Big flavours, simple recipes

Fish-sauce butter(!), drunken pasta, backwards bread

Hello and welcome to this very first edition!

I have 10 recipes to share and most of them feel pretty special without needing heaps of time or effort.

In the spirit of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the Jenny Han books and movies this newsletter was named after, I’m dedicating this issue to Eric Kim, a Korean American food writer and lovely person to follow on the internet.

His Table for One column was one of my favourite things to read before he moved over to NYT Cooking. And his Instagram regularly features meals and snacks he’d make for Timothée Chalamet.

Keep scrolling for my three fave recipes by him, plus other delicious things like scallion oil noodles and a sourdough recipe that’s actually easy.

Catch you next month!

Sonya

THE RECIPES

Three great Eric Kim recipes

Roast chicken with croutons and fish-sauce butter is a simple recipe that tastes incredible. You roast some chicken thighs, add some bread to the pan and mix up a sweet and tangy sauce on the stove. The fish-sauce butter really makes this dish, and the cute recipe video inspired me to try my hand at homemade milk bread for the croutons.

Is making this bread as funny as it looks? Yes, and you should do it.

Brushing egg wash over a loaf that looks like a butt gave me the giggles and I highly recommend it for stress relief. My small fail: I second-guessed the sugar and didn’t add enough, so add the full amount!

Two more Eric Kim recipes I love: 

Sheet pan bibimbap is vegetarian and very flexible as a recipe/method. It’s a fun way to use any gochujang you might have in the fridge.

For a classic, cold-weather dessert, I love his 15-minute chocolate lava cakes. It’s one of the easiest ways to make this type of chocolate pudding and still great without the clementine too.

One-pot pastas

Last month I also loved Hetty McKinnon’s drunken pasta with burnt butter, sage and walnuts. It’s a one-pot pasta that uses a whole bottle of red wine. It smells incredible while it’s cooking and definitely feels like a special weekend meal without the fuss.

There are so many good one-pot pastas to try:

I usually have the ingredients for Anna Jones’s kale, tomato and lemon one-pot spaghetti (and always make it with tinned tomatoes). 

Joy the Baker’s one-pot French onion pasta is a very comforting meal you can make when supplies are low. 

Scallion oil noodles (cōng yóu bàn miàn)

These Shanghai-style noodles by Betty Liu taste as good as takeaway! The technique reminds me of Alison Roman’s shallot pasta, where you make an oil/base that gets mixed through noodles.

THE PROJECT

Backwards bread is a genius way to make sourdough at home without the struggle. It’s the bread-child of Melbourne cookbook writer Jessica Prescott and Instagrammer Mary Grace Bread and involves mixing your ingredients together at night, doing one round of kneading then… going to sleep. The next morning, you shape your loaf and bake it. That’s it!

If you want to try it, Mary’s saved the recipe and process in her Insta Stories. I also have a copy of her easy sourdough zine and if you get the online version, she regularly updates it with new recipes and tips. The latest version has the backwards bread recipe and sourdough croissants!

TO FINISH

I found myself ordering extremely spicy kimchi jjigae while reading Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart recently. Her memoir is about so many things — growing up Korean American, trying to make it in the music industry and going home to take care of her mum after a cancer diagnosis. Sample it via the Sporkful podcast and in this episode of Death, Sex & Money.

I’m also a big fan of her band Japanese Breakfast and their latest album Jubilee.

Finally, if cooking in winter makes your apartment smell like the last thing you cooked (me, everyday), mask the scent with a simmer pot, which is also a nice winter thing to do.