Why Hello There, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where we bake, broil, sous vide and stew, to make cooking clearer to you. I’m Jon O’Guin, and…I don’t know what I’m doing.

You would think, given the relatively insular nature of my work that the imposition of quasi-quarantine would do little to affect my procedures. But you’d be wrong, in an frustrating way. Technically, yes, I can continue cooking and writing relatively unchanged from my standard fare, but I am no less susceptible to the assorted and insidious parts of the process: the “loss of time” as the days blend together, the sense that the fabric of my life has been suddenly pulled out from under me, creating confusion, and, you know, more pragmatic issues like “My family is facing their own issues that bleed over (my mother IS an essential worker, while my brother is not, but the infrastructure to allow him to work from home was delayed)” and stuff like “rather than drive home and pick Jon up to go grocery shopping, we’re going to do it on the way home.”

Because of this, the structure of my plan for the next few weeks of the blog kind of fell apart.  So I’m not going to lie: this post should be UP by now, and I only started writing it a couple minutes ago (3:38), because I was paralyzed. I didn’t know what to write about. I had been removed from the process, and left with nothing TO process. So I had nothing.  (This is mild hyperbole: a better phrasing would be “I had nothing new to add I had not already assigned to other projects”.)

So please bear with us as we try something new. A Magazine Review!  Well, semi-new. We’ll cover that.  

Serving up the Stories

It should come as no surprise that my family buys a lot of cooking magazines. I personally am subscribed to Bon Appetit, and pick up Saveur now and again, because…well, I mean, those FEEL like things I read, don’t they? More niche, high-minded kind of cooking projects? The house is also subscribed to Food Network magazine, and Cook’s Country, and my mother has a subscription to Pioneer Woman. I am constantly receiving poring over magazines for ideas, information, and connections to dishes, companies, trends, and so on.

How would I have known about Nduja without these resources?
Fun fact: SORTEDFood from last week are pretty big fans of Nduja.

Now, this is technically an idea I pursued once before, as a Patreon video, and then never followed up on, partly because I wanted to revisit and edit the idea (I did 4 magazines, which took like, an hour of filming to review,) and no one had been clamoring for me to return to the well. So my Patrons will recognize a lot of the points and ideas I touch on here There’s also going to be a lot of links, since a lot of my thoughts about dishes will, naturally, connect with previous attempts of similar dishes and stuff. Hey, more stuff for you to read, right? So let’s see if I can cover 2 Magazines in about 800 words apiece! 

Cook’s County

It’s a beautiful meringue, but I’m just not a huge banana cream guy.

Cook’s Country is, in my opinion, one of the better formatted cooking magazines on the shelves today. They’re relatively short (this month is about 34 pages if you count the back cover, which I will…cover…in a second.) and have very clean distinctions between one article/recipe and the next. There’s a lot of white space, bright pictures and text columns. They’re made to be USED in a way that some other cookbooks aren’t: they possess a two-page insert of recipe cards in the middle, there are very few articles that AREN’T about a product, process, or recipe itself, hell, the back cover is actually a visual table of contents for most of the dishes inside.

Behold the Leviathan.

I made that picture bigger than most on the site, because I really wanted to cover various topics quickly, and having a nice visual like that will help organize and streamline my thoughts. Will it be big enough to read, and small enough to not be eye gouging? Probably not. But I won’t know until I upload it. As such, I’ll try and keep my notes on the various recipes in a “as you read the rows” order.

Fried Green Tomato BLT – You know, I’ve never had Fried Green Tomatoes to my knowledge. This looks like a nice way to introduce someone to them.

Chicken arrabiata – It has been YEARS since I made an arrabiata sauce, and it’s not one I’ve tried in many restaurants. Maybe I should explore it.

Strawberry Rhubarb – Interesting, but Nate hates Rhubarb.

Slow-cooker Pork Ramen – This is certainly the time for slow-cooker dishes. And my family loves ramen. Bring up as an option soon.

Hot Rice – Basically an Ohio version of Jollof Rice, uses much less spicy peppers, and doesn’t process the vegetables as much.

Several White-Bean Recipes – I do have a lot of canned products in the cupboard. We should consider something like that. A “Pantry Cleaner” recipe.

Jamaican Beef Patties – Their crust looks so much better than mine! How much butter do they use? 1 cup of butter, 2/3rds cup sour cream to 3 cups flour. I used 2 cups butter to 4 cups flour…I think I’ve solved the original recipes issue: I think the 4 cups flour, 7 cups butter/shortening are backwards. It’s supposed to be 7 cups flour, 4 cups butter. That would be pretty close to the same ratio. Glad to see that mystery solved.

It looks so NICE.

Sandwich Bread – That’s another good thing for people to be making at home these days. Invest some time, stay inside…Ooh, maybe I’ll remake my Tuna Salad recipe. That’s a pantry cleaner, and if we make our own bread, that’s a solid window of time.

Chicken Croquettes – Nate and I love to quote the croquette scene in Samurai Gourmet. (“Two, please!” I ordered too many. I can’t eat TWO whole croquettes.) And I’ve referenced them a couple times on the site. Maybe this would be fun. Do like, a roast chicken recipe, and then use the extra for croquettes the next week?

Green-Chile Chicken Enchiladas – A bougie version of a recipe my family already makes…Though I haven’t written about it, so maybe we should.

Gravlax – Oooh, Another time sink. But it’s like, in the precise overlap of family issues: it’s fish, so I don’t love it. It’s home curing, so it makes mom nervous. And it’s something you do, so Nate hates it.

This last row of recipes isn’t bad, but it doesn’t really speak to me. Other than like, “salads made of other leafy vegetables than lettuce are interesting” and “chili mac that leans harder into Chili than Mac” are interesting concepts.

There’s a couple articles not featured on the back, mostly reviews of products, such as a review of 12 inch non-stick skillets, deep fryers, tortillas, and very dark (90%) chocolate (I hadn’t heard of the winner, but the runner-ups were Ghiradelli and Lindt, which is unsurprising.) They also have a “questions” section in the front, where they spend a page and a half to two pages answering reader questions like “what’s the difference between normal soy sauce and “dark” soy sauce?” (Dark soy sauce is sweeter and thicker) “what are chicken oysters?” (A little nugget of meat on chicken backs, cooks love to eat them while carving the chicken) etc.

It’s a good magazine, overall. Lot of nice suggestions. And Cook’s Country covers 2 months per issue, so you’ve got time to look for it if you’re interested.

Bon Appetit

“Sticky Date Buns” sounds like a great end to an evening.

I’m in an interesting place with Bon Appetit at the moment, since I’m becoming such a follower of their Youtube channel I get a lot of sneak peeks into what they’re working on for the magazine itself, sometimes quite a ways ahead. Last month’s issue, for instance, included the recipe for Spicy Chicken Katsu sandwiches, a recipe that I aired online April of last year. (and one I am very interested in, being essentially  a mid-point between Nashville Hot Chicken sandwiches, and a standard Chicken Katsu, both foods I have history with. (Alright, I don’t have history with Nashville Hot Chicken, but I’m INTERESTED in them.)

Bon Appetit doesn’t have the same utility-focused layout or tightness that Cook’s Country has. This month’s issue is 98 pages, and while part of that is that it has 28 recipes to CC’s 25, there’s other considerations and nuances. For one, Cook’s Country doesn’t sell advertising, which takes up just over a quarter of Bon Appetit, at around 27 pages, and for another, Cook’s country is much briefer when it writes about non-food or product based topics: When covering a New York bakery that was the source of their Jamaican Beef Patty recipe, they spend half a page on it. Bon Appetit spends 6 pages discussing the food scene and points of interested in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, one of 4 segments about locations and food, from the restaurants worth  checking out in South Philly, the details on the menu and décor of a popular DC Bar,  to a collection of highlighted porridge/congee dishes from around the country.

Hey, that middle one is near me!

Interestingly, there’s something of a sharp divide between the “main event” cooking segments, and the before and after sections: while I mentioned about a quarter of the pages are advertisements, there are NONE between page 46 and page 89. The CORE of the magazine is focused entirely on the topic at hand. (And yes, mathematically, this does mean that the first 40% of the magazine IS about 50% ads. I didn’t personally notice until I had to count for this.)

And you can kind of see the different tones blending over into my discussions of the two: by this point in the Cook’s Country section, I was bullet-pointing quickly sketched out thoughts about recipes. With Bon Appetit, I’m still riffing a little. And that’s partly because that’s what I look for more in Bon Appetit: the riffing.

This month, for instance, they have Tahini Billionaire Bars.

I’ve just realized I want to make “Tiger Millionaire Shortbread”. And not for the reasons you might think, I haven’t seen Tiger King yet.

If you don’t know, Millionaire’s Shortbread is a recipe for bars with shortbread, caramel/butterscotch, and a layer of chocolate on top. Bon Appetit adds sesame seeds in the shortbread, tahini in the butterscotch, and a sprinle of sesame on top to make these Billionaire Bars. It’s a riff on the same idea. Or when they make a Carrot Cake with similar ingredients to carrot halwa (an sort of creamy Indian carrot “pudding” (more of a paste) mixed with cashews, pistachios, and almonds)

I feel like, somehow, the nuts were more visible when I took this picture.
I have somehow been betrayed.

There’s also Sour Cream and Onion Biscuits, Buckwheat Chocolate cookies, Sticky Buns where the cinnamon paste is made with dates instead of a ton of brown sugar. A bunch of baked riffs on classic recipes. This is a section where I may not directly use the recipes (though I love sour cream and onion chips, so the biscuits might be nice), but it helps ‘stretch’ my mind a little, pushing at the boundaries of what I think is acceptable in cooking and ingredients. (Sour Cream and Onion might sound like a weird flavor combo for biscuits, but it’s not that much different than, say, Cheddar-Garlic biscuits from Red Lobster)

There’s a section on Aliums (members of the onion, garlic, and leek family, such as the aforementioned three, ramps, green onions, etc) That has a visually stunning recipe for Charred Leeks in Honey and Vinegar.

I mean, that just LOOKS pretty.

A Section on pasta focused on recipes from Evan Funke, a pasta chef who has just released a new cookbook. Only a couple recipes leap out at me (Tagliatelle with Prosciutto and Peas: sounds fine. Spaghetti al Limone with Asparagus sounds like it might be good, and I believe is fairly seasonal, as I believe this is when Asparagus starts sprouting. Rigatoni with Fennel and Anchovy…sounds BOLD, but maybe not my style.)

Like I said earlier, with Bon Appetit, it’s often not the core recipes that catch my eye, it’s stuff like “here’s how to make a bacon-fat vinaigrette for a salad” or a plug for a re-usable cleaning bottle early on. It’s a plug for John’s Roast Pork in South Philly, a restaurant I’ve heard about on several shows and in other magazines that might motivate me to look up how to MAKE a Roast pork sandwich (the answer is: It takes several hours, and is likely to start a fight if you pick one side) and so on. You might think it’s a little foolish to be buying a cooking magazine not for the recipes, but there’s some important nuances: firstly, I do use a fair bit of the recipes. Just none this month really blew me away. And second, there are plenty of Korean barbecue places that do better banchan than their meats. And if you don’t know what I just said, that’s kind of the point, now isn’t it?

(Since I’m not a total dick: banchan is the term for the various side dishes served with Korean meals. Kimchi is the most famous example, but things like marinated vegetables, candied or braised veggies, fried small fish, fried bread/pancakes, pastes or jellies can all be featured. To call back to an earlier point: Red Lobster’s seafood may not be amazing, but people go for the biscuits. See also Olive Garden Breadsticks.)

And that’s our post for the day. Two magazines for the month, my thoughts on them, and what interested me. If you need something to read, pick them up, or click any of the (it feels like) dozen links in the post, and maybe we’ll see something inspired by these soon. 

MONDAY: JON HASN’T COOKED IN LIKE, 2 WEEKS. AND STILL DOESN’T KNOW WHERE HIS POLENTA IS. WHO KNOWS WHAT’S COMING.

THURSDAY: THE PANIC CONTINUES.