.

How's the ticker? While dietary cholesterol is apparently not the bugbear it was made out to be for years, saturated fats are still considered a cause of atherosclerosis. Then there is the metabolic/blood glucose issue. Truly you should be studied.

I actually had a routine checkup about 8-9 months ago and all my lab values (including cholesterol) were taken. My doctor said my numbers were literally perfectly at the normal ranges. I’ve never felt unhealthy eating this way but I do feel anemic when I go off of it.

Are you dipping a mayo chicken sando into melted butter?

I always try and have our cook at work (bless you Alvin) saturate the bun and chicken in as much butter as possible but it becomes impractical at some point, because the bun then starts breaking apart; crumbling. So he’ll put the rest into a cup that I can dip the burger in. This time though he didn’t overdo buttering the bun too much I think. I added several salt packets to the meat before putting the mayo on, then dip the bun again in butter before I take a bite.

You belong in a museum.

He'll be well preserved.

Pulled pork that sous vided two months ago. Memphis dust salt, 24h at 74C. Today finished for half and hour at 150c oven.

Damn. Any sides?

Whatever fresh veggies were in the fridge.

I'm gonna say Ramen noodles, some spring rolls and a peanut butter sandwich.

I know I'm meant to pretend to have a 3 course meal here, but sometimes you're spending the evening alone and go for convenience.

Very true. I wish we could have peanut butter in my home, but my brood have allergies.

Damn right. Let us gentlemen of culture partake of our repast.

Probably making either a curry or a dal. Easy to heat up during the week when I don't feel like cooking. Also got a leek & potato pie on tap to make at some point, although I will freely admit I just use storebought puff pastry for the topping. I do need to learn how to make a proper shortcrust at some point, since I love meat pies & pasties, but that's sure as hell not a today thing.

Big pastry and meat pie fan myself. I used to attempt croissants and pastry dough in my youth but I feel it's not worth the effort when you can buy premade.

My MIL is cooking mashed potato patties stuffed with chopped wild mushrooms, which I consider a waste of effort. Frying some potatoes with the same mushrooms would be like eight times quicker and would taste better IMO. But she really loves the dish along with the rest of the terrible Soviet canteen-style cooking, so she gets to make it once in a while.

My wife is cooking us two a steak as well, so the dinner won't be so depressing.

Real personally gathered wild mushrooms? There are few poisonous ones in Soviet areas, but many poisonous ones with identical appearances to safe mushrooms in the US.

No, they were from the friendly neighborhood supermarket. All three species only grow in the wild, though:

  • Boletus edulis
  • Leccinum aurantiacum
  • Leccinum scabrum

I think the morels are pretty safe here. Wouldn't expect someone to stuff those into patties, though.

Sounds good to me. Steaks also sound good. The 和牛/wagyu beef most often sold as high end steak here doesn't quite do it for me. It's not bad but it tastes like an Alien's version of what a steak should taste like. That's heresy here to say aloud, but the best steak I've ever had (outside some tournedos de rossini) was in Alabama cooked on a grill at my friend's house.

Why is this heresy? The US is well-known worldwide for its love of grilled beef.

The heresy part is my lack of enthusiasm for wagyu. The marbling, which is what is supposed to make it so good, is what to me makes the texture oddly surreal.

We don't usually cook anything special on Sundays so I'm planning to try to make a version of this green pea pasta.

My eldest loves green peas and I've been on the lookout for a decent recipe that uses them that I could cook on a week night (I don't make new recipes I haven't tried before on weekdays). I was thinking about adding some stock and garlic but otherwise keep it pretty much the same.

I would totally eat. Green peas get a bad rap in Japan for some reason, but Farfelle, peas and canned tuna with some Italian parsley and garlic is a great dish as well.

A simple stew made with a ham that was on sale for $1.50/lb, cabbage, onions, the last of the garlic from last year's harvest, and some paprika and black pepper.

Sounds good! Any bread involved?

Not tonight. My usual sourdough takes two days to make and it all went to my family this weekend. My dad finished his chemo so we celebrated a little.

Best wishes to a successful remission. Never tried to make sourdough though it's a great sandwich bread.

For me this week was lazy. So, chicken enchiladas with ranchero sauce/Oaxaca cheese, made from a broken down rotisserie, and some steaks that were actually top blade short ribs just grilled to rare with potatos and creamed spinach. Both really easy when you purchase the rice/beans/potatoes premade.

Got more energy this week, so gonna try a panang curry for the first time, and then just do homemade buffalo mac n cheese and grilled chicken for the second meal. I usually just cook twice a week and get 8-10 servings out of each one. My wife gets fed catered meals at work, so her interest in cooking is pretty low atm. I tend to do all of it since I'm technically unemployed and I have the time.

Enchiladas sound amazing. So difficult to get good Mexican food here, although there appears to be a recent taco boom in Japan (they say メキシカンタコス/mekishikantakos to not be confused with タコ/tako or octopus) There's a place in Osaka that has a one-month wait to get in, but no taco is worth that amount of time for me. I'm biding my time for the interest to wane or Instagram to be glutted. And Oaxaca cheese! Couldn't find it for love or money in Kansai (possibly Tokyo?)

Oaxaca is great, but you can definitely replace it with low skim mozzarella in most applications. My mom is mexican, so I tend to make a whole variety of enchiladas on different occasions. My two true favorites though are probably the simple ones. Shredded rotisserie chicken, sour cream, a melty white cheese with good pull, wrapped in a corn tortilla, topped with either ranchero sauce or dona rosa mole + chicken stock + chipotle onion paste. I finish the red with shredded cheese and the mole with more sour cream. As far as I'm concerned, its simply the best easy weeknight casserole dish out there.

I would love to visit Japan eventually. We'd considered it for a honeymoon, but after doing Italy a few years ago my wife and I were tired of planning, so we opted for an Alaska cruise instead. We'll be leaving in 11 days :)

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