Black-eyed peas aren't my favorite (although I did have some to cover my bases), so I've decided to embrace the fabulous tradition in some Asian countries of eating noodles for good luck in the new year. Since I would be more than willing to eat some variety of noodles every day of my life, this newly adopted tradition isn't going to be much of a stretch. After a long weekend of rich festive party food (cheese...lots and lots of cheese), we kicked off 2012 on New Year's Day at Slurping Turtle in Chicago.
http://slurpingturtle.com I had the classic Shoyu Ramen with soy broth and braised pork shoulder, and liked it so much I had to buy the book "Takashi's Noodles" written by the chef/owner, Takashi Yagihashi, who was there that night and so graciously welcomed us and signed the book for me. If the book can help me come close to recreating ramen as good as this one, I very well may be having noodles every day for a while. Although, we also had the duck fat fried chicken...maybe that would be the perfect new good luck tradition?
OK, big deadline at work...over. Week of rebounding from the big work deadline...over. No more excuses for take-out or lazy cooking. I thought a vegan weekend might be in order, to reset any bad habits I may have adopted over the holidays and a busy work time. In that spirit, I went with black bean, roasted butternut squash and kale enchiladas with a Rick Bayless mole sauce. OK, so there's some cotija cheese on it, so maybe it's not quite vegan. Oh yeah, and the eggs I had this morning weren't vegan, I s'pose. But other than that, total vegan all weekend. Well, except for the bone-in skin-on split chicken breasts I plan to cook tomorrow night. I guess that's not vegan either. So mostly a vegan weekend. But not. Anyway, at least I'm back to cooking.
