Friday Five for January 26, 2024

[amw]

From thefridayfive, you know i can't resist a food meme.

1. Do you cook regularly or does someone else cook for you?I cook every day. The number one best thing about not traveling is cooking your own food. It's sad to me when i meet people who aren't travelers who eat out or order in all the time, it seems like they're neglecting a key benefit of having a

Comments

[poliphilo]

I'd eat at your diner.

I use peanuts in a stir fry too. It's just not the same without them.

[dadi]

Om nom nom. Now I am very hungry. And I am right with you on not understanding how people order food or eat out every day when there is a kitchen available. Good, helthy, tasty food takes so few time to prepare and one doesn't need that much skill for it!

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[siglinde99]

That recipe looks tasty but a lot of ingredients I don’t normally have on hand. I didn’t even know sweet soy sauce was a thing. Buy the phone. You are always saying you have more money than you need so this would be a good way to get rid of some of it.

[amw]

You can make a decent approximation of sweet soy by using regular soy sauce (dark version if you have access to both light and dark) and adding brown sugar. Alternatively you could use some oyster sauce, which usually is quite sweet. You can also use plain old Italian basil.

I actually tried it when i lived in Kamloops, using basil from my landlord's plant, typical American chilis (habaneros is better than jalapeños) and sugar mixed with soy sauce. It's not exactly the same flavor, but it's still quite a pleasant meal.

Thank you for the push on the phone. I think i'll do that next week. I have a tendency to never buy myself any luxuries even though i can afford them, because i always feel like an asshole spending money on things that i don't really need. But maybe it is okay to spoil yourself sometimes...

[siglinde99]

Thanks. I usually have oyster sauce on hand, but I can definitely ad some brown sugar to my dark soy.

[geminiwench]

We usually call those quick-fry diners "greasy spoon diners"... but they're not along the outroads, you have to be inside the cities for them anymore. Most who were the highway between-town type diner stops went out of business in the 90s or were bought by chains.

My favorite fast food is a mom-n-pop "Mongolian BBQ".... self-serve fresh veggies/noodles/protein... stack it in a bowl.... a whole bunch of sauces to choose from and you ladle your own cocktail of sauce in and then it all gets cooked on the the flattop fryer from two minutes in front of you.
I am consistently surprised that this sort of restaurant isn't EVERYWHERE!

[amw]

Funny story, "Mongolian" BBQ is actually Taiwanese! Even funnier story, even though wiki tells you it's Taiwanese, i have never seen a Mongolian BBQ place in Taiwan, meanwhile there's a bunch in America. What's with that? It seems a more popular thing here is izakaya type stuff where you still pick what you want and watch the chef cook it, but the dishes are pre-set and much more expensive.

It didn't really occur to me that the greasy spoons are better downtown than out in the country, but it makes sense. Especially with interstate offramps, truck stops etc, that real estate is all jammed full of fast food places and casual dining chains nowadays.

[geminiwench]

I'm not surprised by any American-style misnomer that confuses country of origin.
All you gotta do is talk about Taiwanese food and I start missing my friend's quick-grill teriyaki house! She was a singer from Taiwan who represented Taiwan (not China) at our World's Fair 50 years ago and ended up immigrating here and opened up a teriyaki restaurant that was absolutely killer. Tiny menu but outstanding food quality.

Greasy spoons used to be a highway thing in the 1950s... and dotted rural stretches of road, like lonely emergency gas stations, but as people moved from using highways for leisure-travel into commuting daily travel people stopped having time for the outskirts diners which died but the inner-city ones survived.

Every town of over 5,000 people has a beloved greasy spoon within a 30 minute drive, but they are also meat&cheesy places where absolutely everything can be ordered with gravy on top.