Snow & stock & Saltburn

On cooking projects and willful misreadings.

The midwest is currently getting slammed with an epic, gorgeous blizzard, so our household is hunkered down. Lauren grew up in Florida and spent a good chunk of her adult life in LA; she is completely obsessed with and entranced by the weather, about which I receive a dutiful report every twenty minutes or so. It’s a good, solid storm. Last night, when the snow began, our street was so quiet you could hear the icy flecks striking each other midair; right now, the puffiest flakes you’ve ever seen are eddying in the wind. When we went outside earlier, I took a handful of snow from a ledge. It was so fluffy it was barely cold, and I could squeeze it into a diamond-hard ice nugget. It’s snowball snow, snowman snow. I am reminded—sensorially—of the ‘96 blizzard. I was ten. They canceled school for a week and we built a snow fort that could have easily collapsed and killed us but didn’t. After a week my mother made me deliver my Girl Scout cookies in the snow; she loaded up my little orange sled with as many of the 300+ boxes of product as fit and sent me on my way. Punished for being such a good little entrepreneur.

I have always loved a snow day project. I think because, emotionally, a snow day feels like an actual unscripted vacation, even though it isn’t for me and many other people. I still have to do my work. But I’m still determined to fit some extra cooking projects into my day, even beyond my normal lunch and dinner planning. Here’s the plan for the next few days:

1. Preserved lemons. I’ve been itching to make preserved lemons for ages; I love them, and no store-bought kind I’ve ever had have been better than homemade. The last time I made preserved lemons I ended up mostly tossing them in chicken tagine, but I’d like to try them in some other applications this time around. I went out yesterday before the storm and got a gigantic glass jar from a thrift store so I’m gonna have preserved lemons for uh a year. (I also picked up some key limes at the grocery store, and I might try making preserved limes, too?)

2. Freezer door dirty martinis. A thing about me is I love love love a dirty martini but I rarely ever make them at home because it feels like no amount of shaking with ice ever gets them as ice-cold as I want them to be. But I’ve been really vibing on J.M. Hersch’s freezer door martinis, because they end up saving a lot of time and are also always exactly the correct temperature. (For Christmas I made a friend of mine a bottle of his freezer door expresso martinis and had enough to make an extra for myself and it is so absolutely perfect.) My only complaint is that while this video series is apparently going to be cookbook soon, right now they only exist as videos, and Hersch assumes you’re making everything using a 750mL bottle but also tells you to pour off a certain number of ounces, etc., so between switching up units and using 500mL bottles I end up doing way more math than I ever expected, to make sure the proportions are correct. My cooking notes notebook is like four ingredients and two pages of conversions.

3. Chicken stock. I had a Trauma last fall where I made a stock out of rotisserie chicken carcasses and veggie scraps that I’d been saving in the freezer—which I’ve done a million times—and it was simmering and smelling divine until I went to taste it and it was… bitter? Like inedibly bitter. I googled what to do about bitter stock and apparently it’s a thing that happens sometimes, though no one agreed why¹. I tried some of the suggestions to counteract the bitterness (mostly salt and vinegar) and while it helped some it didn’t make it go away. I ended up just dumping the whole thing and weeping odd tears that I explained to a very concerned Lauren as “hating waste.” (I do hate waste but I also hate messing things up because I am an eldest daughter.) Anyway! The next time I had some chicken carcasses I just looked up a stock recipe and followed it; I chose Samin Nosrat’s because of course, and just used whole ingredients, not scraps. (Though she says to use raw bones and I have only ever used roasted ones.) The result was the most decadent, luscious, gelatinous, incredible stock I’ve ever tasted. I didn’t even salt it (I believe v much in salting things but at later stages in the cooking process) and it was so unbelievably good it didn’t even need it. So I’m hoping to reproduce that today, using my slow cooker. We shall see.

4. Mayak eggs. This style of marinated eggs, which translates to “drug eggs,” were all over TikTok ages ago and I wanted to try them but kept forgetting to prep them in advance. But not today! I’m not wedded to this recipe but it’s an example of what these are: it’s jammy soft-boiled eggs in a soy marinade with a million aromatics. I figure we’ll have them over rice for lunch or maybe I’ll pop them on some ramen. We’ll see.

5. Brown-butter fat-washed bourbon. I’ve been meaning to fat-wash some bourbon this winter but now I finally have the time. Have you ever done this? It’s the easiest thing in the world—you literally just combine any kind of fat with any kind of booze and pop it in the fridge and/or freezer; the next day the fat has solidified on the top and you just pop it off, stick the fat wherever you like, and strain the liquor back into a bottle—and when it’s over you end up with a liquor with this gorgeous, round mouthfeel and a flavorful bourbon butter than you can put on/in anything you want.

6. Rosemary cubes. I have a bunch of rosemary I need to preserve, and I’m going to use one of those 1oz Souper Cube trays to make some little frozen nuggets of rosemary in olive oil².

7. Soak those chickpeas. In Bean Club news, I’m currently brining a whole bag of ceci piccoli and plan to use the chickpeas in two different recipes: Molly Baz’s Chorizo and Chickpea Carbonara and Victoria Granof’s Pasta e Ceci, with Deb Perelman’s impeccable addition of a fried rosemary oil on top. I colloquially call this recipe Adult Spaghettio’s, and if you add a tiny bit of sugar it really hits all the same deeply satisfying notes. Perfect for a winter day.

In non-food news, Lauren and I watched Saltburn (2023) last night.