food//and intuition

+ spicy lemongrass chicken with brothy rice

As much as overarching harm-reduction has become (part of) my niche, so has intuition. I have a lot of respect for the time, energy and cost that goes into recipe testing until perfection- I can relate as the owner of a micro-bakery, Butter Moon Bake Co, which was born out of necessity when I wanted to leave my ex-husband and needed to generate income after having been the primary parent and caregiver for 4 years. I tested and tested and retested and tested those recipes over and over and over. Because of this my tiny bakery flourished, got state and nationwide praise, and respect within my community.

I know there is virtue in precision.

I get it/and that’s not what I’m doing or even trying to do anymore. I don’t want to so much teach you recipes but to teach embodiment and navigating the kitchen intuitively. I suppose this means that most folks benefitting from the way I approach food are the kind of people that love a recipe but yearn to be the whip-something-together type. I would rather be known as “that human that taught me to reach for acid before more salt” than the person whose recipe has become gospel. Perhaps I’d take both.

I don’t always get hyper-fixated on measurements unless I’m baking because science, and I like to think that instead of just walking away with a recipe you love, I will have taught you to take the long way- to consider, to taste, and to trust.

The deeper I wade into the murk of my own healing the closer I get to ___.

To magic, to intuition, to myself. I don’t consider myself to be a kitchen witch, that would feel too in-a-box for me, but that doesn’t mean my witchery doesn’t ever reside there. I’m not telling you to practice magic, but I’m not not teaching you to practice magic either.

To me they are all the same thing, just done in different places and with different intentions. If I can get you to trust your knowing more you will inevitably trust yourself in the kitchen more.

A snowball effect.

Salt over your shoulder? Magic. Stirring clockwise? Magic. Simmer pots? Magic. Cinnamon and/or honey in your morning beverage? Magic.

All this to say, when you are reading my recipes or my thoughts on food, it isn’t that I don’t honor the complexity and science of food. It isn’t that I’m too lazy to care about specifics, it’s that I honor you and your capacity to be that person in the kitchen. The kind that will eventually find their version of kitchen-steady and can stare into the abyss of a fridge and make magic from just a few, ordinary things.

Here is a really great place to start when approaching the recipes you find here or any recipe at all, really.

Kitchen Lessons

Take a look around there first or at least sometime so you can get a feel for what it is I do here in regards to food and making it.

---

I am admittedly fussy about smells, especially the way my house smells, and not in a smell-sensitive way per se. I don’t get migraines or even headaches if someone is wearing a scent that I don’t vibe with. But I am hyper-aware of how I smell, how my house and car smell, how my linens smell etc which makes cooking a thing sometimes. Salmon in the oven? Any fish for that matter? I think it’s been done twice in this house in two years and I regretted it each time. Frying things inside? I’d rather stand over a grill outside in my boxers and hoodie in the middle of winter.

It’s silly, bordering ridiculous, I know.

I wouldn’t braise a meat without searing it first but I must tell you that the shitty overhead exhaust that I hate is running at full and incompetent blast- the one that is so loud that I immediately get sucked into an overstimulated vortex where I cannot hear my family asking me questions, I cannot hear the music, I can hear the fan and the meat searing and I am inside the meal I’m cooking until the fan is able to be turned off. It makes a very minimal difference in How Is This Going To Make The House Smell but I do it every time.

But pan sauces, you know? If I always grill my meat then those sticky, cola colored bits stuck to the bottom of a hot pan wouldn’t be there for me to deglaze and turn into a luscious sauce and that’s a damn shame, really.

Enter- spicy lemongrass chicken + brothy (saucey?) rice

At first I figured I would just grill the chicken like I always do but I couldn’t make up my mind on whether or not I wanted chicken and rice (with smashed cucumber salad) or if I wanted tom kha so I did a bit of marrying instead. I love when I don’t have to be the do’er of line-in-the-sand decision making.

I marinated some chicken thighs in soy, lime, fish sauce, gochujang, ginger and garlic for a couple hours. While it was marinating I made the cucumbers with Little’s help- he loves using the back of a knife to crush the flesh of (whatever) the cucumbers after I’ve cut them into spears. After they have been sliced and crushed I set them in a colander and sprinkle them liberally with salt, set it in the sink, and set a pot on top of said cucumbers to press out as much water as possible (I leave them there for 30 minutes) while I make the sauce and a pot of rice in the rice cooker.

Tips:

Keep your ginger in the freezer and then grate it (still peeled!) into whatever you’re making

I’m not a gadget head but I do have a romantic relationship with my rice cooker. You need one.

Make sure your chicken or whatever protein is at room temp before you cook it. Pull it from the fridge 30 minutes prior to cooking.

Generally the cucumbers always get some variation of sesame oil, chili oil, soy, vinegar and sugar- sometimes I add a sprinkle of cane, sometimes brown sugar, or even honey. Sometimes I use rice vinegar, funky black vinegar, or regular ol’ white vinegar. Sometimes there’s a bit of garlic that I’ve grated (be easy- raw garlic this way can be a lot and this is coming from a garlic Stan) and if there isn’t garlic then a bit of sliced green from a green onion. Once the cucumbers have been sitting in their salt and pressed, I rinse them in a bit of cold water, shake them real good, and add them to the sauce. At this point Little proceeds to be shooed from the stove area so I can sear the chicken and whisks the cucumbers to the other side of the drying rack (to a spot out of my direct line of vision) where he proceeds to eat an entire Persian cucumber- leaving the three of us with approximately 2 cucumber spears a piece. I love that kid.

Your cucumbers are done and in their sauce and maybe gone by this point but you made them!

The rice is cooking in its pot!

It’s time for the chicken.

Heat a heavy bottomed pan (a dutch oven is my thing) on medium high and add a couple Tbsp of neutral cooking oil with a high smoke point- grapeseed is what I typically use. Once your oil is shimmering and you can see rather than hear a drop of water sizzling away because the mother fucking fan is so loud, it’s time.

Tips:

Don’t crowd your pan. It’s annoying but worth it if you have to do any cooking or even just searing of meat in batches. If your pan is crowded, you’re steaming, not searing.

Turn on the stupid fan I guess- at the very least it drowns out “when will dinner be done” or “can I have (another) snack.”

Stop fiddling. You can’t do it. This is a lesson in patience. You have to leave the meat alone in the pan or on the grill. Flip flapping it around doesn’t do much except lend to frustration re: if your meat hasn’t properly seared on one side and you’re trying to flip it too soon, you’re going to get pissed and/or you will lose a thick layer of meat to the pan that refuses to release because it’s not ready.

I have a big dutch oven and that night I only had 4 chicken thighs so they fit perfectly. Generally chicken thighs take 16 minutes total, 8 minutes each side. If I was doing this on the grill I would rotate, not flip the thighs on the grill to get those sexy grill marks but we’re not doing that. We’re letting it cook for 8 minutes on each side. 8 minutes where we don’t touch the chicken, try to cover the chicken to reduce the splatters (just let it go, it drives me nuts too), or rotating it because it doesn’t need it.

Leave it be.

What you might consider doing around the 4 minute mark is to check on the temp of things. My stove top gets crazy hot so while I might start on medium high to get things going, I do a check on other factors to see if my pan is too hot such as-

things, including the oil, are getting too dark, too quick. This doesn’t require you to lift up the meat but to check its surroundings.

If something smells burning… it might be burning, so as a precaution knock it down to medium or even medium low the remainder of the 8 minutes so that you can asses any potential damage once your 8 minutes are up and you’re now flipping.

Once the chicken has hopefully cooked and not burned you should be left with an oily, crusty pot- dark brown bits from the chicken and marinade that you’re going to take off the heat while you put the chicken on a plate and set aside for now.

Here’s the fun part-

make a pan sauce. Don’t want a spicy lemongrass chicken? Don’t make that! Marinate it in whatever you feel like and then deglaze your pot accordingly. This time, since I was vacillating between chicken/rice and tom kha, I deglazed my pan (that I now have back on the heat but only low) with a combination of coconut milk from the can and chicken stock.

Tips:

Coconut milk from the can is essential for something like this. Don’t use a carton of coconut flavored dairy milk alternative.

If it’s cold where you live like it is cold here, set the can of coconut milk in the sink that you’ve stopped and filled with hot water. Coconut milk separates in the can- the liquid from the thick, white fat. If it is still separated and you try to do deglaze a pan with it you’re going to get pissed and make a mess.

So I added half a can of coconut milk and rinsed the can out with about the same amount of chicken stock, turned the heat up to medium, and once it starts bubbling you’re going to scrape the bottom of the pan like your life depends on it- releasing all those beautiful brown bits. I tossed in a shallot I quartered, a few kaffir lime leaves (I always have these, galangal, ginger, and lemongrass in my freezer) and a stalk of lemongrass I pounded while it bubbled and reduced, but you really don’t even have to do that if it feels like too much.

Taste it! It might need a little salt and it definelty needs some acid to balance the richness. In this case I added the juice of a lime and while it bubbled I chopped some cilantro for mine since I’m the only one that likes it and green onion for the other three.

You made a pan sauce.

Do you want another vegetable? Since I couldn’t make up my mind originally I had roasted some broccoli during all of this and added that as well.

Bowl- rice, chicken, pan sauce, (another veg?), cucumbers, herbs, in that order.

I typically have fried shallot and/or garlic in the fridge that I get from the Asian market because I’m absolutely not frying garlic or shallot very frequently and I sprinkled some of that on there as well.

Now your stove top is a slick mess, your hair smells like a pan sauce and so does whatever clothing you’re wearing. You light some incense and much to your husband’s dismay, open the windows and allow the 20 degree winter air to billow inside, and eat.

and then wash your hair.

Biggest love,

AR

Currently Reading: I'm still reading UNRULY by Antoinette Cooper and Pansy by Jasper Joyner

Currently Listening To: the Moody Focus playlist I made

Currently Cooking: as it frequently does here, we’ve swung back into extra-cold territory so I am making some no-knead bread and pasta e ceci (scroll all the way down the page that’s linked- you’ll find it) for dinner tonight