Letter of Rec: Anythingdon

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This is another installment of Letter of Rec, where I tell you about something nice you can do. Several nice things, in fact.

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There used to be a restaurant in DC called Donburi. Well, there still is a restaurant in DC called Donburi, but a different one. Well, it’s the same restaurant, but a different location. I haven’t been to their location on 19th Street, which is probably seven or eight years old at this point, because I am still mourning the loss of the original.

My friends and I used to frequent the Adams Morgan location of Donburi, of the eponymous donburi, which is a Japanese bowl-based dish of rice, meat, and vegetables all simmered together. There are countless variations under the broad penumbra of donburi, depending on your choice of ingredients, which make delightful portmanteaus of their name + donburi, such as katsudon, gyūdon, unadon, etc. And who doesn’t love a delightful portmanteau?

Anyways, my friends and I were quite young, and we’d put on fabulous outfits and impractical shoes and walk over the Duke Ellington Bridge (too young to know about the 96 bus) in the freezing cold so we could feel like we were on Sex and the City as college freshmen. We would file into the narrow restaurant, snagging three or four barstools and winking at the chefs, feigning surprise when a gratis appetizer or two would be placed down in front of us. I always got the salmon sashimi and pickles—I was learning that takuan, the delightful yellow pickled radish that I had been enjoying in tiny pieces in vegetarian sushi also came in whole slices. I would lean forward and ask nicely for a few more please, two never felt like enough.

Then I ordered unadon, the original donburi made with eel (unagi + donburi), because I was so entranced watching them blowtorch the eel filets to a perfect mahogany burnish. The eel was delicious, but I didn’t like the adornments with which it came. I wanted the pickles!

Those halcyon days of youth, before I got rid of my American Apparel jelly heels and certainly before I learned that you don’t really need to flirt with a 23-year old CDP.

Anyways, several years later I found myself thinking about those dinners while I sat at my desk, hungry for lunch. I already made big jars of pickled daikon radish and carrots in the Vietnamese style, couldn’t I make takuan? I looked it up. Hm. Okay, I could make takuan, but it would take several months. Could I buy it?

It was easy to find a vacuum-sealed bag of those gorgeous, neon yellow radishes in the refrigerated section of my local Asian grocery store. I perused the aisles for sushi rice and some pickled ginger when I came across a big bottle of unagi no tare, that delicious sweet and salty eel sauce. Cha ching!

Despite my level of down to clown-ness, I didn’t really want to buy and prepare eel at home. I lost a bit of steam and these ingredients sat in my fridge for a while.

Enter: anythingdon.

One day, I picked up a salmon steak from the fishmonger, brushed it with the unagi sauce, and broiled the absolute hell out of it. I made a single serving of sushi rice, tossed a cucumber with some rice vinegar and salt, and broke out the takuan. It was all the things I wanted, a big bowl of rice, that ultra-caramelized glaze on the fish, and more pickles than I could ever ask for in a civilized restaurant.

And then I just repeated the process with anything. Sometimes another gorgeous filet from my friend the fishmonger, sometimes a tin of something. Or a baked sweet potato, cut open and fluffed a bit before drizzling with that sweet sweet sauce and thrown under the broiler. Firm tofu was just okay, firm tofu that I had first simmered in dashi for 10 minutes was excellent. The best is sardinedon, arranging whole tinned sardines in a little raft and broiling till you achieve a perfect Pangea of fish and sauce that slides right off your baking sheet and onto the rice.

If you have any interest in making yourself personal rice bowls, may I beseech you to buy a donabe? Just a little one, please? It unlocks the perfect 20-minute meal. Turn on your broiler. Wash a bit of rice in your gorgeous little clay pot and set it on the stove. Put whatever you are unagi-ing on a little baking sheet and brush with sauce and get it in to broil. Slice and pickle your cucumber, take out your radish and maybe some pickled ginger. Store bought is fine! Lately, I’ve been adding a big heap of frozen peas into my rice for the last five or six minutes of cooking for some added #protein. By the time your rice is done, your anything will be ready to become anythingdon. The virtue of cooking in a clay pot is that you can also eat out of the clay pot. Arrange your toppings and add a spoonful of soy, or some hot sauce, even some kewpie.

The way I was taught to cook was with the baseline assumption that I could cook anything. Not in a hubristic way, but in that honing my cooking skills and instincts, I would never need to shy away from my desires. If I wanted something, I could make it.

Anythingdon is not an exercise in mastering. I still have yet to make takuan. Hell, I could surely make unagi no tare instead of buying it for three dollars every other month. No, it’s an exercise in having enough skill, enough instinct, and a stocked fridge in service of feeding myself quickly, easily, and without much thought.

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Reading

Like everyone else, I just finished Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton. I have so many thoughts on this book and I don’t know where to put them all. For now, I’ll just say that it’s another tick in my “everyone just wants to live in Seinfeld” column.

Each PLANTCRAFT broadcast is excellent, but Amirio’s conversation with MaKshya Tolbert on Shade is so enthralling.

Another interview, I found Devin’s conversation with Ida Rose Florez in The Good Enough Weekly about her book The End of Education as We Know It: Regenerative Learning for Complex Times so brilliant and ended up pre-ordering the book.

I’m just getting into Chinese and Any Other Asian by Anna Sulan Masing after it came through my mailbox yesterday. It’s been a huge week for this book in my house, more on that below.

Watching

I’m quite surprised by how much I’m enjoying The Pitt. I won’t spoil, but there’s a very frank portrayal of abortion care for minors playing out, and so far I’m not shaking my fist at my TV.

The death of David Lynch made me feel like I needed to watch a bunch of Orson-centric episodes of Desperate Housewives and of course, Charlotte and Trey’s wedding on Sex and the City.

Listening

Two words Bad Bunny

Eating

I spent so much of January reminding myself that January feels like a hundred days every single year and we just live so much life between them that we forget it, but wow January really felt like a hundred days this year. It’s hard to believe that I spent the first week of it in Phoenix. I made my second-ever trip to Tratto, the most high-concept of the Chris Bianco restaurants. I will say that it feels like the sort of restaurant I might write to make a commentary on gentrification in a Justin Spitzer comedy, but I will also say that it’s very, very good. Everything rocks at Tratto but what blew me away for the second time was the simple salad of baby gem, a roasted shallot vinaigrette, and huge shavings of pecorino. I am still trialing my roasted shallot vin replica, stay tuned.

I went to FnB, the Chez Panisse of Phoenix, Arizona, for the first time. God I love vegetables, man. We had a jumble of radishes atop a date compound butter, topped with fried hazelnuts and urfa chili, ultra sweet roasted honeynut squash in a sort of shawarma treatment, some delicious white beans, and a take on polo sabzi that I rather enjoyed.

Back in London, I didn’t do much (cold, dark, etc) but I did have the vegetarian tasting menu at Rasa, which left me grinning, jeans unbuttoned, and saddled with enough leftovers for another delicious meal all for £35. Not bad!

I braved storm conditions for an inauspicious al fresco lunch at perennial favorite Bad Manners, eating a perfect bean burrito huddled under a tarp in gale force winds. Their residency in Hackney Churchyard is coming to a close but they will be moving to Shoreditch soon!

Cooking

I had the distinct pleasure of helping put together the food for Anna’s book party this week. It was a really fun group effort that began on Sunday in Anna’s sun-drenched kitchen as we broke down mushrooms and cauliflower for a vegan larb and roasted a mountain of whole eggplant for a sesame/ginger/scallion take on baba ghanoush. On Tuesday, I woke up early to wash and spin loads of crudité (my favorite kitchen task), caramelize shallots for my well-worn shallot dip, and fill piping bags with Lao Gan Ma cream cheese for amped-up vol au vents. It was a complete blast and some of the most fun I’ve had in the kitchen in a while.

Upcoming

I recorded an episode for Kate Bugos’ podcast about Raya and the market economics of dating, which will be out soon.

I’m very happy to have my recipe for pumpkin spice semifreddo, the ultimate exercise in doing what you want, in season 2 of Produce Parties, now available for preorder.