The resulting noodle food seemed to us to be an intermediate point on the drunken-noodle–>pad-thai axis, thus our name for it: Drunken Padded Noodles.

Totally inauthentic, but so good, we had it again less than a week later, with some bean sprouts and peanuts for crunch.

Drunken Padded Noodles

1. Cook and drain 8 oz flat wide rice noodles.
2. Heat in a wok or medium-large frying pan 1–2 Tbsp peanut or canola oil and sauté 1 minute:
   • 2 Tbsp minced garlic
   • 1-5 Tbsp minced ginger
   • 1 shallot, minced
   • 3 Thai bird chiles, minced
3. While the spices sauté, mix in a small bowl:
   • 2 parts black soy sauce
   • 1 part golden mountain sauce
   • 1/2–1 part Sriracha hot sauce
4. Add to the ginger, garlic and chiles
   • 8 ounces gai lan (Chinese broccoli), washed and chopped
   • a handful of mung bean sprouts

   Add black or white pepper to taste.

5. Add another Tbsp oil and let it heat in the pan. Add the cooked noodles and sauté 1 minute, then add the sauce mixture. Stir-fry until the mixture starts to cling to pan.
6. Add 2 eggs and 3/4 cup chopped Thai Basil leaves. Sauté until eggs are cooked.

7. Stir in juice of 1 lime and peanuts to taste and serve.

Last February, we went to a party where another of the guests brought delicious hummus made with sun-dried tomatoes and chopped preserved lemons.  It tasted amazing and answered a question that I had asked myself earlier that morning—”What the hell am I going to do with this gigantic stack of Meyer lemons that I just purchased on impulse from the produce stand?”

And so, it was time for another of my periodic adventures into the wilderness of home-preserved foods.  I don’t do this too often, having heard too much from my grandma about the Dread Botulinium Toxin and other assorted fatal maladies.  But pickled lemons seemed surmountable, even easy.  Here’s the recipe I followed:

• Roll the lemons on the table to burst the little lemon vesicles and release their juice.
• Quarter the lemons, leaving them attached near the base.
• Use a citrus reamer to squeeze the juice into a sterilized jar.  I put about 10 lemons into a quart jar.
• Dissolve 1/2 cup of salt into the juice. (I misread the recipe and added basically a fuckload more salt).
• Add the lemons to the jar.  If the juice doesn’t cover the lemons, use more fresh-squeezed lemon juice to cover.  Leave at least 1/2 inch of space at the top of the jar.  (If you, like me, add too much salt, the lemons will not sink in the juice.  The juice has to cover the lemons, though.  My solution was to panic and call my friend Dan, who is the sort of person who knows what to do in such a crisis.  His solution was to find a little bowl or some other weight, sterilize it, and put it on top of the lemons to weigh them down.)
• Cap the jar and put it somewhere fairly warm in your kitchen.  Turn it over and give it a shake every day to redistribute the salted juice.  The lemons will be ready in a month.

To use a lemon, take it out using a clean wooden implement (your hands are too filthy to put into your nice clean preserved lemon container!) and rinse it off to get some of the salt out.  Also, a sort of white gunk tends to adhere to the lemons — I think it’s just crystallized salt, and it’s a normal part of the lemon-preserving process (i.e. it is not some deadly contaminant) — but it should be washed off anyway.  Both the rind and the pulp are edible, but I prefer to only use the rind in stuff like salads and dips, for aesthetic reasons.  (If I’m cooking with the lemons, I use rind and pulp.)  The lemons keep for up to a year, and the pickling liquid can be re-used if you want, or you can use it in things like vinaigrettes.

A slightly later salad… with strawberries!

So, my inaugural batch of lemons is now ready for consumption.  I plucked one out of the jar, chopped the rind into little rectangles, and put it into a salad with goat cheese, spinach, red onion, olive oil, and a little of the pickling juice.  It was delicious.  The lemons turned silky-smooth in texture and their flavor takes on a pickled quality (because, after all, that’s what you did to them).  Absolutely delicious.

I have further plans for these lemons:

• Blatant theft of the sun-dried tomato and preserved lemon hummus idea
• Tagines and other Moroccan dishes, of course
• Sauteed with asparagus
• Maybe make some kind of spring roll or rice-paper wrap, with preserved lemons, shrimp, and maybe some Thai basil?

Next time, I think I might try this recipe—the additional spices look really delicious, although I worry that including them might make the lemons themselves a little less versatile than the straight-up lemon and salt recipe.

We call it “à la Don” ’cause that’s who we got it from. Frankly, I don’t know why anyone does it any other way.

Margaritas à la Don

Serves 4
—epanastrophe’s dad

1. • 1/2 cup fresh lime juice
   • 1/3 cup sugar

   Juice limes, add sugar.

2. • 1 cup ice

   Crush ice in blender, add lime juice and sugar, mix.

3. • 2/3 cup tequila (reposado or silver, not añejo)
   • 1/3 cup Grand Marnier

   Combine tequila and Grand Marnier. Add to mix, blend. Taste and adjust ingredients.

4. • salt

   Serve in glasses with salted rims.

See, now, wasn’t that easy? Didn’t that taste a hell of a lot better than those glow-in-the-dark bar margaritas?

You can thank us later, once you’ve picked yourself up off the floor. (Oh, yeah, be careful with these suckers: they’re pretty strong.)

Chocolate Chip (and Kitchen Sink) Cookies

Makes about 5 dozen

—epanastrophe’s mom

1. Preheat oven to 325°; in a large bowl, combine:

   • 2 cups oatmeal
   • 1 cup chopped nuts
     (pecans are canonical; walnuts are also good)
   • 1 cup dried fruit
     (raisins are canonical; dried cranberries, cherries, or other dried fruit, or a mix, are also good)
   • 4 oz semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
   • 8 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips
   • 8 oz milk chocolate chips

2. Cream into bowl:

   • 2 sticks butter, or 1 stick butter plus 1/2 cup shortening
   • 1 cup white sugar
   • 1/2 cup brown sugar
   • 2 Tbsp vanilla

3. Add:

   • 2 eggs
   • 1/4 cup milk

   Whip 3 minutes.

4. Sift into the batter:

   • 2 1/4 cups flour
   • 1 tsp baking soda
   • 1 tsp salt

   Beat another minute.

5. Drop by tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake 12–15 minutes until set and dry on top but not yet brown around edges. Cool on plates or wire racks; whatever manages to survive can go into zipper bags and be put in the freezer. They’ll probably keep for a couple weeks, but, honestly, they’ll be gone before they go bad, or something’s wrong with your family.

I’m sure most every family has a “Kitchen Sink Cookie” recipe, but this one is ours. This one came to me from my mother; I have no idea where she might have gotten it from. (Of course, I suppose I could ask, but then where would the mystery be? Besides, aren’t recipes like this supposed to just spring forth from the imagination of your mother, without precedent, precursor, or equal…?)

For mother’s day presents for a couple family members a couple years ago, I had copies of our ‘known-good’ file printed and bound by Kinko’s.  This was ok for a one-time special-occasion present, but (especially seeing as the file has grown to 50(!) pages, a 288K pdf) isn’t especially sustainable for ongoing sharing. So when we started talking about sharing recipe files with a friend, I started thinking about finding a different, smaller, more shareable way.

So who are we? We’re a couple in our mid-twenties, currently Pittsburgh residents, trying to keep ourselves fed and healthy on a reasonably budget. We like both meat and vegetables in their proper proportions, and we’re not above some soy protein now and again, either. Kat both enjoys cooking and is pretty damn good at it, which is damned lucky for me, as I neither enjoy it overmuch nor am I particularly skilled at it. I, on the other hand, enjoy baking (and, if I say so myself, am not half bad at it).