May 2025

A deep dive into Mediterranean cooking (dips, vegetable brining, a shift toward plant-forward meals) alongside a beetroot-chickpea hummus and a roast poultry method that splits dark and light meat onto separate pans by temperature. Also nailed down: Bruce’s burger sauce and a personal taxonomy of go-to burger styles (the deluxe, the swiss, the mcdub, and more).

Saturday, May 31st

Summer ideas

Chai (inspiration: 1) (this was really good, just cardamom + clove + small cinnamon)
- Pho is close to Chai
Chicken patties v3 (inspiration: 1, 2, 3) → Chicken patties

Rice bowls

Mandoline-sliced + lightly dressed (or pickled)
- carrot ← pickle (light)
- cuke ← pickle (light)
- cabbage ← slaw
- purple onion ← pickle (sweet)
Sweet
- Mango
- Thin apple/pear slices
Extras
- Black beans
- Blanched green beans
- Corn ← lightly fried
Protein (1-2)
- pan-fried steak + pan-made teriyaki sauce
- pork (chops, loin, tenderloin)
- seared tuna (cubed)
- tofu (cubed)
- ground/tofu blend (mapo)

Future

Pho base (Quoc Viet Foods Beef Flavored “Pho” Soup Base)
- quick pho base that is considered good or better

Undated

Summer/fall challenge

Eat our way through our cookbooks (source):

for each physical book we own, pick 3-5 recipes
any cookbook not worth cooking from can go
cookbooks with lame recipes can go
keep only the best

Laziest chili

Beef base → meat sauce + homemade salsa + 1 chipotle + 1 can of black beans 💯
- + leftover roast veg (yams are great)

More Mediterranean learning TODO

Brining potatoes for roasting (lemon, salt, oil?)
- Consider a par boil in brine (similar to SE, but with stock/lemon/seasoning)
- Use brine for braise?
Falafel (1, 2)
Tabbouleh salad (1)
Kababs
- Mince (beef or lamb)
- Whole lamb/beef

Meal planning

Autumn glow salad with lemon dressing with green dressing
- with chicken or pork? (maybe chicken meatballs?)

Sources: 1, 2

New recipe sources

(from a Reddit thread)

RecipeTin Eats
Modernist Cuisine (pizza stone guys)
Nik Sharma (Indian mostly)
177 Milk Street ($, founder of ATK)
Chef Steps ($$, high quality)

Thinking in Mediterranean foods

The foundation of the Mediterranean diet is plant foods. That means meals are built around vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, beans and whole grains. (source)

This is a shift in thinking about meal planning from rural Canadian cooking where we build a meal around a protein. I don’t think these have to be conflicting, but there’s a shift to plant-forward for better fibre and micro nutrient coverage.

Proteins: legumes > fish > seafood > eggs > chicken > pork > lamb > beef (generally)

Diets: DASH, Mediterranean

I don’t advocate for specific diets, but there are good recipes and ways of thinking in these.

Recipe ideas:

Chunky salads
Roast protein (chicken, fish, pork) 125 g
Zucchini fritters
Charred Zuch
Veg/breads and dip

I’ve observed that many North American versions of Mediterranean dishes are still focused more on the proteins, so it’s worth looking at more EU style sites and cookbooks and thinking about entire meals and not just the mains, as Mediterranean meals often include a number of dishes and dips. Also worth noting that there are generally sampling problems in diet studies around food and specific regions due to differences in data quality (sampled ages can be incorrect for various reasons), so regional diets may be better but not quite the panacea they appear to be.

Beetroot dip

→ Beetroot dip

(Source)

1 small can (430 g) canned chickpeas, drained and rinsed (rinse is optional)
140 g beets, cooked
2 teaspoons dried or fresh oregano
2 tablespoons / 30 g extra virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon minced garlic
1 medium lemon, rind finely shredded and juiced
black pepper, 1 dash
salt

Iced tea in grams

350 g strong black tea
40 g 1:1 simple syrup
30 g 3:1 lime/lemon juice

Bruce’s burger sauce

→ Bruce’s burger sauce

I have 4-5 styles of burgers that I feel define burgers for me, one of which is the 🇨🇦 A&W mozza burger. My replica uses a sauce that I’m developing:

1:1:1:1, mayo/kewpie, diced burger pickle slices, mustard

My burger list, while I’m thinking about it is:

The deluxe (wide, thin patty ~130-150 g, standard dressing, but with much less ketchup)
- whopper / quarter pounder deluxe, etc. (double is way too much beef)
- push towards quarter pounder with American cheese
The swiss (semi-sweet savoury burger sauce, swiss cheese)
- mozza-like
The mcdub (90 g patties, ½ cheese, tend towards sweet and fake onion)
- McDouble
- Bacon double (variant)
The pub burger (thicker patty, lots of deluxe)
Triple OOOOO (chili sauce, sweet mayo, pickle)

Roast poultry tests

→ Roast poultry

I seasoned both sides (poultry seasoning), set in fridge for 40 minutes in the roasting pans. One pan for dark meat, one for light.

Roast:

No water, just a bit of oil in the pan. There will be char marks, but deglaze the pans and use in stock.

Dark meat: 150°C for 50%-65% of the time, 218°C for the remainder (until 79-91°C)
Light meat: 218°C for the remaining thigh time

Examples:

Large turkey (50 minutes, 45 minutes)
2 chickens (30 minutes, 20 minutes)

Notes:

interesting that 2 chickens == space of 1 turkey, but only about ⅓ the meat
works well for both turkey and chicken
remaining cook liquid for stock (especially if there’s some dark cooked on spots)

Ideas

Oxtail soup (Jamaican)
Ramen reboot
Korean and Japanese bbq
Sheet pan pizza