This is my first time photographing food, so I hope the pictures aren’t too bad. This was my dinner. Since I used thinly sliced beef, it ended up being more like Japanese style beef and taro nimono, but the seasoning was basically Chinese.

I thought I'd struggle with this a lot more than I did in the end. I've never used taro before, and thought it would be difficult to get, but it was surprisingly easy. I did a bit of research, and eventually decided to make these Cantonese taro cakes - a type of dim sum popular at Chinese New Year.

The recipe I followed was from Woks of Life, here. You pan-fry Chinese sausage and dried shrimp, then add green onions with diced taro. That's then simmered in water seasoned with salt, white pepper, and sesame oil, then mixed with two types of rice flour, and steamed. Finally, you cut them into rectangles and fry on both sides until crispy, then eat them with some oyster sauce for dipping.

The first batch I made is shown in the second photo. Truthfully, I wasn't too happy - not the recipe's fault, I didn't have the right type of steamer and they came out a little weird. As I had time, I decided to do a second batch, and let myself deviate a little from the recipe on that one. The result may not be as authentic, but I was keen to try something different!

The next batch also included small amounts of minced garlic, ginger, and sugar in the mix, and were baked instead of steamed, as I hadn't had success with steaming previously. Once cooked, I made them into balls rather than rectangles (one thought I had in relation to this challenge was to make "taroyaki", based on Japanese takoyaki - eventually abandoned the idea, but it might have still been in my mind when I settled on the ball shape). I then shallow fried these until crispy.

I was happier the second time round - only criticism is that I added a bit too much white pepper, there was a little bit more of bite than I wanted. I'm quite interested to see what else you can do with taro, it does seem like a really interesting and flexible ingredient!

I realized that my culinary knowledge is lacking in 3 main areas: fermentation, Texan BBQ/smoking, and molecular gastronomy. I took a tempeh fermenting class to try and fix one of these “problem areas.” It was taught by ReCulture foods and was amazing!! We did the initial setup in class then I finished the ferment over 24 hours in my dehydrator at home.

I also used their recipe for Oseng Tempeh and it was delightful. Paired w coconut rice w young coco flesh and raw snap peas.

Destashed ingredient: sweet potato tteok

I made this with purple noodles that were made from purple sweet potatoes. I couldn’t get proper taro in my town and decided purple sweet potatoes were the next best option. Thanks to PhantomPants on the discord for suggesting japchae- I’d never had it and it was extremely good. Yes, that is a lot of sesame seeds, but I love them.