Best Time Spent in the Kitchen

There was a lot of brunching on Easter but no Easter Dinner plans, but I'd been spending more than a week assembling certain ingredients and Easter Night the time seemed right to finally put them all together.

Two bags of dried peppers and a tablespoon of Sichuan peppercorns. . .


Plenty of Chinese fermented bean and chili paste and Korean chili powder . . .


A pound of ground pork (cooked, don't worry) . . .

A bunch of chopped up Chinese broccoli . . .

Grilled rice cake sticks (about to be chopped up) . . .

Stirred all together with some super-soft tofu . . .

And voila! Momofuku's Spicy Sausage and Rice Cakes dish. The flavor was pitch perfect (and mad spicy), closing my eyes I could have sworn I was down on 13th street. And with plenty of leftovers, I'm the envy of the lunch room (but I wouldn't trade my rice cakes for 100 juice boxes and pudding snacks).

Other Momofuku cookings of the last few weeks:

Spent an hour roasting these onions . . .

Down into this . . .

Which I've used in a few dishes, including the Noodle Bar rice cakes in Red Dragon Sauce . . .

Pickled some mustard seeds to be used down the line in a meal I'm really looking forward to

Pickled a mess of shiitakes in soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, and ginger . . . these are delicious (and I've got a few months worth of them), I hope you've had them on the pickle plate before.

And finally, last Sunday I got up at 5:30 to roast a pork shoulder (again) because I found one at what seemed like an unbeatable price. Many, many lunches have sprung from this six hour effort. No pictures of the end results because I was too excited to start eating, I guess.