thoughts

I struggle to make well emulsified, creamy pasta sauce when using just pasta water and cheese like in cacio e pepe. The best source for good technique I’ve found is ChefSteps cacio e pepe recipe

• Only lightly salt your pasta water
• Cook pasta in minimum amount of water to concentrate the starch
• Concentrate further the cooked pasta water to increase creaminess
• Add cheese off heat

But I still found myself successfully making an unbroken sauce only 3 out of 5 times. And then I found this very untraditional NYT recipe for cacio e pepe with tuna (e tonno?) that uses a blender (!!) to combine the starchy water and the cheese.

Now my hit rate for a well emulsified sauce is 100%. I would love to be able to do this solely in the pan, without having to use + dirty my blender, but it’s just too convenient.

I made this Olivier salad (aka Russian salad) after trying it at El Chato in San Francisco. I mostly followed Helen Rennie’s recipe, which has a few good tricks, and used some techniques from the Serious Eats tuna salad recipe This salad is not very strongly flavored, but is cohesive and tasty.

Tips before we start

• Toss finely diced onion in the pickles, capers, covering with juice if possible, to tame the bite of the onion. Consider adding a bit of water if not enough pickling liquid to cover
• Steam off the boiled veggies and cool on a sheet tray before proceeding to remove the maximum amount of water and prevent a soggy salad
• Add a bit of anchovy (or fish sauce, or worcestershire, or msg) to amp up the flavor
• Use high quality, oil packed tuna for maximum flavor
• Mix the tuna into the mayo mix to avoid unpleasant dry tuna

Ingredients

Veggie

• 800g waxy potato, peeled and diced to 1/4 inch
• A carrot or two, diced to 1/4 inch
• Half a red onion, diced fine,

Dressing

• 125g pickle (dill, cornichon, etc), diced finely
• Three or four small eggs (Less if using large)
• 2 tbsp capers, chopped coarse
• 3/4 cup mayo
• 2 tbsp mustard
• Lemon juice
• 1 tsp fish sauce
• Black pepper
• Salt
• Chopped herb (dill, parsley, celery leaf, etc)
• 1-2 cans tuna (optional), drained

Recipe

1. Prepare onion. Toss together finely diced onion, pickles, capers. Try to cover the onion in pickle/caper juice. If not enough liquid, cover with water (or other vinegar)
2. Boil eggs. Add eggs to boiling water, cover, and turn heat down to low and simmer for 11 minutes. Remove eggs and run under water until cool. Peel when ready. Squeeze eggs through fingers (or chop roughly). Set aside
3. Cook veggies. Boil potatoes and carrots in well salted water until tender (but not falling apart). Drain in colander, then spread on paper towel lined baking sheet. Distribute evenly and allow to steam and cool.
4. Make the dressing. Drain onion mix and rinse with water. Drain again, pressing to remove the most amount of vinegar possible. Combine mayonnaise, onion mix, mustard, lemon juice, black pepper, fish sauce, and chopped herb. If using tuna, roughly whisk in now until no large pieces remain. Taste for seasoning. Should taste too strong as this point, because it needs to flavor all the potato, carrot, and eggs
5. Combine. Gently fold in veggies, eggs. Refrigerate until cool, serve. Continues to get better in fridge, best after 12hr

Credit card issuers are pulling one over on us. There’s the obvious ways and less obviously true ways. patio11’s Bits About Money article “Anatomy of a credit card rewards program” disillusioned me from the belief that I was winning by redeeming my credit card points in clever and complicated ways.

Switching credit cards to a “cash back” card with 3% back (e.g. Robinhood Gold) per purchase feels closest to “winning” we can do. It disengages us from the credit card game designed to nudge spending in a specific direction. They’re still coming out on top, thanks to an army of spreadsheet watchers, but it’s not obvious to me how. Are issuers really willing to eat a loss on every transaction for no benefit? I don’t think so. Buying customers through subsidizing these rewards is a bad plan. I’m sure they know plenty of people will sign up just for the rewards, never engaging in the rest of RH offerings. Low loyalty credit card users will disappear as soon as the reward system changes.

I’m half convinced that the true goal of subsidizing rewards is to incentivize excessive spending. But for what purpose? The Amazon credit card has certainly nudged me to spend more on Amazon over other retailers. The RH card doesn’t have this “in network” benefit, as there’s no products of theirs to buy over others using their branded credit card. I don’t believe that RH is scheming to get people into debt. I wish I could peek behind the curtain and understand their internal justification for the program.

Opting out of this game by buying everything in cash is tempting, but that means literally leaving the credit card reward money (3%!!) on the table. Are you willing to pay effectively 3% more for the same goods? If shops transparently passed on the credit card processing fee to consumers and offered a cash discount, we’d be able to use cash without setting off the losing money alarm bells.

Would we buy less goods if everyone used only cash? Probably.