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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   2309 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?

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.

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.

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