what’s up youtube. here we are for week 2! four more things, wow. they say the second week is the hardest. i’ve for sure heard them say that.
this week we have another painting of some trees, another little poem, a truly horrible meal i made (for you to learn from), and a little story i wrote.
so far this has been a fun experiment. the framework is good for making connections between things i might not have (who am i, rem koolhaas) but it’s also been great for digging through old notebooks and blowing dust off stuff. sketches. poems. things of that nature.
anyway here we go.
1. painting
usually when i paint these little scenes, i have something in my head i want to try to quickly get out. usually these days it has to do with color and tone. my instagram feed is basically full of little paintings that i didn’t spend more than 20 minutes on, some more successful than others at capturing the thing i was going for, but never really revisited or actively learned-from or anything like that. blip - idea, bloop - painting, bleep - posted. then on to the next thing.
of course you learn things with each one and to some extent those skills build up. but it’s not my job, and so i never made a real effort to push skills and learn things. actively. you know what i mean.
part of the goal with this newsletter was to get myself to spend more time on paintings, and to be better about putting them down and coming back later. so far that part of it has been a success. this one started off as an attempt to paint some spots of bright light on plants in an otherwise dusky scene, and after several hours and a couple sessions, it shifted into more of a tone / color exploration.
2. poem
“house poem” - fall 2020
i’d love to live there, you said
i said
i don’t think all that glass is good for your brain
i said it would probably get old
i have no idea if that’s true -
but it feels true, and so it probably is.
i can see both sides of it,
which is another way of saying
i can talk myself into almost anything.
3. the horrible egg
this week (it has been cold and wet) i found myself craving some ramen. i used to make it all the time, before i went vegan - one of the last big cooking projects i undertook before that shift was to make my own tonkotsu broth by boiling pork bones for 12 hours straight. you have to keep them at a rolling boil the whole time so the fats stay emulsified and you get that thick rich broth - you have to keep adding water, and your kitchen and possibly your whole house smells like pork steam. but if you eat meat, i think it’s worth it. it’s very good.
in this instance, i was also curious about somehow bringing the richness of a soft-boiled egg into a bowl of vegan ramen. there’s a great recipe i came across for a vegan “cream” sauce that does not use cream or fake cream or plant milk of any kind actually - only beans (the beans are the sauce) - and in my head i could picture an egg yolk replacement with that kind of creamy, protein-y texture.
so i decided to give it a shot.
there are quite a few posts / videos / etc. about vegan eggs online - i guess it was kind of a trend a few years ago? but basically the key ingredient is kala namak - a salt with a lot of sulfur in it that has a very eggy flavor. with that flavor, the rest is more or less up to you - some people use tofu, some people use tomatoes, or carrots, or plant milk, or whatever, the list goes on.
i approached the white and the yolk separately. and i will tell you up front that the whites turned out pretty gross so i will not be including my recipe. don’t make them. not worth it.
here we go.
egg whites. you blend them up, then heat on low for a few minutes while stirring, so the agar agar (a kind of seaweed gelatin, i guess?) can start to set up.
i didn’t have anything egg shaped so i used these little dishes. the egg white mix went into these, then into the fridge to chill and set. it was already pretty set up when it went in, actually - i was expecting the surface to smooth out but it did not.
for the yolks, i used a little bit of carrot and some cannellini beans as the “base.” the carrots i boiled for just a minute or so (i have a carrot allergy so they need to be cooked) and then i cooked them up in some vegan butter with a little garlic and salt until they were just starting to get some color and the garlic got fragrant.
then into the blender, with:
some of the carrot water from boiling
a little oil
salt
nutritional yeast
turmeric mostly for color
some more water
a little splash of oat milk because it was still too thick
just a TOUCH of kala namak. like a 1/4 teaspoon, maybe not even that much. that stuff is very strong!
yum. egg mustard.
meanwhile here are the egg whites out of the fridge. they look great huh. just the type of thing you want to put into your soup.
already i could tell that the texture was absolutely not what i was looking for - way too firm. actually very similar to a hard boiled egg, if you’re vegan and you’re missing something like that. but really, at this point, i was thinking i could have just used tofu straight up, and not bothered with the agar agar, the blending, the heating, etc.
i sliced off the gross part and scooped out a little hole.
ta-da! wow. gorgeous.
and here they are in a bowl of ramen. i fucked up the timing on some of the veggies and overcooked them but at that point i could already tell this was not going to scratch the soft-boiled egg itch, so. who cares.
they were bad. the whites especially. it’s possible that by using way less kala namak, they’d be palatable but really, i think what i mostly learned from this is that i do not miss the flavor of eggs at all, it’s the richness and texture of the yolk that i was looking for.
and actually, the yolk mix wasn’t too terrible. i mean it’s beans and carrots and garlic and oil, how bad could it really be.
i had a bunch of it left over, so i used it as a base for a pasta sauce the next night, and with more oat milk to make it from a paste into a sauce, and pasta, and a nice topping, and some broccoli, it was actually very good!
lesson learned. don’t make the horrible egg.
4. memory of the cook
here’s a little story i wrote. i’m posting it in image form because i have already typed a lot in this newsletter this week and i had this image ready to go.
that’ll do it for this week. i hope you learned at least one thing from all this. if you have a better egg yolk, let me know.
hope you all have a good week. see ya next tuesday. bye.