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Seared zucchini, chorizo, and roasted chile Poblano rajas in a tomato and coconut cream sauce. Spices and whatnot included white onion, garlic, jalapenos, cumin seed, bay leaf, and Mexican oregano.

Nah fair enough. I find wholewheat pasta unpleasantly gritty and prefer the fragrant elements of good steamed white rice over anything that isn't a risotto.

\Of course that's an excellent suggestion and no doubt what my doctor would say. But, simply put, I just don't want to. Go figure. As a chemo patient I'm honor bound to be relatively stupid. Orneriness is one of the few toolsI have left and I'm stickin' to it.

@KennethT what you are using is a round bottomed ' pan ' you can call it a wok , or a saucier . each has very different connotations . but , once you go Round , all the rest are Flat.

@bokreta Missing link?

Can you maybe switch the white rice for wild or brown rice, and pasta to wholewheat?

For the past few years, I've been watching a lot of Indonesian/Malaysian YouTube videos of people making various dishes. Most of these dishes are some form of braise, starting with frying a spice paste in oil over relatively low heat, then adding a liquid to the braise. Every single video has them cooking in some kind of wok - and like you say, most of those woks are lined with a non-stick material. For that type of cooking, I don't think the non-stick is much of an issue because it doesn't use high heat that can damage the coating. I used to do my braising in a standard 8qt sauce pan (looks like a mini stock pot), but lately, I've moved to a small, cheap stainless steel wok I got off Amazon and found that it works much better. Even making a small quantity, I don't need a lot of liquid to cover, and it's easier to stir things around, especially when there's large chunks in there. And it's vastly superior to the standard sauce pan when you need to reduce the liquid.

I'm a little surprised that this YouTube channel hasn't been mentioned yet (that I could find). This gentleman, Max Miller, researches historical recipes, does his best to learn needed languages to translate them, and recreates them in his home kitchen as best as he can. He's delightful, and includes a huge amount of historical context. Not a shill, but a fan.

If you have not tried a high quality saucier , you're really missing something special.

I'm a big fan of the saucier and straight sided saute pans!

Sorry, I just saw the Viet on the bag!

Ahhh - good question. Yes, I order the Japanese rices from the Rice Factory here in NY. The Thai Jasmine rice I bought at a store down the block (at a reasonable $6.25 for 5 lbs.). The Japanese freshly milled rices are a bit more expensive.

Coconut crusted grouper with a spicy mango sauce, with coconut rice and roasted broccolini.

Yum. Do I see a garnish of salmon roe? Potatoes, jammy eggs, smoked trout, what's not to like?

Question about the Rice Factory. It appears they have two locations, one in NY and the other in LA I assume you order from the NY location, but the jasmine rice you ordered says it comes from CA. Any idea how their operation works? Are both locations distribution houses for all products?

Yes, sorry I didn't mention that. I correctly seasoned it, and tried multiple times over the years. I have always seemed to have trouble with carbon steel. Even the vollrath fry pans I had which I gave away several years ago after giving up. They would be okay as long as I used them almost daily.. if I didn't use them for a couple weeks, they would begin to rust or get very sticky. Again, no issues with cast iron. FWIW, I can make eggs scrambled and fried eggs on my stainless pans without sticking, too, so I like to think I have achieved some level of home-cook-wizardy - still working on french omelettes, maybe some day I'll get that down. Hopefully this post will not go down the "here's how you season a pan" or "how to keep from rusting" or "too much oil" etc.. I'm more interested in deciding what pan, if any, to get next, and shared the background to demonstrate the basis of hesitation for going down a path I've tried before. Fun side note, about 15 years ago, a family member and I welded/built a solid-steel outdoor wok station/rolling cabinet out of metal and wood to hold an outdoor high-BTU wok burner. That was fun, many grease fires were had as we learned to control the flame. Now that's out of my system, I've repurposed the rolling cabinet for garden storage and my pizza oven

did you season the carbon steel pans? My two are nearly as good as nonstick with seasoning.

I'm having trouble deciding whether I want/need a fry pan with high sides, like a wok or similar, or maybe a larger saucier, or both. Currently I have 12" and 8" SS shallow saute pans, a 10" lodge CI, a 12" round CI griddle, a shallow/wide 8qt SS dutch oven, and a 2qt saucier. 20yr GE gas range, with possible upgrade to induction in a few years if the range stops working (probably won't, it's been easy to make repairs so far). Past 18 months my diet has transitioned to super quick, easy meals with heavy plant and fish/seafood. I rarely sear anything anymore. Some soups when I have left overs. My saute pans and the CI lodge have worked okay for sautes, but they tend to be messy with contents falling over the edges, annoying. The DO is shallow enough to reach my utensils in to stir things around, but it has been really awkward to toss the pan, maybe the shape being so wide or it being bottom heavy. I prefer to keep my tools minimal and multi-purpose. The 2qt saucier is too small to make myself 1-2 portion soups in the winter, and the DO is so wide such that solids stick out of the liquid. So.. it seems a 3qt or 4qt saucier would be the right choice? I have looked into woks, too. Costco at the moment has an induction hob + cheapo carbon steel wok for $100; Sur La Table has a typical carbon steel wok for $35 on sale now; River Light has a nice nitride-gassed carbon steel wok for about $80-90. There are other wok options I found but I dunno. The local "asian stores" near me only stock non-stick coated woks (wtf?!) which I can't use due to my pets, and I've found the super premium snooty fancy fancy oxenforge stuff but yeah.. no. I've tried woks twice over the last 15 years, and totally disappointed each time: once was a "pow" shape carbon steel that would either rust or get super sticky if I didn't use it enough, and second was some cast iron thing that I couldn't get any seasoning on it. That's why the nitride gased CS wok looks interesting. But then the Costco induction hob would be a new toy, much fun, and I waffle to saving money on the SLT, but both that and the costco are standard carbon steel which I've had no luck with in the past. Any thoughts? Blah.

I will try to make my own. Thinking of chestnut with pistachio nut filling. Hoping chestnuts will be available soon. Bought salted egg yolks already. dcarch

These days, due to chemo, my tastes are limited. Japanese food is appealing, but restaurant dining is problematic. Many vegetables don't taste right, but ohitashi, the japanese spinach appetizer is perfect, no idea why, except it's that sesame dressing. The only protein that seems to taste right is shrimp. Also tempura veg with dip taste pretty good. I figure I'm lucky I can eat at all. I eat a lot of white rice. The challenge is getting fiber and vegetables. The other thing that always seems to work is fresh tomatoes on pasta, with burrata. I simply take the best heirlooms I can find (right now purple cherokees and yellow varieties) and chop them up and put them in a bowl. If they aren't ripe and juicy don't even bother. Salt with your favorite salt generously, stir, and let sit for an hour or as long as you can wait, so there's plenty of juice in the mix. Cook pasta such as linguini fine or whatever. Meanwhile throw a few knobs of butter into the tomatoes and just warm the bowl in the microwave. No cooking. Or you can forget about warming and assume that when you dump it over the pasta it will be hot enough. Have the burrata ready to go, halved or not, depending on size and appetite. I like to sauce the pasta individually from the tomato bowl. Once sauced .simply add your portion of burrata to the dish. Yes, it's incredibly plain, but that's what I like; just pasta, tomato and butter and salt. My husband adds shredded basil to his, along with grated hard cheese. The burrata melts a little, but not totally, which is just perfect. I like the contrast of the cold burrata. In the end you are left with a few spoonfuls of creamy tomato soup.

Yesterday's bake and Moe's breakfast. Mug of homemade potato leek soup and toasted sourdough baguette.

Vietnamese jasmine rice?!? I need to resupply my jasmine rice - last time, I bought a 25 pound bag from Weee (new crop from Thailand). It was basically the same price as I can get in Chinatown, but it gets delivered so I don't have to schlep the 25# sack.

That sucks. In the future, another option may be to get them from Lady Wong, the NYC Nyonya/Malaysian bakery - you can get their moon cakes (and other desserts but I don't think their full catalog) on GoldBelly.

@Smithy I had to laugh at your bacon cooking in advance. I did the very same a few days ago. I had a bag of the pre-cooked stuff in the fridge with the intention of making a sandwich (still have great tomatoes to use) and wound up eating most of it for breakfast with a couple of pieces of cheese yesterday. LOL. I'll have to cook more bacon for a sandwich. Last night I pulled out my tenderloin & tots leftovers. I'd eaten about 1/4 of the sandwich Thursday night. I took meat off the 1/4 piece, heated it and a few tots in the toaster oven and put the meat on a fresh bun. Was great. And now, I've got enough for 2 more meals!!! Yikes. I'll get tired of it before I ever finish it.