which one is leading me to hell or paradise?

Hetty's hokkien noodles, Yasmin's curried broccoli lentil salad, and Soy Curl al pastor (a la Emma y Kenji)

No main blog next week, unfortunately, since by the time you’re reading this I’ll be up in San Francisco watching the Laver Cup, a semi-serious tennis event pitting Team Europe against Team World. It’s been years since professional tennis has graced the Bay Area, so I thought I should buy a nosebleed ticket and watch Carlos Alcaraz and crew annihilate our beautiful American boys. The first professional tennis match I watched live as a kid was a Sampras vs. Agassi final at the old indoor event in San Jose. Agassi is back as Team World’s coach, though this time I presume Brooke Shields won’t be in the stands cheering him on.

Last weekend I made another trip out to Ranch 99 (or 99 Ranch, depending on the signage), a chain of Chinese supermarkets scattered all over Southern and Northern California. There are half a dozen all about a 20-minute drive from Atwater, so I’m trying to hit each at least once and decide, once and for all, which is best. I’d been to the Monterey Park branch (old and small) and one of the Arcadia stores (brand new, with a big assortment of snacks but a terrible produce section), so Saturday morning I headed to San Gabriel and found the best one yet. It was relatively large, had easy parking, and a good mix of fresh and packaged food. I picked up some fresh tofu and soy milk, which are sadly absent in even the most hippified white people stores in LA, a couple types of frozen dumplings, some sweet soy and black bean sauces, and fresh chow mein-style noodles. I also treated myself to a green onion pastry and a turbocharged and sickly sweet (complimentary) Vietnamese iced coffee.

leftovers

The noodles were my main order of business, so I could make Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Hokkien Mee, originally developed for ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)’s lifestyle vertical and recently shared on her Substack. My understanding is that this dish was originally made by Fujian immigrants in Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore, before it traveled to Australia and became a popular takeout staple. Maybe because I went to a Chinese supermarket rather than a Southeast Asian one, I couldn’t find fresh noodles officially labeled “Hokkien.” But judging by online photos, they’re pretty identical to West Coast chow mein / East Coast lo mein wheat noodles. Some sources claim that you’re supposed to use egg noodles, but I stuck with Hetty’s recipe and kept them vegan. I made a few minor changes, like subbing pre-fried tofu puffs (again, sadly never available at white people stores) and yu choy (also called choy sum) for the cabbage. I’m not driving all the way out to San Gabriel and not taking advantage of the Asian specialty produce.

Fresh noodles, guys, you heard it here first! In an era where takeout is usually mediocre and expensive, it’s totally worth driving to your nearest Asian market and just doing it yourself. Once you have a few sauces (light and dark soy, oyster, hoisin, rice and black vinegar) and other pantry items (sesame oil, cornstarch), the rest comes together quickly. My haul of noodles, tofu puffs, shiitake mushrooms, and yu choy cost less than $20 and made four big servings. I don’t even have a wok; I just used my 12-inch cast iron. The only annoying thing is that you might need to stir-fry in batches (and keep things as hot as possible) if you want to get a whiff of that wok hei.

Not even Gwyneth could come up with something like this

Lunch this week was Yasmin Khan’s Broccoli and Lentil Salad with Curried Tahini and Dates from Sabzi (pg 58). Bookmark this one, it’s like what you want Sweetgreen or Goop Kitchen or your fill-in-the-blank healthy salad office lunch place to be, rather than what it actually is (serviceable to good but never REVELATORY). There are several layers to this dish. If you say “roasted broccoli and lentils,” what words come to mind? Sad… boring… suicidal ideation. Now, what if I told you to roast radishes along with the broccoli? Weird… why… crunchy? But what if the lentils were marinated in olive oil and lemon juice? Not exactly mind-blowing, but you’re listening. Chopped up dates for sweetness, and a little parsley? Starting to see the vision. Here’s the genius part: a tahini dressing mixed with maple syrup and regular grocery store curry powder. If you’re my age, you remember that amazing grocery store raw broccoli salad with raisins, and you also remember that amazing grocery store curried chicken salad with raisins. This is like that, but a million times better and healthier. Wrap it in a carb-savvy tortilla or eat it plain with a fork (if you’re gonna be all WFPB). I might make it again next week.

no trompo (or pork) required

There are a few dishes that make me miss my meat-eating days. One is the classic Halal lamb/chicken (white sauce hot sauce) New York street food plate. Another is the Mexican-American shredded beef crunchy taco topped with shredded cheddar cheese and barely spicy salsa. A third, and perhaps the most immediately painful, living in Los Angeles, is the al pastor street taco freshly shaved off the trompo, dotted with charred pineapple, salsa verde, and raw white onion. Literally DROOL.

Enter my old friend and yours, Butler Soy Curls (hold for applause). I used Emma Lapperuque’s method of rehydrating the suckers (3 cups veggie broth spiked with 3 tablespoons of nooch), before coating them in J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s marinade for about 3 hours. I roasted pineapple chunks (one of the plastic tubs from Von’s) for 30 minutes on 400 and then pan-fried the pastor and pineapple in my cast iron until it started to char (about 12 minutes). There you have it, Soy Curl Tacos Al Pastor.

I microwaved some blah tortillas (Mission) and topped them with good salsa verde (Mejorado). And, because I already had some cilantro and sour cream lying around, I made a little Love & Lemons cilantro lime dressing, though it sort of just got in the way. The star is that marinade combining achiote powder, dried guajillos, anchos, and jarred chipotles, which pushes it hotter than your average LA taco stand. Three of these guys and a pineapple spice tepache, God is good.

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Ok, after dropping off Overcompensating after two episodes, I finished the rest of the season over on Prime. It’s gooier and more sentimental than your The Other Two or Difficult People or whatever gay sitcom with “unlikable” characters you want to compare it to, but I could feel the joke writing getting sharper and more specific as the season went on. I’m optimistic for Season 2.

Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides is streaming on Criterion. It explores the sudden technological and social changes in 21st-century China, told through the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers. Even if you’re not naturally inclined towards Chinese art film docufiction hybrids (no judgment), I encourage everyone to watch it to witness one of the world’s great screen actresses. It’s hard to know who to compare Zhao Tao to. She has the statuesque gravitas of Cate Blanchett, but she’s as effortlessly cool as Chloë Sevigny. Her face expresses emotion as easily and precisely as Julianne Moore’s. Caught by the Tides was filmed over the course of over twenty years, so we get to watch her age without the help of CGI or makeup. Or dialogue. I’m embarrassed to admit I was so transfixed by Zhao’s performance that I never noticed she didn’t say a word.

I did another AMC double feature on Sunday, watching two movies that are hard sells unless you already have a predilection for their specific charms. First, Downton Abbey: The Grande Finale. My hot take is that Downton Abbey works better as a series of feature films than it did as episodic television. Julian Fellowes has to cram a season of soap opera machinations into two short hours, so he keeps it moving in a way he sometimes struggled to do over on PBS. I already forgot the plot (something about Mary taking over as mistress of the mansion and Paul Giamatti being swindled by the slimy/hot Alessandro Nivola.) Noel Coward makes an appearance too.

Then I watched The History of Sound, a (mostly) chaste romance between Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor set in the early 20th-century anthropological folk music recording scene. Tepid reviews out of Cannes thwarted any possible Oscar campaign, so Mubi dumped it in September without a lot of fanfare. It’s a perfectly pleasant experience, but the prettiness of the composition (not to mention the lead actors) works against its intended depth of feeling.

The MTV Video Music Awards were as dire as expected, but they put into sharp relief how good Doja Cat is at being a pop star. Other girls can dance (Tate) or have charm to spare (Sabrina), but nobody in the post-Gaga generation is a true quadRuple threat (charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent) quite like Ms. Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini from Agoura Hills. Doja performed her new single, a late-80s Latin freestyle / New Jack Swing mashup called Jealous Type. It debuted at #28 on the Billboard Hot 100 a couple of weeks ago before plummeting out of the top 50. There’s no accounting for taste.